#ven-haladra

[dailyadventureprompts]

Hi! The theme in my upcoming campaign is the consequences of imperialism, and I'm going to show that theme through a war between two empires and the devastation it causes. However, I'm unsure how to characterize the empires besides good vs evil, which I want to avoid. I also want to avoid making the tone too dark and depressing; the party should feel like there's something they can do about it that matters. I also want to have a dragon fight that doesn't feel contrived. Any advice or ideas?

Adventure: The Protectorate, and its Price

Loyalty to the Haladrans offers three things, sure as the sun will come up tomorrow: Peace, prosperity, and a gun to the back of your head. You’d be surprised how much of the world is willing to take that deal. 

Setup: The coastal nation of Eandoca is perhaps one of the most beautiful you might ever visit, as every inch of its rolling, bucolic landscape seems as artiful and manicured as a pleasure garden, its people happy, it’s settlements clean and free of suffering. This is not the result of some edenic quirk of nature, but the careful and deliberate oversight by the Protectorate of Ven-Haladra, an occupying military force that sees this land and the people within it as an orchardkeeper might see a tree: something to be nourished, pruned, and cultivated so long as it continues to bear fruit. 

No one seems to mind the Haladrans, their iron grip is light, and they rule through native proxies, fools raised in fortresses turned pleasure gardens where their education has instilled them with a deep love of their nation’s culture and beauty, and a total reliance on their Protectorate advisors to make decisions. 

Life goes on however, and the tension between The colonizer’s patronizing, not-tyranny and Eandoca’s growing prosperity as the Protectorate’s foremost trade port is growing. The flow of wealth means the development of new industries and new learning that the Protectorate can’t sanitize, and the human spirit always bucks against captivity, even if it can’t see the chains. 

Adventure Hooks: 

By preventing their subjugated lands from raising their own militias, the Protectorate simultaneously enforces their monopoly on military power and ensures that same military governance is stretched very thin. Criminals need to be caught, monsters need to be driven off, and by preventing the Eandocans from forming their own garrisons the Protectorate forms a reliance on mercenary adventurers to do the same. Whether drawn from locals put under direct protectorate control or hired from elsewhere and shipped to a problem region, there is good work to be had for a sellsword looking to make their fortune, provided they’re willing to deal with constant scrutiny and hand off any moral judgements to a colonial administrator. 

Something is desperately wrong in one of the palace gardens. Petitioners wait in a great line outside the door for appointments that are weeks overdue, and the gates remain shut with no sign of movement inside. Though it may be culturally taboo to say so, someone ( or a group of someones) should find a way inside ( scale the wall maybe, or find one of those fabled secret entrances among the foundations? ), and see what’s going on exactly. Inside the party will find a bizarre sickness has swept through the palace, leaving many dead and most in an exhausted torpor. The one witness who could tell them exactly what was going on would be Ambasitor Yiji, one of the higher dryad diplomats the Protectorate employs to carry their will seamlessly between their holdings. Problem is, the sickness seems to have affected Yiji in some odd way, causing her to become an almost feral thing of roots and vines that’s territorially protecting the garden where her bonded tree grows.  

Blood spills, gunsmoke fills the air, and the drums of war begin their distant, ominous beat. As the tale goes, a week ago a group of sailors from a rival empire were getting rowdy in port , their carousing escalating to violence and assault against several Eandocan townsfolk. The Protectorate garrison was called in to quell the disturbance, but ended up as part of some kind of colonial imperialistic feedback loop. The garrison thrashed the sailors, who limped back home to their ship and told all their fellows about how “unfriendly” the locals had been. Full of patriotism and machismo, the foreigners found the Garrisonhouse and set it on fire, as the doctrinal Ven-Haladran answer to insurrection is “ take them out back and shoot them while speaking calming platitudes “ this turned out to be a bad idea.  Days pass, things escalate, and a couple of the foreign ships end up firing on the port in revenge for a third that’s sinking into the bay with all hands aboard.    This is a diplomatic massacre, one that neither side will apologies for anytime soon, which will have dire consequences in the days to come. 

Background: To read the accepted histories , a generation or so ago the Land of Eandoca was a chaotic patchwork of warlords and bandit kings. Having suffered through a century of strife after the collapse of their corrupt and oligarchical ruling dynasty, the people cried out for salvation and The Protectorate of Ven-Haladra  answered. These foreign allies (opportunistic expansionists) waged a campaign of pacification against the scattered dynastic holdouts and other belligerents, then established a new, just, ruling power ( puppet state) under their enlightened and abstracted guidance ( total administrative and military control). 

As colonial overlords go, the Protectorate is not the cruelest, but it is the most patronizing: enforcing an idealized, pastoral way of life on the subjugated Eandocan populace while cultivating their country like one would a newly tilled garden. They even minimalize their place in history while warping it to their purpose: the warring states era they interceded in was well over two centuries ago, but in order to make their occupation seem to be a “temporary” measure, their presence always necessary to prevent a backslide into chaos, they keep it just outside of the living memory, keeping history texts vauge and ensuring their colonial subjects live in half remembered dream of their own history. 

Such illusions of ignorance and false reality have let the Ven-Haladra hold onto almost a dozen such colonial holdings across their home continent, purposefully isolated, culturally stagnant, and carefully monitored, all while the Protectorate grows ever more advanced and prosperous by their purloined wealth. 

Ven-Haladra calls itself “ The Provisional Empire” implying there is some future state at which it will no longer be necessary to perform such barbarous conquests. It sees its absorption and cultural gaslighting of its neighbors as a kindness, sparing them from the heavy duties of having to interface with the cruelties of the world at large, preserving their cultures in amber until the empire is capable of “uplifting” them to the proper state.

To the Asker: Hi there, I hope that gives you something to go off of! It’s always difficult to detail full campaigns in a single prompt. That said, I think the pitch of “showing the fallout of empire while also showing them clash” is great,  though I’ll add the caviat that the party should belong atleast inpart to the Colonized, as being a third party who stands to gain/lose based on the outcome of that conflict will lead to some interesting thematic tensions. 

I started with Ven-Haladra because I think it’s a great “ devil you know” when it comes to colonial occupation. Its evil, but in the same way that Disney is evil, ubiquitous and condescending, happy to make you happy so long as you keep being productive. Ideally, they’d be put up against a destructive, transformative empire ( Peace vs Chaos) that wants to throw its weight around and doesn’t care about the consequences. Do the party use this disaster to free their home from their current oppressor ? Do they become heroes of the status quo, then use that influence as leverage for more independence? 

I think you’d want to run this campaign with a few time skips, act 1 happening totally under Ven-Haladra’s thumb, establishing the norms and ending with that fight in the harbor, act 2 is the war itself, the two empires clashing with Eandocan as the battleground, and act 3 is determining is facing off against whoever the victor of that war might be. 

Hope that helps, and if you end up running with any of this, please let me know how it goes!

Art Source 1

Art Source 2