Where the Spirits Have Lease was originally a 3.5 campaign called The Wells of Manifest. It came out of me wanting a campaign with strong atmosphere and theme, where my crew of newbie players became perfect guinea pigs for. A major part of that campaign became knowing (and not knowing) my source material : a 3.0 book called Ghostwalk. As a book, Ghostwalk was neither great or bad, it ran pretty much right in the middle, and because of the 3.0 to 3.5 conversion, it got lost in translation, as did much of its wonderful atmosphere centered around a world heavily populated by undead and spirits. It was the perfect candidate for me to build off of and construct a new world. Its world was underbuilt, only some campaign options where truly noteworthy, but its core concepts fueled my ideas.
Obviously, the book themes leaned me to create a darker fantasy, one that was about of a world during a great period of convergence. This fictional European continent called Varlin was undergoing a transformation, when great wells of spiritual energy started to flow into an inert land, springing magical life into its people, its dead and its wilds. Of course, in college, all my ideas where pretty rough, but I took it slow and built my session more like horror stories instead of fantasy stories, letting me burn my players for answers to complicated story questions. Mystery was essential.
Now, in Where the Spirits have Lease, I’m trying to understand how to fuse the fantasy and horror genre effectively, using the minimal rules of 5th edition, but keeping that ‘slow burn’ pace with intricate world building and gloomy atmosphere.
So this is where it stated, I’ll post more about how I turned the world, and its events into a more intricate universe!