The Four Home Bases

Each base gives the same campaign a different opening key. Pick one; the spine (see the campaign overview) reaches all of them. Full gazetteer detail for each is on the Realms pages.

Alpha

The courtier’s start. The party arrives at the capital by ship, among the would-be lords petitioning Ericall’s court [Alm-Alpha]. Work comes from the crown and its factions.

• Opening situation: The resented war-levies, the king-and-queen tension, and the rumor that the Queen’s Guard answers to Christina first give a low-level party intrigue with real stakes and safe streets to retreat to [Alm-Alpha].
• First thread: A caravan to Regent Pass is ambushed by humanoids who fight with uncharacteristic coordination and carry foreign (Thyatian) coin. Someone is arming the mountain tribes [Neri-RBP].
• Tone: politics, patronage, and the wild country one day past the pass.

Oceansend

The hard-port start. A city a year out from under occupation: released thieves, war debts, a guild in the shadows, a prisoner of state, and a king who trusts mercenaries because his own coup was one [Alm-Oceansend].

• Opening situation: Dock work turns up sunken wrecks and lost artifacts, and undead walk the pre-settlement ruins; the Dark Masks guild is everywhere and nowhere [Alm-Oceansend].
• First thread: A salvage job recovers a Heldannic dispatch case; its cipher points to a mole feeding the Knights the harbor’s defenses before the next assault [Alm-Oceansend].
• Tone: gritty, mercantile, an enemy army over the horizon.

Leeha

The folk-tale start. The party begins as locals of the halfling shire, a safe, likable river town with trouble in its tunnels and its swamps [Alm-Leeha].

• Opening situation: Gang war in the Nighthin Nest, smuggling the krondar ignore, monsters in the Fogvail quicksand, and the old dread of a hard winter that freezes the bay [Alm-Leeha].
• First thread: The smugglers are moving more than contraband, cold iron and strange ice-rimed relics north toward Frosthaven, paid for in foreign gold. The winter is coming early, and not by nature [Alm-Leeha] [Neri-TG].
• Tone: cozy on the surface, with the Ice-Witch spine running directly beneath it.

Two Lakes Vale

The isolated-frontier start. A single hard-pressed barony between two mountain lakes, at the edge of the wilderness, under Baron Maltus Fharo [Gander-Dom] [CM2].

• Opening situation: The Vale is remote and self-reliant; the party are its hands against raiders, beasts, and the mountains. Winters are long and the nights are wrong.
• First thread: The canon dread of CM2 *Death’s Ride*, livestock found bloodless, a creeping dark over the northern pastures, the dead not staying down, run as a slow menace the party is far too weak to confront, and only later learn is one arm of the Unmaking [CM2].
• Tone: siege and dread; a home worth defending and slowly losing.

Choosing and mixing

A one-table game picks one base. A larger campaign can run two bases in parallel (two parties, or one party relocating) and let the threads converge at Tier II, when the regional shape of the conspiracy becomes clear. Whatever the base, by the end of Tier I the party should have: a patron, a reputation, and one hard clue that their local trouble was lit from outside.