faderiftooc | MOD PLOT ↠ A THOUSAND WRONGS

MOD PLOT: A THOUSAND WRONGS

The Fields of Ghislain is a large region, and many places in it need many different kinds of attention. Riftwatch will often be spread thinly across it, but they're not alone in their efforts: the Inquisition still has a large number of noncombatants, and the Exalted March's volunteers include many not fit for the front lines, and these three groups will be loosely coordinating.

Several of the larger towns have been identified as able to house larger numbers of people, and these will serve as staging areas, where supplies can be delivered and divvied up and outreach to smaller villages and hamlets can be staged. The main places Riftwatch personnel will be stationed and working from are:

Pessac, a busy market town set along the small Voire river in the southeast, in the Arlesans area. It's in relatively good shape and has gotten back to "normal" quickly and welcomed the arrival of various Orlesian and allied helpers.
Montluçon, another large market town in the northwest of the region. It suffered some visible damage during the enemy retreat to Ghislain in particular and is busy rebuilding.
Deauville, a medium-sized village at the end of the Voire between Pessac and Montfort. It has suffered significant damage and a relatively high number of deaths and disappearances due to resistance against the enemy.
Vézelay, another mid-sized village right about in the center of the Fields, which was forced to play host to a large enemy camp and associated officers. The town is intact, but there are still lingering signs of the occupation in trampled fields, painted sigils not yet scrubbed off, and the jittery wariness of the residents.

WHAT TO DO

Many tasks will be handed out to whoever has time and ability, and so may require collaboration with—or at least working alongside—members of the Inquisition and Exalted Marchers. But there are others Riftwatch has been asked specifically to handle given its particular capabilities, so it's up to you whether having to deal with them directly is part of any given thread or not.

Rifts

The general spread of rifts over the years had already encompassed this area, and the last several years of bloody battles and the hardships of occupation seem to have only thinned the Veil further, resulting in an unusual number of tears. In some places, the thinning of the Veil may also have caused strange phenomena, such as the surrounding area being noticeably hotter or colder—similar to stepping into or out of the shade—or people in proximity to the rifts feeling subtly more energized or more exhausted, or gravity seeming to increase, slowing people more and more as they approach the rift. Occasionally, in addition to the traditional misshapen manifested demons, those approaching the rifts might catch brief glimpses of more ghostly and person-shaped spirits in the throes of one emotional event or another: dying in battle, running in terror from something unseen, sobbing on their knees, embracing another spirit, laughing so hard they need to sit down.

Riftwatch members will be sent to close these, fighting off demons in the process as always, and to do what they can to shore up the Veil elsewhere, which involves opening a rift in a weak spot just so they can close it again stronger. They'd be ordered not to allow anyone outside of Riftwatch to see them opening rifts; they might not understand.

Enemies

While most enemy forces retreated into Ghislain or Val Chevin, there are pockets of them that still roam the area causing trouble. Teams will be asked to track them down and kill or capture them. The enemies at large include darkspawn (and red lyrium darkspawn), enemy soldiers, Venatori mages, and the occasional Red Templar.

Where possible, groups will be targeted at enemies they're best-equipped to take on (i.e. groups including a Warden sent after darkspawn), but often that won't be possible as stories about attacks are muddled, enemy groups merge and split, and trails cross. And of course, even once they're aware that Riftwatch & Co. are in the region, they may show up unannounced to attack, so you should feel free to stage enemy encounters wherever and whenever, and to tailor the size and makeup of those groups to suit your purposes (within reason; please don't claim there's still a whole army out there).

Rebuilding & Resupplying

A good opportunity for Riftwatch to earn some brownie points especially for mages/rifters/qunari/etc., is helping communities rebuild. In most places, the basic building blocks will already be there, as the stone from destroyed buildings can be reused. People in many spots are also in need of basic supplies and food to tide them over until the harvest, so there will also be some need to collect, purchase, and deliver additional supplies. This will be funded by the Orlesian government and the Chantry, so Riftwatch members are most likely to be interacting with people from allied forces while assisting with these efforts.

Info Gathering

People will be assigned to interview the leaders of various communities, who will then also help put together lists of other citizens who might have information about the invaders. This will mostly be people who were forced to house officers in their homes and who worked as servants for them. There will also be some surviving members of local resistance efforts, who may have been deliberately collecting information already. There will also be people who had more limited interactions but who can still offer some insight: smiths put to work forging for them, innkeepers and tavern maids who served them, farmers who were forced to supply them, people who drove their wagons or polished their boots or happened to see or hear things in passing. There will also be efforts to collect information about the missing, and to try to trace where they might have been taken.

Many of the people PCs speak with will be some degree of traumatized by their long ordeal, and dealing with them and extracting their stories may require care. Some will be eager to talk, grateful for the chance to help, while otherwise may be reluctant, ashamed, or even resentful that Riftwatch and its allies are only now arriving after leaving them to the mercy of the invaders for so long. Many of their stories will be of small personal cruelties or unexpected moments of connection, not useful, but worth hearing.

The overall picture that will emerge is that the invading army were for the most part well-organized and well-disciplined, quick to deal harshly with any perceived resistance or disrespect (typically through execution or enslavement) but not arbitrarily brutal if people obeyed. Most stories are along the lines of being callously tossed out of their homes, their possessions/livelihoods stolen or destroyed, or demeaned by being forced to work for their occupiers and threatened with imprisonment or enslavement in Tevinter if they disobeyed.

There will of course also be stories of the occupiers abusing locals in various ways, and some places will have suffered more and crueler ill-treatment than others depending on the character of the individual leaders in each. Whether you want to engage with this in your RP is up to you, please clear more sensitive topics with your RP partners and include content warnings on threads as applicable. In general, these incidents will be more like individuals getting away with crimes due to their power over the locals rather than a deliberate campaign of abuse—e.g., a soldier in one place might get away with badly beating a local who wouldn't give up his seat in a tavern because his commander doesn't care or approves of harsh and demoralizing tactics, while in another town the same behavior might get the soldier a minor punishment and the citizen some manner of apology because his commander is trying to win hearts and minds. There doesn't seem to be a top-down "pillage and murder to your hearts' content" strategy in place, so things like arbitrary mass murder with no inciting event are unlikely, but neither have they been ordered to use kid gloves.

The Venatori were the more feared, often arriving suddenly and taking people away with them who were not seen again, and anyone who acquired an anchor or showed any sign of magic was swiftly collected. Of the various sorts of enemy personnel scattered throughout the region, the Venatori mages, though not a large percentage of the force, were the most likely to commit arbitrary atrocities—villages burned in response to small slights, people killed in the street for fun.

For the most part it's just a lot of data gathering that will need to be sifted through and compiled into useful conclusions afterwards, and you should feel free to use this type of work more as a prompt for your characters to talk to each other about things rather than feeling the need to NPC actual interviews with locals unless you want to. There may also be some nuggets here and there of more immediately useful intel: a cache of hidden supplies, a stolen document, a snippet of revealing conversation. If you'd like your characters to uncover something that's immediately actionable or could be of plot use in the future, please comment below and link us to a thread already in progress, and we'll give you a tidbit to uncover and share.

Temple Exploration

Exploring the deeper, more secret reaches of the Shrine of Dumat excavation will be covered by a closed mission, but everyone can freely poke around the rest of the shrine. It's a fairly large site, with the excavated portion roughly the equivalent of 100x100m, and a few stories deep. The most pressing jobs will be searching the place thoroughly to (i) make sure there aren't enemies or other threats hiding in it and (ii) collect anything the Venatori left behind that might be of use or explain their interest in the site. There will also be an effort to document as much of the temple as possible just in case it's lost or destroyed in the future, e.g., by creating maps of its layout and sketches of the surviving carvings, murals, and mosaics.

For the most part the site is a typical Tevinter-styled ancient temple and safe to explore, with any major hazards in the main levels already cleared out by the enemy occupiers. But PCs may find a few booby traps that were reenabled by the enemy before they left or missed in less-traveled corners, or the occasional cursed/possessed artifact that was left behind (maybe intentionally), so you should feel free to have your characters grapple with minor issues along those lines.

In terms of finding pieces of potentially useful information, as with the info-gathering above, if you'd like your characters to come across something that might have plot relevance, please comment below and link us to a thread already in progress, and we'll give you a tidbit to uncover and share.

MOD PLOT ↠ A THOUSAND WRONGS

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