Some heroes wear capes, we wear hard hats.
Vasloria.
The beloved King Omund is dead. The Duchies are abolished.
The nobles bend the knee to Ajax, but the never-ending tributes of gold, grain and conscripts leaves the realm anaemic as the new overlord makes war elsewhere.
The Dragon Knights, once symbols of peace, now little more than regrettable memories.
Plague and famine abound. The bodies of dead cattle and townsfolk poison wells and freshwater springs.
Order crumbles. Bandits and mafiosos run unchecked in the wilds and towns alike, and masterless knights dispense their own laws by the blade.
Hatred festers between neighbours. Old suspicions have been torn into open wounds of animosity left in the wake of Ajax’s disastrous obliteration of commerce and the ancient compacts between nations.
It is here that Baroness Sian of Marshwald, lady of a landlocked collection of fens, untillable craggy fields, and fog-enchanted forests, finds herself isolated and forgotten. Her only source of wealth is the basalt quarry over which her keep yet stands proud - a nigh impregnable complex of tunnels and battlements if anybody could ever be bothered sieging it for the right to raise their flag over this land.
What the Otzomik Dwarves excavate in their incessant downward mining, her forebears once exported across Vasloria to form the castles, cathedrals, courts and commons of the thriving Kingdom. Now, with the King’s Road all but fallen to disrepair and the towns stagnant, the stone accumulates in massive anthills.
The Baroness, however, refuses to let her family name fall into obscurity. If there is nothing else left for this stone and tar harvested from the Mireglen, than to become new roads and bridges that elves will one day call old, then in the names of holy Adun and Gryffyn, it will be done.
To this end she summons her Counts, Captains, and Scholars to pave her barony and then connect it to the rest of Vasloria - or find and employ those who can. Under the Superintendency of Count Levi of Hannosham, and in charge of a rag-tag battalion of labourers, stonecutters, ox drivers, engineers, and soldiers, you are those heroes.
The campaign revolves around a simple gameplay loop: adventure to overcome the barriers preventing you from building the next piece of road, and then spend downtime building those roads.
The penultimate aim is to connect various villages, towns and cities along the road to reach Port Verun on the Horizon Falls. Connecting inland Vasloria to the sea once more is key to breathing life into realm by facilitating trade, migration and security up and down the coast.