Creamsteak
Explorer
Ashwell was a remote farming community of little importance to the world until an earthquake struck the parish forty years ago. Following the quake a number of sinkholes opened up under various major structures in the town making many of them uninhabitable, even sinking some completely into the earth. After the initial damage, many residents left, while only those too poor or stubborn to leave remained behind.
Some of the poor or desperate people that remained attempted to plunder the ruins for any valuables that had been abandoned. In truth, some succeeded in finding lost treasures in the ruins of the church, the brewery, the fort, or the manor. Some treasures were easily identified, while others were not so familiar. In time, rumors spread that the parish had been built over a much older city, one which had itself sunken beneath the earth many many generations prior.
Over the years a new town sprung up around Ashwell, one built by new hands working with old stone. Some of the uncovered city below was intact, and the city combined new, old, and much older into a strange testament of ingenuity. The civilization that had been here before had a type of magic that was not well understood to the sages of the modern era. A new artifice had to be invented to repair and make use of this foreign technology.
This thread is not a recruitment thread, more of a Q&A and establishing some initial interest. Ashwell is a setting idea I have that is inspired a bit by settings like Ptolus or the Tower of Druaga. In some ways it calls back to ideas I had some 15+ years ago, and also to some of the "spires" that were in Living En World. It's also partially inspired by a game I played in many years ago called the Psionicle, and to the magic and nonmen of the Aspect Emperor series of books, perhaps with a bit of your typical cthulhu mythos eldritch horrors in the background.
Ashwell is set in a world where "magic isn't real" to the world as a whole. People around the world might be spiritualists or have religions or beliefs, they may even believe in witchcraft, or misunderstand perfectly natural occurrences to be mystical in some way, but the world largely seems to behave according to natural science. The city of Ashwell, however, is on the boarder to a whole new strange world in more than one way. The occurrences in and around Ashwell may have great significance in discovering where the world as we know it may not be what it seems.
Ashwell the parish was built on top of cyclopean ruins of a culture that seems almost cut out from the storybooks. Tall, broad, almost uniformly strong and perfect-seeming. Or at least that's how their artwork is depicted. Yet these precursors also appear emotionless, cold, devoid of anything but an icy stare into the void. Their relics and artwork are largely unmatched in quality and perfect depiction, yet it lacks anything other than form and purpose. There is no embellishment or exaggeration, only strict adherence to duplication of reality. And these ancients are no longer with us, only their ancient tombs and structures. Their artifice hints at languages that "understood" reality, analogies that validated what is real, and concepts that if understood could turn the world inside out.
Still further, peeling back the layers of the onion you may find what the precursors were hiding from, creatures that were predators upon creativity, imagination, and emotion. Something dwells deeper. Thought made manifest. Ancient horrors that defied a rigid reality. Psychic and ethereal things from the void stretching their squishy bits through the cracks in our reality.
So a society of technology and the natural world uncovering the city of the arcane theologians and their magic and gods that tried to block out the realm beyond in the nether and the mind.
So who might be interested? What do you want to know? What kind of adventures would you want to have in this place?
The game would be D&D 5e largely, though with some amount of house rules and variants I'd clearly communicate.