Gilladian
Adventurer
IMC the PCs are about to find a book that was written 400 years ago. In the book, records have been kept about places that a large, active mining company trades with, within 30-100 miles of their current locale (Wave Echo Caves in Phandelver in my home-brew campaign. I know one of them will be a coal mine. The region is essentially similar to the coal mining country of West Virginia (old rolling hills, long ridges, narrow valleys, heavy forest, etc...). 400 years ago, it was heavily settled, well-used land, so there could be many different types of facilities present. But I'm not dreaming anything up!
The PCs now, 400 years later, live in a much more lightly settled, lower magic and lower tech (early medieval vs late medieval/renaissance) world, where they use recovered resources to help rebuild their kingdom. All four or five of the locations on the map could be valuable this way, and they also all should have some connection to the underground world that was a thriving part of the old world, though mostly lost now.
Can anyone help me come up with locations, what resources they might have produced, names and brief ideas for what might exist there now?
For example, the coal mine that will be one of the locations. What was it called back then? My naming custom has been that old places have fairly elaborate names, sort of victorian-sounding. Modern names are more anglo-saxon, but the place probably doesn't have a modern name, or I'll just give it one of the names from my random village list. So, in the book/map the PCs find, it might be named something like the Blackwater Mine.
I think the coal mine will be known to the locals, who do a little mining in one of the surface shafts, but don't go down into the depths any more (sealed off somehow?). So why don't they go down?
This is a 5e campaign, and my PCs are around 3rd level now, but might be anywhere upwards of that through probably about 6th level, by the time they get here to explore, if they choose to.
The PCs now, 400 years later, live in a much more lightly settled, lower magic and lower tech (early medieval vs late medieval/renaissance) world, where they use recovered resources to help rebuild their kingdom. All four or five of the locations on the map could be valuable this way, and they also all should have some connection to the underground world that was a thriving part of the old world, though mostly lost now.
Can anyone help me come up with locations, what resources they might have produced, names and brief ideas for what might exist there now?
For example, the coal mine that will be one of the locations. What was it called back then? My naming custom has been that old places have fairly elaborate names, sort of victorian-sounding. Modern names are more anglo-saxon, but the place probably doesn't have a modern name, or I'll just give it one of the names from my random village list. So, in the book/map the PCs find, it might be named something like the Blackwater Mine.
I think the coal mine will be known to the locals, who do a little mining in one of the surface shafts, but don't go down into the depths any more (sealed off somehow?). So why don't they go down?
This is a 5e campaign, and my PCs are around 3rd level now, but might be anywhere upwards of that through probably about 6th level, by the time they get here to explore, if they choose to.
