I'm so excited!!! After quite a long hiatus from Role-playing, doing band stuff and whatnot, I'm finally getting back to running a Greyhawk Campaign tomorrow.
The game will be run "troupe-style" ala Ars Magic (in fact using AM magic rules) beginning 577 CY, and the main characters will all be wizards under the patronage of....
And here's where I need your help I want it to be someone in the Circle of Eight, since their base of operations will be in the Cairn Hills. I was thinking Tenser would be most appropriate since he lives there. The group will have a covenant that I conceive of as a sort of Research Grant funded entity, like a think-tank with an NSF grant.
So my question is: what would Tenser be willing to give a group of mid-level wizards a research grant to study: Ley lines? Oerth Blood (surely he wouldn't tell them about it, right)? Cairns?
I need to get some clarity on this and any suggestions would be very helpful.
Correct, Tenser would try to detract attention away from his Oerthblood tap. It's probably safe to say only he and Jallarzi Sallavarian have seen the inner workings. A further stretch might be Mordenkainen and even Kieran Jalucian (who is close to Jallarzi).
As for suitable mid level grants, definitely cairns. There is also Maure Castle, GH Castle, the sunken isles of Woe and innumerable other sites in the Abbor Alz-Cairn chain (look to From the Ashes for good ideas).
First off, the AM magic rules kick @$$, and I had much fun playing Ars Magika for as long as I did.
As for the covenant, I'd keep the HQ location very low key. There are not too many large structures in the Cairn hills that would not already have atracted tenants. A small to medium sized ruin(maybe the remnants of a fortified manor house) might be a good site, and acquiring the ruins as an HQ could be the basis of the beginning of the campaign, if you have not already set something up. The pc's need to clean the place out and get workers there to rebuild some of the less habitable areas, etc. Gotta have workers for all those non-wizard type pc's to lord it over after all. It is also a good way to introduce covenant specialists too. And who knows, there might actually be a hidden cairn entrance buried in the deep rubble of the ruin's lower basement, which gives any mages who stay at home something to look into too while the others are out investigating things.
You might place clues to future campaign plots in the ruins too, or at least one clue that leads on to bigger things. Any of the circle make a likely choice as the sponsor of the covenant. Tenser works fine, particularly if the covenant HQ ends up being not too close to Tenser's keep, but close enough for him and any Circle members in Greyhawk city to keep an eye on circumspectly.
Consider using Tenser's castle as the covenant itself. Aren't covenants supposed to have all manner of mystery about them and not be readily understood at the beginning of the story?
Drop clues about the Maures and other interesting locations like the Doomgrinder, the derro, and that underground lake related to falling stars...
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