Legend holds that in a misty valley lies a treasure of indescribable value. Civilizations lost to time fought to claim the mountain and mine the riches fabled beneath it. Now the valley is piled deep with their ruins. Is there still something of value down there, waiting to be discovered?
What Everyone Knows
Cairnfall is a deep, mist-choked valley at the foot of a mountain that has outlived every nation that tried to own it. Kingdom after kingdom raised fortresses, temples, mines, and prisons here, and kingdom after kingdom fell, their works collapsing into the strata below. The valley is not one ruin. It is a landfill of civilizations, stacked epoch upon epoch.
The name does double duty: it is a cairn (a burial-marker of everything underneath) and a fall, of kingdoms, of ambitions, and routinely of the people climbing down into it.
Why Anyone Goes Down There
- The riches. The ruins genuinely pay. Vaults, reliquaries, royal strongrooms, enough real gold comes out of the ground to keep Cairnfoot booming and to keep the desperate arriving in droves.
- The Treasure. The fabled prize beneath the mountain that every dead civilization was digging toward. Nobody agrees on what it is. Nobody has found it. Somebody is still looking.
The Strata
Each buried civilization is its own stratum with its own architecture, culture, dangers, and dead. This is the in-fiction engine of dungeon variety: a dig-site into one stratum plays nothing like a dig-site into another. The first documented stratum is Rabengaat, a fortress-prison of a kingdom whose name the valley has already eaten.
Whether Epoch/Stratum becomes a mechanical deck layer above Biome, or stays flavor, is an open call. see Loose Threads.
Tone
Cairnfall is gothic-sincere. The valley does not know it is in a comedy. The mist is real, the dead are restless, the ruins are tragedies. Whatever is funny about an expedition walked in on two legs and signed a contract first.