The Broken Toll
Stakes If the trade routes close, Fornhost faces famine, war, and the collapse of the only peace binding its powers together.
World Atlas·Sphere·Every road remembers who promised peace.
Western city state and financial center · Coastal hills and vineyards
Hook
Merchant houses hire adventurers to settle disputes that polite negotiators cannot touch.
Kallandra is a mortal world where roads are older than kingdoms and remember every bargain made beside them. On the central continent of Fornhost, three wealthy city states depend on a tentative truce and shared trade routes crossing the neutral Dead Plains. Merchants, soldiers, pilgrims, and adventurers all test the limits of that peace. Every caravan carries goods, rumors, and evidence that someone is preparing for the agreement to fail.
Themes
Form · Sphere
Kallandra is a round, Earth-like planet, with Fornhost occupying a temperate central continent surrounded by navigable seas.
Traversal
Travel follows roads, rivers, coastlines, and caravan routes, with the old milestone roads offering the safest crossings through contested territory.

Sphere

Magic
Common

Technology
Medieval

Death & Souls
Early History
The First Roads
Recent History
The Three Crowns
Present Day
The Uneasy Truce
The Broken Toll
If the trade routes close, Fornhost faces famine, war, and the collapse of the only peace binding its powers together.
The Border Question
A disputed stretch of road may determine whether the Dead Plains remain neutral or become the first battlefield of a new continental war.
Preserve the Dead Plains as neutral ground and keep caravans moving under the old road laws.
Control the richest inland markets and turn the truce into a permanent commercial empire.
Secure grain, iron, and river access before its rivals can close the eastern routes.
Use diplomacy, espionage, and naval power to keep both rivals dependent on its ports.
Stakes If the trade routes close, Fornhost faces famine, war, and the collapse of the only peace binding its powers together.
Stakes A disputed stretch of road may determine whether the Dead Plains remain neutral or become the first battlefield of a new continental war.
Ancient builders laid white roads across Fornhost, binding distant settlements through trade, law, and shared milestones.
Three city states rose around the road network, each controlling vital farms, mines, or harbors while competing through tariffs and diplomacy.
A fragile trade agreement keeps the city states from open war, but sabotage, raids, and disputes over the neutral Dead Plains threaten to break it.
A caravan arrives with every passenger alive but unable to remember the bargain that protected them from attack.
A milestone on the central trade road has begun displaying names of people who are still alive and planning treason.
A city state hires the party to escort grain through the Dead Plains while rival agents attempt to provoke a massacre.
An abandoned road continues into a buried city whose surviving inhabitants claim the three city states broke an ancient treaty.
The road network is a living treaty with its own judgment.
Discovery · Road Wardens reveal fragments of the oldest milestones after a character saves a caravan without seeking payment.
Impact · The first roads were built to prevent conquest, and they can close themselves against any ruler who claims the whole continent.
The truce is not a new compromise but a broken restoration of one realm.
Discovery · Several city archives contain matching passages that have been scraped away from public copies.
Impact · The three city states secretly descend from one administration that agreed to divide Fornhost after a civil war.
The dead are beginning to vote on the future of Fornhost.
Discovery · Dead Plains ghosts repeat the same final question at different milestones: who owns the road?
Impact · The souls bound to the roads are gathering toward a single answer, and their decision may reshape borders without a battle.