The Sacred Sandglass
A Fantasy Campaign About Reality Breaking Down,
Forged In The Dark
In the misty past, when our land was first formed, time was free and fluid, its Sands flowing like the dunes of the great deserts. Fearing what would become of them and their people if the whims of time turned against them, the Ancient Sages grabbed hold of the Sands of Time and bound them in a Sacred Sandglass, binding us to one reality and one timeline. The descendants of the Sages flourished, and the Sandglass was hidden away for safekeeping, until eventually, it was forgotten, a mere legend. From the Sages’ lineages, the Noble Houses were founded, and our great Houses now rule the lands that once ran wild.
But something has gone wrong. People are beginning to remember things that haven’t happened, and the things we know to be true are shifting beneath us. We now know what happened. The Guardian of the Sandglass rode into our great hall and, over the next hours, confessed that they had failed in their duties. The Sacred Sandglass was stolen, and they did not know by whom. It must have been one of the other Houses, but they obscured their identities. Worst of all, in the struggle, the Sandglass was cracked. The strangeness afflicting the land is the Sands of Time starting to escape. The Guardian has called upon our House, the lone one they know to be innocent, to recover the Sandglass and stabilize our reality.
The road will be hard. We are not an ascendant House. The very reason we have been found innocent is that the heads of our House are a pair of mere twenty-year-old twins. The late Count passed away from a long illness last year, and our holdings have dwindled. Still, it is up to us, the Lady and Lord of our House, and our loyal Vassals to save our timeline. We will not falter. We will not fail. We will achieve our destiny, and ensure that our mark on history will not be washed away into the chaos of the Sands of Time.
The Sacred Sandglass is an upcoming pseudo-medieval fantasy campaign about the young scions of the noble House as they try to save the timeline from collapsing by recovering the Sacred Sandglass from its mysterious captors. It is a game of military skirmishes, courtly intrigue, and magical discovery. Powered by the Forged in the Dark engine, but with some drastic changes, this game will follow the House through a series of Missions, sometimes branching, many optional, with dangers and rewards around every corner. Not every Mission will be playable in a single campaign, and not every Vassal will be recruited. The Missions are meant to be interesting and fun to explore, and their Objectives will help keep the campaign from veering off of the Mission track.
A huge campaign built off of the framework innovated for The Unity of Skovlan and refined in The Oleander Daemon, it takes the notion of a roster of characters passed around the players for Missions to an extreme, inviting reinterpretation and mutation of the situation through both the narrative and the mechanics.
The setting is rich, set at a fairly typical pseudo-medieval magical fantasy technology level, but rejects the default European stylings of most fantasy. Inspired by Fire Emblem, Chrono Cross, and Dragon Age (among others), it’s an epic adventure.
No Draft is available yet. Follow my Patreon for updates.
The Plan For The Future
Sacred Sandglass isn’t yet ready for a draft. I was pretty close for a bit, but development of Oleander Daemon sent Sandglass back to revisions, in particular to consider a Locks-style approach to canon for the Vassals. As an assurance, I’m a lot deeper than just an outline or anything, the core system is written but has a couple adjustments incoming, and plot plan is pretty locked in, with only a lot of side-stuff needing to be defined.
Ultimately, this is a long way off from completion. It’s been my favorite back-burner project for a while, an easy thing I can always pop open to work on but I’m not making it the center of attention until I have some other things off my docket.