A Note Before You Begin

This campaign contains themes that are worth naming before play starts. None of them are gratuitous — they serve the story — but knowing they are present lets everyone come to the table prepared.

• Political manipulation and court intrigue. Characters will encounter people who lie, scheme, and use others as instruments. Trust is earned slowly and lost quickly. Some NPCs who seem like allies may not be.
• Memory, identity, and erasure. The campaign touches on what it means to be forgotten — by others, and by history. Characters may encounter situations where the reliability of memory itself is in question.
• Ancient evil and cosmic horror, handled obliquely. There are forces in this campaign that predate human understanding and operate outside conventional morality. They are not described graphically, but their influence is felt, and some of what they do is quietly disturbing.
• Death, grief, and loss. Several significant NPCs carry histories of loss that matter to the story. Player characters may encounter the deaths of people they have come to care about.
• Gothic atmosphere. Decay, fog, things that should have stayed buried, the weight of history on the living — these are features of the setting, not bugs.

The World: Golarion

The campaign takes place on Golarion, a world of magic, ancient gods, and civilizations built on the ruins of older ones. It is not a world of clean heroism or clear moral lines — it is a world where history is complicated, power is rarely clean, and the things that were buried a thousand years ago have a habit of not staying buried.

Magic exists and is real, but it is not common. A person who can cast a spell is notable. An institution built around magical practice is powerful. The gods are real and interventionist, their clerics genuinely channel divine power, and the line between faith and fact is considerably thinner than in our world.

If you are new to Golarion, the most important thing to know is this: it rewards curiosity. The world has depth, history, and internal logic. The more you engage with it, the more it gives back.

Ustalav

The Immortal Principality of Ustalav sits in the fog-shrouded north of the continent of Avistan — a nation of gothic grandeur and slow decay, built on the bones of something that was shattered centuries ago and has never quite reassembled itself.

Crumbling noble estates. Ancient forests. Cold swamps that swallow light. Cities of genuine cultural sophistication that gleam on the surface and quietly rot underneath. If you have ever imagined a place where every noble family has a secret, every ruin hides something that should have stayed dead, and every institution is one bad decade away from collapse — that is Ustalav.

A Nation That Lost Its Kings

The title of Ustalav's ruler is Prince, not King, and the distinction is not ceremonial. It is an admission.

Centuries ago, Ustalav was conquered by the Whispering Tyrant — a lich of staggering power who ruled the country as an empire of the undead for over six hundred years. When he was finally defeated and imprisoned, the nation had to rebuild from almost nothing. The original royal bloodline — the Ustav line, from which the country takes its name — had died out entirely during the occupation. The nobles who survived had only tenuous claims to legitimacy.

The crown passed to the Ordranti family, who have held it since. But the title of Prince rather than King is the quiet acknowledgment baked into the language itself: the Ordrantis are stewards of a throne whose true legitimacy no longer exists. They rule. They simply cannot claim the full weight a King would carry. Ustalav has been waiting to fully become itself again for centuries. That waiting shows.

The Political Situation

Ustalav is divided into counties, each governed by a noble house with considerable independence. In theory they answer to the Prince. In practice, the counts do largely as they please, and the crown's ability to compel them is limited.

The current monarch, Prince Aduard Ordranti III, is a 63-year-old former soldier who never expected to rule and has never fully adjusted to court life. He is blunt, politically indifferent, and deeply reliant on his late brother's aged adviser to navigate anything requiring subtlety. He has no formally named heir, no wife, and no particular urgency about remedying either situation.

Into that vacuum steps Reneis Ordranti, the shadow heir the court has mostly resigned itself to accepting. His legitimacy has never been formally proven or disproven. He has been raised since infancy by his aunt, Countess Carmilla Caliphvaso, widely regarded as one of the most dangerous political minds in Ustalav, who has spent decades positioning him for the throne.

The result is a court organized around a succession that isn't settled, ruled by a prince who doesn't want to rule, with a scheming countess pulling strings in the background. The population has largely accepted that things will probably get worse before they get better. This is, in Ustalav, a fairly normal Tuesday.

Karcau

The city of Karcau sits in the county of Sinaria, in Ustalav's northeastern reaches, built along the shores of Lake Prophyria at the edge of a fetid swamp. Its residents do their best to ignore the swamp. The insects that rise from the lake in warmer months are, by long local tradition, simply a reason to wear beautiful masks.

Karcau is Ustalav's cultural capital in all but name. It is home to the renowned Karcau Opera, celebrated across the known world for its music, its performers, and its productions of extraordinary ambition. The city takes its art seriously and its secrets even more so.

Beneath the theaters and recital halls, Karcau has a darker reputation. A maze of underground canals and submerged tunnels runs beneath the city's streets — some purpose-built, some of uncertain origin, most sealed and not discussed in polite company. The city's buildings hide histories their owners would prefer unexamined. The nobility has had centuries to practice the art of keeping things quiet, and has become very good at it.

Karcau is the kind of city where someone could disappear without anyone being entirely sure when it happened, or whether it would be wise to ask.

The Countess

Sasandra Livgrace

Countess of Sinaria

Beloved, magnetic, a celebrated former performer of the very Opera that defines her city. Warm in a way that disarms, and quietly impossible to read when she doesn't wish to be.

Karcau and Sinaria are governed by Countess Sasandra Livgrace — spoken of with genuine affection across social stations, which is either a testament to her character or her skill, and probably both.

She has ruled Sinaria alone since the death of her husband eleven years ago and has shown no interest in remarrying. She throws the finest parties in the city. She is warm in a way that disarms people expecting Ustalavic nobility to be cold, and quietly impossible to read when she doesn't wish to be.

There is also a piece of old gossip that still circulates in certain circles: a kidnapping, years ago, when she was young. She was taken — or said to have been taken — under circumstances that were never fully explained, and returned without lasting visible harm. She has never addressed it publicly. The city has never stopped speculating.

She is, by most accounts, exactly what Karcau needs: stable, competent, and genuinely present in the life of her city. In a country like Ustalav, that is rarer than it sounds.

A Man Worth Knowing

Emeric Daust

Noble of Karcau

Old money, minor house. A harmless eccentric with excellent taste, even better wine, and a reputation for knowing everyone worth knowing.

If you spend any time in Karcau's better social circles before the campaign begins, one name comes up with notable regularity: Emeric Daust.

Old money, minor house, famous for throwing the city's second-best parties after the Countess herself. He collects rare magical curiosities — or so the story goes — and has a reputation as a harmless eccentric with excellent taste and even better wine. He has been a fixture of Karcau's cultural life for decades and a close confidant of the Countess for nearly as long.

In practice, he is the man who makes the masquerade happen. The Countess provides the house, the guest list, and the occasion. Daust provides everything else — the entertainment, the vintages, the pastries, the performers. If you have been hired to work the masquerade in any capacity, it is because Emeric Daust approved it. If you are owed payment at the end of the evening, Emeric Daust is the man you find to collect it.

He is, by all outward appearances, exactly what he seems: a charming, generous, mildly peculiar nobleman who has made himself indispensable to the city's social fabric.

Pay attention to him. Not because anything is obviously wrong — nothing is obviously wrong. But because men who have been everywhere for decades without anyone quite remembering how they got there are worth noticing. And because the Countess, who notices everything, has kept him very close for a very long time.

The Masquerade

Once a year, the Countess hosts a masquerade of considerable renown — an evening of music, masks, and the particular kind of social theater that Karcau does better than anywhere else in the world. Invitations are sought. Attendance is a mark of standing. The guest list spans the city's nobility, its artists, its wealthy merchants, and the occasional visitor of note from beyond Sinaria's borders.

This year's masquerade is the occasion around which the campaign begins.

Your character is there. The specifics of why — whether you received an invitation, were hired in some capacity, came as part of someone's household, or found your way in through other means — are something you and the DM will work out together. The door is open to a range of possibilities: guests of the Countess, hired staff or security, performers, or attendants in the service of someone else in attendance.

What will draw you there, and what you hope to gain from the evening, is part of your story to tell.

Building Your Character

Characters begin this campaign at 3rd level. The free archetype variant rule is in use — at 2nd level and every even level thereafter, you gain a bonus feat that must be spent on an archetype, in addition to your normal class feats.

Starting wealth follows the GM Core Character Wealth table for level 3: one 2nd-level permanent item, two 1st-level permanent items, and 25 gp in currency. Alternatively you may take a lump sum of 75 gp to spend freely on common items of up to 2nd level. Discuss your item choices with the DM before the first session.

There are no class restrictions. A knight, a witch, a con artist, a scholar of forbidden texts, a street performer with a sideline in blackmail — all of these have a place in Karcau, and all of them can carry a story worth telling here. What matters is less what your character can do and more who they are and what they care about.

That said, the campaign has texture. The following is a map of what the setting rewards.

Investigators & Information-Gatherers

Karcau is a city built on buried things. People who are good at finding what others want kept hidden — through scholarly research, social maneuvering, magical divination, or simply knowing which questions to ask — will find this city endlessly productive. The campaign's central mysteries do not resolve themselves. They require people willing to pull at threads.

Be warned: not every secret in Karcau is safe to find. Some things were buried deliberately, by people who knew exactly what they were doing.

Social Operators

The masquerade is not incidental to the campaign — it is a distillation of what Karcau is. A city where social performance is its own kind of power, where who you know matters as much as what you know, and where the right conversation in the right room can open doors that no amount of coin or force could budge.

This includes characters who move through social spaces by being invisible in them — servants, hired staff, people whom the powerful habitually overlook. There is an enormous amount of information available to someone who knows how to be unnoticed in a room.

In Karcau, knowing your enemies may matter more than knowing your friends. The city has had centuries to practice the art of keeping those two categories difficult to tell apart.

The Combat Capable

The campaign begins as a social and investigative story, and that texture persists. But Karcau has shadows that go deeper than metaphor, and the campaign eventually goes to places that require people willing and able to handle what lives there. The campaign is not a dungeon crawl, but it does eventually send you somewhere underground.

What lives there has been waiting a very long time. It would prefer not to be disturbed.

The Occult & the Divine

Characters with ties to divine powers, esoteric traditions, or forces beyond the material world should know this: those connections are not decorative here. Karcau sits on something old, and the campaign's deeper questions touch on the nature of reality, memory, and what it means for something to be true. Characters who operate in that space may find their abilities and relationships unexpectedly relevant as the story develops.

This extends to characters whose faith is complicated, lapsed, or heterodox. What you believe about the gods, and what they believe about you, is the kind of detail this campaign notices.

Some forces do not announce themselves. They simply make themselves felt — in the texture of a room, in the way certain memories refuse to stay where you put them, in the growing sense that the world has been slightly wrong for a very long time.

The Most Important Thing

Bring a character who is curious about people and invested in something beyond themselves. A character who defaults to suspicion and isolation will have a harder time here — not because the campaign punishes that play style, but because its richest material lives in relationships, in earned trust, and in the slow accumulation of things known and things owed.

Rewards

Those who come to the masquerade in a professional capacity are compensated generously. The Countess pays well and has a reputation for honoring her arrangements. Those who render exceptional service, or who come to her attention for the right reasons, may find the rewards extend beyond coin.

A personal audience with Countess Livgrace is not a small thing. She is the most powerful figure in Sinaria, with connections that reach across Ustalav and beyond it. Her favor opens doors. Her recommendation carries weight in courts that would otherwise have no reason to receive you. And she is, by those who have managed to earn it, regarded as genuinely trustworthy — a quality in notably short supply in Ustalav's current political climate.

For those with ambitions beyond a single evening's work: the Countess notices people. The city notices the people she notices. Karcau is a place where a reputation, built carefully, can become something that follows you in useful directions.

Themes

This campaign is built around a few ideas that will run through it from beginning to end. You don't need to engage with them consciously to have a good time — but knowing they're there may help you think about who your character is and what they care about.

Identity and what makes it real. Ustalav is a country that lost its bloodline, its legitimacy, and its certainty about who it is. Your characters will encounter that question — what makes someone genuinely who they claim to be — in a number of forms.

The cost of knowing things. Karcau is a city of masks. Information has weight here. Knowing the wrong thing at the wrong time is its own kind of danger, and some knowledge, once found, cannot be put back where it was.

A Note on Tone

This is a gothic campaign. It is not a horror campaign — your characters are not helpless, the world is not incomprehensible, and the darkness is not the point. But it takes its shadows seriously. The setting rewards careful attention, slow trust, and the willingness to sit with questions that don't resolve quickly.

It also has room for warmth, humor, and genuine connection. The best gothic stories do. The darkness means something precisely because there are things worth protecting from it.

Come with a character who wants something. Come with a character who cares about something. The rest will follow.

What This Campaign Is Not

This is not a dungeon crawl. Combat exists and matters, but it is not the primary engine of the campaign. Sessions will pass without a single fight. If your character only comes alive when swords are drawn, this campaign will have long stretches that feel slow to them.

This is not a war campaign. The scale is intimate. What happens in this campaign happens to specific people, in specific rooms, for specific reasons. The stakes are real, but they are personal before they are political.

This is not a campaign where the heroes are obviously right. Your characters will make choices without complete information, and some of those choices will have consequences they didn't intend. Moral clarity is a resource in short supply.

This is not a campaign where the mystery solves itself. The central questions will not be handed to the players. The story rewards engagement. It does not punish disengagement with failure, but it does leave disengaged characters watching from the edges of events that other characters are shaping.

This is not a campaign where objects and relationships are decorative. What your character carries, who they care about, and what they believe to be true about themselves — these things have weight here. Come prepared for the story to notice them.

Before the First Session

Before play begins, you'll have a conversation with the DM about your character — who they are, why they're at the masquerade, and what they're hoping the evening holds. The questionnaire is the starting point for that conversation, not the end of it.

A few things worth thinking about first

Your character's reason for being in Karcau. Karcau is not a city people stumble into accidentally. Why has your character come here, and how long have they been in the city? Are they a native, a regular visitor, a newcomer? That context shapes everything about how they move through the masquerade.

Your character's relationship to the nobility. Whether your character belongs to that world by birth, moves through it by profession, observes it from the edges, or has gained entry by means they'd prefer not to explain — each of these positions offers a different view of the same room. None of them is wrong. All of them are worth thinking through.

One thing your character is keeping from everyone else. Not a secret that will derail the party — just something private. A motivation that isn't the whole story. A connection they haven't mentioned. A fear they haven't named. The campaign has room for these things, and they tend to become the moments players remember longest.

Specific questions about your character's history, their reason for attending the masquerade, and what they hope to gain from the evening will be discussed with the DM separately. Come with ideas — the more you bring to the table, the more the table can give back.

Character Questionnaire

Complete this before your first session and share it with the DM. There are no wrong answers. You do not need to share your answers with other players unless you want to.

Players are encouraged to discuss connections with each other before session one — you are free to arrive with shared history. Talk to your fellow players and see what fits.

These last questions are for the DM's eyes only and will not be shared with other players.