The Long Lease
Three hundred years ago, a shepherd queen called Queen Maudry climbed the cliffs at the head of a green valley and asked the dragon who lived there whether the valley could be rented. The dragon, Orpiment, said yes. The lease ran for three hundred summers, with the rent payable at the end.
Everyone forgot. The songs said the Founder drove the dragon away, and the statue in the square shows her pointing her sword at the sky.
At midsummer of Lease Year 300, the dragon came back for the rent.
The premise
The players are the Wardens of the Lease: four people who happened to be closest to the dragon when she landed, and whom Queen Hesper commissioned that evening to find the lease and learn the rent. They have until the Lammas moon, forty days from the fair. The Crown has lost its copy. Hesper’s councillors are split between paying and fighting. And somebody has been in the archive ahead of them with a razor.
The tone
Bright, classic sword-and-sorcery, played for daylight. The campaign opened with a dragon lying along the roof of the Wool Exchange, her tail hanging down into Tanner’s Row, while the town’s bakers argued over who should ask her to move it. The danger is real, and so is the deadline, but in three sessions nobody at the table has drawn a sword against anything that could talk back.
The vale
The Vale of Quillet runs south from the Tally Cliffs, where the Brisk comes over in a single fall, down past the Sallow Hills and the market town of Summerhythe to Sealwright Hall on its island, and on to the Reed Water, where the Brisk spreads out into the lowland marshes. It is small enough to cross in three days on foot, green, well farmed and busy, and until this summer it believed it had no landlord.
The powers
- Marigold Court. The Crown, split between a young queen who wants to pay and a Chancellor who wants to fight, and running on borrowed money.
- Worshipful Company of Sealwrights. The contract-mages, who kept the Crown’s copy of the lease safe for 139 years and then lost the page that mattered.
- Marrable and Daughters. The counting house that holds the Crown’s notes and is very polite about it.
The table
Fifth-edition rules (the 2024 revision), four players, fortnightly Saturdays. The party is level 3. Sessions are written up as recaps on this site, and each recap ends with what the party learned, which also appears on the Timeline.
Credits
The Long Lease is an original sample campaign: its world, people, creatures, text and art were made for GM-Scriptorium and resemble no published setting on purpose.
This work includes material from the System Reference Document 5.2 (“SRD 5.2”) by Wizards of the Coast LLC, available at https://www.dndbeyond.com/srd. The SRD 5.2 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.