Many years ago, I had an idea for a setting. It would be a smallish town in a remote area that existed for one main reason: So I had a place to set D&D adventures. No, not really. It existed as a kind of waystation for travellers passing through the nearby mountains en route to and from places beyond them. Mostly this would be caravans of traders with accompanying drivers (folks to drive the horsedrawn wagons since this is a quasi-medieval world), guards, and such. They paused in town to restock provisions and generally prepare themselves for the difficult trip through the mountain passes. This meant the town went from a rather small place with maybe a hundred or so people in the off-season (late Fall through early Spring) to a few hundred in the "caravan season" as merchants and other temporary residents moved in to service the caravans. Individual travellers might also pass through and, more importantly, weird crap would happen in the region that would attract parties of adventurers.
Problem was, I wasn't playing those games anymore and it was more an exercise for my imagination. So, I repurposed it as a setting for fantasy stories. Given it was remote and kind of on the frontier of its world, I could even give things a bit of a Western flair, with the main protagonist being the town's "Sheriff", which I eventually changed into a "Warden" who commands a town guard of mostly local militia. This character, Dev Jackylbury, was also a veteran of a recent major war, which let me explore the land's history a bit. I ended up building a whole world around this setting, but so far, beyond a few references to Dev's war years and consequent travels, I haven't told any stories outside Avenigar, the town I just described.
Needing some people for Dev to play off of, I added a couple more characters. Jaira is his deputy warden, a skilled leader and officer but lacking Dev's war experience. And Niomi Shen is priestess of the local temple and has a backstory connection to Dev, who first met her during the war. She's also part of the order of the goddess of the moon and magic, allowing her to learn and use this world's form of magic. A mage/cleric hybrid and a pair of fighters isn't necessarily an ideal D&D party, but for a story it's more their personalities that matter than their character niches. And I rather like them.
Sadly, I only ever got one story finished in Avenigar before moving on to other writings. That would be
Night of the Wind, in which a mysterious traveller brings a calamity down on the town during its Winter Solstice/New Year's festivities (yes, it is arguably a Christmas story ). Dev, Niomi, and Jaira have to deal with the events as a powerful blizzard rages around them.
With only one story submitted so far, this comp needs some life but I also need to get things right and not rush just for the sake of moving the comp along.
