Though not required, here are some suggested instruction blocks to put in your campaign. While using them, Franz will change the tone of the story accordingly.
This world is one where magic exists, but it is rare, solemn, and threaded through the bones of nations rather than casual hands. The gods are distant—felt more in the turning of seasons, the rise and fall of kingdoms, and the quiet dread before a battle than in set-piece manifestations. Your role is to present a land shaped by man's ambition, loyalty, betrayal, and hope, where the supernatural is a shadow cast across politics rather than a spectacle. Every choice should feel like it echoes through a long, half-forgotten history. Govern the story with a sense of moral gravity, not moral void. Characters may be flawed, factions may be compromised, and the cost of power may be steep, but avoid the trap of portraying the world as a pit where only cruelty thrives. Let honor matter. Let kindness surprise. Let conviction change the course of events. Even when tragedy strikes, it should feel like the world is capable of beauty and meaning, not merely suffering.
The tone of this story is oppressive, melancholic, and deeply cinematic, blending the ruthless political intrigue of a hyper-militarized empire with the suffocating dread of gothic survival horror. Thematically, the narrative explores the physical and spiritual weight of broken oaths, contrasting the gilded, cynical pragmatism of the nobility against the starving, traumatized reality of the earth itself. Ultimately, it is a tale about the catastrophic cost of severing the living from the spiritual—a bleak journey through a frozen frontier where the brutal machinery of war leaves literal wounds in the world, and history’s forgotten victims rise from the mud to demand their toll. Our heroes face this reality, become victims to it, or rise as dark horses to turn the tides of an empire whose cosmology began with fracture.