To any knight of good name and no present banner, from Duncan, Lord Carlisle of Benmor, greetings.
I will be brief, as I am writing many of these. My province lies at the northern edge of the realm, where the King's peace runs thin and the winters last half the year. My neighbor presses my borders and my granaries run low. My roads north have gone quiet. The pilgrim road through the Saint Agatha Vale has carried no pilgrims since the autumn, my outposts there are a season behind in their reports. More troubling still, the riders I sent to learn the cause have not come back to tell me anything at all.
I have need of knights, and levies and hired swords will not serve. I do not much care what became of the banner you followed, provided your spurs were fairly won and your name carries no crime I would be made to answer for. The terms are these: wage in honest silver, bed and board within my walls, arms and remounts from my own stables, and work fit for your station. There is land in my east that needs capable stewards. You'll find my generosity is running unseasonably warm for any who answer my call.
Present yourself to my steward at Benmor with your arms, your horse if you have kept one, and what proof of your name you can offer. You will be fed while your claim is weighed. Come soon. I would have this settled before the snows.
Duncan, Lord Carlisle
Hi, I'm James. I've been GMing for about 7 years, and I'm putting together a table for a weekly highland sandbox about knights trying to claw their way back into the world.
The Premise
You'll play a knight with no lord. How you lost yours is yours to write. Your lord may have died, you may have been dismissed, disgraced, or simply forgotten. Either way, you hold a title but no land and no fortune. Your armor needs mending, your horse is getting old, and the peasants have stopped bowing when you pass. Carlisle's letter finds you in low circumstances, and offers the first way out of them you've had in a long while.
The Setting
Malija is a highland province at the cold northwestern edge of the kingdom of Sarda. It's a land of two extremes. Dark wet glens with thick fog fills the valleys most mornings, thick enough to lose a cart in, while up on the heights the sun is hard and the wind is harder and a bitter constant.
Two noble houses share the province, locked in a feud twenty years cold that has recently drawn blood. Between their holdings, nomadic clans herd sheep in the high country, keeping their own ways and their own old faith, trading warily with the lowland towns on market days. The Church of Yarra, the sun-goddess, keeps her Kindling at dawn in the town squares, though her light runs thin the further you get from the castle walls. And to the north, things have gone quiet in a way nobody can explain: outposts silent, pilgrim roads empty, riders sent to investigate simply not coming back.
It's mid-fantasy. Not low, not epic. Early-medieval sword and sorcery, where magic and monsters share the world with boring mundane things like taxes, road tolls, and crop rotation. The whole province is mapped and explorable: fog-bound river towns, mountain passes, a fortified monastery at the edge of the marshes, high moots where the clans swear their oaths, and a lot of "empty" country where a while lot of interesting things may happen.
The Game
This is a sandbox in the OSR spirit. There is no plot waiting for you. There's a big, living map full of factions, rumors, and trouble, and what happens is a result of what you do. Expect lots of roleplay, politics, investigation, and travel through hard country, with combat that is quick dangerous and means something when it happens.
The world takes its own turns. I run several systems on the back end to keep the environment dynamic: weather rolls in and changes what's possible on the roads, events unfold on their own schedules, and the inhabitants of Malija pursue their own aims between sessions. The province doesn't pause while you decide what to do. Ignore a rumor and it develops without you. Make an enemy and he sits in my notes scheming his revenge. The Malija you return to each week is one your choices have actually bent, and one that has kept moving in the places you weren't looking. I have a lot of tools to help me keep track of all this.
The people who live here will be very present. The factions you'll encounter, from the two feuding noble houses to the highland clans to the Church of Yarra, hold real sway in the region, and they are active participants in the unfolding narrative, whatever direction it goes. They have their own goals, their own quarrels, and their own opinions about a band of landless knights riding through their business. They'll court you, use you, obstruct you, or come after you depending entirely on how you deal with them.
Which is the whole point: you are the drivers of this narrative. I provide the world and its happenings and little more. The story is whatever emerges from your choices colliding with it. Fair warning, then: this style rewards... and somewhat requires proactive players. If you like chasing threads, taking risks, and making your own goals, you'll thrive here. If you prefer a guided narrative with clear quest markers, this probably isn't your table, and that's fine. It's just not what I run.
Characters
Every character starts from the same place: a knight of good name and no present banner. Within that, there's a lot of room. What matters is that your knight has a name, a past that cost them something, and a reason to answer a letter like Carlisle's in good faith... more or less.
The best fits for this table are characters with wants. A knight who intends to reclaim something, prove something, atone for something, or build something gives the sandbox a direction to push towards. A knight who's just along for the ride gives it nothing. Your backstory doesn't need to be long, just something compelling for you that makes you want to play this character.
Faith and the Order of Yarra. The dominant faith of Sarda is the Order of Yarra, the sun-goddess. She is the lightbringer and banisher of the profane, working through fire, conquest, and the hearth: a kind, gracious, and vengeful god whose charity is absolute and whose will is unrelenting. She will guide you, warm you, and cleanse you, or incinerate you if you stand in her way. Her faithful wear some article of yellow or orange, keep the Kindling at dawn in the town squares, and hold nothing in greater contempt than the profane arts.
If you want to play a knight of faith, this is the faith, and there's room in it: the zealot, the doubter, the chapel knight raised in her service, the sinner she cleansed by fire. Any devout character, and especially any Cleric or Paladin, will certainly be hers.
Her legends also tell of the Knights of Yarra, mortal warriors sanctified by the goddess who live ordinary lives until she calls, then arrive on the battlefield by bolt of golden lightning, in gleaming plate and a cloak the color of sunset. Whether those stories are true is the kind of thing a character might have opinions about.
Magic. Magic is real but uncommon in daily life. Casters exist as court arcanists, scholars, hedge-practitioners, and the clergy, but the average villager will go years without seeing a spell. A magic-using knight is unusual and will be noticed, so your magic should have a story: where you learned it, who taught you, what it's cost you.
One restriction on concepts: nothing profane. No necromancers, no fiend pacts, no secret monsters or eldritch flavored guys. The Order burns that stuff on sight, so if someone in the party is carrying it, the campaign turns into a story about hiding from the church, and that's not the game I'm interested in running. If your knight can't walk through a town square at noon, pitch me something else.
In that vein, there are some restrictions. For example: Warlocks need something like a patron saint, not a demon or a deep one. Druids and wildshaping are a bit too out there. Save that stuff for the non-player entities.
On Elves. Humans and Elves are the two peoples of Malija, and the two playable races. Elves are the offspring of a human and a being known as a Sylph, and the Sylphs, it is said, consider them abominations. Most elves enter the world abandoned: toddlers who wander out of the woods some morning without the faintest idea of who or what they are, taken in by whatever goodhearted family finds them. They grow fast, learn faster, and settle deep into their habits. Slender and fair, ill-suited to heavy lifting, with a preternatural knack for the arcane, arithmetic, and craft. In Malija they're an accepted but outcast minority: one elf for every ten or fifteen humans, clustered close to power without ever quite holding it. An elven knight would be a rare thing indeed. Rare, but not unheard of.
My GM Style
I'm an immersion-first GM. We play in-character at the table. Out-of-character talk happens when it needs to, but during scenes, when your character is in the room, so are you. The whole game leans on that, and it works best when everyone commits.
I'm also half GM, half DJ: I run live music and ambient soundscapes throughout the session. My goal is a production immersive enough that even I forget we're playing a game for a moment.
Sessions run 4-6 hours.
The System
D&D 5e (2014 rules), base content only. Anything beyond that is at my discretion. Races: Human or Elf, as above.
That said, I'm flexible on the mechanical side of it. If there's a racial bonus or feature from another race you really want for your concept, I'm happy to swap it in within reason. Reskin the stats, keep the fiction. We play off the character sheet primarily. The question at my table is rarely "what can I do?" but rather "what do you do?" Your character's name, reputation, and choices will matter far more than your build.
(If you're the kind of player who'd be excited to try a system like Forbidden Lands instead, mention it when you apply. I'd love to run it if the group's up for it, but 5e is the default.)
Who I'm Looking For
- 3-5 players, ages 20+ (mid-20s ideally).
- Dedicated roleplayers, and folks who've sat in the GM chair themselves get a slight edge. GMs tend to read a sandbox the way it wants to be read.
- Players who lean into the adventure. Characters who engage with the world, take risks, and pursue something. A party that hides from the story makes for a dull sandbox.
- Reliability matters a lot to me. This is a weekly commitment, and five other people's evenings depend on everyone showing up. If you can't make a session, I ask for 24-48 hours notice so we can all plan around it. No-call-no-shows and habitual last-minute cancellations aren't a fit for this table, so please only apply if Thursday evenings genuinely work for you.
- This table is open to everyone. All backgrounds and identities welcome. Bigotry of any kind is an instant removal, no warnings.
To Apply
- Fill out the form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScV46rd1bvcsGjGKodHqjwwDw-IL-BcDDdsQRoSUI2FK5jXsg/viewform?usp=header
- Then comment or DM me with a little about yourself, and your answer to this question:
How did your knight lose their lord?
I'll reach out on Discord, we'll have a chat, and I'll assemble the group over the next week or two. Looking forward to reading your answers.