A Profile on the Island of Ramsey

Years ago, faced a problem familiar to many: I had no players. But that's prime time to start working on the next campaign, so I started trying to hatch some bold new idea. I eventually realized I wanted to do D&D in a Western setting, and that led to the immediate problem that I didn't have anywhere in Evanoch that would do to host it. So I hatched a new continent, one where a Wild West aesthetic could live and invite a new kind of adventure. I set to work. 

It was to be a desert island, the sandy earth underfoot replicating that of classic Western setting. People would get from place to place by horse, which already worked for D&D. Standard weapons would be replaced by bows and crossbows, my adaptation of gunslingers (hand crossbows would be common). The storylines would be Western-themed, and the towns would be the true star. Each one would have a distinct personality, which I thought would lend itself to curious adventurers. 

It took a year to get the foundations set and the first two towns made. I was distracted, and I was careful, and I was in no rush. I worked away, getting everything just right. I made charts detailing the professions and home locations and personalities of each townsperson as well as a web of their relationships with other townsfolk. I was going way in detail. 

Too much in detail. I was lost in the sauce. I found players and had only a partial map to play with. I hatched a half-brained story, we played for two sessions, and breakups destroyed the group. This Western setting, which I had named Ramsey, went on hold. 

Perhaps two years passed. I returned to Ramsey with new urgency--I had a large group of players intrigued by the setting. I completed the other ten towns in the space of a few months. They had less detail--blessedly, no relationship charts--but the maps were complete, and I understand the character of the places. 

The campaign was, ultimately, a let-down. My party was a group of antics players who destroyed or insulted everything they interacted with, getting them kicked out of all but one town they visited. I didn't get to experience Ramsey this time, either. Maybe one day. But for now, I can give you a guided tour of what that campaign might look like.

Ramsey is a small island to the east of Dalton. It is mostly sandy and mountainous, with warm to hot temperatures year-round. The island has a large prisoner and ex-prisoner population, and crime is widespread in most places. People coming from Dalton tend to land in Hyder Bend or Broken Shield, dismissing Hart Springs (also called Fool's Landing) as too small to bother with. This map is quite detailed--it took me many hours in Photoshop to get just right--and has individualized emblems for each city. 

Hart Springs

Hart Springs is where the campaign begins whenever I use this setting. It's a quiet, idyllic town with trees and hills and water everywhere. In Westerns, this is the Promised Land, the place you get to enjoy when your questing days are over. Hart Springs is full of friendly if quirky people who enjoy their separation from the craziness on Ramsey proper. This map is ugly but detailed--a first draft I never got around to fixing up.

Fairbank and Fairburrow

Fairbank is the classic foreboding town on the frontier. It's hyper-religious and employs sacrifice daily and hates all non-humans, which means it's a strange town to deal with. But Fairbank is not the whole story, as a hatch in the local general store leads down to Fairburrow, an expansive system of tunnels and carved-out spaces allowing a fair population to exist under Fairbank undetected. 

Hyder Bend

This hyper-industrial city may not look like the industrial cities that pressed in on the Wild West, but it has that same spirit--a colossal monument to production with raw capitalism at its core. The heavy industry of Hyder Bend requires the more stable soil of the southwestern continent, so its existence is something of an anomaly, but the money keeps flowing for now. This is one of the biggest cities, and it took a long time to make. 

Hangman's Slab

One of the most important part of any Western is the law. In Ramsey, a large amount of marshals are stationed at Hangman's Slab, in part because the continent's biggest prison is located in the city. A great deal of criminals, who work in a mine owned by the richest man in Hyder Bend, who escape Hangman's Slab's subpar prisons make the swim to Fink's End, though only some will make it. 

Broken Shield

Broken Shield is near and dear to my heart. If Hart Springs is the Promised Land of the past, Broken Shield is the Promised Land of the future. They've developed desert farming, desalinization of drinking and irrigation water, apartment housing, and basic public education. They make decent trade with Dalton but are known for being independent. Note the colorful marketplace in this map. 

Sunset Ridge

At the center of the map, Sunset Ridge is everything you could ask of a Wild West town. It's built along a canyon wall, the city's shaped like a wagon wheel from above, there are a dozen saloons, and any Wild West quest you might dream up can be found here. For a long-term campaign, this would be a likely hub of operations given its geography and facility.

Old Paradise and New Paradise

Paradise, New and Old, is a settlement bottlenecking a pass in the north Bramble Mountains featuring impressive defensive architecture and construction of a fort. Old Paradise, then just Paradise, was besieged by bandits to the point of destruction; the populace of Paradise banded together with mercenaries and drove out the bandits before building New Paradise in a more defensible position. New Paradise makes a considerable tax on those passing between west and east halves of the island.

Fort Weaver

This fort, built and operated by the Daltoner government, represents something of a miscalculation on Dalton's part. While the site, nestled among the spines of the Bramble Mountains, is highly defensible, it also holds no strategic value in terms of location. It was once believed that sailing east from the east coast of Ramsey would lead to new land, leading to the construction of the fort. Today, the fort holds marshals and soldiers who are sent out to fight crime, bandits, and raiders a la the frontier forts of the Wild West.

Fink's End

As a kid, I read a lot of Frog and Toad Are Friends books, and that loving depiction of swamps really stuck with me, so the fact that swamps often appear in Westerns made this town a no-brainer. Fink's End is a shady little criminal town in the swamp. Fugitives often arrive from Hangman's Slab across the way and lay low until they can stray further. Players looking for a criminal connection who want more than Fairburrow has to offer can find most things here. 

Ruby Range

Across a massive spine of the Bramble Mountains from Fort Weaver, Ruby Range sits at the intersection of the flatlands to the north and the ocean to the east, the falling mountains around it. It is less a city and more a mostly permanent camp. Every resident of the settlement is a Ruby Ranger, a trained rider and fighter committed to freedom and the homeland above all else, opposed to the intrusive law of Dalton's government and the aggression of the bandits. 

Red Hawk

This city is the biggest departure from classic Wild West tropes, but I like the idea a lot, and I think it fits in well with Ramsey. Basically, Red Hawk is situated in a massive old-growth forest called the Ancient Sea, and while most people believe a city is there, not everyone agrees, and there's no consensus on what it looks like or how to get there. Really, the people of Red Hawk live in the treetops on platforms they've built into the trees. Why the secrecy? I initially conceived of it as people looking for true isolation from the ills of civilization, and I later played the people of Red Hawk as peaceful werewolves who were isolating for bystanders' safety. In the map below, the rings of buildings are around massive tree stumps; the big circles are hollowed-out trees; and the strange runes were an in-game message to the players who first visited here. 

Pilgrim's Glen

This was another departure from Western style, but I tried to keep it thematically appropriate. Just off Ramsey's northeast coast is a small set of islands. On them are a few strings of farms, a somewhat sizable town, a marketplace, and a spellcaster's college and monastery. In Westerns, it's common for a character to go to a figure of wisdom--often a religious figure--and I wanted a place where players could seek wisdom in a beautiful, idyllic little place like they began in Hart Springs.

I realized while making this guide that I've mapped Ramsey's cities more meticulously than I have with Evanoch's, and that's very interesting to me. I wonder if it's because Ramsey felt finite and completable, while Evanoch feels infinite and impossible to complete. What's clear, though, is that I love this setting. I want to work with it one day. And I have faith. Because I made Ramsey in faith, got a chance, lost that chance, worked on it more, got another chance, lost that chance too--maybe if I work on it, develop more NPCs and questlines and I find a group . . . you never know. It just may happen yet. 

More to the point with Ramsey, though--Ramsey is a land discovered by Daltoners and largely deemed not worth civilizing. Fort Weaver serves almost no purpose for most people on Ramsey. Daltoners back home treat Ramsey as a penal colony and pass restrictive laws. When someone comes to Ramsey looking for opportunity, they are often down on their luck or misinformed. Braving the sands, snakes, and bandits is not for the faint of heart, and Ramsey is a good place to run a dramatic, high-stakes story in that sense--it also worked well for antics, complete with plenty of cowboy accents. 

That's all for now. Coming soon: a pirate D&D one-shot, a guide to the planes, and what perfect GMing looks like. Until next time, happy gaming!

Back to the homepage (where you can find everything!)