Contracts of the Crossroads Court | A 5E Noir Campaign of Heists
In Nauxoire, the exiled city, the King of the Crossroads Court makes offers only fools can refuse. Wealth, power, influence, all yours for the taking.
$30.00
/ Session
Details
Weekly / Sunday - 4:00 PM UTC
Session Duration / 3–4 hours
Campaign Length / Up to 12 Sessions
0 / 5 Seats Filled
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About the adventure
Step into the exiled city of Nauxoire, home of mad gods and lost souls and desperate mortals, as an agent for the King of the Crossroads Court. You will serve as his eyes, ears and hands within the city, stealing arcane trinkets from the Vaults of his rivals. For centuries, maybe even millennia, children have been warned that bad deeds will lead them to Nauxoire. Fickle gods and arrogant mortals banish any who offend or oppose to the city. And there is no escape from that city. It is not merely mortals that call Nauxoire home; many strange and terrible things that once threatened the divine have been sealed within the city. Mortal families that were exiled generations ago have taken impressive root, now commanding great wealth and power. But the more was fed to Nauxoire, the greater its appetite grew. It was no longer satisfied with the meagre offerings and began stealing people and places and things that piqued its eldritch interest, growing endlessly. Imposing statues of forbidden and forgotten gods loom over the streets of Nauxoire, the rain slicking their facades like endless tears and flowing into the maze of canals that tangle through the alleys and thoroughfares between their feet. Smoke-spewing trains crawl along a sprawl of suspended rail-tracks like clattering centipedes, snaking between elevated gondola-dotted aqueducts and water-lifts to the canals below. The city itself seems almost alive, a growing entity that hosts the citizens, accommodating them and their needs as their numbers increase. Perhaps you were exiled to Nauxoire, possibly for good reason or by earning the ire of the wrong person, or the city took an interest in you and stole you, maybe you were born here. But the city is your home. And you have caught the eye of one of the city's most notorious power brokers, the mercurially elusive King of the Crossroads Court. Owner of a vast and ancient collection of esoteric trinkets, a Vault. But his is not the only Vault in Nauxoire. As one of his agents, you will risk life and limb to plunder the Vaults of his rivals, be that through infiltration or violence. You will attend noble galas, gather secrets, evade deadly security and clash with gangs, all to break into Vaults of powerful arcane objects and steal them for your King of the Crossroads Court. * This campaign could be for you if you enjoy things like Bloodborne, Dishonored, The Gentleman Bastard Sequence, Perdido Street Station, Lord of Mysteries, The Nevernight Chronicle, John Wick or The Green Bone Saga.
Game style
Combat Lite
Roleplay Heavy
Rule of Cool (RoC)
Theater of the Mind
Game themes
Meet the Game Master
5.0
(8)
Less than a year on StartPlaying
Highly rated for: Creativity, World Builder, Storytelling
About me
I'm a dreamer. I've been dreaming of imaginary people, places and climactic events since I was introduced to D&D at age 8! I began my TTRPG journey with AD&D and have since played the more modern editions, classic systems like Call of Cthulhu as well as recent contemporary systems like Forged in the Dark and Daggerheart. Whilst I began as a player, it did not take long for the GMing bug to bite, and bite hard. Once it had, I was hooked. I began homebrewing systems more than a decade ago and that has led to the development of a modular, classless, setting-agnostic system, which I hope to introduce to StartPlaying.Games in the future. I am a 'Weird Fantasy' worldbuilder inspired by fantasy, sc-fi and anime and I'm bored of elves and dwarves and orcs. I craft multi-threaded narratives around—and because of—player actions in these dynamic settings. I am an expert in medium-form theatre of the mind, reactive campaigns with cinematic, satisfying climaxes. I think TTRPGs are the best way to tell stories. Magic becomes real at the crossroads of collective imagination and emotional investment. The relationship between GM and players can be a positive feedback loop, reinforcing and improving the experience for everyone and that is what I hope to create at all of my tables. I am no therapist, but I am profoundly and personally aware of the healing and transformational power of TTRPGs. Come join the Imaginaut Studios Discord server: https://discord.gg/rWgBCV9zNu
View Profile →Character creation
Creating your character
Character concepting will occur during Session Zero. You'll decide if you were banished to Nauxoire (and why!) or if you were stolen by the city or are a born native as part of your backstory. The most important thing is that you have a character concept that we're all excited for you to play! You'll work with myself and the other players to create connections between each other and NPCs in the city. Collaborating with your fellow players whilst devising your characters origins allows dynamic relationships to emerge organically and drive the narrative. There are no animalistic or monstrous races in this world aesthetically. Mechanically, you can choose any of them, but many will be reskinned and reflavoured to fit into the broader human-adjacent categories of the setting, and if you choose a flying race, we'll find a replacement racial ability for you. All classes and subclasses are available to play. If you are familiar with the character creation process in 5E, I am more than happy to leave you to it and level yourself up to level 6. If you need some help, we can do so privately, or in Session Zero. I only ask that you hold off on rolling your HP dice until we're all together and about to start a session. We'll be using the standard point buy for Character Ability Scores, with Ability Scores capped at 15 when spending points, using this calculator: https://chicken-dinner.com/5e/5e-point-buy.html Racial Ability Score improvements will be a +2 and a +1 you can apply to any Ability Score after spending your points, regardless of your chosen race. At level 1, the highest Ability Score you can possibly have is 17.
What to expect
Preparing for the session
We'll be playing on video call on the Imaginaut Studios Discord, so make sure you have a Discord account that I can add to the server, and a working camera and microphone. As a theatre of the mind GM, I prefer to not use virtual tabletops for battles as I find that they limit imaginative creativity for everyone involved. I also intend this campaign to be relatively combat-light.
What Imaginaut Sam brings to the table
My GMing style for this campaign will be light on combat, using theatre of the mind when we do roll Initiative. Sessions will be episodic, a session or two of exploring the city, accessing and investigating your target before a heist, to allow you the most opportunities to sink your teeth into Nauxoire... and it to sink its teeth into you. As a Rule of Cool GM, I always want to enable cool player ideas as long as they make sense within the rules of the game and the world. This works well with my theatre of the mind combat style and leads to some very epic, cinematic moments in battle. I approach combat like an action scene in a movie; the better your imagination, the bigger our budget for spectacle. Roleplay is central to my GMing, allowing players to freely interact with each other and the other memorable inhabitants of the world that I love to perform. Your relationships with each other, and the characters of the world, are dynamic and fluid and the consequences of your choices will ripple through the campaign.
Homebrew rules
The King of the Crossroads Court is generous with his agents, arming them with powerful and strange artefacts to aid in the thievery of his rivals' Vaults. Once you are agents, you will each be granted a homebrew magic item, and you will earn more from the King as you steal from rival Vaults and your endeavours in the city pay dividends. Nothing feels worse than rolling a Natural 20 and then rolling like shit on your damage. Enter, the Savage Critical (pioneered by Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford). The Desperate Measures system from Critical Role's Campaign 4 gives you high risk, high reward options once you're at half HP or less (Bloodied). I'll explain the details of what you can do in these life-threatening situations in Session Zero. Death Saves are one of the most boring mechanics in 5E, but the Desperate Measures system also makes dying more interesting and gives you a way to aid your allies, even as your life fades. Again, the specifics will be explained in Session Zero.
Equipment needed to play
Internet
Computer
Microphone
Webcam
Platforms used
Safety
How Imaginaut Sam creates a safe table
During Session Zero, I work with you to define what content is and is not acceptable within the campaign. I do not have my own Lines and Veils, but I encourage you to make me aware of anything I should steer clear of.
Content warnings
Safety tools used