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Rules and Reference
Community Status
Critical Characters
Culture
Gallery
History
Mechanics
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Recruiting Players: NO
Recruiting GMs: YES
One of the larger and more active games on RPoL, Freehold began in January 2011, and continues today.

The community now known as Freehold began as a game entitled Forgotten Realms: Unnamed Settlement. Always intended to be a semi-sandbox campaign focused strongly on conquering an untamed frontier, it was set in Dungeons & Dragons' Forgotten Realms campaign setting, in the little-used region called Veldorn, also known as the "land of monsters" due to that area's high population of nomadic monstrous humanoids and many dangerous creatures. In Forgotten Realms canon, Veldorn is a graveyard of failed prior civilizations, which conveniently served two purposes for the game's original designer: Plenty of nearby ruins (referred to in the Forgotten Realms setting as "stonedelves") and dangers, and a large, free location which was unclaimed by the surrounding nations.

While the game was initially quite successful, both in attracting enthusiastic players and assistant GMs and in achieving its early campaign goals, the Unnamed Settlement was yet plagued by many of the difficulties that often afflict play-by-post communities: Despite the best efforts of a competent team of GMs, attrition set in as many players left or were expelled for a variety of reasons, soon after which (March 2011) the founding Game Master and originator of the idea vanished without a trace from RPoL, proving unresponsive to attempts by his staff to contact him offsite. In many online message-board-style games, this often foretells the collapse of the campaign, but the Unnamed Settlement survived due to quick action by remaining GMs.

Since admins and moderators were allowed to run their own player characters in the campaign, the GM staff had a vested interest in keeping the game up and running, and appealed to players for assistance. Foremost among the effort to support and continue was GM Sermo, one of the first assistants recruited by the community's founder to aid in operating what was meant to be a large project. Specializing early on in the ins-and-outs of canon minutiae for the game area, Sermo took the lead in employing new GMs, among them one of the first-wave players who would become GM Sionnach, and successfully enacted sweeping new localized plots to engage and retain players.

Perhaps mistakenly foreseeing the potential failure of the game, some leaders (GM Coolhand, Rules Ogre) understandably chose to bow out of the project while it was in decline, while others (Village Headman) took on a much-reduced role, leaving the day-to-day operations of Unnamed Settlement to Sermo and Sionnach. With critical support from players, the pair implemented significant changes in design and functionality of the game, from standardizing character sheet formatting to a streamlined interview process for new applicants. Sermo maintained the hard mechanical portion of the project, while Sionnach took on the role of reviewing and adapting "soft data," including conversions of 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons material to the updated 3.5 system. Both GMs contributed much to plot and character development, as the game's founder was discovered to have kept his design notes and materials, if any, offline or in some other location inaccessible to the GM staff following his disappearance, resulting in a complete scrap of whatever unknown goals he had originally set for the campaign, and a ground-up redesign of all short- and long-term campaign milestones.

In April 2011, Village Headman retired from the still-struggling game, leaving GMs Sermo and Sionnach to administrate things. With the ever-increasing success of Paizo Publishing, LLC's new Pathfinder product, a plan was devised to poll remaining players and attempt a reboot of the game using the Pathfinder system, while leaving the Unnamed Settlement's history and location unchanged: The community would go forward using Pathfinder mechanics and a mixture of Forgotten Realms and Pathfinder official materials, and be reconstituted as a new, separate community on RPoL. First-generation PCs still participating in the game at that time (Adoward Beastfriend, Adrian Fisher, Cravan McLepid, Lysander Kendricke Arkaine, Nitis Nochan, Shara Graye, Vio Belc) were notified May 9, 2011, and elected universally to participate in the reboot; on May 17, 2011, an official name was chosen for the settlement: Freehold.

The current iteration of Freehold officially began May 17, 2011. Since that time, numerous GMs and players have passed through, many adopting a more or less permanent place in the campaign. The game celebrated its successful "real" nine-year anniversary in January, 2020. Don't be fooled by the number of visible posts; the archives are well in excess of some 50,000 messages!

While any endgame has yet to be revealed to current players, the long-term focus of the game remains on building and improving the settlement, with heavy emphasis on PC involvement in government, economics, construction, exploration, and defense. Short-term benchmarks are measured by players' deeds and achievements in-game, including the successful embarkation and conclusion of various adventure scenarios which include elements for later plots or from PCs' wishlists, making the community almost entirely player-driven and -administrated.

Professional artwork commissioned especially for Freehold is supported by player community funding.





See also:
Rules and Reference
Community Status
Critical Characters
Culture
Gallery
History
Mechanics
OOC Diversions