Rosenhall is a fantasy campaign setting designed for players who want a world that feels inhabited, consequential, and resistant to easy answers. It is not built around spectacle or power fantasy, but around societies trying to survive in the presence of extraordinary forces. Kingdoms rise, institutions calcify, faiths fracture, and economies strain under pressure; not because a plot demands it, but because the world continues to move. Player characters enter this world as capable, influential figures, but not as its center. They are participants in an ongoing history, not exceptions to it, and their actions exist alongside forces that do not pause, scale, or soften themselves for the sake of the plot.
Over the past decade, Rosenhall has existed across multiple campaigns, each exploring different regions, conflicts, and ideas, often in isolation from one another. This remake brings those fractured threads together, not by preserving their exact events, but by unifying their themes, pressures, and unanswered questions into a single, cohesive setting with one clear narrative spine. While the setting has existed in various forms before, those earlier games are not required knowledge, nor are they binding canon. Their purpose here is structural rather than nostalgic. This remake uses ten years of accumulated play as reference material rather than scripture, refining what worked, discarding what didn’t, and recomposing the world into a version that can stand on its own.
At its heart, Rosenhall is concerned with how societies adapt to imbalance. It asks what happens when individuals acquire disproportionate power, how governments respond when they cannot enforce their own laws, and how ordinary people survive in the wake of forces they cannot meaningfully oppose.
This is not a setting designed around moral certainty or narrative safety. Rosenhall does not assume that player characters are celebrated, beloved, or even welcome by default. It assumes instead that adventurers are unusual, powerful, and destabilizing, and that their presence alters the emotional and political temperature of a place whether they intend it or not. Violence is frightening. Magic is disruptive. Good intentions do not guarantee good outcomes. The world responds not to what characters meant to do, but to what actually happened, and that response becomes part of the setting going forward.
Most importantly, every region has its own pressures, fears, compromises, and coping mechanisms, shaped by history and sustained by people trying to live normal lives under abnormal conditions. The purpose of this remake is to ensure that when players step into the world, they immediately feel that weight, that they are entering a place with momentum, memory, and resistance. Rosenhall is not here to perform for the players. It exists to be engaged with, negotiated with, and, at times, endured.
Story, Structure, and Player Choice
Rosenhall is not a plotless sandbox, nor is it a railroad disguised as one. It is a world with a central main quest, a set of pressures, conflicts, and trajectories that will continue to advance regardless of where the players go or what they choose to engage with. This main plot exists to give the setting momentum and coherence, not to dictate solutions or outcomes. Players are never required to approach the story from a specific angle, in a specific order, or at a specific time. What is required is an understanding that the world does not wait. Problems escalate. Factions adapt. Power consolidates or fractures. Choosing not to intervene is not neutral; it is a decision with consequences that may only become visible much later.
The open-world structure of Rosenhall is built around meaningful latitude, not infinite freedom. Players are encouraged to pursue what interests them: regions, factions, mysteries, and personal goals, but the campaign assumes that attention is finite and priorities matter. Every choice implicitly deprioritizes something else. If the party focuses on stabilizing one kingdom, another may slide toward civil unrest. If they chase a personal vendetta, an institutional threat may quietly entrench itself. The setting is designed so that the question is never “What does the story want us to do next?” but rather “What are we willing to let happen while we do this?”
Crucially, Rosenhall does not present problems as isolated content blocks meant to be cleared and forgotten. Conflicts are systemic. They have roots, beneficiaries, and unintended side effects. Resolving one issue may expose another; solving a problem too forcefully may create resentment or dependency. The main plot is therefore less a sequence of events than a pressure gradient, a convergence of forces that will eventually demand a response, but not on any one timetable or in any one form. Players may confront it early, late, indirectly, or not at all. Each approach produces a different world.
This structure requires players to engage with uncertainty. Information is incomplete by design. No single NPC, faction, or institution has the full picture, and many are operating on flawed assumptions or self-serving narratives. The campaign does not promise that every moral dilemma has a clean resolution, or that every sacrifice will be rewarded proportionally. Instead, it asks players to make decisions with the information they have, knowing that hindsight may complicate their certainty later. The tension of Rosenhall does not come from hidden twists, but from watching the consequences of earlier choices mature into something unavoidable.
A World That Remembers
Rosenhall treats geography not as backdrop, but as behavior. Regions are not defined solely by borders, climate, or aesthetics; they are defined by the conditions under which people live and the pressures they endure. To express this, the campaign uses regional effects as a foundational design tool. These effects are persistent states: social, psychological, political, or economic, that shape how a place feels to inhabit and how it responds to those who pass through it. They are not temporary modifiers applied for balance, nor abstract flavor text meant to be ignored. They are the world, made legible at the table.
A region suffering under fear behaves differently than one enjoying stability. In a frightened town, people speak quietly, trust slowly, and inflate prices out of uncertainty. Travel feels dangerous even when no monsters are present. Guards are jumpy. Rumors spread faster than truth. Conversely, a region under authoritarian control may feel safe, orderly, and prosperous: roads maintained, services reliable, crime rare, while simultaneously suppressing dissent, stifling expression, and quietly eroding trust. These conditions shape not just encounters, but tone: how NPCs greet the party, what options are available, and what kinds of solutions are even conceivable.
What makes these regional effects central to Rosenhall is that they are changeable, but never disposable. Player actions can alter the state of a region, sometimes dramatically. Bringing a serial killer to justice may lift a pall of fear, replacing it with relief, gratitude, and renewed confidence. Mechanically, this might manifest as improved social outcomes or lasting goodwill. Narratively, it means people remember who made their lives safer. But the campaign is equally interested in what follows. Relief may give way to complacency. Gratitude may harden into expectation. A town saved once may come to rely on outside intervention rather than building its own resilience.
Importantly, regional effects do not exist to reward players for doing the “right” thing. They exist to model consequence over time. Removing a tyrant may destabilize a region that had grown dependent on rigid control. Ending a threat violently may solve the immediate problem while leaving grief, resentment, or power vacuums behind. Even positive changes can carry costs. Rosenhall is not interested in the moment of victory alone; it is interested in what life looks like afterward, when the banners come down and people still have to live there.
These effects also ensure that regions are meaningfully distinct from one another in ways that go beyond maps or artwork. Two cities may share similar architecture, climate, or demographics, but feel entirely different to play in because the pressures acting upon them are different. One may be optimistic but fragile, another wealthy but brittle, another stagnant but stable. Over time, players begin to recognize these patterns not as lore to memorize, but as signals, indicators of where help is needed, where danger is brewing, or where intervention might make things worse rather than better.
Ultimately, the purpose of regional effects in Rosenhall is to make the world memorable. Places are not cleared and forgotten. They change, then continue living with the results of those changes. When players return to a region months later, it should feel altered by what happened there, sometimes improved, sometimes worsened, always changed. This is how Rosenhall avoids becoming a series of disconnected adventures. The world carries its history forward, and the players move through a landscape shaped, in part, by their own footprints.
Power
Rosenhall is a world that genuinely needs adventurers. The threats that it faces cannot be answered by militias or town guards alone. Ordinary institutions are simply not built to confront extraordinary danger. Adventurers exist because something has already gone wrong, and without them, many regions of Rosenhall would collapse under pressures they cannot survive.
This is why power matters here. The setting does not shy away from letting player characters become capable, influential, and formidable. Their abilities are not decorative; they are the tools required to confront problems that would otherwise be unsolvable.
However, Rosenhall is equally clear-eyed about what happens when power is applied without reflection. Scale matters. A decision that feels controlled at the table can be catastrophic within the fiction. A spell cast to intimidate can devastate bystanders. A show of force meant to end a conflict can instead redefine the balance of power in a region overnight. None of this is framed as punishment. It is framed as reality asserting itself. When extraordinary force is introduced into ordinary spaces, the consequences are no longer abstract.
As characters grow stronger, the world does not simply become easier. It becomes more reactive. Governments adjust their posture. Communities grow cautious. Allies begin to rely too heavily on outside intervention. Enemies escalate in response. Rosenhall is interested in that transition point: the moment where necessary protectors risk becoming destabilizing forces simply by existing at the scale they now occupy. This is not about good intentions turning evil; it is about power outpacing oversight.
Crucially, this does not mean violence is discouraged, or that restraint is always the “correct” choice. Many problems in Rosenhall demand decisive action, and hesitation can be as destructive as recklessness. What the setting asks instead is awareness of context. A battlefield is not a tavern. A wilderness threat is not a civic one. The same action taken in different spaces can mean protection in one moment and terror in another.
Information, Uncertainty, and Imperfect Knowledge
Rosenhall is a world where clarity is rare and certainty is earned slowly, if at all. Information does not arrive cleanly, completely, or without bias. Most people understand only the small part of the world they are forced to navigate, and even institutions with significant power act on partial truths, outdated assumptions, or deliberate misrepresentations. This is not an obstacle placed in front of the players; it is a reflection of how the world functions. Knowledge in Rosenhall is fragmented, contextual, and often contradictory, and learning to operate within that uncertainty is a core part of play.
Players should not expect to have full visibility into the consequences of their actions at the moment those actions are taken. Decisions are made with the information available at the time, not with perfect hindsight. Rumors may be wrong. Witnesses may be frightened, self-interested, or simply mistaken. Authorities may lie to preserve order. Allies may withhold information to protect themselves. Rosenhall treats this ambiguity not as a puzzle to be solved, but as a condition of agency. Meaningful choice requires risk, and risk requires incomplete information.
Importantly, this uncertainty is not used to “gotcha” players or invalidate their intentions. The setting does not punish characters for failing to predict outcomes they could not reasonably foresee. Instead, it allows the results of decisions to unfold honestly over time. A choice made with good intent and limited knowledge may still produce harm. A choice made cynically may have unexpectedly positive effects. Rosenhall is interested in how players respond to those outcomes, not in whether they made the “correct” call according to an invisible answer key.
This approach places emphasis on investigation, relationships, and attention, rather than optimization. Players who take the time to listen, ask questions, and observe patterns will develop a deeper understanding of how the world works, but never complete mastery over it. There will always be unknowns. There will always be second-order effects that only become visible after the fact. This is intentional. Rosenhall is not designed to be solved. It is designed to be engaged with.
Shared Responsibility
Rosenhall is designed to be a game first and foremost. It exists to be played, explored, argued over in-character, and remembered. Choices matter because they create story; narrative matters because it gives those choices weight. This is not an exercise in simulation for its own sake, nor a vehicle for mechanical performance. The point of play is discovery of the world, of the characters within it, and of the consequences that follow when decisions are made under pressure.
At the same time, Rosenhall is a social game, and it only works when everyone at the table understands that the experience belongs to the group, not the individual. Fun here is not defined as constant success or universal agreement, but as momentum, tension, surprise, and shared investment. That requires trust: trust that rulings are made in good faith, trust that ambiguity is not an attack, and trust that everyone is playing toward the same goal, telling a compelling story together. When that trust is present, the game moves quickly, scenes resolve cleanly, and consequences feel earned rather than imposed.
Because of this, Rosenhall is not a good fit for every player, and that is not a moral judgment, but a practical one. This is not a campaign for someone who needs every encounter to be a win, who experiences loss or complication as invalidation, or who cannot tolerate in-character tension, disagreement, or conflict. NPCs will argue with the party. Institutions will resist them. Other player characters may disagree sharply about what should be done. These moments are not failures of play; they are the engine of it. Players are expected to be able to separate in-character pressure from out-of-character safety, and to navigate discomfort without shutting the game down.
Likewise, Rosenhall is not a power fantasy driven by optimization. This is not a setting that can be conquered through numbers, perfect builds, or exhaustive rules knowledge. System mastery alone will not guarantee control, safety, or dominance. Players who approach the game as something to “solve” or “win” will likely find themselves frustrated, not because the game is hostile to competence, but because competence here is measured in judgment and adaptability rather than damage output or AC totals.
An Invitation, Not a Promise
If this document excites you, if you have ever wanted to play in an open-world campaign where choices are real, then Rosenhall may be the game you’ve been looking for. This is a setting where settlements behave like places rather than quest hubs, where NPCs have pressures and priorities of their own, and where the world itself functions as a living engine. Cities, factions, and even individuals are treated as mechanically real: not improvised abstractions, but entities with structure, limits, and the capacity to be meaningfully affected by play.
In Rosenhall, places are not just described, they are stated. Regions have persistent conditions that shape behavior. Institutions have resources, authority, and vulnerabilities. NPCs are not plot devices that exist only when spoken to; they have the same mechanical reality as the player characters do, and the world behaves accordingly. This grounding is what allows choices to matter beyond the moment. When something changes, it does so within a system that remembers it.
If, however, any part of this document gave you pause, that’s okay. Rosenhall is a very fucking odd setting, and it is intentionally demanding. It asks players to be present, flexible, and willing to engage with uncertainty. It is not built to guarantee victory, comfort, or control, and it does not exist to be “solved” through optimization alone. That strangeness is not an accident; it is the point. Not every game needs to be for everyone, and Rosenhall works best when the people at the table actively want the kind of experience it offers.
If Rosenhall sounds like a place you want to inhabit: messy, reactive, mechanically grounded, and alive, then you are welcome here.