marcmaann

Many are the legends of the fabled lost tomb of Captain Charles Vane.
Once one of New Antioch's most famous and well trusted explorers, he deserted after discovering something during a sanctioned archeological expedition in the lands formerly known as Jordan.
No one knows exactly what he discovered, and rumors abound about his loyalties and motivations. Some claim he turned heretic, others that he remained faithful and turned rogue only to keep what he discovered safe from the unworthy.
What is known is that he terrorized the fertile crescent for more than twenty years, pillaging and robbing from heretic and faithful alike, and building up a vast hoard of wealth and relics unmatched in myth and legend.
No one knows exactly how he died, only that he was buried in an unmarked tomb with all his wealth like one of the Pharaohs of old, somewhere in Jordan, and that only his lieutenants held clues to the location of this vast hoard.
It has been nearly 100 years since the death of Captain Vane, but the tomb of one of his lieutenants was recently discovered, along with clues pointing to the locations of the others. Now heretic and faithful alike scramble to uncover these clues, and be the first to discover the Lost Tomb of Captain Vane.
Many great relics are rumored to be included among this vast hoard, from a piece of the true cross to one of the silver denarii granted to Judas for betraying Christ himself. Other wild claims include missing Jabirean manuscripts, plans for holy engines recorded by St. Methodius himself, and the burial shroud of the Bride of Beelzebub, Febris.
This is not a story of faithful and heretics, but a story of greed and the struggle for power and glory.
For whoever is first to find the lost tomb will surely take their place among history and secure glory and power for their faction (and great wealth for themselves).

Solothurn was once the Lantern of the Faithful —a proud cathedral city and the revered seat of one of Switzerland’s high bishops, whose authority stretched across mountains, valleys, and countless faithful souls. Its basilicas rang with doctrine, its reliquaries overflowed with bones of martyrs, and its bishopric was said to guard the last true interpretation of the faith.

Now Solothurn is a cratered corpse of stone and smoke.

The cathedral’s spires lie snapped across the ruins like broken spears. The bishop’s palace is half-sunken into a shell crater, its once-sacred halls drowned in mud and incense fog. Around the city coils a suffocating labyrinth of trenches where faith, fear, and fanaticism decay in the same waterlogged dugouts.

Dozens of warbands—most faithful, some cursed, all relentless—have converged upon the ruined seat of the bishop. For beneath Solothurn, deep in the Vault of Forty Martyrs, something has awakened. Some believe it is the last spark of divine favor. Others claim it is a curse veiled in holy light. And a few whisper that the bishop’s final decree was never written in ink, but in blood—and that the Vault hides the reason why.

No one agrees on what stirs in the relic vaults.
Everyone agrees it must not fall into the wrong hands.

And so the siege drags on.
Crusader hosts, penitent zealots, heretical cabals, broken regiments, and fevered pilgrim militias tear each other apart in the trenches, all fighting for the same ruined city whose bishop once promised salvation.

The Siege of Solothurn is not a war for land—
it is a war for belief, fought in the shadows of a fallen cathedral.