Seeking Feedback on a D&D Campaign Start

Background

I’m thinking of using an old campaign as the basis for my next one.

Prior to the Covid pandemic, when I was still living in Los Angeles, I started a 5th Edition D&D campaign that took place in the Grand Duchy of Karameikos. The Grand Duchy is one of the two place I have most frequently launched my D&D campaigns. It’s the “low level” kingdom for the Mystara setting (the Known World to B/X peeps) and has a solid “standard Medieval” feel.

I've long been a fan of the Mystara Setting for Dungeons & Dragons. One big reason for this is that it was the setting used in the Moldvay/Cook Basic/Expert and BECMI editions of D&D. The biggest reason though, is that I love the bizarre anachronistic mashup of cultures in the game. You have a culture based on the Roman Empire that is doing trade with a culture based on renaissance Venice. It's got a touch of everything.

Having a bit of everything does take away from the verisimilitude, but when you add the reasons for the Hollow World setting inside the world the setting actually makes sense. The world of Mystara is hollow because the god Ka the Preserver, the first dinosaur to attain sentience and eventually immortality, sought to create a refuge for the societies that collapsed on the surface of the world. One could induct from this that Ka's sponsor builds the surface world from the collapsed cultures of other worlds.

At least that's how it works in my mind-canon, not that it will affect the campaign that all of the kingdoms are actually rescued cultures from other worlds. Though that will allow me to bring in some of the material from Green Ronin’s Freeport products more fluidly.

Where most Mystaran kingdoms/countries have a fairly obvious single inspriation, the Grand Duchy is a little different. It has similarities to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (one can easily imagine Baron Ludwig von Hendricks as the Teutonic Order), the Frankish Kingdoms of the Merovingians (because of Flavius Bauto and his connection to Rome), and the Avars. This combination of Slavic, Roman, and Germanic cultures run wild throughout the Karameikos sourcebook which gives it cultural complexity worth exploring narratively, even if this mashup happens to exist right next to a country that is essentially Imperial Rome at its peak.

The Setup

In my old campaign, which I’m thinking of using as the basis for my new one, the player characters were members of a secret police force that investigates threats against Duke Stefan Karameikos. The name of this secret police force was “The Tinkers” and they answered to a secretive mastermind named “The Weaver.”

The combination of the Tinker name with the Weaver, and the fact that one of the characters was a Dwarf, led the players to give the campaign the name "Tinkers, Tailor, Dwarf, and Spy." It was one of the first times any of my games had been given a title, and I loved that.

The campaign began with The Weaver sending the characters to the town of Stallanford to investigate whether the annual King's Festival was being used as recruiting grounds for the Cult of Halav. You can see echoes of the conflict between Christianity and Pagan faiths here, a conflict that Duke Stefan seeks a middle ground on.

After the PCs were given time to do initial investigations of the situation in the town and get a night's rest, a band of Orcs attack the town and kidnap the town's cleric. This cleric is a key figure as he is also the man the PCs are supposed to spy upon.

I'm used the King's Festival module as the launching point for the campaign, but I added the following open threads.

1) Depending on what happens, the surviving Orcs may seek to have the PCs put to trial for murder/wrongful death.
2) Is the cleric a part of the Cult of Halav? Is that cult a threat to Duke Stefan?
3) Is the big bad a part of the Iron Circle? Are visitors to the Orc Caves also members of the Iron Circle?
4) Who is the Weaver?
5) Who is Bargle the Infamous?

In the my older campaign, the players never found out that I intended The Weaver to be Duke Stefan’s wife. I really wanted to role play the moment they discover that fact in an adventure where the characters had to stifle the Duchess’ assassination, but that sadly never happened.

My Request for Help

I plan on using the same set up and adventure hooks/open threads with a new group of players. This time though, I’d like to crowdsource the answers to the questions above instead of relying on the answers I created for the old campaign.

If you are a fan of the Karameikos setting and know a little bit about the King’s Festival adventure, what are your answers to those questions? I love using modules as a jumping off point for narratives, but usually go oft in wild directions afterwards and I’m interested in your feedback here.