You start in a small walled city (really, a small town by our modern standards) called Littleview, at the edge of a tall cliff, above a deep and wide valley. The town has a ring of fields around it, and then empty scrub, and finally the edge of the forest. Littleview is a cosmopolitan town, populated by a mix of races, though dominated by hill dwarves and humans. The local economy is dominated by trade, for Littleview sits above a steep Path down the cliff, which leads to dwarven halls accessed through the cliff face. It is the only local source of fine metal goods, and Littleview is literally built on the start of the Path, so controls access and charges hefty tolls for access.

Two other, heavily used and maintained, Paths run along the top of the valley wall, one each way, which lead to local communities, and fan out further. This makes Littleview if not a heavily traveled hub, at least more heavily visited than any of its immediate neighbors. Strangers come through often and trade, or pay the toll to climb down the Dwarven Path.

The shallow parts of the forest are used for hunting, lumber, and firewood enough that they are not really wilderness, but things wander in from the wilderness often enough that most folk choose to sleep inside the city walls at night. The King, Rahm Littleview, maintains careful order and regular patrols into the forest to ensure nothing too horrible festers and that the dead are kept at rest.

Recently, intermittent bands of refugees have come through Littleview, down the Path from Millhouse along the valley wall, to the north. Some are sponsored for citizenship, if they have particularly needed skills, but most are encouraged to keep going, as the small farms around Littleview are not particularly fertile, and it is dangerous to expand them into the scrub. They continue south, towards Kingdom of Fallwash, a collection of several cities under united rule, where the valley opens into moorland down the southern Path. They carry tales of horrible battles, with too few left afterwards to burn the dead, leaving destruction and chaos in their wake after. But they say they have traveled a long way, a dozen or more Paths to arrive here, and the troubles are far away in places the folk of Littleview have barely heard of.

On a clear day, those with good eyes can see the roofline of a city on the far edge of the valley, many miles away. Sometimes, at night, there are sparks of light there as well – bonfires maybe? No one has ever figured out how to get there, as far as anyone knows! Travelers native to Littleview often take drawings of the roofline when setting out, in case they ever reach a city which matches it. What fame would come from answering questions about this place!

Okay, the intro makes some assumptions, here is an infodump to make sense of them.

• The intro mentions the dead a few times, an important aspect of things here is that if someone dies unnaturally, and their soul is not ushered on (and/or their body destroyed) they often don’t leave, and become monsters preying on whoever or whatever they find. For this reason funeral rites are important around here!
• Most Paths lead to what amount to small city-states. Maintaining independence is not so difficult for a polity when travel is severely restricted and predictable. On the other hand, most of those city-states have natural population limits as expanding into the wilderness is incredibly difficult and dangerous. This isn’t a big deal for most, as the world is pretty dangerous, unfortunately, but it leads to a cycle where if a city is doing too well, collapse can come fast if violence does erupt–see the problem with funeral rites!
• The above dynamic leads to a steady trickle of migration – a city doing well tries to send out colonies, often down Paths which have grown old, but not yet gone wild, hoping the place the stories speak of but no one has come from in a generation is viable again. Finding a place which is reachable, safe enough to start building in, and from which people can travel back is incredibly valuable.
• The danger of the world, and the pattern of expansion and contraction, has made the world old. Small, and large, civilizations have flourished and collapsed many times – leaving ruins on ruins. Legends often have at least a grain, if not a fruit, of truth to them, and chasing them down – to find ancient cities now livable again, barely passable but still stable Paths, and understanding of what happened to them (so as to avoid it now, or use it on your enemies), is a valuable

These are not in any way meant to limit you, but to give you some ideas of directions we could go, at least to start with!

1. Be citizens of Littleview, there is much to do in the local environs that call for adventurers – dealing with monstrosities in from the wilderness, working as mercenaries for merchants, or dealing with the increasing problem of bandits (believed to be refugees who have taken to the edge of the wilderness, rather than press on further).
2. Be travelers, passing through Littleview on some errand or mission, either en route to the troubles past Millhouse in order to see what is actually happening, or moving on towards Fallwash, the largest political entity in the local area.
3. Be scoundrels, preying on the wealth accumulated by those who control trade, especially as those folk are not particularly helpful to those in need! Maybe there is room for a Robin Hood type legend to grow?
4. More people are coming into Littleview than it can house or feed, they need somewhere to go. Maybe you are explorers, willing to risk the wild to find and help establish a new home for them?

Some images to capture visual moods for the environs: