The campaign takes place in a Kingdom where magic is a large part of the culture/lifestyle. This is because of High Elf migrations to this area years ago, and as such has a large elf population. The neighboring power, the Veidreich Federation, is a large body of city states and principalities unified under a central government who are not magically adept. However, they have much superior technology to the Kingdom, not quite industrialised but semi-steampunk in nature. They are afraid of magic and the lack of control over it that they have, thus the two nations have fought many devastating wars.

My campaign takes place just after one of these wars, where discontent is high in the Kingdom and civil war seems likely. I am hoping that the players will be interested in the Federation given how different they will be to the enemies/npcs/people in the Kingdom they are in.

On the backdrop of all this, there are seven "Black Artifacts" that are rumoured to be related to the ancient black dragon who used to used to rule the Kingdom, and nefarious forces seem to be after these artifacts for unknown reasons.