there is safe and then there is safe

The first fully mapped area of Mohr Vesik was the breadbasket country of Hyrmdaal.  This was designed to be the safe English countryside image of my fantasy world.  Quaint little villages and hamlets dot the patchworked rolling hills and sparse copses of hardwood trees.  It's Shakespeare's Italy, it's Tolkien's The Shire and has far as D&D Worlds are concerned, it's as safe as safe can get.  But what does safe mean in a fantasy world?  Well to me, it mainly means that there are not tribes of evil humanoids living around every corner, there are not wandering monsters and dragons camped out in every wilderness and there are not a dozen and a half spots on the map that are marked as DO NOT GO HERE.  A cotter can pick up his gear, walk cross country through some fields gone fallow, over a gentle brook, through a windbreak that has grown thick in the last hundred years and into the next county without having to worry about goblins, orcs and kobolds interrupting his journey with an untimely death.  The roads are well travelled and the Queen's Riders take care of most of the bandits.  What monsters that are left are in out of the way places and usually they are just nasty beasts that leave men alone as long as men leave them alone.

But this doesn't leave much room for adventure outside political intrigues and crime stories.  But I have never been happy with D&D being about gritty, human-centric tales.  D&D is chock full of monsters and monsters should dominate the enemies of the characters.  How do I introduce monsters into a land that is supposed to know none? 

One typical way is to use the Rising Evil plotline.  We already know that The End is only twenty five years away, that Mohr Vesik is going to experience the same apocalypse that plagued the people in the Olde Worlde.  The people brought this apocalypse with them.  So, it has to start somewhere and what better place than in the seat of good, quiet and peace.  Perhaps corruption is being seeded into the nobles, especially those involved in intrigues against the Queen.  Perhaps outside forces, those that want to depose the current nobility and restore the Theocracy, are being influenced by true demons from below the ground.  For in Mohr Vesik, like Eberron, those beings from Hell called Demons and Devils truly do come from below the ground, deep in caverns boiling with fire and lava.  Perhaps ancient crypts, those that sealed in great evils from kingdoms long gone to dust, are being cracked open letting loose undead and even stranger evils.  But if so, it has to be introduced gradually so as to allow her to experience what is good and safe about the country while realizing that it is becoming not so much.

Or, Hyrmdaal can stay the safe country for now.  Let the journey out of this safe, and basically boring, countryside be relatively safe and only have a few mild encounters of no consequence. But once the borders to the plains of the north are reached, things can change.  This is a land not all that populated by men & demihumans, but barely tamed in a few towns and villages.  The catfolk dominate as the demihuman race of the plains.  But creatures monstrous and strange do frequent the area such as Ogre riding Goblins from the northern end of the plains.  And the cold blooded naga that keeps to rocky areas avoided by strong folk.    And once pathways are made out of Hyrmdaal, more dangerous activities and encounters are presented until the treasure trove is found at the end of the journey.

How safe she is completely depends on her though...