As noted, the center point of the adventure will be somewhere in central Gallenia. It'll be winter in a village along a river--rivers were used as trade routes in the wintertime, since the frozen surface worked better than any road at the time. However, you still don't want to be out at night in a Ussuran winter, so this village is one of many with housing and accomodations for travelling merchants. Non-ussurans (and some Ussurans, too) will probably be part of such a caravan, travelling along the river. The Cathayan firewall is too cool a concept to put *too* far away, but I haven't decided exactly how close it is yet.
As far as the timing goes, we're probably still in the middle of Montegue's march towards Pavtlow. In fact, if you'd like to use a character that is/has been a part of that army, talk to me (if you want to use a character from inky's musketeer campaign, for example).
I had figured out a basic setup for this adventure, but had been stuck for further inspiration until I read about the "No Myth" theory that inky has compiled a list of references for. So I'm trying that. The basic idea is that since nothing has to 'exist' before the players see it, as a GM you can do 'just in time' world creation based on the expectations of the genre, and instead focus on the *pacing* of the adventure. It might not work so well at the beginning, but it's the sort of thing that can improve with practice, so I'm asking you all to bear with me.
That being said, I do have several particular ideas about What's Going On, so there will be things to discover, places to go, and people to meet. I just don't know how it's going to play out. Once I get people's characters, I'll be looking at character sheets, looking for stuff people are good at (and presumably would like to do), and trying to think up challenges that would require those skills.
Inspirations for What's Going On in this village include:
The amount of combat in the game can probably be adjusted based on player expectations. In fact, if you've read the GM book, I'll probably be using a variant of 'The other 100 points' once we know who's playing and what characters they'll be using.