Mini Adventure 1, Lair of the Skunk Ape

    To the west of Brambleville is a small stench filled cave in the forest. A group previously used this as a base of operations to funnel out some of the treasure from the keep in the swamp, paranoid the locals would try to take it from them. The cave has had a Skunk Ape family living here for a few months, with a smell to prove it.

Map Key Normal Doors marked with D, Secret with S, Locked with L

1. Skunk Ape sleeping area
  The mother Skunk Ape will be sleeping here in a bundle of canvas from the wagon during the day. Her three cubs will also be here, but each will have a 2-in-6 chance to be awake. During the night the three cubs will wander around the lair and the mother will be out hunting in the swamp.

2. Store Room
   Little is left in this store room, the Skunk Apes have eaten any food and clawed into any barrels and crates left here. Searching the rubble will reveal a jeweled necklace worth 1000gp, and a love letter to some woman who works in a tavern.

3. Secret Store Room
   This room is hidden with a false stone door, three feet wide and three feet tall from the ground. The walls near the door have claw marks from the Skunk Apes trying to find food. The stone door may be pushed back, as it is mounted to a small wooden cart like device on the other side that stops it from being pulled through into the hallway. Inside are a dozen barrels of dried and salted fish, all now well past being edible. Inside is also a locked chest with a small poison needle hidden in a handle mounted to the lid. To open the chest safely you must first tilt the chest forward to the handle. An audible click will let you know the chest is safe to open. Inside are 3000 silver pieces, three gems worth 50gp, 50gp, 100gp. Also inside is a piece of jewelry worth 3d6*100gp. The rotting corpse of a person clad in rusting chainmail is laying in a corner of the room, a dagger still gripped in a decaying hand. 

4. Animal Pen / Feed Room
   A wooden wall blocks half of the 10 foot wide opening at the north of this room. Inside are iron posts hammered into the stone to tie horses to and sacks of feed now torn apart and molding. The remains of two or more horses are splattered around the room, bones picked clean. 

5. Bunk Room
   Inside this room are four cots along the walls and a chest in the corner. The remains of two people are scattered in two of the cots. Inside the chest is a few sets of clothes, three unused candles, and a small pocket journal with a crude map drawn showing how to get to the Keep from here and a note on how the author thinks he was able to make a flower move with his mind. The note mentions that keeping food further from the entrance in the secret room is a good idea, but the author isn't sure it'll keep all the animals from finding the cave. 

6. Ruined Kitchen
   Inside this room is a wooden table with four chairs and a small iron cooking stove. A deck of cards or dice can be found on the table. The secret door is hidden behind a wooden wall that the table is pressed against. 

               Skunk Ape Mother, Cub
Armor Class:   5                 6
Hit Dice:      6                 3
Move:          120'(40')         90'(30')
Attacks:       2 claws/1 bite    2 claws
Damage:        1-6/1-6/1-8       1-6/1-6
No. Appearing: 1                 1-3
Save As:       Fighter: 3        Fighter: 2
Morale:        8                 6
Treasure Type: V                 U
Alignment:     Neutral           Neutral

The Skunk Ape is often mistaken for a black bear from a distance until their white stripes and long tails are seen. Males are often solitary creatures, while the females will raise their young for the first 5 years of life until they venture out on their own. Skunk Apes may spray once every eight hours, forcing a Morale Check from all creatures able to smell the stench or a Save Vs Paralysis to avoid coughing as long as they are near the smell (-1 to attack rolls in melee, -2 to ranged attack rolls). 

Mini Adventure 1, Brambleville

    The small town of Brambleville is located near the edge of the swamp. Known as a sleepy little town of fishermen, the town gets a trickle of travelers from the road to the south. A river crosses the road into the swamp, and a small group from Brambleville have taken to caring for the bridge so the south east. They take a weekly trip out to check for cracked planks and that the supports are in order. The town gets together weekly for a large cookout in the tavern, a major event nearly all the locals attend.

    Our hex map has three terrain types, Swamp as notated by cattail like markings, Forest notated with pine trees, and Plains notated with shrubbery markings. The road is marked with a straight line through the hexes, and the rivers are marked with a scratchy line along the borders of hexes. Lairs are notated with a small cave marking, and the town is marked with a house. Feel free to use your own encounter tables for the wilderness as the Keep and Lairs have specific monsters inside.

    Basic services are offered in town, a blacksmith can provide metal items of iron (Axes, Maces, Spear heads, but NOT swords, chainmail or plate armor) and a leather worker can provide armor from alligator skin at an increased cost. A father and son work as a bowyer and fletcher in town, providing bows and arrows. A tavern and bunkhouse dominate the town, being the only two story building. A half dozen rooms are available here, as well as food and drinks.

Rumors
1. Strangers are seen sometimes near the bridge, the always walk off the road and into the woods to the east once they see the locals.

2. Some fishers claim they have seen gargoyles flying in the night, but most others think they are just seeing bats in the twilight. 

3. A stench sometimes passes over the town, worse than the usual swamp musk. Many say it's just a skunk, but some say it's unnatural.

4. The old keep north is said to still have valuables inside, but no one has been there in months.

5. A fisherman will offer advice of heading west to the river for a great fishing spot, if you can stand the smell of muck near there.

6. Some men came by a few months ago to explore the keep, but after a week they left without saying goodbye. The barmaid is broken hearted about one of them leaving.

Life, Gaming, and Blogging

    When it rains it pours, or so they say. Within the past month I've bought a new car, gone back to work (working 60 hours a week at times), and proposed to my now fiancée. Because of this I've had a difficult time keeping up with this blog, which was a way for me to do something productive while waiting for my call back for my job. I've found it hard to find the time to make weekly posts like I used to. The hours it takes to research, write, and edit really do add up.  

    To keep the work-life-gaming thing in balance, I'll be shifting what I do here on the blog a bit. Each month I'll be writing an adventure location, involving a small hex map on the first Saturday of the month, any lairs or small mapped locations the following week, and a larger dungeon the week after that. This should be easier on me and provide some useful content for my readers! If any of you want an adventure with a particular theme, feel free to leave a comment below. 

A reflection on Gaming over Discord.

    With my players back together and in person gaming happening again, my actual play series is done. Looking back using Discord as a medium for play-by-post was a decent idea. The ease to make multiple channels and adding in a dice bot gave it all the functionality we needed. But using text only? Not the best.

Building Strongholds, One wall at a time

“Gate-tower or Barbican, Walmgate Bar, York, England. In medieval fortification, a tower built beside or over a gate, as of a city, etc., for the purpose of defending the passage.” -Whitney, 1911

    Recently in my discord campaign my players want to build a home for a pack of kobolds they rescued from a dungeon. I'm using Reave to run the game and I didn't yet have anything for building strongholds or settling hexes. The game uses lower XP requirements than traditional D&D, so the costs listed in B/X can't be easily used or converted, so I made my own rules for building structures down to the 10x10 area. By designing it so, the players can easily afford small structures earlier in the game. By having the rules to support building cabins, single room stone buildings, and other smaller dwellings I hope to introduce domain play at a local scale earlier than most OSR games do, as well as providing the ability for players to draw the floorplan of their own strongholds just as they see fit once they acquire enough treasure. On to the mechanics! 

The Gorn River Valley, Part 11

    This will likely be the last installment of this campaign. Shawn is back from his temperary summer job so we'll be picking back up our in person gaming. In this weeks game the players get in a small fight and rest with the kobolds in the dungeon. 

Shawn - Will step to the side and let Terriherd take the lead once more

DM - Terriherd leads the group east along the southern wall, past the stair room and to the room that still has the stinking dead horse inside.

Todd - Mikkel gags but keeps his meal inside his stomach. "The armor wouldn't happen to be under the horse would it?"