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?"

The Gorn River Valley, Part 10

    Another installment of my discord game. This session had an exchange of prisoners and some plotting for the future. Read from part 1 for the whole story!

DM - Mikkel lights a new torch off of Tanehoth's, which is tossed to the ground. 

A while passes and the shuffling of feet can be heard from behind the door. Soon it opens, the smell of tobacco flows from inside. Eight kobold women and four children walk from inside the room, their hands tied together and ribs showing. One is held back in the room, guarded by two dwarves with polearms.