The Heroes of Weaverham: Being the Recounting of Their First Adventure

The morning rose clear and already a bit too hot on the day that the Heroes of Weaverham sauntered forth with the intention of ridding Gullifurd's Path of the brute that had been disrupting traders and causing no small amount of missing livestock in the neighboring farms.

Counted in their number:

Beefsteak Piledriver, doughty dwarf
Mulch Woodtwig, of the Aspleaf Woodtwigs
Father Guinness, leader of the Braumeister's faithful
the mysterious wizard known only as "Brains", as well as his hired followers:
            - Werner, of strong back and tired feet
            - Nyx, who was sired by a pig
            - and Ursula, a typical Stavrovian in that she is sharp-tongued and skilled with the bow

Our heroes, after traveling some hours and nearing the area that the beast was reported to frequent, decided to deploy Nyx as a "scout", a role that was described to him as consisting of walking 50 feet of everybody else and singing loudly, a role he proved to be born for. Eventually the remains of a destroyed caravan was found and here Mulch took over, his keen elven eyes picking up the tracks of a mighty humanoid, as well as many furrows indicating that some large bulky objects had been dragged along the ground.

Said tracks eventually terminated in a small valley in the foothills, featuring a rock wall and a large opening therein, from which uttered a most effluvious scent, as if of a charnel-house. After some short discussion, it was decided that Nyx should again sing. At this, the brute emerged from the cave, a 10-foot tall yellow hulk of what might described as a man in the most fevered imaginations of a poppy-smoking, lotus-eating wreck, clothed only in a greasy shift of cloth and carrying a great club, banded with iron.

Battle was joined as Nyx and the ogre rushed forth at each other, the remaining Heroes letting loose with arrows or exchanging bets on the ensuing physical combat. Curses were uttered as a single blow of the mighty club crushed Nyx's skull and the beast lurched forward at the group, with Beefsteak now rushing to meet him. Things finally started going well for our Heroes when the giant lost his grip on the club, flinging it deep into the valley and forcing him to rely on his fists. However, the threat was still dire and Father Guinness was forced to reinforce Beefsteak in the wild melee, with the archers still able to pick out their foe above the others due to his great height. A fortuitous laying of hands and ale by Father Guinness saved Beefsteak from being bludgeoned to death and as things appeared to be heading toward an early grave for at least one more of the Heroes, a wild swing of Guinness's mace and a well-aimed shaft from Ursula downed the beast.

Werner, who had wisely taken cover in a neighboring copse during combat, was tasked to dig Nyx's grave while the rest of the group took it upon themselves to investigate the cave. Finding a great pile of bones and rotted flesh, as well as a large cloud of insects, the party was able to further discover several great sacks of coin as well as the fact that no-one had remembered to purchase flint and steel, meaning that further exploration of the cave as it extended further would have to be left for another time.

Instead, the Heroes contented themselves with saying a few words (and pouring some special brew) on Nyx's final resting place before heading back to town bearing their trophy, the still-dripping head of the Bane of Gullifurd's Path. Huzzah!

Getting the Gang Back Together

One of the former members of our gaming group moved to Japan a couple years back, which acted as a breakpoint between various RPG campaigns. While he's generally enjoying himself over across the Pacific, there is a lack of polyhedral dice in his life, so when he noted that he'd be in town for a few days next month, I brought up the idea of playing a game and he, naturally, was receptive to the idea.

Since he doesn't have a character in either of the main campaigns we have (the Fenrecz campaign, in which everybody is still stuck in a ghost-dream-time-loop and a Type 3.5 campaign in which I believe we are in some underground caverns having just caused a major cave-in with the hopeful end result of a giant underground flood wave flushing out a yuan-ti hideout), I decided the best thing to be done was to set up the framework for a troupe-based Labyrinth Lord game.

In preparation for this, I had the other available members of the group sit down and create three characters each, using the following criteria: 3D6 in order; after which, the player can decide, if the player meets the requirements, whether they want to play as a demihuman. Should they either not meet any requirements or the player decides to play a human, then the stats can be rearranged. The theory was that this would 1. make humans more desirable and 2. make demihumans rarer.

The final total, was, for 12 characters: 2 fighters, 1 dwarf, 1 magic-user, 2 elves, 2 thieves, 2 halflings, 2 clerics. So, 7 humans and 5 demi-humans, with a number of the humans qualifying for demihuman status and the player deciding that it would fit better with their character idea to move some of the stats around. The clear biases of the group of players came through in the lack of pure magic-users, who are always poorly represented (in Fenrecz, the only "wizard"-y type is the player who's the DM for the Type 3.5 game, where the player who is the sociopathic halfling thief in Fenrecz is a sociopathic necromancer with an unfortunate habit of having missile weapons hit the donkey carrying his mobile laboratory*). Highest stat was 17 (Int for one of the Elves) and the lowest was 5 (Charisma for one of the Clerics, who also has a 6 Intelligence and whose "high" stats are 12 and 10. His name thus far is Father Lump of the Three-Legged Horse).

I wanted multiple characters per person because I'd like to have a campaign where we have a lot of flexibility in terms of who can show up from week to week. If we have only two people, they can run two of their characters. If people are off investigating the Dungeons of the Red Queen and we have to break off at the end of the session and next week we have a different group of players, they can grab some other characters and go somewhere else. And of course with the general durability of 1st level LL characters (I did make the allowance of maximum HP for level 1), it's always nice to have backups.

* - My character in that campaign, Al-Wedjat of the All-Seeing Eye, was intended to be a soothseer-type with the intention of being a Divination specialist. After reading through the PHB and various Type  Three splatbooks, it became apparent that if you want to do divining, you're really better off going with a cleric, which makes no sense to me; however, that's pretty much true of all the specialist wizards in Type Three, which is too bad, because it always seems like a good row to hoe.

Rumor Table for Weaverham

Weaverham is a small town nestled in the foothills of the Smoky Spine mountain range. Sitting on the junction of two major trade routes, the North-South Spinal Trail and the East-West Gullifurd's Path, it has a small number of outlying farms and a decent amount of businesses and residences clustered around the crossroads. Any basic goods and services should be expected to be available. Those cooling their heels in any of the bars of Weaverham (The Old Mill (mostly laborers), The Red Queen (landowners, other elites), Weaverham Arms (well-to-do travelers), Grange Hall (travelers who can pay)) will be talking about, aside from other things, certain subjects that might be interesting to potential adventurers in the area.

1. If you journey due north into the deep woods for a day and a half, you will find a small pond that doesn't ice over in winter or dry up in summer. A beautiful nude woman has been seen multiple times in this area, although nobody has been able to talk to or catch her. TRUE

2. The owner of the Weaverham Arms, Stanley Dimsdale, has a series of cells built underneath his Inn where he keeps a stable of youths who fell into his nefarious clutches while travelling alone. FALSE

3. The animals of the surrounding wood have gone mad, led by an insane druid, they desire to destroy the town of Weaverham and consume all the salted fish in the land. They meet to plot underneath the New Bridge north of the town and can be infiltrated with a clever enough disguise. FALSE

4. A group of bandits has been hitting caravans and other unlucky travelers along a stretch of the Spine Trail south of town. TRUE

5. The Red Queen is named after an ancient monarch who earned her name through the various bloodthirsty religious rites inflicted on her unfortunate prisoners before the peasantry arose and burned her keep. The remains of the castle donjon still stand in the forest northwest of the town and supposedly the lower areas have never been explored due to the unnerving feeling that affects all who come near. TRUE

6. A stone idol with a great sacrificial bowl stained with dried blood lies in a small gully southwest of the town. Cultists gather here to sacrifice unfortunates to Demons. FALSE (There is an altar in this area; however, it's been unused for years and the bowl is full of stagnant rain water, which hosts a couple gnarly worm-pupae things)

7. Gullifurd's Path is named after the famed explorer, Gullifurd the Gold, famed for his obsession with finding new sources of the precious metal. Although Gullifurd was the first man to find a route across the Smoky Spine, he returned to the mountains again and again. The last time Gullifurd was ever seen was heading West from Weaverham on the road that bears his name, meaning that his remains and his possessions are most probably somewhere in the mountains. TRUE

8. Father Nireni has a magical mirror in the basement of Old Weaver Kirk that allows you to travel great distances by stepping into it, including inter-dimensionally. His price for using it involves various unnatural acts. He will deny knowledge of this artifact unless you give the secret passphrase. FALSE

9. The inhabitants of neighboring Hay Bale have been acting extremely strangely lately -- visitors to the town recount hearing a horn blast as they approached, followed by all of the buildings being shut and shuttered with the occupants silently staring from within. Domestic animals have also been found wandering free in the woods, clearly disturbed. TRUE

10. Cows have been disappearing from the farms west of town -- one of the farmer's sons reported seeing a giant figure moving through the fields at night. A caravan guard also told a tale of being ambushed by a giant rock-dwelling humanoid not far out of town, headed west on Gullifurd's Path. Sounds like we got an ogre on our hands mmm hmm, mmm hmm. 'M sure the mayor could be convinced to cough up some coin if that problem were to be dealt with, hrmrmm. TRUE

Beginnings

The Fenrecz Campaign came to be after reading Vornheim and being inspired to try my hand at large-city adventuring, ably assisted by the charts in that marvelous book. Things worked out reasonably well, with the geography (both actual and metaphysical) developing over the course of play sessions, taking my sketched out frameworks and providing some muscle and sinew to fill in the gaps. Some things fell by the wayside that I'd like to work back in at some point (for one, The Warrens as an especially haunted area -- I have the beginnings of a relatively complex Ghost Encounters table that I'd like to get done sometime soon); however, the experience that I've gained from these adventures have made we wonder about starting NPCs in a large city right off the bat.

I say this because one aspect of playing in Fenrecz was that it was really difficult to get the players out of the city -- in fact, I never managed it all, despite numerous hooks that led outside of the city walls. Now, it should be mentioned that this isn't necessarily bad in that if a party really wants to stay entirely within a city the entire time, they should be allowed to in the sense that a true sandbox game goes where player decisions take it and no further. On the other hand, it does lead to one major difficulty, which was that the players were stuck between the city being familiar and alien.

Since the campaign had only ever taken place inside this giant city, it felt unnatural for the players to be newcomers to it, even if that were most of their character backgrounds. This was exacerbated by one of the players asking for a background that would have placed him in the city previously -- so we had a theoretical knowledge imbalance and a practical lack of imbalance that felt like it shouldn't be even as it made logical sense.

Now, I'm sure that a more experienced or more skilled DM could have dealt with this in an elegant fashion. With our group, it wound up making sessions awkward as the players weren't sure to what degree they should be familiar with the city -- the solution, it seems to me, is to start a campaign off in a hamlet or such, a smaller settlement outside of the core cities of the surrounding area. This way, the players can still have a game that centers around a big city -- they just have to make the decision to travel there first. And, in theory, a party would be just as likely to go for dungeon- or wilderness-based adventures, without the draw of a city with conceivably everything they could desire contained within (and, probably just as importantly, full of inns and other "safe" places that are always within easy reach).

Campaign World Thought Experiment

Per noism's post over at his place, I rolled up five random monsters from the Labyrinth Lord game and then envisioned a campaign world where those monsters are the dominant intelligent races.

My building blocks:

Bats, Giant

Goblins

Gnomes

Hobgoblins

Wolves

The game world is a medium-to-small continent running from east to west -- imagine South America from Argentina to Tierra del Fuego rotated 90 degrees clockwise. The vast majority of the land is grasslands/steppes, roamed by the Hobgoblins and their Khans. Nomadic horse-riders with few fixed cities, they drive great herds of lifestock from grazing to grazing land while setting up extensive tent-encampments. When they're not engaging in various wars of succession, they raid...

...the walled and many-domed cities of the gnomes. Naturally magically proficient, the gnomes have used their abilities to create complex stone cities lorded over by the gnomish aristocracy. These small and dense fort-cities, filled with constantly-backstabbing guilds, are mostly located near the coasts of this land, all of the construction being done by golems and other magically-created constructs as well as partially by...

...a slave race of goblins, who also serve as the main agricultural workers for the gnomish cities, with golems as their overseers, and who populate the slum tenements in the cities themselves. There are a small amount of free goblins, both those who live in the cities as adventurers and in scattered wilderness communities, most of which are in remote and inaccessible locations, hidden away from their mounted cousins, although their proximity to the great northern mountain range leads to conflicts with...

...the clans of the wolf-men, whose jarls chafe under the leadership of their King, grown old and infirm. The refocusing on internal politics means that the gnomish cities and hobgoblin tent encampments have been largely free of the raiding parties that swirl down from the craggy peaks like vicious snowstorms. Most wolf-men are hunters. Those wondering what machinations are taking place in the wolf longhouses and hill-forts would be best advised to seek the knowledge of...

...the bat-men, whose great underground settlements are not easily found and whose wizards surpass even the greatest gnomes in knowledge of the secrets of this world, many which lie in the lightless caverns the bat-men frequent. Aside from groups living in the great caves of the northern mountains, there are rockier sections of the grasslands where the bat-men are said to spill forth like a great geyser at twilight from their cave entrances, their scouts scouring the land for anything foolish enough to be seen moving.

So. Hobgoblins = steppe hordes; Gnomes = magic-based nobility; Goblins = slaves/underclass; Wolf-men = Viking/Germanic clans that leave woods full of skeletons hung from the trees; Bat-men = mysterious underground race, nocturnal scourge of large areas, know the most secrets/forbidden knowledge.

I think all of the races should be playable in a red-box race-as-class system, with Gnomes and Bat-men being natural magic-users, Wolf-men and Hobgoblins as fighting men and Goblins fitting into the rogue niche. I'm not entirely happy with Goblins, as they don't fit into either the crazed maniac goblins of the Warhammer universe or the fey/stealin' babies fairy-tale creatures that I generally like to have them as; however, they do work best as the Short, Nasty and Brutish creatures of this world -- also worth noting that there's no "pleasant race" here, the Gnomes are probably the closest; I envision them more as the entitled gentry, interested more in embarrassing their rival at the next society do and creating various golem-like creatures to dominate their slaves -- any playable Gnome would probably be a trader's son or somebody on the lowest possible rung of Gnome society.

The Storm Tower

The Storm Tower is one remnant of the long-gone civilizations of the past, people far more advanced than live today and whose creations lie scattered across the wilderness areas of the world in various states of decay. In this case, the Storm Tower is a nearly-intact tower whose top is always surrounded by a swirling, lightning-filled storm cloud (hence the name). Standing in the middle of a large surrounding pit (into which, if light allows, you can see, sometimes making out large support beams/connecting tunnels coming off of the main tower and into the earth) of indeterminate depth and fashioned out of a coruscating orange and red metal that is impervious to damage, the Tower has become the home base for its self-styled Lord.

Albrecht of the Peaks was a fairly successful dwarven trader working the relatively safe roads between the Snow Peak fortress and Fenrecz when he woke one chill morning with a idea burning bright. Gathering a group of toughs and ne'erdowells, he cleared out the bandit- and monster-infested lower levels of the Storm Tower and set up shop in the cavernous main hall that lies across the deceptively thin bridge running from the edge of the pit to the Tower itself.

The main income from this venture came from those seeking fame and fortune in the Tower -- now such parties of adventurers would have to pay a small fee to enter into the Tower and an additional fee to gain entrance to either the higher levels above those Albrecht had cleared out (or a smaller fee to head into the depths of the Tower). In return, Albrecht offered a safe area where the adventurers could camp out on the floor or pay a few coins to stay in the recently built Lightning and Gold Inn. With additions of a blacksmith and a leatherworker and others following them, a small-ish town has been set up inside the Tower, with the level above it taken up with Albrecht's court and the level below as the dungeons for this community, now policed by Albrecht's original hired fighting men, who make a decent living on the side by hiring themselves out to parties eager for extra muscle or somebody with previous knowledge of the Tower both above and below.

Rumors, Allegations and Adventure-style Hiring Practices

- The staff at the Buggering Bear will let slip at some point about the disappearance of Ol' Rom, who used to clean up around the place. Further questioning will lead to the employees and regulars clamming up unless they start to trust an individual and have a chance to talk to them alone (will happen easier if they've had a few on the party as well). Then they will reveal that Ol' Rom was taken away by the Lord after he was heard to be spreading rumors about the Lord's men capturing a dwarf who had come up from below.

Indeed, both Ol' Rom and a mysterious dwarf are being held in the Lord's dungeons. Nobody's paying much mind to Ol' Rom; however, the dwarf is constantly being visited by the Lord personally, along with his Torturer.

- The Five Aces, a six-person strong adventuring band, lurks in the level above Albrecht's offices. They will not attack anybody on first entering the Tower's upper levels, instead they will observe the party in secret and will have various alarms/traps set after the party moves further upward in the hope of setting an ambush when the party returns.

- The Diviner Osios had laid camp in the main hall of the Tower, waiting for a group brave enough to sign on with him. He wishes to attain one of the many lightning rods that can be seen on the outside of the tower nearer the storm clouds. There are plentiful entrances and staircases that can be observed from the ground; however, no-one has ever been observed traversing them...

Quick Little Adventure: The Marker Ghost

I remember reading sometime recently about how there was a specific type of Norse ghost who was a landowner who had moved the marker stones while alive and after their death, they were cursed to try and move the stones back to their original location. I can't find the original article anymore, hell, that's not going to stop me from making a Quick Little Adventure idea out of it.

The adventurers are moving through a relatively small rurual community, built up enough where land has passed down through generations and is scarce/valuable enough where it's become a standard to mark the boundaries of these lands with small standing stones.

Usually this is a pretty sleepy community aside from occasional bar fights, bandit raids and goblin child-snatchings; however, recently there's been a series of murders involving people traveling after dark in what is usually a pretty safe area. A fairly nototrious enfant terrible of one of the local noblemen has been jailed under suspicions of the murders.

Because of the various problems associated with frontier justice in rural communities dominated by a handful of rival families, the idea of having the visiting adventurers act as investigators/judges is attractive to all parties (except perhaps for the adventurers), especially if the group is associated with a regional power or has a cleric of a well-respected church as a member.

Shortly after the party agrees to investiage/adjudicate (if they choose to, of course), another person will be found murdered. This will cause a hubbub and possibly a full-on melee as rival clans clash over whether this exonerates the prisoner or whether this is just an attempt by his clan to clear his name. Things should escalate to out of control unless the party intervenes.

Careful investigation should reveal that the valley where all the victims have been found is split by the border between two of the largest and most ornery clans in the area and that there has been plenty of conflict over where exactly the border is.

Traveling the valley at night in a group will not reveal anything -- the ghost is ashamed of its crime and will avoid large groups, instead waiting to find groups of one or two, then accosting them to help move the land marker. All of the victims to date have refused as doing so as a great taboo (it can turn into a ghost, for one) and thus have been strangled. If the players manage to produce bait for the ghost, they can either attack when it reveals itself or help it move the stone (which should prove fairly difficult) -- when the stone has been moved, the ghost will move on from this mortal coil, although not immediately and it will try and take its secret to the next world by attacking those that helped it (it'll dissipate within a certain time period, is how I would do it).

About the Victims

If you want to use a traditional D&D ghost, the victims should probably be found horribly aged and ravaged (which may be attributed to the shock of being attacked rather than instantly interpreted by locals as ghost-sign). I personally prefer that the victims be found dead of strangulation, with heavy bruising on the neck (indicating somebody incredibly strong).