Into the Woods

As I mentioned, I was recently traveling about two and a half hours north of my home, in that part of Ontario urbanites call "cottage country" – not quite a truly rural area but close enough for cosseted city-dwellers looking to "rough it" for a little while. Being a cosseted city-dweller myself, that suits me just fine, though, after even a brief time in rustic surroundings of any sort, my thoughts inevitably turn to fantasy. 

As with mushrooms – which I saw in large quantities during my arcadian sojourn – my imagination strongly associates woodlands of any kind with the fantastic. I suspect this is a side effect of my early reading of fairy tales and other myths and legends, many of which feature enchanted, haunted, or otherwise magical forests. Consequently, I frequently found myself pondering what it must be like for the typical D&D adventuring party as they trudged through the woods, never knowing just what they might find there.

What I found, in addition to the aforementioned mushrooms, was a lot of insect life, especially moths. I was quite surprised by how many moths I saw fluttering beneath the shadowy canopy of the wood where I took a hike one day. I expected to see plenty of spiders, a prospect that filled me with some trepidation, and, while I did see more than a few, they were not nearly as plentiful as I feared. There were also, unfortunately, plenty of flies, gnats, and mosquitoes, as my itch-ravaged body can attest.

Another thing that struck me was just how dark the woods could become, even during daylight hours. The trees where I was hiking were quite tall and possessed large, leafy branches that obscured the sun more than I had anticipated. I could still see quite well, of course, but it was still far less bright than I would have expected, given conditions outside the forest. Combined with the silence of the place, save for the sounds of a few birds, the overall effect was genuinely eerie at times.

Wild berries – raspberries and blueberries mostly – abounded and that got me to thinking about foraging and other survival techniques in D&D and other roleplaying games, the sorts of stuff that has long fascinated me. In principle, I like the idea of delving into the nitty gritty of breaking camp, finding food, and dealing with environmental and other similar hazards. In practice, I tend to lose interest quite quickly and hand-wave a lot of these details, however compelling they seem in my head. 

I'm not entirely sure if that's a function of my own temperament or a reflection of the fact that I've never come across rules that simulate what I want without becoming bogged down in minutiae. Mind you, my hike was following an already-beaten trail, with little signposts and landmarks every so often, and I still managed to lose my way, so it seems plausible I'm too much of city boy to ever fully enter into the right frame of mind to understand and appreciate the wild places of the earth – but I very much want to. 

Even after coming home, I still do.

Random Roll: PHB, p. 101

Page 101 of the AD&D Players Handbook contains a long section entitled "The Adventure," in which Gary Gygax the "three major types" of locales in which player characters might find adventure, namely the dungeon, the wilderness, and the town. He then discusses each of these locales separately, highlighting not only what makes them unique but what a character venturing into them ought to consider before doing so. Though his comments on each are short, I think they're nonetheless worthy of a closer look.

Adventures into underworld mazes are the most popular. The party equips itself and sets off to enter and explore the dungeons of some castle, temple or whatever. Light sources, poles for probing, rope, spikes, and like equipment are the main tools for such activity.

I think the equipment Gygax mentions by name is telling: not weapons or armor but torches, poles, rope, and spikes. This is indeed an "expedition," as he terms it elsewhere, one on the model of archeological excavations or perhaps the Victorian adventure tales of H. Rider Haggard (or even "The Tower of the Elephant").

And since none of the party will know the dungeon's twists and turns, one or more of the adventurers will have to keep a record, a map, of where the party has been. Thus you will be able to find your way out and return for yet more adventuring. As you party is exploring and mapping, movement will be slow, and it is wise to have both front and rear guards.

Do RPG campaigns regularly include a mapper anymore? In my youth, it went without saying that someone should be keeping a map. Otherwise, as Gygax says, how would you find your way out again – or, just as importantly, take note of unusual features that suggested there might be hidden chambers nearby? In my House of Worms campaign, the players are blessed to have a professional cartographer in their company, but, even if they didn't, I'm pretty sure they'd keep track of the underworlds they explore.

In the dungeons will be chambers and rooms – some inhabited, some empty; there will be traps to catch those unaware, tricks to fool the unwise, monsters lurking to devour the unwary. The rewards, however, are great – gold, gems, and magic items. Obtaining these will make you better able to prepare for further expeditions, more adept in your chosen profession, more powerful in all respects. All that is necessary is to find your way in and out, to meet and defeat the guardians of the treasures, to carry out the wealth …

That's a very succinct way of describing the gameplay of Dungeons & Dragons, don't you think? More than that, it also draws our attention to the things Gygax considered the essential elements of a dungeon: rooms (including empty ones), monsters, treasure, traps, and tricks – a good list!

Adventuring into unknown lands or howling wilderness is extremely perilous at best, for large bands of men, and worse, might roam the area; there are dens of monsters, and trackless wastes to contend with. 

The wilderness is where Gygaxian naturalism lives – literally – hence the following admonitions:

Protected expeditions are, therefore, normally undertaken by higher level characters. Forays of limited duration are possible even for characters new to adventuring, and your DM might suggest that your party do some local exploration – perhaps to find some ruins which are the site of a dungeon or to find a friendly clan of dwarves, etc.

One "problem" with D&D, it's that the wilderness surrounding a dungeon is frequently far more dangerous than the dungeon itself, given the lack of an artificial level-based framework for assessing threat to the characters. Gygax's comments here remind us of that.

Mounts are necessary, of course, as well as supplies, missile weapons, and the standard map-making equipment. Travel will be at a slow rate in unknown areas, for your party will be exploring, looking for foes to overcome, and searching for new finds of lost temples, dungeons, and the like. 

Once again, mapping and slowness are mentioned – but then D&D is primarily a game of exploration. Nevertheless, Gygax quickly notes that that's not all the game is about.

Cities, towns, and sometimes even large villages provide the setting for highly interesting, informative, and often hazardous affairs and incidents. Even becoming an active character in a campaign typically requires interaction with the populace of the habitation, location quarters, buying supplies and equipment, seeking information. 

Though not intended as such, these sentences could serve as a rebuke of critics who deride D&D as a purely "hack 'n slash" game. Some of my favorite moments in D&D (and other RPGs) have arisen from interactions with NPCs in a settlement as the characters sought out rumors, lodging, or equipment. 

These same interactions in a completely strange town require forethought and skill. Care must be taken in all one says and does. Questions about rank, profession, god and alignment are perilous, and use of an alignment tongue is socially repulsive in most places.  

Everything Gygax says here demonstrates the need for the creation of a social structure and culture for the campaign setting. Without these, there can be no context for adventures and many opportunities for fun interactions will be missed.

There are usually beggars, bandits, and drunks to be dealt with; greedy and grasping merchants and informants to do business with; inquiring officials or suspicious guards to be answered. The taverns house many potential helpful or useful characters, but they also contain clever and dangerous adversaries. Then there are the unlit streets and alleys of the city after dark … 

If this section has made anything clear, it's that, in a good campaign, adventures can be found anywhere.  

Retrospective: Master of the Desert Nomads

For reasons I've never quite understood, David Cook is a divisive figure in old school circles. To some, his shepherding of the second edition of AD&D overshadows everything else he did while at TSR. Regardless of one's feelings toward 2e (and my own, if I ever articulated them in depth, would probably earn me anathematization -- that's a joke BTW), I don't think it fair to make it the sole criterion by which to judge Cook's contributions to the hobby. For myself, I tend to think of him primarily as an adventure designer, both for his Dwellers of the Forbidden City, perhaps my favorite adventure of all time, and his "Desert Nomads" series, the first part of which I'd like to discuss today.

Module X4, Master of the Desert Nomads, was published in 1983 and, while theoretically stand-alone, it's really an extended introduction to module X5, The Temple of Death. That's either a boon or a bane depending on one's point of view. As a younger person, I definitely felt it was a good thing, since it gave Cook ample time to flesh out the wilderness of the Great Waste, from which the eponymous desert nomads have launched their attacks against civilized lands. X4 thus tends toward being, no pun intended, a sandbox module without much in the way of direction for either the players or the referee. It's a classic example of a location-based adventure and I loved it for its open-endedness, a virtue I appreciate even more nowadays.

Master of the Desert Nomads isn't a pure sandbox, though, as it does provide a weak framing device: the PCs are recruited as part of an army to take the fight to the desert nomads on their home turf, but they arrive too late to the staging area and must hurry on their own to catch up with the army as it prepares to fight the nomads led by the mysterious "Master" (or "Black Master," as he's sometimes called). With that established, the PCs are thrown on their own devices to find the army, along the way encountering monsters, NPCs, and hazards of various sorts, some of which give them clues about the nature of the Master and his evil plans. Their journeys culminate in the discovery of an ancient abbey, where things are not what they seem. The abbey is the main non-wilderness portion of the module and it remains a favorite of mine.

Re-reading X4, I will admit that it's neither as good as Dwellers of the Forbidden City nor even as good as I remembered its being. Though published only two years after Dwellers, there's a definite shift in the module's presentation, with more examples of heavy-handed NPCs who push the characters to and fro and injunctions to the referee to help the players if they get into trouble. I don't think these things irreparably harm the module, as they feel more like pro forma asides than integral to its content, but I won't deny that I was disappointed to see them nonetheless. On the other hand, Master of the Desert Nomads has a delightfully pulpy feel to it, particularly so in the abbey, which reminds me of something out of a Clark Ashton Smith tale. Likewise, the Great Waste is a fun, fantasy wilderness for adventuring -- no Gygaxian naturalism here.

For all that, I still like Master of the Desert Nomads, though not as much as its companion module, which I'll discuss next week. It rather nicely comports with my style of play circa 1983, which was heavily influenced by Cook's own Expert Rules, which is where D&D told me what it was about. Were I running a campaign with characters in the 8th-10th level range, I might well dust off these two modules and throw them at my players. I suspect we'd all have a very good time with them.

REVIEW: Weird New World

Weird New World is the second adventure module included in James Raggi's Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Role-Playing. Intended for characters of levels 4-7, it's an adventure intended, like Tower of the Stargazer, to serve as an introduction and model for novice players and referees, this time not of a dungeon but of a wilderness area. Consequently, Weird New World is much less straightforward, being more of a "framework," to use Raggi's words, rather than a completely ready-to-run scenario. It's in this that I think both the module's virtues and vices can be found.

Weird New World is a 28-page staplebound booklet. Thankfully, it returns to the "classic" Raggi layout: two columns of dense text with most illustrations filling an entire page. The interior black and white artwork is by Kevin Mayle and is quite moody and effective. Mayle's cover piece is a little less so but I think that has more to do with its being in color than any technical flaws on the part of the artist. The cover itself is detachable and unfolds to reveal a large hex map of the northern region where Weird New World takes place. There are also two smaller maps of locations keyed on the hex map. All of these maps are clear and useful, the hex map especially so, as it shows not only terrain features but also climatic zones. I should also note that I found the module's title on the cover a little difficult to read, because of its placement. It's a small point, admittedly, but worth mentioning nonetheless.

Because Weird New World is a wilderness module, it lacks even the thin plot that many such products possess. That's a perfectly reasonable approach and certainly a traditional one. I have no complaints about this myself, but, as an introductory scenario intended for beginning players and referees, I'm not sure it was the best one. Consider that The Isle of Dread, a similarly introductory wilderness adventure module, provided some structure for its contents. For that matter, so did the recently-reviewed A Trick on the Tain, which also coincidentally takes places in the frozen north. As an experienced referee, I don't need such structure but I imagine that novices would and it's for them that Weird New World was written.

That criticism aside, the module is nevertheless full of cleverness and imagination. Great emphasis has been placed on the effects of weather, with simple rules and guidelines for determining weather conditions and their severity. Similar care is shown to random encounters, which highlight not only the dangers of the far north but also its oddities, such as desperate whales trapped in the ice, uncharted islands, shipwrecks, and even living aurorae. Raggi once again demonstrates his inventiveness, providing plenty of fuel for exciting events as the characters explore the boreal wilderness of Weird New World.

The keyed encounter areas of which there are 40 are a mixed bag. Many of them are well done, providing just enough information and ideas to let the referee develop them further as he sees fit. Others are fleshed out in greater detail, right down to maps with individual encounter areas of their own. Others still consist of just a paragraph or two of suggestive prose. Taken together, Raggi succeeds in presenting a stark, unforgiving environment, filled with danger and mystery. However, there are occasions where I think the weirdness of certain areas, most notably one of the two fully-detailed ones, is overdone and to no good purpose. Raggi is justly praised for his ability to conjure up "dread of outer, unknown forces," in the phrase of Lovecraft, and Weird New World is full of such moments. What it lacks, though, is a strong enough counterbalance of normalcy, places and people where things genuinely are what they seem.

The weirdness in Weird New World is thus overpowering at times and, while some will no doubt argue, perhaps Raggi himself chief among them, that that's the whole point of the module, I'm not convinced that this had to be so. Indeed, I think the module might have been better if its weirdness were less extensive and inexorable. As presented here, the weird is so ubiquitous that it could become tedious -- "Ho-hum, another abandoned shrine/castle/cave/ship that fills our souls with unease and threatens our bodies with death." I don't mean to be flippant; Weird New World is a good wilderness adventure and one that's got lots of little touches of which I approve wholeheartedly, like the ancient dwarven oil rigs and the frozen stonehenge. Any one of these things things could easily have served as the basis for an adventure in itself and that speaks volumes about Raggi's ability to elicit creativity in others, but, taken together, I found all the weirdness overwhelming at times, but I admit that's a personal criticism and not necessarily a knock against the module itself.

A more damning criticism, I think, is that it fails as an introductory module. Unlike Tower of the Stargazer, there's very little in the way of referee advice or suggestions. Newcomers might therefore be unsure of what to do with such an open-ended and structureless module as this, especially when most of the encounter areas demand extensive elaboration by the referee before they can be easily used in play. Were Weird New World not written with the novice in mind, I don't this would be a problem and I'd probably be cheering at Raggi's willingness to offer up such an "unfinished" module for our delectation. So I find myself in the difficult position of saying that Weird New World is a good, if flawed, wilderness adventure module that I like a great deal, even as I must also admit that one of its biggest flaws is that its intended audience will probably find it difficult to use.

Presentation: 7 out of 10
Creativity: 7 out of 10
Utility: 6 out of 10

Buy This If: You're looking for an unusual wilderness module that demands you build upon the author's own work in order to use it fully.
Don't Buy This If: You don't like wilderness modules and/or prefer that your modules be more "ready to run."

REVIEW: A Trick on the Tain

I'm not, as most of you probably know, a player of Troll Lord Games's Castles & Crusades, but I retain a fondness for it, as it was the vehicle through which I began my return to old school gaming back in 2007. My issues with C&C, though, haven't blinded me to the fact that there have been a number of excellent adventures and support products published for it, most of which are easily translatable to other old school rules systems.

A good case in point is Keith Hackwood's adventure, A Trick on the Tain, released by Brave Halfling Publishing. Retailing for $9.95 in print, this module is 22 pages in length and includes art by Andy Taylor. It's a wilderness-based adventure written for 4-6 characters of levels 1-3 (a Challenge Level of 1-5 for those familiar with C&C's jargon), which I think makes it unusual. Most wilderness adventures are geared toward much higher-level characters, including Jim Raggi's Weird New World (which I'll review shortly). The practice of treating adventures of this sort as primarily the domain of higher-level PCs goes back to at least the days of the Moldvay/Cook/Marsh edition of D&D, but I don't think it was ever intended to have been treated as firm a "rule" as it has been over the years.

I was naturally well disposed to like A Trick on the Tain before I'd even had a chance to read it, as I don't think low-level characters should be dissuaded from undertaking wilderness adventures, even if they do tend to be potentially more risky than dungeon adventures. This module takes place in a northern tundra known as the Tain, a sparsely settled region that's home to two human kingdoms, slowly declining Rigerland and brutal Doggerland. Also present in the Tain are the nomadic, tribal Shum people. I can't say that I am too fond of the naming conventions adopted in this module. They're certainly not the worst I've ever seen, but they seemed both uninspired and likely to elicit chuckles at the gaming table. That's not a substantive criticism by any means, but I do think it might hamper some gamers from taking the module seriously and that'd be a shame, because it's a good one.

Though there is an overarching frame for the entire module, A Trick on the Tain is, in most respects, a location-based adventure that provides the referee with a map of the Tain region, random encounters, keyed locales, new monsters and magic items, as well as rules for cold weather effects. Taken together, it's a solid collection of ideas, some of them quite clever (such as the magical chaos arrow whose effects are random). There's nothing revolutionary about A Trick on the Tain; no one is going to be blown away by anything within its pages. It is, however, well written and engaging and, as I noted earlier, unusual in being a wilderness adventure aimed at low-level parties, thus making it helpful to referees interested in that sort of adventure for their campaigns.

It's also a good example of the old school design philosophy, leaving many aspects of the adventure open to referee interpretation rather than providing a definitive answer to every question that's likely to arise. I appreciate that and think it only adds to the module's utility, although some will no doubt disagree, expecting a published module to be completely self-explanatory. Consequently, I don't think A Trick on the Tain will have wide appeal, even to those who play Castles & Crusades. That shouldn't be seen a a knock against the module; if anything, it means that its author had a clear idea how he wanted to present this adventure and he followed it through. That's exactly what I'd like to see more of from old school products.

Presentation: 7 out of 10
Creativity: 7 out of 10
Utility: 5 out of 10

Buy This If: You're looking for a low-level location-based wilderness adventure and don't mind doing a little work to flesh out the details.
Don't Buy This If: You don't like wilderness adventures or would rather that adventure modules come completely ready-to-play.

Retrospective: Griffin Mountain

Originally published in 1981, Griffin Mountain has been called -- not unreasonably -- one of the best RPG products ever produced for any game. Subtitled "A Complete Wilderness Campaign for RuneQuest," it was written by Rudy Kraft and Paul Jaquays, with additional material by Greg Stafford and details the Gloranthan region of Balazar, which is to the northwest of Prax, where so many early RuneQuest products were set.

And the subtitle is no joke: Griffin Mountain really is a complete campaign in a single 200-page book. Within its pages, you'll find information not just on the history and geography of Balazar, which are pretty standard for sourcebooks of this kind, but also information about the peoples, beliefs, and locations of the place. So, each settlement gets a write-up, along with its leaders and inhabitants, as do various citadels, caravans, and points of interest. There are weather tables and dozens of rumors, in addition to reaction and encounter tables, maps galore, and of course plenty of scenarios. In short, it's the perfect toolkit for a Gloranthan sandbox campaign.

If Griffin Mountain has a flaw, it's that it may be too comprehensive and getting a handle on all of its details is difficult, even for an experienced referee. After all, it describes a nearly 800-kilometer wide area of wilderness, inhabited by thousands of barbaric humans and as many non-humans. Besides Griffin Mountain itself, there's the River of the Damned, Dragonnewt Plinth, Firshala's Prison, and many more significant locales, each of which gets a full description, including maps in many cases. There's also the fact that, set as it is in Glorantha, there are additional details to consider, those quirky bits of lore and context that make Glorantha the remarkable fantasy setting that it is.

But it can be overwhelming and to take full advantage of Griffin Mountain, one would need to spend a great deal of time reading it, taking notes, and preparing in advance. This is not a product that can be picked up and used without preparation, even if the book does handle some of the tedious tasks of refereeing RuneQuest, such as providing stats for all the humans and monsters the characters are likely to encounter. Griffin Mountain is thus very much a product of its time, which is to say that, despite its wealth of information and prepared scenarios, it's still not fully usable "out of the box." It demands that the referee pore over its pages and make it his own, a process that takes time, effort, and no small amount of creativity to do right.

Of course, the result is well worth the effort, as Griffin Mountain is a true masterpiece of the early days of gaming. It's a great example of a sandbox, filled with people, places, and adventure hooks to keep a party of characters busy for innumerable nights of adventure. Best of all, none of it feels heavy-handed or pre-scripted. Instead, what you get is a large canvas on which to create stories of one's own against the backdrop of one region of the world of Glorantha. It's hard to do justice to it in a few words and, even if I described its entire contents exhaustively, it still wouldn't convey just what it is that makes Griffin Mountain so remarkable. It's a pity that it's long out of print and difficult to obtain nowadays, because I'd wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand what sandbox gaming is all about. For that matter, I think some publishers could do worse than to emulate it. Nearly 30 years later, it still has few competitors.

Dwimmermount, Session 38

Having fled from the druidic temple, the characters found themselves in an unknown stretch of wilderness which they believed was somewhere to the southwest of the city-state of Adamas. Before they left, Dordagdonar had surveyed the surrounding countryside from atop the spire of the temple, which I ruled enabled him to see 15 miles (or three hexes) in all directions. This was the starting point for their travels. In the west, there was evidence of a river flowing roughly to the northeast. Since Adamas is situated on a river and was located in that general direction, they decided to move toward it, intending to use it as a guide for their journey. Dordagdonar also noticed what appeared to be ruins in the general vicinity of the river, which also merited investigation.

As they got closer to the ruins, the party detected signs of previous movement through the area -- tracks, felled trees, etc. -- which Dordagdonar assumed meant human beings, as, in his opinion, elves leave not noticeable tracks and humanoid monsters are even more destructive to the forests. He and Gaztea, employing rings of invisibility, scouted ahead to test his theory, which proved to be correct. Some distance ahead they came across a four male humans where a mishmash of gear and weapons. Three of them were engaged in drinking and conversation, mostly about how they hated the forest and wish they could move on, while the fourth was keeping a lookout.

Returning to the rest of the party, the consensus was that Gaztea and Dordagdonar had come across outriders of a bandit encampment. As the party was still low on spells after not having rested in over 24 hours, they broke camp in a hollow away from the outriders and established watches. Other than ordinary forest sights and sounds, nothing unusual happened during the watches. Before moving on, though, the characters had to decide what to do with Tzoth, the Termaxian magic-user Dordagdonar charmed in Dwimmermount. Fearing he'd break the enchantment and attempt to harm them, Brother Candor suggested leaving him behind, blindfolded and tied to a tree. Dordagdonar proposed killing him, but the other demurred. This baffled the elf, who felt leaving Tzoth alive was potentially dangerous. However, Brother Candor won out and they abandoned their prisoner rather than killing him.

Making their way toward the river, the characters encountered a troop of carnivorous apes, who ambushed them near its banks. Though tougher opponents than expected, they proved no match for the party, who slew or incapacitated most of them, causing the others to break morale and flee into the forest. The PCs then marches alongside the river, hoping to see evidence of where they might be in relation to Adamas. After some time, they saw that the waters teemed with giant catfish about the size of a Man (or larger) and suspected that there might be worse denizens within. This ended all discussion of building a raft or canoe, despite Dordagdonar's insistence that he was very "woodcrafty" and more than up to the job.

After several more uneventful days of travel, shortly before their rations would run out (precipitating the necessity for eating the "ape jerky" they'd made days before), the party caught sight of a riverboat and managed to secure passage on board. The captain explained that they were still several days southwest of Adamas but that Yethlyreom was not far away. They could, if they wished, stay in the city of the necromancers for a short time and hire a boat to take them back to Adamas from there. As it turns out, no one dared enter Yethlyreom's gray walls, preferring instead to rest in the outlying foreign quarter, where the rules of the city did not apply. As you may recall, anyone who dies within the walls of Yethlyreom becomes property of the necromancers, to be raised as an undead minion to serve the city. Worrying that this law might somehow come into effect, the party stayed outside rather than risk it. Furthermore, clerics are poorly received in Yethlyreom and no temples exist within its walls. Consequently, Brother Candor felt safer outside. The PCs did, however, catch sight of one of the fabled necromancers, with his black staff and broad-brimmed hat (looking, ironically, a bit like this image of Solomon Kane).

Back in Adamas, the party conferred with Morna of Tyche and Saidon of Typhon, informing them of their activities and alerting them to the existence of the druidic temple, about which Saidon seemed very much aware, although he provided no additional information to them about it. They then made the three-day journey to Muntburg, with the goal of re-entering Dwimmermount and reclaiming the body of Cormac, which they'd left behind before they teleported across the countryside. Brother Candor was quite insistent that Cormac's remains not be left within Dwimmermount and given a proper burial. This they did before settling down to some much-needed rest in preparation for the next phase of their explorations.

All in all, a very good session, albeit one without much combat or "action." In the end, I winged a great deal of it, using a variety of random resources to stitch together the party's journey through the wilderness. It all worked surprisingly well. The only thing I'd really planned beforehand (aside from the map, which I found myself modifying on the fly based on what made sense) was the bandit encampment. Naturally, the players had their characters totally avoid it, thus depriving themselves a chance to interact with one of my trademark eccentric NPCs (and potentially become immersed in yet more schemes). But those are the breaks in sandbox games; as a referee, you just have to accept that many of the things you create won't ever see the light of day or, if they do, they won't do so as you'd expected they would. Fortunately, I like surprises and have discovered that the best aspects of this campaign are those that arose through happenstance rather than planning. I see no reason to change that now.

Into the Wilderness

The Dwimmermount campaign resumes this afternoon, after an unexpected hiatus (my wife was down with debilitating migraine last weekend), with the party trekking back from an unknown location in the wilderness to the city-state of Adamas. Since I'd only ever mapped out the immediate area around Dwimmermount, I needed a larger swath of wilderness quickly and decided to use the old school standby of the Outdoor Survival map.

Unfortunately, the map from the actual game is too large for me to use without the players seeing it (since this is unfamiliar wilderness to them). So I needed a smaller map I could keep hidden and have decided to use this one, created by Snorri of A Wizard in a Bottle.

I'm making some modifications to the map to better reflect some already-established details of the campaign, but, overall, this will do very nicely. The scale will be five miles per hex and I'll be using the OD&D rules for wilderness travel/encounters, ported over to Labyrinth Lord, in addition to some house rules of my own. I'll post these rules, along with a full report of today's session, later in the week, as usual.