Month: September 2024

Ruins of Malbeth: The Micel Kingdoms Overview

by
Light pencil drawing of a map of the Mickel Kingdoms which identifies geo-political boundaries and major geographic regions such as forests, swamps, hills, and mountains.
Map of the Mickel Kingdoms

This is part of a series of posts on about an old D&D campaign world called Malbeth.
Go to the original Ruins of Malbeth post.

While Malbeth was an entire continent, the focus of my Malbeth-based setting was the Micel Kingdoms. As with the Malbeth map, the embedded map to the left is a scan of a pencil drawing I intended to eventually use to make a hex map with Hexographer hex map software.

Referencing the Micel Kingdoms map as needed, I hope this summary overview of the Mickel Kingdoms will make some sense. As I consider what I might want to take from Malbeth for future D&D campaigns, in future posts I’ll look at specific locations within the Micel Kingdoms. In this summary, I used all-caps to mark political entities such as a kingdom and italics to mark geographic entries such as a forest or mountain range.

Overview of the Micel Kingdoms

The campaign is set in the western half of continent of Malbeth in the lands in and adjacent to the Micelgeflowan River valley, one of the most continuously settled regions of Malbeth. The lands of the Micel Kingdoms, all of which once belonged to the MICEL EMPIRE, include a number of human, dwarven, gnomish, elvish, and halfling kingdoms, duchies, and communities along the Micelgeflowan River as well as the Cir Gap, the Western March, the Western Wilderness, parts of the Eastern March Forest, and a few islands in the Southern Sea.

The Micelgeflowan River valley is bordered by the Onnar and Fullangr Mountains to the north. Between them lies the Cir Gap, a broad cleft in the mountains that is dominated by the Cirelin Lake from which the Micelgeflowan River begins. The Cir Gap is also home to the high elf island kingdom of CIRTOL and the independent city-state of CIRLONN, which includes the mountain dwarf and rock gnome community of CIRABLE. North of the mountains and the Cir Gap is the Lambuletal, a tropical rain forest, and beyond that are the Hringtor Mountains and the Northern Sea. Along the northern shore of the Cirelin Lake is the sparsely populated LAMBULETAL FRONTIER, in which the only permanent settlement of note is the town of Cliff on the northern shore of Cirelin Lake.

South of the Onnar Mountains and west of the MICEL KINGDOMS is the Galarr Forest, a vast forest home to various goblin races. South of the Galarr Forest is the Bay of Nor, and below that is Norwood, another vast goblinoid-dominated forest. The far northwest of Norwood, along the southern mouth of the Bay of Nor is the high plateau known as the Ruins of Nor, home of the Lich-kings who ruled the EMPIRE OF NOR. Little is known of the Gallar Forest and Norwood, and even less is known of the Ruins of Nor, although tales and legends of its powerful artifacts and wondrous magics almost outnumber the tales and legends undead armies, dragons, deadly monsters, and all manner of nameless horrors that reside there.

Stretching south of Norwood along the coast to where the Western Sea meets the Southern Sea is the Western Wilderness, a sparsely populated frontier region dominated by the three coastal city-states of the WESTERN LEAGUE, the CITY OF NOR, VINDSVAL, and SYNDALA. Between the Western Wilderness and the Micelgeflowan valley is the Western March, a region also lightly populated except for the hill dwarf Kingdom of DVARLINN, unique in that it spans a number of underground dwarven holds along with a number of surface dwelling halfling and human farming communities, all connected by a network of fortified and surface roads. 

The northeast region of the Micelgeflowan valley is bordered by the Southern Fullangr Mountains. The eastern region of the MICEL KINGDOMS south of the Southern Fullangr Mountains is the Eastern March Forest, home to the wood elves of THILCAMA and the forest gnomes of the EASTERN BURROWS. It is also home to the Gwathimlad, once the elvish homeland of ALCARINBAR, destroyed some 4,000 years ago in a cataclysmic event the elves call the Uplift.

Off the southern coast of the MICEL KINGDOMS are the halfling island KINGDOM OF KALBATHNOSS and the magocracy of OSSE.

Forget the Tavern: That Was Me! Part 3

by

This is part of a series of posts on advice for starting a campaign.
Go to Forget the Tavern: Introduction or to Forget the Tavern: That Was Me! Part 1

In the first two Forget the Tavern: That Was Me! posts, I discussed how I use the That Was Me! activity to start a campaign in media res — with memorable action — and with a party that has a shared history. In those two earlier posts, I focused examples from a D&D campaign. Here, I want to talk about how I used it with a Night’s Black Agents campaign and the changes I made to better fit the context of our NBA game.

Night’s Black Agents That Was Me!

In the Night’s Black Agents game, our campaign frame was based on the organizing trope of Plegane Press’ The Gaean Reach RPG based on Jack Vance’s science fiction series (technically, it was inspired by Kenneth Hite’s article “Call of Chicago: Why Do You Hate Chandler Vaughn?” that applies the trope to other Pelgrane games. In the Gaean Reach, each character has been seriously wronged by an intergalactic criminal known as Quandos Vorn. The point of the game? Quandros Vorn must die! The PCs have banded together because each of them wants to kill Quandros Vorn. At the start of the game, each player gets to name why their character wants Quandros Vorn dead and they get to name one true thing about Quandros Vorn.

In case you don’t know, Night’s Black Agents is ex-intelligence and special forces operatives and criminals gone freelance who discover there is a shadow world behind the shadow world they operate in, and that shadow world is run by vampires.

So, as we began making characters, I told the players there was this figure Örümcek who might be an individual or a name for an organization, and that Örümcek was why they left their old job. Maybe Örümcek framed them and they were fired, or Örümcek killed a loved one and they’ve sworn vengeance, or maybe Örümcek was always two or three steps ahead of the PC, and the rules of their agency kept them hamstrung, unable to do anything but follow Örümcek’s trail of destruction and never able to catch and stop Örümcek. For whatever reason each PC was after Örümcek , the group had come together as they realized each of them believed Örümcek must die. Each chose what Örümcek had done to them personally, and they had a number of That Was Me! summaries to choose from to create a collective back story for their team.

As you can see, these That Was Me! summaries are longer than those I used with the D&D group, and you can also see that I included a question for the player to answer for their That Was Me! The third big difference between what I did for the D&D campaign and for the NBA campaign is that I divided theThat Was Me! summaries into two categories. The first round only included That Was Me! summaries that I wrote, and each of them had to choose one of those. The second round included those written by the players. Unlike the D&D That Was Me! summaries, the ones I used for the first round had specific connections to ideas I had for our campaign — the GM section of the core NBA book includes a chapter on creating a unique vampire (or vampires) for your game. I decided that Örümcek was at war with another vampire group. Whether Örümcek was an individual or a group, I hadn’t yet decided at the start of the game. So, I knowing the basic natures of these vampires, and a rough outline of how the war was being fought — a war in which the PCs were going to learn that they were pawns — I wrote each of the That Was Me! summaries as eventual clues and bread crumbs the agents could follow deeper into the conspiracy.

Here’s a few examples of what I offered them to choose from.

  • Laying low in Triesen, Liechtenstein while the team was trying to access 1873 bank records, you got restless and wound up in the Take 5 Club Lounge. The booze was reasonably priced, the food good, and the billiards tables busy. You were surprised when the bartender slipped you their phone number as you ran out the back after killing a Norwegian satanic biker gang member with a billiard cue. The team cut and ran, and you haven’t been to Liechtenstein since. 
    • Question: What did you do with the number, and what do you know about the bartender who gave it to you?
  • Tracking down a lead, you were given a backstage pass to a Mr. Bungle cover band gig in Venice. After the gig, you waited in the empty green room as instructed, and eventually the singer, still dressed in full clown costume, arrived. They handed you a flash drive and left. On the flash drive was a cipher key, instructing you how to decipher the set list of the band’s gigs. Since then, you’ve received tickets to six other gigs in locations across Europe. Each has given you good intel. For the most recent concert, you received another backstage pass, and like last time, it was just you and the singer, only you realized the person you were meeting wasn’t the singer you saw on stage or the person you met the previous time. When you raised the issue, the clown raised a finger to their lips to indicate silence, and handed you something.
    • Question: What did they give you? And what kind of clue is it?
  • After arriving in Manchester, England you found in your luggage a near-pristine first edition copy of El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman). Throughout the novel, individual letters have been cut out. Someone used gray ink to draw brackets around the section in which Molina recounts the third movie to himself. (You’ve identified the ink as Rohrer & Klingner scabiosa (iron gall dark grey) fountain pen ink. In the middle of the section was a note made of the letters cut out of the novel and glued to a Crane Stationery Wharton card. The message read: “Una historia encantadora, ¿no? Aunque prefiero la cuarta película.” The card was trimmed so that any personalized inscription was removed, and there were no fingerprints or other traces on the book or the card.
    • Question: What do you think the message is trying to tell you?
  • You ran into an old colleague drowning their sorrows at a street cafe in Barri Antic, the old quarter of Andorra la Vella, the capital of the small Pyrenees principality of Andorra. You’re not sure who was more surprised at the chance meeting, especially as you two didn’t like each other. Out of sympathy? Curiosity? Suspicion? You stopped and listened to their tale. They’d been framed for killing their lover. Woke up covered in blood and a knife in their hand. That’s when the visions started. They’re on the run, but they are too tired to keep it up. “The Virgin promised she’d show herself to me, just over there” they said, pointing down the street toward the early medieval Santa Coloma Church. “She didn’t come. Why would the Virgin lie to me?” They then looked you in the eye and said,  “You should go. They will be here soon. The police.” You got up and watched from a distance. It wasn’t three minutes before the police took your former colleague away.
    • Question: Why are you certain your colleague wasn’t lying about the visions?
  • After a botched mission in Bratislava, Slovakia, the team split up and you were caught. You know your cover was blown, only you weren’t sure if they knew who you really were. You were held in a cell with two others, one of whom was asleep when you arrived, while the other barely acknowledged you with a nod and kept silent. Eventually, the sleeping one started shouting about angels. It was clearly a nightmare. When they woke up, they took one look at you and lunged, screaming about you being an angel who had come to kill them. The guards eventually dragged your attacker away as they kept screaming about angels. About 30 minutes later, you were let go. You know the police had you dead to rights, and you have no idea why they let you go.
    • Question: In the bag containing your personal effects was $1,000 in unmarked $100 bills wrapped in paper with a small symbol drawn on it. It was the same symbol you saw tattooed on the back of the neck of the prisoner who had attacked you. What is that symbol?

In Forget the Tavern: That Was Me! Part 4, I’ll talk about how these That Was Me! summaries helped shape our Night’s Black Agents campaign.

Ruins of Malbeth: Religion, Part 3: Pantheon

by

This is part of a series of posts on about an old D&D campaign world called Malbeth.
Go to the Ruins of Malbeth: Introduction post or to The Ruins of Malbeth: Religion, Part 1: Animism

The third pillar of Malbeth’s religious practices was a pantheon. As you can see here, I’d begun to revise the pantheon to incorporate elements of Kobold Press’s Midgard, working with the Deep Magic for 5e pdfs and Pathfinder campaign setting before the 5e Kickstarter was launched.

Major Deities of the Pantheon 

NameAlignment/WorshipersDomainSymbolNotes
Bahamut the Dragon GodLawful Good / lawful good, neutral goodLife, LightGolden dragon’s head in profileRepresented as a golden dragon
Baleygr the BrightLawful Neutral / lawful alignmentsLight, KnowledgeBlazing sunRepresented as a female with a blazing sun on her clothing
Tiamat the Dragon GoddessLawful Evil / lawful evil, neutral evilTempest, WarDragon’s head with five clawsRepresented as a five-headed black dragon
Sigrdrifa the ValiantChaotic Good chaotic good, neutral goodNature, WarSpearRepresented as a female warrior with spear
Motsognir the StormChaotic Neutral / chaotic alignmentsTempest, TrickeryForked lightning boltRepresented as a male with a lightning bolt on his clothing
Vargeisa the WolfChaotic Evil / evil alignmentsDeath, TrickeryWolf’s headRepresented as a black wolf
Gunnhrafn the RavenNeutral Good / good alignmentsKnowledge, WarRavenRepresented as a black raven
Simul the EternalNeutral / neutral alignmentsLife, Death, NatureTriangle within a square within a circleRepresented as naked agendered humanoid
Bakrauf the CunningNeutral Evil / neutral evil, chaotic evilTrickery, KnowledgeClosed bookRepresented as a male holding a closed book
Hluti the Weaver (of Fate)Neutral /worshipers of fate, weaversKnowledgeLoomRepresented as loom with a half-finished cloth or tapestry
Moradin the ForgerLawful Good / dwarves, smithsKnowledge, ClockworkHammer and anvilRepresented as dwarven or gnomish smith. Creator of dwarves and gnomes.
Farex the BountifulNeutral / agricultural and food workersNature, BeerAgricultural toolsRepresented by images of harvest or food
Sehanine, elf goddessChaotic Good / elvesKnowledge Crescent moonRepresented as female elf with a crescent moon diadem.
Again, the idea underlying the tripartite religious beliefs of animism, dualism, and a pantheon is all three were entwined. Very few people were a strict animist, dualist, or pantheist.

Forget the Tavern: That Was Me! Part 2

by

This is part of a series of posts on advice for starting a campaign.
Go to Forget the Tavern: Introduction, or to Forget the Tavern: That Was Me! Part 1

In short, they had been working together for a few months accompanying an assessor taking a population census and recording what various settlements needed, and that the last part of this job had placed them in the mountains. With that quick summary, here’s some of the offerings I provided the players. As you’ll see, these That Was Me! summaries need only be a few sentences long.

  • While in the Tonder Alps accompanying an official taking a census of the mountain villages and watch towers, your camp was attacked by griffons one night. As the rest of the camp was preparing a response, you charged the griffons wielding only a big stick, and in doing so saved one of the pack mules.
  • You got the party permanently banned from your group’s favorite tavern.
  • Realizing you were in way over your head while confronting some cultists, the party chose to flee, running out of the building the cultists were in. You saved the party from pursuit by throwing a dagger and miraculously wedging a door shut as the dagger slid between the door and the doorjamb.
  • While surveying a village in the Eelfens, you stumbled upon a wedding, and learned the groom had no living relatives, even extended family, so you stepped in to serve as the groom’s family during the wedding.
  • You accidentally insulted an important official who now has it out for you.
  • You won a barrel riding contest.
  • You held your own in a game of Kobold Dice with a group of kobolds, and in doing so earned the respect of the town’s kobolds.

Benefit 1: Creating Shared Memories

The first benefit of this That Was Me! activity is, as I’ve said, in establishing a shared history amongst the player characters. As players chose That Was Me! summaries, the group would often spend a few minutes imagining the larger scene, both the player who chose the event and the others who witnessed it, sometimes negotiating what happened, and other times the larger narrative falling into place. In this way, these That Was Me! summaries became shared memories for the players and their PCs.

Benefit 2: Touchstones to Bring Up During the Campaign

Because these That Was Me! summaries became shared memories, they took on a second benefit for our group as role-play fodder for the group. Is the party in trouble? Or is the PC who made the miraculous knife throw rolling poorly during combat? Kind-hearted jokes about the miraculous knife throw would come up. The kobolds came into play as well. When the PCs were in the city that was their home base, the nearly seven-foot tall bearfolk barbarian would call upon his kobold friends to see if they had useful information. So too when they PCs were trying to lay a trap for a shadow fey assassin who had been using shadow goblins to lay traps for the PCs.

Benefit 3: Pre-made Campaign Themes Based in Character Backstories

A third benefit the That Was Me! activity came into play through the campaign was inspiration for future events that resonated with the players. Because a player chose the cultists/knife throwing summary, I decided to bring weave the cultists into our campaign. Our in medias res start was a revenge attack by the cultists as the party and the assessor they were accompanying were attacked the night before they would return to town. Once the PCs/players realized this wasn’t some random bandit attack but the cultists they’d already fought, they had an already established enemy and the players got a sense that the world would respond to their characters actions. And yes, those cultists did keep showing up from time to time. That That Was Me! moment I wrote to just be a cool moment grew into a major theme of the campaign.

Benefit 4: Player Agency to Shape the Campaign World

Finally, the fourth benefit the That Was Me! activity gave that D&D campaign was one of player agency in helping shape the world. The players created an important NPC: The pack mule Potato. Again, I wrote the attacking a griffon pack with a stick as a humorous but cool moment. The players, though, had another idea. Having saved the pack mule — property of the Adventurer’s Guild, technically — the players wanted that pack mule to accompany them on future missions. And having adopted that particular pack mule, they named it Potato because it needed a name if it was going to be an ongoing companion. (The party’s wizard never named his familiar, but he wanted the pack mule to have a name.)

Because Potato was the idea of the players rather than me — sure, I wrote the original That Was Me! summary, but Potato as an ongoing party NPC was thoroughly their decision — the players took ownership of Potato. They’d be off adventuring and someone would ask, “Wait, what is Potato doing? Is Potato safe?” and the adventure would stop while the players decided what Potato was doing and whether Potato was safe or if they needed to rush back as soon as they could or continue to check in on Potato. And if Potato was around combat, players announced that their character was protecting Potato. Quite honestly, most of the players in that campaign would rather have their own character die to save Potato rather than have Potato come to harm.

In the final two That Was Me! posts, I’ll talk about how I used That Was Me! with a Night’s Black Agents campaign.

Go to Forget the Tavern: That Was Me! Part 3

Orbital Blues: Swan Song

by

Earlier this year, I started reading the Orbital Blues RPG core book, a retro-future space western game modeled on media like Cowboy Bebop and Firefly, and this Swansong mechanic caught my interest. It. Is. Amazing.

The Swan Song mechanic for the Orbital Blues RPG. In short, declare it's your character's Swan Song. You get to choose the music. Your character gets to be a badass. All your character's rolls that scene are with advantage (the Upper Hand). All attacks your character makes are Deadly. Your character can make Diving Saves to protect other PCs even if your character has already acted that round. Your character takes no damage during the scene, but narratively your character sustains mortal would during the action and dies at the end of the scene.

I don’t recall seeing something like this before. As a player, there have been times I chose for a character to die for the good of the narrative, and it was a moment. Most of the time the table got quiet, the GM asked if I was sure, and all that, but this, this mechanic elevates that decision. There’s no “are you sure.” It’s baked right into the game, and the mechanic ensures that moment will be epic and properly earns the spotlight it deserves.