Forlorn Skulk

Below is the submission I made to the Adventure Site competition. Feel free to use this however you see fit. If you run it or do something else fun with it, let me know! In retrospect I feel like I probably should have specified that it's designed with B/X in mind. But it is what it is. The seed idea for the adventure was to flesh out some parts of the under-explored Berghof region of Greyhawk. In UK3 The Gauntlet there is a Berghof village called Gannaway, that is destroyed by gnolls. This adventure site is the outpost that the gnolls form about 6 months prior to invading Gannaway (for the Greyhawk heads: this is set in pre-war Berghof). I plan to also create the village itself - which was never detailed - and to create a sort of timeline of how the outpost grows and changes as the gnolls become more certain that they will invade. But I think this is a decent first draft. Feedback welcome! Sarkaasa’s Lair An adventure for 4–6 players of level 2–3 The Scrying Six moons from now the...

I've been participating in Idraluna Archive 's Antarctic Adventure Jam . Idraluna used some clever mapping tools to turn the irl continent of Antarctica into a 6 mile-hex map. They then simulated a more moderate climate for the continent and then - using probabilities- generated hex conditions based on that. I hope I didn't totally butcher the methodology just then. Regardless, the output is extremely cool.  Now a bunch of people are populating the hexes using a variety of OSR systems. I've carved out a small patch for myself as well. I don't think the hexes are quite ready to share but I thought I'd write up a general overview for my own process. As someone who generally finds lore dumps to be extremely boring to read, I'll acknowledge that this is a fairly self indulgent exercise. But hey it's a blog. The area contains two peoples, the Ksouthern (I believe that is the term for it - because when you think about it... Everywhere is "nor...

Ben Gibson of Cold Light Press is hosting  Adventure Site Contest III , and I just sent over my submission. I'll share it here once the competition is done. But for now I just wanted to share my map, as I really enjoyed making it. Like the rest of the adventure, the map took a lot of inspiration from the UK2 and UK3 modules.    

If you're looking for monster inspiration you could do much worse than the old (pre-Warhammer) White Dwarf. Personally, there's something about UK D&D that really hits the spot for me. I think part of it is that they were always happy to embrace the "pathetic aesthetic". As Andy Bartlett put it in his  Known World, Old World blog: "Pathetic [pəˈθɛtɪk]   adj. - arousing pity, sympathy or compassion, - arousing scornful pity or contempt, - miserably inadequate,   - affecting of moving the feelings. From the Greek pathos : suffering . Now that I have your attention, are you ready? Ok? Ok. What I am arguing is this; old-school D&D, WFRP1e, early WFB, W40K1e, and other old school fantasy games, hell even Fighting Fantasy, all have a healthy dose of the ‘pathetic aesthetic’ running through their design." Note that UK projects are over-represented in the quote. US D&D of the same era sometimes seems to stumble into a Pathetic Aestheti...

I've been looking into the question of hex crawls recently. Yochai from Between two Cairns has repeatedly pointed out how inconsistent they are adventure to adventure, and I think he's right on that. Although I don't really get why he keeps asking why everyone wants hexcrawl maps. To me that's pretty obvious: people like the idea of a universal, modular system that lets them plug different adventure's hexes into whatever they're running. It's an attractive and relatively simple proposition. Thinking a bit further though, I think it's worth asking why hexcrawls are so all over the place in terms of dimensions and procedures. I won't claim to have the one true answer (unlike every single blog on hexcrawling), but here's my POV: 1) Almost nobody reads the source material  2) We call it hexcrawling, rather than wilderness exploration (which as far as I can tell is the term used in D&D rulebooks) 3) Every blogger and author wants to "sell...

I've been reading a bit about the urban crawl this week. I did find some other sources, but really the only one I want to highlight at this point is The Alexandrian's blog series . If I do a more detailed exploration I'll mention some other posts as well.  What I liked about the Alexandrian's work is that it strikes (what I think is) the right balance between realism and gamification. What I mean by this is that some OSR people become a bit too hung up on - for example - replicating a realistic medival town. Absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't really cut to the heart of the question which is "how do I run a satisfying urbancrawl in an OSR style?". Another thing I really valued about his posts was the depth of research he did on both new-school and old-school source material. That sort of research really does show in the quality of the writing. Too many people try to do stuff from first principles and get stuck in the weeds. Anyway, that blog...