Forlorn Skulk

The gang (who are currently debating whether they should keep the name "Stone Smashers" or pivot to "The Punishers" - due to the high volume of puns) planned to ambush the followers of Vecna on their way to the human sacrifice at Vecna's hidden temple. But first they had to deal with the morale of their retainers, who just yesterday witnessed the death of the well loved retainer Loradil. Bilbur the Dwarf and David the Torch Bearer both decided to stay after a well placed motivational talk from Roland and Stern respectively, but Magnus was not able to convince his retainer Arnie to stay on. Arnie told the Magic User Magnus to "gif zem haiiil" before disappearing into the night. The party found some healing herbs and set up camp. The next morning, the party crossed the Hool River and scouted the terrain surrounding the temple of Vecna to find the best spot for an ambush. They searched a dormant volcano crater, which now housed a small forest and rain wat...

Still playing catch-up here, this report should get us to the present session. We're playing in Berghof in the Greyhawk campaign setting. This statue of Vecna was better defended than the previous one. The party fought their way past skeletons with rubies in their right eye-socket (a sign of Vecna), towards the big boss: an elk ghoul. Thanks to the cleric Stern Defurer's undead turning maneuver's this ended up being quite a one-sided beat down! The adventurers deftly disarmed the Vecna statue and found a map pointing to a temple of Vecna, along with an invite to a human sacrifice under the Luna new moon (about 2 weeks away). Around this time, the party also encountered a lone adventurer, the Elf Feuersicht. Feuersicht decided to throw his lot in with party ( and IRL we gained another player! ) The adventurers begun an initial incursion into the temple of Vecna - hidden inside a grassy mound west of the Hool River. The runes on the temples front door ominously said...

 I thought I better write a play report summarising my first few sessions of running OSE in Berghof (Greyhawk). I've drawn heavily on the maps and locals of UK 2 & 3, but Ive expanded the region into a sandbox hexcrawls. I made my own random encounter tables, created a couple of lairs, fleshed out hexes using a mix of the D30 Sandbox Companion, Filling in the Blanks, and some other materials. I also sprinkled around some proper dungeons from old and new sources. I'll get into this process some more in another post.  For now here's a summary of what's happened in play so far.  The crew started off in media res in an abandoned lakeside Villa, the Villa Manticore. There are many such villas along the shores of Lake Spendlowe. Rumour had it this one had been avoided by adventurers so far due to its forboding name.    Speaking of the crew, it consisted of: The magic user Igon Hasenclever, the cleric of St Cuthbert Stern Defurer, and the Elf magic user Magnus Volz...

If anyone is interested in joining me on my stupid journey to check out the adventures published in Dragon magazine, I've created a chart. Sorry it's not nicer, I'm bad at technology and this is already a endeavor without me learning html.  Shout outs to DragonDex for creating the original list . All I did was fiddle around with it a bit in excel to sort it by "location" (issue number). I am trusting that whoever compiled this list didn't miss anything. But so far, when it comes to meticulously documenting fantasy nonsense, hobbyists have not led me astray. This was prompted by me asking the Canonfire Discord for good low-level, vanilla fantasy/Greyhawk adventures. A user suggested Citadel by the Sea from Dragon #78. I was vaguely aware that there were adventures in Dragon Magazine but didn't know there were this many, and more importantly that some of them weren't horrible trad slogs (most of them are though). I'll definitely be plonking this some...

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.