DUNGEON23: The Dry River

The bandits have been using the edge nearest their tents as a latrine.  Anyone trying to sneak up to the camp through the dry river during daylight hours will almost certainly be seen by the bandits standing guard on the ziggurat.

Dungeon23: the Bandits Corral

The Corral

The bandits improvised a corral here inside the ruins of a large building.  

• Strong smell of horse and oats.

• Repaired ruin walls.

• Wooden fences to mark the edges of the corral.

• An undyed canvas tarp stretched out over the corral to give the animals shade.

• Inside the corral are:

• 2 warhorses.

• Outside the corral and in front of the ziggurat, hobbled, are:

• 16 riding horses.

• 21 mules.

• The animals are well taken care of (peasants know a thing or two about caring for animals) but are also worked hard.  

• The barrels hold oats and water.  The hay pile is on the other side of the wall from the barrels. 

• There are always at least 2 bandits here during the day standing guard, and 3 at night with the campfire out front lit up, if the horses are here.  If the horses are out on a raid, there might be only 1 guard here if some horses or mules got left behind, or no guards at all if the beasts are all out.  

• The tack for the horses is piled up near the wall and includes blankets, halters, and saddles for the horses, and halters, blankets, and pack saddles for the mules.  

• Early in the morning, just after dawn, one of the youngest of the bandits will be in here mucking out the corral.  In the early afternoon, three or more bandits will be here caring for the tack.

• The dung from the horses and mules is allowed to dry and then used in the bandits’ campfires.

Map made with Inkarnate and GIMP.  Each square is 5’ across.

Dungeon23: the Ziggurat of Potent Waters

The Barrow of the Egg is a megadungeon that someone built a ziggurat on top of.  That Ziggurat of Potent Waters was long known as a place of power, coveted by wizards and priests alike until an earthquake diverted the river that ran past it, leaving the land to dry up into a barren, rocky desert.  Over the centuries, the ziggurat was forgotten.

Until recently.

A priest has moved into the ziggurat and is attempting to uncover its forgotten secrets.  (I’m describing him as a castrated priest of Hekate, but any Chaotic/Neutral Evil deity willing to countenance human sacrifice will do).  To aid him in his work, he’s hired a few mercenaries who have themselves gathered a group of disaffected peasants they’ve armed and trained.  The mercenaries, backed up by the peasants, have been hitting desert caravans.  The primary goal has been collecting water and sacrificial victims, though the mercenaries have been happy to appropriate for themselves any portable loot.  The rest, including the bodies of men and beasts, has been buried in the desert.  They prefer to hit caravans leaving from a nearby fortified caravansary, as these will have the most water to steal and will take the longest to be missed. 

While the priest has taken up residence himself inside the Ziggurat of Potent Waters, the mercenaries and their newly-minted bandits live in tents in the ruins outside the ziggurat.  

There are 32 peasant bandits:

PEASANT BANDIT: AC 10; HD <1; HP 2; #ATT 1; DMG by dagger or heavy crossbow; ML 6; XP 5.

Art made with Stable Diffusion and GIMP.

Murdered by Pirates is Good

This year started off with so much promise for the blog but, obviously, I fell off the wagon in May. So what has the Troll been up to?

Quite a lot. I'm involved in three regular campaigns. One is weekly, the other two switch off weeks, so that's two evenings of gaming every week (plus regular meet-ups for board games and the like). What's crazy for me is that, due to quirks of fate, all three games are 5e D&D. What's really crazy? I'm a player in one.

The big news is that I'm getting an adventure officially, professionally published for the first time. I've written one of the GenCon exclusive adventures Raggi will be selling at the Lamentations of the Flame Princess booth this year. Being a fan of the Orientalist painters, I wanted to do something involving the Barbary Pirates, who were busting out of the Mediterranean and onto the world stage in a big way during the default time period of LotFP adventures.

I worked with Tabby L. Rose on this one. She's DMing the 5e game I'm actually a player in. Her experience with RPGs is very different from mine. She got started later (because she couldn't find anyone who'd let a girl join their games until after high school) and played very different games from me. Where I've been accused of treating most RPG rules as variations to add to Moldvay/Cook, Tabby had an extremely varied RPG diet, ranging from first edition Rune Quest and FASERIP Marvel to Talislanta and Shadowrun. The longest running campaign she GMed was a Firefly game that started using Margaret Weis Productions rules but later migrated to Fudge. This makes her fun to collaborate with because her expectations and assumptions are often very different from mine.

And this was very important on Menagerie of Exiles because, hoo boy, was this a reminder of how odd my games are. When my players' PCs board a pirate ship, whether as guests or crew or cargo, they want to know all about what's happening: who are the pirates and where did they come from and what are they doing right now (at 3 PM on a Tuesday afternoon) and when can we get the quartermaster alone without anyone else overhearing our conversation? They're going to want to seduce the First Mate, and if they see an opening, they're going to prep a mutiny plan, even if they don't necessarily pull the trigger.

Most of my notes for something like this would be almost-kinda bullet-points jotted into my moleskin or possibly just scribbled on post-its tucked in as bookmarks into the rulebooks. Now I had to make it intelligible for other folks all while keeping it within the word-and-art limits of a GenCon exclusive booklet.

We were absolutely overly ambitious. What you’ll get is a ship and crew with the broad outlines detailed and a bit more focus on particular individuals. There’s a dark secret on the ship that threatens to split the crew apart, a secret that the enslaved prisoners in the hold are part of. And that’s probably skirting too close to spoiler territory, so I’ll stop there.

If you’re running a LotFP campaign, you’ll get a creepy little adventure on the high seas that you can use to move the campaign to more exotic locales. In the decades before the start of the English Civil War, the Barbary Pirates were raiding as far afield as Ireland and Iceland (and, in both cases, absconding with the entire populations of small villages). So you could have these pirates pop up just about anywhere and transport the PCs to just about anywhere. If you’ve been looking for a way to move the campaign to North Africa for Rafael Chandler’s World of the Lost, here you go!

If your game is not set in a real-world analogue of the 16th through 19th centuries, you still get pirates with a dark secret. They can transport your PCs across an ocean and give your table something to do with that journey, rather than just handwave it as “time passes.”

If you’re going to be at GenCon this year, be sure to stop by Raggi’s booth (#3010) and check it out. For myself, I can’t wait to get my hands on Barbarians of Orange Boiling Seas. Zzarchov always does neat stuff. And I have a sneaking suspicion I know what James’ mystery book is. If I’m right, yeah, it’ll twist more than a few noses out of joint.