Tag: D&D

The Kältheim Mountains

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This week, a brief description of the mountains that border the march of Annan’s Port.  This is the range in which the Temple of the Earth Mother was built.  It’s a young range, still growing, and pretty rugged.  It’s home to all sorts of animals and monsters such as goblins, kobolds, and giants.

Read the post here: The Kältheim Mountains

I modeled the kobolds of Erde after one of the Germanic kobold types in fairy tales.  Erde’s kobolds are not lizard like, but canine.  They have doggish faces, pointed ears high on their heads, and short fur on their bodies. They are very family oriented, and fiercely territorial.

You can read more about these Germanic spirits on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobold.

Have a great weekend, my fellow World Walkers.  May your explorations take you to ever more wondrous places!

~Jean Nadira

 

The beautiful photograph used in this week’s post is titled Tour To Mont Blanc, by Michel Bousquet.

http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=10841&picture=tour-to-mont-blanchttp://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=10841&picture=tour-to-mont-blanc

You can find more of Michel’s work at http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/browse-author.php?a=9732

 

 

Creative Commons License This work by Jean Headley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Pre-made Modules

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Every now and then a GM needs a little help.  Sometimes you’ve got real life to deal with (more than usual).  Maybe you’ve hit a creative slump.  Or, if you’re really lucky, the crew happens to be together and decides to have an impromptu game night.  Yay!  BUT – you have nothing prepared.  No scenario, no maps, no monsters or npcs, nada.

It r gon be k

Random Dungeon Generators are an awesome resource for those unexpected meetings. My favorites are Myth-Weavers @ http://www.myth-weavers.com, and donjon;RPG Tools @ http://donjon.bin.sh/.  Both sites generate random dungeons, with a ton of customization options, and will populate the dungeon or cave with traps, monsters, and random stuff.  As the GM you need only come up with a reason for why the characters are there.  And that can be as simple as, “You come upon the entrance to a strange cave.”

I also like pre-generated modules.  They take a little more preparation time, but you can skim through the material while the players are getting their stuff together.  Even if you prefer to do everything yourself and your games take place in a home brewed world, the modules are easily adapted to your setting and campaign.

You can purchase professionally made adventures at your local game store, or online through sites like Amazon and Barnes and Noble.  Paizo, (Pathfinder and Starfinder RPGs) offers adventures for their games, including some free downloads, at Paizo.com .  For non-professional adventures and modules, try Drive Thru RPG @http://www.drivethrurpg.com/.  They offer products for a variety of RPGs, at reasonable prices.  Their sister site, Dungeon Masters Guild, offers a ton of modules and adventures for D&D 5e.  http://www.dmsguild.com

I’ve had the pleasure and privilege to get sneak peaks of the D&D 5e modules created by Jeff C. Stevens.  If you need a pre-made adventure, I recommend checking out his.  He writes with humor, and creates memorable situations and NPCs.  I’m currently running my players through a heavily-modified (for world consistency) version of his “The Secret of Karnov Mansion” and we’re having a blast with it.  You’ll find his adventures at the Dungeon Masters Guild site.

If you have any resources for GMs that you like to use, please share!  I’d love to hear them.

May glory and fortune be yours!

~Jean Nadira, Journeyman Worldwalker

 

 

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Temple of the Earth Mother

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South and west of Annan’s Port are two shrines, a temple, and one of the world’s most powerful artifacts.  Only the goblin tribes that still roam the mountains know of the shrines and the temple, and even they have forgotten why they are supposed to defend them.

Click this link to read the description of the Shrines of Moon and Sun, and the Temple of the Earth Mother.

Time, the son of the Moon, was murdered here in his mother’s shrine, his body left on her altar.  A cruel thing to do, in and of itself, and a deliberate act.  When she found her murdered son her cry of anguish filled the world, disturbing any and all who follow her.  Some were called to this place, including an NPC that my players had grown fond of.  They chose to follow him, in his almost mindless need to answer the call and attend the goddess in her shrine.  They didn’t have to do that – it was all their idea.  So I ran with it.  When they finally reached the mountain, Kenny was pulled from his sleep to attend the goddess.  The party found him in the shrine, his body possessed by the essence of the Moon.  Mortal bodies are not meant to handle such things, and her presence effectively killed him. (The look of shock on their faces was priceless. And heartbreaking.  I felt bad. Sorta.)  When she understood what she had done, the Moon told the party about the Well of Souls below, and that if they returned with water quickly enough they could save their friend.  Thus began a mad dash through a maze of crumbling rooms and kobold-occupied caves and tunnels.  The tension from the time-limit was palpable.  All in all, a memorable and enjoyable session.

Kenny had to stay behind, a new cleric to the goddess, imbued with her essence.  When they meet him again he is going to be one powerful dude.

 

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Points North

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There are three places of interest north of Annan’s Port: the Ferry House Inn, the Eidechse village, and a broken wizard’s tower.  This week I offer brief descriptions of these places.  I have two parties running the Sons campaign and one of them is outside the tower.  They had the chance to explore it but now the wizard who accompanied them is apparently summoning a lightning storm on the roof, and two lizard-folk tribes are engaged in battle.  They are fighting for “possession” of a beautiful young man who happens to be Tide, the son of the Sea.  This is where we had to stop last session.

Click the link here to read the descriptions: North of Annan’s Port

Have a glorious weekend, fellow Worldwalkers!  Happy Halloween and Merry Samhain!

 

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Drowned King, part II

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When I started the Sons of Moon and Sea campaign I had one idea: there are missing scouts, and the party is supposed to find them, or find what happened to them.  This was the initial session for the campaign, thrown together on the spot.  We were using D&D 3.5 at the time, and then only loosely.  I nearly killed the party with the centipedes, and a couple of our most memorable failed rolls happened here.  The cleric was using a staff, poorly, and whopped herself in the forehead when it rebounded off the stone floor (the player’s description).  The rogue was wielding dual blades and managed to stab herself in both thighs when the player rolled two 1’s (my decision based on the critters’ size and the player’s role-playing).  After the cleric prayed for a blessing there were no more critical fails.  They started rolling 20’s instead.  🙂

The original map is gone, but it was created entirely randomly.  At each door or intersection I rolled two dice for length and width of the next chamber, then two more for number and position of exits.  The emerald was the players’ addition, as was the secret door.  They asked, I gave it a 20% chance, and rolled something like an 18.  The idea that the hidden chamber was a temple to a lost death god was also their idea.  Basically, without knowing it, they wrote the background for the campaign.

Click here for the description of the Temple of the Drowned King.  It includes a rough map of the sinkhole, a few chambers of the temple, and a little of the cave/tunnel system that leads to the Eidechse village and the sea.

Adventure well!

~Jean Nadira

 

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Temple of the Drowned King

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This week, a description of one of the temples called Temple of the Drowned King.  This is actually the second location that my players were sent to at the beginning of the Sons of Moon and Sea campaign.  They were to check on a powerful artifact, to ensure its safety.  In reality, the two lizard folk shaman who guided them were members of a death cult.  They were there to steal the artifact.  The older shaman sacrificed her acolyte to open one of the blood-locked doors (which didn’t make it into the write-up).  Then, at the last, the entire party was betrayed by a higher-level rogue, the remaining shaman murdered, the artifact stolen, and the party left to suffocate, drown, or be destroyed by the chamber’s guardians.  The rogue used an item to open a portal and skip out on the party.  With just seconds to make a decision (the door, which was also closing, or the portal that lead to only-gods-knew-where), the party chose to jump into the portal after the traitor (a trainer at the local adventurers’ guild).  I used this as an opportunity to give them visions of possible near-future events and to move them forward in time one week.  This explained their absence in the city because I actually had two separate groups playing through two different parts of the campaign, and the temple group had been “on hold” for a while because Life.  It was a wonderfully intense session, since it included a “breath meter” as their breathe-underwater spells ran down, and they were completely surprised by the double-betrayal.

Whew!  All that said, if you want to check out the temple, click this link: The Temple of the Drowned King, part I

Post script:  I had each player roll a d6 before going into the temple.  Once they reached the inner chamber, that stat went up by one point.  This was a result of the residual power of creation saturating the chamber.  (1 = Strength, 2 = Dexterity, etc.)

 

 

 

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Deities of Erde

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So many of the belief systems we encounter in both fantasy reading and role-playing games are modeled after the Greek and Roman pantheons.  There is nothing wrong with this, but I wanted something different for Erde.   I went farther back in time, in a way, and drew on aspects of Egyptian and Asian beliefs, as well as western Pagan beliefs.  The gods of Erde did not create the world or her people.  Instead they are the world, or parts of it, and it was the belief of people that woke them and made them self-aware.

This week’s post includes minor spoilers for the campaign.  You can read the whole thing by clicking the this link: Deities and Beliefs.

May the gods smile on you and yours!

 

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Frozen Blossoms

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So often these days when we hear the word “monk” we think “martial arts masters.”  But a monk is a person who has dedicated himself to a monastic order and to living by the precepts and tenets of that order.  It’s a spiritual life.  It is often a life of solitude, tucked away from the rest of the world.  In the role-playing games I’ve seen, “monk” is a combat-oriented class, a type of fighter, albeit one that harnesses internal energy to do some pretty amazing stuff.  But one does not have to be a fighter to be a monk.

I was trying to create a sorcerer character in D&D 5e recently, and I was unhappy with both choices for sorcerous origins.  Most of my worlds don’t have dragonborn, and wild magic didn’t fit the character developing in my mind.  So I went looking.  I finally settled on Yokai-kin – people who carry the blood of spirits/demons/gods for whatever reasons.  I’m still working on the mechanics for the character, but in the meantime, I present to you the Temple of Frozen Blossoms, and the sorcerer monks who live there.  Click the link to read the full write-up.

 

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the Port of Annan

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This week, a quick description and history of Annan’s Port, the starting area for my current campaign, titled The Sons of Moon and Sea.  It’s set on the world of Erde.

Click here to read about Annan’s Port

The map was created using Inkarnate Worlds, which you can find at http://inkarnate.com/

 

 

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Creating Characters

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This week I chose to talk about my character creation process.  Usually I don’t have any trouble creating new characters. On those rare occasions when the ideas just aren’t there, I use these tricks to get the creativity flowing again.  And sometimes I just have fun rolling up random – really random – characters.

Click this link to read the full post: Character Creation

May the dice always roll in your favor!  Or at least give you really interesting character concepts.

 

 

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