Western Lands Campaign Journal

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Solomoriah
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Western Lands Campaign Journal

Post by Solomoriah »

I'm about to start a Western Lands campaign, with an almost-all-new group of guys. I have just one of my regulars, and he has not played most of our early modules, so I plan to use a bunch of them.

This won't be a play-by-play journal as much as a guide to how I'm fitting all of this together. Many have asked about where exactly all the adventures fit, or can be made to fit, in the Western Lands; I'm going to give it a try.

To start with, I need a beginner adventure. I like Morgansfort (of course, I wrote it) but one of my new players ran a kid's campaign using the fort as a base of operations. So I think I'll start my players out in the village from Chaotic Caves instead.

Regarding a starting scenario... I'm leaning toward Beneath Brymassen. The town in Chaotic Caves isn't named, but it could surely be Brymassen, now couldn't it?
You found your way to the only tavern in the little rural town of Brymassen, and settled in for an evening of washing away the dust of the road with cheap beer. As you all sat at a table drinking your first mug of beer, a man came rushing in; he stood
in the doorway for a moment, peering into the gloomy tavern, before he caught sight of you.

He came straight to your table, almost running. “You are the adventurers, recently come to town? Please, sirs, you must help me. My children have been taken, dragged away into a hole in the wall of my cellar by hideous monsters, goblins perhaps. Please, please, come and see!”
A small rural town pretty much describes the town in Chaotic Caves.

As to placing the town of Brymassen, I'm thinking twelve or so miles NNW from Morgansfort, putting it more inland and making J.D.'s map work more or less as is. I'm going to be using the excellent hex map by Nekron99 found here:

viewtopic.php?f=19&t=2228

The map is scaled in 24 mile hexes. So Brymassen will be in the same hex as Morgansfort, just more inland. J.D.'s wilderness map of the area surrounding the town is forest and hills, which seems to fit both my original plans for the area and Nekron99's very nice map.

As is my usual method, I'm printing out copies of the adventure. I do use those hit point checkboxes, and I don't actually want to mark up my nice Lulu and CreateSpace copies, so I print out what I need. That means all of BF1 and JN1 back to but not including the pregens, plus just a couple of the AA1 adventures (Gold in the Hills and Beneath Brymassen). I'll print more out later when I need them.
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SmootRK
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Re: Western Lands Campaign Journal

Post by SmootRK »

Great idea. It will be wonderful to see how you flesh out the campaign using the BFRPG materials and whatever else you throw in.

I am going to go ahead and say, be diligent about this, because I think it could make for the roots of a Campaign Builder supplement or even separate development book you might even be able to market out like your other game book.
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Solomoriah
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Re: Western Lands Campaign Journal

Post by Solomoriah »

I set out to create a map in 3 mile hexes of the contents of that one hex where Morgansfort stands. I can see that there are some inconsistencies between the large-scale map and the smaller-scale map from BF1; not going to worry about it. I'm going to map out the Morgansfort hex consistent with the smaller-scale map and just let the large-scale map be wrong.

Darned medieval cartographers anyway... :D (even if I'm responsible, as GM I can blame an NPC ...)

Anyway, I was going to do it in Hexographer. GAH. MapMatic seems clunky and weird until I try to use someone else's program and find they are even MORE clunky and weird.

I'm doing it with pencil on paper now. The heck with technology.
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Hywaywolf
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Re: Western Lands Campaign Journal

Post by Hywaywolf »

Real life maps have always been inconsistent to a certain extinct. Even today differing GPSs may give you differing routes to take depending on the complexity of the area you are in. So I wouldn't worry about them not matching perfect. I never did.
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Re: Western Lands Campaign Journal

Post by Solomoriah »

Sat down this morning, getting ready for tonight's game, and tried to fit the Morgansfort map to the Chaotic Caves map the way I described above. Didn't work out as well as I'd like, mainly because I didn't realize what scale J.D.'s wilderness map was in.

I'm using 3 mile hexes on my own area map. When I put a 3 mile hex grid on top of his, using his 1 mile squares as a reference, I discovered I've got to set "Brymassen" (as I'm calling it) about 63 miles from Morgansfort in order to get it inland far enough to make sense as given. That's 63 travel miles, of course; in terms of dragon-flying miles, it's about 51 miles away.

Here's a preliminary excerpt from the large-scale map; roads are not yet included.
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BF1 Western Lands Hex Map Excerpt.png
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Re: Western Lands Campaign Journal

Post by Solomoriah »

First session last night, and it was a blast. Noticed a few issues though... in particular, JN1 has no named NPCs. I kind of need names given, because I suck at thinking them up on the fly. So I've created a supplement called Brymassen that copies J.D.'s material but expands it to make it a modestly detailed area that I can use in play.

When I get a few people named I'll post it here.
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Re: Western Lands Campaign Journal

Post by Solomoriah »

I have a couple of pages done, so here it is.

A note about names: This is very much a frontier area. Character names for humans in this setting tend to be either English or Italian (and appropriate to a medieval era, of course), reflecting the combinations of settlers from different areas. There are a few outliers, as there would be in any such setting, and of course nonhumans will have appropriately fantastical names.
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Nekron99
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Re: Western Lands Campaign Journal

Post by Nekron99 »

If you need a closer scale map of the area just give me a quick down and dirty pic of what you want the area around Brymassen to look like and I can get you in closer. Say 6 miles per hex or even one mile per if you want that much detail.
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Re: Western Lands Campaign Journal

Post by Solomoriah »

I'm working out a 3 mile hex map which I will share when I get somewhere with it. I may pass it on to you to fill in some parts, but probably not for a while yet.
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Re: Western Lands Campaign Journal

Post by Solomoriah »

Ran another session on Monday. Discovered that Beneath Brymassen is the opposite of the Olde Island Fortress... OIF is too hard, BB is too easy. But they finished it, even finding both secret doors; the grizzled hobgoblin figured out they were going to come back and off him, so he ran away after distracting them by pointing them at one of the secret rooms.

They are now exploring the wilderness area J.D. mapped out near the village, starting with the one ruin marked on the player map. I had never noticed before that the actual location of the caves is not on the GM's map; the text says the GM must place it somewhere on the map, even splitting up the dungeons if desired. Not sure how I'm going to proceed there, but I'm looking forward to it.
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