Estates of the Eliari

[leon]

Revision 6 is on the top post with the following edits.

• Added note about the path to the river to the "Outside the Walls" text.
• Moved and edited text about what's inside the walls over to the "Inside the Walls" section.
• Page 10 - Fixed paragraph style under "House" header to "Text Body".
• Updated well description to Note the sound of the river heard from near the well.
• Added a compass to the map. Scale was already marked as "1 square = 5'".
• Removed "by weapon" from Two Figures in the Parlor – Zombies.
• Added HP boxes to Sun Room Challenge – Ghouls.
• Updated evil cleric and fighters in the kitchen. Added HP boxes. Removed abiltity score lines. Removed asterisks after the two spells that are reversible because these are the forms memorized.
• Updated "1d4 books" to "1d4 books. Refer to the Additional House Tables if books are present." in three spots. Leaving page numbers out for now.
• Changed rot grub HP format per suggestion.
• Add +DEX to boulder trap on the porch.
• Added "If rolling area descriptions places either the leader or the sergeant in two locations, choose one only."
• Revised slippery stew, adding "To avoid falling while moving through this area, halve movement or save vs. Death +DEX every round."
• Added stats for the henchmen with the evil clearic in Lady's Bedroom Challenge – #3.

A Few Notes

• I think it's OK if the text doesn't work hard to lead players to investigating the river or the well.
• It's likely the map will need to be remade at some point to be more functional and less artistic.
• In some cases, I've left out "by weapon" text for a monster if it has no weapon, e.g. the vampire in the garden grave.
• We're probably going to be chasing references to page numbers in the text until content settles down.
• I'm not sure "Changed the last line of HP Blocks to WanderingMonsterEnd Style." is the right thing to do. I think this style only goes on the last line of the last wandering monster block. As it is now, vertical space is inconsistent based on if an entry ends in HP boxes or not.
• Not a big deal, but "roughhewn" seems to be an accepted spelling. Also "rough-hewn".

To Do

• Outside the Walls / Wall Construction styling is not ideal because the WanderingMonsterBlock doesn't do well with wide dice roll targets. It may need a new style created.
• Update monster descriptions to discuss abilities per Al's suggestions, but I think we need clarity on preferred stat line style. I'll raise that in the topic about the style guide.
• Still need a #4 entry for the bandit version of "Parlor and Hallway".

[leon]

Revision 7 added to the top post. This version cleans up the map to better show grid lines, replaces the compass and shows scale as regular body text instead of inside the image.

[leon]

I'm going to work on a Revision 8 that uses new text styles called AreaChoiceBody and AreaChoiceEnd to resolve the need for a bit more width on the left of the tables. I'll also clean up the monster descriptions to include notes about special damage and abilities.

[leon]

Revision 8 is up on the top post. All the tables are now converted to new AreaChoice styles. I preserved the vertical spacing after checkboxes. I also made a few other stylistic changes for uniformity.

Whenever text refers to a table, I have written it like "Generate a Basement Challenge using the tables, below." The bold, capitalized text is meant to match the heading the follows.

I went over every monster and added notes about any spells or special abilities between the stat-line and the hit point checkboxes, per the style guide. I prefer this approach to trying to cram damage effects into the stat-line. I might have overshot on the terseness, though.

I standardized in-line rolls to look like "[1d4 1 red, 2 blue, 3 green, 4 purple]". Bold square brackets and bold die targets.

I made every area reference look like "Area 25". These could be changed to be "25. Basement" instead.

There was an entry where an evil cleric is meeting with three henchmen. I made sure to bold henchmen because, like the rest of bandit descriptions, this means that you should pull from the pool of gang members. I removed the extra monster block.

Lastly, I added a note to the front about how this doc is in development and meant to encourage people to contribute more entries. I'm willing to add ad hoc contributions for anyone not wanting to deal with LibreOffice. I would love to someone figure out a third theme to go alongside undead and bandits.

[leon]

Release 9 is up on the top post. All edits are from James Lemon who says

Mostly stat-line corrections, a few other small edits.

Thanks for the edits!

Since my last update, my players ran through an instance of this. They ended up with an orc gang that was no challenge for them, but it lead to a couple interesting role-playing experiences. When it came up randomly that they'd found an estate, it was a bit hairy dealing with all the roles. At first, I was rolling only as they got to each area. That wasn't reasonable once they went into the house. I had to pause for 5 minutes to make all the rolls. I was doing this in a copy of the doc on my computer.

Probably the best way to use it from the doc is to prep beforehand by rolling up all the choices and then cut out all the content that's not needed. If the content fills out a bit more and stabilizes, I'll probably port it into my code that can generate everything in one go inside a web page.

Probably the biggest editing challenge with this document remains how the tables are formatted in a custom style AreaChoice (based on WanderingMonsterBody/End). This allows checkboxes to work, but it does vary from the standard styles. Consider this an expansion of BFRPG called Eldritch LibreOffice Wizardry.

I still want to see contributions!

[chiisu81]

r11 uploaded to first post.
Updated/correct fonts.
Changed all stat-line "Ml" to "ML"
Replaced double-daggers with "(m)"

Will still need to comb through to update/correct damage to new style.

[leon]

Thank you!

[leon]

Top post has release 12. I went through all areas to be at least 1d6 and to add more "[TBD]" marks for where I think there should be more content. I also removed the dice rolls from headers to use a line of text below instead.

[chiisu81]

r13 uploaded to first post.
Corrected text font size to 10
Corrected header and footer font, size, etc.
Replaced size/distance symbols with wording
Corrected multi-attacks in stat-lines to remove slashes

[leon]

r14 updated to first post. All TBD's are handled.