Ideas for Ancient Magic Tech – Telepresence Robots!

Hey folks – it’s been something like about six months since I last updated this blog, and in case you hadn’t noticed the world has gone somewhat strange since my last post.

I’ve been incredibly lucky in that I’ve been able to keep working – albeit remotely – and most of my friends have stayed well. Along with changes to work, and my kids’ schools, a big impact has been that I’m no longer able to run my Dungeons and Dragons games with friends around our big kitchen table, and instead I’ve had to learn how to use a whole load of online tools so that I can still run games for friends. But that’s not what I wanted to talk about today – here I am, barely two paragraphs into this post and I’m already wandering off topic. Very quickly then, and then we’ll get back on to topic.

• I’ve taken to running games using Roll20 as a virtual tabletop
• We’ve been using Skype for voice / video (Roll20 offers video comms but we’ve found the quality to be variable depending on time of day and bandwidth, and everyone knows how Skype works)
• I’ve been using the quite frankly amazing Dungeon Map Doodler by Todd Ross to draw up dungeon maps

I’m pretty sure a post in the very near future will cover some more information on my move to online play. I know a lot of folks will have been playing online forever, and perhaps might only play online, but this is a new experience for me.

Anyway, on with the post…

Ancient Magical Technologies!

Arthur C. Clarke once said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and in my game world – see Introducing “The Valley” – I’ve taken that to heart. Up to a point, my game world is a traditional D&D fantasy setting – it has the usual races of elves, dwarves, humans and goblins; it has magic powers and hidden treasure; it has mystery and intrigue. But it’s also a world that’s built on top of another older one, which has now fallen into decay.

Thousands of years ago, it’s said that a race of tall blue-skinned beings known only as “The Builders” created the world, and built wondrous cities using advanced technologies that have now been lost. Their ruins litter the landscape and their technological artefacts can be used as powerful magical items in the game – if only they can be discovered, understood and harnessed.

It’s a world-building approach with a long history of course – to give just three examples, those of you who have played Nintendo’s “Breath of the Wild” will remember the “Ancient Sheikah Tech” which you can find in the game, Isaac Asimov described the lost wonders of the First Empire in the “Foundation” series of books I devoured as a teenager, and one of my favourite Studio Ghibli films, “Castle in the Sky” has, well, a castle in the sky. Along with cool robots who shoot laser beams at sinister military attackers (what’s not to like about that?)

My point is, I’m not breaking any new ground here.

So, about those robots?

One of the technologies left behind by The Builders in my game world is a kind of telepresence robot based on the “Animated Armour” monster from the 5th edition SRD (I’m British so I’m spelling with a ‘u’ here, anything else looks wrong). As per the rules, the animated armour is a medium sized construct with minimal intelligence, built to serve the wishes of the spellcaster who brought it to life. Or just wander around smashing adventurers they meet in dungeons – either works.

Stomp! Smash!

In my game, characters can sit at control panels found in specific ancient Builder ruins, and project their consciousness into one of these constructs. From the player character point of view, they’re not at the console pulling levers and controlling buttons – their consciousness is in the construct. They see through its eyes, hear what it hears and can use the construct’s body to walk around and explore.

I adapted it slightly, describing the construct as a blue stone statue (the same colour as the Builders) with glowing blue eyes. Once the user is piloting the statue, they get to use its physical abilities and skills (strength, dexterity, constitution and attacks), but keep their own mental capabilities (intelligence, wisdom and charisma). I wanted to impose some limits here, so spellcasters can’t use magic while piloting the statue, otherwise they might want to stay on board the statue for good.

One good thing about introducing this idea of telepresence into the game is it lets low-level characters take risks and explore more dangerous locations and environments that they otherwise wouldn’t go near – of course they still have to be careful because if the telepresence statue is destroyed they can’t use it any more and can’t rely on its strength and resilience – they have to venture out themselves! It also can let them explore inaccessible parts of ruined buildings and use the telepresence aspect creatively for problem-solving. I’d say these have been a big hit since I introduced them to my game – the only downside of course is that the bad guys can use them too… but that’s another story!

Anyway, if this sounds like an idea you might like to use, feel free to steal it – you should know by now that you don’t need to ask. I have a dungeon which features some of these statues, which I recently ran in my game. I’ll be posting about that and sharing maps and adventure hooks next time. Cheers folks!

Learning when to hold back…

I’ve spent a lot of time in these pages over the past few years talking about Dungeons and Dragons, and Eberron, and my homebrew world of The Valley. Today I’d like to talk more generally about running games as a Games Master (GM) and one of the annoying habits I’ve spotted in the way I run games, that I’m trying to fix.

I enjoy running games, but I love building worlds and coming up with cool stuff to put in them. The desire to share these worlds with my friends is part of why I enjoy running games. I like to make the game world seem as real as I can, so that when my players spot hidden secrets or depths within it, or realise a connection between what they had thought were two unrelated parts, they have that “aha!” moment, and the joy of discovering something new and interesting. I love that.

The problem is, this can lead to some bad habits from me as a GM. It can lead to me pushing my players in a particular direction because there’s cool stuff over there they haven’t noticed. Or it can lead to me throwing in random hints where none had been asked for. I’m aware I do this, so I try to moderate it, but I need to learn when to hold back (hence the title of this post). So what if they don’t discover the Magical McGuffin of St. Nifty? It’s not the end of the world, and it’ll still be there if they ever come back. Or I could leave clues, or make it part of a mini-quest. There’s lots of ways to make that reveal more meaningful for my players.

I think another part of it is because I want to reward my players, and don’t want them to go home empty-handed, especially if I think they’ve gotten tantalisingly close but not found the Cool Stuff. A large part why my players are exploring the homebrew world is to understand what’s out there, what the stories of this world are, and what lies behind its deepest mysteries. I don’t want the world to appear so opaque that the players get disheartened and don’t come back, but at the same time I really don’t want to make things so easy for them that there’s no challenge. I need to learn how to find a balance and walk that fine line, but that’s a challenge all of its own.

I’d like to say this is a lesson I’ve learnt running tabletop roleplaying games for friends, but it’s one I’m still learning and it stems from a desire to share my world with my players and tell a story. While it comes from a good place, it’s something I need to rein in, because I worry that I’m denying my players opportunities to engage with my world on an emotional level.

Let me give you an example of where I recently rushed in to share part of the world, when in retrospect I should have held back the reveal. It’s not a big deal, but knowing that I could have handled it differently and given my players a better experience is an incredibly frustrating feeling as a GM / storyteller, and it makes me sad to think on how things could have gone instead. Let me tell you about Ikata’s Heart.

Ikata’s Heart is a sacred artefact buried deep inside a mountain. Ikata is (or was?) a water dragon who fell from the skies in ancient times and is now a guardian spirit of the mountains. There is a shrine to the Heart within the mountain, and a monastery built around it.

When my players met the dragonborn monks at this monastery, they were travelling through the area and had gotten caught in the snow on the mountains. The dragonborn monks gave them shelter and fed them, and my players spoke to them and asked them about the monastery. From a GM perspective, this is a good thing. The NPC abbot can tell a little bit of the story and my players can learn something about the world.

It was at about this point that I made a mistake. I had described the temple my players were in, and how there was a stone archway in the far wall, leading into darkness. That was the way to the shrine, and there would have been nothing to gain by hiding it from the players because their characters would easily have spotted it. They asked about the archway and what lay beyond it, and that’s where I made my mistake.

I was keen to let my players see Ikata’s Heart. Too keen. They were asking all the right questions and I wanted to share. I wonder a little if I wanted to show off. I was improvising wildly and the abbot offered to take them through the archway to see the shrine.

This was a bad decision, and I knew it. My players even knew it. “I can’t believe these monks are going to show us the shrine, we’re complete strangers”, one of them said, and they were right. I made up something about the monks being confident in the guardian spirit’s protection, and then decided that they’d be escorted by more monks, and that only those with dragon’s blood would be able to get up close and see the Heart. After all we had two party members who would qualify. This was me backpedaling furiously though, and I knew it.

Now, after this, the players did see Ikata’s Heart, they thought it was neat, and seeing how the monks behaved around the Heart gave a clue to something later in the session, so it was useful too. But I could have done this so much better.

Let’s think how I could have made this reward of discovery more meaningful, by making the reveal contingent on completing a challenge. I made a stupid decision by saying only those with dragon’s blood could approach the shrine, for two reasons. Firstly, those players whose characters qualified didn’t have to work in order to earn the reward. Those who didn’t qualify were permanently excluded through no fault of their own. That’s what cheeses me off the most.

What if instead, the dragonborn abbot had said “only those who have proven themselves worthy can enter the shrine”? That would have taken longer, but remember my players wanted to see what was down that tunnel. They would have happily worked for it. We had already learnt in that session that the monks were in conflict with the frog-men who live in a lake at the foot of the mountain. I could have had the players accompany a party of monks out to fight the frog-men and prove their worth in combat. I could have thrown in peril, drama and danger. But instead I said “here, come look at this Cool Stuff”.

How much better would the Ikata’s Heart reveal been if I’d made my players work hard for it? My players will never know, and that’s what eats at me. I threw away an opportunity for emotional engagement because I was too keen to show off a McGuffin and move the story along a path I had chosen. They’ve probably forgotten that little bump in the story already, but I need to learn from it.

There’s probably a deeper lesson here about ego-less GM’ing, but one step at a time…

Ed’s Big Review of 2019

tl;dr – entirely by accident, I started doing a lot of new things this year, I had a long summer break, wrote a few things, played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons and saw some wonderful musicians play. Overall, it was a good year, tinged with some sadness and occasional health troubles. But at the end of it all, I’m feeling positive.

Winter to spring: and so it begins…

The year started as the last one ended, full of nerdy promise. I had just started working with a wonderful group of people in the roleplaying community, putting together a series of Eberron adventures for the DMs Guild. For the avoidance of doubt, yes, I’m talking about Across Eberron, who I have mentioned before on these pages (I’m nearly published! woohoo! from back in May). I was spending a lot of time on the group’s Discord channel, geeking out and having a whale of a time. Meanwhile my kids were up to their own gaming habits – we’d bought a Nintendo Switch for Christmas 2018 and the kids were spending a lot of time playing “Breath of the Wild”… it looked like fun so I asked my daughter if she could show me the ropes. (That was back in January and I’m still playing it – I could have finished it by now easily, I’m sure, but I just can’t quite bring myself to, because then it’ll be over. One day soon).

I was struggling a little getting the hang of Dungeons and Dragons fifth edition, which I needed to know for the Across Eberron project. Even though 5th ed. had been out for nearly five years, 3.5 and 4th ed. was what I knew best as a player and DM from our home Eberron games. Still, I needed to figure out how the new version worked so I bought some books and decided to run a second home game. I wanted to do some exploring and world-building in this one, so I created a new setting (as you do) and decided to run it as a West Marches style game where the players would start at a safe home location and travel out into the world, exploring and finding new things, before returning home and reporting back what they’d found. It works well with a large group of players in an “Adventure of the Week” kind of game, building up to a larger story over time.

That little diversion became The Valley, which I launched on February 26th and is now the game I’m spending most of my time on. My players seem to be enjoying it, so for as long as that’s the case I’m happy to run it for them. Due to many various commitments, the game has been on hold for a few months now but I’m really looking forward to picking it up again in the new year.

The home village in The Valley

Jag talar Svenska! (sort of)

That wasn’t the only new thing I was trying out in February. During January and into February, my wife and I had been watching Black Lake, a Swedish-language TV thriller, and I’d been struck by the language as we’d been watching it. In places it sounded like nothing I’d heard before, while in other places there were words that almost sounded like their English counterparts. I had already been brushing up on my German through the Duolingo app, so in February I decided to learn some Swedish as well. Ten months later and I can name a number of animals in Swedish, describe family relationships, name colours, simple household items, and the like. It’s coming together in that slightly abstract way Duolingo does. Whether any of it will be useful if I actually go to Sweden in the future, I don’t know. I hope so.

Just like all the many mishaps in Black Lake, me starting to learn Swedish is this man’s fault.

Late Spring, early Summer…

Over the May bank holiday weekend, our family took a trip to Matlock in the Peak District with friends – we were only away for three nights, but it was a lovely break. We walked along the side of the Derwent to Matlock Bath, had fish and chips and ice cream, took the kids to the aquarium and enjoyed some warm Spring weather. We played a few games, watched some films, caught up on our reading, cooked dinner together and had a really nice relaxing long weekend.

As soon as we all got back to Sheffield, I was off to London for the day, visiting the Amazon AWS summit at the Excel centre. It was a good day out, but long. Boy was it a long day. I was back in London again later in the month, with work. I have gotten to know the DLR routes through the East end of London far better than I ever expected (or wanted) to.

I was also playtesting and editing my first “Across Eberron” adventure at this point, and after a lot of late nights, “The Silvered Edge of Twilight” launched on the DMs Guild on May 28th. By an unusual but happy coincidence it launched three years to the day since I started DM’ing our home Eberron game.

My first published adventure launched on May 28th!

日本語が話せます (sort of)

Because obviously I wasn’t doing enough to tax my brain at this point, I decided to start learning Japanese on Duolingo, beginning in June. This is progressing slowly but surely. I can read hiragana and katakana ok now (mostly) though kanji is another story entirely. Nothing you can do there but learn things case-by-case and hope they stick. Things are sticking enough that occasionally I will be watching Japanese language videos with English subtitles and I’ll be able to recognise phrases, and increasingly I’ve been having the strange experience when out and about in town of seeing Japanese written down and realising I can read this. I’m enjoying it but it’s difficult.

And don’t get me started on numbers and counting.

Into the summer…

In July, my younger brother graduated from Sheffield University and my mother came to the UK to stay with us, to attend his graduation. It was also my birthday, so we all went out for dinner together to celebrate. At the end of that weekend, my wife and I took the kids to the last day of the Tramlines festival in Hillsborough Park where we saw Happy Mondays, Sleeper, Lewis Capaldi, Rag ‘n’ Bone Man, and Nile Rodgers & Chic. Not a bad line-up for a Sunday afternoon in Sheffield!

At around this time, I moved into a new office at work – a far nicer office than the old 1970s concrete building we’d been based in up until that point, and far more central.

I was busy working on a contribution to the final installment of the Across Eberron “Convergence Manifesto” series – an adventure called “Skyfall” (no connection to the James Bond film of the same name!)

I was working late into the night pretty regularly and with the unusually hot weather (for Sheffield) I wasn’t sleeping well. One morning in late July I woke up and discovered my right wrist and hand had stopped behaving themselves – the hospital diagnosed radial nerve damage and gave me a wrist brace which helped a lot. This would have been difficult at the best of times, but this happened the day before I was due to drive the family to the wilds of Scotland for a four week holiday. Fortunately however the thing with radial nerve damage is it meant I couldn’t extend my wrist or my fingers. I could still grip, and use a steering wheel, so we weren’t sunk, luckily. But it was still pretty scary and it took more than a month of rest and physio exercises before I was anything like back to normal. It’s much better now.

Readers, I was unimpressed…

Four weeks in the Western Isles

From the end of July to the end of August, we spent four weeks living in a little white cottage on the West coast of Lewis, not far from Uig bay where the famous Lewis chessmen were found in the 19th century. This was our third visit to the island, so we settled in quickly – while we were there we traveled all over, spending time on the beaches of Harris, visiting Callanish and Stornoway, walking round the headlands, flying kites, dropping in on music nights at the Loch Croistean restaurant but most of all relaxing. I honestly can’t remember the last time I felt as chilled out as I did this summer. The wonderful thing about taking a longer break was that we got to know people and places well, and by the time we left at the start of the August bank holiday weekend we almost felt like we were starting to become part of the community. I love Lewis and Harris dearly and I can’t wait to go back again.

Looking over Bhaltos and Cnip from the road to Reef beach

Stornoway in the sunshine – the Lewis Carnival

The neolithic stones at Callanish

On the way back, we managed to meet up with my cousin Chantelle who lives in Helensburgh and spent an afternoon with her at Luss, on the shores of Loch Lomond. We might be heading back north of the border next year, and are thinking about spending a weekend in or near Glasgow, so we might get to catch up again. Fingers crossed!

The Wasps of Doom

We came back from Scotland and we spotted a few dead wasps in the hall. That was odd, but it had been a month… then there were some more in the bathroom. Suspicious. More kept appearing around the house and I looked to see if we had a nest – fortunately we didn’t, but our next door neighbours did and despite getting pest control in the nest was in a sufficiently awkward place that it couldn’t be killed outright. So over the next few months we were troubled by wasps in the house. Plagued might not be too strong a term. It became a bit of a morning ritual. Get up, kill the ten or so wasps in the hall, dispose of the bodies quickly so as to not leave pheromones floating around the place, get breakfast, go to work. Ho-hum. The worst indignity was getting stung at four in the morning in my bloody bed by an overnight wasp visitor, or being woken up by buzzing from the bedside table as the wasps in the bedroom were drawn to my light-up alarm clock. The Wasp Plague lasted until well into November but hopefully we won’t be seeing them again after the queen leaves the nest next spring. Horrible creatures…

Into the autumn and winter…

In early September we took a drive over to Southwell in Nottinghamshire where a family friend, Richard Frith, was being installed as the Canon Precentor. It was a really wonderful service and it was nice to meet up with him and his wife Emma again, because it had been literally years since I’d seen either of them – they are university friends of my wife, and she’s better at keeping in touch with people than I am!

I also started running again, taking part in the weekly Saturday morning Parkrun at my local park. It turns out I vastly overestimated my fitness on that first run, but now three months later things are slowly improving. I’ve taken five minutes off my 5km time since I started, and I’m actually starting to enjoy it. Just about.

Run, fat boy, run!

In October we were lucky enough to see local dance troupe Mr Fox perform not once but twice – first at the Stannington Story Festival, and then a week later at in Wortley. They’re a great act, and seeing them play has become a key part of our local calendar – autumn wouldn’t feel right without them!

 
A short video I took at the Stannington Story Festival

the “Skyfall” Eberron adventure that I’d been working on in the summer was published, which marked the end of the current collaboration with Across Eberron though hopefully more will come along in the future.

The big finale and the end of the adventure… for now.

At the end of October we flew out to Spain to visit my mother for a week’s holiday. We were blessed with sunny weather for almost the whole week, and it was great to catch up again. I even managed to get some running in, finding a nice little route along the top of the beach, jogging out to the nearby town and back in the early morning – I wasn’t the only one either, it seems to be pretty popular with local runners too.

Sunset over the sea on our last night in Spain

In November we traveled to Penistone for the “Folk Prostate Cancer” concert, seeing Eliza Carthy and Ralph McTell on stage at the Penistone Paramount. Although I only mention this in passing, it was a brilliant concert and it was really great to see both acts play, and we even got to meet them afterwards for signings. Ralph McTell in particular was a lovely chap and very friendly.

I had one more publication this year, which was the Demon Wastes “Wisdom and Warning” Eberron supplement. My name’s not on the cover of this one, because I only wrote a few pages and put together a map for the town of Desolate, which my regular players might find familiar…

Yes, it even has Natak the were-rat’s music shop in it. What more can you ask for?

Looking forward…

And so, a new decade looms large and the 2020s will soon be upon us. The past few years have been difficult at times, with the passing of both family members and close friends, but also there’s the glimmer of promise for better things to come. I have more writing planned for next year, hopefully we’ll be able to travel a little more and spend more time with friends and family.

However 2019 has been for you, I hope 2020 is better. Happy New Year to you all!

 

Exploring Eberron : Thaliost

It’s been a while…

It’s been a long time since I’ve written one of these “Exploring Eberron” posts, and most of them so far have concerned places my regular group have explored in my home game. However there’s another place I’d like to talk about, because I think it’s something of an underrated gem in roleplaying terms, and somewhere ripe for storytelling in your Eberron games. It’s a place my regular gaming group hadn’t been to until I started some research into it for my Across Eberron adventure “The Silvered Edge of Twilight“… the city of Thaliost, in Thrane.

What’s in the books…

Thaliost is a city of 25,000 people which lies in the northern part of the nation of Thrane. It was once part of the nation of Aundair, but fell to Thrane seventy years ago during Eberron’s century-long “Last War”. In human terms, that’s nearly an entire lifetime ago, but of course in Eberron there are elves, dwarves and others with longer lifespans for whom the fall of Thaliost feels much more recent.

It’s a city fundamentally divided in many different ways – between rich and poor, between Aundairians and Thranes, between those who follow Thrane’s official religion (the Church of the Silver Flame) and those who follow other faiths. There are people in the city who still consider themselves part of Aundair and who can never accept that Thaliost is still part of Thrane – and likely to stay that way, now that the Last War is over.

The official Eberron sourcebooks don’t have a lot to say about Thaliost compared to some other cities, which is a shame because I think it’s a fascinating place. The Eberron Campaign Guide for D&D 4th edition describes the bare facts of the city and describes it as having a tower-filled skyline, long straight roads and a bitter population barely held in check by an archbishop of the Silver Flame, Solgar Dariznu, whose rule is brutal and despised by the people who have to live there. Five Nations for D&D 3.5 also mentions Dariznu’s occupying force (the Knights of Thrane), a revolt in the year 928 (which was brutally put down by the Thranish authorities) and the collapse of the White Arch Bridge, the bridge which took the lightning rail across the waters of Scion’s Sound to the nation of Karrnath to the east. Surprisingly, the book which I found had the most useful information on Thaliost was The Forge of War for D&D 3.5, which talks about what life is like in the occupied city, with rampant crime in the poorer districts, spies and saboteurs plotting in the shadows. Forge of War also mentions an organisation known as the “Scions Liberation Front” who aim to free Thaliost from Thranish governance and return it to its “rightful” position as part of Aundair (and it’s where the map pictured above came from). What all of the books agree on is the description of Thaliost is a “powderkeg”, liable to erupt into violence and unrest at any moment.

Where I went with it…

While writing The Silvered Edge of Twilight, I had the initial feel of the city from the official books, but it needed some more work to really capture the atmosphere of the place how I saw it, while sticking as close to the official sourcebooks as possible. I wanted to show it as a city of contrasts – between rich and poor, between the Silver Flame and other faiths, between Thranes and Aundairians, and between the honest and the corrupt.

The 3.5 books play up the more sinister and authoritarian face of the Church of the Silver Flame, and while that’s something we might have gone with for a home game, it wasn’t somewhere we wanted to go with for a series of adventures introducing the Eberron campaign setting to new players. So we agreed to portray the church as  the good guys… this time at least!

There’s the question of what a Silver Flame church actually looks like – fortunately, Faiths of Eberron covers this. It’s tempting to imagine the Silver Flame as an analogy for Christianity, and to picture its places of worship as being like Christian churches full of iconography, but the description in Faiths of Eberron shows them in a different light and more pared back, with tapestries, large open spaces and mosaics. In a scene which takes place in a Silver Flame church / temple, I described a large open space under a high dome, with a single brazier suspended by chains from the ceiling, burning brightly in silver. The area under the brazier is an open circle of mosaic floor, surrounded by concentric circles of benches where worshippers can sit and contemplate the flame and pray. It came out as a surprisingly egalitarian worshipping space, with the focus on the flame itself rather than the priest – which I like. Feel free to steal this!

I needed somewhere to host the church, so I described a district of Thaliost near the centre of the city, called Valtrosgate. I got the name of Valtros from Faiths of Eberron, he was one of the first paladins of the Silver Flame and it seemed fitting to name the place after him. Much as Thaliost is described as being in the Aundairian style of long boulevards and open spaces, that’s not what I wanted for Valtrosgate. I saw it as one of the oldest parts of the city, less bound by grand planning and more “organically” built. I like to think of it as being like some of the medieval parts of York, here in the UK – all winding streets and overhanging shopfronts.

Near to Valtrosgate is Serrain Plaza, where our adventure begins. That’s not it’s original name, it was renamed after Kaith Serrain, who was Keeper of the Flame (the head of the church) when Thrane took Thaliost in the 920s (as per Five Nations). I like to weave in little historical details like that if I can, even though probably no-one will notice. Serrain Plaza is definitely in the Aundairian style – a large open square surrounded by tall buildings, glittering spires and domes. A large marble fountain sits in the middle of the plaza, while neatly manicured trees and carefully curated garden areas surround the perimeter. To me, Serrain Plaza feels more like something you would find in Rome or Florence – a world away from the nearby older higgledy-piggledy streets. On a busy day, Serrain Plaza would also be filled with street vendors selling food and drink and souvenirs. In my version of Eberron I’m pretty sure it’s a post-war tourist trap.

The other part of Thaliost we covered in Silvered Edge was a district called Archfall. This district is the complete opposite of Valtrosgate and Serrain Plaza. For one thing, it’s nowhere near the centre of the city – it’s out on the eastern edge, near the docks and the waters of Scions Sound. It’s a crowded and chaotic arrangement of original buildings and newly built slums, for it owes its very existence to a disaster which happened during the Last War.

There used to be a gleaming lightning rail bridge, the White Arch Bridge, which ran from Thaliost and out across Scions Sound to the neighbouring country of Karrnath. A few years after Thaliost was conquered and occupied by the Thranes, the bridge was destroyed in what the books describe only as some kind of magical conflagration. Nobody knows who destroyed it or why, perhaps it was blown up to stop Karrnathi troops from crossing over into the city, perhaps it was a terrorist strike by the Scions Liberation Front, but regardless of how or why it was destroyed, the bridge fell. The books move on at this point, but I wanted to take this a little further and see where it went. Can you imagine the devastation wrought by probably hundreds of tons of stone and metal raining down from above on a city district? The threat of invasion from across Scions Sound would have already put pressure on businesses working in the docks and a disaster like this would have finished them off. I can imagine that part of the city falling to rubble and ruins, and the Thranish authorities being too busy fighting the war to step in and tidy up. From this neglected and ruined pile of rubble the new district of Archfall was born, taking its name from the disaster which ushered it into being.

In the post-war setting, seventy years after the fall of the White Arch Bridge, the district of Archfall is an impoverished part of the city, but its residents are fiercely proud of where they live. After all, they took matters into their own hands and rebuilt after the fall of the bridge, and when the wealthier parts of the city and the church abandoned them, they rolled up their sleeves and put everything back in order. Well, some kind of order anyway. Archfall today is a ramshackle place bodged together with amateur repairs and creaking woodwork, with more than its fair share of seedy taverns, dangerous alleyways and criminal gangs. It’s also a hotbed of resistance against the Thranish occupation – Aundairian separatists operating from the backrooms of inns, cellars and safehouses throughout the district. Plenty of Archfall’s residents defiantly wear Aundairian blue despite the overbearing Thranish authorities. The separatists themselves frequently sport blue neckerchieves – which of course, can be pulled quickly up over the face to mask the wearer’s identity should the need arise!

I only came up with Archfall because I needed somewhere to set a scene in Silvered Edge, but I had a huge amount of fun devising it and thinking about what it would be like. With it’s rough-and-tumble streets, proud residents and the ever-present threat of violence adding tension to gameplay, I think it could be a really fun place to base an adventure – and I’m sure I’ll do more with it in the future. (Keith, if you ever read this and want to add Archfall to “Kanon”, you have my blessing!)

I could add a little more but this post is already quite long and I’ve got Other Things To Do. The next Eberron post will cover some thoughts on DM’ing in the setting, following on from a twitter poll I put up last month. See you all next time!

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Photo of The Shambles, York, taken by Sebastian Mrozek – published under Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 3.0. Source image : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shambles#/media/File:The_Shambles,_York.jpg

The Silvered Edge of Twilight

This is a follow up post to I am nearly published – woohoo! which I wrote a few weeks ago when my Across Eberron adventure “The Silvered Edge of Twilight” was in editing. The adventure is now published and available to purchase on the Dungeon Masters Guild, over at https://www.dmsguild.com/product/278049/AE0107-The-Silvered-Edge-of-Twilight.

It was actually published on Tuesday but with a mid-week trip to London with work, furniture-wrangling and other shenanigans, I haven’t had time to sit at the computer to write this up until the weekend. I had an absolute blast writing this adventure, even though there were a lot of late nights and deadlines stresses along the way. I honestly couldn’t have wished for a better team of people to work with than the Across Eberron community and I really hope I can write something else with them in the future. This is my first published adventure and seeing it published, knowing that people out there in the world are playing it with their D&D groups really makes me happy. I’m really proud of what my co-author Will and I put together, but an adventure isn’t just words – the cover artwork by Kristóf Köteles and the editing and layout by Laura and Anthony bring everything together wonderfully and add so much to the final product.

There was a happy coincidence on this adventure as it turns out – I didn’t realise until the publication date itself, but The Silvered Edge of Twilight was released three years to the day since I first picked up Dungeon Master-ing in order to run a one-shot for my ten year old daughter and a few friends, which I wrote about in “Adventures of a reluctant Dungeon Master in Goblintown“. I’d played in plenty of games before that point, but that was the first time I actually ran a D&D game myself. It’s funny how things turn out!

So, what’s next?

The next couple of months are filling up fast, and I’m still running the West Marches “Valley” game (see Introducing “The Valley”) but I’ve got some free time over the summer where I’m planning on getting some writing done. I have a few ideas floating around in my head for some follow-up projects, all of which are Eberron-related.

Firstly, I’m going to be collecting together the various threads of mythology and folklore from the Eldeen Reaches which have featured in my home game, and combining it all together in a supplement called “The Lands of the Owl King”. This will mainly focus on the northern coasts of the Reaches, an out-of-the-way part of the map that doesn’t get a lot of love in the Eberron sourcebooks, but that gives me a lot of leeway to come up with some ideas. Expect seafaring adventure, haunted forests and ancient legends from the edges of the Demon Wastes. I’m expecting The Lands of the Owl King will also include some new monsters and a short adventure, as well as information about this part of Eberron.

Secondly, I have a halfling adventure set in Sharn I’m mulling over, and finally I’d like to do something around the moons – Eberron has thirteen twelve moons after all, and there’s a lot I could do with those. But I’m going to hold off on the moons until I see what the new Eberron hardcover looks like, because I don’t want to write anything that’s going to contradict whatever Keith Baker’s got up his sleeve. The other two ideas should be safe, though!

Anyway, just a quick post today to say “woo-hoo” and mark the occasion. I’ll be back soon.

Introducing “The Valley”

A map of “The Valley”, the starting point for my Sheffield West Marches game. Click to embiggen.

As well as the 4th edition Eberron game I’ve been running for a few years, I have also started a 5th edition game in my own setting. I needed to get up to speed on 5th edition while writing for Across Eberron, so what better way to do that than to come up with a custom setting and run a game for between 15 and 20 players? Well, almost any way, I suspect, but that was what I chose.

“The Valley” is a West Marches style game I’m running as an actual pen-and-paper tabletop game for friends in my home city of Sheffield. I’ve been fascinated by the idea of West Marches games ever since I saw Matt Colville talk about them on his YouTube channel a while ago:

I’ve got a large pool of players (around 15 to 20, which is more players than I’ve ever had). The idea is that the players start off in a safe position (The Valley) and go out exploring, learning about the world, drawing their own maps, having adventures and talking about what they’ve found when they return to the Lakeside Inn, the social hub of their home village. To that end we have “The Valley” Google Group and the beginnings of a wiki where we can share what we know about the world (which I’ll share in a later post once it’s got some content). I’ve also been able to do some more map-drawing, which I love doing.

We’re playing around once or twice a fortnight and the idea is that the players organise themselves into adventuring parties and plan where they’re going to go adventuring in this new and unexplored world, then tell me on the group so that I have time to prepare. It’s working out pretty well so far – the party have discovered a mysterious white tower on a hill, met with a village of elves, battled kenku, giant spiders and sinister blue stone statues and found a number of unusual artefacts and ruined buildings which might shed light on the history of this world.

One thing I had to figure out fairly quickly was how to manage timekeeping in this game – it might seem like an odd thing to fixate on, but if we have multiple parties, all going on adventures and then reporting back on what they’ve found, how do we avoid things getting out of step? For example, if party “A” ventures out for two weeks in-game but then immediately reports back on what happened to them, then party “B” can act on that knowledge in their own adventure, even if by the in-game calendar the first party haven’t got back yet. I figured the easiest way to deal with this would be to synchronise in-game time to real-world time. So if a party goes on a week’s worth of exploring in an afternoon’s session, they wait a week then post up on the forum – which means the other players will have to wait until the adventuring party “gets back”. It’s working well, but we might need to bring in “alt” characters if players go out on longer voyages (which I hope they will do one day).

That’s something I haven’t quite gotten my head around yet – if we have a big world full of things to explore, yet we always want to have players end each game back home, how do we square that in a way that feels right? If you’re reading this and you’ve ran a West Marches game of your own, I’d love to know how you managed this. Comments are open, as ever!

I am nearly published – woohoo!

Well, this is a little embarrassing. It’s been eight months since I last posted on this blog. It’s not like I didn’t have things to post, but I’ve been ridiculously busy with other things.

Across Eberron

One of those things has been contributing towards a Dungeons and Dragons adventure for the Eberron setting. I’m working with a bunch of misfits great team of people on the “Across Eberron” series of adventures – mine is the seventh adventure in a series of thirteen (the good old “Baker’s Dozen”). It’s called “The Silvered Edge of Twilight” and will be published on May 28th on the DM’s Guild (tell your friends!)

You can find out more about “Across Eberron” at the Across Eberron website, and find the whole collection of Across Eberron adventures published to date for sale here – Adventures by Across Eberron on the DM’s Guild

Across Eberron is a fan-made project started at the tail end of last year when Wayne Chang (writer on “Curtain Call”, “Trust No One” and co-host of the “Manifest Zone” podcast) sent up the bat-signal and called a number of us into what was then “Project Hypothetical”. I’ve enjoyed working with the Across Eberron crew immensely and I’m hoping to work some more on the project with them in the future. It’s been wonderful hanging out with such an incredible group of creative and talented people from all over the world, talking about our favourite Dungeons and Dragons setting and building new stories and adventures together.

It’s been quite the roller-coaster for me personally, as this is the first adventure I’ve ever written for publication, despite coming up with all kinds of crazy stories for my home games over the years. The adventure is in editing now, and I can’t wait to see what the finished product will look like!

Anyway that’s it for now, got to dash! I will definitely post again in the near future once my adventure is published. I have some other things I want to talk about, and some ideas for a few other Eberron products I’d like to write for the DM’s Guild, hopefully later this year. More on those in another post…

Exploring Eberron : The Owl King

First, a quick note…

This post is based on material for a game which is currently in progress. Because of this, I won’t be able to go into as much detail as I might like as I don’t want to give away any secrets which could spoil things for my players. The level of detail in this post will be limited to what you might be able to find out by visiting the library in the Eldeen city of Varna. I will release more details as my players find things out though whether I do that by making changes to this post or by adding new posts I haven’t decided yet.

Anyway, on with the show…

This is the third in a series of posts exploring the “Eberron” campaign setting for Dungeons and Dragons, but more specifically these are posts exploring my world of Eberron, the things I’ve created for the game I run for my monthly D&D group.

At this point in the story, our four players are in the Eldeen Reaches – traveling north to the coastal town of Merylsward, having agreed to help protect it and the nearby smaller coastal communities from attacks by pirates and raiders. They’ve also heard some fireside talk of the “owls” in the north, a local name for the night-wandering undead who stalk the forests  in the far north of the Reaches, in the shadow of the Icehorn Mountains. There are tales going back centuries which say these undead are part of a larger force controlled by a mysterious figure known only as “The Owl King”, but most people just think this is an old superstitious folk-tale, which couldn’t possibly be true… could it?

So who is the Owl King?

“Guardian of Chaos” by Felipe Escobar was the original inspiration for the Owl King – you can find more of his work online at his DeviantArt page and at https://fesbra.artstation.com/
(image used with permission)

The Owl King is a figure from Eldeen folklore, known better in the north where the forests and farms of the central reaches give way to plains, rocky crags and windswept coastal towns. Most of the smaller scattered communities in the northern reaches have tales about the Owl King – especially Owl’s Perch – but what they all agree on is…

The Owl King is rarely seen outside the northern forests, except when great danger threatens the Eldeen Reaches.

He’s strongly associated with war and death, and is even known in some places as “The King of the Dead”, and is believed to have the power draw the spirits of the dead to him, especially those who have fallen in battle. During the Last War, stories of the Owl King grew in popularity. The song of Colric and his brothers, from early in the war, tells the story of a young soldier from the farms of the Eldeen Reaches whose brothers fall in battle and are drawn to join the Owl King. Colric rescues them and brings them home back to the farmlands they knew in life.

He is linked to Sypheros, the shadow moon, whose pale light shines on Eberron in late autumn and early winter. When the nights grow dark and a chill bite enters the wind is when the Owl King is at his most potent. Some say that he is – or was once – a druid, but the only depictions of him show an eerily thin humanoid figure whose yellow eyes glow with a sickly light. He is dressed in a dark coat patched with blue and silver, with tattered holes which seem somehow to shine with starlight.

Despite his fearful appearance, he is not seen as an evil or malevolent figure. He is seen as a protector of the Eldeen Reaches.  In stories that date back to the days before the kingdom of Galifar, the Owl King and his undead army were said to have taken up a position on a rocky outcropping on the Wynarn river to defend the reaches from an attack from the east. That outcropping, looking across to Aundair, is now the site of the town of Owl’s Perch. The Owl King’s ranges in the north of the reaches cover the foothills of the Icehorn mountains, beyond which lie the Demon Wastes, and there are stories told that the Owl King and his army of the dead even now are defending the reaches from the demonic hordes on the other side of those mountains. Perhaps the nomadic Yaltsa people who live in the foothills know more, but they aren’t telling…

Exploring Eberron : The Northern Reaches

This is one of a series of “Exploring Eberron” posts I’ll be publishing in order to share – and hopefully discuss – ideas which come to me over the course of running a D&D game in the Eberron setting with family and friends.

At this point in our adventure, our party is in the Eldeen Reaches in the west of the continent of Khorvaire. This is a land of forests, druids, farms and villages, bordered by warring human nations to the south and east, and monstrous lands to the west. It’s a wild and sparsely populated land, a new nation split from the human kingdom of Aundair to the east only a generation ago.

Map of the Eldeen Reaches from the 4th edition Eberron Campaign Guide book showing the forested areas in the west of the Reaches and farming and fishing communities in the east. The House Orien trade road running from Breland up to the north coast connects all of the major settlements.

If you read the Eberron campaign setting book, it talks a lot about the druidic sects in the Towering Woods in the south and centre of the reaches, the Eldeen capital Greenheart and some of the other settlements but mentions more or less nothing about the scattered cities in the north, at the far end of the House Orien trade road, which is what this post is about. Incidentally I’m fine with the lack of detail in the official setting book, because this gives me more leeway to make stuff up and play at world-building which is one of the things I really enjoy doing as a DM.

On this map of the Eldeen Reaches, we can see a number of communities in the north of the Reaches, towards the end of the Orien road. The road actually crosses over the border (the Wynarn river) between Aundair and the Reaches, because when the road was built these were part of the same kingdom – when the road crosses back into the Reaches we can see the town of Owl’s Perch on the river and then at the far end of the road, near – but not on – the coast we have the town of Merylsward.

Before we move on, let’s take a look at those names…

Merylsward in particular is one I like and it shows to me how these names don’t just come from nowhere. At first it’s hard to tell if this is “Meryl Sward” (sward as in grassy sward) or “Meryl’s Ward” (as in the area governed by Meryl, whoever that might be). Personally I think it’s Meryl Sward given the town’s proximity to the sea – the name Meryl is a variant of Muriel which means “bright sea”, so in combination with the -sward at the end we have “the grass by the bright sea” which works well given the town’s location in grassy plains by the coast. Of course I might be reading far, far too much into this.

The books say precisely nothing about Owl’s Perch, but I like to imagine that it’s a promontory of rock on a bend in the Wynarn river, something like the Lorelei in Germany. Perhaps there are hollows in the rock that make eerie noises a little like owl calls when the river runs fast and high – I only just thought of this but I’m totally using it now. The name hints at a folktale, and I just happen to have a mythological figure in the Eldeen Reaches called the Owl King (resemblances to the Erlking are strictly not coincidental, more on him in another post) so I like to think that the Owl’s Perch was somewhere this Owl King stopped by on his way through in legend. By the time my players get there I suspect I will have worked this story into something like the tale of how the devil created the twisted spire of Chesterfield. I’ll see if I can make the Owl King my next post, because I want to talk about him some more but this isn’t the place right now.

Our party are currently traveling north on the Orien road from Greenheart, where they met Councillor Brunstan Fisher of the Eldeen Council^*, who is having trouble with pirates and other sea raiders attacking the towns and villages he is responsible for. The party decided that defending isolated coastal towns from pirates sounded like a fun thing to do and although it’s not what I had planned for them it’s definitely something I can weave into the overall story.

^*haven’t heard of the Eldeen Council? That’s because it’s another thing I’ve made up and will cover in a later post. To summarise for now though, it’s a group of around 20-30 councillors who meet up eight times a year at Greenheart. It deals with day-to-day secular matters as opposed to the spiritual matters dealt with by Oalian and the druids.

So what is it like up in the north of the Reaches where Brunstan Fisher hails from? It’s a good deal further north than the inland lower Reaches near Lake Galifar where Oalian and the druids are most numerous. It will be colder and yet wilder in the north – the temperate southern reaches and lush forests will give way to more windswept pine forests, low mountains and rocky crags of black granite. The Icehorn mountains loom in the distance and beyond them the Demon Wastes. Even though there are still druids here, keeping a watchful eye, Oalian and the Wardens of the Wood will feel very distant indeed.

Outwardly it will be a harsher and more forbidding place, but I think because of this the people will be more hopsitable once you gain their trust. In our game it is now late spring moving into early summer – the equivalent of late April / early May. The days will seem brighter and the evenings longer. Merylsward will be hosting a summer fair shortly after our party arrives, and Councillor Fisher will be keen to see that no surprise raids or attacks spoil the occasion.

The rich farmlands of the southern reaches peter out the further north you head in the reaches and people will rely more on fishing than farming. That having been said, House Vadalis will still have a major influence even in the north as they do elsewhere in the Reaches, and I will be putting a number of ranches in the surrounding countryside, as well as Vadalis wardens and breeders who monitor and protect their griffin nests high in those rocky crags I mentioned earlier.

Merylsward is easily the largest town in the northern Reaches, with a population of around 2000. In my game it will be built on top of the ruins of an ancient Dhakaani city, since the existing fortifications will have been useful in defending the town from sea raiders – even though it’s not right next to the coast, it’s close enough to be a target. Most of the population will work for House Vadalis in some capacity but there will also be a number of taverns, an auction house for trade in magebred creatures and more mundane animals and farm produce. Near where the Orien Road comes into Merylsward, there is a temple to Kol Korran, the sovereign of trade and commerce. Given the isolation of these communities and their dependence on the fisheries and farms for their survival, Arawai is also widely worshipped here. In the smaller coastal villages nearby, Onatar is worshipped by smiths and boat builders.

Branching out from the north end of Merylsward is a road leading to three small coastal villages. These are, from west to east on the coast…

• Svartstrand – a small fishing village of around 50 people, most of whom belong to three families. Around a dozen or so small houses made of stone and driftwood, rooves thatched with straw and seaweed huddle around a small chapel dedicated to Arawai. Below the village is a long sweeping bay of black sand (hence the name Svartstrand, “Black Shore”)
• Uglaness – a slightly larger community on a rocky promontory jutting out into Eldeen Bay. Around 120 people live and work here, a mix of fisherfolk, boatwrights and farmers. The community takes its name from the promontory itself, which roughly translates to “Owl’s Headland”… wait… owls again? What’s up with that? 😉
• Ulfwick – a fishing village in a small and almost circular natural harbour along the lines of Lulworth Cove in southern England. The population of Ulfwick is just under 100 and is almost exclusively shifters. The humans from the other villages approach Ulfwick with caution, especially when the moons are full… for some reason.

Exploring Eberron

This is the point at which I concede the obvious and embrace the direction this blog was always going to go – full pelt towards nerdery. I’d originally thought it might cover travel, books, music, politics and the like…

Nope. Nerdery it is, then.

In my last post, Adventures of a reluctant Dungeon Master in Goblintown, I mentioned a D&D game I was running for my daughter, my wife and two friends. That was nearly a year ago. When I wrote that last post, we were three sessions in, having started the game as a one-shot to see if my daughter would enjoy playing D&D (yes, she really does). We’ve been playing around once a month with gaps for Christmas and the like and I’m really enjoying running this game now. The good news is my players seem to be enjoying themselves too, so I must be doing something right. We’re playing in Keith Baker’s “Eberron” setting, a D&D setting I’d played in before in the mid-to-late 00s (big thanks to my old friend Rich “Hobbes” who introduced me to the setting!) It’s a setting I really enjoy because it’s a world with so much going on, without being overwhelming. There’s political intrigue between twelve “dragonmarked” mercantile houses, each with their own business interests in the world, some of them open, some of them unseen and hidden. There are tensions between five nations just emerged from a century long war, there are mysterious jungles in the southern continent of Xen’drik, strange cults worshipping the things which dwell in the deep dark places below the earth, great cities of gleaming stone and glass towers, “Manifest Zones” where the barriers between this world and others become thin and strange magics leak through… and of course the usual D&D staples of gods and demons, kings, warriors, wizards, monsters, goblins, orcs and elves.

The feel of the world is different, though – from a historical perspective, most D&D feels  like a medieval setting, whereas Eberron definitely feels more like a late Renaissance / early industrial setting, with elements of what I suppose you might call “magicpunk” with elemental-powered airships and railways. To be honest I think you could organise more or less any adventure you cared for in Eberron, and I think that’s its strength. Want a pulp Indiana Jones style adventure? Treasure hunting in the steaming jungles of Xen’drik it is, then. Pirate campaign? Off to the Lhazaar Principalities with you. Want more of a traditional fantasy style punch up with goblins, orcs and monsters? Darguun or Droaam will probably fit the bill nicely. Strange adventures in enchanted forests? Can I interest you in the Eldeen Reaches perhaps? A detective story tracking down a gang of rogue Nexus-6 Warforged? Sharn, the city of towers and eternal drizzle will suit you to a tee.

Anyway, you get the idea.

Our game has been running since May 2016, following the initial one-shot. I decided it might be fun* to turn the clock back ten years, so instead of having the world emerging, blinking, from a cataclysmic hundred-year war, I would have the war still crashing on as part of the background of the world. Our players started out in the city of the Great Crag. in Droaam, a city ruled by three evil and conniving hags in a nation clawed back from the western edges of one of the old human kingdoms. Due to… “complications” I will probably describe in a future post, the party have now fled Droaam and have made their way north into the forests, farms and towns of the Eldeen Reaches, encountering druids, talking trees and all the other wild things which creep, crawl and slither through the forest. They have spent time with the druids at the religious commuity of Greenheart and are now traveling into the northern coasts to help the communities there deal with pirates and other raiders from the sea. But I have a lot planned for them between now and then…

*for certain values of “fun”

I plan to write more about our specific game in later posts, to recap on what’s happened so far but I’d also like to write some posts about my specific interpretation of Eberron and the ideas I’ve come up with for this world… in no particular order…

• The culture and folk stories of the Eldeen Reaches
• The Eldeen Council
• “Towers”, an airborne sport played on the backs of griffons
• Some of the people you might meet in Greenheart
• The Battle of Erlaskar Bridge
• The towns and cities of the Eldeen Reaches
• The Owl King
• The walled port city of Delethorn on Lake Galifar
• What really caused the Mourning (ha, only kidding!)

More to come soon.

As an aside, I’ve also really been enjoying the “Manifest Zone” podcast for Eberron specific discussions and “The Dungeon Master’s Block” for more general D&D chat.