Valderia Ho! - A Good Places To Start

The map below shows a brief and simple map of the continent of Moran where can be found the Valderian Empire, or Valderia as it's more commonly called, and it's immediate neighbors. This map really only exists for background purposes, providing a map of possible places from which the player's characters might hail from.

I assume that most of the players will be playing Valderian humans from either Valderia itself of one of the seven baronies that fill out the empire. Alternately, they might choose to be of The Lyndemarkes as a foreign fortune-seeker or perhaps one of the simpler folk of the Westholde seeking a fortune he did not find in that land of promise. I hope at least one of the players will decide to make an orc character.

Most orcs on Moran are found outside the empire. in Winterskarre, Blackholde, and in the uncivilized Westholde. They live as savage tribesmen and small nations of unified tribes and clans but there are still tens of thousands of them living within Valderian society. Most of the latter are the descendants of those clans and tribes that were conquered, destroyed or who capitulated to human expansion and consolidation.

There are also dwarves in Moran, but they are content to remain in their underground kingdoms for the most part and only really deal with the surface world for trade and occasionally politics. Still it is possible that a rare dwarf might set out for adventure alongside humans. Half-orcs do not exist. Neither orcs, nor humans will have them.

Moran has no native elves, halflings, or gnomes. These races do not even visit Moran in any measurable numbers as any of their population centers are far across the sea with much nearer trade ports available to them.

Hope you enjoyed this peak at the world from when the players shall come. I will share more of my plans in some future posts, including some information on the state of those usual of fantasy RPG suspects, the humanoids.

Take care,

-Eli

Quick and Dirty City Gazeteer Maps

As I am going into my second week with a nagging cold, I haven't had much energy or focus to sculpt or paint, never mind a lack of stability due to being worn out and coughing all the time. Because of this, I've been trying to do up a few bits and pieces for my Labyrinth Lord campaign which is supposed to be kicking back in gear following the holidays here. This has mostly entailed me going through various resources and printing out the bits I'd like to have at hand but I've also been cobbling together some play aids. It's amazing what you can do with a few maps pulled off the Internet and a little cut and paste.

The first few things I did were simple flash map style, gazetteer blurbs for different districts in the "home town" of our mostly sandbox campaign. A good, solid starting place with a little detail serves well to keep players grounded in the setting and also adds a bit of attachment as this place develops and grows. To make these maps, I just took three maps of blank city maps, gave them names and wrote a couple of paragraphs of flavor text on each. These were then printed out and put into the campaign notebook. I have left them blank for now and will number and detail as needed, keeping with the whole sandbox style of play.

So far I have done three -

High Ward - wealthy district.

Merchant's Quarter - center of trade and commerce.

Blackwytch Quarter - bad area of town.

They're nothing overly special, but I think they will prove to be a simple and effective tool for letting the players interact with the game world a bit more. This will be especially useful as none of my players are overly experienced gamers.

I've started another OSR game recently. This time I'm playing with my oldest daughter, her dad (she's a step-child, technically), and his girlfriend. Overall this is a group put together for her benefit with the adults being there to back her up.

Anyhow, the first adventure I ran them out on, I decided to go big and have fun with a serious dungeon crawl. I went with this map (shown right) that I found on A Character for Every Game. This is an amazing dungeon with a lot of interesting character and some complex twists and turns.

As of the end of the first sessions they had entered the dungeon through stairs at the middle of the lower part of the map and fought their way past the hobgoblins, goblins, and kobolds that were standing guard in that first cluster of rooms. They barricaded the well after hobgoblin reinforcements tried coming up it and had just headed westward where they encountered an ogre supported by a shaman.

We had to end there but we had a great time and using this wonderful map made my job as DM all the more entertaining.

Game on!

-Eli

[Labyrinth Lord] Elwyren - A New Beginning

I have been asked to run another Labyrinth Lord game at home, but this time I will be including some of the extended family, i.e. my oldest daughter Anna's real dad (she's technically a stepchild) and his girlfriend, both of whom are old gamers from way back. This isn't as odd as it sounds as they come over to the house just about every weekend anyhow and Anna's dad and I are friends, pretty good ones in fact.

Anyhow, enough about my mixed up life.

Not one to take anything lightly, I have begun cobbling together a new setting to run this new campaign in. I've already run Anna through the basics and she's run them herself with her friends, so now it's time to amp it up a bit. We're not taking the dial to eleven just yet, but I thought that adding such things as separate race and class as well as a few tweaked rules wouldn't be a bad thing. I want her to see that RPGs are what you make of them and not let her develop a "rules are everything" attitude while she's still learning what gaming is about.

I started by putting together a quick, possibly overly detailed map...

The map depicts the central area from whence all adventure shall spring. It shows the human-settled lands of the southernmost part of the main land mass of a land called Elwyren. Here I have laid out several cities, towns, and villages. There are roads, forests, rivers, mountains, hills and even a swampy area. There is even a great chasm that creates a natural barrier in the north which is flanked by two man made walls that breech the gap between the chasm and the mountains that border it. All of this should frame out a nice starting place for adventures.

There are some other ideas in mind for the setting, but I'll go into these in a future post.

-Eli

[Editor's Note: I mistakenly put in the wrong world name for this setting. I have since corrected the post to bear the proper name of Elwyren.]

Old School Maps 3

Continuing with the series on old school maps from the old Imagine magazine, I bring the last of the examples I have scanned. These are some particularly nice maps, being either quite detailed or simply interesting. The first is a dual map, featuring a plan of a castle as well as a modest dwarf stronghold. Like many of the maps from the various Imagine articles, these maps are at once interesting and evocative, but not so specific that you can't pluck them out of the magazine and plop them down anywhere in your own campaign. Both the castle and dwarf stronghold here could represent any encounter area in a game and could be readily used to represent generic structures found throuhgout a campaign world.

The next two are a rather detailed and nicely arranged inn and an Egyptian styled temple complex. Both provide numerous rooms across a number of buildings and plenty of space for encounters and treasures. Though the temple is designed as an Egyptian styled structure, it could be used for any great temple without any extra work.

I hope you have enjoyed these posts showing the old Imagine maps. I had a lot of fun pouring over them again and sharing them. It should be noted that these last three maps are yellow not because of the age of the magazines but because they were included as part of the "centerfold" pull-out adventures included in many issues of Imagine. These adventures were printed on thicker stock paper than the rest of the magazine, three-holed punched and made removable for transplant into notebooks. I think this is a great idea, myself.

Have fun,

-Eli

Old School Maps 2

The next set of maps from the old Imagine magazines are a few of the more involved ones that I have seen. These are still part of the whole City League series of maps for their featured setting. As you can see below, these are a gambling den, a courthouse, and a castle.

The Cornucopia gambling house map is a nice example of a luxurious manner style house and has a great underground element to it.

The Court is a bit simpler on the above ground levels, but still features a nice underground/dungeon section. I find the idea of civic offices around a central courtyard with multiple gates to be a particularly nice architectural choice.

The castle in the map may not be from the City League maps, but it is a nice, solid-built structure with thick walls and lots of rooms and passages. For those who don't like dungeons for dungeon's sake, this castle map would make a suitable alternative and still allow for enough room to explore for a dungeon.

Old School Maps

Going through some old issues of Imagine magazine I was struck by how nice some of the maps were. If you aren't familiar with Imagine, it was an older British gaming magazine, published by TSR Hobbies UK that ran from 1983 to 1985 as far as I can recall. It followed a format very similar to the early Dragon and White dwarf magazines offering articles, supplemental material and adventures for D&D as well as other fantasy and science fiction RPGs. There were some really nice articles in its pages as well as some fun monsters and adventures.

One of my favorite things in the later issues was a project called Pelinore - The City League where they detailed a particular set of cities providing NPCs, local information and some lovely maps of the buildings. I have some scanned images of some of those maps included below. As the magazine is long out of print and next to impossible to find, I hope they won't mind me sharing a few snippets of the fine map work that was done within those pages.

I hope you enjoyed these maps. I'll post more in the future.

-Eli