Still Looking for Players

There are still two slots open for Saturday's G+ game.  Shoot me an email if you're interested.

Constantcon Nightwick Abbey Session

In honor of Halloween, I've decided to run a one shot consisting of the first level of Nightwick Abbey on October 29th, 7:00-11:00pm EST.  If you're interested, email me at evanDOTvanDOTelkinsATgmailDOTcom, though I can only take four players.

You can find the the FLAILSNAILS conversions for the Dark Country here.

Edit: the first level of Nightwick Abbey is designed for first level characters, but anything through third level should be fine.

Lazy Post: Music of the Dark Country

And the silly one:

Nightwick Abbey in Hindsight Part 4

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Now comes the fourth and final part of my retrospective on the Nightwick Campaign.  While it was rather short, only about 25 sessions, It was the culmination of ideas that extended back at least to 2008.  The name Nightwick originally belonged to a castle on a map I made for a campaign I never ran.

When all of this OSR stuff was still starting up, my players were divided between die hard 3.x fans and die hard 4e fans.  All of us began gaming early in my highschool career, which was the heyday of 3.5.  I mentioned in my first post that some rather peculiar circumstances led me to be interested in OSD&D despite the fact that I did not spend my formative years playing it.  The OSR added some fuel to this fire, and I had already tried to get them into OSD&D with a failed Castles & Crusades Wilderlands campaign, but the rest of my group found my fascination with it rather alien.

I would, as I still do, make hex maps for games I would ultimately never run since I mostly ran 4e in a heavily modified version of the Wilderlands at that point.  While making one I used a random generator to determine some settlement names.  One of the results was Nightwick Castle.  I thought the name was cool, so I kept it in my mind for future use.

Then one day I was wasting time between college classes, listening to Sabbath and looking at OSD&D blogs.    The particular song was "Black Sabbath" from their first album, and I happened to be in the middle of it when I saw this picture:

Now, I  had seen that cover 1,000 times before, but something about the juxtaposition of the spooky castle, the devil music, and my boredom inspired me.  I began to think about what kind of setting that castle would exist in, and I remembered an intro to a computer game I enjoyed.

The line at the end "must face the demons it unleashed" really got my brain going.  I imagined the milieu being essentially a stand in for the Baltic, with the Sword Brothers replacing their earthly namesake.  At various periods I thought of them as either being a crazed death cult (for a BRP game) or an army of vampires (for an abortive 4e version of Castlevania).  As my regular readers will already know, I eventually decided that the Sword Brothers no longer existed, having been quashed long ago by those who realized how evil they truly were.

I decided to revive the name Nightwick Castle, but I also combined it with some old notes I had for another dungeon.  That other dungeon was also centered around a group of warrior monks who were corrupted by some evil power.  That dungeon was my write up of Gardmoore Abbey (sp?).  It's a small dot in the 4e DMG's map, and I can't check the information contained therein since I recently sold off most of my 4e books.  I decided to smoosh the names together giving me Nightwick Abbey.

Over time I was able to wear my group down and convince them to let me run the setting using Swords & Wizardry.  Those early sessions didn't use Nightwick Village, Lichegate, and the Abbey.  Rather, I set it in an area that was somewhere near the abbey.  It consisted of Hommlet sans the moat house which I replaced with Dyson Logos's The Necromancer's Garden, which I stocked with heavily reflavored monsters and demons.  

Eventually the group changed to WFRP 2e, which most of us were happy with and the Nightwick campaign area (which had no name besides Nightwick at that point) went into hibernation.  It only exited its cave when I moved to Knoxville and started this blog.  The rest of its history can more or less be seen by reading my old entries.  I'm not really sure at what point I dropped my Baltic setting and replaced it with this, but the switch to a Transylvania inspired landscape allowed me to keep the themes of the setting and gave me more mountains.  I like mountains.

One final note: the name The Dark Country is actually a quote from the really shitty movie Howling 2: Your Sister is a Werewolf.  When the protagonists are leaving to head to Transylvania, Christopher Lee referred to it as the Dark Country.  I thought that sounded pretty cool.

Edit:  I should also note that the Halloween season has caused me to miss the Dark Country something fierce.

Greyhawk Farms Redux

click to embiggen

The above map only shows the settlements the PCs would be vaguely aware of.  This time, I stocked the map using a combination of methods.  First, I used my old standby the Welsh Piper's Hex Based Campaign Design system.  I decided that the major settlements would all be cities while minor settlements will all be towns instead of villages.  I got one major settlement (which was obviously going to be Greyhawk) and two minor ones.  I determined their populations using the system in the Greyhawk folio.

Now I wanted to determine where the farmland was.  It seemed like it would be difficult to wed the Hex Based Campaign Design system with the Welsh Piper's equally excellent Medieval Demographics tool.  Instead, I decided to use Rob Conley's figures for use with the Wilderlands.  Since his numbers were largely based on Judges Guild material, I figured they'd be a better fit for a more fantastic setting like Greyhawk.  I figured out the number of 5 mile hexes needed to feed the populations of each of the above settlements.  Then I just placed that many hexes of farmland around each settlement.  

Now, the overly meticulous regular readers may think to themselves "but Evan, wouldn't the hexes on this map be 6 miles, not 5?"  Right you are!  However, I'm lazy and I figured it was better to skew high and assume that the people of Greyhawk, Wizard's Bridge, and Blackleg sold the excess or used it to feed the men stationed at Portsmouth Castle.  

This method is not precise by any means, but it makes slightly more sense than just having an isolated settlement with no farmland whatsoever.  It also allows me to maintain a certain amount of wildness to the setting, which I enjoy.

Greyhawk Districts: The Thieves' Quarter

The Gem of the Flanaess has few rivals in terms of size, prosperity, or majesty.  To assume that a city possessing such wealth and diversity is homogeneous would be folly.  Its streets are, to a new comer, a incomprehensible maze of taverns, tenements, and temples.  However, to the learned observer there is some order to this chaos.  Natives and citizens of Greyhawk broadly recognize ten districts.  Two of these create what is known as the "Old City."  This is the first in a series of posts that will detail each of these as they develop through play.

The Thieves' Quarter (Old City)

One of the two Old City districts, the other being the Slums, the Thieves' Quarter is only slightly more affluent than its neighbor.  The structures here are constructed with a surprising amount of stone, as is the case with the rest of the Old City.  This was done long ago to prevent the cramped buildings from succumbing to fire.  This construction also has the unfortunate effect of being difficult to rebuild and repair, and as such much of the district is in shambles.  The crowded streets make the treatment of sewage difficult, and the small streets make it almost impossible to work in greats that would allow rainwater to take the waste with it.  This problem has lead the Dung Gatherer's Guild to set up their guild house in the Thieves' Quarter.  That way they can more easily get access to the stagnant crap they can sell as fertilizer.

The Thieves' Guild is, rather obviously, rumored to keep its guildhouse somewhere in this district, though only members know its exact location.

The Green Griffin Inn used to be the primary meeting place for the various skullduggers and ne'er-do-wells seeking employment within Greyhawk's walls; however, the management recently made a deal with a group of adventurers that precludes their renting rooms to others.  The bar is still open, but most self respecting leg-breakers wouldn't be caught dead in the place.  "Those assholes have killed the atmosphere."  Boris the bloated bartender serves drinks and provides bread, meat, and "ain't meat" to patrons.  He is known for occasionally belching mysterious substances onto the already unappealing food on occasion.  Boris also runs the establishment, though no one is sure whether or not he is the actual owner.

The Temple of Kos as lies within the Thieves' Quarter.  While not the only temple here, it is certainly the largest.  Built by the Suloise founders of the city long before the settlement obtained the name Greyhawk, the temple resembles nothing so much as a large, stone mead hall.  Despite its size, the number of worshipers it attracts today is relatively small. Only about seventy attend the sacrifices, though in tough times -- such as war or famine -- many more pay him so that he might be placated and delay whatever doom he has in store for them.  These rituals are done twice a day, once at noon and once at midnight.  Usually only a dove or game bird is sacrificed.  It has been centuries since their sacrificial knife has know the taste of human blood.

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That is it for now.  I'm currently using a modified version of Zak's Urbancrawl system.  I tend to alter the results in order to make each district of the city possess a unique character.  The above is only what has been detailed through the party's travels in the city, and there are many more locations that have yet to be detailed.  Technically, the Temple of Kos has not been seen at the table, but my wife's character is a shieldmaiden of Kos and so I thought it would be necessary to have some idea what the temple is like.

Nightwick Village Map

I did a stupid thing and made it a tad too big for blogger.  Here is the key.

It doesn't quite match up with some of the events of the campaign, since I used a different map, but its good enough for my future purposes and it certainly looks nicer.