Welcome back to Wittering of a Worldbuilder! A while back I began writing about the new Dungeons and Dragons Starter Set: Heroes of the Borderlands and presenting my ideas on how to better tie this adventure into your world and expand upon it. To follow up on a previous post wherein I tried to link character backgrounds to the local area – The Keep on the Borderlands; I thought I would do the same for the different character classes. During character creation, it really helps players gel with the adventure if their characters ‘feel’ like they are a part of the world and it is to this end I have come up with these ideas. This post is just the latest in part of a larger playguide I am compiling, so stay tuned for future posts!
Continue reading “Heroes of the Borderlands: Class Missions”Author: Wittering of a worldbuilder
Highpass Major NPC: Sindren Gildamure
Welcome back to Wittering of a Worldbuilder! As always, I am spinning many a plates, trying to balance life and creativity, and running three D&D games to boot! Today, I thought I’d show you one of the NPCs from my current campaign in the small town of Highpass (Phandalin), which is essentially my rewrite or the classic 5E Lost Mines of Phandelver. This is a detailed NPC and so I like to ensure I have a more detailed character profile fleshed out which will fit nicely on two sides of A4. Meet Sindren Gildamure – My version of the classic Sildar Hallwinter. Enjoy!
Continue reading “Highpass Major NPC: Sindren Gildamure”Gods of Egaar: Thingol
Welcome back to the Egaan Pantheon. It’s certainly been a while! In these posts I delve into the details of my various gods. I attempt to provide background, descriptions and interesting tidbits to hopefully give you a better insight into the World of Egaar.
This project came about when I presented a document I referred to as my Godmaker Manuscript. I have been using this over the last year few years to revamp the pantheon of my world – Egaar. It’s been a while since I fully completed one of these templates for my gods but the other two I have published may be found here and here. The inspiration for completing this one came from not only a player in one of my campaigns who plays a cleric of Thingol, but also a student I teach, who plays in another one of my campaigns and is himself, an incredible artist. It’s amazing where inspiration and motivation comes from!
Below I present another one of these gods; Thingol, God of Earth, Ore and Stone.
Continue reading “Gods of Egaar: Thingol”Adventure Plan Template
Welcome back to Wittering of a Worldbuilder. Today’s post is just a short one where I share my template for planning quick adventures. I do also use this template to plan out longer adventures, but the most common use I have for it is to create sidequests or starter missions. This template is created with MudWorldblog’s methodology in mind and I find it allows me to quickly flesh out the bare bones of any small quest I need to create.
Continue reading “Adventure Plan Template”Approaching the Keep: How to start your Heroes of the Borderlands Adventure – Part 1
A few months back, I bought the new Heroes of the Borderlands Dungeons and Dragons Starter Set and started to explore how I would use the set in a campaign. The new adventure has a very sandbox-style setup and is heavily refined for a modern, younger audience. As a fan of the older module The Keep on the Borderlands, I feel that the designers have oversimplified the adventure and setting too much for my taste. As a result I have started to tinker with the new set and share my thoughts and additions on here. I will be leaning into the old adventure module and various other third party materials and expansions I have found and bought, and will make recommendations as I go, citing the sources of my ideas. This post is the next section of a playguide I am writing, to help other players better expand on this adventure and use my ideas for their own worlds. The first post in this series is here.
Continue reading “Approaching the Keep: How to start your Heroes of the Borderlands Adventure – Part 1”Heroes of the Borderlands: Background Hooks
Welcome back to Wittering of a Worldbuilder! I have recently purchased the new Dungeons and Dragons Starter Set: Heroes of the Borderlands, and having read it, have a few ideas for expanding upon it and tying it into the worldbuilding of my own world, Egaar. The set is based upon the old B2: Keep on the Borderlands module and I love the nod back to this old-school setting and the efforts taken to redesign the associated Caves of Chaos to better fit a game for new players and the sensibilities of the modern audience. However, in their efforts to do this, I feel that the designers have oversimplified the adventure and setting too much for my taste and so I am embarking on a quest of my own to tinker with the new set and share my thoughts and additions on here. I will be leaning into the old adventure module and various other third party materials and expansions I have found and bought, and will make recommendations as I go, citing the sources of my ideas. I have run the old module for a party of adventurers before and have had a lot of fun revisiting my notes from this recently and writing up a detailed playguide to better seat the location and people in my world. Stay tuned for further posts on this playguide.
Continue reading “Heroes of the Borderlands: Background Hooks”Fantasy Short: Adherent
Welcome back to Wittering of a Worldbuilder! Today I am sharing with you a bit of writing I did a couple months back. During some time off, I wanted to have a go at a writing challenge, as I have done so in the past and so took a single word writing prompt and challenged myself to write a short story inspired by it in 2 hours. What follows is the result of that 2 hour session. The word – Adherent.
Continue reading “Fantasy Short: Adherent”Random Encounters: Lost Mines of Phandelver
So, once again – I have opinions. I like random encounters – @me in the comments.
Random encounters get a bad rep because too many people look at the random encounters table given in published adventures and ONLY use them as literal ‘Random’ encounters. You roll a D20. Okay… uhh… 1d6 wolves attack you from the bushes. Roll for initiative! Like… I get it. That seems random, but it sure as hell isn’t fun. Over. And over. And over again. So you just need to mix it up a little bit more than that, and use it in a better way, because they CAN work.
Continue reading “Random Encounters: Lost Mines of Phandelver”Lost Mines of Phandelver: The lead up to the Mines
Over a year ago, I began a redesign of the classic D&D starter set – The Lost Mines of Phandelver, to better fit the adventure into my world and redesign the Wave Echo Cave megadungeon. Since then a lot of stuff got in the way, but I’m starting to get back into the swing of it. I’m running the adventure for my group and thought I’d pick back up where I left off. I introduced this project here, so please check back on that entry for any context and changes I made initially. In this post I took heavy inspiration from Kenji at Crosland and have wholesale quoted certain sections from his ideas in my write up below because he had some fantastic design notes. This section of the adventure is designed to fill some gaps in the overland travel where the party are searching for the lost mines and discovering different things in the lead up to it.
Continue reading “Lost Mines of Phandelver: The lead up to the Mines”Fantasy Short: The Story of the Jackal King
Welcome back to Wittering of a Worldbuilder! Today I’m sharing with you another short tale I put together when writing about the werewolves in my world. This tale is inspired by various myths I explored on the internet regarding werewolves across different cultures. It’s a grim and sad tale at times – as they often are, but my world can be a dark place and in many tales of blood and monsters, these creatures are born from cruelty and suffering. This is but one of many.
Continue reading “Fantasy Short: The Story of the Jackal King”
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