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”Category: Battlemaps
Mini Map #2: The Classic Tomb
Welcome back to Mini Maps! In these posts I share a small dungeon map from my world that is designed for use in tabletop roleplaying games. Today I present the Classic Tomb!
This map was created in Microsoft Paint using a simple gridded base and drawing the room shapes on top. I used interesting plans and images of real life catacombs and tombs to inspire this design and wanted to make the tomb realistic in nature as a common design for a relatively wealthy tomb. I have also tried to adhere to the classic 5-room dungeon design which is laid out below. This should hopefully allow anyone to cut and paste this tomb design into their own games.
Continue reading “Mini Map #2: The Classic Tomb“Battlemap Encounters #1 – Bandit Ambush
Welcome to my first attempt at creating a series of levelled encounters built around the same battlemap premise. In this Encounter map, I intended to set up a classic bandit ambush on a forest road. The Encounter ideas are scaled up for different level parties and are of course subject to DM discretion. The purpose of these posts is not to provide perfectly balanced encounters, but to give a variety of challenging encounters for your players. I don’t often follow the Challenge Rating system from 5e and prefer to design exciting and challenging match ups for players, using elements of Matt Colville’s Action-orientated monsters as well as the use of hazards, traps, terrain and dynamic environmental events. If you feel the encounters are too difficult or not difficult enough, it is up to you as a DM to alter the encounter as you see fit to match your party.
Continue reading “Battlemap Encounters #1 – Bandit Ambush”
Wittering of a Worldbuilder 