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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Lost Mines of Phandelver: Redesigning the Starter Set to fit my world

The Lost Mines of Madril – Basic Map, Key and Context

As part of my Summer break, I am taking the time to redesign the Dungeons and Dragons Starter Set Adventure – The Lost Mines of Phandelver. I have begun running the adventure for one of the groups I DM for and after reading ahead, quickly realised that I wanted to change so much to not only improve on the adventure as written, but also to increase the level of realism and better fit it into my world. Now, I know that the Wave Echo Cave/Lost Mines are quite far off in the adventure for my group, but I was inspired by the map made by Hituro here, and decided to take it further and develop my own. This post will serve to just introduce my map and give it context in my world, before I later develop a full map legend including room descriptions, encounter designs and loot. That should hopefully follow.

TL,DR – Feel free to skip past my In world Lore and go to the section labelled Map Key for exactly that – A key to my maps.

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Rogue Backstories – Questions every Rogue should be able to answer

In order to better integrate Dungeons and Dragons into my world, I have been working on creating a bit of a guide for new players in my games to use when creating their characters. I was inspired by Anto over at Icarus Games on youtube to create a document template that would allow players to fill out a detailed backstory for their characters. Using his ideas as a base, I filled mine out with some additional sections and sets of useful prompt questions to help flesh out a player’s backstory. However, when I came to considering a player’s class, I realised that I wanted personalised, specific questions based on the class they had chosen and thus I created different Backstory templates based on the class selected. In today’s article, I explore the key questions that a Rogue in my world should know the answers to.

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Monster Musings: The Ankheg (Ficula)

Welcome to Monster Musings. In this post, I will explore one classic monster from the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual and either redesign it using historical myths or take inspiration from it to create a new, realistic creature that could exist in my world – Egaar. I will try to remain true to the original monster influences but am aiming to create something with a new and interesting take.

[Adapted from Monster Manual, 2014, WoTC]

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Megadungeon 23: Week 3 & 4

This new project, referred to as Megadungeon 23 is a concept developed by Sean McCoy over on his blog here.

It is a project that I too have decided to embark upon this year as a non-labour intensive side project to help develop a cool megadungeon for my world. The idea is simple in premise: draw a dungeon room a day, everyday; for the whole year. 365 dungeon rooms, drawn in 7 room sections. Each month will represent one layer of the megadungeon, resulting in a 12 layer dungeon by the end of the year.

Unfortunately, I was unable to post Week 3 last week, so this will be a double post for both weeks!

Here are Weeks 3 & 4 – The Sunken Caves and the Main Tomb

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