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.
Continue reading “Lost Mines of Phandelver: Redesigning the Starter Set to fit my world”Megadungeon 23: Week 17 & 18
Welcome back to Megadungeon 23, a concept developed by Sean McCoy over on his blog here.
It is a project that I 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.
I am well aware that my blog posts have fallen massively behind over the last 3 months, especially my Megadungeon project. However, I have managed to keep my sections and scrawls up to date, I simply haven’t had the time to upload them onto here. Now that I am on my summer break, I intend to try and catch up on my uploads, so prepare for a lot of blog blasts posting the last few weeks worth of Dungeon updates as I try to get up to date!
Loot Tables: The Hinterland Caves
Welcome back to Wittering of a Worldbuilder! In my last post, I detailed the Hinterland Caves, being explored in my 1:1 game. I thought, as a follow up to that post I would just briefly share some loot tables that I put together for the various people and factions encountered in this cave network. Generally, I like to have a range of loot tables for each person my players encounter and a selection of harvest tables for any creatures they wish to butcher. Most of the time, these tables are pretty generic, but I thought I’d customise these ones for this 1:1 game to better tie them into the storyline.
Continue reading “Loot Tables: The Hinterland Caves”Mini Map: The Hinterland Caves
Welcome back to Wittering of a Worldbuilder! In today’s blog post I am sharing with you a recent dungeon I ran in a 1:1 game with a friend. He has been playing in a region in my world called The Barren Wolds and although I have had these caves pinned on my hexmap since day 1, he only learned of them and sought them out last session.
The map itself was originally taken from the Mudworldblog and I have added to it and tried to Jaquay it a little so that it can fit the ideas I had for it in this region of my world. So, here I give you: The Hinterland Caves!
Megadungeon 23: Week 15 & 16
Welcome back to Megadungeon 23, a concept developed by Sean McCoy over on his blog here.
It is a project that I 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.
These weeks were by far the hardest yet! I really hit a creative low and started to very much run out of ideas for some sections. However, I am determined to not go longer than two weeks without catching up on the Megadungeon, so I have recovered my pace once again. Although I am not hugely happy with either of these weeks, I will likely just go back and rewrite/add to them when I come to playing the dungeon next year. So, I present to you here, Weeks 15 & 16 – Two more areas of the Dwarven City.
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.
Continue reading “Rogue Backstories – Questions every Rogue should be able to answer”Megadungeon 23: Week 14
Welcome back to Megadungeon 23, a concept developed by Sean McCoy over on his blog here.
It is a project that I 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.
Here is Week 14 – The Dwarven Palace. This is the ruling seat of the Stonehand Dwarven City forming this level of the Megadungeon. The palace complex includes the Royal apartments and the halls from which the City Council met and governed. However, 200 years ago, the City was abandoned due to a mysterious sickness known as ‘Gold Sickness’ that drove the leaders and many of their subjects mad over time. The Palace was locked up and sealed off from the rest of the city by revolting peasantry and turncoat guards, but sadly, this was not enough to stem the flow of sickness throughout the population.
Megadungeon 23: Week 13
Welcome back to Megadungeon 23, a concept developed by Sean McCoy over on his blog here.
It is a project that I 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.
Here is Week 13 – The Halls of the Timekeepers. This is a section of an ancient Stonehand Dwarf settlement where the Dwarves would keep their sacred ‘Tally’ on the passage of time and mark the hours of the ‘Day’ from a bell tower that once rang out across the settlement. The Timekeepers recorded time, kept history and in some cases predicted future events from these halls, whilst others of their sect tinkered and experimented with smaller timekeeping devices.
Megadungeon 23: Week 11 & 12
Welcome back to Megadungeon 23, a concept developed by Sean McCoy over on his blog here.
It is a project that I 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.
These last two weeks have been extremely hectic in real life and as a result I have not had any time to publish my work or keep on top of it all on a daily basis – Hence the lack of post last week. This time of year is a bit of a pinch point in the teaching profession and the combination of work stress, exam marking, life admin and other busy events has taken me away from this project. Nevertheless, I have managed to recover my pace and complete the last two weeks and so today, you have a double post to read!#Here are Weeks 11 & 12 – Two more sections of the Wildercave Complexes!
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