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”Tag: TTRPG
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”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”Megadungeon 23: Week 19 & 20
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.
So, I’m still playing catch up on these posts, but they are slowly getting done. I am trying to get as many done as I can to catch up, but we may well be playing this game for the rest of the year. But mark my words – it shall be done! Enjoy this addition to the megadungeon!
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”
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