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Garhelt: we are outfitting an expedition up the river…
Tronde: Mother…
Garhelt: we need the best of our warriors, the best equipment, the best of our scholars, and we are going to discover the Orkland!
Tronde: Mother sigh Mother I am the hetman now.
Gerhalt not listening: I think we will need 4 dozen horses!
Tronde: you can get a mule.
Gerhalt: And I need the Giant’s Thumb!
Tronde: … tell you what mother, I will let Olaf put up some posters when he’s in Havena next week, deal?
Gerhalt: I knew I could put my trust in you! (exit to right)
Aide: Tronde, is that really wise?
Tronde: I don’t care. Let Olaf put some posters up. Either we get some foolhardy idiots who actually do the trip, or some scammers that are gonna turn back immediately. We can suffer the loss of a mule and some equipment if it gets me the chance to get rid of that disgusting thumb. I’ve wanted to kick it into the sea since I was a kid.
So let’s go through Das Schwarze Auge scenario B15 Im Spinnenwald (In Spiderwood), part of the 3-part campaign Die Entdeckung des Orklandes (The Discovery of Orkland) from 1986.
This should be the first we have from that year.
The Discovery series his is a small starter campaign written by Ulrich Kiesow (again…) and unlike the previous attempts at starter adventures this one wants to be a wilderness adventure.
https://gmkeros.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/mapb15.pngNow when I say a wilderness adventure you might expect a hex crawl, but this is DSA and it was written for a German-speaking audience, so we instead are dealing with squares.
Kiesow did this already with B13. There already was an actual hex map in Werner Fuchs’ B8, but obviously they didn’t like that. So squares it is.
Also: considering this is supposed to be the discovery of the previously undiscovered wilderness, there are quite a lot of roads on that map.
Anyway, the heroes get hired by the former leader of the Thorwal Pirates (and mother of the current leader) Garhelt.
After finding a public notice on a wall somewhere in their hometown.
Which is just up the river from Thorwal. You gotta wonder why they have maps of every other part of the continent but are missing their own neighbourhood.
Ok, there’s orks, but still.
The whole expedition has a homespun pet project feel to it. Oh sure, you are working for the former leader of Thorwal. But not the current one.
So you get a mule. And a few life-saving pills.
And the thumb of a giant.
Have fun.
…
Thumb of a giant?
Yes, some ancient hero of the Thorwalians once brought home a thumb he cut off from a giant and it has been in their hoard ever since.
That sounds like Garhelt just took off with whatever nobody wanted.
Anyway, the fun thing about this thumb is this: it works.
Orcs have a justified phobia of giants, and showing them this thumb will make them run away.
That is until you meet that one village who thinks giants are just ancient superstition.
Har Har.
So we get our characters dropped off as far up the river as the dragon boats can go, and then we and the mule have to make our way to the other side of the country.
Ok, that’s not quite true, we do get whatever we want in equipment. but no ranged weapons except bows, or heavy armor. I guess that would be a bit too much for some people about to die miserably in orc territory. And as I said, only a mule. And this is a starter scenario, maybe if you pool your money you might get a second one.
Fair enough. The giant thumb actually leads to the odd feeling that despite exploring the “Ork”land, there’s not actually that many orcs to be seen. After the first few encounters with them word spreads and they leave us alone. What we have instead are lizardmen, spiders, three-headed dragons, and lots of wildlife.
Now I have to say I actually like this adventure, but despite being a squarecrawl it also is… uhm… heavily railroaded. Or maybe the word is gated. The simplest way is to follow along the roads (well, paths I guess) that already exist. If you try to cross open plains you are bound to get accosted by a bunch of narmy Lindwurms (three-headed dragons) that you have no chance in fighting.
Of interest is maybe the Firun priest who might counter aggressive PCs with a hail storm miracle and dies that way.
Awkward.
Also there’s a unicorn that just looks at them and then goes away (dare I say it? sequel hoooook)
Trolls are quite nice and give valuable information, but if the PCs talk too long with them they get the idea to rob them.
Swamps also have ork gadflies on basically every field, in addition to monsters, nicely keeping the PCs off those as much as possible. and the rest of the denizens (besides the lizardmen) are not much better.
And Kiesow clearly states this is exactly how it is intended: the heroes after all are supposed to reach the Spiderwood and not trot around along the river.
Sigh.
Anyway, lizardmen.
Or lizard folk. Achaz in DSA parlance. By 4th edition they ended up as playable character races (the same as orcs and goblins). But in 1st edition so far we encountered them in some of the earlier scenarios (B1 and B4) on the side of the antagonists.
You most likely read over me mentioning them and assumed that we’d be set to murder our way across a tribe of poor scaled folk living there off the land.
Nothing could be further from the truth, the lizard people are actually quite friendly.
Unless the PCs really fuck up the encounters this is a purely social challenge, with the biggest threat being one of them getting married to a (presumably very attractive) lizard princess.
https://gmkeros.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/b15lizard.pngActually no, there’s also the feast they are served as guests of the Achaz. Not that their hosts intend to hurt, but their cooking is of such a quality one might gain or lose permanent hp.
It seems orkland Achaz cooking is… interesting.
Anyway, it’s not necessary that one of the PCs gets married, but king Azl Azzl is very intent on getting his daughter Tili Tiki hitched.
This is presented as a roleplaying challenge to get out of this predicament, but Kiesow does acknowledge that some players might be totally ok with getting married to a lizardgirl.
For what it’s worth Tili Tiki is deadly afraid of violence, and living in a swamp in the orkland that’s not a good condition. I guess it does make sense the king wants to get her to a place where not every day is a struggle to survive.
I don’t know if this is what was intended, but it’s quite heartwarming
After this and a bit of overland travel we need to get the heroes into the Spiderwood, so there’s two encounters to do that. Technically there are roads that lead around the forest, but to the west is a giant called Orkeater who will also branch out into eating foolhardy adventurers, to the east are the lindwurms Skyflame and Skysparkling, who refuse any attempts of characters to cross the plains. Skyflame is presented as a helicopter parent who doesn’t like humans (or other small folk).
Both encounters are of course much more powerful than the heroes, leaving the forest as the only option.
Sigh. as I said, gated
I mean of course it’s called Im Spinnenwald, so we have to go to the Spiderwood at one point. But it’s kind of pointless to start a wilderness exploration adventure and then railroad people into going where you want them to.
anyway, the main part of the scenario:
The Spiderwood.
Guess what’s all over the place?
If you were thinking “spiders” you’d be wrong. what actually is the most annoying part is a kind of plant (the so called Basilamine) that has nice red flowers and exploding seed pods which destroy equipment and give tenths of damage points and oh my god there’s a whole page of rules for these fucking things I think I need a spreadsheet to track all this garbage. DON’T GO INTO THE FLOWER FIELDS IS WHAT I’M SAYING!
There’s another encounter table here, containing mammoths and boars and wolves… and horny big bugs that fight rival bugs by bumping into them. hmm…
Also red dwarves. which are dwarves with red caps that don’t talk and might go berserk if interacted with.
huh.
These are still canon by the way. I just saw them in the 4e book about dwarves.
One might assume they are supposed to be redcaps, but they more seem to be some variation of wood-dwelling gnomes and dwarves in Germanic mythologies. But that all isn’t quite clear, and unlike everything else besides animals, these guys cannot be talked to. So we don’t really learn what they are about at all.
Considering this is in the middle of the “undiscovered orkland” this forest turns out to be much more human-inhabited than expected. there’s multiple log cabins, one of which can give you a free dog and has a magic artifact that just says “if you can read this you can read’
(it grants you the ability to read if you don’t have it yet, which is necessary later)
we also can meet an invisible human mage (ok, debatable, but the heroes can’t know her current physical form), a bunch of trolls, at least some poor ork villages, and at least one more whole abandoned human village, now full of goblins (and the question what a Nivese tribe was doing that far south to begin with, living in otherwise very standard medieval buildings).
So what about the spiders the forest is named after?
They will kidnap one of the characters at one point. So now we hopefully will try to find that character again. Lets hope the group doesn’t have issues with each other and just decides to leave the character to his fate.
This is the first time the negative attributes are introduced. Grisbart is a dwarf with a Greed for Gold attribute of 8, meaning whenever he sees gold and wins an attribute check HE NEEDS IT RIGHT NOW.
I guess the idea was popular enough to become a standard for 2nd edition DSA. The later editions introduced a rather specific set of negative attributes like this, one of which always was Greed for Gold. Only 4th edition changed this and made this an optional drawback to buy in a point buy system.
He will join us rescuing the other character. well, if the heroes want to. who knows.
Anyway, how about having at least a single Orc NPC?!
I know I can just introduce some, but I might be mentioning it a bit much, this is supposed to be an expedition through a region where orcs are the predominant people.
Lets cut this short. The spiders that kidnapped the PC are not technically a bad sort: They are a colony of intelligent telepathic spiders who discovered that people reading to them gives them interesting telepathic pictures in their head. so they kidnap people, let them read, and then lose them to scurvy.
https://gmkeros.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/b15reader.pngThey aren’t evil, they just don’t understand that this is no way to deal with humans. After a few scenarios by Kiesow I recognize his streak of dark humor again. The spiders just don’t have a clue how humans really work, they just know that they can read to them. And they feed them and try to keep them alive, but humans just can’t survive on a diet of nothing but fish and water. So multiple people have been kidnapped (some maybe from that Nivese village, and some others), used as a reader for the female spiders (the males only know enough to know that the females like those humans for some reason), and then they died of scurvy.
There’s opportunity for some roleplaying here, or just a simple dungeon crawl. It’s not a big dungeon, and Kiesow presents it appropriately alien. In one room we find a couple of spiders post-copulation, the female trying to eat the male one. As one does I guess.
I actually like this adventure. There are some bizarre setpieces in there which I think could be fun. In fact there is a nice actual play by the current publishers of the system which is quite fun and which I enjoyed listening to. I want to play it with people. But damn does it have issues.
It is certainly full of interesting ideas and roleplaying challenges. I think outside some random encounters it doesn’t demand fights anywhere. but it also wastes the possibilities of both the exploration section and the forest section by gating like crazy. This would have to be reworked.
One certainly could introduce something about orc culture here instead of basically everything else.
It occurs to me that there is a good business reason for this particular campaign: up to now most releases have followed along with the levels that could be expected for a normal group. I.e. if you started with B1 and played maybe one official scenario a month you’d end up around the level range for the advanced line of adventures by now.
So how do you sell more? Start over again and tell people this adventure is for experienced players with new characters.
In a way this is the true end of the first phase of DSA adventures. Previous adventures were already mentioning some of the advanced classes, this is the first that places the events on the map from the advanced box. The world soon would start to get filled in with detail.
Both here in the B series and soon in the A series exploration adventures would become more common, with much more social roleplay challenges and less dungeon crawling.
This also received a French version, from what I can see only in the Schmidt trade dress though. No Gallimard version from what I can see for this one.
I might need to point it out, but this and all the other adventures I have been talking about lately recently have been reissued, so they currently can be found in shops again. During my last visit back at my parents’ place I found a whole shelf of them in the local comic store. They are generally near faithful replicas, with only the Schmidt logo replaced.
Kenne ich hier irgendwen, der*die sich noch für D&D 3.5 Regelbücher begeistern würde? Nehmen bei mir nur Platz weg, sind zum Wegwerfen aber zu schade. #Rollenspiel#DnD#RPG
Hab nebenbei Hellboy am Laufen und mir wird mal wieder klar, dass ich „zeitgenössische, urbane Magie“ irgendwie am geilsten finde und auch im Rollenspiel spielen würde. Dunkle Rituale in einem städtischen Umfeld, düstere Zauber in dunklen Ecken der Moderne.
In Fantasy-Settings reizt mich das nicht, aber heutzutage hat das was.
Lese gerade das Abenteuer „The Tower of Cirith Ungol and Shelob’s Lair“ für MERP, cooler Scheiß.
Spoiler: Ich würde mich mit Shelob (Kankra) nicht gern anlegen, weil sie in #MERP noch sehr viel mächtiger scheint, als in den Filmen.
Grund fürs Lesen: Ich übersetze gerade „Middle-Earth Adventures“, ein kurzes Regelwerk, mit dem man Herr-der-Ringe-Sachen ohne viel Gedöns spielen kann.
Heiße News von der #DreieichCon:
Die #RatCon 2024 wird vom 30.08. bis 01.09. in der neuen Stadthalle in Langen stattfinden. 🎲
Ob es eine Kaffeeflatrate geben wird, steht noch nicht fest, aber es wird sich aktiv darum bemüht. ☕️
Hallo liebe #KleineHelden & #pnpde Freunde.
Im heutigen #Cartoon beschäftigen wir uns einmal mit der Frage, ob ihr im #Rollenspiel schon einmal unmoralisch gehandelt habt?
Im Kopf trage ich #PnPDE Konzepte mit mir, über die ich nachdenke und Notizen aufschreibe. Mir ist das aber klar, dass noch lange dauern wird, bis diese Ideen die Brainstorming-Phase verlassen werden.
Das eine ist eine Kampagne, welche mit verschiedenen #Rollenspiel Systemen gespielt werden soll.
Das Zweite, ein Rollenspiel, in dem die spielenden Kandidaten*innen in einem Wahlkampf sind. Fokus Drama & Wahlkampfdynamik nicht Policy.
Habt Ihr Ideen, über welche Ihr seit Jahren nachdenkt?
Ich hatte gestern eine Idee zu Gerüchtetabellen, in denen man die Quellen von Gerüchten definiert. Nicht jedes Gerücht ist bei allen Klassen/Schichten/Völkern im Umlauf. Gab es sowas schon? Jedenfalls hat mir die Idee sehr gefallen.
(Spieler:innen in meiner Conan-Runde möchten die Gerüchteliste im Artikel vielleicht nicht zu genau lesen.)
In #Frankfurt und auf der Suche nach einer #penandpaper#rollenspiel Gruppe?
Ich starte eine #pathfinder2e Kampagne (Strength of Thousands) live in Frankfurt Niederrad (unter der Woche). ✨️🎲
Einsteiger:innen willkommen! Bei Interesse melden für mehr infos/weitersagen 😁
Bei Humble Bundle finden Hobbyist°Innen mit einem 3D-Drucker wieder mal ein interessantes Bundle, zumindest wenn ihr Hobby aus Pen & Paper-Rollenspiel oder Tabletop-Spielen besteht.
Hallo #KleineHelden & #pnpde!
Im heutigen #Cartoon geht es einmal darum, wie man einen Endgegner NICHT präsentieren sollte.
Seid ihr schon einmal auf lächerliche Gegner gestoßen? Lustige Namen, Marotten oder Aktionen, wodurch ihr den Antagonisten nicht mehr ernst nehmen konntet?
Hi #pnpde ich hab im Laufe der Zeit viele Quellen für kostenloses / kostengünstiges Bildmaterial zur grafischen Gestaltung von Rollenspielen zusammengesucht. Wäre doch blöd, wenn die Links alle nur in meinem Browser rumhängen. Deshalb hab ich mal alles zusammengeschrieben: https://barcosa.net/ressourcen/#ttrpg#rollenspiel#grafikdesign
Endspurt bei #Follow, dem spielleitungslosen #Rollenspiel
über eine Gemeinschaft, die sich auf eine Queste begibt. Beim nächsten Bonusziel gibts für alle beteiligten Freelancer*innen mehr Geld, was extrem toll wäre. Und danach winken noch weitere Zusatzziele!
Also schaut doch mal rein und teilt gerne den Beitrag oder erzählts euren Rollenspiel-affinen Friends :)