A New-ish Campaign

 

I've never played a Zelda game but that's pretty raw. 

I did it. I slew the greatest beast the hobby has: THE SCHEDULE. About two years ago through sheer force of will I carved out a chunk of solid time-stream dedicated to D&D and gaming on Thursday nights and got some other busy adults to do the same. It's wonderful. But its online and online games just don't hit the same as in person games sometimes. As such I have used up more mojo and wrangled a group together for a Sunday evening game of either B/X or Original 1974 D&D for an in person game! Now that the hard part is done, I have to do the other hard part and prep the damn thing before next Sunday. Luckily everything a DM writes is never wasted; if you get nothing else from this post understand that all prep, even unused is just biding its time to be used again. 

The Challenge: A Campaign within 50 sq miles 

I want to run a sandbox hexcrawl I never got to use and maybe throw a few old modules on top of it as well. I'll also draw from my last few years worth of dungeons that can be reused for fresh faces. And I want to cram it all into 50 sq miles worth of space just to see how a small scale campaign with a real tight focus feels. 

Goals: Put together everything I've learned reading blogs and running game to make a tight focused sandbox game. 

First we'll need a map. 

 

Hey look, a map.

With each hex being 6 miles its 72 x 60 miles which is close enough to 50 x 50 for me. Maybe I'll cut off the last two columns if I can't find anything inspirational to put there. 

A point of light setting, the only friendly civilized parts of this region are the two forts with towns and the town in the center, Tarnburg. Putting them in the middle makes it less likely to wander off the maps back towards civilization, The forts are ruled by a feuding baron and duke, technically part of the same empire but like the houses Harkonen and Atreides on Arrakis, they despise one another and secretly aspire to conquer the other. A few conflicts prevent this. For one the giant fucking moon that hovers over the desolate wastes in the middle of the map. 

Conflicts 

An enormous moon, probably a few miles wide, warped into existence a few thousand feet above the lush grassland about a century ago. It immediately began sucking all the water up from the region with some kind of tractor beam/reverse gravity, drying up the marshland and plains. 

<Tangent. I much prefer plains and savannah over woods in my games. Maybe my characters were abused one to many times in endless same-y forests of the games of my youth but I find flatlands much more inspiring. The megafauna and ecology of the Serengeti are endlessly inspiring especially when extinct creatures of the past make up part of the food chain. If I need forests, a copse of plains trees will do fine>

A local Conan type flew up there in a chariot pulled by cockatrice, or so the legends go and disappeared. While he never reappeared, days later, the moon made an enormously loud pulse, with a shockwave like Krakatoa, destroying the town beneath it and further flooding the region from the tsunami that followed from the water of the Great River. It now only intermittently sucks up water and a hundred years later he's worshipped as god-hero and saint by the locals, his priests forming a cult of bodybuilding, swordsmanship and athletics. The cockatrice (think more velociraptor that turns you to stone instead of chicken) has become a locally protected animal and to kill one is considered bad luck, at least by the hero cult. Ordinary folk avoid them.

However, the moon continues to be an issue, sucking up precious water at a much slower rate, but every full moon releasing some and dripping all the time but not at equilibrium and every month, the dry earth creeps closer to the food supply of the region. The ground, sucked dry of its aquifer, can barely hold the water, leading to flooding. Huge puddles, like shallow lakes appear and disappear with the weather. And during the thunderstorms, the Eelmen raid. 

Eelmen 

The Duke and Baron each were tasked with dealing with the forces of Chaos to the West, a land in permanent dusk. The Eelmen rule it, under their brooding and petty Eel King. Nobody knows where eels come from, only that Eelmen are made from them. Obviously, the answer is spontaneous generation, arising wholesale from the guts of river mud, crawling to the river and swimming thousands of miles upstream like medieval rats from cheese cloth or goblins from refuse and negative energy. The Eelmen catch them and grow them in cold pools and feed them a diet of human blood, ritualistic fat and bones, so many bones. Often they'll simply toss still living humans they capture into the pools, and like piranha, the elvers strip them of flesh. The fat makes them crave the calcium in the bones of these unfortunate souls. They will need it for what happens next. They grow huge and contort, rubbery skin thickening, primitive lungs ballooning in too-tight ribcages and pectoral fins stretching as heavy bones grow painfully in them forming long thin razor sharp four-fingered hands. The slimy mutants are dragged from the pool, forced to take on air, cough up dense phlegm from pharyngeal jaws and given a hooked spear, the signature weapon of the Eelmen. 

This YouTube video is 15 years old. It only went up to 240p. But it is exactly what's in my head. Exactly. 

Eelmen are made, not born. And they are made to hate. Proud, agile and clever they embody all the worst traits of their hungry primitive kin. They use hit-and-run tactics, ambushes from the pools that form in the desolate lands under the moon and raid under the cover of dark during thunderstorms. In combat they are merciless, hooking with spears, tripping and disemboweling, coming to finish off a foe later. With two sets of jaws they are infamous for biting and not letting go, even in death. In fact, if losing a battle to a mighty foe they may simply latch on before being killed to slow their enemy down, giving their comrades an advantage. They do this not to aid their allies but to spite their enemies, ultimate sore losers when their deadly pride is wounded. Their bones are cartilaginous and they can squeeze into spaces of creatures a quarter their size, lacking collar bones like cats. Their two weaknesses, besides arrogance and love of betryal, are their slow speed on dry land, slithering (or sidewinding to "run") and their need to stay damp. A dry Eelman will suffocate within a few days, but not before making others around it as miserable as it can.   

 They despise each other only slightly less than the other denizens of the area. It is because of them that the Baron and Duke are afraid to openly attack one another. Like a Mexican stand off, all three factions are waiting for the other to play their hand. Simultaneously, all three are trying to ascertain the secrets of the mystery Moon, gleaning great power within if the remnants that fall from it occasionally are anything to be seen. So they send adventurers! (A rival adventuring party of Eelman would be fascinating).

I have a few other conflicts going on in the background I may incorporate as well. Elves being up to no good and something about a Rainbow Veil being shattered and its denizen pouring into the Mortal World to stop the Unreality from entering will be present. But we can save that for a later post. Next post on this new campaign we'll churn out some hopefully solid encounter tables.