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Deck of Worlds Arrived

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At long last, and mostly down to disruption to services due to strikes around the Christmas and New Year period, I have got my hands on the Deck of Worlds. Its the result of a Kickstarter I backed last year by the same team who created the The Story Deck. Both of these boxes of prompt cards are now sitting very proudly on my bookshelf and will be getting some use over the weekend.

The entire concept is that there are different cards for types of location, something significant there, an adjective or property that can be applied to either, a peculiarity of the region, and something that is happening there. These can be shuffled and interpreted in all sorts of ways – and in particular I think they’ll be useful for world building in my games.

As an experiment I ran through the cards and came up with a combination that I turned into the following description:

In a windswept forest lies the ruins of a forge and workshop that legend declares to have once been the home of unknown gods. When the wind whips round and the moon is bright, the sound of roaring flames still lingers here. Animal life that comes close to the ruins seem to become confused while near, but soon recover when they leave.

I then fired up Dungeon Alchemy and created the image in this blog post – showing a clearing in a hilly forest. Within it lies the ancient forge, bits of fallen masonry, an abandoned temple building behind it, a well and an overgrown path leading away into the forest. I’ll post the finished map when I’ve added a few more trees and bushes along with some ideas for encounters. I might even use a version of it in one of the D&D games I’m currently running as it has turned out rather well I think.

Map – Snowy Mountain Pass

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This is the map I used for Sunday’s game where the DDC encountered both a group of Ice Trolls and then a far more dangerous Dire Troll that had been buried in the stone circle. Rather than being a ravine environment, the intention was more to have a raised ridgeway or track through mountainous terrain that sloped away either side.

I set the adventurers at the top of the map, emerging from between trees into the more open area, and the trolls initially in and around the rough circle of stones. The map is designed as a 25×30 portrait area, and was exported from Dungeon Alchemy. The zipfile is mountainpass.zip and you’re welcome to make use of it and the lighting information as you need – or you can just copy and download the map below without any other information.

DDC – Troll Fight

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We picked up the story from last time with the group making their way across a frozen lake towards a burning trading post. Battle was joined with a group of four trolls, and at the end of the last session, Kerne had slain one of them with a deluge of acid.

This week, the remaining trolls ran for cover, running around or into the trading post, forcing the DDC to pursue them. This was the moment they found that the trolls had left concealed bear traps in their paths – a level of preparation and use of tactics not typical of troll encounters. They lost sight of two of the trolls, but the third could be seen through the trading post’s windows. Valenia and Caeluma therefore focused their efforts on shooting into the burning building with varying degrees of success.

Arwan made his way inside in pursuit and was charged by the troll he found in there – and despite weathering powerful blows stood his ground. Valenia finished the troll off with acid-infused magical arrows and just for a moment all was quiet. Arwan extinguished the largest fire in the building by summoning water – and then the other two trolls reappeared.

They had climbed onto the roof undetected and crawled over the top to try and flank the group when the damaged roof collapsed. One leapt clear and landed next to Kerne – the other fell through and landed next to Arwan. In the blink of an eye Kerne was on the ground and bleeding out, with the troll preparing to eat them. Caeluma and Arwan fought the other troll with magics that severed limbs and dropped it quickly.

Overhead map view of a burning wooden building in a snowy forest landscape on the edge of a frozen lake. Its the setting for the encounter described in this blog entry.

Valenia risked the irate troll’s claws to heal Kerne, saving their life but getting her back sliced open in the process. Inside the trading post, the fallen troll’s separated body parts began to fight on independently. For a few moments, as fast as the DDC knocked the trolls down, they or their body parts got back up and continued fighting. Then Arwan called on the gods to summon a flame strike from the heavens. The column of fire punched down through the broken roof. It incinerated the troll remains in moments. Outside, Valenia and Thorin finished off the remaining attacker with acid.

In the aftermath, the group took a short rest and investigated the wreckage. There was nothing of any worth remaining in the ruins, but each of the trolls wore two tokens. The first was a bone and iron brooch in the shape of a humanoid skull. The second was a crude silver fist wrought in silver on a silver chain.

Valenia’s investigations also found deliberately dumped animal and human remains. Blood and gore were placed to form a lure to the area, and based on the blood on the troll remains, they had been the ones placing the lures. They mirrored the gore piles found earlier in the forest trails. The DDC decided to return to the Hold to plan and research their next move.

I’ve included the map here, as well as the zipped file of the Dungeon Alchemy base file, jpeg, and text file with dynamic lighting, door, and window location details: tradingpost attack.zip

Map: Sewer Test

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I’m experimenting with some of the new features being rolled out in Roll20 – namely interactive doors and windows, and how to use dynamic lighting settings to restrict movement. The latter is nothing new but I’ve not really been using it. In large part that’s because it’s been fiddly and has had big impacts on people using older kit, but I’m still playing around with it.

The other excuse for this map was to experiment with exporting maps assembled from resources inside Roll20 so that I could then stitch them together with other assets to meld elements together

Today’s map falls into that category, having been assembled from a series of floor tiles before I grouped them together and took a screenshot that I then imported into Paint and cropped to save as a jpeg.

Its a simple enough layout, suitable for an encounter. In this instance I inserted a couple of unlockable grates, put in some light sources, and populated it with two iron defenders for an encounter that a group of third level characters would find easy on their way to some further destination while also allowing some world building from the abandoned desks, crates, and fallen rubble in the sewer space.

Well, it appears to be working, and it only took a little bit of swearing under my breath and some casting around to find where the laptop had defaulted to saving the image so I could import it here. Enjoy!

Map – Winter Stone Giant Workshop

Tim Maidment2 Comments

I’ve been sat this evening after a last-minute change of plans and started playing around in Inkarnate again. Here’s what I came up with – a winter landscape set in the mountains, with a cave, broken stones and statues, and plenty of space to run an encounter. It might even turn up in a future DDC session.

The concept is that a pair of Stone Giant sculptors have picked this isolated place to try and gain inspiration from the wilderness. The amount of broken stone, furniture, equipment, and items suggests either many frustrations or an over-estimation of their skills.

There’s a good open space that includes places for smaller and squishier characters to take cover – some changes in height from cliff faces and elevations – and nooks and crannies to navigate around. The whole is scaled for a square 40×40 while not having a grid installed on it so it can be re-sized to taste. The resolution is 2048×2048. Feel free to copy and use.

Map – Mountain Camp

Tim Maidment1 Comment

I’ve not played with Inkarnate for a while, so thought I’d have a play yesterday with their watercolour palette and stamps to start making some simple reusable maps. I’ll include a link to the published Inkarnate map which has the stamps as layers so that you can clone it and customise the original for your own needs.

Green and brown coloured overhead map with blue-watered stream flowing around a central island. Smaller islets are in the stream and there are markers for bushes dotted across the map, Five tents of different colours and sizes surround a campfire
Made with Inkarnate.com

I mostly made this up to have a default map for the DDC if they flee their current encounter and need somewhere to rest up – to that end there’s a tent for each character around the campfire. The idea is that the sparsely grassed islet and the banks around it are tucked away in a hidden dip in the mountains with a stream rushing around the raised area.

If you’re an Inkarnate user, here’s the link to the published map – https://inkarnate.com/m/kvDJqG-mountain-camp/