Adventure in Your Own Backyard

I took an atypical approach when designing the outskirts of Elf Water. In the past, especially when I anticipated a megadungeon-centric campaign, I’d locate potential adventuring sites a bit of a distance away from the PCs’ home base. This was a nod to realism, seeing as how an ancient ruin rife with fell monsters situated too close to a settlement would mean constant raids and the eventual deaths or departure of any sentient residents living nearby. That’s not the course I undertook with the Realms campaign, and there were several reasons for this design choice.

The first was that the Realms have such a rich and long history. I didn’t quite grasp this in my younger days, but now I have a better idea of what Ed was going for when he built the world. With a history stretching back millennia, the Realms have seen innumerable civilizations and cultures rise and fall, with each potentially leaving their mark behind. There are a lot of similarities between the Realms and Middle Earth, and Peter Jackson’s movies have influenced my mental picture of what the Realms “looks like.” Just as in Jackson’s films, a moss-covered ruin or broken statue of an ancient potentate isn’t out of place in the wilds of the Realms, lingering evidence of those who tread Faerûn long ago. I could conceivably place such enticing lures close to the village and thereby hint at the Realms’ history and to serve as adventure hooks.

Secondly, since I was running a by the book AD&D game with a small number of players, I wanted them to have ready access to help for the first level or two. They could flee to the safety of civilization if they ran out of important materials or got in over their heads. Borrowing from the MMORPG school of design, the outskirts of Elf Water is the “yard trash” newbie zone where one can familiarize themselves with the world before pursuing grander and more dangerous goals. In the future, I could see myself using Elf Water and the environs as an introductory campaign for players experiencing RPGs for the first time, but I hope it’s also challenging and interesting enough that veteran players will enjoy their own explorations.

Thirdly, I wanted to ground the PCs in their home town, making it seem like a real place, one they have familiarity with by virtue of living there their entire young lives. I have many pleasant memories of rambling through the wooded glens of my own neighborhood in my youth, dreaming dreams of what adventures might be found there and making my own discoveries of places and things forgotten in the scrap woods of suburbia. It stands to reason the PCs would have similar experiences, albeit of a slightly more dangerous variety.

Lastly, and I make no bones about this, I was influenced by Ed’s map of Shadowdale that appeared in the Gray Box. In addition to detailing the village of Shadowdale, there are a number of geographical features depicted on the map, many of which have legends and adventure potential assigned to them. If it’s good enough for the Realms’ creator, it’s good enough for me.

With these design decisions in mind, I set out filling in the rest of blank space on my big piece of poster paper that already held my Elf Water map. This is the result:

Blank poster paper and colored pencils: Life's less celebrated wonders.

There are few special landmarks and places the PCs know about—and more they don’t. I have a master map with each interesting place or thing detailed, but these are unmarked on the big map. During the game sessions, I lay the large map down on the table and let the players consult it, replicating their familiarity with the area. Of course, growing up here doesn’t mean they know everything about their own backyard. They know the major landmarks and legends, so I’m not spoiling the fun by pointing out a couple of them. Maybe it’ll get your own creative juices flowing.

In the lower left-hand corner is a gorge running through the woods. This is the somewhat infamous “Orc Trough.” The elven/human alliance broke the Black Slashers’ drive toward Loudwater in this gulley back in 1235 DR with a cunning ambush. The rocky walls of the Trough contain a number of elven catacombs known as Sinomrin. An Espruar word that’s closest Common translation is both “tomb” and “remembrance place,” the Sinomrin were formed from the surrounding rock to memorialize some of the great lights of Eaerlann who fled south when Hellgate Keep rose in power. When the Black Slashers marched through the Southwood, guerilla engagements drew the horde to this location. Human and elven troops concealed themselves in the Sinomrin, springing out to ambush the horde and cutting the orcish flanks to bloody ribbons before routing the Slashers and sending them back to the Graypeaks. When the elves conceded the verge of the Southwood to human settlement, they emptied the Sinomrin, leaving the catacombs bare. Since that time, the Sinomrin have served to host teenage parties away from parental eyes and more than a few adulterous rendezvous. But they are not all completely abandoned as the party has recently learned.

Just north of the Orc Trough on the far side of the brook is the farm of Amrig and Sobashy, a woodsman and healer, respectively. The couple prefers the solitude of the woods over the hustle and bustle of the village proper, and they are largely believed to be “elf friends,” individuals who deal with the isolationist Lanymthilhar elves.

At the eastern edge of the banana-shaped clearing bisected by the western road stands a single tree. This is the Hangman’s Tree, a relic of the rough frontier justice enacted regularly in the early days of Elf Water’s settling. Although no longer used, rumors say a ghostly figure is sometimes sighted beneath the tree and is undoubtedly the spectre of an unknown criminal who met his (or her) death on the tree decades ago.

North of the large clearing where the Hangman’s Tree grows is a rocky hill known as “The Prow.” The southern edge of the hill is steep and narrows to a point, giving it the appearance of a ship’s bow breaking through the surrounding trees. A stone bearing Thorass runes is located atop the Prow and some of the PCs have seen it in their youth, but the lack of fluency in the dwarven tongue means the stone’s writing remains a mystery.

Immediately east of The Prow and in the vaguely star-shaped clearing located east of the Orc Trough are two large clearings. The presence of a pond and creek in each meadow makes for damp earth, making both places possible sites to gather leathertop mushrooms, should one be in the mood for such fare.

All my initial prep work was now finished and I was ready to begin the campaign. There was just one small chore I needed to do: seed the campaign with rumors and see which ones would spark the players’ interest, thus deciding the course of the campaign for the first few sessions. I’ll share those rumors, or to put it in Realms terms, “the clack,” tomorrow.

Welcome to Elf Water

The next step in the campaign prep stage was establishing the PCs’ “home base.” This was a much easier phase than settling on a region in which to set the campaign—largely, because I cheated.

I’ve always enjoyed and appreciated maps, even before I discovered RPGs. One might even argue that my fascination for this hobby stems from that love. I still recall a map from the interior of some children’s book I owned that showed the protagonist’s journey through a forest, diagramed in dotted line fashion like a “Family Circus” cartoon. For me, the attraction wasn’t what adventures were documented, but what possible events might occur in the areas unvisited by the hero. Maps still have that effect on me.

The “cartographilia” has manifested in a peculiar habit of mine. I find it incredibly relaxing to sketch maps of small towns and sylvan areas, rending such landscapes in either regular or colored pencil. My mind wanders during the process, pondering who lives in these imaginary places and what life must be like for them. It’s a wonderful way to de-stress when something’s bothering me. As a result, I have a number of little maps tucked away in various stages of completion. When it’s time to introduce a new community into a game, I check this collection first to see if anything fits the bill. In this case, I had the perfect map.

Coming up with a name for the community was a quick chore. I imagined that the settlement was situated on a place where the elves and humans first came into contact, a place to trade and negotiate the accord that ultimately led to the human settlement of the outskirts of Southwood. Picturing a forest glen along a riverbank, a place where elves once danced graceful waltzes underneath a summer moon, the name “Elf Water” sprung to mind as an appropriate human-given name for that place and the community that arose on that site would share that moniker.

In the past, I’ve gone to great lengths to detail most of my home bases before play begins. The pages accompanying my old Ashabenford map is a good representation of how much effort I’d expend before the game started. But this time, going along with the “this is supposed to be fun” mantra, I whipped up just two pages of notes documenting a few important NPCs and buildings to guide me. I plan to flesh Elf Water out as future play dictates. I know who’s in charge, what temples are in town, who has their fingers in quasi-legal (or outright illegal) pies, the major wizards, and a few other colorful individuals. That’s all I needed to get things rolling.

The final step was to scan my village map and key the important buildings for the players to consult as needed. A quick trip through Photoshop and—viola!—Elf Water was ready for PC inhabitation. With plenty of space to add new material, I can get a lot of use out of this community, now and in the future.

Yes, I know what "festhall" really means.

That’s it for this week. There’ll be a post on Elf Water’s outskirts and some actual play reports next week as I continue to ramble on about the Realms. 

Choosing a Backdrop

To say the Realms is large place is an understatement, even if I’m confining myself to regions covered in the Gray Box and some of the supplements. Those poster-sized maps only hint at the scope of Faerûn and it’s not until you put down the transparent overlays and start counting hexes that you realize how much an area even a small section covers. Needless to say, I was going to have to zoom in on but a small part of its grandeur for the campaign.

My usual choices for campaigns are the Dalelands (Mistledale in particular; see my original campaign map of Ashabenford here), the Western Heartlands along the Trade Way, or somewhere in the Savage North. One of these years I’ll tackle Tethyr or the lands east of the Sea of Fallen Stars, but since this was an exercise in fun, I decided I’d keep to my old haunts. Having a backlog of previously-generated campaign materials for those regions doesn’t hurt, either.

Since I was coming off of Kingmaker, and as an old school DM I have a preference for such, I wanted to keep the campaign on the fringes of civilization, thus allowing me to play with some of the plot ideas I had in mind. This crossed the Dalelands off the list and I wasn’t feeling like managing the constant stream of traders and costers rolling along the Trade Way. Plus, I personally like mountains and forests. A return to the Savage North was in order.

Breaking out my copies of FR1 Waterdeep and the North and FR5 The Savage Frontier, I started re-reading them and looking over the landscape. Although a Waterdeep-based campaign would be fun, running an urban game requires a lot of work, and I discarded that idea. The same reasoning also removed Silverymoon, Neverwinter, Luskan, and other large urban sites from the list. Then my eyes fell on the Loudwater environs and the creative wheels started churning. A nearby fallen Elven empire, a large town, the biggest forest in all of the Realms, a Zhentarim-controlled village, an abandoned dwarven kingdom, and Hellgate Keep all in close proximity to one offered more potential adventure seeds than I could count. This had potential.

Following my decision to only incorporate Realms canon as interested me, I started looking for what was actually detailed about this area. None of it is covered in the Gray Box, so it was time to move on to secondary sources, namely the above-mentioned supplements. Loudwater and Llorkh garner a paragraph or two each in Waterdeep and the North, while Hellgate Keep and the High Forest each earn three. Hardly a treasure trove, but exactly the amount I felt like dealing with. The Greypeak Mountains have a paragraph in The Savage Frontier, and more detailed information for Loudwater, Llorkh, and Hellgate Keep is provided. The High Forest earns an entire chapter, but by this point, it’s become beyond the scope of my focus for the initial campaign adventures, so I can ignore that material for now.

What does catch my attention is a small entry covering “Other Woods” in FR5. It reads in its entirety, “This is not the name of a single forest, but includes the Lurkwood, Southkrypt garden, Southwood, Moonwood, and Westwood. These [sic] edges of these forests are logged by men, though their dark depths are largely a mystery.” Southwood (or South Wood depending on if you’re going by the text or the map) is located just beneath Loudwater and seems perfect what I’m thinking about: A frontier area close to a bastion of civilization but offering unplumbed mysteries.

I decided to consult a tertiary source—The North boxed set—to see if there was anything further I could use in there. As much of the material in that set is based (or copied outright) from both FR1 and FR5, it might or might not provide additional glimpses or inspiration. Luckily, there was a little more, but the entry was still sparse enough for me to monkey with. I’ll decline quoting it in case it spoils any surprises for my players.

Next, I started brainstorming and came up with the following background for the campaign:

After the transformation of Ascalhorn to Hellgate Keep, the elven kingdom of Eaerlann fell, and most of the moon elves fled down the Riving Shining to either travel to Evermeet or join the Fallen Kingdom near Ardeep Forest. A few, however, lingered in the Loudwater area, either joining the small mixed-race community or occupying the Southwood. These displaced refugees harbored dreams of resettling the ancient kingdom if the forces of Hellgate Keep were ever banished. For centuries, the elves claimed the Southwood as their own, a small domain of displaced elves dreaming of their former glory. This enclave dubbed themselves “Lanymthilhar.”

In 1235 DR, the Year of the Black Horde, a never-before seen force of orcs boiled out of the Northern mountains, rampaging as far south as Calimshan. One tribe, the Black Slashers, charged down from the Graypeak Mountains towards the River Shining. Forging a tentative alliance, the humans of Loudwater and the refugee elves of Lanymthihar battled the Black Slashers, breaking their invasion near the northern verge of the Southwood. After this defeat, an accord was reached between the Lanymithihar elves and the residents of Loudwater. The agreement opened the outer edges of the Southwood to human logging and settlement, but the forest interior would remain sacrosanct and protected by the elves. So long as this compact was obeyed and the loggers didn’t become greedy in their yearly felling of timber, the two cultures would pursue their own agendas separately and in peace.

The PCs would begin the campaign in one of the few forest edge communities, caught between civilization to the north and forbidden mystery to the south. A decision to play up the mystery of elven culture and the phenomenon known as “The Retreat,” led me to prohibit elves as a starting race for the PCs as mentioned previously. While not actual enemies, I wanted to explore the “alien” factor of elves, rather than making them pointy-eared humans. I hope to have fun with this aspect of the campaign.

After a quick trip of the maps through my scanner and importing the scans into Photoshop, I made minor changes and additions to the canonical landscape of the region. I also took a look through Volo’s Guide to the North to see if I could use anything in that book, and decided I’d incorporate one of roadside inns mentioned therein. Situated to the east of Loudwater, “The Nighthunt Inn” might come in handy should the PCs ever decide to travel toward Llorkh. I now had my regional campaign map.

Loudwater and Environs as Ed never imaged.

The next step would be zooming in even more to detail the PCs’ home base of Elf Water and the adventuring opportunities in their own backyard.