Sunday, February 15, 2015

Lost Baronies Campaign Map and Adventures

Back when the Lost Baronies campaign was under way, I had the bright idea that I could provide a rough starter map of the island, and let the players fill it in as we played. That idea was inspired by the West Marches campaign another DM successfully executed.

I wanted to give the map a different look than hex paper or graph paper so I bought a roll of that inexpensive brown wrapping paper commonly used for shipping packages. Then I drew in a few landmarks and obvious features, leaving everything else blank. Part of the plan was to have various players drawing the map creating a mix of styles.

The players liked what I had drawn, but the campaign didn't last long enough for the mapping idea to blossom. Below are some pictures of what exists, drawn by me:

 The island boundary is very lightly drawn on the map to make it easy to shift the outline should players need to do so when adding to the map. The only places it needed to stay put were at Restenford, and Loreltarma, the major port towns.
 Restenford and Farmin are the locations for the old TSR published adventures L1 The Secret of Bone Hill, and L2 The Assassins Knot, by Len Lakofka. My players successfully avoided all but one of the published dungeons and wilderness encounters while in these areas.
 Kroten and the surrounding towns are all from another in the L series of published adventures. The party had gotten into Grest and were about to get themselves caught up in a puzzle dungeon that could become a death trap if they gave up too soon. Fortunately the players that were active at the time were resourceful and methodical so the danger would be somewhat mitigated.
 The Kenall Keep on this section of the map is none other than The Keep on the Borderlands, aka the Caves of Chaos. Wolford is the town over by that weird looking mountain on the map, which as it happens, is Skull Mountain (published by Faster Monkey Games).
 I threw a bunch of mountains along part of the northern edge of the island just because.
Loreltarma (the correct name for the city, which is misspelled Lo Reltarma on the Greyhawk maps).

The published adventure material that was available for the player characters to interact with is quite large. It included the following list and more: The Secret of Bone Hill, The Assassins Knot, Priestly Secrets, Devilspawn, The Keep on the Borderlands, Skull Mountain, Stone Hell, Dwellers of the Forbidden City, The Wandering Trees, and assorted smaller vignettes. Since most of it with certain obvious exceptions, has not been played by the current group, I can still use all or parts in whatever I run next.

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