Today I'm rolling up another random campaign.  I'm choosing two of the three starting adventure opportunities to test out their roll-up tables, then letting the dice decide the rest. You can follow along with the process below, or you could skip straight to the resulting one-page campaign. Settlement on the Frontier The three adventure opportunities: a new Frontier Settlement, some sort of Raiders or Pirates, and a Military Expedition.  We'll start with the frontier settlement, which has plenty of details to roll up: The plan is short-term resource extraction: pan for gold, gather ..read more

In the old forests where the tree-goblins once lived, their voices might be rare today, but they still speak through the Talking Knots.  All the peoples of the North use ropes and cords, but only goblins use them to carry messages.  Strands of cord in different colors are tied into knots, each one with its own meaning. an Andean quipu, the inspiration for Talking Knots These days there are few people left who can read the knots, fewer still who can tie them.  It's an ancient art, passed down from elder to apprentice over the generations, but like so many things it was n ..read more

Traveling across the North you're likely to meet some humans.  Many of those humans speak the language of the Isquentaga, or something closely related to it, so it helps if you know a little of that tongue.  Here's a quick intro. Letters When elven memory-transfer technology is used to record human words, here's how they're spelled.  Vowels are sort of like Spanish: a [a] as in swat  e [e] as in whey  i [i] as in ski  o [o] as in tone  ų [ʌ̃] as in skunk These consonants are just like in English: p, t, k, ch, s, h, m, n, l, w, y.  G is always [g] like ..read more

All along the creeks and the lake-shores live the humans, farming and hunting where the water and the woods meet.  Humans are a proud people, bold and eager for fame.  Whenever you hear shouts and the barking of dogs, get ready — it's either time for a feast or time for a fight. Appearance Humans (called yaskan yah-skahn in their own tongue) are taller than goblins, shorter than giants and elves, and quite strong for their size.  They are mostly hairless except for the hair on their heads, which grows very long and is the object of much attention and vanity. Unlike other specie ..read more

Deep in the forest live the goblins, the reclusive people of the trees.  They lie in wait to ambush their prey, making calls to lure them in.  Goblins are the reason outsiders fear the woods, but they fear outsiders in turn, only occasionally venturing out to investigate the dangerous world around. Appearance Tree-goblins (nuruí noo-roo-EE as they call themselves) are a type of small primate, looking something like lemurs or raccoons.  Their hands and feet are well adapted for gripping branches, but they're also ready for a brief sprint on the ground.  Like a flying squirr ..read more

A giant's life has always been a lonely one, even before the Starving Time.  They wander the land alone, checking their traps, watching the stars, and telling tales of old to those they meet along the way.  What other peoples have forgotten, the lonely giants remember. Appearance Giants are a large primate, something like a gorilla or sasquatch.  They are the tallest of the four peoples by only a little, hunched over as they walk, but they are the strongest by far.  Their thick fur comes in colors from charcoal black to russet brown to pale grey. Roleplaying Giants (or og ..read more

Elves are the city-dwellers, the colonial conquerors from beyond the ocean sea.  They came a century ago in their great ships and established outposts of empire here in the North.  Now the empire is gone, but a few colonies remain, citadels of power and wealth. Appearance Elves (cazandi in their own tongue) are primates from a hot and dry continent.  They are taller and thinner than humans, with long spindly limbs and digits.  Outsiders cannot recognize any distinctions of gender among them.  Their skin tends toward dark, earthy shades of gray and brown, but their eye ..read more

If you want magical items that feel scientific, you need a branch of science for them to belong to.  You're not going to fool anyone into thinking a weather control device is scientific unless you've got a university degree in physiodetics or a couple of textbooks in geophotodynamics or some other fictional branch of science. And a fictional branch of science needs a proper name. Roll for a Prefix and a Suffix.  You might need to add an -o- between them to make it sound right: hydr- + -sophy = hydrosophy. If you roll a 19 or 20 for the suffix, the name becomes longer.  Roll aga ..read more

Every town you find has a life of its own.  Sometimes it's about the small things that add flavor to the story, but sometimes the town brings its own new trouble to the game.  (And trouble usually means adventure.) Humans are a community-oriented species that typically get most of their food from farming, supplemented by extensive hunting and gathering from the land around.  The average human tribe grows corn, hunts deer in the woods, and catches fish in the streams and lakes. Let's roll up an example town as we go along.  This is Peace Junction, a town of the Istansi trib ..read more

Adding detail is easy; taking it away is hard.  There's a value in distilling something down to its simplest elements, stripping away all else to reveal the bones underneath.  One of the hardest posts on this blog to write was the very first one, where I tried to summarize the entire concept of this setting.  Like it says above, this is: A 1700s post-apocalyptic hopeful frontier fantasy setting for roleplaying games. I saw a post from The Theoretical GM where he distilled his entire setting down into four images, and I thought that made for a great challenge.  So here's Sig ..read more