Lear
LADIES and GENTLEMEN
For crimes INCLUDING but NOT LIMITED TO
CANNIBALISM
SLAVE TRADING
GROSS violation of the moral law in service of a PROSCRIBED DEITY
And his FAILURE to appear before this body and give account of these accusations
The GENIUS LOCI is proud to announce
(PAID FOR by generous contributions from POTION ADDICT, the WORSHIPFUL COMPANY OF THE MATACHINS, the FRIENDS OF NATURAL JUSTICE, and the TOWER OF PAIN)
A bounty of FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND SILVER PIECES
On the outlaw ALDRICH BRISBANE
(The VILLAIN last seen absconding to HOGMAN'S PLAIN)
DEAD
OR
ALIVE
RIVERBOAT GAMBLER
or: Dying on a Warm Planet
A riverine adventure and plainscrawl in the "mythic overworld" of Hogman's Plain. Pursue a criminal mastermind and his rapacious army of Giants up the river Hog and across a scorching desert infested with undead, or explore the ancient tombs of the Plain and do a little plundering of your own.
Map Generation
The basic building blocks to populate the map.
Send a Gunboat by Skerples, mirrored in case something happens to the original. The original basis for this project.
Hex and Ship Travel, my own rules for the gunboat the players built.
Settlement Gazetteer, to create inhabited places
Travel and Terrain, a system to add geoforms to the desert
Encounters on Hogman's Plain, to populate the plain during travel
Example Map using the tools above and below.
People
Unique explorers of the Plain.
Aldrich Deathsbane, the culprit
Baradye the Blue, the extortionist
Hunter and Hunted, the victims and victimizers both
D6 Bounty Hunters, the interlopers
Points of Interest
Small blocks of handmade content to fill out the procedurally generated stuff.
Full Dungeons
Bigger dungeons full of monsters, people and monster-people.
Barbican of the Blaster Caster. Place by the Potion Addict outlet from the Gazetteer
The Flooded Forge. Place at the origin of a river.
C2: Cerebro Cerebro Cerebro. Place east of the Pharos from the Points of Interest.
Palace of the Naga Raja. Place on the bank of a river.
The Marsh On Mogart's Creek. Place on a creek of the same name.
Widow's Grove. Place at the origin of a river.
The Unquiet Tomb. Place anywhere.
Dent in the Shield. Place away from water.
Shrine of Sanctification. Place away from water.
Shrine of the Dragon. Place away from water.
Meat Points
The stories that started it all.
Ferguson
THE MAKING OF
Hogman's Plain is a combination of Death Valley and the Valley of the Kings. The name comes from Brian McNaughton's Throne of Bones collection. It began life as a background setting for a series of short stories. When I made it into a playable area I was disappointed that it did not have the same atmosphere as the original fiction. But that's the way the moon wanes. The purpose of an RPG adventure is not to be mysterious and evocative to the person running it (though that helps), but to the players.
I
realized early on that the chain of events leading to a player
character becoming the evil human king of the Giants was extremely
unlikely to shake out the same way in anyone else's game. So I focused
on making a fun place to explore regardless of whether the players chase
Aldrich around.
After hand-creating a lot of points of interest I found the Send a Gunboat river creation rules did not fit the pieces I had, so I mostly ignored them. Only the basic premise of early modern gunboats bullying third-worlders remains.
If I ran it again I would make the map smaller and either move everything closer to the river, or give the players more reason to enter the desert hexes beyond. A smaller map with more of the handmade content within the players' field of vision would break up the grind of random encounters that, by the end of the journey, were starting to repeat. The pursuit frame discourages free exploration because every phase not spent moving closer to the target reduces your odds of ever catching up.
The series taught me a lot about what works and what needs to be fixed in my personal heartbreaker Begone FOE. This is the first adventure where the players were in charge of a whole expedition and stable of NPCs. A force of twenty goons who all have a single class level is transformative and exposes fault lines in the game system, mostly around the HEART statistic. I liked the ability to drop healing as a reaction but when you have a whole group of even low level Clerics backing the players up it becomes a massive pool of bonus HP that can't be circumvented. Revision 16 will address this and some issues that came up around saving throws.
Thank you to everyone who played with me and everyone who read this series.
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