We concluded the first act of our Forbidden Lands campaign and this makes me uniquely qualified to spew nonsense about my experiences running the game and perhaps also share a few nifty resources for a fellow Forbidden Lands gamemaster.
We played 13 sessions centered around the player created home town of Svingkirk, the plains north of there and the adventure site Amber's Peak.
13 sessions probably sounds quite some time spent on one adventure site, and looking back on it - yeah, it dragged on a bit. In hindsight we definitely could have cut down on some of the unfolding plot lines, especially some of the additional story fluff I added between sessions. Overall though, it was an enjoyable run. A particular highlight was the events leading up to break-in at Amber's Peak, as well as the nighttime infiltration of the castle that turned violent, real quick.
The starting hex
Before the first session, I spend several days
prepping the map, to allow players to choose their own starting point. In retrospect I should have made sure that they started near one of the starting adventure sites. Amber’s Peak turned out to be a little too complex in terms of storylines and number of NPCs. A more simple entry point would have been better.
The world map
Whether it was an attempt to make the campaign feel more rooted in Scandinavian culture, or it was a late night bout of madness. I spent several hours translating the original English/Swedish map file to Danish. Here is the result
Forbidden Lands Map - Danish.
The encounter maps
Circumstances forced our group to play online, and because of that I ended up creating a few battle maps for some of the encounters. The first one was a four variant road encounter. The intent of this encounter was to unfurl certain plot hooks and give the players a first hand experience with the blood mist. Because the terrain was mostly open or forrest and i did not know which way the players would go. I created two versions -
Road - Caravan Ambush and
Road, Woods - Caravan Ambush. The idea was to drop a timer or a clock onto the scene indicating impending trouble, and during the ambush the entire scene would change once it got enveloped by the mist.
Road - Caravan Ambush Mist and
Road, Woods - Caravan Ambush Mist.
Later when the party got to Amber’s Peak, they decided to help some farmers, for that encounter i created this farm map (inspired heavily by an image found when googling “farm battlemap”)
Farm - Boar Attack.
Next post, I'll talk a little about characters, rules reference and our online setup.
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