Monday Motivations #7

Article #7 in a regular series where I offer up some ideas for character backgrounds by class.  I aim to collect these ideas together for a future pdf publication.

What made your character decide to become a wizard? Why did they leave their home town? Did they leave family behind or are they looking for something? These are all questions players face when generating their characters, with the best will in the world it's tempting to rely on cliché.

BARD

Bard by AIBryce

1.  Every Bard Needs a Hero - You've made a respectable living up to now sing in the various inns and taverns of your homeland, but singing the same old songs and telling the same old tales has begun to wear thin.  It is said that a bard is only as good as the hero he follows, you must therefore strike out and find your own hero who you can immortalise in song...

2.  The Great Bard's Instrument - When you needed to repair your instrument after a particulary rowdy evening in a local tavern you stumbled across a dusty tome of the Great Bard's work in the luther's workshop.  The tales and songs were familiar but it was the illustration of the Great Bard himself which captivated you.  You had never seen his image before or the instrument he played, so different from your own.  When you ask the luther if he can make such an instrument he tells you that the instrument was made long ago in a land far away and perhaps they have the skills and knowledge to recreate it.

3.  The Masked Mariachi - The people are a sad and dispirited lot, their backs and spirits have been broken by the work party enforcers sent by their despotic ruler to harvest the crops and mine the ore needed to further his own ends.  The people need to rise up and overthrow him, but to do this they need hope, the kind of hope that can be spread through song.  You know that this won't be easy, you'll need to travel swiftly from village to village, be selective in where you play, and you'll need a disguise but the people need you.  The people need the Masked Mariachi...

DRUID

1.  Blight - A terrible blight has cursed the land and the desperate townsfolk turned to you to save their crops, there was nothing you could do.  Your grove has withered and in order to save it you have uprooted it's heart vine which now sits safely in a pot of earth in your backpack as you try to find a new home far from your blighted birthplace.  Perhaps the townfolk will forgive you for abandoning them if you could only find a cure...

2.  Nature's Balance - You became aware of a shift in the natural order of things several months ago during a peyote ritual.  The visions you had showed a dark tide sweeping across the land and plants and animals alike withered and died in it's wake.  The visions grew stronger each time you performed the ritual and you became convinced that the only way you can stem the tide and regain the essential balance is to journey into the heart of darkness and cut out it's root...

Citymorphs #001 to #004

Inspired by Risus and Dyson, I've started geomorphing, but as I mostly enjoy DMing urban environments I thought I'd try something a bit different.  So here are the first in a series of Citymorphs:

#001 Palace District

Every city has to have a big cheese and they need a nice place to crash, of course the hangers on and other courtly types need somewhere to live close which makes for a similar architecture and style.

#002 Colliseum

The people have bread, so give them a circus.  Print off 2 of this tile and you have a whole colliseum for them to while away the hours watching chariot races.

#003 Harbour

Maybe your city is also a port, if so it'll need somewhere to land those ships and some warehouses to store goods and cargo.  It'll also need some sort of harbour master's buildings to control what comes in and what goes out.

#004 Municipal Buildings

With all this commerce going on there's got to be some sort of tax collection and administration going on.  Civil servants like nice buildings to make them feel important so grand architecture and domes are the order of the day.

Monday Motivations #6

Article #6 in a regular series where I offer up some ideas for character backgrounds by class.  I aim to collect these ideas together for a future pdf publication.

What made your character decide to become a wizard? Why did they leave their home town? Did they leave family behind or are they looking for something? These are all questions players face when generating their characters, with the best will in the world it's tempting to rely on cliché.

RANGER

2.  The King's Deer - Your family were starving and even though you knew it was wrong you shot the King's deer to survive the harsh winter.  Your Father was livid when you returned with the carcass, you explained that you were careful to clean the spot where you gutted it and bury the entrails but he didn't speak to you for weeks.  When the King's Warden posted bounty you knew that in order to protect your family you would have to leave your home and go on the run...

3.  Sacked - You were one of the Baron's huntsmen until the day the castle was sacked by a Goblin horde.  You had no love for the Baron, who was a blundering oaf when it came to tracking and stalking, but it was the beatings he personally administered to you as a stable boy which made you hate him.  You did little to help him when you chanced upon him in a clearing, soon after the castle had fallen, trapped under the weight of his dying prize charger.  The sounds of his screaming when the Goblin's found him still haunt you across the many leagues you have travelled since... 

4.  Trophy Hunter - The old ranger to whom you were apprenticed taught you many things, the woodcraft necessary to stay alive in the wilderness, how to differentiate and track prey from their prints and stool, how to set traps and lure the prey to them and how to butcher your kill quickly so the meat does not taint.  These challenges would satisfy most rangers, but your lust for knowledge is insatiable.  The day came when the old ranger told you that he could teach you no more, with some swallowing of pride, he admitted that your skills had far surpassed his own and that he had been learning more from you than he had been teaching you for the last year or more.  His advice to you was to travel to distant lands and to find new prey to hunt and new teachers to learn from...

5.  Big Fish - Your skill with the bow is legendary in the province where you were raised and your success in local tournaments earned you your freemanship.  However, in the last tournament you entered you were soundly beaten by a strange bowman with sun darkened skin from the desert lands.  His accuracy and speed drew gasps from the crowd and incredulity from you.  Your friends did little to help your dark demeanor that night in the inn, barracking you with taunts of "big fish, little pond".  To save face you brashly claimed that you would travel to the home of the black bowman and learn his secrets.  Their taunts echo in your mind as you pass through yet another backwater village on your long journey south...

CLERIC

3. Missing Relic - Your order was founded in a time of war, its' first and most revered Abbot was killed on the battlefield in a distant land as part of a crusade to bring the word of your God to the unbeliever.  Your Abbot has decided that your final test as a novice is to retrieve the lost foot of the founding Abbot and return it to the reliquary where it belongs.  You have been furnished with a map showing the approximate whereabouts of the battlefield and a scroll which Scrollmaster Deach has created at great personal cost to help you located the missing remains...

The Lands of Dual - A Dirty Dungeon Bash

After an introductory scenario my new campaign kicked off proper in Session 4 with a bit of light dungeoneering in the sewers.  The full session report can be read on my dedicated campaign site but my players seem to have enjoyed their first real taste of of Castles and Crusades.

Part of the sewer network of the town of Ayfal

I've been decorating at home recently and uncovered an abortive attempt to build a Worldworks style gaming board which promptly got canibalised for custom floorplans.  These seemed to go down well but the small rooms and even smaller corridors got the party stacked up in single file, resulted in two characters being involved in melee and blocking the entrance for others to assist.

This may be symptomatic of the 5' square concept for floor plans which I've always thought that however "materially" necessary it does lead to very cramped dungeons.  It may also be as a result of my players being a bit rusty at dungeon bashing.

Still I enjoyed DMing the scenario immensely (even though I hadn't spent too much time actually reading it) and can't wait for the next instalment.

Monday Motivations #5

Article #5 in a regular series where I offer up some ideas for character backgrounds by class.  I aim to collect these ideas together for a future pdf publication.

What made your character decide to become a wizard? Why did they leave their home town? Did they leave family behind or are they looking for something? These are all questions players face when generating their characters, with the best will in the world it's tempting to rely on cliché.

ASSASSIN

3.  New Sheriff in Town - When a new Sheriff arrived a few months back, things just started to take a turn for the worse.  He ferreted out some of your Assassin's Guild colleagues and the jobs started to dry up.  The final straw came when the Guild Master decided to close up shop.  You decide to strike out on your own, perhaps another town's Guild will have need of your skills...

4.  Set-up - That last job you did went South pretty quickly, those bodyguards knew you were coming.  Someone in the Guild is either supplying false intelligence or someone's put out a contract on you, but who? and why?  One things for sure, you can't go back to the Guild a failure, they kill failures...

WIZARD

3.  Magical Runt.  Being a wizard runs in your family your mother and father and your little sister are all wizards and they're far more accomplished than you will ever be.  Which is why you decided to run away and set up yourself up as a hedge wizard in a far flung corner of the world...

4.  Army deserter!  - Around your twelfth birthday your powers manifested themselves.  You were promptly registered with the local magistrate and you forgot about it completely as you buried yourself into your new studies.  Nine years later you shouldn't have been surprised when the kings letter arrived drafting you into the Mage corps of his army.  It wasn't long before you couldn't take anymore of the endless drilling so one night you escaped the compound and made a break for enemy lines...

BARBARIAN

3. A Legendary Blade - Whilst out hunting one day your prey darted into the relative safety of a small copse of trees and you hunter's instinct told you to follow.  The copse was deceptively dense and soon you needed to hack a path through the tightly knit trees.  You slash your way into a clearing and discover a pair of large boulders and lying at their foot a skeletal warrior holding a finely wrought blade.  The warrior has clearly been dead for many years, his disintegrating armour is of a strange design, the like of which you have never seen, however, the sword he carries is untarnished and as you slide it out of it's scabard you marvel at the keenness of the edge as it reflects the light.  After taking the blade back home your sleep is disturbed by strange dreams and a voice calling out to you.  Each morning as you strike out to catch the day's pray you feel compelled to keep walking and leave your dreary tribal hunter's life for that of adventure and distant lands...