Circle of Dar Janix

    During Session 5 of my Wilderlands campaign, the party encountered a house goblin. This particular house goblin was from the household of Lady Rixia, a manor holder to the west of Byrny. But what is a house goblin? Below, I present the explanation of house goblins for my Wilderlands campaign. As far as I know, this is not a concept native to the original setting, but it is obviously influenced by many real world myths about goblins with a dash of Gremlins thrown in. Goblins were originally a gift to humans from the elves. Under certain conditions, elves are able to give birth to a true goblin. This goblin is immortal (in the sense of not getting old) and is bound, against its will, to serve the household in which it lives by doing various household chores. The magic that binds the goblins is highly conditional, and the household has to follow a fairly strict set of rules to avoid breaking it. While these rules are too numerous to completely detail here, they include avoi...

  This is part of an ongoing campaign. You can find the other sessions over on the sidebar. This session was run on May 23, 2022.   2 Sweetrain 4433 B.C.C.C.   This session picked up right where Session 5 left off. The party had just escaped from the dire bear with a goblin prisoner. Once they put some distance between themselves and the bear by crossing the river (hex 2111), they stopped to heal up and interrogate the prisoner.  As Uggmar, the half-orc monk/rogue, is the only party member that speaks goblin, he took the lead in the interrogation. As his Charisma is 3, he decided to go the intimidation route instead of trying for a charm offensive. The goblin responded exceptionally well to this approach, and immediately began spilling his guts to Uggmar. Creng, the goblin, was a member of the Purple Mushroom Tribe, which makes its home in hex 2009 (just north of hex 2010 on the map above). They live in caves and raise mushrooms for food. They also capture vicious m...

    I had the fortune of meeting Kelsey at GaryCon this year. She was demoing her new game, Shadowdark RPG , right outside of the room where I spent the weekend running Castles & Crusades. The game is a well-done melding of OSR and 5th edition D&D. She does a much better job explaining it on her website than I could here, so I recommend clicking the hyperlink to learn more. I believe there is a free starter.  I was also very impressed with her GMing style. She was tracking torches, making reaction checks, coming up with on the spot rulings, and other old school staples, but doing it her own way. For example, she tracked torches by how much real time passed using an alarm on her phone. This was a fun way to handle something that can often feel like bookkeeping. The video is certainly worth watching, and you should also check out her game.  I just wish that I known she had all that Wilderlands experience, I could have picked her brain on the City State.

 Below is my adaptation of the Sleeth race from Gamma World for my Castles & Crusades Wilderlands game. I believe that the picture is from the Alternity version of Gamma World. This adaptation has not been subjected to any significant playtesting yet.     

  This is part of an ongoing campaign. You can find the other sessions over on the sidebar. This session was run on May 16, 2022.   2 Sweetrain 4433 B.C.C.C. At the end of the last session , the party set out to investigate the goblin raids on the villages to the west of Byrny (hex 2312). As they headed out of Byrny they found themselves passing through fairly dense farmland with regular small villages. After crossing the Rorystone Road (hex 2211), the farms began to thin out a bit and they came across a strange sight at a crossroad.  The pasture to the north of the road the party was traveling on was fenced in, and there was a gate on the road intersecting to the north. A halfling woman, wearing heavy makeup was sitting on the fence alongside a goblin wearing a burlap sack. The goblin was polishing a helmet, and both were watching a dwarf standing on the back of a barrel-chested pony. The dwarf was struggling to tie a brass ring to an arm mounted on a post.  The par...

 Below is my adaptation of the Sasquatch race from Gamma World for my Castles & Crusades Wilderlands game. I believe that the picture is from the Alternity version of Gamma World. This adaptation has not been subjected to any significant playtesting yet.   

  This is part of an ongoing campaign. You can find the other sessions over on the sidebar. This session was run on May 2, 2022.   The session started with their arrival in Byrny after crossing the River Stillring at the end of Session 3. Byrny is not a walled settlement, so it does not have a gate, but there is still a manned checkpoint on the road entering town. Sebastian, the badder gate guard, took an instant dislike to Stranger and gave him a hard time passing through the gate. This wasn't a complete surprise, since badders are known to be very intolerant of hoops, but his reaction seemed extreme even in that context. They managed to pass through the gate without provoking an incident though. Once they were in town, they decided to split up. Stranger, always suspicious of any mining activity, decided to lurk outside the mining office in the southern part of town to see if he could learn anything. After watching for a while, he got an idea of the makeup of the miners (most...

 Below is my adaptation of the Badder race from Gamma World for my Castles & Crusades Wilderlands game. I believe that the picture is from the Alternity version of Gamma World. This adaptation has not been subjected to any significant playtesting yet.