Games that take place on the wandering tortoise cities have always been fun and challenging, but after buying the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Bestiary 2 a couple weeks back, and mulling over it for a bit, I decided that the people of the tortoise cities need something to really keep them wary of the darkness, and of rolling thunder storms that frequent the world, they need to fear the jabberwock. As I see it, the jabberwock is just as timeless as the tortoises themselves in Alidor, and they are not dragons; they are Tane. The jabberwocks, the sard and the thrasfyr are all from Alidor’s past in the time before the elves from the days when Pagdush Firethrower was just a clerk in an architectural firm, hired to build the city of Alidor; to raise it’s inhabitants high above the throng and savage beasts of the world. Back then, there were many jabberwocks, and other Tane, that were part of the machinery of a great war that Pagdush’s people were loosing until the city was complete, and the cleansing came and all life was eliminated from the world except for a few unlucky souls, the great tortoises and Surma.

Since then, jabberwocks were lost from the world, only bits a pieces of their existence are eluded too, mainly in ancient texts that were found in the ruined cities of the people of pre-alidor. These days information about the jabberwock is limited, and shared only among sages and scholars; the people whom now hold in their libraries, the bestiaries of old. No common man, or elf has ever lived to describe such beasts in recent days. The tortoises, being immortal, know of these creatures, but have no way to emote this to those they are telepathically linked with. As for the weapons the jabberwocks fear most, the vorpal blade, there exist maybe three individuals left in the world that know how to make them, the Melbrindar, the Empress Zoe of the elfin folk and Pagdush Firethrower; to find a vorpal blade is even rarer, as the magic to most vorpal weapons of old have faded over the millennia since they were last used in the great war; sometimes though, a wandering priest can awaken the magic of a vorpal blade.

In my home game, I am designing a dungeon with a Jabberwock as the primary antagonist and decided that Cork would be a great place for one to exist since that tortoise has seen much trouble as of late. Once the party is of high enough level I shall bring forward the Jabberwock! maybe at 2nd level. (evil laugh)

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For now, I am calling it an ogre hut but that doesn’t mean ogres live there.

This is how I make dungeons I start witha picture, or image in my head I then merge that with ideas gleamed from the table talk at some earlier game, and from all that, I brew a dungeon. Simple process but it can take weeks so I work it in parallel with the active game so it appears seamless to the players as they transition from dungeon to dungeon.

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Birds flying like nuts outside our house

I am more balanced in my approach to swarms, and prefer to use them more judiciously. First off, screw the mod, if the author has more than three swarms, after the third, the party will just hate you as a GM, and the “but that is how it is written” excuse will not fix table morale. In most cases with swarm encounters that the party can’t beat, I will invoke my hurry up to skip ahead method. That method is perfect for convention play. It will also work in a home game. I would ask permission before initiating the rule, then summarize the carnage, and pick some random lackey/player at the table as the hero of the battle and move on; every encounter needs a hero, even “hurried up” ones. With that simple trick you are done and back on track. I personally don’t like being at a game table where the judge will not divert from the mod, and the swarms endure, and the party grumbles, and morale breaks. it happened a Mega con this year, everyone scattered, my PC nearly died, two others ran off, and two hid and laughed at everyone else’s predicament, and the GM continued to torture us with endless bat swarms in a 40foot shaft for 3/4 of the game… We nearly didn’t complet the module. Swarms suck.

If you don’t like the hurry up method, just roll a couple die sixes for the swarm in secret and that number equals the number of rounds it stays together as a threat. I had a party nearly dead, and all of the sudden the swarm scattered, they all thought some “balrog” scarred them off, but it was just me tracking the time the swarms attacked for. Typically it is 1d6+2 rounds in my home game, but don’t tell my players.

As GM you can really screw with a party with swarms since you can make them up of little magic resistent beasties from hell or wherever, but is it worth it for the story to go forward? Vampires and Mummies need swarms for clues, that is just classic, but not ten in every other encounter. Hint at the swarms presence, warn preceptive players, have a bottle of raid in the room next door, just don’t be that GM that TPK’ed the party with a swarm. Swarms suck and your players will never forgive you. No more than three swarms in a dungeon…

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As opportunity would have it, I also had more free time then, having just moved away from my loyal players to make it on my own in Biology as a lab slave. I found out right off, small steps worked best; doodle a map, add a town or two, then some creepy dungeon and you’re done. I did not have to create the world all at once, nor did I have to have all the answers all written up in advance; I just had to keep notes on decisions and names created in while “in game” and keep things constant. If a player met a Duke named Bob, okay, Roger; a Duke named Roger, that Duke would be part of play until the game campaign ended of the Duke died. The next game I played, if the same players were involved, and they had more questions about the Duke, or something else, I could add more information from the older game’s notes or (this is a cool trick) listen to the players ideas as they talked about the Duke, because players do talk, sometimes too much, but sometimes just enough to get creative gears working, so if a cool hook came up that was not too crazy like maybe there were werewolves in the family, I would key in, and now the Duke of Noordoon was a werebear. Just like that, new story added.

Except now I have “Nordoon” the land the Duke owns or manages for a king, oh crap a king, what King… And the world grows…

I thought I had figured out a cool way to have just one city by putting my cities on wandering tortoises, but the players moved off and away from the cities in games. Almost right off someone asked is there another city; Elwonna was the first, then Ingersol; Cork came in as a mystery town full of savage orcs, and that really made for some fun games. Jelling came out in honor of a game I played once called Harn, which had an English feel, so I invented stories that took place in Jelling, which is where Surma was developed, and the story of Jelling continued to grow from 2000 to 2003. Making my own game world really took off in 2001 when a group had a couple players that “knew” all about elves, and at the time, my games still relied heavily on the old AD&D Forgotten Realms stuff, As a GM if you have it in the house, it’s fair game, and I had quite a bit of the AD&D stuff, but we were playing 3.0 with these folks, and these two players started dissing my idea of elves. (dude it is just a game) Arguments ensued, and finally I cancelled the game and started with a fresh group of players and my own elves… Silly how that goes, but back then I had a waiting list of players, something I miss now that I have moved around so much.

I changed maps I started with this jumble:

Gradually over seven years ended up with this:

I enjoyed adding new parts to my world, lately, I added Kingleaf after signing up to judge my home game at a local convention in Illinois called Winter War.

I made this image using google maps and a pen tablet:

Yeah, it takes hours to make your own stuff, but all the players who sat at my table since 2000 really liked the newness of an unknown game world and most said they enjoyed the sandbox style of play I provided; I never said to anyone well “it is not in the module so I don’t know.” Having my own game gave me the freedom to make shit up on the spot just as long as I kept it consistent and didn’t get too grandiose with my GM machinations people usually had fun.

I love making Alidor, and I do all of this in little steps and most the time the players don’t care about this detail or that, sometimes to my chagrin, but in the end we have fun with the rules at hand which as of this writing is Pathfinder. (Pathfinder Rocks!)

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The Hill House is an old stone keep built into a hill on the lower slopes of Mt. Revenge, locals call that area the Crane Hills; it is located on the South Eastern edge of the District of Nordoon. Ten years of mild winters allowed the ice and snow to reced enough to open an old mountain pass from the eastern coast inland, giving the ogres access to the interior of Jelling and to the District of Nordoon and it’s people; and their pigs and cows, and chickens and horses, and pigs; the ogres do favor pigs. The Hill house is an old Dwarven trading outpost that closed after the dragon Surma attacked and decimated the dwarves of Mt. Revenge. If you look at my maps of jelling Mt. Revenge is in the middle of Huraram Mountains. GMs prerogative, I moved the mountain North.

That’s the cool thing about being the world builder, plus map makers in Alidor don’t have GPS technology; since most folks in Jelling never travel more than five to ten miles away from home in their life time, but nearly all have heard the story of the Dwarf King Stowbeck Stealsword; so any mountain of good size could potentially be Mt. Revenge to them. The true Mt. Revenge is now more North it will stick and say from this point since I have some dungeons written up to explore it if my party wants.

Possibly Related Posts:

• New Badguy to Test My Players With – The Jabberwock
• Ruins in the Woods
• I Hate Swarms
• Making a game world one small step at a time
• The Unfortunate Ransomers