The series of encounters and confrontations of CY538-543 that became to be known as the Paladin wars are a significant piece of history in terms of the nature of the Land of the Young, the city of Dunromin and, most significantly, the fate of the Royal Family, the Lufthearts, of this realm. It has not, however, been examined or recorded in any detail in the publications, to date, of the Dunromin University Press.

This is, perhaps, not so surprising as there are no less than twelve different accounts of the events, nine written by eye-witnesses, none of which agree on several fundamental details. To this end this account is, while painstakingly researched and checked, an amalgam of the most commonly referenced elements of the war. We include, mainly for the entertainment value, extra details and stories discovered in these twelve, and other, records.

The events started, as such things often do, with a prophecy. In CY537 no less than seven well-respected mystics and seers reported that a “Force of Darkness” lurked in the far west of the Wild LandsThey all declared that signs and portents suggested that this Force would bring great calamity to Dunromin and probably the downfall of the house of Luftheart. The Seers suggested the nature of this Force was an evil and powerful entity that held a great grudge against the people of Dunromin and wished to destroy them. King Marioch, 45th King of Dunromin, resolved that something must be done and charged his commanders to come up with a plan to defend his realm.

Thus were put into action a sequence of events that would, ironically, come close to making these dire prophecies come true. It with the faultless wisdom of hindsight we know now that, at the time, the personage of this Evil Entity had little knowledge of Dunromin and its royalty, and really couldn’t have given a Booka’s fart for their fate. It is only by the actions of King Marioch’s Paladins that the Evil Force became first aware, then offended and finally to be the mortal enemy of the realm.

The Evil Entity was named, confusingly, by the city’s soothsayers as being Garym the Great Gorger, Kzenzakai the Witch-King or the Mighty Wunn. This puzzle was quickly resolved when it was discovered that they probably all referred to the same person. As is pretty common knowledge now, Garym the Great Gorger was the name of a mighty barbarian warrior-necromancer from the far west, alive some 1000 years ago.  In the service of a legendary Magic-User, the Mighty Wunn, Garym rose to become a terrible king of a significant territory, possibly as much as two-thirds of the vastness that is now the Wild Lands. The legend goes that Garym became so powerful that he turned upon his master over some trivial disagreement and killed him, taking the source of his power, the Wunn Ring, from his finger.

Thus was the Mighty Wunn, perhaps greatest Human mage of all time, laid low by his closest ally. In doing so Garym was also dealt a mortal wound but, combining his necromantic arts and the power of the Ring, was able to survive as a powerful undead entity. Reborn as the Witch-King Kzenzakai, this spirit set himself upon a black throne of death in the eldritch fortress of Doomdank, in the twilight realms far to the west, assisted by his equally fell and sinister younger brother and sister.

Kzenzakai’s dominance lasted for nigh 1000 years until the strange prophecies of King Marioch’s seers in Dunromin in CY537 started an inevitable string of events leading into the Paladin wars and, eventually, the cataclysmic events of the War of the Ring in CY580, barely 5 years ago.

The noble knights of Dunromin decided, after some considerable debate, navel gazing, inquisition and wine drinking, that offence was the best form of defence. Consequently, a Royal Charter was issued that the best knights and magicians of the kingdom should gather and set out on an expedition into the Western Wild Lands to find and kill the Witch King. Many be-knighted sons of Barons and their studiously arcane friends were thus assembled and supported by many men-at-arms.

At the start of the campaigning season of CY538 this body of Humans and Elves set forth, led by the King’s own eldest son, Prince Morev, himself a Paladin of great renown. Records of this great host vary but the numbers seem to be about 400 knights, mostly Human and Half-Elven but with some High Elves and even a few Dwarves and a Halfling or two. This spearhead was supported by four-score Magic-Users of various hues, in the main Human and Grey Elf but also including Half- and High-Elves. Of Gnomes and Half-Orcs there were none as the fashions of the time precluded these races from appropriate social status. This glittering phalanx was supported by some 2000 armed supporters and a baggage train of perhaps 1000 more individuals.

It quickly became apparent that such a huge army could not be supported on such a long march and, after some hasty re-planning, most of the baggage train was sent home along with more than half of the men-at-arms. The remaining force was then split into six bodies, each tasked with a different route through the hinterland with the aim of reuniting before the gates of Doomdank in the high Summer. The reasoning behind this was that such large forces would be pretty immune to the efforts of all the known hostile entities on the way but also small enough to maintain themselves by plundering the lands they passed through.

Many suggested that this was an ill-conceived plan but, as it proved, the main idea proved sound and, even as Autumnal colours started to stain the forests of the west a mere four and a half years later, the great host was made one again. Reunited and emboldened by their experiences, they arrayed themselves within sight of Doomdank and girded their collective loins for the epic confrontation to come.

Before we describe those bloody days, we will pause a moment to give some indication of the intervening years, wherein the six hosts journeyed through lands hostile and friendly, strange and mundane. Not one host escaped this period unaffected by the trials and tribulations of the journey and the tales of these adventures have become the sustenance of many fables, legends, epic poems and stories plied by minstrels throughout the Land of the Young and beyond. Anyone offering coin to such storytellers and musicians can soon get a vast and varied array of versions, some wild and some slanderous. One tale, indeed, is treasonous.

One of these war-bands drove a direct path westward but in doing so found itself fighting through several realms loyal to the Witch-King and peopled by many and varied Humanoids. This proved a difficult task and instead the wily Paladins used subterfuge and spread rumours among their enemies of such foul betrayal that they triggered a sizable civil war between them. It took a few years but the cunning knights were able to attend the final battle in good order.

Another of the armies, commanded by Sir Shirley Dragonsbane, took a northerly route, seeking to pass through less well-defended lands in haste in order to make the longer journey in a similar time. Their encounters included some friendly civilisations and they made good time until arriving on some wild moors where they found themselves in running skirmishes with Orcs and Half-men mounted on fast ponies and armed with strong bows. This enemy took longer to put down but were eventually bribed into leaving Sir Shirley’s force alone.

Of the other warbands similar strange antics were experienced, with one force becoming besieged in a ruined citadel for several moths and suffering terrible casualties. We will not tell of these adventures here but instead focus on the more important Warband led by the Prince himself.

The first tale that comes from this group is also confusingly recorded in the memories of those of the Prince’s bodyguard who were present. It pertains to his host passing through the eaves of the ancient and magical Greywood. There are several accounts of the weeks spent in this fey woodland and no two match completely with other in the facts and nature of the creatures and events experienced therein. They do, broadly fall into two camps, however, which we will record here.

Both camps pertain to the Queen of the Greywood, a magical creature of ancient legend, thought to be a fiction or myth of the fey until Prince Morev and his loyal bodyguards happened to encroach on her realm. The first version tells of how the travellers found themselves in a glade one evening bedecked with colourful lanterns and tables loaded with food and wine to satisfy the most slovenly glutton. Obviously cautious, the knight were welcomed by the Queen herself, magnificent but ancient in rivers of silver and white silks melding with her long locks and illuminated by a glorious smile, framed in lines as old as the forest itself. At last convinced of her generosity, Prince Morev and his warriors relaxed and partook of the delights of the magical feyland for several weeks, without hurt nor hazard. When the time came they left good friends and with many promises of continuing loyalty then and after the war.

The other version of this encounter is far more sinister. In this version the force was reluctant to enter the woods in the first place, forced to enter the trees by flooding in the valleys to the north preventing a more direct path. Once into the forests the band were blinded and confused by mists, pathless tangles of briars, trees that seemed to move and, as they wandered deeper, by trailing mosses and vast clouds of spiderweb. They were set upon by all manner of fey enchantment and spent weeks spiralling about the endless twilight green knowing not where they were. Only when the most powerful mage in the retinue, Prince Mozgad, was able to brandish a powerful enchantment did they finally force the Queen from the shadows and confront her. Mozgad, younger brother of the king and uncle to Prince Morev, was a young and ambitious Magic-User but even then had an ambition to become one of the Board of Three of the Magic College.

In this version the Queen manifested as a tall and jagged hawthorn tree with bladed fingers on many tentacular arms. In a fraught battle of wits Mozgad and Morev’s guile and charm combined to defeat the malevolent presence and their army was delivered, unharmed in the end, out of the western eaves of the forest. Another version of the latter story also claims that the Queen identified herself as Kzenzakai’s estranged sister, although little credence can be given to any such inventions. It remains curious to note that Mozgad himself claims to have no recollection of ever being anywhere near the Greywood during their expedition and claims never to have met the Queen of the Greywood.

Later in the expedition it came to pass, in the heady summertime of CY543, that Prince Morev and his retinue came into the lands of a Barbarian King of cheery manner and generous mood, no friend of his erstwhile fane, the Witch-King enemy of the host. This King, whose name may have been Offlar, Kilgreese or Guthrey of Three Stomachs, had three sons and a daughter. His sons were wild and powerful warriors who loathed their sad fate as vassals of Kzenzakai. His daughter was also a wild and furious warrior as dangerous as her brothers, but also comely, charming and of a spirit such that she claimed the heart of the Prince Morev. The two were betrothed, records show, with the undertaking that once the campaign was successful this daughter, named Lillian the Crimsonbloom, would be brought by her father to Dunromin where Morev would make her his wife, uniting their kingdoms.

This is all well and good and letters and sanctified contracts were duly made and passed to Rangers to carry to Dunromin to confirm this arrangement. Many of the survivors confirm this but these writs were never received by King Marioch in Dunromin and the arrangement was never formally recognised.

Given that Morev perished in the war and that the land of King Offlar (or whatever) was razed by Kzenzakai’s avenging hordes some years later, this would seem to be of little import in the greater scheme of things. There is, however, an alternative narrative wherein Morev and Lillian were wed in that same summer in King Offler’s (or whatever his name was) court out in the Wild Lands. This same scandalous and treasonous tale claims they did consummate their coupling so thoroughly that Lillian was with child by the time Morev came to continue his journey to the locality of Doomdank. What happened to Lillian and the babe is not not explained in the version of the tale that this scribe was able to find. Of course, should the child have lived, it would be the rightful monarch of the Land of the Young.

These are but a sample of the dozens of tales that came from these strange times from all the separate forces but, as has been said, the plan worked and the six armies came, hale and hearty in the main, together in the Autumn to attack Doomdank. All the forces had suffered some losses of course, one was down to barely 60% of its original roster, but all were toughened and emboldened by their experiences and were a far more capable force than even when they set out.

For the final assault the great army swept through the fertile river-lands around Doomdank to the heart of the realm surprisingly easily. They encountered increasing resistance at every turn but none of these skirmishes were sufficient to delay their progress by much. In this manner they came at last to the final wasteland of broken stone and burnt earth that surrounded the castle and tower-keep of Fortress Doomdank itself. Wreathed in mist and low cloud the attackers sought divinations to learn more of their opponent’s powers and dispositions.

They discovered that while a vast force was stabled in the lower, outer curtain walls of the fortress and in the fathomless dungeon below, the major powers of Kzenzakai and his generals lurked in the middle of the main Keep at all times, and would be loath to come out to face any assailant.

The attackers came up with a plan and organised their vast force into two commands. The majority of the force, including all the warriors who were not paladins nor wizards, would engage the fortress in a pretty traditional assault, seeking to penetrate the gateways and move into the core of the castle by sheer brute force. The smaller force, entirely the Paladins and Magic-Users along with other spellcasters and specialists, would use flying spells, winged mounts, magical carpets and such to move, invisibly and under cover of clouds, to land on the top of the castle and push downwards as quickly and quietly as possible. The aim was to take the Witch-King by surprise or at least get close enough to him that a deluge of magical fire, lightning, poison gas and such, followed up by cold steel, would be enough to annihilate him.

It was a bold plan and very nearly worked perfectly.

The flying force made entry to the tower and closed to some vast chambers where Kzenzakai lurked, served by the Liches, Vampires, Ring-Wraiths and other fell creatures of his personal retinue. There a vast fight ensued and many of the evil hordes were slain but at a terrible cost. At the culmination Morev himself closed to personal combat with Kzenzakai. Morev’s sharp blade cut away the Witch-King’s left arm, which fell from the parapet into the boiling mass of war below them. But Kzenzakai was barely startled by this maiming and drove his own vorpal weapon through Morev’s heart killing him in an instant.

Now, the Wunn Ring was kept by the Witch King on his left middle finger and, with the loss of this limb, the link between the ancient undead entity and the source of so much of his power weakened the enchantments that held the entire fortress together. As the vast edifice started to crumble the survivors fled the ruination by flight or hasty feet, a great many of them making the safety of the lower workings in time. As it happened, while all this was happening the larger force had done an excellent job of penetrating the outer defences and were able to offer their allies a safe route out of the cataclysm.

A Pyrrhic Victory is a victory nonetheless, and the survivors made their way back to the Land of the Young resolute in their success but mourning greatly their dead, the good Prince among them. Morev’s body was never recovered, but neither was the body of the Witch-King leading to the assumption that he, too, had been destroyed in the ruination of his fortress. Likewise, the Wunn Ring was lost, dropped into the maelstrom of battle, covered in the wreckage of a castle and swept away by flood-waters released from a dam behind the castle. The expeditionary force that embarked upon the Paladin Wars returned as heroes and were lauded as the best and bravest of the world for the rest of their days, even though barely 4 in 10 of the magnificent force that set out actually came home and many of those were damaged in ways that are hard to discern.

The prophecy, it seemed, had been denied but at a terrible cost. King Marioch was so devastated by the loss of his eldest son that he died of a broken heart a few years later, succeeded by his second son, Mordred, who rules the land well and fairly to this day.

But things were not settled with the Witch-King. In fact, the whole expedition had only managed to encourage the very terrible fate it had been begun to avoid. Kzenzakai was not dead, although he was initially diminished. He rose again from the ruination of his capital and began building again anew. This time he sought not to rebuild the great empire he had once ruled but gathered his forces again with but one goal; the annihilation of the family and realm of his new enemy; the Lufthearts of Dunromin.

This is, of course, the beginning of the subsequent events that led to the War of the Ring, which is beyond the cope of this document save to summarise that first, Kzenzakai felt he had to locate the Wunn ring. He sought for it in vain for many years, sending his servants hither and yon in search of a trace of it. As the search continued the Witch-King recovered more and more of his own powers and at length, he decided that he had power and cunning enough to defeat Dunromin and the Land of the Young without it. He may have been correct and many suggest that he would indeed have been successful but for the efforts of Baron Garibaldi and his Heroes.

While any mention of Baron Garibaldi’s exploits is bound to solicit a bold Hurrah! From the masses, there is another reason why Kzenzakai was, perhaps, not in such a favourable disposition as he thought. It is worth mentioning the destruction of the Wunn Ring in the ruins of Creb Untool by a certain adventuring party whose identity seems to have slipped, somehow, from popular recollection. But such kill-joys who remind us of this cannot deny it was Baron Garibaldi’s brilliance that saved the city and delivered the Land from the military might of Kzenzakai the Witch-King, as the most fashionable minstrels claim.

These subsequent events are recorded well in the annals of the War of the Ring and recollected by many of the population in their living memory. If the reader wishes to learn more of these events or any of the personalities mentioned herein please refer to the publications of your modest publisher, Dunromin University Press, available here…

Footnote: When Baron Garibaldi did battle with Kzenzakai’s main host in the southwestern corner of the Land of the Young, he first had to defeat the Witch-King’s nine Ring Wraiths on their Black Dragon steeds. One of these creatures, Garibaldi discovered, was the reanimated cadaver of Prince Morev himself, found and enchanted as a powerful servant of darkness by Kzenzakai as a base and vicious taunt to his sworn enemy.

Disclaimer 1: The fictional tale of the impregnation of the barbarian Princess Lillian is included here purely from a standpoint of academic curiosity and is in NO WAY hinting that such an event really happened. Such a suggestion would be treasonous in the extreme and Dunromin University Press wishes to distance itself with LARGE AND PURPOSEFUL steps from any such conjecture.

Disclaimer 2: The above notes have been compiled from the written accounts of various witnesses to the actual events and the resemblance of any of the concepts, names, events and details there-in to any other popular stories about rings, wraiths and Witch-Kings is purely coincidental. A bit. But we do love Tolkien.

Some people were quite engaged by the idea and I got some thought provoking comments. Others took issue with the concept and claimed Owlbears would be too heavy, which is a perfectly reasonable response too.

But Gravity doesn’t work quite the same way on Barnaynia.

Being a non-spherical world, Barnaynia has an edge and there are already some cultures and species taking advantage of this. When you jump off the edge of the planet, if you go horizontally, you just drift off into space. The World Guide to Barnaynia details explorers using this to go to the Planets and the Outer Shell.  The Wizards of Rimland use the varying gravitational field for a lethal sport and the xenophobic Far Elves once used it to put a colony in the northern Rim Jungles.

So why not Owlbears?

Just imagine!  The huge beasts launch themselves off the Rim and then glide out to a few miles. Then they skilfully loop around at a high altitude and use their rudimentary wings to glide around looking for prey as they lose altitude.  It adds a whole new dimension to a wandering monster attack…

          “You are attacked by an Owlbear,”

          “Fighters to the front, Magic-User preparing Magic Missile.”

          “The Owlbear landed on the Magic-User. Take (huge crushing damage).”

          “Wait, what?  Landed? WTF, dude?”

Glorious.

It also allows Owlbears and beasts like them access out to the Necklace and the wide variety of sky castles and Dragon lairs out there.  Lots of possibilities for wonder and silliness…

And on to the Movie!

I’ve not seen it yet so no risk of spoilers here, but I do intend to and I am really looking forward to it. No, my comments come from a different angle.

I have three kids, all teenagers.  Despite my best efforts NONE of them are even remotely interested in D&D or Role-Playing; even the youngest who still loves Power-Rangers and Goosebumps.  Go figure.

Anyway, as I type this my daughter and her friends are in the local flix watching the film!!!  Wuh?

Cool girls who don't play D&D are wanting to watch the D&D movie?!  Contrast this to my school experience of girls in the eighties and D&D which was, at best, “boys will be boys” and, at worst, treating it like some kind of disease.  This HAS to be good for the hobby!

Most specifically, I echo his comment: "Most referees really like it when you want to know about the world they’ve created or the published setting they’ve chosen. It makes them feel like the time they’ve put into world building was worth it. If the referee has provided some information about the setting, engage with it as much as you are able. Take notes. Read session reports and setting lore the referee provides."

This is EXACTLY what we intended when we made Dunromin available to the public. Few GMs have the time to invest in cataloguing all the fun ideas they have, especially if the players don't take any interest in them.  It can be frustrating is a whole plot loop is ignored when the interesting NPC says hello, gets ignored and the players just pottle off to start a bar-room brawl. To prevent that frustration we have tried to build an infrastructure for the GM to build on, with space in the margins to scribble down the tweaks and inspirations that happen through the game.

Now if you match this with Travis's vivid concept of the low-level magic-user you can see how the weakest link in the party in a melee becomes the perfect tool for opening up the many subplots in a city campaign. Not for nothing are there so many Magic-User/Thieves in Dunromin that they have their own pseudo-class-name in common parlance; the Trickster.

Work. Sleep. Reproduce.

Do you wonder if that is all there is to life?

Perhaps you think you’re different? Unique? Touched by something more powerful than any of us?

Steve McCulloch was different. Gifted by an unspeakable power. As were his brothers, but what was behind it?

The gods are getting angry; their servants are not safe in their homes. War is looming.

This book is not set in the Barnaynian gameworld; it is a very, very different setting.  The story begins on Earth at the end of the twentieth century but goes much, much further. Perhaps further than you ever imagined. The Eternal Victim is a fantasy horror story that spans a multiverse of terrible violence and fear ruled by gods and demons. The fates of mortals and immortals alike are closely tied, their doom beyond their control.

[Includes graphic violence and scenes of a sexual nature]

Patrick Knight-Bridges is a new name to the world of Dunromin University Press but, as a few of you know, we have been involved with the Eternal Victim book project for a very long time. We have finally taken the plunge to publish the four stories in the series collected into a single volume for simplicity. We are publishing initially as an eBook, available through Amazon and Kobo, but hope to have a softcover version available soon.

If you do have a read please, please, please give us a few stars and drop us a review.  You can get the eBook for $2.99 at  AMAZON or KOBO

In Dunromin we have alignments, but they are not enforced particularly hard except in certain cases where the alignment is tied to magical powers.  To get something useful and fun out of this we have to first go back to why Alignments were first implemented and for this I am guessing…

1 – It’s a way of controlling players and keeping them consistent in their Roles. In our experience alignment becomes irrelevant when the players are role-playing properly; to go against their alignment is to go against the style of the character and is bad role-play – the character simply wouldn’t do certain things; it wouldn’t occur to them. Although this has to be balanced against the pain in the ass player who ruins the game “’cos it’s what their character would do” whom, in my experience, is a fiction anyway. All the players I have played with do not deliberately sabotage the party and the plot out of such silliness, although some have sailed pretty close to the wind at times…

2 – It’s a way of indicating the temperament and inclinations of Monsters. This goes to easily understand their likely attitudes towards society, property, other races and even each other. It could indicate their readiness to kill, injure and enslave people although not necessarily their immediate hostility to others.  This is where people get their undergarments all bent out of shape. I don’t really get this – given that Humans are given as generally Lawful Good and we are demonstrably not all Lawful Good. We are talking, after all, about the behaviours of fantasy species that don’t exist in the real world and whose attitudes and behaviour are alien to us by definition. I think it’s rather arrogant to suggest they should behave according to current human social preferences. I am proudly “woke” by the way, as are most of our players.

So that gets us into a rant. Nope, sorry, don’t talk to me about modelling the right behaviour. How do we train people to deal with adversity? It’s as 1984 as any other extreme view.  MORE IMPORTANTLY, what effect does alignment have on the game?

It’s a social lubricant; stereotypes, while always wrong, do help us manage in a world full of contradictory rules and habits. Dig deeper into any social group and you’ll find no one really conforms to the stereotype, ever, if you dig deep enough. If you get into that kind of interaction it’s up to the DM to come up with some variance on the standard to make it interesting. That’s down to the skill of the DM.

How do we implement Alignment on Barnaynia?

Alignment, like behaviour, is often said to be a choice – we don’t subscribe to that ideal. People often claim that behaviour, particularly bad behaviour, is a choice. It simply isn’t. From the day we are born we are subject to social pressures, social engineering and indoctrination. Society and other forms of conditioning, not choice, determine our core behaviours and values. If you don’t agree, read up on Pavlov’s Dog. Changing those values is difficult, uncomfortable and often puts us at odds with those around us. Most in society think those values are perfectly right and proper and will resist any attempt to change them. Societal change is VERY difficult, takes a long time and old habits die very, very hard indeed. So it is with Alignment in Barnaynia.

Alignment in Dunromin is more of a philosophy of life than a constraining doctrine. People can change alignment although it is difficult and damaging, at least socially and professionally, although we haven’t gone as far as describing this in the Guides published so far.

On a rules basis, the Alignment system provides guidelines for the characters with special abilities; the Paladin must behave in a certain way or lose all their powers, same for a Cleric, Monk or Druid, as these powers require a certain subservience to nature or a deity that they lose if they change alignment. A Ranger becoming non-good becomes a normal Fighter. Likewise, the Assassin will behave in a certain way or lose their powers, but how does that work without a supernatural power being responsible for their class benefits? Well, if they develop a conscience, for instance, they become morally uncomfortable with killing for money and no longer use their powers. This kind of ‘choice’ based self-limitation might not sit well with a player who wants to be Lawful Neutral but still kill things with a single stab. Tough. With that alignment you don’t feel it is right, any more, to use those kinds of techniques.

This implies that a character of one of the other classes can change Alignment as and when they choose without penalty. Not so.

Firstly, the character must have a reason for changing, a good reason. A long debate with a person who convinces them of the error of their ways; a conversion to a new religion or a rejection of an existing one; a significant life event that has made them re-evaluate their lives. It is unlikely that they have always felt this way and are just opening up – if this were the case the new alignment should have been their alignment all along and they should have been pretending, which makes no sense. For Player Characters at least; why roll that character if it’s not what you wanted to play in the first place?

Secondly, they must make the change plain to those around them. This will likely alienate friends, family and normal society. People will avoid the character and accuse them of having “changed” which of course they have. Some people might attack them verbally or even physically. The reaction should be similar to someone in the modern world joining a cult or changing their core religion.

Thirdly, the character will lose some levels. This is a game mechanic only to discourage playing fast and light with the rules and changing everything on a whim, but could be explained as a change in philosophy affecting the fundamental way the character interacts with the world (for a Fighter or Thief) or with the Cosmos (for a Magic-User). The number of levels lost is up to the DM but the rule of thumb we use is based on severity of the change; each “step” on the alignment chart is a penalty of losing a level (or losing 1d4 levels if you wish). Lawful Good to Neutral Good is one step, LG to CE is 4 steps – no diagonals. Loss affects all classes if Multi-classed.

Also, we don’t have alignment languages. I think we did away with these pretty much the same week we started playing AD&D, maybe even when we were playing the Moldovay Basic rules back in 1981 (although I can’t remember if Basic has alignment languages?). They just make no sense to us.

That’s our ten-cents. The rules given are ideas to adopt or reject as you like. The philosophy behind them is our, primarily my, current take on the situation. This may be a grenade in the social-media of your choice but it’s not intended that way. We are NOT telling you how you should think.

This delightful little beastie popped up on one of our Facebook feeds this week and it struck us that such a brilliant and useful idea should be circulated to a wider audience.  We would like to thank Vince Garcia, Admin of the “1st Edition AD&D” Facebook page, for his generosity in allowing us to post this.  We have tweaked his original details a bit slightly to clarify some elements and localise it to Barnaynia.  If you like the original Matrix film, you’ll love this…

Dreamweaver.

Frequency: Very rare.
No. appearing: 1 to thousands.
AC: 8  (AAC 11).
Movement: 6”
HD: 1 hit point.
% in lair: 100%.
Treasure type: Nil.
No. of attacks: 1.
Damage/attack: Special.
Special attacks: Phantasmal dream.
Special defences: Nil.
Magic resistance: Standard.
Intelligence: High.
Alignment: Lawful Evil.
Size: S.
Psionic ability: Nil.
Attack/defence modes: Nil.

These are a very special form of psionic arachnids, though their psionic powers are not typical.  No one knows where they come from.  One theory is that they spring forth from the spider goddess called “Arachne” in the Wild Lands; another that they enter Barnaynia from Queen Mab’s Fey realm or some similar Fey place, possibly in the same breech that gave us the Bookahs (see SM02 for more details).  Whatever the case, they are some of the most unique - and potentially deadly - denizens Adventurers might encounter.  Dreamweavers resemble black widow spiders but with grey-blue stars on their backs rather than the red markings.

They will only be found in some sort of dense woodland, often Fey, giving some credence to their being tied to Mab.  Small colonies have been known, very rarely, to survive in more civilised rural areas but they seem to prefer more remote locations, possibly because their psychic sensitivity to intelligent creatures gets swamped by too many minds around them.  They have never been known to exist in villages, towns or cities and sages investigating them say they die quickly in captivity.

During daylight hours they will often, but not always, hide high in the trees or rest in their webbing. This webbing, when large colonies fashion it, can extend over large swaths of forest land even if some parts lack spiders living in it. It is invisible or unnoticed most of the time, as it resembles the fine network of normal spiderweb and is generally not on the lower branches of the trees in clear sight.  It is very visible shortly after dawn or in misty conditions when dew or mist condenses on the fronds.

The web seems to form a sort of network or Telepathic Field permitting the spiders to communicate with each other and also detect intelligent creatures passing beneath.  The signals sent around the web will draw the Dreamweavers to the intruders and the spiders will then follow the targets and wait for them to encamp for the night.  If the victims stray outside of the webbed area the Dreamweavers, or some of them, may follow them as long as they remain in the woodland.  Once the targets are resting and sleeping then the monsters will enact their abilities, and their game will begin.

The spiders, possibly using the webs as a telepathic enhancer to focus their power on their intended targets, cast a powerful phantasmal dream spell that transports the minds of the targets into a Dream Realm that the spiders have constructed for them.  The enchantment automatically affects those asleep. Those that are awake must save vs. Spells each round until they fail and nod off, whereupon they are put into a trance and then all enter the same dream state at the same point.  Those that save will realise they are under some kind of magical attack but those already asleep and dreaming will have to pass a saving throw against spells at a penalty of -2 on the dice to be awoken by even violent shaking.

Once the whole group are under the spell they all will awaken in the Dream Realm the spiders have created for them. This may start where they fell asleep or they will awaken someplace completely different but will always involve a specific task or goal being apparent to them. This is because the spiders will have scanned their minds and, using things familiar to the characters, will construct some sort of scenario to put them through. It may be short, it may be long; it may be simple or intricate.  In real time, it will last only a few hours and will end at dawn.  In dream time, it could last days or weeks.

Why the spiders do this is unknown although it is suspected that the Dreamweavers benefit in some way from the psychological trauma the victims experience. But what is known is that they delight in their victims being slain in these phantasmal scenarios. The only guess is that they view it as a sort of chess game, with various groups of them playing different roles, or constructing different portions of the quest to challenge each other and hopefully overcome those subjected to the trial.

Curiously, they seem to apply a strict regime of rules as to how dangerous they can make the Dream Worlds they create.  For instance, they do not subject their victims to impossible odds.  One theory is that this would break the rules of the contest the Dreamweavers are having between them.  Thus, 1st level adventurers subjected to such a night-time attack would never face an adult red dragon, but might face orcs or goblins, or perhaps simple traps or skeletons.  The complexity and interaction of the setting is also limited to being “fair” in a pretty loose sense of the word.

Those who die in these phantasmal encounters die in real life.  Any comrades who survive will find their friend(s) lying dead when they awaken.

The one benefit to survivors is that they gain experience, as they are living the experience as real it involves genuine risk to their life, although they do not retain any magic items or other physical treasure gained.  They will suffer the consequences of any mental trauma they experience in the Dreamworld (insanity for instance, or loss of Wis, Int or Cha) once they escape but any physical harm will simply not be present on their bodies when they awake.

At the completion of their challenge or at dawn the Dreamworld will dissolve and the characters will return to their sleeping forms about their camp-fires.  The Dreamweavers themselves will then retreat back into the treetops.  It is not known if these monsters would ever attack the same group twice.

As there may be so many Dreamweavers engaged in the attack it could be impossible to kill them all. Occasionally only a single specimen may be encountered, however, targeting a lone individual.  Druids with the appropriate alliances (e.g. Rhiannic Druids) can Turn the spiders as Zombies, affecting the whole swarm if successful.

While they have no treasure in their lairs, the remains of any victims may be found scattered through the woodland and still have their valuables with them as the spiders have no ability to loot them.

As a point of interest, Dreamspinner’s Book of Dungeons makes use of the Essence of these spiders to work its magic.

When we at Dunromin University Press read this monster description our imaginations were fired up by the possibilities of this monster.  We had a bit of a brain-storm and have the following ideas to share with you:

• Woodlands where Dreamweavers are known to be will be avoided by intelligent groups in the area.  Certain malicious humanoid groups may even tell tall stories about treasures and enchantments in the woods, intending to come in and loot the characters’ bodies in daylight, after the Spiders have worked their magic.  If the characters are a problem for some cunning enemy then it might be arranged that rumours or maps come into the party’s knowledge describing the wealth contained in the “Enchanted Woodlands”
• The dungeons/adventures that the characters find themselves in may not have any logical or rational form.  It could be an improbable zoo-dungeon style or a series of encounters located impossibly close together.
• All kinds of wondrous magical items and creatures might be present and useful to the party, knowing that the DM will not have to deal with the long-term issues of having to cope with a player with powerful magic.
• If you have a low-power group and want them to be a higher level for an adventure you have planned, then this is the perfect encounter for them to have along the way; it gives them experience without any long-term issues in terms of powerful items or serious injuries.
• If, during their time in the Dream Realm, any players start to suggest that things feel very wrong don’t confirm or deny this but give them extra experience for spotting it.  In such circumstances characters might try all kinds of things to see if they can break the spell, which you may or may not allow (probably not).  Characters may even try killing themselves, thinking this will release them from the enchantment – try and discourage this.
• If any characters are killed then, in the normal sequence of events, they will roll up a new character.  How this new character gets into the Dreamworld is another problem but not an insurmountable one.  The remaining characters might easily find the character as a prisoner in the realm, perhaps believing they have been captured by a Dryad and have been there for hundreds of years.  If the characters escape then the new character will merely “wake up” some distance from the rest of the party, where they fell under the Dreamweavers’ enchantment that same night.

As you can see, we think this is a brilliant monster idea and we very much appreciate Vince Garcia’s generosity in allowing us to share it with you.

There are more ideas and Fey Beasts for your consideration in our publications SM02 The Games Master’s Guide to Dunromin and SM05 The World Guide to Barnaynia.

While we at Dunromin University Press are not fans of unquestioned practices established in less enlightened times, calendars, years and times of celebration are always interesting.

So, what of 2022?

Well, it’s been our most successful year to date and more and more people are giving us positive feedback about the content we offer.  It’s great to hear how people are using the resources in so many varied ways to augment their own RP experiences as well as using the setting as-is.  The dungeons seem to be the most popular so we are focusing our efforts in that area for the New Year; well, some of our efforts.  The World of Barnaynia game setting isn’t 100% complete but it never really will be.  There’s more than enough to use and lots of room for others to build on it so there’s enough there to achieve what we set out to do.  And anyway, writing and play-testing dungeons is fun!

On a personal level 2022 has probably been more positive than previous years, slightly, on balance.  The cost of living crisis is a concern for everyone and the consequences of other disastrous events and decisions by people in power rumble on.  Old age is biting and Simon for one is suffering from uncomfortable ailments at both end of his alimentary canal.  BUT! Some crises we predicted didn’t happen, or proved less of an issue than we thought, so that was nice.

Our conversion of all the products we have to Print On Demand was fraught but successful – DriveThruRPG were very helpful in this regard and we cannot recommend Affinity Publisher highly enough in terms of the flexibility required.  Of course, flexibility comes with complexity and we are still on a very steep learning curve with the package, as we still are with GIMP – our design package of choice.  To celebrate this great achievement we have produced a discounted bundle of the new versions of the PDFs of the core Dunromin game-setting publications; nearly 40% off list price!

For the Future!

As stated, more scenarios are planned, although production rates are slowed as we all catch up with Real Life after the efforts of the POD conversions.  The first out of the blocks are likely to be The Orc Battleforge; The Pit of Panza and The Tomb of Firkin (probably not in that order) but they are all in very early development and still only hand-written at the moment.

We have also decided to produce versions of our core settings for 5th Edition D&D under the OGL.  We have avoided this so far as we are not really very familiar with the system and are nervous of the OGL and its stipulations.  But now we think that we should stop being such miserable Grognards and get into the party (a bit late, probably, given the approach of one-D&D, or whatever it’s called…).

The second and third books of the Chronicles of Gavin, our FREE fantasy novels based in and around Dunromin, are still in progress – cover art being the slowest element to be completed…

What will be out sooner and we think is the most exciting project is The Eternal Victim by Patrick Knight-Bridges.  This represents a bit of a departure for us as it is a high fantasy/horror set of fiction books more likely to appeal to the mature reader due to graphic content.  The writer, Patrick Knight-Bridges, is a new name to everyone here but we love his work and hope you do too.  We are aiming to get this out through Amazon as an e-book, so watch this space.

Lots of ideas, not enough time, as always.

But we remain loyal to our roots: We do this for the love, not for the money, as illustrated by our tiny profit margins. Dunromin University Press remains determined to produce interesting, fun, useful and top value products for all kinds of FRPG enthusiasts of all levels, ages and systems.

Happy New Year randomised time interval renewal everyone!

Day 10 – What was the first game you DMed?

Well, as has been recorded, Wakey and Ribes got me to try D&D in Summer 1979 I think, but nothing much happened for a few months cos I lived at the other end of town.  I got the Red Basic set for Christmas and the first thing I DMed was Keep on the Borderlands for my friend Mark Crossley, who lived around the corner.  Great fun was had and we made every error in the book.  Looking back now I can smile at our deeply ingrained fear of Ogres generated from that first adventure.

I got the Expert Set soon after and then bought the DMG for 1st Ed AD&D as I had seen it in the shop.  I don’t think I really understood the significance of the two different games at the time but I loved the Magic Items and Mark and my characters (we both had characters, even though I was DMing) were soon equipped with Girdles of Storm Giant Strength and Gauntlets of Ogre Power.  I then got the PHB and the first ed Deities and Demigods with the Cthulhu Mythos in it.  Not the standard order in which to buy the books but we were still playing Basic-Expert really and making it up as we went along…  The Companion Rules just didn’t seem to appear when we needed them so we had to improvise.

I shifted to being a player when I joined another group, Moog’s D&D group born of adolescent tantrums and such.  That was 1st edition AD&D proper and I never really went back, although I still admire the simplicity and speed of BECMI as it has become.

Playing this kind of anarchic way suited us and after Moog moved away I took over as DM again and kind of stayed that way for years, although others ran other games and I even played in Wakey’s AD&D for a short while before we switched to Odyssey; his own game and still one of the best I have ever played.

It was at this time that some characters we had been playing for some time were starting to get to VERY high level.  No, really, higher than that…  We called it Mega D&D and it was mainly just Neill Ford and myself.  It was very silly, really very, very silly indeed.  Deities and Demigods became a Monster Manual, except the Gods weren’t tough enough so we multiplied their levels and hit points by a factor of ten.  By this time our characters were immortals themselves and were level 600 or something.  Yes, it was broken, but we kept making up stuff to keep it interesting and generating mega-villains to fight and we were only 14 or 15; it was just brilliant fun.  And no, I haven’t read the Immortals set, although I bought a pdf of it – I should get around to reading it.

When I went to University of Central Lancashire (Lancashire Polytechnic as it was then) in September 1986 I joined the SciFi and Fantasy Society and a whole new journey started.  Ray Jennings was running the game I joined, which was great fun too, but when Rag Week came around in Spring 1987 it was decided to play a 72-hour endurance RPG session.  We had three groups ready to play and players could flit between them or rotate DMs.  There was a Traveller table Roger was running and an AD&D table.  I can’t remember what the other was…  Ray was originally going to do the D&D but he wasn’t able to for some reason, so I volunteered to run a new AD&D campaign for the first stint.  As it transpired I ended up running the whole thing.  I think I only had a 3 hour break to play a bit of Traveller (besides the 5 minute an hour rests we were allowed under Guinness Records rules, which we could add up).

Noon on the first day and we all rolled up characters.  Unfortunately, everyone rolled evil characters except one Ranger, run by Craig Tooke.  They immediately started a row and had a fight.  Only the Ranger survived.  Much hilarity.  So, they all re-rolled Good-ish characters and they set about the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh.  Some loot and experience was gained and they walked to the nearest city to do some training.  Being very tired by this time things were getting woozy.  Some mad city-based capers ensued, part of the city got burnt down, a party member narrowly avoided getting hung for something unrelated and other things happened but memory fails me save for fleeting images; Taff soaking himself in deodorant to quell his "pheromones"; Adrian pulling off the most perfect piece of role-play that is, alas, unprintable; Pete ranting (just ranting, a lot); Frog falling asleep under the table and lots and lots of laughter.  I do recall someone asking what the name of the city was and I replied “Dunromin”, knowing it was the name of a house built by a retired couple I used to deliver newspapers to.  It seemed appropriate.  It all started there…

The concept of the World being banana shaped arose later in the same session – on the last day just after dawn as I recall.  It was a momentous time to be alive…

For some time now, we have been trying to get our various publications on Print on Demand.  It’s been more of a struggle than we anticipated BUT we have FINALLY done it!

Printed copies of the core books SM00 through SM05 are available in hard-copy; some in softback but all in hardback and they are DREAMY!  The POD function that DriveThruRPG offer is excellent quality; the hard covers are smooth, beautifully printed and robust.  The contents clear and bound well, making the text easy to follow and the pictures quite delightful.

And we’ve thought carefully about what’s in it for YOU, our customer…

We decided that we needed to offer something to make people interested in actually upgrading to the new printed copies rather than the old PDFs but at the same time didn’t want to make the existing PDFs that are in circulation obsolete.  What we have arrived at is a pretty good deal for everyone.

The Second Edition versions of the books all include new content, particularly in the case of the Players and GM’s Guides to Dunromin and the World Guide to Barnaynia.  There’s new monsters and magic items, new cultures and civilisations, a new character class (the Navigator) and a whole new section on Poisons and their effects.  We’ve also re-worked the Witch so it’s a proper character class rather than a sort of hobby.

All this content is now available in the PDF download and the printed copies of the books – all the printed copies include a FREE copy of the PDF as well by the way because, well, why not?

If you have already purchased the PDF copy of the first editions and feel a bit short-changed due to not getting the new Second Edition goodies FEAR NOT!  Existing customers can download the PDF of the Second Edition versions of the books they have already bought FREE OF CHARGE!  Although we hope you’ll look at getting yourself one of the hard copies too – somehow there’s nothing like flicking through a physical rule-book, possibly with your own personalised notes in the margins.  Plus those matching spines look cool on the old bookshelf.

Sorry it’s taken us so long to get here!

People have been asking for hard copies for a long time and it’s something we always wanted to add to the original offering but setting everything up has proved a LOT more difficult and time-consuming than expected.  As you probably realise, we are all hobbyists ourselves with “proper” jobs as well and family and real lives that get in the way of everything Dunromin-related.  This means that everything always takes a while anyway!

First, we had to get the books into a PDF form that was of sufficient quality for Print on Demand.  Easy eh?  After all, a pdf is a pdf, right?

Wrong.  We were whipped and beaten by the software for our naivete and quickly realised we would have to skill up on Desktop Publishing in haste.  I must say, DriveThruRPG themselves have been FANTASTIC as regards supporting us through the process and have been very patient and enthusiastic throughout.

We had a bit of a false start with Scribus as the desk-top publishing app we would use.  It’s a brilliant package for a freebie but we found it difficult to learn and the output wasn’t getting to the quality we needed so, after about a year of faffing about with it, we abandoned the idea.

On the recommendation of a friend we switched to Affinity Publisher, which involved spending money (yipes!) although we lucked out and happened upon a special offer and got it for about thirty quid.  Nice.  Then we had to learn how to use it.  Being pretty IT savvy and most of us working or having worked in the IT industry we are pretty good at learning new packages.  Plus, there are loads of “how-to” vids on YouTube too.  We started work on SM00 first as it was the smallest publication and a sensible one to start with.  We hit some problems pretty quickly as some of the maps looked bad in the new format so we re-drew all the temples, which was kind of fun but took more time.  We used GIMP for this and are really pleased with the outcome.  All our maps are done on GIMP these days.

After a few attempts and some great help from DriveThruRPG we got SM00 done and ready.  This was about 2 years ago, in the pits of Covid.  As we started work on the other books it quickly became apparent that there was still a lot of work to do.  Plus, we began to realise that just moving the existing work onto POD didn’t really do our customers much benefit.  We decided to add content to all the books and call the new versions the second edition (as described above).

This meant there was a whole new flurry of work (and delays) on writing, proof-reading and illustrating the new stuff, but it was fun to do.  The new content is great and, we think, useful and relevant.  We hope you like it!

Now the page count was getting pretty high, which puts up costs, which is something we always try to avoid – we are about value as well as quality.  So, we decided to decrease the font size to 11 points and narrow the margins to get more print on the page.  This works well and got the page count for SM01, SM02 and SM05 down below 300 pages again.  Phew!

It’s been a hell of a ride, very frustrating at times, and it has DEFINITELY taken longer than we had hoped, BUT it’s here!

As you read this the printed versions of the first five books should be on DriveThru’s website and available for purchase.  The other books will follow suit soon as well, Mirt’s Folly is first, hopefully with some extra content too – along with a bit of re-writing to address some issues that have come to light since the original publication.  ENJOY!

And let us know what you think by commenting here, reaching out to us or leaving a review on DriveThruRPG

The efforts towards a Print on Demand strategy that has been ongoing for SOOOOOO long is resolved; through the purchase of Affinity Publisher.  This excellent package, although resource hungry (creaky old laptop struggling to cope), allows us to finally re-work our products into a form that is good enough for the exacting requirements of modern print technologies.  So far, we have reworked SM00 The Atlas of Dunromin and the Land of the Young and got it printed in hard-back and full colour.  It looks fabulous!  The print quality from Drive Thru RPG is simply Gorgeous.

So, the plan is to re-work SM01 and SM02; the Players’ and GM’s Guides next, and get them out and ready so they can be bought in hardback too.  The three new versions will be launched together, hopefully in the next month or so.

Of course, this means that existing customers might feel a bit left out so we are adding extra content to both books and updating the information in them.  This includes reworking the Witch as a proper character class, adding more monsters, NPCs and such as well as updating and elaborating on some of the city information.  We have also reduced the font size to 11 so that we can keep the page-count down, although it’s still well over 200 for both books.  Don’t worry, this second edition pdf will be free to everyone who has already got the first edition pdfs.

Judging by comments on various forums, people don’t like paying extra for the pdf if they’ve bought the print copy so the pdfs will be free with the print copies too.

What to do next is tricky.  We have a number of plans in mind as well as prepping the Print on Demand versions of all the current products so selecting a priority is hard:

• Reworking all the other books for POD will probably be first,
• We have two more scenarios in the pipeline following on from the amazing success of Under Mirt’s Folly.  These will be the Pit of Panzar and The Orc Battleforge but are likely not to be available until Christmas.
• The second book in our Dunromin novels; the Chronicles of Gavin is in editing.  If you fancy trying the first for size, here’s a link to the FREE download on a previous blog.
• The Book of Legends was well received as a resource for all kinds of ideas and is mostly stand-alone and so can be used with anything; we are planning another, similar resource, probably called Unfinished Tales…
• In the slightly longer term, we would love to rework everything for fifth edition D&D, although it’s probably more realistic to aim for sixth edition now!

Lots happening – but slowly given that we have real lives as well…

If you have any thoughts, comments suggestions or requests please don’t hesitate to get in touch via the contact page or through the Dunromin University Press Facebook page (yes, I know, but we are pretty old and simply can’t make time to get down with the youths on other Social Networking packages…  Sorry).

Special release pricing of less than THREE BUCKS until the end of the month!  (Normal price $4.99)

Mirt the Long Flame was a mighty wizard of years gone by.  He fell in love, so the story goes, with a beautiful Goddess.

Using all his powers he built his true-love a temple and a pleasure palace with the intention of making her his wife.  On midsummer’s eve he bent all his powers to calling her down to him, luring her to our world with the sweetest compliments and tempting gifts.  After several hours of calling, she appeared and he proposed to her, explaining the wonderful life together he had planned for them.

She was not amused...

The blasted remains of the temple and the derelict palace, all made from the finest white marble, are all that remains of Mirt’s crazy ambitions.  The abandoned ruins are now known by all now as Mirt’s Folly.

Of course, the anger of a mighty Goddess leaves deep scars in the landscape.  A hundred years later the hill, despite being in civilised lands, remains an abandoned place of strange magic.  It is the haunt of ghosts and monsters and all who go there return changed, fearful and anxious, if they return at all.  No one knows the nature of the Curse of Mirt’s Folly and few desire to find out.

But Mirt was a great mage!?  His powerful magic items and his many books of spells and research have never been found, not to mention the vast wealth he had accumulated.  All this amazing loot must still be up there, in the ruins of the palace, or perhaps below it, in the catacombs he is said to have dug there.

But who is brave enough, or foolish enough, to go and look?

Under Mirt’s Folly is the latest production from Dunromin University Press.  As with all our supplements, Under Mirt’s Folly represents astonishing value, offering excellent quality and quantity at rock-bottom prices:

• A challenging scenario for a party of 4-8 characters of levels 5-8;
• Written for OSRIC, OSR, 1st and 2nd Edition D&D and compatible with pretty much ANY FRPG you fancy;
• More than 100 pages with over 250 encounter locations over 8 levels;
• Four wandering monster tables;
• A Rumour Table to inform and confuse;
• New and inventive uses of all kinds of Monsters;
• Tantalising new Magic Items;
• Tricks, traps and treasure enough to make any player salivate!

And all this for a special launch price of less than THREE BUCKS until the end of the month!

Most players of Fantasy Role Playing games like Dungeons and Dragons will have wondered what it might be like to wake up one day in their games, free to explore the worlds of their imagination with swords, magic and monsters.

For Gavin and his friends this ultimate fantasy came true.  They found themselves in the bodies of their in-game characters, armed with magical weapons and spells, ready for adventure.

Not only that, but Gavin had been the Dungeon Master in the real world and knew where all the traps were and how to find the best treasure.  They were living the dream!

But the dream became a nightmare.

Gavin’s friends were slaughtered by an unexpected band of monsters and Gavin came to realise he was trapped and alone among the Frap people of the strange city state of Skull Crag in Barnaynia; a frightening world of supernature, secret cults, terrifying monsters and wars without end.

He fell into a hopeless and depressed state, until one day he happened to overhear a conversation between some sailors at the docks; sailors speaking English!

The sailors had come from the far-off city of Dunromin, capital of the Land of the Young, where everyone speaks English and not Frapper, as they do in Skull Crag.  They tell him of a city of warriors, wizards and wonders beyond count!

Gavin immediately resolves to journey to the city of Dunromin to find out more

But he is barely in the city two days before he finds himself trapped in a deadly mystery where a sharp wit is more use than a sharp sword.

DOWNLOAD FOR FREE HERE!

The attached pdf is the first book in a series of stories we have planned for free publication.  The idea is to offer a bit of entertainment, stimulation and do some advertising as well.  It's free to download, no strings attached.  Share and Enjoy!

And if you are a big Hollywood producer and want to talk Film Rights, you can reach us through the website! ;-)

At the start of my role-playing career we didn’t have music; we were 11-13 years old and simply didn’t have the money or the access to much music.  As we got older we variously obtained tape players or “Ghetto Blasters” as they were called in the early eighties, all unconscious of any implied prejudice, and the era of the cassette tape was upon us.  C-90 tapes with various albums on each side started making the rounds and these were inevitably played in the background while we played.

My friend Dave Chapman ran Star Frontiers for us, and later Star Wars and Ghostbusters amongst others.  He played all sorts of pop that he liked, Blondie was popular but his fandom of Frankie Goes to Hollywood meant that Welcome to the Pleasure Dome was a staple.  Whenever I hear the opening bass riff of that album I am transported back to his back room and endless fun silliness.

My own D&D (1st ed) sessions were themed by my passions at the time; U2, Big Country, Eurhythmics, the Who, the Smiths, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Ultravox and so on, but above all; Echo and the Bunnymen.  Lots of Echo and the Bunnymen.  Their fourth album, Ocean Rain, came out at about this time, which is brilliant, but my favourite was Porcupine.  I still often play this wonderful soundscape when writing scenarios – I am reminded of sitting in my parent’s house doing the same thing, listening to my elder brother’s vinyl copy on my parents’ stereo.  It was a time of deep contentment.

As we got older, fashions of the post punk era diversified but we found ourselves drawn to gothic genre and the harder, more rocky stuff.  At Dave’s, the staples moved on to the Sisters of Mercy, All About Eve (he does like his fey ladies) and the Mission.  All of which started to appear at my sessions too, and we were also into The Cult, Husker Du, the Sex Pistols, Sound Garden, Nirvana, Screaming Trees, Pearl Jam and so on.  Our tastes widened even more when most of us went to college, bringing back all sorts at holidays, although more time was spent at the pub than rolling dice in those days.

My oldest friend, John Sewell, was my dealer when it came to new music.  His broad and eclectic tastes from listening to John Peel and the like drip-fed me the choicer elements of what was going on then: The Godfathers, Ride, the Snapdragons, Stone Roses and the bizarre Colour-Blind James Experience.  John has always been a bit left-field in music.  Dave was getting more industrial Goth by this time: Stabbing Westward, Korn, Bush, Perfect Circle, Ministry and then, via Marilyn Manson, to Nine Inch Nails, where his passions remain to this day.

By this time music had become a vital part of our role-playing experience.  The D&D group I ran at college, with whom Dunromin and Barnaynia was created, gathered for all-night games once a week in 1986-9.  These were crazy times and the soundtrack was more Sisters of Mercy, Metallica, The Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen, Depeche Mode, Siouxsie and the Banshees and everything Goth I had copied off Dave.

It was at this time that I began consciously selecting music for the atmosphere I wanted.  I had a suitably large collection by then, hundreds of C90s, and even some CDs.  I had also invested in a really good stereo that could get brilliant bass and high definition at the low volume that was required so as not to interfere with the role-playing but enhance it.  And enhance it the music did.

My friend Tony Warrington ran the Masks of Nyarlothep for Call of Cthulhu for us and his choice of music played a big part in creating the atmosphere.  Tony brought along the soundtrack from the Last Emperor and the ethereal, far-eastern vibes were perfect.  Low light, candles and the music made for an atmosphere of creeping horror, week after week.  It remains one of my favourite role-playing memories.

This was an important lesson – film soundtracks and instrumentals lend themselves far more readily to setting the scene for your role-playing experience.  As I have got older I have realised that vocals, especially if unfamiliar, can be a little bit of a distraction.  Soundtracks are perfect – they are, after all, specifically  designed to add atmosphere without swamping the dialogue.  Dave Chapman played the Crow soundtrack a lot, but this is probably not a brilliant example of what I am getting at here.

In more recent years I have fallen in love with Dead Can Dance, specifically In the Realm of a Dying Sun, Spleen and Ideal, Spiritchaser and Aeion, but pretty much anything is lovely for a Celtic-medieval, sinister vibe.  The Lord of the Rings Soundtrack is cool too but the well-known bits can be distracting and have a habit of popping up at inappropriate times – the last thing you want playing when the party confront the BBEG is some happy Hobbit dance music coming through the speakers…

And it seems that I am not alone – reading through all the threads about gaming music that are out there the common themes that emerge are heavy metal, predictably perhaps, but also lots of atmospheric stuff – particularly the epic rock of the early seventies; all that sweeping synth stuff about elves and goblins seems ideal for most folks.  Which is cool, although not my bag; my seventies scene was the punk scene, thanks to my elder brother and his more rebellious influences.

But if that is your bag, take a look at the Facebook group 1st Edition AD&D.  John Scott does regular items about what he’s listening to and the band Yes are a regular feature of his games.

But this is just a (long, perhaps too long) lead in to the observation that actually prompted this blog.

As you may be aware, I am a trained educator; specifically, a secondary school and A-Level Science teacher (that’s High School; 11 to 18 years olds for you in the ‘States) and one of the elements of my training resonates here (pardon the pun).

Different people have different learning “styles”; that is there are visual learners, who remember pictures, diagrams, videos and images most clearly; there are kinaesthetic learners, who respond best to actually touching and playing with things, movement and so on; and Auditory learners, who pick up best on sounds, voices and so on.  In fact, few people are entirely one kind of learner or the other, most people are a blend of different types (I am unusual in that my responses are the same to all sorts; I don’t have an outstanding type, which may be why I am quite a good communicator).

Since any role-playing group is likely made up of different types of learners the best DM is the one that uses different techniques to appeal to all learner types, whether they consciously realise they are doing so or not.  The great pictures, maps and other visual aids will help the visual learners; mini-figures, dice and so on will appeal to the kinaesthetic learners; and cool character accents and mood music to the auditory learner that is in every one of us to some extent or other.

SO!  Embrace the movie soundtracks, the Celtic meditation sonnets, the folk music, Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Dead Can Dance and all the rest – lots of classical music has an incredible theme and feel to it.  Even a YouTube or Spotify of Whalesong might add an eerily surreal atmosphere to your Drow City…

One word of warning though; some people find music distracting and annoying, sometimes to the extent that it can ruin the experience completely for them, so check with your players that they like it first.  If everyone’s into it then you can REALLY up the intensity of the experience.

In SM01 The Players’ Guide to Dunromin there is a calendar giving a view of the shape of the year (copied above).  This is all well and good but it doesn’t really tell you much about what happens in the city as time ticks along; in this blog I aim to amend that.

Of course, in the passage of most games such things are pretty much irrelevant; Adventurers don’t have a “weekend” and when they are training or resupplying it is generally assumed that the shops and services they need are open and available.  Which is fine.

But what if you REALLY want to immerse yourself in the life of the world setting?  Or maybe mess with their heads and make the simplest tasks frustrating and/or awkward?  What if they can’t get any arrows because all the fletchers are shut on Sitting-Day?  What if the scroll they need copied before the cataclysm is in the scribe’s shop and the scribe is closed so they can take part in the Great Hunt as part of their role in the Celtic Temple?  What if the party member can’t get a Cure Disease because all the temples are closed for the Winter Solstice?  Or maybe the Dunromin natives refuse to leave on an adventure unless it is a Sunday because it is bad luck?

It’s probably irrelevant to most games, but here’s what happens:

The months mark the orbits of the Moon, which follows a figure of eight pattern every seven days above the western end of the planet.  Every four trips around the figure-eight the moon does a double loop around one of the ‘lobes’ of the figure-eight, taking an extra 7 days.  These figure-eights process around marking out a circle in the heavens, taking a half a year to complete a full circle.  Also, the Moon changes phases as it spins, taking 21 days to go from new moon to full to old moon.  The reasons for this are described in SM05 The Worldguide to Barnaynia.

It is these bizarre movements that define the weeks, festivals, months and years, in combination with the Sun’s daily orbit and yearly oscillation from its highest (Midsummer) to its lowest (Midwinter).

While the week, as a standard unit of time, is used throughout the world, the significance and names of the days vary widely.  Likewise, there is no “weekend” and few workers will get a day off, although many stop work or close their shops early on some days, even during festivals.  The names of the days are as follows and are deliberately designed to look familiar.  But be aware that the Dwarves and the Grey Elves do not recognise weeks, as such, and instead have different names for every day of the month.  Gnomes do not celebrate the Festivals apart from the Spring Equinox, but instead just use the extra circular-orbits of the Moon as normal weeks.  Gnomes do take a day off at the start of the month and have many unusual and often inconsistent Holy Days celebrated with knife-fighting.

Moonday is the start of the week in Dunromin, although some religions disagree with this.  It is a Holy Day for the Olympians and is seen as the most favourable day to cast powerful magic – Olympian Clerics will avoid casting spells of 5th level or more on other days if they can avoid it.  Because of the Moon’s association with Magic this is a very important day for the Black Magic Guild and if it is also a full moon they are likely to have quite a party.  The Magic College recognises this as the most important day of the week too and all ceremonies and important meetings there will be scheduled for a Moonday.  There is a tradition among some of the city to not answer the door to visitors on this day, but the origins of this practice are confused.  Followers of the Celtic Temple may paint a white circle on their forehead, or paint their whole face white, or wear a white headscarf or mask on this day, as a symbol of their respect for the Moon.  Many clothiers, cloth-makers and weavers will stop work at Noon, except the Mill.

Two’s Day is the second day of the week and is uniformly recognised as a day of serious business.  This day is not a holy day for any religion and even during festivals it is a day when celebrations are set aside to ensure the necessary work has been don.  It is the first day of the Festival Fayre (see below).  Schools and colleges, including the Great Library and the library at the Magic College, close on this day to allow the students to help their family businesses.  For the (non-grey) Elves this is a day of significance and many traditional elves will fast on this day from midnight to midnight.  In the Circus this is also known as Dog Night as in the evening a circular track is marketed out for dog racing and a pit for fighting dogs or bear-baiting is opened.  Big racing events will be scheduled for this day, including horse racing in Shantytown.

Odin’s Day is a holy day for the Norse temple and, since the Royal Family are Norse worshippers, this is the name of the day most commonly used.  The Norse belief is that this is a day for important meetings and big decisions, a fashion copied by many merchant groups.  The City Counsel meet on this day every week and it is the day when Baron’s pay their tributes; that is on the Odin’s day closest to the anniversary of their being made a Baron.  The Celts call it Hunting Day and it is their tradition to only eat venison, hare or similar meat and no farmed produce on this day, only hunted or gathered foodstuffs.  Most of Dunromin also refer to it as Wedding Day as it is traditional to get married on this day among the Norse, Babylonians, Heliopeans, Olympians and several minor Cults.  Boatyards, Carters, Blacksmiths and Farriers do not work on this day.

Thor’s Day is also named by the Norse and it is a day for celebrating.  Most Norse worshippers will visit the temple on this day and get drunk in the evening, or at least celebrate something or other.  The Celts, Heliopeans, Olympians, Babylonians and non-humans see nothing special about this day.  All fish shops, slaughterhouses, meat shops and butchers will close at noon on this day.  The afternoon is the time when serious spectator events are held at the Circus.  Although there are plays, minor fights and gambling events there most days, this day of the week is a time when high-stakes fights are fought or exotic beasts are pitched against each other.

Known as Fish Day or For Selling Day, this day is always a Market Day across the Land of the Young.  While most towns and the city have the markets open almost every day, on this day things are particularly busy in the city as it is the day when local villagers and specialist suppliers travel into the city to buy and sell things not available to them locally.  Like Twos Day this day is also maintained by the Merchants’ Guild as a business day for all members and no Trades Guild in the city is allowed to make this as a day of rest.  It is traditional for Norse and Celts to eat fish on this day too and the tradition of frying fish on open grills and eating them with deep-fried potato slices and mashed peas is common all across the city on this day.  As a result, this day is most commonly known as Fryday.

For The Sitting Day there is a tradition of spending time with the young and the elderly and of being peaceful.  Any trade involving weapons or fighting (armourers, weaponsmiths, the Fighters’ Guild and the combative sports in the Circus) will not work or do business on this day.  All schools and colleges will close at noon and apprentices are usually given the afternoon off.  The evening meal for most citizens will be a time of gathering for stories and exchanging news, often followed or mixed with visiting the Inn.  In good weather neighbours and even entire streets will have their evening meal together in the open air.  Jewellers, money-changers and the like will close at noon.  The Babylonians see this day as holy and will fast from dawn until dusk, meeting at the temple for a ceremony after dark.  For the Olympians this is the Day of Legends and they will all wear a head-scarf or wreath of some kind, the evening being a time of stories and wine, or quiet contemplation.

Sunday is generally regarded as the last day of the week and is traditionally a time of endings and farewells.  Journeys begun on a Sunday are seen as blessed in the Norse and Celtic belief systems.  The Heliopean religion will always schedule burials for this day if possible and it is a time for many to visit the graves of family and friends.  The day of the Sun is recognised by all the main temples although the Olympians call it Apollosday.  For the Babylonians it is a holy day and no Babylonian cleric may work on this day, only meet in the temple for prayers and chanting from dawn until dusk.  Many shops will close at noon on a Sunday, many bakers and similar businesses will be closed all day.

Thus, most weeks are the same, even during festivals, for the working classes.  Those that can afford it might take a day or two off during a Festival Week to celebrate the time in a certain way, but these practices vary from temple to temple and only the pious and wealthy will devote the whole week to them.  Every Festival Week will have a Fayre, starting on the Twos Day and lasting until Fryday, inclusive.  This will mean the markets are open all day and many people will travel in from the villages for buying, selling and various celebrations.  Throughout the Fayre all the temples will have on special events and the Circus will have all kinds of entertainments on.  The King always has a feast on one of the Fayre days to which many important people are invited.  Such feasts involve dancing and singing and so on.  The text italicised in the following is taken from SM01 The Players’ Guide to Dunromin and has been extended on:

The Firefest (Winter Solstice) is associated with the family; the most popular practices are staying at home and spending time sharing family memories and stories, hibernating almost.  Being the deepest winter, this week is usually a time when the city is quieter than normal.  The Lake is almost always frozen slightly at this time of year and there is a tradition for men to joust on sleds across the ice on the Thor’s Day.  Many of the city turn out to watch in the hope of seeing someone fall through the ice and drown or freeze to death.  The King’s Festival Feast of this festival is the smallest of all and includes only the royalty, Guarde captains and guild masters, plus any Barons that are in town.  The Babylonians have a passion for blood sacrifice and many non-human prisoners will be slaughtered in ceremonies on the Sitting Day of this week.  By law these prisoners cannot be natives of the Land of the Young but it is likely some victims may slip through the net…

The Waterfest (Spring Equinox) is a celebration of Spring and delivery from Winter’s clutches.  This usually involves drinking and feasting on the last of the winter’s stores.  A very popular festival among the working classes as it is tradition for most businesses to shut at noon on the Sitting Day and all the people to wash themselves in the lake, baths or the docks, and then clean out their homes.  They will then gather in large groups or families and have a feast as the sun goes down.  It is tradition for the King to organise a Tourney at this festival as well as the feast, the two events happening on the Odin’s Day and Thor’s Day of the week.  The Tournament takes place with jousting in the Upper Market (the cobbles making it most amusing for the spectators) and several melees in the Circus.  The Spring Feast is always called the Spring Ball and is a time for all the society of the city to gather at the Castle (by invite only of course) and generally make matches and such.  The elves and halflings avoid these martial displays and instead gather under the trees to sing and dance together through the early evening and then fall asleep under the stars reciting ancient tales and family legends.  The Heliopeans celebrate the Great Flood at this festival.  At the climax of the Thor’s Day celebrations all the senior members of the Heliopean Temple, as well as some specially chosen minor members, retire to the inner sanctum of the temple for the night to celebrate the creation of the world.  They remain there until dawn and always reappear exhausted but with many temple issues resolved.

Earthfest (the Summer Solstice) is a deeply significant time for all religions as it represents the highest sun and the longest day.  From here on things start to get colder and darker.  It is a time when festivals of self-sacrifice and pious celebration are enacted; long evenings of meditation, journeys to special places for silent vigils and such.  On the Sun Day the King will pass amongst the poor handing out presents to individuals nominated by the Guildmasters for acts of generosity or kindness through the year.  It is expected that all the nations knights and Barons will visit the city this week as well to renew their fealty to the king, many paying their Tribute at this time as well as this is also the week when most suitable warriors are knighted and the children of dead Barons are recognised as the new Baron.  There are feasts in the Castle every night but they are ceremonial affairs with formal speeches and flashy clothes, rather than just eating and drinking, except for the Odin’s Day Feast which is known as the Summer Ball.  At this celebration all the eligible unmarried members of society that are invited can come, escorted by their mother, father or similar, and present themselves to the King.  It sounds very grand but this just means that they parade past the royal family as they arrive; only significant individuals are actually introduced to the King or whoever is substituting for him that year.  All the young men who attend this ball are expected to make themselves available in the local villages for the harvesting over the next few months.  This is organised by the Merchant’s Guild and the University and is generally regarded as hard work but great fun.

The practices of the Airfest (Autumn Equinox) differ most widely.  To some it’s a binge on the stores that won’t survive the winter, for others it’s a solitary time of contemplation and preparation for the harder times ahead.  The graveyard has its largest flood of living visitors at this time, the colder weather keeping down the levels of disease and undead infestation normally associated with the dead.  This is the big festival for the Celtic Temple.  Although the various members will hunt often during the year and sometimes go quite far from the city, this week is when most of the temple and the leading followers head for the hills all together.  They will journey to the Low Moors for the Great Hunt and ride across the moors for several nights seeking something entertaining to hunt – usually stags, humanoids, dire wolves or similar monsters.  For the Olympians the preparation of wine is a large part of the mythology but, given that Dunromin suffers The Curse, those Olympians who can afford it travel southwards to the vineyards to be found there, some even going as far as Loom.  This means the city’s population at this time is probably the lowest, although the working classes can neither afford the time nor the money for these events and will always be working.  As such, the King’s Feast focuses on the Merchanting Classes that remain in the city and it is a prime time for successful businessmen to try and catch the King’s eye and promote their ideas.  For the Babylonian and Heliopean Temples this is a solemn time of year and both temples are mysteriously quiet for the whole week.

As well as these regular festivals there are a number of special occasions tied to every temple and/or social groups as well.  Here are some examples:

Hero’s Day – on the 13th of Sunhigh the Royal Family and the Fighters’ Guild celebrate the achievements of city heroes from history.  The Fighters’ Guild members and the Royal Family take over the Circus for the day and hear stories and plays about the heroes.  Any outstanding efforts or glories achieved that year will also be recognised and suitable rewards given or remembered.

Victory Day – on the 11th of Sunfall the King recognises the defeat of Kzenzakai and the deaths of many of the city at the hands of his beasts.  Widows of warriors slain that day are given alms and the King will visit the memorial in the Upper Market marking the place where Kzenzakai was finally struck down.

The Call of the Wind – on the last day of Brownleaves the Celtic Temple celebrate the glories of the Great Hunt, which would have started in the Airfest Festival and should have been finished by now.  Particularly successful huntsmen and those killed in the hunt will be recognised and celebrated.

Evening of the Swan – on the first day of Sunhigh, the first day after the midsummer festival, the Olympians will all come to the temple and bring gifts for the temple swans, regardless of whether the swans are present at the time or not (they tend to come and go as suits them; while the Temple does feed them, there is no space to swim or roost in the temple grounds).

The Anniversary of the Victory of Gilgamesh – 2nd Greenleaf; the Babylonian temple have a bull fight in the main temple hall, often with several bulls and various naked priests and acolytes armed only with clubs.  It is a very chaotic and dangerous event.  The dead bulls are then jointed and the meat shared among the temple members for a meal that night.  The dead priests are honoured appropriately.

Bloody Sunday – 7th Flowering; the Babylonian men will beat their heads with especially blessed planks of wood for an hour.  Bleeding and feinting are seen as signs of great piety.

The Night of Stone – 20th Fireseek; all the dwarves in the city will sit in their temple and chant the old sagas until midnight.  This is quite a wonderful sound and is followed by riotous drinking.

And so on…

So, there you have it – a glimpse of some of the kinds of things that go on in Dunromin that might serve to add colour and distraction to your campaign.  Those fans of utterly immersive play may wish to continue such practices even while on campaign and the GM is of course free to invent even more special days and ceremonies to the calendar as they see fit.  Dunromin is an extraordinary place so ANYTHING might be going on at any time!

After the mono-maniacal science binge of SM15 - A Scientific Discourse on the Nature of the Universe we have returned to more useful pathways regarding playing aids and scenarios for the Barnaynia World Setting.  SM07 Under Mirt’s Folly is now in production for release in May (we hope).  This is a proper mega-dungeon with well over 200 encounter areas, high quality maps, diagrams and artwork.

As with all Dunromin University Press products SM07 - Under Mirt's Folly is written for the Osric system which makes it completely compatible with 1st and 2nd Edition Dungeons and Dragons and all the fantastic retro-clones that have evolved from that original game, such as, but not limited to: OSR, Pathfinder, Swords and Wizardry, Labyrinth Lord, Castles and Crusades, Hackmaster and so on.  It will also be easily applied to Tunnels and Trolls, Talisanta, BECMI style D&D and later versions of D&D, as well as others, with very little work; probably just a bit of tinkering with the monster stats.

After SM07 we will be turning our attention to SM10 – The Pit of Panzar and SM11 – The Orc Battle Forge, which are both large dungeon complexes bordering on Mega-Dungeons themselves.  In parallel to this SM08 – The Adventurer’s Guide to The Barony of Garibaldi and SM17 – The Book of Lost Tales are being drafted.  This second product, SM17 – The Book of Lost Tales is a GM resource inspired by the success of SM16 - The Book of Legends.  It is intended to contain NPCs, Magic Items and lots of adventure hooks based around cultures of Barnaynia located a long way from Dunromin.

In parallel to all this stuff we also have a short novel based on a character surviving in the World of Barnaynia.  This will be free to download and is a kind of fan-lit work based on the Barnaynian World-Setting, seeking to demonstrate the wonder and flexibility of the place.  Although we still don't have a title, the book is subtitled “Part one of the Chronicles of Gavin” and should be available for download soon…

We had been hoping to announce the availability of all the Dunromin University Press products on Print on Demand (POD) this month, because we all love to hold the lore in our mortal hands and lavish fond looks upon their spines on our hallowed shelves.  Alas, we have been foiled thus-far by spurious software!

We will get there but the process is a tricky one, mired in monotonous copy and pasting from Word into the excellent DTP package Scribus, and that’s just the start.  The current issue we have is finding a pdf format that the print engines at DriveThruRPG will accept.  This is no reflection at all upon DriveThruRPG themselves, whose support and positivity has been wonderful, but rather a simple clash of Adobe print software refusing to get along with Microsoft, or Microsoft doing a cludge to get Word to produce pdfs on the cheap.  Whatever, the situation is not helped by our tiny resources in terms of time and money…

But it all does have an up-side!

In anticipation of a new version for POD, all the Temple maps originally included in SM00 – A Traveller’s Atlas of the City of the Dunromin and the Land of the Young (to give it the full title) have been reworked (example above) and the new POD compatible SM00 will include them and more.  Likewise, we are planning to add some things to SM01 – The Players’ Guide to Dunromin and SM02 – the Games Master’s Guide to Dunromin, so that people who have already paid for them can get some more return on that initial investment if they do want to go for the POD version as well.  These additions will be more detail on several of the organisations and institutions of the Land of the Young and some new character classes (the Monk is already written, and is a subclass of Cleric rather than the 1st edition AD&D Kung-Fu style Monk). 

So, I do hope you have all survived the Pandemic thus far and that normality returns to the world soon, whatever “normality” means…  And thank-you again, truly, for your ongoing interest in the Dunromin University Press product range.

Like many, my own understanding of what makes a great scenario was influenced by the original publications by TSR way back in the day; from the Keep on the Borderlands to Queen of the Demonweb Pits – they were all great inspiration.  In fact, we were playing U1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh when the idea of the city of Dunromin and the whole world of Barnaynia started to germinate in our minds – way back in 1986.  You can obtain downloads of all the scenarios described below and more here or here.

Over the years since then I have probably run most of the classic TSR adventures on Barnaynia and I thought it might be fun to share how I did this with you all.  To this end I have got a map of about a quarter of the Upper World of Barnaynia (above), including the Land of the Young and Dunromin, and marked the various locations I have used on it.  Here’s the key to the locations given:

1. U1-3; the Saltmarsh series.  The start of it all, beginning in the Barony of Saltmarsh and working down the coast through the Lizardman lair and the Final Enemy (no spoilers!).
2. A1 The Slave Pits of the Undercity.  This was a bit of a kludge, placing the Slave Pits in an old abandoned city rather than Highport.  The idea was that it was a node on the Slave network where all the slavers who are pinching people from the west of the Land of the Young brought their prisoners to sell to the Slave Lords.  It spawned the idea of a whole “nation” of Humanoid groups occupying the north-eastern Wild Lands.  Alternatively, you could replace “Highport” with Gorgola and run the whole Against the Slavers series in the lands around there – off the eastern edge of the map above but detailed in SM05 The World Guide to Dunromin.
3. A2 Secret on the Slavers’ Stockade.  Putting the headquarters of the Slavers’ network north of the mountains here made most sense.  The network across the whole of the Borderlands and Wild Lands feeds into this base and then into the Dark World and the Deep Elf civilisations beneath the mountains.
4. A3 and A4 The Erie of the Slavelords.  And so the campaign comes to a head in the island city where the Slave Lords themselves live in debauched luxury.  The maps we are developing for this area even have a volcanic island (to be included in SM09 when the maps are finished).  You could even say the Deep Elf name for the Hellmarch Mountains is Drachenscrab if you wanted…
5. G1 starting the Against the Giants series.  The Wild Lands west of the Land of the Young can hold all sorts of general wilderness/dungeon settings.  This seemed a good place to locate this classic adventure as it led on neatly from the Slavers series.
6. G2 and we are into the icy tops of the Hellmarch Mountains’ frozen western reaches.  I would have liked to put this classic module way out in the frozen wastes beyond the west of the map but that wouldn’t have fit with the larger story-arc of the series (no spoilers!).
7. G3 completes the series and keeps the party in the right locale at the fiery heart of the Hellmarch Mountains.  It means we have ice and fire in the same mountain range but they are a few hundred miles apart…
8. D1-3; the Descent into the Depths and the Vault of the Drow.  Of course, the term “Drow” comes with a lot of luggage and the Deep Elves of Barnaynia are different to the classic “Drow” in many ways, being based more on a cencept of Tolkein's elves but given to a life underground and followers of different gods, turning away from the light of the sun and the stars and looking to the Moon instead.  The primary belief of the "Drow", being that of the Spider Cult, is only one of many cults that exist among the Deep Elves of Barnaynia.  In fact it’s not really a major religeon if one looks world-wide, although pretty major local to Dunromin.  The term “Drow” only exists in Barnaynia as the Old Elfish for dirt or filth, hence the Drow Hills in the north don’t actually have any Deep Elves in them at all; mostly dwarves in fact, at least at the southern end.  But, returning to the theme of the blog, the Deep Elves are similar enough to Drow that you can use them equally, but Deep Elves are a LOT more sophisticated and cultured than the classic TSR Drow…  No, really, they are!
9. UK1 Beyond the Crystal Caves can be set among the islands and sparsely populated lands east of the Land of the Young, along with a good many other adventures; Castanamir for instance…
10. I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City - In the Jungles of the Urdum Empire or in the maze of foothills and low Vilsact Mountains you can place this classic.  There is space to have the snake people infiltrate the old city of Greywall too, if the fancy takes you…  There are other jungle scenarios you could place here too; Tamoachan for instance.  Likewise moving further east you are into endless shifting deserts that can be the setting for the Deserts of Desolation, possibly based north of Gorgola.
11. I2 the Tomb of the Lizard King fits nicely into the drab and swampy landscape south of the gnome city of Constantan – the place is even called the Kingdom of the Lizard.
12. N1 the Reptile Cult and the whole T series starting in the village of Hommlet (famous for its cheese) fit nicely in here.  South of the River Greyflood are marshes and rough terrain poor for farming.  Legend tells of an ancient temple ruin there, once the base of an Elemental Cult.
13. All sorts!  The Grim Mountains can be the home of many ancient controversies, like Tharizdun, Tsojcanth, and Inverness as well as some horrific tombs.  The peoples of the City States around Gidrall sometimes even call this mountain range the Barrier Peaks; ripe for an expedition.  This last one, S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks is a little problematic though, as the suggestion of an object from a technological race from another planet doesn’t fit with the Barnaynian model of the Universe, so the travellers will have to be from another plane, really (trying to minimise spoilers here – tricky).

And that’s just the lands reasonably local to Dunromin.  There’s more, but I think I have made my point.  Even a casual glance through SM05 The World Guide to Barnaynia will have any GM spotting some locations that will fit very easily with almost any scenario you fancy.

I hope you find this list interesting, it is a blatant advert for the classic AD&D adventures that Wizards of the Coast are still offering.  I can’t recommend these enough!

The Book of Legends - over 100 pages of game resources for any FRPG!

SPECIAL JANUARY LAUNCH PRICING OF $2.99 !!!

In the style of a Rogues Gallery, this new publication from Dunromin University Press if chock-full of ideas and resources for any games master. 

The Book of legends adds yet more colour, ideas and inspiration to the World of Barnaynia fantasy role-play setting, including:

• More than 50 fully detailed NPCs - including back-stories, plot hooks and stats optimised for D&D 1st and 2nd editions, OSRIC and Pathfinder, and readily adaptible to all versions of D&D;
• Five Mercinery Groups to harass or serve you PCs;
• Two new Characters Classes - the Oni Holy Warrior and the Navigator;
• New Monsters, Gods and Magic Items;
• A set of Amazing Legends, old and new, each one inspiration for a scenario or campaign in itself;
• A load of interesting hirelings;
• And MORE!

At this price for ALL of this, the Book of Legends represents, as do ALL the Dunromin University Press Publications, ASTONISHING value for money.

Famous Sayings and Slang of Dunromin

He always has a penny in his hat – someone with a positive attitude; an optimist or possibly someone who irrepressibly cheerful to the point of being very annoying. Eg “That idiot Andy, goes around everywhere like he’s got a penny in his hat.”

Papa Baz will have you for a Zombie – a general warning for a youth whose behaviour leaves something to be desired.  Arising from the fact the famous circus owner Papa Baz once used zombie orcs to put up and take down his circus tent.  He abandoned the practice after customers started to complain about the smell.  “You stop hanging around with that street gang or old Papa Baz will be having you for a Zombie.”

A darned sock never forgets – a warning that doing someone or something harm may never be forgotten, or that some visible feature will always remind a person of some past misfortune, such as a scrape on some armour will always remind the wearer of a time they cheated death.

You can’t spend a penny and keep it – similar to the English saying “You can’t have your cake and eat it” but of a form that makes more sense; referring to the fact that once a resource is used up you can’t automatically have more of it.

Money doesn’t die – often referring to taxes or other debts, warning that ignoring them (or any other problem) doesn’t mean it’ll go away.  Sometimes used as an excuse for remaining polite and loyal to someone who is not nice.

Selling/Buying a house on the moors – a reference to the once wonderful farmlands of the northeast that were torn up by great magics to form the High Moors and the Blasted Heath; a reference to something that sounds delightful but is actually worthless.  Eg “That sounds like a good plan but I have a nasty feeling we’d be buying a house on the moors.”

Telling a mage how to darn socks – general term for a pointless or thankless task; a reference to the fact that no powerful person, such as a mage will allow anyone “below” them to instruct them on anything or possibly to the fact that a rich or powerful person like a mage will always have someone else to do their small tasks for them and have no need for the skill.

Barking at a Dragon – a needlessly dangerous pursuit; a choice of action that will always end badly.  Eg “No point telling the King his taxes are too high, you’d just be barking at a Dragon.”

You’ll end up kissing an orc – a suggestion that your choice of action will fail or lead to an undesirable outcome.  Eg “Don’t volunteer to help Old Pony with his stall; you’ll end up kissing an orc.”

Magesplaining – Someone explaining something to someone in a patronising way, often telling them something they already know; a “Magesplainer” is someone superior who assumes they know more than anyone else, mostly just called “Maysplainer”.

Old Gubbings might have something around the back – a dismissal of someone asking for something unreasonable or impossible; eg “You want cream with that? Go and see if Old Gubbings has some around the back.”

Don’t touch it with a ten foot pole – Suspecting that a specific object or person may be trapped.

I’m off to the ‘Wench to pick strawberries – The person is intending to go out for some drinks on the town (possibly at the Bawdy Wench Inn) with the intention of finding a strumpet.  Usually uttered by married men with the inference that no one should tell their wife where they are.

He’d take a sailor for a pirate – often used in different ways; either to describe a person as being cynical and suspicious, or inferring they are actually a shrewd judge of character.

Teaching ogres how to knit – a hopeless or endless task.

He/she knows their shovels – a person involved with organised crime or having a murderous or gangster reputation, referring to them having being involved with the disposal of murdered bodies.

He/she would tell a Temple it’s wrong – a headstrong, determined or argumentative person.

It would be like waiting for the City Guarde – a fruitless endeavour or something that is likely to be cause someone to be waiting for a long time.

You can’t outrun the Centy-Plague – A reference to the fact that persons living in the city often die of the “Century Plague” at the turn of each century, whether they remain in the city or not.  It is usually used to refer to any unavoidable event or mishap.

Badger – slang term for someone always looking for trouble, ready for a fight or just violent; eg “He’s a right badger that one.”  There is a variation on this often used away from the city where someone might be called the “Village Cat”.

Charming Howard – slang term for a womaniser/seducer with a known record, as opposed to someone who claims to be able to seduce women.

Mary’s Girl – slang term for a prostitute.

(On their) Way to Boc – someone on the run from the law, an outlaw.  Also “Bocbound”

Hobbler – Slang term for the city guarde, referring to a Hobbled Horse, meaning something unable to run.  This is a reference for the reputation of the City Guarde for not hurrying to the scene of a crime.

Shanty – Slang term for a horse race.  There are also “Dog Shanties” which is greyhound racing or similar.  The term comes from Shanty Town where such events are often held.

Blunt sword; Stooly; Arse-wiper; Slug-brain; Patsy; Dungtool  – slang terms for someone demonstrating low intelligence.

Tosser; Crow Blinder; Prince of Ponds; Orc-mouth; nag-saddler – slang terms for a liar or con-artist.

Streeter; Candlewaxer; Scraper; Muck-runner; Swagger; Bag-snatcher; Cutpurse; Alley cat  – Slang terms for beggars, thieves and general low-lives.

Grunter – Slang for any humanoid, usually an orc.

Quid – Slang for a silver piece.

Penny; Bob; Dud – Slang for a copper piece.

Score; Brass Magrit, Twenty Bit– slang for a Gold Piece.

Tenner; Gnomeling – Slang for an Electrum Piece.  Electrum coins are uncommon as only the Gnomes mint them.

Pony – Slang for a Platinum Piece.

Muppet – Slang for 50gp, named after King Muppetrik who ruled for 6 months and whose only real claim to fame is in minting coins worth 50gp out of ivory which became almost worthless after his death.  It was an early foray into using an equivalent to paper money but was too early in the history of banking to succeed.

Grand – slang for 1000gp.

With a view to jumping on the bandwagon of seasonal discounts, Dunromin University Press is proud to announce our...

Gone Grey in the Wash Black Friday Deal!

We have reduced our flagship products SM05 the World Guide to Barnaynia and SM02 the Games Master's Guide to Dunromin to just $4.95 each !!! This brings them in-line with SM01 The Players' Guide to Dunromin, which is already just $4.95

Note that the city maps are all available for FREE as SM00 the Travellers' Atlas of Dunromin and the Land of the Young

That's hundreds of pages of:

• NPCs
• Inns and businesses
• Nations and civilisations
• Magic Items
• Public and secret guilds
• Monsters!
• Breath-taking artwork
• New character classes
• In a fully explained and mapped world and medieval city - all ready to explore

                                                                            and MORE!
This astonishing offer comes as part of our lead up to the next big release, due out before the holidays:
                                                               The Book of Legends:
This weighty tome is over 100 pages of fully detailed NPCs as individuals and parties, more magic items, two new character classes (the Navigator and the Oni Holy Warrior), Gods of Barnaynia, legends, adventure hooks, new monsters and more. SM16 The Book of Legends is the next part of the comprehensive yet flexible game setting based around the Free City of Dunromin and the bizarre World of Barnaynia.

As you know, Dunromin University Press believes in producing great value, top quality gaming resources aimed at Old School RPGs and 1st and 2nd edition D&D players, although the majority of content is readily transferrable to ANY Fantasy Role Playing system.

Thank-you for your time in reading this message, I am sure you see many every month so we are very grateful for you taking the time to read this one. Dunromin University Press has a range of excellent, high quality FRPG products at insanely low prices and even Pay What You Want, which frankly makes most of the other stuff available on the Internet look like over-priced bloatware.

Come and check us out on our webpage or go direct to DriveThrurpg.
 

From the time our teacher, Mr Robinson, read us The Hobbit when I was about 9 or 10, to all the films, I have enjoyed all of it.  Yes, I REALLY like ALL the films!  AND I think the Silmarilion is a cracking read too, although I have struggled with some of the other over-analysed stuff from Christopher Tolkien…  All my RPG experience is built on a foundation of D&D in a Middle-Earth style fantasy setting, not the Vancian Dying Earth that so much of the magic system is based on.

Ever since that first experience of the Hobbit, however, I have always had one concern – where do the Baggins family get their money?  It’s probably not what young minds are supposed to take from a book about magic rings, goblins, elves and dragons, but I am a pragmatist in such things.

Now, Bilbo was a Took on his mother’s side and all that interesting geniality stuff that Tolkien loved so much is well set out, but I always wondered how they came by these lavish lifestyles when none of them appeared to actually do any work?  I am not sure now, looking back, as to why I was so puzzled, especially given my own mother’s family were tenant farmers in North Yorkshire.

I think the whole Baggins and Took families were significant land owners – their luxurious opulence and care-free existences funded by the rent-paying peasant class that surrounded them.

“There’s always been a Baggins at Bag-End, and there always will be,” said Bilbo, in the films at least.  Of course there was!  He owns the whole village and gets rent from EVERYONE!  If you read that quote with a voice of right-wing defiance it puts quite a different image into your head…

No wonder the Sackville-Baggins are so keen for Bilbo to die heirless – they would probably get the village!  No wonder Merry and Pippin lived such anarchic loafer lives; they were on a healthy subsidy from their parents, living their lives free from any responsibility with no idea of the damage they were doing to the local economy when they were stealing from Farmer Maggot’s crop.  Just like Bertie Worcester, they had no idea of the grinding poverty surrounding them and we, as the reader, were not to be bothered with it either.

Were the locals all so polite to the young hobbits out of genuine affection or fear of what might happen if they came to any harm?  Were, indeed, all the pleasant hobbits of the village currying favour with the very people who would become, in time, their own lords and masters?  It’s hard to increase rents when as a child you used to play with the person you are exploiting…

In the Shire there seems to be an absence of education – although they can read write there seems no education system in place; everyone appears to be expected to take over from their parents when they grow – no social mobility to speak of.

At the end of The Hobbit, Bag End is being stripped bare by an eager peasant class desperate for a bit of liberty and personal gain – there’s no indication of loyalty there.  No sign that the friendliness demonstrated to Bilbo and Frodo is genuine; once the landlord has been absent for long enough the downtrodden rise to claim their own piece of the pie – how lucky for Bilbo they had no charismatic leader to start the revolution and bring Bolshevism to the Shire.  Instead, the hobbits lack the imagination to throw off the fetters of bougeouise dictatorship.

Looking at the books through this lens, the seemingly innocent pastoral paradise of the Shire becomes a little bit more sinister; a time-capsule of the landed gentry of the upper classes running the whole show with the working classes grafting dawn until dusk to pay the rent.  Exactly the situation that was undermined by the industrial revolution and the emergence of the middle-class.  A hierarchy of landed gentry as a ruling elite over a resentful working class, which was then destroyed on Flanders Field and rendered irrelevant by the collapse of Empire heralded by two World Wars.  Which, of course, were part of the inspiration for the whole Hobbit and the Ring story in the first place - even humble Samwise was 

In fact, exactly the situation that the Founding Fathers fled from to start their New World in the Americas.  Or that existed in Ireland and Scotland before the Famine and the Clearances…

Pursuing these thought experiments we discover more curious re-representations of the books:

What were the Dunedain up to?  Protecting the Shire from the outside world, according to some of the texts – but from what and for whom?  Perhaps they were the bully-boys of the powerful hobits; mercenaries paid to keep new ideas and rabble-rousers out of the Shire.

The end of the Lord of the Rings and the scouring of the Shire is a blatant protest against the evils of the Industrial Revolution but too late.  Perhaps the Ring itself is a metaphor for the whole concept of Industrial Progress?  And Smeagol a tragic Trotsky; driven by a vision of a wonderful future but even rejected by like-minded people.

It’s fun to think about, but of course I am not the first to wander these paths.  “The Last Ring Bearer” is a book by Kirill Eskov written in Russian and translated into English, available as a free pdf download from many places (here for instance).  It’s a different telling of the world of Middle Earth, post LOTR, and it’s Chapter Two that I find fascinating – if you haven’t sampled this then I strongly encourage you to do so, even if it is just this chapter.  It gives a brilliant insight into the power of propaganda and proof that “History is Written by the Victors”.

I love the Lord of the Rings, but I love this idea too.

In Barnaynia, this fundamental property is confused by the spectacular cosmology of the banana-shaped world.  The whole setting is very High Fantasy, there’s lots of things we would be boggled by, but the prevalence of magic on the mundane lives of the folks in Barnaynia is less High and more Mid-Fantasy.  Sure, there are wizards and magical swords and magical creatures everywhere but the average Joe Peasant in the street would not have access to it: it is special, it is possessed by an elite.  So how does this work?  Well, I have a nice Simile I am going to torture to try and clarify how it works…

Magic is like swimming in the sea:

The Sea is always there.  It is big and powerful but very few people have anything to do with it.  Some people work with it or rely on it in other ways.  We also use it, a little bit of it anyway, for entertainment, or we have simple skills in dealing with it, like being able to swim.  But it is a huge thing and very, very few people have ever been deep into it…

Some people can deal with it naturally – the ones who can swim from birth, who never lived without water.  Fishing communities, Pearl Divers, that kind of thing.  These are like Witches, Shamans and Witch Doctors.  They have a natural talent that lets them play at the edges, dive to places other people can’t see, do simple things that boggle the mind.

Some people are given magical instruction and taught to read and write Arcana, the language of magic.  This is like being taught to hold your breath and to swim.  It is necessary to any kind of magical practice of a learned rather than natural variety, but doesn’t in of itself grant the power to do magic.  You can hold your breath whether you are in the sea or not.  You can swim in swimming pools and ponds; you can read about spells and learn the steps of the Semantic components without being able to cast a single spell; without ever having salt-water touch your skin.

Then you go to college and they teach you Magical Skills; they show you how to use a snorkel and free-dive.  Suddenly, with a simple tool, you are elevated almost to the level of a Pearl-Diver.  The magic flows around you, you can immerse yourself in it and do some of the cool things that the other wizards can, see the hidden things that lie below the surface.  But you can also see the deeps.  You are a first level Magic-User.  You can peer over the side of the reef and see the light rays dancing into the distant, black depths, and wonder…

As you rise in levels then the art of Scuba Diving is taught to you or learned by you.  Suddenly you are not limited by the capacity of your lungs.  This is perhaps 5th or 6th level – a level of skill beyond the reach of the naturally talented ones without some form or tutelage or old crone showing them The Way.  Now you can go much deeper, stay down for longer, know and explore things that you have only been told about before.  You can encounter and understand creatures, entities, which no one on the surface has ever seen, other than a shadow in the deep, sliding, silently under their flimsy boat.  But it is tiring, dangerous and you must rest afterwards.  You can’t stay too long and if you push it you will die.

Getting beyond this, perhaps 12th to 15th level, requires a much greater investment of time and effort.  Specialist skills known only to some must be sought out, learned and practiced.  Key equipment, expensive and cumbersome, has to be obtained.  Strange devices that seem ridiculous but can only come into their own in the depths of the magical world that is now your obsession, if it wasn’t already.

And so it goes on; your learn more, realise there is so much more to know.  Scuba is still a delight but it is mundane, easy, simple, although still requiring respect in case a stupid mistake might cost you your life.  You use your new knowledge, skill and equipment to go deeper, deeper and for longer than you ever thought possible.  You see things, glimpses of the strangest possible worlds.  Whole ecosystems of creatures no surface dweller ever even remotely dreamt might exist.  You have knowledge far beyond the mundane experience of mere mortals.  You have seen things others couldn’t imagine.

And yet, and yet, these are only glimpses.  You shine a light into the darkness and you see a small zone of illuminated wonder.  You drift through the depths agog at everything you see, fascinated by the processes you see, in awe of everything.  But who can say what lies beyond your light?  What strangeness might have seen the glow of your approach and calmly moved out of the way, invisible and unknown in the darkness?

The mystery just gets deeper, more unreachable and even more magnificent.  The blue around you still goes black in the distance and keeps its deepest secrets from you.

But look at what you have achieved!  Out of all the souls in the world you have visited places only a handful of similarly powerful beings have been.  You have powers and knowledge you couldn’t even start to explain.  And yet you are frustrated.

You have also seen the greater creatures down there, or some of them at least.  Happy in that habit.  Breathing and moving in the impossible deeps as easily as you move about your house at home; safe and warm, without a fear in the world.  You are terrified there.  Every moment is a challenge, annihilation a breath away, and yet to them it is their common experience.  To them this impossibility is normality.  Your miracles are mundane.

There is yet more to know, more to discover, and there always will be…

Check out SM05 The World Guide to Barnaynia for more fascinating detail about the Cosmology of the banana-shaped world.

SM05 - I think Covid allowed me to put out the long awaited SM05 World Guide to Barnaynia quicker than I expected. It's not exactly selling like hot cakes but feedback so far is very positive.

SM14 - Of the Rakuli was an adendum to SM05 I think, although the Rakuli were first designed back in about 1990 so most of it was tidying up some previous notes. Since it's offered on Pay What You Want quite a few downloads have gone - some have even paid for it, which is a nice bonus. TBH it's just nice to know my ideas are out there.

SM07 Under Mirts Folly is about 70% written but needs artwork and layout to finish it off. It's a megadungeon crawl with over 150 rooms over 4 or 5 levels (to be confirmed) and I am trying a slicker presentation style to allow faster play and avoid the GM getting bogged down in description.

SM15 Is a new idea, a bit of a mad impulse really. Tony Pearce and I are working on it together and it is a completely left-field "Scientific Discourse on the Nature of the Universe" primarily about what exists beyond the Outer Shell of Barnaynia. Both Tony and I are physicists and he is also an astronomer so the plan is to get something thought-provoking and funny out there, although probably not very relevant to most players.

I am also planning SM16 The Book Of Legends; which will be a collection of NPCs and magic items from past campaigns with loads of new ones to add into the mix.  The ideas are 80% down so I just need (as always) artwork and time to hack it together.  If you have any character ideas or new magic items you think would suit let me know; all contributors printed will get a complimentary hardcopy of the finished book as usual.

Since I started the whole project we have had SM10 The Pit of Panzar, SM11 The Orc Battleforge and SM13 The Tomb of Firkin advertised on the back of the books. These are both written but need to be typed up, artworked and so on before release. The other items listed on the back covers but unavailable yet are likewise a long way from release. I have given up on deadlines as I always miss them but rest assured, all these wonderful products WILL be available, eventually...

Over 1700 downloads across all the titles to date, which is pretty cool. Most of these have been done for free so the project as a whole is not in the black yet but I am loving it all, which is great.  My pie-in-the-sky target for the whole project was to be able to afford a new car or bike but, while this isn't going to happen any time soon, the whole journey has been a blast and it's getting better all the time...  Thank-you to all my customers and contributors!
 

My favourite of them all, which is saying something considering the above list, is “At the Mountains of Madness” by H.P Lovecraft.  The idea of finding an ancient, super-powerful culture frozen under the ice and waking up, or possibly just arriving as they wake up, makes me tingle.  Especially the bit where (spoiler alert) the noble adventurers nearly get creamed by one of the ancient race’s biological-machine-weapon-guard-things (a Shoggoth).  It is a passion I share with ST Joshi, an acquaintance of mine, top bloke and one of the foremost Lovecraft experts in the world (look him up – he’s done some cool stuff!).

So, being a bit of a fan boy, how could I produce an homage to this fantastic story without re-hashing something and producing a lame smear of a book?  Well it was tricky but I have given it a go…

“SM14 Of the Rakuli” is the latest publication by Dunromin University Press.  The Rakuli of the title is the elven name for the Great Old Ones who once ruled Barnaynia completely, up until about 90,000 years ago, when they just seemed to vanish.  So completely and suddenly did they go that they have since passed progressively into history, legend, myth and fairy story, before being pretty much forgotten by everyone.

So what were they?  What happened to them?  And are they ever likely to come back so that they can feature in my campaign?

These are the kinds of questions this book sets out to explain in depth…

It’s essentially a Monster Manual but with only one monster in it (although the Deep Race, Deepsea Dragons and Minor Elementals from SM05 The World Guide to Barnaynia are reprinted here as well, as they are closely linked to the Rakuli in different ways).  The text starts with a bit of scene-setting fiction and then goes into the monster stats, culture, history and all the other details about the race you’ll need, including the Great Cataclysm that ended their reign and several adventure and campaign ideas as to how you might use them in your own games.

Spoiler alert (again) – they are not all evil but they will not be your friend.  They have a diverse culture with different groups (nations) representing different ideals, government styles and social norms.  They are pretty powerful, but in a scaled way so you can use them against any level of party from about level 5 up and keep them a challenge without being a TPK.  There’s lots to read and consider; plenty of food for thought - even if you don’t use them.

The stats are written for OSRIC which means they will work with pretty much any OSR ruleset and First and Second edition AD&D with no adjustment.  They should also work with BECMI and later D&D editions with a little adjustment.

The book is ready for download on DriveThruRPG as Pay What You Want.  I know this means you can have it for free, which is fine, but if you can spare a penny for this small, independent publisher with three children to feed, please do.

Just type #rpgaday into your search engine of choice and see what’s going on!

While doing this I have been reading and re-reading some of the World Building parts of the book and wondering if, just perhaps, there’s too much in there?

In my last Blog I put in an extract from the book about Thaumofunghi.  I publicised this on Facebook and quite a few people responded to it.  One poster responded “So it’s just magic then?” and it set me thinking.  He has a point.

Is all this extra detail really necessary?  There is, after all, a LOT of extra detail in here.  There is astronomical and astrological information; there is Biological and Ecological information, including a discussion of the classification of magical species and the ecology of the underground Darkworld; there are descriptions of the Magical, Gravitational and Magnetic fields about the planet, there is even a diagram of the Gravitational Field about the banana-shaped planet.  So, have I, perhaps, over-done it a bit?

Probably yes.

But I wanted to do it that way.

There’s some mad ideas in there and some of the difficult bits have forced me to resort to the “It’s Magic” get-out clause, but not often.  The idea of a banana-shaped world (well, shaped like a flattened banana really…), triggered by a one-off in-character argument and probably subconsciously inspired by Monty Python, is all very well as a mad idea for a one-off dismissal to get the game moving again.  But what happens if you use that as a start point to build a world from?

I have spent many hours thinking about and discussing the idea with friends, particularly Tony Pearce and Rob Hooley, since that fateful night.  More than thirty years in fact.  We have been trying to work out how such a weird place would really work, or even if it could, using what we know (we are all Physics graduates).  How does gravity work?  What happens at the edge?  What’s the weather like?  Does it orbit around a star like a normal planet?  (No!)  Does it have a Moon? (Oh yeah, it has a GREAT moon, and an asteroid belt)  What about tides?  Seasons?  Shooting Stars?  Asteroids?  Plate Tectonics?   All this has been addressed by Tony, Rob and I over the years, our addled minds lubricated with beer of course.

I think, at their core, this is what FRPGs are really all about.  Building a fantasy world where you can become someone else, something other; that much is a given.  But if you have watched/read Game of Thrones or the like, or played on-line RPGs you soon realise that you are not the world-changing hero destined to save the world.  There is no predictable destiny reached just before the end credits.  You are just another adventurer trying to survive to the end of the session, and maybe save the world in the process.

And the world and the people in it are a lot more complex than you thought.  These people have their own lives!  Their own motives!  Even the monsters have more on their mind than just trying to kill you.  THAT is where a properly built world comes in.  That’s where Barnaynia offers the Dungeon Master a helping hand.  When the PCs start asking big questions you have most of the answers ready for them, along with a load of other stuff about the places the PCs might find themselves in.  This is where the really cool, classic game settings we know and love really triumph, and where Barnaynia will as well.  The background is fluid and not set in stone.  There’s a lot going on around the players that they have no part of.  History carries on whether they interfere with it or not.

But having all that stuff about Gravity, climate and the Moon’s weird figure-of-eight orbit; is it all really necessary?

Well, you don’t HAVE to read all that if you don’t want to; it’s all a bit superfluous to the day to day experience of the players, which is exploring dungeons, interacting with NPCs and killing monsters.  Do they really care if the King is trying to initiate a war between two rival empires across the sea if they are marching in the opposite direction?  While the party are cleaning up the monsters left over from the last great war are they going to notice that the Deep Elves are engaged in their own civil war?  Will the PCs notice that having the Deep Elves getting distracted in this way is allowing some stuff from the lower Darkworld to come up to the higher levels, nearer the surface?  Probably not – more experience, more loot!  But those beasties and those wars are going to happen whether the players are there to stop them or not.

This is where the depth of the setting becomes important.  The lower level the PCs the more concentrated their minds are on the next ten feet of corridor, but that won't last long.  With a fully formed and complex world to move about in they will constantly be coming across new curiosities, side quests and other stuff that entertains them.  This isn’t an excuse for the extra bits, it’s a reason.  When you spend more than thirty years building a fantasy world there’s a lot of screw-ball stuff gets added in.  The REALLY silly stuff is gone but what is left is brilliant, even though I do say so myself.

And if this all still seems a bit much don’t worry, these rather esoteric babblings only take up the first couple of dozen of the nearly two hundred pages in the book.  After that there are extensive chapters on monster races, other civilisations and their social structures (and there are some pretty wild societies in there I can tell you!), full-colour large-scale maps of the whole world and hundreds of locations.  There’s also new monsters, magic items, key NPCs and groups, a load of new campaign ideas and shed-loads more.  It’s a complete World Guide after all; like the Times Atlas of the World but for Barnaynia.

Of course it was all fun to write and, judging by the reactions of the proof readers, pretty fun to read too.  It’s a bit tongue in cheek and designed as much as an inspirational and entertaining read as a World Guide, but it remains a thorough and useful FRPG resource nonetheless.  Well worth taking a look at.

So is it worth it?  I think so.

SM05 The World Guide to Barnaynia will be released in June 2020.

On Barnaynia we have come up with a solution and then gone a bit Gonzo with it to build up a whole range of new stuff to bamboozle the players with.  A whole realm of flora and fauna that doesn’t base its food chains on photosynthesisers but on Thaumosynthesisers; that is organisms that get a substantial amount of their energy from the Magical Field projected by the moon…  (this is an extract from one of the appendices of the upcoming SM05 World Guide to Barnaynia.

Thaumofunghi are an astonishing form of life that form the foundation of the food webs and general ecology of most of the Darkworld and the other areas where the light of the Sun might not supply normal plant life with the kind of energy they need to survive.  Almost every civilisation that has had any time surviving on the magnificent world of Barnaynia has some experience of this life form and many have completely depended upon it, in one form or another.  However, its very existence, let alone its many, many forms and uses are practically unknown in Dunromin and the Land of the Young.

To start from basic, Thaumofunghi is not a single form of life.  The term represents a whole branch of Zoology, a vast range of plant and fungus life that depends on Thaumosynthesis for its energy rather than Photosynthesis.  The myriad forms of this entire Phylum of organisms can boggle the mind and it is estimated barely 10% of its forms are known the Science (by Science of course we mean the University of Dunromin).

And this does not even include the even more vast variety of microscopic forms that comprise Paraplancton in the poorly explored watery deeps beneath the ground…

So how do we cope with all this?

Fear not, in the new book, SM05 The Worldguide to Barnaynia, we have two tools to help the beleaguered Games Master.  The first section is a series of tables for determining the properties and form of any form of Thaumofungus you might need at any point.  The second gives some common examples of Thaumofungus you can use as and when you need to.  There are also a few ideas of how the concept of Thaumofunghi might be included in your scenarios, if you want to.

In real game terms this is like trees and plants, but underground.  Over time any explorer or adventurer who spends any amount of time underground will learn to recognise the different forms that Thaumofungus can take.  They will learn the dangerous ones first, the useful ones later.  Just the same as a child playing in the woods will discover the nature of plants and mushrooms, possibly with some guidance from a more experienced person.

As you know, there are some forms of Thaumofunghi already documented in the core rules.  All the Slimes, Moulds and animated fungus in the core rules are forms of Thaumofungus and won’t be re-documented here.

In the upcoming new release SM05 The World Guide to Barnaynia we include the above information AND the random Thaumofungus generator…

[snip]

The treasure found on campaign is the life blood of the FRPG world, however the nature of producing coinage in a medieval setting is more complex than it may first appear.  In FRPG terms the coins are all of a uniform size and purity, every Gold Piece is assumed to have the same construction and therefore value whether it's being passed over in a tavern to pay for a night's accommodation or found in the horde of a ten-thousand-year-old Lich.  This is a game construct that is merely put in for convenience and in no way recognises the fascinating panoply of coinage that would really be travelling around in the Multiverse.

The Easy Solution

Just carry on as it stands.  There's nothing wrong with this, indeed in the Viking/Danelaw era in Europe the accepted unit of currency for large payments was pounds of gold and silver.  It didn't matter the form of the metal, just its weight.  It’s not clear how they standardised the 'pound' they refer to but the system seems to have worked OK.  So, it's perfectly fine to carry on using the units and values given in the main rule books.  Or you might think about something even more infuriating.

The Dunromin Coinage System

In Dunromin, being Dunromin, there is a little more to money than meets the eye and it's an excellent example of how the city and country has adopted a simple idea and made it work very efficiently.  First of all, the standard exchange rate is termed the Dwarf Rate as it was first invented by the Dwarves many millennia ago and they have stuck to it.  Originally, the city was using several different coinage forms across the country but in CY296 the King of the time (King Michael I) proclaimed the Dwarf Rate the new city standard.  This decision was mainly for convenience but also slightly political as the city was trying to expand the magic item manufacturing industry at the time - Dwarves made the best weapons and the Dunromin mages were the best at enchanting them.  Or at least the cheapest at the time.  The adoption of a standard monetary system made trade easier, especially as the Elves of Loom had already adopted the Dwarf Rate hundreds of years previously.  The Gnomes of Constantan also blended the Dwarf Rate with their own, very similar system, although the Gnomes are the only ones to manufacture Electrum Pieces (so all eps found will be minted by gnomes, probably).

The Dwarf Rate (and the most common Dunromin slang for the quantity):

     1cp (Bob or sometimes Dud)

     10cp = 1sp (quid)

     10sp = 1ep (tenner, nomer or a gnomeling)

     20sp = 1gp (score, twenty bit, or just 'a gold' rather than 'a gold piece') (= 2ep)

     5gp = 1pp (Pony)

     50gp (10pp) (Muppet, named after King Muppetrik whose only achievement in his 6 month reign was to have minted a 50gp gold bar/coin that he called an Imperial Galleon – very few are left in circulation.  The term is also common insulting slang for a useless or simple person, eg; “Don’t put that there, you muppet!”)

    1000gp (a grand, although there is no single coin worth this much)

Note that the word 'penny' is used in many references.  It can mean 1cp or it can be a reference to any coin.  The term 'Bit' is also used, e.g. "Can anyone change me this gold penny for twenty silver bits?" and variations thereon.

Coin Size and Manufacture

Each coin has to be a standard size such that they have the required mass of 0.1lbs (approximately 45 grams - from here on metric forms will be used because they make more sense than the other systems, even though feet and inches are quite fun for confusing people) of the native metal.  Since the definition is mass rather than size, different coins from different civilisations and even periods of time will have different thicknesses compared to diameter, possibly different shapes.  The following are the Royal Mint standard sizes for Dunromin coins and the year they started being manufactured in these sizes, based on the counter-intuitive idea that the bigger the coin's diameter the less valuable it is.

   Copper - 45g of copper has a volume of 5.0cm3; this is used to make a coin 4cm diameter by 0.4cm thick.  Common since CY490.

   Silver - 45g of silver has a volume of 4.3cm3; this is used to make a coin 3.2cm in diameter and 0.5cm thick.  Also common since CY490.

   Gold - 45g of gold has a volume of 2.3cm3; this is used to make a coin 2.6cm in diameter and 0.4cm thick.  This has been used since CY445 and was probably the model for the current coin designs, although its origins are not well documented.

   Electrum (not Dunromin originally) - is 20% silver and 80% gold on Earth but is 60/40 on Barnaynia otherwise you can increase the value of your Electrum by Melting it down and splitting it up.  You still could but the return would be minimal (that's not to say there aren't smiths buying Electrum in Constantan, bringing it back to Dunromin and splitting the alloy up again...).  So 45g of Electrum has a volume of 3.5cm3.  The gnomes fashion this into a square coin with a square hole in the middle of it.  The coin is 3.6cm to a side and 0.5cm thick, with the hole 0.5cm to a side and slightly offset from the centre to match the designs cut into the coin's surface.  The gnomes have been making these for hundreds of years.

   Platinum - 45g of Platinum has a volume of 2.1cm3; which is used to make a coin 2cm in diameter and a chunky 0.7cm thick.  They have been using this form in Dunromin since CY480.

Note that all Dunromin coins except copper have milled or decorated rims to avoid 'clipping', which is cutting or shaving off bits of metal to use separately to the coin while ostensibly keeping the coin's original face value.

Coin styles and origins

In archaeology coins are of great interest to historians as they give the investigator a lot of information about the nature of the settlement they are investigating, such as when it was inhabited, what civilisation inhabited it (or whom they were trading with) and so on.  It is perhaps a neglected part of FRPG treasure hunting that players are not given this additional information when they find a treasure horde or perhaps search the bodies of fallen wandering monsters.  For instance, if an orc is in possession of a newly minted Deep Elf coin this might give the party a clue as to how Deep Elf influence is expanding in a given area.

Coins minted in Dunromin follow a very traditional style which most people will recognise as very Earth-like.  That is to say they have a profile picture of the current head of state on one side, along with their name (in common) and the year the coin was minted (following the CY or City Year dating format – years since the city was founded).  Note that the date has only been included since CY120, not that this will particularly bother the players.  The reverse ('Tails') side traditionally bears the coat of arms of the city’s ruling family, the Lufthearts, which is the winged heart.  It is interesting to note that the value of the coin is not stated anywhere on the coin as this is taken as implicit from its size and material.

Old Karan coins tend to be smaller and thicker but are getting rarer.  Deep Elf and other elven coins are similar although with which race of elves the designs originated is hotly debated.  Gnome coins are square.  Dwarf coins are round but have characteristic crenulations in the milling about the rim.  Some orc coinage has been identified but these tend to be lozenge shaped.  Many races have copied other designs, usually very badly, and such coins as gnolls, kobolds and others might possess will often be of any style.  Whatever their origin, foreign coins are usually melted down when they come to Dunromin and re-minted, as is the practice amongst most civilisations.  Coins from Oomland are square prisms of varying length and width while the coinage of the Yelnai Province are always round with various shapes cut out of the middle; they are carried on loops of material inside their clothes.

Dragons and other monsters do not mint their own coinage so might have any style in their hordes.  The odd people of Skull Crag use a similar system to Dunromin but the coin dimensions and decorations are different (same mass, for game convenience) and the land around Deerlish has coins similar in style, size and value but with curious lumps and bumps on the rim.  The Kingdom of Marln has a more varied and oft-changed coinage that other peoples tend to re-mint as soon as they can.  Coins in this form will usually be counted as their nearest equivalent when counted up – the differences between individual coins being of marginal significance in game terms.  The same can be said of coins from Grondarf, although there is very little trade with Grondarf as it is a very insular civilisation.

[unsnip]

I do hope you found that interesting and/or useful.  Like I said, this is a very small sample of the 200+ pages in BOTH the Players’ and the Games Master’s Guides to Dunromin – both brimming with new ideas, NPCs, plot ideas and stuff.  Bargains at five and ten bucks respectively!  And this is indicative of the quality of content in my other publications too – which are on Pay What You Want….

As I have said before, the concept of Dunromin came out of a college D&D group in the way-back of 1987 and it has been slowly evolving ever since, with occasional bursts of inspiration fuelled by alcohol and ridiculous discussions with friends.  Thirty years is a long time.  The ideas have been scribbled and typed up over the years in many different formats but I am determined to put these collections of thoughts into something that is at least readable, even for people not fortunate (cursed) enough to be in on the games that germinated my seedling ideas.

Basically, I had all this shit in my head and I wanted to get it OUT THERE, where-ever and whatever “there” meant.

I hit my fiftieth birthday and asked myself some serious questions.  “What, exactly, was stopping me?” was the main one.  The only answer I had was “fear”.  Fear of failure, fear of looking an arse, fear of hard work?

And this brings me (in a rather roundabout way) to the subject of this Blog, which is my thoughts and advice on self-publishing as regards FRPG products…

I was very fortunate in terms of the channels and resources I had available to me, in that after a career in IT and with many old friends still in the business I had considerable resources to call upon, whom I will  credit later.

I should mention that I am not the first to try this and would draw your attention to my acquaintance Phil Viverto at These Old Games here.  On his website blog he describes his own publishing experiences so I will not repeat his thoughts here, however both of us have chosen DriveThruRPG as our channel to market.  I have also had a few discussions with Charles Robinson who is designing and marketing his own products as part of an Academic Thesis; more here.  The Fen Orc is another correspondent who has a mighty, passion-driven website here.

But I need to go back further.

First I needed to get my product into a form I was prepared to let other people read.  This was no mean feat and took a lot of time and effort (many thanks to my long-suffering wife) to achieve.  Writing it all down was a major task in of itself – this included spell-checking and re-arranging and then thinking about layout and all kinds of things.  At this point I was assisted by Brian Fazekas who shared some sage advice from his own experiences of editing & Magazine.  He particularly pointed me at GIMP software, which is a free drawing package not unlike Photoshop.  It took me a long while to get to the state I am now and it’s still a long way from competent I think, but it is incredibly powerful.

There was also a key piece of information that came from a Facebook group about 1st Edition Dungeons and Dragons.  A discussion happened at EXACTLY the right time about whether people preferred 1 or 2 column pages.  2 was the conclusion and so that’s what I went for.

And then I realised I needed some artwork.

The look and feel of a publication is crucial.  We all remember the pictures in our first rulebooks far more clearly than we remember the rules themselves I think.  For me it was the tiny picture of skeletons in the Basic D&D Red Book from about 1980.  I would include it here but I am not sure who owns the copyright.  And there I hit the problem – I needed original work!  I can’t just blag stuff of the internet.  Now, I am ok with a pen (I had used Gimp and even done some covers for & Magazine under my pen-name Milo) but it still took another age preparing the pictures for the book.  You need a lot of art for anything like this.  Get some good stuff.  Preferably make friends with some very talented artists some years previously and tap them up for some of their genius sketches. Gareth Sleightholme stepped up and sent me a load of his rough sketches.  I gratefully nicked a load of these, tidied them up a bit using GIMP and put them in.  Top job.

Next I needed a channel to market.  DriveThruRPG seemed the obvious choice due its presence in the marketplace.  I looked at Lulu as well but, although the terms were better, DriveThru has got the all-important market presence and momentum in the RPG world.  Amazon is also popular but they seemed too big and scary to me – too corporate.  So I took the plunge and got in touch with DriveThru.

First impressions were DriveThru are all very regimented, but at the same time simple and logical.  It was obvious they were keen to get your product out there, but the process was respectful and professional at the same time.  I got my own contact for any issues and questions as well, who was brilliant:  Responsive, helpful and patient.  Overall a very positive experience.  In fact I really like the DriveThruRPG platform.  So far it’s all good!

It became apparent though that one thing that was required here, really, was my own website to funnel sales leads through.  This was easy as one of my oldest mates, Bragi, just happens to run his own internet company.  Useful.  He sorted me out with one of his simple templates which fitted the bill, I bought the URLs I wanted and I was off and running.  This stage would have been a LOT more complicated without Bragi’s help (I know what a URL is and even know a bit about network architectures and coding in HTML but that’s it…) so I remain indebted to him for his help; and you're looking at the result.

So my first product was ready to go live and I had the concerns of pricing policy and advertising to consider.

Advertising requires a lot of money to do it right.  I had none.  I would have to try and just get my presence out there and see if word of mouth would help.  I asked around my friends in the hobby to see what they read and what inspired them to try new products out.  I got some very varied answers, mostly costing money…

At this time I was a member of a couple of Facebook groups that were fan-based and I saw occasional adverts for similar through them.  I thought I would try that too – I even joined some more fan sites to see whether they might be appropriate.  This was quite good fun ‘cos I love posting about the hobby and so I made some friends and put some stuff out there.  I didn’t charge in with the advertising on my first posts though.  I am very conscious that no one likes to be spammed.  As a result I have tried to keep my advertising posts low-key and less frequent than my “normal” posts.  Some posts also led to opportunities to reference my work in the chat, which was nice.

Advertising is still my Achilles heel though.  When I bring out a new product I post about it, some people go and look, some of them buy some, that’s about it.  I am not sure how to reach more people without putting more time and money into it.  The amount of time I spend on it is already a sore point with my wife so this situation will probably remain unresolved for some time…

Pricing Policy has proved to be a lot more interesting and counter-intuitive.

Well, I started from the pretty obvious position of wanting to make a bit of money out of the deal.  “Of course” I thought “My genius is so obvious word will spread and I will be breaking the DriveThru payment servers with the demand.”

No.  That is a lie.  I knew it would be small beans all the way through and that no one was going to part with their hard-earned cash for an unknown quantity.  I had to price the product cheap, but not so cheap that it look like I am desperate.  Or so I thought.

I priced my first two books, Player’s Guide and GM’s Guide at about ten bucks each.  The maps I put out for free as a kind of taster, lure sort of thing.  I didn’t shift much (see my comments on advertising above) so after I put out my next product, The Warren, I started to think more carefully about it all.

What did I want from this experience?  What was I trying to achieve?

I quickly realised that actually, I really liked my stuff and thought a lot of other people would too.  I just wanted it out there so people could enjoy it in their own game worlds or whatever.  I wasn’t looking at giving up the day job or anything, so why charge anything at all?  Well, I had run up some bills.  I had registered the URLs and I had printed off some copies as little thank-yous to contributors, helpers and play-testers.  It would be nice to recoup that.

I hit upon the strategy of keeping the core rules at a cost but putting everything else out as Pay What You Want.  Of course I expected the majority of customers would then gleefully snap them up without paying anything.  This was Ok to that Rational part of my brain that realised what was going on, but snagged on my Yorkshire roots that I wouldn’t make much money from it.  It felt like I was giving up a bit, but it did make sense to me – people would be reading my stuff and hopefully getting something useful out of it, although I probably wouldn’t make any money.

And it worked!

I have now had over 1000 downloads all told and, although I haven’t broken even yet, lots of people have pushed a few bucks my way.  It seems people are curious about new products but no so curious that they want to spank a load of hard-earned on them.  Without marketing to create the pull I have to reduce the risk to them to try it:  Since no cash is actually being demanded up front, people seem to feel a lot more comfortable actually pitching in a few dollars here and there; not the full suggested amount most of the time but that’s cool – every little bit helps.

I genuinely appreciate it!  I am grateful to everyone who has downloaded any of my publications, even more so if they have actually read them as well!

If someone downloads it without paying anything that’s fine, of course, I want people to read it, enjoy it and use it.  But if you can chuck a few pennies in the pot as you go that is brilliant too.  I hope people see me as an honest hobbyist just trying to share my good ideas with the FRPG community and don’t suspect me of being some money-grabbing corporate wannabe.

I am only at the start of the journey but I am enjoying it loads.  And I am REALLY looking forwards to the next publication – the big, serious one about the whole World of Barnaynia.  Probably as big as the Players and GM’s Guides and brim-full of cool ideas, notions, cod-science, madness, NPCs, monsters, nations, civilisations, warlords and weird stuff.  It will be a feast!

As is well known, the magical fields of the World of Barnaynia are concentrated in many places, including the area of the City of Dunromin.  This manifests itself in the Elven quarter in great fecundity of a vast array of plant and insect life.  The local bird life in particular is colourful and noisily tuneful beyond compare.

All the trees in this place are unnaturally huge and old, but none more so than an ancient oak called La Grande Jambe.  This vast tree holds within its arms a rambling structure of chambers and open performance areas, most with roofs.  The place is constantly buzzing with chatter, poetry, music and song.  This is La Boîte de Grenouilles (the “Pavillion of Ecstacies” in the common tongue), the oldest public house in the country, more commonly known simply as “The Box”

To call La Boîte de Grenouilles an inn is a vast over-simplification of its great purpose and is certainly misleading.  The edifice is owned and run by a family of Grey Elves called Ponce, as it has been for hundreds of years.  It serves as a social nexus-point for the elven population and offers accommodation to all kinds of artists and performers.

In the great bowls of the tree roots can be found little shops and workshops producing exquisite utensils and objets d’art.  Above this are meeting rooms and balconies for the chattering classes to pass the day and then the main theatre areas where hundreds can enjoy special performances.

The kitchens produce excellent elven food, which is too light on the meat for many, and wine and other beverages are available.  The rooms are comfortable and rarely unoccupied, with preference always given to travelling performers, artistes and guests of the elven community.

Princess Elleraiya of Loom (a wood elf) declared the place to be “The most exquisite location in which to spend a warm summer evening in the world of men.”  Whereas Boldass Smirchiq, a dwarf Hammer-baron from the Blue Mountains declared that “The wine’s good but the food is shite and that twat Ponce who runs the place is so far up her own arse that I am surprised she can breathe.”

In response to this critique Insignia Ponce, the current manager of the Boîte de Grenouilles, merely responded that she was surprised a Dwarf had managed to get served in her establishment and that she would remind her staff of the policies of the place.

In truth, the place is full of elitist cliques each with inflated opinions of themselves and their importance to the city.  Anyone who isn’t a polite, well-spoken elf will find the place cold and unfriendly.  High Elves tend not to favour the place and prefer the Elf’s Walk Inn west of the lake, so the clientele is almost exclusively Wood and Grey elves at any particular time.

Some Halflings tend to like the place, if they are easily impressed by a well-groomed elf, but most prefer the Elf’s Walk as the ale is better.  In fact, The Box doesn’t serve beer of any kind.  Humans would find the place hard to relax in although Barons and Royalty are welcome.  Dwarves and Gnomes have never stayed for long when visiting and never left with a good impression, while Half Orcs just avoid the whole area.

Really, the place mirrors the worst excesses of its owner, Insignia Ponce, who is an old family matriarch who fawns about any artistic personalities and treats everyone else, including her own family, with contempt.  Her sons are Mirror and Finbar Ponce, both married and with their own families living and working in the Box.  In fact, most of the staff are family members.

Despite their good breeding and high opinion of themselves it is fair to say that no member of the Ponce family has ever made a favourable impression on anyone they have ever met.  Which is a shame, because the wine and cheese are superb and the opera, poetry and other performances to be experienced here are quite wonderful…

Fair enough.

But some spells are very powerful.  They link into extra-planar or other deeply magical forces of the Multiverse.  Surely, that must count for something?  In a lot of Fantasy Fiction, from Harry Potter to the Colour of Magic, spell books are changed by their contents.  Spell books become animated entities, sources of strange effects, portals through which strange entities act.

But why?

This line of questioning started with the Wish Spell:

I was thinking about the use of a Ring of Wishing one of my victims, erm, I mean players had.  Now the core rules encourage the DM to be inventive, pernicious and cynical in their completion of any wish their players might try.  The wording and interpretation of wishes is a really fun part of the game.  Or infuriating.

Anyway, I wanted this Ring to be particularly vicious and perverse in its interpretations of the working of the player’s deepest desires and I got to wondering why?  How did this ring, ostensibly created using the same impersonal magic as every other ring, become so particularly nasty, cruel even.  Well, obviously I supposed, the person who made it was particularly nasty and cruel.

This opened up a whole separate stream of consciousness about why anyone would go to such extreme measures as making one of the most potentially powerful items in the Multiverse just to annoy some unknown person at some point in the future, but that’ll be a different blog post…

So if Wishes can mirror some of the personality of the caster, why not other spells?

Looking at the nature of the spells that have been written down one can guess certain key elements of their creator’s personality by the way in which the spell works and the specifics of its effects.  Why wouldn’t the enchantment reflect this in a more implicit way: what if the spell itself was entwined with the alignment of its creator or its own basic nature, in some way?

Several thoughts come to mind:

Why bother?

If they do, so what?

How might this manifest itself?

So, in order then, why bother?  Well, why not?  Anything to complicate matters for the PC and make beating the monsters difficult has to be good fun right?  Perhaps you can restrict the power of high level NPCs this way – make them a bit more manageable.  Could a Good Cleric use an Evil spell?  It might even just be fun thinking about it.

If spells do have alignments, so what?  Well, it adds another layer to the character of the magic in your campaign.  In most FRPGs magic is a set of simple incantations designed to do certain things.  You cast them, the effect happens.  Pow!  Well, that’s a bit dull isn’t it?

Magic is supposed to be this amazing and super-natural force, alien, dangerous and powerful.  But in FRPGs they are, like I said at the start, merely tools.  There’s no mystery to them, no intrinsic peril (other than using Fireballs in confined spaces) that might make the caster think twice about using them.

By giving spells a basic alignment you can sow discord into the relationship the Mage or the Cleric has with their spells.  Some might be off-limits, some might have their effects curtailed.  To a certain extent this is already acknowledged:  Reversible Cleric spells are off limits or mandatory to certain casters on a basis of alignment.  Why not take this one step further?

How might this idea manifest itself?  Well, you might already be thinking up your own problems and consequences but let’s start with basic implementation.  What spells would have alignments and why?

Well, there is a risk here of building a ridiculous level of complexity into everything and changing the fundamentals of the games we love, so don’t change everything immediately.  It strikes me that most spells, if they were aligned, they would be Neutral.  Also, even if they were Good or Evil, would they necessarily have the power to manifest that inclination?

Certainly I can see no real benefit in aligning the less powerful spells.  Except for certain obvious exceptions I wouldn’t even think about spells below 5th level.  Only at this level are spells routinely using great powers and calling upon powerful entities to complete their effects.

Having said that, the nature of the game is that spells are tools, and tools can be used by anyone, any time.  Tools don’t fix things, people fix things, the spells are not autonomous and cannot cast themselves.  So it seems to me that all spells have an element of Neutrality about them and the majority will be True Neutral.  So this limits us to just the various Neutral alignment mixes.  That’s still some interesting possibilities.

So I picked up my ancient copy of Unearthed Arcana (complete with burnt corners – long story) and this is what I came up with, although I should say I have no idea how this might affect play yet:

Any Curse – Neutral Evil

Protection and Healing Spells – Neutral Good

Animate Dead – Neutral Evil

Most Illusion-style spells – Chaotic Neutral

Golem, Conjure Elemental and similar faithful/servant entity generating spells – Lawful Neutral

Maze, Imprisonment, Hold Spells and anything that traps someone or otherwise removes their freedom – Neutral Evil

Anything that causes the victim to behave in a way alien to their nature – Chaotic Neutral

Resurrection, Raise Dead and so on – railing so dramatically against the laws of nature heedless of consequence they simply must be Chaotic Neutral.

Wish – which brings us full circle.  A normal Wish, I would suggest, is Chaotic Neutral.  They are determined to fulfil their function but only in the most tortuously awkward way.  Perhaps the Ring I originally started with would be aligned Neutral Evil instead – deliberately doing what it was asked in the most nasty, inconvenient and dangerous way it can get away with.  Which perhaps begs the question, could you get Neutral Good wishes as well?  Such a thing might be keen to please in any way it can.

There’s only a few here.  Most of the spells are really Neutral, but if they weren’t, how might this confuse and embarrass your PCs do you think?  And might that be fun?

Of course Swords can be intelligent and have alignments and all kinds of things, and I know of many DMs who have extended this to powerful non-sword weapons as well.  Surely other powerful magic items could have the same options associated with them?  How about a Chaotic Neutral Wand of Wonder?  A Lawful Good Bag of Holding?  Hmmm.  Now that needs some further thought…

Karan is the second city of the Land of the Young and was once the capital of an ancient and highly cultured empire.  The city was founded on valuable mines in a strategically important mountain pass.  The mines are still there and the upper galleries have become an intrinsic part of the city - being used as much as the surface streets by the inhabitants.  The deeper caves are still working mines, mainly for tin but also for small deposits of gems and silver.

A few hundred years ago the ancient empire lost the war with the Land of the Young and Karan and the lands around it have been part of the Land of the Young ever since.

The colonies the old empire had in the west have been left to rot and lost over time, making Karan a frontier town on the western edge of the Land of the Young.  The Borderlands to the west of the city are being slowly reoccupied but remain a wilderness in the main.  Beyond the Borderlands are the Wild Lands; and almost endless expanse of fleeting civilisations, wilderness and strange monsters.  The Wild Lands stretch all the way west to the Twilight Sea, half a world away.

This publication is different from the last two scenarios in that it is not an adventure but rather a game setting.  At SEVENTY PAGES of gorgeousness it remains a lot less detailed than Dunromin but has enough information in it to allow a GM to use it as a base for adventuring into the west.  The book includes a city map and a map of the extent of the unusual cave system beneath the city, as well as information about Guilds, temples inns and public buildings.  There is a generator for detailing other buildings and a rich history and social structure to the whole thing so there's no want of detail for anyone wanting to have a closer look around.

Enjoy!

But with specific relevance to the wonderful World of Barnaynia I often wonder if dear Terry might have had a little bit of an influence on the design and conception of the world.  The manner in which the world came to be imagined as banana-shaped has been described elsewhere but I will summarise here:

It was very early morning in 1987 (March I think) in a sponsored marathon D&D session in aid of Lancashire Polytechnic’s Student Union rag-week.  We had been playing for about 36 hours and were very sleep-deprived.  As play swooped from dangerous to surreal and back again two players (while in character) started arguing as to whether the world was flat or spherical.  One of the debaters was Adrian “Arse” Bell, the other may have been Frog, Pete Leary or possibly even Taff.  Or Craig Tooke.  Or Spikey Mikey….

Anyway, the debate was getting heated and I was asked, as DM, to confirm one or the other side.  In an inspired moment (or a fit of ego) I said they were both wrong and that the world was banana-shaped.

As it happened, due to the Lancashire Polytechnic Students Union being on a spine of hills, you could illustrate this at the time by looking at the horizon.  From the Coffee Shop (as it was then) on the top of the Union building I could illustrate the idea by pointing out that the horizon curved more in one direction than in the other, as if of the back of a banana.  It was perhaps a clever bit of spontaneous improv, maybe not, but it caused a giggle and became the accepted form of the planet…

It was only some time later that I remembered the quote from Monty Python’s Holy Grail   [link below under "More Information"]

Now, I have seen this film several times from years before the incident at Preston Poly and I am sure many of the lines were quoted and requoted dozens of times in various peer groups I had inhabited.  I am sure many of you had similar experiences.

So the question is, and I cannot answer this as I am not sure myself, is whether the shape of Barnaynia was my own invention or was it subconsciously inspired by my remembrance of the quote from the film?  I certainly knew the quote and have repeated it often, but I do not recall thinking about it at all at the time.

Regardless of the truth of it, and I kind of hope he did inspire me, a comic genius has died.  May he rest in peace and live forever in comedy cults everywhere.

I also had a kind of epiphany and realised the only thing stopping me trying to get stuff published was my own fear of failure...  So I decided to stop being an idiot and put my best stuff out there on the 'Net to see if anyone else was interested - I thought what I had was cool and other people might enjoy reading it, or even using it themselves.

The history of how Dunromin came to be is recorded in the Player's and Games Master's guide to Dunromin and I don't intend to repeat that all here...  But I thought it might be worth mentioning my own pedigree in terms of D&D, RPGs and such, so here it is:

I started playing D&D in about 1980, when I was about 12 or 13, in my hometown of Hornsea, in East Yorkshire, UK.  My friends Pete and Ribes invited me around to try out this new thing they had, called Dungeons and Dragons.  Within 4 months I had got the Red Box Basic D&D (pictured) set and started my own group.  This developed quickly into Expert D&D and then switched to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (as there was no Companion rules at the time) and I have stayed there or come back to that 1st edition AD&D ever since.

Through Secondary school D&D and RPGs in general were a significant part of my life, often at the expense of my studies and certainly to the detriment of a normal teen social life (although there was still room for that too).  The core of players eventually called ourselves "The Eight" because there were nine of us, but there were many others that came and went.  The Eight remain some of my closest friends even now, more than 35 years later.

We played AD&D, Star Frontiers, Traveller, Runequest, Ghostbusters, Call of Cthulhu, Price of Freedom, Indiana Jones, James Bond, Star Wars RPG and others I can’t remember - I still have a lot of the character sheets.  Pete also wrote his own RPG, called Odyssey, which was and remains my favourite.  There were several flavours of Odyssey; Fantasy, Super Hero and our favourite Marines Odyssey, which was based on the colonial marines from the Aliens film.

I had intended to go Edinburgh to study Architecture after my A levels (Maths, Physics, Computer Science, Art and General Studies) but didn't get the grades (due to too much beer and RPGing).  Instead in 1986 I ended up at Lancashire Polytechnic in Preston, Lancashire, studying for an HND in Applied Physics.  Making a mess of my A levels turned out to be the best mistake I ever made.  As well as discovering what life was really all about (women - and got my heart broken for my trouble, never mind) and having an unutterably brilliant time, I also got heavily involved with the Sci-Fi Society, which was the role-playing group in the Student's Union boasting over 100 members - I was even the chairmen in my second year.  I met many like-minded young people, several of whom are still very close friends.

It was at Lancashire Polytechnic (now the University of Central Lancashire) that Dunromin first came into being and the World of Barnaynia was conceived (during a marathon D&D session when we were all pretty sleep-deprived).  It was a momentous time and my recollections of those three years are many and fond.  The Eight still met during the holidays back in our home town and occasionally during term time, but now my circle of co-conspirators in the (then still socially embarrassing) world of D&D and Role Playing was growing.

My HND course was a ‘sandwich’ course, which meant we spent some time out in industry.  My industrial placement was spent in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, working as a research assistant in the petro-chemical industry.  It was during this time (1988) that the first draft of Dunromin and the original map was produced.  I think I also came up with the names "Dunromin" and "Barnaynia" there too.  From this time in Abingdon I fell in love with the city of Oxford and chose to go to Oxford Poly (now Oxford Brookes) and do a Degree in Physics and Microelectronics after finishing my HND.

I then spent two years on the piss and playing RPGs before Graduating with a 2:1; Hurrah!  This was another marvellous time of my life and I remember making many friends, having some extraordinary adventures and generally enjoying myself far too much.  It wasn't all golden though.  At the end of year one there was a fire in the trailer all my stuff was in and most of my worldly possessions went up in smoke.  I still loath insurance companies for the way they treated me then.  My books were all stacked together and so didn't burn, although they are all singed and got wet through - I still have my DMG, PHB, monster books et al. from that time, complete with scorch marks and melted corners...

I also learned to ride a motorbike, passed my test and then had a massive crash.  This was another huge learning experience and I think it changed me a lot.  A near death experience puts everything into perspective.  I am not sure all the lessons I learnt then were good for me but I came out of the process a lot more positive, curious and inspired by life and living than I had ever been before.

After Oxford I got a job through a friend in an engineering firm in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire.  This was another steep learning curve and, although I hated my life at the time and was relieved to be made redundant when the firm folded, I am immensely proud of the things I managed to achieve at that time.  I demonstrated aptitude in the areas of electrical and mechanical engineering design, draughtsmanship, electronics, programming and discovered a natural flair for sales.  I also had another big bike crash.  Oops.  But I didn’t really play much D&D at the time…

After being made redundant I went home to East Yorkshire, where I had grown up, and spent the next 18 months living at home with Mum and Dad.  I got a job pretty quickly at the place I worked during the holidays in my student days, but it was a dead-end and I needed much, much more.  So I handed my notice in after 9 months and then spent another 9 months unemployed.  This time was spent travelling around the country, mainly hitch-hiking, visiting friends and registering with various job agencies.  I had a number of interviews but the time was dismal - probably the most miserable I have been in my life - got my heart shattered again – although my friends and my writing (mostly my friends really) kept me sane, just about.

As well as travelling about the country I also spent a lot of time with the two of the Eight, Bragi and Coops, that still lived in the area and we developed our own RPG between us, called BRPG (the Bastardised Role Playing Game).  This was a very cut-down game based on imagination and as few rules as possible.  It was a great hoot and we had a lot of fun with it.  Nothing ever got written down as we kind of made it up as we went along, but it was excellent fun.

The longer my unemployment went on the more difficult it seemed to be able to break free but then a fantastic opportunity came my way in 1994 and I relocated to Reading in Berkshire - specialist computing sales and a real job, earning proper money and, I was surprised to discover, a career!  I found myself in a new city with no friends so I of course immediately joined the local RPG group (I don't remember how I found out about them but they met every week in a pub in the city centre - the George I think?) and there I made some more friends who, again, I shared many bizarre and wonderful experiences with and remain firm friends to this day.

My time in Reading was great fun.  I met some very odd people and enjoyed my time both professionally and socially while I was there and generally felt like I was, at last, growing up and ready to adult the shit out of my life.  I ran a D&D campaign for a while and then tried my hand at writing my own game, based on the BRPG idea, which became an awesome and very strange campaign which everyone who played in it remembers very fondly.  BRPG was drafted properly and nearly got published.  I think I will probably put it up on here for people to try out at some point.

The job was good but it was a small firm and I soon hit a ceiling beyond which I needed to change companies to progress.  I was also not enjoying living in the south as much as I had hoped.  I liked the people well enough but the southeast itself felt crowded, claustrophobic and totally urbanised.  I am not sure what it was but I wanted to move north again, to be nearer my family again.  As luck would have it I made contact with a fantastic firm near Nottingham and got a position there.

I moved to Nottingham and kind of started again, although I had some old friends in Nottingham too.  The job was great and I had my own house (rented) so for the first time ever I wasn’t sharing.  I had a number of historic parties there.  I ran a D&D club on Tuesday nights, making EVEN MORE good friends, and filled my weekends with marathon D&D sessions, writing, visiting friends and generally having a fabulous time.  This was probably the best time of my whole single life, just.  I even learned to drive and got myself a car as well as my bike.

And then shortly after the turn of the century I took a three week holiday in Namibia.  It was fantastic.  I had an amazing time and had some more extraordinary adventures.  And then I came home  to my lovely, but empty, house and realised I was the only one who had been on this amazing adventure; I had no one to share those great memories with.  The realisation had been growing in me for a while: I was lonely.  I needed a mate, a partner, and I realised I wanted children too.

It took a while but eventually I met Lynsay and it all came right; she is a fun loving, intelligent and beautiful lady, accomplished, informed and fun to be with.  We fitted.  It was the right time and the right place and we were the right people for each other.  Our togetherness was greater than the sum of our parts, and it still is.  My dad summed it up best when, after meeting her for the first time, he said "She's great.  We feel like we've known her all our lives..."  So we got married in 2004 and went to New Zealand for our honeymoon.  Which was brilliant!  Nine months after that along came Edward and twenty-two months after that Annabelle arrived.

Two years after that Annabelle became very ill.  It was a terrible time but she got better and remains well.  And then along came Lawrence.  We were five.  Lynsay and I were outnumbered.

Shortly after Annabelle was born I realised I was getting disillusioned with my career, it was 2008 and my Mum had recently died.  I had moved jobs again, twice, and was earning very good money as an external sales executive.  This was good but I was hating it and, as a result, I was failing at it.  Our little family were now based in Southern Derbyshire and I enjoyed the travelling involved in the job but I hated everything else about it.  Eventually we decided I should change careers.  We had been toying with the idea of switching to teaching for some time and we resolved that's what I should do.  I retrained as a Physics teacher which was one of the best decisions I ever made.  I remain a physics teacher to this day and I am still enjoying it more than any other job I have had, and I have had quite a few...

The role-playing kind of petered out after I met Lynsay and we had the kids – I just didn’t have the time for it, apart from the occasional get-together with old friends from Preston, Reading and so on.  But as the kids got older I found I had (a bit) more time on my hands and all that RPG stuff I have written and played and enjoyed over the years was still sat there, in boxes, on shelves, some even in the attic.  I resolved to do something about it, about a year ago, and that’s where this blog entry started…

I hope I haven’t gone on too long – please excuse the indulgence of an old man (not that I feel particularly old).  And yes, I still ride my motorbike, whenever I can.  It’s a Yamaha YZF600 Thundercat, for those that want to know.  I still have a plate in my leg from the first crash and see a back-doctor regularly due to injuries from the second, but I regret nothing (well, not much).  Life is a blast.

Well, yes.  I am.  I am achieving a lifetime's ambition of getting into print.  I am not making a living but was that the point?  Well, it would have been nice but, at the core of it, I had some cool ideas and I wanted to share them with people.  So I have.

Now... do I really want to make money from it?  Sure, but it seems unlikely at present...  So I realised what I really wanted to do was share my stuff with people.

This meant a major change in my sales plan - change everything to PAY WHAT YOU WANT.  This seemed ideal - sharing my ideas and allowing people to donate if and wehen they wanted to.

But I still have to pay for Website fees, gift copies and such so I have reduced the the price of the core books by a half, rather than PWYW, to see what happens.  This is still a bargain for two books of over 200 pages each, stuffed with ideas and such.  Now we shall see if I can make any headway...

I also have plans for the future - the second adventure, The Trials of a Young Wizard is out there and flying off the shelves at the new reduced price (over 100 copies shifted already!).  The City Guide to Karan should be out in a couple of weeks and the Gazeteers for the whole World of Barnaynia and the Land of the Young are next - mostly written but not yet illustrated or laid out...  Thank-you to you and all my customers for taking the time and seeing what I have to offer - you are all welcome.

And thanks for the REVIEWS:

The Trials of a Young Wizard: https://www.theseoldgames.com/2019/12/title-sm12-trials-of-young-wizard-code.html

The Warren: https://www.theseoldgames.com/2019/12/osric-module-review-m06-warren.html 

The Traveller's Guide: https://www.theseoldgames.com/2019/12/dunromin-university-press.html

And another for the Warren: https://rpggeek.com/thread/2285940/tuckers-kobolds-2-electric-bugaloo  [although goblins are Lawful Evil not Chaotic Evil, but otherwise a very useful review]

Stay tuned for more banana-shaped fun and games!

Included are detailed maps, backgrounds and structured encounter areas with payer descriptions and GM descriptions, along with key information high-lighted for ease of use in the heat of play.

The premise is that one of the players is a Magic-User or Multi-class Magic-User freshly graduated from the Magic College of Dunromin; probably the best Magic College in the known world.  The new post-grad is immediately accosted by the College Bursar with news that a fellow student may have gone missing while searching for Kobolds in the Royal Parks.  The Bursar also has a little errand he would like the players to run for him while they are in that area, namely looking up a retired mage and getting back a magic item the college loaned him some time ago.

• "The Lost Son" is the first part of the three adventures and involves a quick search for, and exploration of, a kobold lair.  It's pretty straight-forward stuff and all good fun BUT (well this is Barnaynia after all - there had to be a "but") there are some simply traps and a strange discovery down there that might open up a whole campaign of exploration, if you want it to.
• "The Return of the Cauldron of Milent" takes the players to the unfinished grand manshion of Herefus Darkhand and his wife, where mystery awaits...
• The last adventure is "The Murder at the Red Barn" and has a different spin altogther.  It can be run before, after or during the other two and is a mix of murder/mystery and panic/horror/slash.  As an entry-level scenario it shows prospective player an alternative application of the Role-Playing format FRPGs are famous for.

So there you have it - an adventure on the doorstep:  challenges, significant danger (if you're not careful) and lots of diverting new ideas, all presented in a top quality package as you would expect from Dunromin University Press and all for Pay-What-You-Want at DriveThruRPG.com.   Enjoy!

Some beg to differ…  Our reporter sought out a couple of sources to find out more; first the most well known:

Astromelda  The grand Vizier believes she has a sight for future events.  She is a striking lady in her middling years and robustly built.  She wears the robes of a priestess of Isis of the Heliopeans and her headdress is decorated with the stuffed remains of an ibis of uncertain years and ragged manufacture.  In keeping with her priestly look her face is painted white with the red highlights around her mouth and eyes, decorated with fine-lining in black (note – the Heliopean temple told me that she had never attended any of their ceremonies nor had any training in any proper rites, however she claims her qualifications come from an association with the Priestlings of the Bright Fruit and their Sanctuary to the east of the city.  Given that the Priestlings are a male-only order this seems an unlikely happenstance) *.  Her eyes twinkle with unholy maleficence; her shop is appointed in thick drapes of black and gold, lavishly equipped with symbols, charms and similar equipment of High Magic.  These charms and protections are also for sale, she is keen to point out.

Although Astromelda says she doesn’t so much “see” the future as “feel the strange impression of peril, wonder, fear and death dribbling through the ether like the echoes of a distant singer singing a mysterious song.”

When I spoke to her of her powers she was expansive in her responses: “The fates are fickle creatures, weaving their fronds of past, present and future together.  If one is wise in the ways of weaving one might perceive what the pattern might be, at least for a short time into the future, or regarding one event.”  I asked if this meant that fate was written and unavoidable.  She looked perplexed “Why would you think such a thing?  Pick at any weave and the threads become unlocked, you can twist them to your own ends.  If you are capable.”  This sounded like she meant the work of the gods could be corrupted?  She agreed, “But one must always be careful when it comes to dealing with the gods.  Terrible sacrifices might be demanded.”  And what might I have to sacrifice, I asked.  Her tone sharpened noticeably.  “Ten gold for a normal reading,” she replied, “If you want a horoscope that will be a hundred and will take me a week.  I read palms too.  They’re ten gold.  No guarantees, no refunds given.”

Astromelda’s greatest competition in this is Arum the Soothsayer.  Arum is a slightly (but only slightly) more down to Earth seer who uses the echoes of fate as described in signs and portents displayed in the “now”.  He claims to be able to discern the path of the future by closely observing certain indicators in the present.  From the flight of birds he foretells the destiny of harvests.  From the entrails of fish he can predict the weather.  From the ritual imbibement of certain arcane fluids he can predict the rise and fall of kings.

His own place of business, for lack of a better description, is a set of poorly maintained rooms near the Celtic Temple.  These dimly lit chambers are dirty and smell fouly of rotten meat; buckets of offal and past dissections are piled near the door and the poorly-stripped skulls of numerous beasts, large and small, decorate the walls.  Arum himself always wears his wolfskin in public, its boneless head strapped down over his own, and beneath that he wears greying robes in need of a wash.  Or perhaps burning.

Arum is a man of indeterminate years.  His face is stretched with the trials of a long life, or perhaps a short one poorly led.  His eyes are young and sparkle with mischief but his mouth, lipless between a straight, grimy beard and moustache, is perpetually twisted to suggest something distasteful in the air.  Which of course there usually is.

I asked him if the future was written and unchangeable; “All futures are written, but all possibilities are played out.  Like the streams making a river one can flow in which ever one you like to branch from the main flow.”  I pointed out that small rivers flow into larger ones and he looked perplexed, “Yes, perhaps.  The fortunes I render are more useful than my metaphors, I should think.”  I asked him if he subscribed to the many-worlds perception of the Multiverse, given he suggested the path might be changed, chosen even. “I wouldn’t like to comment on something so lurid as modern science.  I deal with magic and folklore, the wisdom of the gods and the transducing of their intentions and desires.  I won’t have any truck with that modern nonsense.”  Instead I asked him how one might go about changing ones fate.  “With years of study and no small amount of talent you might learn the paths and minds of the gods.  You might, and I emphasise ‘might’, then be able to see further and deeper into your own future.  It’s not a trifling matter.  And certainly only a gifted few might see another’s future.  I have been blessed, nay, cursed one might say, with The Sight!  It is a grim burden to have the future play before your eyes, like characters in a theatre acted out too quickly.”  And how might one with no training know one's fate then, I asked.  “Ten gold for a normal reading,” he replied, his tone now tight and more earnest that it had been.  “If you want a reading of entrails that will be a hundred gold and you must supply me with the appropriate fresh cadaver as I instruct.  I read palms too.  They’re ten gold as well.  No guarantees, no refunds given.”

And then, of course, there is the traditional path of bribing the gods with your time, essence and material goods.  Just pop along to your favourite temple and do something time-consuming and/or expensive and you can rest assured, probably, that your patron god has your best interests at heart and will endeavour to make sure your plans come to fruition.  All very well but there is a clause in the theological contract: if you don’t get what you asked for either you can’t have tried hard enough to impress your god, or you are trapped in a bigger and more mysterious plot in which your role is written and inevitable.

The best way to find out what destiny has in mind for you is probably to go to the future and find out.  Don’t fancy that?  Tough luck, you’re already on your way and there’s only one way to get the best from this trip.  Join in the fun and frolics in the most exciting fantasy game setting that includes a banana-shaped planet - the City of Dunromin, capital of the Land of the Young.

* Just before going to press a representative of the Heliopean Temple contacted me and informed that, after a meeting with Astromelda and her banker, the temple now fully recognises her status as Associate Member and Seer.

The Bawdy Wench lurks at the centre of the city, near enough.  It sits at the bottom of the Old City Walls on the border between the old town and the new.  It is on Deepdale Street, just along from the steps up to Gibbet Tower.  It has several doors and within many rooms, bars and lounges.  It stands three or four stories tall, it is hard to be sure from some angles, and offers all manner of services and distractions.  The beers and ciders are not city ales (which are famously and uniformly foul, due to The Curse) but imported from the fertile valleys of the south, usually from the halfling villages there.  The wines are imported from all over, as is the tradition in most of the drinking houses in the city, but in the main from the elves south of the mountains.  The food is, well, there is food.  Accommodation is varied and suitable to any purse and experience, and a little extra (or simply having the right reputation or connections) will ensure your belongings are still your belongings come the morning.

Ownership of the ‘Wench has changed many times over the years, in normal business or lost and won in games of chance or other nefarious dealings.  The current owner is perhaps the most unusual yet, although not the most colourful.  In truth Tom Dunug does not own the ‘Wench, as being a humanoid, he is not allowed to own property in the city, at least, not yet.  Who exactly owns it is a matter of debate, although rarely serious.  Tom bought the inn when an adventurer, a successful fighter and a Lord, and a human.  He was unfortunate enough to get himself killed on his very next adventure, incinerated by dragon fire (he still refuses to serve dragons and resents lizards).  The Magic-User in the party, his lover at the time according to some, acted in haste and cast Reincarnation.  What became of her is not known but Tom found himself a Troll, hence his current ownership conundrum.

Tom is a pleasant enough fellow and will talk happily (with a slight lisp due to his teeth) to any about new news from the far reaches of the world.  His adventuring days are behind him, he says, because he claims “In the heat of battle my companions might find themselves lashing out at me in their haste.”  There is little trouble at the Wench, save among those who regard such activities as entertainment.  Those types tend to be restricted to the Back Room, where the furniture is cheaper.

Tom is not the only staff, of course, and has a motley crew of cut-throats, out of work actors, brazen harlots and homely elderly lags to keep the whole place jumping along.  Music and poetry can oft be heard in some of the rooms, shouting and bidding in others.  Many games of chance are catered for and there are secluded areas and private rooms for private business.  The staff tend to lodge in the attic but during festivals every room is in demand and they must sleep when and where they can.  Tom himself has a chamber beneath the cellar where, since his trollish incarnation, he has found himself to be more comfortable.

Everyone (except dragons) is welcome at the Bawdy Wench, as long as they have the coin, and even better if they have a tale to tell or news to share.  Anyone and everyone might be found here and almost every conversation hides an opportunity for an ambitious and cunning mind.

But why should this be?

In one massive dungeon hack I played there was a small goblin tribe in a dozen or so rooms.  I used a bit of cunning and set up their rooms to be more easily defended, using burning oil and barricaeds a bit.  To my surprise the party (all 4-6th level characters but fairly new players) made very heavy weather of the whole process.  They must have retreated and re-attacked three or four times before getting through and even then they skirted the main rooms to get through to the other side and on to the next part of the dungeon.  It was amazing how easy it was for low level monsters, using nothing but animal cunning and conventional weapons, to create such a problem for the players.  One player even started referring to it as the Stalingrad Level because of the unexpected and damaging resistance they encountered.

This all set me thinking:  What if the goblins built their own lair from the ground up?  Er, I mean ground down...?  They could construct corridors that suited them better, use secret passages and tricks and traps all over the place.  The main problem they will have is being able to hit the characters who will all have pretty good armour, so how could I level that playing field?  The result is the Warren.  It's a goblin lair with some bite.  In fact, if the party are careless or too over-confident this could get even a 7th or 8th level party into a TPK (Total Party Kill) situation if you're not careful...

It's a challenge to even experienced players and DMs.  Are you up tot he challenge of a few poxy goblins?  Go on - give it a go.  I DARE you...

This is a gateway into a fantastic new realm of Fantasy Role Playing!  Since its inception in 1986 the City of Dunromin and the world on which it sits, Barnaynia, have been played in and developed using AD&D and OSRIC rules by many new and experienced players.  All that depth of development has now been brought together in the Players' Guide to Dunromin and the Games Master's Guide to Dunromin.  These are the proud results of years of work by me and my friends.

The idea of this blog is to give you some insights into the character and philosophy of the creators of the world and some of the history of it's developemt.  As this is the first Blog post it seems fair I should explain what it all is and where it came from...

It all started at Lancashire Polytechnic (now the University of Central Lancashire) in the Coffee Shop at the top of the Student Union building.  This place was the long-established main meeting place for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Society, then run by Ray Jennings, and was equipped with a meeting room, a number of video games, some pool tables and some comfy seating areas with tables that were perfect for playing RPGs at.  It was our 'place' and you could guarantee meeting someone from the Soc there any time after noon.  Plus there was a bar downstairs with regular cheap offers on.  What's not to like?

There are so many strange and wonderful stories we could all share from then but Dunromin and Barnaynia were specifically spontaneously created during a 72-hour charity Role-Playing session for Rag Week.  Some photos exist!  I was DMing the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh for the players' newly rolled characters and, after gaining some loot, they went "back to their city" to train and such.  I made up the name "Dunromin" on the spur of the moment and it became the base for the campaign that grew out of the 72-hour session and then ran for 3 years until we all finsihed our courses.  Dunromin has featured as the base for every campaign I have run ever since.

I became chairman of the SF&F Soc the next academic year (Sept 1987) and was then on a work placement for most of the year.  During this time I obtained some lab books and some large sheets of graph paper and drew the first version of the city map now available in the Travellers' Atlas of Dunromin and the Land of the Young (available for a free download from DriveThruRPG.com).  The layout of the city hasn't changed much, but the quality of the map itself has improved vastly.  Since then the original map has been burnt, lost, found and lost again, although photocopies do exist...

The details of the guilds, temples, NPCs and Royal Family, history and other stuff were first written in the two lab books, which I still have, and then typed up into soft-form later.  The maps were re-worked using Campaign Cartographer (thoroughly recommended) by Mark "Penfold" Wardale and using GIMP (also excellent) by myself.  They were brought together in their current book form in early 2018 and edited, added to, proofed and play-tested since then.

Barnaynia, the world on which Dunromin sits, was an even more spontaneous creation:  There was an in-character debate between Adrian "Arse!" Bell and Pete Leary about whether the world was round or flat.  It was just after dawn on the second day of the 72-hours and we were all a bit woozy, to be honest.  To try and get people back into the game I told them they were both wrong and that the world was Banana shaped; everyone knew that.  It is possible this idea bubbled up from my subconscious as a line from Monty-Python and the Holy Grail but we ran with it anyway.  This explanation satisfied Pete but Adrian continued to take issue with it.  I pointed out to him that he should compare the view east to the view north (the coffee shop is on the third or fourth floor on the top of a hill so has an excellent panoramic view of the area).  We noted that (due to local geography) the eastern horizon curved slightly more then the northern horizon.  Adrian (still in character) admitted this was so in good humour and the concept of a banana-shaped world was born; later called Barnaynia.

The first world drawings followed soon after and were also tidied and updated into the form you can download now.