With our heroes all finished with Fort Valtengard (the dungeon from Part 2), they set off downriver in their rowboat, to sell their treasures in the big city: Sole Harbor. (Alternately spelled Sol Harbor or Soul Harbor, and also it’s unclear if it’s “sole” as in “only”, or “sole” as in “a kind of fish”.)
They got to the city and saw our campaign’s first big settlement — a large coastal town still rebuilding from the war. I broke the city down into a few districts: The Waterfront, The Market, The Elder District and the War District.
The Waterfront serves as their new, probably temporary home base. They keep their boat there, and they found an inn to stay at— a kitschy, adventurer-themed establishment called “You All Meet in Here”. It serves as headquarters for now, and it’s a place to get rations and potions. (Right now, they only sell an extra strong, extra expensive healing potion. I think in the future I’ll just have them sell a wider array of basic potions in the form of mason jar cocktails.) The Waterfront also has an anarchist dwarf printmaker named Tiago. He’s a magician trainer and an opportunity for me to play the role of an aging punk.
The Market is exactly what it sounds like, with a bigger variety than in the smaller towns. There’s a blacksmith that specializes in fancy nails, a hunter and trapper duo offering training, and a nerdy, bespectacled teenage witch named Moonsong.
The Elder district is the oldest part of town. It’s a prettier area than the Market. It has a shoe shop, a cafe, and a yeshiva where characters can get magician training and pilgrim training. The standout NPC in the Market is Roberto, an orc and retired gentleman thief. He’s got tusks and a thin pencil moustache, hair always parted and perfectly slicked down. He lives off his stolen fortune, just chilling, drinking wine, and telling anyone who will listen stories about his heists (some of which are true). He’s a vagabond trainer, and he can also train someone as a thief. No one has taken him up on that yet.
The War District is totally ruined from the war. There is little effort to rebuild it. If it comes up, this is definitely where shady criminal types will have meetings and face-offs.
The characters met an old Imperial ship’s-captain named Eva. She’s surly, she’s missing an eye, and she sells old Imperial goods back to Imperial merchants, out on the sea in neutral waters. She is tolerated by the locals in spite of her Imperial loyalties, mostly because she can’t actually return to the Empire (for reasons she doesn’t discuss). She is the only person the gang has met who will buy certain Imperial objects at full value (mostly Imperial art).
Eva bought the spoils of their trip to Valtengard, and offered them a new opportunity to pursue: The Town of Harzgard.
Let’s talk about what my idea was here.
I wanted to write a whole dungeon myself, but I wanted it to be believable. Not realistic, mind you, just believable in the game world. They can’t all be big underground mazes. So I maybe got a bit over-ambitious. This “dungeon” is a whole abandoned town, surrounded by high walls. The town is split into three districts, and each district is to be explored much like a dungeon, with different neighborhoods serving as the encounter areas in the way that individual rooms do in traditional dungeons. Then, scattered around each district, there are a few buildings that will be explored as traditional dungeons.
It’s dungeons all the way down.
There was no way I could actually design the whole thing ahead of time. So I focused on the district they would explore first: the merchant district. I made a map, defined each of the areas, and wrote up the monsters they would encounter. No more hacking old D&D monsters into the game. Everything is new.
Here’s the rough map of the merchant district that the characters would eventually find:
The gray areas are the other districts that I haven’t yet designed.
That’s a lot of buildings! Obviously, I didn’t go in and map out every building. I decided that since the town was abandoned, most of the buildings would be empty, fully evacuated. Each neighborhood instead has a few “places of interest” laid out in my notes.
This went long, so my next post will discuss the gang’s adventures in the merchant district of Harzgard, right up to the time they hunted and fought a huge bestial ogre in the Harzgard market square.