The Lords of Hack is an association of pen and pencil gamers from the South Central Pennsylvania region of the United States. This is our weblog.
Dave and I would like to invite everyone to contribute on the new Krondor wiki at:
http://krondor.lordsofhack.com
I'll send you all emails with instructions on how to log in and make changes. Please take some time and update your characters' sections and add any details you think are interesting that you would like to share.
I've been considering alternate ways for our PCs to get involved in adventures in Krondor. Dave and I have populated the Job Board with public-ish missions for our characters, but it occurs to me that perhaps we might offer alternate paths to adventure that are secret or character-driven. With that in mind, I will endeavor to also include a Current Events card draw for each session to spur the adventurers to action as well as a deck of Rumors appropriate to be heard in Newport and its nearby settlements.
The Smirkenburg mines are a complex of natural and man-made caves abandoned over a century ago. It was started by colony of early settlers from a northern city-state named “Smirkenburg” who had settled areas throughout Krondor only to abandon them unexpectedly. There are rumors of other ruins from antiquity that might be found across the island. The mines are tucked in the rough cliffs and highlands above the rocky western shores of Newport Bay. Each of the The twenty-six mine entrances are identified simply by a letter. They are spread across a two-mile square area just above the cliffs overlooking the bay.
I expect we'll have the "Smirkenburg Temples" or "Smirkenburg Caverns" as well. Basically anytime we want some sort of randomly generated content we can all play. For Sunday, I've got an assortment of 26 random caverns for us to explore.
If it interests all of you, I would like to volunteer to start play "in medias res" with this job offered by the Harbormaster.
"About an hour's boat ride out is a beacon built by the Royal Krondor Trading Company just in the past decade to keep ships from joining the graveyard of trading vessels who have run aground navigating in rocks just below the surface in the dark. It has been manned by a keeper and his servant, and would receive supplies weekly to keep the beacon burning each night during sailing season. This season alone, the beacon has already been attacked twice. Each time the keeper was found murdered and the beacon sacked of all obvious valuables. I think it's an inside job since the past two servants were halflings - probably associated with the pirates who regularly sail these waters! Also, some really valuable stuff was left up on the high shelves. Those punters are short!"
"I can't station a whole garrison of troops there. They would be too obvious, and the pirates wouldn't make their move. Instead, I want a group of rat-catchers like yourselves to hide in the beacon and counterattack once something smells fishy. Take the fight back to these pirates! If you can keep the beacon lit throughout fifth-month, you can keep anything you take from the pirates and I'll see that those of you who last are paid 150 gold each."
If we have time after this adventure, we will do a "lightning round" discussing what we all want to do with our downtime characters, and perhaps mount an expedition to the abandoned Smirkenburg Mine directly to the West across Newport Harbor (SQUARE V29).
It occurred to me in our game last night that we might consider asking PC players to roll to see if a monster fails its saving throw. It would really help the GM, and make some "save or suck" cantrips feel more like an attack.
When a character forces an opponent to make a saving throw, that player instead makes a saving throw check. The bonus to the d20 roll for a saving throw check equals the effect’s save DC − 8.
The DC for this check equals 11 + the target’s saving throw modifier. On a successful check, the character overcomes the target’s resistance and treats the target as if it failed its saving throw. On a failed check, the target is treated as if it succeeded on its save.
As with attacks, the saving throw check has advantage if the target would have disadvantage on its saving throw, and vice versa.
Dave had mentioned a method of keeping track of secret loot values in a three-ring binder so that loot cards shuffled into the deck could be cross-referenced with a sales value. However, since there isn't any *appraise* skill of its own I'm not quite sure how to have PCs know the true cost of stuff. Since loot is the basis for XP, I thought this could be a very important bit of rules we want to agree on beforehand.
I've come across this post which has a few ideas that we might perhaps use. I specifically like this section:
As far as what skill can be used on this check, or whether a skill can be used at all, I leave it up to my players to suggest a skill that might apply and justify it. This puts the onus on them to decide what they want to use, and it has the additional benefit of sometimes letting them use something that wouldn't have occurred to me.
I like it because it occurs to me that PCs may have creative ways to appraise things that aren't clear. For example, one might use the Persuasion skill to just "make stuff up" about a particular item, essentially doing the exact same thing as a basic appraise roll.
I'm looking up ways to shrink the 5e monster stat block and I came across this gem. What do you guys think?
Apparently there are already some 5e rules on the books to help with downtime actions of other PCs on our character trees.
Let's sketch the outline of Krondor next Sunday as well, pointing out the location of Newport, the volcano, and the mouths of a few rivers. If we use a 1 square = 10 mile scale we could easily fit a PA/Iceland sized island on a piece of 1" graph paper.
Once we've got a rough sketch, I'll be able to create a digital version appropriate for displaying in our logs. With any luck, I'll have the Lords of Hack website back up and running by then and we can start to wiki about things we find on the island and the world of the Great Ocean.
The climate of Krondor is temperate, not unlike that of Pennsylvania. Prevailing winds come from the East, and there is heavy precipitation in the South of the island in the Spring and Fall. Snow accumulates fast on the island in colder months, but ocean borne currents melt large deposits within a week. Winters are often bitterly cold and dry, with biting winds - particularly in the highlands to the North where there is less precipitation.
