Status Of the Vales Setting

I have been working pretty hard on the Vales setting, and hope to be able to post some of it next month.

Working on the Base Town of Tirbreth Hold

Most of my efforts have been on the home base of Tirbreth Hold. This town of about 2,250 people is the capital of the planned starting region, or Vale. I’m taking a little more time to flesh it out to have it ready for urban adventures as well as a safe haven for wilderness ones.

The town itself is on the banks of the major river that flows through the Vales, and is at a crossroads for land traffic as well. I wanted to start in this location because it gives a lot of options for local as well as foreign people and cultures. It also gives me more opportunities for buying and selling strange things, like loot!

The town has a number of different quarters or wards, to give characters different feels as they move around town. It also gives me plenty of room to expand and create as I adventure there.

One thing that I am doing with the town, though, is creating it as a pointcrawl, not as an explicitly mapped town. The major reason I am doing it this way is to make it easier on myself, and make it quicker to run solo adventures. I’m not an artist, so I just ain’t going to come up with a beautiful, hand crafted town map!

In addition, I am drafting up a number of NPCs to place around town in the places of interest that I come up with. Most of these will be just rough outlines, but they are giving me great ideas for story hooks for future adventures…

Working on the Surrounding Hexes

Taking a step back, as part of the Gygax ‘75 Challenge that led me to create the setting, I mapped out the entire Vales with a hex map in 24/6/1 mile scale “grid.” This allowed me to place random features and ruins throughout the Vale.

And that is what I have done. I have notional ideas for each feature or ruin, but I need to flesh them out with real details. Still, I can do that later as I plan adventures to specific areas or locations. But the framework is there.

Gluing It All Together

Bringing this all together, I have been making some pretty good progress on the Vales. (That was one reason I decided to keep playing with this one–it was small enough to be really focused on and actually get somewhere!)

However, life always intrudes. I expect that I will hit snags and distractions here and there. I will persevere, though, and get to where I am doing some real gaming in the Vales. I want to use it to flesh out a magic system for Blades & Black Magic, as well as a solo game system for it.

As always, I will keep writing about it here—so stay tuned for more!

Marko ∞