So, here’s a very free translation of what I wrote back in 2012, so as to make it easier for the english-speaking audience to get where I’m coming from.

Sometimes I have really weird thoughts and one of those (that I’ve been mulling over for quite some time now) is that I should try to get something useful out of the RPG stuff I read. At least more than just the enjoyment of reading that stuff and some cloudy ideas of what I could do with it. I’m very lazy though when it comes down to put things into a notebook, so a lot of the ideas I have while reading RPG books keep dissappearing in a dark corner of my brain or I simply forget about them completely.

It’s time to change that and as I just read through Kobold Quarterly #2, I’ll take this issue as my base from where to start. What of the content piqued my interest, what set my creativity machine in motion and can I use this stuff to create a complete adventure from it (or at least the idea of an adventure?)

So let’s take a look at the parts of that magazine that might be useful for such an endeavor. What do we have here?

We have:

• Belphegor, the Baron of Lazyness and Invention and his comfort devils

• Gustable Arondur, owner of the Broken Wheel Inn

• Assassins

• Barghests

• Jeff Grubb’s system for using Aristocrat levels as a PC reward

There are also some things I don’t know what to with them directly:

• an undead dragon

• griffon towers

• Paladin alternative class abilities

I’m a big fan of Ed Greenwood and his creations, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that it’s Gustable Arondur that stands right in the centre of my machinations. He is beautifully characterized by Master Greenwood as follows:

“Arondur, who limps and aches in damp weather and stares longingly at every red-haired woman he sees.

Arondur, who is in awe of elves.

Arondur, who despises warriors in the army of the local king but a score-and-more years back was a hero in that same uniform, winning battles hereabouts for the king who was father to the present king. Why does he never talk of those days, and treats today’s soldiery so curtly?

Arondur, who owns all three roominghouses in town and the brothel, too, yet dresses simply and never spends a coin he doesn’t have to; where is all the money going? And who are the masked women who ride into town in the dead of winter and the middle of the night, once a year, to meet privately with Arondur, leaving him gray in the face and shaking when they depart?

Arondur, who can read books peddlers offer him, from lands beyond the sea whose names even they can’t pronounce.

Arondur, who is unmarried but keeps an outland girl in his bedchamber who has been blinded and had her tongue cut out. Those who get a glimpse say she is covered in strange tattoos that seem to be writing of some sort.” (KQ #2, pg. 15)

What follows is the result of the brainstorming I did over those things, back then. I posted everything in one article but in reality it took me two days to finish it.

Summary of the Adventure

Just before the PCs reach Yonder at the night’s beginning, they surprise a Barghest who’s just about to feed on the fresh corpse of a young woman he just murdered. When they have slain the beast (or at least have driven it off), they find a letter to a certain August Berronald, once the kingdom’s regent, that contains a dire warning of an assassination attempt commanded by none other than King Thorder himself.

The PCs need to find Berronald and help him to defend his life , hoping to enlist him to the Rebellion’s ranks. But though Berronald proves as grateful, he hesitates to do that. So to convince him to join the rebels, the PCs need to travel to the legendary Griffon Tower, to find a cure for the Archon of Justice that Berronald is divinely bound to.

Unluckily the Griffon Tower is inhabited by a young Dracolich that has added the cure to its hoard. The PCs need to find a way into the tower that is guarded by a family of griffons. Inside, they need to fight the Dracolich’s minions and the tower’s undead guardians, before they finally have to face the Dracolich that is’nt willing to give the Cure away for free.

Some comments:

Well, as it seems, a lot of those items I found immediately inspiring have gone to the adventure’s background and those that I didn’t know what to do with them now have taken central roles in my plot. On the other hand, my ideas have already expanded on the single adventure I planned to create. While brainstorming I suddenly thought about Dragonheart from 1996, that has some parallels to the relationship between Berronald and the former and the new king respectively. Now what if King Thorder had made the transformation into a Lich and the adventure’s Dracolich had, by means of the ritual that transformed Thorder, become his phylactery. What if Knight Bowen (errm, Paladin Berronald) had unsuccessfully tried to stop that ritual, severely hurting and defacing the Archon bound to him (by the way, I chose that Archon for her red hairs :D) in the ensuing battle (remember the young woman in his chamber room?)

And suddenly, we have a little campaign arc, that let’s the PCs join the Rebellion’s ranks at level 1, and after they went on several missions for the rebels (think level 2-4), they stumble (?) into the adventure outlined above (which I imagine to take place a t level 5 at the moment).

Healing the archon would immediately win the rebellion to Berronald’s support, who’s sson to be their leader and symbol of resistance. And here’s where the assassins from above come into play. For some reason, Berronald is linked to the kingdom’s assassin guild (the women that pay him a yearly visit), that is entangled in a deadly gang war with the Capitol’s thieves‘ guild that is led by a Barghest and used as a means to wipe out any resistance by King Thorder himself. To help the assassins might not also make them into a valuable ally but would also serve to weaken the evil king, the end goal obviously being to directly attack and beat him (and possibly put August I. On the throne instead).

And I guess that the PCs‘ reward might include one or two honorary levels as aristocrats as well.

This is what I wrote back then. I still kinda like the idea (especially as Paizo has done three Cheliax-AP s already and that stupid Thrune bitch still sits on her throne, so for once, I could show them how to do it :D), but on the other hand, if I really want to turn that into a full fledged campaign, I have a lot of holes to fill. Which would be the focus of the article series, that I mentioned yesterday and that I plan to do for this month’s Blog Carnival.