Bay of Spirits by Roan Studios.
I am a big fan of Randy M's Bay of Spirits setting and I was delighted to get a message from DrivethruRPG this morning to say that Randy has released the first in what I hope will be a regular 'magazine of sorts' called Taverns, Tales & Trails, a 64 page collection of art, maps and old school fluff as Randy M puts it.
I have only looked at the preview so far, my hobby piggybank is well and truly depleted so even though its only $2.99 (£2.40uk) the actual purchase will have to wait until I get a few £'s back in the hobby bank, hopefully that will be this weekend as it looks a really excellent resource which, even though it deals with the Bay of Spirits, there is no reason you cannot just grab bits of it and blend them into an existing campaign.
As with all of the booklets put out by Roan Studio, the artwork is fabulous and the text well set out with sections on the backgrounds and cultures of the Bay as well as sections on adventuring in the wilds and a section about Moose, if that's not enough there are stunning maps and plans of taverns and caves to keep your adventures happily occupied for months.
It has really inspired me to get those other Bay of Spirits pdfs I purchased open again and to go back and look at the five characters I created, Hugo, Culdus, Strawberri, Rhian and Karina, (you can read their first adventure here, https://chainmailandsword.blogspot.com/2021/07/blood-in-snow-part-1-old-school.html) who are 5 adventures from Winterton created using Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures, and that is the rule set I will be using for my solo games set in the Bay of Spirits, indeed it was always intended to be that way but I went off at a tangent and its taken this new publication from Randy M to bring me back to where I should be.
I have already started on a new adventure for my 5 young hero's, look out for the blog post.
Barley campaign and Chivalry & Sorcery 5e.
And all the above has left me with a slight issue. I have invested a not so inconsiderable amount of time in my Barley setting which I was going to run, indeed started to run, using Beyond the wall rules but as I will be using those rules set for my Bay of Spirits games I think it would be good to use a different set of rules for my Barley games.
I have built Barley and the lands that surround it as a Medieval Fairy Tale land, I have drawn heavily from the folk tales found in the collections of Andrew Lang and illustrations of H.J.Ford, adding goblins, dwarves and elves straight out of the Beyond the Wall rule books. The problem I had with the games I have played so far is that I ended up ignoring the fairy tale aspect of it and running the game using the scenario packs and threat packs from Beyond the Wall, so maybe it was indeed time to change rules system and get the setting back to how I first envisioned it.
I have had the pdf for Chivalry & Sorcery for some time and I have been wanting to do something with the game but just found myself struggling with 600 pages of text. Slowly but surely I have read my way through the bulk of the book , making notes as I went along, and feel that I have a better grasp of the game system, so I plan to port Barley over from Beyond The Wall to C&S 5e.
My logic for this move, well, Barley already has a fairly detailed description of the manor, its lord and the good and not so good folk that populate the village and the surrounding area. It is a very medieval setting which should work well with C&S. There is a book, European Folklore Bestiary, available for the game which fits in well with my Folk/Fairy Tale setting and on top of that, the rules are way different from Beyond the Wall, so although I will have two fantasy campaigns on the go, they should both feel very different from each other.
So I now need to set about converting the PC's and NPC's from Beyond the Wall to C&S, that could be fun. The NPC's should be no problem, only a few have stats, the majority just have a description, to be fleshed out if and when required, the PC's, thats a different matter. I want to keep the five I already have, Hazel, the witches 'prentice, Auden the Beast Keeper, Midwinter the lords wayward daughter, Tristram the lords forgotten child and Elowen the Fae foundling. I suspect porting them to C&S could take a bit of work, indeed some of them, Elowen in particular, may be tricky to do but once I get my head around all that it will be time to
Adventure On!
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