Southlands: Session 1

So, yeah, it's been a while. I've been juggling various jobs here and there, not to mention not really having a permanent group going, leads to a lack of posting. But I recently got back together with my old group from Oklahoma via Skype and got them going in their first session of my Southlands campaign. It's set in the Southlands setting from Points of Light which itself is being set in the larger world of the Castles & Crusades "Rings of Brass" setting, and played using Castles & Crusades Rules. Since I only could gather 2 players, I had them each roll up 2 characters they could play simultaneously. M.E. rolled a half-orc monk and a gnome rogue; while M.C. rolled a halfling wizard and a human fighter. All the standard C&C rules for character creation were followed, and I'm sticking close to the rulebooks on this go round. I'm wanting to keep things as simple as possible.

This is going to mostly be a wilderness exploration campaign with probably quite a few dungeons/towers/keeps interspersed throughout. Main point: it's not a city/urban game, it's about being in the thick of things, burying your axe in orc skulls and seeing how many characters you got through at the end.

Oh yeah, we made a stab at using MapTools, but so far have been thwarted in our efforts due to a connection issue. We're going to keep trying to get this to work, and if I do I'll have a separate post about that, it's a great tool for this kind of game and I really hope we get this working.

The characters started out in Castle Westguard which I substituted in the Keep on the Borderlands (yup, that's in there too, should they find it). The first direction they went was into the swamp (by choice, oddly enough) and this made their first foray into the wild, a tough one. My Random Encounter charts almost guarantee an encounter in each hex (I roll once in each hex, unless they spend an undue amount of time in a hex) and my swamp encounters are nothing to shake a stick at. They first encountered a giant lizard which nearly killed one of M.E.'s characters, the rogue I think (poor rogue, he had a tough go of it). The group decided to go back to the Castle for a healer and came across Matheus Landerly, a level 1 Cleric of Athria and his two acolyte helpers. They healed up and rested to get spells back (yup, the 15 minute day is in effect) and continued on the next day. Day 2, they found tracks which belonged to some kind of lizard-like reptilian creatures (troglodytes, though they never saw any) and they decided to skirt well around the area. The next encounter was a spot on the map - a group of will o' wisps guarded a long lost treasure. This they also smartly avoided. At this point they were just about out of the swamp, when they were attacked by 2 stirges, which they took down with little trouble. Exiting the swamp they made for a dirt road they could see in the distance when they were set upon by 3 wild boars. This was a tough encounter and it showed: poor rogue was killed and their was not help in sight. We ended the session just outside the Dwarven town of Gilhig where we will start up the next session this Saturday.