The City of Lordsmouth - An Outline

The basic ideas for the city of Lordsmouth comes from the basic principles of Lovecraft country. Lovecraft set up a pleasantly sinister country side among the rolling foothills of the New England region of the US. He dotted this landscape with many towns and points of interest that many in the Lovecraft Circle and beyond would expand upon. A couple of the main points though that are recurrent in the most media are Arkham and Innsmouth. The horror of the miscegenation (now a horribly outdated and racist concept, when applied to human culture) of the deep ones that interbred with the simple fishing folk of Innsmouth provide the backdrop for the horror in that particularly salty town. Arkham on the other hand is nestled in the New England foothills and may be the most famous setting in all of Lovecraft. Arkham is home to the epicenter of all things pertaining to the study of the Cosmically weird, including one of the few copies of the Necronomicon that remain.

The idea for Lordsmouth is to be a fairly variable base setting that could prove expandable. You could set it up in any weird way you'd like, but I am going to develop some tables that will take bits and pieces of the weird, grotesque, and phantasmagorical to generate an odd city. There are a few major elements that I think any central hub needs in a roleplaying game. First and foremost is a way to feed story elements or to give the characters a hook into the story - maybe it is an elder, a district captain, or a particularly new and sinister town manager that will only deliver orders via notes under the door of his down town office.

Another is secondary locations, and the idea is that Lordsmouth is an early industrial revolution city that has plagued the area of dark forest and ancient, eldritch mountains with the smog and choking chemicals. This gives rise to a lot of insecurity that I feel can be a great tension builder. The early industrial revolution is an amazing parallel to modern day. There are a ton of new technologies that are developing paranoia among the citizenry, leaving many to wonder what their place in society is. Use this to draw players into the drama of the setting and greatly unease them with the weirder elements. What really accentuates the weird in any thing is the mundane to compare it to, and even better than that is when you can manage to make the mundane weird. Maybe on the outskirts of the city are vast complexes of archaic and collapsing buildings, and if your party is lucky (they're sacred places in which the belching Machano-Gods live and drive the town from their man-crafted tombs) or unlucky (these buildings are crumbling and sinking into the terrafirm, and maybe not even the terrafirma - but the belly of some gnawing, hungry beast with a mouth like a coal furnace and thousands of eyes.) enough to be sent into these buildings to retrieve this or that object. One of my favorite ideas in weird fiction is the idea of shifting, dimensional streets or alleys. Maybe a party passes by a building's facade that they've passed on their way to the Inn every time they've ventured out, but this time there is no facade. Instead in the place of the building that is too tall and too skinny to house any real people there is a street, and at the end of this street is a quaint shop with a light on.

To think about the city is to think about how you want to build your campaign or setting. The city will be the repository of all the treasure, the home base, and a driving force for the campaign. Maybe in Lordsmouth there is plague that is creeping, and every day a new set of the citizenry are infected. The plague is insidious and nondiscriminatory - it is killing anyone that is unlucky enough to contract it. Possibly the citizens are forming up into roving bands that are policing the districts and summarily executing everyone that has the 'Plague-look'. Maybe the adventurers are a group of outsiders that are coming to the town on the eve of a grand festival, but they catch wind that the festival has more sinister roots. They could be called there by some ancient arcane wizard and task with finding a certain, cursed manuscript that upon reading will drive anyone insane. There are so many tropes, hooks, and story ideas that could be included in a setting like Lordsmouth.   

This are just a few basic ideas that I am rolling over for Lordsmouth and the associated tables I intend to create.

The Doom that Came to Lordsmouth

There are a handful of things that have heavily influenced me in my adult life that seep through into my tabletop play. The biggest of these, however, is my great fondness for Weird fiction. I started on Lovecraft in high school after stumbling across his Wikipedia entry and I soon developed an obsession that would take me through his entire catalog of fiction and into the greater world of the weird. 

I've sat back and thought many times about what sort of campaign setting I would like to make, and I've came to the conclusion that it would have to be a weird and surreal place dripping luciously with cosmiscism and unease. I've laid down a basic framework of ideas that I would like to fill out. 

Lordsmouth Setting

1. A small city containing phantasmagorical elements. 
2. A hex crawl based around a dark Appalachian setting. 
3. Incorporate extensive use of random tables to add many variable elements.
4. Acid fantasy and weird fiction elements front and center. 
5. Interesting and original creatures. 
6. Weirdos and freaks as NPCs. 

This is a very rough and very basic outline of my current ideas. I'm starting to shape some of the random tables and I will be sharing those in a further post. I'm hoping to start mapping out some of the more geographical elements of campaign very soon as well. As work slows and we look at a possible shutdown or self-quarantine period I strongly feel a lot more progress will be made. 

Stay posted and check back as I will be updating often with more detailed drafts of each bullet point to further flesh out my ideas. 

First Attempts at 1 Page Dungeons

I've had an interest in fantasy cartography and map making for a while, but it slowly transitioned into an interest in the design, development, and illustration of dungeons. The ultimate goal is to slowly work towards grafting together a megadungeon! Here are the first two attempts. One I described as the temple of Forge Priests devoted to an almost forgotten dwarven entity. The second is a tomb to a lord that was thought dead decades ago, but as strange events descend upon the denizens of the local village they task  the party of unfortunate adventurers with investigation. 

High Adventure in Life and Roleplay

I began investing serious time into tabletop roleplaying games around 5 years ago when some friends decided we were going to get into Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition. Boy did we invest, because for the first two or so years we had twice weekly sessions that would last for about 4 or 5 hours - even sometimes extending to a third day if our schedules could work it in. Sadly, those were the easy times and as with all easy times it seems they've gone. We played weekly for another 2 years and then in the 5th years we sort of tapered off, often meeting once a month, or just when this or that person had time. Now into my almost 6th year of roleplaying game veterancy I have no group and my schedule barely, if it all, allows for things like a Play-By-Post game, but that is just part of growing up. Luckily though that isn't the sad end to the story.

Fast forward to about 2 months ago and I discover solo roleplaying. A sort of arcane art where you roll on various tables, apply them to your system of choice, and then document what you're doing to produce a one man show. It has enraptured me, quite honestly and now I spend most of my free time reading new blogs that I discover daily, researching new systems to explore and hack mechanics out of, and dreaming of new dungeons, kingdoms, or universes that I could design and explore - or even better gleefully share with others in the community. Reddit has been a huge help - initially finding the subreddit r/Solo_Roleplaying. I'd not managed to keep up with any trends in tabletop RPGs as my group was fairly set on D&D 5e and wasn't really interesting in moving, even though I had tried many times. Reading up in the subreddit led me to eventually come to grips with both the concept of solo roleplaying and the greater Old School Renaissance movement.

OSR, in the most layman's of terms, could be described as an effort to emulate or in some cases straight up clone the initial efforts of the Tabletop Titans we have built on for 5 decades. I have no nostalgia for the classics as I wasn't around for them, I didn't have older siblings or family members (save for an uncle) that played them, and I was never shown the ways of death at the hands of a devious dungeon master. Instead I came at the movement from an interest in the mechanics. Somewhere along the line in my play we drifted more into a video game mindset and played our game as we would a video game, which I found enjoyable - but I now find myself seeking a more authentic feel and a broader mechanical depth.

As I don't have a solid group or really the time for a solid group I find myself lingering on about how to get into and invest in solo play options, and thus far my attempts have sadly floundered. I've found more fun in the world building, dungeon creation, and the reading/dissection of the rulesets than I have in the actual play of the game - and that's okay. I might never actually play a game, but I will enjoy building worlds and dungeons and sharing them.

Finally, that is why I am here. I hope to share with the community my interests and takes, as well as my worlds as I build them. I hope I can provide an interesting prospective or be able to lend a helping hand in the community. So I hope in some way I can give back.