Captain Thorne and the Frostfang Marauders.

I am working on a few little adventures in a wintery and very icy setting. The first is an icebound sea adventure where the characters are hired to recover an artifact stolen by Captain Thorne and the Frostfang Marauders. This is not only my first attempt to create something with aim to publish it but also my first attempt to write a coherent adventure, I usually make things up as I go along, this is particularly true with my solo games.

I did wonder if I could create this adventure using some of the techniques I tend to use for my solo games, (the plan is for this adventure to be a multi-player, face to face type game, not a solo game), and I feel, as it is a low fantasy, watery adventure, that Through Sunken Lands and Other Adventures would make a good rules set to test how well the adventure runs, I know the rules well and there is a lot of water in the Sunken Lands

Tilly and Moonwane are two established, third level characters, (There is a 13 part solo adventure I played last year using Tilly and Moonwane up on the blog if you care to read it). In order to make the adventure work, they need some new companions, someone with sailing skills and a ship to navigate the Hundred Seas. Then I had the idea to make it two new characters, the Pirate Twins. Lets make them sisters and one a Pirate Captain, the second a Spell Thief as we have no magic user in the party. I will go through character creation in another post.

I am going to start them in the Haven, this is s free city in the west, paying no tribute to Jundarr or the slavers of Alonia, ruled by the Pirate Kings and Queens. But bar from spending some silvers equipping themselves, the characters will not be staying long in Haven.

Non of what is to follow will be written in tablets of stone. I am only using Captain Thorne and the Frostfang Marauders as a working title, and the adventure will not be written for use with Through Sunken Lands only, I want to make it very generic, to be run with as many systems as possible, with as little work converting it to other systems as possible.

How this is going to work.

I already have an idea for Captain Thorne and his band of pirates, what they look like, where they hail from, what they do, and where they are currently holed up at. What I don’t know is what artifact they have stolen, who they stole it from, why they stole and what they plan to do with.

Tools I am thinking about using apart from Through Sunken Lands and Other Adventures. I think The Lazy DM’s Companion by Sly Flourish could be a useful starting point. It has a adventure generator and many other useful tables. Although slightly geared towards D&D 5e, it most certainly can be used for other systems.

Beyond those two books, I am not sure. A lot of the Roan Studios, Bay of Spirts books are geared towards a wintery setting so I will be turning to those for inspiration quite often. I envisage sea monsters playing a role as adversaries to the characters and their ship as they try to locate Captain Thorne, so any books with lots of those in would be very handy.

Then there is the usual oracles and such like, for the oracle I think I will use the bones dice from Pickpocket Press as well as the Read the Signs deck of cards by the same publisher.

The rest, indeed most of it can only come out my own imagination, so we will see where that takes me.

All in all, this is going to be quite a journey for me. I am both excited and scared at the same time. How this adventure will turn out is anyone’s guess, and I have ideas for five other wintery adventures in the wings, or the back of my mind. My only hope is that the finished product will at least be playable and if its publishable, well that would be the icing on the cake, or perhaps the icing on the cake would be if anyone liked it enough to buy it.

Adventure on.