Lore Herbarium

A while back I wrote a blog post about food & drink in Strotherhine , the setting I created to run a Cairn 2e West Marches game in. The setting is based on the fauna, flora, and geography of the Southeastern United States. The blog post has a lot of great information in it, but it's not the easiest thing to actually make use of at the table. I often found myself struggling to find the information I was looking for while running the game. The solution I landed on was to take the information from that original post and turn it into a series of d6 tables, which you can find below, that can be used to determine what kind of food the players find when they take the supply action during wilderness exploration. Seasonality is an important theme of the setting, so in addition to organizing these table by the different regions, I also created a different table for each season. Fields of Moseley (Piedmont Prairie)   Spring 1 Spring Wild Greens: Dandelion, Chicory, Plantain, Purple D...

  Expedition Party:  Gregor Scrivener, Aspiring Postmaster and Devotee to the Church of Mither   Stram Marchguard, trying to make a name for himself    Feodor  Bonekeeper, the forgotten middle child of a Nobel House   Jack Farmhand, hireling trying to earn some extra money for his family On a grey overcast afternoon in late fall the party arrived at an abandoned camp, sheltered beneath a rocky ledge. They were there to look for a few missing folks as well as a relic that had gone missing with them. While the team was well equipped for the expedition, they asked few questions in town and headed out before getting many details about who was missing and what they may have been doing in these parts of the wilds.  After arriving at the camp they picked through the few scattered items and crates, quickly discovering a tunnel with a rope ladder leading down into a dark cavern smelling of fish. They also found digging implements and an unknow fr...

When I started planning my West Marches campaign I had initially been concerned that the death of a character might result in a player losing interest in the game. So I knew I wanted to set up as many incentives as possible to get players invested in the setting and world. One way I sought to do this was to make sure that characters had as much agency to shape the world as possible. This would hopefully mean that even if a character died, there would still be a meaningful impact from their existence and a sort of legacy or mark left by them.  Finding ways to allow that to happen is relatively easy in a game like Cairn, it has agency and player choice literally written into the rules, but I wanted to take it a step further. I wanted players, not just characters, to feel like they were working toward something that could improve and grow. West Marches games generally have things like lore collecting and collective map making to help facilitate this but I double downed on the concept ...

East of Stortherhine in the Saltwater Marshes known as the Fenlands, or more simply the Fens, there is a Rusted Tower that juts out of the tidal waters. This tower is said to be the home of demons, and its exterior is rumored to be coated in blood. This is all my players have heard of this location, a vague rumor that obscures the truth of this place as much as it informs them about it. The Rusted Tower is actually the remains of an old cargo ship. The “tower” is the superstructure of the ship, and the only part that has not sunk beneath the mud and waves. The ship is thousands of years old, from the time of the ancients, and it is coated in a thick rust, the color of dried blood, giving rise to the rumor. It owes its continued existence to the diligent care of its predominant inhabitants: kobolds. It is powered by a still active nuclear reactor that the Kobolds have learned to maintain, and worship as a sort of deity. It only continues to function because it is cooled by the waters...

I am a brewer by trade, so I may have a strong bias about the significance of food and drink, but I think it is telling that so many great authors devote so much of their works to depicting these elements of their worlds. Food and drink are such vivid and tangible reflections of the people and place that they come from. Both tell so much about the society and time that produced and enjoyed them. But it isn’t just the finished food and drink that tell these stories, the customs and process that surround their preparation and enjoyment are also grounded in the cultural and historical roots of a society. So in thinking about what to write for my monthly Lore 24 posts I knew I wanted to devote at least one to the food and drink of Strotherhine.  Strotherhine sits on the edge of the known world, and its citizens come from an empire that spans continents. Meaning that the people that make up Strotherhine will each have their own food traditions and techniques that may already be foreign ...

Lore 24 Lore 24 is a worldbuilding challenge similar to Dungeon 23, but instead of working on one dungeon room every day you work on one piece of lore for a campaign setting. The original concept is to create lore everyday.  Drawing inspiration from this challenge, I plan to do a monthly blog post focused on fleshing out different aspects of the campaign setting I am using for my West Marches game: Strotherhine. I learned about Lore 24 on the NSR Cauldron discord server, but if you are looking for more information on the challenge check out these two blog posts: https://spriggans-den.com/2023/12/10/lore-24/ http://gamerblog.twwombat.com/2023/12/welcome-to-lore24.html The Roots of West Marches World Building Ben Robbins deserves a lot of credit for creating West Marches and shaping that style of campaign. If you intend to create your own West Marches campaign I highly recommend reading his series of blogs posts and if you are interested in creating your own setting for this type of ...