Tonight we’ll be playing Khelez-Mar: The Dwarven Imperative, our dwarf-centric campaign set on the Pomarj in the World of Greyhawk. The last adventure saw the adventurers tracking a large orcish warband comprised of orcs, grey renders and manticores. They engaged and mostly destroyed several of the warbands patrols before breaking off from the main body to track a group of uruk-hai south. A hard march followed that ended with the orcs meeting a group of powerful human mercenaries … which the party promptly ambushed.
My character, the dwarven mountain man Kull, lost his wolf companion in the fight, and this week finds himself mourning the animals death while seeking out a new aerial companion in the form of a mountain hawk. Meanwhile, the rest of the party is set to interogate the human prisoner they captured previously
Talk like a Dwarf
Rather than make Kull yet another generic dwarf-who-talks-like-a-human I went searching for some dwarven language tips, and found them at Delving’s Dwarven Langauge Resources (archived page). The web page has sections for:
- Speak Like a Dwarf (Accent guide)
- Dwarven Runes, Alphabets & Fonts
- Tolkien Dwarven Word List
- AD&D Dwarven Word List
- Warhammer Dwarven Word List
- Swear Like a Dwarf
I used the dwarven word lists and “swear like a dwarf” most frequently last week, as I named all of Kull’s animal allies (from a bag of tricks … not that he calls it that) and then started cursing profusely as his wolf died in the ensuing battles.
RPGs Go POD
Treasure Tables has a note about KenzerCo using LuLu Press (a print-on-demand service) to reprint their out-of-print titles (archived page). Companies have been “reprinting” old books as PDFs for a while, but this is the first time I’ve heard anyone going the POD route. This strikes me as a great idea for Kenzer and its fans; it lets the company have books “in print” without having to stockpile hundreds or thousands of them in a warehouse while letting fans have actual dead-tree editions of older titles. PDFs are great … but if I’m using a book a lot, I want a print version.
Pierce Haligarth, Magician
Finally, last week I introduced my character for our new Ravenloft campaign: Pierce Haligarth, acquirer of fine treasurers. Things didn’t go well for Pierce in that first outing, as the intial combat saw two zombies nearly kill him outright, spilling his entrails across the dirty street of an abandoned village and sending me looking to create a new character on the spot.
He survived, but only barely, and for a time I considered replacing him with a human paladin. After much discussion and debate with my gaming group, I decided to stick with Pierce, only he’ll now be looking for arcane means to give him an edge against the undead hordes that currently surround him and his companions.
The debate led to some spontaneous role-playing on our discussion forum for the campaign. There’s a lot there, from metagaming discussions of what class to take to philosophical debates over whether adding a level of mage or bard is the right thing to do, story-wise.
I like how this all played out — Pierce remains the confidence man/burglar he started out as, but he’s also growing in reaction to the horrors he’s encountered. Moreover, it provides role-playing hooks for other players, as the elven mage Nellis steps up to test and teach Pierce about the arcane paths.