Adventure at Galen's Ford

The Spirit at Galen’s Ford (hex 0715)

Just north of of Galenford Keep is Galen’s Ford. This ford across the Stajin river is named for a the village of Galen that used to be located at the ford. The village consisted of a dozen or so wooden buildings that were all put to the torch when Galenford Keep was stormed many years ago. Years later a small waystation was built at the ford to give travellers a place to shelter. It was run by a succession of factors working for the Merchants guild. The last of the factors was a devious man who consorted with river pirates and highwaymen. He arranged for rich merchants to run afoul of bandits or killed single travellers on his own. The bodies were dumped in an unmarked pit out back of the buildings near a copse of trees.

One of these travellers who was killed in his bed was himself a particularly evil man and he came back as an evil spirit (spirit, wight, spectre whatever is appropriate in your campaign). This evil spirit scratched at the doors and windows of the way station at night frightening away men and beasts. The factor dug up the corpse, burned it and reburied it with a stone slab placed on top. The next night the spirit was back scratching at his door. Eventually the factor went mad and burned the buildings down trying to kill the spirits but himself died in the blaze.

Galen's Ford Map

Today, travellers have no choice but to pass the Way station ruins and the ruins of keep on their journey into Stillwater valley. But few stay the night in the area. The experienced travellers of Stillwater valley make certain to spend the night in Whitewater and then pass through Galenford in the middle of the day. Occasionally, foolish travellers spend the night in the way station ruins and speak of moaning noises and scratching at the barred windows that continues until the sun rises.

Introducing Galen’s Ford to the players

The best method to introduce this short scene to the players is to arrange for them to be approaching Galen’s ford as night falls and bad weather nears. The building are damaged but they do offer shelter from the storm. The evil spirit can be put to rest with the normal methods for the type of creature chosen (reducing a wight to zero hit points) or if it is considered an evil spirit the creature can be put to rest by exhuming the body beneath the stone and properly burying it in a ceremony.

Stone Building (location A)

The stone building is the most intact. It is 40 feet long by 20 feet wide. The interior is full of charred wooden debris. The roof is mainly intact except at the front where the stone wall has collapsed. The building looks to have had two floors but the upper floor collapsed into the main floor. Careful searching could allow players to find the evil factor’s treasure. A loose floor tile reveals a shallow hole with a canvas bag inside full with 200 sp, 50 gp, and 2 pieces of jewelry worth 200 gp each.  It is very hard to find.

Wood Shed (location B)

The wooden building was likely a stable. The roof is gone and the charred walls are rotted and leaning precariously. The wall at the front has collapsed. There is a small chance that in high winds the entire structure collapses.  If characters are inside at the time they would be buried in debris.

Stone grave

Out back of the buildings are three, old oak trees standing fifty feet tall. Not far from them is a large stone slab (6 foot by 4 foot) lying on the ground. It appears something dug its way out from under the slab judging by the hole in the ground. Lifting the slab (300#) reveals a shallow grave. If the evil spirit is a physical evil then there is no body located in the grave after sunset. If it is daytime or the evil spirit has no physical body then there is a fairly fresh looking corpse of a man in tattered clothes. He has a gold chain and medallion around his neck (worth 500 gp it is the badge of the mayor of Pirn).

Galenford Dungeon Map

I have put together a player’s map and GM map of Galenford Keep’s dungeons. I think I will write up something with generic statistics as well. I am calling it “The Secret of the Caves”.

The Keep map with the entrances marked

Background

Galenford Keep (named for the Galen’s ford over the Stajin river) has been abandoned for almost a hundred years since it fell to a marauding army. The main trail through the Stillwater area still travels directly by the keep but no one stops anymore. The keep was blackened by fire and battered making it look like ugly, black teeth reaching up out of the ground. The appearance and a reputation for ghosts keep the curious from stopping.

Recently a river pirate has made his home beneath the keep after he found an entrance to dungeons that opens at the river level. He has carefully kept the entrance hidden from merchants travelling along the river. It put him in an ideal position to pick boats that are lightly guarded so he can overwhelm them with his pirates.  Goods are resold to a merchant in Whitewater who asks no questions. Those people who are captured alive are sold to barbarians to the south in the wilderlands.

There are three entrances to the dungeons. The original entrance to the keep is buried under a pile of rubble that will take time to remove. There is the pirates sea cave entrance at the water level.  Finally there is a winding tunnel that the pirates dug that exits on the beach.

The GM Map

Player's Map (for Online Play)

Galenford Keep

I wanted to write up a short adventure to take place at Galenford Keep on the Stillwater further afield map. I had an old Harn adventure I thought could be converted easily to something more OSR Sandbox like.

Then it occurred to me to learn how to do some outdoor texture modelling. So I spent much of the time learning how to paint textures on a scene. The results are not bad for a beginner’s first try I think. I while have to learn how to create trees.

Galenford Keep atop a rise at the confluence of two rivers

Galenford Keep

I decided Galenford keep would be an abandoned site. That allows me to easily convert the old adventure to it. The Keep was built by knights from a realm to the east when the army that now rests in the Barrow of the Forgotten Legion roamed the area. The keep fell in the fighting and when the knights were victorious in the end they returned to the east and the keep was never reconstructed.

There is an entrance under a heavy stone in the ruined keeps courtyard to the dungeons. There is also a second entrance along the side of the riverbank hidden in bushes.

Galenford Keep Above ground map

Galenford keep from the road

More textures trials

Before getting onto something I am sure everyone will find more interesting I thought I would post how my trials and tribulations are going with texture editing in blender.  I am finding that I discover something everyday but it is kind of one step forward and one back.

I am finally starting to understand the UV coordinates and what they mean. I thought I could manipulate the faces in the editor but it is becoming more apparent that it is really difficult to do so. Maybe I need to cut the faces up with more seams.

As long as my shapes are fairly boxlike they work pretty good.  But once I get an angled or cylindrical shape it gets really difficult.  I am meeting with limited success.

The randomly placed texture on the left. UV mapped on the right.

I also have been working on a triangular shaped ship in an attempt to figure these textures out. The fins are cubes so they work easily. But the triangular hull unwraps very oddly and becomes impossible to apply complex textures.

Pirate Ship

Texture Madness

I have been spending a lot of time trying to work on textures. They really all critical to creating a model that looks like something. At first I was just unwrapping textures onto shapes. But eventually I tried using the UV Editor with mixed results.  I could create textures in paint software and apply it to a simple cube shape and it would get stretched. So I stretched the textures before applying them and that helped a little.

A simple Spaceship shape with texture added via UV Editor

But with complex shapes, like spaceships my unwrapping led to some really messy and unusable UV maps.  So I went down to simpler and simpler shapes. Every time I started creating a little complexity the UV Map became a mess. I even tried manipulating the shape after applying the textures. As you can see in the simple rocket below the texture wrapped over on itself once I used merge a few times on the tail fin and the cylinder has some odd wrapping.

Even splitting up the ship did not help

At my wits end I tried unwrapping with every single projection. Unwrapping cylinder using the cylinder unwrap just created a mess.  But when I unwrapped a complex spaceship model with Cube projection I got something that looks very usable. I just need to mark what each piece represents.  But I think I can work with this.  Trying to join textures is going to be hard but I think I can at least get started on something now.

Using the Cube Unwrap I actually got something I can use.

The Bandit Lair

If I am going to develop the area around Stillwater more than I am going to need to have a way of identifying the location hex on the map.  So I did the rather tedious task of numbering the hexes. I did it in paint.net so I have a version that has the numbers on a second layer. The version here was flattened to a single layer.

Numbered Hex Players version

Now the locations that have already been developed have a numbered location. Stillwater village is hex 1008, Crimson Moon Maze is hex 0703.

So if I wanted to write something about hex 0606.

The Bandit Lair (0606)

Located a short distance off of the north-south road between Stillwater and Mrorg Hall is the lair of a group of six bandits. The bandits have built a rough wooden palisade (six feet high) protecting four open fronted hunting cabins (three walls and a rough). They pretend to be hunters and trappers and they have some game and skins drying to prove it. But they make their living by preying on small groups of travellers on the road. Lone travellers are especially likely to be ambushed. Ned is the leader and he makes certain that one of his men is watching the road from a hidden location at all times. The bandits are weakly armed with spears and bows and lightly armoured with leather jerkins. A search of their camp will turn up some packs of equipment taken from travellers.

• Two bags for fine clothes
• One bag with assorted ropes, spikes, nails and hammers
• One bag with a leather armour in it that is rent with holes and unusable without repair
• One bag (under Ned’s bedroll) with 34 coppers, 12 silver a useable dagger and a leather pouch containing a map showing the location of Crescent Moon Maze that is located with an “X” and the comment “much treasure protected by kobolds”.

Bandits (6): Ned, Rufus, Tomas, Aswell, Gint, Hengi. Armed with Spears. Hengi and Aswell also have bows and 15 arrows. Ned wears a leather tunic.

Textures & UV Editing

I watched a tutorial today on textures and uv editing. It finally made all of my problems with textures make sense. Basically I was trying to manipulate textures in a manner in which they could not be manipulated.

I put it to work right away on my Landing Site scene. I got the textures for the container and the blockhouse to work after a few attempts. They looks fine. Working with uv editing is reasonably easy as long as the objects are simple symmetrical cubes.

Landing Site scene with new textures on the container and the Building

Two problems. Number one the uv editing panel makes textures equal in aspect ratio even when they are not. So textures tend to get stretched. I am not sure if you can stretch the uv editing map so that the proper aspect ratio can be worked upon in an image editor. Number two my already created objects were made up of multiple objects, subtractions, joins, merges. Creating seams for them is next to impossible. After a few tries I have decided I am better off starting from scratch.

Attempting to create a UV Map of an existing complex object

In the future I need to create simple hull shapes and then join things like engines and turrets on to the hull after the textures are set.

I did create a quick new simple hull shape, see below, the textures worked but I do have the stretching problem.

A simple hull shape and an interchangeable pod held aft