Skip to main content

The Lands Beyond Larm

The back cover of the first edition of the Labyrinth Lord retro-clone contains this passage:
Back to the Basics of Fantasy Role Playing.  Enter a world filled with labyrinths, magic, and monsters!  You can take the role of a cleric, dwarf, elf, fighter, halfling, magic-user, or thief on your quest for glory, treasure, and adventure!  This is a complete role playing game.  All you need are a few sheets of paper and some dice.  Welcome back to the simpler old-school gaming experience.  The Labyrinth Lord awaits your arrival.  Can you survive the dangers of the labyrinth?

With that glorious introduction in mind, I have begun working on a fantasy hexcrawl experiment, using the generic "Known Lands" map contained at the end of the Labyrinth Lord game book.  The idea is to use the published material as a starting point and move on from there.  A quick look at the map shows that there is a perfectly placed frontier community named "Larm."

Not much is known about Larm, the authors of Labyrinth Lord tell us only this:

This is a smaller town, with a population of 1,000.  They have a small militia of 100 individuals, but can recruit as many as 500 in a crisis.    They have direct access to Dolmvay by the river, and they are primarily a farming community with some mining in the hills.

This might not seem like a lot of information, but it is more than enough to act as the beginning of a homebrew campaign exploring the Lands Beyond Larm!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Larm: The Lay of the Land

From the previous post we know that the authors of Labyrinth Lord gave us very little to work with in the published description of our beloved Larm.  We know that it is a farming and mining community.  We know that it is a river community.  And we know that it has a 100-man militia.  This information is enough to get us started, for it implies certain things about our frontier community. First, being some 140 miles (14 hexes) from the grand city of Dolmvay, we know that Larm must be largely self-sufficient.  To feed and support the 1,000 residents, Larm's farmers must be raising both crops and livestock.  Looking at the general terrain, we see that Larm is located in hill country to the east, and river valley to the west.  It is likely that Larm's farmers tend flocks of sheep and cattle, harvesting the wool and leather in addition to the meat of the animals.  In addition, the access to the river suggests that Larm has no shortage of fishermen. Sec...

Solo RPG Report: Procedurally Generated Dungeon

Working on a new side project that will hopefully intersect with the solo rpg format.  I'm using the random dungeon generator tables from the 5e Dungeon Master's Guide to create a fresh dungeon for the heroes to explore.  Here are the results for the first room (rolling under the "Starting Area" table on page 290). Of note is the fact that the entry chamber to this underground ruin is somehow in "pristine" condition.  The open passageway to the north and the wooden door to the east are interesting for sure.  But what really catches my attention is the locked/barred stone door to the west.  

Encounter - Desecration of the Barrow Tomb, Part 2

In this dungeon, the players will encounter both the surviving human bandits who broke in to raid the barrow tomb and the animalistic Morlocks that dwell in the adjoining subterranean passageways.  The players will have the opportunity to explore the three tombs to get a sense of what's going on before they encounter the survivors.  The encounter can be played out in two ways: 1) with the players realizing the danger and allowing the Morlock in Room 4 to retreat back into its lair; or 2) with the players pursuing the Morlock and its allies, with a final showdown in Room 6. Room #1 - The Tombs Descending down crudely fashioned stone steps made slippery from the leaves that have blown in through the open doorway, you enter a large room with stone tiled flooring and natural earthen walls.  You are underground, in a place that outsiders were never meant to enter.  The desecration and disrespect are apparent immediately.   You see the remains of a campfire, filt...