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!

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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...

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The frontier village of Larm occupies a prime location on the eastern bank of the river, giving it easy access to the surrounding forests, fields, and hills. Larm is truly prospering, but there is one small annoyance that continues to raise the ire of the Magistrate and the Home Guard. Across the river, less than one mile from Larm's town square, sits a crumbling old manor house and a few old cottages, known simply as "Senger's Crossing." The swift current of the river allows the sturdy barges laden with Iron Pine timber, copper ore, and surplus crops to be sent down river to Dolmvay. But the river also marks the boundary between the lands claimed by Larm and the ancestral homeland of the Isvirin hill tribes. Larm wishes to bring the western shore under its control but does not wish to alienate the hill tribes. In the midst of this diplomatic stalemate, Moritz Senger saw an opportunity. Moritz approached the hill tribes and got permission to develop the old...

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