Hill Cantons Campaign Tidings

The last few weeks have seen 15 new players introduced to my eponymous home campaign. It's been rollicking good fun and I find myself shaking off some of the inertia around the campaign and stretching my creativity more in that setting.

One of the most interesting bits about the new play is watching players start to want to dig into the layers of mysteries I am so inordinately fond of. That kind of out-of-session info-sharing and questioning is one of the most welcome development of open world campaigning.

To help facilitate that I've set up two new fronts: 1. a Google Plus page (you can find it and encircle it on G+ by searching for “Hill Cantons”) to help serve as a clearinghouse for player chatter and wheelings and dealings; and 2. a weekly feature that will appear both here and there giving the a list of fresh rumors, obfuscations, tall tales, and news from the Cantons (below being the first installment).

Month of the Black Goat, Year 42,412

The Horned Oracle has revealed that the otherworldly, mightily-armored zealot who carried off the famed bugslayer, Terminaxe, has fallen in battle in a distant bog in the Elsewhere Planes. The Order of the Brothers of the Other Mother have offered a copious bounty for a brave soul to return it back to this world—and the local Ur-Abbey of course.

Bonelace-makers, Garlmongers, and Nagsmen from all around the Cantons have converged on the town of Ostrovo for a three-day market fair. It is said that the unlikely confab of crafts is a front for a meeting of the heretical Evening Star Society. But you didn't hear that from me.

The Waldgraf vin Scadenfreude, that contumelious hothead, is this week at the Dome of Supernal Dealings reportedly hiring on at triple pay Guild rates for an expedition to hunt the dreaded Voormis beyond the Weird.

Kugel the Lucky--a foppish thief famous for his expeditions into the Hall of the Hyperboreans and his inadequate survival sense--has taken up residence at the old vacated townhouse of the Lady Szara. Strangely his death was commemorated by his one-time friend and expedition member, Mandamus the Erudite, in a one-hit wonder ballad (made famous by Thorrgrim the Skald) a year ago. It is said that he only leaves the manse after sundown.

Frantisek, also known as the Striped Mage, has raised his reward for the acquisition of the bejeweled Cod Piece of Radegast (the Old God of fermented drinks, hosts, and magister ludi) to 1500 gp. It is rumored to lie “somewhere in the Slumbering Ursine Dunes.”