Thoughts on Starting a Nordlond Campaign

[binn05]

Necroing here a bit.

One thing I thought about and couldn't find other related threads is how to "undungeon-fantasyfing" your DF game.

GURPS DF or DFRGP are great and streamline many things, but I would like to use a more traditional fantasy where Status and Hierarchy play a bigger role.
Also, I would like to use the Nordlond setting.

So, what would you change on the templates to be less dungeon-crawl and more real-life?

Also, I'd be glad to know if there are any threads on this topic.

Edit: Oh, I saw that this post is on the DFRPG Forum. I will ask in the GURPS forum. Sorry for the confusion.

[restlessgriffin]

Originally Posted by binn05

Necroing here a bit.

One thing I thought about and couldn't find other related threads is how to "undungeon-fantasyfing" your DF game.

GURPS DF or DFRGP are great and streamline many things, but I would like to use a more traditional fantasy where Status and Hierarchy play a bigger role.
Also, I would like to use the Nordlond setting.

So, what would you change on the templates to be less dungeon-crawl and more real-life?

Also, I'd be glad to know if there are any threads on this topic.

Edit: Oh, I saw that this post is on the DFRPG Forum. I will ask in the GURPS forum. Sorry for the confusion.

Was this thread continued in GURPS forum? I don't see it under the same name?

[binn05]

Originally Posted by restlessgriffin

Was this thread continued in GURPS forum? I don't see it under the same name?

I created it here - link.
I hadn't the time yesterday to do it.

[jcpatten]

FWIW - with respect to moving from Hall of Judgement to Forests End...

I started with HoJ - which took a couple of trips back to Isfjall to be able to handle the faerie warrens. Then on the last trip back to Isfjall, I had the party encounter the last survivor of a party from Skalavik which got caught by faeries toying with them and driving them north. This brought the party to Skalavik, Nordvorn, Elskaðr, and eventually to Skogurenda (because they were trying to find a boat to take them to Rosgarth - but there's a waterfall on the bay outlet of the Rosgarth river!).

[mburr0003]

"Skógurenda is set upon the coast of the Reiðr Sea. Norðlond is considered a northern climate and Skógurenda is even further north…."

Presumably it's river does not flow down from any points leading back to Rosgarth or the rest of Nordlond.

If you have that river being the Jotunnáin, you'd need to adjust the map, either putting a group of ports north of the falls. Or you could fill in some of the map going east, showing the wide river having shallower falls more eastward which become passable, but still dangerous for larger ships (the hulled knar), when the tides come in at night...

If your PCs don't know the geography, you could just surprise them, they've traveled a little further east than they expected, they'll need to ship down the coast back to the Jotunnáin River, or they could forge their own path up Skogurenda's river hoping to find their way over back to Rosgarth overland when closer...

If you look on the map in the Citadel of Nordvorn on page 4, I'm pretty sure Skogurenda is on the river furthest east on that map... so we're only really talking about a 20 miles coastal journey south and west.

I've linked to an edited version of Douglas Cole's Eterra map to illustrate (I added where I'm thinking Skogurenda might be):
https://imgur.com/fmhlats

[Dalin]

With the Nordlond Sagas kickstarter, Douglas released a poster map (by Glynn Seal) of the Nordlond region. It included both Rosgarth and Skogurenda, and placed both on the same river. (Here's a screenshot of that section of the map.) The river has different names in the two pertinent adventures: Drekanshlid in The Dragons of Rosgarth and the Sálsigti Ána in Forest's End.

In my Nordlond campaign, I explained the naming discrepancy by the fact that the Endalaus is not carefully explored and mapped. Upstream, the river is known as Drekanshlid ("Dragon's Gate") because it marks a rough boundary within the forest between "dangerous" and "really really dangerous." On the coast, it has a different name.

When my PCs visited Skogurenda, I had a side plot where they discovered that Irzhajötunn merchants had a hidden portage site on the north side of the river, so the party knew that some sort of illicit trade was happening on the river, but didn't investigate further.