Summary: The local mayor throws a small party. If the characters are at all well known, they are invited. During the party, the mayor is murdered, and there are a half-dozen potential suspects – word of this murder quickly gets out to the rest of the town, giving the characters reason to snoop around if they aren’t already. Characters will want to find the culprit to either bring them to justice or help them abscond.
Travelogue: An Intervention for Reynauld
Dear brother,
We here at the Hamlet have agreed to focus on restoration of the local road networks to make it easier for anyone interested in our excavations to reach us, and I’m happy to say that this has already begun to pay off! We’re receiving so many new arrivals that we’ve had to consider starting some repair work on the hotel instead, just to have enough rooms open to service to house them all. This week’s new arrivals include Maubene, who I understand is also some kind of archaeology expert, Beringar, who is another superhero of some description, and Gournai, who has a halberd. I’m not sure what her actual job is, but she appears to be from Scotland. Unfortunately, she does not appear to speak any English, although she does speak a language that I am mostly sure isn’t European. Maybe she only speaks Scottish and European?
In any case, the local clinic was reopened today, so we held an intervention for Reynauld about Denouncing Venice and managed to convince him to go to rehab there. Good thing, too, because the mayor is still obsessively denouncing at the altar at all times of day and night! I do have to echo some of my concerns about that old torture chamber I found in our family’s estate, though. Specifically, I can understand why a rehab patient might need to be kept in a room that’s equipped for other kinds of treatment, given the current state of the town and the unfortunate fact that we don’t really have a whole lot of room to go around, and any place with four walls and a bed is better than nothing right now. What concerns me is, why does the local clinic even have rooms with manacles and a reinforced steel door?
The Disembodied Daemon
I’m not super keen on how relatively easy it is to lose a party member to this one, not to mention the possibility of TPK with an unbound daemonhost lying around, but if I sleep on it I run the risk of my alarm failing and missing my post time again. Normally I’d make a joke about how this would disappoint all the non-existent readers of my blog, but at some point I picked up some number of followers who actually read my posts, though not usually these ones. So weirdly enough the posts I originally considered “actual content” have morphed into filler that my accidentally acquired audience doesn’t care about, while a subsection of the filler content I post because I can only make so many encounters a week has become the actual draw of my blog, to the extent that it has any. I always knew that posting adventure content usable by like 5% of the TTRPG community wasn’t very likely to get me a huge audience, but I didn’t expect it to underperform relatively low effort articles slapped together half on autopilot based on exploring random thoughts I have and hoping something interesting comes out. Go figure.
Anyways, daemons.
The Slasher
I really need to get a new alarm.
Writing to Market: This Book is Spishy
I’m reading up on writing recently, as part of my ongoing efforts to hopefully someday make a living off of that, since on size of market alone my odds are much better there than in tabletop gaming. As part of that, I dropped some pocket change on a Kindle book called “Writing to Market” which claims to help books sell better by finding underserved genres and serving them. This sounds like a reasonable strategy to me if you can find the damn things and decided it was worth $4 to see if this guy actually knows how to dowse for untapped markets.
Here is a screenshot from my Kindle app of page one, with a relevant claim highlighted:
So you can probably guess that somewhere in this book I’ve found an example that did use romance. You may not guess that it is on page two:
I’m going to give this guy the benefit of the doubt that he meant examples of finding a genre or something, rather than all examples, period. Even assuming it’s just slightly sloppy phrasing, though, I’m immediately more skeptical of taking writing advice from someone who let an apparent contradiction slip in separated by like five paragraphs. This isn’t a Reddit comment or a blog post. I paid him for this. Why wasn’t this caught in revision?
Travelogue: Unseasonal Agitation
Dear brother,
For a full week now, the Hamlet has been overrun by mosquitos and other insects. Given that, you might be wondering if I’m in the southern parts of Europe where winter doesn’t hit nearly as hard. I am not. It is two (metric) degrees above freezing right now, and there are bugs everywhere. I guess European bugs don’t mind the cold so much? Really, these ones seem to be thriving on it. I guess that one part of Uncharted 3 where the villa in temperate France houses tons of enormous spiders was more plausible than we thought.
The Hydra
It was late last night when I finished this post. I decided I’d go to sleep and go over it real quick in the morning to make small tweaks before copy/pasting it into the blog. Then my alarm failed to go off. I still don’t know what. When I woke up naturally (and two hours late) it was still on and set to the right time (AM, not PM). I think it may be broken. Anyway, I’m backdating this to two hours ago, and let’s all just agree to pretend that it was posted on time.
The Cannibal Clan
Summary: A clan of cannibalistic freaks hides out in the wilderness, preying on any who come by, but mainly on one another.
Capturing Towns in Vestitas
Many of the towns in Vestitas can be captured as a result of engaging with the adventures associated with their hex, as often the town government is in on or targeted by whatever conspiracy is afoot. When that doesn’t happen, however, characters may capture towns with pure military force. This requires two things: To clear out the current forces holding the town, and to install new ones behind.
Every hex encounter town in Vestitas is held by three forces. For the Imperium, these forces are the PDF, the Ecclesiarchy, and the Arbites. For Chaos territory, these forces are the Red Guard, Chaos sorcerers, and the Praetorians. Every town has a single squad of PDF/Red Guard with a chimera, an Ecclesiarchy preacher or Chaos sorcerer, and a pair of Arbites or Praetorians, plus the Lord Mayor, who is either a noble or a warlord. Once the first three (PDF, Ecclesiarchy, and Arbites or Red Guard, sorcerer, and Praetorians) have been defeated, the Lord Mayor will flee, although if he ends up being killed in the fracas, that works too.
Either way, once the players have cleaned the town out, they must drop a squad of at least a half-dozen of their own loyal minions on the town to provide the muscle. Providing a spiritual leader and someone to investigate crimes that dumb-as-bricks paramilitaries can’t figure out is optional, but encouraged.
Travelogue: The Bad Part of Europe
Dear brother,
I think, after this week, I can safely conclude that I’ve come to the bad part of Europe.
Chamomile Has A Blog 