The West King's Field Campaign Report #1

An Introduction

     This is the first game session for my new fantasy campaign, which takes place in my personal setting of West King's Field- which is an untamed frontier of wilderness just beyond the reach of the Kingdom of Ogre. I will be alternating between tabletop RPG and miniature war gaming rules to flesh out the campaign and will tell the stories of the campaign's events through this blog.

 

Humble Beginnings 

    To start off playing in my world I made a level 1 fighter using the rules from White Box: Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game. White Box is a remastering of the original Dungeons and Dragons rules powered by the Swords and Wizardry engine. It's by far my favorite RPG rule set and comes closest to what I desire out of a tabletop RPG. The fighter's character sheet was as follows:

I like to use a note card to keep track of my characters. It makes it a lot simpler to manage than a whole character sheet and can easily be discarded when no longer needed. I usually keep track of game notes this way too. The front I use to write down a character's stats and, on the back, I keep track of their inventory. 

Low-level Adventuring

    I am strict when it comes to playing games by their written rules, or at least making modification to rules when needed and sticking to them. Therefore, in order for my fighter to become a hero, he's going to have to survive his backstory. I didn't put too much complication into getting my game started. My fighter found himself in the village of Backwood, the last footprint of lawful civilization west of the Kingdom. There was a large bounty of 90 gold coins on the head of a troublesome wyvern who had nested at the nearby ruins of Castle Malborg.  To try to face the wyvern alone at such a low-level would-be suicide, therefore I was going to need the help of mercenaries to back me up. In order to get some coin, I decided to explore a small cave not far from the village to see if I could loot some treasure from the goblins rumored to be living there. 

    This is the map of a cave I quickly drafted up. I created it with a few random dice drops to give me the basic shape of the cave and filled it in using some terrain dice I have. Since this is a low-level, one-page "dungeon" I didn't think to put much detail into it besides what the randomized tables would give me. Firstly, the tables were not kind to me, as a ghoul was waiting for me at the entrance to the cave which chased me off. Thankfully I came across a level 2 magic-user NPC in the forest who was willing to help me out for some treasure. We ventured into the first chamber in the cave and fought off some tough gnolls and took their treasure- 180 gold coins which we split evenly. After I got back to Backwood I hired some mercenaries to help me kill the wyvern. 

 The Wyvern of Malborg Castle

    Legend has it that Malborg was one of the castles magically constructed long before the crowning of the first king of Ogre when sorcerer warlords battled endlessly with legions of summoned monsters for control over the Overworld. During the time of the campaign [1st day of the 4th month in the year 100] Malborg is nothing more than mysterious ruins. A wyvern was found nesting here by a pair of explorers who nearly lost their lives trying to flee from it. The image is a close representation of what my fighter and his soldiers would have seen as they approached the ruins. 

        The wyvern is a 7HD monster with 24 hit points, an armor class of 16, and poisonous tail which it would use 60% of the time to kill a foe. My strategy was to continuously volley missile fire at the wyvern to constantly chip away at its health while I led the charge with my halberdiers to engage it in melee. My plans didn't work as well as I hoped because the wyvern first targeted my missile troops and made quick work of them, forcing my melee fighters to play catch-up in order to deal some damage.  

    I had a real chance to slay this monster but sadly the dice would turn out of my favor once I got the creature down to 4 hit points. Long story short, my character was killed along with most of my mercenaries. The rest of the mercenaries lost their morale and fled back to tell the tale in the dimmest corner of the tavern back at Backwood. Such is the way of things in White Box.