An adventure ‘snippet’ for Maelstrom RPG.

Synopsis: Beggars find something of value, but need to get back to civilisation to make anything from it.

Adventure Outline: The characters go scavenging in the fields around the city, wandering the paths and lanes in search of anything valuable. In tough times, you have to be prepared to do what you can to make a few pennies. They have a small scuffle with a couple of ruffians in the morning, out to cause trouble; but by lunchtime nothing of value has come to light.

Following a short rest, they decide to head back to see what scraps they might pick up around the markets, and stumble across a corpse in a ditch at the side of the road. As luck would have it, this scene – though gruesome – is not a murdered soul, but the carcass of a dead pig.

On closer inspection, it looks like it may have died from a hunt related injury, a slow bleed. The carcass may have been there for a day or three, but the flies swarming around aren’t too bad. Back in the city, you could get a shilling or more for meat like this from a pie-maker.

Trouble with stuff like this, the authorities don’t approve of people bringing uncontrolled foodstuffs into the city. Disease runs rampant, so controls offer some measure of protection. They wouldn’t know a nice bit of seasoned meat if you slapped them around the head with it.

Complications: Guards on the city gates will not allow anyone to openly walk through with a carcass. Secondary gates or waterways may provide an alternative, but they provide their own hazards. Beggars tend to gravitate towards suspicious activities, so the characters may face nosey competition trying to claim the carcass for their own.

Adventure Preparation: The adventure provides a little entertainment for a band of beggars, so you may want to run as a one off – or perhaps engineer a situation where non-beggars fall on really hard times and need the money badly enough to consider smuggling condemned meat!

The house is quiet, except for the scuffling of various small animals in the dining room and the vague nattering of the boys in their bedroom. New Year was 40 minutes ago, and I’ve done most of the washing up. We spent the evening with friends nibbling on a buffet of snacks, and played a few party games. Now, it’s time to go to bed.

Resolutions for the New Year, anyone? I plan to:

• Secure and complete business for at least three web sites
• Write one Maelstrom supplement
• Write one PARANOIA supplement
• Enter a short story into this years SFX short story competition
• Lose a stone

That seems like a fair set of aims. How about you?

In 1446, Wales perched on the precipice, faced with the prospect of a new rebellion by restless natives. Complacent English nobles, entrusted with expansive domains, stretch themselves all too thin, leaving stewards to run much of their lands and properties. In many instances, these stewards come from the local population, swayed by misplaced loyalties and the corrupting influence of power.

In the midst of this, a simple merchant requests the assistance of travellers in Swansea to drive, and provide escort, to a cartload of goods, bound for Pembroke. It seems a simple enough task, providing payment and transport for a couple of days on the road. However, how often do games present simple tasks that stay simple. Mixing legendary stones, agents of the Crown, bandits and stray sheep, ‘The Sward and The Stone’ is a new adventure for the classic ‘Maelstrom‘ role playing system.

You can download The Sward and the Stone now from Drive Thru Stuff and RPGNow. A 27-page adventure plus two maps, the booklet provides background, NPCs and a gazateer of the character’s route through the craggy, troubled landscape of south Wales in the mid-15th Century.

E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson made a difference to my childhood and adult life alike. Without the popularity of Dungeons and Dragons in the 70s and the surge of games that spawned around the role playing phenomena in the ensuing decades, I would never have led the double life I have. Yes, I would have still read fantasy books, but I might not have read them with such interest and enthusiasm.

Having read ‘Lord of the Rings’ (or part of it) in my pre-teens, I received a copy of the Middle Earth Role Playing (MERP) game as a birthday gift. I had been playing occasional games of D&D in the practice rooms behind the main music room in my school for months and wanted to run my own game. One friend, Graham, ran D&D – where I had a fighter called Ironheart, while another friend, Jon, ran Call of Cthulhu and Star Trek – which generated Matt Houston, the grizzled private investigator, and Captain James Andrew Garth, commanding officer of the USS Lexington, respectively. When I finally ran MERP, I did so with the over-enthusiasm of an amateur gamemaster with a dodgy understanding of the setting, throwing the characters into a conflict with a group of Black Numenoreans just outside Bree. However, with time I found my footing and a firmer grip on the setting, resulting in adventures that spanned weeks, then months. At one point, we gamed for an entire summer almost non-stop, spending endless hours in the sweltering heat of a caravan in Graham’s parents’ driveway.

Those were exciting times, filled with constructs of imagination and youthful excitment, peppered with references to Monty Python and the Holy Grail and the adventures of Guybursh Threepwood that ground sessions to a halt in storms of laughter. In time, the real world crept in and sessions became ever more infrequent until they stopped altogether… but, my interest lingered on.

I played extensively at university, finding a splinter faction of the Role Playing Society that didn’t find character generation such an exciting nine week experience. I then dragged around my role playing collection from house to house, moving for convenience to get into work, wherever that might be. Occasional culls led to the destruction of the occasional magazine or the loss of a book to amnesiac borrowers, but otherwise my collection stayed intact and grew.

A few years back I stumbled on the rebirth of the PARANOIA role playing game and the open playtest that surrounded its creation. Allen Varney gathered a team of willing co-writers around him who have helped to generate a whole new line of books. Not only did I finally get my name into print inside the covers of a role playing manual, but I managed to beat out a supplement of my own – ‘The Underplex‘ – and fulfil some small dream. Now, I play a little with my own children, engaging their brains and voices in a way that Nintendo never will – throwing them in the face of challenges and danger without threat of harm, and seeing what they can make of it.

E. Gary Gygax (1938 – 2008) changed my life. In one way or another, without him (and Ironheart the fighter) I would be who I am today. I’d certainly have a lot more free shelf space… Gary – you willed me missed. Like that final climbing skill roll that killed my favourite Gnome rogue Golchak Grimface.