Words & Other Sorcery

There is a new Dungeon Age adventure available on DriveThruRPG today in both 5E and OSE formats! Go check out Battle for Carrion Vale. It’s grim. It’s dark. It’s gritty. It’s…grimdarkgritty.

“This morning, the forces of Law and Chaos clashed at Castle Yennagor. The battle raged all day, but as darkness fell, a cataclysmic explosion destroyed most of the castle and leveled both armies. Now, as night claims the vale, flickers of life return. Survivors make camp, flee the field, or continue the fight. Scavengers creep over the dead. And one question remains unanswered: what happened inside the castle?”

This is a dark sandbox adventure. Players take the role of battlefield survivors. They can choose which side they are on (or neither), and they can choose their goal, such as to escape the field with their lives, to plunder the dead, or to reach the castle and finish the mission.

The map is a sort of point-crawl with 30 locations. It looks like this:

You can show the map to your players because the Location names only describe what the PCs can see or hear as they move about the battlefield. If the PCs travel along the dotted paths, they can move quickly and safely. If they choose to move across the wilderness (off the paths), then they take longer to move and roll for a Random Encounter with one of the factions of Law and Chaos that are roaming around the valley.

Locations!

There are 30.

At each Location, the players can Search the battlefield for supplies. There is d66 table of things they can find, which include all sorts of useful or ruined weapons and armor, medical supplies and food, gravedigging gear, magical items, and lost animals.

Also at each Location are the actual battlefield wreckage and survivors that make up the encounter, including magicians casting spells, war-mounts dying in the mud, eldritch visitors from the stars and the future, thieves looting the dead, monsters eating the dead, necromancers recycling the dead, warriors adding to the dead, and lots more dead.

I told you this is a grimdarkgritty adventure.

Factions!

The Army of Law has brought the Silveri soldiers, who are your all-purpose good guys who just want to do the right thing. They aren’t very strong, but there are a lot of them. Law has also brought the Crusaders of Virune, who are extremely passionate about killing the forces of Chaos. Be careful around them.

The Army of Chaos has hired Jassinar mercenaries, who don’t care about cosmic politics at all but they are definitely worth their high price. Chaos also hired the Tharite corsairs, flamboyant desert pirates who are less than reliable. Chaos also tricked the Ngadi rangers into helping out.

Of course, lots of other people are here in Carrion Vale who have no allegiances. Watch out for the Plague Warriors, the Thieves Militant, the Last Folk, and three horrible old women, to name just a few.

Features

There are 70+ new magic items in this adventure, including weapons of Law and Chaos, specialized gear for rangers and assassins, hideous devices of bone and iron, unusual musical instruments, and a very dangerous bile sac.

There are 30+ new monsters and creatures in this adventure, including a wide variety of wizards and warriors, vampires and werewolves, aberrations, undead, and some very sad little demons who might have been watching Voltron and gotten some strange ideas.

Battle for Carrion Vale

Check out Battle for Carrion Vale on DTRPG, and let me know what you think about it.