Burials of Teganshire Indiegogo Campaign: We did it!
Here we are across the finish line!
Thanks everyone! We appreciate your business–Tales of Lothmar is going to be a great line of products.
Those on the fence can still back, as the campaign has moved into InDemand mode.
Fulfillment Timeline
We are going to move quickly to fulfillment. As soon as Indiegogo sends us the cash and emails, we’ll send out the PDFs’ coupon. We do digital fulfillment through our store website at https://griffonloregames.com/.
Print copies are moving along, too. Theoretically (it’s always a bit unsure in the COVID-19 shipping world), we should get the printed proofs today and approve them. We’re still optimistic the printed versions will go out in September, too.
Our support alias is support@griffonloregames.com.
Best Regards,
Anthony, Christophe, Anna, and Etta
Burials of Teganshire now LIVE on Indiegogo
Check and back this fabulous 5E and Pathfinder 1E adventure module in our new Tales of Lothmar line of products! Back now and tell all your gaming friends!
Summer Sale! Tales of Lothmar!
We have a PDF sale going. Check out the store for a great summer discount.
In other news, we have a new website where we will talk only about the new Tales of Lothmar branded series of products. Check it out: Tales of Lothmar.
You can find our IndieGoGo campaign here for the first Tales of Lothmar product, Burials of Teganshire.
The Griffon Lore Games website will serve as announcements and, of course, our fabulous digital store.
Curse of the Lost Memories Campaign and You: a DM Guide
As books start trickling out, here is a DM-centric guide to starting the campaign. Curse of the Lost Memories gives you the credits and jumps right into the thick of it to get the campaign started. Due to page count, what is not in a book is a discussion on how to carefully start your campaign to maximize the game’s fun for both the players and you. So let’s back up to the beginning: why run Curse of the Lost Memories?
Hard Fantasy Means Grit, No Handwavium, and Rationality
Curse of the Lost Memories is hard fantasy.
Hard fantasy has a rational, plausible system of rules for the setting, which includes the definition and use of magic. The system used does not bend for a narrative, “hand-wavium” convenience. That doesn’t mean that hard magic has a scientific explanation and current logical principles; instead, it has internal consistency.
Hard fantasy doesn’t necessarily mean low fantasy (and the Kingdom of Lothmar is definitely not low fantasy) and not just about magic, but does take into account magical principles on everyday society—and this impacts your game sessions.
As a DM, this is the difference between Griffon Lore Games settings and other settings—especially settings that are post-apocalyptic (Greyhawk) or built on the many ruins of previous societies (Forgotten Realms, Numenera). If something is magical, it conforms to the rules of magic and not merely something that the DM explains as “powerful magic from the ancients.”
This is the time of the ancients. Your PCs are running around in a setting that is the height of magic—divine and arcane. Even the ancient druids, reputed to have drawn the gods to the Welt and had access to primordial magic called “world spells,” are bound by limits—as evident by the disposition of the PCs being curse up the wazzu. World Magic isn’t gone for good, the PCs are cursed and don’t have access to it.
But in the last module of the campaign (adventure path in Pathfinder terms), PCs can grab the reins of this primordial magic. They will need to make some tough choices on how they exit the campaign.
So, no handwavium. Keeping within the attributes of hard fantasy gives you the tools to add conflict and tension within the fantasy system.
Grit
It’s a gritty world out there in the Kingdom of Lothmar. The common folk have a good life and have a reasonable expectation of living their lives without violence and pestilence. Females usually survive childbirth, and infant mortality is low–all characteristics of a fantasy setting with access to knowledge and magic defined by 5E and Pathfinder.
However, commoners know that if they wander too far from other people, it’s eat or be eaten. Travel along the old Imperial Road system is mostly safe, but people who don’t stick together, or travel under the protection of a knight or men-at-arms, are fair game to all manner of hazards. Everything from trolls to natural hazards such as flash flooding, to political rivals, are hazards. And wandering into the wilderness, while rewarding both spiritually and possibly monetarily, is perilous.
People in Lothmar have a high sense of community for safety reasons. Going it alone is harsh, and so the feudal system isn’t merely a method for controlling the rift-raft. It’s a mechanism to keep people alive until old age.
So, people like the PCs, who wander off the beaten path, usually hired by knights to go clean out some den of nastiness, are viewed with awe, deference, reverence and a bit of suspicion.
DM Tip: As the adventure progresses, keep the rationality of the magical system, and, in conjunction with the setting, that will add immersion to your game sessions. Avoid effects that can’t be explained within the confines of the game books, source material, and internal consistency.
Scale vs. Open World Gaming
Scale is a campaign killer.
There is a reason the Village at the Crossroads has significant detail oriented around the common folk and the power players—it provides the adventure a sense that the world continues when the PCs are not in it.
This is the basis for world-building. A world that seems to exist outside the context of the PCs is a world that is fun to play in because it doesn’t adjust by plot convenience but rather by the motivations of the PCs and NPCs within it.
Sometimes shit happens. In the Kingdom of Lothmar, flooding is a natural hazard, along with poor harvests and sometimes draught. Events such as these add to the gritty feel of the world.
So, what does this have to do with scale? By deemphasizing the hazardous nature of overland travel or by having the plot having the PCs wander hundreds and hundreds of miles in the early levels, their level of interest in the world around them appropriately decreases. Why become friends with the local knight if the module sends your 300 miles north? Who cares if the Dame needs help if the PCs are going to abandon them all in pursuit of a goal?
Every time we, as DMs, give players an excuse to not care about NPCs, they’ll take it. Nothing says Fuck Your NPC like requiring PCs to go where those NPCs aren’t.
Conversely, an open world has its own challenges. The PCs could contrive a reasonable and rational reason to travel outside of the bounds of the module. What’s a DM to do?
DM Tip: This is D&D. Well, 5E and Pathfinder, but both D&D. The DM in an open world where players have agency has the responsibility to world-build. But the players also have the responsibility to play the game. Tell the players if they want to wander off the map, you as the DM need time to prepare for that. I’ve even gone so far as to end a game session early—hey, you guys wandered in a direction I don’t have fleshed out. Let me take care of that, and we’ll pick it up next session.
Consequently, the players also have a responsibility to tell the DM, if they know where they are headed, that actual direction. Ahead of time. Communicate this in Session 0. However, back to the actual module, regardless of the reason, there are no answers to their curse outside of the Barony of Lothmar.
We plan to have Campaign Guide out this year. It will be a big help for running a campaign in our setting, especially with players that like to wander and meet NPCs.
Motivation: the DM NPC Hack
One way to immerse your PCs into a game setting is to have convincing NPCs. And NPCs that have their own motives articulated and documented become NPCs that, again, seem to exist without the PCs.
DM Tip: But what also adds to the world is the changes the PCs and NPCs. The PCs have their own motivations (impacted by your players’ motives!), and so do the NPCs. Keep track of both the listed NPCs desires and disposition towards the PCs and adjust accordingly. This is the hack to the entire campaign—you don’t need to keep track of all the reasons Sarah doesn’t like the PC Bard (although as a bard you can probably guess). All you need to know is her disposition is hostile. She’ll pursue her own interests, as documented by her NPC description, but she’ll also have an inclination to act one way or the other to the manipulative and shallow bard.
Hard Choices – Mechanics
Beyond campaign philosophy that adds flavor to your adventure, there are mechanics the DM should become familiar with and use to his or her advantage.
PC Character Creation
The DM needs to focus on the introductory chapter. The Player’s Guide doesn’t explain how to implement the boon matrix or the other bonus attributed to their character sheet and it certainly doesn’t discuss their curse. The DM may want the players to have fun mixing and match PCs to boons instead of using the suggested curse/boon.
DM Tip: Use the Pre-Generated PCs to reveal the mechanics behind the individual boons. If you have Hero Lab, the POR files can be of use (especially if you are using Pathfinder) to illustrate the mechanical effect, which is also on the PC character sheet. Each PC also comes with a backstory with support of the campaign lore, some of which we have not published yet.
For 5E campaigns, we use the Epic Boon and Bonus Feats mechanic. Since Epic Boons are not in D&D Beyond (a standard tool) yet, a player can implement them using feats and custom feats that they can apply from the character sheet. In 5E, The Player’s Handbook and Dungeonmaster’s Guide is necessary to implement PC creation.
Difficulty Setting
The Fallen Barony of Wailmoor is a dangerous place. It’s been ignored for far too long and now whoever travels to there (the PCs), pay the price for this neglect.
DM Tip: Add to the grittiness by avoiding adjusting a Challenge Rating down. For any reason. We’ve given PCs extra powers for a purpose. If there are only three PCs, well, then, they better be sneaky little bastards, they better work in tandem and they better use the Lady in the Tower to help against the Dead Knight Harakan or they are going to die. A lot.
Some encounters may be too easy for a group of six—if the players aren’t playing cautiously, even with six players, there is reasonable chance (in Challenge Rating mechanics) for them to die in numerous places. And sometimes having six players leads to analysis paralysis, which, through inaction, can also lead to a TPK.
The Death Mechanic introduced in the module might seem like an MMO intrusion into our happy-fun world for Easy Mode, but it is definitely anything but. We encourage you to use it. “Never die” might seem like a boon, but it’s part of the PCs curse. And in the following modules, it gets worse. Players that don’t keep it together find themselves diminished and usually facing the same problem that killed them in the first place, but now with decreased ability scores until they level again.
Time, Your Campaign Mechanic
This is a module in a detailed campaign setting. Just look at Anna’s map to see the level detail available to the DM. And with that detail comes the advantage that time can add to a campaign fun factor.
There is no overall doom clock running. Some events will happen with or without PCs in later modules (such as war and faction conflict), and the PCs, if they ignore the corruption so close to the Crossroads Village, will be met with the devastation from their cowardly choice to ignore it. But within the module, the PCs themselves are rewarded by cautious, slow play, rather than rushing against the clock added for dramatic purposes with no other reason. Overused, a doom clock is both a break in both immersion and hard fantasy philosophy.
The Temple of Dvalin can take PCs months of in-game time to progress. It’s a tough nut to crack, using magic they don’t have access to yet (but will later), filled with terrible monsters in the basement (regenerating bone golem is regenerating), with requisite knowledge locked in a vault that requires personal sacrifice.
But it’s a choice, isn’t it? The players chose their classes and deities to worship. If one of them decided to be a cleric or paladin of Dvalin, well, their progression is going to be easier. It is not unfair if no one in the party is a divine servant of Dvalin. It just is.
That’s hard fantasy. Choices matter—all the way back to character creation.
DM Tip: Preserve the advantages of campaign play by not setting arbitrary time limits. During the adventure, the Wailmoor is their land. No one is going to bother them. It may be monster infested, corrupt land, but it is over 12-square miles, 144 miles of detailed territory, to claim as their own or extract the resources from within.
Religion
Speaking of Dvalin, religion infuses everything in the Chronicles of the Celestial Chains campaign. Sages have visited Purgatory and Mt. Elysa and come back with evidence of their existence. Everyone is religious in the campaign setting. Atheists are dealt with harshly in all lands as corruptive demon worshipers. For example, in dwarven communities, the local authorities will simply shrug, take the offender out back and slit his throat. In the Royal Lands, the person will be put on trial and banished. In the Duchy of Hardred, they are burned at the stake.
DM Tip: the Temple of Dvalin is the first place that players see how religion impacts the campaign world. These are the people, after all, that built the dam to the south that is powering all the corrupted and non-corrupted wards. As the campaign progresses, the conflict between Law and Chaos (as opposed to Good and Evil), brings religion into the forefront. A prudent DM should become very familiar with the religion appendix in the back of the module. DMs using their own pantheon (or a different product’s pantheons) will need to do some mapping between the deities presented to deities used in the campaign world.
But we hope you will consider our presented pantheon, with considerable expansion in the Kingdom of Lothmar Campaign Guide.
Race
Pay close attention to racial differences between our campaign lore and other products. Elves are not reincarnated bemoaning lost and ancient magic—they are eugenicists with the ability to invest a lot of time into furthering the elven goals and many cases, not friendly people. Half-orcs are not moody brutes but seen as the product of two warrior races and treated with awe. Dragonborn are not a race but the outcome of a dragon in human form mating with a human.
DM Tip: Both the Introduction chapter and the Player’s Guide define the presented races. Mechanic wise, educated people view two-legged free-willed beings with a soul as a single species and the variation of the soul-bound as racial differences. Encourage players to chose their race based on the definition in the Player’s Guide.
Final Thoughts
This is a tough adventure and can be made tougher without a lot of effort on the DMs part. PCs should encounter a mix of friends and enemies that are both easy to deal with and above their pay grade. We designed the Wailmoor to be an open-world, wander around type-of-environment. And they can literally walk into a floating leech swarm that sucks all their blood. Some players are not used to having so much agency. They could encounter 5 trolls at Level 1 and think there is some “trick” to overcome the encounter when the “trick” is merely to run away. Quickly.
DM Tip: Tell the PCs up front that this is less Harry Potter and more Games of Thrones. Tell them this is a setting where the bad guys are not villains in their own story. Encourage them without foreshadowing to read the player’s guide and to be less murder hobos and more PCs that can impact the world around them, for good or bad, with their mere presence.
As always, chat with us on our Discord Channel or leave a comment here to start a conversation.
Last Chance to Update Your Address!
It’s been a journey getting our books to physical print.
We print our books in the United States, so we’ve avoided the giant brouhaha of the tariff issues recently imposed on books printed in China. We’re not talking about a small printer, either, but a printer/distributor that numerous other publishing companies use (including, on occasion, Amazon).
So it was our surprise that the printed proofs we got back did not match the eProofs and were messed up. Twice. The printer was super embarrassed about these issues, but now we have correct proofs and even made a small print run of two boxes of books which had no problems and look great.
If you have moved, please update your address in Kickstarter here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1709719996/curse-of-the-lost-memories-dungeons-and-dragons-an?ref=user_menu#survey. Otherwise we will send your physical goods to the wrong location. If you have not responded to the survey at all, now is the time.
Our apologies for the delay between PDFs and physical goods.
How to Obtain an Upgrade
If you are a Kickstarter backer, email support@griffonloregames.com with (or from) your Kickstarter email address, and the tier you would like to upgrade to, and we’ll send you an invoice for the difference and then mail our your book(s). For upgrading, we’ll need you to register on our website with your current shipping address.
How to Obtain Digital Goods
Many of you have registered on our website and received the PDFs. Some of you have not. Kickstarter can’t deliver these PDFs, but our fancy-schmancy website can. We’ll make another pass on newly registered users and match their email address to Kickstarter so you can download your PDFs. Email support@griffonloregames.com with any issues obtaining digital goods.
Best Regards,
Anthony & Christophe
Welcome Anna!
We are very excited to announce that Anna Meyer has accepted to join our staff at Griffon Lore Games!
Anna is a leading artist in the fantasy map world and has contributed already to many popular games and settings. We encourage you to look at Anna’s work for the Greyhawk maps of the Flaeness (http://ghmaps.net)
or her recent work for the Midgard campaign setting. See if you are as excited as us about what Anna is going to be bringing to Griffon Lore Games products!
In her position as Director of Cartography, Anna will oversee all the parts of our creative process that originate or are supported by maps. She will create maps for our products to come and also work with the other talented artists who are completing the cartography art these products will be using.
While Anna will continue working on other projects she is passionate about, we are thrilled to see how she will help Griffon Lore Games grow and discover new horizons!
Anna, Let’s explore that map together ?
You can join Anna at anna@griffonloregames.com
Pre-Gen PC Pack and Player’s Guide Available Now–FREE of course!
Curse of the Lost Memories Player’s Guide
That was another sleepless night. The dreams started after sunset.
Still the same dreams. The barren moor, strange knights in powerful armor, a lonely tower out in the wilderness. And the fear, the anger, the sadness. Always the sadness. Long after you woke, your heart kept pounding in your chest, not being able to get back to sleep.
You must do something about these visions that aren’t visions.
You cannot ignore them any longer.
These memories are not yours.
But they might just kill you.
Add the free Curse of the Lost Memories Player’s Guide into your cart and enter a hard fantasy world by Griffon Lore Games.
If you dare.
Curse of the Lost Memories Pre-Gen Character Sheets
This bundle contains:
- 5E PDFs
- Pathfinder 1.E PDFs
- Hero Lab 5E SRD .POR files
- Hero Lab Pathfinder 1E .POR files
Download it by adding the bundle to your cart. Questions? Join our Discord Channel! https://discord.gg/FrUBfum
We Are Processing the PDFs
We are processing the Curse of the Lost Memories PDFs. Please register on the website with your Kickstarter email if you have not already. Otherwise, no PDFs for you!
Fulfillment Registration, Survey, Project Update, THE INTERN
Super Mega Important
Hi Everybody!
Watch your mailbox and updates for the link to the backer survey. But before that, please go to https://www.griffonloregames.com/my-account/ and register with the email you use for Kickstarter! The new (stripped to the basics but retooled for account management and fulfillment) website is where we can apply digital products to your account and you can download them at will.
It’s also the software that we use to ship physical products and change your order.
Once you have registered (with your email that you use for Kickstarter!), please answer the survey when it shows up on Kickstarter or your mailbox. That is how we can match your registration on our website with your Kickstarter rewards.
To Summarize:
1: Register on https://www.griffonloregames.com/my-account/ with your Kickstarter email
2: When Kickstarter prompts you, answer the survey (including your address)
3: On the backend, we’ll connect the rewards with your account on our website
4. When the PDFs are released you will immediately be able to download them
5. You can change your address anytime on our website up until we print the shipping label and stuff the books in the mail
A Small Digression
Kickstarter is pretty dang cool. A good chuck of our Kickstarter backers came from people browsing and searching. How Kickstarter works for campaigns after it’s over? Not so much cool. This is why there are so many custom and third-party Post-Campaign services. Our new website is geared towards distribution, and, unlike our prior site, if it gets bogged down we can easily scale it. Over time, we’ll snazzy it up, but it’s job right now is customer fulfillment and blog updates.
Project Update
Everybody is nailing it. The artwork is great, the maps are great, the adventure is great—and Christophe and I really wanted to ship by the end of the month, but that’s not going to happen. Mainly for two reasons:
1: Interior Design – Third Time is the Charm
Finding our interior designer was a much more difficult process than anticipated and we went through two separate design teams that were not meeting expectations before casting a wide net to find the third. Our new interior designer is now hard at work creating the templates for the book layout team. He’s super professional, a D&D and Pathfinder fan, and already has gone above and beyond to make up for the lost time.
2: More Content Than Planned For
In hindsight, we should have commissioned all of the maps and artwork and kicked off the campaign after they were all in draft mode. It’s super helpful seeing the maps and artwork while adventure writing. We plan to do this for the next module in Chronicles of the Celestial Chains Adventure Path, Beneath a Dreary Wave.
That’s a minor issue as the largest impact to our schedule is Curse of the Lost Memories is going to clock in somewhere between 130 and 150 pages (depending stat block style, font choice and the interior design). We keep reviewing the writing and wondering if we’re just going off and being verbose, putting in content that should be in the Kingdom of Lothmar Guide, being boring and blah, blah, blah. But no, we’re covering the necessary areas in a guided sandbox. While it’s mainly bad that we didn’t judge the page count properly, the content is highly useful.
Because we’ve significantly blown past 100 pages, we’re commissioning more interior artwork to break up any walls of text. As you can see by the examples included in this update, Ryan is nailing it. Our backers have made it clear they bought into the quality vision by driving over almost all of our stretch goals.
So on one hand, the project isn’t going to ship at the end of the month, on the other, it’s dramatically more content in the module that we campaigned on. We’re going to try super-hard to get the PDFs out by the end of July or somewhere close to it.
Larger Book
A larger book has higher printing cost and higher shipping cost. And that’s perfectly OK. We’re not going to bill any backers for this; please consider yourselves initial investors to what is shaping up to be one of the most epic hard fantasy module to hit the shelves.
Intern
We’ll be getting an INTERN soon. She’ll be a huge help and as soon as she arrives, we’ll get her an alias, but for now everyone can think of her as THE INTERN.
We’ll Say it Again
Thanks so much! We’re living a dream and we’re excited to get you this module. We really appreciate everyone’s support and can’t wait to get you guys the finished product.