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Forbidden Lands Legends and Adventures – The Story of Blood Manticore Monastery

If you can’t bring the game world to life, the story falls apart. And that is precisely what the Legends and Adventures generator does – it tells stories of the Forbidden Lands’ inhabitants and their pursuits. | Photo by Taylor Wilcox on Unsplash

If I haven’t run the Forbidden Lands campaign for 1,5 years, I wouldn’t think that the Legends and Adventures generator may lead me to create a full-blown module that I’ll publish. But here I am: Today, I describe how I put this great tool to work and what precisely this thin leaflet is capable of. Namely: creating setting-friendly stories on the fly that might yield you a complex plot for a whole campaign with little to no effort.

Learn how to tell a story of Forbidden Lands with Legends and Adventures

Running an RPG as a GM comes down to this: you create the scaffold upon which you build the story together with your players. In Forbidden Lands, you get one excellent tool for doing it – the Legends and Adventures generator leaflet. It comes with the Boxed Set edition of the game if you’ll want to lay your hands on it. And you should, by the end of this text! 😉

When Hrod, Mara, and Buri searched the ruins of Eagle Nest keep in Thynde Range, they heard a tale of the lost Fire Wyrm’s Arrows. They hoped to find the artifact there, but I knew for quite some time that they won’t. From the moment they’ve met Grulf the Ailander, which pointed them to this quest, I saw the story complete. I turned to the Legends and Adventurers for fleshing out Grulf’s objective in the Hollows. I rolled the whole legend of the Arrows. The raw results I’ve got from the Forbidden Lands Legends and Adventures tables were such:

The Legend of the Lost Arrows of the Fire Wyrm

A long time ago, during the Alder Wars, there was a honorable princess who sought an artifact because of war and travelled to a castle located a few days off in mountains to north-west. As the legend goes, she died in battle and that at the location there is now a weapon but also watchful ghosts.

To finish it, I rolled a single d6 to determine to what degree the legend was true. I used a good OSR practice of oracle die with outcomes ranging from “NO AND…” (1) to “YES AND” (6) – “AND,” meaning an amplification of the false/true versions of the legend. In my case, I rolled 4 – “YES, BUT…” – the legend generally was true, but some parts weren’t that accurate. What’s better for an engaging story than a bit of complication? I rolled d10 to select one of 10 elements listed in Legends and Adventures. It pointed me to “… and that at the location there is…” So, the story was true save for the artifact that wasn’t there after all. What’s better for the narrative than a good twist?

Refining the Legend to Fit the World of the Story

To determine the actual location of the Arrows, I repeated respective steps from the legends generator. It pointed me to a dungeon northwest of the castle. Now, if you look on the map, you’ll see how all these pieces fit nicely in. The party explored the area around the keep to find clues. I rolled an encounter with a single NPC who turned out to be a Rust Brother. Given the dungeon I came up with, the dice couldn’t roll more consistently. And what was it?

The map of the Forbidden Lands' region I fleshed out using Legends and Adventures.
The map of the Forbidden Lands’ region I fleshed out using Legends and Adventures.

Sticking to the generator from the GM’s Guide, I had a place built during Alder Wars by a sorcerer who sought loneliness – and who still lives there. So a sorcerous hermit who took Arrows of the Fire Wyrm with him. In addition to the original hermit (and his followers, I figured), the dice told of a manticore that lived there. I’m going to save you all the other details. Nevertheless, Forbidden Lands gave my players and me an excellent opportunity for very old-school dungeon exploration through its Legends and Adventures tool. Moreover, it was entirely consistent with all the stories we had told together up to that point.

Legends and Adventures Put to Action

Back in Ravenland, the party managed to capture the Rust Brother. He got the dwarven fighter broken through magic before being thrown to the ground, gagged, and tied. A very appealing aspect of the Forbidden Lands – even a seemingly weak opponent may take one PC down in a single round. That made the characters go about their hostage more carefully – as they should when imprisoning a sorcerer. They had the poor guy interrogated, which gave them the location of the recluse in which he lived. Given Bruni’s temporary broken stats and Mara’s tendency for getting lost the moment she strayed from the camp, Hrod went to scout two hexes away where the alleged hermitage was.

Try It Yourself!

What did he find there, and how the party handles the dungeon inhabited by mad worshippers and a manticore? Well, the story still has many twists, so let’s stop here for now. But I wanted to take a moment to recap what I found most helpful while using the Forbidden Lands’ Legends and Adventures leaflet – or its likes in other games. It really is the heart of the sandbox game.

A great setting, fantastic mechanics, and superb improv skills are significant. But if you can’t bring the game world to life, the rest falls apart. And that is precisely what the legend generator does – it tells stories of the Ravenland’s inhabitants and their pursuits. You can use it to make any rumor – from myth-like to a simple family feud. And with all those stories come things to do for the player characters – treasures to seek, conflicts to solve, and NPCs to meet and fight or ally.

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