Custom Frostgrave Scenario: Gorepin's Manor

Recently I was back home for the holidays. While I was home I got my friends into Frostgrave and we had a bit of a mini narrative over 4 gaming sessions total. This all culminated in the 4 warbands finding the destroyed ruins of the legendary wizard Gorepin's manor. While his house was chock full of treasure, the ghost of Gorepin himself was there to protect it! Well at least he was supposed too... due to some unfortunate die rolls Gorepin only made himself known twice in our game. You may want to adjust the summoning target number if you run this scenario with your group. Below is the pdf scenario.

 Here's some photos of some of the warbands I painted and the ruins of Gorepins manor!

The Final Battle

My Warband, led by Marieth the Ancient

A Friends Warband, led by Steve Craftmine

Another Friends Warband, led by Tombra

A final warband, pictured partially painted, led by Magus

Randomly Generating Backgrounds and the "Your Storied Past" Table

 Recently I've just had a session 0 for a campaign I am running in Savage Worlds where I decided to take inspiration from Cyberpunk RED, which I had ran the previous summer. In RED you go through what is called lifepath generation, where you roll for or choose various aspects of your character background, until you have a fleshed out Edgerunner of your own. My favorite part of the lifepath system is rolling for friends, enemies, and tragic love stories. With just these 3 things I was able to run my summer Cyberpunk campaign with little to no prep, and it was a blast. It also forced the players to work within limits, which as many of us know, limitation breeds creativity.

So while prepping this campaign I knew I wanted to do something similar. But, as I was now running a dark fantasy setting, not all the options would translate. So I took this as an opportunity to innovate on Cyberpunks lifepath system.

After a few hours I created the Your Storied Past table. with only 2d20 you can easily generate an invocative story from the past that frames your characters motivation. I have included this table below.

I tried to include vague but distinct prompts that would spark imagination when rolled together. For example, Signature Weapon could obviously mean your character has a cool axe, but it could also mean they've developed a technique as their signature weapon.

My table used this to great success, I'm happy to say. And all the player agreed afterward, most had never used random character generation, that it had led to very interesting characters which were slightly out of their comfort zone (in a good way of course).

In addition to this table we also used a slightly modified version of cyberpunks friends, enemies, and tragic love stories, as well as the relationships page from "This is Totally Not another D&D Fiasco" by Dyson Logos. Between the three resources, we are starting off our game with a lot of player cohesion and useful background details.

This table can be found here, on my google drive. It is Licensed under Creative a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 BY NC SA International License

The Travelling Alchemist

Throughout all time and all realities, there is one constant. Tucked away on some back street, inside the walls of an unassuming wooden building, there is a tavern that exists everywhere. It is called the Travelling Alchemist, and throughout time it has had many owners. From Leymond the Legendary to Bornis Bhaghis to Kyap the Wise, the keys to this multidimensional speakeasy have passed through many hands.

So, who am I? My name is Drew and I am the current owner and manager of the Travelling Alchemist, at least in my time. I have been into tabletop gaming since January 2020. I know, quite a short time, but I learn alittle bit every day. Since then I've done a variety of projects in the ttrpg space that I am very excited to share with the world.

While you are here, please, take a seat and have a drink. If you wish to stay allow me to tell you my tales and imbibe you with my findings as I continue my various RPG and Wargaming projects.

Thank you, and enjoy your time at The Travelling Alchemist!