Penumbra: Backdrops (OGL) PDF

We're the stagehands so you can focus on being the director.

Backdrops presents a collection of ready-to-use locations for your OGL System fantasy campaign. Each location, or "backdrop," is detailed in a two-page spread including a scale map and descriptive text to enrich your adventures—wherever they take place. Backdrops is like paying a set designer to build a few stock sets on your campaign's back lot.

Backdrops features fourteen set scenes, including:
• The bath house is a place of whispers, threats, lies, and scheming. Beneath its tranquility it is a tense scene, where enemies face each other without swords or shields.
• An urban stable breeds noble horses in which the wisdom of ancient tribal kings is scattered as a blessed reincarnation.
• In the secret smithy, three burning golden dwarves arrive from within the forge at the stroke of midnight to craft wondrous items.
• Small, fortified caravanserai offer protection and company to travelers and traders... though bandits know that the most valuable thing in any caravanserai is the caravan visiting it.
• Narrow alleyways wind like veins through the city... but only three sorts of souls walk these streets at night: lantern-bearing guards, cutthroats, and the undead.
• In the thick of the city are the public cages where burglars, cutpurses, housebreakers, and felons are jailed; those souls who cannot pay their fine in coin will pay it with time.

Link the sets to detail a single city, or scatter them across your campaign world. Use them as a foundation for more exotic travails for your PCs, or to fill in the dark corners of your characters' hometown. It's your game, after all; Backdrops just gives you more time to play it!

Author: Will Hindmarch