I'll will probably put up another thread for my own ROTR recruitment. Also, I'd love to play in another AP. I'd vote for Reign of Winter. I've got a Wizard prepped for that AP.
Good luck Mr Holden.
I find it funny that the interest check for any AP showed the people who wanted to play, but interest check for a single AP is apparently spawning 3 games for 3 AP's. Well I guess we know how to do this again lmao.
Just got lucky :P.
The other thread also generated a RoW game.
So if there is enough interest AND it has been a while since some AP's started, we can do 1 thread on it ;).
I was actually coming over here to offer to GM since I already have 3 groups I am GMing RotRL and they are all almost finished with Book 1 it wouldn't be too bad to start a forth. However, finding someone else offering to GM I would still love to actually play this one.
As such I would like to offer up Jes. I will adjust as needed for creation guidelines but background etc is already there.
Well I will throw this out there:
start with a story:
Where to begin? Life has always been an adventure for me, even from the start. After twelve hours of labor my mamma shot me out like a professional skiprock. After some extensive bungee action, I am told; I finally came to hang with a cord wrapped around my neck. Well things could only get wilder from there…
My ma and pa, Cillia and Kulobi, raised me on what they knew. During the day, I’d help dad run the little Jolly Halfling Inn in Artume. I’d watch and sometimes help dad haggle prices with merchants and tell tales of his great adventuring days. He was the most famous man I’ve ever met up that point in my life and not everybody has ever seen a great dragon, except of course Ole Carl, which was how he became Sheriff after all! Anyway I digress this is about me after all and who wants to hear about old man Carl anyway.
Artume is a small domain amid hills and fertile plains within the River Kingdoms. Artume lies on a western branch of the Sellen River, not far from the cities of Daggermark, Gralton, and Sevenarches. The region boasts high quality livestock, especially horses, as well as leather goods and stone. The kingdom welcomes adventurers, who Regent Waike frequently uses to deal with bandits and nagas.
Anyhows; after working with Pa, I’d come home and make a big batch 0’ food with ma. She was always hosting elaborate parties, so I specialize in hors d’oeuvres.
While I love getting good prices on candies and I can’t get enough of my “Pattonded Homemade Out-Of-This-World Moon Waffles,” However, neither baking nor haggling was the life for me. At least not at that time; Ahh Youth, when your young and in love, and as pa would say, “stupid”.
So when I turned 16 I began looking for a way out and as fate would have it on my birthday bash, a group of adventuring types came to the Inn. Clumsy big folk they were; and my first real experience with them. I soon realized that they were dumber than a young hobbit in love. They had in their midst a lovely hobbit girl named Lily. She was the reason they were in here. She told me tales of great things they were planning on doing like free some human nation from the hands of evil or some such nonsense. I told her there was no evil here. But she insisted there was a bigger world than Artume.
Now with a lust for adventure in my heart and raging hormones are my loins, I pleaded with the human folk to take me with them. Of course Ma and Pa disagreed but Pa saw the look in my eye (and the bulge in me breeches) and said it was time to sow my oats. Don’t really know what he meant, I had no intention of farming but I thanked him anyway. So equipped with a frying pan (a gift from ma), a towel (father said “always bring a towel”) and the clothes on my back I left the next morn in the company of two humans and a fat tall hobbit with a big beard, He said he was a dwarf but I say he’s a “hobbit in denial.” I wanted to survive on my own, bring home my own bread, reel in my own fish, and tame my own wild badger… (Note: no farming dad!)
Lily and I became friends on the course of our travels, here is a picture of us (I drew it myself, well sort of):
See pa no farming yet!
Well now back to the story:
We journeyed for several days seeing wondrous sights like trees, and bushes, and trees, and shrubberies, and trees, ohh look a squirrel, and did I mention Trees, and Hobgoblins, and trees, and what! Hobgoblins Ahhh!
Well we fought them Hobgoblins and killed them all, but one, and the humans decided to question him about some great evil that need to be stopped, like the Hobby (that’s what I called them) had a clue about what they were talking about, maybe he was a farmer. Well we learned from the Hobgoblin that “gruu grack!” (Or something like that) meant I ain’t talking! So he ended up dying instead. I got my first kill and it wasn’t fun at all I will never do that again! At least not that way it was very… ahhhh… un-heroic!
Several days later after seeing more trees we found out that Hobbys like to travel in really big groups. And the hardy human adventurers fought them bravely. I protected that rock like my life depended on it (and I think it did) Lily had a rock to, but she kept throwing it at the Hobbies I told her come over here my rock is bigger! Boy did that come out wrong.
Anyway, she did, and oh boy was I proud of that skill! I love that rock.
We hid while the humans and that hobbit in denial got slaughtered. Really felt bad about it but if I was to keep them in my memories and tell the tales of their great deeds (and about my rock) I would have to stay alive. Never met a dead hobbit that told me an edge of your seat tale.
The Hobbys never found us and we slipped away, left to our own devices in the wilds of a non-shire place.
We made our way to a place called Thronestep somewhere in a place called Razmiran. Well after 16 years with 5 full meals a day, independence sure made my stomach growl. Far from home and only Lily with me I shifted to crime in a moment of weakness. Well, the guy looked like an easy mark, but I guess I’m not quite the pickpocket I thought I was. His ear twitched as I approached, and he promptly spun around and bonked me on the head with some sort of guitar.
When I came to, my vision was blurred and I though I saw Lily kneeling beside me so I reached for her and boy was that guy mad and he gave me gift I won’t soon forget, a second bump on the noggin!
When I came to again, my vision was still blurred (I got to stop getting bumped on the noggin). The sun hurt my eyes so I just shut them again. But then I heard the most enlightening music. It was soft and low, with a strange buzz to it. The slow tempo was depressing, but it touched my heart and seemed to liven up my spirits.
Opening my eyes, I saw the man responsible for the bump and the source of the tune, He was sitting on a barrel, he was elegantly dressed in performers motley, and he sat there legs crossed creating a beautiful sound from what I later learned to be called a harmonica. And behind him I could smell home style cooking and there was Lily making me my favorite meal, “Pattonded Homemade Out-Of-This-World Moon Waffles” at least the best she could, considering it was my recipe. Isn’t she wonderful, I need a shower, (now I understand the bit about the towel)?
I also noticed the ground had turned to wood and was rocking and I heard the sounds of the ocean, just like when Ma and Pa took me to the ocean to swim. Hey I am on a boat! Wonder where I was going?
The man noticed I had awakened and discontinued his melody. “Hungry little fella?” he asked politely. “Eat now, and tomorrow you can begin to work off your little crime” shame fell over me, and a little embarrassment.
I’ll tell ya, they make new definitions for words every day. Who would think that by work, he meant learn to play an instrument. I spent the next couple of days taking harmonica lessons from Fflewddur Fflam the Music Man, and at the same time we got to know each other and I got to know Lily even better (wink) (Guess what Pa! I am a farmer!!). Anyway he explained his story and I told him mine especially about the big rock and the trees. [I might be going crazy, but whenever he got to describing some epic battle he fought in, I could swear his harp strings would break].
Eventually we arrived in a city called Tamran in Nirmathas. I learned a lot on that ship, the ship was a merchant ship and the crew, with the way they talked reminded me a lot of home with pa and the merchants. I managed to trade a bit with them and they told me all about something called merchant’s run; A secret trade route which is heavily protected that connects Lake Encarthan and Conqueror’s Bay.
We spent almost 6 months with Fflewddur travelling the Merchant’s Run learning all sorts of new things along the way, and Lily and I became very close we were married not long after my farming incident (shame ma and pa missed out, but at least they didn’t know about big rock). But alas we had to part ways with Fflewddur. He said I could never discover who I was until I made it for myself. As a parting gift he offered me his harmonica, on which he engraved the warning:
“It is the mark of an immature man to die nobly for a cause, and it is the mark of a mature man to live humbly for one.”
Lily and I settled down in a little gnome community called Whistledown and we opened a small Inn, aptly named the Jolly Halfling Inn (Western Style).
The new Inn wasn’t open for very long when we were asked to perform at some girl’s 40th birthday bash. Never being one to turn down a chance to play the harmonica and I readily accepted.
But that is when it all happened. Townsfolk go missing, strange happenings at night. It was on the night of the birthday bash that everyone was ordered inside by the mayor and the town militia was to take up guard posts to put an end to the strange happenings.
Their blood curdling screams woke the town in the dead of night, and after the sun came up only the bravest of the townsfolk ventured out to investigate—(I stayed in the Inn with Lily) -- they found only scattered weapons, dented helmets, and pools of congealed blood.
The next day, a group of Pathfinders came to town. Mayor Bagalom managed to persuade the adventurers to take care of the problem for the town. Many of us were excited to have people of such prominence in town even though they were from so place called Sothis or some such place and I think they were looking for some dead prostitute. I know, weird huh?
Well, this group brought back fond memories of our time with Fflewddur and our journeys along the Merchant’s Run. Anyway the group spent some time at our little Inn and I could tell that the birthday girl we were supposed to perform for had a thing for the Halfling in their group. Well its none of my business what they do, but I did make sure he had plenty of clean towels. Maybe he was a farmer to?
Well, the adventurers succeeded in stopping whatever it was that plagued Whistledown. And there was a great festival in their honor. (Though the fact that they were carting around a 400-year-old corpse of an Osirian concubine was a tad unsettling for most of us). And I served everyone a heaping of my “Pattonded Homemade Out-Of-This-World Moon Waffles,”
Well the adventurers left and that gnome girl left with them, I confided in that Halfling fellow that liked her about Merchant’s Run and they were off on another adventure.
I moped around the Inn for the next several days yearning for adventure just like before. But then it happened. A message arrived. It was from someone named Ms Cherry Blossom (What?!? Do gods think I should be a farmer too?) Anyway after some grumbling about the name, Lily said it was her mother coming to visit.
“Oh Great, Company, this will be so much fun!” But lily just looked at me weird.
“You don’t understand, she doesn’t know about you and expects me to marry Bernard” Lily seemed rather upset over this but I told her that Ma wanted me to marry Ingred but she had buck teeth and almost no hair on her feet. No respectable halfling boy would marry such a girl, and luckily Pa agreed.
Well Lilly decided that I needed to go away for a spell while she visited so Lily could straighten things out. And that very same day (Like there wasn’t enough coincidence in my life) I found a flyer talking about a Swallow your tail festival in a place near a sandy point, or was that the town of Sandpoint. Oh well who cares it was an adventure, and a means to be away from “Ms. Cherry Blossom”.
So I told Lily all about it and she was thrilled for me and helped me pack. So off I went heading to the swallow and have a tail festival and headed east out of town.
Lily called to me after no more than 3 minutes of leaving. “Isn’t she sweet she missed me already”?
“The town is West”. (Lily always was good with directions like that. Never could understand that whole North – South thing. But anyway once pointed in the right direction I headed to a point in the sand to swallow my tail at a festival!!
rest will follow later but consider this a halfling bard
Lots of great submissions! Putting up recruitment within 2 hours.
By the way im just a goblin psion!
With a little fluff on how i got my telepathy powers and a voice i get to talk to myself with >.>
Working on crunch, will post in the new thread!