The Mythic World of Urd: Assault on the Goblin Lair

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The following was posted by GameDoc on our private social media.  Check out the Arcane Alienist Podcast and listen to the session here!

Assault on the Goblin Lair

As the party retreats into the forest to regroup, the come across a small band of kobolds kicking and stabbing at a dead bugbear – the bugbear they had driven off only a few moments earlier. The kobolds explain that they were out foraging when they heard the bugbear crashing through the forest, so they hid and ambushed it. After some discussion, they agree to meet the part back at the same spot the next day and try and help them get into the goblins’ lair.

Settling in back at the Canopies, the various retainers discover that all the weapons they’ve taken from goblinoids are made of bronze, not steel. This leads to the realization that as fey-descended creatures, they cannot abide the touch of iron. 

The next day, the kobolds are there as promised. They party again approaches the upper entrance to the lair while the kobolds distract the goblins guarding the lower entrance. The kobolds wind up picking off the goblins with slings while the party is able to overcome the hobgoblins guarding the upper entrance. The kobolds agree to bring up the rear as they party explores the caves within.

When in doubt, just run at 'em.  They never expect you to just run at 'em.

Forging ahead, they discover a dining hall where several hobgoblins oversee a large brood of juvenile goblins. The hobgoblins move to attack and all but two are slain. It seems the party has learned how to better use positioning and coordinated attacks! The two survivors are concerned for their young and agree to a binding pact that if they can leave with the juveniles unharmed, they will make no attempts to harm any of the party again. They explain that the curse of the Troll King befalls any who violate such a pact. 

The retainer pool consists mostly of kobolds.

Doubling back, the party discovers a guard post and again combat quickly turns in their favor. One hobgoblin loses its nerve and surrenders, but the kobolds, seeking revenge for their enslavement, fall on it and kill it anyway. Roderick chastises them, much to their confusion. Two more guards surrender an offer to tell the party how to find their captain’s hidden chambers but are also clearly stalling and speaking a little too loudly. A second wave of guards appears but seeing they are outnumbered, retreat. The party follows them into the next room to find an armory of steel armor and weapons, unusable by the goblins, but no hobgoblins at all. Dolly and Hedegar also locate a hidden door and a secret passage the hobgoblins must have used to escape. 

Secret doors lead to secret prizes.

What lies beyond the passage… riches and glory, or certain death?

Woodland / Grassland Hills

 I consider hills to be one of the cornerstones of the tabletop.  Whenever I build a new table, these are one of the first things I count for terrain.  Of course, I'm old school so these hills are 'free-placed' rather than built into any tabletop.  Modular hills - they are ubiquitous, and every table needs some modular hills.

Continuing with the motif of updating the hills from the old club.  Obviously, these were concerned with functionality over aesthetics.  All of these were cut from standard styrofoam, probably cribbed from packaging.  They were then treated like I normally do them - covered in pva to create a hard shell and then spraypainted.  This makes them very sturdy - the big one on the bottom right is almost 25 years old.

The edge-old dilemma of storing these kind of hills is the 'chipping' that will occur as they are tossed around over the decades.  Every time I redo these, this is the #1 thing that must be fixed every single time.  Luckily, I ran across a method I would have never thought of to fix this - or at least heavily mitigate it.

And thus I found - the wet toilet paper method.

The idea apparently is used quite a bit across the terrain-o-sphere, but I got the idea to use it here at the edges of my chipping styro-hills because of the apparent strength granted.  The methodology is simple:  using watered-down PVA glue, you apply a rim of 'wet' toilet paper and let it dry.  This not only hardens the edges of the styrofoam, but also can be spray-painted.

Make sure to get up under there.  Don't worry - it dries flat.  The reason you can see under the rims in some of the pics is because of my tables slight warpage in the center.  

Hey, it's old too.

Once they were dried, I painted them up with some acrylic.

I almost called it done here.  

Yet, I decided to go ahead and apply some flock before I took pics of the table in my dimly lit dungeon.

There's a special mix of flocking material including sand and talus, but it's mostly different colored flocks.

So yeah...I should probably replace my tables or build a new one.  That bend in the middle really grinds my gears, but oh well.  Maybe I should just resurface it.

Content Update / Site Overhaul

Inspirobot will tell you like it is.

Oof.  I really let the fire rush to my head on that last post.  Let's forget all that for a while, and maybe we'll circle back in a while.  Maybe not.  

So many things have changed since the end of 2019, it's taken this long to really see the impact on how we do gaming in our area.  The very nature of the hobby has changed quite a bit for me personally since our activities have been limited.  Now that we've spent some time in the 'new normal', I think it's time to shift gears.  We've come to see how things have matured and how people have begun to interact.  Now, it will be easier to create engaging content instead of having 'false-starts'.  With the Beer Koof returning in force, it might be some time before we see larger scale organized gaming...

Anyways...seems a good a time as any to overhaul the site!

I've been thinking this over for a while and it's time to prune old articles, as well as update a few.  I've been fighting with the mobile display code for a while since I'm stubborn and used an older template style, but I think I finally have it licked.  You should have a much better time navigating the site on mobile, but this is just the beginning.  I have been building a better organization for everything than what I have now, with a much better presentation.

One important change will be my publication days.  Due to the way our schedule has developed over almost two years of Beer Koof, my original publication days of Sunday and Friday are no longer workable.  Starting now, publication for Iron Seer Wargames will be Wednesday and RAWRPG will be Saturday.  That should help me with gathering up time to maintain the site much better than my trickle of posts would show.

I also have content from old, defunct blogs that I keep finding myself referring to over time.  The answer here is obvious, so I'll begin to update and integrate content from those places as well where it's relevant.  There are a few gems out there I'm proud of and I'd like to see renewed for a new decade.  Yeah...I've been at this a while...

During this maintenance time, some parts of the site may become inaccessible for short periods...or may become replaced by a new section entirely.  Don't worry - it's being put back together in a nice package.  This will be a slow process for me, and I expect it to take me at least a week as I'm going to go through all the content piece by piece.  I'm considering a lot of actions here...from merging the subdomain to a 'soft' relaunch of the wargames section.  I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do, but be advised there will be some changes to organization and display.

If you have any suggestions for changes you'd like or features that might be cool to integrate, let me know by dropping a comment here on the blog or on social media.  Give me your suggestions!

If you haven't already, take a moment and sign up for Disqus.  It's a fantastic comment system you can use across the blogosphere, most notably (and most importantly) right here on this site!  Just click 'comment' below and tell me why dark UI sucks, or why I'm going to hell for cursing last week...

Whatever.  You can follow me here on Disqus, and I'll follow you back.  Then we'll Disqus things as we follow each other around.