It’s time to get my first ‘official’ 5 Leagues from the Borderlands underway – practice games with unpainted minis do not, of course, count – and so as with all solo endeavours one must start with a new blank notebook.
After doodling a generic – and likely ungeographic – map, I rolled up the settlements and starting locations by the book and dotted them around. Some areas have been left in pencil in case borders need to change, and placeholder names are likely to want something a little more characterful. I suspect this map will become extremely messy in short order.
Whilst 5LftB does come with some campaign trackers and character sheets, I don’t find they help me visually, so I scrawled down a slightly different configuration of boxes for the campaign and warband resources and notes.
Rather than rolling for threats, I picked the three I had most suitable miniatures for whilst maintaing a bit of variety. Didn’t want all enemies to be human-centric, after all. I’ve now plenty of zombies and hooded figures to fill in for ‘Whispers From Beyond’. I’ve plenty of Caesar Miniatures ratmen miniatures which, while not 15mm in scale, should work for the ‘Gnawling Horde’ if we accept that in the Furtherlands ratfolk are in fact a bit larger than humans. And the celts will work for the war-like ‘Duskling Warbands’ raiding the area.
My only stipulation for my own warband was that they all be human, both to match my painted mini collection so far and because I’ll take grubby fantasy over high fantasy any day. And for variety no duplicate backgrounds. Otherwise I let the dice fall where they may.
Agoztio
Human Noble, Avatar
Combat bonus
Full armour
+2 XP
Boluaga
Human Zealot
Speed & Toughness bonus
+1 Will
+1 Luck
Bandages
Skill (Devotion)
Caraile
Human Mystic
Speed bonus
+2 XP
1 gold mark
Spells: Compel, Darts, Manipulate, Premonition, Shadows
Duhin
Human Frontiersman
Agility bonus
+1 XP
Fine self bow
Skill (Crafting)
Skill (Scouting)
Erlea
Stout human yeoman
Fede
Faithful human servant
Picked Agoztio as the ‘avatar’ less as a tabletop representation of me and more because the group as a whole gave me some Don Quixote-esque vibes – a particularly enthusiastic nobleman with a thirst for adventure able to drag a number of friends and lackeys of varying competency into his orbit. Here’s hoping that with so many of them bringing XP to the table that they’ll be able to roll up some more applicable rolls quickly.
I hurriedly threw together some character sheets on Powerpoint which should be a bit more helpful during gameplay. From experience with RPGs I’m not so fond of lots of narrow lines like the ones on the official roster sheet – I prefer a bit more space for my messy handwriting to spread out. These were printed four to an A4 sheet, so Caraile’s spells all comfortably fit on the reverse side.
I realised after printing these out that I’d missed a typo – there should only be one shield / light weapon box, the other accidentally usurping the slot for armour. That has since been corrected, but I wasn’t going to waste paper over it. If these character sheets are of interest to anyone, here they are as a PDF. If somthing crops up in gameplay which would clearly be worth including I’ll probably revise them, but they’ll do for now.
There Could Have Been Snakes 