[Found Treasures] Early TSR Correspondence

Proof that the Nerd is strong in this one... 

I am finally going through the pile of boxes that has been sitting in our garage for the last four years, and that were sitting in storage in one place or another for the last, um... eep... 16 years before that?

OK, so I am a pack rat. But sometimes being a pack rat pays off, as when I opened a box I had not opened in... um... 20 years, and amongst other things from my childhood and youth, discovered this letter...

Now, my memory is terrible. I KNOW I started playing D&D when I received the Moldvay Basic Set, which I THOUGHT I had received for Christmas in 1980, though the release date of it was not until January 1981, so... either the release date was early (Mom & Dad did get it from Toys R' Us, so maybe), or I did not get it and start playing until December 1981.

Which means from the dating of my letter of April 5, 1982, that I was bit by the game publishing bug within four months at the earliest (16 months at the latest if that set was available for Christmas 1980).

I have no memory of sending the letter or even of receiving the reply. Shame, that. The next time I would try corresponding with Gary would be when I was in grad school, in 1993. But that's another story...

[Found Treasures] SnarfQuest Westrian Kingdoms

And here is a rendition of the Westrian or Olde Young Kingdoms of SnarfQuest in Hexographer.

I took my old hand-drawn map, scanned it, plunked it into Hexographer and ran with it. The Hexographer map is a mix between the original and my hand-drawn version. Seems like it could make for a nice, interesting B/X or Labyrinth Lord campaign setting...  I'll have to see if I can do anything with it...

Click to embiggen

[Found Treasures] World of Snarfquest

Long ago the pages of Dragon Magazine hosted Snarfquest, Larry Elmore's comic series about the adventures of a strange being, Snarf, who was a Zeetvah, an odd humanoid race. The world included all sorts of standard fantasy creatures, in addition to the odd creatures such as the Zeetvahs; while most of these "Exotic Beings" were found in the appropriately-named "Valley of Exotic Beings," a few other such critters could be found elsewhere.

At one point the comic featured the brief depiction of the map of the continent and region upon and in which Snarf adventured. And of course, with my love of maps, I took it and ran with it... end ended up with a series of interesting maps, closely based on the map depicted, but slightly changed up, with a few name and other changes here and there...

I never ran a campaign set in this world; it was only an exercise in map making and world building. Maybe someday... as it seems like a wild and wahoo kind of world suitable for a B/X, BECMI, or Labyrinth Lord campaign. Or maybe that's just because I associate Elmore's work on the Mentzer version of Basic and Expert, and thus could easily see Snarf walking through the art in those pages...

If only Aleena had had Telerie Windyarm at her side instead of some nameless schmuck, she'd still be with us today and Bargle's skull would be a random bit of dungeon dressing...

Here's the map of the geography of the continent...

Here's an map overview of the world's regions...

Here's a map that focuses on the geography of the Westrian Kingdoms, the area where Snarf was from...

Here's a regional map of the kingdoms of Westria...

And here is the regional map for the Tyran Empire... gotta have an Empire of Tyrants. A great place for gladiator games, debauchery, and backstabbing...

And here's a scan of the original map as depicted in the comic series (Dragon #94)...

I found two little notes in the folder where I keep the maps. One indicates that there are 48,000 Whaven, the "Exotic Nomadic Tribes" of the plain of the same name. There are nine tribes, each with a different skin color... Black, Red, Orange, Gray, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, and White. The tribesmen ride zebras known as "Kwags."

The other note indicates the ethnic types of the region. Wesmen are red-haired Celts; Whaven are tawny-haired Picts; Elani are black-haired Greeks; Gelts are tawny-haired Germans; Northrons are blond-haired Norse; Martani are black haired Berbers; and the Tyrans are a mix of Elani, Gelts, and Wesmen.

There is also a little random chart to determine the title of the ruler of the village, town, or city that characters pass through. Even the smallest hamlet might be ruled by a king... very points-of-light style...

[Found Treasures] Mystara Miscellany

Found two interesting bits from my Mystara campaigns...

The first is the map of the area around Arbanville, center of a campaign set in the Westerlands of Darokin, in the Malpheggi Swamp. A no-prize to whoever first recognizes the real-world region and era upon which this is based...

And someday I need to revisit that Westerlands region map with Hexographer...

The second piece is the rate sheet for the Evil Minions Guild. This was used during a HackMaster Hackwurld of Mystaros campaign set in the Black Eagle Barony (the BEB). The misadventures of that crew were remarkable...

I have also found a chunk of old Ochalea material, but as I know I have a LOT more of that somewhere else in the boxes, that will wait for another time when I can put together scans of all the material. The big problem will be scanning the massive 8-mile-per-hex hand-drawn map I drew of the whole island and surrounds... its on one of those huge Armory hex maps sheets, so I'll probably just have to take a picture of it and call that good. Maybe Kinkos has an affordable large-scale scanner; I'll have to check...

[Found Treasures] Gangs of Specularum

I'd always loved the premise behind module B6: The Veiled Society, though thought it showed only a fraction of the mob/gang activity that would be present in such a large city. When GAZ1: The Grand Duchy of Karameikos was released in 1987, I combined the material from Veiled Society with inspiration from the gangs of Porta as described in the Powers & Perils: Perilous Lands supplement, Tower of the Dead, to create a full set of gangs for the city of Specularum.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure what else survives. I had full write-ups of each gang, but have not found those yet. Probably disappeared with my computer from that day, or they might still be found on a disk somewhere, if the disk hasn't failed...

This first image is a map of the areas controlled by each gang as of 1000 AC.

This second image shows the relationships between each gang.

This third image is a map of the stronghold of the Minstrels.

As usual, click to embiggen any image...

[Found Treasures] Gamma World Map featuring the Yceea Campaign

I went to grad school at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa from 1992 to 1994. While there I ran numerous campaigns with many gaming groups. One of these campaign was the Yceea Gamma World Campaign. This Gamma World setting had several influences. The two most prominent were from television and literature.

As one can see, the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century TV series had a major influence, from the inclusion of a "New Chicago" arcology/mega-city in central Illinois. New Chicago, along with a dozen or more similar locations, were built by the Starmen, the Pure Strain Humans who arrived from interstellar colonies and re-colonized the irradiated Earth. The Starmen were the source of all Pure Strain Humans in this campaign, as all native humans were Mutants. PSH had spread throughout the lands, as the Starmen arrived centuries ago, had a civil war, and those who wished to live free from the kind but stifling benevolent tyranny of the City-State settled their own lands.

The other influence were novels by three authors: Donald Moffat with Crescent in the Sky and A Gathering of Stars; the excellent Budayeen Cycle by George Alec Effinger; and of course, the Horseclans series by Robert Adams, notably mentions of the Khaleefate of Zahrtogah. And so most of the Earth, or at least, the campaign area, was dominated by a vaguely Islamic-style culture, with Ahmeers and Sooltahns, Mahleeks and Khaleefs; as with the Khaleefate of Zahrtogah, rulership was usually held by those with the most potent mental mutations...

I haven't yet found any of my notes from the campaign, just this map. I hope something printed remains; all my notes were on the first computer I ever owned, complete with a dot matrix printer. I think I might have even typed up some notes on a typewriter I still owned. But almost 25 years later, it is unlikely that much else remains. I might just rebuild it from the ground up for a Mutant Future or Mutants & Mazes campaign...

Scale is 8 kilometers per hex, or about 5 miles per hex.

As usual click to embiggen...

[Found Treasures] Labyrinth Lord Known Lands Expanded

Here's a map of far more recent vintage: an unfinished attempt to expand out the Known Lands of Labyrinth Lord. I never got very far with this map; IIRC, this was from around the time I picked up Hexographer and started working on the Olden Lands. I was definitely going with a Norse-inspired section in the north, something England-like in the east, Mongols in the west, and Egyptian/Arabic in the south... but never got any further than this.

Scale is 30 miles to the hex, as the original map it is based on was 10 miles to the hex, but IIRC I was planning on changing that to 24 miles and 8 miles, respectively, to fit with the old school scale of the Known World...

As usual, click to embiggen...

[Found Treasures] Hand-Drawn Map of Taymor

So I've finally gotten a chance to go through some of those boxes of long-stored gaming materials. I've found a trove of old maps and campaign notes, stuff I wrote ages ago that, if they exist in digital form anywhere, it is likely they are rotting on an old 5 1/4" or 3 1/2" disks in a box somewhere in the back of storage... so I'll eventually sort out what is cool and not, scan it, OCR it, and maybe do something with it... we'll see.

But for now, the maps. I used to hand draw TONS of maps back in the day, all sorts of maps from dungeons and wilderness to cities and villages. Now I pretty much doodle on Hexographer for hex maps and use existing maps from elsewhere for dungeon and city maps.

This map was my first go at a version of Taymor, the lands of the Known World of Mystara back before the disaster that created the Broken Lands and destroyed the Kingdom of Taymor. I wrote up a TON of backstory on Taymor when I was running Mystara on a regular basis. Most of that can be found on the Vaults of Pandius; at least, that which I posted to various Mystara fan sites. There's a ton of stuff still remaining that I might get to eventually...

This map is of course at the 24-mile-per-hex scale that was used in the Known World series.

As usual, click to embiggen