The Aluborg Sagas (Judge's Notes)

  Day 2 of Hex23 - Enter the Kurganov Taiga (B001) - January 2nd, 2023      The taiga forest to the northeast of Aluborg is full of ancient graves. Centuries ago - possibly millennia - an ancient civilization thrived in these lands, and buried their dead in grave-mound barrows called kurgany in the Vylgar language.  Map Designation:  B001 Alignment: Chaotic Climate:  Cold Terrain:  Forest (Taiga - coniferous forest) Settlements:  None Features:  The taiga forest is full of the kurgany (burial mounds) that give the region its name. Anyone exploring these hexes is likely to find several burial mounds. There are no reliable charts or maps to them all.       The trail from Aluborg into the forest leads to : 1. The Kurganov Complex - A large clearing  in the forest, almost a mile wide, with exposed ruins - a vast complex of unburied stone that was apparently part of the burials, but somehow unearthed. The tombs have mostly been looted, and encounters are rare, here, but there is an eerie se

 Day 1 of Hex23 - Aluborg (A000) - January 1st, 2023      So, in 2023 I'm doing a version of the Hex23 challenge (#Hex23 on most social media); generating some hexcrawl regions every day of 2023. I'm working on the map for the Aluborg region for the challenge! So for January 1st, my first hex is the "home" hex, the location of Aluborg itself.  Map Designation: A000 Alignment: Lawful Climate: Cold Terrain: Plains/Farmland (Also: Town of Aluborg, River) Settlements: Aluborg Features: Aldeigjuborg Road to the west, trail into the hills to the south, trail into the Kurganov Taiga to the northeast      This first hex is a "safe," "home" hex. The intention is for this to be used as part of a "West Marches" style of campaign, in which this hex is the "home base" (although this style of campaign is known as "West Marches," in point of fact, in this world it would be an " East Marches," since that is where the frontie

 Crossroads & Cultures The Intersection of Cultures in the Aluborg Sagas      This is the first in what I hope to make a regular series of notes on the Aluborg Sagas, a campaign setting I created for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role-Playing Game. The Aluborg Sagas are set in the world of Midhgardhur, which has been the setting for other RPG campaigns (mostly Pathfinder 1E) and I have published a number of stories and books set in that world, so a great deal of the setting is pretty firmly fleshed out going back more than 10 years now. But as a Judge creating a setting for RPG play, I try to be conscious and intentional about the ideas to which I give voice and space. So I wanted to make some notes about "crossroads of cultures," or as I entitled this blog post, "Crossroads & Cultures" (which I admit was because it had a "Dungeons & Dragons," "Tunnels & Trolls," "Castles & Crusades," etc. vibe).       The first large-s