Planning the Campaign

• "two campaign articles in Dragons 63 and 65, and would advise anyone starting a new campaign to check them out: "Plan Before You Play" and "Law of the Land."
• two pieces of local info (rumours, legends) per character, written on index cards and randomly distributed.
• "The old man hadn’t said much about the job before he got himself killed, just that you were to conduct him to the town of Dressanthorpe and that you’d be payed the going wage for bodyguarding/escort work and, afterward, he’d tell you more if you wanted to brave a greater danger and reap a greater reward. Well, it turned out the journey was danger enough. The four bandits that attacked you were either desperate from hunger or too drunk to know better. It hadn’t taken long for you to subdue them when they burst, screaming, out of the brush along the side of the road. Unfortunately for the old man, one of them wasn’t too bad with his sling and got in a lucky shot before falling to your swords.
  
  It was bad enough the old man died just as you arrived at your destination. The fact that he obviously intended to cheat all of you just made it worse. The pouch he wore so prominently on his belt, the one he led you all to believe was full of gold, turned out to hold mostly copper; definitely not enough to pay you all off at the price he quoted. The sale of his clothes, weapons and other items had barely earned enough cash to buy you a night’s lodging and some warm food.
  
  But he hadn’t left you entirely empty handed. The hidden pocket he’d had sewn into his coat had been decent, but not good enough to escape detection during the close inspection you’d given him while looking for enough cash to fund your journey home. You hadn’t found any cash, just a letter on old, fading parchment. It was obvious that the letter was what brought the old man to this town on the edge of the kingdom, at the foothills of the Trollstep Mountains; and that his allusion to “greater risk for greater rewards” meant he’d planned to offer all of you a chance to seek the treasure described in the letter.
  
  And so, you find yourselves sitting around a scarred old table, in the darkest, remotest corner of Dressanthorpe’s only Inn staring at the letter, reading it over and over again, trying to decide between working your way back to more civilized lands as caravan drovers or bearers and heading up into the mountains to find a fortune."