Testing Settlements - Coldwater Bend Part 4

Need better outhouses.

I'm testing my settlement system by telling the story of Coldwater Bend, a brand new hamlet built by a party of ex-adventurers by the riverbend teeming with trout. You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here.

Turn 10

Income consists of 3 Coin, 2 Morale (Culture has a +1 temporary bonus, so we're currently at 7 and getting a few bonuses on rolls), 1 River Trout, and 2 Wood. The people finish work on the Tavern, and it gets added to the Infrastructure list, giving +1 Culture and a 50% chance of generating 1 Coin at Income. The Recruiting effort bears fruit, attracting 2 People (I rolled a 1 and added 1 from High Morale). I rolled Settlers as an Event, so another 5 People (rolled 4, plus 1 for High Morale) move to town. That puts us at 18 Population, squarely in the overlap between Holding and Hamlet. Looks like we should start working on growing Coldwater Bend pretty soon.

Testing Settlements - Coldwater Bend Part 3

Citizen With A Dog.

I'm testing my settlement system by telling the story of Coldwater Bend, a brand new hamlet built by a party of ex-adventurers by the riverbend teeming with trout. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

I've changed the turn order a little, so I'm making those modifications in this test run. I'm planning on running another few turns later today, and I'll post those results this week.

Turn 7

Income consists of 2 Coin, 1 Morale, and 1 River Trout. The Lumber Mill finished this turn, so that gets added to the Infrastructure (costs 1 Coin in Upkeep, gives 2 Wood at Income). People harvested a second River Trout for their Forage project. The dice gods were kind, giving us no Event this turn.

No trading took place this turn, as there's enough Coin and Resources to go around this turn. Specialists now get paid here, just before resolving their effects. So Zofia gets her 1 Coin here, and Coldwater Bend enjoys +1 Trade for another turn.

Testing Settlements - Coldwater Bend Part 2

Getting Swans In A Row.

I'm testing my settlement system by telling the story of Coldwater Bend, a brand new hamlet built by a party of ex-adventurers by the riverbend teeming with trout. You can read Part 1 here.

Turn 4

Income consists of 1 River Trout, 2 Coin (Trade went up to 2 last turn thanks to Zofia), and 1 Morale. Residents gathered 2 Wood to prep for building a lumber mill, and they managed to trap 1 Rabbit for food. I rolled an Exodus event, so 3 people left (the refugees went back to the city to the rest of their family, bringing the population down to 10), causing Morale to drop by 2 (it hurts to say goodbye).

I was planning on building a lumber mill this turn, but with Morale running in the negative, it's time for a Festival (1 PP) to cheer people up, plus foraging for more food to keep everyone fed. Zofia sold off the River Trout for 1 Coin, and everyone had rabbit stew to keep their bellies full. Upkeep also included 2 Coin (1 for Size and 1 for Zofia, bringing us down to 1) 1 Morale (bringing us to -2).

Testing Settlements - Coldwater Bend Part 1

They probably have cows.

I've got enough structure built for the Settlement System to give it a whirl, so let's try an alpha test by starting with a brand new settlement.

A few definitions to navigate what's happening might help. Basic stats are Size (governs the scale of everything), Trade, Culture, and Militia. Each of those except Militia corresponds with a more volatile stat that potentially changes every turn, namely Population, Coin, and Morale. Settlement Turns are how often Income, Events, Projects, and Upkeep happen; I'm using a week per turn, but for a more casual experience a month per turn should work (and probably make more sense).

Settlements have Resource Income, which generate Food, Raw Materials, and Luxury Goods for consumption or trade, with extra Resources persisting between Turns in the Warehouse. Infrastructure tracks settlement buildings and Specialists are notable people in the settlement, and both can impact settlement stats. Projects allow the citizens to build and do things, and Events happen randomly every Turn to help or hinder the settlement's progress.

With all that as prologue, let's follow along as six ex-adventurers found a tiny settlement named Coldwater Bend.

Hallowe'en (Promptober 2025 #31)

Dead guy? Ho hum.

Most sages agree that the veil between the living world and the land of the dead is thinnest on Hallowe'en. Expect to see spirits and ghosts haunting the places they lived and died in life as you wander around. Haunted places show the most activity, but maybe that's because people seek out haunted places on that one specific night.

But what if Hallowe'en thinned the veils between all the planes?

We would still get ghosts, sure, but what about devils? Almond-eyed and long-fingered fey creatures? Shadowy forms intent on stealing the warmth and strength of living people? Dust devils and floating candle flames as tiny elementals escape their home planes and wander?

What makes Death so special?

Harvest Festival (Promptober 2025 #30)

Many cultures celebrate the end of the harvest season with festivals. Ionians have Meditrinalia, a wine-soaked party and feast dedicated to Meditrina, the recently-named goddess of wine and longevity. Dunhill still celebrates Samhain, a more sober festival featuring spirits walking the waking world and ushering in the darker half of the year. The Cappadocia region in Okular boasts many varieties of grapes, so their Üzüm Hasadı Festivali lasts for a week slightly earlier in the fall. The Alfinwald holds their Amaro Emel'glir, literally the Festival of Singing Hearts, raising their voices to thank nature for providing for the elves' needs, and as a promise to protect and nurture plant life, especially as the plants slumber the winter away.

But what about Fellport?

The city proper has some green space, primarily Highgarden, the meditation gardens and labyrinths surrounding the Divinity Sanctum, the quad at the heart of the College, the gardens in the public square near the Council House, the Penny Chestnut, and the smaller Brinemist Preserve closer to the harbor. Some homes have smaller gardens growing in containers or in their tiny yards, and a few abandoned houses in Talltown have been overrun with weeds. But you need to leave the city proper to find any large-scale agriculture.

Colossal Beast - Ti'an the Celestial Dragon (Promptober 2025 #24)

Ti'an, Celestial Dragon
Mythical creator of Beneterra

One ancient myth from the Yamagura Empire tells of an ancient and massive dragon sacrificing itself to create the world of Beneterra. The myth gives the dragon a name, Ti'an, literally meaning "heaven" or "sky" (though modern translations break the name into two characters roughly meaning "bloody paste". Linguistic evolution. Go figure.). The myth refers to Ti'an as a Celestial Dragon from that point on. Ti'an supposedly has scales made of the purest metals: platinum, mithril, and adamantine, and its body glows with starlight and holy fire.

The myth starts with the Celestial Dragon flying across the universe, creating life in its wake as it travels. It weeps comets and breathes dust and fire to ignite the stars in the heavens. Sometimes it hovers and watches what it created, and most times its creations die out in short order, but mostly it moves on to the next patch of sky that craves more than emptiness. Ti'an eventually tired of its journey after millennia of seeding the heavens, and it decided to sacrifice itself in a final concentrated burst of creative energy. It found a warm, welcoming, yellowish sun, then curled up and slept until it expired, laying the seeds of life and intelligence in its own corpse.

Lost Knowledge - Beneterra's History (Promptober 2025 #20)

Past and Future in One

How do we even know what knowledge we've lost over the past several millennia? The characters in my Fellport game have a vague idea of recent history, but some of the deep, dark secrets and stories elude nearly everyone living in Beneterra today. Even the stories and myths that nearly everyone knows have been altered after the centuries of telling and retelling.

Let's talk about a few major things from Beneterra's distant past.

Beneterra's Creation

During the party's time in Krugheim, capital city of the dwarven Clan Stormhammer, they found a pillar that flashed random colors with no discernible pattern. An artist colony grew in the cave around the pillar, and dwarven scientists set up a lab to study it.

And of course, the party went up and licked it. The party's psionic tried to gather psychic echoes from the pillar using Psionic Investigation and rolled a natural 20.

Sorcery (Promptover 2025 #18)

Thrice Spoken, Once Fulfilled

Back in my youth, I read Master of the Five Magics by Lyndon Hardy as part of my quest to read every fantasy book I could. The world involves plenty of handwaving, but most of the worldbuilding went into the 5 systems of magic. Perhaps I'll explore more forms of magic in future posts, since each set of rules provides some great flavor and interesting drawbacks.

Since today's prompt is Sorcery, let's take a look at that particular flavor of magic and see if we can adapt it in a useful manner.

Sorcery in Hardy's book focuses on manipulating other minds by making eye contact with your target and reciting a charm three times. Sorcery is governed by the Rule of Three: Thrice spoken, once fulfilled. Reciting a charm in the exact same way three times seems a little cumbersome in a game with fast combat rounds, but maybe we can think about using the Rule of Three for slower magic and ritual use.

Myths - The Lupercal (Promptober 2025 #6)

The She-Wolf Statue.

According to Ionian myth, the twins Ionius and Iulius founded the city of Ionia and consolidated the rule of the area under Ionius, the first Ionian king. An oracle said that twin sons would dethrone King Amulius, so he decreed that all twins should be killed for two years. Not even the king's niece, Rhea, was immune from this decree, but servants abandoned her twins on the bank of the Allia river instead of killing them outright.

A mother wolf found the twins and carried them to a nearby cave to suckle them back to health. They stayed for months, growing strong under the she-wolf's care. She eventually found a shepherd, Faustulus, who adopted the boys as his own. They grew up not knowing of the oracle nor their importance, eventually becoming soldiers in one of the many civil wars. In the years to come, they dethroned King Amulius and united the people on both sides of the civil war into the Kingdom of Ionia. In the hour of their triumph, Ionius and Iulius had a dispute about where to build the capital city, leaving Iulius dead and only Ionius's name to live in perpetuity as the name of the city and the kingdom.

The Rumor Mill - Week 52

We look at another list of slang for week 52 of The Rumor Mill, but this time in a smattering of other languages. If humans build culture by stealing interesting customs from everyone they meet, then Common mugs other languages in back alleys and rifles through their pockets looking for interesting words and phrases to absorb. In a cosmopolitan city like Fellport, you can hear several languages spoken, sometimes all at once in the same conversation.

Let's take a look at this pocketful of entertaining language nuggets and see what Common might want to retain.

The Rumor Mill - Week 51

Slang fills our list for week 51 of The Rumor Mill. From swapping insults between water-breathers and air-breathers to dozens of names for a rich fool, we cover a cross-section of everyday terms you might hear in Fellport that mean something other than the strict definition given by sages. Like most slang, many of these terms grew from backhanded "compliments", reductive summaries, or dismissive language, all meant to end conversation or start fights.

So let's dive into this week's list. Rest assured, there's no shortage of language flying around the streets of Fellport, so maybe we'll finish the #Lore24 year with a second week of slang after this.

The Rumor Mill - Week 50

Since 50 is a nice, round number, let's talk about milestones for week 50 of The Rumor Mill. We look at record high graduation classes at the College, and record low vacationers at Crystal Lake. Annual festivals, newly-returned dragons, people healed, and zero combat fatalities round out our list of rumors this week.

So let's dive in to the round numbers of anniversaries, milestones, and record lows of this week's worldbuilding miscellany. We've got 2 more Rumor Mills to go, and 3 days left in the year to finish them. I think I've got this, but we'll see for sure in a few days.

The Rumor Mill - Week 49

Let's take another look at gods and their followers for week 49 of The Rumor Mill. And I just realized that I previously looked at gods in Week 4 and Week 9, so numerology fans will feel a thrill that it's currently Week 49. Totally unplanned, so let's hear it for the invisible influence of the gods, yeah?

As for topics, we question both the need for ubiquitous gods of death and the strength of disease gods in the face of clerical healing. We name-drop gods from several pantheons, looking at oddities and similarities as we go.

So let's get into this week's rumors about the gods and their followers.

The Rumor Mill - Week 48

Since the College takes up a sizable portion of the city, we look at theories of magic for week 48 of The Rumor Mill. Where does magic come from? How do spells lock a specific physical effect into a repeatable pattern of sound, motion, and materials, and why does it seem so primitive? Will magic ever run out, or do its reserves and potential truly stretch infinitely far? Does divine magic have an entirely different source from arcane magic? Nobody has found limits on magical power yet, but will casting powerful spells over and over cause dead spaces or drain everyone's magical potential?

Let's get theoretical in the magical sphere, exploring the edges of what people think they know about how magic works.

The Rumor Mill - Week 47

We haven't looked at obvious adventure hooks for a while, so let's gather a list of them for week 47 of The Rumor Mill. It looks like hordes of undead (and the rats to a lesser extent) gather in force to cause problems in town. Add the anonymous rich person who might attack the Gostra Festival from Pirate's Spire, the rumors about the kindest dwarven merchant spying for Ionia, and the Ionian sailors seeking asylum in Fellport as prisoners of war, and you have a recipe for intrigue and mayhem. Here's hoping heroes step up to sort out the truth from the drunken conspiracy theories.

Let's explore these eight stories in a little more detail, and uncover the weirdness happening under our noses in Fellport, shall we?

The Rumor Mill - Week 46

Dragons have returned to Beneterra, ending Ionian aggression against Fellport in what historians will call the Ten Days' War. For week 46 of The Rumor Mill, we look at all the little things that need to happen to tidy up after the failed invasion. Now that hostilities have ceased, the Fellport Watch is sending out parties to assess what else needs repairs or remediation. Is there poison in the water supply? Did the Ionians leave traps outside the harbor mouth? Did the crops at the Amaryllis Estate suffer any damage, or is Fellport's food supply safe for now?

Let's look into some stories on the streets in the aftermath of the war in this otherwise peaceful trading hub.

The Rumor Mill - Week 45

Sometimes themes happen organically, like the one that emerged from week 45's Rumor Mill stories involving various disappearances. Most of these take the form of evading pursuit, though a few touch on smuggling, kidnapping, assassination, and college pranks. And then there's the story of a fear symbol forcing a robber to flee town a decade ago and never come back. Talk about a disappearing act.

So let's get into these stories of the vanished and vanishing, and we'll see if any of them hold even a kernel of truth.

The Rumor Mill - Week 44

Since last week's list of personal rumors went so well, we take another stab at it for week 44 of The Rumor Mill. This time we look at dealing with devil attacks, fey creatures taking over tabaxi bodies, selling drugs, stealing things, smuggling, scamming, and obsessive rule following. It seems like this group of stories is somewhat less law-abiding than the previous list of rumors.

So let's explore another list of rumors involving specific people in Fellport and their current business.

The Rumor Mill - Week 43

We focus on individual people for week 43 of The Rumor Mill, uncovering stories of deception, history, and reputation. You can find anonymous healing, a first adventuring gig, and honest alchemy in these stories, along with family drama, questionable loyalties, face tattoos, sleazy businessfolk, and paths not taken. All have various relationships with the truth, but all have a core of believability, like every persistent rumor.

So let's get to examining this list of stories about people around Fellport, for good and for ill.