Sunday, March 30, 2025

Five Leagues Campaign Turn 9

Turn 9 is the first formal engagement with the Armies of Chaos threat.

See Turn 9: Chaos Orders for the full battle report.

The mystery of Chaos forces organizing into a disciplined army deepens after a raid on their camp on the Planes of Thar.


Here are some highlights:

Armies of Chaos Camp

Chaos Warriors

Sneaking up

Some heavy melee


Wednesday, March 12, 2025

Five Leagues Campaign Turn 8

I decided that the previously posted campaign turns 1-7 have amounted to Act 1 - The Messenger's Satchel.

Act 2 opens with a Quest (a self paced multi-part mission) which was rolled in turn 7.

Turn 8: A Quest Begins

The lore and happenings in this little section of the world is really starting to explode! Some of the supporting documentation still has holes. But the stories in the turn descriptions themselves are complete.


Here are the highlights:

The company was asked to retrieve an "ingredient" from a monster lair.

The lair was a wraith's haunted mausoleum.

Some scattered treasures were searched while the wraith was away hunting the living.

The wraith returned but was no match for the company

Brother Benniard reveals himself as a Ghastalker, an ancient order of undead hunters. He is now Benniard Duskwalker.

The Ghastalker Weapons Master, Leopuild, who travels in one of the order's vardos gave the first part of the quest as a means of introducing himself and permitting Benniard to reveal his identity to the company.

Deep beneath the earth, undead servants of Yaegrax the necromancer have broken the first seal of his prison vault. He can now cast his potent diabolical visions through the rift and into the dreaming mind of any who feared death.

The rest of the multipart quest will involve supporting the Ghastalker Order as they counter the necromancer Yaegrax who is attempting to free himself from his vault prison.

Wednesday, February 26, 2025

Five Leagues Campaign Turns 5, 6, and 7

Three more campaign turns have been posted!

See the full campaign.

Here are some highlights (spoilers): 

In the Elven Gardens the young follower "Shrub" became the hero "Hedge."

Brigands were tracked through the wilderness all the way to Wyvern's Rest.
Several happenings conspired to delay the recovery of the messenger's Satchel.
The trail was permanently lost after an odd encounter with a memory manipulating scholar wearing a lotus signet ring.


That evening in Wyvern's Rest, the company was robbed and followed the thieves back to their camp. The thieves were defeated and a lot of gold was recovered, but the correspondence in the messenger bag was gone.

Thursday, February 20, 2025

Five Leagues Campaign Turns 3 & 4

Two more campaign turns have been posted!

Turn 3 : The Missing Satchel

Turn 4 : Highway Wolves

Or see the full campaign.

Here are some highlights:

An encounter

Brandal summons a genie and Benniard becomes the wolf!

Tuesday, February 18, 2025

Monday, February 17, 2025

Starting Five Leagues from the Borderlands

This effort will describe a miniatures wargame campaign play-through of Five Leagues from the Borderlands (3rd edition).  

Five Leagues from the Borderlands is a solo adventure wargame where you take the role of a warband of heroes and adventurers, and explore a grim world full of monsters, enemies, creeping malice, and exciting quests.

Five Leagues is a small book with limited lore and the game system relies on players to use their imagination to spin a story based on core elements and happenings which are generated randomly. The player may earn and spend "story points" to put their thumb on the scale, however nearly any event can be shown to be related (even intimately so) with just a little creativity. On the other hand, enemies and battles are meant to be adapted to your existing miniatures collection.

My world (and miniatures collection) will be styled primarily after Tolkien's Middle-Earth with influences from Howard's Hyborean Age, Salvator's Ice Wind Dale, Sapkowski's Witcher, as well as classic fantasy games like HeroQuest, and Warhammer Fantasy.

Saturday, April 20, 2024

The Return of HeroTeX

HeroTeX is a LaTeX package which automatically formats the standard one-page Quest notes used in HeroQuest.

All you need to get started is:

The rest of this post will demonstrate how to quickly create your first Quest.



HeroScribe

You are here because you are using HeroScribe for Quest maps and would like to create authentic looking Quest notes to match. I run Linux, and from there "java -jar heroScribe.jar" works right out of the box after downloading the HeroScribe package.


I'm sorry that I cannot help you with this part if you are having issues.

HeroTex Package

Download the HeroTex zip file. You may want to unzip it and have a look, but this is not necessary.

There are many files, but most of them are graphical assets with duplicate entries for Color and Black & White formats as well as support for Chaos/Dread naming conventions.

LaTeX

If you already know how to use PDF LaTeX and have a full fonts package installed, you should be able to compile and view the DemoQuest. And this should be enough to get you using all of the provided tools.

If you are not familiar with LaTeX, then you can get setup quickly by heading over to Overleaf.com and creating a free account with unlimited projects (of limited scope). Thankfully these simple HeroQuest documents are within those limits. I signed up with my Google account and it was very easy.

  1. Create your Overleaf account
  2. Create a New Project, select "Upload  Project" and feed it the HeroTeXv01.zip file you just downloaded.
  3. Switch the "main document" to DemoQuest.tex
    1. Press "menu" button on the Overleaf website
    2. Find the "Main document" entry and change it from the random file it has selected by default to DemoQuest.tex.
  4. Press the Recompile button to generate the PDF
Generating your own quest involves uploading your own map and entering your quest text.

You should be entering your notes in the "code editor" and as text and a few useful commands. I took a quick look at the visual editor and I do not see how it will be helpful for us, but I'd like to be proven  wrong here.

The DemoQuest has some helpful comments, but you can ask me questions in the comments here if you need help.


Enjoy!