Forum

I'm preparing to run my first session of the Raven's Purge campaign in the next few weeks, so I have been reading through the GM's Guide and the Raven's Purge book to get a good idea of what I'm up against (I've only ran a few D&D 5E one shots before, so a new system and a full prewritten campaign is a big change). My initial impression was that you would place the stickers over an adventure site marker on the map. So The Hollows would be placed on any village adventure site that was also next to a river. Vond is a fortress, and we know it was built to guard Shadowgate Pass, so it makes a lot of sense to place it at E38. However, a passage in Raven's Purge contradicts this. It says "The fortress of Vond should be placed in a hexagon on the map with the terrain type RUINS. the obvious choice for the location of Vond is Alderstone." This means you wouldn't place the Vond sticker on a pre-marked castle adventure site. This raises many questions.

• Is this breaking the rule, or can adventure site stickers always be put on any hex even if there isn't an adventure site already marked there?

• If Vond is supposed to be placed in RUINS terrain like in Alderstone, what is the castle adventure site at E38 supposed to be?

• Was Alderstone built on top of and around Vond after it was taken by Alvagard, or was Alderstone a full city before The Man Flood of 825 AS?

The lore supports Zytera and the Misgrown working out of Alderstone, and the descriptions of Vond in Raven's Purge make sense for it to be at the base of the mountains surrounded by ruins. I'm having a hard time understanding how the adventure site at E38 fits into any of this. Maybe it's Zytera's Mogarium or Merigall's Lair, and it's just a really far walk up a mountain pass from the rest of the Vond adventure site? Maybe that E38 castle is completely unrelated?

I know that no two games are supposed to be the exact same, so I can do whatever I want and it won't be wrong. But I'd love to know if anyone else figured out what was going on with these Vond/Alderstone inconsistencies. Or if these are all really silly questions because there's an obvious answer I happened to miss.

The idea is that you can place the stickers on any of the appropriate adventure site listed. Vond here is special, it is a castle but should be placed on a hex with ruins instead, any of the ruin hexes of Alderstone is recommended, but you can place it any ruins on the map. You can technically also place it on any hex on the map but doing so to much will make the adventure sites a bit pointless and will make map exploring for the players much harder.