Bent Goblin's Companion to Dragonlance's "Scales of War"

Finally, finally, finally, Bent Goblin Press' first publication is available!

If you are planning to run the new Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragonqueen campaign published for D&D, get started with a bang! This publication provides guidance on running the Scales of War prelude that is sketched in the book
and offers the following supporting material for it:

• A map and descriptions of four locations and ten NPCs of a settlement somewhere along either the river Inkwater, the Esker Brook, or one of its tributaries.

• A battle map for the confrontation with the draconians.

• A backstory of how Rhys (the NPC with which the whole prelude is getting started) came to join the soldiers, which also serves as segue into an additional encounter with several villagers.

• A table of facts, rumors, and gossip (meticulously crossreferenced with the Vogler Gazetteer) about Vogler, which the characters can learn from the villagers.

• Five ingenious inventions of two gnomes that can be found at one of the farms.

Also, the layout of this publication is like none of you have ever seen before: it provides the most salinent information required by the dungeon master at a single glance.

Bent Goblin's Companion to Scales of War is available from the DMsGuild

Acknowledgments

This is Bent Goblin Press' very first publication. It would never have happened without Jamey Stegmaier's appeal on his blog to "create something meaningful to you in
2022" and Mike "Sly Flourish" Shea's Musings on "Making it in the RPG industry." Mike named "Write something three other people enjoy" as a (low-level) example of what "Making It" in the RPG industry could mean for somebody. So that was my aim for 2022: I would try to write and publish something that three other people enjoy! (Actually, I am a full magnitude more ambitious, and want to get at least 30 people to like something I wrote!)

Mike's work also was instrumental in the development of the rather unique layout of this (and hopefully future) Bent Goblin Press publications: the starting point for the layout's development was my question of how to best present the secrets and clues -- that are so central to Mike's approach to dungeon mastering -- in a published adventure.

Hugely influential were also Scott "Angry" Rehm's thoughts on adventure presentation and the excellent example of how Scott has laid out his introductory adventure The Fall of Silverpine Watch. Last but not least I want to thank Shawn Merwin and Teos Abadía, whose thoughtful weekly discussion about all things rollplaying on their Mastering Dungeons podcast is gospel. Shawn's repeatedly expressed opinion that adventures should first and foremost serve as a user manual for the DM had quickly become the guiding star in the work that lead to this publication.

From Teos' excellent series Success in RPGs, I know that for me, writing and publishing adventures will never be more than a hobby -- but hopefully one, whose first output I can get at least 30 people to like!

The main map in the publication is based on a map by Dyson (very small modifications were made so as to make the path through the woods more narrow.) Many thanks to Dyson for the incredible generosity of regularly publishing maps under a Creative Commons BY license as part of his Release the Kraken project.

The cover artwork is based on a photo by Vlad Zaytsev (via Unsplash); the Scales of War title font is by Shaashimov, the "DragonLance" font on the cover by Dieter Steffmann, and the "Bent Goblin" font by bosil unique fonts.

The publication has been typeset in LaTeX with a substantially modified version of the wonderful D&D 5e LaTeX-Template.