Adventure Site Contest 2: Scarborough Shire

​Written by Nick Roman
Systemless (AD&D), levels 5-7
Hobbit thug lair
  Green hills roll to the horizon; nature’s bounty springs forth from the soft, black earth; stamping music and the scent of hearty food fill the air. In the very center of bucolic halfling country, Scarborough
Shire springs up along a little-traveled hill-country road, with hospitality aplenty for travelers.
  Ah, halflings. Happy hobbits or nasty little thieves, with very little between. While they’re a core race from some of the very earliest D&Ds, most parties will have a second dwarf or elf before gaining a spare Bilbo, and there’s a similar lack of halfing adventure sites. Ruined dwarf mines? Hundred of them. Fallen elven shrines? Can’t sneeze without hitting one. But halfling locations for adventure? It’s pretty much Lipply’s Tavern from last year’s Adventure Site Contest and that’s it. Good for Nick Roman trying to rectify this lack.
  The story here makes sense given what tropes exist for halflings. The titular shire in inhabited by a nasty old bandit halfling, with his family all under strict orders to present an outside appearance of bucolic charm to hapless travelers, while stocking their worst ill-gotten gains in a hobbit hole warren beneath. A hobgoblin warband is hiding out underneath as well, in an increasingly tense hideout situation. Salt in the fact that grandpa is dying and he’s got two different lieutenants vying for control of the estate before he kicks the bucket…explosive situation, lots of potential, can’t help but approve.
  The map is a slightly iffy scan of ballpoint-on-graph paper, nothing going to make you ooo and aah but it’s legible enough and the legend is helpful. Given the primary axis of the adventure is assumed to be social, the pretty standard geometry is not just forgivable, but desirable. Investigating players will be looking at sneaking beneath the normal-floorplan “tall hall”, you don’t want a whole other dungeon under there, you want a couple turns leading to big set-pieces, and you want a logical flow when making those skulking decisions. Nice little Easter egg in that a little side tunnel links up to D3 Vault of the Drow for the ambitious DM.
  I did miss a relationship map for the people involved here, by default every named NPC outside of dying grampa is someone you’d expect to talk with, even the hobgoblins have a warlord leader and an ogre lieutenant eager to replace him. The inn has a colorful panoply of interesting characters ignorant of the halflings’ bad behavior, the fields have poorly-buried adventurer bones that the halfling children are daring each other to touch, there’s a neglected assassin in the outhouse who just longs to kill someone on the loo…the whole thing is a mixture of charm and horror, worth the effort to grok, but needs a few read-throughs to be able to run flexibly at the table. The final reveal, that granddad hobbit is taken over by a devil, could use some lampshading.
  I do feel a lack of an official order of battle, because there’s a very real chance the whole site blows up into a massive pitched battle. There aren’t a lot of monsters, per se, but in there are a decent pile of halfling thugs, a big hobgoblin warband, plus plenty of bad guys with class levels, a mixture of fighters, thieves, and assassins, plus a gnome illusionist (mild gnome theme emerging here by this point) and the old grandpa is basically a bone devil thanks to some infernal pacts he’s made. There’s the occasional statue to dink around with and get trapped by, but mostly we’re looking at big swarm battles, should be decently threatening to an APL 6 group but they won’t be too troubled for their payday unless it’s all at once. Or there are civilian hobbit shields. The worst threat, that big hobgoblin warband, really wants the good-aligned level 4 NPC party’s help.
  Loot is okay for the amount of challenge, interestingly listed in cp/sp/ep/gp/pp for the mix of luxuries and trade goods as a quick shorthand for encumbrance. Hope you brought enough wagons, there’s some bulky stuff here. Magic is all book items and pretty standard ones at that, but there’s enough here that parties selling magic will level up pretty consistently. This is all assuming AD&D, which I’ll note is what the writer was aiming for but forgot to specify.
  I don’t foresee any issues whatsoever putting this into most campaign worlds. It’s a fairly remote crossroads location with reasonable hooks, the map calls out some specific places but there’s absolutely nothing forcing any particular world here. The juice is probably worth it to put this in your map, just know that it’s going to be a bit of a squeeze. 

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