Campaign Chronicles

  "Jack and Jill went up the hill To fetch a pail of water; Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Jill came tumbling after. Up Jack got, and home did trot, As fast as he could caper, To old Dame Dob, who patched his nob With vinegar and brown paper." While the party was in the Grimmlands , they discovered that Jack, Ruler of the Checkerboard Kingdoms, had vanished. His queen, Jill, had been searching for him and enlisted the party's aid. My original plan was to have the party find Jack and then take him to Dame Dob to heal his injury and have his memory restored. The group came up with the idea to restore his memory with a True Love's Kiss. I hadn't even thought of that being an option but it was so much better and fit the setting better thematically so I ran with it. In the final battle with Humpty Dumpty the Rotten King, Cinderella, Maleficent, the Fallen Muse, and Grotto's brother, Delve , the group managed to reunite Jack and Jill in time for he...

The Neverland Ferry was owned and operated by Winken, Blinken, and Nod, respectively, the Butcher, Baker, and Candlestick-maker of their small town.   Fashioned from the discarded wooden shoe of a passing giant and roughly outfitted with a sail and small rudder, the “Tub” as it came to be known was one of the few methods available for crossing Neverland Bay, linking the city of Hamelin with the Grimmlands' small coastal villages along the bay’s northern shores. Moreover, its three owners had learned the secret of navigating (regardless of the boat’s starting point you need only wait until nightfall, set a course for the second star to the right and sail straight toward it until morning) to the Island of Neverland itself and carefully guarded the knowledge they had acquired. The Tub was destroyed by the whale Monstro while ferrying a group of adventurers from the coast to Neverland where the three owners had planned on waiting until morning before completing the second leg...

The lands of the Grimm RPG remind me of Ravenloft .   Children are ensnared   by this twisted world, entering it through the boiler room beneath their school or via a heretofore hidden passage in their closet or by making a wrong turn on the way home from school in much the same way the Mists would rise and claim adventurers from disparate lands.   I thought that new “domains” should appear as time went on, with each representing a different storybook setting and that these lands would appear at the borders of the core, expanding outward from the center to fill the plane. The Grimmlands, or at the version of them that exist in my campaign , were formed when Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm began collecting stories with the purpose of creating a scholarly treatise.  They decided that the best way to do this is to travel from town to town, listening to local folklore and collecting fairy tales. They were approached by a woman named Melusine who provided them with a tome ...

The Witching Cloak is based on the magical item of the same name featured in DC Comics’ Vertigo Imprint “ Fables ”.   In that comic series, the Cloak was an immensely powerful magical item. While wearing it, the user can make themselves invisible, as well as change their form to almost whatever they desire. The wearer is also able to teleport across distances and dimensions, as long as they know where they want to appear. The cape is nearly indestructible, though other magic, if strong enough, may cause some harm. In my campaign, the adventurers first encountered the Witching Cloak in the Grimmlands .   It was in the possession of Boy Blue but he was not the noble hero he was portrayed as in the comics.   Instead, he was an alcoholic, a wastrel, and a slaver who had passed out in a haystack after drinking too much.   His unattended sheep were then eaten by the Big Bad Wolf.   When he awoke and discovered what had happened, Blue began kidnapping children a...