I was going to wait until we had more facts and knowledge before addressing the big turmoil in the TRPG, but I think this issue is so big and important that I need to address it now. First let me state my support for Open Game Content, and being a person whos main source of income is to create TRPG content and giving it away for free I try my best to live up to the idea of a free and open gaming community.
For information on what is going on and add your name to the open letter to support the Open Gaming framework that have been the foundation for most of the TRPG industry for over two decades, please go to: https://www.opendnd.games
My Greyhawk related content is not released under OGL, it is released under the less known Fan Creation Policy (https://company.wizards.com/en/legal/fancontentpolicy). If the OGL v1.1 takes effect as written I can still continue to do this, as long as I publish it using the Non-Commercial OGL v1.1. The sacrifice would be that I would have give WotC the right to use all my content for any purpose without attributing or compensating me. An OGL v1.1 world would force me to change how I do things and what I focus on. The lore related content will be something I keep away from my patreon and website, and even names and labels might need to go. It depends on the Fan Creation Policy and what additional requirement that might come with it.
Like I wrote in my last post, edition changes are never easy, but this is the worst one (yet). Just the uncertainty around all this is causing a lot of problems with publishers and creators scrambling to work on contingency plans and seeking legal advice. And yes I'm trying to figure out what I want to do in an OGL V1.1 world as well. Thankfully this is all speculative, we don't know if WotC will try to overturn the current order under OGL v1.0a, and if they could succeed if they try to. The date stated in the OGL v1.1 for it to be published was January 13th and it we still haven't got anything from WotC, so whatever comes will probably be different. I expect more leaks and cat and mouse games before we know for sure and even a statement of "we are not going to change anything" will be hard to believe when the trust is no longer there.
I was set to run a series of games for D&D in a Castle in England, but opted out of it. Now that feels like a good decision, being paid to take part in an officially sponsored WotC event is not something I want to be connected with. The last product I bought from WotC are the Ghost of Saltmarsh and that might very well be the last D&D product I will ever buy.
I will continue to work on and publish my maps for the community as Fan Content using the Creative Commons license, as long as WotC doesn't officially change the rules. What happens if they change the policy depends on what those changes are, we don't know yet. Rendering the first set of textures for Altimira for Troll Lord Game's and work on Shield Lands and more is going on right now. My new computer is rendering while I'm writing this!
Change means that there are also opportunity and I'm sure that we are in for a time of huge changes in the TRPG hobby, in many ways. The digital revolution is coming big time which are changing how we purchase out games, learn the rules, prep and play our games.
I played Pathfinder for until two years ago, then had a short stint with 5E before switching to Level Up. Today Kobold Press announced a new Core Fantasy tabletop ruleset - Project Black Flag, definitely something I will look into for running my games. https://koboldpress.com/kobold-press-a
Troll Lord Games are discontinuing all their 5E products and that seem to be the trend in the TRPG industry. Paizo is going to announce something soon so stay tuned, lots of change is coming.
For me all this means business as usual while I'm keeping an close eye on the developments and keep an open mind for the future. Thank you so much for all the help and support for small independent creators and publishers like me, it is you guys who keep our hobby alive and thriving!
My fantasy cartography efforts started 25 years ago when I decided to start mapping the World of Greyhawk. Bryce was a new program back then and I was also just a complete newbie in the world of computer arts, graphics and 3D. Despite my shortcomings there are some features from this embryo of a map that are still on the map in its 2022 Edition.
Corel Draw was the first program I used to to label the terrain renders I made in Bryce, and the beginnings where humble here as well. Here is an early attempt that has some features still on the latest edition of the map. The symbols have had several iterations of development, as has the heraldry, but this is when I started to learn and I have progressed slowly but steadily over the years.
Internet and the digital realm was still in its infancy back in the late 1990's so my goal was to make a map that could be printed, and computers where very limited in power which also limited maps size and complexity. Until 2013 my Greyhawk maps where still published like this.
After having used Illustrator for a some years a stable 64bit version came out and it made it possible for me to merge all the small maps together into a single large one and I was ENNIE nominated, my first. Been involved in several projects that have been both nominated and awarded since, which is a great honor even if the Best Cartography Award still eludes me.
In 2019 my main project was an overhaul of the terrain map that hade been around for 20 years without much changes. Here is what it looked like before the update.
The overly saturated and garish colors of the 1990's desperately needed some tweaks and the terrain lacked tonal range and variety seen in the real world. After several months of very tedious work an overhauled version was ready for the 2019 map Edition, and I'm very happy with the result.
In 2020 Hepmonaland was added in full and the map now covers a significant part of the whole Oerth.
This version of the terrain map will live on for years to come and will be gradually replaced as I create detailed maps of areas using modern tools. First out was parts of southern Shield Lands in 2021 and next year it will be the area around Altimira and more of the Shield Lands as they get done.
Last year for me was shaped by a new ways of doing things, both when it comes to my maps and how I interact with all of you. A slew of new and updated tools entered in my workflow and often replaced tools I've been using for a long time. Streaming have helped me so much and given me an online presence which is both a fantastic opportunity, a lot of fun, but also increases the amount of comments, notifications, messages and email I have to go through on a daily basis. Like so may I'm lacking in this department and need to shape up!
I've started to seriously dip into a wider field of content creation with heraldry, and campaign lore. This have been a success both in positive feedback and Patreon backing, it is also both fun and very inspiring for me to create so expect more of it going forward. For the first time since I started playing in the setting I know feel I'm starting to really understand it. I've read and stied it enough to start to make connections and observations, and draw conclusions for my own games.
To keep "MeyerHawk" a bit separate from the standard version of the map and other content is something I'll try my best to uphold going forward, encouraging you to cherry pick the parts you like and ditch the rest. So far it has been a first look at how gods are created, Iuzian Zombie Goats and a first batch of heraldry of Shield Lands and Iuz. I'm working on a customised version of Level Up Advanced 5E from EN World Publishing. I choose to base my campaign on this rule set mainly for its 5E compatibility and that is it fully available both in Print (which I haven't used), PDF and on their website. This makes it easier to use Obsidian.md as my campaign management tool. It is the tool I have always dreamt of having for my games notes.
D&D is again in flux with a new edition looming in the future, eagerly awaited by some, or viewed with suspicion, hatred or fear by a significant part of the community, or ignored all together others. For us who have been around editions changes before this is nothing new, what I think is new this time is that it will not be the rules that are the most important change, it will be the business model and how it is published. It will be interesting to see this unfold in 2023. In our Greyhawk community editions play a much less of a role, we have been spread out over multiple editions and variants of the game for decades, we can incorporate one more!
2022 was a bit of a year when science fiction became a reality for me. I got a computer powerful enough to create the virtual terrain I dreamt of 25 years ago, and to run flight sims real enough to make me happy flying around the world in my virtual XCub using VR.
With my new computer I can now render many thousands of square miles of terrain in one go instead of a few hundred, at the same resolution. With software updates this can be increased even more, making continental and even planetary terrains within reach.
A discussion of technological advances in 2022 wouldn't be complete without mentioning AI art and text generators. General Artificial Intelligence broke through into general use and have caused, and rightly so, a big debate over its moral, political and legal implications. The technology is amazing, powerful and will change (for good and bad) how a lot of things are done, and it will force a lot of people (including me) to be very ready for change. It took decades for the personal computer or the Internet to change society, AI will probably things faster with more disruption. The invention and quick growth of social media serves as a good example, it has been very useful and entertaining for a lot of us (including me as a creator), but also scary, disruptive and divisive. Hopefully we as a society are a little bit more prepared for the AI onslaught.
This year have taught me a lesson about trying to be everywhere, I'm not that good at it. It been a lot of fun dipping into a lot of different projects and helping out in various places, but it makes me feel torn and inadequate and that is not good in the long run. So my main goal for next year will be to try and concentrate on what I do best, map Greyhawk. This means that I will retire my $50 Custom Map Tier, and making sure I finish the projects for those who have been supporting me on that level instead of branching out even more.
I have hopefully 20-25 years ahead of me that I can work on mapping Greyhawk, my goal is to try and make the most of this time. This means: Map Greyhawk, Get Better at it and Teach Others how to do what I do! The getting better part is really important, I've gotten this far by both embracing new technology and learning proven knowledge from old. This is something I intend to continue to do, I'm currently studying both GIS (Thank you Troy!), The History of Cartography (over 3000 pages in 7 volumes!) and dipping my toes into Unreal. I want to understand how maps have been made and used through history, today and into the future. Then pair this knowledge with my RPG experience, needs as a DM as well as draw from real world use of maps for hiking, aviation and military use.
This will be my biggest project this year, the mammoth task of brining my current maps into the world of Geographical Information System technology. This means georeferencing the content, meaning give all the data, terrain, settlements, roads etc, location data so it can be placed and styles as needed for each future map.
GIS is way to manage data for geographic purposes simplifies a lot of things and opens up a lot of new possibilities that I intend to make good use of. A big one is to keep track of all the things on the map, and to add meta data to it, and import and export it easily. What took me more than a hundred hours to do when I did the index for the Atlas will be a simple data export done in a few minutes using GIS.
Using different symbol sets and terrain versions it will be fairly straight forward to create historic versions of Greyhawk. I'm working on the first one already The Era of the Flan which shows my vision of what the Flanaess looked like around two to three thousand years ago.
There are whole range of new types of maps I want to start working on when the my current stuff is georeferenced, player handout versions, heat maps for all sorts of things and more. An idea that has been on my to do list for a long time are weather maps. They are way too much work to be feasible now, but using GIS I plan to start making them. Like a Greyhawk weather service with regular updates on the weather that you can use in your games. Working out the details will take time, but I want it for my own games and of course I want to share it with you guys.
Maps that are more than a pretty pictures should be a key part of my work that I aspire to, but not really live up to yet. With this I mean that creative DM's should be able to download the content from my website, customize it to suit their games and then share it again if they like. For this to work well, usable and persistent file and data formats, as well as intellectual property rights needs to be thought of from the planning stage to finished content.
I've used Creative Commons as the base all my Greyhawk content publication for the last 10 years, this gives everyone the right to download, alter and share my content for non commercial purposes. In return they need to acknowledge the source and publish using the same CC license. I see this as fair and as a way to make sure that my Greyhawk content stays open and usable by the Greyhawk community in the future.
The technical side if this is to try and publish using open and standardized file formats, and keep the data standardized over time and between projects. This means lower costs and and other barriers to use and customize it, and that the end user can mix and match different content as much as possible. I'm working on a refined base set of symbols and stiles that I will use on my future maps. This will come in at least two scale variants for large and small scale maps.
There will be a need for more symbol sets for handout maps, data maps and more. I would love to make special version of handout maps made by Elves, Dwarfs, various Humanoids and others, that will be a fun creative challenge. When all the base symbols are ready to be used I'll start look into the others.
Real world data behind maps like OpenStreetMap, Google map etc need to be standardized across the globe and also over time for things to work. I'm working on the standards needed to best map the World of Greyhawk, what formats, resolution and data types are best suited for the task. Things of this nature is always a balancing act between what is desirable and what is obtainable. With limited amount of time, computing power and storage the right balance and the focus on what what type of data, and the quality of that data, we need for our games. When it comes to this it is very much up to play style and how we as gamers and DM's get inspired and play. I run very "setting centric" games where detailed geography plays a big part in both inspiration and execution of my games, but I hope that my "overprepping" in this department can be of use to you as well.
For planning and running overland games I have found PortaPotty Scale works really well for me, meaning each pixel is a 5 feet square. It gives both an overview of a town or a large chunk of terrain, and at the same time detailed enough to plan encounters and other obstacles and happening while traveling. Individual buildings and trees are discernible, and it is even relatively easy to use it as a base for encounter and settlement maps.
Using a bit of Photoshop magic and some effort with my Wacom pen my PortaPotty Scaletm map can be turned into a decent looking encounter map with 10 or 20 pixels/feet resolution that can even be used in VTT's. An added benefit is that they are automatically accurate without tricky tracing.
It is amazing to see a large part of a country in Greyhawk come to life like this, explore it and create settlements, roads, fields and even buildings and orchards. I hope you want help out and join me in exploring the wonders of the setting we cherish. Thank you so much for your support and I look forward to a new year of more cool maps and other content for our community!
Thank you all!
Anna
Here are the first in a series of my take on the Heraldry of Greyhawk, and first out are the classics from the 1983 golden boxed set. The inside covers of the guide had the heraldry that I'm sure is one of the main reasons we fell in love with the setting in the first place.
This is my homage to those wonderful illustrations redone using modern day Photoshop trickery to try and make them look even better. This first part comes either as a direct re-creation of those two inside cover pages, or a a vertical panorama of the two.
Thank you again for your support making this possible!
Tomorrow at 8pm EST Jay Scott and Me will have a discussion about Spells with Ed Greenwood on the https://www.twitch.tv/lordgosumba channel.
I'm sure this will be a good discussion, that is a guarantee with Ed Greenwood on the show. I will try and add my bit to the topic well with a few custom spells from my campaign.
First is a low level spell used by Iuzian priests to torment their subjects:
Level: 1
School: Necromancy
Casting Time: 1 Action
Range: Touch
Target: One creature
Components: S
Duration: Concentration (1 minute)
Saving Throw: Charisma halves (special)
Your patron is giving you fell energies that torment the target. You need to succeed on a melee spell attack that deals 1d10 psychic damage per round. And it turns the targets eyes red and bloody.
The target can make a saving throw each round and only suffer half damage when successful. The bloody eyes persists until the spell ends or the target takes a life. On a round the target kills someone (or something) no save needed and the pain goes away.
The spell can be ended using a Remove Curse.
Cast at Higher Levels
Increase the duration by 1 minute per level above 1.
Conduit: Divine Strain: Fiendish Taint: Evil
I converted some of the spells from the AD&D2E Complete Book of Necromancers:
Level: 1
School: Necromancy
Casting Time: 1 Action
Range: 1 mile
Target: Self
Components: V, S, M (sensory organ of a creature)
Duration: Concentration (10 minutes)
The caster can sense deaths within a mile. Creatures or areas that are protected from scrying are also shielded from this spell. The information gained from this spell are whether the dying creature had a soul or spirit and the power of it (CR or level), and only creatures with a CR or level are powerful enough to register
This spell can be used to target a Corpse Link spell, but as that spell is cast the concentration is shifted to the Corpse Link and the Detect Death spell ends.
Conduit: Arcane, Divine Strain: Necrotic Taint: Evil
Level: 1
School: Necromancy
Casting Time: 1 Action
Range: 1 mile
Target: Self
Components: V, S, M (sensory organ of a creature)
Duration: Concentration (10 minutes)
With this versatile spell, a wizard establishes a sensory link between him- or herself and a corpse, or a mindless undead like Skeleton or Zombie within a mile. This link allows the caster to gather sensory information from the vicinity of the cadaver or undead being.
Conduit: Arcane, Divine Strain: Necrotic Taint: Evil
An offensive favorite among the Iuzians are the Wall of Pain. This is an old D&D3.5 spell that I have converted to fit my campaign.
Level: 5
School: Necromancy
Casting Time: 1 Action
Range: Long (120 feet)
Area: 60 feet Sphere
Components: V, S, F, M (drop of blood)
Duration: Concentration (1 minute)
Saving Throw: Charisma and Wisdom (special)
You fill an area with horrid energy that inflicts severe pain upon any who pass through it. The area can be up to 30 feet in any direction from the spells origins, creating a 60 foot sphere. The Wall of Pain can be detected as Evil or by using Truesight, or by a Perception DC 18 check.
Affected creatures takes 9 (1d8+4) points of psychic damage per round to anyone caught in it. Creatures affected makes a Charisma Saving Throw and are Frightened on a failed save, forced to either retreat, or trying to push through.
Creatures who failed their Charisma Save can try pushing through on a successful Wisdom Save, but suffers 12 (2d8+4) psychic damage. Failing the Wisdom Save the creature suffers 20 (4d8+4) psychic damage and are Paralyzed for 1 round.
Cast at Higher Levels
The damage increase 1d8 for each slot level above 5th.
Conduit: Divine Strain: Fiendish Taint: Evil
Next is a very powerful spell in the Iuzian arsenal that only the most powerful of his clerics can cast:
Level: 9
School: Necromancy
Casting Time: 1 minute
Range: self
Area: One square mile
Components: V, S, F, M (an intelligent being killed within an hour of casting the spell)
Duration: Concentration (1 hour)
Saving Throw: Wisdom (special)
You fill a square mile sphere with horrid energy that inflicts gradual pain upon any who are caught in it. The Dome of Despair can be detected as Evil using Truesight, or by a Perception DC 18 check.
Affected creatures takes 1 point of psychic damage per round in the first minute. This damage increase by 1 per two minutes up to 5 points of psychic damage per round after 10 minutes of the duration.
Victims who accept the damage can continue to function as normal. Victims who become obsessed with getting away can make a Wisdom Save of become Frightened and on a fail they are forced to move and take the Dash action in whatever direction they think will get them to safety.
There are a few possible ways to avoid the effects of this spell. An obvious way is to somehow force the caster to loose Concentration. Iuz demands pain and suffering and there is a risk the spell might affect the caster, if there are no other creatures taking damage the caster will suffer the wrath of the Old One with no save.
One is to do Iuz bidding and kill a creature, which will give you immunity for a number of minutes equal to its CR, and Good creatures gives you double length immunity. This spell is also cast by Iuz priests to make sure their own troops are motivated and effective on the battlefield.
Radiant Shield will reduce the damage by half.
Beacon of Hope will provide advantage on Saving Throws and maximize effect of healing.
Holy Aura will give complete protection from the effect of Dome of Despair
Miracle will dispel a Dome of Despair
Conduit: Divine Strain: Fiendish Taint: Evil
Another Iuzian specialty is:
Level: 9
School: Necromancy
Casting Time: 1 Action
Range: 300 feet (special)
Target: Any number of creatures within range
Components: V
Duration: Instantaneous
Saving Throw: Constitution halves (special)
You send out a wave of smoky black necrotic energy in all directions that travel 100 feet per round inflicting 30 points of necrotic damage.
Creatures within 100 feet save at disadvantage, within 100 - 200 feet save normally, and beyond 200 save with advantage.
This spell damages all living creatures not immune to necrotic damage, it heals undead.
Conduit: Arcane, Divine Strain: Necrotic Taint: Evil
I hope these spells will inspire your villains to some more foul deeds in future adventures!
See you on Twitch tomorrow!
I wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
I hope you will find some to game a bit among all the celebrations. After a couple of weeks with a terrible cold, flue or something (not covid) I'm now back feeling well again and will celebrate with wrapping up the last projects of 2022.
I'll be back in a few days with a major update and more.
Thank you so much!!
So sorry for the lack updates, its been two crazy weeks here. First the best part - I have a new computer!
My five years old loyal workhorse is now in semi-retirement as my secondary computer and I have a new intel 13th gen 24-core machine decked out with as much RAM, NVMe and HDD's I could afford, 128GB, 8TB and 40TB respectively. Paired with my "old" RTX 3080ti it is an significant upgrade and after a couple of days tweaking memory settings to make it stable it is now running stable and test renders have come out without a glitch.
My 16K Shield Lands 1 area that took 14 hours and 12 minutes on my old rig was done by my new one in 1 hour and 22 minutes! Love that improvement. Now I can up mu game and have done a couple of tiled renders that have went well and given me good results. Next up is to try and do a 64K test, that is 60 x 60 miles at 5 ft per pixel.
If 64K tiled works it will probably take me about 12 hours or so, which is OK for overnight renders, and it will save me a ton of post work stitching together small parts. Regional scale maps at 50 feet per pixel will be covering 600 x 600 miles, enough to make a dent even on a continental scale.
Tonight its time to have an inaugural Mapping Live Stream for a first proper work session on it!
Linda Buth will join me, and tonight I will work on Altamira fleshing out the terrain making sure it covers enough of an area for a 64K tiled render test.
Handout Maps Uploaded
The Handout Maps I did back in 2018 are now on my webserver so you can get them from the 598CY download page: https://www.annabmeyer.com/598cy-maps/
Thank you so much for making my computer upgrade possible!!!! 🙂
See you guys soon!
Here are a first look at the 598 CY Atlas, all the 98 maps in JPG version.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1yy9qqh5w39h5gw/598CY%20Atlas%202022-%20JPG-Maps.zip?dl=0
I will go over them once again as I move on to the Index, but to have your sharp eyes helping me will be a huge help finding errors like labels cut in half and overlapping for example. This happens easily since I have to adjust both size and placement of a lot of things to make them fit on the page.
This is a major part of the the 598 CY atlas update, the other big thing sis the index which I will start work on on Monday. Now I will enjoy a weekend of more creative work since splicing up the big map into small pieces is very tedious and repetitive.
Tonight's FMS will be a very special one, Forgotten Realms geography, cartography and more with Ed Greenwood!
Join Alyssa Faden, Jay Scott and me for Episode 17 of the Fantasy Mapping Show: Cartography of The Realms, with Ed Greenwood! Ed has been kind enough to share some of his mapping works that go back to the early 70s (one to 1969!); over a decade before Forgotten Realms was even published! These are so awesome and rare, that I am not even teasing them in the post! Frog God Games Sponsor Giveaways for 2 - $25 Gift Certificates! Join us Friday, November 18th, 8:00 PM EST for this truly memorable show and discussion! twitch.tv/lordgosumba
New Computer
I've bought a new computer that will be delivered this weekend. It is a fully decked out Intel 13th Gen I9 with 24 cores, 128GB RAM, 8TB NVMe SSD's, 32TB HDD. I'll install my RTX3080Ti in it for while, until the issues with the latest gen GPU's have been solved.
It was an expensive investment, and only possible thanks to your support. With this hardware I will be much better equipped for big renders and touch GIS tasks ahead. It will take a few days of reorganizing my office, untangle all the wires, rearrange my computers and set it all up again. So no Shield Lands Game this weekend, that is when I will be at Micro Center in Tustin picking up my new rig.
Thank you again for making this possible!! 🙂
Here are links to the source files for this map, so you can make your own version of it!
Updated to version 2, fixed Olenak.
Thank you for the help pointing out the faults.
Finished Map:
https://annabmeyer.com/Downloads/Shield%20Lands%20576CY%20Province%20Map%20-%202.jpg
Terrain file (6.58MB): https://www.dropbox.com/s/ssyhp8dwrpvn1cq/Shield%20Lands%20576CY%20terrain%20-2.jpg?dl=0
Illustrator AI file with labels (114MB):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/8xf29z3znxghwno/Shield%20Lands%20576CY%20Map%20-5.ai?dl=0
Final PSD file with heraldry (1.53GB): https://www.dropbox.com/s/nqj1pl7znufvdy0/Shield%20Lands%20576CY%20Province%20Map%20-%202.psd?dl=0
I hope you like this first in my series of the fauna of my campaign. Animals are often overlooked in fantasy role play, which is understandable when you have so many more interesting options to use. Still I think there are room for using the natural world and its animals (and plants) in your campaigns.
Focus is also often on predators so this article is an attempt to show that a herbivore and "prey animal" can be interesting. A herd of these impressive beasts are enough to make even a party of midlevel adventurers make a detour. Animals that can take a stand against even worgs need to be powerful enough, and a herd of these beasts pack a serious punch!
The aurochs are grand oxen creatures. This large, horned animal has a brown to black thick fur and an aggressive temper. Its horns are wide and sharp and both males and females have them.
Origins
Aurochs ancestors roamed the northern plains and forests of central Oerik west of the Bakluni Basin. They spread west and east, and even north during the ages of warmer climate. It was probably during one of these warm periods when they first arrived in the Flanaess via the Thornward gap and the Dramidj coast. Well adapted to both cold climate and covering long distances to find good grazing these first Aurochs quickly made themselves at home.
Soon the worgs that were one of the few predators powerful enough to successfully hunt them followed and both species are now part of the fauna of the Northern Flanaess.
Description
It is the largest bovine in the Flanaess at around 7 feet tall and often weighs more than a ton, bulls are slightly larger than cows. They live in herds ranging from around 20 - 30 in areas where they are rare and used to being hunted by intelligent hunters (like humans), to many hundreds in the few areas where they are still common.
The fur of bulls range from pure black to medium brown. Cows are only rarely black, usually having a dark brown to light brown or even grey fur. In winter they are covered by a much thicker dense fur giving them the ability to survive in near arctic climates if necessary.
They are highly aggressive and are ready to charge and kill anything that seems threating. Cows are only mildly less aggressive, and all adults cooperate in defending the herd.
Size: Large Type: Animal
AC: 13
Speed: 40 feet
HP: 78 Bloodied: 39
Hit Dice: 12d8+24
STR: 20 (+5), DEX: 10 (+0), CON: 16 (+3), INT: 2 (-4), WIS: 10 (+0), CHA: 6 (-2)
Maneuver DC: 13
Damage Resistance: Cold
Damage Immunities:
Damage Vulnerabilities:
Condition Immunities:
Senses passive Perception 10
Languages: none
CR: 4
Proficiency Bonus: 2
Powerful Build. The aurochs counts as one size larger when determining the aurochs' carrying capacity and the weight it can push drag or lift.
Gore. Melee Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 12 (2d8 + 4) piercing damage.
Charge. If the aurochs moves at least 20 feet straight toward a target and then hits it with a Gore, Melee Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 20 (4d8 + 4) piercing damage, the target must succeed on a DC 15 Strength or fall prone.
Trample (bonus). The Auroch uses its weight and hooves to deal extra damage, a creature takes 6 (2d6) bludgeoning damage and is knocked prone.
After having been hunted extensively for many millennia only a small number are still living in the northern wilderness of the Flanaess. Summer grazing ranging from the Burneal Forest in the west to the Hraak forest in the east, and in winter they move down to range from the Vesve to the Fellreev.
The wars of late was first devastating to the Auroch population being hunted in their southern grounds. As the war intensified meant that a large part of the humanoids in the north was needed to fight in the south which meant that much less hunting of them in their main areas in the north, so the population have slowly started to increase again.
Aurochs have played a major role in the lives of various cultures throughout their presence in the Flanaess. Early on they quickly became a symbol for strength, courage and aggressiveness, and most likely plays a large role in stories of the Horned Ones of old Flan.
The Suel of the Thillonrian also saw them as a symbol for strength, but more so as a main target for their hunting prowess. The Stonefists who are a mix of the Suel and Old Flan settled on the narrow stretch of land between the Griff and White Fanged Bay, to be well placed to cash in on the Auroch migration to and from the Kelten and Amaran Atamanships each spring and fall.
In the west both the Tiger and Wolf Nomads revered the Aurochs as their most prized prey, and many are the horns decorating the helmets of their best warriors. The Wolf Nomads are also currently the most successful in their attempts to domesticate Aurochs. They occasionally manage to capture male calves, castrate them and use them as draft animals. Using males means they impact the numbers of wild Auroch the least, but the main reason for only using male calves are that females seemed determined to retain their aggressiveness no matter what.
The Ur-Flan successfully bred Aurochs with a southern bovine that are now extinct to create the first domesticated cattle breed in the Flanaess. Later Suel and Oeridian immigrants brought with them other domesticated cattle breeds, but there are still a significant amount of Auroch in a lot of the cattle breeds today.
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