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Wednesday, July 4, 2018

The People of Hommlet PDF

The People of Hommlet PDF is finally complete. It lists the stats and information of 17 NPCs from Hommlet on three pages. When working on this I converted the NPCs over to be used with Swords & Wizardry Continual Light.

Direct link for The People of Hommlet

Now that these two accessories are complete I will start working on the One-Page Adventures for this campaign.

But, I must first discuss something that is pretty important about this project. Mainly, The People of Hommlet. T1 The Village of Hommlet was published in 1979 and then republished in T1-T4 The Temple of Elemental Evil in 1985. While reading through just the T1 section while working on this project I noticed something that was a bit off and upsetting. There is NOT a single named/keyed/statted female character in this book. Not one.
Now, I wrote The People of Hommlet as what was given to me within T1. But I would highly recommend, or even demand really, that you make some of those NPCs female or even trans, non-binary, gender fluid or whatever. Just something that isn't male. None of the allies or foes presented within Hommlet are female. They are all males and they also appear to be all human rather than any of the other races of the realm. I may even go back and change some of these NPCs so they are not all males. But really this is such a simple task any GM can do on the fly. The stats don't change. Just maybe the names.

Well, on to the brainstorming I must go for this Series of One-Page Adventures for The Temple of Elemental Evil.

5 comments:

  1. Couldn't you just make your own town populated with all female, trans, non-binary, gender fluid or whatever? Why mess with someone else's work

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    1. Do you even know what a module is?

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  2. Yeah, I’ve always felt this way about this otherwise great module. I certainly wouldn’t expect much LGBT representation from something written 40 years ago, but the lack of any meaningful women in the town is unfortunate. But aside from being disappointed, my thought is that a module is essentially just a series of narrative prompts for *your* players’ story, so change away.

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  3. This is very helpful and I really want to thank you. Those annotations and desciptions about NPCs are the best. I'm running VoH in OSE system to let the mostly 5e players taste the oldschool atmosphere and I'm loving it. I plan to run most of the original modules but this one is great sandbox setting and potential HQ for PCs, so I'm just adding new sidequest til my players wil be ready to handle old Moathouse.

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  4. Thanks for this! Good reminder to use more non-straight male NPCs. I do disagree on the non-human point. I think that depends on your campaign world. I, for one, prefer the humanocentric world of the old D&D modules to what I perceive as the zany cosmopolitanism of 5e.

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