Moonstone Hill

 

Moonstone Hill

Moonstones in RPG is a trope. Moonstone Hills from northern Allansia in the wonderful Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks. The 90s videogame Moonstone on Amiga. The 2010s tabletop RPG game Moonstone. 

Moonstones are a type of gemstone. 

In my games moonstone is used by werewolves to help the tame their inner beast. Wearing of moonstone pendants as a tribal heirloom within a werewolf pack. 

Moonstone Hill is a rise in a forest mountain region where a huge moonstone attracts werewolves to hang out there. 

One day while walking my dog I discovered a small piece of stone with a fossilised crystalized shell inside of it, the shape of a crescent moon. 

That’s the standing stone to use in the terrain for Moonstone Hill!!! 

Thieves Forest

The name is black humour. Ever since exportation of live prisoners to Prisoner Island stopped due to a successful revolt by the Prisoners, local Governors have resorted to the quick and effective yet ghastly methods of crucifixion, cages and impaling prisoners on spiked poles. The thieves forest is a sunken valley which stinks of rotting flesh and has the largest, noisiest flock of crows to be found anyplace. 

The lower valley is swampy with an old mill-house now occupied by ‘the manager’ of ‘the poles’ also called ‘the spikes’. The track now surrounded by corpses runs in two circles, one third and two thirds of the way up both hills, with several intersections. The road in and out of the valley is to either end of it following the river through. There are some old passages across the swamp but it is said to have claimed more lives than the ones you see stuck on poles and left to rot in rusty cages. 

Other abandoned farming facilities include a derelict barn and a burnt out farmhouse on the far end of the valley and a tiny chapel building up a track on the hillside, which has a beautifully carved wooden door featuring an old man holding a young boy, symbol of the God of Wisdom and Learning. On the interior of the door someone has scratched a crude map of the swamp passages. 

To get the best of games-mastering this location it does well to have NPCs refer to it vaguely for several sessions before the player-characters discover the thieves forest is not a thriving bandit camp in the woods but rather a grim place of death. 

 

Reed Village

Reed Village is situated on marshland with a wide, shallow, pebbled ford across the river quite close to the coast but before the river splits into many branches of a dendera. 

The inhabitants are primitive, living as one large tribe who eat communally from the kitchen which has the only metal cooking vessel in the village, the great Cauldron, situated in a crude open-walled, woven-reed-roofed hut raised up on a hill made of pebbles, the top of which overlooks the marshes to the far distance in all directions. 

The tribe fish in the mud for dozy flat-fish (mud-fish) and in the river for swim-fish of all sizes. They eat the frogs which add their voice immensely to the usually windswept sounds of the area. They catch nesting marsh-birds for meat, eggs and feathers. They bake buns from the reeds which produce a sweet, starchy powder somewhere between flour and sugar. 

The reeds are the core of village life. Visually they look like bullrushes. Clumps of reeds surround hidden lagoons. Paths through the reed filled marshes are on top of pebbles gathered by ancestors for the purpose and surrounded in patches by Reed walls may of which curve around to form sections of tubular tunnels made from woven reeds. 

Also of interest are the mud-covered but otherwise white chalky lumps to be found beneath the reeds in this region. The tribes collect and dry the ‘swamp-ore’ to trade with any travellers who might happen along. Their most frequent visitors are witches and other magic-users who recognise the purple-sparkling chalks mystical qualities. It is a core ingredient of the witches portable teleporting-circle-spell therefore is called by them ‘travellers chalk’. 

Port Rufus

History of Port Rufus

Port Rufus started out as a tiny wood shack fishing village in an atmospheric yet ignored location along the coast between Port Popular and the Navy Shipyard, some days journey by foot from the Lumberyards of the Great Forest. It started out as an incidental way-point location during a much bigger adventure, thus requiring a name which was named after my sons shaggy dog and then it grew in the shaggy dogs telling like shaggy tales do. 

During that story it prospered and attracted many Nerva pirates navy and land-based dwellers of a thriving and expanding town, stonemasons, industries, support industries, land developers looking for cheap plots to build retirement and resale mansions, you know how it goes. 

It became necessary to create a 3D set from cardboard, only the very basics, to game on as a tabletop spread. Which helped to develop it also. 

Wharf 

Warehouses

Stone walled and squalid, the wharf front warehouses are owned by: private trader, mafia, pirates, empty.

 

HarbourMasters Hut

Accessible through an overhead hatch with a ladder and winch, between the stone warehouses forms a through-way to the main market. Windows on front and rear for a view of the sea, docks and the market, town. It’s attic contains confiscated goods going back generations, forgotten about. 

The Sunken Flagon Inn 

Painted black a generation ago, constructed entirely of wood, the Inn is suitably shabby looking haunt of pirates and sailors fresh back to shore after a long voyage and looking for the basic pleasures of rum, a hearty meal, hot hearth, a woman to bed for the night and a bed for the night. 

Mingling with sailors of all types from local fishermen to navy, merchants, smugglers, one quickly learns here there is no real division line between the types inside this place. Stories and music, laughter and brawling, often. 

Most of the action in the Sunken Flagon Inn takes place up the wooden on the first floor, with bedrooms in the attic space ‘in the eaves and in the rafters’ is inn-code for clients who seek a bed simply for sleeping or clients who seek a bed for quick companionship. 

The ground floor is the domain of the private security guard who checks everyone in and out, when he’s not drunkenly sleeping in the job. He is an ex pit-fighter from the desert across the seas who won his freedom and ended up here. 

Food is not prepared on the premises but from the soup-house across the way, Mama Bamba’s.

Mama Bamba’s Hot Soup House 

The oldest eatery in the Port. Legend has it is still serving the very same questionable fish stew as in it’s opening day, never allowed to go cold and topped up with whatever ingredients the tide brought in. 

Mama Bamba herself grew up in the swamplands far to the east, escaped from a slaver ship and hid in Port Rufus back when it was a tiny fishing village with barely a name. She will often remind everyone whenever opportunity arises that some people say she is a mermaid captured into the form of a woman by a love story she will never tell. 

Everybody in Port Rufus loves Mama Bamba and her cauldron-of-plenty. She feeds just around everyone who comes through the Port or lives here, most days. It is said about her she is the most protected person in almost any port. If asked the secret ingredient she obviously must use to get everyone appreciating her broth so much, she says; “Passion. Ya gota love wha ya do an’ ya gotta do wha ya love.” 

 

Watch Tower

Situated behind the warehouses the tall stone building has a roofed wooden observation post high above and the Watch HQ on the ground floor: a guard room With steps dow to damp dungeons below. 

The Shaggy Dog Tavern

A hole-in-the-wall bar which serves anyone. The shaggy dog in question is Rufus the wonder hound whose kennel was on this very spot. His ghost is said to haunt the Port, guarding and guiding the friendly. Most people who live here claim to have seen his spirit at some time. Some of them actually have. 

SHIPS

The Crescent Moon 

Permanently moored here is a drug dealers river-barge, the Crescent Moon, a bandit/mafia hq. Mostly they smoke way-weed in the cabin and do illicit business deals. The ship brings their herbs in every crescent moon and they store it and ship out from here mostly in bulk but also in smaller deals to various pedlars. 

Fisher Boats

Coastal Taxi