News

The News Page lists updates made by creator Leord and (perhaps in the future, but not now) contributors.

Below are all news items made for the wiki.

2024

First quarter new campaigns and a guest

Partly because of my energy and partly because "new is fun", I have encouraged the group to alternate other campaigns than CoS 1 for the tuesday slot. Both Jenny and Staffan has shown interest and Jenny has done a session 1 in a campaign where all the players play as Tabaxi, with lots of cat humour. Staffan is preparing a campaign in Faerûn around the very north of the world and possibly including dragons. His first s0/s.5/s1 session will be on the 16th.

On the 23rd my friend Greg, whom I played a lot with in Bridgwater, is going to be a guest at the table and the current plan is for him to play Ezmeralda in the battle for reconsecrating Yester Hill!

Leord (talk) 12:38, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

Happy New 2024!

The rest of the autumn went pretty well and started speeding up the CoS 2 as well. The new players in CoS 1 have acclimatised well by now. Ann has said she needs to focus on another thing for a bit but isn't closing the door for the roleplaying. My energy levels are depleting a bit for reasons but work is going better. May be related. :P This week we're back on (hopefully) regular sessions.

So, cheers and hope for a great year! :)

Leord (talk) 15:07, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

2023

New roster and my energy

So we had our first session with Elly and Jenny this past Tuesday on CoS 1 and they seem like great fits to the table. They play a clueless barbarian and essentially insane scientist who arrived in Barovia from the West.

Lifen has decided he would like to pursue a different table that closer align to his preferred play style, and while he's always welcome back, we're at least for now putting Gocai on NPC duty and we'll see how we solve for it all.

Julle is planning to do a one-off boardgame soon; "RP" dungeoncrawling classic like DnD but less complex and more focus on the board. We're discussing doing it on a weekend so Jaroslav can make it, but I have opffered to replace a RP session, regardless.

I have been unable to get things working with CoS 2 as I have been unusually exhausted but it's very much something I want to do.

Leord (talk) 21:37, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

A couple new players

Following issues organising sessions I decided to not wait for Jaroslav to say proper good-bye and got two new players from the same FB group as before. We welcome Elly and Jenny to try out the next few weeks and then they can decide if this is the campaign for them. :)

Leord (talk) 21:15, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

Getting into a routine

Since last news update, I have started a second CoS campaign (CoS 2) and while I struggled to get that one regular (will try to run Thursdays instead of Mondays), CoS 1 has gone OK. We added Jaroslav and later Ann. In end of June we did the last couple of sessions before the summer break, which is at least until end of July but exact dates have not yet been set. We replaced the very last session with boardgames and social. Ann's friend Fredrik joined us to try but he felt it may be too much of a challenge to come regularly so we may ask online again for a 5th when we lose Jaroslav.

Leord (talk) 16:56, 10 July 2023 (CEST)

OGL calmed down

After much more shitstormyness the OGL thing died as WotC backed down on teh entire thing, but they have lost SO much goodwill in the process. Looking at YouTube videos now there are SO many more things than just DnD 5e or the new "One DnD".

The effect here is though that Jonas resumed his DandDBeyond and we're no longer in a rush to abandon DnD, but I do think the next campaign, whenever that happens, should be something other than 5e just to try other things.

Leord (talk) 18:36, 1 March 2023 (CET)

OGL shitstorm

So through a leak it's discovered WotC has decided they want to try and clamp down on their old amazing invention of the "Open Gaming Licence" which is the foundation of the popularity of DnD and D20-related roleplaying systems. Essentially they want a system where anyone actually earning from it like a company will pay hefty royalties (on income, not on profits), and anyone who earn enough for a single contributor to live on to register all their products and EVERY contributor of any size only gets 30 days guaranteed use of their own content after which WotC can ban yours, forcing you to destroy any material, then re-use the same material under their own brand. I reccomend the Rules Lawyer's video on this but more info is coming soon when WotC release their actual document.

I obviously make NO money at all on things I write and the overwhelming majority of stuff I do is unrelated to OGL, but I will need to review all material just like every single GM out there to ensure the language is neutral in regards to WotC copyrights. A proper scrubbing is needed. Risk for me is essentially zero, but not zero.

Very keen to move on to other systems after concurrent campaigns/projects are concluded if WotC choose to go down this path. Leord (talk) 16:13, 6 January 2023 (CET)

CoS1 Player changes

Sadly for us and fortunately for Engh, he has found a great apartment in Stockholm and i moving there, meaning it will be unfeasible to commute just to play with us and so he's leaving the party but may show up from time to time.

After consulting the group I contacted the other players we were in contact with when we got Jaroslav and two of them have shown interest, so we'll see how that turns out.

Leord (talk) 16:13, 6 January 2023 (CET)

2022

CoS2 Feedback

First ever online session for CoS 2 was done yesterday. I didn't manage to get Foundry to be tip-top for the session so I streamed using Photoshop and with no music. Still, it went fairly alright. My three main takeaways

• I'm gonna be at the office in the future to ensure there are no child interruptions in the future
• I'm planning to speak to Darío regarding streaming sound
• I'm going to use either a working Foundry setting or improvise in Roll20 instead (among other advantages is you can move your own tokens, measure distances etc even if there is no DnD Beyond interaction or stats in the TTS)

Leord (talk) 10:56, 6 December 2022 (CET)

Curse of Strahd 2

Believ it or not but I will run a second Curse of Strahd campaign, mostly via Discord. Starting with group Zeta (Masen, Tobias, Staffan and Darío) with room for at least 1 more.

Leord (talk) 20:36, 1 December 2022 (CET)

Curse of Strahd up!

Following the summer break on the Hökaland Escape campaign, momentum was diminished and we all felt that the concept of "escaping" from an unseen assailant and "exploration" was a bad match. Character didn't have a lot of time intermingling and there was no feeling of either fear, excitement or, well, much of anything. PF2 is excellently designed but the reliance on conditions sort of requires fairly frequent play to keep it all active in one's head and we've struggled with this.

We decided I was going to ask in the FB group if anyone wanted to play in Uppsala to increase party size from 3 to 4 or 5 and then have a "minimum 3 players" policy instead to ensure we can almost always have 1 session per week. I did so and though tough to get people to organise, even harder with people we didn't know so in the end only Jaroslav showed dedicated interest and rather than booking in more meetings with potential players, we simply recruited him and used the meeting as a rough session 0.

After some debates on Hökaland or premade campaigns (including rise of the Runelords) we decided on Curse of Strahd. A few days before the first session (2022-09-06), Jonas was also invited and accepted into the campaign. Yesterday the second session was run with some delays and we're looking forward to future vampire-killing adventures! :D

Meanwhile, I am doing what I can to get the IPO campaign running again. It was converted to 5e last year and I'm struggling a little but there are progress made.

Leord (talk) 15:38, 14 September 2022 (CEST)

Hexploration working fine

After a few sessions it seems Hexploration is a fairly fun and engaging system. I have expanded on the Activities a bit further and made degrees of success to them and will try it out this coming Tuesday.

I have yet to organise the next IPO session and it seems more and more likely it will have to wait until after the summer break. Maybe do 1 on 1 on a new player.

Leord (talk) 16:20, 13 May 2022 (CEST)

Picking it up

After losing news a few years back I stopped making updates. Sicne then, I have been off sick from exhaustion, partly a reason for halting Hökaland IPO, and played in Jonas's CoS an sated a trial PF2 campaign with some Uppsala players. I am starting to get better and getting back on IPO, ending PF2 and starting Escape. Check out healing and fatigue for PF2 house rules used! :)

Leord (talk) 00:03, 6 April 2022 (CEST)

2016

Missing News

I know I have written a news item a week or two ago but I can't find it. I will look around further but there has been decent progress since February. Especially of note are non-content news of the first session with Hökaland England campaign, having a test session with Heather and Jonathan that now has grown into them getting their own characters and joining (the very large) party.

I'll get back to the news regarding content updates.

Leord (talk) 20:52, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

Slow First Quarter

In the past couple of months I have primarily suffered from Fallout 4, which has eaten most of my free time. It's great fun but doesn't produce much in terms of Hökaland material. Behind the scenes I have primarily been working on the Sickle, its Spire and Phrontistery, with design and architecture. I have spent a lot of time researching architecture with things such as prevalence of round towers, machiloations and other things. Some pictures of drawings are already added to the Sickle article, but most of it is solely in my notepads.

The main reason for this focus is the New campaign with the English crew where the Sickle will play a major role. A lot of the background and story hooks demand there is a solid foundation.

Other changes include:

• Travel - Added more detailed information that is easily accessible for overland movement, something that came up in the IP-Only Campaign.
• Church of Rahn - Some minor additions, mainly related to campaigns.
• Magic items - Mainlyrelated to the Sickle: Brass Coin & Thundercatcher.
• Rogue - Minor updates to the house rule version of the Unchained Rogue.

I'm almost done with Halflife now, it's just a matter of deciding how much more I want to play. A lot is just about lugging loot around. I'm hoping inspiration will strike and make me more active on the wiki, but I'm not making promises of actually produceing things. Yet. :)

Leord (talk) 07:30, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

2015

Gnah!

The October Curse

During October I was alone on my shift at work, which can be great. Unfortunately it was the Month of Continous Problems, and in knackered me to buggery. So from being ahead of the curve, starting on the new English campaign, making house rules and updating the lore, I basically got nothing done all October (not to mention, no RP sessions) and was totally out of whack.

Now, I am starting to catch up, but I am still lagging with the English campaign (which has not really been touched since beginning of October).

• I did manage to get some stuff done, and one is more information about names in general and Northern tribe names in particular.
• A lot of gathering of information to try to get a feeling for the value of gold.
• Gwennport has been seriously updated, mainly because of new information from the English campaign. This also includes Peacebonding and a start about Crime, events in Hökaland and Attitudes of regular people.
• I've started listing known Mercenary bands.
• Also inspired by the English campaign is a number of updates of the Sickle Phrontistery. More on how it is to study.
• For the Lofty Peaks I found a lovely illustrating pic in a YouTube video (unexpectedly) that I added.
• Capitoleum has seen some updates. Some are from older notes and others include writing the text to be more descriptive rather than notes.
• Church of Rahn has well due updates. In this case it just got a few small.
• Based mainly on the IPO campaign, a number of things have been updated.
  • New Materials have been added:
    • Black Iron
    • Black Steel
    • Bloodlead
    • Blodlead Steel
    • Aqua Vitae
  • City updates including:
    • Wellbarrow - several minor updates as well as the map with legend.
    • Southshore - New destination.
  • Items that I have made illustrations for:
    • Emerald Gemmed Dagger
    • Slotted Black Iron Sceptre
    • Simple Black Iron Sceptre
  • Session log has been moved from the Campaign page to aseparate page and I link in the latest logs using transclusion.
  • Minor updates to Chamber of Shadows.
  • Spell updates based on opinions or experience:
    • Prestidigitation - clarification of uses.
    • Cure Minor Wounds (both) - Slight nerf. It has simply been too good while playing, allowing a significant free healing pool.
  • Food has been added as a stub, with information about how much people have to carry when killing a boar and cooking the meat!
  • Travel has been made useful with shorthand information (and a few homebrew tweaks) to make it easier to include travel while playing.

Leord (talk) 15:19, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Progress with lots of things

In the past few weeks I have tried updating the magic (D20 SRD) stuff a bit with the spell‎s relating to sparks in particular. This is a first step to finally re-include the meta-magic rules I created for the DnD 3.5 house rules. The idea to make magic more visible to those initiated and to enable casters to use magic more stealthily. Most of this will come under Spell Trickery (when I have the time). Magic residue‎ is also part of the start of this work as well as a couple of metamagic feats.

I have done further work on the knowledge skill, including adding cryptography‎ rules. This will probably not be overly used, but the Shadows use it, and some character associated with the Shadows will as well.

The characters for the New campaign are shaping up nicely as well. Getting excited! :)

Some more notable updates:

• Elf - A little bit about social structure with things such as lineage and nobility
• Campaigns - Streamlined how house rules are shown with ALL campaigns.
• House rule - Did the campaigns by updating this article and transcluding a part.
  • IPO - Specifically tidied up and shortened the Timeline.
• Perspective - A new article helping out showing size of the Hökaland continent compared to Europe or area in perspective compared to Stockholm.
• Materials - Two new updates:
  • Paper - Paper production in the world.
  • Gwennport glass - Especially nice glass as well as general information about glass.
• Wyrd - Minor added.
• Dragon - Started an article with some basics.
• Pissing Unicorn - Started and also drawn a floor plan using accurate scale (1:1000). Not uploaded that yet though.

Leord (talk) 18:53, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

Roleplaying & House Rules

In the past few weeks I have added new content, such as the Northern tribe‎s, essentially barbarians, and updated the Coin & Blood‎ campaign page but then having to close down the campaign (because, honestly, it was done in 2013, nobody remembers much from it and never had much of an opportunity to bond with their characters).

On the flip side, I've opened up a New campaign‎ with the English crew, which I am very excited about. A lot of background work has gone in to it that (for obvious reasons) are not on the wiki.

Then for the actual rules, I decided to add Hero Point‎s to the game from lvl 3 upwards as I don't want players to accidentally just die, unless they act stupidly, but at the same time I don't want to fudge the dice either.

As I was looking over changing Julle's character to another class, I realised that some classes do deserve some love even in Pathfinder, and thus I started a homebrew Class‎ page with some modifications. So far only the Rogue.

The biggest change has been an overhaul of house rule articles. All of the decent ones are up to scratch and I have specifically marked those that need to be put to the same level. at the moment I'm not using any rules that are not properly updated. Easiest way to see them all is with the brand spanking new Roleplaying Nav Box. Though the neav box itself will need some rearranging, at least all house rules links are there. There will be a link or two added shortly, but nothing urgent.

Weirdly, as I just updated pages, even removed some, the total article count jumped up to 114! :)

Leord (talk) 21:46, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

100 Articles

I just noticed that the addition of the Ratel race is the 100th article in the wiki! :D

Leord (talk) 21:36, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

Bits and Pieces

The IPO campaign has finished its eight session, finding themselves in Skull Castle across the border in Vasj territory, killing cloaked figures with nasty tricks and receiving some punishment themselves in turn. I have primarily made updates in these five articles:

• Harbour Master's Office‎ - Another important faction
• Scima‎ - Developing the article from old notes
• Attitudes‎ - How people in the world looks at particular issues
• Worldcraft‎ - My own views of making a world
• Language‎ - Slightly part of Worldcraft, but more to do with language history and current languages

Leord (talk) 19:35, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

Holidays

July has been good for adding things. I have started on the Wyrd full map, expanded its data, really fleshed out the magic items used by the Sickle and finished Daniel Engh's character as well as Petteri's (almost). What I forgot to write for last news item is the categorisation was changed from "world" to "lore" and I added navigations (finally) for Factions and since then I added a World navigation as well. Since the last news item I also added the navigation to lots of pages I had forgotten to do.

I started a Kingdom creation article to remind myself of how to make all the stats for a kingdom, which helped when I updated the Artipellin stats a little and really got going on Wyrd.

The Coins finally got its own article, and I even made a diagram on how it is built! It has long been a "wanted" page in the wiki but I researched ancient roads, including roman roads, and combined it with my visions of the road system.

The house rules were expanded with new Feats, especially for character coming from nobility and having gone through Sickle training. I will add an additional feat for the Wyny Academy of Warfare at some point as well (at least I started the article). Also environmental effects such as thirst and hunger were added. It makes the rules slightly harsher than the regular Pathfinder rules.

Gentry had some minor edits to it (such as Viscount added) as it turns out I had misunderstood nobility in medieval Europe a little. Viscounts were added to Artipellin and all Baronets were promoted to Barons.

As for the campaigns, we've had another session and introduced Daniel Engh's character to the mix.

Now I will be on holiday in England for a couple of weeks. Unsure if I get to do anything Hokaland-related there. It's not a priority at least.

Leord (talk) 18:08, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

Content Continues

In the past few months a lot of content has been added, which includes copying notes and writing new content (such as the Sickle and expanding Artipellin. I will move the News section to a separate page as well.

We also added Daniel Engh to the IPO campaign. Let's hope he is as good a roleplayer as he is a converser.

Leord (talk) 16:58, 7 July 2015 (UTC)

Loads of content

A slight update in that I have made a load of minor updates. Noting Healing for a combined article on house rules and Generator for worldmaking. Also very large updates on Capitoleum, the Sabenius Order and much else.

Leord (talk) 19:29, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

Factions and religion

So, for the IPO campaign, I have also made numerous minor updates to the wiki to make it more readable from my old notes as well as written new material. Especially on:

• Religion
• Gods
• Faction
• Governors
• Court of Houses

The team is all but done. One character that needs some polish and one that needs most work done. Next Sunday is the first session.

Leord (talk) 17:35, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Content and campaigns

Some friends at work have shown interest in playing, and we have begun building characters and I have begun planning a campaign. Exciting. As such I have also made some more updates to the wiki. :)

Leord (talk) 06:20, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

More Spam; now sorted

I haven't had the energy to work on this wiki since I got my job, just after the last post, and progress will continue to be slow. However, I did find and plugged the last spam issue as I had forgotten to remove anonymous editing. That's no longer possible.

I may make a separate wiki that only I can log in to and have stuff that I don't want to be public be there, but that will also have to wait until I magically have the energy to finish that book...

Anyways. Always a pleasure to log in here. See you!

Leord (talk) 19:07, 10 January 2015 (UTC)

2014

Dwarves!

I have started working on the finer details of the dwarven homelands, which are really unknown to most non-dwarves. The massive Gabilgathol "gem" populated by dwarves. To do so I also needed to specify pitch quartz, the material of which it is made.

Leord (talk) 11:04, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Spam prevention and Flora

The wiki had its first spammers a few days ago so yesterday I changed the wiki so you can't add pages as anonymous and you can't create accounts. However, if you (who are reading this) would like to help out for whatever reason, contact me and I'll just make an account for you.

Also made a massive update on flora.

Leord (talk) 22:18, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

Domain/hosting move

Not noticeable in the wiki (fortunately), but took a great deal of time was to move hokaland.com from being my main domain for me (I'm using GunnarPetzall.com as the main domain now) which meant making a new wiki installation and fiddle with the database backup. After much ado, it's at least working fine again in the same location on the web (and a different location on the server) and any links work fine as far as I know...
Leord (talk) 11:34, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Content rush

Added a lot of content and editing/moving existing stuff into useful shape.
Leord (talk) 16:52, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

A start

Added last links from the Obsidian Portal page for Hokaland. Starting on adding content.
Leord (talk) 13:02, 6 September 2014 (UTC)