The stable hand at the roadside inn had passed along a rumor about an old hermit living in the wooded hills outside of town. Finding the hermit had put us square into troll territory, but survive and find him we did. Sure enough, he had been sitting on the map we'd been looking for the past week. The map had led us east to a town where we rented a boat to take us the rest of the way.

The marker was easy enough to find, thanks to the directions given in the invisible runes on the back of the map that the mage found by pure luck. Sure enough, there was the cave, right where it should have been. The false wall was child's play to spot and open. Behind was a sloping passage which led to a room lit by seven torches, and which featured a gold statuette resting on a pillar of ivory. "Jackpot," I thought.

Of course, neither the rumor nor the map had mentioned the falling wall which cut off our exit as soon as the statuette was moved. The crunch of the stone slab falling into place was followed by a shuffling, growling noise that meant we were soon to have company. As I unslung my axe off my back and prepared to deal with whatever was about to land in our laps, I started to rue the day I had ever bumped into that damned stable hand...

------------------------------------------

The Fortune And Glory campaign is officially open. This campaign is a Fantasy Hero campaign that will take place in the Young Kingdoms fantasy PBeM setting.

The Fortune And Glory campaign will hearken back to fantasy gaming's dungeon crawling roots. A party of adventurers with unique and disparate backgrounds, having come together to form a company, ply the back roads, hidden places, and wild unknowns in search of tales, rumors, stories, and legends that might lead to fortune and glory! The campaign will follow the path of a mercenary company that specializes in underground exploration, tunnel clearing and extermination, and the retrieval of rare antiquities.

This group also sells their services to city and town leaders to fulfill a variety of missions, sometimes in a quite legitimate fashion, and keeps their ears to the ground for discovery of new caves or deep forests where old legends may rest, waiting to be reclaimed. The group will be problem solvers for hire, and general self-profiting adventurers when not under contract. If they wish to take a job on principles, well, it's their funeral. For more details, please visit the campaign page at:

http://www.angelfire.com/rpg/taranch...une/index.html

I will be looking for no less than five players and no more than six players. These players will be expected to post twice a week at minimum, more if possible, especially during combat situations. Players who do meet the requirement on a consistent basis will find themselves participating in and directing the course of a vibrant and exciting campaign. Players who fail to consistently meet this minimum posting requirement will not last long. Lurkers are welcome, but cannot post.

All submissions should include a full background and character sheet built using the 5th Edition Hero System rules. An example of a full background can be found at:

http://www.angelfire.com/rpg/taranch...ters/rex1.html

Submission backgrounds should be at least as detailed. Please send all Fortune And Glory campaign character submissions to the game list. This list can be found at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Taranche_FortuneGlory/

If you have a question regarding character construction, then you probably haven't read through the house rules and other information available to you already on the Young Kingdoms web site, located at:

http://www.angelfire.com/rpg/taranche/index.html.

Do that before you ask and you probably won't need to ask. If you're still stumped on something, by all means please send your question over the game list.

Submissions will be scrutinized for quality of writing, originality, and depth of background material. All characters should bring something unique and valuable to the table - submissions which try to be everything at once or which are too broad in concept will not work with this campaign. Ask yourself: what does a company specializing in underground explorations need? Front-line monster fighters? Underground mining or engineering experts? A clever lock opener/trap disarmer/wealth redistributer? An expert in mythology, lore, and things arcane? A diplomatic flair for negotiating those contracts? The possibilities are a wide and teeming sea, so by all means dive in and challenge yourself.

The submission period will remain open until Monday, August 25, 9:00 AM EST.

John Scalera
GM: Fortune And Glory