The Red King.pdf

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OSPREY GAMES
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
PO Box 883, Oxford, OX1 9PL, UK
1385 Broadway, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10018, USA
E-mail:
info@ospreygames.co.uk
www.ospreygames.co.uk
OSPREY GAMES is a trademark of Osprey Publishing Ltd
First published in Great Britain in 2020
This electronic edition published in 2020 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
© Joseph A. McCullough, 2020
Joseph A, McCullough has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be
identified as Author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or
retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: PB 9781472838858; eBook 9781472838933; ePDF 9781472838926; XML 9781472838940
Osprey Games supports the Woodland Trust, the UK’s leading woodland conservation charity. Between
2014 and 2018 our donations are being spent on their Centenary Woods project in the UK.
To find out more about our authors and books visit
www.ospreypublishing.com.
Here you will find
extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletter.
AUTHOR
Joseph A. McCullough
is the author of several non-fiction books including
A Pocket History of Ireland, Zombies:
A Hunter’s Guide,
and
Dragonslayers: From Beowulf to St. George.
In addition, his fantasy short stories have
appeared in various books and magazines such as Black Gate, Lords of Swords, and Adventure Mystery Tales. He
is also the creator of
Frostgrave
and
Frostgrave: Ghost Archipelago,
and co-wrote
The Grey Mountains,
a
supplement for the
Middle-Earth Role-Playing Game.
His continued ramblings can be read at: therenaissancetroll.
blogspot.co.uk
ILLUSTRATOR
aRU-MOR
was born in Tarragona, Spain, and studied
Fine Arts at the University of Seville, specializing and
working on artwork restoration. She began her
professional career in 2000, sculpting historical, fantasy,
and science-fiction miniatures. These days she combines
her work as a sculptor with her work as a freelance
illustrator, and has provided illustrations for various
Spanish RPGs, books, and card games.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Artwork:
aRU-MOR
Official Frostgrave figure design:
Giorgio Bassani, Mark
Copplestone, Mike Owen, Mark Sims, Bob Naismith
Figure painting:
Kevin Dallimore
Photography:
Kevin Dallimore
C
ontents
Introduction
C
hapter
o
ne
:
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C
hapter
F
our
:
The Red King: Act Three
Scenario Seven: Herded Like Cattle!
Scenario Eight: Planar Sinkhole
Scenario Nine: King of the Hill
Scenario Ten: Ethereal Tethers
Scenario Eleven: The Bridge
Scenario Twelve: Ringworld of the Red King
C
hapter
F
ive
:
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The Invasion
The Herald
The Blood-marked and the Hrut
Existential Collision
Warping Reality
Reality Cracks
Reality Cracks List
Ragged Warbands
Injury and Death
Experience and Level
Counting Treasure
Spending Treasure
Random Recruits
The Campaign
C
hapter
t
wo
:
The Red King: Epilogue
C
hapter
s
ix
:
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Treasure
Artefacts
C
hapter
s
even
:
Bestiary
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The Red King: Act One
Scenario One: The Squatter
Scenario Two: Investigations
Scenario Three: The Veil of Unreality
C
hapter
t
hree
:
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Blood-Marked Berserkers
Burning Man
Foulhorn
Herald of the Red King
Hrut
Key-Master of the Red King
Mindshrike
Nullman
Creature Traits
The Red King: Act Two
Scenario Four: Back Into the Fire
Scenario Five:
The Demons and the Mad Man
Scenario Six:
In the Mind of Kalamon Ryce
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i
ntroduCtion
Welcome back to the Frozen City!
The Red King
is the first supplement for the
second edition of
Frostgrave,
and as such, I wanted to write a book that both
harkened back to the game’s past, but also moved it forward both narratively and
mechanically. In terms of looking back, I wanted to write another grand campaign
in the style of the very first supplement,
Thaw of the Lich Lord,
where every
scenario pushes the narrative ahead to an epic, final confrontation. I also drew
inspiration from another of the first edition supplements:
Forgotten Pacts.
In that
book, numerous barbarian tribes occupy the northern part of the Frozen City,
forge pacts with demonic entities, and generally cause a lot of mischief. Although
there are some fun showdowns in that book, none of them have quite the same
sense of epic finale as fighting the Lich Lord. What if, I wondered, the barbarians
made a pact with an entity that truly had the power to occupy the whole of
Frostgrave in a very literal sense…
Both
Thaw of the Lich Lord
and
Forgotten Pacts
are still available and still
useable with the new edition of the game; however, neither are necessary to use,
or get full enjoyment out of
The Red King.
While some of the narrative elements
tie back to those earlier books, and a few favourite monsters return, this book is
a stand-alone story, with all the rules, stats, and scenarios needed. Over the course
of the twelve scenarios presented in this book, the wizards and their warbands
will investigate a strange new power that is arising in the Frozen City; something
that is causing the plane of existence to fold and crack. As always, the wizards are
in it for themselves, and there is plenty of treasure up for grabs, but there are
times when the situation can get so desperate, or the stakes so high, that they
might – just for a moment or two – decide that working together is the better
option…or not.
As always, when I sit down to write one of these books, I ask myself: ‘how am
I going to make this one different from those that have gone before?’ While I
might want to capture some of the flavour of the previous books, I don’t want to
just re-write them with different monsters. I want to continually push my abilities
as a game designer and push the bounds of what is possible in tabletop wargaming.
I want to make sure that this supplement has a distinct flavour, and gives a
different play-experience to anything that has gone before. In this case, I wanted
to experiment with the nature of reality on the tabletop. Essentially, the over-
arching narrative of this campaign is the collision of two realities: the one that
contains Frostgrave, and the pocket universe that imprisons the Red King. Such
an existential collision is bound to fracture reality in ways that toss the laws of
physics as we know them out of the window.
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