Gladiatorial Hijinks

"Headless" Hugh de Godfrey is depicted in the page at left. Originally, the drawing contained a head, but I didn't like it. Subsequently it was erased and never replaced.

Hugh de Godfrey is in fact the third Hugh of the early campaign creation. Inventor Hugh Krendle, whose mansion sits at the end of Rare Crafts Row in Bahar Dar, sold Thrym a pair of binoculars. Locksmith Hugh Poomphower is a member of the Council of Stoneborough, chief of the Stoneborough Merchant League and, surprisingly enough, the most enduring Hugh of the campaign.

If you take a look at Hugh de Godfrey's character sheet, you can see that he would have proved an incredibly formidable opponent in the Gladiatorial Arena. De Godfrey was one of those neutral NPCs whose allegiance or enmity with the Wildlanders would have depended more on the players' reaction to him than anything else. I'm trying to remember whether a upgraded de Godfrey ever encountered Thrym in the Arena of Ras Dashen.

The story page for "The Arena of Death" is a really interesting one. It describes the role of the Arena in Bahar Dar society. Included on the page also is a description of a sinister lottery, devised by the clerics, that takes place at the weekly games. A brief enough decription of Hugh de Godfrey is also cntained in the page. At the top of the page is an awesome drawing of the Gnomish capital city of Narbondel. which will be covered in a future post.

The "Arena of Death" module was perhaps the most developed of all the areas of Bahar Dar. Four full pages of the Little Red Book were devoted to its particulars, including a smatteriing of totally awesome names that never got used in the campaign. Another full-page graph-paper drawing shows all of the buildings in that section of the city. Alas, the Wildlanders never saw fit to engage in the fray of the gladiatorial games of Bahar Dar. To their credit, it would have proven an incredibly dangerous time-waster on their path to their more important goals.