You are also really, really, really good at designing awesome cities and their surrounds, including adventures and encounters. I remember such a buzz from your Scorpion Lands game, where the cities were alive with factions, intrigue and personalities.
I could literally see the flickers of firelight from windows and smell the spices from cooking food as we stalked the darkened streets in search of those who planned terrible deeds.
Just for you, Guy. I started writing the following 9 minutes after your post.
Above the Kingdom of Gotlin, known to its neighbors as the birthplace of the Church of Thaera, the radiant ring shines in the sky. The forests and glens of the highlands and the low floodplains of the island nation glimmer green under her glorious light in the benighted sky. Here and there, sleepy villages and hamlets, no longer plagued by the horrors of the Age of Nightmares, are peopled by a sturdy common folk. Backs are broad, knuckles are thick, and callouses are many, for the land is a hard mistress to work in the most pleasant of times. But the Army of Light has passed this way, near two decades past, and the monsters which once claimed so many have been driven down into the darkness of the Earth, lest they be burned by the radiant ring of Thaera, or cut with silver-steel blades that make twisted flesh hiss and bubble.
Truly, in these lands, where whippoorwills call brightly in the trees and from the eaves of simple homes, are the people truly blessed. For no longer do monsters and horrors of the night wander the streets, nor press upon their doors while calling out in the voices of loved ones now lost. The streets are silent as the grave in the dark of night, as children remain fearful of the stories their parents tell, and the scratching of bare twigs upon the window sill can make even a grown man quail 'neath the covers from what horrors once plagued these lands in his youth. But with the dawn comes certainty, promise, of the light of Thaera shining upon all.
And it is here, in the lands so recently ravaged, that our story begins. With the scratchings on the window sill, deep in the night. With the silence of the whippoorwills in the eaves. And with the scream of a child ripped from a bed and pulled through an open window by the same clawed hand that scratched...
