Julius Threebeard
Hello, and welcome to this week’s issue of LoreMasters - Your regular source of inspirations, ideas, and homebrew for your TTRPG games. In each issue, I'm going to be bringing you a veritable Heroes Feast of items, spells, podcasts, streams, Kickstarters, and STUFF, so if you like this, please subscribe and pass it on to your close friends and distant relatives.
As always, the main chunk of this newsletter is a homebrew for your game and if you have any questions, comments, or thoughts, come find me on the Twitters.
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Julius Threebeard
The yard was heaving with traffic, horses and oxen braying as stablekids loaded all manner of goods onto the wagons.
“Ya what? Ya want work?” the short figure looked up at them, “Here? Good thing too, last lot of guards were useless layout scoundrels. You lot look like a shower of piss in need of a bucket, but maybe you’ll do better eh?
Ketlin spoke up, “Y-yes, is t-there pay?”
“Pay? PAY? You greedy lil oik, is that all you want? Alright, I can throw you lot some coin each day, make sure ya don’t let me down. Get onboard, we leave in the hour. Gods, the rough lot I gotta deal with these days…”
Julius Threebeard is a short and stocky dwarf, hard-bitten and mistrustful. He runs the main wagon train out of Nook, running out to Dunselm and Tresside. His beard is long, infamous so, and all manner of myths and rumours have sprung up about what lies within. Deep behind the whiskers, his eyes twinkle a deep sapphire.
He is always on the hunt for new guards for the wagons, his last lot being almost always ‘useless layout scoundrels’. He is slow to trust, any newcomer to the wagons is kept at arm’s length until proven, usually in battle against the roaming bands of robbers and bandits in the wilds.
Once tested and proven capable of defending the caravans, Julius is known to open up, share a tot of the dwarven rum he keeps under his seat, and even allow someone to lead the train for a while. Prove yourself again, and you’ll have a friend for life.
Cross him once, and it’s likely you’ll not see the next sunrise.
Julius is a lovely NPC for low-level games.
He’s designed to serve a couple of functions within a campaign. Firstly, and most simply, he can offer your players a job, earning some coin whilst getting them out into the world.
Secondly, he provides a very small mini-game for the players, to win him over. He is going to be initially gruff and dismissive, aloof to the players, but they will see him being kind and thoughtful to other members of the wagons, turning him onto their side becomes a social game within the journey.
And thirdly, and for a more long term role, if they can make him a friend, he’s a brilliant ally for the party, he’ll know all manner of folks across the known world from his work, and be best placed to pick up rumours and tidbits of information to push your players along.
That and it’s always fun to play a rude NPC to who the players have to be nice…
Things To Check Out
This is the part of the newsletter where I bring you a few things to check out that inspired me and might inspire you.
LONG HAUL 1983
As a Brit, the allure of the American open road is an allure built on movies and borrowed mythos, and so how could I resist this? A solo game from Sean Patrick Cain, you take on the role of a long-distance trucker, dealing with the wilderness, the loneliness, isolation, and the threats you find along the way.
I just adore the aesthetic here, both hard-bitten and deeply personal, dealing with the physical dangers as much as the psychological ones, a wonderfully different sort of role-playing game.