I escape being shamed, and my players encounter Vornheim for the first time...

Had a momentary panic that I accidentally named this blog "DND and Legos," which, of course, would have caused me incredible shame.  Thankfully, I didn't do that.

So, on to our adventures...
Our team stumbled onto a sorcerer opening a way gate to the elven homeland, and while they managed to slay him, they didn't do it before he got the gate open.  They quickly looted his still steaming corpse and ran for it before elven armies poured through into our dimension.  Among his sorcerly possession they found a book, which they lacked the skill to read.  Upon finding someone who could read it, they discovered that they'd need three other books to close the gate (because who puts their closing spells with their opening spells?  That would just be silly.)

So they are looking for the three books they need to close the gate and banish the elves (again.)

Hence they come to Vornheim.  If you aren't familiar with Vornheim, you can read about it, and buy it, here.

Vornheim is a city kit put together by Zak over at DND with Pornstars.  Previously I'd only used my own hand crafted campaign materials, and Paizos, so this is my first foray into 3rd party stuff.  So I want to talk a little bit about Vornheim as a campaign aid, then lego a bit, and I'll mix in the events of our game to illustrate my points.

So, some things about Vornheim.  It's not written for Pathfinder.  If you're playing Pathfinder, or 3.5 or 4E, it's not written with you in mind.  That said, it took me about 10 seconds to get the jist of what Zak was going for and make some modifications so it worked for us.  And keep in mind, I'm fairly new at this whole DND thing, so I'm sure most DM's could make it work between breaths.

In fact, my favorite thing about the module is that it's very very easy.  And the odd thing about that is, it's easy because of the things it leaves out.  A couple of times I found my asking "How is this supposed to work?  Does he event tell me how it's supposed to work?" and then, instead of trying to find page 113 graph B section C which may explain the minutiae of how it's supposed to work, I just made it work.  I can see how some people that would be a game breaker for them, but for me, the freedom of knowing "there may not be a rule for that," felt freeing rather than restricting.

Anyway, so my players walk north and find the strange city of Vornheim.  The mountains it is located in aren't generally known to be particularly cold, but around the city they've been transformed into a dark and ominous tundra.  They decide they need to find an inn, ask some questions, take a nap.

There happens to be a table on Inns (I didn't actually look for it, it just happened to be open when they asked about an inn), so I rolled up an Inn for them to stay at.  They quizzed the locals and drank rancid beer.  Our rogue won 40 gold playing pool, and was gifted a pool ball, wherein they found a mysterious key.

Sleep was had (with only a small inter dimensional interruption), then off they went to the most likely procurer of books, The Library of Zorlac.  Of course, the Library of Zorlac isn't a public library, but that didn't stop them from sneaking around looking for the book they want.  Puzzled were solved and fights were had, and our casters have so far avoided burning the place to the ground...