(Go ahead and use this, just don't post this elsewhere and claim it's your own idea)
The Highmoon Vale Park Rangers
The Highmoon Vale Rangers run a small outpost in the deep woods of a mountain-girt valley on the trade road above Silverymoon. (*or wherever you like it in your setting)
The Vale is a big oval shape full of forest and ringed by mountains, and the trade road loops around one end. Unfortunately, a lot of people try to make a “shortcut” right through the beast infested, magic-riddled Vale, and a tribe of Orcs likes to spend their summers up here. You can imagine the shenanigans. Someone has to mediate all that and maintain the trails, too.
The entire area is within the Rangers’ care, with a little bit of funding spared by the Governing powers of Silverymoon, but like any government funded wildland managment program, the funds are never quite enough. They scrape by with gutsiness, stubborness and a vast knowledge of woodcraft between the forty or so Rangers of varying ages and races, as well as by running the small and tacky gift shop and shrine inside their outpost palisade.
You live in the rambling log buildings of your Outpost, with the rest of the Rangers, who are like your weird family. Only about a dozen of you are “home” at any given time, with others out on patrols or maintenance runs. The Outpost’s main building has the bunkrooms, the guest bunkrooms, an infirmary, a kitchen, and a big mess hall with a giant fireplace for communal meetings or eating meals. There’s also the shrine room, which is a meditation space with various small altars to gods, and the Gift Shop, where travelers can buy whittled souvenirs, keychains and postcards of the Vale. The outbuildings are the hot springs bathhouse (sectioned), privvies, and a small barn and stable, as well as a few sheds for nursing injured animals or rearing orphaned babies, and some storage sheds.The Rangers have many tasks to keep them busy all year round, from trail maintenance to helping Adventurers, to Wildlife Rescue and Rehab. Raising orphaned owlbear cubs which you have to feed via puppets to keep them from imprinting on humans and being unfit for eventual release is even harder than it sounds.
Play Options:
Background: You Join a Party: Without enough funds for essential repairs, your Ranger is selected from the group as the most suitable to join one of these gangs of adventurers that keep passing through here and go make us some money. Come back with a fortune! It’s for the baby owlbears! And we could do with a new kettle, and maybe a dartboard for when we’re off duty.
All Ranger Party: You guys are now these Rangers, tasked with keeping the Vale protected, the animals safe, and the civilians out of trouble. Can you make it through an adventuring season doing this job? Every day a new challenge! When the troubles pile up, will you be able to cope?
General maintenance: fixing broken signs, scrubbing graffiti off historic sites, picking up litter, removing poachers’ deer stands, fixing traveller’s wagons or carts
Trail maintenance: removing downed trees from trails, closing off unauthorized trails, replanting eroded areas
Seasonal maintenance: weatherproofing buildings, picking up deadwood for firewood, shoveling snow, handling the orphan animal influx and the spring traveller/adventurer inundation, watering newly planted trees, shrubs, or flowers
Writing, studying or teaching natural history, local history, or local ecology
Staying out late running a campfire or a campout for young halfings or the local elves’ youth program.
Sleeping on the ground and then waking up at dawn to do a 9 hour shift
Building things like fences, arbors, deer exclosures, signs
Overseeing scouts, or groups working on the trails or projects
General hazards: weather, falling rocks, disgruntled travellers, bandits, ANGRY BEES, dragonlings. Well, ONE dragonling but one’s enough.
“Where is the bathroom?”
Directing lost Adventurers who stop by, asking where they are
Going off in search of lost people who have twisted their ankle
Guiding a group back into the valley after dark for more lost people whose kin sought help from the local Knights, but -they- are scared to go in the woods at night so they called you
Finding children lost in the Valley or who have run away from home
People having sex in the woods or doing drugs in the woods
Injured animals that you might have to put down, or Great Beasts you might have to call out the whole Company to handle
WEIRD TRASH
“No seriously, where is the bathroom?”
Random druids living in the woods (generally very nice people)
Encountering people breaking kingdom or forest laws and asking them Nicely to Please Stop Doing That
Encountering people breaking kingdom or forest laws and asking them Not Very Nicely to Please Stop Doing That
Encountering those people again in court when the Government has you there for the biannual reporting.
Running the gift shop!
And much, much more!
Animals and creatures to deal with:
In the Woods and Meadows
Dire Boars, Boars, Dire Bears, Bears, Owlbears, Dire Wolves, Wolves, Bison, Foxes, Owls, Badgers, Elk, Deer, Wild birds
Peryton: Evil sentient deerheaded winged monsters who rip out living hearts. They have a nearly impervious hide, and their shadow is never their own shape.
Branta: Huge hairy long necked herbivores that move in small herds.
Unicorns: One to two might still be in the vale somewhere.
Up the Slopes
Asperii: sentient-Good white magical horses, they can impart temporary featherfall by touch. Enemies of Hippogriffs and Gryphons
Hippogryphs: very territorial and fierce. Clever but not sentient?
Gryphons: Sentient, may consent to be used as a mount. Nest in high out of the way places.
And One Young White Dragon: Theristominnapree, or ‘Pree, is a young White Dragon who hibernates through hot summers and revels in the cold winters in the Vale. She’s not very bright but she’s also not very nice. She’ll kill and eat whoever she can find and catch if they don’t trick her out of it. Taking cover under thick growth where she can’t fly well is your best bet.
In the Waters
Bunyip: A seal like, carnivorous, slightly telepathic beast that mates once a year in the sea then returns to the lakes to raise young, poached for their leather. (Meat is edible but not much good.)
Nymphs: stunningly beautiful water immortals
Other Neighbors:
Broadshoulder Orc Clan: sometimes okay to deal with, sometimes not. Try not to make them total enemies.. without letting them eat travelers.
Dryads: magical tree people
A Galeb Dhur: They are a type of rock elemental, asexual, solitary and a bit touchy at times.
Treants: Walking Treefolk. They come to Rangers sometimes with news, or for help with rot or pruning.
Hill Giants: There are a few of the voracious beings about.
Satyrs: A handful might still live in the vale.
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(Go ahead and use this, just don't post this elsewhere and claim it's your own idea)
The Highmoon Vale
ParkRangersThe Highmoon Vale Rangers run a small outpost in the deep woods of a mountain-girt valley on the trade road above Silverymoon. (*or wherever you like it in your setting)
The Vale is a big oval shape full of forest and ringed by mountains, and the trade road loops around one end. Unfortunately, a lot of people try to make a “shortcut” right through the beast infested, magic-riddled Vale, and a tribe of Orcs likes to spend their summers up here. You can imagine the shenanigans. Someone has to mediate all that and maintain the trails, too.
The entire area is within the Rangers’ care, with a little bit of funding spared by the Governing powers of Silverymoon, but like any government funded wildland managment program, the funds are never quite enough. They scrape by with gutsiness, stubborness and a vast knowledge of woodcraft between the forty or so Rangers of varying ages and races, as well as by running the small and tacky gift shop and shrine inside their outpost palisade.
You live in the rambling log buildings of your Outpost, with the rest of the Rangers, who are like your weird family. Only about a dozen of you are “home” at any given time, with others out on patrols or maintenance runs. The Outpost’s main building has the bunkrooms, the guest bunkrooms, an infirmary, a kitchen, and a big mess hall with a giant fireplace for communal meetings or eating meals. There’s also the shrine room, which is a meditation space with various small altars to gods, and the Gift Shop, where travelers can buy whittled souvenirs, keychains and postcards of the Vale. The outbuildings are the hot springs bathhouse (sectioned), privvies, and a small barn and stable, as well as a few sheds for nursing injured animals or rearing orphaned babies, and some storage sheds. The Rangers have many tasks to keep them busy all year round, from trail maintenance to helping Adventurers, to Wildlife Rescue and Rehab. Raising orphaned owlbear cubs which you have to feed via puppets to keep them from imprinting on humans and being unfit for eventual release is even harder than it sounds.
Play Options:
Background: You Join a Party: Without enough funds for essential repairs, your Ranger is selected from the group as the most suitable to join one of these gangs of adventurers that keep passing through here and go make us some money. Come back with a fortune! It’s for the baby owlbears! And we could do with a new kettle, and maybe a dartboard for when we’re off duty.
All Ranger Party: You guys are now these Rangers, tasked with keeping the Vale protected, the animals safe, and the civilians out of trouble. Can you make it through an adventuring season doing this job? Every day a new challenge! When the troubles pile up, will you be able to cope?
The Rangers’ Jobs
Based loosely on a list first written by draconym.tumblr.com
about nonfictional Rangers
General maintenance: fixing broken signs, scrubbing graffiti off historic sites, picking up litter, removing poachers’ deer stands, fixing traveller’s wagons or carts
Trail maintenance: removing downed trees from trails, closing off unauthorized trails, replanting eroded areas
Seasonal maintenance: weatherproofing buildings, picking up deadwood for firewood, shoveling snow, handling the orphan animal influx and the spring traveller/adventurer inundation, watering newly planted trees, shrubs, or flowers
Writing, studying or teaching natural history, local history, or local ecology
Staying out late running a campfire or a campout for young halfings or the local elves’ youth program.
Sleeping on the ground and then waking up at dawn to do a 9 hour shift
Building things like fences, arbors, deer exclosures, signs
Overseeing scouts, or groups working on the trails or projects
General hazards: weather, falling rocks, disgruntled travellers, bandits, ANGRY BEES, dragonlings. Well, ONE dragonling but one’s enough.
“Where is the bathroom?”
Directing lost Adventurers who stop by, asking where they are
Going off in search of lost people who have twisted their ankle
Guiding a group back into the valley after dark for more lost people whose kin sought help from the local Knights, but -they- are scared to go in the woods at night so they called you
Finding children lost in the Valley or who have run away from home
People having sex in the woods or doing drugs in the woods
Injured animals that you might have to put down, or Great Beasts you might have to call out the whole Company to handle
WEIRD TRASH
“No seriously, where is the bathroom?”
Random druids living in the woods (generally very nice people)
Encountering people breaking kingdom or forest laws and asking them Nicely to Please Stop Doing That
Encountering people breaking kingdom or forest laws and asking them Not Very Nicely to Please Stop Doing That
Encountering those people again in court when the Government has you there for the biannual reporting.
Running the gift shop!
And much, much more!
Animals and creatures to deal with:
In the Woods and Meadows
Dire Boars, Boars, Dire Bears, Bears, Owlbears, Dire Wolves, Wolves, Bison, Foxes, Owls, Badgers, Elk, Deer, Wild birds
Peryton: Evil sentient deerheaded winged monsters who rip out living hearts. They have a nearly impervious hide, and their shadow is never their own shape.
Branta: Huge hairy long necked herbivores that move in small herds.
Unicorns: One to two might still be in the vale somewhere.
Up the Slopes
Asperii: sentient-Good white magical horses, they can impart temporary featherfall by touch. Enemies of Hippogriffs and Gryphons
Hippogryphs: very territorial and fierce. Clever but not sentient?
Gryphons: Sentient, may consent to be used as a mount. Nest in high out of the way places.
Wolverines, Martens, Mountain Goats, pika, hares, wildcats
And One Young White Dragon: Theristominnapree, or ‘Pree, is a young White Dragon who hibernates through hot summers and revels in the cold winters in the Vale. She’s not very bright but she’s also not very nice. She’ll kill and eat whoever she can find and catch if they don’t trick her out of it. Taking cover under thick growth where she can’t fly well is your best bet.
In the Waters
Bunyip: A seal like, carnivorous, slightly telepathic beast that mates once a year in the sea then returns to the lakes to raise young, poached for their leather. (Meat is edible but not much good.)
Nymphs: stunningly beautiful water immortals
Other Neighbors:
Broadshoulder Orc Clan: sometimes okay to deal with, sometimes not. Try not to make them total enemies.. without letting them eat travelers.
Dryads: magical tree people
A Galeb Dhur: They are a type of rock elemental, asexual, solitary and a bit touchy at times.
Treants: Walking Treefolk. They come to Rangers sometimes with news, or for help with rot or pruning.
Hill Giants: There are a few of the voracious beings about.
Satyrs: A handful might still live in the vale.