With the fourth episode of the podcast, we move into the second adventure in our D&D campaign. Please listen now or subscribe via iTunes. This new episode features the following segments:

• The Staging Area: I briefly recap the adventure presented in episodes 1–3 and set up the new adventure, which begins with our heroes drifting aimlessly on a vast sea previously unknown to them.
• The Weather Report: The first hour, more or less, of “The Wellspring,” recorded on August 30, 2008.
• The Prop Shop: I review various battlemap options for representing a trackless rainforest, eventually preferring one of the maps from Mongoose Publishing’s Starship Troopers Roleplaying Game: Floorplans product over other options from SkeletonKey Games and Paizo. I also play a promo for the Escapistcast.

For more detailed show notes, please follow the “Read more” link below. Thanks for listening to “The Wellspring, Part 1,” and look for “The Wellspring, Part 2″ around September 13–15!

The Staging Area

This episode’s Staging Area recaps the adventure thus far and briefly sets up the final portion of the adventure.

The Weather Report

In this segment, the PCs chiefly organize themselves aboard the Broken Promise and decide on their next course of action. Lacking water, they search for land, finally coming upon a small island. This episode ends with the PCs trekking through a thick jungle (with no apparent water source, strangely), about to engage in their first battle of this adventure.

I really should have rewritten this adventure so that the PCs would trek through the withered remains of what had once been a thick rainforest, but alas, I didn’t give myself enough rewriting time to come around to that change.

The Prop Shop

As mentioned above and as you’ll hear in the actual recorded play, a good bit of this adventure involves the PCs in a journey through trackless jungle or rainforest (though there’s little sign of rain, actually, except for the plant life itself). I considered using one of the following products to represent the jungle:

e-Adventure Tiles: Deciduous Wilderness by SkeletonKey Games

GameMastery Flip-Mat: Tavern by Steel Sqwire and Paizo

GameMastery Flip-Mat: Woodlands by Steel Sqwire and Paizo

However, none of these really gave me the “tropical rainforest” feeling that I wanted to evoke. Also, I don’t (yet) own these particular Steel Sqwire/Paizo Flip-Mats. In the end, I went with a battlemap from a product that I picked upon a whim—and a great discounted price—just in case the maps would be useful:

Starship Troopers Roleplaying Game: Floorplans by Mongoose Publishing

Sample of the jungle map from this product

The sample shown above represents about 1/8 of the entire map. All of the maps in this product are well-done. I briefly describe them in the podcast itself, but I’ll repeat it here: they’re generic enough that they could be used in any RPG that features outdoor settings and uses a one-inch square grid. None of the floorplans feature specifically sci-fi scenery or accoutrements; there are no starships or metallic installations (although Mongoose includes four pages of cardstock enhancements to provide exactly this sort of thing, if you want it). I expect to find many uses for these maps in my D&D games.

Finally, this episode features a promo spot for the Escapistcast, a general RPG advocacy podcast that I recommend.

Thanks for listening to “The Wellspring, Part 1″ and for reading through the show notes. I look forward to your comments on this and any episode, and hope you’re looking forward to “The Wellspring, Part 2″!