Scratch Made Pies: Rats in the Cellar a.k.a. My players demanded a history that I had to make up on the fly.

Even before I had set about creating the world, I had decided that I was going to run a variation on the old trope adventure of rats in the cellar of the local inn. And with this I introduced a new race and deities into the world.

The twist that I decided to run with was that the rats had been feeding upon the mead that was being brewed in the mead hall in Joonsvyk. Over time the rats gained sentience from the mead and began to worship the brewer and his wife as gods. This brought into existence, Brennig the Mead-Father and Merin the Ale-Mother, and the race of sentient rats, the Ratkith. And the major source of conflict for the adventure, a cult based around a fallen Devil that loved wine, Milner. Along with this I introduced Joona, the namesake for the town as a deity. So with this I had the first four gods of the setting.

The adventure started off fairly well, the party didn’t groan that loudly when the owner of the mead hall asked them to pay for their meals and would give them a discount by helping them with an issue in his cellar. When they found the “rats” were tapping the pipes and not really stealing anything other than mead from the hall, I was presented with an issue that I hadn’t been prepared for.

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Scratch Made Pies: Introduction

“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” – Carl Sagan

Hello, welcome to Scratch Made Pies, a blog that covers my trek through fashioning a fictional universe that I use for a bi-weekly Pathfinder game. I will be using this blog to work through my ideas and thoughts as well as the process that I am using to spin my own little slice of a fictional reality.

But first, a little about me. I have been playing Pen and Paper RPGs since 1990 when I first played the old Marvel Super Heroes published by TSR. After that I played in various games of AD&D when I was able to check the books out of the library (I’m from a small town. Comic book and game shops are nowhere near my home.) I really hit my stride when I moved to a town WITH a game shop and delved deep into the White Wolf and AEG offerings of Vampire, Legend of the Five Rings and 7th Sea. And then 3.0 hit like a lightning bolt and it was EVERYWHERE. This is where I got my first taste of running games and was fortunate enough to have a regular group where all of the other players were seasoned Dungeon Masters. This gave me some very harsh lessons in how to and not to run a session. Fast forward to a good deal of time later and I’ve been a player and DM for The Redacted Files.

But one thing that I had wanted to do for the last few years was to develop a game world for my Pathfinder/D&D games that I really could call my own.

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