This won't be a play-by-play journal as much as a guide to how I'm fitting all of this together. Many have asked about where exactly all the adventures fit, or can be made to fit, in the Western Lands; I'm going to give it a try.
To start with, I need a beginner adventure. I like Morgansfort (of course, I wrote it) but one of my new players ran a kid's campaign using the fort as a base of operations. So I think I'll start my players out in the village from Chaotic Caves instead.
Regarding a starting scenario... I'm leaning toward Beneath Brymassen. The town in Chaotic Caves isn't named, but it could surely be Brymassen, now couldn't it?
A small rural town pretty much describes the town in Chaotic Caves.You found your way to the only tavern in the little rural town of Brymassen, and settled in for an evening of washing away the dust of the road with cheap beer. As you all sat at a table drinking your first mug of beer, a man came rushing in; he stood
in the doorway for a moment, peering into the gloomy tavern, before he caught sight of you.
He came straight to your table, almost running. “You are the adventurers, recently come to town? Please, sirs, you must help me. My children have been taken, dragged away into a hole in the wall of my cellar by hideous monsters, goblins perhaps. Please, please, come and see!”
As to placing the town of Brymassen, I'm thinking twelve or so miles NNW from Morgansfort, putting it more inland and making J.D.'s map work more or less as is. I'm going to be using the excellent hex map by Nekron99 found here:
viewtopic.php?f=19&t=2228
The map is scaled in 24 mile hexes. So Brymassen will be in the same hex as Morgansfort, just more inland. J.D.'s wilderness map of the area surrounding the town is forest and hills, which seems to fit both my original plans for the area and Nekron99's very nice map.
As is my usual method, I'm printing out copies of the adventure. I do use those hit point checkboxes, and I don't actually want to mark up my nice Lulu and CreateSpace copies, so I print out what I need. That means all of BF1 and JN1 back to but not including the pregens, plus just a couple of the AA1 adventures (Gold in the Hills and Beneath Brymassen). I'll print more out later when I need them.