Walt's Table — The Borrowed Vale

Pull up a chair. First in a series, this one — I'm working through the thirteen custom races we built for the Borrowed Vale, one table at a time, and we're starting with the folk who'd rather you didn't find them at all.

Who they are

When the loggers came up the valley with axes and torches, they found the hollow empty — or so they told themselves, all the way home, in the dark, with the feeling of being watched sitting right between their shoulder blades the whole way.

The Duskbough Elves are a tall, nocturnal people — six feet and more, spare and long-limbed, built like people who climb. Their skin runs the colors of the hollow: bark-brown, weathered grey, deep moss-green. Their eyes are large, silver-grey, and reflective, catching light the way an owl's do. In daylight a Duskbough squints and shades those eyes with one hand. By dusk, they are the best eyes in the valley.

They are not exiles from a shining empire, and they serve no goddess. They are the grandchildren of elves who lost a small, dirty war over timber six hundred years ago, won the peace by vanishing into a hollow nobody else wanted, and built a whole way of life out of dusk, patience, and very good eyes. They want, more than anything, to be left to keep it.

They keep no written history and no temples. What they keep is the Reckoning: a calendar of moons, recited aloud by a Keeper at each new moon from the Reckoning Stone at the hollow's heart. Every moon has a name — First Frost, Owl, Thaw, Greening, Moth, Long Light, Hay, Ember, Turning, Mists, Hunger, Dark — and every Duskbough knows the moon of their birth the way other folk know a birthday.

And every able Duskbough owes the hollow two years of service in the Boughwardens, the loose war-band that patrols the rim trails, watches the logging roads, and settles the question of trespassers — usually by appearing out of the gloaming close enough to be unmistakable, and waiting. To valley folk, “the Wardens are watching” is not a threat. It is a weather report.

Where they fit in the Vale

The hollow is a steep-sided valley some nine miles long, walled by ridges and filled with old, close forest — oak, hickory, and tulip-poplar giants over a floor of fern and mist. Three villages of root-hollow halls and canopy walkways hold perhaps nine hundred Duskbough between them.

Outsiders who enter uninvited generally meet, in order: silence, a feeling of being watched, a Warden, and the road out.

A Duskbough met outside the hollow is usually one of three things: a Warden on a long errand, a younger child of a big House with no inheritance but a good bow, or somebody who asked one question too many at the Reckoning. All three make excellent adventurers. A Duskbough met outside the hollow who is willing to talk is, by their standards, practically an ambassador.

They fear fire above all things — a dry summer is their season of dread — and they fear the slow arithmetic of a small people in a big wood: every generation, there are slightly fewer of them.

How they play

Standard Basic Fantasy format, no core rules changed. A Duskbough may become a Cleric, Fighter, Magic-User, or Thief, or combine Fighter/Magic-User or Magic-User/Thief. They need Intelligence 9 and Wisdom 9 minimum — the hollow does not suffer fools gladly — and Constitution caps at 17, with hit dice never larger than a d6.

Their gifts, straight from the book:

• Darkvision 60 feet, keen even by elven standards.
• Secret doors found on 1–2 in 6, and 1 in 6 on a cursory look.
• Immune to a ghoul's paralyzing attack, and harder to surprise in combat (surprise chance reduced by 1 in 6).
• Gloaming Camouflage: in dim light — dusk, dawn, deep shade, a forest interior — a Duskbough who stands still is detected only 20% of the time. The gift deserts them in full daylight: bright light dazzles them for a −1 penalty to attack rolls.
• Saving throws at +1 vs. Paralysis or Petrify, +2 vs. Magic Wands and Spells.
• Languages: Elvish and Common. Their dialect is thick with hollow words for weather, trees, and kinds of darkness, and lowland elves find it rustic and a little eerie.

They reckon age in moons, not years, and live four to six centuries. A Duskbough who has seen four thousand moons is considered to be getting on.

A GM note

Play the hollow, not just the elf. The Duskbough's best trick is that the party never quite meets them — first the silence, then the feeling of being watched, then the Warden stepping out of the gloaming. Let a Duskbough player be the one who always knows what the weather will do and is never, ever surprised. Then, when the party finally earns a conversation, make it cost something: a Duskbough who talks freely is sticking their neck out for you.

And if you want a hook that writes itself: a valley miller will pay well for guides through the hollow — and the Wardens have let it be known they will pay better for the party to refuse. Both offers are real. Let the table squirm.

Next in the series: the Valefolk. Same table, same chair. Bring your own dice.

Pull up a chair. First time I ever sat behind the screen, I wasn't running for some seasoned group that'd been rolling together for years. I was running for my coworkers.

And I homebrewed it from day one. No published module, no safety net. Just me, a screen, and a story I already knew by heart — a Dragon Ball storyline, lifted whole and dressed up in different clothes.

They never realized. Not once, not all night.

That's the trick, and it's older than any rulebook on my shelf: steal the plot, change the clothes.

A good story is a good story. Your table doesn't care where the bones came from. They care whether the road in front of them feels real, whether the choices feel like theirs, and whether the villain makes them lean forward instead of check their phones. If you take a tale they already love — the quest, the tournament, the ragtag crew chasing something bigger than themselves — and you file off the names, swap the costumes, and let it breathe in your own world, they'll walk straight through it grinning and never see the seams.

Here's how I think about it, all these years later:

First, keep the shape, lose the labels. The shape is what works: the gathering of the party, the rival who keeps showing up stronger, the MacGuffin everybody wants for a different reason. The labels are what give it away. Change the names, change the places, change what the thing looks like. If the original had seven glowing orbs, yours has seven sealed letters, or seven old coins, or seven debts owed to seven very different people. Same engine, different paint.

Second, let the players break it. That's the part a borrowed plot can't do on its own. In the original story, the heroes go left because the script says so. At your table, they might go right, or burn the bridge, or befriend the rival. Good. Let them. A stolen plot is a starting map, not a leash. The moment they swerve off it, it's your campaign anyway.

Third, don't wink. The fastest way to ruin the trick is to nudge the table and wait for somebody to catch the reference. If you're running it well, there's nothing to catch. Play it straight. The story earns its keep on its own legs.

Now, I'm not telling you to pass somebody else's work off as your own invention out in the world. At the table, though? That's just old-school GM craft. Every veteran GM I know has a drawer full of borrowed bones. We just learned to dress them up proper before company came over.

My first night behind the screen, everybody had fun. That's the whole report. No disaster story, no tale of the wheels coming off — just a room full of coworkers, a story they already loved without knowing it, and a new GM learning the best lesson early: you don't have to invent the wheel. You just have to make it roll in your world.

So go steal a plot. Change the clothes. And when your players have the time of their lives and never once guess the source — well, that's not cheating.

That's the job.

— Walt