I have gone back and forth with myself on the map I would use for Weaverville. I knew that I didn't want to use the map of Phandalin that comes in the box, as it's more of a village than a town. If I was doing a settlement of 400 people it would be fine, but I wanted something closer to 1000 people; a small town or large village. I originally planned on using the Sanborn map of Weaverville from 1889 which shows a population of 1000 people. I actually did a lot of work based on this map, but have decided against using it. Instead, I'm going to use a map generated by watabou's Village Generator  because it's less work and offers me several advantages regarding the style of the map (b&w, color, night, simplified). I took the map and layered some text over it and badda-boom, badda-bing I have a settlement of 980 people. It's not the historical Weaverville, but I think it will make for a more playable location and do quite nicely for the purposes of our game. Wel

Technically, not #001, as it's pretty apparent that this group has been going on for a while now. But, it's new to me. What am I talking about? Well, I decided to get out of my shell and join the RPG community after a long hibernation from actively participating in the hobby. I looked up Dungeons & Dragons on the Meetup website a while back, sat on the results for weeks, and finally decided to take the plunge. Today, I joined a group at the local game store for an afternoon of adventure. The meetup event is called Random Encounter and purports to be a series of one-shots or short campaigns of various systems.  I joined the event on Meetup  and the DM Mike reached out to me Saturday morning. They're playing DnD 5e right now and asked if I was familiar with the game. I said I was experienced and open to playing just about anything, what did their group need. The answer, they need a magic user (obviously an old school DM here), so I've made a wizard. They're playin