A ready-to-use adventure location for any D&D campaign.
Need an exciting adventure location for your heroes to explore? Look no further.
Vor Rukoth presents a fully detailed, ready-to-use fortress ruin, complete with secret locations, maps, adventure hooks, monster and NPC statistics, ready-to-play encounters, and a full-color, double-sided battle map. The book is perfect for Dungeon Masters looking for a mysterious adventure location that fits instantly and easily into their existing D&D campaigns.
Once a stronghold of the tiefling empire of Bael Turath, Vor Rukoth has fallen into ruin and become a haven for monsters. Within its vaults, the treasures and mysteries of Bael Turath wait to be unearthed! In addition to an adventure location, Vor Rukoth holds many hours of excitement and adventure.
Product History
Vor Rukoth (2010), by Greg Bilsland, is the second Adventure Site for D&D 4e. It was released in July 2010.
Continuing the 4e Line. 2010 saw the first major revamp of the D&D 4e (2008-2012) line, as Wizards tried out a new series of 32-page softcover books. This included short player books, short adventures, and short GM books.
The GM books in the line were each an "Adventure Site", which Wizards described as "a ready-to-use location to drop into any campaign". The first was Hammerfast (2010), a "Dwarven Outpost", while Vor Rukoth is an "Ancient Ruin". To be precise, it's a Tiefling ruin, which connected it to the second of the short player books, Player's Handbook Races: Tieflings (2010).
Vor Rukoth isn't exactly an adventure, but instead a locale, full of detailed people, factions, and plot hooks. Bilsland calls it "a different approach to adventure writing". Though the style broadly matches the Hammerfast supplement, there is one notable difference: Vor Rukoth details a much larger location, which means that it includes more overview.
Like its predecessor, Vor Rukoth includes a map of the locale on the inside cover of the book as well as a tactical poster map. Vor Rukoth's map features a ruined city street on one side and an internal throne room on the other.
Unfortunately, July 2010 marked the end of EWizards' short-book experiment, with Vor Rukoth and HS2: "Orcs of Stonefang Pass" being the last two publications in the line. Wizards said that book stores didn't like the saddle-stitched books because of the lack of printed spines — an irony for an industry built on books of that format, from the digest-sized OD&D supplements to the numerous short adventures of the '70s and '80s.
Exploring the Nentir Vale. The Nentir Vale was originally meant to be a setting detailed through adventures not sourcebooks, but Hammerfast and Vor Rukoth marked a major change in that policy. Alongside Underdark (2010), also released in early 2010, they were the first books to provide supplemental details on the geography of the Nentir Vale region.
Vor Rukoth is the more exploratory of the two because it goes "off the map", describing a city distant from the known parts of the Nentir Vale. Besides detailing the geography of the city, Vor Rukoth also introduces several NPC factions. The idea of factions dates back to the d20 Modern line (2002-2006) and was now being well-used in D&D itself. Of course, Vor Rukoth also provides more information on tieflings and their ancient empire of Bael Turath.
Both the emphasis on the Nentir Vale and on factions would continue right into the upcoming Essentials (2010) line, which marked an even larger revamp of Wizards' 4e publication schedule.
About the Creators. Bilsland took Vor Rukoth on as a side project, amidst his work revamping the monster stat block for Monster Manual 3 (2010).
About the Product Historian
The history of this product was researched and written by Shannon Appelcline, the editor-in-chief of RPGnet and the author of Designers & Dragons - a history of the roleplaying industry told one company at a time. Please feel free to mail corrections, comments, and additions to shannon.appelcline@gmail.com.
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