Gurdinford is a thorp situated in a scrubland thicket, at one of the few crossing places on the Gurdin River. It consists of two Creel Cottages, a garden and an animal pen, joined together as a single compound Overnight, it is guarded by two watchdogs. The carefully curated ring of trees provides shelter and some concealment for the settlement - it isn’t hidden, but it isn’t obvious that there are people living here. Inside the tickets there are radish, wolfberry and cloudberry patches, all plants that grow wild in the area, and have been slowly transplanted in, to make harvesting easier. They make a few coins selling leather, furs, feathers and reed baskets to travellers.

• Arvon Fisher, Mila and Ramo Tanner, and their son Tigan (14) share one cottage.
  • Arvon is a fisherman! He travels in a coracle – uses a net to take shoals of the small fish known as silver grunters, traps for eels and uses rod and line to fish for trout, pike and other larger fish. The eels are normally smoked to serve as winter rations, while grunters are pickled in their own juices. Old Arvon is a bit of a loner, he loves being on the water and will happily spend all day alone in his boat. Since his wife died, a couple of years ago, his daughter (Mila Tanner) runs the house and holding.
  • Ramo smokes the eels, pickles the grunters and plucks the game, as well as curing hides and skins. Mila cooks meals for the extended family, brews hooch and small beer, preserves the fruit, and patches clothes when needed. She also oversees the gardening and basketwork. Tig looks after the goats and helps with the gardening.
• Besh Hunter, and his daughters, live in the second cottage, which also serves as the main storage area for the community.
• Besh is a Male half-orc trapper who married Arven’s older daughter, who died in child birth many years ago. Besh works the local riverbanks, mainly for eels and small game, but also brings back reeds for basket making and building maintenance. His two daughters, Snaga(14) and Ush(15), tend the fruit and vegetable patches – although they sometimes go out on trips with Besh. The Hunters have two large dogs, one of which stays with each of the girls during the day and guard the compound overnight. Depending on the season, there may be barrels of pickled radishes, baskets of dried cloudberries, urn of wolfberry hooch, garden vegetables and preserved fish ready for winter.

Gurdinford was a small almost wilderness settlement, written to supplement a Kingmaker game. An RP side quest, where the party got to meet a remote community, discover they were happy where they were, and didn’t really want ‘protection’, thank you very much. As it happened, one of the characters took Ush as an apprentice, and trained her up, before she returned to the village.

I think I had Besh as a Barbarian-2, Ramo as an Expert-1 and everyone else as a commoner, the adults had a skill, the children were unskilled.