John Tynes Ain't Dead Contest Results

Komoda

The John Tynes Isn't Dead Contest just wrapped. Submitters had a couple months to write submissions based on entries to the Unnatural Phenomena page, an Unknown Armies fansite dating back to the early 2000s (and mirroring content from other, now defunct fan pages).

 

The jam was initiated after Atlas Games allowed the Statosphere community content program for Unknown Armies 3e to die by neglect, ignoring DrivethruRPG's communications on the subject and subsequent fan communications asking about the status of the program. UA3 was basically abandoned anyway, but the disappearance of Statosphere through bureaucratic incompetence added insult to injury.

Creature Compendium Test Drive: Palace of the Naga Raja

Robert Talbot Kelly

A fierce beast sinks any vessel which sails past the riverside fort. Monsters devour travelers who approach on land. Even the air is contested by shrieking fiends, who fly to frontier settlements on evil wings and carry off defenseless victims. Pestilence spreads across the Plain, ruining crops and sickening farmers.

C Series Masterpost

Introducing the C Series, a trilogy of linked dungeons. A monster infestation beneath a sanitarium leads adventurers on a quest across the planet, and beyond.

 

C Series Music Post

For C1 I mostly used the Barony soundscape, falling back on Machinarium for the safe areas of the Fazenda. C2 was a grab bag. C3 happened the way it did because I wanted to use the space theme from Metal Slug 3, and the rest fell into place after that.

C Series Session 6: The Clay Moon

Roddy Applecreek the Mad Bomber, Delgal Haberkorn the Hundred Handed Mage and Al Hafiz the Preserver went out into the Fazenda gardens to retrieve the Threshers for an expedition through the second portal, into the heart of the alien base. They found La Mal wrestling with a huge pile of lianas and yellow trumpet flowers, while Condition Killer shouted pointers. He explained that the success of the expedition against the Gnolls on the previous day convinced the Grain Cult to loan the team a Mound. It didn't have a name, but they called it Phosgene because it smelled like hay. Al Hafiz collected his ax wielding henchman Eric the Barbarian, but Grit was dead and Gowonry was nowhere to be found.

 

A team of masons and carpenters came out of the portal in the Gnomish mines, carrying trowels, saws and other tools. One of them handed Al Hafiz a business card, bearing the epigram

 

Stone is not too hard

Nor mud too soft

 

and an address in the Marble Cliffs. Condition Killer explained that he hired these people to do some work in the tomb, to make it easier to get into the portal and stop desert beasts from nesting there.

On the other side of the first portal, the entrances leading out from the tomb to Hogman's Plain were all bricked up. The workers added a ladder going up and down the central shaft, surrounded by a wooden cage to stop the user from falling off. The party mounted the ladder to the third floor, waited for Phosgene the Mound to catch up, and went through the other portal - the one that led to the alien base.

 

King in Yellow Tarot - A Second Reading

 

After some discussion with a friend I decided to do another KiY tarot reading. In my first reading I just used the Wikipedia interpretations of the cards, which it seems are strongly biased toward the symbolism used in the Rider Waite set. While Kurt Komoda based the color scheme and linework on the Rider Waite set, the dev team packed the designs with their own symbolism.

This time, I'll try to interpret what's actually on the cards and how it relates to their assigned role in the story, rather than using someone else's opinion of someone else's deck.

King in Yellow Tarot - A Reading

 

My King in Yellow stuff from the Delta Green Conspiracy Kickstarter arrived today. 

 

I've been looking forward to the tarot cards since the earliest previews dropped around seven years ago. The cards come with a little booklet that explains the lore and mythos behind the KiY Tarot, which is familiar to anyone who read the old Countdown splat for the original Delta Green. There's some additional exposition regarding why John Tynes picked the character "Madame Sosostris" as the creator of the deck, based on her appearance in literary works from the interwar period.

C Series Session 5: Cerebro Cerebro Cerebro

Grenthrum and Roddy took Colette, Condition Killer and La Mal back through the portal to the tomb at Hogman's Plain. Colette wanted to wipe out the Gnolls on the first floor and find the bones of her friends for a Holy Mountain burial. The Threshers wanted severed Gnoll heads as proof of work, to advance their position in the Grain Cult. Grenthrum and Roddy wanted money.

The Threshers cleared the portal. The adventurers followed them through.

Creature Compendium Test Drive: The Flooded Forge

An underground temple of the Hammerer, Dwarven God of divine justice, has fallen to ruin and been infested with monsters.

Riverboat Gambler: Aldrich Deathsbane

By marriage to the Giantess Morwenna, the mercenary Aldrich Brisbane was recently crowned King of the Giants. His bride was immediately killed by a revolutionary from the Hundred Hands, his inlaws and retinue incinerated by an Ancient Red Dragon during the ensuing brawl. Aldrich escaped the wedding massacre, along with subsequent pursuit by the Trade Wardens of Brazenkragg who intended to use him as a political pawn. 

Now he leads a small band of large humanoids on a riverboat cruise, staying one step ahead of his pursuers and stealing everything not nailed down.

C Series Session 4: Cerebro Cerebro Cerebro

 

Doctor Pleroma hired two mercenaries to assist the Mad Bomber Roddy Applecreek and the Hundred Hand Wizard Delgal Haberkorn in their exploration of the tomb on the other side of the portal. They needed warriors, so warriors is what he brought: the Cleric Condition Killer and the Fighter La Mal, Threshers from the Grain Cult. He took care of procurement and payment as thanks for the adventurers heeding his wishes and not hiring any of the patients.

Condition Killer explained that the adventurers were welcome to any treasure they found, but they needed to turn over any monster corpses to him and his colleague for dismemberment. Receipts like ears and heads could be claimed for bounty, while other parts could be sold as magical reagents. Roddy filled them and Delgal in on what waited for them on the other side of the portal: Intellect Devourers, Gnolls, alien super-science and maybe even another portal.

As frontline fighters, the Threshers went through the portal first. After a moment on the other side, Condition Killer came back through to give the all clear. The adventurers followed him through into the tomb.

Begone, FOE - Fun With Conversions

magnificenttophat is currently working on a Monster Manual and Spell List for my fantasy heartbreaker Begone FOE, with everything organized around the four stat points and associated saving throws. For now I've been using OSE stat blocks for monsters and trying to build NPCs like player characters.

I ran a session of Begone FOE last week and made a huge mistake. The players fought an NPC Cleric who I quickly generated stats for using the OSE generators, as I'd been doing for the last couple years. The last time I did this I did it before the session and handled the conversion details there. This time I forgot. HP caps out at 24+BODY in Begone FOE, while it scales basically indefinitely in OSE. The Cleric ended up with 35 HP, more than all the players combined. This made a huge difference in survivability and nearly wiped the group.

Besides HP and saves, Begone FOE also flattens the spell level curve. You get spell slots equal to your MIND stat and can cast spells whose level sums to that number of slots in a day. This means you get access to higher level spells earlier, but fewer daily spells overall. It also means that any caster created with the OSE generator will have way more spells than the players, but not access to the maximum possible ones. The Cleric threw out two Fingers of Death in a row, which is more than a player cleric of equivalent level could have done.

Reaper Miniatures by Sculptor

I just finished my latest pile of Reaper miniatures (ignore the Wizkids Manticore on the right) and thought it would be fun to go through my collection by sculptor.

Reaper is my go-to minis brand because it's the only one you can semi-reliably find in game stores outside the usual spread of Games Workshop/5E/Marvel/Star Wars/maybe Infinity. Stores have to stock what moves, and indie miniatures are a big risk. I've never found anywhere that carried Reaper metals so I've only tried the plastics. 

They've got the typical flaws associated with plastic figures. Bent weapons that won't stay straight even after multiple boiling/ice baths, mold lines that inevitably cut across the most detailed parts of the figure and can't be removed without gouging out facial features, occasional quality control issues that look like someone doodled on the flat surfaces of the mini with a scalpel... Price of doing business. In exchange you get cheap, durable figures (I dropped several to no ill-effect while photographing for this post) and a huge variety of characters and monsters. The bulk of the figures are fantasy but they also offer smaller pulp, modern and sci-fi lines.

This will be a non-representative sample of each sculptor's work, since I just buy and paint whatever looks fun. I've been painting miniatures on and off for about nine months now, so this is how the models look in the hands of a beginner-to-middling painter. If you want to see more examples, check out Reaper's Show Off Painting board.