Unknown Armies NPC: Bartholomew Gates

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The Great Glass Mountain - Session Three

Valenta the Chain Knight, Tiber the Salt Knight and his squire Reme arrived at the Seat of Power on Sceptremas, the high holiday where the vassals of the realm renewed their loyalty oaths to the ruler. The Glass Mountain was a series of triangular spires, clad in white limestone so they shined in the summer sun. The jagged range of wavering peaks swept down to a white walled bailey overlooking a harbor at the end of a vast inlet, stretching south for leagues and widening until it was too far to see across from east to west. 

The Knights watched as ships from the Pearl Knight's domed cove tied up at the docks. The largest vessel beached itself on the pebbly beach, where teamsters waited with wooden rollers to haul it out of the water.

 

The Great Glass Mountain - Session Two

Valenta the Lost Knight and Tiber the Salt Knight tumbled down the hill, away from the shadows and away from Reme and the horses. Tiber bashed his head on a rock, leaving him addled and vulnerable. He asked Valenta if the Knight he rescued had escaped the shadows. She told him that it was so. He got up and looked around. The Squire would either double back and try to find them after losing any pursuers, or would climb to a high place to get a better view of the area. The Knights decided to do the same. Tiber was headed into the mountains anyway to find the shining thing atop the spire that he saw from the deck of the wrecked ship. The one the Pearl Knight denied was there.

The Lost Knight opened the locket she carried down the mountain with her, alongside her armor and longsword. Inside was a man she didn't recognize. Or couldn't name. The face was familiar. The white and gold clothing.

mellonbread reviews Starwater Strains

I wrapped the Starwater Strains collection a month or two back. I didn't believe the cover art was real until I actually had the book in my hands. I love Endangered Species but the best stories are squirreled away at the end and there are a lot of duds to wade through. Wolfe At The Door has some bangers, but also several stories I only enjoyed reading in conversation with his other work (and some juvenalia that's only worth reading out of historical interest). I think Strains strikes the right balance of rich-but-approachable. Like in At The Door the stronger entries are strategically placed to prop up the weaker ones so there's never a losing streak, and the longer entries are bookended by shorter ones so the reader never leaves exhausted.

As usual, I'll skip the summaries and go straight to my thoughts.

Mythic Bastionland Myth: The Flying Swords

 

The faithful five

The flying swords

High-hearted, fierce-fighting wind-warriors

The closer they get to the sun

The further they have to fall

Against Surprise?

I've been thinking about surprise attacks in RPGs. Rather than making up caricatures and laundering my opinions through imaginary critics, I'll go straight to listing some games and how they handle the subject.

Gencon 2025 Recap: Pickup Games

I ran two pickup games at Gencon 2025 for some friends. One was a familiar game and scenario, one I had never run before.

Gencon 2025 Recap: Scheduled Games

My Disco Elysium outfit. I promised #monumenthobbies I'd post this to my socials in exchange for a bottle of their Gencon jungle juice paint
 

Rapid fire play reports from my Gencon 2025 games. The scheduled games were reruns of old mellonbread adventures, so I'll just post what happened without digging deep into the context. Click through the links to get the full story about the scenarios.

(I'll do a little editorializing after each one).

 

mellonbread reviews Shotguns vs Cthulhu

Shotguns Vs Cthulhu is a 2012 short story collection by Pelgrane Press, full of pulp action stories where humans fight supernatural forces. I won't be providing full plot summaries because I believe reviews like this are only fun for people who have already read the story.

Bonus Cleric Post: The Black Mariahs

Hutter

They looked ridiculous at a dead run. Sexless yet sensual with protective codpieces and pigeon breasted armor and thighs enormous from carrying it up endless flights of stairs and ramps and cornices. The crowd parted before them. Nobody wanted to get within arm's reach. Even brushing against them was enough to sever fingers, break bones, shave skin off muscle. Their falling bevors were peeled down so they could breathe easy as they ran and one of them had no lips and drooled steam through the gap in their perfect teeth. 

The largest one had no weapon and carried a dented shield painted with a woman embracing a barbed devil with the text HELL CAN'T BURN ME MORE THAN THIS encircling the act. The smallest wore a quilted jacket and had a carrion crawler wrapped around their shoulders like a stole. The bug held on tight with its tarsal claws but resisted the instinct to luxuriantly stroke the exposed mouth with its fluttering tentacles. To kiss and then to feed.

The middle one carried a gun. The inside of the barrel glowed, lit blue and purple by the charge rammed down the wide mouthed bore. An explosion already in progress held back only by the thin layer of sealing wax that kept the bullets from falling out.
 
Ahead of them was the terrace. The urban canyon that separated the Company neighborhoods from the wafer-thin alleys of red lit Elftown on the other side. The big one casually bundled the others into their arms without slowing. They both reached behind the giant's neck and held on to the dragstrap protruding between the gorget and backplate like a tongue of black leather. The brute pushed off with a single foot that left a cracked footprint in the yellow stone.

The moment held suspended in the air was a perk of the job, equivalent or better than the sex and potions and winning fights and the embrace of the Flesh God who drank the pain like water. To feel protected by armor and the thick body of the fighter. To fly. Over the Mulch at the bottom of the swale to the narrow balcony on the other side. Stumbling down the chute to another room that smelled like blood. Bathing, drowning in the heat and sweat of love.

Riverboat Gambler: Baradye the Blue

The edge of the old crater formed a ridgeline steep enough on both sides that the night creatures couldn't climb it. Norte sat on the edge and kicked his legs and watched the monsters crawl over each over like waves lapping at a cliff. They crawled and climbed and often managed to get a third or even halfway up the slope before the unliving pyramid collapsed and sent them all tumbling back into the pit.

He liked to imagine what the corpses did when there were no people for them to slaver at. If they rose out of the sand and stood and stared at the moons until the sun came up again. Perhaps they lived in ordered societies and spoke intelligibly to one another when nobody living was around to listen. He was a Man of the Forest by birth but he was first of his family to leave the path of flower and beast and tree. First to sail in a boat and shoot a gun and use coins dug up from the burning sands to purchase goods. It occurred to him that his father may have been correct regarding man and whether he was patient or plague. That here he was the interloper and the carpet of undead, however unnatural they might seem, were the rightful stewards of the place. 

Two shooting stars flashed before Norte's gaze. The air above the Plain was thick with them. Comets or ships in the void or celestial conflicts between elementals and the things that lurked outside the envelope of air that cushioned the world. The sparks flashed again, closer this time, a blue that hurt his eyes in the dark. Without taking his eyes off the spot he swept his hand across the snaplock of the long gun cradled across his knees. The sound, he hoped, would wake the others without the need to individually clout them to attention or hiss directions. 

Then she spoke to him.

Riverboat Gambler: Settlement Gazetteer

I wrote a bunch of desert tombs full of monsters who prey on the colonists swarming across the narrow habitable band of Hogman's Plain. Here's a basic taxonomy of colonies for them to attack. We can combine them with the river generator from Magical Industrial Gunboats to create the map.

Minidungeon: The Unquiet Tomb

In the distance, shimmering in heat haze so thick they may have been a mere illusion, a lounge of bright white lizards skated across the Plain. Their skin regulated the diffusion of heat and moisture, allowing the particles only to move one way and thereby letting them control their internal temperature in the lethal heat. By day they jogged across the dunes, legs thrashing like pistons driven by the strange energy of glowing crystals. By moonlight they climbed rock formations to sleep out of reach of the night creatures, and it was not uncommon for travelers on the plain seeking similar shelter to surprise such lizards and send them leaping out of rock fissures at top speed. Like the corpse leaping from the grave as the necromancer cast his staff in, soul returned to the place it once called home but thinking only of ruin and the necessity of flight.

The green men who called the Plain home showed the first adventurers how the skin of such a creature could be made into a heavy cloak that would protect the wearer from the heat, or a half-shelter or a tent to rest inside during the day. The adventurers built vast reeking meatcamps and slaughtered the lizards in the thousands to make garments that would permit their further expansion into the deserts of the frontier. The camps tinted the river red and blue and iridescent shades as the menu of creatures disassembled for parts expanded and the effluent from that biological pillage flowed ankle then knee deep. 

Coxinha stomped toward the jagged cliffs at the edge of the plain, wrapped in such a cloak. Her eyes were shielded by protective goggles made from the eyecaps of a Rhagodessa and smeared with a thin layer of smoke colored oil to dim the sun and stop them fogging. The cloak was wrapped around her face below the goggles to stop the superheated air from scorching her lungs. It cooled the air but the feeling of suffocation went nowhere. Slow death in a jar. A capsule confined to the airless void of space.

She couldn't see the ranger up ahead. His cloak was bright white like hers but never seemed to shimmer. Never gave up his position. Ahead of where she thought he was, the entrance. Low tide in the desert pulled the dunes away from the mouth of the cave. A tunnel without ornament but clearly artificial. Unplundered.