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.

mellonbread reviews The Wolfe at the Door

Gene Wolfe's posthumous collection The Wolfe at the Door collects a bunch of Old Man Wolfe's short stories that were never included in previous collections, or in collections nobody read and are long out of print. I'd read one of them before and the rest were all new to me. 

Gene Wolfe has a handful of dedicated scholars who have produced a body of secondary works attempting to solve  the puzzles and mysteries he litters his books with. As much as I deride these talking heads for dressing up their confabulations as authoritative interpretations, they've undeniably put in a lot of work to help people understand what the hell is happening in the stories. Due to being uncollected and unpopular, the stories in Wolfe at the Door do not have a large body of critical work yet. You're on your own and it's up to you to figure out what's going on - or decide there isn't a mystery at all and you should just enjoy the ride.

I'm going to go story-by-story and pick out my favorites. This review will not make sense unless you've read the collection.

C Series Session 3: Cerebro Cerebro Cerebro

 

Grenthrum the Dwarf needed help exploring the dungeon. Roddy was dead, Jack was in physical therapy and nobody else was around to go through the portal with him. He went looking for some Thouls to hire, starting in the chapel of the Leper Heart. The room was deserted, but a trail of ash and slime led from the empty bucket to the Fazenda kitchen.

In the kitchen, a pair of Mutants shouted and threw salt at a dark red blob, which crawled up on the table and devoured a plate of empanadas. The blob gurgled a greeting to Grenthrum in Roddy's voice. The power of Leper Heart had resurrected his ashes. With a slime and three henchmen backing him up, Grenthrum thought he had a chance.

Downstairs in the defunct Gnomish mines, the mage Delgal Haberkorn fussed over the portal while Doctor Pleroma stood guard, ready to dissolve anything that came through. Grenthrum asked if he could hire any of the doctor's patients and was rebuffed. The Thouls were obsessed with maintaining combat readiness in case their creator Rope Trick ever came back for them. They needed to learn how to be something other than living weapons and dungeon exploration would only reverse that process.

Delgal gave the all clear. Roddy, Delgal, Eric, Gowonry and Grit stepped through the portal into the unknown.

 

SWAP MEAT Jam Results

Following up on Zomnocon, the 9/11 Jam and last year's Halloween event, the Unknown Armies SWAP MEAT Jam wrapped a couple weeks ago. Participants had 333 to 1,296.3 words to write about at least one of the following prompts.

• Man vs Technology, Nature vs Civilization, Grief and Loss 
• Genre: Folk Horror (1800s to Modern Day), Urban Horror, Corporate Horror 
• Inspiration: The Witches Sabbath by Francis Goya, The Dust Bowl, Faustian Bargains 
• What you hear about Occult Underground during Halloween

We got six entries this time. The Unknown Armies fan community is not large and has been demoralized in recent months by Atlas Games inadvertently shuttering the Statosphere community content program. But what are you gonna do?

Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan's Unknown Armies Con Scenarios

 

 

While looking for entries to use in Tormsen's Unnatural Phenomena Jam, I found links to some of Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan's old Unknown Armies con scenarios from the early 2000s on the defunct game.eire site. The Wayback machine had captures of all the relevant .zip files. 

 

John Tynes ain't dead but he's under a noncompete at Wizards, which is basically the same thing. Meanwhile Hanrahan is the best of the Pelgrane devs, his blogposts are better than most of the other guys' published products. But was he always a scenario writing powerhouse, even twenty years ago? I uploaded his UA con adventures here for people to read. I've never heard anyone talk about any of them so hopefully you enjoy reading along.

 

This is not a full review since I haven't run/played any of the modules. I'll likely never run them regardless of quality. If I ever get enough players together for Unknown Armies again I've got a bunch of my own stuff at the top of the pile to be run.

C Series Session 2: The Caverns of Contemplation

One day after breaching the first line of Gnomish defenses, four adventurers descended into the Caverns of Contemplation for a second try.

• Grenthrum Doorknocker, Dwarven Monster Hunter
  
• Jack Fatherd, Coureur des bois
  
• Roddy Applecreek, Mad bomber
  
• Shahid, Adjudicator
  

They left their hirelings Gowonry, Grit and Barb Eric behind, and managed to convince the two Thouls to stay out of the fight for now. They'd be more valuable protecting the entrance than trying to squeeze into Gnome scale tunnels.

 

The cavern floor below the entry shaft looked suspicious and Roddy realized that the Gnomes had cast an illusion on it. He dropped a rock on a rope and triggered the flashbang runes and chromatic orb trap. The illusion blocked the light from the flash and Roddy was too far away to be hit by the orb, but the bang undoubtedly alerted every Gnome in the mine. The group debated what to do, and elected to forge ahead anyway.

C Series Session 1: The Caverns of Contemplation

Frans Post

 

Fazenda Sanitarium, a lakeside estate in the sweltering Rubberlands below the Marble Cliffs. Formerly the estate of a Don who staunchly supported the Old King, currently a hospital run by the healing Church of Leper Heart. On the patio, a mutant with fleshy lobster claws pours cold anise liquor mixed with sweet, citrusy tonic for eight adventurers:

• Al-Hafiz, Self-Sacrificing Preserver, and his three henchmen
• Eric the Hired Barbarian
• Gowonry and Grit the Mutoids
• Grenthrum Doorknocker, Dwarven Monster Hunter
  
• Jack Fatherd, Coureur des bois
  
• Roddy Applecreek, Mad bomber
  
• Wakefield, Burglar and Confidence Trickster

The sentient green slime Doctor Pleroma explained the mission with such precise diction that his Common took on an accent of its own.

There’s a monster underneath my hospital. It opened a hole in the ballroom and when one of my patients went inside it killed him. There was a loud sound and a flash of light from the hole and he was burned. We lifted the body out with a hook. Go down there and kill whoever did it. All of them. Your pay is 5,000 silver pieces plus any treasure you find. Except the red stones, those belong to the Heart. Don’t take any of the patients with you, even if they ask.

Special Orders Preview: Alive in the Pressure Tophet

Friday was the busiest night of the week for the Colonel’s Secret Coterie cell, all five of them crammed into the restaurant awkwardly sandwiched between the community college and the interstate. Fonz at the register, passing out freebies to the cops who always swung by for a magickally charged pick-me-up before a high risk warrant service, mouth always two sentences ahead of his brain but making them laugh and smile all the same. Mick on the drive through, employing his best customer service accent and killing the mic to lisp out the orders in his natural deep southern falsetto. Orlock, stripped to the waist, mesh vest like a hairnet for his torso as he slaved over the fryers. Nadia weaving neatly between them, never shouting if she didn’t have to, speaking just loud enough to be easily heard over the endless machines that shrieked and hissed and buzzed and chimed.

And at the heart of it all, the Loyal Laborer, the hero of the scene: Ozzy Packard. Thin sleeves of plastic plastered to his hands with sweat, which melted on contact with hot metal and had to be painfully scraped free and replaced. The snap of boiling oil where it leaped to kiss his face, always narrowly missing his eye. Enormous sacks of potatoes, bags of drink syrup, ice, chicken, bread, so light they might have been air. The actual air heated to the temperature of blood so that it felt like his own body, the noise blending so that orders for fries and sandwiches and cardboard buckets filled with chicken melded with his own inner monologue. A mop detaching congealed fat from the tile. Enlightenment. Oneness with the world around him. The headache gone. The bone-deep weariness gone. The pain so thoroughly obliterated by devotion to the task that he didn’t feel the oncoming fit until he was already on his back. 

 

Unknown Armies 9/11 Jam Results

Results from the Unknown Armies 9/11 jam. Submissions were limited to 3,333 words, set some time in 2001 to 2008, and linked to a series of prompts chosen by the contest organizer.

Meat Points: Gentle Repose

Pickled in enough Endure Elements to keep it comfortable in the vacuum of space, Artaud’s brain barely noticed the sun baking it alive through sombrero and helm and coif and the partially-scalped remnants of his skull. The sun kept the night creatures underground. Kept the creatures of the day from pestering him. Even the flies neglected to bother his friends where they lay on the sledge behind him.

It was called Fat Sun by those who wished for luck, and O Sun by those who wished for honor. He had thought nasty things about it while he was down there in the dark, where it was useless to him. By way of apology he tried to remember a song about the sun.

Born beneath a blazing star
Through fire and riot, raid and war
To dawngate, where the-

 

There was a hole somewhere in his body, besides his mouth, which the potions hadn’t filled. The plug of tissue holding it shut burst with a squelch and he couldn’t sing anymore. He sagged, then rose and kept walking.

 

Meat Points: Guidance

You wake to a pair of enormous hands around your throat. The fingers squeeze. The thumbs seek the windpipe and hyoid bone. In focus now: behind the hands and arms, the beard rusty brown. Eyes like pools of bacteria - brilliant blue with a red rim, burning hot. As beautiful and as painful to look at as the first time you shoved them back into place. The voice, repeating mechanically in a breathless hiss.

GIVEITBACKGIVEITBACKGIVEITBACKGIVEITBACK

Yes, again. A dissatisfied customer, unhappy with services rendered. Trying to spread open your heavy body. Look inside for things he thinks you’ve taken. That he put there.