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.

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.

Meat Points: Attack of Opportunity

It came squirming out of the vat and Pharnobal felt a rush of satisfaction at being right again. Though it expanded slightly as it solidified, the shape didn’t change from moment to moment. Which suggested - no, which basically proved - that it wasn’t actually extruded from another plane, like a sphere rendered as an expanding and contracting circle in two dimensions. The effect was a purely visual one that occurred inside the eye and, if one was warded against it, didn’t happen at all. Humayan was wrong again, and she-

Focus. Left hand wishdoll right hand fist downward sweeping motion two words. Gift of speed to the muscle step to the left ten feet.

Meat Points: Hold Person

 

Through Gods’ years of having his eyes gouged by blades and his ears burst by explosions and his skins flensed by fire and his tongue smothered by dust Artaud had come to understand that a man did not experience events as they occurred, but as memories extending ever backwards. Even with the gift of Haste it was so. He had once felt in slow motion a pistol ball, energy largely spent on his helmet, auger through skull and sinus cavity and slowly render him imbecilic with a tiny bite taken from his frontal lobe. Even unmediated by sense data there was a perceptible gap between the event occurring and the internal experience of it occurring. The quanta could be asymptotically sliced but no sorcery could reach that final point where where experience and thought and action occurred at the same time.

Or perhaps the damage had interfered with memory formation. Even with the lost gray matter Clerically restored there were gaps.

Meat Points: Random Encounter

Artaud only got a brief look at the body before the others hustled him aside. That look was enough.

The cap of the skull had been removed with cuts more precise than anything Hipolito could achieve with his blades, no matter how obsessively he sharpened them. The arteries inside and the thin skin of dura mater delicately folded in a pattern like a star with greater care and attention to detail than Rakia ever showed him, undamaged despite their severance from the old master that once squatted inside the snug home of the skull. Like the brain might one day be returned to its home to resume where it had left off. The shining object clasped in the hand, left by the perpetrator, which portended a greater mystery than any of Pharnobal's jabbering about Wild Magic and Enlightenment and Great Work.

Meat Points: Threatened Squares

 

Where are they? Where are my legs?

By what right do you address me in this manner?

Water, a dram. Just a dram. Water.

So cried out the beasts at the edge of the ruin, in the voices of the many dead they had eaten. A year or two ago a mid-level mage cast Continual Light on the obelisk at the center, creating an oasis that held the night creatures at bay. They lurked just beyond the reach of the light in a gibbering mass, a carpet of monstrosities so thick that every night they formed a seething wall the height of two standing men, climbing over one another and falling forward into the circle to be burned and scrambling back, swimming beneath the surface of the sand ineffectually as the blazing pharos scoured their bones clean.

After a few minutes trying to pick out individual threads of narrative, Artaud excluded the whole clamor from his sensorium without conscious effort. He couldn’t afford to spend precious resources on the things outside the circle. 

Meat Points: Gold For XP

  

Artaud turned the empty flask over in his ungloved hand and slurped the dregs from his own beard. He must have looked like a bear, muzzle slick with carrion from a magical carcass left to rot on the llano by hunters interested only in tusks and beaks and strange glands. Potion Addict passed every bottle of Cure Wounds through a shining lantern that imbued it with an inner light, so it would glow red even in total darkness. In case of total blindness the glass was embossed with raised lettering. Even illiterates quickly learned to recognize the phrase DRINK ME under their fingers. 

Rakia stared at him under the brim of her visorless kettle, affectless but clearly incensed that he had cuckolded her with a prepackaged commercial product.

Meat Points: Death Saves

A man who fought at the front of the group would be scarred. The flesh melting like water and the fingers evaporating like cigarettes smoked away to be later regrown. The facial features crudely reattached until they resembled an abstract painting. Intestines slurped back into the body as the magic simulated the vomiting action and caused them to contract just quickly enough to avoid being caught as the wound closed itself. The Gods gave man Clerical healing because they thought he had it too easy.

This occurred to Artaud where he lay on the floor of the tomb. They were on the third level and something had come through the door. He had broken his leg and fallen much further than the distance from his head to the floor. He didn't remember much after that except flashes before his gaze. The feeling of flight.

The Library of Lanthorn: Session 4

 

Shahid and the Halflings went back into the dungeon for another crack at finding and closing the lock. They cautiously descended to the third level of the tomb, where Breadrick scouted ahead in total darkness. He found writing on the wall in the Shrine language of the Djinn Potentates. Shahid determined the substance was Djinn blood, which Roddy harvested to enhance the power of his bombs.

The next chamber was the one where the multidimensional monster spawned previously. With time to investigate, Breadrick found evidence of habitation by several soldiers. He looted their items and lit the brazier in the altar to Shrine of Storms that watched over the room. The light reflected off the Three Monkeys statues of Genies, but not the wall behind them. Breadrick pulled his hood over his face to cover his eyes, mouth and ears. The wall behind the statues slid open, but slid back the second anyone else observed it. The gang decided to explore the rest of the floor before probing this further.

The Library of Lanthorn: Session 3

The Halflings felt sick after waking up from their nap, like something very bad happened. The soldiers  milled around outside, along with the Librarians. Concerned that the Lock had been opened, the group descended into the Library - either to close it again or loot the place before it was destroyed.

The archive stairs led back into the basement stacks. The worms were finished eating the dead soldier and fresh worms crawled around the corpse. The altar of Oil Lamp gave off a strange hum. Delgal deployed his Unseen Servant and commanded it to start pulling books off the shelves and tossing them on a cart. Then the group descended to level 3.

Review: Book of Fuligin

My copy of Book of Fuligin came today. This is a Book of the New Sun fancomic that was crowdfunded a couple years ago. Various artists and writers contributed short comics or illustrations set in the world of the Solar Cycle - the posthistoric dying Urth created by Gene Wolfe. Submitters were prohibited from using characters from books for original stories, though some of the submissions depict the canonical events of the novels. I've had the PDF version sitting in my Gmail for months but I forgot I even backed this project until I got the email asking me to update my shipping info. I'm very glad I did.

The book is a hardcover with good cloth binding. The cover is a minimalist illustration of Severian and a tangle of thorns on a black field. There's a embossed Terminus Est with a single blood drop on the spine, which looks great. There's an illustration of Old Man Wolfe on the interior covers (front and rear) that makes him look like Doctor Robotnik. The matte black they chose for the cover and pages accumulates fingerpints like nobody's business and looks gray in good light. I wouldn't nitpick this except that the cover claims the book is "written and drawn in the darkest of inks" and I just discovered through miniature painting that you need a gloss to make black actually look black.

 

The package came with a loose page that had a cool drawing of Severian.

 

Enough about the physical product. Let's dive into the stories. This review assumes you've read the New Sun books and won't make sense if you don't. It will contain spoilers for plot details from the novels and will give away some setting or thematic elements of the stories in Book of Fuligin. If you got a copy from the Kickstarter I suggest reading it before you read this. As of this posting the publisher says there are a handful of spares they might sell after they make sure the backers are taken care of. You may yet get a chance to grab one if you haven't already.

Playtest: Barbican of the Blaster Caster

Two gangs of desperate adventurers congregated in the bar on the top of the Potion Addict outlet at the mastaba looking out over Hogman's Plain. 

• A pack of thieves, mixed humans and demihumans
• A group of deserters and junk dealers
  

They had spent all their money getting to the trading post, leaving nothing for further exploration of the realms beyond. Then a blast of red energy exploded out of the ridge above the river. A blast that indicated a magical accident and the availability of treasure. They got climbing before anyone could upstream them.

 

Minidungeon: Escape From Borgo Bridge

You wake up in a bed. The last thing you remember is a delicious meal, a glowing orb and a voice laughing. Out the window, endless mountains, shrouded in mist as the sun goes down. You need to get out of here.

The Library of Lanthorn: Session 2

Delgal Haberkorn, Roddy Applecreek, Breadrick Bravebelly and Shahid the Adjudicator took care of some housekeeping on the surface before re-entering the Library. Breadrick snuck into the soldier camp to supplement the squabs from the roof with some stolen food. As he pilfered cheese and pemmican he overheard the officer of the watch yelling at a subordinate who had found a magic item. The Halfling sent Delgal over to investigate. Private Patrick of the 11th Parliamentary Sappers had found a weird little sculpture of a fort that he thought may have supernatural powers. Delgal conned him into paying 150 silver to identify the trinket. Delgal couldn't immediately identify it and pocketed it for further analysis.

Begone, FUNNEL Draft 1

Alekseev

 

Is it fun to run a DCC style funnel in Begone FOE? Let's find out.

 

Every player starts with four randomly generated level 0 characters. They move and act as a group and go on the same initiative count in combat (use the highest SKILL value to place them in initiative order). You can break up the group and send one character to scout ahead, check for traps etc, but the default assumption is a four man blob.

This document assumes you're familiar with basic Begone FOE chargen, including derived statistics and how skills and magic work.

RPG Sanity Systems

By me

Let's clean out the drafts folder with a survey of RPG SAN systems, inspired by a discussion in the SA traditional games chat. I think essays are generally boring and reveal more about the author than they do about the topic of discussion. With that in mind I'll focus on games I've actually played and enjoyed.

Minidungeon: Barbican of the Blaster Caster

A bright red beam of energy bursts out of the rock face above Hogman's Plain. You happen to witness this from the back porch of the forlorn Potion Addict in the shadow of the ridge. Looks like a magical accident, the kind that leaves arcane treasure up for grabs.

Marriage of the Giantess Morwenna: Favorite Foods

de Bry

Bonus post to clean out the drafts folder. Favorite foods for dungeon dudes.

BRIGANDS OF ALL NATIONS

Gorrister the Great: Gold

Garabedian the Bullywug Chief: Tadpoles

Mantis Man: Robber Flies

Uzza the Manscorpion: Raw Auroch

Lobsang the Yeti: Milk

Manus the Snake: Beef tea

Polyhymnos the Satyr: Honey fritters

Minidungeon: Haunted Castle Doctrine

The famous Cave Elf Bard Chelicera is playing a set at the old church outside of town. Fans from all over the province have come to see her. It would be nice to figure out what happened to all those people who saw the show and never came back.

The Library of Lanthorn: Session 1

The City of Lanthorn. Founded by the Old King during his border war with the Djinn Potentates after the discovery of its enormous self-healing lantern, which he took as a sign of favor from his patron deity Oil Lamp. Since the fall of the Monarchy the city is overwhelmed with refugees from the endless war between the Djinn and the upstart Sanctuaries of Mercy. The Djinn may be confined to their fortress at Shrine of Storms, but the Sanctuaries' conscription of every able-bodied man, woman and child for futile assault after futile assault has created a flood of draft dodgers uninterested in an ignominious death. And the lantern is dimming. Without a stream of captured genies to fuel it the light must be fed an endless stream of oil, flickering feebly against the neverending storm on the horizon.

But all that was irrelevant to the adventurers who assembled outside the Great Library of Lanthorn, lured by the promise of payment.

• The Halfling Accordionist Breadrick Bravebelly
• The Halfling Alchemist Roddy Applecreek
• The Yeti-Man Sangyal the Lesser
• The Journeyman Mage Delgal Haberkorn
• The mysterious Adjudicator who hired them.

The Librarian Al-Sirr went over the terms of the contract with the hired adventurers. Someone broke into the library and their job was to go inside and apprehend them by any means necesssary. They had reached the "old floors" and there was a risk they would try to open The Lock, which was very bad. The adventurers could have anything they wanted from the library if they got rid of the thieves, as long as they didn't try to open The Lock themselves.

 

Summer Lego RPG Setting Jam: The Drakonomachy

Thousand Lakes is home to sturdy Barbarians who shun arcane magic, trusting the strength of ships and steel. It's also home to Dragons who prey on the magically deficient swamp dwellers, extorting tribute and destroying those who resist.

The coastal Jarl Kaarlo Bogiron refuses to pay the Dragons' tithe of gold and blood. He defies the power of the Drakes from his island fortress in the estuary beyond the river Sprat. The engineer Arto Shornhand, builder of ships and siege weapons, equips the Jarl's forces with weapons capable of challenging the flying beasts. Warriors flock to the Jarl's banner, while Dragon cultists fete the great Worms who oppose him.

Minidungeon: The Spring of Saint Mamacona

The Spring of Saint Mamacona was once a source of Holy Water for the people of the Sentinels, the mountains above the Highlands. Then the flow of water to the villages below was cut off. Of the scouts who ascended Red Mountain to investigate the shrine only a few returned alive, telling stories of enormous shapes moving through the mist, giving off a great heat that melted the snow around them.

The Marriage of the Giantess Morwenna - Masterpost

Egbert Lievensz van der Poel

The Giantess Morwenna is hosting a tournament, a grand melee with a grander reward: her hand in marriage. Her soldiers have scourged the landscape for miles around, kidnapping farmers as slaves or food for the Giantess. Three mercenary armies have added to their depredations, led by a trio of warlords intent on contesting the hastilude. The festivities begin in seven days.

The Marriage of the Giantess Morwenna - Music Post

John Martin

Marriage of the Giantess Morwenna used a mix of handpicked and recycled sounds. I got a lot of mileage out of the Dwarf Fortress OST, which is the best thing to come out of the Steam release. 

The Wedding of the Giantess Morwenna - Epilogue

Flying away from the wreckage of the wedding as fast as possible, Jack Fatherd received a telepathic message through the talking sword Agia, given him by the Cave Elf Carnamagos prior to his final mission against the Giants. His handler in the Hundred Hands, using the mated sword Agillus, asked him for a report on the mission. Jack reported that Morwenna was dead, the Giant Cleric and his servitors were dead, the Red Ball mages were dead, but Aldrich and the Brazenkragg Agents escaped. Jack got an image from the guy on the other end of the line. A man sitting in front of four plates, two of them filled with cakes. The man was smiling. The next image was Jack's next mission: a room full of people, hands soaked in purple grape must, stabbing Aldrich to death. 

 

But that would have to wait, because Jack needed to take care of the Giant Bat who almost died. If his asshole Case Officer wanted it done faster than that, he could come down here and do it himself.   

 

The Wedding of the Giantess Morwenna Session Ten

Four of the victorious Lute Bastards attended the Wedding of the Giantess Morwenna.

• Aldrich Brisbane the Groom
• Laguna Tempest the Mage
• Zigar Kneecapper the Thug
• Grimm Dundragon the Ranger

The wedding was on the lakeshore, where slaves had set up tents with food and an open bar. Grimm was already drunk, courtesy of the Red Ball mages who insisted he get wasted. Laguna tried to convince the student wizards to cast a protection spell on him, but they were no longer in his employ and wouldn't go for it. Zigar talked with the numerous soldiers running security for the event. They explained that they had a combat scribe with a scroll of ESP to judge the intent of the guests and prevent any assassination plots. The mage read the scroll but the alcohol coursing through Grimm's brains protected his thoughts. 

 

Houdini came over to remonstrate with Aldrich. Morwenna had picked out her sister Dora to witness the consummation of the marriage, and the Mummy needed to know who Aldrich would bring. He chose Datura, because she was a notary or because he thought it would be funny. He'd actually met Dora previously, even helped her escape the Manor of the Giant Arminius alongside her real father Pendergast the Wizard. Technically she was only Morwenna's half-sister, though that wasn't public knowledge. Aldrich looked over at Dora and Pendergast, who were giving Morwenna an early wedding present: a box filled with eggs. Morwenna wore a tight robe made from the skin of a dozen saber tooth cats, which could barely contain her body. Dora said something Aldrich couldn't hear, and Morwenna's face contorted in an expression of unforced wonder and delight. She picked up her half-sister and hugged her.

The Giantess put Dora down. Her face assumed its usual affectless sneer. She caught Aldrich staring. Licked her lips. The Giant Cleric Kadminion, emissary from the Godsfeast Abbey, announced it was time for the main event. 

 

OSE Play Report: Temple of the Lizard God

I've had this one in my drafts for a month or two. This is a game I played in (as the Wizard) rather than ran.

The town council of Elgard Valley was concerned about lizardmen sneaking around the ruined temple outside of town. They hired four adventurers to check the place out.

• Faldo the Fighter
• Robert the Wizard
• Seva the Cleric
• Varik the Dwarf

The adventurers negotiated partial payment up front and investigated local rumors about the temple. They heard it was dedicated to prehistoric gods, that clerics weren't allowed inside, that it was a portal for prehistoric spirits, and it was full of jade jewelry.

The Ninepins

Otherworld miniatures, painted by me

The Ninepins are a group of swindlers who operate by deception and stealth, robbing dungeon denizens and adventurers alike. While they can intimidate and overwhelm low level threats they prefer to employ con-artistry vs tougher foes.

Monster Overhaul Test Drive: Kidnapper's Keep

With the collapse of the City of Tontes, the Marble Cliffs have become anarchic. Petty lordlings reassert their authority, controlling the surrounding landscape from fortified keeps. An entreprenurial gang of thieves operating out of a stolen castle run a kidnapping and ransom business, grabbing anyone who looks important and imprisoning them in the dungeons beneath the fortress.