Sunday, April 21, 2024

Dune 2d20 Whalefall - Playtest

Giger

Bene Gesserit Sister Wilhelmina was falling. Her shuttle down to Giedi Prime exploded in flight and her  sealed capsule fell out of the sky, stuttering descent barely slowed by the sporadic activations of the emergency suspensors. The suspensors failed entirely and the capsule fell the rest of the way. She was ready for the impact but an unsecured object left by the flight crew struck her in the throat, crushing her hyoid bone at the most inappropriate time. She was at no risk of suffocating thanks to her excellent physical control, but the injury prevented her from using the Voice.

The first thing she noticed was the stink, like a thousand animals being melted in a giant vat. She calculated that the shuttle must have been flying over the megafarms outside Harko. She levered the door open and was confronted with the reeking whalefields of House Texoco, confirming her suspicions. Cetaceans dangled from enormous derricks, penetrated with tubes that siphoned precious bodily fluids through pipelines to an enormous tryworks in the distance. The rendering plant sent up enormous clouds of foul smelling smoke, mingling with the sooty sky that reflected sunlight from all angles like a greasy mirror.

The falling star had not gone unnoticed. Pyon laborers peered out from behind machinery, wiping tallow off their goggles to see her better. A grain hauler hovering lazily over the tableau turned suddenly and swooped toward her, its speed incongruous with its shitbox exterior. Wilhelmina quickly grabbed the contents of the pod's emergency box and made herself presentable.

Tuesday, April 16, 2024

Monday, April 15, 2024

Unknown Armies 3e Canned Rules Tutorial


Here's the rules explainer I use when running one-off adventures for new players in Unknown Armies 3rd edition. It takes maybe half an hour at most. It's good to pause between paragraphs and give the players a chance to ask for clarification if they don't understand the basics. It's also okay to say "we'll cover that later" if they want a more in-depth exploration of individual subsystems.

Sunday, April 14, 2024

Unknown Armies Artifact: Ha'nish's Harrow


DESCRIPTION: A bed of soft wool with leather straps to hold every joint of the body still, over which is suspended a curious apparatus. The apparatus menaces with glass needles, pointed downward at the bed. The whole thing is built in the Bauhaus style, with curved metal rails to suspend the apparatus and lots of cubes growing like geometric tumors from other cubes.

The apparatus includes a slot for punchcards from a Dehomag tabulating machine - a primitive electromechanical computer of the 1920s.

Saturday, April 13, 2024

Unknown Armies Shotgun Scenario: The Full Boot

The Sleepers were bad people who got what they deserved in the ‘03 war, but even their detractors admit they performed an important pest control function. If they were still around, a place like The Full Boot wouldn’t last a week.
THE FULL BOOT
The Full Boot is a bar in an old Ancient Order of the Hibernians temple. The one the Know Nothings bombed in 1851, killing a dozen Irishman and leaving shrapnel scars on the interior walls still visible to this day. The name is a pun on the novelty glass boots they serve beer in, and their signature performance completely flaying the skin off a victim’s foot and lower leg.

The stairs lead down into the bar area, which is poorly lit during business hours. Low tables, cigarettes in defiance of the indoor smoking ban. Bar counter against one wall, where the soft light makes the things in the bottles swim. There’s something wrong with the barman. Other side of the room is the stage. They used it to give speeches, maybe a hundred years ago. Now the old wood is bloodstained, no matter how many tarps they lay down and how hard they scrub.

Friday, April 12, 2024

Unknown Armies Shotgun Scenario: Clown Death March


We were in Davidson (?), Illinois staying at a cheap no tell motel where staff got stuffed 8-10 to a room while Joe stayed in the tour bus with his boys. We had just gotten back from almost 24 hours at the local mall doing magic shows on the hour and showing off tigers in collapsible cages in-between. It was snowing like a motherfucker and I was perched on the balcony/second story walkway in a lawn chair smoking a cigarette when I saw the clowns.

The clowns were just ex-cons in their 50s-60s who wore clown makeup and were the hype men during the days at wherever we were stopped. They'd draw people out of the hustle and bustle of the mall towards the sad tiger shanty town we'd built in the middle of the mall (it was almost always malls or parking lots).

One big rule Joe Exotic had was NO ALCOHOL. I figure this stemmed from his brother dying via drunk driver. These old clowns had a helluva time with bottleache though, so whenever we'd get settled they would go straight for a liquor store or gas station. Since Joe was cozy in his tour bus, they wouldn't get caught. They didn't get out of costume or even wipe off the facepaint. They just threw on jackets and started walking. A line of 5 or 6 clowns in the snow, wandering towards the nearest bottle of KD. About an hour later I'm back on the balcony smoking and see these guys coming back. They're trudging through the snow, facepaint sloughing off, wearing clown clothes. Each one was carrying a bottle in a brown paper bag. They were walking single file. It is one of the most surreal things I've ever seen. Like some kind of horror movie death march. If I was artistically inclined I'd have already painted that strange tableau on black velvet and hung it in my living room.

Untrustable, February 2nd, 2020


Friday, April 5, 2024

Hex24: The Wedding of the Giantess Morwenna - The Lakeside Garden

George Baxter

This hex is surrounded by a stone fence with a wooden palisade on top, eight feet high in total, except on the lake side to the north. A gatehouse protected by nine Level 0 Soldiers armed with firearms protects the western approach, and a raised causeway on the southeast side leads up the hill to Morwenna’s steading. The river flows in through a grate under the fence on the south side, and out into the lake on the north. If the gate is attacked, the soldiers use a hand-cranked alarm to summon reinforcements.

The hex is a garden full of dinosaurs, brought from Isle of Sweat by traders who heard Morwenna loved the beasts. Enormous cycads the size of trees shelter the reptiles as they lumber from their wooden paddocks to graze on ferns and primitive grasses.

Saturday, March 30, 2024

Unknown Armies - The Full Boot

Corrupt Chicago PD beat cop Archimedes "Arch" Brabrand had a problem. One of his informants, one Adrian Lebarge, was nowhere to be found. She was his source of information on the city's occult underworld and if something happened to her he'd have to cultivate a new source, which his ego and laziness would not allow.

He started his search downtown, to pester some detectives who owed him a favor. He swaggered into the cube farm where the homicide dicks flew their desks, and was immediately intercepted by Sergeant Gold. The old guy looked terrible, way worse than Arch remembered, and immediately told him to get the fuck out. There was something wrong with his voice and he was much surlier than normal. Like he was covering something up. Arch acted like he was leaving, then doubled back to rifle through Gold's desk. The last month of notes he had taken were borderline incomprehensible, but Arch picked out two things:
  • A list of names and addresses, including Adrian's.
  • Scribbled drawings of a boot, with foam overflowing the top like a novelty beer glass
He hit the streets before Gold caught him snooping around.
 
 
Adrian was a source of information on Chicago's supernatural underworld. That made her disappearance a problem for Blue Line, a circle of bent cops like Arch who investigated occult crimes. A pair of Cohles answered his summons to the hot dog shop to go over the facts of the case:
  • Special Agent Manny Mordiggian, Disgraced Psychoanalyst and Hypnotist
  • Robin Goodfellow "Rob" Dogma, Sheriff's Deputy and Super-Strongwoman

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Maintenance and Preservation Masterpost


Maintenance and Preservation was a nine session Esoteric Enterprises open table I ran for a local RPG group. It was my first in-person game in years and was a lot of fun. The players were maintenance workers and had to go spelunking in the undercity to solve problems, dodging monsters and traps and getting chased around by different factions. Thank you to everyone who showed up to play, both the regular players and people who just tried out one session.

Maintenance and Preservation - Lessons Learned


Juan de Valdés Leal
 
Simplification is great. The lack of classes and class subsystems meant character creation only took a few minutes. This let new players quickly join tables of experienced players without the need to prepare before the session. This is a fantasy offered by other Basic clones like OSE and Lamentations, but in my experience chargen in those games takes substantially longer and requires more paperwork at the table, because you've got to pick a class and then copy a bunch of class features, saving throws and additional items (particularly rolled spells) to your sheet. Every player missed something on their first go (skills, starting items, the ability to "invert" ability scores which I admit is unintuitive) but since there weren't a lot of interdependencies on the sheet it was easy to fix.
 

Maintenance and Preservation - Session Nine (The End)

 
John Benson and Pepper woke up after a long fall. They were in a domed cave, on an island of fine grained white sand in a chalky blue underground lake. An Aelf fussed over them, face a photonegative of the unseelie fairies from the undercity they knew. He brushed a feather duster over John Benson's face, a stick with slimy tendrils cut off an underworld creature. The tendrils had no effect. Benson realized his hands were "bound" by a long glass spike, inserted through his wrists like a syringe. On a normal living human it would have made freeing his hands painful and debilitating. For an undead revenant it was easy.
 
Benson sat up and asked the fairy what was going on. The Aelf was disconcerted by his ability to move and talk. Pepper sat up, similarly unaffected by the paralytic poison from the cave crawler stick. The Aelf hadn't bound her hands yet, the glass spike lay on the sand ready for use. The Aelf shot Benson with a magic spell, which spattered harmlessly against his dessicated flesh. Pepper asked what was going on. The Aelf ran back into his hut, a structure of stone and leather. He turned out a bag onto the sand, containing their possessions.

Pepper realized that the weird underworld guy was trying to ensorcel/enslave them, and was trying to get rid of them now that he realized it wouldn't work. She thought about jumping him and stealing whatever he owned in retaliation, but Benson convinced her to focus on escaping the unknown cave before exacting revenge. He established a pidgin with the cave elf and learned that the way out was to the south, across a series of stepping stones sticking out of the beautiful blue water and through a passage in the rock. As for an explanation of his behavior, the Aelf told the humans that there was a vast wall of impenetrable glass, as high as the eye could see. There was a world on the other side, and he would kill every man in existence to get there.
 
The maintenance workers left. The Aelf was happy to see them go.
 

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Maintenance and Preservation Music Post


This was an in-person game, played in a public place where I didn't have control over the sound system, so all these tracks are for my personal benefit.
 

Friday, March 15, 2024

Hex24 Bonus - The Winged Hobelars


Sergeant Baldwin was astride his flying mount Pneumatophore, leading a squadron of four troopers in a reconnaissance flight over the broken lands beyond the frontier, when he heard the voice in his head. Smoother than any voice could be if it spoke out loud.

Reprobates. Northeast. Two and a half leagues. Eleven hundred fathoms. Two flyers. Six Elves. Eleven Captives.

Reprobates being a pet name for an enemy formation, more dangerous than Poltroons, less so than Brigands. Leagues being the distance from his position. Fathoms the altitude. The two flyers would be the pteranodons the squadron was tracking. They were fierce reptiles but they couldn't take prey in the air. Couldn't fight an attack from above. The Elves on board would have Sleep memorized, a powerful disabler in ground combat but useless in a high altitude duel, where the wind and the shock of high-G turns would quickly wake a man who dozed off.

But how to rescue the captives? That was the real question, and probably why the slavers felt safe operating in the area when they must have known the Hobelars were near. They smugly assumed the presence of hostages would dissuade the squadron from engaging them in the air.

No. They wouldn't get away this time. He had a plan for that too. 

He thought hard about the Gnome, telepathically calling out the ranges of the minds glowing at the edge of her perception. Hidden in a surface camp to minimize the odds of being spotted, suspended in the harness that kept the weight of her head from bending her spine and crushing her internal organs.

He thought a message for her.

Going forth.

The wind blew through the face of his wooden sallet, freezing the drool that leaked around his tusks at the thought of battle. He ran his enormous tongue over his lips and squinted, looking for the promised foe.

There.

Baldwin raised his fist and the Squadron ascended.

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Hex24: The Wedding of the Giantess Morwenna - The Stadium


The stadium is already constructed: a concentric ring of elevated seating around a cone shaped plinth. Above the benches are a series of poles with retractable screens of wool, to keep rain and direct sun off the audience. Besides the general seating there are several boxes for distinguished guests, and a big throne for Morwenna herself (stuffed with 5,000 SP worth of cave spider silk).

Saturday, March 9, 2024

Maintenance and Preservation - Session Eight


New hires Avery and Daniel joined old hands Parker, Benson and Eddie at Eddie's museum in downtown Clearmountain. Eddie had set up all the treasures he found in the underworld, along with paragraphs of factual and conjectural information about what they might be. The healing chair made by the famous Barzini was in the lounge area, where the

Or so they thought. The boss quickly apologized, he wasn't feeling his act. Then he shifted. It wasn't Kurta, it was another illusionist. Not the lizard/goat/old woman, the other one. He had a gift for the explorers: a sack of magic scrolls. They were going into a dangerous place to do a public service, and that reminded him of some people he knew back in Cow Town. People who deserved better than what they got. And they needed to be quick with their work this time, or they'd be lost forever beneath the earth. He left the museum without answering any more questions, and almost ran into the real Kurta as he slipped and fell down the alley stairs.
 
Fortunately for everyone, the one legged supervisor wasn't hurt. He had a big briefcase, containing two smaller cases. One was filled with hand grenades, one for each member of the team, courtesy of the marker he finally called in with the surviving Ponda Rays. The other was sealed, and it contained their mission. The team had to take the machine down to the third level of the undercity, below the now-opened hatch, and open the case in the room with "the machine". This would end the earthquakes and save the city. Then they needed to get the hell out as fast as possible. The things on level three might not recognize the maintenance team as a threat on the way in, but once they broke the device all bets would be off.

The explorers decided to spend some of the money they accumulated before delving back into the underworld. They bought ammunition, weapons, supplies, and a Scroll of Fireballs using money from the museum and the treasure they found over the last seven weeks.
 

Dune 2D20: Whalefall - Retinue


A couple or three people you might meet on a visit to House Tlaxxon's manor - a tiny keep that floats above the whalefields, roof planted with beautiful cacti and sootblack flowers, fastened to the earth by an anchorchain connected to an enormous boulder that predates the arrival of man on Giedi Prime.
 

Friday, March 8, 2024

Dune 2D20: Whalefall - Houses


House Harkonnen's adroit manipulation of the whalefur market required them to establish a handful of potemkin operations on Giedi Prime, importing Bjondax Whales from Lankiveil to rouse suspicion that they were planning on establishing a rival operation. These efforts had to appear credible to make it past CHOAM's audits of the House's financials, requiring them to gift extraction rights to a handful of Houses Minor so they could spin up something convincing.

Once they had the money, the Harks immediately lost interest in their sacrificial whale farms. But nobody ever gives up power on Giedi Prime. A handful of Houses resisted consolidation, extermination, and the market crash that immediately followed the Baron cashing out.

Monday, March 4, 2024

Hex24: The Wedding of the Giantess Morwenna - More Assorted Hexes


The cabbage farms in this hex are depopulated, with signs of violence. Posters for THE TOURNAMENT plastered everywhere.

In the absence of farmers to put down salt, the fields are overrun with Flail Snails eating the vegetables.

Sunday, March 3, 2024

A Bed of Roses Masterpost

Roberto Cueva Del RĂ­o
 
The year is 1521. The place is Tenochtitlan, heart of the Aztec Empire. The island-city has just been conquered following a ninety day siege by a coalition of Spanish Conquistadores and their Nahua allies from neighboring city-states. Weakened by starvation and smallpox, the surviving Mexica are at the mercy of their conquerors’ insatiable lust for gold.
 
An Unknown Armies 3e scenario for up to four players.
 

A Bed of Roses: Music Post

Si Sheppard

City of the Inhumi is what convinced me to finish A Bed of Roses. It looked like a lot of hard work to write up tons of locations for the City of Tenochtitlan, but then I imagined the song playing as the players came out of the Guild Hall and saw the ruins, and decided to do it anyway.

Unknown Armies: A Bed of Roses Playtest Two

The year was 1521. The place was Tenochtitlan, head of the Triple Alliance of the Aztec Empire. The island-city had just been conquered following a ninety day siege by a coalition of Spanish Conquistadors and their Nahua-speaking allies from neighboring city-states. Weakened by starvation and smallpox, the surviving Mexica were at the mercy of their conquerors’ insatiable lust for gold.
 
Jason Field
 
In a Pochteca Guild Hall, four merchants were confined to a storeroom amid sacks of cocoa beans and bolts of cotton cloth - the majority of the Guild’s liquid wealth, which the Spaniards had no interest in.
  • Bleeding Scorpion, Merchant and veteran knight
  • Jumping Spider, Merchant and luxury goods trader
  • Yellow Thorn, Merchant and far-traveler

Their hands were tied and they only had a moment to contemplate what they would do next, before a group of hairy men from the other side of the world hustled them out into the banquet hall.

Saturday, March 2, 2024

Unknown Armies: Clown Death March


 
After almost twenty four hours working the crowd at a sad little tiger show in the parking lot outside a Wal Mart in Davidson Illinois, a pair of clowns threw on their overcoats and set out into the snow.
  • Andre Bones the Silent Clown
  • Jesus Rinconsito the Sad Clown
The pair of ex-cons were only interested in one thing: the liquor store down the interstate, whose lights they could barely see through the blowing snow. They trudged forward across the field that separated the motel parking lot from their prize. Almost immediately their shoes got soaked. Andre toppled over and knocked Jesus down. The two fell to arguing and almost fought, but kept it together through the trek.

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Hex24: The Wedding of the Giantess Morwenna - Assorted Hexes

Florencia Molina Campos

This plains hex looks east to a valley of grass, in places growing taller than a person. Rough trails interpenetrate the densely packed blades.

This field is also a meeting point for Morwenna’s goons and a party of gauchos, mounted herders from the fringes of civilization. These rough and ready cattlemen hunt game and rustle livestock from poorly defended frontier farms. They sell the animals to Morwenna’s operation, feeding the majority of her forces who don’t subsist on human flesh.

The group has 24 mounted Nomads, led by the 3rd level Ranger Facon. He has no interest in politics or respect for the law, but is bound by a rough code of frontier hospitality. He is hospitable but takes offense at any sleight by a man of equal social standing to himself (anyone who rides a horse).

The gauchos have a few muskets and pistols, but they mostly fight with lances while mounted and enormous knives on foot. Each one carries a pair of heavy wooden balls connected by a length of rope, which they throw to entangle foes. On a failed Save vs Paralysis, the target cannot move without tripping until they spend an action hacking through the cord with a heavy blade such as an ax.

The nomads have 6 spare horses, and typically bring 4D6 cows, 6D6 sheep, meat from various game animals like deer and wild hens, and the pelts of more exotic creatures like mountain lions and giant snakes.

If attacked by a superior force, the horsemen simply mount up and leave, scattering any animals they brought with them. They are superb riders and difficult to catch without a cunning plan or superhuman speed.

Monday, February 26, 2024

Hex24: The Wedding of the Giantess Morwenna - Hex 2, 6



Brightly colored tents and temporary structures dot this hilly terrain, populated by visitors excited for the tournament or hoping to make a quick buck off the attendees.

The biggest tent is an Iron Cup outlet, a trading company with a writ from the Genius Loci to market luxury goods plundered from the furthest realms. They sell coffee, chocolate, tobacco, potions and other treats. The rest of the hex’s inhabitants tend to gather here.

Sunday, February 25, 2024

Maintenance and Preservation - Session Seven


Hairy Joe the one armed secretary introduced John Benson, Eddie and Pepper to their two new colleagues: Hank Dredger and Vinny. Kurta the one legged supervisor wasn't available to brief them, he was dealing with some suits from Central Central Services - weirdos with face masks and eye-dagger cufflinks. That made the three veteran members of the maintenance team pretty nervous. Either way, the crew had a job to do: the detectors placed by the maintenance team on a previous delve had pinpointed the source of the seismic disturbances causing the earthquakes. Central Services knew how to get down there, but the path was blocked. The mission was simple: go to the geothermal caves on level two of the undercity, find a path to the hatch east of the old research base, and mark it with signal flags. That would set the stage for subsequent operations to clear the path downward and solve the problem.

Hank wasn't comfortable going into the undercity with just a wrench. He wanted some real firepower. Thanks to the contacts made by the team on previous digs, Loyd the Bartender at the BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD club hooked him up. The barkeep passed him a .380 pocket gun in exchange for a nip of blood, sucked out of Hank's arm and into the massive neon cylinder above the bar counter. Pepper gave Vinny her shotgun because she wasn't interested in hauling it around, and he similarly gave up a little blood for a fistful of shotshells.

Thus equipped, the group went to the old railyard to use the derelict subway entrance. It was the closest one to their objective and the workers wouldn't bother them on the way down.

Thursday, February 22, 2024

Special Orders Preview: Amarna Boundary Stela C


POWER: Major

DESCRIPTION: Nestled in the Northern cliffs of the ancient Egyptian ritual city of Amarna, Stela C is unique among the Boundary Stelae of Akhenaten. Unlike the other Stelae, C was concealed from public view by its location in a gorge not easily visible from the city itself. Stela C is six meters tall and ten wide, carven from the native stone of the cliff. Most of the face is occupied by a bas relief depicting an androgynous human figure on their knees below the sun disc Aten. The figure is holding their stomach, intestines, lungs and liver in their open palms. The majority of the accompanying Hieroglyphic script is effaced, either by deliberate vandalism or weathering (though neither explain why the image is still visible). The only decipherable text reads “ATEN…HIS THRONE…GATHER POWER…VESSEL”.

Below the relief, at ground level, is an arched indentation in which rests a carven alabaster throne. Like the relief, the throne is suspiciously unweathered. The seat of the throne is stained with a black, pitch like substance and a dusting of unknown pinkish residue. On each side of the throne are two indentations sized for urns or jars, for a total of four.

EFFECT: Sit on the throne while the four indentations are occupied by canopic jars containing your preserved stomach, intestines, lungs, and liver. Recite the full text of the Stela (not just the surviving fragment). You can then combine ten minor charges you’re carrying into a significant charge, or ten sigs into a major.

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Unknown Armies Artifact: The Panoply of Thug Babur

By "unknown Indian artist"

This suite of items is traditionally attributed to Thug Babur, a legendary cult leader and serial killer from the waning years of the Mughal Empire.

The Thuggee were a secret society or social movement that operated in the Indian subcontinent from the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries. They murdered travelers for personal gain and as a bloodrite to Kali, she who destroys evil to protect the innocent. The exact reach and prevalence of the Thuggee movement is debatable. The earliest textual references to Thug activity far predate European incursions into India, but The East India Company and later British Raj undoubtedly exaggerated the threat posed by the cult as an excuse to institute repressive social policies against the subcontinent’s poor and rural peoples.

Thug Babur himself first appears in 18th century sources, most of which are retellings of earlier stories. He is typically a boogeyman who induces potential recruits to join the Thugs by engineering great misfortune in their lives, appearing to them when they are at their weakest to offer a way out. He had the power to torment people in their dreams, destroying them psychologically before the final confrontation in the waking world.

The panoply of items are signature weapons of the Thuggee, who according to the various sources were required to kill without shedding blood, to kill with a ritual dagger, or to personally bury their victims.

Sunday, February 18, 2024

Cyberpunk RED Easy Mode - Play Report


A trio of edgerunners drove their stolen van away from their latest act of super-crime, traveling at a speed slow enough not to be pulled over, but fast enough not to be immediately suspicious for obeying the speed limit. In the car:
  • Mover the Solo
  • Redtail the Medic
  • Torch the Tech
They had just dropped off the goods from their latest heist and were on the way to pick up their payout from the fixer. Said fixer, name of Lazlo, gave the Solo a call on his disposal burner phone - a violation of protocol that ran against the very purpose of a burner phone. The Solo, buffoon that he was, answered the call. Lazlo told him that the location of the pickup had changed - they'd be picking up their payout in the industrial side of Heywood. The group immediately suspected a double-cross, but wanted the money more than they wanted to spend the night in complete safety.
 
Large sections of the industrial district were still "under construction", caught between Night City's successive waves of deindustrialization and reclamation as the real estate keiretsu waited out a more favorable economic climate to rebuild. The pickup was set for an alleyway in the shadow of a skeletal building, whose rebar was laid so long ago it was already starting to rust. The group parked the van a block away and approached on foot. Mover peered into the alley with his cybernetic eye and spotted several armed figures waiting in ambush, one of whom wore a Night City Police badge under a hoodie. He casually strolled around the block and set up behind them without attracting their attention.

Redtail and Torch pretended they hadn't noticed anything amiss, and went down the alley to collect their paycheck. One of the goons came down the alley in response, clad in a hoodie and carrying a briefcase cuffed to his wrist. He stopped and fussed over the key, unlocking it and inadvertently dropping it on the ground after about half a minute of fiddling.

Torch took the case. Two more plainclothes cops stepped into the alley, blocking his egress.

"He's got a gun!" one of them shouted.
 

Sunday, February 11, 2024

Maintenance and Preservation - Session Six

The earthquakes were getting worse. Something under Clearmountain was causing them. Central Services needed to pinpoint the source of the disturbance before they could do something about it.


Pepper and John Benson had a job to do: place three sensors in the southeast region of the underground. One in the old church crypt, one in the cult stronghold and one in a complex of buried ruins. With only two people to do the job, Pepper decided to call for backup. She called up the Explorers of the Furthest Realms and asked if anyone wanted to go on a delve into the undercity. 
 
The Explorer Gunnie met them at the central services building. She had the Death Knight Hildegrin's armor on, stripped of the gold damascening that adorned the matte black plates. She didn't make any clanking sounds stomping around, and the explorers noted a yellow scarf around her neck, the only adornment on the dark armor. Benson asked where she got the suit of plates, and she explained it came off a dead body in the underworld. She was excited to get into the undercity, and suggested the group use the entrance at the club downtown, under the old textile mill, which would put them within walking distance of their objectives.
 

Friday, February 9, 2024

A Bed of Roses - Favorite Foods


POCHTECA
Bleeding Scorpion - Roast bicep w chilies
Jumping Spider - Turkey tamale
Stone Hammer - Tlaxcalli (tortilla) w guacamole
Two Legs - Snow w honey
Yellow Thorn - Quail egg
 
ADVANCED PREGENS
Consecrated to He Who Lowers His Head - Pozole w manflesh
Pepper Knight - Spicy chocolate
Pierced By Thorns - Roasted pumpkin seeds
Smoking Lilly - Fresh pineapple
Toppled Cactus - Stewed tomato

Monday, February 5, 2024

Unknown Armies: A Bed of Roses Playtest One

The year was 1521. The place was Tenochtitlan, head of the Triple Alliance of the Aztec Empire. The island-city had just been conquered following a ninety day siege by a coalition of Spanish Conquistadors and their Nahua-speaking allies from neighboring city-states. Weakened by starvation and smallpox, the surviving Mexica were at the mercy of their conquerors’ insatiable lust for gold. 
 
William de Leftwich Dodge
 
In a Pochteca Guild Hall, four Aztecs were confined to a storeroom amid sacks of cocoa beans and bolts of cotton cloth - the majority of the Guild’s liquid wealth, which the Spaniards had no interest in.
  • Consecrated to Father Death, Warrior and elderly Eagle Knight
  • Jumping Spider, Merchant and luxury goods trader
  • Pepper Knight, Capsaicinurge and mighty warrior prone to ignominious pratfalls
  • Toppled Cactus, Fool and sideshow dwarf from the city's menagerie

Their hands were tied and they only had a moment to contemplate what they would do next, before a group of hairy men from the other side of the world hustled them out into the banquet hall.

Sunday, February 4, 2024

Maintenance and Preservation - Session Five

A surly middle aged man in a track suit stormed into the Clearmountain Central Services building. He cornered a pair of maintenance workers in the lobby and read them the riot act. His name was John "Johnny Boy" Benson, and they were responsible for the death of his nephew John Benson. Maintenance workers Pepper and Eddie patiently explained that Benson's soul was just fine in the jar where they stored it, and they had a plan to bring him back. Johnny Boy wasn't having it, but the one legged supervisor interrupted him before the situation turned violent.
 

Johnny Boy tried to flex his authority as a Costa Nostra hood, but Kurta wasn't intimidated. If John Benson was under the protection of a Sicilian family, it was that family's responsibility to protect him from the depredations of a rival crime syndicate. And Johnny Boy was far from home, if he wanted to cause trouble in Clearmountain then the Ponda Ray family would be happy to take care of him.
 
Fortunately cooler heads prevailed, and the maintenance workers explained their plan: they would take John Benson's body and the jar containing his soul down to the crypt beneath the Serpent Ruins and resurrect him. Johnny Boy insisted on coming with them, to make sure they didn't fuck it up.
 

Sunday, January 28, 2024

Maintenance and Preservation - Session Four


The peg-legged maintenance superintendent of Clearmountain Central Services had a problem. The recent round of earthquakes was barely noticeable on the surface, but it had wreaked minor havoc on infrastructure in the undercity. Chemical sensors in an underground cistern showed contamination by an unknown and potentially dangerous source, presumably ruptured and leaking into the pond as a result of the seismic disturbance. Pollution of a subterranean graywater pond was not itself an issue, but if it were to flood and back up into the main stormwater system...

Pepper and John Benson were joined by new hires Eddie and Gary on their expedition to the undercity to fix the problem. The underworld map suggested two angles of attack to the previously unvisited node: entry through the defunct subway station below the railyard, or entry through the old bathhouse in the northeast of the city. They had heard rumors from the Exploration Project that the bathhouse entrance would take them to the cistern, though the exact route was obscure.

Peg Leg gave the team some useful tools before sending them out: a spray tank of sealing foam (somewhere between caulk and insulation) and a thermal lance (a cool and incredibly dangerous cutting torch that used pure oxygen and an acetylene torch to ignite a tube full of steel rods as fuel). Then they set off for the bathhouse, excited to scout a new dungeon entrance.

Sunday, January 21, 2024

Maintenance and Preservation - Session Three


A warning light came on in an old control room at the Clearmountain Central Services headquarters. The one-legged boss didn't know what it meant, but he knew it signified something bad happening in the undercity. Someone needed to go down there and fix whatever was wrong. That someone was veteran maintenance men John Benson and Professor Ethan Boule, assisted by three new hires: Charlie, Pepper and Yana.

The group checked the approximate position of the problem sector against the underworld locations the veteran explorers had already visited. The zone in question was on level two of the undercity, which they knew how to get to through the geothermal caves. But one of the new hires heard there was also a hatch in the underground frontier which led further into the depths, which would shorten the journey significantly. The closest entrance to the frontier was the suburban house used by the mobsters. The boss told them it had been filled in. They suspected he might have been given some bad information, and decided to check it out. They got into the work truck and drove across town.

Sunday, January 14, 2024

Maintenance and Preservation - Session Two

The Necropolis by Eric He
 
Three technicians met the one-legged boss on the roof of the Clearmountain Central Services building, under the arched glass that enclosed the grimy tiled roof.

  • Professor Ethan Boule, disgruntled lecturer at Clearmountain College
  • John Benso, experienced maintenance worker from a long line of cowardly adventurers
  • Kovie Fauxer, nonverbal engineering student at Clearmountain College
The mission was this: Tectonic activity in the tunnels beneath the university had severed a fiber optic cable. The maintenance crew had to find the damaged cable in the limestone caves, descend into the next level of the undercity and link it up to the other end of the cable.
 
Based on the zones Benson explored on the last job, the closest underworld entrance to the caves was the necropolis. There was a mausoleum with a staircase leading down into the tombs. They tossed their gear in the work truck and set off across town.
 

Thursday, January 11, 2024

Unknown Armies: In Defense of Milestones

 
In Unknown Armies 3e, the players and GM create the characters and setting together at the beginning of the game, all pointed at a shared objective chosen by the group. The player created objective is supposed to have GM created "milestones" that grant percentage point increases to the score when accomplished during the course of play. 
 

Tuesday, January 9, 2024

Fear & Hunger: Singing Sand Masterpost

David Roberts
 
In the year 1913, archaeologists, scholars and financiers from across the Old World descend on the Valley of the Gods in Songhai, Abyssonia, where scholars from the Temple of the Sun Amon have just unearthed the tomb of the legendary New God Djoser Parahu Daoud. 
 
An adventure in the style of The Mummy and Raiders of the Lost Ark, set in the world of Fear & Hunger. Contains the rules and mechanics necessary to play, along with the pregens, scenario documents and maps.

Monday, January 8, 2024

Maintenance and Preservation - Session One


In the basement of the Clearmountain Central Services building, the sweaty one-legged head of the Maintenance & Preservation laid out a job for his newest hire: a drain in the undercity had become clogged. The new guy needed to go down there and unblock the flooded chamber before the whole storm system backed up. He warned the new hire to be careful of deadly traps, wild animals and unfriendly underworld denizens - he wasn't a police officer or social worker, he had a job to do and an important part of that was not getting killed.

The closest entrance to the undercity was in the garbage dump in the northwest. The new hire locked and tagged out the trash mincer and climbed inside the machine, slithering down the handholds into the depths below.

Monday, January 1, 2024

Dungeon23 Recap

Jean BĂ©raud
 
Besides my other RPG stuff, I completed five "dungeons" in 2023. 
  1. The Temple of the Crying Buddha - Unknown Armies 3e. During the 1937 Rape of Nanking, a squad of Japanese soldiers are sent to retrieve an artifact from a hidden temple mysteriously untouched by the looting.
  2. The Mountain of the Mad Marquis - d20 fantasy. The legendary bandit Gorrister the Great was last seen descending into the ruined DeCavalier estate on the edge of civilization. There's a price on his head, but the real question is what he went looking for.
  3. Dungeon Crawling Double Feature - Unknown Armies 3e. The Four Adventurers descend into the underworld in search of occult power, then use their discoveries to raid the Old King's fortress and topple the Monarchy.
  4. The Cage Cup - Unknown Armies 3e drinking game. In the year 143 BC, a party of Slaves is caught in the Roman Republic's violent suppression of the Bacchanalia. Their only hope to escape the bloodshed is the power of the wine god himself.
  5. Singing Sand - Delta Green dungeon crawl in the world of Fear & Hunger. Feature complete, awaiting a third playtest. The year is 1913, the place the ancient land of Abyssonia, where archaeologists have just uncovered the lost tomb of a New God.
My next project is a hex crawl.