Riverboat Gambler: Settlement Gazetteer

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

GENERIC SETTLEMENT TYPES

Settlements are close to rivers because proximity to flowing water cools the surrounding terrain enough to survive in the open without protective gear. If someone settles far from a river it's to extract a valuable resource, valuable enough to pay either for protective measures or for a serious risk of injury and death. 

FARM 

The Grain Cult is the primary sponsor of the colonization effort, per their holy mission to tile the world with farms and spread agriculture to the nomads by bread or by sword.

Roll a D8 to see who the farmers are.

• 1: Penal transportees shipped to the Plain. Guarded by a mix of soldiers and trustees recruited from the prisoners.
• 2: Indentured laborers working off the cost of church magic. Major healing or resurrection contracts carry lengthy terms of service.
• 3: Orcs or other creatures of the Plain. Some are attracted by the benefits of agriculture (and gunpowder weapons) over nomadic life, others adopt settled life under threat of extermination by scalphunters.
• 4-5: Sharecroppers or hired farmhands working someone else's land, either the Grain Cult's or a corporation's.
• 6-7: Homesteaders granted land by Trade Wardens as a fast way to populate the frontier territory and generate taxable revenue.
• 8: Retired Adventurers (mid to high level) carving out their own piece of heaven in the hell of the Plain. Fortified and well armed.

Necromantic farms worked by skeletons do exist on the lawless frontier but are considered an abomination by the Grain Cult and destroyed wherever found.

Indentured or convict laborers work centralized haciendas with barracks style housing. Farmsteads worked by free laborers are more spread out, with homesteads no more than a few miles from a centrally located mill/bakery, Grain Church and shipping dock.
 

Roll a D8 to see what is grown at a farm. 

• 1-3: Edible crops. Produce grown on the Plain is delicious. The hot weather combined with the cold water produces some of the best fruit and vegetables in the world. 
• 4-5: Animals. Mundane creatures with tolerance for the desert, or a monster ranch for exotic beasts (destined for the meatcamps).
• 6-7: Cash crop. Coffee, tea, tobacco, grapes, mushrooms, sweet pods or rock nuts. If they can get Lost World crops like sugarcane and chocolate to grow on the Plain they can break Iron Cup's monopoly.
• 8: Mandrake plantation. Farmers with earplugs yank little vegetable men out of the ground and butcher them screaming to make potions. Plants fertilized with corpse semen harvested from perpetually hanged and resurrected farmers with taste for asphyxiation.

By night Hogman's Plain is infested with night creatures - Leucrocottas and Ghouls and Zombies and other undead beasts that crawl out of the sand to attack the living. Roll a D8 to see how a settlement keeps them out.

• 1-4: Canals with swift flowing water from a nearby river, which night creatures cannot cross.
• 5-6: Fortification dug into bedrock. Occupants seal themselves in at night.
• 7: Continual Light spell kills monsters 
• 8: Perimeter consecrated by Clerics, monsters cannot enter.

Farmers are typically armed with a mix of gunpowder weapons and bows. The former is preferred for hunting and self defense but the latter allows for reuse of ammunition. Their morale is good while defending their homes and especially their children. Indentures and sharecroppers have worse morale and prisoners will turn on their captors or escape at the first opportunity.

Ken Currie

MEATCAMP
The magical revolution's demand for ancient artifacts and precious metals hauled out of tombs is equaled only by its appetite for magical reagents. Those come from inside monsters, which the Plain is full of. Dunemen and Scalphunters and Adventurers haul their kills to centralized camps which pay bounties and chop shop the bodies. The parts are packed in salt or ice or dried or pickled. Fleshwrights keep severed organs alive with tinctures of fresh blood or seawater. 

Your average meatcamp produces a column of greasy smoke visible miles away. Normal people think it smells disgusting, adventurers are overwhelmed with nostalgia. Their jaws tingle and itch as they drool, remembering their first kills. Even close to the river, bodies putrefy fast in the intense heat. The water shines and glows strange colors downstream and isn't safe to drink.

Meatcamps are made of temporary structures, usually erected over the foundations of ruined buildings near a river. The process starts in the "cutting room", a large awning full of incense to keep the flies away as the flaymen chop up the carcasses. The parts go to the tryworks for rendering down fat, a tannery reeking of chemicals for converting hides to leather, a smokehouse for preserving edible meat, a taxidermy shop for trophies, a fermentarium with vats of brine for pickling, and an alchemical workshop for delicate work that must be done on site.

On any given day a camp will have visiting adventurers, a handful of casters who supervise the process and use spells to preserve the best bits, and a lot of burly slaughterhouse workers, tanners and teamsters. The workers are a mix of humans, demihumans and disfavored monster races who found the frontier colonies more hospitable than the prejudiced imperial core. Ogres, Mutants, Cave Elves from the slave diaspora created by the Old King's wars against the Abyss... The average worker in a Meatcamp is desensitized to violence and has better morale than a commoner. They eat anything that isn't reserved for the markets back home and a few things that are. The owners accept a small amount of leakage. Camp wizards sometimes craft Flesh Golems made from monster bits for monotonous heavy work. They have to constantly replace the parts as they rot away in the sun.

Most camps are independently run. They sell bulk monster parts to Potion Addict but sometimes contract directly with mages in the imperial core, sending orders by courier ships chartered from the Brilg and Spowegg Concern. They keep cash on hand to pay out bounties to Adventurers, Type F treasure guarded by the toughest and most trustworthy brutes in the camp, plus whatever spells the casters can trap it with. The coins are a mix of hard currency and scrip redeemable at the Grange bank.

Every camp has an ecumenical shrine full of images to the popular Gods. Flaymen nail up fingers lost in accidents as offerings to Knacker and Tower of Pain.

Tom Baxa

RESOURCE EXTRACTION

The primary resource extracted from Hogman's Plain is treasure, hauled out of the endless tombs beneath the singing sand. Normal mining and quarrying isn't economical because of the danger and the cost of transportation, pending large scale alteration of the climate (Clerical weather control is the domain of Catchpole and his rival Storm King, both hostile to the Grain Cult). The only raw materials extracted on the Plain are those which cannot easily be found in more hospitable climes.

 

Meteor fragments and associated impactites are used to create handicrafts immune to earth magic. Meteor "mines" are wide pits where workers excavate huge amounts of earth to sift for metal and glass. Besides ankhegs a common hazard of meteor sifting is attack by spirits. Rocks from space host all manner of alien intelligences, ghosts and elementals.

Mummified Wood occurs when a river shifts its course and the trees that once grew on its bank quickly die and desiccate. Over the next century, extremophilic bacteria native to the plain consume the cellulose and replace it with a material prized for its great strength and light weight. Competition from Druid Sculpted Fogwood has driven down prices but Mummified Wood is still valuable enough to be worth logging.

Crude oil is foul smelling and flammable but prized by necromancers because it's a corpse tar made from millions of years of dead primordial beings. Magical experiments using oil as "programmable matter" have so far ended in gruesome failure, but the potential is there and the price per-barrel remains high enough to justify drilling for it on the Plain.

Mines and logging camps have a similar organization and racial makeup to meatcamps, Technical work is often done by Dwarves, Cave Gnomes or Pech, while the hard labor is done by an ecumenical mix of humans, demihumans and monstermen. Mines don't use penal labor. The Grain Cult lobbied the Genius Loci for an exclusive lease on convicts transported to the Plain. Flesh Golems tend to fall apart fast in the harsh conditions. Stone, Bone and Wood Golems work fine for unskilled tasks.

Workers survive the lethal heat by staying underground most of the time. Airflow is provided by a system of bellows articulated by magic, animals or strong monsters. If the ventilation system fails mass suffocation or hyperthermia is common. For surface work they use potions of Endure Elements, Lizard skin cloaks to regulate body temperature, or just outheal the damage (Cure Wounds, Troll Blood). Potions are expensive and this is why only the most valuable resources are economical to harvest.

WIZARD LAB

Wizards come to the Plain to do necromantic or alchemical research. Despite advances in preservation it's both cheaper and more hygenic the closer you get to the supply. Plus a lot of them do illegal research you couldn't get away with back home, mutating and vivisecting humanoids.

The typical Wizard Lab is an old tomb, cleared of monsters and secured against intrusion from hungry night creatures. Magic users prefer Skeletons and Zombies for defense and labor because they don't mutiny or ask for pay. Mages without the ability to animate and control undead recruit Gnolls, Orcs and Mantis Men, backed up by giant desert wildlife such as snakes and spiders. Per C2 the Gnoll art of scrimshaw lets them create crude "programmable" spells and the wizards incorporate this into their traps.

Wizard Labs hold one each of type C N and O treasure plus any from NPCs and creatures garrisoned there.

David Roberts

UNIQUE BUILDINGS

GRANGE HALL

The Grain Cult doesn't use coins for economic transactions with its followers. Transporting piles of gold and silver around an area with no road network and a serious monster problem is inefficient and a great way to lose all your money. They use an internal network of credit and keep the actual money in a ruined palace they refurbished as a Grange Hall. The money is used for transactions outside the cult or when members want to cash out their accounts.

The bank is run by Smaragdino the Grain Cleric. His power level means he spends most of his time blessing crops, creating water, sanctifying water and curing disease rather than doing anything administrative. Which suits him fine. Banking is mostly about maintaining customer confidence and if people see him out in the field they know everything's working the way it's supposed to.

The Minotaur Alejandra is in charge of security. A dairy cow uplifted by the Grain Goddess after she stomped a young Blue Dragon to death when he robbed her owner's farm, she likes her position of authority but finds guarding a pile of money dull. She leaves superficial "weaknesses" in the defense system to encourage robbery attempts so she can ambush and fight intruders.

The palace is staffed with a mix of Threshers, Mowers, Reapers, Hayseeds, Harvestmen and other hoods from the Cult's supernumerary militant orders. Some of these are Clerics and the rest Fighters. They guard the palace and use it as a base for punitive expeditions into the waste whenever someone attacks a settlement under the Cult's protection, killing random monsters and monster-people as a deterrent to future raids.

The tunnel system beneath the palace is patrolled by Shambling Mounds and the the Type H hoard itself is guarded by a Harvest Avatar and a cadre of Harvest Minions (Monster Overhaul). The big flaw in the defenses is the lack of air cover. Alejandra put in an order for cannons on anti-air mounts to shoot at dragons but the shipment was delayed.

POTION ADDICT
The Adventurers Guild Potion Addict sells supplies in dangerous locations where the comforts of civilization are scarce. Their fortified outposts are combination general stores, bars, hotels and fences. They carry enough cash to buy treasure from tomb raiders, confident they can auction the items to interested buyers in more civilized climes.

The Hogman's Plain Potion Addict outlet is built on an ancient Mastaba, adobe fortifications nestled atop the old step pyramid. A bar with a back deck looks out over a riverfront pier where boats unload supplies and adventurers bound for the funeral plains beyond. The patron God of Potion Addict is the master alchemist Great Work, depicted in a tobacco-stained wall mural a hermaphrodite with a one-eyed pyramid for a head. The place is full of Adventurers and former Adventurers employed as guards.

Potion Addict is shrewder and more subtle than their chief rival Iron Cup, buying off local monsters rather than exterminating them. The shop is run by the Androgynosphinx Astarte, who once devoured travelers to the Mastaba but now feasts metaphorically on the flood of archaeological finds dug up by adventurers in the ancient graves that honeycomb the region. Per the Monster Overhaul the Sphinx can see through most dirty tricks and protect the shop's Type H treasure hoard. They don't like identifying magic items because it makes people less willing to sell them, but can be conned into doing so by appeals to their vanity.

Von Stuck

PARKING LOT

We can use the Monster Manual generators (Peasants, Townsfolk, Mercenaries, Wizards, Adventurers) and maybe a few from Magical Industrial Revolution (Industrialists, Wizards) to create named NPCs at any of these settlements.

  

Hogman's Plain is based in part on Death Valley and in part on the Valley of the Kings, and thanks to Dariusz Sitek we have numerous tomb floorplans from all parts of Egypt. We can use these for Wizard labs or for tombs found randomly while exploring the plain itself (might give these their own post).

We need encounter tables for desert adventuring which let you run into people from all these places, plus monsters and other Adventurers looking for tombs to plunder.

Also

• Poleviks as guard labor for convicts and indentured servants
• Scarecrows for magic defense.
• Gauchos herding live monsters on cattle drives
• Hermitages and shrines from other religions
• A Blue Dragon
• Mummies