Riverboat Gambler Session Ten

Mayer 

 

Jack Fatherd, Roddy Applecreek and Datura the Elf led a squad of Hsigo into the mastaba. They entered on the third level and took a spiral staircase down to the bottom floor, following the tracks left by the birds. The bottom floor landing had four stone doors, one in each direction.

• North, illustrated with images of crocodiles. The door was open, the tracks led through.
• West, illustrated with a man descending into a watery abyss
• South, illustrated with a sarcophagus
• East, illustrated with a baboon headed man and a beetle headed woman.

Jack opened the southern door in hopes of finding treasure. He stopped in his tracks when he noticed a slot in the ceiling, where a stone slab could descend and trap him in the room.

Datura followed the tracks into the north room. The seven surviving giant woodpeckers stood around a pool filled with sand. They gave warning cries. Datura shot one of the wounded birds and they attacked as a flock. The east door opened and a flood of animal mummies spilled out into the landing.

Undercroft: The Mines

Parker

 

The mines beneath the City were officially closed long ago when they ran dry, and when buildings began to collapse. The opening of the Underworld has filled them up with dungeon monsters and ignited a gang war over the remaining treasure.

Undercroft: The Weald

 

Diefenbach

The Weald is a place where the natural world thrives in the lightless depths of the Undercity, defying physical laws that demand sun and rain for things to grow.

Undercroft: Dungeon Builder and The Weird

This is a dungeon builder for His Majesty The Worm. You use it a bit like the City Builder in the corebook, but for the underworld. It’s based on the one from Esoteric Enterprises, my favorite dungeon builder ever.

His Majesty The Worm Monster Mash: The Triplets

 

The Triplets are a pair of Dark Elf twins raised in a Church orphanage and a Brain Spider who “adopted” them after they aged-out of the program. They like the dungeon because nobody charges them rent or makes them perform religious rituals, and if someone hits you you’re allowed to hit them back. They’re like the Guild, completing Contracts while pursuing personal motivations. They’re tough and confident adventurers but lack emotional maturity.

 

The Great Glass Mountain Masterpost

Shishkin

 

...euhemeristic view that the Myths are exaggerations of real historical events. The Beast began as a real animal, a boar or bear or auroch that achieved local notoriety by killing a warchief. The Goblin was an outlaw or social bandit with a physical deformity. The countervailing view holds that the myths are allegories for societal ills or vehicles for moral lessons, with each chronicler adding successive reinterpretations according to the social mores of their age. In this view the mysterious arrival of the Legion late in the tale smacks of an early modern poet inserting their caricature of man under protoindustrial capitalism into the mythic setting: the herd of identical semislaves who speak only in obedient grunts and trudge forward to hack away at their foes with mass produced weaponry.

The paucity of written sources from the period when the events in question allegedly took place makes archaeological evidence difficult to interpret. The chained effigy in the chapel at Widowsgrove, which Lazenby initially believed was the actual resting place of the character from the tale, may postdate the earliest versions of the story. A tomb decorated with images of by-then already mythical heroes every child grew up idolizing and every ruler wished to emulate. The image of the Horned Knight likewise appears in later manuscript illustrations but primary source carvings are difficult to disentangle from similar images of...

-Seekers of Seekers of Myths. Messer, Ishizaka, Kadminion et al. The Archaeological Survey, vol. 55 

The Great Glass Mountain - Music Post

 

Lacombe

 

The Great Glass Mountain was named after the song of the same name from Judero. I don't usually use music with lyrics but I got to deploy that one in-game and I really liked the way it turned out. 

The Great Glass Mountain - Session Fifteen

 

Schreyer

 

Queen Valenta the Chain Knight rode north out of the capitol. She rode hard and when she crossed the river to reach the woods where the Company found the Crown, she made a rough crossing that left her horse shivering so she had to dismount and wipe him down. As she toweled the beast it occurred to her that this might be the last time she did this. Anything she did now, she might never do again.

 

Riverboat Gambler - Session Nine

 

Datura, Jack and Roddy set off on their Giant Bats to recover guano from the tomb. It was within walking distance but it was still night and the Plain was covered with undead. The tomb was on a hill surrounded by a thick stand of cacti that stopped the zombies and ghouls from getting in. The Gamblers landed their flying foxes atop the mound of rock.

 

Two blue flashes over the horizon lit the plain to the north. A moment later, two more. Two double taps for a total of four. The distant sound of thunder came later, indicating the source was leagues away. Four total blasts was more than a single Blue Dragon (which they had spotted) could fire in a day. Roddy suspected there were two, who each used their breath weapon twice and held the third in reserve. But where did the second one come from?

 

The courtyard outside the tomb, surrounded by the cacti, had a weathered statue of a jackal headed man. Jack took a silver ring off the stone sentinel's finger and pocketed it for later identification. He detected Cactus Cats hiding in the teddy bear cacti. The adventurers headed inside.

 

His Majesty The Worm Monster Mash: Cave Hulk

Cave Hulks are enormous burrowing mantises with a confusing gaze attack. They straddle the line between endurance and ambush predators. They burst out of the wall when you least expect it and attack you. If you’re on your guard they follow you, burrowing out of sight and waiting for a moment of weakness. Their favorite time to strike is during the Camp phase, especially after following you and building up an appetite.

 

His Majesty The Worm Monster Mash: Dark Creepers

Dark Creepers are dungeon thieves who live to steal magic items. Dowries of arcane treasure are an essential part of Dark Creeper marriage proposals. Creepers who don’t steal are condemned to bachelorhood/spinsterdom, giving them a powerful incentive to rob adventurers. Turn out the lights, grab the goods, run as fast as you can.

 

The Colonel's Table: Special Orders

Magick is a force for liberation.

 

It could be. It should be. The people who have supernatural power don't want to share. The people who have mundane power don't want to compete with supernatural power. Together they engage in a tacit conspiracy to suppress the magickal revolution through the coercive apparatus of the state and through organizations operating in the occult underground.

 

Undercroft: Books and Papers

Grutzner

 

Draw from the Major Arcana to get a book.  

 

Number, title,  

author

language, media, 

description.

BFRPG Field Guide Omnibus Test Drive: And May You Reach The Moon

Cabrera

 

Following the death of the Slave King, the resurgent Mountainhomes sent expeditions to restore the far flung fortresses of the old Dwarven civilization. HANGEDSCEPTRES wasn’t on the list. It was was remote, strategically useless, and based on the available records, poor in minerals. The Dwarves needed quick wins to show everyone the project had legs.

Early reclamations were a smash hit. The underkingdoms caught fortress fever, sparking a gold rush to reoccupy the remaining sites (and establish new ones). The first scouts to HANGESCEPTRES reported an infestation of Wyverns circling the peak, along with smoke and snowmelt indicating the site was already inhabited.

The Great Glass Mountain - Session Fourteen

Friedrich

 

Outside the Great Glass Mountain, the Glass Knight asked his wife Valenta how many of Alexander's men she let into the castle with him. Two bands of mountaineers, all of whom were allowed to keep their weapons. The King nodded. He could work with this. He told the others to follow his lead, except for Valenta who wouldn't be part of the deception. The important thing, if things got violent (and it wasn't guaranteed that they would), was to never present Alexander with more than two opponents at once. That would keep his War Knight powers from kicking in. The War Knight knew that, and would try to fight his way out and engage the whole group. That was why Shoat was in charge of the entrance. In his Siege Plate nothing could move a door if he braced it. 

 

With the plan figured out, he entered the Great Hall with his entourage, stopping only to give instructions to Charcabol's men at arms.

 

Riverboat Gambler - Session Eight

Jack, Roddy and Datura supervised the excavation of the debris obstructing the ships. They mounted up and used the shallow draft of their vessels to skate over the thin layer of water covering the rock fill. Grain barges coming down the river would be in trouble, but they were on a mission to pursue a dangerous fugitive and couldn't wait.

The Mowers held funeral games aboard the Bottle Full Of Rain for the four dead cultists. They wrestled one another and challenged Alice Woodfingers. She denied them catharsis. The strength of her biomechanical arms was given by the Goddess, it wasn't fair to pit them against the strength of men. One man responded that an unfair contest between man and God was the essence of life itself. Alice nodded and tossed him into the river.

 

BFRPG Field Guide Omnibus Test Drive: Into the Cheese Cave

 

The Old King jealously hoarded his Wishes. He raised a head of Cow Dragons and accumulated a strategic reserve of their Wish granting cheese in hidden caves. When he wanted to make a Wish he gave precise instructions to an expendable cultist screened for absolute loyalty, then fed her bite after bite until she either got lucky or instantly died (at which point he called up the next victim in line). This proved unreliable because the cultists came from enclosed orders who revered him as a God. As much as they wanted to do what he said, they couldn’t resist wishing for what they actually wanted, which was usually “be impregnated by the King” or “be lifedrained by the King in a moment of timeless sustained ecstasy.” It took a lot of work and a lot of dead cultists and he only messed with it when there was no way to get what he wanted through cunning or brute force.

During the rebellion the Cow Dragons were slaughtered in their kraals by a strain of psychic encephalopathy brewed in the plague pits of the Goblin alchemists, bringing an end to the whole program.

Or so everyone thought.

 

Undercroft: Small Change

Knaus

More treasure tables for His Majesty The Worm. This list is here to fill lesser dungeon room and the pockets of low level slobs. For big ticket items use the previous Undercroft tables.

Undercroft: Treasures For His Majesty The Worm

Lagrenée

 

I'm working on an Esoteric Enterprises style dungeon generator for His Majesty The Worm. In order to do that I made some treasure tables for stocking the generated rooms.

 

THE TABLES 

In the below tables, a single card drawn from the Minor Arcana list yields either a magic item, a magic weapon/armor, or treasure worth 90ish gold pieces. Use that to calibrate when/how often you want to draw when filling up chests, hiding things in rooms, filling the pockets of the scariest monsters...