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.