In the City at night

It takes two days of canal travel from the Eastern and Western canal to reach the Docklands after one has passed through the shadowy enormity of the Capital's great walls and the mercenary militia and trade towns that cluster about the gates.  Two days of distant spires, and endless vistas of ruin as the bargemen pole furiously up the green canals - past fishing rafts, and under the black snapping flags above the dens of feral thralls.  Through expanses of arcane lilies that project the ghostly images of ancient beauties from their blooms, and over the fish gnawed bones of thousands of years worth of suicides and murder victims.

Hubert Robert - 1789

The Capital sprawls at the confluence of two great rivers, bound and channeled within the great circuit of it's two hundred foot, bonewhite walls and emerging again as canals that lead outward, rays from a dying sun.  For even though the Capital is dying, the spires of the Imperial Presence still gleam in the sun with its ancient shadow stretched out to cover entire blocks and neighborhoods of insula.  Within however is only a wilderness of dust and great polities of vermin, the street a mazed jungle of imperfection and abandoned buildings.   Imperial tower blocks stand in indestructible bonewhite and magically extruded stone, but the less permanent materials of their interiors are rotted and burnt away to leave only regal shells for the pigeons to roost beneath.

Urban Life is limited to to the North Eastern Quadrant of the Capital, around the foreign quays and the outlanders market where the men of the Resurgent Kingdoms gather to trade the salvaged wealth and mysteries of empire for the earthly dross of grain, dried meat and clean wine. Only here are the canals clean of unnatural life, and the night streets safe from haints, ghouls, blackhearts, and ferals.  Magical sinks cover much of the Capital's Southern half, the once towering factor hives collapsed into themselves, teaming with feral thralls and worse - the roaming sports of curdled magic: parliaments of owlbears, cockatrice, hollow men and even the rumored demon.

Hubert Robert Again

Within the civilized Northern half of the capital the dockyards form a new and growing metropolis of Resurgent adventurers rebuilding from rubble as locust like they plunder the Capital's ancient glories or trade them for necessities and cheap intoxicants. Swaggering mercenary guards, white haired men and women of the Pine Hells, or wilder places that once were the Empire, provide rough security to those who can pay and it is not uncommon to find such oddities as a pair grey skinned, lamp eyed Ibian wrestlers, guarding a hook handed corsair captain from the Southern Isles or a merchant caste family protected entirely by amazons from across the mud sea clad in the corroded golden plates worked from the shells of ancient automatons.

Beyond the dockyards are the mansions of the trade and craft caste families, both afraid of the ways the Resurgent newcomers ignore the all consuming Imperial system of courtesy and caste, using violence as a negotiation tactic, and intrigued the Resurgent appetites for Imperial craft, salvage and trade. Even with the new trade most of the craft and merchant families ape the manners of the nobility and remain immured by custom within their mansions, or possibly extinct - a few bones in the high rooms of a darkened and moldering house.  Here and there though there are signs of growth and life, with gardens that are more then overgrown tangles of magically augmented plants, and windows that glow with light in the darkness.

Surrounding the Palace Spire itself are the Spires of the nobility, a world of their own, still inhabited by the degenerate and decadent remainders of the caste and their servitors.  Many towers are empty, but a salvager can never tell if somewhere within a hundred stories of crumbling opulence a great magus noble remains, surrounded by her pack of dedicated servitors and ready to protect her inherited mountains of rotting finery with fel sendings or life draining sorcery. 

Hubert Robert 1783

To wander the streets of the Captial is too witness broken wonders built on a scale larger then human ambition and abandoned because their care is beyond human ability.  It is to age and decline in every crack and worn stone block and to know that humanity's best days are behind it, to feel one's own insignificance, overshadowed by the past.


Sight in the moonlit Capital Streets, random Locations (A-Z or 5D6)

Fallen Empire, Carcosan Nonsense - A table of metaphors, lies, and explanations.

Inspired largely by this post at Rotten Pulp, and by a nice big hangover binge on Calvino, I've prepared this handy table.  Useful perhaps for when people ask scholars or oracles how the game world came to be a sublime ruin teetering toward the aesthetic of grotesque.  Of course you might find it useful for other reasons as well - for example I'm keeping it open on my phone to help talk to relatives at Thanksgiving.

Michael S. Hutter paintings are always good for inspiration.

Curse of Strahd - Table of Cheap Jewelry (and implicit criticism)

A PRELUDE TO A REVIEW

My readers may think that I have absolutely no time for the tabletop products produced by Wizard's of the Coast and would rather laud "Maze of the Blue Medusa" and everything Hydra Co-op puts out, but this isn't entirely true.  Let's face it OSR/DIY D&D types, WOTC has the best market penetration and is going to be far more widely read then any other tabletop product.  I want these products to be good, I want people who plunk down $50 for a hardcover high production value (though frankly not up to the production value of the better LOTFP products and Maze of the Blue Medusa) book to think "D&D is awesome!" - they just haven't been in my experience.  Until now(ish)!

A sad lady one meets early in the Curse of Strahd
one of many decent, topical pieces of art

Yeah I'll say it Curse of Strahd is good.  It has problems, some the typical Hickman problems of being campy and thinking it's more clever then it is (a problem that almost all OSR/DIY self published products - say "Maze of the Blue Medusa" and "Slumbering Ursine Dunes" arguably share in a different ways and degrees) and some typical WOTC problems of trying to cross market product and play to video-game sensibilities (that no OSR product - even the worst bit of Gygax emulating randomly generated from the 1st edition DMG cruft - shares).  I may write a full review at some point, but really it doesn't have unforgivable problems and provides plenty of material for a GM (as well as good GMing advice - shockingly). 

One thing Curse of Strahd suffers from, though at least they are trying - clearly they are trying - is mediocre treasure. I can't shake the suspicion that 5E doesn't see treasure as important and still relies heavily on the idea of character advancement through dynamic 'combat as sport' murder (of baddies, clearly only the murder of baddies) which I like to call "Judgmental Murderhoboism", but at least they are trying to make treasure interesting.  One area where Curse of Strahd fails utterly, predictably and awfully is the repeated use of "Cheap Jewelry" - often found in wholesale lots and always worth 25GP as treasure.  Now eliding the question of if 2.5 lbs, or say 2 for craftsmanship, using the classic D&D weight for GP, of gold can be considered 'cheap' (and one can't blame Curse of Strahd for this system and genre wide failure), I think this was a missed opportunity to add a lot of evocative setting  detail to the adventure.  It's funny too, because the module does provide numerous small random tables for an ongoing joke about macabre children's toys - clearly the wit and wisdom was there - but the two pages a good 'cheap jewelry' table would take were less important then a few more paragraphs of typically Hickman purple prose about the twisted narcissistic love of Strahd or some copy repeating the idea that the vampire lord is evil via more boxed text.

Barovians from Curse of Strahd - again pretty good art that is setting specific.

I give you the "Barovian table of Cheap Jewelry" below:

The Haunted Dungeon - a series of tables

IN THE SHADOWS   OF   THE   DEAD

One of Goya's creepier etchings

Sarin the Mambo immediately knew something was wrong as the familiar hatch swung open. The pair of Shrine Fanatics, their unarmored bodies covered in devotional tattoos of ancient mechanical schematics - meanings lost, but the ancient clean lines still a lure to protective spirits of the vessel - could even sense something uncanny.  The two men, emboldened by the priestess' presence, cranked away at the hatch’s manual override wheel, but their loud chanting of the 537^th sutra to the Prime Engine shrank to a whisper. Beyond the hatch, the formerly domesticated companionway leading to a slaughterhouse and several large, elementally powered meat freezers was wreathed in fog, fog and utter wrongness.  Sarin’s various fetishes of the Winding Gear, her patron, felt as if they were vibrating atop her armor and her frail elderly hand tightened involuntarily on the cord that held the heavy mace to her gauntlet.

Sarin didn’t even need to borrow the eyes of the Winding Gear spirit that “rode” her and filled her with its power to see that there was foul magic beyond the hatch.  It was as if death, hate and sorrow were pushing out from the peeling wall papers of the companionway beyond, weeping from around every bent rivet in the companionway walls beneath, and dripping like curdled oil from the ceiling.  The fog was the worst of it, light from the lanterns held by the Mambo’s companions would not penetrate more than a few feet into the shifting miasma whose swirls and eddies gave an impression of intentional, malicious movement.

The slaughterhouse had gone bad, and those who had died within had not merely risen as common revenants or individual spirits, but instead corrupted the whole of the region, the fear and horrors of their deaths leaking into the walls and fixtures of the slaughterhouse to turn the entire area into an expression of hate, fear and a deep abiding sense of betrayal that sought with inchoate fury to punish the living for its multitude of deaths.    

  

Starting Minor Magical Items For Darkly Haunted Noble Characters

THE TRUMPET UNBLOWN

A List of unique starting magical items for noble characters in my (admittedly underdeveloped) Fallen Empire setting.  Alternatively I suppose these are the minor items one finds in the crumbled ruins of decadent high-magic mansion, where thousands of years of ease and glory have given way to rot and rodents.

Your house has fallen, not once, not even twice, but like a tottering drunk, tumbling endlessly, colliding with fixed obstacles, cowering from imagined enemies and unprepared to face tomorrow.  Why do you alone see it? Your elders, the family head, the old retainers, the children, and even your peers are blind, wrapped up in false glories and an imagined past. While they sit in dark worm eaten parlors, clutching the greasy and threadbare arms of their patched tapestried thrones and waiting for the Empire’s return to fortune, you have calmly laid out the need for change.  Over meals of what were once decorative carp but are now your rubbery repast carved up on golden plates, you have shouted and raved for action.  In the mossy dripping blackness of the overgrown topiary garden you’ve intrigued and schemed.   

Your efforts have come to naught, your warnings, your rumor mongering, your pleas and prayers cannot move the fixed inertia of a Millennium's propriety and tradition.  Now there is only flight, clutching poorly prepared supplies and rushing for the unknown world beyond the mansions and spires.

Note the illustration are from a 1940's edition of Wuthering Heights (If the swarthy gentleman digging up a grave marked Catherine didn't clue you in.)

Underdark Musings - Company Game Trait Generator

At the very bottom of everything, the well stretching skyward, with the surface as distant as the radiant heavens of the Bother Gods, and for us equally unobtainable we took stock of who had survived slaughter by the maggot skinned beasts.  We sat around a meager fire making biscuits from the weevil rich flour  whose sacks had been torn in the combat.  Our only protection was a low roof of stone held by a myriad of pillars, an edifice much like a pier, but rising from the smooth dry stone of the cave.  As we sat, men and woman first tried to find those of their own country, or those who had made up the cliques and gangs in the camps above. 

The grim descent and the fight afterward had scattered and broken these chains of the past.  Amid the abattoir of our fellows, torn by the deep beasts, the past seemed less important then before, a rebirth from a womb of light and space into a place where darkness has twelve distinct varieties.  I found myself using the blade of the ax I had grabbed up in desperation to help the man next to me heat his doughy biscuits as well as my own. He was a lean and ageless man, and from his ragged robes I knew him to once have been a noble from the distant islands across the spotted sea.  From the scars of torture and the brands on his hands I also knew him to have been a sorcerer, who had somehow survived the special attentions of the Crusaders. He called me "Ax" from that day, and we became friends there. I for my part always called him as "Titter" from his strange laugh - in our own lands we would have clung to our proud traditions and he insisted on his title and honorifics while I demanded he respect the honors I once won in the City of Glass. 

- Testimony of fallen redeemer No. 34 at the Inquisitional inquest regarding the White Fortress massacres.

I was thinking again about running a 'company style' game, where the player select from a large pool of potential characters, but do not each 'own' a specific character. Obviously generating PCs quickly is essential in such a game, and as mentioned in previous posts on the subject the goal is to have a varied party of 'adventurers' each session with a trade off between leaving the best company members in camp or using them as characters in a specific session.  While stat lines can be generated quickly, and equipment becomes more a function of company stores then individual record sheets, I wanted to add a bit more to character generation so that the company members, most who will be little more then replacements or NPCs could be a bit more memorable.

To this end, below is a table of 100 Nicknames and Traits, many of which also adjust statistics so that a player will have something to go on when starting with a new PC.

Hooks and Rumors

I've been working on a few projects here and there, adventures that I hope to put up as a PDFs eventually. Some are nearly done, some long overdue, some new and barely outlines, but one of the things I have been focusing on is improving design and usability.  My past adventures, especially early ones like Obelisk of Forgotten Memories have a lot of content, but they are a bit of a mess.  I've been trying to improve the layout and utility of what I write and I think I have made some improvements. 

 

Rumors, always found in fantasy bars

The description box, encapsulating smell, lighting, treasure and perils in a given location is a good addition I think, as it provides at a glance what a GM needs to know to run the room, or better to job then a memory of the room description that the GM previously read might do alone.  With a personal solution to this basic location description in place I've been thinking more about the larger issue of scenario design, and the weaknesses I find when reading published adventures, specifically the B-series of modules, specifically the introductory hook and the rumor table.

Fallen Empire - Central Province Ruins

Ruins Of the Central Provinces

Pepinot Vex has set off across through the decaying grandeur of the Imperial Capitol and into the desolation of the Central Provinces.  The heartland of the Successor Empire, and the richest provinces during the thousand years of Imperial Peace, these lands are desolate now, clogged with ruins and soured by the esters of abandoned ancient magics. 

D20	Central Provinces Encounter Tables (Ruins)
1	A Coaching Inn, abandoned in the past two generations.  The core buildings of antediluvian bonewhite are surrounded by a sagging maze of later wood and stone construction.  The ruin looks uninhabited, but seems the sort of place that wildlife, bandits and arcane sports would congregate
2	A Coaching Inn, burnt timbers and frames jut from a pile tumbled stones. Only bright yellow mushrooms grow from the ashes so the fire was relatively recent or the ground is cursed with magical waste.  The inn was of modern construction and little remains above ground.  Careful searching will reveal a stone trapdoor that leads to the Inn’s former cellars.
3	Only a roadside sign, of weathered bonewhite, proclaiming “The Moneylender’s Folly” hints that a ruin of a coaching inn concealed in a dense growth of briar trees.  The ancient buildings have been melted to slag by some magical conflagration, but the foundations remain, filled with a maze of briar trees festooned with bone chimes and trained into a warren.
4	A Coaching Inn, bright pennants and bunting decorate a plastered white building roofed in blue tile and the sounds of a pianoforte tinkle out onto the road through an open window.  Approaching the ruin reveals that this is an illusion of prosperity a spectral remnant of the past, only single wall of the inn stands pitted and covered with mould.
5	A much worn coach of black polished wood rest on its side in the ditch, perhaps the conveyance of a member of the rural nobility.  Scattered around and within the coach are 1D4 badly mutilated bodies and the contents of several trunks (torn and soggy clothing).  The massacre appears recent (2D100 hours old).
6	Half buried in a hill a few hundred feet from the road are the gutted remains of an ancient bonewhite flying coach.  The cause of its crash is not evident, but its location provides an excellent overlook of the nearby countryside.
7	The bare outlines of farmland remain here: foundations, rotting wooden posts. More notably this large farm was once an orchard, and many of the trees, though long past their prime, are still covered in strange bright fruit of varieties now uncommon or unknown.
8	The low buildings of an ancient plantation are nearly invisible beneath a riot of fleshy purple vines, some as thick as a man’s waist.  Only a bell tower, molded in flow-stone with lost art, climbs above the overgrowth.  The vines are clearly a product magical corruption, and rustle with ominously.
9	A hamlet is visible from the road, its exact details masked by strange blurring.  Upon approaching to a few hundred feet the there is a sense of incredible wrongness about the place.  Within the haze of magical corruption figures still move, seemingly carrying on normal errands and work.  If observed for long enough the figures' movements repeat.
10	A peaceable looking thorp of modern construction, reed hovels surrounding a few substantial wooden buildings.  The entire thorp is mined and trapped so that individuals investigating the building will trip wires, step on buried or disturb carefully balanced triggers  and shatter glass orbs containing air flammable alchemical compounds.  The resulting fire will set off a conflagration as numerous barrels of oil and flammable straw pack the hamlet’s buildings.
11	A neatly kept Imperial messenger station stands near to the highway.  Its windows are shuttered, door locked, and horse paddock empty, but otherwise the post appears untouched by time.  The interior of the station barracks once housed a long squad of 18 vigiles, but now contain the body of one elderly man, who has rested dead in his bunk for at least a month, wearing the threadbare uniform of a forgotten legion.
12	Once a small rural garrison, this ruin shows the signs of titanic violence.  The walls of the fortified blockhouse have been blasted outward and the other buildings crushed from above.  All that remains of the garrison are ancient bone fragments and a few pieces of shredded armor
13	Scorch marks, small fires and shattered windows mark this mansion an empty ruin. The interior is covered in the graffiti of a redistributionist cult and the bodies of the lord and his family hang desiccated from the rafters of the great hall.
14	Once a stately carved stone manor, worn by eons of rain, now in a terrible state of ruin by neglect.  Still the vineyards that surround it are well trimmed and contain only the most gnarled of old vines rich in black fruit.
15	The pit’s sides are more slope then cliff, but they are clearly an old sinkhole.  At the center of this pit is a largely intact manor house, its roof collapsed on its upper level and its lower level collapsed onto the elaborate crypts and cellars that may have undermined the structure whose passages still gape in the pit's walls.
16	A nameless town, built around a distillery, now standing in ruins. The place appears to have died of neglect rather than violence, but careful examination of the buildings will discover repeated graffiti of the yellow plague sign.
17	This town was ancient, and once prospered on trade from the surrounding farms. It appears as if it was inhabited only recently, at least in some of the buildings closest to the road.  The rest of the ancient buildings contain only bones, human and animal, stacked in huge careful piles.
18	The crumbled hive of a factory looms, its high walls covered in vines and lichen.  The edifice seems to have been abandoned for centuries, but the descendants of its workforce may still reside within, feral a plague upon the countryside.
19	A line of stone hills, covered in an aggressive vibrantly green moss, mark the fall of an ancient stone war-titan across the road.  While the immediate path has been cleared, straying will enter the arcane sink created by the slowly dissipating magic of the ancient construction.  The effects of this pollution are minor as the fall occurred long ago, but strange life persists amongst the titan’s crumbled remains.
20	A bronze titan, 60’ tall and incredibly ancient was finally brought down here, likely in a skirmish between noble houses. The bulky wreck crushes a vineyard building, still partially intact, and the fruits in the fields beyond have grown wild and gigantic from the wreck’s magical emanations, making a fertile landscape for arcanovores.

I have decided that in any game of Fallen Empire played there is an additional stat, much like the stat for Sanity in Call of Cthulhu.  Exposure to magical pollution will slowly wear away this stat, and when it’s exhausted there will be a nice mutation table to roll on.  I might even consider allowing magic-users to burn this stat as a means of recasting spells.

Also given that the pernicious influence of magical radiation is a major setting component, I think that the Owlbear will be a commonly encountered monster, they are inexplicable horrors that persist on vermin and magical radiation after all.

It is Unsafe to Wander the Gloom Lit Red Channels and Purple Sucking Bogs of the Livid Fens

The Livid Fens are several thousand square miles of bogland South of Denethix along the River Effulent, between the Southern Certopsian Plains and the Sea. They are a strange place, shrouded in mists and lashed by scorching sun, seemingly without season. Teaming with life, the vegetation of the fens is unlike anywhere else, universally shades of red and purple, the Fen’s flora tastes of burning iron and grows in shapes that look profoundly alien even to the jaundiced eyes of the Fallen Age.  Fecundity brings wealth, and the fens have made many fortunes animal products (especially the bones, blubber and meat of the enormous Froghemoth), herbs, drugs, medicines and gems.  The Fens also contain thousands of tiny channels, innumerable islands and countless wrecks and ruins which draw adventurers, fugitives and hermits. ... (Table Follows)

Subsurface Environment Level 1 Treasures Table

In the past I've talked a bit about my efforts to run ASE, basically using the book as published by Patrick Wetmore.  Due to the tendency of my players to wander off and gain levels elsewhere, and ore their tendency to play in groups larger then the 3-4 the module seems written for. With a group of 8 or 9 2nd level PCs I've made the opposition both more numerous and more powerful. Consequently I've had to make the treasures a bit more numerous and valuable.  I've decided to do this by A) Providing groups of wandering monsters with a chance (1 in 6 for humanoid, 1 in 10 for animal/monster) to carry small treasures worth 10 x 1D6 GP.  Likewise I've added more treasure to fixed locations in packets of 100 x 1D6 or 1D8 GP.  Now packets of treasure are normally a bad thing, but to my mind a treasure type is just a packet anyhow, so I figure it's fine.  Simply handing out coins though is really boring on the other hand I don't want to design a treasure on the fly during play so I create the table a while ago of potential treasure that I think no only seem interesting but give some clues in the context of ASE's 1st Level.    

8 Wagons to Chemfoldshire - ASE travelling traders.

My Anomalous Subsurface Environment game continues on G+, and the adventurers have finally figured out some of the basic mysteries of the first level beneath Mt. Rendon.  It's been a few months of game time though and the little mold farming hamlet of Chemfoldshire is growing into a boom town a rowdy boom town from the fortune hunters flocking to Mt. Rendon's various entrances.  Below is a table of traveling merchants, some of whom have flocked to Chemfoldshire (though I've changed the details in my own game).  This isn't perhaps the most useful of tables - but with all the OSR competitions going on right now I'm trying to work on some things for Dyson, Tenkar and the One Page Dungeon contest.

Space, Boredom and the Modern Megadungeon - With ASE Level 1 Examples.

I’ve been running Anomalous Subsurface Environment straight from the book, for what is really the first time. In the first campaign of Land of 1,000 Towers that I ran the party steered clear of the ASE itself and I ended up using scenarios of my own devising. That is happening in this campaign as well, but it seems like for now the adventurers are back in the megadungeon at least for now (the key is offering them revenge for several deaths).

More Morlock means more flavor!

A problem I’m noticing is that ASE has a lot of empty rooms, at least on the first level, and for online play, especially with a large number of players, this can be really slow and a bit boring. I don't think this is limited to ASE, I think this is a central issue with published megadungeon design. It's an issue of not enough flavor, and too little variety in the empty rooms, and ASE has more flavor then a lot of mega-dungeons, Stonehell for example (not to say Stonehell is bad - it's great), but even with ASE the small room descriptions leave a lot up to the GM and there are plenty of rooms that are simple filled with dust leaving a large amount of blank exploration space.

Wreck Hunting in the Vile Fens

So I've been thinking a little about the Livid Fens, and area well South of the Anomalous Subsurface Environment Megadungeon on the Land of 1,000 Tower's 'world' map.  The place is sketched in ASE 1 as a weird red swamp filled with dinosaurs and froghemoths, undoubtedly irradiated.  I've expanded it with hints as the home of human tribes people, a necromancer witch queen and the site of ancient battles. 

Map W-1 of a "Weird Wreck"

Indeed, the Livid Fens are filled with monumental rusted war machines from the wars after the fall of the ancients.  Strange cults, mad dictators and radiation mad battalions in clanking steel tanks of dungeon size all perished in a mutual orgy of nuclear, chemical, thaumaturgical and biological mass destruction.  The remnants (The Red Demon being a medium sized one) still provide interesting adventure locals and offer places for salvage. Below is a small wreckage map and a table of treasures for within.  Note: I have a separate table of perils, but since my ASE game may make it to the fens sooner or later I don't want to give too much away.

D20 Random Lunatic Hermits

Recently I got to thinking about Death frost Doom again, specifically as a representative of a definitive OSR (No I don't know what 'OSR' means) product that plays well on an 80's D&D ruleset (or retro-clone, whatever) but is nothing like an 80's D&D module.  I've been reading some of those things lately - and am still fuming about the apparently beloved "Pharaoh - I4" (which takes a cliched setting so brimming with life and reduces it to a limp grey ghoul confusedly wandering a 10' x 10' room).  Death Frost Doom is not without places to tweak and reskin it to make it better, and it may demand a bit much from a GM (or play testing has shown that it's end game isn't as final as the author originally believed so some additional material would be helpful), but it's a great little adventure well worth dropping on any sandbox map. 

One of the best parts of Death Frost Doom is the mad hermit who cajoles and warns the adventurers to steer clear of the haunted mountain.  Zeke (the hermit) is a bit dubious and might be scary to you or me (though not to the pack of money crazed sociopaths that make up most adventuring parties), but he is no liar.  Avoid the scary mountain and survive!  the problem with Zeke is that he's a give away for Death Frost Doom (also reskin the cottage and tooth door), and well informed players will run when they see his untanned hide wearing figure stumbling down an icy path.

Silent Perils of the Crystal World

The maniacs, they blew it up and were damned.

The world (or at least this vast expanse of it) is sick, silent and perfect.  Everything is now crystal, tinkling leaves on trees with trunks like cut glass, and shattered plains of broken fragments. Nothing can live among the majority of this beautiful ruin, though here places capable of supporting life endure.

Use the table below for any hex where you wish to emphasize that wizards did something stupid. Roll a D10 or D12 if your world is completely dead and a D20 if maybe some desperate holdouts still cling to terrible, miserable existence.

D100 Random "Minor" Science Fantasy Treasures

Below is a list of randomly generated "minor treasure" for the South of Denethix, where the Tombs of the Rocketmen and Obelisk of Forgotten Memories can be found. I like this sort of list because it provides random treasure for unexpected encounters, with a great variety.  Generally putting some odd valuable objects in place and then some coinage where appropriate is more fun then using classic treasure tables.

In addition to description and value I have included two other columns. Weight and fragility. Weight is based on the LOTFP "significant item" rules, and the modifications of that play are increasingly common in the games I've been playing.  A character may carry 1 significant item for every point of Strength. Exceeding that limit means the character is encumbered and cannot act normally. Fragile helps determine the possibility of the item being destroyed if it is dropped suddenly, caught in a fireball, or otherwise subject to destructive force.

100 science fantasy treasures on the table below.

Signs your party is not the first in the Dungeon.

Sometimes players decide to keep returning to the same picked over part of the dungeon because it's safe rather then delve deeper.  This is especially common if it's a mega-dungeon.  best way of dealing with this is rival packs of murder hobos on a spree.  Treasure gets grabbed, enemies slain, allies turned hostile and a new extremely dangerous entry goes on the random monster table - the rival adventuring party.

Add this to your random encounter table...

Here's a table of  hints that the party might not be alone anymore.

Encounters Among the Moribund Hulks of the Great Rust Waste.

Running East to West, the exact size of this belt of ancient trash and abandoned technology is unknown, as the winds that whip the sands of the desert into flesh stripping cyclones uncover and conceal new deposits every season.  The sand scours the ancient objects clean, so that each new pile of twisted junk gleams like treasure for weeks after it is uncovered, before the dust and flash flood rains cake it in dry yellow grime and flakes of ruddy corrosion.

1. A broken tower of rusted bits and corroded pieces.  The tower is later construction, obvious order amongst drifts of similar rusted detritus.  All three stories are uninhabited, though close examination will reveal signs of a massacre.  Black stains on the wall that are not corrosion, a spray of cracked teeth covered in dust, though nothing else to indicate who may have dwelt in the tower or what exactly befell them.   There’s a light ballista wrought from scrap bolted to the tower’s roof parapet.  While it’s lacking ammunition and has cranks in need of oiling, the compact siege weapon is well made and still functional (3D6, two rounds to load, requires crew of two – 250lbs, spall shield offers base AC 6 to crew).  Divination spells will reveal that the residents of the tower (idealistic freeholders or simple bandits, were slaughtered in the night by lanky unknown creatures that came from the rust piles in the night and left no one alive). 

Odd Objects from the Outer Darkness.

A table of six encounters that mark the world as Science Fantasy.

1. A statue of pale blue crystal about four feet tall, roughly human in shape. It is the work of no hand, but the remains of an ancient stellar sailor. Long dead, the spirit within the crystal awakens when it is near the delights of a port. If the statute is carried to any town of reasonable size, the ancient mariner’s spirit will manifest evenings in the form of a hunched being of pure energy. Appearing suddenly in low dives, bawdy houses and cheap burlesque shows it will snatch drinks, dance on tables and sing raucous songs in an unknown language. Unfortunately the spirit’s singing causes fires and explosions.

The Absurdites of Wizards.

I have a feeling all Pahvelorn's wizards
are the spiritual successors of this guy.

Wizards, they are all crazy.  The random table of horrible wizard affectations listed below has been inspired by the variety of mad wizards encountered in Pahvelorn.  So far the Pahvelorn party has done in the following wizards:

1. Some chump necromancer with theatrical aspirations (he had a skeleton acting troupe), wore a three horned headress.

2. His would be successor, an even less intelligent necromancer, killed by Beni because the clerics in the party wanted to torture the poor touched soul.

3. Lovitar the bleak eyed - madder then a rat living in an outhouse.  Enjoyed turning people into beastmen while hiding invisible - an ineffective tactic when faced with killer war dogs.

4. Some crazy old alchemist type (looted and exiled, not actually killed, because he proved not to be a wizard...in retrospect however.)