One Page Dungeon Contest - Brittlestone Parapets

Hey look the One Page Dungeon Contest just ended!  My submission, the Brittlestone Parapets, is linked below.

Honestly I'm not especially happy with it, even though it has Owlbears and killer swamp hillbillies.  It might provide a few hours of non-setting specific fun though.

Above is the Map, a overland sort of thing, showing the broken trench of the Brittlestone Parapets, where lich and wizard once battled for petty reasons. It's theoretically a land ripped by strange sorcery with looming pillars of crystal and piles of moldering bones - but the limitations of the one page format didn't let me get the level of detail I like into it. I like the idea though, exploring old battlefields torn by the mad wars of missing warlocks/gods has a certain appeal.

Link to "Adventure"

Magical Teasures of the Ship Spirits - HMS Apollyon Magical Items

The Fortress of the War Dead, quickly erected from beams and slabs of broken deck plates is fallen, smoke and the stench of burning undead corpses now fills the buried vault wafting through the Rust Gates and putting the downtrodden there off their pitiful dinners of fungus loaf and kelp noodles. To the fanatical zealots operating out of the Rust Gate's shrine to the Ship Spirits, this is the scent of hard won victory, and the wake for the martyrs from the recent battle  looks like it will last a week, providing free food and drink to any who will light a candle in the martyrs names.

Yet few recognize that he victory is not Brazen Gear and the Sect's alone.  The hard work of throwing open the main gate and breaking up the dead's blocking forces was done by mercenaries including members of the rival Leviathan Cult, and Church of Lyriss.  Brazen Gear is a man of his word however and these hired killers will each receive one of the following items (of their choice) from the Sect's store of Holy artifacts listed below:

 

A Table for Wermspittle - "Those aren't worms!"

Recently I was talking with J. Garrison of Heriticwerks and I mentioned how much I liked his Wermspittle campaign setting.  The entire game is set within a crumbling ruin of a strange baroque city.  Lots of slime and terror, a disturbing cross between Virconium and Gormenghast I guess is the best way to describe it.  In talking I also mentioned my desire to do a table for some random Wermspittle content.  So here it is...

In the alleys and cellars of the ruined district, wriggling in the dust or surging from the bloated corrupt flesh of a corpse, you find it ... and soon realize "Those aren't worms!"
Roll a D12

Play Report - HMS APOLLYON - Uptown Ranking

 HMS APOLLYON - ONE SHOT - THE MADAM PROPOSES A SOIREE

This one shot ran a few months ago and I hadn't finished the play report. It was a very successful session for the party, though they ignored the mansion's upper floors.

Madam Bibi Laughs Last

Quartle the frogling aquamancer, and Semm, crusader of Lyris lounged outside Semm's bustling strorefront church, awaiting a delivery of salted giant pigeon meat that a local butcher had promised in return for the crusader's efforts to cure the terrible fungal infestation the man had picked up somewhere.  The meat would be going into the Lyris's stewpots and then most likely into the mouths of the many poor and desperate who clustered about the church. They might not be devote, but Lyris offered up good fare and other sorts of help in exchange for setting through a weapons lesson or two, without the sanctimony of the Queen's Church, or the exhortations to combat that the chapel of the Ship Spirits had lately become so insistent about.  As for the Leviathan's preachers, well when they managed to offer up food, it was always frog grub, and it took a special stomach to eat grubs and live fish on a regular basis.

100,000 Hits and a random encounter table...

this morning this blog reached 100,000 hits.  Not sure what this milestone means, as I produce the stuff on here primarily for my own benefit and my own use, but apparently people enjoy it which has been great to see. So, thank you readers and commentators for indulging me in a singularly antiquated hobby.  It is nice to see that several hundred people a day are interested in whatever random nonsense pops into my mind about imagined worlds, poorly simulated with clumsy mechanics.

Without further ado - here's a list of several Extra-planar, Outsider entities that roam the decks of the HMS Apollyon.

Swords & Wizardy - Appreciation - A Post About the Old School

The Swords & Wizardry Whitebox

Post has been slightly modified, as I was reading S&W non-Whitebox due to PDF confusion.  The core of this discussion though is why a simple, very lethal system for combat makes gameplay better - a philosophy that S&W Whitebox follows.

So today a whole bunch of game bloggers have taken the lead of Tenkar's Tavern and decided to post about and in appreciation of the Swords & Wizardy Whitebox.

Swords and Wizardy is an early edition D&D clone, designed to evoke the 1979 or earlier edition of TSR D&D.  It does a good job and S&W Whitebox is an excellent retro clone, but how closely does it actually mirror the old edition and is that a good thing?  As someone who plays, and enjoys playing a long running campaign using Little Brown Book Rules I want to contrast the two, and talk about a couple of small, but incredibly significant tweaks that S&W makes which make it a bit less then the 1979 Whitebox experience, but generally hold true to the original rules.  Specifically the effect that incredibly deadly nature of combat in the Little Brown Box, and its brutal simplicity have on gameplay.

Tomb of the Rocketmen - Overland Map.

Really who needs hexes?

Labels will be added later - with science.

Further Thoughts on Older Edition of Dungeons & Dragons and Cooperative World-Building Play

In this recent post I discussed why I enjoy the casually lethal nature of early (pre-1980) editions of Dungeons & Dragons.  The principle idea is that if you view the game as a narrative of the adventuring party collectively becoming more powerful and successful over time, losing individual characters but building a group identity and engaging in a cooperative game of world-building/exploration with the GM, the death of one's personal character is less of a serious letdown and more of an expected set-back.  A way of analogizing it would be that running a OD&D PC is like playing the main character in a Shakespearian tragedy...it's a great role, but you have to die at the end.

Upon thinking a bit more about the topic, there might be a way to capitalize on the fun of running a PC that has a high chance of dying where the character development is not "lost", and where dying doesn't feel so punitive (there are still penalties for death in ODD, they're just less steep because of the relatively flat power curve).  The method I think might be fun takes a nod from a set of novels popular with table top game folk, specifically Glenn Cook's "Black Company" novels.

The Black Company - Yeah these are the "good guys" of sorts

Ruminations of Beni Profane - A Pahvelorn Play Report Digest

My thief in the Pahvelorn Campaign has reached 6th level and is quite the dastard at this point, he began as simply a doodle of a 16th century rat catcher, abut through play and in game jokes, carousing rolls and strange coincidences he's not a bit of a vain cynical fellow who worships a strange rat spirit and has started really resenting the party's clerics.  He's also become ambitious lately and wants to set himself up as a robber baron to feed his appetites for garish clothing and his aspirations of respectability. I never intended to play a character that was a secretly kindly, horse faced blonde version of  Nicky Santoro from Casino - but that's what's fun about developing characters through play.

Beni Profane, self proclaimed "Rat Catcher General" is a 6th level Whitebox D&D Thief who has made a fair bit of coin in exploration and recovery.  He affects shirt with a ridiculous silk floral motif, and a well worn scarf of a similar make when not on the trail.  He prefers his wine rough and mixed with a bit of pine resin, and has been seen in the company of priests despite his obvious impious nature.  The stories Beni tells of his experiences beneath the ground and of the wilds are undoubtedly the product of cheap spirits and other narcotics.
  
It's been a long time since I've seen the dank halls of Pahvelorn, been on a vacation from the pit.  The margins there were never any good once we put down that wizard with the stag demon master and the obsession with making animals out of men.  Demon worship doesn't pay, worship doesn't pay in general, but with those things from outside the world it costs more than a few coins to pay a priest's brothel bill and time spent on the autem.  Pahvelorn had killed Satyavati, the only sorcerer I ever met that a fellow could respect, and left me the lone sane fellow amongst a band of priests and a spooky spell flinging child.  Well compared to the priests the child's tolerable, can't hold her liqour, but she's coming around to the Mother of Thousands perhaps, and with a better understanding about the nature of the world than the vestment wearing fellows. Pahvelorn's margins are scant, but it's still a place for fangs in the dark, so my band and I alighted for better chances.

Treasures of the Fetid Pit - table 1

Treasure Table I for the Fetid Pit. These are “small caches”, and valued at the location’s “X” multiplied by the number proceeding it. The Fetid Pit is for the most part a Level 1:100GP per X area, but the table is appropriate for other fungal forest type areas with incidental scavenged treasure.