The Divine Wight Part 1 - Intro and Rumors

In my recent review of Tomb of Annihilation I mentioned that I'd started work some time ago on a jungle adventure and included some bits of it.  Some people seem to have enjoyed the small parts of the unfinished work that I shared, so I'll do some editing and maybe put up bits and piece in more or less sequential order here until I run out.

THE DIVINE WIGHT

An ancient deity rots on a distant jungle shore, and promises immortality and wealth to those who are unafraid of meddling in the Gods’ cruel games.
A legend popular among those who find both present regimes and their opposition oppressive, especially those dusty secret cabals that claim long memories, is that of the Hated Pretender.  The story is that of a cruel ‘false’ emperor in a time before the current powers of earth and heavens who battled even the primal deities of his age, and who in defeat still spited his enemies among the gods. Once the great Demesne of the Pretender stood supreme among nations, its glory tainted by the obscene cruelty that its hated master used to shore up its power, build its magnificent works and spread its influence.  The Pretender’s foes were many, and many fell before his numberless armies and his ever more powerful champions. Only those who joined the Demesne as lesser lords survived.  Alone, the Theocracy of the Beaked God didn’t break, and in the end the Pretender’s frontiers crumbled before the paladins and interventions of their avian deity.  Knowing defeat was imminent The Pretender sought revenge and sent his greatest divisions, led by a cadre of most powerful champions, to penetrate the heart of the Beaked God’s realm, his holy city, where they were to ascend to his throne in the firmament and assassinate the God. As the Pretender’s allies turned against him below, his cities burnt, and his armies fell one after another, the heroes of his cause succeeded above and from the crumbling towers of his scourged capital the Pretender watched the blue comet of the Beaked God’s fall.

Few now know of that holy city’s existence, and fewer its location in the hungry vastness of the Jungles of Midnight, but it is still there, the remains of its shattered god nearby, immortal but ravaged and trapped in a nightmare of pain and insanity.  The ancient city and divine flesh offer many reasons to travel there for those brave, well equipped and foolish enough to do so. The most obvious is treasure - both in the form of the city’s golden decorations and the divine flesh of the Beaked God - a magical panacea. Other motives include retrieving the weapons used by the Pretender’s agents, which are likely some of the few in existence capable of harming the divine, or even resurrecting the Beaked God on behalf of his diminished and secret cult. Conversely there are still deities that remember the primitive Beaked God, but wish what is left of him destroyed as they hope to absorb the morsel of power that remains in the Beaked God’s shattered form, and are willing to risk mortal pawns like clerics or paladins to do so.

The Rumors below will provide an interested party of fortune hunters with a rare means to locate the fallen god.

TOMB OF ANNIHILATION - A Review

WIZARDS CAN STILL SURPRISE ME - TOMB OF ANNIHILATION REVIEW

Another 203 page behemoth from Wizards of the Coast.  I’ve read Out of the Abyss, Curse of Strahd, even Hoard of the Dragon Queen and more, and everything from WotC these days is over 200 pages.  They aren’t all entirely bad, but they all contain the same grievous failings, failings that one can guess from the fact that the teams writing them often appear to have little experience doing professional writing for editions of Dungeons & Dragons prior to 3.5. Even with 5E adventures that have stronger open world elements, such as Out of the Abyss and Curse of Strahd (both also headed by Chris Perkins) have a devotion to scene based adventure design, excessive backstory, muddled text lacking evocative detail, a focus on set-piece combat as the default solution/climax of any scenario, a disdain for both player critical thinking ability and GM choice.  You end up with a huge volume that’s so optimized for a GM to read it like a novel that it is almost unusable at the table, and when used, focused on dragging the players along a specific story and campaign arc in a largely predetermined way.

This and all other art appears to be promotional imagery for the adventure or related (videogames, boardgames) products.

A first sign of hope is that the writing team wasn’t entirely the same with Tomb of Annihilation.  Steve Winter was involved and has a long history with earlier games: Star Frontiers, early Dragon and as the writer of Ruins of Adventure (The basis for Pool of Radiance).  Even Chris Perkins who has been a lead writer for Wizard’s later editions and 5E products provided an adventure to Dungeon Magazine Issue #11, that Bryce of 10-Foot Pole describes as “A tournament module, with scoring. It revolves around a four-level keep/castle with about fifty rooms in it. The party has to make their through it to the end. The two major occupants are betting on the parties outcome and if they’ll make it, with the adventure eventually ending with the party fighting both of them. It’s not terrible for a tournament adventure: it’s self-contained and there’s a decent amount of variety in the encounters as well as options available to the players in navigating the keep.”  Pretty high praise from him for anything published in Dungeon.  WIll Doyle and Adam Lee are newer game writers who seem to mostly have worked on 5e product.

Despite having some writers who might understand how location based adventure design works, and presumably have run games where the most important use of a written product was providing a skeleton and overview of a location or set of locations for players to adventure in rather than providing pages of boxed text to read aloud as justification for moving from complex tactical combat to complex tactical combat, Tomb of Annihilation doesn’t start with much promise.

Like every other Wizard’s product Tomb of Annihilation promises epic adventure that will raise a party from low level (1st) to high level (11th). Using 5th Edition’s default experience points for bloody handed killing this means a lot of dead monsters. The book that follows includes its share of the rest of WotC’s big design flaws (copious read aloud text, promise to adhere to larger underlying story, dense writing that conceals important location aspects/elements, requirements for the Monster Manual to determine enemy strength and assumptions of PC morality).  More hopefully Tomb of Annihilation is a throwback and an intentional re-framing of Tomb of Horrors (It includes the infamous Acererak) and Dwellers of the Forbidden City. Like the unofficial marketing for Tomb of Horrors, Tomb of Annihilation claims to be exceptionally deadly to characters - with the suggestion of an optional “meat grinder” mode (which amounts to a harder death save), and a story mechanic that makes character death more or less permanent.  There are even a few words on providing replacement characters for the dead. 

Despite my initial foreboding Tomb of Annihilation won me over - it's by no means a great adventure, but it's solid, interesting and usable in a way that prior 5th edition products haven't been.

Monster Archaeology - Magical Beasts

MYTHICAL BEASTS OF LEGEND

It's hard to know exactly where to start and stop the next set of monsters from Monsters and Treasure, bestial creatures that are (with one interesting exception) pulled directly from classic myth and legend.  These creatures are best described as "Dragon-like", but depart from the common structure of Monsters and Treasure in that they don't represent a hierarchy from weakest to strongest within a specific monster class.

Manticores ("Manticoras"), Hydras, Chimeras and Wyverns don't really share much descriptively or in any conceivable ecology, though all have some special attack, all appear in small numbers and all are dangerously powerful with 6-12 Hit Dice and decent armor class.  They seem to exist to provide a lone alpha predator, menace or 'boss monster' when dragons aren't appropriate.  This is somewhat unfortunate as most of these creatures are quite evocative and offer interesting encounters.

Manticores are perhaps the least dangerous of these large monsters, and Monsters and Treasure describes them as follows and continues to use the name "Manticora" which is the name of a genus of African beetle and the Latin term for Manticore - it describes them as follows:

MANTICORA: Huge, lion-bodied monstrosities with men's face, horns, dragon wings and a tail full of iron spikes.  There are 24 of these spikes in a Manticora's tail and they can be fired 6 at a time in any one direction with the range (18") accuracy and effect of a crossbow. Their favorite prey is man.

As a 6+1 hit die creature with great speed (12/18) and a good AC of 4, Manticores seem like they would be excellent hunters of man - and in the ancient Persian that provides the name it translates to "man eater".  They mythological Manticore seems to be one of those monsters of spirits of the wasteland that explains why shepards, hunters, travelers and herdsmen go missing and thier bodies are never found.  Allegedly the mythical beast devours its prey whole after stunning with it's poisonous sting.

As a monster the Manticore as a mechanical concept is far less interesting then it's parts imply.  It's a burly ranged attacker (though limited to one attack in melee) that can launch a dangerous (an with an attack bonus of +6 or the ability to hit a plate and shield armored character on an 11 or better) flurry of missiles.  The mechanics of the Manticore's missile attack present interesting possibilities, in that it can target a single enemy six times in a round at range, picking off magic users and other dangerous but unprotected characters.  Played with the human cunning that it's man's head implies a Manticore could be very dangerous, sniping party members from ambush and flying by to kill at long range.  One envisions them as predators and raiders, flying, retreating to filthy bachelor lairs in the wastelands, decorated in stolen frivolities and aping humanity, but scattered with bones and bloody bits of meals.  Goblin Punch has this lovely piece on Manticores, making them more mythical then the original myths of confused man faced and poison tailed tigers, or the later ones of cats with the faces of beautiful spiteful women, confused with the sphinx and as an allegory for fraud.  More recently Trey at Sorcerer's skull released his Manticore wizard focused adventure which takes the beast in a somewhat different direction but still focuses on the   It's hard not to think of Manticores as the idea of a monster in need of more interesting statistics.

Hydras are the next of the magical Beasts listed in Monsters and Treasure:

Heraldic Beasts

As regular readers of this blog may know, I don't love Monster Manuals, and rather enjoy designing my own monsters - usually via a quick re-skinning of something simple (A bear, giant rat or 1st level fighter being the most common).  This doesn't mean I'm uninterested in monsters for tabletop games, or the general concept of monsters as a sociological phenomenon.  I've been slowly reading through "Monsters & Treasure - the earliest edition of D&D's monster manual, thinking about the foes provided and how I'd personally make use of them.

One that's struck me about Monsters & Treasure is the somewhat clumsy feeling of its adaptions from mythological sources.  It pulls in various words for creatures from European and Classical myth, but often ignores many of the interesting elements of the underlying story.  The Monsters & Treasure Hydra seems the best example of this, transforming a sneaky, oddly botanical, regenerating, many headed snake thing into a super dinosaur.  Additionally, Monsters & Treasure (and the Monster Manuals that follow from what I can tell) miss a rich vein of mythical beast lore by almost entirely (the Dragon, the Wyvern and a few others are retained) ignoring the legacy of Heraldic Beasts.

Heraldic Beasts are the fantastical creatures used on shields and as devices for (primarily) European nobility, and there are lots of them.  Below is a list of several I found interesting and worthy of inclusion as strange monsters in your tabletop game.  I'm not sure why exactly, though many of them have rather mundane names (Tyger, Lion or Wildman), their descriptions are as bizarre as anything else in the monster manual  Heraldic Beasts seem like they would make an especially valid or even a key addition to a setting that seeks to remain quasi-historical (such as Lamentations of the Flame Princess's default setting) or to provide a knightly, even Arthurian element.

The 'Queen's Beasts' of England

HMS Apollyon Viking Character Generation Rules

Below are some rules I wrote up to run Viking seafarers in the HMS Apollyon setting to run some one shots of a few new areas.  A friend ran a game at NTRPG Con using these rules and related WWII Commando Character Generation Rules and reported success. I think they make a nice enough distillation of my current rule system and provide a nice means of character generation.  A Character sheet is also included.  For further explanations of rules and things you might find this Players Guide for Combat and Exploration helpful as well.

VIKING CHARACTER GENERATION

I have no justification for using this illustration

The Karve was a ghostly shape in the sea mist when Thorgest the Foul and his men reached the black pebble beach, and his screaming red face was the last you saw of the cold fjords at Hornstrandir as the clansfolk who had survived the hall burning rowed hard into the tide.  Rowing West and South you intended on reaching Reykjavík or Ireland for supplies.  The sea had different plans, and after three days of storm, buffeted by waves and lashed by rain, the Karve was far to the West, beyond the known sea, and the supplies already stretched.  You’ve sailed now for a week more, two men dead from wounds gone rotten, another lost over the side, and even with the storm the water is almost gone again.

Doldrums, a crew too exhausted and hungry to row more than a few hours and no sun to act as a guide in the heavy fog seem to have written a grim end for you and your people. But the fog breaks, orange light trickles in and in the near distance a cliff of metal looms.  A cliff that seems to float like a great ship, sides encrusted with shell and trailing weed, but beneath black plates, smooth like the toenails of dead giants.  It is Naglfar, but there are no choices - go aboard and be damned or die of thirst and sink into Hel.

Steel Leviathan

Sometimes I still mull over ASE and things like will it ever get more levels, and will I ever write anything more for the setting.

Sometimes this musing goes as far as drawing some stuff for the setting.  Like this Steel Leviathan and Unyielding Fist detachment.  I think this is a bigger and meaner steel Leviathan then the ones described in ASE - I imagine that it is a new creation from the Academy designed for the wars against the Dinosaur Khan and Serpent Men of the Certopsian plains who threaten Denethix's expansion and sovereignty.

It's also a chance to play around with some drawing effects.

Let's take this another step ... here are stats for "Red Ruin" and the unit it's part of.  If you are running ASE, they can flesh out the Unyielding Fist that guards all the other entrances of the megadungeon after it opens

A Swords and Sorcery Setting - Part 1

 I haven't ever really bothered with applying about Swords & Sorcery elements as setting building blocks.  Here's an attempt.  At some point the This is the World PDF may be followed by This is You, These are Your People, and This is Your Fate.  Which will contain rules for character generation, a faction/town/quest system and very short combat rules based on my HMS Apollyon rules. Don't hold your breath though.

THIS IS THE WORLD

The Sky is red at midday; light has gone out of the world, long before your unprophetic birth. In the thin light the grain grows slow, a meager harvest before the ice storms come.  Sometimes the rain is a torrent of blood or a cascade of frogs - a boon to the village, but too much salt and iron is bad the soil.

Iron is rare; the earth mined clean of useful metals so your tools and weapons are carved of bone or red oak, chipped of obsidian and jade or hammered from old soft copper.  Iron is power and steel a myth that rust in the ruins of the ancients among those lesser imperishable metals of grey or green that only grow brittle or burst into flame in the smith’s fire.

Man is no longer the ruler of this world, or presumably those that rave, sometimes blossoming with green fire in in the night sky. You are made of dirt and to dirt you will return.  Man is only a thing, among other things, Beastkind, Ghostkind and the others that hunt and creep or stride proud to seek dominion atop the ruined root-choked world.

It has been a fat generation, and there are more of the polis then the herds and crop can support, or at least there might be if the grey shivers, the raiders, and the gods are kind and overlook your people for another generation.  Thus it is no longer a crime to take your fertile flesh beyond the village palisades.  Already a mother or father, you have given your people at least a life to replace your own squandered existence. To be an explorer is still uncouth, a whispering offense, unless you return with good grey iron, trade or artifacts.

Beyond the palisades, almost a mile of traps and sharpened logs, the world to the North is ice steppe, tall dense forest to the East and West, and deserts of glassy sand to the South.   Little else is known, but lies and half-truths filter back from outlanders, traders and explorers - something must be true even from the lips of the mad.

Linked is a PDF with a bit more to help randomly generate a Swords & Sorcery Setting.

The Oldest of Old School (part III) - G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief

GYGAX RISES AGAIN

G1 - Steading of the Hill Giant Chief
Original Cover Art

Recently I reviewed both Tomb of Horrors (Gary Gygax - 1975/1978) and Temple of the Frog (Dave Arneson - 1975) and found them both interesting from a historical perspective and as iconic representations of styles of location based adventure.  Steading of the Hill Giant Chief (G1) (1978) is another of the oldest adventure modules and unlike Tomb of Horrors (which had some contribution from Alan Lucien) appears to be purely the work of Gygax. Steading of the Hill Giant Chief is also a very different sort of adventure from Tomb of Horrors and doesn't appear to have been written solely with tournament play in mind, though it certainly has elements of Gygax's tournament style. Steading of the Hill Giant Chief is for ‘experienced characters’  - though it’s unclear if this is only raw levels of if Gygax (rightfully) suspects that the adventure might be tricky for players that are unfamiliar with some of the more sneaky options available to their characters in AD&D.

Steading of the Hill Giant Chief is short (13 pages or so) and densely written.  It’s much clearer then the writing in Temple of the Frog, but is similar in construction - with the now standard introduction, hooks, and note for the game master followed by keyed locations (52 on two levels) and a single page of pre-generated (tournament) characters.  The writing is Gygaxian, though far less descriptive than that and without the illustration booklet provided in Tomb of Horrors it still has some of his unique phrasing.  The adventure is a simpleattack on a hill giant stronghold, but set up specifically to build tension and encourage infiltration and character creativity due to the enormity of that task.  

A first level details the giant’s huge wooden hall and palisade, a sort of cliched barbarian/Viking/Celtic chief’s hall or even inbred backwoods family compound, built on a giant’s scale and filled with details that repeatedly hammer on the giants’ themes of squalor, debauchery and sloth.  While individually keyed most of the rooms on this upper level are empty, as the inhabitants feast endlessly in their great hall they do offer plenty of clues and interesting spaces to explore.  A secret stair leads down to a lower level much closer to a traditional ‘dungeon adventure’, though a rather tightly wound one, in the Giant’s cellar (slave cells, weapon manufacturing area and secret treasury, insane manticore garbage disposal), caverns with orcish rebels and several other factions, and a secret tentacle god temple.  The upper level is a tightly written adventure locale that inspires plans and schemes in the players while giving the GM the tools to make them fail or succeed interestingly, the lower level is a bit of a jumble.  Yes it has useful faction and a few neat set pieces, but it also very densely packed and small with a bit of the 'monster hotel' feeling, especially in the cave portion.

The Haunted West

You know you want this
in your Boot Hill Game...

A few days ago I got to play a game of Boot Hill using the 2nd, 1979, edition (which are very similar to the 1975 1st edition in its little brown book) of what can best be described as a percentile driven cowboy gunfight game.  Boot Hill's rules are simple and spare, solely designed for rolling percentile dice to mercilessly kill characters and NPCs alike.  There are very few rules about anything other then various forms of Western mayhem, and no implied setting beyond a list of statistics for famous Western gunfighters and a weapons list where the better items are listed as 'available after 1870'.

Yet I enjoyed Boot Hill, I've always liked the idea of the system, murderously fast gunfights in the collective American (or possibly Italian) cultural confusion of the Wild West. Playing with the players from Hill Cantons, with Chris K running things (he's clearly run Boot Hill before) makes for a fun game and plenty of jokes about the inherent idiocy of the Western genre. While the mechanics of Boot Hill are strangely sparse, creating only a 'white room' where gunfights between faceless cowboys endlessly repeat, Cantones County (Hill Canton's Western equivalent) has already been fleshed out to a fair degree.  Best, these character generating 'Fast Packs' build character backstory almost as quickly as the quirky modifier heavy rules of Boot Hill (Really it only has 3 meaningful statistics so it's not that bad) allow for character stat creation. 

When I rolled "calico dress" as a fashion statement, several guns and a "child named William" as my character's possessions, my own fast, frail, accurate and fairly inexperienced gunfighter quickly became "Sally Murder" the last survivor of some sort of old order religious wagon train, loaded down with the guns of her dead fellows and her nine-year old son (at least this is her story, she might just be a mad murderess). The other players were able to concoct equally amusing backstories with equal speed based on the possessions randomly generated by these tables.  While this is an important lesson (one I've long embraced) that equipment and a few random items can lay the basis for interesting characterization, the world that the strange gun thugs of Cantones County exist in still seems pretty bare. 

Boot Hill's rules cover combat, exclusively and without variation.  Almost a page on the effects of exploding dynamite, but nothing sneaking past sentries in the gloaming to take up a position on a rocky outcropping and snipe the local mine boss from cover on behalf of his perturbed workforce (this was the plot of the recent game).  While articles in ancient Dragon magazines have some strange errata, mostly stats for fictional TV cowboy gunfighters, even the adventures offered are tactical map based gun battles against outlaws (and a Tyrannosaurus Rex) - individual scenes that may be fun but don't offer much variety or campaign play and suggest no space for expanding ones campaign beyond gunfights.

A famous US President as Supernatural Monster Slayer - Jason Hauser

This doesn't really appeal to me, while I enjoy Western shootouts as much as anyone who watched a lot of UHF television as a child, Marty Robbin's "Big Iron" gets old fast. It gets old especially fast with the Boot Hill rules which use a static speed and percentile rolls to determine who gets shot in the groin. My own inclination for Western gaming is the Weird Western, where supernatural elements abound, but this of course is hard to mechanically model in a system as narrowly focused on cinematic gunfights.

Monster Archaeology - Cockatrice, Basilisks, Medusae and Gorgons

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