Now Recruiting: Villains

One of the (many) long-dropped, game-play features from D&D's halcyon early days that has long intrigued me is that of allowing players to take on “NPC” adversary roles to the main adventuring party. Since reading several years ago the amusing back story of Sir Fang, the player-run vampire in Arneson's Blackmoor famous for being the reputed origin of the cleric class in the game, I have always been interested in exploring that bit of outsourced intra-player competition.

Because, see, after running the Hill Cantons for four years with two groups of rather clever and canny veteran players, I've started to feel that the machinations I throw at them have started to feel a bit predictable. (Though the campaign is still mostly locale-exploration in orientation, a fair number of “whirly bits” being moved by any number of NPC-led forces occur on and off-stage at this point).

In plainer words, there are times that I think they are on to my shit. Time to change up and throw (not to abuse my portmanteaus too much) a slurve.

Cutting to the chase, I am looking to recruit 1-5 “NPC” villains to help co-create some of those said whirly-bits. 

The particulars:

1. Ideally looking for someone who has played in the HC but is not currently active—or at least fairly familiar with my campaign posts.

2. I email you your “situation report”: the broad brushstrokes of who you are playing, what your resources are, where you are, how that might interact with the players, etc. 

If you are so-inclined are encouraged to co-create the color and details of your bad apple, villainous lair and attendant forces (of course, with my potential, gentle modification to fit campaign tone and balance).

3. You relate to me what your nefarious plans through some very limited Play by Post (I have limited patience/will for this kind of thing so emphasis on “limited) and/or fairly infrequent Google Plus Hangouts. When this intersects with what the campaign players are doing I will reportback to you on what you perceive of the situation.

4. Note importantly that, the point is not to smash the players per se, but to create some interesting, wild-card challenges for the party. It basically has to be broadly fair and contributing to the overall enjoyment of the campaign. 

Is your soul benighted and wicked enough for this experiment? If so, drop me a line here or on Google Plus and I will send you details.  

Amazons and Scalping Blades, Campaign News

And now the News...

Our new Decade-King continues to stubbornly stay on the lips of Kezmarokis. Seeking to overturn five centuries of cherished tradition of not having to see or hear from the monarch more than the usual “touch the jewels and wave” appearances of the great festivals, the ceremonial monarch announced to great shock that he would deliver a “rousing bit of oratory” from the organic-machine-themed Yakquirby Balcony on Sunlorday.

In other news, noting the considerable erosion and water damage to the external walls of the palace, the Autarchs have (finally after decades) released funding for much needed structural work on the teetering pile. A massive cocoon of scaffolding went up around the exterior immediately, much to the praise of local citizenry.

The Amazons are celebrating again their biennial Ebon Festival of the Pearls on their distant isle near the resting point of the Sun Lord's daily ride. The festival marks both the climax of the black pearl harvest from the swamp-polyps and the victory of that muscle-bounded race of maidens against the invading forces of the Overkingdom in the Twicefold Battle of Vague Suggestiveness now some 112 years ago. It is said that the high-point of the festivities is the public bathing and drinking by their much-feared, rubenesque queen of the blood of 12 male lovers.

And in the identified magic items department...

The Four Brother-Blades of the Evening Red

In the darkness that fell after the last Latter-State Hyperboran necromancer-king was hung with the guts of the last ur-bureaucrat--a time so dark that the chatiness and love of written language so dear to our age was reduced to flashes of the sordid art of epic poetry—four brother hero-champions of the Muhtl people arose. These brothers, though noted for their bloodlust revels and vicious scalping, were unswervingly loyal to each other and when the vicious Muhtl were finally put down by the Kaftor matriarchs—and their own deaths by castration at hand—through dark oaths had their respective souls transferred in part to their beloved blades.

If all four blades are wielded in battle by a single party, each sword becomes +2 to hit and damage. On a natural 20, the blade lands a near scalping blow to a humanoid causing an additional d6 bleeding damage. Striking the four blades together while chanting “hrom, hrom, hrom” (the Muhtl word for “thunder”) will produce Call Lightning once per day at the level of the strongest wielder. All magical powers of the swords are only functional when all four swords are in use.

Individually each blade exhibits a bare, but strongly-willful sentience (INT 5, EGO 15). When touched the sword emanates a tremendous—and malign—sense of potency, a potential warning that the blades seek to turn the wielder into a debased and violent existence of wanton evil. (When wielding the sword, if erections last for four or more hours, call a cleric.)

Hill Cantons Bestiary: Wereshark

Read as literature J. Eric Holmes' novella The Maze of Peril is fairly awful, but a read of the book as a window into the pulpy, exuberant kitchen-sink D&D of that good doctor it is supremely enjoyable. One of my favorite sections of the book occurs in a large underworld lake dominated by a pyramid-temple of Dagon.

After the protagonists loot the fishy demonic temple, they are confronted...

“Out of the black waters of the underground lake rose a triangular dorsal fin. The creature would have been immediately recognizable as a huge shark except for the thick muscular arms and hands with which it drew itself up upon the rocks. As the entire body became visible, the startled adventurers could see humanoid legs and bare feet supporting the fish-like tail.”

Totemic beast cults—and their shape-shifting devotees--have run old in the Hill Cantons history, so I knew I had to have one for my campaign. Thus was born Andimachus, the wereshark cousin-antagonist of the resident godling of the Slumbering Ursine Dunes, the Master. Following are the stats I did for that game (he has been dispatched in a near-thing by the players long ago).

Wereshark
No. Enc.:	1d4 (1d4)
Alignment:	Chaotic (Evil)
Movement:	120’ (on land)/180' (water)
Armor Class:	3
Hit Dice:	6
Attacks:	2 (bite, clawed arms)
Damage:	2d6, 1d4, 1d4
Save:	F6
Morale:	10
XP:	1,000

Old salts will tell you of the subtle signs of the human-formed wereshark: a slight greyness of skin, a deadened, hard cast to the eye, a hint of razor among the teeth, a tendency to take positions in the banking guilds.

The monsterish version is inescapable obvious, rearing a full 8-foot tall with the pronounced snout of a shark, sharp-toothed grin, dorsal fin and muscular clawed arms. They are as fleet in the water as their fishy brethren. In this form they can only be harmed by silver or magical weapons.

Despite their bestial rapaciousness weresharks are drawn to soft luxuries in their off hours. Treasure hoards inevitably will take the form of soft, exquisitely-woven silks, velvet cushions, choice wines, fine silver dinnerware, and the like as opposed to straight cash.

Those unfortunates bitten by the wereshark will themselves become victim to lycanthropy on a 30% chance (remove curse to lift). On a full moon—at high tide—there is a 90% chance that the victim will transform into his new form and seek out others of his kind in the murky depths.  

Campaign Hooks and News for the Ruinscrawl

Putting my money where my proverbial mouth is I have been busily pimping out a ruinscrawl (the second part of the series will be posted tomorrow). Fortunately the players have been headquartered in the half-ruined metropolis of Kezmarok, I can shoehorn in such adventures a scant and convenient half-mile from their own base of operation (a convent itself a rehabbed ruin).

Much of High Kezmarok (that's the northern, elevated part of the city on the crappy players map below) is sparsely inhabited at best, with whole sections completely given over to the various stages of ruination I wrote about the other day.

While I am limiting the pointcrawl portion to only the Farwest ward mentioned in the hooks below for the time being, the large scale of the city (a massiveness compounded by the vertical expansiveness of the undercity beneath its streets) still gives me a fairly large area to work my map with: a space roughly 500 yards by 700 yards. Many of the boulevards marked on the map will be translated directly into “double line” connections for the map. The 100-yard squares (you may be able to faintly discern if you squint really hard) translate nicely into discrete points.

F

But now the news...

Noting continuing fears of High Kezmarok's shabby gentility and licensed squatter leagues that the magnificent ruined piles of Farwest ward have slipped irrevocably into the Weird, work crews have finished construction of retaining walls blocking access to the ward's radials. Resting a hand on the eight-foot-high recycled-stone barricade at the dedication ceremony, the Lord Warden assured citizens that the “wearers of skin, night hags, demi-liches,  and other such otherworldy riff-raff will now be kept at bay.”

Defiantly taking note of the official abandonment of Farwest, Zax, the sybarite heir of the Despot of Ma'arb, has posted a 2000 gold sun bounty for anyone “man--or desperate--enough” to escort his ruins-porn party to the Great Aviary looming over the center of that benighted district. 

The newly-anointed Decade-King Uloysalik IX continues to create a furrowing of brows and a clucking of nervous tongues throughout the hostel-salons of Kezmarok. Declining to retreat to the customary seclusion of his predecessors and wait out a gloriously decadent 10-year revelry before his inevitable ritual deposement (and blinding), the new ceremonial head of state has cheekily gone as far as to issue wallposter proclamations.

Among the king's first announcements was a celebratory festival tomorrow honoring the heroes and heroines of the Battle of the Twelve Guns, the decisive engagement that is “so last year” in the minds of the fickle Kezmaroki crowd. Citing costs of repairing the outer wall, reworking the attendant mountains of paperwork, and of course the annual goal of keeping high municipal officials salaries “competitive”, the Council of Autarchs has met the proclamation with an “alternative, supplementary budget.” The new budget generously resites the festival grounds from the Plaza of the Five Banners and main radial boulevards to the Adamantine Room, a cozy chamber secured from assailants under the palace scullery and behind a locked back staircase. 

To date the other wallposters that bear the albino catoblepas seal of the monarch have been general exhortations like "the Turko Fey are only great because we lie on our knees, ARISE!" and a vague program for the "aesthetic and martial" training of adolescent age natives. All the posters are illustrated in vivid colors in a style we would call "agitprop."

Pointcrawling Urban Ruins, Part One

A few weeks back, I kibitzed about my difficulties in running city and town ruins. I have had a lingering problem make that awkward scale between the micro-environs of a dungeon and the macro-handwavingness of wilderness work just right. Readers both here on the blog and on Google Plus (oh why Google did you have to screw up integrating the comments between both streams so very, very badly?) chimed in with extraordinarily useful advice from their own campaigns.

The following two-part series is my own attempt to wrap my brain around a better way to run these kinds of adventure locales in the future (and of course reflects some of the best practices of many of you who responded).

The first major hurdle was getting over the scale problems. Naturally given one of my running themes here (and here) and the need to abstract some of the larger-scale movement outside discrete buildings in the ruins, my brain went back to stretching the pointcrawl to fit. In today's installment I will deal with a quick system to classify broad ruin types, travel among points, deal with encounters and create a large-scale map to make sense of it all.

Taking my individual points I began to think of them as roughly corresponding to a neighborhood or ward area, an approximate area maybe incorporating one to three hundred yards on a side. Because I don't want to overproduce detail that won't be used in actual play I am overall aiming for a hierarchy of maps with detail by potential party interest-level.

I will assign standard-size graph paper map at a 10 yard per square scale to each point--depending on how interesting each square is. A dull point say for something like a rubble field will only really serve as way-point and may not have a breakout map at all. A typical area may have a single-page map with a few choice sites mapped out (and further broken down into a 10-foot square scale maps if especially interesting). A locale-rich point may even have two or three maps in the smaller 10-foot scale.

Because I want quick and dirty ways to classify and describe points when the party moves between them I came up with a color-coded method that borrows heavily from Runequest's excellent Big Rubble.

Ruin Types

Type 1 (Red). Completely ruined or razed area, walls and other structures indistinguishable and now just rubble.

Type 2 (Orange). Completely ruined areas. Surface areas nearly identical to Type 1 above (with occasional free-standing walls), but underground areas (cellars, dungeons and the like) may still be intact if rubble is cleared away.

Type 3 (Yellow). Mostly ruined area. Some may walls exist and structures may be distinct but nearly always lack roofs and upper stories. Underground areas may be existent.

Type 4 (Green). Semi-ruined area. A number of structures are relatively intact with roofs and walls (though there may be holes in both). The relatively intact structures will be interspersed with rubble or partially ruined buildings. Underground areas are often existent.

Type 5 (Blue) Barely ruined area. Most structures in the area are intact with minor neglect. Will often be inhabited with recent repairs done by sentient locals.

Now let's move on to our connections. You will note that because of the relatively more open nature of outdoor ruins (than say an undercity or megadungeon) that I add more connections than usual between points. Connections are assumed to be represent 30 minutes of travel in a small-sized ruined (town and the like), an hour in a medium-sized one (small city), two hours in a large (medium city), and four in a massive one (metropolis and the like).

Obviously some factors will scale travel time up and down, so I have characterized the connections with a few relevant conditions below (and for color when describing travel to players).

Connection Types

Dotted Line. Movement is relatively free and often over a field of rubble.

Broken Line. Movement is difficult, perhaps only through thickly-rubbled and ruined roads. Double movement time.

Single Line. Small streets that may have an occasional obstruction.

Double Line. Open avenues, boulevards or obstruction-free roads. Halve movement time.

Questions? Suggestions?

In the next part I will deal with encounters, some mechanics for randomly generating interesting buildings and their contents, and some assorted other whoha.

Teaching Monsters with Exquisite Corpses

Last week, I had my fantasy creative writing class take up one of those big ticket items in good speculative fiction: imaginative monsters.

Since nothing will ruin a good fantasy more than a dully-imagined monster—ok, ok dully imagined anything, but bear with me—we spent a good solid two hours messing around with a few ways to free up their imagination.

Hour One: The Exquisite Corpse

I set the classroom up talking about historical bestiaries, those great, colorful catalogues of creatures strange that issued forth from the intellectual fog-of-war of the medieval mind. Thumbing through a slideshow of images from the Physiologus, the Aberdeen Bestiary, the Queen Mary Psalter, and other works of the time we discussed how many of the most fantastical creatures were composite monsters drawing from a combination of 2-4 different animals.

Then we got down to the hands-on exercise. I handed out pairs of index cards instructing them to draw a front and rear half of any animal or monster they could think of with an eye to having them mostly line up to about an inch and half in the center (and labeling each half for reference). After all had drawn 2-4, we collected up the cards randomly shuffling them into front and rear decks. I then had the kids draw them one by one, naming them and assigning characteristics and fell powers to each as we went.

The resulting list was fairly hilarious. We had the dreaded Pigama, a piranha-headed hog with its razor sharp teeth and wallowing, nudging up to the snobby snake-dog hybrid Snog and the poison-farting Snalf. Striking the proverbial iron in its heated state, I had them write them up and people their own budding worlds which has compounded since with a flood of ever-stranger fauna.

All in all an enjoyable exercise that can certainly be carried over into monster creation for a fantasy rpg campaign.

Next up, a run-down in the second hour of building clay monsters and fighting them out in our classroom arean.