Invasion of the Land of the Dead - Hexcrawloween Jam 2024

The rules or Hexcrawloween - create a system-agnostic hexcrawl that has:
20 keyed hexes
Settlement w/ NPCs
Dungeon A (6-room)
Dungeon B (6-room)
Dungeon C (6-room)
Dungeon D (24-room)
Dungeon E (12-room)
Bestiary 9 original monsters (3 uniques)
An encounter list with at least 1d20 entries
Hand-drawn maps

Best effort before I ran out of time below; first our Hexes.

This whole region are the foothills of mountains where a wicked god was slain; the veil between planes warped and wounded, souls trapped one place, things from beyond easily entering another. Across all this, conflict rages - the clerics of Kirianshalee driven back by invading dragon-blooded orcs. Once vassal fey-folk now rise in insurrection and simultaneously ancient horrors bottled up by the church of Kirianshalee seize their moment to break out.

Shiny TTRPG links #196

Links from about the interwebs, fresh and time-seasoned. For more, see the previous list found here or you can check the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Elfmaids & Octopi gives us Dungeons in Decline, seige conditions and desertion

Alone in the Labyrinth shares THEMATIC SAVING THROWS

Playful Void writes Juicy Worms, Local Knowledge and Player Engagement

Kontent Punch gives us Obstacles are the Fun

What a Horrible Night to Have a Curse... shares Hirelings: Making the Players Care

A Knight at the Opera gave us How to Make Problems for Your Players

Setting First wrote The Jumbo Shrimp Rule

INHERENT DICE gives us Why Aren't More People Playing TTRPGs? (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Move On From D&D) - Perspectives From a Beginner

Meeples for the Win (GLoGtober 7 '24)

Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '24, challenge #2 is from a list by TheFirstGokun - "Physical Game Pieces."

I do quite a lot of cafe gaming and my big space saver has been using meeples for combats - does not quite give the square-by-square tactical detail of standard grid combat but 4/5 times it does everything you need - where are the clusters of bad guys, who is on what bit of terrain, who is near who.

I got these four bags from the In-House Testing Team one winter and they have proved remarkably useful. I have settled in on the stars and little circular things (right side) as the usual NPCs/monsters, the middle-right bag of meeples and houses as PCs and allies, and the mid-left bag tended to be the ships for Spelljammer combat.

Given that these are smaller than most dice they work really well by letting you have a whole battle-space on a single sheet of A4 - which in turn means you can use a piece of stiff card in a plastic-pocket plus dry-erase markers as an easily portable reusable battlemat.

All of which then fits neatly into a bag.

This does not support people bringing their Heroforge 28mm minis to table and I fully recognise that there is a chunky wow-factor to being able to haul out your custom 3D-printed bad guys and have your players squinting trying to figure out is that a standard beholder or some sort of other tentacly horror. The wear and tear on my shoulder and pocket book implied by aquiring and hauling around such a collection is a sufficiently high threshold that I am going to stick with my faithful meeples.

Hardbitten veterans, every one of those little blocks, earned their place in Valhalla multiple times over by now.

Strange Stones from Weird Aeons (GLoGtober 6 '24)

Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '24, challenge #6 is from my own list - "Secrets of the Stones."

Inspired by Onion Souls idea of Magical accretion and the multiple OSR weird time epochs collected on Coins and Scrolls I was thinking about what kind of strange geology is lying around in the gameworld.

Things are plenty strange already in the real world - I have seen this burning earth with my own eyes.

So these strange deep time periods are all well and good but what actual remnants and extrusions from those times can be stumbled upon?

d10 strange rock formations from weird aeons
1. Shock planes - remnants of particularly outrageous continental drifting during the Turbozoic era, these incredibly hard, thin sheets rise high above the landscape and are extremely damage resistant
2. Fossil supercomputer - intricate circuitry from sublimbed organic supercomputers of the Svahbavan Glaciation - carefully transmutation spellwork might get you a tiny fragment of a once-godlike entity
3. Compacted stars - remnants of sloppy creationeering, discarded stars look like big geodes until they crack and suddenly you have a sun at your feet with all the problems that implies
4. Cathedral channels - remnants of holy mounds, allowing wind to blow through them will randomly cast a divine spell on a random valid target near by
5. Purging Sprite soot - a thin layer, scraped up can be blown or pasted onto things to shatter magical effects
6. Astrogenocene coal - coal-analogue from high energy biosphere - igniting, striking or otherwise disturbing in this lower-energy world causes it to chill, rust, rot and otherwise soak the energy from surrounds
7. World-eater seacucumber - looks like a fossil, is just biding its time, do not get it wet.
8. Serpentis Iradium layer - traces of the sorcerous war that made the God Serpent never have been. Exposure sickens lizard folk or other scaly-kind.
9. First necro-layer - limestone-like crushed bones of the first total victory by necromancers. Anyone foolish enough to carve or cast this into some mobile form will find they are still active
10. Rogue colours - a trapped pocket of colors from the early Great Funkadelican era, releasing long-gone hues on the world once more

Shiny TTRPG links #195

Due to travel, mostly a deep dredge of 'OSR classics'. For more, see the previous list found here or you can check the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Yak-Hack gave us Table-Centric Design

The Retired Adventurer wrote Six Cultures of Play

GROGNARDIA shared The Ages of D&D

Trollsmyth wrote Shields Shall be Splintered!

Jeffs Gameblog shared Party like it's 999

Hereticwerks wrote Roofcrawling: Intro (and Links)

Rotten Pulp shared The Underworld

Delta's D&D Hotspot gave us Basic D&D: On Archery

Scantabulous! wrote Petrifying!

Mazirian's Garden wrote The Hidden Metamorphoses

Rise Up Comus shared 1937 Hobbit as a Setting

DIY & dragons wrote Landmark, Hidden, Secret

TableTobRPG gives us Building a City with His Majesty the Worm

Wombat's Gaming Den of Iniquity gave us [Got Loot?] The 3 Types of Loot

AMONG CATS AND BOOKS shared How to Set Up and Use Faction Turns: Addendum

Widdershins Wanderings asked What Makes A Good Player-Facing Pointcrawl?

From the Sorcerer's Skull wrote The Titan and the City

False Machine gives us Echoing Stars - 12 Forms of Posthuman Corporations

Middenmurk gave us On Fantasy

Settlement morale check (GLoGtober 5 '24)

Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '24, challenge #2 is from a list by Phlox - "A procedure relating to a city."

Maybe useful as a mechanism to implement 'things fall apart' adventures like "Recruiters" from Well of Worlds or other siege or high tension situations.

You could use this with or linked to a chaos index or other kind of doom clock.

Proceedure
- roll morale check for the settlement
- apply any adjustments due to events
- apply consequences of morale check result

Intention is that people should be able to feel if the city is on edge and know if they spend their time causing chaos or calming things down will it likely achieve the desired effect

Initial morale score for a settlement should tie to scale - it is hard to shift the attitude of a big metropolis but easier to do it for a thorp.

Settlement	Pop	Morale
Thorp	50	5
Hamlet	240	6
Village	650	7
Small town	1450	8
Large town	3500	9
Small city	8500	10
Large city	18500	11
Metropolis	25000	12

Target is roll under on 2d6 - a little Thorp without anything to reassure it is going to be very jittery.

High morale just means cohesive, tending towards 'business as usual' - it does not mean nice, noble, or any other positive connotation.

Stuff getting weird imposes a morale check, nothing notable happens recently? No morale check. Sleepy thorp remains sleepy.

Where a settlement fails its morale check, cohesiveness breaks down temporarily, there may be panic, riots, looting and whatever response from authorities those warrant. Anything that requires processes or trade becomes hard as things shut and people are busy tending to their own affairs. Anything that prospers in chaos like heists, revolution or the like will go more easily.

Things that move the needle for a morale check at a settlement:

You get -1 to the roll for:
- Grand speeches or other crowd-interactions that were seen at least 10% of the population
- Nearby threats defeated of HD = 10% of population
- Recovery of treasure nearby equal to 100gp per population
- Arrival or emergence of popular public figure

You get +1 to the roll for:
- Sightings of threats of HD = 10% of population
- Death within the settlement of 5% of population
- Great magical workings, without clear benevolent intent
- Unexpected death of significant public figure (popular or notorious)
- Significant damage (e.g. fire)

You need to do a lot to shake a metropolis into chaos, conversely small settlements hang together only because nothing is threatening them - likely they will pack up and head for the hills if anything scary comes their way.

What dwells within the dwarf roads (GLoGtober 4 '24)

Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '24, challenge #4 is from a list by Shadowfray - "Infrastructure & Logistics." - with special thanks to Walfalcon for unsticking my writers block with their own post on the topic. For my contribution we return to the Dwarf Roads and the things you find down there.

Long ago, during the Membrane Wars, the dwarves retreated from the Last Star and built the under-roads in a frenzy to reconnect their scattered holdings as their previous airship-empire failed beneath the tainted light. Their alchemical-botanic mastery was turned to wringing fuels from the blood of the earth and they ground out the under-roads then fought the cult of the Last Star to a standstill in the dark.

The roads are now long abandoned, ancient defences still lurk and automata still roam but some things have made their home and some brave venturers traverse the paths once more. Few are good to meet.

Whatever else is found, there are usually dazzler walls - they make shadows leap and dance confusingly to the light of a normal flame but even unlit they are glaringly irritating to those with darkvision rapidly inducing headaches and making anything requiring vision exhausting and difficult.

Traps
1. Bulwark doors - Most renowned aspect of the Dwarf roads - known as Gnashing Doors for their fail-closed multiple redundancies
2. Darkness cascade - stinging chill showers of liquid darkness, typically matched with slopes and spiked pits
3. Lightning Arcs - discharging along dazzler walls in blinding torrents
4. Turret traps - throwing a variety of poisons, incendiaries, and caustics
5. Mellified beast release - honey-bottled monsters in arcane stasis, released. Basilisks a favourite
Hazards
6 - Maintenance golem - ever-burning elemental core heat the great rock-scrapers it has used to shore up the tunnels these past millenium
7 - Haunted train - a near intact war-borer train - too intact for the dead crew will rise to defend their charge
8 - Hypnotic archives - missing interface psychadelics might be found and information gleaned
9 - Unstable magazine - alchemical fire, night bombs, seeker swords - lethal things stored uncarefully by soldiers under pressure
10 - Breached fuel unit - dripping caustic and flamable pools, clouds of noxious gas fill the local area
Monstrous residents
11 - Weretoads - loners, often heard long before seen croaking low-wave messages along the roads
12 - Crocodile cultists - pale, trogoldyte forms, highly territorial of their glorious depths
13 - Dwarven shades - death has not released them from their dutiful defence
14 - Giant spiders - keeping the giant flies down
15 - Myconids - inheritors of the dwarves deep-botanical endowment
Intruders
16 - Humanoid raiding team - soldiers of one of the realms above, trying to outflank their foes from beneath
17 - Questing adventurers - pursuing something or someone that has fled here
18 - Blockade runners - smugglers trying to worm their way past surface hostilities and customs barriers
19 - Treasure Seekers - trying to search out some last forgotten coin
20 - Dwarven Reconquistadors - reclaiming their ancient birthright

We have visited these roads before with Small god: Lady Deephome (GLoGtober 2 '23).

Other references:
The Last Star - Bearded Devil
Jungle Dwarves of Forgotten Gorzu - Lizardman Diaries

Shiny TTRPG links #194

Short list as ill this week. For more, see the previous list found here or you can check the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

Trilemma Adventures gave us An Era of Standard RPG Terminology

Tower of the Lonely GM shares Knockback rules from TOR 1st to d20 games

Slight Adjustments shared FIGHT / DEMONS

levikornelsen gives us Post-Politicized Procedure

thydungeongal hosts a discussion on tumblr on D&D is easy to learn

Kill It With Fire! gave us Check-off boxes, not HP

ars ludi writes West Marches: Finding the Dungeons

Dice Goblin gives us The Two-Tiered Reaction Roll

Widdershins Wanderings shares The Magic Tree House Spectrum of OSR Player Behavior

Personable Thoughts gives us A method for condensed worldbuilding

Don't Split the Party wrote If Your Torches Burn for only One Hour your NPCs will be More Important

Torchless gives us LOW OPINION: System Matters

Hive Kratos launches with Introduction

Death by a Thousand Claws (RPG Blog Carnival)

This months blog carnival from The Other Side has the topic of Horror and Fantasy - so I was inspired to write about implementing the dread of the onrushing doom.
Thinking through what is dreadful and horrifying to a group of typically well armed and cunning adventurers, I had a few thoughts - most of which stem from lack of knowledge.

Menace for highly experienced players are signs that point to multiple dangerous options, signs not clear enough to allow countermeasures to be chosen. Menace to newbies is anything, with the caveat that they will not recognise the threat signs more experienced players would nor understand the scale of thing they might face in some cases. The weird monster is a traditional approach - like critters from Fire on the Velvet Horizon - things operating out of a non-standard game-space where the players do not know the rules this monster is operating.

Tricks to pull this off are
- reskin monsters - the familar becomes unrecognisable
- tweak abilities - the element of an attack or the stat that is attacked

These root in the horror of doom, which requires finesse to avoid tipping into despair - you want the grim, tense silence of the narrow margin fight around the table not the glum resignation of the lost battle.

ONe thought on making this work - you want a monster which is difficult to pick off at range or en masse - very few hit points, comes in groups, glass-hammers some stat-drain then dies.

Our concept here would be the horde of little things of which any individual one is not hard to deal with, and you're unlikely to get hit by any given one, but should they manage to lay a hand on you, that is damage.

Darkling Wisp (B/X)
AC 6, HD 1-1, #AT 1, D 1+special, MV (30’), Save F 2, ML 12, No. Appearing 1d6
If a darkling wisp scores a hit, it drains a point of Constitution in addition to normal damage. This lasts for 24 hours.

In pitch darkness it has a faint violet flickering outline, somewhat ball-like with a suggestion of mephit-like wings and spindly limbs. In light it appears as a scintillating shadow of the same. They pop into existence in hordes at places where the veil between the Feywild or Shadowfell is changing, typically dawn or dusk, lunar cycles or seasons turnings. They rush in hordes for a time, snatching vitality from whatever they encounter, before flickering out of existence. Prolonged exposure to these things cause the lands where the veil is thin to have their ephemeral aspect.

Darkling Wisp (5e) Small fey, chaotic evil

Armor Class 12
Hit Points 4 (1d6)
Speed 30 ft.

STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA
6 (-2) 14 (+2) 10 (0) 6 (-2) 10 (+0) 8 (-1)
Skills Stealth +4
Damage Vulnerabilities radiant
Damage Resistances acid, cold, fire, lightning, thunder; bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical attacks
Damage Immunities necrotic, poison
Condition Immunities exhaustion, frightened, grappled, paralyzed, petrified, poisoned, prone, restrained
Senses darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 10
Languages –
Challenge 1/4 (50 XP)

Darkling Touch: Melee Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, reach 5 ft., one creature. Hit: 1pt necrotic damage and the target’s Constitution score is reduced by 1d4. The target dies if this reduces its Constitution to 0. The target can recover their level worth of Constitution points when they finish a long rest.

Hidden depth of domain encounters (GLoGtober 3 '24)

Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '24, challenge #2 is from a list by Vivanter - "An encounter table for domain-level play."

So for this I thought of the many things that would crop up in domain play and thought I would have another go at a universal chart. For a domain level game, the problems scale up but the boons also change. For me domain level means 'so big, the king needs to send ...' either the cavalry or the tax wagons because it makes a difference on the scale of hundreds to thousands of people. The problems, if left unattended would threaten the viability of the realm itself. The type of stuff even high level adventurers would get out of bed for.

I blocked things out into a couple of groups
Catastrophes - big, rare things going very wrong in the deep wilds
Bad Times - things that hit 'civilization'
Critters - all the usual sorts of monsters but more of them or bigger.
Pesky Humans - people, either the neighbours or outlaws, being the nuisance
Civil Matters - things happening in the towns and cities
Stars Align - other peoples magical fantasy nonsense happening to you and your realm

Then blocked out a hidden depths table with the first four blocks and filled it out to a potential d30 roll with the last group.

You could run this as a chaos clock - switching 6d4 > 4d6 > 3d8 > 2d12 > d24 > d30 as things get weirder.

Score	Roll	Group	Event
2	d4d20	Stars Align	Treasure hoard uncovered
2	d4d20	Catastrophe	Major volcano
3	d4d20	Catastrophe	Fey incursion
4	d4d20	Catastrophe	Plague
5	2d12	Bad Times	Terrible Weather -
6	2d12	Bad Times	Crop Failures - peasants on the move
7	3d8	Critters	Minor monster tribe
8	3d8	Critters	Beast herds
9	3d8	Critters	Bountiful harvest
10	3d8	Critters	Insect swarms
11	4d6	Pesky Humans	Cult outbreak
12	4d6	Pesky Humans	Banditry
13	4d6	Pesky Humans	Herdbeast rustling
14	6d4	Civil Matters	Festival
15	6d4	Civil Matters	New construction
16	6d4	Civil Matters	Trade fair
17	6d4	Civil Matters	Crimewave
18	6d4	Civil Matters	Riots
19	4d6	Pesky Humans	Raiders
20	4d6	Pesky Humans	Siege
21	3d8	Critters	Big Scary Individual Monster
22	2d12	Bad Times	General Revolt
23	2d12	Bad Times	Plague
24	d4d20	Catastrophe	Divine incursion
25	d30	Stars Align	Lost secrets unearthed
26	d30	Stars Align	A mighty warrior arises
27	d30	Stars Align	Blood War Incursion
28	d30	Stars Align	A craft falls to earth
29	d30	Stars Align	Titans War breaks out (giants, dragons, etc)
30	d30	Stars Align	An archmage takes up a new goal

Shiny TTRPG links #193

Links from about the interwebs, both new and time-tested. For even more, see the previous list found here or you can check the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.

The Other Side blog writes ITS OCTOBER 2024!! RPG Blog Carnival and Horror Movie Marathon

Attronarch's Athenaeum compiles RPG Blog Carnival: Wondrous Weapons and Damning Dweomers Round-Up Post

Warhammer Conference has proceedings on their Youtube channel

Direct Sun Games gives us With the Cult of Crimson Revelers

Play Material gives us Putting together the Scene Kit and boiling it waaaaay down

Trilemma Adventures shared Some Thoughts on Intrigue

Sword of Mass Destruction gave us Rethinking clerics and religion, part 1 and part 2

Personable Thoughts gives us The Freedom of Constraints: Game Jam Writing

Play Material writes Doing a TTRPG game jam changed my life

Patrons Seeking Adventurers (GLoGtober 2 '24)

Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '24, challenge #2 is from a list by CommonUse - "Patrons: their source of power/wealth and their goals in using the party."

Practical Patrons, their natures and what they seek from their hirelings
1. Sithulf - whiter-than-white, the clergy of Bahamut, support through the church, needs deniable catspaws but if things are done by the book, they can drop the hammer on anything proved
2. Mallory - keen long-haul traders, breathless explorer, demands good notes, provides good briefings, can find or fence anything
3. Master of University - classic wizard, wrong species, lots of weird help to hand out, bound imps, consumable magic
4. Ragnbjorl - delvers into beyond, hunters of eldritch monsters for profit, seek gutsy, ask-no-questions types, support subcontractors, tend towards wild victory parties
5. Rynskald - ancient house, guardian of hazards, dangerous deeds, well paid, good intel, operational support, bloody handed defenders of the realm, everything is expendable
6. Kalfyra - minor members of the ruling house, odd hobbyists, sketchy briefings, official support, shows appreciation through lands and titles.
7. Hentlebrock - minor lordly deeds, local political power, fixers for the common folk, often seek classic adventurers for typical quests
8. Pillars - bordermarch lords, monster expertise, local guides, often seek rescue assistance for lost travellers or cut off settlements
9. Mhysanor - glitteringly wealthy coastal lords, sleek and polished, seek spy-hunters and capables to stalk magical foes on their home terrain
10. Kordites - disorganised church, motivated, messianic, supported by living saint, temple network plus mythic overlap, has prophetic visions to be handled
11. Sellal - river-baron, trade-taxers, covert actors, connections to the seelie courts, seeks sneaks and spies
12. Crown - the realm, ultimate but distant authority, officially their writ is law, lots of support until there isn't, quests often wrong on the details
13. Mysmys - Orthodox Church of Tiamat, guided by oracles, seeks contract killers, ruin delvers and hoard plunderers
14. Alchemists Guild - makers of warforged, tomb-divers and tower-raiders, pay well, need deniable
15. Chiming Zam - smuggling boss, network everywhere, needs discrete, cunning folk to help shift cargos quietly
16. Drizero - looks like a dragon cult, is the local lord, sponsors ruin diving
17. Uncargicks - wealthy smiths guild, pays top coin, needs muscle for clearing mines, path-breaking, caravan escort
18. Thenya Palace - city rulers, the local law, lots of odds and ends the palace guard cannot deal with, mostly message runs or ruin exploration
19. Gray Wasp - sorcerers collective, continuous demand for wierd and exotic fetch errands
20. Garzidh - military stronghold, excellent equipment, henchmen support, steady mercenary work keeping supply routes open

Bonus Eldritch Patrons seen in-world
1. Queen of the Terror Birds - recently dug up after long aeons underground, gleefully seeks to restore avian dominion
2. Last Star - the Special light
3. Ezbotha - your local hag, runs a very charming bathhouse
4. Master of Tongues - gruesome plucker of the strands of fate

Dungeon Cities (GLoGtober 1 '24)

Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '24, challenge #1 is from a list by Walfalcon - "A city where you can dungeon crawl."

The key difference between a 'lost city' and a standard dungeon to my mind is that there are a bunch of factions/peoples present who are just living normal lives to a relatively sophisticated standard - it is just that the distance to very dangerous neighbours and deadly ruins is measured in minutes walking rather than days of hiking.

I am using 'Lost Conchordia' from my home campaign for my model here - the city of the Titans, predating giant-kind, from the time of Amman ruling supreme, before the Ordning. I had it lost beneath a glacier but this also works for buried under sand or silt, engulfed by volcanic ash or any other number of cataclysms that would fill the streets and spaces of a city with something solid.

Intent is that your standard urban location toolkit would be used, whatever that is, then layer on these tables below to capture the 'buried city' flavour.

Conchordia beneath ice.

d6 room types
1. dug out of ice
2. old room as was
3. adapted room
4. non-dwelling space but big enough to be room
5. rubble/ruin still navigable
6. bubble/crevasse or other naturally occuring gap

In Conchordia, the original inhabitants were mostly gone but for a very few remnants - automata, undead, moving statues, etc. Things of course had moved into the space over the long run of time - both beasts and people finding spaces to live within the old city. Finally there are other non-dwellers - both welcome visitors and unwelcome intruders that might happen to be there.

d20 things encountered
1-2. original inhabitant
3-8. beastie moved in
9-17. recent dweller
18-20. intruder/adventurer

My suggestion for cities where you dungeon crawl is to set the range on attitude tables as equivalent to cities, and have monsters encountered be both more savvy around humans - like urban bears, crows and coyotes - habituated to people, not man-eaters, and perhaps more of a nuisance, less of a direct threat. Going about your daily business is a little more risky however with things falling on you or out from under you and the poorly ventilated buried nature of the whole place.

d6 background hazards the locals cope with daily
1. rickety walk ways over plunges
2. low door lintels
3. bad food
4. sleep-ruining noise
5. random collapses
6. bad air
7. disease
8. getting lost and disorientation

This would also come into play during any chases.