d20 careless archmage devastations

Pondering arch-mages again, on the lines of 'what do you do when you get total control of reality' - previous I wrote on their goals, the status flexes of individuals beyond want. Now I have been pondering what kind of casual horrors they inflict on those around them through sheer carelessness and self-absorption without any accountability and way too much agency.

d20 regional impacts of careless archmages

1. their tower is absolutely crammed with automata who spend more time going "excuse me" and attempting to work around each other with their countermanding orders because nobody has priority. Nothing gets done and the wizard's idea is then "well nothing's getting done, I must add more automata obviously". They are overworked and so the cycle has worked itself into a teeming hive of jammed up autonomous automata. The entire place is a sink for magical energies and ores and dwarvish engineering. The dwarves love it. The gnomes dislike it, but view it as better the gold is in their hands than in that lunatic wizard's.

2. An entirely illusory tower where it appears to be absolutely fantastic but people keep dying because the guests are in fact exposed to the elements even where the illusion appear they are sheltered. The illusions are impeccable and very well supported but the wizard himself having a couple of rings of elemental endurance fails to recognize this is the problem.

3. Classic hybridization, chimerization program where they have simply too much time and industry and attempt to make the perfect fill-in-the-blank and of course have a whole bunch of misbegotten failed experiments roaming the countryside.

4. The giant churning forge where the wizard was incensed at local craftsmen's temerity has spent a significant amount of time rendering them all obsolete and has flooded everything around with okay smith goods equivalen. Only okay is good enough for most people and the remaining demand for quality is insufficient to sustain a population of skilled craftsmen and it is now becoming absolutely impossible to get decent gear anywhere around here to the point that the king is worried that his military forces are unready.

5. The wizard has created a library of old knowledge clones of himself that wander the realms answering questions. These questions are just wrong based on a hasty stitching together of factoids from a set of raiders that destroyed all the local libraries

6. A wizard has stolen all the groundwater for water elementals to guard their tower and also run their fancy fountains because they are from a coastal nation and they're feeling homesick.

7. Stole all the groundwater because they are attempting to fill an ocean within their own private demi-plane. This is the only way that they can get the authentic flavor of their local spring water.

8. Stole all the groundwater because a local dryad refused to take up with them on the basis that they're simply a heinous individual.

9. Devastated all the local forests by casting a summon woodlands spell and then marching off to battle with another wizard and getting the entire forest either killed in battle or stranded in a desert to eventually die.

10. Devastated the local locality by diverting a river to create enough ice for their new hobby of ice crafting.

11. ruined the local ecology by continuously summoning storms to their local mountain top tower and creating a freakish rain shadow across a continent, a series of storm attracting lightning rods marches across the landscape.

12. A badly thought out but highly effective mine has been digging away. Elements have collapsed and flooded twice now. However, the internal mine protocols were have been clever enough to keep them in operation, but not clever enough to recognize the damage that they're doing.

13. Created an artificial god from whole cloth to prove it could be done by importing a large amount of koa-toa and embarking on a generations-long social engineering project.

14. an attempt to win a bet with another wizard has resulted in the excavation of a truly colossal marine trench that has allowed huge ocean predators to come much closer inshore than they normally can. The local cliffs act as something like a salt lick to these monsters and they have been slowly eroding the ground with their activities.

15. A failed attempt at trying a pillar of flame wizard's tower has been abandoned. Said tower has ignited fires across most of the local landscape and rendered everything to an ashy wasteland the the tower itself has since gone out for want of fuel.

16. An attempt to resolve a wrong-headed argument about the nature of the cosmos has created a portal to a nightmare realm from which spews ceaseless nightmares. The wizard is long dead, no longer capable of regretting his folly, and yet the nightmares persist.

17. An illusionist attempting to demonstrate the superiority of their craft has microcosm where nothing is real or to be trusted. They all craft work within a certain region has a half chance of being simply illusionary.

18. in an attempt to make an easy access to his local thing, this wizard has created an unstable set of portal networks which allow weird migratory behaviors. The local wildlife have adapted. There is now an entire cohort and subspecies of migratory beasts that use the portals for their seasonal wanderings. The nearby ecosystems have been altered by this. However, they have stabilized into a new equilibrium, which is in fact working perfectly well, but it is not entirely native.

19. A wizard has released bunch of servitors to improve the local ecosystem and this is an ongoing forced evolution cautionary tale showcase. Every fix needs another fix. It is in fact a a glorious endorsement of the foolishness of messing with nature when you don't really understand what you're doing.

20. They have released monsters because they like the sounds they make and because they are no threat to the wizard they do not account that these things are deathly dangerous to 99% of the rest of the population

d12 Attack flyers for Spelljammers

I see quite a few engined-/fighter-type things in various Spelljammer homebrew and it leaves me surprised we do not have more 'attack critters' for the same purpose but more aligned to the Age of Sail flavour - packs of trained beasts or flying mounts.

The archetype I can think of is the githyanki knight on a Star Lancer from the "Behold... H'Catha!" Spelljammer Academy 5e adventure though there have always been nods towards 'getting monsters on the opposing ship' - with catapults flinging skeleton-balls or bottled green slimes in various Spelljammer 2e adventures.

It feels like there should be more 'ship-based monsters' for boarding action support than we see - especially since in 5e killing the crew is a far more direct path to victory than attempting to batter the opposing ship apart.

Ship-to-ship encounters could be made more interesting with the addition of such 'attack monsters' - it is the equivalent to changing the terrain to make ship-to-ship action feel fresh again when you might be constrained by the ship deck plans or opposing forces otherwise being quite similar - e.g. in a conflict against a faction where you might repeatedly run up against the same ship type (i.e. terrain) and fights might get to feel samey.

My thoughts are that there are a couple of potential options that achieve this while fitting a bit more into the 'age of sail' flavour
- flying-steeds / mounted attackers - as per SJA knight-on-a-star lancer
- attack beasties - harassers, swarms, like a wardog in a dungeon
- flung critters - as above, skeletons, slimes or other 'living munitions'
- the 'fast-moving, damage-flinging single thing' is a mage or a monster - or someone decked out with a flying-carpet and a wand of fireballs.

If there is the means for a small-fast craft lying around, I would see it being more used for sneaky boarding actions rather than engaging something with a lot of weapons while you only have a few.

I think best illustrated by a few examples.

d12 creatures arriving as that craft closes to boarding distance

1. A burly crewman with a boarding pike atop a small wyvern swoops under your hull to attack weapon emplacements from the far side
2. A gallant captain with polished blade and befeathered hat atop a comet steed directly challenges his opposite number
3. Robes billowing behind them as they fly, a mage loops over your ship firing spells at exposed crew
4. An ogre flings howling goblins into the rigging of your ship, some with shortbows, some with firepots, others scuttle down below decks to ambush your crew there
5. Giant wolf-spiders leap from the drow ship, biting crew and darting along the hull
6. Illithids just appeared aboard, firing spells and trying to devour your crews succulent brains
7. Giant toads with psurlons atop them leap aboard and start trying to swallow your crew, fighting over them
8. A flyby from the neogi ship drops a spread of piercers on your deck
9. A squad of dohwar atop space swine swoops down on you weapon emplacements
10. An elf flying a gadabout drags a rope with a trio of fellows into your rigging
11. An enemy catapult flings a jar with a tar-form gehreleth onto your deck with the intention of standing off and allowing the fiend to rampage
12. Catapult flung balls of skeletons land on the deck, un-fold and attack

And further; Dungeonize the Property Section

Rise Up Comus makes an excellent point in Unblocking Yourself: Dungeonize your Home look to draw inspiration for your hexes and dungeon rooms from what you see about you. They made the point in particular reference to dungeon rooms by looking at what is about your own house. I think that is an excellent idea; I have gotten good mileage out of a variation - finding inspiration for sites in newspaper property sections: "d30 dwellings and sites"

Normally these would be going straight into recycling but they are often great sources of quirky dwellings that you can get some nice ideas for odd features.

Property sections give inspiration for dungeon rooms or for me more often for hex locations or just general encounters.

The photography of these places give a great sense of how to treat the whole site - things like this persons sculpture garden attached to their house. Is it the lair of a Medusa? Is it living statues? Is it some kind of stone giant sacred space?

Elaborate gardens would be really difficult terrain to have to advance stealthily over or could be stuffed full of killer plants or traps. Interiors that serve exactly as in Dungeonize your Home but with the clutter of hundreds of strangers.

Often the interiors of our dungeons or structures end up quite sparse so it can be good to look at some of these places and consider "what would it be like if you had to get across this room?" Maybe there is only a narrow path between the piles of books between the chair and the door. Maybe it would be quicker to just trot across all the shin-high coffee tables and take the risk of them breaking. There can be some good ideas for shaking things up a bit.

The inspiration can be whatever you like and it also serves to use these property sections somehow instead of sending them straight into recycling.

=== Joesky Tax ===

d12 more dwellings and sites
1. Crooked paths tree - giant old moss covered tree of sprawling branches, home to a group of local woodlands folk who cheerfully abide it being the local easy access to the canopy above and a range of other fey destinations
2. Hags slab - somewhat unkindly named mid-lake foundation of an ancient structure. When not being used by local coven, often used for fisherfolk and a good source of local news
3. Ogres sauna - once a dwarven forge, now sealed over with crude daub-and-straw where an ogre is often found sweating or traipsing between it and a local pool
4. House of Mirrors - a cottage amid a garden festooned with broken mirror shards, home to an enchantress and their faithful minions, and filled within with mirrors from all corners of the world. Every magic mirror type is in here somewhere.
5. The strange interior shutters of this battered little cottage is the shell of the colossal centipede currently asleep within.
6. This clearing is festooned with battered but impressive furniture around a firepit. A trail through the forest leads up a hill to a smashed open wizards tower, still smouldering.
7. A line of collapsed trees bridge a ravine and provide a lively highway for local critters. A significant shortcut but very noisy to take.
8. The perfectly sheared away tower of a flying castle is slowly sinking into this wetland.
9. A ruin sits within perfectly tended gardens. Thirty feet from the walls the grass has been nibbled down by the sheep and geese that live here. Within skeletons continue to tidy and neaten what remains of the crumbling structure.
10. A fantastically arched structure, glassy domes of mystical construction, within a garden of plants from a much hotter clime and a small group of natives from a land far away.
11. Walls of ice make an otherwise normal local structure, inhabited by bundled-up halflings running a tavern in a tent in the garden.
12. A magnificent manor sits within a dell, its gardens a cornucopia of psychotropic plants. Grimly unsmiling, armed staff will sweep up any visitors/intruders to meet the master and be subjected to their interminable lectures about the liberating powers of vast quantities of their home-brewed psychadelics.

Iconography of a history yet to happen

I have long been a big fan of the Semiotic Standard developed for Alien (1979) by Ronn Cobb for "all commercial trans-stellar & heavy element transport craft" - in particular Artificial Gravity Absent is just so cheery. There should be lots of icons like that littering future settings, addressing problems we are not even considering yet.

Snip of Semiotic Standard by Ronn Cobb, recreated by Scotch and Soda

I have two particular cases in mind where there should be something like this about.
- Iconography developed by alien multi-species civilizations (Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5)
- Iconography still lying around from the distant past (Warhammer 40k's dark age of technology, Foundation)

Alien gestures

While noting that iconography assumes that one is communicating with other critters that also 'read' or similar, one would assume that if you are sharing environments closely enough that some hazards or information needs to be communicated passively, this would get worked out.

The key here is 'form' - but actually there is quite a bit of leeway - looking across our iconography, a sufficiently abstracted 'Predator' would look the same; even a very strange alien form would be renderable in most of these signs with minor modifications - it would still have 'standing' 'lying' 'floating upside-down' and 'suited-up' forms - albeit with a tail or six limbs or an octopoid form or what have you. Swap those out and all the rest of those icons remain comprehensible.

One would assume that a whole block of hazards that are not dangerous to humans would appear on such a set - perhaps warnings of 'large beings walking' for smaller creatures or a variety of dangerous atmosphere tags for things with less tolerance of pollutants or even certain atmospheric components than humans.

From the history of a far future

For 40k, there ought to be some iconography that roots in the dark age of technology that ought to be plastered all over everything - even recognising that the Imperium has its skulls-and-wings staples, there ought to be other symbols in there that have persisted alongside the quasi-magical technologies they have. Red and yellow hazard striping has been part of armour designs for as long as folk have been painting but it would be neat to have some other iconography too.

For all that the Imperium has lost lots of know-how and technology, simple icons ought to have persisted - things like 'psi hazard', various warnings for plasma, melta, las and other hazardous technologies and all the semiotic standard above for voidships. Maybe some kind of 'beware the Men of Iron' or the like.

I would think that Necromunda terrain and Genestealer Cult gear would have lots of these plastered all over the day-to-day objects they use and fight through.

A counter argument could be heiroglyphics - where the meaning of symbols became lost for a chunk of time until dedicated study restored it to understanding. This could well be a valid argument, but I posit a setting where enough time-lost spaceships, isolated colonies and long-lived organisations stuck around that such symbols have survived, even if only a fraction of them.

What use to you, a DM?

Maybe not a lot, maybe what I am probing at here is that in your far future setting there could be icons and indicators that have become common across species or persist through time such that the ancient site you break into is comprehensible.

I feel there is an exercise here of going, much like Ronn Cobb did, "what hazards do folk face in this environment, what needs to be warned against" and coming up with symbols for those. If you could create such a set, imagine sharing a map with your players where all the hazards and traps are fully explained in the iconography, the challenge is for them to figure out the translation and then map their path based on that.

= = = Joesky tax = = =

d6 Icons of a Future Yet To Pass
1. Arm intersected and shifted by an arc - "Danger, Reactive Energy Shields"
2. Triangular 'face' with spiral eyes - "Caution, free-will subverting entities"
3. Black human figure with light blue line around head in front of red/white spiral - "Wear psy-barrier equipment"
4. Human figure with right side dissolving into pixels - "No shielding beyond this point"
5. Human figure with head split diagonally, across split is squared skull - "Beware humaniform mechanoids"
6. Diagonal split vertical lines and dots (1/0 cascade) with triangles/circles/squares - "Data corruption / memetic contamination"

Regional encounters & complications for the Scaled Lands

Setting up Yaksha's hexfill as the 'regional encounter table' for the collapsing lizardfolk imperium of the Scaled Lands - it is the same just making the reference space bigger. I already had the d10xd4 encounters done as penance for screwing it up in my previous test (a d14 table... oops).

To recall - the requirements are:
- 1 Unique Encounter
- 2 Tools/Gimmicks for the region
- d10+d4 Local Encounters
- d10 Small Jobs
- d6 Big Jobs
- d20 Scene-setting sights/stage design
- d6 bounties/location implications
- d6 ways to expand/change-up the area set to tone.
- 3d10 names for places (locales/nature sights/crossings.)

Based on the success of using this method for the fuzzier, less structured parts of the dual-mode hexcrawl campaign, it seemed like the right tool for the Lizard Kings 2d20 Conan campaign where I was not planning to deploy a hex-map at all. There is a map, which will make broad regional chunking be sensible but since I will not be using structured travel mechanics, it seemed like something looser, more point-crawl-like was in order.

The region I am looking at is this escarpment edge above the drop into the deep abyssal basin below. Down there be hot-house jungles, dinosaurs, all sorts of things yet to be discovered. The top edge is the somewhat known space where play starts.

So for the marked in settlements, I already had information, what I need was a set of encounter tables for general out-and-about along the escarpments edge. The first pass of this is below, slightly modified for the 2d20 system by swapping the d6 bounty/location implications to be d6 complications. I wanted these as ready-to-go, 'could happen anywhere' conditions I can throw at players whenever things get worse for them through my spending Doom or their rolling badly.

d10/d4 Encounters in the Scaled Lands
1. Wizard Kingdom Expeditionary Force (1. Couriers, 2. Outland Mercenaries, 3. Spies, 4. Local Auxilliaries)
2. Lizard Imperials (1. Tribune, 2. Taxmen, 3. Magistrate, 4. Regiment)
3. Local Militia (1. Posse, 2. Patrol, 3. Monster Hunters, 4. Garrison)
4. Merchants (1. Blue Dragon Cultists, 2. Shattered City Trading Coster, 3. Local Traders, 4. Imperial Procurers)
5. Adventurers (1. Locals, 2. Imperials (official scalyfolk), 3. Deep Basin Wanderers (private scalyfolk), 4. Extra-planetary Explorers)
6. Nearby Dwellers (1. Farmers, 2. Foresters, 3. Fishers, 4. Herders)
7. Lurkers (1. Small God Cultists, 2. Site Keepers, 3. Minions of an absent master, 4. Lost villagers)
8. Roaming Monsters (1. Shambling Mound, 2. Giant Pitcher Plant, 3. Strangler Vines, 4. Displacer Beast)
9. Beasties (1. Migrating Herd, 2. Roosting Flock, 3. Cubs + Parents, 4. Territorial Titan)
10. Factioneers (1. Red Dragon glory-seekers, 2. Adherents of the Devouring Sun, 3. Followers of the Nourishing Sun, 4. Templars of the Great Fire Beyond)

1 Unique Encounter - venturers seeking to blaze a new descent path to the great basin, certain they know of the location of lost riches

2 Tools/Gimmicks for the region -- dinosaur beasts of burden - spike-tails, club-tails, and tri-horns - all of which have lots of intertia, get cranky and have at least one way to ruin your day. A small tank for the party on a good day, a rampaging beast inside the camp -- verticality - the great escarpment down to the deep basin with lots of scope for fights happening on narrow ledges or within vine bundles or tree roots

d10 Small Jobs
1. Red dragon cultists want you to scout, drive a monster into their ambush
2. Imperial procurers want an updated survey of local settlements, many of whom want to remain forgotten
3. Caravan looking for replacement guards after dinosaur attack
4. Hired by cultists to act as operators of caravanserai to bait ambush
5. Explorers/surveyors looking for some muscle for a ruin-dive
6. Wardens of a shrine need some cultists driven off
7. Outlanders need a message brought to a mercenary camp
8. Local militia want specialists to plumb a catacomb
9. Sage collective want a relic recovered
10. Lizardfolk magistrate wants a fugitive found and brought back alive

d6 Big Jobs
1. Caravan never showed up - attempted message indicates drover dead - dino wandered off, go get it back
2. Lizards mobilising to break Dwaven siege of settlement - run in ahead of them, raid temple
3. Cultists going beserk, summon help - convince the lizard it is worth them getting moving
4. Adventures swear they found treasure in outskirts, died in bar-fight; back-track their movements to find the score
5. Expedition lost at base of escarpment - find and rescue or loot the corpses, as preferred
6. Local aristocrats have depleted local sources of desired spice, descend to the deep basin and fetch more

d20 Scene-setting sights/stage design
1. Daybreak shrine
2. Solar furnaces
3. Hotsprings
4. Heated site
5. Abandoned tower of astronomer
6. Interplanetary portal
7. Star-light capacitor spires
8. Forest-swallowed lizardfolk settlements
9. Towering anti-dinosaur fortifications
10. Cultivated hives of pharmacopeia bees
11. Vault of hibernating lizardfolk regiment
12. Serpentfolk shrines
13. Dinosaur lair
14. Abandoned skyship port
15. Ruined infernal shrine
16. Depopulated settlement (active but far less inhabitants)
17. Elemental fire temple converted to forge
18. Dinosaur caravan
19. Forgotten ruin
20. Ambush aftermath

d6 complications
1. Devouring insects
2. Overwhelming sun
3. Dripping, slimy surfaces
4. Treacherous footing
5. Crumbling structures
6. Stalking dinosaurs

d6 ways to expand/change-up the area set to tone.
1. Originally lizardfolk location being restored and reoccupied by tabaxi
2. Predatory dinosaurs moving in
3. Hallucinogenic honey hive found, locals losing grip
4. Devouring sun cultists turned location into ambush
5. Flooded with refugees from dwaven attack
6. Imperial lizard regiment camped on way to front, old ways being enforced

d20 names for places (locales/nature sights/crossings.)
1. Obsidian Mirror
2. Staircase
3. Threshold
4. Sholtipec
5. Sholimeth
6. Supileth
7. Mersuumaar
8. Bitalen
9. Barianthuul
10. Zaysunthul
11. Chalcedra
12. Tremsaar
13. Narenthul
14. Zomilest
15. Somaroon
16. Tesseral
17. Chumagaar
18. Pun Narenthra
19. Derusal
20. Far Suriel

d30 Entertainingly Weird Guests

Inspired by @prokopetz making the point that "hospitality was a major part of a wealthy household’s basic social obligations" and "at any given time, a large household might be playing host to a bewildering assortment of friends, relatives, friends of relatives, relatives of friends, celebrities both far-ranging and local, dignitaries, con artists, miscellaneous weirdos, and that one guy who nobody can quite place" so that "you’re missing an opportunity if you never talk about the Guests" here are some entertainingly weird guests that can be hanging around your nobles court or castle - or wizards tower, if they are hospitable, roadside inns while they are travelling or the hostelries of a city in a pinch.

d30 Entertainingly Weird Guests
1. Latest playwright, needing inspiration. Slightly desperate to repeat crushing success of recent efforts.
2. Cultural tastemaker hiding from supplicants.
3. Clique of artists.
4. Poets come to attend on the host, their muse. Swing between wild revels and sighing melancholy.
5. Host leading a cultural moment of artists, writers, poets and designers. Other guests liable to be sketched, painted and rendered in prose, verse and song.
6. Illusionist, playful. Noone is clear anymore on exactly how many people are here.
7. Conjurer, practicing. Strange things appear and vanish with flashes and bangs at mysterious times.
8. Planar scholar. Has travelled far to peruse the hosts library and study the details in the background of the family paintings.
9. Visitors from beyond. Almost entirely hidden within high-collared clothes and elaborate wigs. Fascinated by everything, talks to the pot-plants, tastes the fire-irons.
10. Young noble on wandering year. Significant power and responsibility waiting at home, does not want to think about it.

Home campaign Bard plus pal during her wandering years, by The Bard

Carousing table for the ruin-filled swamplands

To encourage the squandering of gold for XP accrual I came up with the following carousing table for my Hexcrawl25 campaign. Given that most of the players are veterans of my Brancalonia 'Bay of Princes' campaign, I adapted the Brancalonia Revelry table - you go carousing and always roll; high is good.

To adapt a little towards encouraging the squandering of gold, I have players declare what gold they are squandering and then roll.

The entries were cooked up partly inspired by events so far in the campaign and partly by the local cultures and ruins. These were then combined with a spark list of possible effects and consequences - fights, good times, reputation changes, followers, hitpoints, contacts and romantic partners, allies, enemies, illness, rumours. Stirring them all together gives us the rough table below.

d20 Revelrous Incidents

d30 dwellings and sites

d30 dwellings and sites

Inspired by scrubbing through old newspapers while recycling.


1. Heritage - an ancient site, falling into ruin, maintained with grueling effort by descendants of the original builders. Inhabitants are a powder-keg of blame and recrimination about how it came to this
2. Tapestry workshop, light-soaking yarns for heat management, also rare magic and soul-absorbing threads made by experts - good for banishing the undead
3. Dwelling set on only high-tide rise above sand-banks; very hard to approach without being observed, unhinged weather mage with a solar obsession and their protective staff; very grand, chic, baking hot. Effort is exhausting
4. Dwelling of trellises, "rooms" are defined gardens, most of the structure is outdoors - lush, humid, full of pollen, scent, insects, lizards and toiling gardners. Very little privacy, cheerfully communal
5. Grand old country lodge being restored - busy work parties, with crafts folk, local laborers, experts.
6. Tower with the gardens surrounding it as a maze of pathways through shallow waterways clogged with lillies and fish - one could with difficulty jump a direct path or simply slog through the knee high water and spoil the plants. Stubby old fortified manor at the centre
7. Geometric tiles and carvings within and without with continual perspective tricks that make movement between rooms disturbing but staying within a room serene. Inhabitants can be observed moving about by memory.
8. Fortified manor with enthusiastic young lord raising new breed of burly cattle - locals are aggravated at the disturbance and interference, cattle are also smarter and keep escaping.
9. Survey team from local nobility attempting to refortify an old castle - have just discovered it is far worse than thought plus infested with monsters, noone wants to go back with the bad news, workers refusing to enter.
10. Half built wizards tower, caught fire, just extinguished, exhausted minions and injured watch-beasts scattered around in hasty triage. Multiple traps were left in unstable state.

Forgetting Your Notes And Hexcrawling Anyway

Running a hexcrawl campaign and I ended up having to improvise somewhat at the last session because (of course) the players headed off in a completely different direction to what I had thought (and prepped). This is partially inspired by I Cast Light writing on Building An Encounter On The Fly.

It was not a totally blank map, I had put some thought into where they were going but I just had none of those notes with me nor had I the book I had been using as a support otherwise (Knock #1).

I did have some partial scrawls from a previous session prep where I was even less sure what they were going to do and I winged it off those.

Thinking I had done off table (vaguely remembered)
- who the local factions were and what they were up to (6 sub-hex sites mentioned before)
- bleed over from neighbouring hexes
- overall campaign 'what is lurking beneath' premise
- interactions players had had with the faction elsewhere in previous sessions

What I had with me at table
- encounter table
- general terrain properties from Azgaar maps
- some pre-rolled terrain possibilities (d100 terrains from Frog Factory)
- overloaded encounter dice table

So when the players wandered onto less filled out parts of the hexmap I had a couple of irons in the fire to use.

First and most useful was the Landmark/Hidden/Secret framework which let me go 'whatever I roll up that they encounter now, that is not the definitive only thing in this hex' which might seem incredibly obvious to some of you but it stopped me getting paralysed in trying to reconcile whatever might have been 'supposed' to be there and whatever the part encountered now.

Second was the overloaded dice - I use Hexploring by Meandering Banter - because the table is getting used to it now with the 'high good, low bad' general feeling though I do not think they have reverse calculated the exact structure of it. This gave a good 'on ramp' to whatever hex as the first thing done was roll that encounter dice on entry to the hex. This set the 'mood' of either eager anticipation (high) or concern (low) to frame whatever came next.

For low rolls, I had my encounter tables which gave the 'who' was being encountered; that combined with a bit of terrain gave enough to work on, particularly since the players usually tried to talk their way out of any trouble first. We ended up with one patrol encounter in tall reeds that they talked their way past and a big crocodile by a deep pool who tried to grab and drag someone under.

For mid rolls, exhaustion, expiration of rations, I tapped my scant terrain notes for things they ran into - two fatigue rolls led to non-lethal but delaying critters - a mosquito filled wetland was one, a region full of territorial but non-dangerous small lizards was another - an expiration roll revealed that the small lizards had savaged their rations during all the chaos.

The higher rolls - perception boons and advantages - were the trickiest to hammer together on the fly - one percept roll was finding an easy way through a hex that had previously been established as difficult to traverse. Another was spotting a local shrine/gathering spot to discretely talk to some locals, another was arriving on a location. These in theory should have been the rolls where the deeper secrets of a hex would have been revealed - the Hidden/Secret elements but I just did not have them to hand.

Things I missed that I will now be printing for my binder
- terrain table - what bits i had from it saved my bacon
- some more boons and minor treasures to be found scattered about the place
- one-page monster manual

d100 Deep Astral Spelljamming Encounters

I have been pondering the encounter table for travel on the Astral Sea and comparing it to the old encounter tables for the phlogiston from back in the day. The 5e one is all about running into things from across the planes - a good 30% chance of running into another ship but otherwise all planar travellers or monster encounters - one single site, no weather.

The old phlogiston table had a same chance of a ship but it had 40% of non critter things - space debris, planetoids and space phenomena which I think has been dropped a little too quickly from the current table.

Sundered’s Encounter Stocking Technique (ZEST) test for Menagerie world

Poking about I stumbled over Sundered Shillings anti-Joesky tax - their Sundered’s Encounter Stocking Technique (ZEST) which I liked the look of because I do love a good unified table you throw different dice at depending on the circumstances.

To summarise the mnemonics -
For random encounters, we get IN FIVE (Interruption, Numerous, Friendly, Indifferent, Violent, Extreme).
For random structures, we get FLAVOR (Fane, Lair, Abandoned, Vault, Oddity, Ruin).

Tweaking their structure to create a combo d12/d20 table by re-stacking the entries we get a way to generate a unified travel/delve table - first IN FIVE then a gap then FLAVOR and a filler gap at the top.

Site Encounter (d12)/Travel Encounter (d20) table
1. Interruption,
2. Numerous,
3. Friendly,
4. Indifferent,
5. Violent,
6. Extreme
7-12. No encounter
13. Fane
14. Lair
15. Abandoned
16. Vault
17. Oddity
18. Ruin
19-20 - no encounter

I recently had a game of my Brancalonia-mod go off the rails and while I was able to catch that one, it struck me that having a good random encounter table for that campaign locale could be helpful.

Version I am taking to table-testing at the Friday night open tables:
1. Interruption - the Law; Queens Guard on patrol against such knaves as the party
2. Numerous - the locals; pilgrims, farmers or others
3. Friendly - travelling performer - puppeteer or seer
4. Indifferent - non-hostile other knaves; curious what the players are up to may be tempted to follow
5. Violent - Hostile knaves - one of the NPC gangs the party has messed around in their adventures
6. Extreme - Stray monster - viperwolf or bavalisk
7-12. No encounter
13. Fane - Animalings - shrine to one of the small gods with lots of offerings
14. Lair - Bevana - cottage-in-the-woods with spooky hag resident
15. Abandoned - Elves - hunting lodge style luxury holiday spot - dangerously decayed magical nonsense
16. Vault - Insectfolk - stacked up eldritch weirdness
17. Oddity - Dwarven Great Works - Borehole - physically hazardous, potentially rewarding
18. Ruin - Predator Queen 'this is not a place of honour' castle-shrine - dreadful, players own fault if they go near it
19-20 - no encounter

d50 more memorabila to loot

tl;dr: The other half of the d100 trinkets table for a Brancalonia game.

There is a table of Memorabilia (p69 Brancalonia Spaghetti Fantasy) which are both interesting things to find as part of loot and also legitimate winnings for brawls and the like. The table is referred to relatively often and each entry is supposed to be unique so as a campaign gets going you find yourself burning through them.

According to the book good examples of memorabilia must:

- Have no economic value and no particular use. Generally, they cannot be resold. - Be original. Memorabilia cannot be shoddy or counterfeit, and even if they were, nothing would change. - Be so bizarre and unusual that they could never be confused with other Memorabilia. Each piece is unique.

So I rummaged through old magazines during recycling and cooked up the following. They also reflect the fact that I am using an animal-folk heavy setting for my Brancalonia game, hence the fur, horn and feather references.

d50 memorabilia
1. Tiny carved sea-creatures, well worn to the touch
2. A bottle of mysterious, foul tasting pills - vitamins, good for your long term health, will ward off scurvy for a week
3. A false beard in formal dwarf style, fitted for a goblin or halfling
4. Brightly coloured fur dye
5. Portable shrine (idols rolled up in a mat)
6. Tiny bust of a glowering king - breaks a fear effect
7. Velvet and gilt waistcoat fitted for a small creature
8. Short stub of a fat candle
9. Blue enamel fittings to reinforce something and make it look fancy
10. Genie vase with captive minor imp
11. Pegasus shoe - cold iron, both good luck and good for striking the supernatural
12. Frayed bridle of leaping - fits to any ridable animal, liable to break after one use but triples the distance it can jump

Masquerade as social depth-crawl (RPG Blog Carnival)

For this months blog carnival - hosted by VDonnut Valley on the topic of Let’s Party! Festivals and ceremonies! I bring Masquerade as social depth-crawl.

In my Spelljammer campaign my players decided to run a shell-game masquerade - they had one princess and decided that all three elven PCs (incl. the barbarian) and three hired locals were going to get the same dress and throw a giant masquerade to put the princess in contact with potential allies while also having cover against the hostile factions and antagonist prince who were also in the city.

I dug out my old Festivities as a social depth-crawl and decided to use that as the chassis - set up an encounter list with the players rolling more and more d4's as things progress.

The key addition for all this is that the players are hosting do they get to drive the 'chaos factor' - each time block they get to amp up or chill out the party - adding a d4 or holding at the current level. Two consequtive rounds of 'chilling' will step the dice count down.

The big thing about a Masquerade is everyone pretends that the disguises work and they do not recognise each other, giving lots of opportunities for breaking social norms and acting out, for good or ill.

I swept the net for some ideas to get started - key was Dungeons & Kobolds - and then tailored those to fit the circumstances. Genericising the events list we get:

d20 Masquerade events
1. Local flavour - fortune tellers, world colour
2. Local flavour - significant NPC introduction
3. Key NPC interaction (low stakes)
4. Hostile encounter (low stakes) - pickpocket/jewel thief
5. Carousing opportunity
6. NPC conflict - bodyguards duelling
7. Gambling opportunity
8. Dancing requirement (medium social stakes)
9. NPC opportunity - guest drops something interesting
10. Overheard information - NPCs flexing the deniability of being masked
11. Duel challenge to PC or allied NPC
12. Hostile encounter - e.g. BBEG run in, social monster like vampire or succubus
13. Allied NPC or PC intoxicated, must be handled
14. Hostile NPC social approach, does not recognise masked PC
15. Spotted schemes and plots - opportunity to spy/disrupt
16. Campaign event trigger (e.g. allied NPC assassination attempt)
17. Stumble onto schemes and plots - as 15 but surprised)
18. Campaign event trigger (e.g. friendly NPCs turned to hostile)
19. Campaign event trigger (e.g. hostile NPC ambushes isolated PC)
20. Positive happenstance (potential ally comes to you)

And the additional wrinkle I am throwing in is four locations -
Interior Rooms - medium visiblity
Private chambers - low visibility
Street and grounds - medium visibility
Balcony - visible from the street and grounds - high visibility

Visibility affects how likely others are to get involved in events. If the players split up and are in private chambers, they are on their own - but also can avoid notice. In medium visibility, locations others have a chance to get involved or assist, both friend and foe. For the balcony anyone who is not in private chambers will be able to get involved if they wish.

As it happened on the night the players did some tweaking of the antagonists noses, gathered an ally and then launched their big visible set piece move which then triggered bad-guy reaction and at that point the Masquerade was gone out the window and we pretty much wrapped the session there. The players never backed off the party, running it all the way to 5d4 rolls directly. The sequence that came up was:
1. The fortune teller reads the colours of a PC, making them the center of attention and giving them a chance to grandstand
2. A skillful jewel thief is spotted and recruited on the basis of their talent
3. One of the princess-dressed PCs spots some gamblers and engages in dice-blowing for luck
4. A duel breaks out between NPC factions, two allied factions to the players build friction between them
5. Another duel breaks out between members of the same non-allied NPC faction
6. An officer of the antagonists does not recognise a PC and seeks to dance with them, putting that PC incognito with the 'foe' when things kick off
7. The BBEG spotted watching the PCs

A lot of the content of the encounter list did not get hit but even so I think it was worth having a mechanical structure for events rather than just freeforming it. I feel that my rolling off an encounter list and them having to deal with events which may or may not segue neatly off what they were just doing is more real than fully 'yes, and'-ing the events of the night. Certainly it helps me because I too am waiting to find out what happens as opposed to just running a railroad.

However, in the same way that combats rarely last more than 3 rounds before the bad guy is toast, you could probably get away with a 12-event list and be pretty safe you have enough. There will likely be some repetition which will stretch the use you get out of it.

Review: Uncharted Journeys

tl:dr; well regarded journey mechanics plus a worlds worth of encounters.

I grabbed this off a kickstarter vaguely understanding it was the ripped out and expanded 5e version of well regarded journey rules from Cubicle 7's Middle Earth game. That coupled with 'support your European game houses' got me to lay my money down.

Cover art by Antonio de Luca

First impression - unexpectedly chonky! Great art, nice interiors, good printer smell. Lots and lots of stuff in here. After reading through it I realise this is a giant nouveau cuisine hexcrawl - all the good stuff you need to populate hexmaps in a wide variety of terrains are just shifted into lists instead of a map key. Even if you never use the journey rules, 5/6ths of the content in here is great inspiration for populating your worlds.

So what is all this stuff you get in the book?

The Great Wheel of the Far North (GLoGtober 7 '23)

Last of Glass Candles GLoGtober '23, challenge #7 is from their own list - "A post about a weird train." Here endeth my run at GLoGtober for 2023!

The technologies of the Forge clan are misunderstood. Outsiders think their discussions of agitating water and fire elementals by proximity to one another are their crude ways of describing steam technologies. In fact it is more like 'cats-in-a-sack' drive.

The pinnacle of their works is the Great Wheel. A towering framework, a pyramid on sleds with a roaring, spinning disk in the centre. Within the disk, an unlikely prize - a fire elemental that is fascinated by artifice and adores clambering around inside the labyrinth within the disk. The outside of the disk is grooved with treads that bites into the glaciers and tundra and hurls the train along.

Behind are great sleds with lesser sleds and wagons tied down under rickety frames on which catch dries, travellers loaf and sight-seers perch for the view. The Great Wheel grinds along throughout the year, shuttling nomadic communities around on the great ice-fields, bringing fishers from the rivers to the sea, herdsmen across the tundra and above all towing the workshops and stores of the clan in an endless trading circuit.

The Great Wheel itself is attended by a dedicated group of artificers from the Forge clan, some old conjuring hands who commune with the fire elemental, danger-addicts who maintain the ever-spinning parts, and apprentices come to learn from the others at this culmination of their craft.

The train is a perpetual nomads conclave, the default seat of government of the Forge clan since more likely than not the largest concentration of the clan elders will probably be on-board at any given time.

d6 groups onboard just now
1. forge mages with acolytes and arcane equipment
2. skimmer crews with their ice-sleds
3. herdsfolk with their herd
4. nomads with dwellings, packbeasts, families
5. workers and crafters, processing some of the cargo in transit
6. dungeon-divers with packs of equipment en route to a site

The Great Wheel descends on a location like an anteater come to a nest, disgorging tribesfolk and warrior bands, cracking open dungeons, uprooting wizard towers and breaching fortresses that what lies within can be hauled out and carried away back to the icefields.

d6 raw plunder being carried
1. raiders with hand-carried winnings from raids
2. a whole ship, dragged from the sea
3. a mine, dismantled
4. quarried materials, for a new fortress
5. a great beast, being butchered and rendered down on the move
6. a wizards tower, wrenched whole from it foundations

It is said with some encouragement the spirit of the wheel can do more than simply drive it. Witnesses say they have seen it form a great humanoid shape and fling things - barrels of pitch, rocks and even grappling hooks to drag things to it. Mostly those who witness this and live to tell the tale recall the unnerving joyful yells of the creature, cheery 'yaaahhhgs' ringing our across the tundra as it visits chaos wherever it has arrived.

d20 Puzzle boxes. (GLoGtober 6 '23)

Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '23, challenge #6 is from a list by metalsnail - "Puzzle boxes."

Taking a puzzle box as a thing that requires certain actions to unlock it that are more than just 'insert key'.

This puzzling box is...
1. A key itself - rotate it and a demi-planar structure opens up with many things stored within it.
2. A bioform larvae - effectively a seed; this box unlocks into different forms depending on what it is planted in. Rich soil begets a bush that delivers nourishing fruit. Sands and gravels gives a woody vine that provides spices. Precious metals yields a geode-like tuber that can be cracked open for semi-precious gems. Blood or corpses sprout a fearsome hunting beast.
3. covered with tiny sockets. If the gems that once were there are replaced with similar tiny diamonds (400gp worth) and left out under the stars that match the constellation formed, it opens.
4. A memory palace - touching this puzzle box dumps someone elses memory palace into your mind; finding their knowledge is easy, understanding it is harder and finding yourself again at the end might be very tricky.
5. A grimoire - unfolding each panel of this puzzle box reveals magical texts and minor trials of arcane knowledge to unlock further panels. This is an elaborate tutorial from a bygone era.
6. A labyrinth - correctly triggering the 'lock' transports anyone nearby into the intricately carved folds of the box. The things stored within are magically shrunken.
7. Covered with tiny pins - pushing them in or out to form the likeness of someone animates it into their behaviours, aiding in attempts to impersonate that person
8. Very faintly carved along its faces - inking and printing off the faces will reveal a riddle that must be solved to open the box
9. An engine - unlocking it reveals some gears that deliver a low revolution, effectively infinite torque. The 'lock' is just a safety mechanism.
10. Covered with intricate patterns with a number of tiny flaws that must be very carefully pushed back into place to unlock it.
11. Faced with hollow chimes that must be rung to play the creators favourite tune. It remains a popular ditty, you will get earwormed.
12. Made with sides that must be pried off and formed into keys. These fit together to unlock other sides and unfold the box into a large extradimensional space.
13. Wrapped about with a very long, fragile string that must be carefully unwound in just the right way or it breaks and you must start again. Some find it soothing.
14. Carved with channels down which strong liquor must be poured and then ignited before the box will open. A flaw in the design means you can just sit it in a bowl of flaming alcohol also.
15. Etched with lines from various poems, some obvious, some obscure. All the poems must be recited in full to the box before it opens.
16. Openable only when breathed upon after you have eaten something painfully spicy.
17. Made with a single white side that must be coloured in with a new colour to open. It has been around a while and finding a new unique colour has been tricky for some time.
18. Carved with lines of qualith and has grasping tentacles carved along the edges. You must hold it to your forehead and sacrifice a memory to open it. You get the last memory sacrificed.
19. Stamped with the icon of a solar god and opens after being left in view of the sun for a full dawn-to-dusk cycle. Any shadow during this time resets it.
20. Clearly marked with instructions to solve the complex push-button problem but is very hard to read and operate alone. Easily done with assistance.

Treasure routes & vessels. (GLoGtober 5 '23)

Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '23, challenge #5 I did to myself - Glass Candles roped me into this back at the start of September and I was thinking of how sunken treasure galleons provide adventure even today. Vast amounts of adventure in our world was driven by lucrative trade and people trying to get a slice of the action.

A classic trope of dungeon-delving is going after the buried riches of a time before - one key source of this can be lost shipments of wealth - which begs the question of wealth from where to where and by whom. They key rule of "trade routes will form along the easiest, safest, cheapest path between two trade hubs" gets a little odd in our fantasy world. Let us talk about two things - first the things being transported and second how they were being transported.

First, the stuff, the cargo, the treasure. To get down to brass tacks, a merchant caravan on a trade route will carry only as much as a given merchant would have amassed through trade, for the real treasures you want the fruits of a treasure route.

Cartoon by Tom Gauld

In the least bloody case, this is where the amassed wealth of a long-dead realm is being excavated and transported away by newcomers. More likely this is treasure being pried from cooling fingers or worse being acquired through slaves and strip-mining. In our fantasy realm this could be the discovered ruins, hoards of some great magical beasts or potentially the exploitation of some magical anomaly. Whatever the exact source, a treasure route implies that a land far-away found something valuable and is looting it for all it is worth to haul all the wealth back home.

Assume for a treasure route that the vessels are over-loaded, as these are abnormal volumes being moved, and that time at site after discovery is going to be limited because people know the legends and once they get a sniff that you actually *found* the lost golden sky-whale, you will have cut-throat competition for the site. Also assume that conditions can get volatile around the treasure site - something went wrong to leave this treasure here in the first place and further prevented it from being found and recovered by its original transporters at the time.

d6 What went wrong the first time?

The Seed Of Worlds (GLoGtober 3 '23)

Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '23, challenge #1 is from a list by semiurge - "Adventure, location, character, item, class, or whatever else based on the name of your blog."

The Seed of Worlds is a demi-plane extruder. It looks like a polished rock with a metal mesh around it that makes a very ergonomic, obvious way to hold it. It is typically found in a sealed box with multiple broken seals, new seals applied over them and large 'do not open' messages chalked on it.

To bust this fourth wall wide open - if a player at your table triggers the Seed of Worlds, roll a d100, count that number of books into your gamebook collection starting at the leftmost lowest book near the door you entered through and going right, then up. Take that book and have the players generate new characters appropriate to that gamebook. Subtract the smallest digit of the two d10s in your d100 from the largest, this is the number of hours you must play the new gamebook before this world implodes and you resume your previous game. The characters retain all memories.

Lets see how this would work at home...

First roll was 06 - which leads me to WH40K Dark Heresy Codex Anathema. This triggering of the Seed of Worlds leads us to six hours of bug-hunting in the grimdark future.

Second test was 28 - 3.5e Magic of Faerun; we are going on a jaunt to pre-sundering Faerun, also for six (8-2) hours.

If you find you have a lot of shelves to get through, roll a d6 first and count in that number of shelves before you start going book by book.

Inspired by the Inner Light Star Trek TNG episode and shelfies.

3 reverse-atlantis (GLoGtober 1 '23)

Taking on Glass Candles GLoGtober '23, challenge #1 is from a list by PRIMEUMATON - "Atlantis-type situation but in reverse. It goes up instead of down."

1. Dwarf Citadels - it is known that dwarfs understand how to create citadels - the carving of mountain tops such that they can fly.

What differs hugely place to place is how dwarfs feel about this. In some places to walk beneath the open sky is shunned and to sail the void of wildspace a dreadful fate. For those dwarfs, citadels are flown only by those who have dishonored themselves and seek redemption. A clan exiled in such a way gathers at the highest peak of their holdings, severs the mountain top and flys away to seek glories to over-stain their shame.

As the carving of this citadel of exile is being completed, often others will come to join them - some adventurers but mostly individuals who seek glory and restoration of their own honor among the stars. For the dwarf society that remains, such times can be seen as a cleansing of rogue elements or a grievous loss of debate and innovation and calcification of power and opinion.

Once launched these citadels of exile typically seek great works - finding rich ores to mine, dread enemies to fight, or great works to create. Often starting from a deeply dwarven traditionalist perspective, freshly launched citadels often overshoot into interfering with whatever they come across as they seek their new focus.

d6 Exiles of this dwarf citadel
1. - Monster Slayers seeking bloody redemption
2. - Artificers with a war-machine to test
3. - Surveyors examining the richness of these lands
4. - Old guard warriors here to resolve a local situation to the glory of the dwarves
5. - Foraging crew, logging and quarrying materials for their new great work
6. - Raiding team, testing the strength of local forces before the invasion

2. Merfolk cities - rarely an aquatic city can be thrust from its place on the seabed to the surface. Typically this happens through a ritual curse of unknown name and origin. First used long ago, with unknown purpose, it now exists only as a city-destroyer, suppressed by authorities and with even research into the nature of the curse viewed as a dire threat to be dealt with harshly.

The casting of the curse is the death of the city. Without water it is useless to its onetime inhabitants - even where they are happy to breath air and lurch around without the support of water, all the buildings are constructed to allow swimming with no stairs or other accomodation for ground-walking.

After a first wave of treasure hunters picks through the abandoned streets, these become hotly contested by avians who can make use of them in their existing form.

d6 People encountered amongst the ruins
1. - Kenku brigands setting up a base
2. - Aaracockra settlers, colonising the top of the city
3. - Winged Elves
4. - Djinni
5. - Winged kobolds serving a manticore
6. - Flying serpents

3. Exposed Underdark cities - broadly equivalent circumstances can be underdark cities expose to higher realms through earthquake, volcanic activity or other cataclysm. This will only happen for the upper-dark - the kind of catastrophe that would bring a middle-dark city to the surface is not going to leave anyone around on the local continent to be curious about it afterwards. Four things can happen - an aquatic underdark city suddenly drained - similar to the merfolk city, treat as above. An aquatic underdark city can be suddenly connected to the seas, in which case you potentially have a serious disruption to local trade routes and either rich picking for the local aquatic raiding cultures or a dread power landing among them like a wolf thrust among sheep. Next there is a 'dry' underdark city suddenly flooded, in which case it is almost certainly a treasure trove for the local aquatics to fight over and loot at their leisure. Lastly is the dry underdark city connected to the surface and likely to be at more of a disadvantage than an aquatic underdark city due to having to deal with flyers like dragons that were never a problem before.

d20 illithid cultural artefacts

After spending a bunch of time thinking about illithid worlds due to Spelljammer, some general thoughts about things they will have lying around beyond the usual, recognisable stuff.

First, the general aesthetic will be:
- upsettingly asymmetrical because they like to hold things with their tentacles and long-fingered hands and like to know which way is the 'front' by feel
- flanged or ridged design with bits sticking out for ease of tentacle holding
- sensory tools for the senses of a mindflayer - emotion (empath), thought (telepathy), telekinesis, dream (which for them is 'channel the far realm'), body-mastery (a slightly taboo hobby of attuning with whatever form your tadpole took over)
- textural approach - etched in qualith text is very common both as instruction on the item, makers marks, dedications and other notes associated with its use or origin
- materials can include mother-of-pearl and other shell-like substances shaped into desired forms and highly precise carvings rendered using telekinetic abilities

d20 illithid cultural artifacts
1. Qualith meditation beads - quadripartite inscriptions spiralling around beads on a string, a relatively common design with a huge variety of writings available. Can be inscribed with koan-type truths, community doctrines, great questions, forget-me-not messages
2. Infinite sagas - a long flexible spiral, typically an embroidered or otherwise textured ribbon, containing stories that run on forever, reflecting the time-skipping nature of mindflayer dominion itself ".. until once more, at the far end of time, our Empire rose again and..."
3. Empathy detector - equivalent to an ear-horn, particularly for illithids who have spent too much time alone and want a little more clarity. Weakens defenses against 'blast' psychic attacks. Usually a hidden necklace as wearing one is a sign of weakness.
4. Emotional broadcaster - usually a very ostentatious head-piece that makes sure that what you feel, everyone else feels too. Wearing one of these is an illithid boss-move, be very sure of your place on the social ladder.
5. Empathy shield - for when others tiresome emotions are just not worth dealing with. Also provides some limited defense against psychic attacks. Usually a discrete brooch or pendant worn hidden as openly displaying you have one of these is seen as rude.