Dredging old adventures for a campaign #City26

I have been pondering the nature of adventures to run in this hive-city - what is interesting to run *here* as opposed to just anywhere else.

The City26 template itself does mandate adventure hooks, random encounters and NPCs and these are useful but do not quite snap together into full sessions. I also realised as I have been preparing this graphic that I misread the instructions and have been coming up with d6 plot hooks & quests for each ward to go with the d12 random encounters and 7 NPCs - which is not actually what is requested.

I think the unique stories to tell here are the 'teeter-totter' ones - where there is motivation to minimise damage as opposed to just glass everything. Looking at the corpus of Imperium Maledictum and Dark Heresy adventures, we do not actually get a lot of them, in particular there are not so many that see you committed to a single hive as opposed to doing the Inquisitions will across the sector.

Casting about for other potential sources I looked at a few -
- Riffing off the 'megacity' aspect - old Judge Dredd adventures in White Dwarf / elsewhere
- Focussing on the 'weird investigation' aspect - Delta Green
- Taking the 'anachronistic technology' swords-and-robots angle - Eberron and Iron Kingdoms
- Returning to the sources - Necromunda skirmish wargame scenarios

It was a fascinating dive to fish out the best-of Judge Dredd adventures and recall my old 2000AD reading days but ultimately while there are some interesting adventures the flavour is too gonzo in Dredd and only a few could be retrofitted without wringing all the interesting bits out. There were a couple of potential ones - a murder investigation on a mobile mega-highway rest stop and a bang raid by rubber-ball bouncing thieves - that could potentially be workable but this is not the rich deep vein of adventures I wanted.

The Delta Green angle seems most promising - having read through Warhammer Crime novels recently, I appreciate that a standard criminal investigation gets interesting when you have to contend with all the nonsense of the 40k universe. There are libraries of freely available one-shots and the 'mythos threat' and cultists of Delta Green is easily reskinned as 'chaos threat' for 40k. This is a motherlode of content but complex and requiring a fair amount of red-penning to re-align it from mythos to chaos.

Looking at Eberron there are good adventures here - lightning rail heists, intrigue and mystery as a focus - but a lot of running around the continents. Similarly with Iron Kingdoms - much of the action takes place out in the wilds. There are probably some good things here but when I look at the recommendations for urban adventures, the advice seems to be to convert yet other standard D&D campaigns to Ebberon, so not quite what I need.

There is good thematic fodder in the Necromunda scenarios - a pair of good summaries are here and here but these are more fodder for tactical combats or conflicts to work around than for the overarching framing of an adventure. Useful, because once you get any sort of big hook you can then bulk it out with some of these encounters en route, but not the whole thing.

All told this suggest that tailoring an adventure creation workflow for the investigations in this hive-city might actually be the way to go - identify the factions in play and clarify their resources, pull on some of the plot-hooks and then fold the whole thing together by picking some of the random encounters or some Necromunda fight scenarios to be site of interest, salt those with clues to the plot hooks (potentially delivered via the 7 NPCs) and then think through the locations where resolution could happen.

The key difference compared to most of the standard fantasy adventuring I would run is that there are a lot more opportunities to do stand-off investigating and research in such a setting - pulling auspex logs, querying records with local Arbites divisions, etc.

The other bit I think I need to ponder is capturing the different flavours of adventures available on a Hive of a Knight-world. I think a campaign set here would be an exploration of all the dreadful things that can go wrong just on world, as inspired by my recent Rogue Trader CRPG run where nothing ever stayed fixed. It points towards the players being potentially Administratum tithe-auditors or their equivalents working directly for the Knight-house Sacristans - the classic general trouble-shooters with a strong side-order of getting things done quietly before higher authorities decide to stop being subtle and drop the hammer on the whole world.

All this does point back to the importance of 'intro adventures' to showcase a setting. Once more, we discover the wheel.

Anyway, in my 'keep me honest' progress tracker stats:
Progress: 23/56 wards completed
Completion vs target: 42% vs 33% target
Population covered: 56%

So far doing ok but I think I have creamed off the best inspiration and things are slowing down a chunk. I already reworked my initial list of wards to drop in a new trio I came up with, I think this approach will serve well as we go because things that are currently looking a bit beige to me will become interesting as two or more previous things get mashed together because I need the space for other good ideas.

Assessing your local crystal sphere for campaign potential

tl;dr: roughing out your local crystal sphere can pay dividends in keeping campaigns consistent.

This is an extension of the 'high-mobility magic' discussion about handling your players rapid unlocking of access to huge new areas.

As part of early-days prep for my Home Campaign I rolled up the local crystal sphere, just to get a sense of what was out there and what kind of things would be visible when you looked at the stars at night. I was glad I did because a couple of odd local phenomena that would be obvious in the night sky revealed themselves. Lately the players have begun to contemplate travelling off-world after getting access to some higher level magics and so I have revisited that early prep to build it out some more.

Insectfolk elementalism (Conclave Bandwagon)

A brief background to insectfolk elementalism, d12 typical elementalists and a 'Conclave encounter' for the emergency 'Conclave' bandwagon called by Prismatic Wasteland.

What do you get when your culture pre-dates the gods, souls and the outer planes at large.

Why are there no insectfolk wandering around in the heavens? Because insectfolk do not have souls - not in the mammalian sense of them falling out and drifting away when their body dies. Insectfolk are far supperior to that. The soulstuff of insect folk gets caught in their carapaces and stays on the prime material, typically leaching away into the ethereal and then collecting back to the great hives.

Half the point of the great hives of the insect folk - and all of their great structure building in general - is to provide waystations for these last remains of the dead, to guide them back into the hatching chambers to be reborn anew.

In the ages of the insectfolk, the times before even the illithids, times the aboleth dimly recall, there was no worship of gods as would be recognised today - all that came later. Animist practices were frequently found but mostly insectfolk who pried behind the metaphysical curtains found the elemental planes. The astral was a barren place then; no outer planes had formed as no soulstuff had collected to form them.

The purity of the elements were looked to by insects in a manner somewhat like worship - shrines were raised, omens consulted and abiding in harmony with the elements was held as a goal by many. What exactly it meant to be 'in harmony' was the subject of much debate and conflict. Lines of schism included whether to focus on the manifestation of elements as inner strength or to look to draw power from the elements in the environment. Nothing was ever resolved.

Law and Chaos shaped the cosmos; primal forces of order and entropy churning the elements - manifestations of these forces from the elemental planes became the first great primordials accorded worship and respect by the insects. Law was held most in esteem, for the structures of the insectfolk both social and material sat well with Law. The place for Chaos and entropy was seen but feared and fought against.

Over time elementalism, insect-style developed a broad panoply of wise ancestral insects, saints and teachers, heroes of great battles, disasters and ventures. Worship included all these many intercessors more often than it appealed directly to the elements themselves.

Auditing my home campaign city for urban game-playability

Reading Dwiz's magisterial 6-part series on running cities I was struck how I recognise a lot of as things I have arrived at over trial and error with the Ducal House campaign - but what have I missed, where can it be improved?

We have put in a lot of time in cities over the campaign; the color coding below is all the sessions that are non-Thenya - anything un-highlighted is Thenya. This is 76 of 130 sessions in Thenya, 372 of 593 hours of play - so we have spent nearly 2/3 of the campaign in the city.

I was grinning reading Dwiz's posts because it is based off a Watabous fantasy city generator map and I used the districts created from that map.

Hexcrawl25 and Hex Kit

Returning to the challenge of juggling between scales of hexes and sub-hexes while bringing my Hexcrawl25 map to table, I switched to Hex Kit. I used the Classic, Fantasyland and Travelling Through Dangerous Scenery hex packs.

Azgaars was good for the 10 mile hex scale but now I wanted to get down to 2.5 mile hex scale. The main thing grinding my gears was getting things consistent between levels, marking in the terrain and all that. To start off with I created a layer and just drew in some hexes to help with orientation. THe gray ones are sub-hexes shared between two macro-hexes. Sub-hex A1 is outlined for orientation.

The chunk of the map I am trying to work up is the centre of this hex grid; hexes A1-A7.

Hexcrawl25 and Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator

tl:dr; Azgaars Fantasy Map Generator is a good tool to get your broad strokes regions - your hexes - for you to then fill in your sub-hexes.

I set out to do Hexcrawl25 and made some poor decisions. Happily, these have revealed themselves in the first half of January rather than mid-year. I chose to scale up, which was a poor choice, revealed upon actual contact with a table, and so I have adjusted to scale down.

For... reasons I can no-longer recall, all my work on my campaign world so far is mapped with 10 mile hexes. This is not *entirely* useless but it is not great. I have done too much work with things at 10 mile to start changing things now - the campaign map for my home campaign is in 10 mile hexes, I am committed at this point. I used the following settings in Azgaar to get this; in the Style tab, selected the Grid element and set the scale to 0.1333 for 10 mile hexes.

I previously figured since the challenge was 24 mile / 6 mile, I would scale up to 40 mile / 10 mile - which you can see in the images below. Since taking this to table, I realise I have massively overshot and instead will be going 10 mile / 2.5 mile; our adventures will now take place in what would be hex A below and all those 10-mile sub-hexes within it are going to get broken down into 2.5 mile hexe.

I am happy enough with 2.5 mile hexes as close enough to the 3mile hex that is what you can walk in an hour and how far you can see. What is interesting is that zooming down that direction knocks out lots of the big regional shifts in religion/culture/nations.

I grabbed screen-shots of my Azgaars for the area I wanted with a bit of care - fullscreen, overlaid exactly - then fiddled with the full region template until it all lined up. I did this all in powerpoint and then just pushed and pulled different layers forward and back. This is clumsy as hell compared to layer manipulation in a dedicated photo editor but good enough to get by.

Draconic ancestries and noble lines (RPG Blog Carnival)

This months blog carnival from Forsaken Garden has the topic of Haves & Have Nots - so I was inspired to write about the dragonblooded noble houses of my home campaign - inspired by Dragon Kings of Atlas Games 2004 "Seven Civilizations".

My home campaign has 'dragonbloods' the long descended, much diluted ancestors of dragons as a significant chunk of the nobility - PC's included. Dropping 'dragons' in on top of the usual human noble house too-ing and fro-ing has lead to some interesting effects. 'Rule by sword-right' is pretty close to the surface at the edges - this interacts with long-life because dragonbloods live for a long time and in folk memory (grandpa's stories to people alive today) there have been significant turnover in lands and titles because folk memory is centuries long.

The continent most of the adventures are set on was once conquered by elves with their own notions of what makes a suitable elf until they left and everyone else got to pick up the pieces. This institutional overhang of 'elven civilization', even if only in the warped memory of most, has lead to a strong affinity for elven-court like behaviours in public, even when these are a badly-fitting mask over red-clawed conquest.

The Lords Funeral (RPG Blog Carnival)

This months blog carnival from Forsaken Garden has the topic of Haves & Have Nots - so I was inspired to write about an old lords funeral some family witnessed not so long ago. This is offered up in the spirit of being closer to the kind of country customs most of our adventurers might encounter as opposed to the high pomp and ceremony of British Royal funerals which would the most obvious point of reference otherwise.

The local grand old landholder died recently and his funeral was well attended; a relatively rare glimpse into that old world. Use this for the more traditional, smaller scale events than the grand paegantry we all witnessed for Elizabeth II.

Groups in attendance, in order of social standing, were:
The Family - including the new lord, potentially also including others of the blood family returned from far afield.
The County - the old lords peers, the local nobility and other major land-holders.
Our Friends - the non-noble members of the lairds community, be that co-religionists, or in something more fantasy could be same-species or other affinity group.
Our Betters - important members of local society - non-landed nobility, significant clergy of other religions, community leaders, and so on.
The Neighbours - local farmers and landholders, including the tenants of the laird and other commonfolk who had some sort of connection to the laird through their activities - i.e. they would have been recognised by the laird.
The sixth, unnamed group, are everyone else who has come along, the local peasantry, tradesfolk, passing travellers, others who wish to pay respects. This group will probably be similar in numbers to all the others if not more.

Boiling that down into a table, because after all this is a gaming blog: d100 - who are you meeting at this local nobles funeral
1-2 Family - children, cousins, aged siblings or cousins
3-8 Peers - other local noblility; could be the nobles themselves could be various representatives, minor family members and so on
9-22 Faithful - people who shared some notable commonality with the deceased; in our fantasy games that could be religion, it could be plane of origin, it could be species.
23-43 Respectables - regional notables, not quite nobles, nor sharing the notable trait of the deceased, but the 'leaders of the community' who would need to be seen attending
44-50 Known Commoners - local dwellers, could be tenant farmers, old hirelings, homunculi, craftsfolk - those who would have actually worked with and for the deceased - the most likely to both know useful things and share them with strangers come to town (such as adventurers)
51-100 Masses - everyone else; while plenty happy to talk about the deceased, "facts" discussed may be wildly unreliable.

While the demographic split above is reasonable, attitudes and atmosphere can vary wildly, from the tension of an heirless throne to the fond celebration of life for a respected and long-lived lord. Tensions between those of the 'notable trait' and everyone else can also be played upon - appearing in particular between the Peers and the Respectables, the Faithful and the Massses. Depending on what exactly the old lord liked to do with his time, the Family may or may not be happy to see the Known Commoners present and/or to see them talk with outsiders.

Lots of social potential to be had at a funeral, in particular because lots of folk who would normally quarrel, possibly violently, will hold themselves in check for this occassion only out of respect.

Deep Time Monster Groups - Adversary design notes from Hexcrawloween

Background to the hexcrawloween region that I cooked up was twists on classic monsters - taking the 'niche' of certain monsters and imagining their equivalents for other species and times.

I had a notion of what this patch of the world was - Land of the Dead, ruled by Theocracy of Kirianshalee, currently being invaded by dragon-blooded orcs from the north. After using the Wilderness Generator from Izirions Enchirdion of the West Marches to put some finer texture over that I got a patch of reality where clearly the veil had worn thin - lots of planar, fey and afterlife bleed through - souls not going where they ought to one way or another.

All this following on from the 'epochs' reading I had been doing for GLoGtober got me thinking of how this is the age of humans - or human-like things - but certainly there have been other ages dominated by other beings - and thus there must have been an ecosystem of predators, mimics and suchlike for those other times.

Review: Feather, Beak + Bone and Claw Atlas

tl:dr; awesome map-labelling game, build a city together, perfect for a collaborative session zero.

So I got Feather, Beak + Bone and the Claw Atlas expansion as part of the 'Details of our Escape' Kickstarter. I picked them up as add-ons but it can also be found on itch.io. I recall it seeing it crop up with people saying "hey yeah this is cool" a fair few times and particularly talking about map making so I thought "sounds like my kind of thing". A slimmer pamphlet than I was expecting, definitely in the zine class of game, really punchy, with nice presentation.

Cover by Austin Breed

So all told this is a nice straightforward game with the usual zine high content to weight ratio in here. Fully self-contained with good line art that gets the whole feel across. Good stuff.

It comes bundled with three blank maps and you get another example of the map inside the front and back covers of the book - so strictly five blanks of the map come with it and then you could photocopy for further versions.

d30 creatures in this unseelie nobles entourage

Taking the unseelie court as a mix of the takes of 'dark mirror of the seelie' with beautiful-but-terrible combined with 'the court of misfit things' with goblins, monsters and other rejects from the seelie plus also recognising that any courtly entourage comprises not just its native members but also those who have come to petition the couty. All together we get the following mix of people in the entourage of your unseelie noble.

d30 entourage member role
1. bewitched mortal
2. desperate supplicant
3. gleeful cultist
4. bored relative
5. climbing noble
6. sadistic duelist
7. prancing fool
8. harassed page
9. serene handmaiden
10. overloaded scribe
11. gaudy herald
12. lurking bodyguard
13. peering apothecary
14. preening companion
15. detached shadow
16. leashed monster
17. unkindness of ravens
18. magic mirror bearer
19. bestial knight
20. savage hunter
21. snarling heir
22. bombastic sorcerer
23. smirking almoner
24. scowling cupbearer
25. glowering guard captain
26. overbearing sage
27. beast-leashed huntmaster
28. animated armorsuit
29. shadow dryad
30. orbiting fey musician

d20 entourage member origin
1-3 eladrin
4-5 shadar-kai
6-7 elf, other
8 sprites (d4)
9 dryad
10 faun
11 brownies (d4)
12 quickling
13 awakened animal (terrain appropriate)
14 fairies (d4)
15 satyr
16 redcap
17 yeth-hound
18 bugbear
19 goblins
20 mortal, random

August 2024 RPG Blog Carnival: It Came From Beyond Time

Welcome to the new month for the RPG Blog Carnival - our topic for August 2024 is "It Came From Beyond Time" - on my mind is the stramge effects of long life and magic can have in dredging things up from the deep past and hurl them into your current campaign. You can find some deeper background on the RPG Blog Carnival on 'of Dice and Dragons'.

If you want to join the carnival, write up your own entry and post it in a comment below, send me a link (my username at gmail.com) or ping me on the 'blog-carnival' OSR discord channel or find me bluesky, twitter or mastodon. I will gather all the participants into a wrap-up post on September 4th.

Below is my own take on the topic.

Your great-grand-elf's elvish: long lives slowing language change (RPG Blog Carnival)

/The RPG Blog Carnival prompt from Beneath Foreign Planets of WORDS! Etymology, Onomatology and Linguistics sparked some other thoughts for me - on the stability of language when there are very long-lived organisms around.

The core thought here is that you can find thousand year old elves, dragons and giants around - presumably still speaking the same language with the same accent as when they learned their languages in their your - so accents and languages would change much more slowly in such settings than in our own world.

In my home campaign one of the key blocks of background was the elven conquest of the main continent about 5000 years ago and their great withdrawal about 1000 years ago. This has been time enough for many, many generations of the various different short lived races to have lived and died - but alongside this there are the children of the elves who departed 1000 years ago.

This sets up elven as the lingua franca for the local region based on elvish conquests and for that elven to remain recognisably similar because you are talking to the same elves or their immediate offspring. Even within elven populations, since a generation is 100-200 years and their lifespan is ~800 years, then an elven child will learn their elven in part from their great-grand-parent who will still be about. Now, noting not everyone is going to have the same accent as their parents, but this does act as a brake on linguistic drift.

This stabilising influence of very long lived creatures would also apply for giant and draconic and one would assume acting on goliath and dragonborn populations too. The big question is whether these long-lived creatures would also stabilise other langages for other populations? This would be a question of contact - if elves and dwarves are in frequent contact with shorter-lived humans or goblinoids *and* speak with them in their own tongues, it could happen. If contact is less frequent then you would end up with divergence like modern Swiss-German sounding like Ye Olde German to the Austrians and Germans - understandable but not quite the same.

Counter-vailing forces, pushing greater change in language, would be speaking populations isolated from one another and shorter lifespans. I think the shorter life-spans would not necessarily have as strong an effect on causing language drift - but things like populations being able to live in noticeably different environments would.

Greater density of languages and dialects occur around broken up places (mountain valleys, difficult terrain) which keep populations from talking to one another - in D&D you would have a further layer of hazardous barriers (in monsters) and also a broader span of what is habitable - underdark, aquatic, hot and cold environments all have sentients who can dwell there who are 'isolated' from other environments that are uninhabitable to them, but perfectly fine for others.

This sets up two opposing forces - first lots of population groups dwelling in relative isolation and the stabilising anchors of the long-lived. However, assuming the tendency is towards people adopting what most easily allows them to be understood, then where there is contact between the two, it will be change that is slowed and pulled back towards the old ways.

What about transmission along dwarf roads, planar portals and other non-linear connections between places? This would just further serve to stabilise language other greater distances.

For the purposes of world-building and running your game, this means you can with some justification say that adventurers walking around today can understand old, even ancient, languages in a way that would seem quite unreasonable in the real world. Adventurers could well be able to read the script on the ancient tomb or spellbook even before magical assistance. All this is helpful to us as GMs because it gives us a handful of languages we can expect to remain stable for us to deliver our clues in.

"Planars got a lot of words for 'ethereal'" (RPG Blog Carnival)

This months RPG Blog Carnival comes from Beneath Foreign Planets with the prompt WORDS! Etymology, Onomatology and Linguistics.

I have shied away from using language too heavily in world-building because I have not had much luck getting people to follow up on cues tied to language - the base assumption being that names, words, places and the like are the outputs of generic fantasyland slush and not actually backed by anything meaningful and thus not worth digging deeply into.

However, if I was to weave language into a setting more deeply a thread I would follow is the effect of connection to gods and to the planes. These provide a common seeding, almost a stabilising effect across settings - particularly with some groups (elves in particular) having extra-planar populations like eladrin and shadar-kai.

The current implied D&D setting has a lot of planar interaction - if I take a look at the players that pass across my open tables we have a lot of tieflings, genasi, aasimar and the operating assumption most people have coming to table is that these things are unremarkably common.

One would assume this understanding of 'the planes are out there' would lead to a much more finer grained to say 'of planar origin' with the classic 'Irish have a lot of words for rain' higher fidelity around more common aspects.

One line to take would be that this make planar things unworthy of comment, so ordinary as to not need specific words. The other line to take would be that familiarity would be enough that common folk about your setting would have at least passing familiarity with planar effects.

A couple of ways that this could manifest:

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

On the morality and intricacies of love, passions and marriage in dragonblood-led societies

Guest post from the in-house testing team, on topics that have become relevant during our long running Ducal House campaign.

Dragons are among the most unpredictable creatures in existence. When they bred with humanoids, chief among them the ever-unsteady humans, their bloods mixed together in strange ways. All except the most distant of dragonbloods are fundamentally the same, their dominant draconic heritage an internal unifier, almost no matter to which extent their blood carries human, elf, or even, rumor has it, goblinoid parts; and yet, they can be fundamentally different in what drives them. There is no predicting the passions of a dragonblood - only the fact that there will be passion for something, be it buried deep or spilling out of every word and gesture.

A dragonblood-dominated society lives by unwritten, oft unspoken rules where passions of the flesh are concerned, necessitated by the potentially vast differences in the extent of such needs and wants between individuals of even the same clan.

For obvious reasons, marriage and offspring are vitally important concerns to titled individuals and families. Owing to the ancient magical prowess and recipies of the elves, however, these have little bearing on how an individual dragonblood chooses to live out their passions.

Two maxims appear to rule intimate relationships: discretion and plausible deniability. If an innocent bystander observes something they may well have overlooked had their gaze been turned a different direction, it is presumed by all parties that nothing of note occurred. Indiscretion and carelessness, however, are frowned upon and will lead to gossip and/or pointed questioning, particularly in repeat occurrences.

No dragonblood need fear moral outrage for engaging with their passions, even well outside their own species, as long as a certain amount of deniability is maintained.

Two dragonbloods who are courting may do so openly with decorum. Sharing a residence or discreetly sharing a bedroom before or without marriage will not be commented upon by society at large, though it has been observed that the closest acquaintances will take particularly the latter as permission to ask, nudge, jibe and joke with incongruous relentlessness.

Most dragonblood marriages among the higher strata of society take place under the patronage of Bahamut rather than one of the goddesses. What couples promise to one another in front of the altar of the Oath-Keeper allows for some variation, and the clergy of Bahamut does not concern itself with the policing of such vows (any who swore an oath in the Platinum Dragon‘s name will have to answer for its keeping before being granted his eternal rewards, after all), except perhaps for a gentle reminder in particularly ostentatious or high-profile cases.

However, engaging with one‘s passions outside of one‘s established marriage is a vastly more risky proposition among dragonbloods; the reason for this lies not in social repercussions or admonishment by the church, but rather in the well-documented irrationally possessive nature of draconic creatures.

Tribute to Collaborative Dungeon Creation

tl;dr: trying to recall a genius blogpost on collaborative dungeon creation as 'forces of nature'

This is an attempt to replicate a genius blogpost I found years ago and has eluded me since. Hopefully the original author will rock up and go 'hey, thats my idea' so I can finally link it. In the absence, let me tell you a tale of a genius idea, gather round the campfire comrades... The inestimable DIY & Dragons questioned if it might be Tom Dowlers "How to Host A Dungeon" - and from that tip I found the post I was thinking off - Dyson Logos doing a test of How to Host a Dungeon. So I am actually mis-remembering this as a multi-player experience which perhaps could be another way to do it. Anyway, all that follows was written before I found this out, please view it in that light.

Fado, fado, there was an idea that if you were a DM with access to multiple pools of players, you could use some of them to set situations that would then serve as challenges for others.

The original post addressed dungeons but in the hope of appeasing Joesky's ghost I am going to generalise it a bit to make it a tool for any setting.

So breaking that down into a procedure:
1. Kick it off by picking a base location type - a temple, dungeon, cavern, etc. Sketch out some part of that to get things started.
2. Everyone around the table then chooses to act as a force that has altered the space over time - dwarven miners, burrowing dragons, lava flows, a wizard (there is always a wizard).
3. Go around the table adding to or modifying the base location in a way that matches thematically to that force.
4. Repeat #3 until you have a sufficiently large or interesting location

Review: Infinigrad: The Weird City Toolkit

tl:dr; a shiny new iteration of the go-to urban generator for Suburbs, Buildings, Guilds, Foes, Dungeons and Quests.

Infinigrad: The Weird City Toolkit by Gorgzu Games is the current iteration of a toolkit I have been gleefully using for years - in its first iteration as it was released in parts on the Lizard Man Diaries blog to create cities for my Lizard Kingdoms campaign and it has remained my go-to whenever I want to get granular and creative in an urban environment. Books like World Without Number give you great high level stuff but Infinigrad is the one that takes you down through the suburbs to the room by room.

Conceptually, I belive this sprang from the authors desire to have a toolkit that would support random generation of episodic weird fantasy heists or cyberpunk style 'runs' - each session would see a newly diced up location in the infinite city complete with atmosphere and opposition and off the players would go. What it is now is a hugely detailed set of urban location generators from the suburb scale down to the people and things in the rooms which can be deployed to support any urban setting from fantasy to far future.

The book itself is, to my mind, a solid improvement in useability on older versions, cleaner text layout, easier to read and same great content expanded in useful places. The art through is AI, by "the Daemon Midjourney", as has been the Authors style for years. This may or may not sit well with you but for the vibes of Infinigrad it works as a dreamy, twisted place where people *do* have the wrong number of fingers and generally look twisted, warped and uncanny.

The DriveThru package also includes a bunch of HTML generators - Building Stocker, Guild Dog Generator, Job Generator, Suburb Generator, Suburb Street Stocker and Universal Stocker - which you can just click-to-use instead of rolling dice to look things up. I think I will be sticking with dice on the table and the pdf but these are a nice quality of life inclusion for those who want them.

Orc-shifted world (RPG Blog Carnival)

For this months RPG Blog Carnival because the prompt it’s not easy being green from RPG Wandering got me thinking about orcs - and how the world changes, if any, if we slot orcs into the central world spot that humans typically occupy.

What if orcs and goblins were our 'base' for our fantasy world in place of humans? Taking standard D&D fantasy world, you get lots of mixed entities from the influence of magic, the planes, dragons, etc. What does a world look like where the assumed base block of the world is an orc?

This is not Orkworld where we assume Orks are the protagonists in otherwise standard fantasyland, this is assuming a world grown up around orcs rather than one grown up around humans.

There looks to me like three major blocks of creatures that would change to 'orc-based' versions
- those changed by the influence of magical forces - planars
- those combined with other fantasy races through heritage
- those affected/cursed during their life

Rare Feasts from Magical Terrain (RPG Blog Carnival)

A second thought for this months blog carnival from VDonnut Valley for the topic of Feasts, Foods and Fancy Drinks, oh my!.

Based on an anecdote from family about how particular meat from particular places tastes good because of what the wind blows there from a particularly grim industrial accident, stealing a bit from the French idea of terroir, we have reasons that foods might be sought after that tie to where they are from.

This builds from our previous strange weather from magic terrain combined with some food item generators.

As a workflow this is:
1. Figure out your unusual meal courses - great starts for this are Monster Menu-All Part 1: Eating the AD&D Monster Manual by Coins & Scrolls. You could also tap Box Full of Boxes great Local Cuisine Generator or Random Table of the Week's Local delicacies or the d30 offal ideas for giant appetites elsewhere on this blog.

2. See why the source is special. Roll up a strange weather effect and terrain type from strange weather from magic terrain - use the weather effect to give you how the food type was affected and the terrain type to give you the nature of the difference.

3. Spice to taste. Back reference our previous Lavish feasts and high tables and see if you want to layer any additional things on - the 'materials' and 'difficult to execute foods' might be taken care of by what you have rolled up already or maybe you want to spread yet more extravagance into the mix.

My own test case for 'why' the terrain is strange and what is being harvested from it was a house of summoners who threw a big feast to impress their patron - I pulled Mimic, Salamander and Dragonturtle from Coins and Scrolls list, then diced up some magical terrain locations to see where they had come from.

First I got Meteor Fields and Intrusive Outsiders, second I got the Black Earth and Flooding; this gave me mimics that had come down on meteors, grown up in a meteor field and caused wierd extra-sensory effects when consumed followed by Salamanders drowned when positive-energy Black Earth flooded - incredibly nutrious and energising stuff. I felt dragonturtle was interesting enough on its own and served that as was.

Given the fuss that people in the real world make about tiny shifts in soil quality and breeds of crops and animals in the taste of things at their table I am sure that nobles, worse long-lived nobles like elves, worse elven noble mages would have preposterously refined tastes, insisting on things being Just So. This type of thing also makes fabulous treasures - finding some delicacy well preserved on a dark shelf in a dungeon? A fortune to the right buyer... or a quest in its own right.