QHW, Day 18: Post-Apocalyptic

Humanity used to stand proud and tall. We transformed matter atom after atom with nanotechnology. We created AIs that thought at the speed of light. We made our children healthy and beautiful and clever and immortal. We reached for the stars. That was the Light.

But pride comes before a fall and the higher you rise, the harder your fall. Maybe it was a war. Maybe a natural disaster. An alien invasion. An insane omega psion. A simple mistake that turned the ubiquitous nanite clouds at us. We fell, and no one remembers the fall today. That was the Dark.

But now, the Dark is in the past and a bright future of reclamation and re-discovery looms near. People emerge from ancient vaults and arcologies, or finally dare to venture away from their hidden villages and sheltered towns. That which was lost will be found again.

What once were the city spires that reached so high above now all lies buried in toxic muck, yet both the treasures and the defenders of yore remain. Radiation and bioengineered super-plagues and insane medical nanites and other horrors released by a million past accidents and catastrophes threaten the intrepid pioneers. The land at large is ruled by mutants and insane technology, full of danger and wonder and excitement. Death is always near, but so is endless fame and untold riches.

What awaits in this brave new world? In the After-Dark?

The truth is, this was not the first time. There was another apocalypse before the last one, and more before then. If you dig deep enough, you will find ruins of hundreds, thousands fallen civilizations. Buildings buried by continental drift. No one remembers the years any more, as they no longer make sense to human mind. No one remembers the true cause for the cataclysms, for every time it was something different that brought humanity to its knees.

There was Dark, and there will be again. We shall rise and we shall fall, until the very ashes of past civilizations smother the Sun, already tinged red.

QHW, Day 16: Deep Space

Stars are born in the wombs of nebulae and spend their long, long lives attending the Galactic Court. They dance at the eternal ball, every step according to the Grand Scheme of Cosmos. Astrologers figured out long ago that they can glimpse Fate itself by observing the movement of the stars, but much fewer people will ever hear the music of the spheres. Yes, the stars sing an endless Song of Existence, preserving the harmony of the whole Universe. And after billions and billions of years, the stars grow old and red and bloated, until finally they die. It is said that virtuous stars leave behind a white, radiant heart, while only a rotten, black heart remains after those stars that were filled with vice.

But this story is not about stars young or old, pure or depraved. It is not even about the dreadful lich-stars, dead and reborn through the most horrid of necromancies. It is about a star who turned away from her sisters and their dance, who screamed against the harmony, who first lost her way, then her place in Cosmos, then her mind, and finally even her existence.

Yet she strayed so far and fell out of the rhythm enough that she wasn't even able to die properly. She writhed in agony for aeons, collapsed and withered yet not truly gone, her energies trapped, unable to return to life nor move on to the afterlife. She trashed and screamed until the very fabric of Creation started to fray and wear thin, and then a moment of sudden silence came as the undying star fell Beyond, leaving a star-shaped hole in reality.

The Voidstar was born.

Unbound by the celestial order, the Voidstar wanders freely through the galaxy to this day. She still shines, but with darkness-that-illuminates, a negative, poisonous unlight. Life touched by this unlight is corrupted and sickened, structures corroded and decayed. Even the spirit of things is subverted and ruined. Vibrant colours help resist the effects of unlight, and deep enough darkness or bright enough light offer some respite.

The Voidstar also still screams, unarticulated and unheard, punching gaps in the harmony of the Universe. A silence strong enough to kill. It is said that music, this tiniest reflection of the universal harmony, might ward off the killing silence.

But most importantly, the Voidstar is not really there, being a gateway to Beyond.

So put on your garish vacc suit and let the space ship be flooded with song. The Unformed and Blanks and Neverwere may be countless, but we are the Last Guard and we have a bullet for every last one of them.

QHW, Day 15: Crowns

• Nobility has nothing to do with bloodlines and birthright, nor some nebulous moral concept. Being noble is a metaphysical quality that literally turns your blood blue.
• Similarly, wickedness turns your blood green. Greenskins and wicked witches were human once, before their evil deeds turned them into a wretch.
• Blue blood makes one more beautiful, intelligent, healthier and longer-lived than normal humans. Extraordinarily virtuous nobles will one day find a set of wings growing from their shoulders.
• Only those of blue blood may hold land or serve as knights.
  
• Green blood makes one stronger, tougher and more ugly than normal humans. Wretches of unprecedented depravity will eventually be twisted into quadrupedal beasts incapable of speech, who can nonetheless punch through a stone wall.
• Your blood does not change all of a sudden, but rather every good or evil deed shifts it little by little. The art of bloodletting can separate this changed blood and remove it from the body, slowing any effects your behaviour might have.
• Blood transfusions can be used to completely stave off green blood, though this practice is less well-understood and much more dangerous. Some people will still turn to it in face of a looming wretchedness; such miserable creatures are called vampires.
• Transfusions of blue blood into a normal human let the human enjoy some perks of nobility for a short while, helping them to heal from a grievous injury or a serious disease. Many legends feature a noble sharing their blood with an ailing companion to save their life. The stories about nobles kidnapped for their blood, to prolong the life of some old, wealthy and unscrupulous man, are only whispered, though.
• Some greenskins, on the other hand, have forcibly conscripted more of their kind by injecting their blood into humans.
• Mixing too much of both blue and green blood in one body can have horrific consequences. At least one assassination is known to have been carried out by injecting a great noble with green blood. Accidental mixing (such as when someone kidnaps a noble for nefarious purposes of blood transfusion, unknowingly turning most of their blood green in the process) are much more common though. The resulting abominations would be pitiful, if they were not so frenzied and hostile.
• The flagellant knights train themselves to reinforce their will while weakening their bodies, bleeding themselves every day with barbed whips. Thus they reduce the amount of blood they have, making every deed count more, thus bringing them more rapidly towards the angelic metamorphosis.

Regioncrawl

I've been playing Dark Elf lately, an older online kingdom management game, and it has a beautiful map with little regions that you war over. It would be perfect for region-crawling. So I've taken the liberty of keying all the regions, though only with names so far. Hopefully they can serve as hooks in and of themselves. Many places are named in Low Elvish (see the dictionary below), because why not, and some are loosely inspired by their in-game names.

>KEYED MAP<

>CLEAN MAP<

Each region can be handled as a hex or point on a more traditional map, with your favourite rules for overland movement. Any shared border means the regions are adjacent "hexes" and each region takes the same time to traverse - the smaller regions have rougher terrain while the larger ones have nice roads. Rivers and mountains on region borders are impassable unless the PCs find a ferry/mountain guide, while rivers and mountains within a region have bridges or trails.

There are several portals, which can speed up your travels a lot if you know the rune-code of your destination.

 

As far as starting locations go, I'd suggest Crown-by-the-Sea in the lower left corner, the Refugee Camp in the upper left, one of the settlements around the Undertide Lake, or perhaps the Little Big Burgh in the lower right. (Pro tip: You can Ctrl+F any location on the map.) I'm personally a fan of starting the players in a relatively normal place and then having them delve deeper into the weird, and all of these locations can serve as the grounded base of operations while having something worth exploring only a hex or two away. I'd probably just show the players the named map to give them some idea about what they can expect and aim for.

You can also start some trouble brewing for the players to fix or flee from.

Have I missed any regions on the map? Any suggestions or corrections?

Abyss of Damned Souls

I submitted an entry to the 200 Word RPG Challenge. It's basically a card-based deck-building RPG.

Sort of.

From here.

It is intended for 1 game master (the Abyss) and 1+ players, and you will need several decks of playing cards.

You're dead.

You got lost and went where all lost things and forgotten places go.

You'll need one suit from a card deck. Take 2-10 and choose one face card.

• Jack is sneaky.
• Queen is charming.
• King is violent.
• Ace is clever.

This small deck is your soul.

Actions have difficulty determined by the Abyss*. Draw a higher card to succeed. When you draw your face card, you automatically succeed and reshuffle your deck. You may discard extra cards to sum them with an already drawn card, but only if the action corresponds to your face card. Discarded cards are gone forever.

In conflict, opponents draw from their decks and the higher card wins. Winner takes the card of the looser, both discard their card in a draw. When only your face card remains, you fade away.

The Abyss will throw obstacles and monsters** in your way, and reward achievements with inhuman powers.

You'll loose pieces of your soul, then patch the holes with stolen bits of others. Your deck will change, until nothing from you remains.

You'll be a monster.

Damn you,
damn us all.

*) Game-master.
**) Monsters may be customised by the size and value of their deck.

Unlike normally, when I pile fun mechanics together and see what sticks, this game has themes I tried to build the central action resolution mechanics around: power at a price and the slow loss of humanity.

The players will start with a full suit of cards in their deck, and then loose them as they perform big actions or get defeated in combat. They will gain new, different cards from successful combat with monsters, and magical powers when the Abyss is pleased.

I suggest that the Abyss uses distinct decks to build their monsters, so that it becomes obvious how much the players' decks changed. Hopefully, they will notice that there are no true "monsters" in the Abyss, only other lost souls that survived for far too long.

On the right, a newly arrived lost soul.
On the left, one already experienced with the ways of the Abyss.

 
How to make a monster
Separate a deck of cards into number cards and face cards, then shuffle them both. Roll 2d6 and take that many number cards, then add one face card. Have a look at the face card and decide what the monster might be like, what does it want and what kind of magical power it has.

Voila, your random monster.

Very weak monsters might have no face card, turning to flee once they run out of cards. Their deck is reshuffled only once they rest. On the other end of the spectrum, very powerful creatures might have more than one face card.
 

 

Example bestiary
Edit: Here are some more bogeymen for Abyss of Damned Souls.

Rats and bats and piranhas and insects
Deck: 3-4-4-5-6-6
There are some diseased, warped animals in the Abyss. They have no face card, so once they run out of cards, they will turn to flee.

Goblin
Deck: 2-2-3-4-5-J
What do you get when you take a human and remove everything positive from them? An undersized, disgusting wretch. It cannot win in a fair fight, so it won't fight fair.

Carver
Deck: 5-6-6-7-7-9-Q
A woman stitched together from ill-fitting body parts and stuffed into a dress suit. She can knit your wounded body, but only takes payment in fresh organs and body parts.

Ogre
Deck: 2-2-7-7-8-8-9-9-10-10-K
A brutish woman, morbidly obese and freakishly tall. She will tear off your limbs and feast on your flesh. She wears a burlap sack over her head.

Summoner
Deck: 10-10-A
A man with screaming faces tattooed on his skin. He will offer secrets and knowledge, if you promise him a favour. He may summon anyone who owes him with just a word.

Grue
Deck: 3-3-3-5-5-5-7-7-7-9-9-9-J
A monster in the darkness. It is never there if you have light and always here when your torch goes out.

Wraith
Deck: 3-4-5-8-K
Skeletal figure in tattered robes. It's falling apart and not long for this world, but the wounds inflicted by its rusty knife never heal.

Demon
Deck: 5-5-6-6-7-7-8-8-9-9-10-10-Q-A
Royal, proud, diabolic figure. Its clothes are lavish and soiled, its words are wise and venomous. It has a trove of artifacts forged from stolen souls.

by apterus

Of Monsters and Men

I recently finished reading the Monster Blood Tattoo series by D. M. Cornish, and I probably never saw a story more appropriate to be used as a setting for OSR. Even if you didn't want to read the story itself, the books contain massive Explicarium and Appendices with enough information to run a game in that strange world. Really, I somewhat suspect the author from playing tabletops as he was writing this one...

The world where the trilogy takes place, the Half-Continent, is basically a Victorian Europe caught in a constant struggle between men and monsters. There is an actual metaphysical war between civilization that tames the land by cultivation and "threwd", a genius loci or monster-producing awareness of the wild nature. Humans build cities, each one a hole in the threwd and a bastion against monsters, protecting the surrounding farmland but rarely strong enough to push far against the wilds. Nature responds by sending monsters to fight humanity off.

A nicker.

And yes, there are monsters everywhere. Unless you are within the safe streets of a city, monsters will most likely prowl nearby. All villages are built with a protection of strong walls, all mansions are more like fortresses. Larger roads are patrolled by the military and travellers hire bodyguards. The farther away you go from a centre of civilization, the more common and dangerous the monsters will get. They crawl out from various swamps and muds "impregnated" by threwd, countless in numbers and an ever-looming threat over humanity. They come in every size and shape - goblinoid grinnlings; animal-headed glamgorns, huge umbergogs, aquatic kraulschwimmen, and more, ever stranger creatures. Every forest, river, mountain or marsh will have some, and they will come out at night, invading into the fields, pastures and orchards unless deterred. And should you forget to lock the doors and windows of your fortified house, they may very well eat you.

A glamgorn.

Yet monsters are not mindless killers. They are as intelligent as humans, and very much varied in their attitudes. Many despise humans for their conquest of the wilds, many like the taste of human flesh (or horse meat, monsters are said to love horse meat), but way more monsters would just like to be left at peace. Precious few are even benign, hoping to reconcile monsters and men. And they are also not just disorganized packs or solitary wanderers (quite some are, but not all). The wild lands are ruled over by urchin-lords, monster nobility so ancient and soaked with threwd they basically have psychic powers (there is no true magic, so psychic powers and alchemy is as close as you will get to supernatural). The deep seas then hide the dormant false-gods, gargantuan monsters of apocalyptic powers, inspiring cults (monstrous or human) that try to find ways of waking them so that their false-god can rule over the world.

The Vinegar Sea hides even stranger monsters.

For their part, the people of the Haacobin Empire (a collection of city-states where the story takes place) see monsters as pests to be eradicated, and threwd as a challenge to be overcome. Of course, there are the "heretical, monster-loving" kingdoms that the Empire wages war at, and which maybe live in relative harmony with monsters. But in the Empire, any sympathy to monsters is a capital offense, and even being accused of monster-love can get you exiled into the hostile countryside. And because of this philosophy of "the only good monster is a dead monster", of course there are various monster-slayers and adventurers - how convenient for tabletop gaming!

An undead, man-made monster.

Your usual murderhobo party will appreciate the organised quest-givers, as the number of monster-slayers and monsters to be slain had given raise to the so called "knaveries". A knavery is an administrative establishment where all the hireling slayers, professional killers and freelance murderers can get commission to work on government-declared monster-hunts or private contracts. Monster slaying is rather lucrative business - there are never enough soldiers to keep all the public roads in the country safe, merchants will gladly pay to have their precious cargo protected, and rich land owners or remote villages are always pestered by some troublesome monster. Many cities even offer prize money for every monster’s head you bring.

A monster-slayer.

Monster slaying is also a deadly business. As the average monsters has every physical advantage over humans (even the two feet tall boggles are said to be stronger than a grown man, to say nothing about claws, fangs or armoured skin), monster-slayers need some gimmick to level the playing field. Sure, there are flintlock firearms, but that alone is not enough when monsters may be large and tough enough to shrug off cannonballs. I already mentioned alchemy, though, which is powerful, widespread, diverse and oft-used.

A lahzar.

For starters, there is proofed clothing - clothes alchemically treated to reinforce them against both blade and claw. You can wear a frock coat instead of a chain mail, yet still get comparable protection, and with more expensive alchemical concoctions, better defensive abilities can be achieved. Thus using medieval setting is no longer required to maintain the idea of effective armour, and your players can let their fashion sense run wild as they search for the best-looking armoured embroidery. No one would be caught outside of a city without proofing. Even better, proofing solves the problem I have with firearms in many fantasy worlds - why didn't they quickly spread and made melee combat obsolete? But when everyone is walking around in bulletproof clothes, you can still reliably whack them with a pole-axe or a war hammer.

The Appendices contain explanations
of nearly everything, with pictures.
All of the pictures here actually come
from the books.

But I digressed a bit from actually slaying the monsters. For this, there are many concoctions, acids and monster-poisons - skolds are professional battle alchemists, hurling explosives, combustibles, or caustic and toxic chemicals. Other potions can enhance the abilities of normal humans - leers take drugs that help them to see in shadows or darkness and notice minor details, or use biologues (artificially grown living tools and machines) to track monsters by smell and find their hiding places. There are also the dangerous lahzars, given psychic powers by a combination of alchemy and surgery. And even the common monster-slayer can take advantage of envenomed blade or bullet, and when the job is done they will chug down one of the many restoratives (yes, there are healing potions, or something pretty close).

A leer wearing a smell-enhancing olfactologue.

Alchemy has great many uses, and just as many misuses. While lahzars skirt the line of legality, there are strictly illegal practises of mad alchemists who use human cadavers, butchered monsters and ancient chemistry to create gudgeons - undead made-monsters, Frankenstein-esque brutes and stitched beasts of war. Maybe your players would like the profit that comes from trafficking stolen human bodies and living monsters? Such dark trades can pay really well, as gudgeons are valued both as "super soldiers", and as opponents to  captured monsters in underground fights for the entertainment of the wealthy and aristocratic. On the other hand, monsters see gudgeons as the ultimate blasphemy and will try to destroy them on sight. Maybe the players can find an unexpected ally when hunting such a zombified abomination, or help monsters free their kin from a fighting pit? Either way, they will be hanged if discovered, as smugglers or as monster-lovers.

A single skold against a massive war-gudgeon.

All in all, the Half-Continent would make for an excellent adventuring location. The only thing missing in the books are some forgotten dungeons to explore, if you need those in your game.

I think I might try to adapt some of ideas for OSR...