d20 shitty little guys

 

THE UNDERWORLD

1 A cult comprised of three members, each squabbling over their new scripture

2 Highwaymen arguing over the roles they’re playing in this con

3 An amateur Witchfinder’s Brigade just waiting for someone to beat the tar out of

4 An herbalist who just can’t find the sprout they’re looking for

5 A doctor overseeing a slapdash leech removal that isn’t going so hot

6 A half-hearted exorcism in progress

7 A vagrant magician whose only trick is to disappear coins without returning them

8 Some teenagers failing to be nonchalant about asking where they can find the Undermarket

9 Conquest re-enactors in need of some better weapons than this shitty wood and foam

10 A pith-helmeted amateur explorer asking directions to the nearest Untamed Wilderness or Lawless Frontier

THE KNOWN WORLD

11 A poser jongleur, with no clue what they’re doing, trying to teach someone how to juggle

12 An overworked crier who’s awful at getting people to take their pamphlets

13 A “renowned alchemist” who doesn’t know how the placebo effect works and thinks they’re just that good

14 A gaggle of enthusiasts bickering over who has the best hat

15 A stodgy old diet-racist with food poisoning from ethnic food

16 Amateur stargazers wondering why their telescope isn’t working

17 Children getting in a fight over a game of kick-around-a-raccoon-carcass

19 Out-of-tune buskers playing a parody of a folk song about having sex with a goat

19 A kid looking for help they desperately need in a game of hide and seek

20 A team of engineers who are just a few parts shy of getting this spaceship off the ground

Here are the principles, not rules, that guided me.

• These NPCs should be doing something upon approach, or better yet, invite approach.
• They should all be Extremely On Their Bullshit.
• They should all be incompetent enough to be interesting.
• They should abide by and reinforce the ever-developing Pb anticanon.

Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.

R.A.F.

That is, Random Aerodyne Features. Written for the airships of Pb, but could likely work for any boat-like vessel.

1. Shrouds of braided human hair
2. It’s always freezing on board
3. Shag carpeting
4. Hands and mouths sticking haphazardly out of the walls and floor
5. A skeleton lashed to the steering wheel
6. Animal cages built into the cargo hold
7. Stylized animal wings painted on the hull demarcating port and starboard
8. Shrouds of coin-chains
9. A phonograph horn running up the mizzen stuck blaring Imperial marches
10. A magic sword being used as a flying jib boom
11. Balloon sewn from Churlian textile
12. Shrouds wrought of ashtadhatu chain
13. A mummified snake wrapped around the foremast
14. A figurehead of a wild-eyed warlock clinging to the bowsprit
15. A quaint fireplace in the cargo hold
16. An inverted bell for a crow’s nest
17. An executioner’s chair lashed to the base of the lightning rod
18. Sugar crystals growing on the hull
19. A mural of eye-clusters painted on the hull; the pupils are lightning cannon gunports
20. A coffin full of keys being used as an anchor

What, you want more? Fine. Here. Knock yourself out.

1. Stocked horizontal bookshelves for a deck
2. The rusted head of an Old World automaton being used as an anchor
3. Wheels, just in case
4. The cupped hands of a titanic statue for a crow’s nest
5. Balloon shaped as a skull serving as a vanitas
6. Thuribles hang from the masts
7. A figurehead carved of hardlight crystal
8. Everything is monocolor
9. Tentacle infestation
10. Multicolored candles melted onto the length of the railings
11. An aquarium set into the middle of the deck
12. An overgrown thicket of luminescent toadstools growing in the cargo hold
13. A nervous system painted into the deck
14. The whole ship is built in the shape of an ankh
15. Cobwebs so thick you can’t see the floor
16. A burnt-out lightning cannon being used as an anchor
17. Balloon inhabited by a firefly colony
18. An oversized mortar for a crow’s nest
19. The whole ship was carved out of one tree
20. A quote from the Siliconium carved into the keel

Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.

Towards the ingredients of a lasting game

Here are ingredients that I believe will generally produce a years-long campaign:

• A group of friends, friends who would want to spend time with each other with or without DnD. Between 4 and 9 total, DM included; too many and the spotlight-splitting diminishes engagement, too few and the interpersonal dynamics aren't robust enough to support extended play. Always err on the side of less players, and on the side of better players over better friends.
• A reliable schedule that works for the players consistently and the DM constantly. Avoid playing with less than 3/4 of the players, or scheduling on a session-by-session basis, at all costs.
• A sufficiently compelling campaign that, on average, playing it is a better experience then sitting and chatting with the same snacks, and that at its best, playing it is a better experience than any board or video game.
• Start with as gripping a session as you can run, then spend several sessions doing the simplest play possible, folding out from there as slowly as can be organic and satisfying. Leading with your best, highest-concept material will make sure it gets to the table, but it also makes it easy to walk away with satisfaction after having experienced it.
• Ensure the party, in every moment, has some goal, ideally one that will motivate them further into the unknown. Prioritize clear trajectory, even over realism. A secret uncovered too fast is a point of pride, a mystery that can't be solved is worse than a waste of time.

The dividends of these bullets will be, I think, a game that will survive. Doubtless you've had a long-running campaign that hasn't met these criteria, or you have some insight into this alchemy I don't. I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.

"Sundering" Planescape

I really wish I liked Planescape, but I don’t. Let’s see if I can fix it.

WHAT DO I LIKE ABOUT PLANESCAPE?

• IT’S ECLECTIC. The primary draw of Planescape is the near-surreal variety of experiences it can offer, especially those well outside of the standard purview of dungeon fantasy. There is nothing outside of Planescape’s purview, and a campaign on the cosmic scale promises an endless variety of novel experiences.
• IT’S PHILOSOPHICAL. It’s difficult to adventure in Planescape without making choices about what you believe and why. A party, over the course of a campaign, is implicitly challenged to carve out an ethical niche in the cosmos, which is delightfully fertile ground from which the more cerebral possibilities of roleplay can sprout.
• IT’S ACCESSIBLE. Through a Planescape campaign, interplanar play that’s typically locked behind a high level becomes accessible to any party. Like a game that starts with domain play (our beloved), it takes a pleasure that by default arises out of a long-running DnD campaign and presents it to anyone who wants to enjoy it.

WHAT’S NOT GREAT ABOUT PLANESCAPE?

• IT’S SPRAWLING. With an endless and easily-accessed multiverse, it’s hard to delineate the known world from the unknown world, and the early game from the late. This also makes it difficult to make small stakes still feel meaningful in the shadow of the leviathan of infinitude.
• IT’S REDUNDANT. Especially because of the constraints of the ninefold alignment chart, the obligation to arbitrarily fill out existing matrices creates natural redundancies in the worldbuilding. What’s the difference between Arborea and the Beastlands, the Doomguard and the Bleak Cabal?
• IT’S HYPEREXOTIC. The sheer number of genuinely original features of Planescape’s world makes explaining it to a neophyte an act of endless onboarding. Barring individual research on the setting, there’s next to no grounding of common understanding from which a table can work together to make sense of each other and the world they’re creating.

Now, I’m certain that a smarter, more creative DM could circumvent these issues without having to restructure the Planescape canon. But this is my take on the matter: a Planescape whose central conceits can be clearly communicated in three bullets, a Planescape with the capacity to  fruitfully constrain a party’s interplanar antics, a Planescape not yet oversaturated by the need to fill every niche.

In 1917, the US joined the Great War, the last mother crumples a salt-stained telegraph delivered by a smartly-dressed hero, the last priest’s rosary falters in his trembling hands, the last soldier’s eyes stop twinkling as he white-knuckle grips his childhood best friend rotting alive in a backwater trench, and the corpse of God falls out of heaven and crashes headsfirst into the Western Front. That was a decade ago.

Everyone who could make the pilgrimage without being blown to bits by their neighbors built a metropolis in God’s ribcage, and named it Sigil. Sigil is the only city that matters; the rest of the world, far as anyone knows, is still an endless morass of smoking mortar shells and mud-caked, mist-drenched wasteland. The Temperance League instituted a prohibition a couple years back, which you obey if you’re poor and smart.

God bled all over the cosmos. This vanishingly rare and unspeakably valuable ICHOR serves as fuel for interplanar zeppelins called spelljammers. Without ICHOR, you have to navigate the cosmos long way round, through natural gates and wounds between dimensions. Sigil stripped God’s flesh from His bones long ago, milking it for the ICHOR necessary to establish a spelljammer flotilla and a cluster of pancosmic colonies called Gate-Towns, so all the remaining ICHOR is sequestered in the least penetrable crannies of the multiverse.

Next up: a primer on the seven outer planes. Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.

Dungeon fantasy's archetypal monsters

 This is a sequel to my post on archetypal spells; in much the same style, I’ve gone through a fat stack of monster manuals to find out what themes unite the core coterie of monsters therein, and what niches they fill.

—

This is the minimum viable bestiary: what’s the least a DM needs to make informed choices while making and running their own monsters? (If you’ll recall my GLoG reviews, my primary critique of most hacks were their lacks of bestiaries, so pay attention.)

• A normal dude with a shitty spear, the soil upon which cathedrals are built.
• A wizard, the scapegoat for bullshit.
• Two mundane animals, something dangerous and something not.
• Some faceless minions, so one may enjoy butchery.
• A sack of hit points and malice, to fuel a starting dungeon.
• A monster with some extraordinary power, to show what a broken rule looks like.
• A campaign-level superthreat, usually a dragon, to show where the road ends.

—

This is the full archetypal bestiary: if you wanted to use your bestiary to repopulate any standard module without headache, what would you need in it, given that your monster stats can acommodate on-the-fly level tuning? (Bloated bestiaries are often primarily composed of bestial and intelligent variants of what the latter list considers the same monster, same for good and evil variants.)

ANIMAL/INSECT

• Mundane animal (typically dangerous)
• Magical variant animal (typically giant)
• Hybrid
• Swarm
• Prehistoric animal
• Fantastical nonmagical animal

HUMAN

• Unskilled combatant
• Wizard
• Priest (typically evil)
• Skilled combatant (typically evil)
• Tradesperson
• Class-analogue (if not covered already)

HUMAN-ADJACENT

• Big guy (particularly orc)
• Little guy (particularly goblin/kobold)
• Hybrid (typically plant/animal)
• From elsewhere (typically underground/another plane)
• Giant
• The French

UNDEAD

• Zombie
• Skeleton
• Incorporeal
• Vampire
• Mummy
• Class-analogue (if not covered already)

OCCULT

• Dragon
• Fiend (particularly demon/devil)
• Lovecraftian horror
• Angel
• Brain-eater
• Task-bound

ENVIRONMENT

• Underwater
• Burrowing  
• Filth-dweller
• Ice-dweller
• Flying
• Nature spirit

CAPABILITY

• Petrification
• Corrosion
• Teleportation
• Regeneration
• Infection (particularly lycanthropy)
• Immunity (typically invulnerability)

BODY

• Elemental (particularly genie)
• Ooze (particularly cube)
• Ophidian
• Mouth with legs
• Invisible
• Disembodied head

FORMS

• Construct (particularly golem/automaton)
• Animate object (particularly gargoyle)
• Murderous plant
• Disguised predator
• Shapeshifter (particularly doppelgänger/mimic)
• Collector

Please do comment if you think I've forgotten or misapprehended anything, in service of making this as valuable a resource as possible. Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.