My First 6 Months with Bones of Contention

About six months ago, I announced that I was joining the Bones of Contention blog. Although this has been one of my least productive blogging years, I did manage to get a few posts in.

 

 
 

Dungeon Dioramas - In the Light of a Ghost Star & Earth Expedition One

 

For my first post, I decided to review one of the first adventures put out by the prolific minimalist Nate Treme. In addition to a careful reading of the gamebook, I was able to base my review on some actual play experience with my regular Friday night game group. This one also features something that I hope I can still make a somewhat regular feature of the column, a section where I put the procedural adventure generators in the book to work and run them through their paces by generating an entire setting.

 

 

Cryptic Signals - Mausritter, Anomalous Subsurface Environment, Honey in the Rafters, Doodle Champion Island Games

 

One of the interesting things about Bones as a blog is that we have multiple authors. The Cryptic Signals series of posts tries to use that to offer a series of short vignette reviews of several different game books. I went ahead and organized this one, and wrote two of the reviews, including for the Pokemon-like browser game Google released to celebrate the 2020 Summer Olympics. My review of Mausritter included another test of adventure generation procedures.

 

  

Dungeon Dioramas - Night Land

 

When I wrote my Ghost Star review, I mentioned that I had been hoping for a setting like William Hope Hodgson's Night Land, which led Trey from From the Sorcerer's Skull to recommend this Night Land to me. Aside from the name and the basic premise of a weird, futuristic land stuck in eternal darkness, this adventure doesn't borrow much from Hodgson, but I'm still glad I read it. 

I feel like mentioning the book in my first two columns makes it seem like I'm obsessed with Night Land, and I'm sure I'll review more science fantasy in the future, but I promise that every column won't be about how another game designer has failed to sufficiently remind me of Hodgson.

Cryptic Signals - Dissident Whispers

This was our most thematic Cryptic Signals so far, and to be honest, I liked that so much I hope more of them will have some sort of unifying theme. I picked my second favorite review from the book. I didn't review my favorite - yet - because I don't want to pigeonhole myself as only writing about Mausritter. I'm hopeful that we'll do another batch of reviews from Dissident Whispers though, and if we do, I'll be sure to review it then. The process of writing my three "mini reviews" so far makes me wonder if I'm constitutionally incapable of writing an actually short review, but it is good practice reining in my tendency to wordiness.

Dungeon Dioramas - Root Quickstart & Pellenicky Glade

My last review of the year looks at the free, public materials for the upcoming Root roleplaying game. I backed the Kickstarter, so I have the pdfs for the full game, but I wanted to base what I wrote on the parts that people can actually play. I wished I could have included this year's Free RPG Day adventure, but I didn't pick it up in person, and the pdf still isn't publicly available. 

I'm glad there was an adventure to review though. It could be tempting to fall into a trap of just reviewing rulesets, but I think the most interesting part of this project is looking at the more actionable advice that shows up in adventures. I want to note that Root actually has a small system for procedurally generating the campaign area, but I didn't bother testing it out, precisely because the availability of pre-written villages makes the random generator to create them less important.

Index of Reviews by Title

My final contribution to Bones for the year was to make an index of the reviews so far. For next year, I hope to use my Cryptic Signals entries to highlight some zines that I think have done something interesting, but that maybe don't rise to full review status. I also hope to try out the Folie a Deux format that Gus and WFS pioneered. I think they're another good way to use our numbers, and I have a couple already tentatively lined up. I just need to come out of my shell enough to get them written.

Bon Mots - Iceman, I Shall Avenge You!

Suppose one of the Sentinel robots kills, idk, Iceman. Punisher sees this and is like, "Iceman, I shall avenge you!"

So then Punisher goes to the guy who built the Sentinels, but before he can say anything, the guy explains how he has this really sweet laser rifle he could give to someone who killed maybe ten more mutant scum.

And Punisher's like, "That is a really sweet laser rifle! Iceman, I shall avenge you ... after I get my hands on that laser."

So then Punisher goes to the X-Mansion. He sees the other X-Men are all dressed in black, standing around a big floral wreath next to a fresh grave in their private graveyard. Some of them are crying. Some of them are swearing vengeance of their own.

These are Iceman's friends. They would die to protect him if they could, and empirically, he did die to protect them.

And so now Punisher's thinking to himself like, "Alright alright, I never swore anything about the other X-Men. I can go commit a dozen more anti-mutant hate crimes, identical to the one that killed Iceman, and not break my oath! Plus, what is vengeance anyway. Do I really need to kill the guy who built the Sentinels? I mean he's giving me a really sweet laser, so long as I align myself with him and further his goals. I don't want to kill the golden goose, you know? So maybe I get vengeance on my new best friend and ally by switching his salt and sugar dishes so he drinks salt in his coffee? Surely that will satisfy my oath to avenge the death of Iceman!"

It's not at all related to this story,
but Punisher in Squirrel Girl is my favorite Punisher.

 

Punisher makes up his mind and rushes the crowd. "This will eventually lead to vengeance for Iceman!," he shouts as he opens fire on the mourners gathered at Iceman's funeral, instantly killing Professor X, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Beast, Archangel, Storm, and Banshee. Colossus was too slow to armor up and died. Shadowcat has time to become intangible, but chooses to take the bullets to shield the teenage Jubilee.

Punisher strides over to Shadowcat's body and kicks her aside. She dies watching Punisher reduce Jubilee to a smear.

Wolverine isn't dead, but his body is too full of unhealed wounds to stand. His friends, his family, everyone he ever loved lays dead around him. He weeps. "Why'd you do it Frank? First Bobby, now Scott, Jeannie, Hank, Kitty... Jubes was just a kid. Why Frank? Why?"

Punisher puts his gun to Wolverine's throat and pulls the trigger. He knows this won't kill the genetrash mutie, but at least it should shut him up for awhile. Punisher muses that maybe the really sweet laser rifle would be able to finish the job. "This is ultimately for Iceman," he says as he turns and walks away.

Punisher hops on his motorcycle and rides back to the base of the guy who built the Sentinels, deep in thought. His mind runs through a list of possible pranks and japes. Maybe he could find out the guy's least favorite color, then get him a really ugly tie? But he had to be careful. This was a delicate balancing act. On the one hand, he had his oath of vengeance to consider. On the other hand, Punisher sensed there might be a lot more really sweet laser rifles where this one came from - but only if he played his cards right. He doesn't want to risk a too-hurtful joke ruining what could be a very profitable friendship.

Also not relevant here, but I love the time that
Squirrel Girl went on a date with a Sentinel robot.

He arrives back at the guy who built the Sentinels' hideout. "Come in, come in! Your X-Mansion massacre is all over the news. I've laid out a room for you. Please be my guest until the heat dies down. In fact, I'd like to hire you to keep killing X-Men. Think of yourself as my employee, and this as your first payment."

At last the guy hands Punisher the laser rifle. It was really, really sweet. Punisher brushes tears from his eyes, just to see how cool it was.

"This particular rifle comes from a Sentinel I recently had to decommission. Poor thing came back drenched in some sort of cryo-blood that froze half a dozen of its essential systems. What you hold there is a former arm-mounted rifle that..."

But Punisher is hardly listening. He strokes his fingers down the length of the laser rifle, rubs it against his cheek. It is so, so sweet. Punisher wishes Iceman could see him now. He'd understand why Punisher had to get the rifle first, before his vengeance. Iceman would've wanted him to have this rifle, Punisher thought. This thing was so sweet it was to die for.

Suddenly, Ghost Rider appears before Punisher. "I am the Spirit of Vengeance," Ghost Rider says. "Punisher, you found a dead X-Man and swore an oath to avenge him. Then you killed ten more X-Men, and aligned yourself with the first one's killer. Explain to me your vengeance!"

So now Punisher is confronted with a creepy skull-face guy who's on fire, making some blabbity-blahs at him. Is this guy a criminal? Is he a filthy mutant? Punisher wishes he'd paid more attention at the last Avengers meeting. Whatever. Punisher smiles. It's finally time to see exactly how sweet this laser rifle really is. "Vengeance?," says Punisher, "This... is for for Ice Man!"

Actual Play - Candlewick Mysteries

Over the last 6 months or so, I've been playing on-and-off in a campaign using Candlekeep Mysteries, run by Jack Shear from Tales of the Grotesque & Dungeonesque. I made it to more sessions than I missed, though, and it was satisfying to have (what was, for me) a long-term campaign come to a conclusion recently.

 

Candlekeep Mysteries by Clint Cearley

 
The adventures in Candlekeep aren't really intended to be run as a single, linear campaign, I don't think. I believe the idea is that they're meant to stand alone, and that you can drop them in to other ongoing campaigns to add a bit of variety. They all involve books in some way, and I think most of them have a connection to Candlekeep Library set somewhere or other in the Forgotten Realms. Jack reskinned this to be Creedhall University Library, in his Krevborna setting.

I managed to play in 13 of the 17 adventures (although I missed the back half of one of them) and had an especially good run at the end. I played a paladin - a first for me! - and generally enjoyed getting to assist the other characters with healing and my various auras, and getting to smite my enemies with the power of divine magic.

Jack kept a running series of actual play posts on his blog, and a parallel series of reviews of each adventure. You can find links to the whole of both series here, in the appropriately titled "We Played the Whole Thing". I've gone ahead and linked to the adventures I played in below:

The Joy of Extradimensional Spaces, part 1 and part 2

Mazworth's Mighty Digressions

The Book of the Raven

A Deep and Creeping Darkness, part 1 only

Lore of Lurue

Creedhall Dekonstruction!

Zikran's Zyphyrean Tome

The Curious Tale of Wisteria Vale

The Book of Inner Alchemy

The Canopic Being

The Scrivener's Tale

Alkazaar's Appendix

Xanthoria

Since Jack's already written a good narrative of each session, I'm not going to try to reconstruct all of them now. My paladin Elsabeth had a good run, becoming friends with another lady knight NPC, getting magic muscles from a magic painting and managing not to suffer any consequences for it, slaying an actual dragon, and saving the world like 2 or 3 times. But I did want to say a few words about what I thought about playing through the campaign.

Too Many Demiplanes - If I had one critique of Candlekeep Mysteries, it would be that too many of the adventures have the same set-up where a magic book transports you to another dimension, and specifically a mini-dimension created by the book's author. (And way too many of those involved a rather tedious guessing game to figure out how to open the portal!) I mean, I get it, it's already metaphorically like every book has a secret world inside it, and like reading transports you there. It's a pretty good metaphor to make literal. But there are too many of them. And I also get that Candlekeep isn't meant to be played straight through. But there are still too many of them. 

D&D is set in a magic-filled world, Forgotten Realms especially so - you don't need to travel to some wizard's pocket dimension just to set the adventure in a magical environment. The need is even less if the environment turns out to not be very magical anyway. It sometimes seemed like the only purpose the conceit of the demiplane served was to handwave travel time or to put up a wall around the playable area that the player character couldn't travel beyond. But if so, I would argue that's the wrong approach. Metafictional concerns like that don't need rules workarounds, they just need the GM and the players to agree on what kind of game they're running.

Complex Backstories, Linear Adventures - If I had a second critique about Candlekeep, it would be that the backstories that set up the adventures are often complex to the point of unintelligibility. The example that stands out in my mind is "The Book of the Raven". The PCs get a book delivered to them by some mysterious ravens. The book leads them to an old abandoned house with ravens flying overhead. The house is haunted, with some whole drama playing out among the ghosts as they continue to fail to resolve their unfinished business from life. Also it turns out the ravens are secretly human cultists who can magically transform into ravens. They were compelled to deliver the book to you by a different cult, who worship some kind of demon lord, and who then pull you into, wait for it, a pocket dimension, where a couple of demons try to kill you. There is, as far as I can tell, no connection between the ravens and the ghosts, the ghosts and the demons, or the demons and the ravens.

And while the backstories of Candlekeep can be convoluted, many of the adventures themselves are pretty linear. You arrive at the entrance to the adventure site, perhaps by being teleported there by the book, and then follow a straight-line path going from one encounter to the next until you reach the conclusion. That's certainly not true of all them, but more than you'd hope for in what's meant to be a flagship product. The worst offenders combine both - a terribly complicated backstory leading to a terribly simplified conveyor belt of encounters.

Options and Opportunities - That said, some of the adventures did provide some good chances for the players to make meaningful choices. While trapped in a grotesque fairy tale, we met some wolves and managed to befriend befriend them and enlist their help in fighting some terrible hunters by borrowing a page from Aesop. We met a dragon who might have killed us, but we offered to catalog his library, and he ended up offering us safe passage through his section of the dungeon. In a desert hideout, we met a giant worm, realized we'd followed the wrong clues and were in the wrong place, and left without needing to fight it. (Though sadly we did lose our camel to the worm's ferocious hunger!) Even the dragon Elsabeth fought and killed was avoidable - although this was another case of misunderstood clues, and having set it free from its ancient trap, we didn't feel good about just letting it seek unlimited vengeance on the world that had entombed it.

Because we played this campaign as an "adventure path", we didn't take advantage of any of the opportunities to follow up on details that could give rise to new side adventures. If I recall, replacing the missing books in "Mazworth's Worthy Digressions" could have occupied several more sessions of questing, if the book thieves hadn't turned out to have spare copies on hand in the back room. And the university tower that turns into a rocket ship absolutely cries out for a follow-up adventure where you get to use the damn thing and go into space. Jack repurposed the last adventure in the book and set it on one of Krevborna's moons, but if we'd just let it blast off with us inside, instead of preventing the space cultists from launching it, I don't know if there would have been any advice in the book about where it should take us. But that's not just an obvious follow-up, it's a necessary one - if you write an adventure where it's possible for the characters to steal a rocket ship, you'd better also make up a planet they can fly it to!

Better Boss Fights - Boss monster types in 5e get special "lair actions" and "legendary actions" that basically let them react by doing something every time they're attacked. I was really impressed with how well this worked out in practice. I recognize that the ideal military strategy to use against a big monster is to come at it with overwhelming numbers and the element of surprise, win the initiative, and kill the damn thing before it ever gets to strike a single blow. But while that's probably the ideal strategy, it's not necessarily the ideal gameplaying experience. With these special actions, the monster gets to alternate with the players; we get to see the monster doing cool, scary, monstrous things; our numerical advantage is somewhat balanced by the extra attacks; and the fight ends up feeling much more epic and narratively appropriate than it otherwise would. These are a 5e innovation I can absolutely get behind!

NaNoWriMo / NaGaDeMon - Let's Write an Adventure Site (part 1)

I don't know about you, but the idea of trying to write an entire novel, or design a complete game, in a single month (especially a month that's already filled with additional obligations to work and school and family) sounds to me like volunteering for disaster, like signing up to be crushed beneath a weight I can't possibly lift or carry. I already worry about failing at my responsibilities, I already fear disappointing people who are counting on me. 

Do I really want to fling myself into new opportunities for failure and disappointment? The NaNoWriMo and NaGaDeMon challenges say yes! My good sense says no.

But I haven't been writing as much as I used to lately, as evidenced by this year's fairly low post count, and I want to try to change that. 

This year has been hard for me. If we're being honest, the past 4 to 5 years haven't exactly been easy, for me or for a lot of people. But this year has felt different, like the exhaustion you get when all the adrenaline runs out. The disaster isn't over, the crisis is ongoing, but the tempo and the emotional tenor has changed, for me at least, and mostly I just feel tired, and it's been very hard to write anything. The one positive development for me has been that I finally feel able to read again like I used to, something that the manic phase of 2020 had nearly robbed me of.

I'm not planning on writing a novel this month, or designing my own game, but I want to do something to feel more like myself again, and perhaps enjoy the sense of accomplishment that comes from finishing something. So I want to dig up an adventure I started writing and then abandoned a few years ago, and try to shepherd it to completion. I'll need to review what I wrote and drew (and just thought about but never actually put on paper) back then; figure out what works, what needs to be reworked, and what ought to be abandoned; write new materials to fill in all the gaps; and hopefully end the month with something I can feel the least little bit proud of.

So let's write an adventure site!

I think I want to start by recalling my initial idea and inspirations for this particular adventure. Next time, I'll take stock of what all I produced before, and try to identify the biggest flaws in my original plans. (Spoiler alert - too much simulationism, not enough gamism - and also too much railroad, not enough sandbox - but I'll do a deeper diagnosis next time.)

 

 

via Smithsonian

  

One of my first inspirations at the time was my recently learning about the desert superbloom phenomenon. A region of desert gets inundated by an unusually heavy rainfall, and for a few days or weeks afterward, the ground is carpeted in wildflowers that only bloom once every few years.

I don't think this idea is as trendy at the moment as it was back then, but when I first started dreaming up this adventure, a kind of au courant idea was that there should be some explicit reason why no one else had ransacked your dungeon before. So the idea of a dungeon (or adventure site, or whatever) that literally didn't exist before the player characters got there and won't be around long after - that immediately struck me as neat solution to the "problem" of dungeon availability.

I decided that the center of the adventure site would be a rain-filled pond or lake, and that the rest of the superbloom site would be a kind of oasis. It's an idea that comes with some set-dressing and some potential hazards - a hot angry sun, mirages and hallucinations, cacti and succulents, desert animals, shifting sands, etc. My original name for this adventure was "Night Garden at the Vanishing Oasis" - which I still kind of like the sound of!

 

 

Another source of inspiration were some books I had been reading at the time:

• Nick Harkaway's The Gone Away World
• Felix Gilman's The Half-Made World
• Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day
• Zachary Thomas Dodson's Bats of the Republic
• ... and perhaps surprisingly, Catherynne Valente's The Habitation for the Blessed.

Against the Day is set in the historical American West. Half-Made World is set in a fictional second-world West. Bats of the Republic is set in the West in both the past and future. Most of Gone Away World is also set in the desert, although in the Middle East instead.

Both Gone Away World and Half-Made World take place in settings where reality itself breaks down, and the world reforms itself in response to human thought. In Gone Away World, the process is faster, as cottony clouds of "Stuff" reshape themselves to become physical manifestations of our fears, desires, and hopes. In Half-Made World, it's more like the far desert is a place still inchoate, where things are made up of incorrect parts, animal, vegetable, artificial, made up of images that look almost right but not quite, not yet fully formed. A place of unreality, even temporary unreality, seems like a great place to have an adventure. Thoughts that become partially real also remind me of heat mirages, so there's a nice affinity there.

Half-Made World's uncanny imagery fits really well with Habitation of the Blessed, which is full of strange plants. There are trees that grow books as fruits - they are both book and fruit at the same time, and can, for example, become overripe and start rotting, possibly faster than you can read them. There's a strange garden with all sorts of trees, including one that grows cannonballs. And while A Voyage to Arcturus and Carcosa both famously have scenes of a person turning into a tree, Habitation of the Blessed has scenes of human-plant hybridization that are far more disturbing. A special garden surrounding a special oasis absolutely should be home to special plants.

Against the Day is filled with strange doublings and various devices that produce doubled images. Bats of the Republic has the same characters living different lives during different time periods, a kind of doubling by reincarnation, or by something like Nietzsche's eternal recurrence. Gone Away World has a few very frightening scenes of doubling, where a person's self-image imprints on "Stuff" and becomes a kind of horrible doppelganger. There are a few ways these ideas could be worked into an adventure.

There are also plenty of smaller things that could be incorporated. Individual characters who could appear as wandering NPCs. Creatures who could show up as monsters. Incidents that could form the basis of locations within the site. 

 

 

Thinking about the theme of unreality lade me to think about glitches in computers and video games. I thought that some of the more famous glitches might be neat to include to signify the breakdown of reality, things like Missingno and 'M from Pokemon, or the underwater Minus World from Mario, or even the imagery from Google's Deep Dream engine, like their famous puppy-snails, that are so much like the edge of reality in Half-Made World. I still think these would be good to include as I update what I wrote before.

Thinking about different kinds of deserts also led me to think about sea beds. I kind of thought the oasis should include a shipwreck, a ship that sank back when the desert was the floor of an ocean. I also thought that ancient sea life might come back to life because of the rain, possibly representatives from everyone's favorite Cambrian fossil site, the Burgess Shale. This doesn't seem crucial to the overall concept, so maybe I should treat these as only a tentative inclusion. This might be like a spice that gives the adventure that little bit of something extra ... or it might be thematically confusing and something it would be better to leave out.

I think all this is enough to get started, or rather re-started. Maybe too much! As I said earlier, in the next post in this series, I'll take stock of what I planned before to see what can be saved and what should be thrown out.

Science Fantasy Factions - Oh No! Necro-Tokyo! Go Go Godzilla!

My ongoing Tolkienian Science Fantasy project is all about creating an easy-to-understand "french vanilla" setting by replacing the common character and monster species of fantasy with some well-known examples from science fiction.

In personal communication, From the Sorcerer's Skull described the project this way: "I think this idea could broadly be placed in a category of setting creation: Make a D&D setting as derivative as possible, while employing as little as possible of the usual stuff D&D campaigns are derived from."

I think that sounds right. You get something different and distinct from a plain vanilla fantasy setting, but because all the pieces used to assemble this campaign are easily recognizable in their own right, the setting as a whole should remain easy to understand and remember.

Today's faction is the Lizard Kingdom, which occupies the Monster Island Archipelago, and the skeletal ruins of the once-great city, Necro-Tokyo.

 

 

 
The most numerous residents of the Monster Islands are the time-traveling Sleestaks from the original Land of the Lost tv show. The first Sleestaks to join the Lizard Kingdom were incredibly technologically advanced, although their numbers were few. But having found a haven for their species, and wishing to secure both their own past and future survival, these Sleestak scientists set about transporting other Sleestak communities from across space and time to coexist in the tropical region of the Archipelago. 

Alas, the time travelers discovered that they represented the pinnacle of Sleestak science. Most of the other communities they found were stone-age tool users. The few remaining scientists are outnumbered by their machines, and vastly outnumbered by the temporally-displaced Sleestak migrants.

The technologically advanced Sleestaks might also be able to produce a class of infiltrators capable of disguising themselves as humans (or whatever other faction they're trying to subvert) based on the Visitors from the tv show V.

 

 

 
The mountain and desert regions of the Archipelago are patrolled by the Gorn, highly skilled and solitary hunters who gather to socialize only rarely. They're strong, intelligent, and cunning, with a keen understanding of stealth and ambush tactics. They have an ancestral hatred for humans and Apes, and owing to some famous historical encounter, prefer to arm themselves with bamboo-barreled rifles when fighting against primates.

If I wanted to add more variety to the Monster Islands' wilderness, I might add in some technologically advanced Dinosaucers, who are armed with high-tech laser pistols and bio-scanners and the like, and who can temporarily "dinvolve" into unthinking monstrous dinosaurs.

 

 

 

At the heart of the jungle, in the seat of the science Sleestaks' technological civilization is a compound that holds their greatest science leader, Kraid from the Super Metroid video game. Kraid sets the Sleestaks' agenda, directs their research, and reaps the rewards of their studies. Kraid is a genius and, thanks to some successful experiments, a giant. Kraid's political machinations and self-improvement programs are aimed at the eventual goal of seizing control of the whole of the Lizard Kingdom.

 

 

The revered, godlike ruler of the Monster Islands is, of course, Godzilla, from the original movie. Godzilla is the only living permanent resident of Necro-Tokyo. A city of ruined skyscrapers and abandoned pagodas, Godzilla patrols streets haunted by a thousand skeletons of the ages-gone human residents. The skeletons arise again each night to reenact a long-lost battle, led by the skull giant Gashadokuro. Each night, Godzilla wins again, and each day, he wanders amidst the bones.

Bon Mots - Darkseid & Cinderblock

Darkseid left his suit at the cleaners, and all the other DC villains mistake him for Cinderblock, who got stuck working overtime at, you guessed it, the dry cleaners, trying to get all the invulnerable super-blood of Darkseid's costume.

 

Cue the Odd Couple theme music...

 

Twinsies!

Darkseid gets roped into participating in some heist Cinderblock was supposed to do. The other villains are really rude and dismissive and don't listen when he tries to tell them he's not Cinderblock. "Stop messin' around, Cinderblock", etc.

 

The villains dig a tunnel under some science complex. Darkseid is tasked with punching through the underground portion of the security wall. He's not even trusted to go in and grab the loot. But showing initiative befitting a planetary ruler, he goes ahead and gets the stuff.

 

When he comes back out of the tunnel, laden with riches, he finds that the other villains are getting their asses kicked by a hyper-obnoxious team-up of Booster Gold and Guy Gardner.

 

Darkseid gives the heroes the old Hulk-Loki treatment, thus saving the heist just when it seemed all hope was lost. The other villains hoist him onto their shoulders and carry him back to their hideout, cheering "Cin-der-block! Cin-der-block!"

 

Meanwhile, all this has been intercut with scenes of actual Cinderblock working at the dry cleaners. They just can't get the damn super-blood out of Darkseid's clothes! Cinderblock knows he's running late for the heist, but he really needs this job, and his manager is so despairing that Cinderblock can't bear to leave the poor guy.

 

They call in Chemo, then Plasmus, but neither can get the stains out. The boss is ruined. He's spent far more than Darkseid paid, but at this point, it's all about not getting murdered for failing a New God.

 

Cinderblock has an idea. If the boss is willing to bust open the piggybank, they can call in Lex Luthor. They guy's a genius, he can solve anything, right?

 

Luthor shows up, and he's thrilled to get his hands on some super-blood. He has just the right tools to extract it and bottle it, and pays the boss a finder's fee that's even more than he spent hiring the Chemo and Plasmus. The boss is so relieved that he's not going to get vaporized, he gives Cinderblock a big tip. 

 

Cinderblock leaves, just narrowly missing seeing Darkseid who's arrived to pick up his uniform.

 

Back on Apokolips, Darkseid has returned to his routine of bossing around parademons, etc. He starts yelling at Kalibak, but then remembers the other villains yelling at him when they thought he was Cinderblock, and has a change of heart.

 

Cinderblock leaves the cleaners to go to the bar to apologize for missing the heist. He knows he took so long the whole thing is probably over by now. He's shocked to find an impromptu celebration in his honor. "There he is! The man of the hour! Get over here, Cinderblock old pal!"

All in a day's work...

 

Dungeon Dioramas - Night Land

After recently reviewing In the Light of a Ghost Star, it seems my antennae were up for other games inspired by William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land. So I was pleasantly surprised by the coincidence of Singing Flame's summer release of Night Land, written by Vasili Kaliman, illustrated by Andrew Walter, and with a map by Benjamin Marra.

 

Night Land is a sandbox setting compatible with Necrotic Gnome's Old-School Essentials rules, although travel and NPC reactions have their own rules built into the setting. Night Land is rendered as a self-contained pointcrawl with a defined entrance in the west and exit in the east, and it is consciously inspired by Weird fiction ... although notably missing from Vasili's list of inspirations is Hodgson's The Night Land. I think that's accurate. The mood here is maybe closer to the nihilism of Clark Ashton Smith's Xothique stories, refracted through the lens of Jack Vance's faux serious absurdity, and Adventure Time's full-on gonzo. 

  

 
 

The Sandbox

 

Night Land is a mini setting with 17 sites. The sites are roughly laid out into two loops with a single connection between them, a bit like a pair of eyeglasses. There is an entrance in the west and an exit in the east, each represented by a deep hole in the group occupied by an eccentric spellcaster.
 
The titular Night Land is a snow-covered plain of eternal night, lit by an unsettling moon and a surprisingly small number of stars. Vasili recommends that the player characters enter the Night Land unexpectedly and by accident while traveling at night, and leave it like waking from a dream. 
  
Distances along the paths between site are given in hours to travel, and travelers have a 1-in-6 chance of a random encounter per hour on a path, and the same with lengthy site visits. There's a single list of encounters with different numbering for adventurers on a path or inside a site, although certain types of encounters can only happen on paths and others only within sites. There are encounters with NPCs and monsters, sights and weather, and complicating events that are generally negative. It's clear from this table that the Night Land is meant to be a dangerous place, only barely habitable by humanity.

 

 

 

Factions, NPCs, and Monsters
 
Vasili poured a lot of his effort into filling the Night Land with people to talk to. There are several named factions with philosophies that mostly revolve around how to think about the darkness and light. Nearly every site on the map has a list of named NPCs who are singled out for a more detailed individual description. And random encounter table includes significant chances to encounter "cultists" who have non-sun-related philosophies and "residents" who are essentially civilians. 
 
The three factions most concerned with light and darkness appear at the beginning of Night Land, and locating their write-ups there helps Vasili drive home the importance of the endless night to the people of the setting. The Sun Mourners are sort of guilt-driven Catholic types holding an endless funeral for the dead sun, the Necro Divas are narcissists who want to be worshiped and are casually violent, and the Void Engineers are addicted to hallucinogens that give them visions of the perfecting the science needed to reignite the sun.
 
Of the three, the Sun Mourners and Necro Divas show up the most. They both have individual entries on the encounter tables, and each control one site on the map. The Void Engineers appear in the "conflict" encounter entry, but are otherwise much less present in the setting. The Chaos Messiahs, found near the exit, seem like they should be counted among these factions, since they have a plan to relocate the planet to orbit a still-active star. Both the general absence of the Void Engineers, and the last-minute appearance of the otherwise-unmentioned Chaos Messiahs feel like slight missteps in the creation of the web of competing solar factions.

 

Cultists get a couple spark tables to generate a name, which can then serve as the basis for the referee to improvise. Residents get a bit more spice. They have names, skills, motivations, possessions, and personality quirks. There's also a spark table for generating names for NPC character classes. The philosophy behind these tables is a kind of baroque minimalism. You get an evocative turn of phrase to spark the referee's creativity, a cult called "The Flesh Dawners" for example, or an "Overworld Visionist" character class, or an NPC who's a "insane scholar, convinced they are cursed" who owns a telescope. Vasili's writing is at the opposite end of a spectrum from the encyclopedic entries for organizations in D&D and Pathfinder. Somewhere in the middle, perhaps, are the terse but still defined factions Jack Shear wrote for his Krevborna and Umberwell settings.
 

Aside from the guardians of the entrance and exit to the Night Land, the NPCs you can meet all have between 1 and 3 Hit Dice, so even for low-level characters, talking instead of fighting is a choice rather than a necessity. Vasili wrote his NPCs to facilitate talking. As I said, most locations have named NPCs who are willing to converse and negotiate. And each is written with enough detail to help the referee portray them as a unique person. 
 
If there is a flaw in Vasili's writing here, it's that the NPCs feel really random, perhaps too much so. There are a lot of details to work with, but the different facts listed don't necessarily easily cohere into a personality, and I don't see any running themes that make the named individuals in one faction seem consistently different from those in another. On the other hand, these strange people are certainly genre appropriate, and the randomness is probably less noticeable to the players, who might see 5, than to the referee who reads 30. Here's an example, a Sunmourner from one of the first sites the players might enter: 

 

"TAHAN - Former map maker. Absurdly tall. Easily embarrassed.
No memory of the past. Can chop off a finger to become invisible for an hour. Hates everyone.
Possessions: Key to a family crypt. Lyrics and music to a song. Power: Eye carved into forehead, can read a creature's thoughts for one minute per day."

 

The otherwise excellent presentation of information (more on that in a moment) kind of breaks down for the NPCs as well. What makes "easily embarrassed" more important than "hates everyone"? Why is telepathy called out as a bolded "power" while invisibility receives no special emphasis? There's nothing exactly wrong with this, but it also gives Night Land's NPCs a strange kind of same-ness in their oddity. They are all unique in similar ways, a bit like the procedurally-generated monsters from Island of the Unknown.
 
The bestiary at the back of Night Land contains only a half dozen creatures - all the other adversaries in the Land are human. They range from ½ to 20 HD, but mostly fall into the same low, limited range as the NPCs, and the biggest monsters are also the rarest. Twilight Vermin are procedurally-generated and seem to fill the niche of representing the Night Land's far-future wildlife. Winged Beheaders - which fly around on dragonfly wings, wearing the severed human heads of their most recent victims like masks, and slicing throats with their wicked scorpion tails - are perhaps the most memorable of Vasili's monsters.
 
Instead of a universal reaction roll, Vasili has written a mini-table of specific reaction for each major faction, for cultists, for residents, and for the intelligent monsters. The monsters are mostly violent and hostile, but all the people are much more likely to want to talk than to fight. This is a nice touch that I think probably encourages non-combat interaction. The different tables also help establish the personality of each group. It's clear that residents are less dangerous than cultists, for example. And even if you get a positive result, knowing that the Necro Divas are "hostile" half the time shapes how you think about their typical behavior. 

 

 
  
The Sites
 
The sites on the pointcrawl map are a nice mix of types. There are the entrance and exit, a pair controlled by the Sunmourners and Necrodivas, and a few others with human or near-human inhabitants. There are also a handful of buildings that, although there are no dungeon maps provided, could conceivably be explored if the referee and players were interested. The others are locations where the players will encounter unusual phenomena, like a vista of the strange stars in the Night Land's sky, or perpetual weather systems with supernatural effects.
 
The layout of the map is such that players who are focused on passing from entrance to exit as quickly as possible will see about half the possible locations, while players who want to explore should be able to loop about without backtracking or too much revisiting.
 
Vasili has front-loaded the earliest sites with the safest and most interactive NPCs, and with plenty of rumors, plot hooks, and quests to ease the players into the setting and provide them with reasons to go forward into the more dangerous parts. It's another area where his care to encourage exploration and negotiation really shines through. 
 
The real heart of this setting are its opportunities to interact with the strange people who live there, to learn their bizarre philosophies and venomous rivalries. The map and its sites are less a maze to explore and more a stage for all the weird personal dramas to play out. Players can likely navigate the map by  asking questions and listening to rumors, but traveling in the Night Land is less about what you want to see and more about who you want to meet.
 
 
Presentation of Information
 
One final aspect of Night Land stands out to me as deserving of special mention, which is the excellent and efficient presentation of information to the referee. Night Land uses the standard "good layout" tricks of not allowing sections to cross page breaks and co-locating useful information onto two-page spreads. But it goes beyond that. 
 
We start with a "prelude" to give an overview of the setting and its few unique rules. We get write-ups of the key factions. We get a random encounter table with separate dice-result columns for those encounters that happen while traveling and those that happen within map locations. The key for each location includes reminders of which other sites it's linked to. The map is in the center page-spread where it can be easily turned to at any time due to the staples. There's a smaller unlabeled map on the inside of the front cover. After the last location we get a table of rumors. We get tables to generate cultists, residents, and other NPCs. 
 
And at the very back, we get a pair of tables that help to summarize the relationships between the various inhabitants. One is a matrix that lists the 3 factions and 6 monsters both horizontally and vertically, then uses the two intersection to explain the two sides of their relationship. So looking at the Necrodivas and the Quantum Blinkers, for example, we see that "Divas GLORIFY Blinkers" and "Blinkers SPY for Divas". It's a very quick way to tell how the players' alliance with one group might affect their interactions with another - or how to decide what happens next when a random encounter causes two groups to interact unexpectedly. 
 
The second matrix uses the intersections to show the singular connection between each of 7 key map sites. If I want to know the relationship between the Children of the Rain and the Tea Gardens, for example, I can see that "Children of Rain are ADDICTED to a variety of tea found in the Gardens". This is another tool that seems useful for a referee wanting to know how the NPCs at specific locations feel about each other, and what sort of missions they might try to persuade the player characters to go on.
 
Presenting information this way does place limits on the scope of the adventure. If you are determined that your reader should never turn a page to continue something, but only to move on to a new thing after the old thing is finished, you're required to limit the number of things you can talk about, and to describe them fairly tersely. If you want an encounter table that fits on two zine-sized pages, or a relationship matrix that fits on one, then you're limited in the number of monsters and factions you can include. In Night Land's case, I think that working creatively within those limits has produced a setting that is relatively small, but still complex enough to be interesting.

Why the Sun is Dark and the Realms are Forgotten

From the Sorcerer's Skull's recent posts about Dark Sun have gotten me musing about the relationship between the world of Dark Sun and other fantasy worlds within the WOTC orrery.

Magic in Dark Sun is scarce, and comes at a high price, especially compared to places like the Forgotten Realms, where magic is plentiful and virtually free. 

Suppose that the relationship between these planes isn't just one of coincidence or natural variation, though. What if it's not just that Athas has less magic and Faerun has more? Suppose that the relationship is one of cause-and-effect. What if the Realms are rich because Dark Sun is poor? What if Dark Sun is poor because the Realms are rich?

The basic idea here is that mana is a finite resource. Every time you use it to cast a spell, you're also using it up. (Or perhaps it replenishes itself, but slowly. Over geological time, not human time scales.) 

Faerun is a lush, tropical land supersaturated with mana. With mana so abundant, people use magic with abandon. Magicians are everywhere, and every other adventurer carries a magic sword, sings magic songs, punches with a magic-infused fist. People summon fire elementals to cook their breakfast, cast illusions to amuse their kids, rely on healing spells in lieu of any other form of medicine, brew potions so they can drink magic, make trinkets so they can wear it.

Athas is a desert. It's desiccated. There's very little mana left. Accessing it is is hard, few people have the ability to access it, and they only spend it on spells that are important. Even the most callous and depraved Sorcerer King or Templar Defiler isn't going to harvest the souls of a thousand worshipers or kill all the crops in a hundred mile radius just to iron their shirts, or light their cigarettes, or play a little light jazz to set the mood for a date. Even if they're going to waste their magic, they're going to waste it ostentatiously and dramatically as a show of strength, to impress an ally or overawe a foe. To waste magic in private really would be too much of a waste.

 

Dark Sun Creature Catalog cover by Wayne Reynolds

 

 

There are a couple possible relationships.

Perhaps Faerun is the past and Athas is the future. 

In ye olde days of yore, the Realms could use magic for anything, so they used it for everything, including the pettiest, stupidest shit you could possibly imagine. Goodberries on your cereal in the morning. Disposable Tenser's floating discs to carry home your groceries. Bardic inspiration before you take a test. Scrying when you don't feel like walking to the library. Leomund's tiny hut to keep out of the rain. Mordenkainen's magnificent mansion for a weekend getaway. Glamours on everything. Continual lights on everything. Sleep spells to knock you out when all auras and dweomer's you've been staring at all day start to mess with your circadian rhythm.

Eventually the supply of mana just can't keep up with all the demand. Peak Mana arrives when wizards have to start going farther and farther afield, work harder and harder, longer and longer, to bring back a diminishing supply of mana. Sadly there's no such thing as renewable energy in this world. Some genius invents solar power and starts extracting elemental fire straight from the heart of the sun. Some other geniuses come up with wind, geothermal, and hydroelectric energy, letting them convert the air to smoke, the seas to salt, the ground to dust. The inexhaustible bounty of the Realms is exhausted, and there simply isn't enough mana from any source to maintain civilization in the style to which it had become accustomed. 

Then comes the Collapse. Then there is no Faerun anymore. Then there is only Athas.

Or perhaps Faerun and Athas are separate. Perhaps Faerun is a resource extractor, and perhaps Athas is a resource.

If Dark Sun and the Forgotten Realms are different planes, then when Faerun starts to run low on domestic mana, they'll begin plundering their neighbors for supply. Perhaps they start by whaling - capturing dragons, demons, angels, and gods to press them like olives, crush them like grapes, until hot, wet, living mana pours out to fill the pipes and keep the faucets running. 

But as the herds then and the fisheries grow sparse, Faerun's prospectors will turn to other worlds. Some planes are easy to reach, and have deep wells of easily tapped mana. Some planes are like shale oil and tar sands. They're hard to get to, their climate is hostile, and it takes so much more work and effort to extract their mana, like wringing it from a damp dishrag. Athas is the tar sands. Athas is wrung out.

Magicians in Dark Sun divide themselves into Preservers and Defilers. The locals do their best to monitor their Mana Footprint, to cut back on their Mana Emissions. They name and shame. They reduce, reuse, and recycle. But it doesn't matter, because theirs is a problem that can't be solved by individual conservation or local action. Every mage in Faerun is a Defiler ... of Athas.

This is why the Realms aren't forgotten exactly, but they are a closely guarded secret. When the Mana Barons and their pirate crews set sail, they fly no flags, they carry no papers. They dare not bring with them anything that could identify the name or location of their homeworld. 

 

Dark Sun Campaign Setting cover by Wayne Reynolds

 

 

The really exciting part of either idea comes when the people of Faerun and Athas finally get to meet.

When people from Faerun come to Dark Sun, they arrive as imperialists. They've landed with their cargo holds empty, and won't be leaving until they fill them up with mana. They're not particularly concerned about how big a mess they make, or how many people they hurt, while doing it. Indeed, there are surely some among their number who are mostly there for the chance to commit violence and atrocities in a context where their home government will not only tolerate their depredations, but reward them for it. 

Others may be motivated by patriotism. Still others find meaning in their work knowing that they're helping to maintain the high standard of civilization, imagining that the Faerun too would be a desert ruin without their efforts. And some are just there for a paycheck, doing the only job they could find at the time they needed work, their only consolation the knowledge (or at least hope) that the money they're sending home is enough to support the people they're sending it to.

When citizens of Athas arrive in the Forgotten Realms, they want revenge. If they're there, it's because they've finally realized who destroyed their world, and they're going to make those fuckers pay, and stop them from plundering anyone else.

The only real question, when the hotwired Spelljammer crashes through Elminster's tower like the Old Mage built it out of Jenga blocks and plows through the center of Waterdeep like a plow through that verdant, mana-rich soil, when a mob of gladiators and psychics and giant mantises tumble out of the wreck wearing leather bondage outfits and carrying weapons made of the bones of the last people they killed, the only real question is whether they have a plan to bring the fight directly to the Big Mana companies who've been financing all the drill sites on Athas, or if they're just going to start breaking things and killing people in an indiscriminate frenzy of vengeance.

Either direction of visitation sounds like a pretty good game session to me.

Blogs on Tape 4 - Resources 4 All

Nick LS Whelan has started the fourth season of his Blogs on Tape podcast, and I'm honored to have one of my posts included as the first episode of the new season!

You can listen to the episode at Episode 89 - Resource Management 2: Defining Our Terms, and you can read my original blog post here.

Another round of big thanks to Nick for the entire Blogs on Tape project, and for including my work in it!

Crytpic Signals - Doodle Chapmion Island Games

  

Doodle Champion Island Games

 

This review is a bit of a departure, since the Doodle Champion Island Games is a video game, rather than a tabletop RPG. It's a free-to-play in-browser game made in a collaboration between Google and Studio 4°C. The release of the game coincided with the start of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, and the game itself casts the player as an aspiring athlete who travels to an island of champions to test her prowess. The game art reminds me of the 16-bit pixel art from the SNES era, and features very brief cut scenes with anime-style animation at key moments. The reason I've chosen this to review though is that it's a fun little sandbox, and there are some elements to it that I think are worth pointing out.

 

The setting of the game is the eponymous Champion Island, which has a vaguely asterisk-shaped eight-legged map. The first "leg" is the dock where the player character, Lucky the Cat, arrives on her boat. Each of the other seven legs is home to one of the island's seven champions and others who live in that area. There are rugby-playing oni, a tengu who loves table tennis, a skateboarding tanuki, and an owl sitting atop the climbing mountain. There are beaches, a volcanic peninsula, and a bamboo forest, and the cosmopolitan Tanooki City which has the largest and most diverse group of residents on the island. At the center of the island are statues depicting the champions and trails - marked by signs and helpful NPCs - that lead to each leg of the island.

 

The ostensible goal of the game is to challenge each of the seven champions in their chosen sport and best them, winning a scroll and your likeness on the appropriate statue at the center of the island. But the arenas, marked by red gates, are all right at the entrance to their respective legs. You have to go only a little further in to each leg to find the dojo for that sport, where you can meet the champion and get advice about how to play. If all you do is go to the seven arenas and win the seven sports, the game is quite quick, and a little disappointing. There's an animated cut-scene the first time you challenge the champion, showing off their prowess, that reminds me of the animations in Mega Man. There's another after you win the match to show them graciously passing you the scroll of victory. Although they're not combat, these are boss fights, but these contests are much less than half the game. 

 

The real pleasures here are exploration and interaction. The island is beautifully drawn, and it has secrets to discover. Not every place can be accessed initially. There are four teams with clubhouses hidden on the island. If you join one, you can get inside their clubhouse, but you can only choose one. The NPCs vary greatly in terms of their dialogue. Some basically serve as signposts to tell you where you are or where a path leads. Some give you a glimpse of their inner lives. All over the island are kappas who just say "Kappa!", but there's one intelligent kappa who gives you a little speech about loneliness. And some NPCs can give you quests. 

 

The way they do this is by telling you about a problem they're having. If you want, you can volunteer to help, and they'll tell you how. Some quests are fairly simple, like the royal arrow collector who wants help picking up arrows, or the grandfather who wants help catching up to his granddaughter who keeps jogging ahead. Other quests require you to go visit a specific other person - maybe you met them once already, remember them, and can go back, or maybe the quest gives you a reason to go meet them. In a few cases, you'll go back and forth several times before you're done. Some quests unlock new parts of the island, in particular, more difficult versions of the sports, with matches that are longer or have higher scoring requirements and opponents who play harder. And interestingly, some quests are nested. Finding enough driftwood to help the artist make a statue, for example, requires you to find the hidden beach, the bakery, and the hot springs, along with several others. You can earn trophies, kept in a trophy house near the center of the island, for helping people, but the real incentive is the satisfaction of figuring something out and putting it right. If I could make one change to the game, I'd remove the trophies, though I suppose they are a staple of contemporary video games.

 

I made a comparison to Mega Man earlier, but unlike that game, where you can visit the levels in any order, but they're much easier if you find and complete the secret correct order, nothing in Champion Island pushes you to visit the legs in any particular order, or to finish everything in one before visiting another. In fact the nature of the quests encourages you to wander, explore, and revisit. In both video game terms and in D&D terms, the game is level-less. Nothing is too hard to try it first, and nothing gets easier simply because you've been playing for awhile. You the player might get better, especially at the sports, but Lucky the Cat never gets faster or stronger. It creates a radical openness that I'm not sure you can really replicate in any D&D-like game where characters level up and get stronger over time. 

 

The other difference between Champion Island and other sandbox adventuring sites is that there's no combat. You never have to fight anyone - there are no guard blocking off certain areas, no guardians protecting treasure, no dragons to slay, no wandering monsters harrying you just for existing within the space. I'm not sure the game could remain so open if you did have to fight. The closest analog to combat are the sport-matches where compete against the champions. But like everything else, these are totally optional. I called them boss fights earlier, and perhaps it would be fair to say that these are the closest things to dragons to slay - you want to win the scroll and earn your face on the statues, I guess, but the main reason to play the sports is for the enjoyment of the activity itself, the excitement of competition. In certain versions and editions of D&D, combat is like this, a kind of mini-game, the way the sports are. It may advance a goal, but players also seek it out and spend time on it because they find it enjoyable. It's a contest with clear conditions of victory and loss, it has its own distinct rhythm, and it uses rules that aren't necessarily part of the rest of the game. In most versions of D&D, combat is really the only mini-game, while Champion Island has seven. 

 

The quests are one area where the game could be made more complex and more interesting, although probably at the cost of its generous, forgiving tone. There's no real way to fail a quest in this game. Some NPCs need to be convinced of this or there, but there's no way to accidentally or intentionally turn them against the thing you're supposed to convince them of. You can always try again. Quests might be uncompleted, but they'll never be uncompletable. The tabletop setting doesn't really lend itself to unlimited tries though, or to NPCs who'll happily repeat your last conversation every time you leave the room and reenter it. Although it contradicts the tone of this game, consequences for failure would make succeeding at the quests feel more meaningful.

 

 

This post originally appeared on Bones of Contention. 

Cryptic Signals - Mausritter

  

Mausritter

 

Both WFS and I have written favorably about Isaac Williams' Mausritter in the past, especially its mechanics, so this will be a brief review of Mausritter's adventure generating tool, found on the last few pages of the book. 

 

The recommended campaign structure for an ongoing Mausritter campaign is a hexcrawl sandbox, where each hex contains a landmark and a complication that potentially makes interacting with the landmark more interesting. The recommended hexcrawl map is 19-hex region formed by a central hex with two rings around it. It's the same map structure as in In the Light of a Ghost Star, the same structure as a Hex Flower, and as Dungeon of the Brain Jar notes, it's a structure that's become a popular template for hexcrawling recently, sort of a wilderness analog to the jewelbox dungeon.
 

Mausritter's hex flower sandboxes are centered on a peaceful settlement, and each contains two main adventure sites. The player character mice don't start in the settlement though - they start in a hex with an adventure site. Getting to town is your second goal. Surviving the adventure is your first. The example hexcrawl in the Mausritter book actually only details 11 hexes our of the 19, but referees are encouraged to fill them all.
 

The first roll in each hex determines the terrain - countryside, forest, river, or human town. A second roll generates a landmark specific to the terrain type. These are mostly geographical features. The kinds of landmarks you might navigate by, but not necessarily anything to invite further interaction quite yet. The final roll generates what Isaac calls a "complication". These are mostly additional sites within the hex, places where mice live, and thus places where the player character mice can interact with NPCs. Example complications include religious sites, places where a lone mouse lives, even settlements. There are also ruins, abandoned places, and various naturally occurring locations. Each complication includes both a prompt and a leading question to encourage the referee to develop it further. There are also a few tables to begin generating the central settlement. 

 

As I said, Isaac suggests placing two primary adventuring sites in each hex flower sandbox. There's one set of tables for generating the adventure sites, and another for generating what Isaac calls the "adventure seeds" - the client, their problem, and a complication. So you could pick your adventure sites by looking at the map so far and deciding where you think the two most promising locales are, or you could start by generating the sites and then deciding afterward where to place them. However you decide where to put them, you then pick one to serve as the starting point for the campaign.

 

 I think these tables probably work best if the referee mixes some random results, some results chosen using the tables as a menu of options, and some of their own creation. There are 20 landmarks for each terrain type and a total of 20 complications - so repeated across 19 hexes, pure random generation might look a little strange, especially in a setting that's intended to be less gonzo and more naturalistic. Besides, even if you trust the dice to the maximum extent, you'll still have to make choices, turn the complications from starter ideas to actual locations and place the two adventuring sites. So my sense remains that these tables work better as sparks for the referee's creativity than as full-on stand-alone procedural generators.

 

Blackpond Manor and Waterland Environs - click here to view

   

I used the tables to generate a hex flower sandbox. It ended up being very heavy on rivers and human towns. Let's call it Waterland. It's centered on the fallen mouse aristocratic manor of Blackpond. The two adventuring sites are both home to rival cat lords, one of whom obviously believes the other is their star-crossed lover, and the other who is just as obviously a faerie disguised as a cat. Since I generated this map for a review, I didn't exercise any of my own choice or creativity in placing the hexes or developing any of the prompts. This is the start of a sandbox, but it won't be ready to play without a little more work from the referee. 

  

 

This post originally appeared on Bones of Contention.