Merry Hexmas 101 - Coal Mountain

Prismatic Wasteland has announced a new Blog Bandwagon. This time, it's adding hexes to a hexcrawl based on the Christmas movies of Rankin & Bass. For my entry, I thought about where Santa might get the coal he gives out to naughty children. My answer was a classic cartoon villain, complete with an exciting but dangerous casino lair.
 

 

 

COAL MOUNTAIN (HEX 101)

 

Rugged, hilly land with countless small peaks and summits. The ground is covered with loose slate tiles and scree, the whole region cracked like an eggshell. The sky is forever overcast with black clouds of burning coal smoke. Stunted, gnarled candy canes eke from the impoverished earth. Rivulets and streams of ashy, polluted water flow southeast to further contaminate the Poison Swamp (hex 201).

 

Mine entrances bore into the valleys and hollows. Small wooden miners' shacks cling to the slopes in clusters near each entryway. On the largest plane of smooth level ground towers The Coal House. Blinking red neon signs announce its name and the entertainments - Drinks! Live music! Dancing! Gambling! - found within.

 

 

 

Adjacent Hexes

South - Miserable Mountain (hex 102)

Southeast - Poison Swamp (hex 201)

 
 

 

Wilderness Encounters (roll d8)

 

1 Weary, gnome-sized elves in faded blue work suits carrying picks and shovels march to a mine entrance to start their shift. Everyone here used to work at Castle Claus (hex 302) but was fired for some form of incompetence or disobedience. (1-3) Bermy, a cross-eyed elf who just needs a pair of glasses, was fired because all his toys were crooked and wonky; (4-5) Fermi, a former Italian physicist before the elfing process, was fired for powering his toys with uranium; (6) Shermy, an ordinary red-headed human child, sure hopes his friend Mr Peabody comes back to rescue him soon. No one can stop to talk long; the overseer will dock their pay.

 

2 Pipes emerge from the rock face expelling greasy grey water, which collects into a new stream flowing downhill and southeast.

 

3 Elf shepherdess Frilly leads her flock of Wooloo sheep to graze on the stunted candy canes creeping up between the rocks. She thinks the Coal House is a naughty place, and does her best to discourage anyone from going there.

 

4 Elves on strike! A mine entrance is blocked by a half-dozen elves with little wooden signs demanding safer working conditions, shorter hours, better pay. Orc labor activist Scabkiller (escaped from the Orchish Toy Factory hex 603) leads their chants. Middle-aged elf taskmaster Maestro Tasckrow is outraged as though every reduction in others' misery will cause equivalent pain to him personally. He cracks his whip and exhorts the elves to get back to work.  

 

5 A huge, chest high pool of freezing, stinking, fetid water collects outside an obstructed culvert. The giant pipe is covered in a metal grate, which is visibly blocked by leaves and scraps of broken wood. All paths through this area are obstructed. The water's too deep for a elf to unclog the drain. 

 
6 A wild herd of Dubwool rams block the way. They're territorial and fighty.

  

7 Exhausted elf miners, covered in coal dust, trudge wearily back to the Coal House after a long shift, dragging their tools behind them. (1-3) thoroughly jaded Grumble has complaints about everything, but argues against any suggesting that things could or should be improved; (4-5) disorganized Jumble wears his shirt on backwards and carries a gardening rake, he means well but everything he says is incorrect; (6) supernaturally delicate and beautiful  Melnibonean elf Yorrick Zweihander was never meant to perform manual labor, but he's trapped in the wrong story. They'll happily trade information for a bowl of soup or a stiff drink.

 

8 The wooden frame is partially collapsed around the entrance to this abandoned mine. This can serve whatever function you need it to. The tunnels could act as a secret entrance to another mine or the cellar of the Coal House. If you have a treasure map, it leads here. If you're looking for someone's lair or hideout, this is it.

 
 
  

THE COAL HOUSE
 

A great warrior's stronghold, converted into a raucous nightclub that never closes during the endless night of the arctic winter. The exterior still looks like a keep, but it's been dressed up with blinking red neon signs announcing THE COAL HOUSE and the many sins and vices found inside - drinking, live music, dancing, gambling. Pictograms depict a liquor bottle, a trumpet, a dancing girl, and a pair of dice for the benefit of the illiterate.
 
The interior of the Coal House is sweltering and clouded with a mix of tobacco and coal smoke. The music alternates between a lively brass swing band (for dancing) and a quieter jazz trio (for business), both playing arrangements of classic Christmas songs. The audience is mostly exhausted elf miners trying to indulge as much as they can afford. The staff are mostly elves too; like the miners, they've been rejected from Santa's workshops.
 
Most prices are denominated in Company Scrip, a worthless paper currency the overseers use to pay the miners. A silver coin will get you any drink on the menu. Some of the better-off miners can afford to buy a single silver coin, and can offer d6+6 CS in exchange. 1 CS buys a bowl of soup or gruel, a small loaf bread, or a glass of the cheapest drink.
 
The Coal House is the domain of Jazz King Coal, a giant of a man dressed in a black suit and ermine-trimmed red cape, smoking a pipe the size and shape of a saxophone. He thinks of himself as an important businessman. He buys all the coal from the mines and sells it on the Santa and several others, while technically employing none of the miners or overseers. He has a big, outgoing personality to match his great size, and will sing to introduce himself:
 
Ho ho ho, I'm Jazz King Coal
And a merry old king is me
So let's have us a drink and have us a smoke
And let's hear from my Fiddler's Three!

If he's asked about his business, he'll snap his fingers, and the miners will sing in unison to explain:

Do you remember?
Naughty children get coal in December
So these mountains must all be dismembered
And we dig must every night and day!
 
 
 
Events in the Coal House (roll d8)  
 
1 Jazz King Cole's aging elf overseers attend to front of house business. (1-3) fastidious chef Keugal is bringing Christmas cake on a cart to the boss, he'll sell a round of Christmas cookies to any table along the way for 1 silver coin; (4-6) band leader Fleugal is showing off his brand new authentic who-hoober horn, wants to know what you got for Christmas so he can tell you why your present was worse than his.
 
2 The band is hot right now! (1-3) the brass band is on fire, Fleugal is playing the best horn of his life, the whole audience is on their feet dancing; (4-5) The Fiddler's Three are playing a love song, and dime-a-dance elf girl Violet really wants someone to give her a silver coin for a slow dance; (6) there must have been some magic in that old top hat he found, because Michigan Frog is actually performing a rousing round of "Hello My Baby" for an adoring crowd.

3 Jazz King Coal encourages everyone to try out some gambling. The nearest gaming table has (1-3) roulette!, costs 1, roll 3d6, payout is 30 CS for triples; (4-5) blackjack!, costs 1, 5, or 10, player and house each roll 2d12 and try to get the higher score, house wins ties, payout equal to bet, payout double on player roll of 21, player loses all rolls of 22 or higher; (6) yahtzee! cost 5, roll 5d6 and try to make the best hand, house wins ties, player can buy a reroll by raising the stakes (but house gets one too), payout equal to current stake, payout double on a yahtzee. Each game costs either 1 Company Scrip or 1 silver coin. If you wager in silver, the payout is d6 × the listed amount, but all prizes are awarded in scrip.

4 Unruly customer causing a ruckus. (1-3) aging elf Clarence has been annoying the staff by asking for drinks and gaming not on the menu, and now he claims not to have any money anyway; (4-6) addled elf Harvey Harko is talking to his imaginary friend the invisible rabbit again.

5 Jazz King Cole is conducting a major coal sale to an important buyer at his VIP table. (1-3) Jingle, a representative from Castle Claus (hex 302), is here to place Santa's monthly order, plus a little extra to be delivered in secret to Mrs Mary Claus; (4-5) butler automaton Fetch-Kvetch is here from Kubla Kastle (hex 102) to buy fuel for Kubla Kraus's latest Keh-Night army; (6) cruel elf Caduceus is buying supplies for the Orcish Toy Factory (hex 603), he wants coal to fuel the orc-conversion process, and a supply of "volunteers" who owe debts to the Coal House. 

6 The elf dancing girls are putting on a real show. (1-3) a dozen elf ballerinas are reenacting scenes from The Nutcracker Suite, (4-5) dime-a-dance elf girls Violet and Viola are working the room, pulling people up out of their chairs, dancing with each other, giving away a quick twirls; (6) the ballerinas are performing a cancan, and the audience is losing their minds, hooting and hollering, howling like wolves.

7 The Robot Devil arrives and demands that everyone have a good time in his honor. Drink! Smoke! Dance! Make merry, dammit! Merrier!! Anybody seen not enjoying themselves risks being thrown out.

 
8 Disturbance at the door, somebody wants inside and the bouncers don't want to let them in. (1-3) elf deerherd Nilly is blocking the door with her mixed flock of Stantlers and Wyrdeer, exhorting everyone to leave the Coal House, trying to bring her deer in to crowd the customers out; (4-5) orc activist Redgold (escaped from the Orcish Toy Factory hex 603) has a satchel full of labor rights pamphlets, she wants to organize a union inside the Coal House; (6) seemingly harmless and feeble Grandpa Dracula can't come in unless he's invited, but c'mon, how dangerous could this old man really be?
 
 
 
Drink Menu 
  

1 Company Scrip - Grog Nog - cheap beer mixed with sweetened milk with a sprinkle of nutmeg

 
2 Company Scrip - Wassail - a teacup of steaming hot punch served from the communal bowl
 
5 Company Scrip - Mine Shine - strong, harsh liquor distilled from coal tar
 
1 silver coin - Jingle Juice - a spicy whiskey and cranberry drink with a miniature candy cane stir stick, served in a collectible novelty glass (Periwinkle Bartholomew hex 201 collects these)
 
 
 

(A final note on coal - Everyone knows that coal is for naughty children. It can also be purchased for individual, household, or industrial use - but never mind that - everyone knows you must have really gotten it because you were naughty. Coal is an admission of guilt! It's also cheap and plentiful, it burns warm and bright. For many residents of the region, coal is their dirty little secret. They don't want anyone else to know they're using it; they're each certain everyone else who uses must really be naughty.)

My Barkeep Jam Entry - The Cockatrice Tail

This is my entry in the Barkeep Jam hosted by Prismatic Wasteland. I wanted to write something as different as possible from my previous pubcrawl location. Among other things, my other pub was kind of out of the way and disconnected from the rest of the Raves of Chaos, this one is right in the thick of things. And I took a bit of advantage of the unlimited space afforded to blog posts. Fitting a full pub on a two-page spread requires brevity, and really good editing. Here, I let myself sprawl a little.

 

 

 

The Cockatrice Tail

 

A former sculpture garden, enclosed and used as a warehouse, forgotten, lost in a bet, then converted into a pub by its new owner. Now it's an artists' hangout, popular for its pastoral interior and abundant inspiration. Grass floor, park bench seating, lampposts for light, and dozens of statues of all kinds supply an artificial crowd even when the place is empty. Rumor has it the Medusa barkeep has ties to the criminal underworld... Located halfway between Three's Company and The Birdcage.

 

 
 

 

When the jolly crew enters the pub, roll 1d6 on the table below. If a character's number is equal to or below the result, they are in the pub right now. 

1d6 - GARDEN PARTY-GOERS

1 - The Medusa works as a bartender for her aunt, the absentee owner. She knows she could run her own place better, if she could just get a chance!

 

2 - Down-on-their-luck Bard trying to write a comeback play about the Raves. Thirsty for gossip about events around town, and loves monologuing about what they already know.

 

3 - Chauntecleer and Pertelote, a canoodling pair of married chickens who love matchmaking other pub patrons, so everyone can be as happy as they are. Are any crewmates single?

 

4 - Delicious Dungeoneer only wants to talk about food the jolly crew has eaten at the Raves. Wants to know exactly how it tasted, will buy drinks for advice about where to get specific meals.

 

5 - Slow-moving Living Statue is maudlin and nostalgic for the good old days of the original Caves of Chaos. Unending list of complaints about kids today. Why do things have to change?

 

6 - The pub's owner, elderly Auntie Echnidna checking in on her investment. Everyone's doing everything wrong, and her whole body aches because she's pregnant again.

 

 

 

If the Risk Dice rolls a Setback while the jolly crew is approaching the pub, roll 2d6 on the table below.

2d6 - SIDETRACKS

 

2 - Hobgoblin baker supervises 1d6 chalk-white goblin lackeys as they crush white rocks and pour the dust into burlap flour sacks.

 

3 - Hypnotized 'snake charmer' plays imaginary flute at slithering, hypnotized human 'snake', luring them back toward Somnambula's. Encourages bystanders to "come see my performance!"

 

4 - Blindfolded bachelorettes' party stumbling through the street playing Pin the Tail on the Platypus. The slowest crewmate makes a Dex check or gets nailed for 1 damage and a beaver tail they can't take off.

 

5 - Gambling impresario clearing a path and taking bets for an off-track cock race. Certain to run afoul of the Tuck Mob if they find out...

 

6 - Trio of living statues perform slow-motion reenactment of The Murder of Gonzago. Claudius poisons the King and marries Gertrude. Bystanders wonder, is this what happened to the Monarch?

 

7 - Haughty tailor judges a jolly crewmate's outfit as "hideous!" Starts taking measurements, cutting cloth, stripping off old clothes, and oh by the way, this will be 50 gold coins...

 

8 - Pair of living statues engaged in an exhibition wrestling match. Bystanders are eager to gamble, oblivious to risk of being crushed.

 

9 - Annoying rooster minstrel whistles, strums lute, and narrates the jolly crew's recent deeds in song, and will only go away if they can pawn him off on someone more interesting.

 

10 - Drunken fairy wizard flings curses around the crowd. The unluckiest crewmate makes a Wis check or gets the features of a donkey (roll 1d6): (1-3) tail, (4-5) head, (6) braying "heehaw" laugh.

 

11 - Desperate wizard fraternity pledge chases goat-chicken mascot, stolen from a rival frat, toward Ship of Thesis, offers free drinks to whoever can help catch the nimble beast.

 

12 - The Heir's royal baker describing cake decorations to hobgoblin chef, orders the jolly crew to assume various heroic poses for visual reference.

 

 

 

If the Risk Dice rolls a Setback while the jolly crew is inside the pub, roll 2d6 on the table below.

 

2d6 - SITUATIONS

 

2 - Chalk-white goblins who've been hiding motionless amongst the pub's statues scream and jump to life, startling everyone.

 

3 - Pair of off-duty gargoyles from the Royal Palace relaxing after work. They'll fly the jolly crew to any other pub in just 1 turn in exchange for a round of drinks at the next stop.

 

4 - Love sick, half starved art student, produces sketch after sketch of the statue they're obsessed with. Begs the jolly crew to buy a Corpse Reviver so they can finally be together (roll 1d4).

 

5 - Reform parliamentarian dressed as hedgehog and Royalist dressed as flamingo playing official croquet match to determine a crucial point of order, keep accusing each other of cheating. They demand the soberest crewmate act as an impartial referee.

 

6 - Catastrophic breakup between a disillusioned rave-goer and her paramour, a giant rooster wearing a disguise. She's just now, suddenly, spontaneously realized that he's not a human, he's her chicken beau.

 

7 - Someone (roll 1d6) urgently wants to hire the Medusa for her side-hustle turning people to stone! (1) dutiful child wants elderly parent to become their own grave marker, (2) pair of degenerate gamblers will petrify the loser of their high-stakes coin toss, (3) star-crossed young lovers vow to stay together forever, (4) Tuck Mob enforcer proffers a squirming body in a burlap sack, (5) doctor reassures dying patient they can be un-petrified once there's a cure for their disease, (6) narcissist wants to be immortalized on their most perfect hair day.

 

8 - Vain but self-hating snake woman throwing a screaming, glass smashing temper tantrum. She's hired yet another artist to draw a sketch or paint a portrait of her, and once again she's inconsolable and furious at the result.

 

9 - Boisterous bout of lawn darts in danger of flying out of control. These louts won't quit until they're beaten! Score hits on AC 10, 12, and 14 to win, the opposing team aims at the drunkest crewmate instead of their own target. Oops!

 

10 - Hyper intelligent white swine, the Pigmalion, an escapee from the Dreamlands, studies the statues and sculpts miniature likenesses of the patrons from living clay that mimic their models' behavior. One of the figures depicts an NPC important to the jolly crew.

 

11 - Obnoxious oread tourists from the Elemental Plane of Earth amuse themselves by talking to the statues and pretending they're old friends from back home.

 

12 - Sentimental Heir commissions 1d6 living statue thespians to reenact their sibling's final battle. The jolly crew are invited to help block out the heroic yet tragic scene.

 

 

 

PRICE - SIGNATURE DRINKS

 

1 silver coin - Fountain Drink - Day-old sparkling wine pours from the mouths of swans, giant fish, and cherubs into a central basin. Grab a glass! Free refills if the Medusa is distracted.

 

2 silver coins - Tail of the Cock that Bit You - Whiskey, coffee, lots of hot sauce, and a raw egg. Might wake you up, will definitely clear your sinuses.

 

4 silver coins - Yes I Amphora Good Time - Red wine with a hint of pine tar, served in a Grecian vase.

 

5 silver coins - The Green Ferryman - Hallucinogenic liquor, known to knock your head off and send you across the river to wake up dead.

 

1 gold coin - Everybody Must Get Stoned - A granite punch bowl big enough for the whole crew. Served so cold it makes its own fog, with straws for everyone.

 

10 gold coins - Corpse Reviver - A hangover cure strong enough to bring statues to life! If you roll 4-6 on your Sobriety Dice, it upgrades by one step.

 

 

 

 

This work is compatible with Barkeep on the Borderlands (found at prismaticwasteland.com), written by W.F. Smith and published by Prismatic Wasteland, LLC, pursuant to the Barkeep on the Borderlands Third Party License.

Maps & Cities - Gossamer, Hembeck, Spooky City, GLOG Cities, Bastionlands

I like seeing what sorts of interesting world-building other bloggers get up to. I also like a good map. (For that matter, I'm fairly fond of bad maps!) Recently I've noticed people trying their hands at city-building. A couple have set out to create entire cities in some detail, others have more like introductions or first glances. Some are working alone on a project of their own devising, others are communally riffing on a set of shared ideas.

 

 

The Wilting Quarter by Jonathan Newell

 

Bearded Devil, already the creator of the cities of Hex and Jacksburg, recently started in on a new city mapping project, creating a spooky, gloomy fairy city, named Gossamer. The city of Gossamer is laid out on a streetmap like a stylized spider's web. It's possible that the other three quarters of the city will have different moods, but the Wilting Quarter in the northwest is definitely autumnal and dark, full of bugs and mushrooms. The really nice thing about this series of posts is that Jonathan walks us through his artistic process, and we get to watch the districts accumulate to form the quarter, like watching the highlights from a few episodes of The Secret City. 

Introduction to Gossamer, and Explanation of Process

Shroomsbury District

Wormwood District

Finished Wilting Quarter
 

 

Hembeck by Ruprecht

 

Grindstone Games very recently put out another complete city, this one called Hembeck. Hembeck reminds me of a Roman city after the fall of the Western Empire. The city is filled with temples, towers, and other order-keeping institutions. One neat touch is the use of well-chosen alphabetized names for the neighborhoods, which makes for clear keying, but doesn't feel gimmicky.

Introduction and factions of Hembeck

Districts of Hembeck

Alder Rock and Bowyer Ward

Cheap Ward and the Dockyards

Eastrade, Farcraft Ward, and Greatcraft Ward

Heathgate Ward and Ironthorpe

Jembgate Ward, Kruddlestreet Ward, and Limey Ward

Final Map of Hembeck
 

 

Johannesburg Administrative Subdistrict 7 by Mad Cartographer 

 
Several GLOG-bloggers responded to a challenge that Oblidisideryptch put out on the OSR Discord, and put together introductions to their own cities. The breadth of information that different writers have put forward in response to the same prompt surprised me. We get neighborhoods, landmarks, encounters, goods for sale.

Districts of the eponymous capital city of Meatropolis

Encounters and trades in Shalialas, the city of genies

Buildings and residents in the New City and the Old City

Encounters and trades in Qasira, a city on the coast of the Sea of Sand

Landmarks and factions in the Okavango Subdistrict

 

 

one possible Spooky City by Evlyn Moreau

 

Anxiety Wizard developed a more systematic way to build a fantasy city, and wrote up the process along with an example, the Spooky City. The procedure involves writing a number of important "truths" about the city and its inhabitants, that are constants; then writing 12 landmarks, 30 districts, and 100 random encounters. Then the city itself can be procedurally generated by placing a few landmarks and drawing a crossroads coming off of each. These intersecting lines form the boundaries of the districts. 

So you have sort of an eternal truth of the city, as well as particular instances of the city that different play groups might find. Anxiety Wizard wrote the lists for Spooky City with help from several collaborators, including Evlyn Moreau of Le Chaudron Chromatic. Evlyn in turn rolled up her own procedurally generated Spooky City, and then wrote up a couple others cities following the same instructions. My favorite is the Slumber City, and especially the detail that paprika spice is a dream drug imported from Slumberland.

Spooky City and city-building rules

Two views of a Spooky City

Slumber City

Fire and Ice City

Buttermilk Borough by Simon Forster

 

Addermouth District by Joshua LH Burnett

Misty Tracts by Kyle Maxwell

Inspired by this year's release of Electric Bastionland, and following the advice Chris McDowell laid out for creating new neighborhoods, several people have made their own little sections of Bastion. Bone Box Chant proposes an alternative, watery, dieselpunk city called Phosphene, but the others stick to neighborhoods, filled with a whole variety of interesting sites and complications.

 

City of Phosphene

Buttermilk Borough

Addermouth District

Misty Tracts

 

 

one possible Vornoi City Diagram generated by KTrey Parker

As a kind of bonus, Mazirian's Garden has a procedure for generating explorable cities. This involves creating neighborhoods, then filling them with both obvious landmarks and hidden points of interest. He also wrote some rules for exploring such a city, including both getting lost and gradually learning your way around.

d4 Caltrops also has some advice for drawing interesting city maps. His idea involves a mathematical concept called Vornoi tiles, but fortunately, he also has links to some free online tools you can use to make your own map fairly easily. 

Down in the Chthonic Depths' Secret Jackalope Present to Me - Cafe Prost

There's a springtime prompt-trading blogathon going on right now called Secret Jackalope, and I'm participating this year! I'll be posting my submission here soon. But in the meantime, I wanted to shine a spotlight on Down in the Chthonic Depths, who answered my prompt.

I asked for "A small coffee-house dungeon, either - daytime (filled with factions) or nighttime (ready to heist), your choice!"

Molly J and Nick S went above and beyond with their submission - Cafe Prost and the Little Red Notebook

Secret police! The resistance! A criminal gang! A little red notebook that everyone wants to get their hands on! Plus 36 more café patrons with agendas of their own, looking for a place to read or a a chance to meet a lover, who you can try to inveigle in your schemes.

Procedural Generation Demonstration - The Manse's Underdark Ocean Island Generator

Cacklecharm from The Manse wrote a series of random tables to generate islands on an Underdark ocean. These tables work together quickly, and I had little trouble assembling the pieces into a narratively coherent whole in a matter of minutes. So instead of my usual two, let's generate three!

Underdark Ocean Island Generator by Cacklecharm

 

1 - Tusk Island
Rolls: 4, 2, 4, 9, 7, 5

Tusk Island rises like a tooth from the sea. The pale stone island is a great stalagmite, pregnant with calcite and riddled with cavities. The water around it glows pink from the luminescent red algae that clings to the island's base, just beneath the waves, feasting on the rich magnesium oxides that burble up from a vent at the island's base.

The Tusk has a large central cave, just off the most obvious landing site. Its floor is flat, carpeted with soft layers of lichen and mushrooms. These grow in ring formations; a few circles are clear, making ideal spots for fire-building; one large ring is especially lush, an inviting place to sleep. Tooth-fairies lurk in the hollows of this cave. They attack sleeping adventurers, stealing teeth from their mouths, clothes, books, and other symbols of civilization.

Most of the other caves on Tusk Island are inhabited by olms, blind, white salamander people. The tooth fairies are slowly domesticating them, filling their mouths with human teeth, supplying them with stolen supplies, and relentlessly tormenting them to enact parodies of human behavior. They will eagerly trade for information about human customs, along with corpses, and literally any possessions the adventurers are willing to barter.

Though most of the olms' belongings are worthless - saturated with seawater and humidity and fluids from the olms' own hygroscopic bodies - they currently own a quiver of magnesium arrows that burn brightly (though without heat) for an hour, from the moment they're exposed to the air, and continue burning even underwater.

The olm are also tormented by "the dragon" a giant of their own species, a mutant olm twice the height of any other, tattooed with arcane sigils, able to breathe fire. It subsists on a diet of olm-flesh and fairies.
 
 
2 - Cackle-harm's Glacier
Rolls: 3, 6, 5, 2, 2, 2

It would be easy to run aground against the black glacier. The island is made of black ice, almost invisible against the background. The waters around it are filled with carnivorous black seaweed that grasps at the hulls of ships, and pulls anyone who falls overboard deep below to drown them. Chill winds blow down off the glacier at unpredictable times, always preceded by the sound of laughter, dealing 1d6 frost damage to anyone unprotected by shelter.

A wrecked dwarven ship is tangled in the weeds just off the coast of the glacier. Seven dwarven prospectors have a makeshift camp. Their mining company will pay handsomely for them to be returned to dwarven civilization. These seven are the survivors of a much larger expedition, but their numbers have been much reduced by the wreck, the seaweed, the cold, and the depredations of an invisible menace.

The dread goblin Cackle-harm lives on the glacier, his hideous laughter echoes across the whole island just before the chill wind blows. A marauder and brigand, Cackle-harm and his pirates robbed elven merchants for years before they caught him, and tried to execute him - but the magic in the elf-rope noose they hanged him with malfunctioned, making him invisible and invulnerable. He'll be happy to tell you his story ... right before he kills you. The only way to kill him is to remove the rope. The unbreakable elf-rope is Cackle-harm's only treasure - everything else he steals he throws in the sea, unreachable beneath the black seaweed garden.

 
3 - The Sleeping Giant
Rolls: 6, 5, 2, 4, 4, 7*
(Note: The Manse recommends rolling d6 to determine inhabitants, but also suggests the island might be uninhabited, so I rolled a d10, and I'm interpreting results 7-10 as uninhabited.)

It's impossible to miss the Sleeping Giant. It's a giant olm, an albino salamander the size of a mountain, trapped in magical slumber.

The waters surrounding the island are filled with flags and warning buoys written in dozens of languages. Shipcatching nets are set out to prevent any vessel larger than a lifeboat from approaching the island directly. A lighthouse sits atop an promontory stone, positioned so shadows prevent its light from hitting the slumbering giant's sleeping eyes. The everburning flame of the lighthouse is a trapped fire elemental, magically bound to the tower.

Hidden in the crevices and folds of the giant's skin are dozens of pest-traps. By now, about half have been triggered and hold the skeletons of various underworld vermin. The rest remain a hazard to adventures. Each deals 1d4 damage and requires an exploration turn for two people to remove.

The only treasure on the island is a spellbook, Ø ōōōō ō Øōōō ØØØ ØØØ ØōØ ØØØ ōōØō Øōōō ōō Øō Øōō ōō Øō ØØō, the Book of Binding, which is locked to a chain, the chain wrapped around the giant olm's neck like a collar. The book is written in a kind of braille, legible to the sightless hands of the original spellcasters. The book contains only two spells - one to put the olm back to sleep if it begins to wake, another to bind the elemental to its lighthouse prison. Any spellcaster intelligent enough to translate the spells from their time-forgotten original language is also skilled enough to reverse them to awaken the giant or free the fire.

(Also note: I just used Morse Code to write the book title. If you decide to use this island, consider making a "book" out of three notecards folded in half. Use a hole-puncher for the dashses and poke a smaller hole with a pen-tip for the dots. The spells can just be called "sleep" and "bind" for simplicity's sake.)

Should we Start Numbering Hallways on our Maps?

I was thinking about Diogo Noguiera's now-famous post "How to Never Describe a Dungeon!"

If you haven't read it, you might like to. He makes a persuasive argument. I'll summarize.

There are two ways to describe a dungeon hallway. One way is bad and, you should never do it. The other way is good, and you should try to do it every time.

The bad way is like this: "You get to a intersection and there is a door to the north and two passages, one going east and one going west."

The good way is like this: "If the corridor in the east leads to a natural cavern covered with mushrooms and myconids, maybe when the PCs look down that passage they will see a dim fluorescent light that emanates from the weird moss that lives there, and feel a light cool breeze flowing from that direction. Some moss may be growing in that corridor also. If to the west there is a nest of giant spiders, that corridor will certainly have more cobwebs covering it than the other passages they have been through, and some of them are still vibrating, as if something alive is touching the web."

The bad way is bad because it prevents the players from making an informed decision. With no information to base their decision on, they might as well roll the dice to decide which way to go. They might as well be in a straight railroad.

The good way is good because it supplies information that lets players make meaningful, informed decisions. Rather than a simple toss-up between "left or right" or "heads or tails" they have a real choice between moss and cobwebs, and whatever each implies about what's at the end of each hallway. (I would add, this approach also encourages players to use the information available to them to try to draw conclusions, and it rewards them for thinking ahead, by hopefully supplying them with a safer or more favorable path through the dungeon.)

I feel like Diogo has persuaded me, but what I'm thinking about is how to make it easier to put his idea into practice. (I say "his idea" even though I know Diogo's not the only one who's ever made this point - he IS the one whose essay on this point I'm quoting here.)

Because good intentions are fine, but I think there's a reason so many game-masters probably default to the bad way of doing things. The reason is, it's easier.

Pick any dungeon you like. Open the map, find a hallway. Imagine your players entering the hallway. Now, prepare to describe it to them. What will you do?

The first thing you'll do, of course, is look at the drawing of the hall on the map. How long is it? How many doors open off of it? Where are those doors? Are there any special features you need to mention?

All of that is important information, but if that's all you describe (and I'll be honest, it's probably all I usually ever describe) then you're doing things the bad way that we just agreed doesn't allow for meaningful player decision-making.

What more do you need to do, in order to describe this hall the good way? Well, you need to take note of the room numbers. You need to go check the key to the map for each of those rooms. For each room, you need to read the description, come up with a general impression of what's the most important thing in the room, decide what a good clue about that thing would be, and then move on to the next room, which is probably on another page. Also, you need to hurry, because your players are waiting, and what's taking so long describing a simple hallway?

Did I say the bad way was easier? I misspoke. The bad way is MUCH easier.

So if all you have is good intentions and a regular map, it's going to be much harder to describe each hallway the good way. And that's because RPG maps don't number hallways.

Which is one of those things that I noticed, and thought was odd, when I first started reading RPG books. But there are all kinds of conventions and practices that go into making RPG books. Pretty quickly you get used to them, and basically forget that you ever thought they were strange. But reading Diogo's essay made me remember the way I felt when I first looked at an RPG map and wondered why the hallways didn't have numbers like the other rooms.

Which is fine, I guess, if you're treating hallways as non-spaces, like we've probably all been doing all along. But treating them that way basically forces you into the bad way of describing halls, because it forces you, the GM, to come up with a description right there on the spot.

If we want to describe hallways well, we need to number them on our maps.

Every hallway is an empty room, except we usually don't think of them that way. They have all the promise, and all the problems, that we associate with empty rooms. Think of every blog post, every essay, you ever read about what to do with empty rooms - we should apply all those ideas to hallways. And we should number them.

Getting good hall descriptions during play shouldn't be a matter of exception skill, fast reading, and quick thinking. It should be a matter of looking at the hallway's number on the map key, and communicating the information there to your players.

Kyle Marquis's Dungeon I Want to Explore - The Sea of Vipers

Kyle Marquis is a game designers who tweets at @HexADay. His ongoing project is tweeting out hexmaps at a rate of, well, you can probably guess. Anyway, he's completely finished one so far - The Sea of Vipers. It looks pretty cool!
 

Sea of Vipers by Kyle Marquis

 
The general feel here is that particular gonzo blend of Stone Age meets Sorcery meets Saturday Morning Cartoons meets Super Science that I associate with the Anomalous Subsurface Environment or with Operation Unfathomable.

The world is ruled by a wizard called the Technogogic Implementer and administered by a bevy of vice-potentates, The Enthroned. Among the gods who rule this world are Ootoon, the Flowing One, the god/goddess of slime. Other NPCs and factions sound nearly as cool.

The individual entries are just as good, with that special blend of creative imagery, evocative names, and terse prose (imposed here by Twitter's character limit) that people love to see in their RPG writing.

I've picked out a handful that I enjoy, really just the first five that were too good to not write down. All these samples are from the left-hand side of that first island, because that's how quickly I got to five. I think Hex 0622 is my personal favorite so far. I really want to see those fish, kill that aboleth, and steal that treasure!

One thing you can't tell from this sample is that there seem to be a lot of interconnections between the hexes, as well as a lot of NPCs with agendas that the player characters could choose to become involved in. For example, one hex has a dragon searching for crystal shards from a half-dozen other hexes in order to assemble them into a weapon to go murder a wizard. If the players like that idea, they could easily spend a session or several tracking down the missing shards and pitching in to un-throne the potentate ... or they could just as easily try to defeat the dragon and earn the wizard's favor.


Hex 0416 "Werewoses. Cavemen bites shift your mind back to a prehistoric simian body when the moon rises, as your body runs amok in this time."

Hex 0622 "Beneath a long-dry riverbed: ancient aboleth mummy guarded by skeletal flying fish. In its treasure hoard: the TRILOBITE OF HOURS."

Hex 0723 "Rock troll vampire that couldn't reach its lair before dawn. It simultaneously burns and petrifies, forever, but can say 1 word/day."

Hex 0728 "Unicorn graveyard. Magically hidden until recently; anyone finding and speaking of it will trigger a horrible magic-horn gold rush."

Hex 1007 "Coast patrolled by mermaid pirates in upside-down catamarans. The captain has a lobster on her shoulder that says 'Yar!' "


Anyway, if that interests you, check it out on Kyle Marquis' website.

Laughing Panjandrum's ASCII Dungeons I Want to Explore - The Imminent Church Engine

I have no idea who Imminent Church Engine is, and I can't remember how I initially found a link to their website, but I'm glad I saved a copy. They've created two quite-beautiful dungeon maps using only colorful ASCII text characters, and I'm hopeful that they'll eventually create more.

Church of the Ailing Flower by Imminent Church Engine

Tomb of King Oraine by Imminent Church Engine

The first is the Church of the Ailing Flower. I think it may technically be the larger of the two, though that's in part because of the large exterior space. In all, there's fewer rooms and less going on in here. The small square rooms on the right-hand side are also meant to be stocked using a small random table during play.

The second in the Tomb of King Oraine (also called the Tomb of Cursed Glass on that index page I linked to.) This one has more rooms, more interesting paths and loops, and more going on. There's more treasure and a few different factions for the player characters to interact with. Personally, I also find this one prettier. There's more contrast, and even areas with a lot of similar-colored tiles have a bit of variation that breaks the possible monotone up nicely. The pink numbers also look good against all those cool colors. I think the only way I could like it more would be if the background were dark blue instead of black. I definitely feel an urge to try copying this visual style.

I would categorize both these adventures as "horror," since both involve exploring a creepy abandoned space, piecing together clues about what awful thing happened here in the past, and then potentially fighting a single large and extremely dangerous monster at the climax. Which isn't to say there aren't a number of small monsters in each dungeon, but the "boss" of each area is much more dangerous than anything else in the place. (Although by this argument, Mega Man is also a horror game, so my definition might be flawed.)

The writing here is pretty terse, but manages to pack in a lot of visual detail, and in both cases, the dungeons are fairly tightly themed. The Church has a lot of floral and, well, church imagery, while the Tomb is full of machines and glass. Here's an example that really highlights the visual imagery of the writing, from the entryway to the Tomb:

"1 Entrance - Tomb door is shut but unlocked, overgrown with vines. Hall also overgrown with lichen and flowers. Sunlight shines through cracks in the ceiling."

The monsters and treasures are all unique here. The monsters are written up in a way that's rules-light and is basically universally compatible. You get the number of hit dice, how they attack, and how they defend themselves. A couple monsters have special considerations, like the fact that if a Creeping Thing kills someone, it'll "begin to ravenously devour the victim, ignoring all else." Again, the writing here is brief, but I think gives you enough to work with so you're not grasping at straws. The treasure is similar, brief descriptions of the objects, followed by a price, denominated in silver.

There's something so fascinating seeing something like these two dungeons. The art is an aesthetic I've seen before, but not often, and not recently, outside of roguelike video-gaming. There's a spark of vital creativity, yet the text also has the hallmarks of someone who's well familiar with the evaluative standards that Bryce Lynch of Ten Foot Pole, for example, applies to adventure writing. But who is the author, what are their views, have they used these at the table, do they have a blog? Who knows. Instead they just sit there, deprived of context, not even a diamond in the rough - a diamond in the void.

Be sure to check Imminent Church Engine's page again in the future to see if they post any more of these images.

Update: After posting this, Laughing Panjandrum, the creator of these images, reached out to me and shared their blog link. You can find them at Imminent Demon Engine, where they're currently writing about a Dark Sun -esque setting!

Descend into Brimstone - Shrine to Hezzemuth Dungeon Map

The players in my current Black Powder, Black Magic game for DCC have finally visited the demon shrine I generated for level 1 of the Maw ... and they probably won't be coming back to it anytime soon. Now that it's been used at the table, I can post it here for everyone. You might remember the first room of this place, because it had a bear trap the characters skillfully avoided, and a giant soldier ant they less-skillfully didn't.
 
I generated this map using Mad Monks of Kwantoom. It felt a little small, and the pool of water in the first room was randomly assigned the magical property of teleportation, so I decided that diving into the pool teleports you to an alternate dimension, where the shrine is present but slightly different, and where the air is filled with sulfurous yellow fog. My players' explorations didn't reveal that detail at the table, but you might have a different experience.
 
I used the Black Powder, Black Magic vol. 4 zine to fill out the contents of the shrine. "Hezzemuth the Painmistress" is the demon associated with level 1 in the Maw. She's described as having 4 arms and the lower body of a bullet ant. Her shrine is supposed to have traps (random selection led to bear traps this time), and desecrating the shrine has consequences (random selection led to living statues). Rather than having only a chance of a "rare opportunity", I decided there definitely would be one, and I picked (and combined) "A chance to interrupt a human sacrifice." and "A chance to interrupt a demon summoning." rather than rolling randomly. My initial plan was that whenever the characters arrived, they'd have the chance to interrupt the sacrifice, although after they got a direct invitation, if they'd gone to do something else, the sacrifice would have happened in their absence.
 

Download here

Descend into Brimstone - Giant Ant Colony Dungeon Map

In my current Black Powder, Black Magic DCC campaign, my players recently decided they'd had enough of giant ants. Their current plan is to go explore other small mine-dungeons around town. If they return to the mine-megadungeon underneath town, they're likely to go to 2nd level or deeper.
 
Which means that the point of interest I made for the 1st level isn't very likely to be explored. Since I no longer need to worry about spoiling my players, I'm posting it here.
 
This is my map for a Giant Ant Colony dungeon. I made it using Ruins of the Undercity. It's an abandoned mine (within the larger Maw) that's been taken over by a colony of giant ants, and a few of the original Yellow Jacket Mining Company workers are still trapped inside.
 

Download here

Two Blasphemous Guilds in Infinigrad

Michael Raston from The Lizard Man Diaries has a new book out, meant to generate guilds and guild-jobs for his Infinigrad setting. After my previous post generating a couple of Infinigrad neighborhoods, I was already thinking of generating a couple random guilds, and Michael sent me a free PDF of the book. It's based on the guild generator and the guild-job generator he previously posted to his blog, although a close reading might reveal differences. Luke Gearing from ANT-LERRR did the art and the layout, giving the whole thing a kind of punk-collage aesthetic that fits well with the content, and really elevates the visual experience of the book beyond the simple text of the original blog entries. A close reading of the text might reveal differences, but I think the blog and the book are basically the same. If you like the blog, your reasons for buying the book would be because you want to support Michael's writing, or you enjoy Luke's art, or your want to own the polished final product instead of the earlier draft.
  
Infinigrad, as its name implies, is an almost-infinite city, a city-plane like Ravnica ... and like Ravnica, it's full of powerful guilds that control basically every possible form of commerce. Although the guilds would like to war on each other endlessly, some powerful / magical law prevents any guild from acting directly against any other. Which is where the player characters come in. Players don't control guild members, they control unemployed vagrants that the guilds can use as patsies and cutouts and catspaws to attack one another indirectly. So the "guild jobs" that the generator creates aren't jobs for guild members, they're jobs the guilds want someone else to do for them. They aren't jobs that have anything to do with the guild's expertise - that's something they're perfectly capable of doing by themselves. These jobs are the only thing the guilds can't do, the only thing they need to hire someone else to do ... that is, they're cold war black ops.
  
I'm going to generate two random guilds and two random guild jobs. Since all the guilds are embroiled in a war of each-versus-all, I'm going to go ahead and assume that each of the two guilds' jobs are targeting one another. So that means that I'll learn more about each guild from the job its enemy wants done to it than I will from the job it wants done to its enemy.
  
  
First Guild - The Cackling Embrace
  
expertise 10/2/3, forename 10/2/1, modus 7/3/2, aftname 7/3/6
   
expertise: god killers
modus operandi: work is intended to be used in a netlike fashion
   
target 3/2, action 3/5, location 2/4, danger 1/10, reward 2/1
   
target: a device that moves the world around it, a person who causes reactions in others with silence and stealth
action: clean, erase, or otherwise erode target
location: wizardly places, magical laboratories, golem factories, portal mazes, and the like
danger: entire location is an obscene death trap, a torturer's wet dream
reward: a guild-specific blessing
  
The guild: The Cackling Embrace weave giant nets that look like spidersilk webs strung with dew. They use these nets to catch gods, plucking them from the sky and imprisoning them in glass display cases. Some they keep alive in a zoological garden, others they taxidermy and kill, others are never seen again. Once a god is caught in one of the Cackling Embrace's nets, it's cut off from its followers, unable anymore to empower relics or answer prayers. So far, the largest god they've ever caught was an enraged tree spirit the size of a train car, but at the moment they're weaving a new net to catch their largest god ever - an astral leviathan, a god whale.
  
The origin of the Cackling Embrace's nets are a closely guarded secret, but their enemies have recently learned that the "dew-drops" that bedeck each strand are mothers' tears of joy. When a mother learns that her sick baby will live, that it will remain here on earth with her rather than passing on to the afterlife, she laughs and cries, and her tears help bind gods to the world, cutting off their connection to the Spirit Realm, even as the nets bind them physically. The aquarium tanks where the Embrace display their most prized gods aren't filled with ordinary water, but with the same mothers' joyful tears.
  
The job: The Cackling Embrace aim to strike a decisive deathblow against Ambulator Vicis by using glistening net-silk ropes to bind and stifle their central mechanism, the Infinite Orrery. The existence of the Orrery and even its location are no secret - they're in the central chamber of Ambulator Vicis' guild stronghold. But reaching the chamber through any direct route would mean fighting off an army of Vicis guards, battering down doors meant to withstand the crumbling of the world itself.
  
Better to sneak in along the maintenance shafts and utility conduits that connect the Orrery to the bedrock of Infinigrad. Of course, navigating that route means winding a path through a maze of circle-shaped rooms with only one door, that rotate to connect with their four tangent neighbors. Innumerable of these rooms are death-traps, and only one safe route through the maze exists. The Embrace has learned that Vicis calls this route "the knight's tour" but beyond that little more is known. What information they can give you comes from a handful of survivors who only escaped by accident, finding their way by chance to one of the exits rather than the center of the maze. These scarred souls tell of friends crushed beneath rolling wheels, ground up in mills, broken on torturer's wheels, drowned in water wheels, cursed by wheels of fortune.
  
The Embrace will supply the rope to trap the Orrery. Fed into the mechanism as it spins, the rope will wind around and around it, creating a tangle that can never be untied, made from a material that can never be cut. Despite the dangers, they've had no dearth of volunteers, for the prize is a god of the victor's choice, any god from among the Cackling Embrace's collections.
  
  
Second Guild - Ambulator Vicis
  
expertise 7/3/3, forename 7/3/3, modus 6/4/4, aftname 6/4/2
  
expertise: wheeled transportation
modus operandi: work achieves the opposite effect of what is normally expected from expertise
  
target 2/3, action 2/10, location 1/6, danger 3/1, reward 1/1
  
target: someone or something taken for granted but vital and important, most see right through target
action: desanctify or otherwise corrupt target
location: heaving and overpopulated tenements, teeming with conflict
danger: an abundance of light, nowhere to hide
reward: thanks in the form of basic guild-specific service
  
The guild: Ambulator Vicis controls the Infinite Orrery, and with it, the very layout of Infinigrad. Underpinning every neighborhood in the city are gears and wheels, axles, shafts, and pistons - and they all connect back to the Infinite Orrery. Ambulator Vicis doesn't transport goods or people (although supply may be connected to demand through their aid), Vicis moves entire neighborhoods, reshuffling the streets of Infinigrad to push and pull, weave and shift.
  
Sometimes they simply relocate a single neighborhood, shoving its new neighbors aside to make room. Sometimes they do transpositions, switching two neighborhoods' places with a minimum of disruption to anyone intervening. Sometimes their work is more arcane, reshaping whole swaths of the city by reordering the residents according to some unknown or occult streetmap - maybe working for a wealthy client, maybe obeying the demands of the stars in their infinite gyre. Most commonly two neighborhoods in the same region of the city are made direct neighbors, or a divorce is finalized by relocating the sectarians deeper in their new home territory, far from the disputed border.
  
Either at the behest of a hidden client, or perhaps out of civic pride, Vicis has been making moves recently to relocate and contain a disaster site within the city limits, a foundry that exploded like a volcano, trapped in a bubble of slow-time, a problem that seems beyond the scope of any power in the city to address. Never directly, but always as part of some other job, Vicis has begun moving the disaster site, begun reshuffling which neighborhoods border it. They must be planning to contain or control the explosion, mustn't they? Or to contain it by surrounding the site with other derelicts and wrecks? Surely they can't be arranging their enemies to be repositioned en masse? Surely they can't be preparing to surround the site with their foes before releasing the explosion back to real time?
  
The job: How did the war between Ambulator Vicis and the Cackling Embrace begin? Does the Vicis take on gods as clients or retain them as counselors? Is the Embrace's hidden net-works facility somehow sensitive to the movement of the city? However the war started, Ambulator Vicis wants to end it. By studying the net-strands brought into their facilities by would-be saboteurs, Vicis has learned the secret of the mothers' thankful tears. By means unknown, they have discovered the Embrace's greatest collector, a human doctor known as the Angel of Infantile Mercy, who visits the slums and tenements whenever plague wracks them or illness runs floor to floor. The Angel of Infantile Mercy! Whom all the poor mothers pray to! Whom all the poor places beg to appear! Whenever the sickness comes, they beg her to arrive in time, before the dying starts. The Angel of Infantile Mercy saves them all, or most anyway, and collects no payment, only tears of joy and relief, only mothers' grateful tears.
  
The Angel of Infantile Mercy does as much work as dozens of other collectors. Without the Angel, the Embrace could not string their nets, could not fill their tanks. Ambulator Vicis wants the Angel gone. They want the Angel discredited, defamed. They have already planned the blasphemy, that the Angel only goes where the Angel has already been, that the Angel always travels to first to spread sickness, then returns to treat it, that all the children the Angel "saves" were only endangered because of her in the first place. Is it a lie? No one will want to believe it. Charges so serious, if credibly made, will mobilize the Fourth Estate to evaluate and judge. Any frame-up will have to be iron-clad to survive such scrutiny. Every witness will have to be paid, every track and trace swept away. The public would prefer to believe that the accuser tells lies, so any accuser must be prepared to weather the withering gaze of every investigating eye in Infinigrad. But if the charges stick, if the Angel can be blasphemed, then the Cackling Embrace may not survive the revelation of their association with someone so scorned.
  
In return, Ambulator Vicis will move the victor's home neighborhood anywhere they please, will let them choose their immediate neighbors, and agree to forego any job that would upset this arrangement.

Two Neighborhoods in Umberwell

Jack Shear from Tales of the Grotesque & Dungeonesque is writing a book for his Umberwell campaign setting, which will likely be similar to his Krevborna book. I've played in Jack's Umberwell campaign, and recently, I had the opportunity to preview a random neighborhood generator he's written for it.
    
So here are two random Umberwell neighborhoods, built using the generator, and my idea for the seed of an adventure you could have there.
    
    
Neighborhood purpose: artist's quarter
Neighborhood aesthetic: maze-like
Noteworthy neighborhood feature: monument

    
1 - The Cubist's Quartet: 
Filled with art students all slowly driving themselves mad, streets are so sharp-angled they're nearly non-Euclidean, uncanny resemblance between local streetmap/architecture and the output of the local artists, here cubism is realism, dozens gather daily to sketch beside the quarter's most famous statue - the 20' tall "Portrait of the Artist Descending the Stairs".
    
Why would you adventure here? The streets aren't just maze-like, they are a maze. And the purpose of this maze is to hide from the world a single house and the unwilling occupant kept prisoner there. A recent gallery opening provides three clues - the same artist has a painting of the house, a portrait of the prisoner, and an abstract rendering of half the maze. A patron in the position to recognize what the paintings show has hired you to obtain the artist's sketchbooks and to navigate the maze, find the house, and visit the prisoner, to kill, free, or relocate them.
    
       
Neighborhood purpose: landfill
Neighborhood aesthetic: floral decoration
Noteworthy neighborhood feature: rooftop farms
    
2 - Rose Hill Reclamation:
(This was a really tough one!) Once a botanical garden, then rezoned as a dump after being flooded with sewage, specializes in chamberpots and other broken crockery, the red clay tiles on the original surrounding wall were all stamped with a rose motif before being fired, the ground is like gravel made of shattered pottery, the roofs of the original exhibition buildings now grow wild with feral Queen's Roses possessed of animal intellect.
     
Why would you adventure here? A mysterious group calling themselves "the Reclaimers" have taken credit for a half dozen assassinations, all using Queen's Roses as the murder weapon. The dump seems like an obvious place to start looking for them, but no one seems to be present on-site during the day. Climb the red tile wall at night though, and you'll see a handful of campfires arrayed in a loose circle. Investigate the center of the circle during the day, and you'll find what you were unlikely to notice before, that someone is excavating the dump, peeling away layers of soil and pottery with the thoroughness of an archaeologist. They're obviously looking for something specific.
    
    
The aesthetic seems to be more important in my first adventure seed, but it might inform what the Reclaimers are looking for in the second. I hope I caught the feel of Umberwell in both neighborhoods and adventurer-starts. The seeds are deliberately a bit light on detail to leave the important decisions to the individual referee. As I said, Jack offered me the chance to preview part of his book (after reading my previous random neighborhood post, actually) and I thought it would be fun to put his procedure to the test. I will say that unless you're a very fast thinker, this is probably better to use to prep beforehand, rather than trying to use at the table during play.

Two Chromatic Neighborhoods in Infinigrad

The Lizard Man Diaries has posted a generator for creating fantasy city neighborhoods. Le Chaudron Chromatique has a new fantasy building generator. Let's combine that with Lizard Man Diaries' fantasy building generator, and create a couple fantasy neighborhoods, as well as a landmark building for each neighborhood. In one neighborhood, we'll use the "fantasypunk megacity" generator to provide extra information about the neighborhood itself, and in the other, we'll use it to provide more detail about the landmark.
 
 
Neighborhood 1 - The Fountain District
 
Okay, so our random table tells us that this neighborhood's prevalent architecture is something to do with water transport - canals, pipes, sewers. There's engraved script that winds along the streets, and that script communicates some kind of message. Finally, the neighborhood is somehow existentially committed to being ethereal, vaporous, twisting, flowing, or floating. We can work with that.
 
Now let's add in extra detail from the other generator. The neighborhood has feral, makeshift, or jury-rigged architecture, made from repurposed materials, and seemingly on the verge of collapse. Despite its appearance, it actually required great expense in its construction. Meanwhile, the residents of the neighborhood are stoic or silent, and they dislike visitors.
 
Finally, the landmark building. It's a productive building of some kind and/or has something to do with food - a barn, farm, store, granary, greenhouse, mill, workshop or factory. Its special feature is that the building is made out of or connected to a giant fruit, vegetable, mushroom or tree.
 
Infinigrad: prevalent architecture 24, what's going on 85, atmospheric mutation 14 
Fantasypunk megacity: raceoid base 6, physical quirk 2/3, mental quirk 4/4
Fantasy house: trait 1, type 3, special 8
 
"To everyone else in the city, the Fountain District is a joke, but despite the place's whimsical appearance, the locals in the Fountain are all grim and serious. The whole neighborhood is filled with pipes, the entire apparatus above-ground, looking like something from a Dr Seuss book or a Rube Goldberg diagram. Pipes as densely packed as bamboo in a jungle, rising 10 feet, 20 feet in the air, vaulting over the streets, passing through buildings at eye level though open windows. The layout is more or less permanent, but it looks like it was built yesterday and ought to collapse tomorrow. The pipes wind and meander, merge and split, diameters stepping up and down, water pressure rising and falling, joints and valves and gauges everywhere you look. At any given time, half the water in the neighborhood is in the air, which is how the Fountain District gets its name. Every spray looks like an accident, a leak, but there are thousands of them on every block, and every one of them gets caught by a funnel or basin or drain, perfectly placed despite looking for all the world like a haphazard mistake. The locals shuffle around all day, taking pressure gauge readings, carrying wrenches, tightening here, loosening there, grafting on new pipes that look just as accidental as the old."
 
"What the residents know, but won't tell outsiders, is that the pipes in the Fountain District perfectly match the blood vessels, organs, lymph nodes, and glands of an Astral Leviathan. Anyone who's studied marine astrobiology will notice the similarities immediately. The daily routines of the locals involve a great deal of turning on faucets, filling basins, drinking and washing and bathing - and somehow, they believe, their activities don't just copy the natural biological functions of the leviathan, they cause them. Every day for the locals is a 16-hour choreographed routine that sustains the life of their Whale God. If directed with the right orchestration, they could seize control of the great beast, summon it to the mortal plane. For now though, their goal is just to keep the Leviathan alive on the Astral Sea, and they treat this responsibility as a sacred trust."
 
"Unfortunately, with all that water, it was inevitable that something would start to grow. First it was rust-colored lichen growing along the pipes, then precise lines of moss forming living shadow of the whole apparatus on the ground. Then came the ultramarine snozzberries, growing on winding vines that gripped where the lichen and moss already took hold. The locals tried ripping it all up, but it just grew back, and vermicious wasps began attacking anyone who tried. Now a giant peach has grown up right in the south-central park, right where the Leviathan's womb should be. The wasps have chewed away the peach's interior, carving it like the cliffs of Petra. It seems to serve as a cafeteria of sorts for them, perhaps a boarding house as well."
 
"The locals have two theories about their newest landmark. One faction thinks the God Whale has cancer and the peach is the earthly manifestation of its tumor. The other faction thinks the God Whale is pregnant and the peach represents is offspring. Obviously opinions differ about what should be done with the peach, but both sides agree the stakes are very high. Just recently a peacemaker seems to have convinced both factions that the only way to decide is to summon the Leviathan itself to the city, and perhaps to let it cure itself by destroying the worldly embodiment of its disease. The ceremony is currently being planned..."
 
 
Neighborhood 2 - Old Foundry
 
According to the neighborhood generator, this one's dominant architecture are ancient factories, oil wells, and fire pits. It's also a maze of teleportation portals, and might not even be physically connected to the rest of the city. The atmospheric mutation causes everything to be frozen, preserved, or caught. Okay, I think I'm getting a sense of what this place is like.
 
Next up, the landmark building. This one is a combination of two building types. It's somehow both a small house and a theater, arena, music hall, agora, or forum.
 
Let's see where it came from. The building was built by whisker men, so it's got low ceilings, tunnels instead of hallways, and the whole thing feels claustrophobically cramped to surface dwellers. The weather directly over the building is different from the weather in the rest of the neighborhood, and the building has been somehow partially destroyed by caustic liquid or boiling lava. Maybe something like the output of all those foundries?
 
Infinigrad: prevalent architecture 52, what's going on 19, atmospheric mutation 11
Fantasy house: trait 5, type 7/5, special 9
Fantasypunk megacity: raceoid base 3, physical quirk 1/8, mental quirk 2/9
 
"Old Foundry is a catastrophic industrial accident in slow motion, quite literally. In the hundred years since the final redundancy failed, perhaps 1½ seconds have passed. The cataclysm is still happening, still threatening to wipe out all life in every neighborhood that touches Old Foundry, and in every neighborhood that touches one of them. You can still hear the alarm bells ringing, a low bronze note that hums like thunder and never wavers."
 
"The old founders must have triggered one final failsafe to slow down the disaster so that someone could fix it before it was too late, and surely someone will, but not today, and probably not for another hundred years. For now, it's much cheaper, much more profitable to redevelop other boroughs, places where the sky isn't black and the air doesn't reek of sulfur and there aren't 10-story-tall crucibles midway though tumbling over, no tidal waves of molten iron hanging over the ground waiting to finish splashing down. The cleanup is going to be a logistical nightmare, and frankly, no organization exists within the city with enough employees and enough expertise to handle a problem on this scale. No one even comes close, no one is even in the right order of magnitude. So the problem waits for another day."
 
"The old founders sealed off the Foundry when they pushed the final button. All roads leading in or out of it are dead ends. From the outside, you might not notice that the buildings along one edge of your neighborhood form an impassible wall, but from the inside, it's obvious that Old Foundry is inside a sphere of black. Every factory and forge in the city has a secret entrance to the Foundry hidden in it somewhere, and if you aren't careful to go back exactly the way you came, you could end up halfway across town when you return. The whiskerers maintain their own network of entrances, as they do with most things, and it links up in innumerable ways to their larger network of underground tunnels."
 
"The whiskerers don't mind the dark, they like the warmth of the place, and time being near frozen doesn't seem to bother them much, they move so slowly anyhow. The only thing that would bother them is the dry, but recently they solved that too. The whiskerers have built a shanty town in Old Foundry right underneath one of the fire control stations. An entire water tower is slowly falling onto them, most days just enough lands to make a heavy mist, occasionally they get a light rain."
 
"The whole slum is centered around the Sensatorium, a kind of museum / performance art space. It's maintained by an onsite caretaker, who tends the tactile portraits and the haptic displays. The museum is filled with slow-time objects with unusual textures and properties. The centerpiece is a fireplace surrounded by dozens of sconces. The fireplace is the door to an industrial oven that was blown off in the disaster, with a blob of lava that landed right in its center just as time came to a halt. The sconces are dozes of pieces of ever-burning metal."
 
"The whiskerers collect dead bodies too, all the original workers, they carry them off somewhere. But unlike the Sensatorium - their pride - they share the location of the dead with no outsiders."