Procedural Generation Demonstration - Two Chromatic Islands

Evlyn at Le Chaudron Chromatique has created a minigame for referees to create island ecologies. She recommends starting with an encounter list, removing half the inhabitants (maybe they went extinct, maybe they never made it onto the island), then allowing the surviving inhabitants to speciate to enter the vacant ecological niches, and finally allowing the original survivors to evolve due to genetic drift.

Even starting from an extremely mundane encounter list, it's a procedure that's guaranteed to lead to weirdness.

Evlyn uses the Labyrinth Lord "Forest/Wooded" Wilderness Encounter Table.

For fun, I thought I'd try it again, using the D&D 5e "Sylvan Forest Encounters" from the Dungeon Master Guide. (I've modified the list to remove the non-creature entries, and to separate entries where you would encounter 2 different creatures at once.)

Also for fun, I thought I'd see what would happen if two different islands separated off the same mainland.


Step 1: First we see what species survive on each island. Evlyn suggests that half the mainland die off or fail to migrate, and half survive on the island.

ISLAND A
1 displacer beast
1d4 gnolls
2d4 hyenas
1 giant owl
1 dryad
1d4 satyrs
1d4 centaurs
2d4 elven scouts
2d4 pixies
2d4 sprites
1 owlbear
1d4 elks
1 giant elk
1d4 blink dogs
1d4 faerie dragons
1 elf druid
1 treant
1 unicorn

ISLAND B
1 displacer beast
1d4 gnolls
2d4 hyenas
1 giant owl
1 dryad
1d4 satyrs
1d4 centaurs
2d4 elven scouts
2d4 pixies
2d4 sprites
1 owlbear
1d4 elks
1 giant elk
1d4 blink dogs
1d4 faerie dragons
1 elf druid
1 treant
1 unicorn


Step 2: Next, we allow existing species to split off new species to fill the vacant ecological niches. Evlyn has a table to roll on to see which traits the new species "pick up" from convergent evolution into the niche, and any trait not "picked up" in this way should stay the same from the original species. 5e doesn't have Morale or Hoard Classes, but it does have official creature types and bolded descriptors used to organize the entry in the Monster Manual, so I'm going to use those instead.

ISLAND A
1d4 gnolls - replaced by unicorn, adopts 4 traits (AC, HD/size, special ability, appearance)
2d4 hyenas - replaced by treant, adopts 5 traits (AC, attack type, damage, special ability, Appearance)
1 giant owl - replaced by treant, adopts 3 traits (AC, saves, special ability)
1d4 centaurs - replaced by displacer beast, adopts 3 traits (alignment, movement, creature type)
2d4 elven scouts - replaced by giant elk, adopts 6 traits (number, AC, HD/size, descriptor, special ability, appearance)
2d4 sprites - replaced by giant elk, adopts 4 traits (alignment, movement, AC, HD/size)
1d4 elks - replaced by treant, adopts 3 traits (AC, descriptor, appearance)
1d4 blink dogs replaced by displacer beast, adopts 4 traits (alignment, attack type, damage, creature type)
1d4 faerie dragons - replaced by treant, adopts 4 traits (number, alignment, special ability, appearance)

ISLAND B
1 displacer beast - replaced by dryad, adopts 6 traits (alignment, movement, AC, attack type, saves, appearance)
1d4 gnolls - replaced by satyrs, adopts 4 traits (number, movement, attack type, special ability)
1d4 centaurs - replaced by giant owl, adopts 3 traits (movement, damage, creature type)
2d4 elven scouts - replaced by pixies, adopts 4 traits (attack type, saves, creature type, special ability)
1 giant elk - replaced by sprites, adopts 2 traits: (number, saves)
1d4 faerie dragons - replaced by hyenas, adopts 5 traits (number, movement, HD/size, damage, appearance)
1 elf druid - replaced by sprites, adopts 5 traits (movement, AC, HD/size, damage, special ability)
1 treant - replaced by giant owl, adopts 4 traits (movement, AC, HD/size, appearance)
1 unicorn - replaced by blink dogs, adopts 6 traits: (AC, attack type, saves, creature type, descriptor, appearance)


Step 3: Third, we allow each of the surviving species to experience genetic drift, so that they chance from the mainland baseline.

ISLAND A
1 displacer beast - dwarf variant (reduce HD/size, increase number)
1 dryad - giant variant (increase HD/size, reduce number)
1d4 satyrs - random characteristic variant (modify: descriptor)
2d4 pixies - dwarf variant (reduce HD/size, increase number)
1 owlbear - random characteristic variant (modify: appearance)
1 giant elk - random characteristic variant (modify: creature type)
1 elven druid - hyper variant (intensify: damage)
1 treant - hyper variant (intensify: saves)
1 unicorn - random characteristic variant (modify: saves)

ISLAND B
2d4 hyenas - dwarf variant (reduce HD/size, increase number)
1 giant owl - giant variant (increase HD/size, reduce number)
1 dryad - giant variant (increase HD/size, reduce number)
1d4 satyrs - dwarf variant (reduce HD/size, increase number)
2d4 pixies - stunted variant (dilute: number)
2d4 sprites - dwarf variant (reduce HD/size, increase number)
1 owlbear - giant variant (increase HD/size, reduce number)
1d4 elks - dwarf variant (reduce HD/size, increase number)
1d4 blink dogs - hyper variant (intensify: HD/size)


Step 4: The final step is to put it all back together into an encounter list for each island.


A - THE ISLAND OF CATS, ELK, AND TREES

1d4 dwarf displacer beasts (as displacer beast, except: size medium, 10d8+20 hp)

1 gnoll-like unicorn (as unicorn, except: size medium, 5d8 hp, add Rampage ability, appearance "feral humanoid with one-horned horse head")

1 hyena-like treant (as treant, except: AC 11, attack bite +2 melee weapon (1d6 piercing damage), add Pack Tactics ability, appearance "huge fallen tree with knot-holes like spots, stalks on four limbs")

1 giant-owl-like treant (as treant, except: AC 12, save S+1 D+2 C+2 I-1 W+1 C+0, add Keen Hearing and Sight special ability)

1 giant dryad (as dryad, except: size large, 5d10+5 hp)

1d4 variant-descriptor satyrs (as satyrs except: remove Hedonistic Revelers descriptor, add descriptor Abstemious Perfectionists "satyrs spend long hours practicing and perfecting their music, forswearing any distractions or mind-altering substances, living only to prepare themselves for seasonal concerts which they carry off flawlessly")

1 centaur-like displacer beast (as displacer beast, except: alignment neutral good, creature type fey, speed 50 ft)

2d4 elf-scout-like giant elk (as giant elk, except: AC 13, size medium, 3d8+3 hp, add Scout descriptor, add Keen Hearing and Sight special ability, appearance "humanoid elk with antlers")

2d6 dwarf pixies (as pixies, except: 1d3-1 hp)

1 sprite-like giant elk (as giant elk, except: alignment neutral good, speed 10 ft / fly 40 ft, AC 15, size tiny, 1d4 hp)

1 variant-appearance owlbear (as owlbear, except: appearance "panther body, wooden face, lion's mane of leaves")

1 elk-like treant (as treant, except: AC 10, appearance "huge fallen tree with crown of antler-like branches, bounds on four limbs")

1 variant-creature-type giant elk (as giant elk, except: creature type plant)

1 blink-dog-like displacer beast (as displacer beast, except: alignment lawful good, attack bite +3 melee weapon (1d6+1 piercing damage), creature type fey)

1d4 faerie-dragon-like treants (as treants, except: alignment chaotic good, add Innate Spellcasting ability, appearance "huge fallen tree with pair of leafy wing-like branches and root tail, hops and flits about")

1 hyper-damage elven druid (as elven druid, except: all attacks increase dice by two sizes, quarterstaff deals 1d10+2, produce flame deals 1d12+2, shillelagh deals 1d12+2, thunderwave deals 2d12+4)

1 hyper-saving treant (as treant, except: save S+12 D-2 C+10 I+2 W+6 C+2)

1 variant-saving unicorn (as unicorn, except: save S+0 D+3 C+3 I+4 W+2 C+2)


B - FAERIE AND GIANT ISLAND

1 displacer-beast-like dryad (as dryad, except: alignment lawful evil, speed 40ft, AC 13, attack tentacle multiattack, two +6 melee weapons (each 1d4 bludgeoning, 1d8+4 bludgeoning with shillelagh), save S+4 D+2 C+3 I-2 W+1 C-1, appearance "woman with dark green skin, black leaves instead of hair, two legs, four arms, two leafy vine tentacles growing from her back, cruel laugh, glowing emerald eyes")

1d4 gnoll-like satyrs (as satyrs, except: speed 30 ft, attack bite +4 melee weapon (2d4+1 bludgeoning damage), attack spear +4 melee or ranged weapon (1d6+3 piercing damage), attack longbow +3 ranged weapon (1d6+3 piercing damage), add Rampage special ability)

2d6 dwarf hyenas (as hyenas, except: size small, 1d6 hp)

1 giant giant owl (as giant owl, except: size huge, 3d12+6 hp)

1 giant dryad (as dryad, except: size large 5d10+5 hp)

1d6 dwarf satyrs (as satyrs, except: size small, 7d6-7 hp)

1 centaur-like giant owl (as giant owl, except: Speed 50 ft, Attack: Talons +3 melee weapon attack (2d6+4 bludgeoning damage), creature type monstrosity)

2d4 elven-scout-like pixies (as pixies, except: attack multiattack, two shortswords +4 melee (each 1d6+2 piercing), two longbows +4 ranged (each 1d8+2 piercing), save S+0 D+2 C+1 I+0 W+1 C+0, creature type humanoid (elf), add Keen Hearing and Sight special ability)

1 stunted-number pixie (as pixie)

2d6 dwarf sprites (as sprites, except: 1d3-1 hp)

1 giant owlbear (as owlbear, except: size huge, 7d12+28 hp)

1d6 dwarf elk (as elk, except: size medium, 2d8 hp)

1 giant-elk-like sprite (as sprite, except: save S+4 D+3 C+2 I-2 W+2 C+0)

1d4 hyper-sized blink dogs (as blink dogs, except: size huge, 4d12+12 hp)

1d4 faerie-dragon-like hyenas (as hyenas, except: speed 10 ft / fly 60 ft, size tiny, 4d4+4 hp, attack deals 1 piercing damage, appearance "cat-sized hyenas with rainbow-hued fur and butterfly wings, they wear sharp-toothed grins and their tails twitch with merriment")

2d4 elf-druid-like sprites (as sprites, except: speed 30 ft, AC 11, size medium, 5d8+5 hp, attack deals 1d6 damage, add Spellcasting special ability)

1 treant-like giant owl (as giant owl, except: speed 30 ft, AC 16, size huge, 12d12+60 hp, appearance "a huge owl with feathers like green leaves, its face like a mask carved from wood")

1d4 unicorn-like blink dogs (as blink dogs, except: AC 12, attack multiattack, horn +7 melee (1d8 +4 magical piercing), paws +7 melee (2d6+4 magical bludgeoning), save S+4 D+2 C+2 I+0 W+3 C+3, creature type fey, add Divine Guardians descriptor, appearance "white furred dogs that twinkle like starlight as they blink in and out of existence, a single spiral horn grows from each of their foreheads")


Final Thoughts: There's always something meditative about solo procedural generation, but trying to do this for a 20-item list (twice!) is maybe pushing the boundaries of what's feasible as preparation. This would probably work best with a shorter initial encounter list. More cosmetic and fewer mechanical changes might actually affect the player experience more.

It might also be interesting to utilize something like this method for an island-hopping game where the players will get to see multiple alternate ecosystems - especially if they can see them without having to fight all of them.

Two Salt-Throned Alien Cultures

Over at Throne of Salt, Dan has set up a series of generators for making alien cultures, at least partial inspired by Ursula LeGuin's Hain Cycle of books and stories. Dan recommends choosing 3 of his 25 cultural trait tables, and maybe 1d3 mutations from Coins & Scrolls biological mutation list. I'm also going to assign each culture a trait from one of Melsonian Arts Council's planar culture generators.

These took quite a bit of thought to make coherent sense of, so I can't recommend trying to do this at the table. These procedures should be used during preparation only.
 
 
Culture 1 - The Skyminders
 
Danscape cultural traits - age, learning, rank
Age: "Transitions celebrated: child to youth, youth to adult, adult to elder."
Learning: "Learning must be active, rooted in traveling and interacting."
Rank: "Higher status means more trepannations, so as to let more spirits of the open sky into the mind."

Melsonian cultural trait - dress
Dress: "Nudity as social scale. The rich wear nothing while the poor dress in endless filthy layers. Nudity represents the access to warmth? The opposite may be true, where the rich wear clothes 'cos it's valuable, the poor are prevented. Like the the old Imperial Purple. Origins or traditions may be misty. Skin painting a distinct possibility."

Biological mutations - burst of speed, cilia lips, mirrored hands
Burst of Speed:  "Once per day, can double movement for 10 minutes."
Cilia Lips: "Wriggly. Seals food inside. Like kissing a millipede."
Mirrored Hands: "They swap sides."

The Skyminders' ancestors were fully aquatic, and their lowest classes are still required to dwell fully underwater, their minds closed to the sky. The working and middle classes live in partially flooded districts, the water level in any given neighborhood carefully indicating its status. Only the elites live fully on land, atop spires, in fact, to be closer to the sky-spirits and further from the sea.

The Skyminders' bodies and attires are as closely calibrated to their social position as their homes are. The elites have the entire tops of their skulls removed, so that their brains are fully opened to the air, and their minds fully opened to the sky-spirits. They alone are permitted to go nude. Beneath them, the middle classes may, over the course of a distinguished life, attain a filigree of trepannations, while a worker at the start of their career has only their fontanel open to the heavens. It is a crime to wear fewer clothes than the holes in one's head would indicate, and a mark of shame to wear more. The lowest classes go swaddled in public, with even their heads and faces wrapped tight to prevent them from polluting the sky-spirits by contact. Criminals are welded into a prison of metal masks and clothes that block them from the sky.

Outsiders, of course, are the lowest of all, though it is confusing that they arrive from on high, closer to the sky-spirits even than the highest of spire-dwelling elites. But they must be low, for are they not covered completely? Do they not wear impervious suits to separate themselves from the sky? Do they not bring their own gasses in tanks, so that they may breath without inhaling the sky?

Skyminders are born shelled, and as they age, shed their stiffer skins for the supple blubbery leather of adulthood. Each shedding is a great occasion, celebrated as fully as a new trepannation, or the glorious skull removal ceremony. Each upward (or downward) movement in status is also a going-away, it must be accompanied by travel to a new place, to be around others who now share one's new caste, and away from those who might remember one as they were before. The Skyminders' bodies still bear the signs of their aquatic past. Their hands are fins, their mouth adapted for bottom-feeding, their thick skin requiring no clothes to stay warm atop the coldest peaks.

Though outsiders are obviously the lowest of the low, still when they visit, they are sometimes allowed to accompany a Skyminder into areas where their level of clothedness would otherwise be forbidden. For though they must surely be great sinners and criminals to be locked in such suits and shunned from the heavens, still, the Skyminders appreciate the tales of anyone who has traveled so far.


Culture 2 - The Dragonkin
 
Danscape cultural traits - learning, child-rearing, work
Learning: "Oral histories and folklore, taught by extended family members."
Child-rearing: "Members of eunuch caste act as teachers and caretakers."
Work: "Labor ought serve the public good first, and the personal good second."
 
Melsonian cultural trait - family
Family: "All social engagement is official. Marriage ceremonies, friend ceremonies, enemy ceremonies. Most significant interactions must be played out within the confines of a relationship or else is considered illegal/immoral."
 
Biological mutations - snake tongue, the vapours
Snake Tongue: "Can extend up to 1'. "
The Vapours: "Your breath comes out in foggy white burps. -2 Stealth."

The Dragonkin are the descendants of dragons, those great firebreathing beasts that still dwell in the Kins' zoological gardens and nature preserves and on the Forbidden Continent. The Dragonkin still hatch from spherical amphibian eggs like their ancestors, and their juvenile forms look just like miniature dragons, until they metamorphose into their adult bodies.

Like the ancestral dragons, the Kin possess tongues that extend half their bodylength, and blazing chemical furnaces inside their chests that superheats any moisture they inhale past the boiling point, so that their breath comes out in a great billowing fog. The poets of the Dragonkin have always practiced a form of cloud calligraphy, using their long tongues to shape their exhalations into cloudforms that either mimic or provide ironic commentary on their words - although few lay Kin possess the skill to practice this art.

The dragons are a perpetual reminder to the Kin of their animal past, and so the Dragonkin place great importance on rules and rituals, the only things (or so they believe) that keep them from reverting to their ancestral brutality. The most fearsome monsters in Dragonkin folk tales are monsters with the hearts and minds of dragons hidden in the bodies of Kin.

The Dragonkin have ceremonies for all good behaviors - and any behavior not honored by the proper ceremony is automatically not good. Every interaction between business associates, friends, even family members, plays out in a choreographed ritual, a scripted dance that allows slight improvisation, but only within strict confines. There are rituals for working, for shopping, for eating and bathing, for sports and games, for love. Every ritual is for the benefit of others, for the good of the community of Kin.

To take any action outside the prescribed ritual, to perform any service purely for the good of oneself, is to give in to the beating heart of the dragon that races inside every Kin's breast; each step outside the path is a temptation to wander further and further away, to venture into the Forbidden Continent of the soul. The choreographers who devise new rituals are among the Kins' greatest artist, but they are also seen as heretics, their new dances perhaps invitations to enact the old and bestial ways.

The tales of the dragons, the history of the Kin, every dance and ritual, every useful skill, these are taught to the young by a blessed caste of sacred eunuchs, who perform a special rite just before the final metamorphosis into the Kin's mature and gendered forms. The eunuchs give up the chance to lay eggs or fertilize them, to become the matriarchs and paters of Kin society, in order to birth adult minds rather than infant bodies, in order to become the parents of civilization itself.

It took some time for the Dragonkin to recognize the morality of the outsiders, who wear Kin-shaped eggs over their entire bodies, for the outsiders' behavior did not initially conform to the Dragonkin's own ceremonies, and the ceremonies of the outsiders are strange and all but invisible to Kin eyes. Many Kin still fear the outsiders, who (though they have eunuchs) have no single caste that fulfills all the eunuchs' sacred duties. Many Kin fear that the outsiders, inside their strange eggshells, have the hearts of dragons, the secret sinful souls of the ancient monsters.

Procedural Generation Demonstration - Box Full of Boxes' Subdimension, Hive, and Bastion

Box Full of Boxes is a relatively new blog on the scene, but they've already written several interesting random generators, including one to create a small extradimensional space to use as an adventuring site, one to create a criminal meeting place, and one to create a law-enforcement organization. Let's make all three, and see if we can determine how they're connected.
 

Illustration by Rockwell Kent for Moby Dick

 
Subdimension - The Vault of the Hesperus
Rolls: 4/2, 5/2, 8/2, 6/4

On the Second Day, God made the oceans and the sky; on the Fifth, God made all the great creatures of the sea, and every living thing that teems within the waters. On the Seventh Day, God rested, and took His pleasure yacht out onto the seas, and He saw that they were good.

And then came the War in Heaven, and the pleasure ship was made a ship of war. The angel Ismael captained the ship, christened the Hesperus, and Ishmael sailed the Hesperus across the seas, and there fought the great worm Leviathan. Every angel aboard perished, save for Ismael, who was rescued by the archangel Rachel. Together the two angels locked the Hesperus in a vault, still littered with the unburied dead and the detritus of battle, and they returned to the heavens together to await the outcome of the War.

God opened the vault only once, to instruct Noah on the building of the Ark, and to collect the bodies of the angels to await the eventual resurrection of their bodies, but on that day, God left the door ajar.

Today, it is possible to enter the vault where the Hesperus is kept in drydock. When the eye of a hurricane is centered over the spot where God slew the Leviathan, the same spot where Noah released the dove, a ship within the eye that plots a course toward the Evening Star will sail through the open door and enter the vault of heaven where the Hesperus still waits. It is strewn with the debris of war, but seaworthy, and able to sail across the sky and cross the celestial spheres, to go anywhere its captain wishes to take it.

The tale of the Hesperus is told in Melville's recent novel The Leviathan, in the apocryphal Book of Ismael, in The Collected Expurgated Cantos of Paradise Lost, and in tall tales told during storms at a certain seaside bar.
 

Illustration by Rockwell Kent for Moby Dick

 
Hive of Scum & Villainy - The Anchor & Saucers
Rolls: 1, 7, 3, 3

Amidst the overcrowded seaside streets of the Wharf District is a bar marked only by the sign of a fat lizard with a morning-star flail where its tail should be. On rainy days it fills up with shop owners and fishing-ship captains, who gather to trade stock and drink rum served with tea. Although the place is always full of the murmur of conversation, it's impossible to eavesdrop on anyone in there, which makes it ideal for conducting business without fear of the competitors sitting at the next table.

The proprietor, Ismael, looks barely more than a boy, and though battle-scarred, is quite beautiful. The regulars call him "the old man" and "the dinosaur". During particularly harsh storms, he entertains the bar with raucous tales of the hunt for a great whale or sea serpent.

Ismael enforces only two rules that outsiders find strange. First, none of the business conducted may be illegal - indeed, those who try discuss crimes find that not only eavesdroppers, but no one at all can hear them speak. Second, no members of the royal navy are allowed inside.
 

Illustration by Rockwell Kent for Moby Dick

 
Bastion of Law & Order - Seventh Fleet of the Royal Navy
Rolls: 5, 1, 4, 6

The largest building in the Wharf District is the urban base for the Royal Navy, home to the infamous Seventh Fleet, led by the notorious Admiral Abrahad and his right-hand man, Fleet Captain Isaiah. The fleet captain is always impeccably dressed and marches preening through the streets several times a day, his uniform made from much finer fabrics than are standard in the navy. Abrahad is withdrawn and rarely seen, except peering through the windows of the Admiralty Building, or standing atop its roof, staring down at the wharf. The sailors of the seventh fleet follow the fleet captain's neat example in their habiliment, but give off the unsavory impression of being a pack of murderous thugs disguised in the Queen's uniforms.

Ostensibly the Seventh Fleet is responsible for enforcing all maritime laws in the Wharf District, but the sailors mostly only ever seem to collect "taxes" from all the local merchants, ship captains, and anyone new passing through the district. Anyone attempting to report a crime or seek compensation from the fleet office is likely to subjected to an interminable stack of forms and "filing fees" in order to make their case, and the outcome is equally likely to be a summary dismissal, a back-alley ambush and beating for the plaintiff, or an over-the-top show of "justice" as the Navy executes the accused and confiscates all their effects.

Admiral Abrahad is extremely interested in any information about the interior of the Anchor & Saucer. He might attempt to pressgang newcomers into going inside as his spies, or may send sailors to waylay out-of-towners as they leave the bar. Once Abrahad has heard the final detail he needs (which will sound totally innocuous to the teller), he'll try to recruit any adventurers who are onhand to sail to a particular spot in the ocean, and he'll seem maniacally pleased that there's a hurricane pressing down on his expedition. A group of regulars from the Anchor & Saucer will likely seek recruits and mount a counter-strike to disrupt Abrahad's plans.


All Moby Dick graphics were found at the Book Graphics blog.

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.)

Two Supporting Castmembers in Umberwell

Jack from Tales of the Grotesque & Dungeonesque has a new book out about his Umberwell setting (which I've played in!) Included in the book is a section for generating "supporting cast" or NPCs. Let's generate two.
 
 
First NPC - Ugly Safra
 
Race & occupation - wight stevedore
Appearance & personality trait - brutish and bold
Ideal, bond, flaw - progress, land, superstitious
Nemesis - a collector wants something she owns
 
Short and horrid, Ugly Safra looks like a mindless corpse. Her cloudy eyes never seem to focus, her lipless mouth always hangs slack-jawed, her wet rotten skin, her hair like tangled black seaweed. But Safra's ugly visage belies her lively heart. She is friendly to a fault, and assumes instant intimacy with anyone who shows her the least bit of kindness - though admittedly, those who've been kind enough to see her friendly side are few in number. And Safra's no fool, she can tell genuine kindness from the sort who would feign it in order to use her.
  
Safra is a recent victim of the Necrophagous Fever. Her life before is gone now. But unlike most who succumb to the disease, Safra kept her intellect intact. She works on the docks now, mostly night jobs unloading contraband at the shore of the rivers that run between Umberwell's island boroughs. She's still in awe of her new undead body and works unloading the most dangerous cargoes, the ones too deadly for the living. Living a life of crime, handling materials that would have killed her with a touch before - Safra loves the excitement and opportunity that the Fever brought into her life.
  
Safra's only problem is that someone's after her diary, the journal she kept as she was wasting away with Necrophagous Fever. Safra thinks of it as her "brain" and fears that if she loses it, she'll lose the spark of intelligence that separates her from the Fever's countless mindless victims. She's not sure who this collector is, but through agents, they've tried offering her cash, breaking into her room, even attacking her at work. The Knights of Ruin have offered to recruit Ugly Safra, as they offer all of Umberwell's recently undead, and so far she's refused ... but if she can't get rid of the collector who's hounding her, she might accept the protection, and the obligation, that comes with Ruin membership.
  
Using Ugly Safra in your game -

• The characters want to buy something illegal, need to learn about the underworld's shipping schedules, or meet a contact on the docks, and find puppydog-friendly Safra.

• A patron hires the characters to steal Safra's diary. Or a faction wants the characters to use Safra to infiltrate the Knights of Ruin. The characters know someone will get the job done whether they accept or reject.

• Desperate Safra approaches the characters wanting to hire them. She needs help finding out who the collector is before they simply kill her to take her book. Or she learned something from a Ruin recruiter that scares her, and her conscience demands that she tell someone before it's too late. 

     
Second NPC - Darbidian Ral
 
Race & occupation - rakshasa cultist
Appearance & personality trait - pristine and double-dealer
Ideal, bond, flaw - wealth, dead loved one, prideful
Why he came to Umberwell - seeking revenge against someone in the city
Cult devoted to - Ravsana, goddess of pleasure
 
The newest most glamorous cabaret in town is The Sinners' Home, operated by the rakshasa gangster and impresario Darbidian Ral, a recent immigrant from a sun-soaked and demon-haunted land far to the east. Ral stands shoulders above most of his clients, looking for all the world like a tiger on its hind legs wearing the most fashionably-cut and hand-tailored suits. Ral always catches eyes with his immaculate coiffure, silk ties, gemstone cufflinks, and fresh flowers tucked into his lapel. He seems to be everywhere in the club, booming voice, hearty laugh, slapping backs, shaking hands, stooping and stage-whispering confidences with his clients.
 
And oh! what clients The Sinners' Home attracts, all the highest rollers in Umberwell are here, night after night, drinking the finest imported wines, snorting the purest manufactured drugs, gambling at Ral's high-stakes tables (and every table in the Home is high-stakes), watching the intricate choreography of Ral's cabarets. Ral's dancers dress up as different incarnations of the goddess Ravsana, often several dancers in close coordination portray a single goddess with many arms, or several heads, or male and female aspects, all set to lively foreign music. Ral claims that the dances are all authentic to his homeland, but he must be lying, must have sultryed them up, unless dancers in that distant land beneath the demon sun truly end every performance by making love onstage for far longer than they initially danced. And besides, what tradition would have the goddess humiliated, made ridiculous, what tradition would rob her of all respect, song after song?
  
It's expensive going to Ral's, everyone seems to pay more than they intended, but it's worth it just to be at the best club in town. It must be worth it, because his clients come back every night, dropping more and more coins at his baccarat tables, his roulette wheels, dipping into savings, taking out loans, some working all day to afford just one more drink, one more dose, one more dance.
 
Though few realize it, Darbidian is not the first of his family to come to Umberwell. His younger brother Arvanyan Ral came first, and died here. Arvanyan's servants came back without the young man, but carrying rumors, stories, and one harrowing daguerreotype of Arvanyan with a smile on his face, surrounded by willing executioners, partaking in the pleasures that would soon consume him. Darbidian believes Arvanyan joined a pleasure cult in Umberwell, believes he gave himself, willingly, to be used, beaten, degraded, even beyond the superhuman limits of his rakshasan body. Arvanyan's body died starving, covered in sores and unhealed wounds. Dravidian blames the cult, blames the goddess Ravsana, blames the city of Umberwell, and the wealthy elite who permit deaths like Arvanyan's to take place. The Sinners' Home is Darbiddian Ral's trap, his revenge. His club is a lure to draw in the people he thinks killed his brother, his demon magic keeps them coming back, keeps them wanting to come back, even as they are ruined and brought to the brink of death themselves. Unless stopped, he will bring Umberwell to its knees.

Using Darbidian Ral in your campaign -

• The player characters first meet Arvanyan Ral and witness his self-destructive tendencies over a couple sessions, then he is gone, then The Sinners' Home appears, and Darbidian Ral makes a splash in Umberwell's demimonde.

• Someone wants to know Ral's secrets and how to stop him. It might be another cabaret, starving for business since The Sinners' Home opened. It might be a wealthy family, trying to save their fortune from total dissipation at Ral's club. It might be a true believer in Ravsana, trying to stop Ral from further besmirching her name. It might be the lover or family member of one of Ral's clients, wanting to rescue them from self-destruction, or seeking revenge on Ral for facilitating their loved one's demise.

• Ral's servants seek out the characters for help. They fear their master will destroy himself in his open-ended pursuit of revenge. They want the characters to find out who killed Arvanyan - was it the Ashram of Willing Vassalage? the Risen Temple? some other self-abnegating sect? or did Arvanyan come to Umberwell already prepared to die to fulfill his desires? Be warned, for this or any other adventure - Darbidian Ral is impossibly proud, and it will be much easier for the player characters to persuade him he's won than to convince him he's wrong.

Black Jenny for The Forest Hymn & Picnic

Cecil Howe from Sword Peddler has a Kickstarter for a print version of his game The Forest Hymn & Picnic. (Full disclosure: after looking at the available preview content, I decided to back this Kickstarter.)
   
The most recent Kickstarter update is a set of rules for procedurally generating a forest monster, and an invitation to give it a try. Since I am very fond of proc gen, I decided to generate a monster.
   
   
Black Jenny
   
Galloping out of the Spookwood with a sound like a dozen tin cans dragging through the gravel behind her - here comes Black Jenny, out to wreak havocry on the good People of the woods. Jenny has the head of a donkey with eyes like black pools of endless night. She has no neck, her head just floats above her body, a child's body dressed in a shabby girl's school uniform. Her body floats too, hovering over her donkey Black Bottom, fur so depthless black it looks like a silhouette. Jenny looks like a child, but don't be fooled, she's incorporeal, and nothing can touch her.
   
Black Jenny rides to stop the People of the woods from singing or enjoying music. The community needs music - for celebrations and gatherings, to keep our courage up on lonely nights. Black Jenny makes the music go away. She opens wide her mouth to speak noise like a metal ocean, noise that crashes in waves, that breaks and withdraws and returns in a horrible rhythm. Jenny's noise is cacophony, a hundred metal voices screaming, and good People who hear it are like to get spooked and run away. (Make a Q&A roll with Resolve modifier and Sortilege grade against 10. If you fail, you are spooked and can't attack. Jenny makes this noise once when she arrives and again right before she leaves.)
   
One more thing, don't look too close at Jenny's black eyes, or in her mouth when she's screaming, or at Black Bottom beneath her. Anyone who stares at them gets to feel like drowning, and might could faint. (Make a Q&A roll with Intellect modifier and Funambulist grade against 10. If you succeed, you feel like waves of black ocean water washed over you, and you come to soaking wet. If you fail you fall unconscious and need a friend to wake you up. This is not a gaze attack, you only need to roll if you choose to stare at or examine Jenny's darkest parts.)
   
   
I don't know exactly what Black Jenny's scream sounds like, but I imagine it's something like the Pree-Sisters Swallowing a Donkey's Eye.

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."

Experimental Layouts for a Dwarven City Megadungeon

I previously wrote about devising some experimental procedures for generating a dwarven undercity. As I explained, I have a friend who plans to write an undercity generator, and I'm helping him a little by thinking about the procedures. I wanted to test my suggestions to see how well they did at generating a usable map. My initial ideas worked pretty well, although I developed some modifications while using them, and realized at least one more after I finished.
   
I started with a blank hexmap with the same layout as the Brimstone Mines from Black Powder Black Magic, volume 4, including a central borehole as the primary entrance. Since the procedures are intended to generate paths as you explore, I didn't want to just start in a corner, fill in a row, hit the carriage return, and repeat. Instead, I started at the entrance and followed a path. Actually I followed two paths, because I did this twice to see how different the layouts might look. The first time, I always went to the left-most unexplored hex; the second time, I went to the right-most unexplored hex.
   
I realized after doing this that I probably included too many "passageway" hexes, and that if this is supposed to be an under-city, then it ought to have some neighborhoods. I think I rolled more 2s on the left-hand path and more 3s on the right-hand, so if you wanted to use these maps, I would flip coins for each of the passages, and whichever comes up more (heads or tails), I would give the left-hand map more "neighborhoods" and the right-hand map more "passages".
 
The "passageway" hexes are the ones with small squares and little tunnels branching off them. The things that look like amoebas are "caverns". The larger squares with terrible maze-diagrams are "maze" hexes. "Special" hexes would involve rolling on a sub-table. I imagine these will be unusual, but not unique, terrain like parks, gardens, lakes, perhaps particular districts within the city. I drew them as mushroom forests because, (a) c'mon, of course a dwarven undercity is going to include mushroom forests as one of the possible special terrain types, and (b) they look better than a hex full of question marks. "Unique" hexes would also involve rolling on a sub-table, and I'm thinking these would be known locations, palaces, landmarks, and the like. I drew these as fortresses because again, (a) c'mon, and (b) the question mark aesthetics thingy.
 
As you enter a hex, roll on the following table to determine terrain type:
1 cavern
2 neighborhood
3 passages
4 maze
5 special
6 unique
   
Regardless of the terrain type, roll 1d4 to determine the number of exits. If the hex has no blocked sides, it gets 1d4 exits in addition to the entrance you just drew. If it has any blocked sides, it gets 1d4 exits in total. Hexes on the edge of the map all have at least one blocked side by default. Place the exits at random from among the available sides, and consider any side that doesn't have an exit to be blocked. I found it helpful to draw in the blocked sides to remind myself not to draw a new connection there in the future. (When randomly placing the exits, you should never need to roll more than twice - either roll once or twice to determine which sides get exits, or roll once or twice to determine which sides don't get them.)
   
Earlier I wrote (what turned out to be) some complicated and unwieldy ideas about comparing the number of exits you just rolled to the available sides and using that to determine secret passageways and temporary blockages and etc ... ignore all that. If the number you just rolled is higher than the number of unblocked sides, then all remaining sides get exits. If the number you rolled is lower than the number of pre-existing routes into the hex, then just block the remaining sides off. Trying to use the normal path generator to make special passages was a mistake; those should be features that get determined by a separate table.
 
I also had some ideas about generating significant sites within each hex. Determining if those procedures are correct or not would take a different kind of playtesting and/or philosophical introspection about what the nature of the undercity-crawl should be like. I will say that I think it will probably be easiest to roll a d20 on a menu showing possible site locations within the hex. Rolling d4 to determine the number of sites, and then rolling d-something several times to randomly place them gets a little tedious.
   
The question of whether or not this is the correct size map would also require introspection to answer. A larger map lends itself to more horizontal exploration; a smaller map means that players are going to start descending to deeper levels sooner. But it's a question of preference, not true right and wrong. What do you want your city to look like and feel like? How quickly do you want your players to descend? The city probably does need edges though, unless you want it to possibly go on forever. With d4 exits per hex, you will never procedurally generate a map edge unless you start out with one drawn on the map already.
   
Anyway, the two maps I drew are below. I think the terrain-and-path generating procedure I've come up with leads to a decent variety of areas that are fairly interconnected without allowing total freedom of movement. You would need some actual playtesting to be sure, but I think this should feel more like being inside a large structure or network of caves rather than being in an open under-wilderness. d4 exits might even be too many, although I'd have to try this again with d3 to confirm that. The left-hand map was totally filled in. After the initial pathcrawl filled in most of the hexes, I just went back and rolled for the remainders. The right-hand path actually led to every hex on the map, and cut eight hexes out of the map by blocking off all their available sides.
     
Here is the map I drew by following the left-hand path:

   
And here's the map that came from the right-hand path:

   
I kept track of the two paths I followed while drawing, and you can see them here: