Dungeon Dioramas - Root Quickstart & Pellenicky Glade

In fall 2019, Magpie Games ran a successful Kickstarter for a roleplaying game based on the Root board game published by Leder Games. In support of the Kickstarter, Magpie released a free Quickstart version of the rpg. In 2020, on Free RPG Day, Magpie released a free quickstart adventure, Pellenicky Glade. 

This year in 2021, Magpie released another quickstart adventure for Free RPG Day, and plans to release the final versions of the full Root roleplaying game. At the time of writing, the second adventure is only available to people who picked up a copy in person, and the full game is only available as a pdf to Kickstarter backers.

 

  

 
 

First Impressions 

 

There's a certain sleight of hand that Root pulls off, in both its board game and roleplaying game formats. It's a trick that draws you in with lovely digital art showing adorable woodland animals, and delivers a game of conquering factions engaged in a brutal war. 
 
The board game hands you cute little screen-printed, critter-shaped meeples, then sets up a conflict between a corrupt aristocracy, an invading imperialist, locals who are by turns apathetic and divided by ethnicity, a burgeoning multi-racial democracy, and opportunistic types who live outside the law and subsist on a mix of odd jobs, charity, and grift no matter who's currently in charge.
 
The roleplaying game casts you as the ne'er-do-wells, and drops you into a fantasy roleplaying game where all the fantasy is supplied by casting talking animals in all the speaking roles, where there is no magic at all. Your characters are weak and vulnerable, supplies are scarce and costly, the numbers are small and unforgiving, and unlike even the lowest of low-fantasy roleplaying games, you have nothing more fantastical than a well-forged sword to help keep you alive.
 
Want to play a game where Robin Hood faces off against the Sheriff of Nottingham, rather than one where Hawkeye and Green Arrow go after Doctor Doom and his army of Chthuloid monstrosities? Although the art shows you something that looks more like Disney's foxy Robin Hood than any dour, "realistic" live-action king of thieves, Root will get you closer to your goal than any version of D&D, or any other fantasy roleplaying game I've seen. None of that necessarily speaks to the quality of the game design, but I want to be clear about what you can expect from the setting. 

  

 

Basic Mechanics
 
The mechanics are organized into "moves" that require rolling 2d6 and adding an ability bonus, with rolls of 7-9 representing partial success, and rolls of 10 or more representing a greater success, a system that should be intimately familiar to players of other PBTA rulesets. The basic moves involve persuading an NPC, tricking an NPC, asking the referee questions about an NPC or about a situation, recklessly breaking something, recklessly trusting to chance, attempting a "roguish feat" like lock-picking or trap-disarming, or attempting a "weapon feat" like disarming a weapon or cleaving through armor. There are also three different moves for attacking an enemy - either by grappling, attacking with a melee weapon, or attacking with a missile weapon. 

 

I want to call out the weapon feats as being particularly interesting. To perform a weapon feat, you need to know that particular feat, and you need a weapon that is "tagged" as being able to perform it. This is loads more interesting that weapon proficiency in D&D, and something that people should seriously consider importing. Some older editions of D&D toyed with the idea of characters learning specific weapons, like axes or polearms or what have you, but since the only difference between weapons is how much damage they deal, and that's determined by size rather than type, there was kind of no point, and those rules have mostly fallen out of fashion, in favor of just learning "simple" or "martial" weapons that are mostly distinguished by damage amount. But the weapon feats seem great, because it actually matters which ones you know, and it actually gives you a reason to use one weapon type over another! 

 

Resources are tracked in a few ways. Each character has an "exhaustion" track and a "wounds" track. Exhaustion is acquired pretty easily, and in fact many character abilities require you to take a point of exhaustion in order to use them. Exhaustion is also the easiest to recover, both by resting, and by taking actions especially related to your character's motivation. Wounds mostly come from combat. 

 

There's a third resource called "decay" here and "depletion" in the finished rules. Each major piece of equipment also has its own depletion track. You deplete your equipment by using it, although you can substitute your own personal depletion track for the equipment's instead of letting it run out or break. You can also draw on your personal depletion track to produce small items of generic adventuring equipment. "Decay" is a terrible name and "depletion" isn't much better. I would have gone with use personally, but I also recognize that the designers were a bit hemmed in by the choice to name each track for a deficiency - for "wounds" instead of health, for example. 

 

Each character has 3-4 points of each major resource to start off with, although you can increase them by "advancing", which is sort of a piecemeal leveling up. With so few of these intrinsic resources, and so many opportunities to lose them, I do kind of wonder how much adventuring, in practice, can actually be accomplished before the characters run out of steam. That's a question I can't answer without playing the game though, which I haven't had the chance to yet. I suspect there's a bit of a learning curve for new players and new referees alike to set an appropriate pace. 

 

There are 6 character types included in the quickstart rules, plus 3 more in the full rules, and another 10 in the Travelers & Outsiders expansion. The ones included here are the Arbiter, a mercenary who follows a personal code of justice, the Ranger, the Scoundrel, who's maybe closer to the Joker than to Han Solo than the name would imply, the Thief, the Tinker, more of a blacksmith than a mad scientist, and the Vagrant, who is some sort of charming grifter. All these character types have some martial ability and some felicity with thieving skills, along with special abilities related to their archetype. 

 

This is a PBTA game, with all that that implies, both good and bad. The good, from my perspective, which may tell you more about me and my preferences than about the quality of the game, has to do with the comprehensiveness of the rules. While I don't really care for heavy rulesets with fiddly bonuses and penalties and situational modifiers that only crop up under special circumstances, I can't honestly claim that I like rules light either, with barely-there mechanics that provide so little guidance you wonder what the putative game designer's contribution was at all. Instead of rules light, I like rules simple, rules consistent, and rules clear. Flexible rules that can be easily applied to similar-but-not-identical situations, like 5e's table for Improvising Damage from the environment, I personally find far more useful than a rules heavy, somehow-still-incomplete list of hundreds of possible damage sources and their very minor variations, or a rules light exhortation that I'm the referee, and I should decide whatever damage is right for myself and apply it as I see fit. 

 

So I like that Root includes rules and advise for the most obvious things that players might try to do, not just in combat, but also traveling, socially interacting with individuals, and crucially for a game set against a backdrop of war, for dealing with the major factions. Though minimal in the quickstart, little more than just a reputation tracker, the full rules have much clearer advise for the magnitude of favors players could request, or the retaliation they might provoke, by interacting with factions based on their current level of notoriety or prestige. The travel moves especially please me - there's one mechanic for traveling along a path, and a second for going off into the trackless woods.

 

The bad, in my view, comes from a legacy of trying to distinguish PBTA games from D&D by changing up the vocabulary. I generally like the idea that players describe what they want their characters to do, and then the referee either tells them the result or asks them to roll the dice to find out. But start throwing slogans like "fiction first" and "to do it, do it" and "moves are triggered" at me, and even though I agree with what you're saying, something about the passive voice and the implied relationship between the players and the referee really bothers me. I recognize this is a basically irrational complaint, but I feel it anew each time I read that text. I'm also not a big fan of special abilities that basically say "when you perform X move, add this ability bonus instead of that ability bonus like everyone else uses". There appears to be at least one special ability like that per character type, but fortunately no more than one per type.

 

Playbooks I consider a bit of a mixed blessing. They're great for getting started quickly, and for having all your abilities already written out with no need to hand-copy anything. Just make a few decisions, check a few boxes, and you can begin the game. But there's hardly any room to write on these things, and as you go, your character should acquire equipment and abilities that aren't pre-printed on the original playbook. Having an actual character sheet as a backup, something you could fill out once you've advanced to the point of outgrowing your first playbook, would be a really great inclusion. 

 

  

 
 

Worldbuilding and Adventure Advice 

 

Arguably the biggest selling point for the Root rpg, (okay, besides its connection to the board game ... okay okay, and also besides the cute art), is the campaign setting. Yes Dungeon World isn't as popular as it used to be, and yes the complete Freebooters on the Frontier is still forthcoming, leaving a bit of a hole in the fantasy offerings among PBTA games, but probably if you're looking at the free rules and adventure, it's because you're interested in what it's like to run a campaign in a forest that's at war all around you. 

 

The quickstart rules are rounded out with advice for setting up a map with a dozen linked communities and for running a first adventure session. Your campaign map will be a large-scale point crawl with 12 "clearings", which represent villages and their immediate surroundings. Each clearing is controlled by a faction, either the invading Marquis de Cat, the moribund Eyrie Dynasties, or just the local Denizens. The denizens are a mix of rabbits, mice, foxes, and birds, although each village has a predominant species. Each clearing also has: two "landscape features", two "important inhabitants", two "important buildings", and two "problems", which strikes me as a pretty good starting point, not far off the setting creation tables you see in Stars Without Number and its sister games. 

 

There are only 6 landscape features, and 3 of them are water, so I imagine that gets old much too quickly. There are 36 entries on the other tables though, so you might find a clearing has "a farmer and a smith" and "a market and a bakehouse" and is troubled by "poisoned supplies and a strange mystery". As a writing prompt, that does provide a starting point, but it will still take a lot of work on the referee's part to turn that into something that's ready for players to interact with it. 

 

The generator for creating a starting adventure is more detailed. You get a starting location, a goal, the person who hired you, objects related to your goal, threats and groups related to your goal, and possible complications. So you might start out en media res "in a forest between clearings", there to "destroy an item", sent by "Local Help, a leader of a neighboring clearing". The item you're there to destroy might be "a strange device or relic", you might be threatened by "an overzealous guard captain", while your goal might require the involvement of "a metalworker's guild" in some way, and the whole thing might be complicated by "a usurpation in progress" in that neighboring clearing. This would take more work to bring to the table too, but it strikes me as more interesting than the clearing generator results. There's the inherent dynamism of having a goal and things standing in the way of completing it of course, but I think the adjectives are doing some heavy lifting here too. If we didn't know that the relic was "strange" or the guard captain "overzealous", the prompt would probably seem flatter and duller.

 

There's a page of advice for creating NPCs, complete with a list of sample names, and (importantly!) a half dozen sample combat statistics for different types of opponents. This too reminds me of Stars Without Number - the different enemies your players' characters might fight will be distinguished by things like faction membership, role, and motivation, but not so much by mechanical differences. One thing I like here is the recommendations for treating mobs of civilians as single, powerful opponents, with three different size options based on the size of the crowd. 

 

The final touch here is advice for having the war pass through clearings between player visits. In between one session and the next, you could find that an army had been through and ransacked the place. Obviously the war shouldn't intrude in that way in between every pair of sessions, but the possibility of one side slowly winning or losing in the background makes the war a source of change and instability within the campaign, which seems appropriate. And although the player characters are assumed to be outsiders with no particular stake in the local conflict, the fact that the war's not just a perpetual stalemate might also give them some incentive to get involved, and have an impact. 

 

 

Pellenicky Glade

 

The glade is the first pre-made clearing that Magpie released in support of Root. As I mentioned, they also put out another free one this year, although I haven't seen it yet, and the complete rules include a book of four more clearings. I'm really glad to see that, because I find it frustrating to a new ruleset or campaign setting come out, but no supporting materials offering any clear idea of how to play it.  

 

I mean this in two ways. First, every ruleset is good at some things and bad at others - presumably things the designers want you to be able to do more of, and things they don't think you should bother with, respectively - but it's not always easy to tell all the cool things the designer thinks you're supposed to be able to do, or how to assemble those tasks into a coherent adventure. Second, every unique or interesting campaign setting seems like it should host adventures unlike those you could have anywhere else. But again, if the only set-ups you already know are from other settings, it can be challenging to develop something that's both a good fit for the setting, and good full-stop. 

 

Rulebooks can and should offer advice for adventure writing, but to be frank, these almost always suffer from what we might call the "draw the rest of the fucking owl" problem. The gap between what the advice in the book says and what a good, complete adventure ought to look like might be almost insurmountable for novice referees, and even experienced refs might benefit from help writing adventures that are specific to the setting, not just whatever they're used to running, regardless of how well it works with the new game. And the best kind of help is probably a good example. 

 

All of which is to say that I'm glad to see Pellenicky Glade and the other pre-written clearings. I haven't read the adventure writing advice in the complete rules, but the gap between the quickstart advice and what's actually in Pellenicky is absolutely a "draw the rest of the fucking owl" situation. 

 

Pellenicky Glade is a clearing dominated by birds, but mice make up a numerical majority. They were formerly allies of the Eyrie, but are now functionally independent. There are four major conflicts ongoing at the time the player characters arrive, and a brief summary of how each conflict will resolve itself if the players decide not to get involved in it. I love the idea of this, because it provides a baseline for deciding what effect the players actions have, and it helps you create the feeling of a living world where at least some things happen without the players making them happen. 

 

The Eyrie is demanding that Pellenicky rejoin them; everyone in town has an opinion about whether to try to remain independent or submit to vassalage, and the Dynasties might invade regardless of what the townspeople decide. Also there's a mayoral election coming up with three main candidates, two mice and a young member of the Goshawk family. Also also someone has killed the patriarch of the Goshawks family, and three possible heirs are vying for succession. Also ALSO also, a notorious cat burglar is in the area, and no one knows what she might be trying to steal, or how to stop her.

 

There are about a dozen named and statted NPCs involved in all this drama and a half dozen locations are briefly described. In addition to recommended resolutions if the players don't get involved, there are also tips for escalating each situation in response if they do intervene. There are a 6 pre-generated characters to use, and tips for giving each of them ties to the community. What you have here is not so much an adventure as it is a sandbox with at least a half-dozen possible patrons who might want the player characters' help, and who might offer up various adventuring tasks as ways to provide that help. 

 

The parallel problems of picking a leader for the town and for the richest family, and the tie-in to the setting-wide problem of aligning with the warring factions both strike me as good ways to introduce the players to the themes of the setting. The mysterious cat thief isn't directly tied to the Marquisate faction, but I guess she serves as a reminder that there are cats in this game too? I'm less certain about her inclusion, but it does make sense to have at least one problem that's not of the locals' own making, which is maybe not something I would have thought of if I were developing a clearing without an example to reference. Pellenicky is also ostensibly a prime place to resupply and repair equipment, which ties directly to the unique rules of this game, which again seems good, although this seems like almost an afterthought compared to the political maneuvering. 

 

 

This post originally appeared on Bones of Contention. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

So let's write an adventure site!

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

 

 

via Smithsonian

  

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

 

 

 

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

 

 

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

Cryptic Signals - Dust Remains

  

  

A few years ago, I was running a weird west Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign where I went searching for mine-themed adventures to reskin and convert to DCC. I used Melancholies & Mirth’s Abandoned Mines Above the Caverns procedural generator, reskinned Into the Odd’s Iron Coral as “The Irontown Corral,” and even started in on Goodberry Monthly’s Goldsoul Mines before my play group moved on to other things. If I had known about Dust Remains at that time, it definitely would have made my list to try, and might have beaten out one of the others.
 
Christian Kessler pushes the two-page format to probably its absolute limit, giving us a mini-setting on one page and SIX mini dungeons on the other. In the extra space, Christian finds room to give us a table of encounters, four new monsters, a list of ghosts, a random table of minor treasures, and 11 unique magic items and spells, all written up for Troika and other descendants of Fighting Fantasy.
 

Dust Remains presents us with a series of ancient tombs, left over from an empire of cruel wizard kings, carved into the cliff faces of a winding canyon. The area is still haunted by elemental spirits who escaped from their long-ago enslavement, and by the zebra riding nomads who claim to be the empire’s only survivors. Some of these details, along with the names of the tombs - “Vault of Enuliki” or “Vault of Mazzolamus” for example - make me think the setting is meant to be fantasy Africa. There’s a tent city of wannabe tomb robbers and the various merchants and traders that accompany any gold rush, and a second camp of “rich fucks desiring ancient artifacts as status symbols” who provide an immediate market.
 
The flavor of the various treasures and the activities of the ghosts (which show typical actions of the long-dead imperials) help to communicate the distant culture of the ancient empire. The dungeon keys consist mostly of traps and puzzles, plus a list of treasures behind the final door at the back of each vault. The variety Christian presents is impressive, although the referee will likely want to add a bit more to each dungeon to bring them to life and give them a true sense of exploration. The referee will also need to create NPCs to populate the groups described in the setting introduction. Given all that Christian manages to fit into the available space though, I think these limitations are understandable.
 
The greatest flaw in Dust Remains is the maps, which are almost unreadable. The region contains two different encampments plus all six dungeons. I’m not sure which camp is shown or where the second one is located. The dungeon maps are reproduced in slightly smaller form on the second page, where a handful of the rooms are keyed. At that size, and with the very thin font used on the key, it’s very difficult to make out where anything is supposed to be. Christian’s instructions for randomly stocking any unkeyed rooms also ask the referee to differentiate between “accessible” and “inaccessible” rooms, a distinction I’m not sure I can make quickly at a glance. 
 
If I had a second quibble, it would be that the anticipated time frame of the “Events & Encounters” table isn’t specified and seems unclear. I would guess you’re meant to check daily, because that’s the only way certain results make sense, but others seem a better fit for checking on expedition time.

 

  

 

(Dissident Whispers is an anthology of 58 TTRPG adventures, produced by Tuesday Knight Games in collaboration with the Whisper Collective, made possible through the collaboration of over 90 artists, writers, editors and designers.) 

 

 

This post originally appeared on Bones of Contention. 

Bon Mots - Darkseid & Cinderblock

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

 

Cue the Odd Couple theme music...

 

Twinsies!

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

All in a day's work...

 

Dungeon Dioramas - Night Land

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

 

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

  

 
 

The Sandbox

 

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

 

 

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

This post originally appeared on Bones of Contention. 

Why the Sun is Dark and the Realms are Forgotten

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Dark Sun Creature Catalog cover by Wayne Reynolds

 

 

There are a couple possible relationships.

Perhaps Faerun is the past and Athas is the future. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Dark Sun Campaign Setting cover by Wayne Reynolds

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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