Bodys Isek Kingelez's Dungeons I Want to Explore - The Dream Cities

The Grey Lady recently had an article about Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez receiving his first exhibition in America (three years after he died, unfortunately) at the MoMA.
 

"Ville de Sète 3009" by Bodys Isek Kingelez, image via New York Times

  

"Ville Fantôme" by Bodys Isek Kingelez, image via New York Times

  
Kingelez sounds like he was an outsider artist. He had no formal artistic or architectural training. He built these model buildings and cities in his home using consumer-grade and found materials. He designed them as he built, without drawing plans or studies beforehand. The Times' critic is especially impressed with Kingelez's "consistency of style", his "multitude of references" to other architectural styles, and the way he uses those references: "every suggestion is fastidiously integrated".
  
The MoMA is calling this exhibit "City Dreams." I mean in no way to diminish Kingelez's artistic accomplishment when I say that to me, these look like set-pieces in a game I want to play - colorful, vibrant, playful, hallucinogenic cities I want to explore.
  

"UN" by Bodys Isek Kingelez, image via New York Times

  

"Canada Dry" by Bodys Isek Kingelez, image via New York Times

Mechanics I Want to Use - DCC Movement Rates through a Dwarven City Megadungeon

I have a friend who's brainstorming a dwarven undercity campaign, using procedural generation to fill in a minihexmap as the characters explore a multi-level ruined-city megadungeon. These are my thoughts on the mechanics of moving around the megadungeon. The point of writing this is to try to think through some of the mechanical structure so that he can worry about the content. I'm using DCC as my base here, but my friend could relatively easily convert these ideas to work in B/X or any other system.
 
 
   
Humans and elves in DCC have a base movement speed of 30. Dwarves and halflings have a speed of 20. Characters with the Wild Child birth augur can have their speed altered by plus-or-minus 5, 10, or 15 depending on their starting Luck score. Wearing heavy armor can slow characters down. Wearing scale, chain, or banded mail imposes a movement penalty of -5, and wearing half or full plate imposes -10. So a DCC adventuring party without animals is usually going to have a group speed of 20 or 30.
 
Dogs move 40. Donkeys and mules have speed 30, ponies have speed 40, and both horses and warhorses have speed 60.
 
I propose to treat a character's speed as their movement points. Navigating the dwarven undercity requires spending movement points to explore and travel between hexes. The slowest character in the party determines how far the party can travel without anyone needing to forced march. The fastest characters in the party can take advantage of their speed to scout ahead and report back.
 
Hexes are approximately a mile across.
 
Although travel times are given too, the need for rest is based on using movement points, rather than the passage of time. Characters need to stop for the night and rest once they get to 0 movement points. Continuing to travel beyond that requires forced marching, which entails some element of risk. You could require that the characters have to stop to briefly rest around the time they use half their movement points, but unless you plan to have something happen during that rest, or just really want to narrate it for realism's sake, there's no reason to. (Alternatively, ignore the movement points, and use the travel times to establish the adventuring day. Travel up to 8 hours is as normal, going longer carries the risks of forced marching. Characters with low movement rates due to their species or encumbrance may begin forced marching after only 6 hours.)
 
Entering a hex is "free," but passing through it to come back out costs 0, 2.5, 5, or 10 movement points, depending on the terrain and on whether or the characters are exploring or crossing through a space they've already explored.
 
Terrain types
There are at least three common types of hexes in the dwarven undercity - caverns, passages, and mazes. There may be other common types that will need to be detailed later. There may also be special or unique hexes that would never show up on a general list. (Cavegirl's Game Stuff's The Gardens of Ynn might be a useful tool for thinking about what these uncommon hexes might be like.)
 
Cavern hexes
Movement point cost: Caverns cost 2.5 to explore initially, 0 to cross after exploration. Some caverns contain difficult terrain (such as weed-like or forest-like stalagmites) and cost 5 to explore, 2.5 to cross after exploration. Difficult caverns are relatively rare.
   
Time cost: Caverns take an hour to explore, half an hour to cross after exploration. Difficult caverns take 2 hours to explore, 1 hour to cross.
 
Cavern hexes are mostly filled with giant, wide-open caverns. They make ideal building sites and contain 1d6 or 1d8 significant structures. They contain 1d4 exits in addition to the entrance the characters used. Unlike in passages and mazes, the structures are not tied to particular exits and should all be considered central.
 
It is impossible to get lost in a cavern hex.
 
Passage hexes
Movement point cost: Passages cost 5 to explore, 2.5 to cross. Some passages are very easy to navigate. They have wider corridors, simpler layouts, and/or better signage. These cost 2.5 to explore and 0 to cross. Some passages are more difficult to navigate. These are narrower, more winding, contain stairs or other changes of elevation, etc. These cost 10 to explore, 5 to cross. Both easy and difficult passages are relatively rare.
 
Time cost: Most passages take 2 hours to explore, 1 hour to cross. Easy passages take only an hour to explore, half an hour to cross. Difficult passages take 4 hours to explore, 2 hours to cross.
 
Passage hexes are mostly filled with halls and corridors used to facilitate navigation between structures. Passage hexes contain 1d4 significant structures and 1d4 exits in addition to the entrance the characters used. Most structures are associated with a particular exit, and either can or must be accessed to use that exit. Occasionally there are central structures that can be accessed freely by anyone passing through the hex. Even the first time they explore the hex, players can always choose which exit they use to leave the passages.
 
It is almost impossible to get lost in a passage hex. Difficult passages have narrow walls, long winding stretches, sharp turns, weird angles, and other features that slow down movement, but, they do not present a navigational hazard. Like caverns, they can be considered fully explored after a single crossing, and unlike mazes, they carry almost no risk of losing one's way (unless the party fumbles their exploration.)
 
Maze hexes
Movement point cost: Mazes cost 5 to explore, 2.5 to cross. Some mazes are especially difficult to navigate. These cost 10 to explore, 5 to cross. Because of the risk of getting lost, and the need to fully map a maze before it can be considered explored, difficult mazes are a nightmare for adventuring parties. Difficult mazes are relatively rare.
 
Time cost: Mazes take 2 hours to explore, 1 hour to cross. Difficult mazes take 4 hours to explore, 2 hours to cross.
 
Maze hexes are filled with halls and corridors laid out to confuse and misdirect the traveler. Maze hexes contain 1d8-4 significant structures and 1d4 exits in addition to the entrance the characters used. Structures in a maze are always associated with an exit. If there are more structures than visible exits (including the characters' original entrance), then the extra structures contain secret exits. The only way to find a central structure in a maze (at least initially) is to get lost.
 
Exploring mazes: Mazes take much longer to explore than normal passage hexes. They are designed to thwart navigation and make stymie mapmakers. Fully exploring a maze requires multiple passes through the structure. The characters must leave a maze by each of its exits in order to fully map the maze. Since all maze hexes contain an original entrance and at least one exit, it always takes at least two trips through the maze to fully map it. Getting lost in the maze does not count toward meeting the exploration requirements. (I know, I know, in real life, getting lost in a place a few times really does eventually make it easier to find your way around. Either dwarven mazes are too confusing for that to work, or if the ref is feeling generous, getting lost means that you roll +1d the next time you try to explore it.)
 
Until a maze is fully mapped the characters can either choose to travel a known route or leave via a random exit. Traveling a known route doesn't let you go any faster, count toward your exploration requirements, or run any less risk of getting lost, but it does let you pick which exit you use to leave the hex. Leaving via a random exit maps one route, putting you one trip closer to mastering the maze, and requires rolling 1d5, 1d4, 1d3, or 1d2 to determine which exit (including the original entrance) you use to leave the hex. For obvious reasons, when there's only one unmapped route left, you don't have to roll the dice, you just go the only way you haven't gone before. Once a maze is fully mapped, you can pretty much treat it like passages.
 
Getting lost in a maze: Mazes are designed to make you lost, so this is a fairly regular occurrence. Getting lost doesn't count toward your mapping totals. Typically, getting lost either means ending up back in the hex you started from before you entered the maze. Less commonly, you might end up stuck in the maze, or if you're lucky, you might find yourself outside a random exit. The other thing that might happen, if you're lucky, is you might discover a lost wonder of the dwarven underworld. (This can happen in passages too, but since getting lost there is rarer, so is finding forgotten wonders.) Lost wonders are cool, long-forgotten structures and treasures that you can only find by getting lost. There are two ways to handle this. One way would be to have a special encounter table for lost characters, and to include finding a lost wonder as a possible encounter. The other way would be to use a Luck check to resolve what happens when you get lost, and make finding a lost wonder the best possible result of the Luck check.
 
Exploring the dwarven underworld: When the characters traverse a hex from their entrance to one of the exits, this generally counts as exploring the hex. (It's possible to fumble this in a passage, and mazes of course require multiple trips through to fully explore.) After they've explored the hex, characters can simply cross it thereafter.
 
The lead character in the party's marching order makes the exploration check. In passages and mazes, this is the roll that determines if you get lost or not. Other consequences TBD. If a character scouted ahead and reported back, and that character then leads the party through the hex, that hex can be considered already-explored. (Something like this also applies for return trips to the undercity bringing along new characters.) Probably rolling the exploration check involves rolling d10 if you're untrained, d20 if you're trained due to your occupation or class. (Since it's a dwarven undercity, I would imagine that all dwarves are considered trained.)
 
I'm not sure if you should have to roll an exploration check if you're just crossing the hex. If you do, you should either get to make the roll using larger dice, or have a friendlier table to roll on. I guess it depends on whether the exploration check is just to see if you get lost, or if it also functions as the wandering monster check. That might be good, because the person you want to help you avoid getting lost isn't necessarily the person you want in front if you need to sneak past a sleeping monster, or negotiate with a dwarven guard patrol, or lead the charge in a fight. (It could be the same person, but it's not guaranteed.) The exploration check should be a separate roll however, from any rolls that are used to procedurally generate the contents of the hex. (Your exploration roll shouldn't determine if the next hex you move into is a cavern or a maze, for example.)
 
Structures
Depending on the hex type, a hex may contain one or more significant structures. (Or it could be empty, although I guess the numbers I given so far make it impossible for anything but mazes to be structure-free. Hmm...) The terrain type determines both the number and the type of structures. Depending on the type of hex, structures could be things like dwarven mine-works, small caves, monster lairs, burial sites, temples/shrines, residential buildings, barracks, workshops, vaults. Presumably important public buildings are mostly located in caverns, whereas mazes mostly contain things that they want to protect or hide (like graves and vaults, maybe) or things that appear as the result of neglect (like shantytowns and monster lairs). Also, I'm calling these "significant structures" because you could imagine in-significant structures being part of the set dressing in passages or caverns. (You could walk past a row of dwarven office-worker cubicles that contain no personal effects, or there could be a block of spartan dwarven apartments that you have no need to enter or search.) This is the content that you're filling the the undercity with.
 
Significant structures should be like minidungeons. Ideally, it should take considerably less than a single game session to explore one structure. You might have some of these pre-keyed and waiting to be used, others could be procedurally-generated right there at the table, as long as the procedures are fast enough. Dwarven mine-works, for example, might be 1-6 rooms, with the room-types weighted toward long passages leading away from the entry. Dwarven buildings could have a handful of stock blueprints, which are then filled up using random tables. Characters should be able to explore multiple structures as a routine part of almost every session. Hexes that contain special/unique locations could contain large buildings that take one or more sessions to explore.

Secret doors
There are a few ways to get secret doors. In a maze, if there are more exits than structures, then some of the exits are hidden. Also, you may have noticed that I'm suggesting that each hex have between 2-5 ways in and out. There are no true dead-ends using the procedures I've laid out, but there are also no hexes without any barriers between them and the others. These barriers lead to secret doors in two ways. One way is, you go into a hex and roll for the number of exits. The number you get is larger than the number of unblocked sides (or, when you're randomly determining which sides have exits, you get a side that's blocked.) Voila, that exit is hidden. Also, there are going to be some hexes, or even some small areas that seem to be fully blocked off from the rest of the undercity. For each hex or area like that, random procedure decides if it's truly solid rock, or open but only accessible from a higher or lower level, or open but only accessible by secret door, or open but accessible both by secret door and stairs from above or below.
 
By the way, what happens if you know from its surroundings that a hex has more exits than you just rolled when you finally entered it? That means something has happened to make one of those exits unusable for now, and you're either going to have to quest for it or negotiate with a faction to get that connector fixed.
 
Dwarven factions
I don't know what my friend's plans are, but I do want to point out that the OSR has created a plethora of usable dwarf-types. Chris Kutalik of Hill Cantons and Slumbering Ursine Dunes has given us robo-dwarves and caveman dwarves. Jason Sholtis of Dungeon Dozen and Operation Unfathomable has written gray dwarves, blue dwarves, and bat-winged dwarves. This is to say nothing of all the dwarven subtypes that Wizards and Paizo have published. Thanks to the Open Gaming License, those (or some re-written version of them) are all available for any dwarf-themed project.
 
 
 
Okay, I think that's enough brainstorming for now. With this framework, and some minor tweaking, one has the beginnings of the procedures necessary to start creating a dwarven city megadungeon for DCC characters to explore. You'd need to start with a blank hexmap that has the outline of the first level of the city. The terrain types here give you the start of a procedure to fill in the hexes as the characters explore, and the times and movement rates lay out how much they can explore per day. (You'd still need tables to decide "what's in this cavern?" and "which significant structures are in these passages?", etc, but this is a start.)
 
Camping and staying overnight in dwarven houses is pretty much mandatory after the first few forays, although intelligent use of horses and scouts could let the players focus on in-and-out play for awhile before they start going deeper. The use of passages should keep the whole place feeling more like a dungeon and less like some gigantic open space, without the same slowdown that mazes create. The use of structures should also prevent it from feeling like you're always in abstract space, while keeping the structures mostly very small should prevent getting so caught up in exploring individual buildings that you have no time to move across the larger structure. I'm trying to thread a needle, basically, but I think these procedures should avoid several undesirable outcomes ("undesirable" for the goal of feeling like you're in a sprawling dwarven warren, anyway). Only playtesting will reveal if I got it right, or show up where the mistakes are and the fixes are needed.

Session Report - Descend into Brimstone - 20 May 2018

Characters
Archibald (innkeeper, 1st level Thief)
played by American John

Louis Black (politician, 1st level Warrior)
played by Petra

Nell (innkeeper, 1st level Warrior)
played by Todd

Session 3
A trainload of fur trappers passed through town, bringing along a barbarous Canadian holiday from the savage northern hinterlands during their stopover. Axes were thrown, foul-smelling fermented beaver meat was consumed, gravy was poured onto potatoes, and pretty much every drop of alcohol in town got drunk.

The Canadians are gone, back on their train, bound for who knows where, but the whole town is dragging in the aftermath of the celebration. Seems like half the damn town is laid up with one thing or another - hangovers, alcohol poisoning, beaver poisoning, gravy poisoning, and alcohol withdrawal while we wait for a new shipment from back east.

Meriwether, Eldon, Ethel, and Blaze were all hiding out in the cabin nursing unbearable hangovers. Sweet Nell had a pretty bad headache, but she felt up to another trip down into the mine. Louis Black had a sweet new beaver-fur hat, and bragging rights after drinking a handful of fur trappers under the table.

Archibald, Louis, and Nell decided to continue their search for the demon shrine the Freemasons had found and the Mexican police had been searching for. Louis loaned Archibald some money to help him buy thieves' tools, and Archibald repaid the favor immediately by forging lift tickets for all three of them. The were pretty fine craftsmanship, but the elevator attendant in the Gallows barely even looked at them, only glancing down for a moment before going back to holding a glass of cold water against his throbbing forehead.
 
The group decided to take a slightly different path than they had before, to avoid the high-gravity area where their friend Daniel and Officers Benicio and Shia all died. They traveled northwest into a region with enormous natural tunnels, where the gravity felt lighter and put a spring in their step. The group found another waterfall, and were attacked by a giant centipede that had been drinking from the pool. Louis drew his elephant gun and annihilated the creature with a single shot. Nell complained about her headache, and when she went to drink from the pool, found a statuette in the catch basin. It was a carving of a bat in Aztec style, with Aztec writing on the base. They wrapped up the statue and decided to show it to Meriwether, since his service in the Mexican-American War had seemingly familiarized him with some of the art from the region.

They continued northwest, arriving in an area of medium mining tunnels. They crossed another stream, possibly a tributary of the semi-circular stream they had found running around the northern side of the Maw. They also found an entrance to one of the Yellow Jacket Mining Company's claimed mine tunnels. The sound of insects chittering, omnipresent on the entire level, seemed somehow louder from inside the mining tunnel. They decided to pass it by.

They turned north, and entered another area of huge natural tunnels. This area also had increased gravity, and Archibald thought it might border the other high-gravity region they encountered before. It seemed there might be no way to enter the northwest quadrant without passing through an exhausting slog in high gravity. They found a pool with stagnant, cloudy water, which they declined to drink from, and found a mule wearing Yellow Jacket livery, with a pick and shovel strapped to its sides. They decided they would return the mule to the mining company in exchange for a finder's fee. With the lost animal following, they continued north.

As they traveled north, they passed into an area of man-made corridors, the floors and walls covered with stone tiles. They found an unusual doorway, one decorated with images of ants and a woman with the lower body of an ant. They decided this must be the shrine, and prepared to enter. Archibald the thief recognized that one of the tiles had a false surface, and underneath was a bear trap. It took him several tries with his crowbar to trigger it safely.

Unfortunately, while he was disarming the trap, they were approached from inside the shrine by a giant soldier ant. The ant bit Archibald in the back, wounding him badly. All three friends fired on the ant, but in the confusion, none of their shots harmed it. The ant attacked again, tearing into Archibald's gut and sending him tumbling to the ground bleeding. Louis used his magic cat gauntlets, sounding a musical note that visibly rippled through the air like a pebble tossed in a pond, lifting the ant off the ground and causing its carapace to fracture. The fight continued until Louis managed to stab the ant in the chink between its head and thorax, causing a gout of fluid to burst from the wound. The ant was still alive, but its morale failed; it ran past the group and down the hall.

Nell and Louis rolled over Archibald's body to see if he might still be alive though unconscious, but a look at the wound and the lake of blood left on the floor showed that he was truly dead. They tied his body to the back of the donkey, and returned south into the area of high gravity, deciding to leave further exploration of the shrine for another day. They passed through the enormous natural tunnels without incident, but their time in the mine and the difficulty of traversing this area began to fatigue them.

Nell and Louis force-marched the rest of their journey, although neither of them suffered injury as a result. As they passed the Yellow Jacket mine, a worker ant emerged from the mine and quivered its antennae at them, but they hurried ahead of it, and the creature didn't follow.

After passing through the final easy passage traveling southwest, they returned to the lip of the Maw and made their way back to the elevator. The elevator operator was surprised to see the donkey. Nell and Louis hadn't heard the news before now, but Yellow Jacket had a whole team of miner's trapped down here somewhere, and this donkey was the first sign of any of them in a week. The elevator operator put them in contact with the mining company, which paid for the return of the donkey, and offered them $50 a head for each miner they could manage to return alive.

Nell had other ideas though. She wanted to take the lump of demon ore and trade it to someone who might be able to magic Archibald's body back to life, or at least back to unlife to go to work as some kind of zombie servitor. Louis backed away slowly from the mad look in Nell's eyes, and explained he might have to sit that part out, as he would likely be busy making social visits to his numerous mistresses and bastard children. Meriwether seemed surprisingly open to the idea though. Apparently he saw this kind of thing all the time when he was in the army. He was particularly interested in the statue they'd found. He recognized it as Camazotz, the so-called Death Bat, a likely enemy of the demon Hezzemuth.

Gains
Canadian beaver-fur hat
$10 finder's fee for return of the Yellow Jacket donkey
contract with Yellow Jacket Mining Company for return of lost miners
statuette of Camazotz the Death Bat (worth $90, or usable as a holy symbol by a worshiper of Camazotz)

Losses
Archibald (killed by giant ant)

XP
1 XP for out-drinking the raucous Canadians (Louis only)
1 XP for forging lift-tickets (Archibald only)
1 XP for giant centipede encounter
1 XP for rescuing donkey
1 XP for bear trap
2 XP for giant soldier ant encounter
1 XP for fleeing giant worker ant encounter
2 XP for negotiating with Yellow Jacket
4 XP for exploring four new hexes
Total: 12 XP for Sweet Nell, 13 XP for Louis Black

Running graveyard (and session of demise)
Archibald the 1st level Thief (3), Officer Shia "the Beef" the NPC Mexian police-officer (2), Daniel the plumber (2), Officer Benicio "the Bull" the NPC Mexican police-officer (2), Luther the factory-hand (2), Jed the miner (1), Henry the huckster (1), Lilly the clerk (1), Bill the livery-stabler (1), Harry the butcher (1), Rusty the auctioneer (1)

Postmortem
This week's random campaign event was "Sickness." The reason I was hosting this game, instead of playing in my regular Sunday game, was because two of my fellow players in the regular game are Canadian, and planned to spend the Saturday beforehand celebrating Victoria Day, aka May Two-Four, which traditionally involves throwing axes, eating beaver tails with maple syrup, and consuming celebratory quantities of alcohol. (Or so they told me, the whole thing sounds really made up.) My description of the event was meant to be poking a bit of gentle fun at my friends, not to indicate any serious anti-Canadian sentiment. 

I'm really enjoying using a random campaign event generator each session. It certainly helps give a sense of the campaign world being alive and separate from the players' direct control. Having two weeks of downtime between the start of each expedition is working pretty well so far, part of me wonders if I should up it to a month. If I did, I also wonder if there should be separate lists of events by season, to make spring, summer, winter, fall feel different from one another. Part of me also likes the idea of adding in something like Hill Cantons' "chaos index" so that the campaign world responds - not to the players' explicit desires to what should happen next, but instead to how much trouble and disorder they cause. That's not really necessary, and not worth the work at the moment. But one idea I like from Black Powder, Black Magic is that the War in Hell somehow mirrored the Civil War. If killing in the mortal realm somehow causes (or is caused by?) fighting between demons in Hell, then the players leaving a trail of bodies behind them seems like it should carry a risk of unleashing some kind of metaphysical chaos.

Louis continued to be the MVP of combat, obliterating their first enemy with a single shot, and dealing enough damage to the giant soldier ant to trigger its morale roll. The soldier ant is the most dangerous thing they've faced so far, and if the second attack had been on anyone but Archibald, they might've all come out alive. Unfortunately for Archie, I've been rolling the dice to decide who gets attacked, and his number came up twice in a row. I'm glad I remembered to check morale for the ant, and I'm going to try to remember to continue checking it for groups of insects in the future. Thinking about this combat made me wonder if I should have been doing reaction rolls for the insects this whole time. The soldier ant was guarding a demon shrine, so of course it attacked, but the other insects they've encountered so far might not need to be automatically hostile. It works nicely to create a funnel-like environment for zero-level characters, but leveled characters probably deserve the chance to get through some encounters without needing to fight. I could decide to do that going forward, or I could decide that there's a good reason the insects have all been hostile so far, and that if the players address that reason, then the hostility will stop. I'm leaning toward the second reason so that the change in their behavior will be linked to some goal the players accomplished, rather than me just changing my ruling for no good (in-game) reason.

The players have found both the sites I prepped so far for level 1, so I may need to prepare another "point of interest," although it sounds like their next adventure in Brimstone will be out in the field, rather than down in the mine (more on that in a second). Playing through like this, the feel of the game is not quite what I want it to be. First, it feels very open. In principle, each hex is supposed to represent a tangled maze of tunnels, which is why it takes an hour to find the way though. In practice, the players walk in, encounter whatever there is to be seen, and then walk out in whatever direction they choose. It makes me wonder if I should be using a mechanic more like Papers & Pencils' "flux space", where the players enter, declare which exit they wish to try to find, roll for encounters, and risk getting lost each time, until they map it successfully, at which point they can navigate more easily. In demonstration, it seems like this should work out. This could be combined with making some of the hexes complexes of rooms (4, 8, 12) instead of flux spaces. This would likely make each hex feel less like a single open room and more like a labyrinth of tunnels. The cost of making this change though would be to slow the game down considerably. Alternatively, I could lean into the idea of it being very open down there, making it less like a real mine, and more like a hollow earth / lost world environment.

Second, the level feels very empty. The random tables have succeeded in placing a single winding stream, fed by multiple waterfalls, a couple dead-end hexes that are cut off on five of their six sides, and a couple chasms that block travel in one direction. However, in each hex there's only a 2-in-100 chance of a demon shrine appearing as a complication, and a 1-in-20 chance of a "point of interest". (Since features are rolled twice for each hex, I guess this becomes closer to 10% rather than 5%, which makes for about 3 points of interest per level, on average. That maybe sounds alright, but the thing about random tables is that in small environments you never get the average result - you get "too many" repeats of some things and no appearance at all of others.) These are the only mini-dungeon-like structures. There are also chances to find caves, caverns, empty mines, and faction-controlled mine entrances, but so far I haven't been treating those as mini-locations - although maybe I should be. Writing a small random generator to create explorable mine-shafts would create definite mappable locations (and give a logical place to find some of the treasures and have some of the encounters). Making caves/caverns real locations might prevent each hex from feeling like it's just an open space.

Third, the movement rate is a little awkward. (Or it would become awkward if I changed anything else.) The characters get a number of movement points which are equal to the average of their Stamina scores. I've been treating this just as 12. Moving through each hex costs 2 movement points (unless it has high gravity, which makes it 4, or low gravity, which makes it 0). This is just about enough to go in, come back, and get out in one session, with a chance, but not a certainty, of forced marching to make the last couple hexes. On the one hand, this freedom of movement lets me get through every session in a couple hours. On the other hand, it contributes to the feeling of openness. Getting to move 12 spaces, instead of 6, would give pretty much total freedom of movement, which would likely make the problem worse - unless it was combined with flux space. Combining flux space with the current movement rates might slow the game to a true crawl and make camping mandatory. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but if you goal is to get the players in, back, and out in a couple hours, having to talk your way though several nights of camping could be too much of a slowdown. 12 moves a day, combined with flux space, and with a few more obstacles that limit crossing into whichever hex you chose, might be able to make the whole thing feel like more of a maze, and less like a giant open plain, a single enormous cavern that contains the entire level. Ruins of the Undercity and Mad Monks of Kwantoom are probably decent guides for how to make location generators for making caves, mines, shrines, points of interest.

I'm going to continue to playing this as written for now. I want to be sure I understand what I'm tinkering with before I try taking it apart and putting it back together. The issue I most need to think about before my next game is what sort of quest to send them on the resurrect Archibald (and what sort of quest-giver will accept their demon ore in return). I suppose that if I want to play a game that alternates between default underground exploration and player-driven above-ground questing, that I need to think about how I want to design the quests. I know that when I played in Carl's game, he sent us on several, but I have no idea how he came up with them. If I had some kind of random quest generator for this game, I guess it would generate some people who are capable of trading demon ore for magic items, along with some seeds of ideas of what task they want done in order to broker the exchange. (A list of magic items would be nice, but not really necessary, since there are so many out there.) You could use this generator a few times to generate rumors, so that players who don't have a goal in mind know what sorts of things are possible, and what treasures they could go for if they have nothing better to do with their ore. You could also use it each time the players propose a quest to accomplish a goal of their own choosing, to help figure out how they're going to accomplish it. I would also want the generator to have a chance of making quests that are recursive - to do the favor for one person, you need something from someone else, who wants a favor of their own to provide it. That structure is common enough in fairy tales, and I experience it once in Carl's game; it's very satisfying when multiple quests come to fruition in a single session. That's far beyond my needs for right now. Right now I just need one quest for next session, whenever that will be. But I mean, to play this kind of game consistently, week after week, a generator would help. Yoon Suin or Stars Without Number would probably be a good role model for that kind of situation generator.

Dungeon of Signs' Characters I Want to Play (part 1)

The Dungeon of Signs blog has officially stopped updating. Which makes this a good time to revisit some of the author's, Gus L's, best ideas, or at least the ideas I liked best. This is something I could, perhaps should, have done sooner. This first post will be about character creation ideas from the Dungeon of Signs.

Most of these ideas come from Gus L's HMS Apollyon campaign, which was probably his longest-running series of posts. He also wrote ideas for the Anomalous Subsurface Environment, an Underdark exploration campaign, and his take on OD&D, the Fallen Empire - all of which I'll talk about later - but most of what he wrote was for campaigns set in a megadungeon-sized ship, lost in some extradimensional sea (including a high-class fop-slaughter campaign that I'm especially fond of). HMS Appollyon is one of the OSR settings that's inspired me most, and it's one of the closest matches to my own aesthetic, alongside the original out-of-print Engines & Empires, Heriticwerk's Wermspittle, Tales of the Grotesque & Dungeonesque's now-deleted pre-2013 gothic campaign ideas, and Into the Odd's Electric Bastionland, all set in a kind of fantastical, urban, long-19th-century rather than the Dark-Age-Medieval-Renaissance pastiche that forms the default D&D setting. It occurs to me as I write this that I haven't done much in this aesthetic in some time. (It's also not lost on me that two of my inspirations no longer exist on the internet, and exist for me at all anymore as a handful of downloads and memories.) The endings of things always feel melancholy.

Let's start with fighter skills. In this system, fighters can only use weapons they're skilled with, and as they improve their skills, they both fight better and learn new kinds of attacks. Later, I believe Gus L switched to a system that combines X-in-6 skills with X-out-of-6 tiered abilities, so some or all of what he wrote here may have been reincorporated into the tier system, but this is a starting point.

For me, when I first saw this, there was something revelatory about the idea that a character improving their skill in something didn't just become more likely to succeed, they also gained new abilities related to that thing. At that point, the only other model I'd seen was D&D 3.0/3.5, where characters could take feats that lets them use their skills to do new things, such as tacking the Tracking feat to use the Wilderness Survival skill to follow tracks. In retrospect, Gus L's approach reminds me a little of Tekumel, where a warrior starts out knowing how to use spears, maces. and axes, and learns to use swords, slings, bolas, etc by gaining levels. But at the time, this was my first exposure to the idea, and it expanded my ideas about what was possible in this game.

Ship's steward by Gus L of Dungeon of Signs

 
Thieves on the HMS Apollyon follow a code like the Vory, living by stealing, refusing to do honest work or cooperate with law-enforcement, and they all have tattoos documenting their careers. Alongside thieves are assassins, dirty fighters, "murderous thieves,pretty much the most antisocial character class one can play." Specialist characters can become engineers, who learn to use grenades, fix machines, and pilot "boiler plate", which is robotic/cybernetic armor somewhere between the original Iron Man suit and steampunk mecha. Gus L's original version of thief skills include weapons and armor like the fighter, but instead of tactics, fortitude, and agility, they have the option to learn the full array of typical thieving skills, alongside business skills like appraisal, wilderness skills like animal training, and magic skills like hedge magic and huckster faith. His revised version of thief skills is intended to work alongside the tiered-ability system I mentioned earlier.

The idea that D&D thieves could be modeled on specific, historical real-world criminals was a new idea when I first read this, and alongside Land of Nod pointing out that D&D's magic-user spells are based on real world occult beliefs, and that D&D's cleric spells are based on miracles described in the Bible, it opened up my own ideas about how to use real-world ideas to inspire gaming material. Thieves as Vory is still my favorite version of the classic "thieves guild" idea, too.

Clerics in Gus L's games don't just have a few spells determined by their deity or domain, they have all their spells determined that way. Much like wizards in the GLOG, each deity's clerics gets their own spell list. Actually, if I understand correctly, they each get three spell lists, since each deity gets three avatars, and each avatar offers a list of spells. Gus L's first take on this was for clerics who worship animal-gods or primal-gods. These spells were mostly reskins of existing spells, a spell to detect secret doors becomes "Sight into the Hidden World," and a spell to summon a familiar becomes "Avatar of the Great Ones." His next spell list was for clerics who worship rats, and this was the first time he wrote using the three-avatar approach. These are also mostly new spells, mostly based on rat-like abilities. "Speak with Rats" is basically a more limited version of a spell to talk to animals, but something like "Insignificance Charm," is more unique to rat priests. He wrote three posts with spells for clerics in his HMS Apollyon setting who worship the leviathan, clerics who worship a force of primal chaos that threatens to sink their city and drown the residents. The first post was about the whirlpool as an avatar for the leviathan, the second was about the brine witch avatar, and the third about the leviathan's devouring maw as a kind of synecdochal avatar for the whole beast.

Gus L imagined lawful clerics too. He thought clerics on the Apollyon might worship the ship itself. Likewise, in this Fallen Empire setting, he imagined clerics who worshiped the empire, which is really very similar to real-world kingdoms where the king is worshiped as a god. He also had a larger vision for the religious landscape in his HMS Apollyon setting, and house rules for clerical turning power.

Imperial cultist by Gus L of Dungeon of Signs

Illusionists in Gus L's games are halfway between wizards and thieves. He also allowed magic-users to specialize as necromancers (not surprising, given his interest in the undead), and as alchemists. As he did for fighters and thieves, he wrote a list of skills for magic-users. He thought it was important to reskin the "magic missile" spell so that each caster manifested their power in a different way, and he wrote a similar reskin list for the "lightning bolt" spell.

He also wrote a more detailed reskin for the "floating disc" spell, wherein an earth elemental takes the form of a bronze frog, swallows up your treasure, hops along beside you for the spell's duration, and then vomits it back out onto the floor. It's an evocative image for a spell that otherwise bores me, and it raises an important idea. If your spellcasters are using Vancian magic and can only memorize one copy of each spell, then a variant version of an existing spell becomes a valuable treasure, because it becomes a way to cast the same spell twice. Even a relatively mundane spell can become somewhat interesting when you describe it well and when scarcity lends it value. (Needless to say, "floating disc" also becomes more valuable if you track encumbrance in some way, or if you find treasures too big to carry by human hands, both of which were features of Gus L's campaigns, at least according to his play reports.)

The HMS Apollyon setting includes a handful of monstrous character classes. The first is the merrowman, a kind of catfish-like humanoid. Merrowmen started out as a monstrous NPC faction, but Gus L later decided to make them playable characters. The notable thing about merrowmen is that they're biomancers. They grow weapons and armor out of dead bodies, rather than manufacturing them by conventional means, and while these are usually of standard quality, he hints that they might occasionally grow powerful magical items this way. The other cold-blooded, magic-using, anthropomorphic animal class on the Apollyon is the frogling. Instead of grotesque body horror magic, though, froglings are elementalists.

I love the idea that while there are both fish-people and frog-people, they are totally different from one another, almost seeming to come out of two different sf/f genres. Merrowmen embody some kind of New Weird, biopunk, body-horror aesthetic, while froglings are more like young-adult, high-fantasy Pokemon catchers. The minigame of raising the rank of your pet elemental by having it defeat and eat wild elementals feels very videogamey, but in a good way. Gus L's descriptions of the wild elementals aboard the HMS Apollyon is also one of my favorite things he's written. Consider just this sample description of two variant types of water elementals:

"Abyss - Strange and powerful elementals formed from the highly compressed waters of the deep sea. Considerably denser and stronger than normal water elementals, any creature captured within them will be crushed by the terrible pressure that their waters contain. Weed - Elementals that have taken in enough earth essence to spawn life within themselves and are full of algae and weeds. The plant life perhaps links these creatures more closely to the material plane, but as a practical matter it allows them to choke and entangle in addition to the normal pummeling and drowning attacks of a water elemental."

Reading this makes me feel like there should be some classes that act like Pokemon hunters. Those games are popular for a reason, and having a character who catches and raises pet monsters creates a source of motivation that's necessary if you want to have player-driven sandbox play. Having a minigame to increase the ranks, or tiers, of some ability that's separate from level progression seems to be very typical of Gus L's vision for D&D. Also typical is the way that merrowmen have three subclasses, one warrior-like, one thief-like, and one mage-like. This is something that shows up again and again in his writing, including the last character class he posted, for playing vikings. Another innovation, and one I also like, is Gus L's way of handling ability score modifiers. Starting from AD&D forward, D&D games have included paired +2/-2 modifiers for non-human ability scores. Instead, Gus L recommends that for abilities where the non-human is likely worse than humans, they roll 2d6+1 instead of 3d6, for abilities where they are very average roll 2d6+3, and for abilities where they are likely to excel compared to humans, they roll 2d6+6. It's a different way of handling the same idea, but one I rather like, especially because it keeps all scores within the 3-18 range.

Merrowman by Gus L of Dungeon of Signs

Frogling by Gus L of Dungeon of Signs

The other non-human character classes Gus L makes available are the passenger, a kind of nobility that inherits its status and right to receive service from its ancestors first-class tickets back when the Apollyon was an earth-bound vessel. Since then, they've intermarried with demons and other supernatural entities to maintain their stature and their wealth, making them a bit like elves or tieflings. If there's going to be a noble character class, it seems like there should be a servant class as well, and there is: flying monkeys. I don't quite know why or how Gus L chose flying monkeys to be livery-wearing bellhops aboard his ship, but they're a perfect fit, although I suspect they make better hirelings than player characters. The final option is the draugr, an undead class.

Flying monkey by Gus L of Dungeon of Signs

In addition to his character classes, Gus L also wrote a random starting appearance table for characters on the Apollyon (who might be drawn from seafarers from many eras, on many worlds) and rules for gaining and using reputation (see what I mean about minigames to increase tiers/ranks being typical in his work?) Driving home the diverse origins of Apollyon residents is a d100 table for hirelings and their personality quirks, as well as another one especially for passenger-class characters, and rules for buying a dog.

While Gus L's own non-human character classes help to define their setting, he also wrote interpretations of horrible halflings, horrible dwarves, and horrible elves - all ostensibly for the Anomalous Subsurface Environment, but they're so evocative they're likely to color your view of the awful demihumans in any game you play. I especially like his take on dwarves as a society of debt-prisoners, ruled over by the few, rich, debt-holder dwarves. Why are dwarves gruff, surly workaholics who're obsessed with gold and jewels? According to Gus L, it's because they're desperate to pay off their hereditary debt. I even like his account of why dwarves have beards. The few debt-holder dwarves are all clean-shaven, but if any debtor dwarf so much as trims his own beard, it's likely to get a kind of "if you've got time to lean, you've got time to clean," reaction from his debt-holder, including some kind of bump of interest rate, balloon payment, or other reprisal.

The final character contributions I want to talk about from the Dungeon of Signs are Gus L's meditations on character competence and character death. The two are related. Old versions of D&D are highly lethal - hit points are few, combat is deadly, skills are unlikely to succeed, hazards are save or die, and in an open world, there's nothing but good information gathering preventing players from wandering into a situation far beyond their ability to handle. Characters will die, often. How should the players, and the judge, understand the meaning of that situation? My preferred answer is slapstick black comedy, but Gus L offers a different answer:

"The idea that dying to everyday horrible like banditry, bar fights, ergot madness, food poisoning and disease is commonplace suggests that dying to poisoned spikes and the rusty weapons of the unquiet dead is at least somewhat glamorous and perhaps a better fate then what awaits characters who decide to stay at home. ... The first level fighter is a 'veteran' - a warrior and slayer of men on distant dusty battlefields, hard to frighten, adept with tactical stratagem, knowledgeable about ambush and survival. The first level thief knows every dire mechanism that the merchant houses use to protect their wealth, has a fair grasp of standard poisons with the danger sense and ferocity of a startled alley cat. Magic-users are learned, filled with powerful secrets and observant and clerics blessed and protected by divine favor.  Yet the hazards of the underworld are far more dangerous then back alley brawls with hardened toughs, and the depths monstrous strangeness far more terrifying then breaking the final desperate shield wall of a band of sea raiders pursued back to their longship. The alternative is to view the characters as complete incompetents, weak willed, unskilled at the arts they profess and incapable of basic survival without specific player input. ... One must take the player's word that their characters are not incompetent wastrels and act accordingly."

Of course, all of this isn't advice for avoiding character death, not really. It's advice for avoiding capricious character death as a result of "killer GM-ing," but the in old-style D&D character deaths will happen. A lot. What Gus L has is not advice for avoiding character death, it's advice for making sense of it, making it fair, accepting it. He has three good articles about it. In one sense, they're just articles about what to do when your pawn gets captured in fantasy chess. But in another sense, they're articles about how to deal with loss, about what to do when some part of your shared imaginary world, something that exists only so long as you keep talking about it together, what to do when that comes to an end.

Those GOD-DAMN Bird People in Scarabae

I was able to play one final session in Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque's online Scarabae campaign last year.

After this game, I picked up a new shift at work, which prevented me from playing anymore online games during the Scarabae timeslot. Also sometime after this game, the referee, Jack, renamed Scarabae "Umberwell", and he's been posting a lot of new ideas and hosting a lot of new games in the renamed city.

I harbor some hope that I'll get a chance to venture back to the weird city of Umberwell-Scarabae in the future, but for now, this post is a swansong.

At the end of Travita's previous adventure in Scarabae, Yuriko, the adopted daughter of her tiefling "odd jobs" broker Koska, was kidnapped by anti-city cultists called the Children of Fimbul.

Traviata may have been experiencing a bit of an identity crisis over her previous failures to sufficiently punish "the guilty" (basically, other, more successful artists) but the other half of her life's mission was to protect "the innocent" (herself, and other people who remind her of herself) - and Koska's daughter Yuriko certainly qualified! So together with her previous companions, Khajj the minotaur cleric, Crumb the kenku artificer, and Viktor the dragonborn sorcerer, and a new ally, Dr Aleister Whiffle the human fighter, Traviata boarded a steamship bound for Zarubad, the trading port nearest the jungle where the Children of Fimbul are believed to be holed up with Yuriko.

Zarubad proved to be quite different from the close, dark, dirty streets of Scarabae. Traviata had passed from a city where it seemed to always be night (or at least draped in impenetrable fog) to a city bathed in sunlight, the hot glow like being fixed in the opera's limelight, the wide streets a crowded riot of colored fabrics and flowers, the air thick with the scent of spices and sweating bodies.

In an attempt to get at much free swag as possible of Koska's dime prepare for their upcoming expedition into the jungle, the group split up in the market and began shopping and listening for rumors. The jungles south of Zarubad were supposedly full of biting insects spreading a disease called "monkey fever" so Khajj and Aleister bough gourds full of liquid insect repellent, and Traviata, retaining her sense of civility, purchased cones of incense she was certain would keep her safe. Crumb heard rumors of an undead paladin haunting the jungle, once charged with defending his god's temple, but cursed after abandoning his duty. Traviata heard about an ancient lost city somewhere in a basin or crater, allegedly filled with magic, which she thought would be a likely hiding spot for the Children of Fimbul, if they could find it.

Unfortunately, no matter how many maps they bought, every drawing seemed to disagree with all the others. The local guides likewise had nothing but ill-words for one another, so the group hired the most self-promoting specimen, a young woman named Salome, who was only too happy to tell them that all the other guards were frauds, charlatans, and thieves out to rob them of their wages. Traviata took an instant liking to the young woman and trusted her implicitly. On Salome's advice, they finished shopping by buying a canoe, a barrel of water, tents and mosquito netting, and a few other camping supplies, and finally set out into the jungle.

Collectively, the group decided to take the western branch of the river that led into the jungle. It was rumored to go deeper than its twin, and Salome claimed that it led all the way to a depression where lobster people lived. Traviata thought this "depression" sounded an awful lot like the "basin" she knew they should be headed towards, so it was decided. In less than a day on the water, they passed into the jungle itself, and as they did, the sky went dark from the canopy overhead, and the air filled with the sounds of frogs, insects, monkeys. On the third day, Khajj and Traviata both had good luck while fishing, supplementing their dry (though spicy and flavorful) rations.

On the sixth day down the river, they found a clearing that looked like an abandoned campsite. They found evidence of recent digging and dug it back up, finding a cache containing folded wooden tables and chairs, perhaps left by someone planning to return later. On the seventh day they found a more permanent campsite ... or rather, they found the remains of a more permanent campsite, since the place had been burned to the ground, with nothing but the scorched shells of cabins and long-buildings remaining. They were about to return to their canoes when Khajj spotted a statue he was sure had religious significance - a giant image of a man carrying a crocodile on his back. He was intrigued, but when he asked Salome, she knew nothing about either campsite, and had never heard of such a statue or image before, and Khajj felt the first tremors of misgiving pass through his heart. Searching the campsite further revealed no clues, only that whoever burned the place also seemed to have broken and wrecked everything that wasn't consumed by the fire, except for a tarot card depicting Strength, found in the mess hall.

Khajj's mighty heart fluttered again, and he remembered a human parable that might make sense of the statue. The first man who stood on a riverbank spoke to the first crocodile to come up onto the land. The two made an agreement with each other, that each would carry the other in times of danger. The crocodile began by carrying the man across the river, then climbed aboard the man's shoulders where it remained for the rest of his life, leaving the man feeling burdened and deceived. Salome said she'd never heard that story before, and Traviata too felt the first whispers of doubt begin to tickle her ears.

The statue had a doorway with stairs leading downward built into its base, and the group decided to investigate. They arrived in a long hall, and though Viktor's lizard eyes could spot a door at the far end, his spell to create a magical hand couldn't reach it. Mighty Khajj led the group through the darkened hall, and his canny senses noticed a pit trap in the center of the floor, and, after the group had sidled around that, the trigger for some other trap just ahead. Crumb was able to trigger the trap from a distance, releasing a huge scything blade that swept across the hall, and then ran forward and spiked the trapdoor shut. Finally close enough, they asked Viktor to open the far door with his mage hand, although just as he did, everyone but Salome experienced a kind of premonition and fell to the floor to take cover. As the door opened, Salome was thrown backward down the hall, as though by the shockwave from a silent, invisible explosion. Inside the door they found a spiral staircase leading up into the statue itself, with the skeleton of a giant lizard or crocodile scattered around the foot of the stairs. Aleister felt very worried that the bones might somehow reanimate, but Triavata thought that the skull would make an excellent crown and put it on. (A lot of my characters end up doing things like this. It might be my fondness for hats.)

To ease Aleister's mind Viktor cast a spell to sense magic and examined the bones. They were ordinary, but when he looked at the staircase, he noticed that several of the steps were somehow enchanted, and marked them out by drawing on the steps immediately before and after each one. They made their way safely to the top, where they found a large globular jug hanging from the wall by a strap. Guessing it might be important, Traviata tried to identify the object, but Victor simply pulled it down, in a hurry to return to safety outside. Somehow the jug had been weighing down the lever it had been hung from like a coat peg, and when it was removed, the lever popped up, and the entire structure began to collapse. Even the statue itself seemed to rain down upon them. Crumb, Traviata, and Salome were all nearly crushed, but Khajj rescued Traviata and hearty Salome somehow stayed on her feet and managed to pull Crumb's body to safety. Aleister and Viktor clung together, limped out side-by-side. Outside in the wreckage, Khajj and Aleister administered aid to Crumb and Traviata, saving them from death. Finally safe, the group made camp for the night on the shore.

In the morning, Traviata fully examined the clay vessel and found it to be an alchemical jug, an enchanted object capable of generating gallons of fresh water and other liquids. Before leaving, the group made a final sweep of the campsite. Khajj found and tamed a baby bird that was being kept in a pen by the remains of the barracks. Salome had never seen a bird like it before, but Aleister was able to match it to a drawing from the guidebook he bought in Zarubad - it was an axe-beak, a fearsome jungle predator. Khajj seemed quite pleased to have a new pet. Viktor meanwhile decided for some reason to enchant a pebble to make light, then threw it down the military latrine. Surprisingly, he found a human body down there, a solider wearing scale armor and carrying a warhammer. Crumb climbed down into the horrible pit and retrieved the soldier's belt pouch, which contained five small gemstones. After bathing in the river, he was allowed back in the canoe, and the group continued downstream. For the rest of that day, and four more days after, they continued down the river, eating fresh fish, drinking fresh alchemically-treated water, and hearing distant roaring sounds like some animal loud as thunder, growing closer the further they went downstream.

On the evening of the thirteenth day, the river ran out, widening out to a mudflat and disappearing down a sinkhole, perhaps continuing somewhere far underground. The group left their boat by the "shore" and approached a plateau that stood over the jungle in this spot. Salome claimed success and bragged that she had successfully led them to the "depression" she'd told them about, brushing off all questions about the lobster people who were supposed to live there. Traviata wondered if the plateau could really be the lip of some great crater, and if so, if it could be the "basin" that held the lost city she still suspected the Children of Fimbul were using as their jungle hideaway, the place they were keeping poor Koska's kidnapped daughter, Yuriko.

Viktor led the way, using his magical slippers to walk up the wall as easily as he walked across the ground. As he strolled up the cliff-face, he saw a boulder, practically a whole island made of stone, floating in the air above the jungle far too high up for any method of approach the group currently had on-hand. He passed carvings of winged lizards and curling flames. Eventually, he reached a landing and threw down a rope to his friends, inspecting the rotted remains of a wooden door set directly into the wall of the plateau. After his friends joined him, Viktor used his mage hand to push the last remnants of the door out of the way, when he heard a frail woman's voice call out from inside: "Hello? Who's there?" An impossibly old-looking woman toddled out of the doorway, short, stooped over, wrinkled and wizened with age.

Viktor tried engaging the woman in conversation, with mixed results. "Victor? Are you the Victor who brings the bread? No one has brought me bread in a long time." Eventually he learned that the woman, who insisted on being called "Nanny" was especially perturbed by a group of "those GOD-DAMN bird people" who, she claims, keep breaking into her home and stealing her things. She gives Crumb a long, evil look until Viktor is able to regain her attention.

Noticing that "Nanny" keeps grumbling about how things are "not like they were in the OLD days," Viktor tries asking her what the old days were like. "Oh, you mean the OLD days? You mean before those GOD-DAMN bird people came around and started ruining everything?" Yes, those old days. It emerged that in the old days, Nanny was a bit of a literal hell-raiser, dancing naked in the woods, summoning demons from the Pit, and performing other bits of black magic just for the fun of it. "Not like these punk kids these days, no respect, and not like those GOD-DAMN bird people neither!" Traviata asked if Nanny could use some of her black magic to cast a spell to locate a lost child. Nanny readily agreed, but it quickly became clear that she thought they were finding the child so that they could put together a good, wholesome, old-fashioned human sacrifice. Aghast, Viktor tried a different tactic, and asked the easily-distractable old woman if she could help them find some people who'd moved into the area recently, some people who were practicing dark magic, but doing it like a bunch of PUNKS and AMATEURS, not the RIGHT way, not like Nanny and her friends used to do it in the OLD days. Nanny (again) readily agreed, and wandered back inside to cast her spell. Khajj wanted to sneak away immediately as soon as the woman was out of sight, but the others persuaded him to stay and hear her out.

(Now, Traviata is a smart woman, but she's not very emotionally complex. She has two goals in life, feels like she hasn't been doing enough to accomplish one of them, and then finds herself face-to-face with an actual honest-to-goodness wicked witch who lives in the forest and wants to cook a child in her oven. It shouldn't be a surprise what happens next. And - if you think more carefully about the tropes of D&D than I was at the time - it also shouldn't be a surprise how that works out for her. I WAS surprised, but you shouldn't be.)

While the group waited, Vikor used his magic shoes to walk around the perimeter of the plateau, and saw the wreck of a sailing ship, looking to all the world like it was fresh out of the ocean, lying broken atop the jungle canopy. He returned just around the same time Nanny was finishing up her hour-long spellcasting ritual. She emerged carrying a hand-drawn map that called for them to backtrack several days back up the river (Khajj shot Salome a withering look) and would have them end up near the shipwreck Victor saw. "Now you want to avoid this spot here, here, and here ... that's where those GOD-DAMN bird people make their filthy nests ..." She started mumbling again until Viktor assured her they'd use the map to get revenge on the AMATEURS for her. "Yeah, really show 'em what black magic should look like! Now in my day, in the OLD days, we would have skinned them alive before roasting them on the..." Again, she began to ramble at some length before Viktor cut her off again. "Victor? Oh Victor! Oh are you the one who brings the bread?" At this point it was Traviata who cut her off, play-acting at feeling happy and offering her a celebratory drink to her health. Despite seemingly having her fill of all the scenery she could chew, Nanny happily accepted the beverage and quaffed it in one gulp.

What Nanny actually drank was magical, alchemical poison, which would have killed a lesser being, but mostly just seemed to make her angry! She immediately slashed Traviata with her fingernails, nearly killing the poor singer. Nearly everyone else attacked Nanny with their guns or spells, and all of them bounced off her iron-hard hide, although Salome managed to cut Nanny with her scimitar, drawing first blood from the old crone. Nanny retaliated by slashing Salome, again, nearly murdering the woman with one stroke. Nanny continued to shrug off almost everything the group could throw at her, though Aleister's magical singing spear was able to pierce her flesh as well, as Nanny continued to savage Salome, who at this point was only kept alive by Khajj's quick thinking and magical healing touch. Finally, at the end, Aleister managed to pin her down with his singing spear, Crumb used his magical firearm to put an enchanted bullet into her, and Salome, whirling around like a pirouetting ballerina, swung wide her scimitar and lopped Nanny's head clean off, ending the fight.

That was the end of the night, and as I said, I never made it back to find out how the adventure ended, although in fairness, I don't think Jack ever made it back to this particular plotline either. After the new year, he changed the city's name and began running a slightly different sort of campaign there. When Traviata next sets foot in Scarabae-Umberwell, it will be a far different place than she remembers. I imagine her stepping off a boat on the docks, her memories of Zarubad already fading, unable to remember why she ever left the dank and gloom of her home, to rediscover anew what weird delights await her in the remade Umberwell.

New Chart-Topping Songs in Scarabae

My character has a new hit single!

From the album's liner notes:
Jeremiad Street Asylum, by Traviata Maru. A tragic opera aria about a woman who visits her lover in a madhouse after he has been exposed to an unspeakable horror from the Far Realm.

This is an exciting time for Traviata!

The song is clearly based on her visit to the Heigelman Clinic, and the horrors she beheld there.

Next time you find yourself in Umberwell or Scarabae, but sure to pick up a copy on wax cylinder!

Book Cover Trends - Just One Letter

V by Thomas Pynchon, 1963

Z by Vassilis Vassilikos, 1966

G by John Berger, 1972

C by Anthony Cave Brown, 1988

S by John Updike, 1988

H by Elizabeth Shepard, 1995

Q by Paul Nigro, 2003

Q by Luther Blissett, 2004

Z by Michael Thomas Ford, 2010

C by Tom McCarthy, 2011

Q by Evan Madery, 2011

F by Franz Wright, 2011

H by Jim Elledge, 2012

Y by Marjorie Celona, 2012

 

Z by Therese Anne Fowler, 2013

HHhH by Laurent Binet, 2013

S by JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst, 2013

F by Daniel Kehlmann, 2014

J by Howard Jacobson, 2014

X by Ilyasah Shabazz, 2015