"The 68 Thorne Miniature Rooms enable one to glimpse elements of European interiors from the late 13th century to the 1930s and American furnishings from the 17th century to the 1930s. Painstakingly constructed on a scale of one inch to one foot, these fascinating models were conceived by Mrs. James Ward Thorne of Chicago and constructed between 1932 and 1940 by master craftsmen according to her specifications."
"A growing community of artisans have turned the craft of dollhouse making into an exercise in aspirational home design on an itty-bitty scale, with their tiny rooms and furnishings displayed on well-curated Instagram accounts with glossy photographs and videos set to music reminiscent of HGTV.
Scroll too quickly, or miss the photograph with a human-scale hand surreally poking into the scene, and a viewer might confuse the image for a real-life one, the type of image that leaves you feeling equally amazed by and envious of the enormous kitchen island with a soapstone countertop. Social media has turned what was once a niche hobby into a decidedly trendy and increasingly profitable business, making it easier for artisans to find each other and potential customers online. Before, miniatures were only publicized through miniature magazines. Social media put it in everybody’s face."
"So many 'miniacs' came to the modern mini movement by way of a childhood love of dollhouses. For some, there is a voyeuristic appeal commingled with the universal desire to inhabit and experience multiple environments at the same time. It’s a way to explore worlds you can’t explore, and tiny fake worlds are easier to make, and less destructive, than secret real ones. We spend a tremendous amount of time in fantasy worlds: watching TV, reading books, playing videos. Miniatures provide a way to practice things that we can’t practice in reality.
For a very long time, miniaturists have had this very 'Grandpa in the basement working on model railroad' vibe to it, or 'Grandma with her dollhouse.' But the miniature is most certainly a growing trend in contemporary art."
"Miyu Kojima works for a company that cleans up afterlonely deaths: a Japanese phenomenon of people dying alone and remaining undiscovered for a long period of time. Part art therapy and part public service campaign, Kojima spends a large portion of her free time creating detailed, miniature replicas of the rooms she has cleaned.
Kojima has been working for the clean-up company for about 5 years and explains that she cleans on average 300 rooms per year. The replicas are meant to capture the sadness of these lonely deaths. One point that Kojima emphasizes is that it’s not the dying alone that is the issue but rather the duration of time that elapses before the bodies are discovered. These individuals were so cut-off from friends, family and society that weeks or sometimes months had elapsed before they were found."
"Artist Joshua Smith is a former stencil artist and gallerist turned miniaturist. For the past two years, Smith has focused his attention on creating miniature urban landscapes replete with detail. From graffitied walls to discarded cigarette butts, he uses everyday materials to bring his scale models to life. Smith primarily uses MDF, cardboard, and plastic for the framing and base. Layers of paint and chalk pastels give the architecture its realistic feel prior to wiring and lighting. The artist’s newest work is a four-storey replica of a building in Kowloon."
"Philadelphia-based rtist Drew Leshko is creating a sculptural archive of the city’s most at-risk architecture with his detailed scale models. Leshko produces these miniatures in order to preserve the history of Philadelphia’s grittiest neighborhoods. From local dive bars to pawn shops and convenience stores, each commercial space is transformed into an artistic sculpture that is filled with nostalgia.
Leshko prefers to prioritize his attention and skill on rapidly changing, or gentrifying, neighborhoods. He selects the most vulnerable pieces of architecture as his focus, as these historic storefronts will soon transition over to slick corporations that push out the individual merchants who had once defined the area. In this way, Leshko’s work is a push to ponder the history of buildings and how they inform our lives."
So I've finally gotten around to playing a GLOG campaign. The players are Josh and Peter from my regular online group. I'm GMing, although we agreed before we got started that we'd learn the rules together, play things pretty open, and not require homework from anyone, including me.
To that end, we had a "session zero" where we looked at a few different GLOG rules documents together, rolled up our characters, and had a "haven turn" where our characters hit the town before going into the dungeon the next time out.
We're using Goodberry Monthly's "Wizard City" setting, with the Wizard City Hexcrawl as the basis for in-town sessions, and his Under Gallax Hall kilodungeon as the site for our dungeon delves. The conceit is that we're playing wizard grad students, whose annual "exams" involve going into the dungeon under the university, possibly just because the other wizard professors want to prank the Torture Department which is housed down there.
So the first "night on the town" happens over the holiday break of the characters' first year of grad school, and the first dungeon delve is their first end-of-year exam. I should mention that Josh in particular is loving the gonzo-ness of the setting Martin has built.
Orthodox wizards have a choice to roll on a short list of good spells or a long list of interesting spells. Peter took one of each and got Knock and Mirror Item. I rolled two interesting spells and got Horsebane and Battering Beam. Since I'm the GM, I played Lunai as rather passive and open to suggestions from her classmates, but for my first time using the GLOG, I wanted to get in on the fun a little bit.
Since our characters were all chartered wizards, they all had crippling student debt from their time as undergrads, and only a handful of pocketchange to spend. Well, except Peter. He sold off his wizard robes for some walking around money, and immediately hired a camp follower. He got a minstrel, who, we all agreed, must be Dandelion from The Witcher. Since he had all the cash, Arivaderchi Zeuchinni took the lead, wanting to visit the Hat Shop and the Krill Shop.
I rolled on Martin's campaign events table and got doubles. The first and most obvious result was that deep in the Student Ghetto, the bar known as The Wandering Monster animated and turned into a literal wandering monster. The three friends - and their minstrel! - went to the Hat Shop, where Arivaderchi could afford the rent on a couple hats, but not the deposit you have to put down beforehand. As they went back outside, muttering about unfair prices, the Wandering Monster strolled up and stole the Hat Shop's sign to wear as a hat before continuing on its reign of terror.
The group went to the Krill Shop next, where Arivaderchi hoped to treat his friends to the local cuisine, but they found it to be inedible for humans, and frankly for anyone who's not a whale, and so left empty-handed again, but again, their night was saved by the Wandering Monster, which ran up and began riding the Krill Shop like a mechanical bull.
Spurred onward by the spirit of adventure, the three grad students found the second random event, the Rooftop Dueling Federation hosting a wizard fighting tournament. Arivaderchi was trained as a war wizard, and he still wanted adventure, so he entered the contest. He got paired up against a wizard gang member - the doggy gangster Damien Knight of the Good Boyz, who is (and this is worth quoting) a "Method actor. Completely assumes the role of 'beloved cute dog that you must painfully put down'. Frequently acts death scenes gratuitously." So when Arivaderchi entered the rooftop field of honor, Damien promptly and quite dramatically played dead. With his opponent apparently defeated, Arivaderchi was declared the winner. A quick search of Damien Knight's pockets turned up ... a severed human tongue. Dandelion grabbed the prize out of his employer's hands and stuck it in his cap like macaroni.
With Dandelion following behind, the three friends linked arms and skipped away, setting out again into the night, the sky lit with red and blue flashing emergency lights and the sound of sirens like backing music for Dandelion's songs, as the Wandering Monster continued its own kaiju pub crawl across town. It was one of those magical nights, where yes, for once, the real magic really was the friends we made along the way.
Three friends enjoying a night on the town over winter holiday
Sessions 1-3 : First Year Final Exams
After another semester of studying, Jimbo Chirrup, Arivaderchi Zeuchinni, Lunai Lovegood, and Dandelion the bard entered the dungeons under Gallax Hall, with an ambiguous assignment whose purpose, instructions, evaluation criteria, pedagogical merits, and role in their overall graduate education all ranged from obscure to opaque. (Typical grad school, ammirite?) They marched downstairs with Arivaderchi bravely leading the way, and Lunai cautiously watching the rear. Their first stop was peeking into the office of Professor Sitch, who was glaring at them through the blinds on his office door. "I'm watching you, Zeuchinni... always watching..." Sitch warned them menacingly.
The group quickly ducked into the next room to get away from Sitch, and found themselves in the Bones Lounge, belonging to the Gallax U chapter of the Skull & Bones Society, and home to their club mascot, the skeleton "Mr Bones." Searching the seat cushions of Mr Bones's club chair turned up a couple coins and a key, and looking behind the donor portrait on the wall revealed a hidden door.
The hall behind the door had more portraits of the same donor, as an old man, as a dead man, as a wizened corpse, and finally as a skeleton. This last portrait had another hidden door to another lounge, this one occupied by several jovial seeming skeletons standing around a crystal decanter. Well, they seemed jovial until anyone looked like they might touch the decanter, when the room suddenly became very still. Jimbo and Arivaderchi had the bright idea to fetch Mr Bones, who came to life, happily quaffed the entire bottle in one long glug, and then seemed content to tag along with his new friends. The other skeletons all sulked, either because Mr Bone drank their good liquor, or because he used up all the bait for their student trap.
After making it through several secret doors in a row, the classmates felt sure there should be another, and tapping along the walls revealed the hollow sound of a neighboring room, but no obvious way to open anything. Arivaderchi cast his Knock spell and a hidden door blew open, devastating the plaster wall of the lounge. A horde of terrible looking animals, rats and dogs, including some that were possibly dead, along with the angry ghosts of the same, poured through the new opening, set upon the lounge skeletons as they scrabbled uselessly for the exit, and then tore down the hall to the Bones Lounge. Distant screams suggested that the plague of lab animals was causing quite a stir at the entrance. Dandelion played some storm music to accompany the mayhem. Mr Bones shrugged theatrically and gestured at the new door.
Inside, they found a ruined laboratory, obviously belonging to the Department of Torture. There were a dozen wrecked animal cages, and the floor was covered in dried blood and animal droppings. Searching through the detritus found a secret staircase going down embedded in a false cage (the only one not destroyed), a small fortune in platinum (perhaps grant money?), and three syringes labeled "zombie potion", which Arivaderchi, carefully tucked into his breast pocket. They also closed the secret door, hoping the janitors would just plaster over it again. "Brave, brave Jim Chirrup, bravely stole the grant" crooned Dandelion.
There was no other way out of the room, but in a few spots, crazed animals had long ago worn weak spots into the walls with their furious scratching, and the group managed to break another hole, winding up in a hall leading into the Academic Probation detention center. The skeleton jailer, Bones Malone, was making the rounds of the imprisoned students. One wept and cried out loudly. "Oh please feed me, I don't know the answer, if I knew any answers I wouldn't be in here, please!" Mr Bones chattered a joke to Bones Malone and the two shared some side-splitting, fall-on-the-floor laughter.
Arivaderchi ventured in among the cells. "Is someone there?" He saw that most of the students had been in detention so long they'd turned to skeletons themselves. "Please help me, they'll never let me out, I don't want to die!" Arivaderchi found a bored and jaded looking undergrad witch. He asked if she needed help, and she rolled her eyes at him. What-ever."I need help! Oh god please help me!" Feeling a slight pang of guilt, Arivaderchi finally went to the crying student's cell, found an obviously unprepared freshman undergrad, and opened the cell door. "Oh thank you, I didn't mean to plagiarize, I thought I'd never get out of there!" Arivaderchi tried to give the kid the brush off, but the grateful student insisted on tagging along because he was too scared to find his own way back to the entrance. The witch looked scornfully at Arivaderchi and flounced back down onto her prison bed. What-EVER!
Bones Malone gave Mr Bones and Dandelion some hearty handshakes and pats on the back as the group left. They next found the Experimental Torture Lab, its walls painted black, its floor a depthless pool of black water. "Please don't make me go in there, I'm scared of the dark, I'm scared of everything!" pleaded poor Zygot, the pitiable freshman. Jimbo Chirrup decided to go in, and the door snapped shut behind him. He emerged a short time later, pale as a sheet, mumbling and stuttering. He had acquired a couple forms of madness, he developed a wandering mind that would enter a fugue state while traveling between locations, and was wobbled by the need to be drunk to read, cast spells, or sing.
Jimbo was visibly traumatized by his experience
Unfortunately, Arivaderchi and Lunai didn't have long to comfort Jimbo, because The Melted Muse, a glowing hot metal statue whose features had all melted away, rounded the corner and began lumbering toward the group. They were hit by a blast of hot air like opening an oven, and the temperature continued to rise as the statue staggered closer. "Oh god, what now! My nerves can't take this! I should have listened to my mother! Accountants never get burned up by statues!" Arivaderchi almost immediately regretted rescuing the sniveling young student, and tasked Dandelion with keeping Zygot out of the way. The group dashed away from the slow-moving creature and into the first room they could find, the office of Dr Kinsley, a faculty member in the Department of Torture.
Inside the office, a custodian was carefully dusting off Dr Kinsley's wall of awards and diplomas. Temporarily-illiterate Jimbo was as impressed as Zygot, but Arivaderchi and Lunai noticed that most of the papers had someone else's name crossed out and Dr Kinsely's penciled in in another handwriting. The group asked the custodian to deal with the out of control statue, and the worker quickly dashed out into the hall, where a lot of yelling and clanging could be heard. The group quickly started casing the office. Arivaderchi grabbed a couple of expensive looking medical textbooks. "B-b-but... stealing is wrong! They'll throw us all in detention again! The only spell I know is Circle of Gunpowder, I'll never survive in jail again!" Jimbo found a neat box of gold coins in the desk. "Brave, brave Jim Chirrup, stole another grant!"
The next room was Torture Laboratory S, where they found a magical pane of glass that kept shattering loudly and reassembling itself, and another custodian cleaning up some human-sized cages. After taking in the scene for a moment, the group closed the door and hustled further down the hall.
They next entered Dr Baun's office, but everyone but Arivaderchi was almost immediately forced back outside by splitting headaches and tinnitus that seemed to emanate from two brains in jars displayed prominently on the back wall. Arivaderchi helped himself to some textbooks about medicine and psychiatry, and used Mr Bones to carry the growing library of pilfered books.
The next room's door sign read "Quartering Pylons" which put everyone on edge. In each of the four corners of the room, large metal pylons with spherical heads faintly crackled with magical energy. The entire group crept very carefully along the wall, studiously avoiding the middle of the room, and the impetuous Arivaderchi Zeuchinni attempted to sabotage one of the arcane devices.
Once past that seeming peril, the group ducked into a janitor's closet, hoping for a moment to relax. Inside, they discovered a display of cleaning supplies that was set up almost like some sort of shrine or altar. Arivaderchi and Zygot both peered too closely at the swirling water in the central mop-bucket, and were pulled inside. Jimbo and Lunai watched, aghast, as Arivaderchi was seemingly flushed down to a deeper level of the dungeons under Gallax Hall, and Zygot was whipped around and around in the watery vortex until he drowned. With his employer vanished, Dandelion slung his guitar over his shoulder and walked away, singing to himself, "Toss a coin to your camp follower, oh college of plenty, oh college of plenty."
A long moment passed as Jimbo and Lunai stared at each other in horror, until another figure kicked open the door. It was Deeringer, the deerlingdrowned wizard. "I heard about your friend," he announced brusquely. "What? How? Who are you?" Deeringer introduced himself as a wizard private investigator and a survivor of the drowning of Atlantis. He also immediately convinced them that Arivaderchi had been carried to hell, "The same place that bastard ocean takes everyone who falls into its rotten grasp," since that is one of the drowned wizard's cantrips. Deeringer offered Jimbo his flask, and he managed to drink enough to restore his spellcasting ability before Mr Bones bogarted it and finished off the liquor. The group quickly rallied themselves to seek revenge against the ocean's cruel collaborators - the custodians who built the shrineThe Torture Department!
Their next stop was Torture Laboratory F, where they found Dr Klaus sharpening his flensing knives and testing his whips. A failed reaction roll later, and Dr Klaus set upon them with a fois gras funnel, prepared to teach them a lesson in force-feeding torture. Lunai used her Battering Beam spell to try to push the hulking, Frankenstein-looking scientist backward, and tried to convince her friends to use this chance to run away. Dr Klaus was strong enough to push forward through the beam a couple times, alternately throttling Jimbo and Deeringer. He very nearly killed them both, and probably would have, if he hadn't been pushed out of arm's reach for most of the fight. Jimbo had good luck with his Magic Missile spell; the spell spirit returned to his brain to be recast several times before flying away for the night. Finally, the group decisively got the better of Dr Klaus, and cracked his skull against a table. Deeringer put a fois gras funnel into the scientist's mouth, filled it with corn, then kicked out a leg of the table to make it look like an accidental collapse. "A freak fois gras-ing accident. Happens all the time. We were never here. No one will suspect a thing." Deeringer felt certain he'd arranged the scene to disguise their coldblooded murdernoble victory over an agent of the ocean.
Unable to take any of the valuable-looking whips from the room, the classmates "borrowed" Klaus's key and snuck into his office. They stole another four textbooks, and continued their habit of checking behind portraits. The oil painting of Dr Klaus's mother had a note tucked into its back: "If you've managed to steal this, then I have need of your services. Ask the bartender at the Wandering monster for a feline on the rocks." They gave the books to Mr Bones, pocketed the note, and hurried to replace the key in Dr Klaus's pocket.
Next they found Torture Laboratory D, but they could hear the sounds of a lecture (or maybe a practicum?) through the door, and decided not to check inside.
Next, the group entered the backstage area of the auditorium. There was no lecture going on at the moment, so the front of the stage and the seating area were dark. Jimbo was curious to investigate an alabaster statue of a rich donor, Mr Alabaster, while Deeringer and Lunai studied some colored levers. Deeringer first raised the house lights, then accidentally turned on a focusing ray meant to induce students to pay attention. Jimbo became fixated on the details of the statue. "Enemy of cats? Hmm. It's clearly blocking a secret door, but what's the mechanism? Hmm." Deeringer and Lunai got very interested in the levers and tried to guess what the last one would do before pulling it. (Lucky thing too - it was a death ray!) Eventually, the wandering monster check turned up a custodian, who turned off the fascinator and escorted them trio back to the entrance.
They were met by a crowd of mourners, none sadder than poor Mr Sitch, who was nearly inconsolable. "I ... I promised him! I told him I was always watching, but I wasn't watching! And now he's gone!" Deeringer, Jimbo, and Lunai made plans to divvy up their coins, fence the textbooks, and visit The Wandering Monster together over the summer. Jimbo was also very interested in using his student heath insurance to visit the university counseling center for help with his two traumatic difficulties.
Three school friends and their skeleton
Gains
786 in platinum coins
100 gp in gold coins
textbooks worth 10 gp, 15 gp, 20 gp, 20 gp, 30 gp, 30 gp, 45 gp, 45 gp, 50 gp, 60 gp
Losses
Arivaderchi Zeuchinni
Zygot the hapless freshman
XP
1026 for treasure (the textbooks re-sold for half their MSRP)
1026 ÷ 3 = 342 XP each, enough to reach 2nd level!
Director's Commentary
I feel like this campaign is off to a pretty good start. We've been enjoying the weirdness inherent Wizard City premise, and GLOG spellcasting rules are working out so far. The variability of whether you'll get your Magic Dice back after casting a spell produced some interesting results. Now that we're leveling up, there will also be a possibility of doubles-induced spell mishaps going forward. I suspect there might be a kind of mismatch between the expectations about currency in the rules and the setting, but it hasn't really been a problem, so I think I'm just going to ignore the possible discrepancy.
Since the GLOG is pretty rules-light, I've been tending to simply say yes when Peter and Josh propose doing something that seems like it would be part of a grad-student wizard's wheelhouse, and calling for roll-under-attribute checks for things that seem like there should be a chance of failure.
My only complaint about the rules so far is that I find the roll-under system to be non-intuitive for me in combat and other opposed-roll situations. When attacking, for example, you're supposed to roll the dice and hit a target number or lower, where the target is "your attack – (10 + their defense)", and somehow the order of operations there kept throwing me off. It helped me to think of it as "10 + your attack – their defense" and honestly, I almost want to make a table, or switch back to a roll-over system to make the mental math easier.
So far the only difficulty the no-prep approach is introducing to the game is figuring out who the various professors are, and what their personalities are supposed to be. If necessary, I might go so far as to print out the wandering encounter table and the "bestiary" of professors. The other other problem I'm having is that my lack of strict time recordkeeping (sorry not-sorry, Gary) makes it a little more difficult to use Martin's interesting structure where both the room-based encounters and the wandering encounters vary over the course of the day. I might either need to try a little harder at that, or figure out some sort of simplification.
One of my goals for my blog this year is to do a bit more sharing of other people's work that I find interesting or enjoyable. You may have gathered from my post collecting character backgrounds that I enjoy the opportunity to play someone interesting and special. So, first up, fun character classes!
Necromancer, Apothecary, Dire Knight, Theurgist, Thief by Spooky Bri
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Nightingale, Pariah, Doctor, Hunter, Priest by Spooky Bri
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Also over on Twitter, @scumbelievable has a 42-post thread of delightful sounding character classes. The list is worth reading in its entirety, both for the names alone and for the delightful suggestions of interesting character powers. I've included a few examples below. (Thanks to Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque for linking me to this one!)
.@Frolord: The Hive, a living host to a variety of exotic eusocial insects able to refine the insects' populations through selective breeding to infuse their own bodies with strange chemical properties, or deploy the creatures themselves as living weapons.
.@YOUWONTBELAFFIN: The Haunt, a spirit possessing a suit of armor or some other mobile piece of equipment, driven by unfinished purpose and existing half in the astral world and half in the material.
.@samzorn: The Magpie, a maker of divine and arcane charms and trinkets, some empowered with looted holy symbols, the remains of familiars and animal companions, and pages torn from spellbooks. They can expend or wear these trinkets for defense or flashes of stolen power.
Over on an actual blog, Flight of the Sky Eels has a list of 16 character precis that sound delightful. These aren't as easy to list as the others, but here are a couple examples:
"Blossom is a Jezoflorid ecologist. Jezoflorids are serpentine plant people who are sold by the monolithic Mothercorp. Blossom is a member of the Glade, an anarchist faction that opposes Mothercorp. They are exploring the galaxy looking for bio weapons to use in their guerrilla war." "Sir Kraver of Dung hill is a Fandoran trash knight. The Fandorans are a rat-like race that have recently been annexed into the neo-floozy empire. In the conquest Sir Kraver lost their ancestral home. They are questing for allies and material for their rebellion against the nep-floozies."
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Ynas Midgard has an ongoing project to write up a "heartwarming sandbox". This post has the Badger and the Basilisk as playable character classes, and this one has Crows, and Dwarves that are unlike most contemporary fantasy dwarves.
My favorite so far are the Badgers, who are described as "Dwarf-sized bipedal creatures; they often wear suits and glasses. Badgers are grumpy and cynical, but also hard-working and loyal to their friends and loved ones. Most work as solicitors, accountants, and real estate agents for the fairy folk. They never give anything away for free, and they despise slouches and bums. They hate Foxes, but due to some esoteric fairy law, they belong to the same trade union."
I don't know why, but I love that detail about the trade unions.
Advanced Xerox Lord only has one post so far, but it's a really good one. They wrote three new player species for the Mausritter game. What particularly impresses me is that these three aren't just variations on a common theme; each species has unique abilities that make them feel different from the others. Consider just one ability from each:
"Moles can easily dig in soil. They aren't restricted to already existing tunnels, and can dig far faster with their powerful front claws than a mouse can with a shovel - about half their walk speed. This is tiring and tunnels can only go a short distance before you must rest: think tunneling a shortcut in a burrow maze, not tunneling across a map hex. Your GM will let you know if you can dig, and where you come out!" "Lemmings love adventure and inspire others. Roll with advantage when forming a war band or determining 'number appearing' for hirelings." "Hedgehogs are well traveled. When exploring a map hex, roll d6: on a 6, you've been here before. The GM will tell you what you know about the area - for example, you may know a safe path past the owl’s nest, the name of the mouse family who live in the oak tree, or where the squirrels bury their nuts."
Over at ArtStation, Kyong Hwan Kim has a series of 12 concept art images for cats with character classes. I first saw this being called "Floofs of D&D", but that appears to have been a fanon title. As with so many of these lists, it's difficult for me to pick my favorites, but I think I'm particularly fond of the Turkish Angora Healer and the Siamese Magician.
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Finally, Remixes and Revelations has a system for organizing of knights. In addition to the expected Paladin as White Knight and Blackguard as Black Knight, we also get the Folk Hero as Blue Knight, which was the entry that especially caught my eye. There's also the barbarian-like Red Knight, and the ranger-like Green Knight. As a system, I thought this was quite clever, and it's not often you see the Folk Hero (the Knight Errant, perhaps?) elevated to the same status as Paladins.
As a final bonus, here's a d100 table for choosing one of these classes to play:
1 Necromancer
2 Apothecary
3 Dire Knight
4 Theurgist
5 Thief
6 Nightingale
7 Pariah
8 Doctor
9 Hunter
10 Priest
11 the Bruiser
12 the Martyr
13 the Blue Mage
14 the Hedge Witch
15 the Entity
16 the Damned
17 the Cipher
18 the Drudge
19 the Punished
20 the Warrant
21 the Hive
22 the Murmur
23 the Fatale
24 the Haunt
25 the Beast
26 the Twins
27 the Falconer
28 the Weaver
29 the Cur
30 the Spiritualist
31 the Mandrake
32 the Lurk
33 the Penitent
34 the Eater
35 the Devout
36 the Swarm
37 the Wind Singer
38 the Bloom
39 the Shard
40 the Automage
41 the Grave-Robber
42 the Clothier
43 the Huntmaster
44 the Null
45 the Carrier
46 the Bellwright
47 the Atavist
48 the Oracle
49 the Vessel
50 the Magpie
51 the Husk
52 the Maestro
53 robotic sword fighter, black rainbow destroyer
54 human monster hunter from a death world
55 dog person, member of the Cult of Master Vigilant
56 former human mutated into a candyling from candy addiction
57 serpentine plant person ecologist
58 sapient computer virus and hacker in a humanoid robotic frame
59 Prime Strain crystal smith
60 human academic from the Academy of Gnomic Arts
61 psychically strong but physically underdeveloped Power Fetus
62 cybernetic grub-creature telekinetic
63 reptile/human hybrid with biokinetic powers
64 a human that has adapted to live in dreams
65 a cyborg monk with an electronic brain and organic body
66 a rat-like trash knight
67 an amphibious star fish, former Orphan Guild operative
68 a sapient fungus, exorcist
69 Crabman
70 Slugman
71 Polar Bear
72 Ghost Narwhal
73 Sea Gull
74 Priest of Pearly Wisdom
75 Badger
76 Basilisk
77 Crow
78 Dwarf
79 Mausritter
80 Mole
81 Lemming
82 Hedgehog
83 Maine Coon Berserker
84 Abyssinian Bard
85 Norwegian Forest Cat Shaman
86 Persian Scholar
87 Bombay Assassin
88 Sphinx Fighter
89 Scottish Fold Warrior
90 Bengal Archer
91 American Short Hair Knight
92 Turkish Angora Healer
93 Siamese Knight
94 Russian Blue Thief
95 Paladin (White Knight)
96 Folk Hero (Blue Knight)
97 Holy Marshal (Grey Knight)
98 Red Sword (Red Knight)
99 Druidic Warrior (Green Knight)
00 Blackguard (Black Knight)
For awhile now, I've had this daydream that a lot of Pathfinder material could be converted to slightly simpler rules-systems where I would feel more able to use it at my table. I like the idea of Pathfinder. It's one of my favorite D&D 3.75 editions (although Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed might be my favorite). It's full of fun ideas, and it has lots of bold flashy art. Yes, it seems to largely be a game of fantasy superheroics, but so does most D&D, and in PF that means there are lots of interesting options for customizing your character.
My only problem with Pathfinder, really, is that its complexity means that neither I nor anyone I play with feels comfortable trying to run the thing. Which I don't mind, really, but I wish I had a way to use some of the cool character ideas that it includes. Hence my daydream of conversion.
So this is something of a thought experiment or proof-of-concept, to see if I can take something from Pathfinder and rewrite it so that I can use it. I want to start with the "combat style" feats that were introduced in Ultimate Combat. Each of these is a series of three feats that define a specific fighting style. One really obvious use for these is additional Mighty Deeds of Arms that DCC warriors could learn. Another possibility is as GLOG spells for characters like the adept class from A Blasted Cratered Land, or one of the muscle wizards from Goblin Punch or Ten Foot Polemic or Remixes and Revelations. In both cases, combining the feats into a single Deed or spell should hopefully provide some nicely variable results.
Boar Style - The warrior bites and scratches her opponent, tearing skin from flesh and flesh from bone, emerging red in tooth and claw. Although the style rewards a brawler who abandons herself to bestial fury, its moves were once carefully refined to inflict maximum horror and break the enemy's morale. Boar style is typically unarmed, but it can be enhanced with flensing knives, or by wearing cat-claws or metal teeth (as daggers). Its techniques are sometimes known to Orc bosses, Beastmen champions, and Hobgoblin sergeants.
A warrior can learn boar style by expending at least half her Intelligence or Personality score while in the throes of battle rage, by stealing a blood-soaked idol from the sacrificial altar of a tribe of humanoid berserkers, or by slaying a Giant Boar (combat statistics as Ogre) and eating its heart.
3 You bite and tear at your opponent. They must make a DC 10 morale check or flee in terror from your ferocity.
4 You bite and tear at your opponent. The wound bleeds freely, and your opponent suffers 1d3 damage each round until they use an action to staunch the wound.
5 You bite and tear at your opponent, dealing an additional 1d6 damage. They must make a DC 10 morale check or flee in terror from your ferocity.
6 You bite and tear at your opponent, dealing an additional 1d6 damage. The wound bleeds freely, and your opponent suffers 1d3 damage each round until they use an action to staunch the wound.
7+ You rip and tear, bite and gouge your opponent, dealing an additional 2d6 damage. Your opponent must make a DC 14 morale check or flee in terror from your ferocity. The wound bleeds uncontrollably, and they suffer 1d6 damage each round until they use a full combat round to staunch the wound.
Crane Style - The warrior stands on one leg, finding her center and balance like a reed that sways in the wind. Allowing her enemy to approach, she batters away her opponent's blows as a bird buffets the air with its wings. This is a measured and cerebral style that turns an opponent's strength against them. Crane style might be unarmed, or might utilize a quarterstaff or shield (shield bash deals 1d3).
A warrior can learn crane style by surviving a fight because her opponent fumbled what would have been the killing blow, by discovering a long-forgotten monastery among the mountain peaks, or by defeating an Air Elemental or an enemy wizard's Invisible Companion.
3 You sway to turn the force of your enemy's blow back upon them. The next attack that hits you, you automatically deal your current weapon's damage to the enemy who hit you.
4 You bend to redirect your enemy's strike against their own allies. The next attack that hits you also deals its normal damage to another opponent.
5 You bend and sway to absorb your enemy's might and turn the force of their blow back upon them. The next attack that hits you deals only half damage. You automatically deal your current weapon's damage to the enemy who hit you.
6 You bend and sway to absorb your enemy's might and redirect their strike against their own allies. The next attack that hits you deals only half damage to you, and also deals its normal damage to another opponent.
7+ You bend and sway, absorbing your enemy's might, turning the force of their blow back upon them, and redirecting their strike against their own allies. The next attack that hits you deals its minimum possible damage to you, and also deals its maximum damage to another opponent. You automatically deal your current weapon's maximum damage to the enemy who hit you.
Dragon Style - The warrior invokes the spirit of the dragon - her mind filled with the dragon's philosophy, her body emulating the dragon's movements, her heart aspiring to imitate the perfect being. Empowered by her own belief and ambition, the warrior is imbued with the nobility and sovereignty, the savagery and ferocity of the living dragon. Although rare, dragon style is sometimes practiced by entire tribes of Lizardmen and Kobolds, whose community life is devoted to reverence and awe for their sacred ancestor.
A warrior can learn dragon style by failing her saving throw against a dragon's breath and surviving, by establishing a hoard of unspent coins worth at least CL x 1000 gp to sleep within between adventures, or by intercepting a rival adventuring party of would-be dragonslayers and taking the dragon's revenge upon them.
3 The spirit of the dragon surrounds you like an aura. Your attack deals +1d damage, and you roll +1d on your next saving throw against magic (usually d24).
4 You strike like the slap of a dragon's tail. Your enemy must make a DC 10 Fortitude save or drop everything they're holding and roll -1d Action Dice until the end of combat (usually d16).
5 The spirit of the dragon surrounds you like an aura. Your attack deals +1d damage, and you roll +1d on your next saving throw against magic (usually d24). Then you unleash the dragon's roar. All your enemies roll -1d saving throws (usually d16) and their ACs drop by half until the end of combat.
6 You unleash the dragon's roar. All your enemies roll -1d saving throws (usually d16) and their ACs drop by half until the end of combat. Then, you strike like the slap of a dragon's tail. The enemy hit by your attack must make a DC 10 Fortitude save or drop everything they're holding and roll -1d Action Dice until the end of combat (usually d16).
7+ The spirit of the dragon surrounds you like an aura. Your attack deals +2d damage, and you roll +2d on your next saving throw against magic (usually d30). Then you unleash the dragon's roar. All your enemies roll -2d saving throws (usually d14) and their ACs drop by half until the end of combat. Finally, you strike like the slap of a dragon's tail. The enemy hit by your attack must make a DC 10 Fortitude save or they drop everything they're holding and roll -2d Action Dice until the end of combat (usually d14).
Your biting, clawing attack deals [sum] damage to your target. The target must Save or become frightened and try to run away. An additional [dice] opponents also test their morale. The bleeding wound you inflict deals an additional [dice] damage to your target every 10 minutes until they receive medical treatment, typically in their own lair.
Some monsters' bodies have magical (or toxic!) properties when eaten. When you attack a creature with Boar Style, you may choose to consume 1 serving of its flesh. If you rolled doubles or triples, you automatically eat a serving.
Your bending, swaying defense protects you from the next [dice] attacks that hit you. Set aside the Magic Dice used to cast Crane Style; none of them will return to your MD pool until after they are expended. The [dice] and [sum] devoted to this spell will diminish as its MD are expended.
When an attack hits you, the damage of that attack is reduced by [dice]. Then select one of the Magic Dice used to cast Crane Style. If the original damage of the attack is more than the amount showing on the chosen MD, you push the blow partially aside, and the attacker also deals [dice] damage with their current weapon to another opponent. If the original damage of the attack is less than the amount showing on the chosen MD, you reflect the blow back on the attacker, dealing [sum] damage with your current weapon to them. Finally, expend the chosen MD normally.
The spirit of the dragon surrounds you like an aura. You unleash the dragon's roar and strike like a tail slap. This spell has three distinct effects: the first affects only you, the second targets multiple opponents at missile range, and the third affects a single opponent you strike in melee.
Until the end of combat, you have advantage on Saves, and all your attacks deal [dice] additional damage.
[Dice] enemy creatures are shaken with fear by the roar. They suffer [dice] damage immediately and have disadvantage on Saves until the end of combat.
Your stunning attack deals [sum] damage and causes your target to drop everything they're holding, to be too confused to cast spells, and to suffer disadvantage on all rolls until the end of combat.
Boar Style, Boar Ferocity, Boar Shred - When I opened the first summary description, I almost immediately regretted my decision to take this on. "Unarmed strikes deal bludgeoning or piercing damage." Oh, come on! Work with me, Paizo! Give me something, give me anything, that I can actually carry over into a system that doesn't care quite so much about damage types!
Fortunately, I kept reading, and there is more there, both in the overall description of the style, and in the complete rules text for the feat. My initial fears may have been a little bit of an overreaction. There are some additional effects to draw on, but what helps at least as much are the descriptions of what you look like, how you learn this, and how you can improve.
For the DCC Deed, I decided to use combine the three effects to produce an A, B, AC, BC, ABC pattern. Obviously, the A effect is the weakest and the C effect the strongest, so I had to think about which should be which. I suppose the platonic ideal combat style Deed would have five different effects, but this seems fine for now. Also DCC spells typically have a top effect that's quite a bit more powerful than the ones that came before it, and I wanted to include that feel here to emphasize the specialness of these moves.
It might be interesting if a Warrior had to "spellburn" Personality or Intelligence to use a style Deed, or if they risked some kind of "disapproval" if they roll low. The point of putting a cost on using one of these moves would again be to help it feel a little more special, and to justify them being a bit stronger than other Deeds.
I also decided to include a bit about how a Warrior could learn each Deed, which is something I first tried when I wrote for David Coppeletti's Class Alphabet, (expected publication date TBA). For these, I thought there should be a way to learn each style by having a particular experience during a fight, a way to "quest for it" on an adventure, and a way to learn it by fighting a specific monster.
For the GLOG spell version, I decided to just pile on all three effects to create a single spell. In terms of the damage dealt, this is like a variation on Magic Missile, and I'm okay with that. Magic Missile also hits automatically, and this one you have to land a punch first, so I think it's alright to add a little more power as a reward for making the hit. Also, since food-based campaigns seem to be relatively common among GLOG players, and since this is a bite attack, I added a culinary effect at the end.
Crane Style, Crane Wing, Crane Riposte - The original version is about reducing the attack roll penalty and increasing the AC bonus for "defensive fighting," and getting bonus counterattacks against an enemy who attacks you but misses. Neither DCC nor GLOG has a defensive fighting option, and reducing penalties isn't super interesting. What DCCdoes have already is a Mighty Deed that increases Armor Class, so I thought it might be more interesting to turn this into Damage Reduction instead. Having decided that, it's obvious that the counterattacks should happen if your opponent hits you, rather than if they miss you.
For the GLOG version, I realized I could make the spell feel a bit more cerebral by making the caster choose whether to deflect the attack onto another monster or reflect it back at their main opponent, so now you have to think about how to use up each Magic Dice you assigned to the spell, by picking whether to spend one that's higher or lower than the incoming damage. Since doubles are always bad in GLOG spellcasting, discarding a dice that has the exact same number as the damage roll does nothing. As you spend the dice, the power of the spell gets reduced too, so it's not like you're repeatedly Magic Missile-ing your opponent at full strength.
Dragon Style, Dragon Ferocity, Dragon Roar - Of these three, this was the hardest style to work with, because the mechanics are so gamey, and it's not necessarily that easy to visualize what's supposed to be going on. It kind of reminds me of a combo attack from a fighting video game. For the DCC version, I tried to avoid having to keep track of modifiers by using dice-size increases and decreases, which is a fairly standard mechanic for that game. For the GLOG version, I just awarded advantage and disadvantage on the rolls. That's also helpful because a lot of GLOG mechanics are roll-under, and this way you don't have to worry about subtracting a bonus or adding a penalty or whatever.
Overall, I think this went pretty well, although it took slightly longer to write than I'd hoped. Still, it's the kind of thing that makes a nice mental palette-cleanser in between other kinds of writing. There's no shortage of interesting Pathfinder content that could be converted, so I'll probably do more posts like this in the future.
Over the last couple academic calendar breaks, I've spent quite a bit of time with a couple friends from work playing Marrying Mr Darcy, watching variousfilmversionsofPride & Prejudice, and talking about our own personal fan theories of Jane Austen. Have you ever wondered what librarians talk about when they hang out socially? In our case, yes, it was books. Well okay, a boardgame about a book, and several film adaptations of the same book. But, still, booooks.
Here are some of my / our thoughts, in no particular order.
- Lizzie and Darcy want to smash. The plot of Pride & Prejudice doesn't really make sense unless you think that the two of them are strongly sexually attracted to each other pretty much from the moment they first meet. (And before you say "of course, Anne, it's a love story," consider that what I mean is that this is NOT a story about two people falling in love. It's a story about two people who are immediately in love with one another figuring out how to LIKE each other.)
Why does Darcy keep attending social functions and seeking out Lizzie to talk to, when by his own admission, he hates attending social functions and doesn't like talking to people? Why does Lizzie put up with Darcy being such an awful conversationalist and insulting her constantly, when by her own admission, every word out of his mouth makes her angry?
I don't think either character's behavior makes sense unless you accept this premise. The whole plot is about the two of them getting to know one another well enough to actually figure out some way to like each other and ignore or tolerate all the things they instinctively can't stand about each other. But why do they bother? Why do they keep spending time together before they like each other? Why do they continue to look for excuses to overlook one another's shortcomings? Because they want to bang. From the first time they lay eyes on each other, they both want to have sex. That fact is what drives the rest of the action.
This interpretation also helps make sense of Darcy's first proposal and Lizzie's rejection of it. Why does Darcy propose to a woman he doesn't even like? Because even though he doesn't like her, he does want to do her. Why does Lizzie say no? It's a little more complicated. She says no to Collins because she wants to marry for love. She's not willing to get married just so she can have money. For much the same reason, she says no to Darcy because she doesn't want to get married just so she can have sex. She's conflicted, because she does want to jump him, but she wants more than that too. She wants love, and it takes most of the rest of the plot for her to learn enough about him to overcome all her reasons for disliking him, even though she's in love with him from the start.
The different film versions don't all handle this point equally well. Lizzie and Darcy have an immediate emotional attraction and spend the rest of the story trying to reconcile that with their intellectual needs and social obligations. And although that reconciliation is hard work, they pursue it because their emotions won't allow either one of them to simply write the other one off.
To my mind, one of the clearest visual indicators of this kind of attraction
is when you can't take your eyes off the person you're attracted to ...
... when you can't break eye contact, when you can't look away.
That's attraction the audience can see, too.
- Muppet Pride & Prejudice needs to happen yesterday. Miss Piggy is clearly meant to play Mrs Bennett, and Kermit wouldn't make a bad Mr Bennett. Gonzo makes a likely Bingley, and Sam the Eagle would be a pretty convincing Collins. Seriously, how has this not already happened yet? Can someone please throw money at this problem?
- I really need to watch Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. Beautiful people in Regency-era ballgowns sword fighting with monsters?
I was hoping for "how am I not in that movie?"
But this works almost as well.
- Charlotte Lucas and Mr Collins feel remarkably open to interpretation. Not all the characters are particularly open. For example, Wickham is a creep. Oh my god, Wickham is such a disgusting creep. (More on this below.) Every time we played Marrying Mr Darcy, none of us wanted to end up engaged to Wickham, even if he was a "good match" for our heroine. But by contrast, Charlotte and Collins both feel open multiple understandings.
When you compare the Collin Firth mini-series and the Kiera Knightly film, in one version, when Lizzie rejects Collins, he and Charlotte end up engaged within a couple days. In the other, he leaves the house, embarrassed, to go for a walk, she meets him on his walk, and by the time he gets back to the house, like half an hour later, they're engaged.
In one version, when Lizzie visits Charlotte after she's married, and she's talking about how Collins is busy with his gardening and his devotion to the Lady Catherine De Bourgh, she seems so desperately sad and lonely, like "Lizzie, help me, I'm so alone, I didn't know what I was getting myself into!" But in the other version, when she tells her all that, she looks so wise and smug, like "Yup, he's outside, I have the whole house to myself, I'm alone all the time, I'm a genius, and I love my perfect life."
As an aside, in Marrying Mr Darcy game, Charlotte is the most "cunning" character. We made a lot of jokes about how "cunning" was code for "oldness", and then discovered that there are a bunch of really insulting traditional nicknames and sayings about how women above a certain age are considered un-marriageable because they're "too old" (no, I won't link to them here). You can probably guess what we joked "friendliness" was slang for.
Collins' two most distinguishing characteristics are his cluelessness about Lizzie's lack of attraction to him, and his comical over-devotion to the Lady Catherine De Bourgh. These two traits push in two very different directions. One is an interpretation I like to call "Neckbeard Collins". This is a Collins who is just an over-the-top parody of every trope of contemporary toxic masculinity. He has a neckbeard, he wears a fedora, he says "m'lady" and somehow manages to spew crumbs on you every time he talks. He's a redpillar, an incel, and a PUA in his own mind. And he's a joke, no one can take him seriously. The fact of his loathesomeness serves as a critique of all the qualities he exemplifies. (Wickham is a neckbeard too, it's just harder to laugh at him. Seriously, fuck that guy forever.) I would love to see a film version that leans into the Neckbeard Collins interpretation.
Another interpretation is "Gay Collins", where Collins is as a gay man living in a time when he knows he can't live openly or love who he wants. He offers to marry one of the Bennett sisters because they're his cousins and he doesn't want to make them homeless, but if they're not interested, he doesn't really care. He has to marry someone though, because society and his patroness expect it. Enter cunning Charlotte Lucas. (More on her in a sec.) He likes gardening, interior decorating, and spending time with his women friends. Perhaps he's a bit of a queen, but that's fine. He's happy with who he is.
And Charlotte's happy with who she is too. In this interpretation, Charlotte is a lesbian. Theirs is a marriage of convenience. Does this Charlotte like Lizzie? Well, Lizzie is her best and oldest friend, they've been inseparable most of their lives. But Lizzie likes men, even if she's not ready to marry one, and Charlotte knows that her friend will never really like her back, not in the same way, and that she might after all decide to get married soon. So in this interpretation, Charlotte and Collins aren't in love with each other any more than they are in any other version, but they are each able to live with perhaps the only other person who can understand their situation. I've never seen anything like that in any version of Pride & Prejudice, but I'd like to.
One last thing about Collins, how does he not realize that Mary Bennett likes him?! I know that he's supposed to be so full of himself that it makes him unobservant, but seriously, how oblivious can one person get? Is it even possible for Mary be any more obvious about her affections? And yes, she's younger than him, but he's not that old, she's not that far off from adulthood, and it's not like there's actually a rush for him to get married. He could wait, if it meant being in a relationship with someone who actually likes him.
I don't mean to seem glib about the age issue in Mary and Collins' case, because age differences and issues of consent are quite serious in our last bit of fanon. If you want to leave on a funny note, this is your opportunity to do so. Seriously, stop reading now if you want to avoid thinking about what exactly it is that Wickham did off-camera that makes him so detestable.
You can leave by clicking a link to see The New Yorker'sdefense of Charlotte Lucas, or LitHub'sdefense of Mrs Bennett. Spoiler alert, when the alternative is homelessness and abject poverty, there might indeed be something to be said in favor of marrying for the money, particularly if that marriage can be companionable, and it saves your widowed mother and orphaned sisters, too.
- Wickham got Georgiana Darcy pregnant. Okay, I warned you. So you know how Darcy leaves to go back home to Pemberley, and it's a huge problem because Jane and Bingley are finally getting really serious in their courtship, then somehow Darcy persuades Bingley to go with him? How does he do that exactly? What could Darcy possibly say to Bingley to make him leave the woman he's falling in love with? And is it really just because Darcy's feeling bored and anti-social? No, I think it's because Georgiana is having a baby. Wickham's baby.
Georgiana Darcy spends practically the entire story on bedrest. When Lizzie (and the audience) finally meet her, there's a sense that she's quite fragile, that she's just barely gotten over some life-altering ordeal. When Darcy tells Lizzie about Georgiana, the timeline he describes puts Wickham breaking off his relationship with Georgiana about nine months before Darcy and Bingley ghost Jane and yeet back to Pemberley.
Darcy only ever hints about what Wickham did to his sister, but I think it's fair to say that he did more than just break her young heart. I think Wickham raped Georgiana, and she got pregnant. I don't like this interpretation, but I'm convinced it's correct. When Georgiana finally meets Lizzie, she's thrilled to see her, probably because she's been in seclusion for like a year up to that point, healing from her wounds and keeping her secret so that she'll eventually be able to re-enter society. A society that, if it knew the truth, would judge her rather than him. My most burning question is, what happened to her baby?
I remember watching Lost in Austen a few years ago, and for some reason, one of the things they're trying to do in that is to find an interpretation that rehabilitates Wickham. One thing that struck me was his complaint that whatever he might have done, he didn't deserve to be punished by getting shipped off to die in a warzone. It reminded me of the scene in Persepolis where the narrator's grandmother scolds her and tells her that even though a man was sexually harassing her, he didn't deserve to have her get him in trouble with the Islamist morality police.
I can intellectually understand the moral argument that says that state-sanctioned violence is worse than the crimes it's meant to punish, but emotionally it's incredibly frustrating to hear that we couldn't possibly hurt this man who hurt someone else, to hear more sympathy for what might happen to him than for the person he already happened to. "No criminal justice" shouldn't mean "no other kind of justice, either." If Wickham weren't being sent to the front lines to get shot by Napoleon, what exactly would stop him from repeating his same pattern of grooming and abuse over and over again? If every one of his crimes is kept hidden to protect the honor of the young women he's injured, and he himself never faces any punishment for them, (indeed if he's rewarded for with payments of hush money), then what kind of protection is there for the next young woman he selects as a target?
One thing my friends and I kept worrying about in both the Firth and Knightly versions is, is Lydia going to be okay? She seems happy, but she's also a child, and her husband is a child molester. She seems like she wanted to marry him, but also, everyone else wanted her to marry him to save their own reputations. Lizzie acts like the test of Darcy's love is that he was willing to spend a fortune to keep her family from being scandalized. But perhaps the real test would be, would he love her enough to marry her even if her family was scandalized? And does anyone love Lydia enough to keep her away from Wickham, even at cost to themselves?
Austen composed her story so that by fortunate coincidence, what's good for Lizzie is also good for Lydia, and as mentioned Wickham gets what amounts to a death sentence disguised as a career promotion, but I wonder what that part of the story would look like if the characters believed their silence helped Wickham more than it helped Georgiana or Lydia. If there was no fortunate coincidence and they had to make consequential decisions? I suppose I'm wondering that, not just because of the MeToo movement, but because questions about what moral courage looks like have been on everyone's minds lately.
One of the first fantasy worlds to really make an imprint on my imagination was Magic: the Gathering's Ice Age setting. I love the frozen landscape, the taiga and tundra and glaciers and ice. I love the image of medieval redoubts holding on to the last vestiges of civilization against the unceasing winter night. That's probably why B/X Blackrazor's Land of Ice is one of my all-time favorite unpublished campaign settings.
I remember playing out in the snow with my sister, imagining a world so cold that magic sometimes froze when you cast it, and the land was littered with ice crystals containing frozen spells. (In retrospect, that part sounds a bit like unexploded ordinance leftover on a battlefield, which is actually consistent with Ice Age's status as a kind of nuclear winter following an apocalyptic mages' war.)
I remember dreaming once of a frozen land, where the royal court was ruled by psychic vampires, who could read minds and drink souls, where among the outcasts dwelt warmth vampires, who craved the heat of another's touch and could never, never drink in enough. (The lords in my dream wore armor like Babylon 5's Vorlons. The outcasts went naked in the wastes, but wrapped shivering in furs within any settlement; it was only HUMAN warmth they longed for.)
So when Jack from Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque published Dirge of Urazya, detailing a postapocalyptic fantasy Eurasia ruled over by a decadent and collapsing feudal hierarchy of vampires, the setting he described managed to touch on a very formative bit of my own personal fantasy mythos.
Jack also manages something that Eberron tries, and, in my opinion, fails at, which is to make historical conflicts between monster factions matter to the present day of his setting. Eberron has something like 40 thousand years of recorded history that takes place before the player characters show up and get to interact with anything. All the events of that history are really samey and easy to conflate, and they're also all just backstory with no particular relevance to the gameworld the players are interacting with. You could maybe argue that all that long history is intended to help gamemasters pick appropriate set dressing and treasures for the ancient ruins the player characters might explore, but it's presented in a way that does nothing to facilitate that goal.
In contrast, in Jack's campaign set-up for Saltmire, the waning vampire lords have two groups of unruly vassals who are jockeying for ascendance, and both are derived or descended from dragons. This in turn implies some prior conflict between vampires and dragons that the vampires won, but the war itself is never even mentioned, the focus is entirely on the present-day conflict. (Jack Vance did something similar in The Dragon Masters, with humans and aliens each breeding captured members of the other species to create fantasy monsters. Unfortunately it's one of Vance's weaker books; the idea is much better than his execution of it.)
Trey of From the Sorcerer's Skull has some really good advice for making setting history matter in your game. One of the key points for our purposes here is that history is useful when it helps define the parameters and scope of the present-day adventure.
Dirge of Urazya itself is much less a setting than an invitation to the reader to create their own setting, within certain parameters, and Jack's recent post about making a powder keg is another invitation, with Saltmire as an example "powder keg" campaign set-up along an unnamed piece of Urazyan coastline. (I don't know why, but I assume either the Black Sea or Caspian Sea.)
To make a grotesque and/or dungeonesque powder keg you need six ingredients:
two ambitious noble houses with a bitter rivalry
a fading imperial power that nominally holds the nobles in check
a trading company or corporation wants to expand from economic to political power
a religious sect whose members are more loyal to it than to any other authority
a foreign barbarians who exist outside the society the other factions belong to
and finally, some scarce resource that all five factions are competing to control
Ideally, the scarce resource should be something the players want for their characters as well. That gives them maximum incentive to get their hands dirty and join the competition. As Brendan from Necropraxis advises, let the players decide who their enemies are. (Although they could, I suppose, like Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, simply play each against all with the goal of creating maximum chaos.)
Jack has successfully inspired me to make a powder keg campaign start of my own. I'll create an outline here, and add details in future posts. For now, I'll focus on the key elements. Names for things are a detail to be added later. (Also, since this is my own little thought experiment, and since I initially misread the title of Jack's zine, I'm going to be spelling it as "Ur-zya" rather than as "Ur-a-zya".)
Location: An isolated town in the far north of Urzya, possibly in what used to be Siberia. Based on details from the factions, it looks like the town was once some sort of vacation or resort spot, that it houses either a biological weapons laboratory or a biological waste dump site, and that it has a railroad running through it.
Imperial Power: An ailing vampire tsarina. She has a loyal court of aging suitors and their household knights, and the town has a sizable population of disinherited dhampirs. The tsarina holds court in a former grand hotel. She badly wants an heir, ie, a young person she can perform either brain transplant surgery or a psychic personality transfer on.
Noble House: The first noble house are dragonborns. Sorry Jack, I'm shamelessly stealing your idea here. The dragonborn were bred by the vampires either to fight their war against the dragons or as some kind of symbol of victory after the war ended. These days they're the more established noble house. I bet they love the petroleum spas in the town's old resorts. I'm not sure what they want besides knocking off the competition, but that's another detail that can come later.
Noble House: Stealing from Jack again, my second noble house is made up of dragonmarked humans. Their dark and gritty origin story also involves being bred as enslaved soldiers by the vampire elites long ago, and let's suppose that they're the more up-and-coming of the two houses. I'll need to look up what the different dragonmarks do to pick out the right one for these nobles. I do remember that dragonmarks come in different sizes, and the larger ones are more powerful.
So one thing they want is to find a child with the correct aberrant dragonmark to become their new leader. Probably the current leader wants to kill the kid, someone else wants her on the throne so they can be regent for a decade or so, and, I don't know, maybe there are revolutionaries who want her as a figurehead atop a democratic government. Three sects within the same faction feels like too many, so ideally I'll narrow that list down to two going forward.
Trading Company: I think that something like the Trans-Siberian Railroad ought to run through this town. Probably no one controls its entire length anymore, or at best there's a very fragile syndicate made up of dozens of local franchises who control the tracks in their turf. (Or maybe there IS a single company that runs the whole thing, and THAT level of control and ownership makes them one of the most politically powerful forces in Urzya?)
Anyway, there's a local company operating out of the old railroad station, and they control passage into and out of town on the only mode of transportation that will reliably get you to another bastion of civilization alive. In addition to controlling the food supply, they're probably also arms dealers selling to both the noble houses, amplifying the risk of conflict. I bet the foreign barbarians have been causing them trouble lately. What do they want that they don't already have? Good question! It'll have to wait until a future post for the answer though.
Religious Sect: My favorite Urzyan religion so far is Our Lady of the Drowned, but I don't think she's the right fit for this town. Instead, I want to use the followers of the Five Headed Empress. Tiamat was a literal weapon of mass destruction in Urzya's past. Let's say that she was defeated at the end of the war and her cult was outlawed.
There's presumably a mainstream dragon-worshiping religion that manages to fill the churches in a town with two different dragon-descended noble houses. In that case, the cultists are like followers of the left-hand path of dragon religion, hoarding banned books and forbidden scriptures, meeting in secret to worship a figure who acknowledged but despised by the dragon church's orthodoxy.
Tiamat was a biological weapon, so let's suppose the cultists are either searching for samples and research notes from her original creation or remnants of her that were buried as waste. They're probably risking touching off a plague by accident. Let's also suppose that they really want to find either a human vessel who can reincarnate Tiamat's spirit, or some way to raise her up in her entirety as an undead (or reborn) dragon goddess.
Foreign Barbarians: What kind of creatures live in the frozen wastes outside of town? Well let's start with some sort of feral life-drinking vampire type. The name "breath-stealer" has a nice ring to it. Let's also have some living spells out prowling amid the snowdrifts. These aren't a coherent faction yet so maybe some sort of winter elves would fit in here? I'm also not sure what they want, other than to raze the city and kill everyone in it. They sound scary though!
Scarce Resource: My first instinct is to say "enough food to last the winter," but that seems really depressing, even for a grimdark crapsack like Urzya.
A thought occurs to me that each faction might be searching for a specific young person - a vampiric heir, the bearer of an aberrant dragonmark, Tiamat Reborn. Perhaps, like in Dune, each faction's messiah is the same person? Each faction might racing the others to find the girl before anyone else, and place her on their preferred throne. The town's other children could probably also use a champion to protect them from being kidnapped by the various factions. (Wait, IS this actually any less depressing than the grain idea? I guess "town where children are disappearing" is time-honored plot element, often in stories intended for children, although it seems awfully creepy. But would this work for a game, or is this the kind of idea that works for book, but wouldn't be any fun to play?)
This part might require more consideration. If there's not any one single thing all the factions want, then there should at least be a couple desired objects with overlapping interest groups.
