Black City Friday: Island Encounter Tables

Encounter tables for the southern and western island of Thule, as well as the northern glaciers and surrounding islands.  I prefer using a curve for encounter tables; common encounters are in the 5-7 range on the charts and the rare and dangerous encounters on the ends of the curve will appear infrequently.

The encounter chance is a 1-2 on a 6-sided die each day, and a 1-2 on 12-sided die each night in camp.

Southern Thule
Roll 2d6
2: Ice Troll 1-3
3: Ice Toad 1-3
4: Taer 1-8
5: Humans
6: Polar Bear 1-6
7: Herd Animals (Reindeer) 2-20
8: Giant Snake 1-4
9: Mammoth 1-10
10: Peryton 1-6
11: Irish Deer 1-6
12: White Dragon 1

Northern Thule (Glaciers) and other islands
Roll 2d6
2: Remorhaz 1
3: Ice Troll 1-4
4: Ice Toad 1-4
5: Taer 2-16
6: Polar Bear 1-6
7: Herd Animals (Reindeer) 2-20
8: Icy Hazard
9: Peryton 1-8
10: Irish Deer 1-8
11: Wind Walker 1-3
12: White Dragon 1

Notes on some creatures:
Taers are bestial white fur covered ape-men; substitute white apes as desired.

Humans will be a Northman themed NPC party (50%) or Berserkers (50%).

The Thule Snake is a giant poisonous snake covered with white fur.  They are amphibious monsters that live near the coasts and feed on marine mammals.

Icy Hazards:  Hazards can include avalanches in the mountains, treacherous ice crevasses on the glaciers, or holes and ditches obscured by snow.  If the party hasn't taken reasonable precautions, a hazard will require each party member caught in the hazard to saves vs petrification or take 3-18 damage.

Wind Walkers:  These are amongst the most feared creatures on the glaciers, bodiless demons of the winds that can strip flesh to the bone.

Metagaming, Illusionism, and the Zones

One thing I like about the megadungeon format is that it lets the players metagame - the megadungeon allows the players to pick their level of risk based on game features instead of story.  I'm using the term "metagaming" here because I'm recognizing that players know things about how character levels, hit points, and encounters interact in a way that their characters don't know.  The players make decisions based on game elements that have nothing to do with the story - but like I said in yesterday's post, we DM's are always trying to come up with story explanations for the game elements!

In the post on Danger Zones, I outlined an approach I'm going to use for organizing wilderness areas in "levels" to support  similar decisions.  Areas bordering the civilized areas may be threatened by humanoids and other low level threats, but higher level wilderness will be further away, or on other continents, distant island archipelagos, and lost worlds.

I don't play any CRPGs,  haven't ever installed one, but I seem to recall from friends that WoW had the concept of "zones".  Is that similar?  Are there areas of wilderness that are known as 'higher level' that would be foolish for lower level guys to go there?  (Kind of like a party of 2nd level characters visiting the Isle of Dread?)

Another question has to do with Illusionism.  In a world zoned with levels, the DM has laid out where it's dangerous and more dangerous in advance.  However, I think most people run their game so that the plot hooks, encounters, and adventures scale with the party.   The DM is constantly shuffling the world behind the scenes to fit the current game circumstances and to surface appropriate adventure hooks when the party is ready for them.  Maybe this isn't Illusionism, but it's a little fishy.  Why were goblins threatening the village when we were level 1, and it's ogres threatening the same village now that we're level 4?

I wonder how different a campaign would feel, "zoning the world" consistently right at the beginning and handing the keys over to the players right from day one?

Ride into the Danger Zones

Psychedelic Danger Zones!

The game side of D&D can sometimes cause issues with believability and realism - if you care about that stuff - but the game elements create just as many creative opportunities to work solutions into the campaign.

For instance  - why can adventurers find thousands of gold pieces and hordes of magic items, but the economy of the world still runs?  How can a 10th level fighter hold off the an entire army of orcs and take multiple arrow shots?  Why do low level monsters live on the top level of the dungeon, and the monsters get more dangerous the deeper you go?

One thing I like about the megadungeon trope is that dungeon level = monster level.  It lets the players decide on their level of risk versus reward.  "We're only level 2, but we do have those extra scrolls and some healing potions - let's try those stairs down to level 3 and maybe score some bigger treasure!"

It's a little harder to structure the level of danger in the wilderness in the same way that dungeon level corresponds to encounter level.  I've been considering zoning hex maps with color coded hot zones; the players wouldn't see the zones, but they could learn about the dangerous areas through rumor mongering and investigation.  Danger zones would help structure wandering tables and lairs to fit the general level of an area; it's a way of implementing the Wild Frontiers idea I was talking about last week.

Take the example above.  The purple represents the civilized lands; once you cross the river into the wilds, you enter the realm of danger.  The green pockets might represent dangerous swamps or forests, the yellow is a long chain of mountains, the orange is the Murky Forest beyond the mountains, and areas of red might be dragon lairs or giant kingdoms (in the mountains), or the stronghold of a Big Evil Bad Guy.

Encounter Level by Hex Color

Violet:  Civilized Lands
Blue:  Levels 1-3
Green:  Levels 3-5
Yellow:  Levels 5-7
Orange:  Levels 7-9
Red:  Levels 9-10+

Below is a conceptual sketch of how this could be applied to a world map.  I've been wondering recently how I could get a D&D campaign to work for something like the Age of Exploration, balancing the gamist elements across a larger campaign world.  The civilized lands are very stable, and the group will need to travel to lost worlds and distant lands to find adventure.

In this map, faux-Europe is highly civilized except for a few areas that are still a little wild; the orange and red area in the dark country would be the misty lands of Gothic Horror.  The yellow islands are lost worlds like the Isle of Dread, and the continent across the ocean would be the Demon Lands and the big bad evil sorcerers.

This type of hex campaign could be structured with levels (like a dungeon) but involve world-spanning travel and pulp action.

Well, if a TPK happens to my current group any time soon we'll try it out... oh, and the Black City would work nicely on some northern island...

Mythic Monday: The Mermaid

Elements of folklore, myth and legend for your game

Flipping through the early editions of D&D and AD&D, I see that merfolk are an actual race of creatures - there are mermen and mer-women, with their merbabies and merkids.  They cultivate seaweed and raise fish in pens like happy sea farmers, and it makes me want to cry - a monster, an honest to goodness horrible creature from folklore, turned into a pastoral sea farmer.  (The monster naturalism gone too far...)

My hope is that anyone using a mermaid would already take a more folkloric approach anyway than the "sea farmers", but here's a brief survey of the mermaid in British folklore to provide an alternate view.  Note - one could conflate the mermaid with the Greek sirens, or the German nixies or Undine - I'm focusing on the British folklore (and definitely no Hans Christian Anderson!)

The first thing to understand is the mermaid is an omen of doom - every sailor that sees a mermaid knows that he's going for a swim and dying.  They'll be crashed against the rocks, sunken by a storm, or sucked down by a whirlpool.

Take for instance, these verses from the Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens (I'm sure all the english majors out there remember this from grade school - this should be a nice remembrance):

The king sits in Dumferling toune,
Drinking the blude-reid wine:
‘O whar will I get guid sailor,
To sail this schip of mine?’

In different versions, the king goes on to commission Sir Patrick Spens to sail in the winter, everyone is sad about the danger this represents, and of course they sink and drown.  There are lots of variants - some have them going to Norway, most feature bad omens of the moon and tides, and they often see a mermaid:

Out and starts the mermaiden,
wi a fan into her hand:
‘Keep up your hearts, my merry men a’,
For ye’re near the dry land.’


Out and spak Earl Patrick Graham,
Wi the saut tear in his ee:
‘Now sin we’ve seen the mermaiden,
Dry land we’ll never see.’

And of course, the various ballads usually end with the familiar quatrain:

Haf owre, haf owre to Aberdour,
It's fiftie fadom deip,
And thair lies guid Sir Patrick Spens,
Wi the Scots lords at his feit.

Another ballad, called The Mermaid, actually features the mermaid circling the ship to sink it (as opposed to watching the carnage from a distance):

Twas Friday morn when we set sail 
And we were not far from the land 
When the captain, he spied a lovely mermaid 
With a comb and a glass in her hand 
...
Then three times around went our gallant ship 
And three times around went she 
Three times around went our gallant ship 
And she sank to the bottom of the sea

But I think one of my favorite lines is in the story of the Laird of Lorntie, who is pulled out of the water from the mermaid's grasp by his manservant, and the mermaid mocks how she was going to be eating his blood:

"Lorntie, Lorntie,
Were it na your man,
I had gart your heart’s bluid
Skirling in my pan."

That's what I'm talking about!  The mermaid is a hateful water spirit that sinks ships and drinks the blood of drowned sailors - for fun!  Forget the pastoral sea farmers with the cultivated rows of sea kelp and herding the fishes and toting along the merbabies.

Fish boobies!

There's a spiritual dimension to the mermaid that get can get worked into the picture, if so inclined.  The medieval mermaid was thought to represent pride and vanity - notice how they're usually described with mirror and comb; carvings of the mermaid would appear in medieval churches as a warning against lust (a quick google search of mermaid church carvings will show a few).

The Mermaid for Gothic Greyhawk
Mermaids are creatures originating from the fairy realm that delight in sinking ships and drowning sailors - they are drawn to lair near dangerous shoals, clashing rocks, and hazardous seas where many sailors meet their ends.  The sight of a mermaid is an omen of impending doom.

The mermaid appears from the waist up as a beautiful topless woman with luxurious golden curls, and will often be seen sunning on rocks, combing her hair and regarding herself in the mirror.  Her body from the waist down is a fish.  Her sunken lair will be the site of numerous ship wrecks and the bleached bones of dead sailors.

The Mermaid (remade for Labyrinth Lord)
No. Enc.: 1
Alignment: Chaotic
Movement: 120' (40') swimming
Armor Class: 4
Hit Dice: 8
Attacks: 1 (dagger) + gaze
Damage: 1d4 / Special
Save: M8
Morale: 7
Hoard Class: XV, X
XP: 2050

The mermaid can call on the following powers:

Weather Control:
Once per day, as per the 7th level cleric spell, the mermaid can use this power to generate storms and maelstroms to destroy ships.  It takes just as long to generate the effect as the spell, which may give a ship time to outrun the storm.

Command Sea creatures:
The mermaid will have a number of sea creatures guarding it's undersea lair, such as giant fish and giant crabs.

Charming Gaze:
The mermaid has an innate charm ability, like the charm person spell, 3 times per day.

Vulnerabilities:
The mermaid has the standard fey creature vulnerabilities:  double damage from cold iron; can be turned by a cleric using the "special" line on the turn chart (in this way, you'll note that most fey creatures share similar traits with demons, the other creatures of chaos).

Game Report: Gothic Greyhawk game 25

Cast of Characters:
Mordecai, a Cleric-4: Adam
Forlorn, an Elf-3: Bo
Mister Moore, Magic User-4: Mike
Grumble the Smug, Halfling-3: Nogal

Henchmen:
Shy, a Fighter-3
Phat Kobra, a Dwarf-3
Zeke, a Fighter-3
Starkweather, a Thief-4
Barzai, a Cleric-3

=========================================
Hammers of the God:  Spoilers
=========================================

The group watched the acrid corpse smoke pour out of the tomb, and decided it'd be a good idea to camp further up the canyon.  They set up their tents out of sight from the entrance and huddled for a cold night in the mountains.  They were roused when a stone giant investigated the source of the smoke, knocking around boulders and making a racket, and sent the stealthy halfling to scout, but they avoided detection and the giant eventually left.

They took their time the next morning waiting for the smoke to clear; once satisfied, they returned to the tomb, briefly scouted the main temple to ensure the ancient corpses were destroyed, and then went through the west door.

Purple smoke still filtered out from beneath the west door, and the room was obscured by it.  It made breathing difficult so they wedged the door open and waited a few minutes for it to clear.  The smoke was coming from a handful of burning seeds in a fire pit, which they doused.  The other intriguing element was the meditative dwarf priest.

Seated across from the fire pit was a half naked dwarf priest, cross legged, and surrounded by a magic circle.  His eyes were closed, but he was still breathing.   This presented a puzzle - the group spent a long time trying to figure out how to safely wake him up (Mordecai's theory was that the magic circle kept him safe from whatever toxin asphyxiated everyone else in the complex).  Grumble the (Halfling) Barbarian kept flashing the elbow and telling them to do a wrestling move on him, like a forearm to the head - "That would wake up anyone!".  At one point, Grumble slipped and accidentally pushed the dwarf over, and then there was a "Weekend at Bernie's" moment as they kept trying to prop up the limp, unconscious dwarf priest and pretend nothing happened.  Eventually, they concluded he wasn't going to wake up and they just backed out the room carefully.

Out in the main temple, Forlorn decided it was time to experiment with the altar.  They had stolen a pair of golden implements days earlier, and had bypassed the huge chunk of meteoric iron that had flecks of gold all over it (which they interpreted was that it would be struck by the golden implements during a ceremony).  Forlorn did some striking, and a secret door was revealed.  They had a new area to explore!

They passed through a room with multiple fountains, puzzled over a few of the inscriptions (and made a big show of who would drink and who wouldn't - Forlorn and Barzai drank no water!) and then descended some short stairs into an immense cavern beyond.

The cavern was large enough that their lantern lit up only a nearby section; the ground was sandy, the air was damp, and conversation was hampered by the  roar of a waterfall somewhere deeper in the cavern.  But their attention was drawn to a metal structure nearby that stretched from the sand up into the darkness above them - metal girders and beams, like the superstructure for a modern radio tower.  A ladder was attached to the side.

Starkweather took a torch and began climbing, while they watched from below.  About 80' up the tower, there was a box at the top (a control cabin), and the tower had an armature and cable coming out of the cabin like a modern day crane.  Starkweather managed to hang on to the ladder when a dwarf zombie lurched out of the cabin opening, startling him and then swiping at his head.  He ducked in time but dropped the torch; Starkweather quickly bounded down the ladder and hoped the zombie wasn't clambering out of the cabin after him.

When it was clear the zombie was staying put, they voted to send Shy up the ladder, with a light spell on his magic sword.  Shy is their official undead slayer.  Kobra went up behind him.  They stopped a bit down from the cabin to secure ropes from their waist to the ladder; if Shy fell, he'd drop 15' instead of 80'.

The zombie and Shy battled at the door to the cabin, and Shy sliced off one of the zombie's arms; but then the zombie wrenched him off the ladder.  Their rope idea was a good one - Shy took damage when the rope jerked, but he caught on to the ladder.  Kobra scuttled up the ladder and finished off the zombie.

The cabin had a winch and a breaking lever; Kobra started cranking the winch and had the impression something at the long end of the cable was getting hauled in, but then it abruptly stopped and he wasn't strong enough to crank further.  Excitedly, he and Shy went down the ladder and told the group they needed to try and trace the cable to its end and see what was out there.

Their path took them down the beach to the edge of the churning water.  A 20' long metal canister (with a hatch) was tethered to the end of the cable, and was pulled nose first up against the shore.  Beyond the canister, the water churned and swirled, and they saw the edge of a whirlpool.  Water was crashing down a waterfall, swirling around the pool, and disappearing down the drain.

Mordecai exclaimed, "Ha ha!  It's like going over a waterfall in a barrel!  The dwarves lowered people down in that thing.  Look at the size of the dents in it!"

Mister Moore looked at the whirlpool, the dented submarine, and immediately said, "I have a better idea, fellas.  We left some gems encrusted in the door of the emperor's tomb - let's go get the gems, scoop the gems out of the fountain pool, and call this one a wrap - we've got some decent loot.  Mordecai can tell his "girlfriend" (the evil witch of witch mountain) we couldn't find the Elf Bane, and that'll be that.  You're not getting me in  that death trap!"

While they decided to consider Moore's idea of scrapping the delve, they first wanted to see if anything was in the submarine.  Shy opened the hatch and got a face full of zombie, and splashed back away from the opening as a troop of those hard-to-turn dwarf zombies spilled out of the submarine to maul the party, but the group put them down fairly quickly.

After the zombie battle, they saw the inside of the submarine had a series of chairs (the seatbelts were rotted away) and a smaller winch for letting out cable from within the submarine.

They decided to postpone the discussion about whether they'd actually take a submarine ride until this week; instead, they surveyed the rest of the beach and discovered that there were two additional cranes and cables.  There was a second submarine by the shore, whereas the third cable stretched into the water and down the whirlpool.  One of the submarines was already at the bottom!

See you next time.

Review: Inn of Lost Heroes

Note:  Spoilers Ahead.

Adventurers check in, they don't check out.

Inn of Lost Heroes is an adventure module by Small Niche Games; it's $4.95 for the PDF and available at the usual suspects (I got mine at RPGNow) and comes in at 30 pages - for levels 3-5.  Small Niche Games uses a clean layout and I find these easy to run at the table.  It's flavored for Labyrinth Lord.

The adventure traps the player characters in a nightmare world that alternates between the Ash World (nightmarish) and the Burning World (really nightmarish).  It borrows ideas from the Silent Hill video game series, and certainly could be an homage wrapped up as a D&D adventure.  It hits on a lot of excellent horror tropes - if you've seen my Horror in D&D post, this adventure features a bit of body horror, loss of control, atmosphere and danger, and plenty of vicarious horror as terrible things happen to NPCs (first).

This is not structured like an old school site-based adventure.  The players are trapped in a haunted Inn with other guests;  much of the action is presented as scenes and will feature a lot of role playing as the DM takes on the roles of the other trapped people.  There are opportunities for the group to explore the inn and unravel the secrets, but this is not a dungeon crawl.

What I loved:  I like to blend some horror moments into D&D, and this adventure is explicitly horror.  I have a small background in improv theater and it's a fun change of pace to run adventures that feature  lots of NPC's and scenes; the approach reminds me of newer, scene based games like White Wolf's.

Issues:  My biggest issue with the adventure is how the story reaches resolution.  When moving to the climax of the story, the adventure takes an abrupt turn, and the story-based solution to escaping the ghost story is thrust on the party heavily (via a death scene monologue).  In this type of adventure, the twist really could have been foreshadowed a number of different ways and worked into the build up.

I'd rate this a 3 on the Beedometer.  It's much better than a home brew, breaks some interesting ground with the Silent Hill themes, but has a (correctable) flaw on the story side.  By way of endorsement, it was *definitely* located in my sandbox for my players to encounter, which is why I held off on a review.  They made other choices, and I'm comfortable dropping some spoilers now.

In terms of my treasure chart metrics, this weighs in at about 21,000gp in treasure, and 12 or so encounters (not counting wandering monsters).  Probably 1-2 nights of adventuring.

Black City Friday - the Thule Archipelago

First look at the Thule Archipelago for the Black City campaign, and a skyline view of the ruined city.

Thule is within the arctic circle and much of the islands are covered by glaciers.  It experiences polar night and midnight sun.  However, the weather and climate is tempered by ocean currents and the winter is not as harsh as similar latitudes on the mainland.

Click to Embiggen

It wouldn't be Black City Friday without a quick sketch - here, the city scape as seen from the fjord.  Thanks Felt!

The Black City