elsewhere, elsewhere

Pint-Sized Play Reports 21 December 2025 Contents

• Contents
• Intro: My Year in Play
• January
  • Electric Bastionland
  • Microscope
• February
  • Ten Candles
  • Kids on Bikes Homebrew
• March
  • Marvel Multiverse RPG
• April
  • Fiasco
  • i'm sorry did you say street magic?
• May
  • Wanderhome
• June
  • The Wildsea
• July
  • Triangle Agency
• August
  • World Ending Game
• October
  • the fifth edition of the world's most popular roleplaying game
• November
  • Lacuna
• December
  • A Land Once Magic
• What's next?

Intro: My Year in Play

My life has been so full this year. I'm a firm believer that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives, and my days have been rife (almost exhaustingly so) with friends, community, art, new birth, joy, and love. This is what we're here for, I think.

Anyway, time to talk about tabletop role playing games.

I've played a lot of games over the past few years! In 2023 I even ran a new game each month just to work through my bookshelf. Unfortunately every time I sit down and write about them, my eyes glaze over and I fall asleep on my keyboard. Turns out: I think writing play reports is super boring!! In fact, I've mentioned this before. IMO everything about RPGs that matters happens in the moment of playing. I don't care about theory outside of like, basic GMing advice, and I don't care about describing my sessions to other people because it mostly just feels like telling someone about that super weird dream you had last night.

At the same time, I want to document my experiences as something to look back on at a glance. It's the same appeal as something like Goodreads or Storygraph - it's cool to look back and say "oh, yeah, I did that! That IS how I felt!" So in an effort to do this without covering my laptop in sleep drool, I'm gonna cover my sessions this year in as stripped-back a fashion as I can, focusing less what actually happened and more on my final thoughts + any collected ephemera. Enjoy!

January Electric Bastionland

Length: Oneshot

Role: GM

NSR darling and one of my favs. This was the first meeting of an in-person group with friends that continued on through the year. Prior to this, I had played in maybe a single-digit number of in-person sessions total? Most of my shit is digital. I forgot how electric (pun intended) it feels to jam in person, especially with people you know.

I ran the first half of Colm Norrish's delirious Mountain Underground. This was most folks' first experience with lighter rulesets, and one person's first time playing period, but everyone got on the level quick and had a blast. Colm evokes a feeling here that I think I spent the rest of the year chasing - a sort of yearning or grasping at the fading edges of a dream. The numbness when that wash of color leaves your eyes and you wake back up in the real. Highly recommend running it yourself.

Microscope

Length: Two sessions

Role: Player (GMless)

Ben Robbins' fractal history-building game. Played digitally with my regular online group. The hardest part of this was finding a stupid whiteboard. We played our first session on roll20 but honestly that shit is poop from a butt and we hated using it. Thank God one player suggested using FigJam for session two - it was worlds easier!

The dynamic was interesting. We played very narrowly in session one and ended up too in the weeds. When reconvening later, we jumped around the timeline a lot more and generally played more loose with it, which improved the results dramatically. Still, we didn't enjoy the way Microscope handles scenes (the parts where you actually roleplay) - it kills the momentum and overall feels very organic. A couple of us had played i'm sorry did you say street magic? together and preferred its scene style, so we suggested it for a followup session.

Standouts:

February Ten Candles

Length: Oneshot

Role: Player

A horror game that keeps momentum by forcing the game forward when one of ten lit candles flickers out. Played in-person (is this even doable digitally?). I prefer this to fellow horror RPG Dread, personally; it runs smoother and feels more collaborative. It almost felt similar to Microscope in the sense that when it was my turn to add details I got a competitive itch, like I wanted to make something so interesting that everyone else would want to play with that detail. I got to contribute to what the Evil Guys were, so I made them willowy sirens that compel you to put yourself in danger. The GM spun them into murky mud angels which was a great choice.

I like the game, and it was certainly worth the time spent, but I wouldn't play it again for a long while. This isn't a bad thing - it's laser focused on the feelings it wants to evoke and succeeds in bringing those feelings to life. The tension, the melancholy, the growing dread - it really works! It's just those feelings are so specific that running it back would quickly give diminishing returns, I imagine. More than anything I crave longform horror over oneshots these days. Playing this really made me want to get a mini-campaign of Trophy Gold onto the table.

Kids on Bikes Homebrew

Length: Oneshot

Role: Player

Played in-person. The GM was inspired by Dimension 20's Never Stop Blowing Up and did her own spin on Kids on Bikes. I've never played normal KOB so I can't speak for how she expanded on it, but it felt light, quick, and great for a one-off. The premise was that we were henchmen unionizing against our evil overlord and ransacking his sick lich mansion. I played a beleaguered shift leader goblin. I'm not really drawn to standard fantasy settings, but I do love playing weird, shitty little guys, so: two thumbs up! 👍 👍

March Marvel Multiverse RPG

Length: Oneshot

Role: Player

It's like superhero D&D? I uhhh don't give a shit about Marvel, but I agreed to play bc I'm always down to clown. The grift of this one is that you can play as actual characters from the comics and the book comes with one morbillion pregen character sheets for all your favs. The Marvel fans in the group naturally went for deep cuts; I picked Cyclops because he was level-appropriate and I recognized him.

This was the GM's first time running anything. What I appreciated was how much work he put into making this oneshot accessible - he printed off cheat sheets for the rules, went through our character sheets and printed descriptions of all our abilities, and even sourced meeples for the heroes we picked. The session played butter-smooth, too. I don't have much to say about the game itself other than that it's not my thing, but he crushed it as a GM.

The truth underneath all this is that, more than any cool settings or beautiful art, what captures my attention the most at the table is real, earnest passion.

April Fiasco

Length: Oneshot

Role: Player (GMless)

The cinematic game of small crime gone wrong. I'd heard a lot of great things about this, but this was my first time playing. Tbh those great things were all earned! It's a lesson in both improv and NPC design - you get handed character flaws, desires, and relationships with other players, and then do basic dialogue scenes. At that point the game just plays itself. It lets you focus on the fun part (playing a freak) without sweating the hard part (making a freak).

It is VERY tropey but I guess it has to be because it gets everyone on the same wavelength very quickly. We picked a scenario set at a New York disco club and blasted the Bee Gees the whole time. I loved it! The worst I could say about it is that it's treading close to the line between Role Playing Game and Just An Improv Scene, but, frankly, that's not a distinction that I give much of a shit about.

i'm sorry did you say street magic?

Length: Two sessions

Role: Player (GMless)

Caro Asercion's dreamy city-builder. Run digitally with the same crew as the Microscope sessions. This game and Microscope play similarly but with different purposes - Microscope focuses on creating a timeline, this game produces a city and its inhabitants. Even on that baseline I vastly prefer street magic, but where it really shines is its character scenes.

In Microscope, when you run a scene, you ask a question that must be answered in order to end the scene, then everyone (everyone, every time) picks a character, then you run the scene. This song and dance not only grinds the game's momentum to a halt, but also, answering questions is hard and lame!!! Instead of giving you space to inhabit the world, the game kills the energy, turns you into writer and actor both, and inorganically tells you to Make A Plot Point Happen. How boring! It doesn't work for me at all.

Street magic, by comparison, has you create a resident of the city, start a scene with that resident in their element, and run it until you know their "true name" - who they are at their core. You paint broad strokes and everyone else can join in as they please. This setup isn't just easy, it's organic. You're not answering questions, you're not solving problems, you're not wearing too many hats; the game tells you to Make A Guy and your job is to Be That Guy. It feels like building a LEGO city and then walking around it in first-person. The world comes to life before your eyes.

...but I still like Microscope. It scratches a different itch. I want to make its scene structure work for me. Another time, maybe.

Anyway, standouts:

May Wanderhome

Possum Creek's pastoral wanderland. Played on my friend's back porch right before a thunderstorm. Every time I've played this has felt divine, and this was no different. It was an interesting game to play at this point in the year coming off Microscope and street magic. Wanderhome also has a collaborative worldbuilding aspect, but you knock out the broad strokes fast so you can spend the rest of your session playing in it. It feels amazing! The game's ability to get everyone on the same page is something special. When everyone buys in, it feels like melding your brains together, or like every movement you make is an extension of someone else's body.

I feel drawn to games of travel and transition this year. Mythic Bastionland, the Wildsea, the upcoming UVG sequel (soon please God) - I'm fiending to not just inhabit a place but feel it change over time and blur at the edges. I have a dream of a year-long runthrough of Wanderhome to fully utilize its excellent seasonal mechanics. One day...

June The Wildsea

Length: seven sessions (ending in November)

Role: GM

Felix Isaacs' bold, sprawling passion project. If you want a review, go watch Quinns, we're not getting better. At this point my new in-person group had done several one-shots and wanted a mini-campaign with some room to breathe. I suggested this because it hit those same feelings I was drawn to in Wanderhome - travel and transition.

This campaign was very fun overall with some weird out-of-game hiccups. One player is moving soon, so I had to keep the pace relatively high in order to wrap up, which made it feel more like a sightseeing tour than a real journey. I also had a player tell everyone he found some cool homebrew for his character only to reveal that ChatGPT filled out his entire sheet for him, complete with fully made-the-fuck-up moves and perks, something I will roast him about until the end of time.

I also made everything from scratch, for good and ill. Over on Carouse, Carouse I wrote about my frustrations with the game's random encounter system and how I experimented with some spark tables to replace it. That worked great! On the other hand, I focused so much on my classic kinda bullshit (derelict, abandoned megastructures mostly) that it left my players hungry for civilization, people to talk to, relationships to build, etc. I can't help but wish I'd tried out the book's prewritten settings instead, which do phenomenal jobs of setting up faction play inside each area.

Well, maybe it's less instead and more also - by the time we finished, the thing I most wanted was more time with the game! I mentioned this in my Carouse article, but I was and am still spellbound by the act of sailing in this game. I spent whole sessions whipping up random encounters on the waves and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. What a game.

July Triangle Agency

Length: Twelve sessions (starting July 2024, ending now)

Role: GM (General Manager)

Haunted Table's corporate nightmare, run digitally for my online group. If you want a review, don't watch Quinns, we can do better. I had the perfect group for this, I think. My players naturally split down the three paths the game offers you (Career, Anomaly, Life) with all the natural conflict that entails. On top of that, they stayed super engaged the whole time, even when the game's tower of rules started to wobble and fall over on itself. Our game sprawled across discord channels, threads, DMs, whiteboards, excel sheets, and more. I loved it and couldn't have asked for better. Thanks, y'all!

We ran through the entire set of missions in the Vault, which was tight, because the advice the game gives you for making your own missions is basically not helpful at all. Actually it does something that really bothers me - it gives you advice that clearly isn't being taken in the official supplements. I understand wanting to put out a nice product, but it feels dishonest. Or unconfident, which is sad for such an otherwise overwhelmingly confident project!

The Vault was lively and super easy to run, although I wish they'd garnered more variety in topics from the writers. It's like 40% missions about nostalgia by volume. I can't believe it's a game where belief makes things real and there aren't any missions about religion, honestly.

It also doesn't mesh as nicely with the game's campaign structure as I'd like. I wish it had some guidance on how much downtime to allow between sessions. You're given the option to allow players between one and three units of Time between missions. I took a guess and went with two; my players ended up leveling their characters out of the game around missions 9 and 10, which left two missions with random new guys that were still fun but definitely dampened the energy a bit.

My favorite missions were:

• Murder at Gruntley Manor, a classic murder mystery where the players play both themselves and the suspects. Feels like the mission in here that most understands the game mechanically.
• Nosedive, an investigation into a pop-up rave taking the city by storm. We ran this first and it set the tone for the entire campaign. Feels like the mission that most understands the game emotionally.

Overall, it was irreplaceable. There were so many standouts it almost deserves its own post, but I'll post a few here.

Lastly, a screenshot from my PDF. A late game rule allows you to evaporate your character in return for the ability to modify the physical rulebook. I don't have the physical rulebook, so I had to make do. Spoilers for the playwall ahead!

August World Ending Game

Everest Pipkin's dramatic campaign ender. We used this to cap off our game of Triangle Agency because we juked and dodged past all of that game's official endings. I suggested it partly because I itchfunded this thing ages ago and wanted an excuse to use it, partly because of that extra rule I posted up above. Since we played this game after our game of Triangle Agency ended, that rule came into effect!

I had to take some time to open myself up to this thing. It suggest a very cinematic framing - narrating camera angles, describing cuts and directions, etc. I was worried it would be a bit corny, but once we got into the swing of it I started to feel comfortable leaning into that style. It was a great time of reflection on a long, strange campaign, and I'm glad I spent the effort to play it earnestly.

October the fifth edition of the world's most popular roleplaying game

Length: Oneshot

Role: Player

it was a coworker game lol

Same deal as the Marvel game tbh. I'm bored of D&D... but I'm still down to clown. Also same deal as the Marvel game: the DM elevated this immensely. Several folks had never played before, so she took great steps to make the game accessible. She wrote pre-gen characters for everyone, made sure to bring enough dice that everyone could have a set and then some, and even had a bunch of spray-painted jenga blocks she'd done up to look like dungeon walls. That kind of energy is infectious!

I'm reminded (against my will) of the sheer passion cultivated by 5e culture. So many people are pouring so much love and effort into this game, and, like... I wish they'd direct that love somewhere else, but it's impressive (even inspiring) nonetheless. I'm endeared to it in the same way I'd be endeared to someone making unironic McDonald's fan edits. Like, hell yeah, shoot your shit.

Actually though the real best part is that the guy hosting made a discord server to organize it and now routinely posts pictures of his enormous cat, Big John.

November Lacuna

Length: One session (at the time of writing)

Role: Player

Jared Sorensen's game of subconscious espionage. Played digitally with my online group. This game has ominous vibes and is not entirely dissimilar to Triangle Agency. You play agents diving into the city inside our collective unconscious to remove the parts of us that make us evil. This is a morally good thing 🙂

I'm glad I'm not running it though. It'd be a bitch to nail down. IMO the absolute core of what makes something feel "dreamlike" is a lack of control. Things just happen to you in a dream and your ability to change that, let alone react coherently at all, is extremely limited. How do you take those feelings and transport them to a medium where controlled interaction is the game? How can you give players the information required to make meaningful choices when that information often shifts and falsifies itself? How can you change the world around the players or even the players themselves without turning your hard-scheduled game session into one long cutscene?

I don't know the answers to these questions, and I struggled with answering them during the session. Our GM did a phenomenal job portraying the imagery and feeling of the dreamscape, but I also had such a hard time feeling like anything I said or did produced a coherent result that I ended up taking a backseat for most of the session. None of this is helped by the fact that the book takes a very smarmy 2010s attitude towards talking about itself.

I dunno, man. Is this game really that inscrutable? If Triangle Agency can have examples of play and sample scenarios, I'm a lot less inclined to give grace to something like this.

Still, the feelings I felt have stuck with me. I've spent a lot of time thinking about my experience with it. I'm looking forward to trying the game out some more, if for nothing else than to see where the dream takes me.

December A Land Once Magic

Length: Oneshot

Role: Player (GMless)

Viditya Voleti's post-fantasy worldbuilding experience. Played digitally with the same crew that played Microscope and street magic. I didn't know anything about this last month, I just saw it on bluesky and had to do it to em.

We were especially drawn to this after playing those similar games as a group. I organized everything into a figjam board again although this game uses playing cards which was a pain in the ass. We ended up using figjam as a big whiteboard and playingcards.io just to draw cards, which... wasn't elegant, but it worked.

Play involves drawing cards and answering prompts about your world and how it works. Things start off broad (magic, legends), then zoom into civilization and eventually specific inhabitants. The world we ended up building was one where magic gone wrong caused time to fracture. Overlapping histories made the past unstable, and our city created stability with the power of belief, for better or worse. This was a particularly interesting concept because I don't think it would've worked in either other game we tried this year. Microscope outright rejects time travel from the get because otherwise the whole conceit crumbles; street magic, by largely ignoring history, wouldn't have led us to this particular concept or really encouraged us to explore its cultural effects. It was also a tough concept to wrap our heads around, but worth the effort - I think we mined some really cool stuff out of this.

In some ways though we chafed against the system. It felt more constrained than the raw creativity of Microscope while simultaneously never giving us the time to build minutiae as with street magic. The forward momentum of the system means we kept moving on right when it felt like we were getting into the meat of something good. I couldn't help but wonder if we were missing something - Viditya puts a lot of emphasis on the conversation in play, which is natural, but it's emphasized so heavily that I think we might have played too fast? Should we have spent more time as the post-fantasy intelligentsia, figuring out our culture over long, winding talks? I dunno 🤷

If I played it again, I think I'd muck around with incorporating the exploratory tables into the game more. As-is, they're extra-specific prompts used as backup options for rolling a repeat on broader tables, which happens rarely. But we took the (optional) suggestion of describing scenes from the Vignettes table after we were done and there was a collective feeling of "oh, nice, the good part!" Our previous games letting us zoom into scenework mid-game allowed for tunneling in on an idea you find compelling; here, the river of play flowed too quickly for us to enjoy the finer details.

That's not to say it was a bad time by any means. Just an interesting one that's worth putting a bit of extra thought into. Anyway, standouts:

What's next?

Stuff on the agenda in no particular order:

• Mythic Bastionland, probably with my in-person group if I can swing it.
• Fomoria, Tannia Herrero's folk horror dungeon crawler. The art goes craaaazy on this one
• The Quiet Year for another round with the GMless gang. None of us have played it despite its influence! I wonder if the tighter scope will make it appeal more than Land Once Magic.
• Twilight Song, another Quiet Year-like. Idk I just like the vibes.

All this and there's still unplayed games on my bookshelf. I wish I had more week per week. But if I'm stuck with the time I have, I'm happy at least to spend it in community.

Take care, and have a good new year! 👋

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Hexmas Blogwagon - Three Calves 7 December 2025 Contents

• Contents
• Merry Hexmas!
• Hex: Three Calves
  • Connections
  • Terrain
  • The Campfire
  • What Happened Here?
  • Frequently Asked Questions
  • Day of Return
  • And After
• Notes

Merry Hexmas!

Over on Prismatic Wasteland, there's a new blogwagon: a hexcrawl themed after old Rankin/Bass Christmas movies. Each blogger writes their own hex and connects them to others in one big patchwork map. Warren helpfully provided a categorized list of R/B movies for perusal. Obviously I was drawn to one that I never watched as a kid: Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey (helpfully filed under the Wait, Jesus Exists in This?! category). Nothing brings us together in the year's long end like a little light blasphemy, so I'm gonna write some! Let's dig in.

Hex: Three Calves Connections

• To the North: Prismatic Wastelands' Keep on the North Pole
• To the Northeast: Periapt Games' Transient Snowfields
• To the Southeast: Playtest Dummies' Christmas Tree Forest

Terrain

Snow blankets unsettled scrubland in perfect sheets. Rolling hills gently build to three sharp mounds, crowned by the rock formations that lend this hex its name: lumpy, primitively shaped calves turning their heads to the sky.

Someone's lit a fire on the tallest mound. It remains lit throughout the day and is easily visible across the hex.

The other two mounds are empty save for shattered wooden slats at their peak. Long, ugly nails are driven through their ends. Old blood and deep ruts trail down their eastern faces, but the tracks end under fresher snow at their base.

The Campfire

Whiffs of mulled wine hit well before you reach the peak. Two tired men in dark cowls, Dismas and Gestas, sit on hard-packed snow near the fire, playing dice and trading barbs. Fragrant spices steep in a pot over the flames. There's enough firewood piled up behind them to last a week, at least.

Nearby sits one of the Calves, unreadable face leaning skywards. Draped across its back: a corpse, rigid in simple robes. His throat is cleanly slit; his face is gentle, almost beatific. A woven basket sits underneath his right hand, bearing dried jerky, a few gold pieces, and some waxy, aromatic resin.

Don't worry, croaks Gestas. He'll be back tomorrow.

What Happened Here?

Dismas and Gestas were hired to murder an annoying nomad known for whipping up the yokels into zealous fits. So they killed him (knife in the important bits, easy peasy), took their cash, and went on their way.

Or not. Three days later, their client broke down their door with a group of hired thugs. The freak's back. Do your job, or else. The boys figured, hey, wrong guy maybe? Didn't matter. They tracked down the nomad, killed him again (rock to the head, easy peasy), and hung around a while to make sure nothing funny happened.

Three days later, the nomad woke up wound-free, like nothing happened. Three more days later (after a quick beheading, easy peasy), he was back again. Now, unwilling to return with a job unfinished, Dismas and Gestas camp next to the corpse, killing him each time he opens his eyes.

At first, things were all business - quick kills, no yapping. But as days turned to weeks turned to months, the two men and the nomad formed a begrudging bond. He greets his killers as old friends, offers suggestions on new murder methods to spice things up, and the killers in turn spend more time in conversation with each revival.

Recently, the nomad mentioned his birthday was coming up. Dismas and Gestas scraped together a meagre offering and plan to celebrate with drinks and a meal before sending him back to the spirit world. If the party wants to fetch food or gifts while they're waiting, it'd be much appreciated. He likes books, grumbles Gestas. Dismas nods absentmindedly.

Frequently Asked Questions What's his name?

They never got one. Josh? offers Dismas. No, something else, spits Gestas. Chris, maybe?

How long are they gonna keep this up?

Gestas coughs. Got an agreement. We die of old age, he wins. He already offered to bury us up here.

Why doesn't he run away?

His wounds heal up when he comes back, says Dismas, picking at gristle in his teeth with a knife, so we cut his feet off first thing.

Day of Return

A day after the party arrives, the nomad opens his eyes, quickly wriggles his toes, and grits his teeth in silence as Dismas and Gestas lop off his feet with quick, practiced cuts. As he pushes himself upright and sees the basket below, his eyes well up. Oh, he laughs, you shouldn't have.

If the party added gifts to the pile, the nomad thanks them profusely and offers to lay his hands on their shoulders. Any who accept find their wounds healed and illnesses cured. Additionally, once per day for the rest of the hexcrawl, a ration manifests in their packs: fresh bread and fish.

If they did not add gifts... the nomad shrugs and makes the same offer. It's the reason for the season, he says.

If undisturbed, the nomad spends the next several hours catching up with Dismas and Gestas. He's inquisitive about the party and insightful of the situations in each surrounding hex. Finally, as the sun sets, the nomad lays down on the Calf's back and says his goodbyes before Gestas cuts his throat.

The two killers offer any leftover food and drink to the party.

And After

Dismas and Gestas remain on the peak. Occasionally one of them heads down to hunt for supplies.

The nomad returns every three days, like clockwork.

Notes

I've done most of my writing this year over on Carouse, Carouse, a monthly TTRPG newsletter, rather than this personal blog. It's been creatively invigorating. Check it out!

Drop me a line on bluesky if you connect to this and I'll update the post.

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Somewhere, Somewhere - Thoughts on Pastel Paradise 10 December 2024 Contents

• Contents
• Intro
• What do I look for in a module?
  • Is it easy to use?
  • Can I steal anything?
  • Does it excite me?
• Review: Pastel Paradise
  • Overview
  • Usability
  • Yoinkability
  • Excitability
  • Would I run it?
• Expansion Pack: Somnic Seas
  • Intro
  • 1d6 Ships under false stars
  • 1d6 Islands on wine-dark water
  • 1d6 Sailors on the dreaming sea
  • Adventure Site: Mella Tonnin's Lagoon
• Outro

Intro

It's Secret Santa Covert Critic week over on the Prismatic Wasteland discord!

Inspired by the 2024 Gifts for RPG Designers post from Explorers Design, this event was set up to get people reviewing / supporting each other's work and generally sharing the DIY love this holiday season. My secret santee (covert crittee?) is a module writer who's been publishing on itch since 2021, Robin Fjärem. Hi, Robin!

His work trends towards adventures in the fantasy OSR sphere, writing for the likes of Dragonbane, Knave, and Cairn, but today I'm going to take a look at the lone Troika! piece in his catalog, Pastel Paradise.

From the ad copy:

"Traveling across the spheres can be exhausting. Kick back and relax with a cocktail by the beach in the Pastel Paradise.

This is a vacation sphere for Troika!"

I picked this one to review for a few reasons:

• A breezy science-fantasy setting occupies an interesting place in a catalog otherwise filled with more grounded work, and I'm curious what drew Robin here.
• I've written about beachside resorts before and love the vibe.
• It reminds me of my favorite level from Anodyne 2, Pastel Horizon.

Most importantly I've seen enough elderly couples rediscover their love for each other at the Margaritaville Hotel & Resort that I feel spiritually attuned to this sort of environment. Let's dig in.

What do I look for in a module?

This is the first "review" I've done here so I'm gonna take a sec and talk about how I'm reading this. The most obvious question to answer is "do I actually want to run it?" but really there are a few sub-questions to knock out first.

Is it easy to use?

Not the end-all-be-all but still important. Is the layout sane? Can I run it on-sight or do I need extra prep to make it work? How much text do I have to parse through to figure out how to play an encounter?

Examples:

• High Usability: The Positronic Library by Yochai Gal. Clean, straightforward, text is sparse but still clearly gameable.
• Low Usability: Sailors on the Starless Sea by Harley Stroh. Huge text blocks, lots to parse, insane map. Tight as fuck, but definitely something you'd want to spend time with before running.

---

Can I steal anything?

Any good random tables? Useable monsters, traps, or magic items? Interesting procedures or mechanics? Even if I never actually bring a module to the table, I'm always looking for ideas to pick apart and bring elsewhere. I've never played Blades in the Dark but you know I'm still using its clocks.

Most modules are going to have at least something to rip, but generally, system-neutral content is going to score higher here compared to anything written for games with overpowering tones or settings (Mork Borg, Troika! [spoilers!]).

Examples:

• High Yoinkability: YOU GOT A JOB ON THE GARBAGE BARGE by Amanda Lee Franck. System-neutral, lots of great tables, and ideas that still work even when you take them out of the barge. I get the most mileage out of the random trash/scents, but the shop liability & upgrade tables are great too.
• Low Yoinkability: Sepulchre of the Swamp Witch by Christian Sahlén and Johan Nohr. Most everything here is tied heavily into the theme of the dungeon (druggy cult shit) and hard to separate out. I'd run it as-is any day of the week, but there's not much I'd rip up and use in a different context.

---

Does it excite me?

Most important for me, personally. Any cool ideas or wild art? Is it beautifully written? Is it strange and difficult to grasp? Is it interesting? Often (not always!) this feels at odds with ease of use.

I'm an improv-heavy GM, so I want to dig my teeth into a weird setting and quickly feel comfortable making shit up there. Anything that can get across the tone or feeling of an adventure space is immensely helpful to me!

Examples:

• High Excitability: In Search of a Bio-Battery by Mouse Druid. Killer collage art, winding prose, surreal exploration. In terms of actual content / mechanics I think it kind of sucks lol but the vibes are so good that, when I ran it, I had no issue going off-book for anything I didn't like.
• Low Excitability: The Thwarted Course by Trilemma Adventures. Trilemma makes a lot of solid workhorse dungeons - easy to slot into a campaign, always a great time, but not the kind of stuff that really sets your brain on fire.

Review: Pastel Paradise Overview

The module takes the form of a sphere (miniverse?) in the world of Troika!, set on a slab of water "carried on the backs of two playful dolphins frolicking in the endless cosmos". Unbothered for a long time, at some point a cosmic rift has opened above the Pastel Sea, bringing heaps of commerce and tacky tourism to the sphere. A cosmic spaceport sits beneath the rift to handle the masses, run by corporate regime SEER (Starfish Entertainment Enterprises & Resorts). Don't fret, they're not all bad.

"After many failed enterprises on other spheres they realized the importance of taking care of the ecosystem and native populace. Nobody wants to go vacationing in a barren cesspool after all."

The doc details a few locations of note, ranging from crowded shops (a several-story-tall bazaar built on a scaffolding tower atop a little island) to mysterious remnants (an alabaster ruin hanging over the edge of the sea, waiting to fall to the cosmic dolphins underneath). These are vivid and fun, if minimally fleshed out - most only get a short text box plus a few adventure seeds.

The centerpiece of the module is the Turtle Island Resort, a keyed adventure site on the back of a giant turtle. By day, the waitstaff (who are also turtles??) care for clientele. By night, they shapeshift into bloodthirsty cursed beasts who sacrifice guests to a giant fish.

Past that, there's a few backgrounds (important tone-setters for any Troika module imo), a small bestiary, and some tables to generate random vacationers. Worth noting also is Robin's watercolor art used throughout the document. I adore it all and wish there was more!

---

Usability

RATING: LOW-MEDIUM

The information here is clearly laid out and easy to understand, although you'll probably have to put some prep work in if you go off the suggested path (spaceport -> turtle island). What prevents it from being a firm medium I think is a good strong hook for the resort. The book suggests that players have special tickets from a mysterious benefactor, and the resort text mentions that you can fill out a sticker card at each area for some kind of grand prize, but neither the benefactor nor prize are fleshed out further. The former is easy enough to improvise (my first thought: the turtles are bringing guests in as sacrifices), but come on, at least write a cool prize!!

---

Yoinkability

RATING: MEDIUM

A good selection of stuff to pick apart here - more than I expected from a Troika supplement, tbh. The random tourist tables are fun and easily applicable to my game of choice (Electric Bastionland). The bestiary is mostly tied into the beach setting but has a few generally applicable enemies.

The most rippable stuff IMO is the background set. They're all flavorful, and Troika's surreal enough that realistically you could hand them to players no matter which sphere you're running them through, but (to take another page from Bastionland's book) the best part is how easily you can flip them into NPCs.

Take the diver:

Great visual, weird quirk, clear drive, bam. You can toss in this guy anywhere with water. Yoink!

---

Excitability

RATING: HIGH

Man I don't know what it is about Troika but it really brings out the sauce in folks. A few images I liked and would love to see play out in-game:

• "yoga lessons supervised by a very flexible squid"
• luxury bungalows attached by rope to the Big Turtle so they float on the sea's surface whenever it submerges
• "centipede family that paid several legs for their stay at the resort"
• a psychopomp on vacation because souls stopped coming their way
• sentient coconuts that can magnetize to each other and form strange little golems

Honestly, my favorite part is actually the lightly explained side areas. They lay some good groundwork that I'd happily flesh out on my own.

---

Would I run it?

Yes! I can imagine two scenarios here:

• run a quick one-shot in the heat of summer w/ the Turtle Island Resort scenario. Make up some bullshit for the sticker prize just as an excuse to get people playing.
• elaborate on Spira and Yr a little bit and write up a short adventure connecting the two. Something about navigating from the highest peaks to the lowest depths of the sphere holds a lot of appeal to me.

The latter is more likely, just because I liked that part of the text more. That said, overall impressions: good! Tbh I went in expecting mostly toothless, tacky, coastal Florida pastiche (Robin is Swedish so idk why I thought this), but I think the module succeeds at mixing classic beachy stereotypes with Troika's out-there science fantasy style. Really the biggest surprise to me is that this is the only Troika content in Robin's ouvre - I'd like to see more of it from him!

Expansion Pack: Somnic Seas

Just for fun, I'd like to cap off this review with an ⭐ unofficial expansion ⭐! I've been kicking around an idea like this for a while, and Secret Santa-ing feels like a solid time to try. I could try and fill in the blanks already provided, but instead I'm gonna follow my heart and take things in a dreamier direction.

Intro

Uh oh! Some blacked out tourist jumped into a cosmic dolphin's blowhole. Drunken bullshit's nothing special around here. What is special is that he came back bearing news: there's another world down there!

Jumping down the blowhole takes visitors to an island on a vast burgundy sea under a starless sky. The horizon sits frozen, painted with swaths of crystalline blue streaks. The water flows like silk and smells slightly floral, but it didn't take long to discover an inconvenient quality: anyone who touches it falls asleep instantly.

The locals think it's a dolphin's dream that got out of hand; SEER thinks it's free real estate. They've already set up shop, offering bougie meditation tours and potent psychedelics. Most recently they've erected long lines of string lights across the sea to form constellations of a sort. Tourist ships are allowed in if they get a permit, so long as they follow one simple rule: no wake.

---

1d6 Ships under false stars d6 Vessel 1 The Dark Rum Noir. Run by bartenders here to easily sleep off a hangover. Liquor seeps from the back; drunken fish swim in their wake. 2 The Everything Blue. Hypnagogic academics tie sleeping volunteers to the bow in hopes that they'll dream up a long-forgotten god. 3 The Loblolly Queen. A wave hit them recently, knocking everyone out. Currently driven by an extremely stressed insomniac. 4 The Fester. Anti-dream monks here to resist ultimate temptation. Share perma-wake tinctures if you sit through a condescending lecture on the dangers of sleep. 5 The Billowing Sputum. Ghost ship (real wood, ghost crew). Love to lie to the living about hidden treasure underwater. Drowned spirits are welcomed aboard! 6 The Cackle and Quail. Two living ships deeply in love. Currently arguing about whether letting a tourist ride in them counts as cheating.

---

1d6 Islands on wine-dark water d6 Location 1 Small spit with a giant billboard advertising the Turtle Island Resort. A Corporate Drone from SEER camps here, firing t-shirts at passers-by from a pneumatic cannon (damage as Crossbow). 2 Two rival resort islands locked in a record-breaking tug of war match. Long rope spans the mile between them, ruining any ships that try to pass. 3 Cave shaped like giant stone nostrils rising from the water. Family of six slimy green bats live inside; they harass passing ships, looking for fruit (Skill 3, Stam 4, Init 3, Damage as Small Beast). 4 Empty save for a palm tree, lit fire, and glittering chest. Actually the tongue of a massive underwater organism. Creates a maelstrom when ships come close, attempting to swirl them underwater. 5 Smoke rises over a low-lit bar. From a distance: steel guitar music and low-voiced singing. The performer is a bored siren, paid to lure in customers (test Bad Listener or be compelled to sail closer). 6 A tumorous metal tower belches dark smoke. On approach, a mechnical sharkmersible swims out, piloted by scrappers hoping to strip your ship for parts (Skill 12, Stam 18, Init 5, Armor 3, Damage as Large Beast).

---

1d6 Sailors on the dreaming sea d6 Visitor 1 Alberto Otrebla, cosmarine biologist studying space dolphin dreams. In way too deep. Thinks you're part of the dream and narrates your actions into a recorder Attenborough-style. 2 Gunt, from the Sludge Dimension. Mostly formless. Sleeps in any body of water and infects it with spreading sludge which produces horrific gas. 3 Rowan, young treant. Outcast from his family for not fitting in. Desperate to make you think he's just a normal tree. 4 Speliogabalus, retired literalmancer. Any spoken idioms or turns of phrase become literally true in his presence. Currently trying to get his foot out of his mouth. 5 Lily Flagg, renegade antimaterialist. Whatever you're after, she'll pay you double to destroy it. 6 Djinnan Tonyck, elemental spirit of liquor. Longs for connection. Think you're only talking to it for free booze.

---

Adventure Site: Mella Tonnin's Lagoon

At the far edge of the Somnic Sea: a spiky mass of volcanic rock, entirely uninhabited save for a tower shrine inside a lagoon. Rumblings on the mainland say it's a communion point for the ancient sleep deity Mella Tonnin, not built, but dreamed.

Hook

SEER corporate oracles have divined that the mainland rumblings got it in one - the island is a communion point for Mella, and, even better, her powers still work despite her age. She can dream up anything you ask... if you can get there.

Wasting no time, SEER's hiring everyone they can to sail out to the lagoon and verify the oracles' data (prophecy can be finicky). The party's been tasked by middle manager Bill Hunts to go out and wish him up a golden pleasure yacht. Their payment? A free stay at the Turtle Island Resort, plus access to the yacht on weekdays (pending one week's notice, appropriate paperwork filing, and availability).

Unknown to the oracles: Mella's reserves of power are nearing their end. She may only dream up one more thing before disintegrating. Her remaining servants know this, and have vowed to protect her at all costs.

Running the Lagoon

From the island beneath the blowhole entrance, roll up a ship to take players to the lagoon, two or three islands to cause problems on the way, and an NPC to bother them on the lagoon itself.

Map and Key

1. Pier

• Lonely dock. No ships. Ropes lead from dock ties into the water. Knee-high black shrubs line the path further up the lagoon.
  • The ropes have been cut. Woven threads litter the water nearby.
  • Three Servants of Mella hide in the bushes. If undetected, they sneak onto the boat when the party leaves, kill anyone on board, and send it sailing out to sea (Skill 5, Stam 12, Init 3, Damage as Knife).

2. Occupied Bridge

• Water pools in small craters here. Swaying rope bridge leads to an ominous stone tower. Six anemone-like creatures huddle on the ropes towards the bridge's center, covered in swaying tubes filled with burgundy water.
  • The creatures are Sleepwalkers. Crab body, shell covered in gently swaying tubes (Skill 3, Stam 4).
  • Don't attack, but spray ocean water from their tubes when startled, causing anyone hit to fall asleep.
  • They scare easily, but can be soothed by soft voices or gentle music.

3. Communion

• The top of the tower. Twenty robed figures sleep on the ground, faces peaceful. In the center: a stone bed floats a few feet in the air. Scent of blood. The air hums. Even recently dreamed, this place's history feels tangible.

  • On inspection, the figures (actually Servants of Mella) are only pretending to be asleep.
  • The bed allows communion with Mella if slept on.
  • A hidden trapdoor beneath the bed leads to area 4.

• Communing with Mella:

  • When someone sleeps on the bed, the surrounding Servants rise and attempt to kill them.
  • The sleeping player sees Mella in a starry void. The goddess takes the form of a shifting amalgamation of every person the character (and the person playing them) has ever met.
  • Movement in this dream within a dream is difficult - they may only speak one word per round (or test Lucid Dreaming for more).
  • Mella happily manifests whatever is asked of her despite knowing she will die. "No dream lasts forever." She does make sure to ask the player if they're absolutely sure they want whatever they ask for.

4. Disposal

• Outisde: Back of the tower. An entrance at the base lies hidden by the illusion of a stone wall. It glitters on inspection.
  • The illusion fades in the presence of bright light or ringing bells.
• Inside: dead travelers from myriad spheres. Corpses look fresh.
  • A ladder goes to a hidden trapdoor leading to area 3.
  • A bell hangs from the wall - ring it to dispel the illusion.

5. Empty Bridge

• Long, tense rope bridge leads up to the tower. The rope is fraying on this end, and will clearly snap if too much weight is put upon it.

6. Empty Shore

• Cold, rocky shoreline. No pier. A figure in bright white armor lies reposed, half its body in the dark water. Toothy mouths are inscribed across its surface. The barest hint of a path leads up to area 5.
  • Too shallow to sail here - you'd have to anchor further out and swim, or walk the long way around.
  • The armored figure is hollow. Golden blood leaks from the joints if disturbed, but there's no body inside.
  • If worn, the suit provides Armor 2, but cannot be removed. The Maw, a great beast said to eat entire spheres in one gulp, lays claim to your flesh when you die. It speaks to you when you're wounded, preparing you to enter its gullet.

Outro

Pastel Paradise can be supported on itch.io.

I don't intend to do this kind of thing often, but if you're interested in having me write a review / mini-expansion / both for your work, feel free to toss me a DM on bluesky.

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The Money Tree 29 November 2024 Contents

• Contents
• Intro
• The Money Tree
  • Week 1: The Golden Shoot
  • Week 2: The Coin-Op Blossom
  • Week 3: The Hedge Fund
  • Week 4: The Money Tree
  • Week 5: The Stalk Market
  • Week 6: The Garden Vault

Intro

It's Blog Friday! I wanted to write a hex location that evolves as you spend time away. I made this between entertaining the in-laws over Thanksgiving break, so blame any inconsistencies on the pilgrims.

Also, I occasionally tease new posts over on bluesky, so if you want to see snippets of upcoming stuff, follow me there!

The Money Tree

One day, in a town too small for even a name, a lonely farmer plants some money.

Week 1: The Golden Shoot

Last week, Farmer Hyatt planted his life savings between two rows of okra. Today, the village is aglow with wonder: a golden shoot, tall as a child, has sprung from that spot. How curious! Villagers poke and prod. Yes (Miss Calm says), it feels like gold. Yes (Old Klayton says), it tastes like gold. But how can these newborn leaves unfurl like any other?

Farmer Hyatt never married. He's chuffed about the attention and happily accepts visitors. Why did he plant his savings? "Well, I can't take it with me." He yaps unprompted about his dreams: live burial, every single night, dirt pouring over his face like rain. Something in his body tells him that his flame is fading fast.

Unknown to the village: each midnight, he sleepwalks out to the field. There he lays a gold coin on his tongue, digs a small hole, and places his head inside. He doesn't move until sunrise - by then, the coin is gone.

Interacting with the shoot

Within five feet, all coins in your bag vibrate with a metallic attraction to the stem. Farmer Hyatt jokes that you should plant some too. "A little fertilizer ain't gone hurt."

If you place a coin near the stem, it rattles and crawls towards the base, then slowly melds into it over the course of an hour. Tomorrow, you'll wake to your "payment": different trifles scattered around your pillow. Petals, fur, teeth.

If you bury a coin near the shoot, add the following note somewhere on your character sheet: Angel investor at Hyatt's farm. This has ramifications during Week 6.

Taking the shoot, or attempting to cut it, earns the villagers' ire. You can get ten gold for it at a curiosity shop, but it won't grow anywhere else.

---

Week 2: The Coin-Op Blossom

Last week, a golden plant grew from the spot where Farmer Hyatt planted his savings. Today, it's bloomed. Oblong sacs bulge like pitcher plants beneath the central blossom, a shining disc ringed by paper-thin petals. The locals thought it some kind of sunflower until they looked closer. In the middle of the disc, beneath the florets: a rectangular slot.

Word's spread. The farm's got visitors. Tourists ooh and aah and laugh as they insert coins through the slot and bend their ears to listen. What's that sound? A few rattles (wind chimes?), then nothing. No, not nothing - a light thump as something falls into one of the sacs.

Farmer Hyatt looks tired. His breath smells metallic. Yesterday he tripped and scraped his knee - a visitor, helping him up, offered to pay for a sample of his blood. The experience shook him; he never thought he'd be party to a miracle.

Interacting with the blossom

If you insert a coin into the flower's slot, after a few seconds, an item travels through its stem and pops out inside one of the sacs. You can retrieve it through a hole at the top of each sac. Looks normal, but close inspection reveals it's composed of thin, tightly packed strands, not unlike mycelium.

Input Currency Result 1 Copper A basic ration (meat, bread, cheese, etc.). Edible, but stale. Tastes like dirt. 1 Silver A handheld tool (lockpick, hammer, file, etc.). Heady scent. Lighter than it looks. 1 Gold A human sense organ (tongue, eye, nose, finger, ear). As long as you're touching it, it functions like one of your own. Hold one next to Hyatt's counterpart - they're an exact match. 1 Electrum (or greater value) No immediate effect. Next time you enter a shop, the owner goes cold, shoves the most expensive item available into your hands, and permanently bans you from the premises. If pressed, they get angry. "My debt is paid!"

---

Week 3: The Hedge Fund

Last week, Farmer Hyatt's little golden plant bloomed. Today, it's overtaking the field. The central stalk, thick as two men and tall as three, grows from the center of a shining dome shaped by sinuous limbs. A few sacs still hang beneath the main blossom, but most have elongated, forming supple tubes that disappear into the soil below. Around the dome, sharp thorns up to a foot long poke from the dirt. Some out-of-towners think it's a defense mechanism, but Hyatt disagrees. "They're tongues. They're how it speaks." How can he tell? He shrugs. No-one questions this.

The crowd is dense and loud, jagged edges in an unfamiliar space. The inn's full up, but Hyatt lets folks sleep in the field. Some locals joke that they'll have to name the town soon.

Farmer Hyatt hosts tours by day, vigils by night. He wants eyes on the plant at all times. This golden blessing has already changed so much, it'd be a shame to miss even the smallest detail. When he coughs, a pleasant tinkling sounds from his chest. He used to think his name would die with him. Now, he's not so sure.

Interacting with the hedge

If you place the tip of a thorn in your ear, you will, eventually, hear a word. "Hear" doesn't fully cover it - the feeling is more like a fingernail tracing a picture through the grooves of your brain. For the listener, this transmission takes a few seconds. For anyone watching, it takes an hour. At any given moment, two or three people lie flat, thorn in ear, eyes chasing a shape you cannot see.

• This is a request for an offering. See table below.
  • If you return with an acceptable gift, the central stalk bends down until the disc-shaped blossom is at your level. The rectangular slot widens as necessary to take your offering. After a few seconds, one of the hanging sacs distends as your rewards drops inside.
  • If you try and commune again before fulfilling the request, the thorn spikes up into your ear (take 1d10 damage).

Transmitted Word Possible Offerings "BREAD" Any fresh-baked loaf (must be less than 24 hours old). "TENDER" Any slow-cooked meat. A lover. A romantic letter. "BUCKS" Any adult male deer. "GREEN" Any green object. "PAPER" Any scroll, parchment, or piece of vellum. "SCRATCH" Any lightly wounded living creature. A gouged piece of wood. A weapon.

Your reward is an amount of coinage commensurate with the size of the offering. The currency is visibly printed from the material you gave to the plant. Still, merchants accept it like any other. Under no circumstances will they admit it is anything other than bog-standard coinage.

Offering Size Reward Tiny 1 gold (half the size of normal currency) Small 5 gold (any text is illegible squiggles) Medium 25 gold (your face is printed on the front) Large 125 gold (super dense. double the usual weight) Huge 625 gold (alive. each piece jitters around. they try to escape while you sleep unless sufficiently trapped) Gargantuan 3,125 gold (a single piece the size of a house, stamped with its worth. the sac bursts long before the piece has fully emerged) Week 4: The Money Tree

Last week, the golden plant at Hyatt's farm grew into a wide hedge. Today, it's become a tree. "Is it a tree without wood?" asks Old Klayton, but nobody cares about the locals anymore. A pillar of gold, ten feet in diameter and thirty high, towers over the field. Long branches bear hanging sacs; wobbly tubes dive from the crown to the ground. Shining thorns sprout every few feet throughout the farm - those closest to the tree are occupied by Hyatt's listeners, ready to document whatever task the plant throws out. And always, the massive disc at the top of the tree waves and waves.

Every hour, little cysts form on the underside of the disc. These quickly burst, showering the ground below with coins. Or are they fruit? Either way, the now-constant crowd scrambles for the free cash. Somehow, the braying masses always set aside a pile for Hyatt - "the planter's portion," they call it. Despite the blessing, the crowd is uneasy. Whispers on the wind say the farm will be attacked soon; it seems word has spread too far. The people look to Hyatt for guidance.

Hyatt no longer farms. "Haven't felt the need." In fact, he hasn't entered his home in days. There's simply too much to do. He stands now in unwashed bedclothes, eyes bloodshot, directing a small cadre of dedicated followers. He has only listened to the thorns a single time, in secret, and he's told no one what he heard. One thing is for sure: he will do anything to protect his plant.

Interacting with the tree

At the top of the hour, the tree drops a pile of exactly one hundred gold coins on the ground below. Without a dedicated plan, assume each party member can reasonably fight through the crowd for 1d2 coins / hour.

If they talk to Hyatt, he asks for help protecting the farm. An attack's coming soon. People want to claim the tree for themselves, or worse. In return, he offers his entire collected portion worth 500 gold ("ain't no use to me"), plus a reward: two golden eyeballs, which, if placed in your head, highlight any gold piece in sight range, even through walls.

• The party has until the end of the week to prepare for the attack.
• Assume enough people are coming for there to be a real problem. Something like a detachment from Electric Bastionland.
• The eyes are his own. He plucks them painlessly from his own head once the attack is repelled. "Don't need 'em where I'm going."

Who's attacking the farm this week? Attacker Description 1 The Bailout Boys Meathead ex-prisoners wielding clubs and hammers. Need the money tree to survive because nobody will hire them. "We're too big to fail!" 2 Goldman Mysterious crime lord said to be made of solid gold. Hired a bunch of mercenaries to destroy the tree because this world isn't big enough for two golden miracles. 3 Boatless Naval Platoon of Paribas Shipmen in full regalia toting cannonballs and long spears. As the name says, they're boatless. They'd like to buy a boat. The money tree will help. Simple as. 4 Barclay and Bailey Zookeepers coming in with an array of large, dangerous animals (elephants, owlbears, gryphons, etc.). Believe that if they feed the tree's fruit to their animals, they will give birth to golden offspring. 5 Banco Santander Extremely wealthy noble using his connections to borrow the royal army for a while. Believes the tree will look great as the centerpiece of his garden. Deeply annoyed that his bribes haven't worked on Hyatt so far. 6 Wells' Far-go Wells is a taciturn mad genius. His "far-go" is a giant trebuchet able to launch projectiles from an insane distance. Just wants to destroy the tree for notoriety.

---

Week 5: The Stalk Market

Last week, Hyatt's little golden plant grew into a tree, and a group of outsiders tried to claim it for themselves. Today, it's become a forest. What once were thorns protruding from the dirt have erupted into tall, swaying stalks, overtaking the field with gold tubes. Listeners hang from the thorns at the top of each with cloudy eyes, communing with the market. Each of these stalks has a hole cut at head height, too smooth to be an imperfection. Above it all, the money tree towers, dropping cash to the patient crowd.

The stalks are thick enough that they impede movement heavily. Anyone making the pilgrimage to the tree must navigate a golden labyrinth. For most of the earlier crowds, the inconvenience has outweighed the results, so the area around the center now holds maybe thirty of Hyatt's most devoted. They collect all dropped cash with a zealot's fervor. Nobody leaves the field to spend it. Why would they, when the market is at their feet?

Hyatt threw up blood the other day. He sees gold when he closes his eyes. His followers hardly bear him any mind as he lays collapsed beneath the central stalk. No need for speeches, no need for work - the market hums around him unguided. In his dreams, he is being lowered into the rectangular slot still at the uppermost part of the tree. He thinks: was this life so bad?

Interacting with the market

If you place any money into one of the holes in the stalks and speak the name of an object, the hole widens to spit out your purchase.

• Your purchase is affected by how much money you put in (see below)
• The item comes up the tube from below. Dirt rumbles; the tube bulges to accomodate the purchase like a freshly fed snake.

How does the market accomodate your purchase? Input Gold Result < 1 The requested object drawn on a piece of parchment in sticky yellow ink (it's honey) 1 - 99 A handheld copy of the requested object composed of tiny fungal strands. 100 - 999 A life-size copy of the requested object composed of tiny fungal strands. 1,000 - 9,999 A life-sized copy of the requested object composed of normal, expected materials. > 10,000 gold The requested object, composed of normal materials. If the object is unique, it disappears from its original location, replaced by a bouquet of golden flowers and a note reading "IOU".

---

Week 6: The Garden Vault

Last week, waving stalks grew throughout Hyatt's field. Today, the farm is gone. A shining golden dome covers the entire space. Looking close at the walls shows that they're composed of last week's stalks, now curled and woven in on each other. If you place your ear to the dome, you can still hear the tinkling of money falling from the tree. There is no entrance.

The only remaining sign of the original sprout is at the top of the vault, where the shining disc-shaped blossom still pokes through. The rectangular slot at its center occasionally spits out a belch of warm, musty air.

Not many people around these days. A few ladders from curious wanderers lead to the top of the dome. Life in the village has, more or less, returned to normal.

Interacting with the vault

If you throw anything into the slot at the top, your character accrues that object's worth. Keep track of the retail value of everything you donate. When your character dies, their corpse may be treated as a unit of currency worth that total value. The corpse may be donated to the slot to stack that value onto another character, as well.

If any party members are angel investors, an opening appears in the vault on approach. From it totters Hyatt, moving stiffly, unable to bend his knees and elbows. His eyes have been replaced by solid gold coins. Something under his skin rattles when he walks. His smile never leaves his face.

• Hyatt follows the party freely and can obey simple orders, but cannot speak or otherwise communicate.
• At any time, Hyatt may be commanded to spend points of HP to cough up gold coins at a 1:1 rate. He recovers HP as any other creature.
• If Hyatt dies, his body shatters, leaving exactly 206 gold coins behind.

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1d6 Vampiric Backgrounds 26 October 2024 Contents

• Contents
• Intro
• Backgrounds
  • Classic Drac
  • Oneiroi
  • Heartworm
  • Lorehound
  • Chair Vampire
  • Ourovore
• Notes

Intro

Happy vampire weekend!

It's been hard for me to get back into my depthcrawl series this month, so I'm taking a little more time away and making some vampire-styled backgrounds for Cairn. I've never written backgrounds for a Mark of the Odd game before despite my love for them, but Yochai has some good advice for it on the Cairn website.

For what it's worth there are only three real qualities that make something a "vampire" in my eyes:

• they feed by removing something critical from the world
• they're created, not born
• they're various shades of weird little freak

I hope to explore all of these with the following backgrounds. Let's get into it.

Backgrounds d6 Background 1 Classic Drac 2 Oneiroi 3 Heartworm 4 Lorehouhd 5 Chair Vampire 6 Ourovore Classic Drac

Everyone loves vanilla, baby. You've got all the hits: fangs, bad hair, thirst for blood.

Sadly garlic's a death sentence and you'll never see the sun again. Hope it was worth it!

Names

Vlad, Edward, Carmilla, Angel, Olrox, Elizabeth, Lestat, Damien, Bella, Sterling

Starting Gear

Special: you only gain nourishment from blood. Human's best. When harvesting non-human blood, halve the resulting rations.

• 3d6 gold
• [Ration] Blood bags (3, travel-sized)
• Nightvision
• Conspicuous cape (petty)
• Rapier (1d8)
• Silver locket (insides faded)

What were you before? d6 Previous Life 1 Dracula Killer. Life's a bitch. Start with a grisly dracula head (terrifying to other vamps) and a complicated relationship with your old crew. 2 Nothing. Your scion pitied you. Even now they watch from a distance. If you look hungry they'll kidnap a peasant to stealthily leave in your tent. 3 Royal. Not that it matters since your exile. You turned your scheming vizier before you left and he refuses to find a new job. He gathers information and rumors as long as you keep him fed. 4 Tinkerer. Did you turn out of curiosity? You've got a pocketful of nuts and bolts and your latest creation: a blackout box (bulky) so your friends can wheel you around while the sun's out. 5 Psychologist. Feverishly studied placebos. Here's the result: you get nourishment from eating anything red, not just blood. The mind's a mysterious thing! 6 Farmer. Born with a crimson thumb. Plant any corpse in fertile ground to produce a blood orange bush after a week. What's your dracula power?

Everybody gets one.

d6 Power Effect 1 Bat Mode Turn into a bat. Gain all the strengths and weaknesses of a bat. Going big to small is easy; turning back costs one fatigue. 2 Charm Person Spend an hour in prolonged eye contact with a human and they'll become your thrall. Limit one at a time; taking a new thrall releases the old one. 3 Innate Healing As long as you're fed, at least. Recover 1d6 STR at the cost of becoming deprived. 4 Telepathy Yes, you can read minds. No, you can't turn it off. Save WIL to enter a crowded area without freaking out. 5 Longevity You've been around a while. When you enter a new area, ask the Warden what this place looked like a hundred years ago. You were there, or at least heard stories. 6 Bloodhound You can always follow spilt blood to its source, no matter how old.

---

Oneiroi

O, blessed sleeper. Your kind feasts on the dreams of your bedfellows, storing them in thick sacks along your lymph nodes.

Most oneiroi wed early and treat their lovers to years of empty-headed rest.

Names

Sybil, Ari, Mica, Joan, Yume, Ash, Sven, Lune, Vox, Dawn

Starting Gear

Special: you gain nourishment from dreams. When sleeping in a shared bed, you may drain 1d4 dreams from the other sleeper to store as rations.

• 1d6 Gold
• [Ration] Three stored dreams (a tapestry, a nightmare, a memory)
• Bedtime candle (1 use. Nothing may disturb your rest while it's lit.)
• Spellbook: Sudden Slumber (Target sleeps for 1d4 hours. Fades away on use. Roll a die of fate each night's rest to find a new copy in your dreams.)
• Smelling salts (3 uses)
• Gossamer robe (petty)
• Un-Knife (1d6, damages WIL)

Who is your lover? d6 Lover 1 A Guardian. Create a new character as a Hexenbane. They broke their vow for you and they'd do it again. You cannot act in combat - they fight in your stead. 2 A Merchant. Refuses to wade into danger. Can haggle an extra 1d6 gold out of whatever you give them to sell. Requires 50 gold in profit a month to make this worth their while. 3 Haunted. They can't sleep without you. Dream-rations you gain from them are fragile and explode in a nightmarish blast when thrown (1d6 blast, damages WIL). 4 Elsewhere. Through monklike ritual they have entered a state of eternal sleep. Must be carried everywhere. Gain double rations each night you sleep near them. 5 Dead. They slept often towards the end. Add +20 starting gold, ten extra dream-rations, and the deed to a mansion within a deep forest. 6 Imaginary. Remove your starting rations and start deprived. While you sleep, a sapphire being of pure love crawls from your tear ducts to defend you (10 HP, 10 STR, weeping claws 1d10+1d10). What did you pull from a dream on the night you turned? d6 Item Effect 1 Mantis Toy (bone) Tell her the name of a married man and set her free. He'll be dead by morning. 1 charge. Recharge: kill your lover. 2 Rose-tinted Compass Always points to the nearest sleeping creature. 3 Oracular Deck Spend a ration (all uses) to read the fate of whoever dreamed it. You and the Warden both secretly pick one word. Roll a die of fate to determine whose word impacts that character's future. 4 A Song About The Moon Perform for an hour and the sun will set. The more you sing, the more you forget (3 uses). When it's gone, the moon will sing it back - gain a use each full moon. 5 Inner Light Dim, dark gold, like a nightlight, emits from your pores. Offers visibility in feet equal to half your current STR. Can't be turned off. 6 Primordial Fear When sleeping near another, instead of feeding, you may choose to overrun their mind with fear. This renders them permanently insensate.

---

Heartworm

Our bodies are small in this great world. We contain so much. Sometimes we burst.

Your kind was made to stop that. Come now, pierce our hearts and take the chaos away.

Names

Attacus, Kaira, Rhyssa, Andria, Carabus, Calico, Petrius, Vanessa, Xenic, June

Starting Gear

Special: you are nourished by emotions. You feed by extending an ephemeral proboscis from your tonsils through the heart of a living creature. They aren't harmed, but their emotions are drained. Stored rations live in cysts along your tongue.

• 1d6 gold
• [Ration] Three stored emotions (love, anger, guilt)
• Stolen mage's lantern (always shines red)
• Long cigarette holder and three rolled smokes
• Diary (most recent pages ripped out. Info can go towards any milestone, 3 uses)
• Black boots (daggers hidden in the toes, 1d6+1d6)
• Recently-torn cloak (petty)

Who were you tending when the town ran you out? d6 Client 1 A priest. He took their guilt. You took his. Gain a church secret that can blackmail any member of a religious order (1 use). 2 A wealthy husband. "No lust for any woman but my wife!" She found out anyway. Gain a discarded wedding ring - unhappy spouses always lend you an ear while you hold it. 3 A surgeon. Tricky case - you took his ennui. His success rate rose, you hear. Take bloodstained white gloves; the red will never wash out. 4 A gravedigger. You took nothing. He wanted to talk. Gain a coffin locket, thumb-sized. Place something inside and seal it forever - the world will forget it ever existed. 5 A spirit. This one's hard to wrangle. Take an extra ration (a remnant). When you kiss someone, you may spend the ration to have the remnant possess them until the next sunrise. 6 Yourself. An interesting experiment. When feeding, you can reverse the connection and pipe your own emotions into the target instead. What emotion have you held for so long it's melded with your body? d6 Emotion Effect 1 A dying man's regret No matter your actual appearance, strangers always view you as a decrepit elder on the verge of death. The effect fades as they get to know you. 2 A pious man's vanity Anything you write, draw, or otherwise create is intuitively understood by the viewer to be about themselves, no matter the intent. 3 A wise man's fear Your tongue can morph into the shape of that man's head. He's a negotiator of some renown and a fierce advocate for peace. 1 charge. Recharge: start a pointless fight. 4 A weak man's obsession Ask the Warden to name a character you've never met: each night, they dream of you without knowing why. If / when they die, repeat this. 5 A small man's wrath All attacks where you are truly, justifiably angry are enhanced. The rest are impaired. Abusing this should have consequences (saves to avoid going berserk, etc.) 6 A tired man's love Take three amateurish figurines carved from your flesh. Anyone you give them to will treasure the gift to their grave.

---

Lorehound

An unfortunate truth: for you to live, stories must die. Your kind slinks around bars and campfires, eating tall tales and histories alike until you're booted to the outskirts. Your scion turned you not from pride or obligation but desperation - they needed a safe partner to swap yarns with. And now they're gone.

Names

Artur, Owen, Velma, Dewey, Cassandra, Bellum, Margaret, Frost, Alex, Crow

Starting Package

Special: you are nourished by spoken stories. They vibrate through a baleen filter in your throat and encode themselves in Braille-like bumps along the chest until absorbed. Any stories you eat are forgotten immediately by the teller and all other listeners - they're left with the taste of your name burning against their tongues.

• 2d6 gold
• [Ration] Three encoded stories (an epic, a fable, a warning)
• Torch wrapped with dusty parchment
• Dirty spectacles
• Gnarled spear (1d8, scratched)
• Shitty hooch and a pair of small cups

What happened to your scion? d6 Separation 1 Killed by a mob after eating a friend's noose-side confession. Take a dagger wound in your back that won't heal - it can eat evidence of any crimes you commit. 2 Starved themself after eating a man's last memory of his child. Take a gravestone (bulky). Plant it, dig a hole, and sleep inside - in your dreams you can speak with everyone you've ever lost. 3 Left you. "No more." Take 12 additional gold and written directions to a reclusive settlement. You are to eat all knowledge of their founder: succeed for 1000 more gold; take too long and the impatient client will sic bounty hunters on you. 4 Died in a bar fight. Stupid. Take haunting sobriety - alcohol makes you throw up; any drink you pour loses its ABV. 5 Disappeared. You woke with a story you don't remember eating. Gain an additional ration (a nonsense). Eating it blurs your face body and makes your name slip from the world - you are unrecognizable for an hour. 6 Stored too many stories and become a gobbledygook, half mindless, unable to speak outside of words they've encoded. Take a horrific phrase: speak it to deal 1d6 blast to all who hear (including you). How do you protect yourself now that you're alone? d6 Remnant Effect 1 Dried Sunflower Charm Petals grow in the presence of one who loves you and wither around one who hates you. 2 Tattletale's Inkwell Writing a lie with this ink painfully inscribes the words on the author's forehead after a minute. 3 An Atom of Divinity Modify one letter anywhere on your character sheet. 3 charges. Recharge: blind yourself in one eye. 4 Spellbook: Read Mind (modified) Target makes a WIL save. On failure, they speak all their thoughts aloud without realizing it. On success, the effect applies to you instead. 5 someone else's knife Replaces your index finger. Carve someone else's face off and place it on your own to merge with it, reshaping your body to match the original owner. 1 charge. Recharge: gained automatically each winter solstice. 6 Malignant Visage A terrifying face growing from the back of your head. Anyone chasing you must pass a WIL save or panic. Loves to speak at inopportune times.

---

Chair Vampire

The boys back in the lab are still sussing you out, but one thing's for sure: you eat chairs.

Your teeth twist like corkscrews and grind through wood with a noise that shakes the skull.

Names

Barber, Chase, Stu, Addy, Field, Rock, Arma, Wick, Parson, Lona

Starting Package

Special: you only gain nourishment from chairs (any size).

• 3d6 gold
• [Ration] Three hand-sized chair carvings
• Torch (wooden chair leg doused in tar)
• Whittling set (small carving knives, whetstone)
• Club (giant armrest ripped from a throne; 1d8, bulky, attacks against royalty are enhanced)
• Apron (petty, covered in sawdust)

When you eat a chair, what part of it do you consume? d6 Portion 1 The entire thing. The way you unhinge your jaw is disgusting. Gain an additional inventory slot representing your stomach: it stores chairs (1 at a time). You can regurgitate the stored object at will or digest as a ration. 2 Its seatability. Looks the same, but anyone sitting on a chair you've fed from slips and slides right off. 3 Its identity. When you're through, the object remains the same, but nobody recognizes it as a chair. 4 Its shape. The material twists and groans into... something else. You describe the new shape (anything other than a chair). 5 Its stillness. The chair animates into a conscious being, ready to live its own life. Unfortunately you only eat dead chairs. Be free, little one. 6 Its corporeality. An image of the chair remains exactly as it was, but flesh passes through it like cold water. Bad for you, good for ghosts. What simple wooden carving have you carried since childhood? d6 Gift Effect 1 Shackle of Return Wooden handcuffs. When both ends clasp around a wrist, the wearer(s) will lose their physicality and slip through the ground, falling to Hell. One end is already locked to you. You don't have a key. 2 Cosmic Map Circular and incomprehensible. Bury it six feet deep and say a prayer to the stars. In a month, a meteor will crash there and wipe out the entire hex. 3 A Little You As you were at age 6. You didn't carve it. You don't know who did. When (and only when) you're truly alone, it whispers the names of everyone who's lied to you since your last chat. 4 Old Redwood's Heart Replaced your original. Given time to plant your feet in good soil, you cannot be moved or harmed by anything short of a hurricane. 5 Hired Man's Clogs Caked in dirt, always warm. Wear them and let your feet take over - they'll walk you to the nearest home that'll house and feed you, whether you know the owners or not. 6 The Face of Your Mother In its mouth is another carving: the face of your grandmother. In her mouth, your great-grandmother, and so on. Spend a charge and the Warden will offer true, genuine advice on overcoming a tough situation alongside a condescending comment about your body. 3 charges. Recharge: Remember one of those comments and repeat it to someone you love.

---

Ourovore

There's a mouth below your nose, a mouth behind your neck, and miles inbetween.

In with the old, out with the new. Forever.

Names

Cleo, Garter, Adder, Anna, Vi, Harley, Lora, Pythia, Rat, Winder

Starting Package

Special: you gain nourishment by eating yourself. A new, different body emerges from your neck-mouth, wet and soft like fresh birth. The process takes a full Watch. -1 STR each day you go without molting.

• 2d6 gold
• Two former eyes that shine bright in the dark.
• A shapeless robe (petty)
• Thick wool scarf (5 ft. long)
• Hammer and chisel (1d6+1d4)
• Salt and pepper sachets (3 uses. It helps.)

Where were you the first time you molted? d6 Location 1 Your wedding. You felt you didn't deserve love, so you made a new you. Take a Faithless Ring, one half of a pair. You can twist it to clairvoyantly spy on its mate, which currently belongs to a distant spouse who wouldn't recognize you. 2 A riot. You were acquitted. They didn't like it. Take an Incendiary Pitchfork (1d8, bulky, Critical Damage: target is frenzied and attacks one ally before collapsing) 3 Alone, beneath a willow tree. You wished to be someone else and that was that. Take a Willow Veil: Whoever parts it sees the face of their lover, no matter the wearer. 4 A blizzard. You did what you had to. Take some Molten Pills which ward off cold for a day and cure frostbite (3 uses). 5 Underground. You don't know how long. Take a Passenger Fungus growing from your right ear. Whoever eats it becomes permanently attuned to you. You share all damage and can read each other's thoughts and emotions from any distance. 6 At sea. You still feel connected. When you molt, you can choose to replace your legs with a mermaid's tail or vice versa. Which part of your original body remains the same with each molt? d6 Holdout Effect 1 Your Lungs You know a Hymn to a Dying God. Hum it to grant her one more breath, violently sucking up all the air in the current room through your neck-mouth. 3 charges. Recharge: On taking Critical Damage, describe what she whispers to you on the edge of death. 2 Your Eyes You can pop your eyes out at will and still see through them. 3 Your Tattoos Pick a spellbook from the core list. Its contents are tattooed on your skin and usable by anyone who can read you. The first time you would take a Scar, the tats are ruined instead. 4 Your Illness Transmitted by biting - a rot, swelling from the point of contact, slowly dissolving everything beneath the skin. You can reset its progress by molting; other afflicted will be dead in a year. Still, one inventory slot is permanently fatigued. 5 Your Voice Any time you hear a noise, you may store it in your inventory (each in a separate slot). Spend a stored noise to replay it through your neck-mouth exactly as heard. 6 Your Conjoined Twin They live on your belly, fast asleep since you both left the womb. When you die, they'll wake with all your abilites and a burning desire to avenge you: set their saves to (20 minus your current stats) and reroll on this table for a new effect. Notes

Heartworm's coffin locket was ripped from the Gravedigger from Triangle Agency.

Art sourced from public.work except for the still from Dracula Flow

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Worm Jam, pt 3 - Torches Gutter 21 September 2024

Note: this is part of a series on writing for the His Majesty the Worm Game Jam. Check out the intro here and the previous post here!

Contents

• Contents
• Intro
• Keying Round 2
  • A reason to explore
  • A reason to flee
  • A reason to talk
  • A reason to fight
  • A reason to breathe easy
  • A reason to experiment
  • A reason to be surprised
  • A reason to return
  • The Meatgrinder Table
• What's Next?

Intro

Finishing out the groundwork of this adventure before I start the horrific ritual of consolidating everything into a PDF. No point wasting time, let's get into it! We're running back the same keying advice as last post. This time around I'll be exploring the fiery wooden keep of the Punctured Dove.

Keying Round 2 A reason to explore

Last time for this section I wrote the entrance for the dungeon and hinted at the treasure on the moon, so I might as well go ahead and define that.

• The surface of the moon. Something beneath your feet thrums like a giant's heartbeat. The world is cold and silver.

• At the north pole: a masquerade frozen in time. Mercury statues form a dense crowd, dancing in angular, garish poses; they quiver on approach. The state of a woman stands at the exact center, face blurred beneath a rose-gold mask. Her arms curve around thin air as if draped across a partner, but she dances alone.

  • She bears The Mask of the Traitor Rose. On looking another in the eye, its wearer hears a sly voice whisper advice for winning the target's love and affection.
  • Valuable to your average peasant, exceptionally valuable to any lovesick City faction members.

---

A reason to flee

Already did a dragon, so I'm not doing that one again. I'm eyeballing the Lighting section of my seed again with those six burning towers, plus the burning arrows seen in the Structures section. I like the idea of an impenetrable wall of arrows.

• A vast, blackened expanse leading to the Dove's keep. Endlessly burning arrows smother the field; a keen eye may spot bodies beneath the flames, flesh and bones melting to slag. There is no snow. Six ashen pinewood towers stand imposing along the keep's walls, dripping with cinder.

• An archer stands at each tower, sworn to protect the front gate. Approaching the keep via this path provokes the following reactions, in order:

  • a warning shot landing directly in front of the target.
  • six warning shots landing in a rough circle around the target.
  • a spiraling torrent of arrows, fired alternating from each tower such that there is no break in the stream. They blanket the field - all within must test Pentacles or die.

• The archers are useless in melee and, in fact, cannot turn their heads from the field. Their vows forbid it.

---

A reason to talk

Last time I fleshed out the factions, but the lovers definitely have servants, right? Or at least something living within their keep. The Moon probably has little glass homunculi built for specific purposes, but who's hanging out in the Dove's keep? I keep coming back to the flames around her as eternal. I like the idea of servants whose job is not to create new fire but just move the existing flames from place to place and freshen up the decor.

• Firetenders! Stooped, bony hags, coughing under asbestos robes - the keep's artists-in-residence. Their tools: long, enchanted paintbrushes that can whip up flame like cotton candy and spread it across any surface. Once they were loyal to the Dove, but time and boredom have flattened them out.
  • Likes: new ideas, new experiences, flamepainting, discussing art, discussing their art, have you seen my latest piece? oh, dearie, it's right this way, you'll love it!
  • Dislikes: stillness, stagnation, their lady's relationship drama

---

A reason to fight

I haven't really utilized those burned-out husks from the Common Monsters seed yet. Now seems like the time for it! The Dove's core idea involves holding onto her anger, so I'll weave that in as well.

• When life is extinguished, hate fills the gaps. Those who die inside the Keep's walls are warped into husks, crumbling wooden effigies animated solely by the Dove's white-hot, overflowing anger.
  • Not quite mindless: they always target the happiest or kindest party member, if possible.
  • On defeat, the flames within erupt into small, jittery wisps. These rejoin the keep's ambient fire, waiting for their next vessel.

---

A reason to breathe easy

Gonna pull in the Interesting Rooms section from last post.

• The library. How solemn. Muted sound, dim heat, low flame, cinders. Char covers each shelf in thick layers, but the books, of course, are pristine. Sometimes a lick of fire snakes toward the stacks, close enough to taste, before recoiling like a spooked cat and retreating.

  • The books are, by and large, embarassingly intimate poetry. They're so amateurish you almost want to cry. Who published this stuff?

• Catatonic Mementos litter the space, draped across seats, shelves, and the floor. Each holds a book close to their face.

  • Every so often one wanders in and stumbles drooling to the shelves, drawn by some primal instinct, only to find they are universally born illiterate. They scratch and tear at the pages, hunting for answers, but it's all just useless words. Time breaks them all, eventually.
  • They don't respond to any stimulus. The hiss of their collective breath rides the line between comforting and creepy.

---

A reason to experiment

This one came to me in a vision while I was at the gym and I had to write it down in my notes app so I'm gonna try and capture that energy here lol

• The Dove tries desperately to force the past down and keep it contained, manageable, like a pet of sorts. Still, the earth overflows. Here in the gardens, memories bulge from the dirt and float lazily in large, glassy bubbles. Silhouettes within dance and mix like oil on canvas. Distant laughter haunts the space.

  • Touching a memory absorbs it through the skin with a sound like slurping oysters. The price: a memory of your own is shunted out to replace it in the bubble. This process cannot be reversed - your cast-off memories refuse to return.
  • The absorbing player describes both the incoming and outgoing memories. The new one fits snugly among the rest, but itches slightly at the back of the head.
  • One may only absorb three memories before their foundation crumbles. On taking a fourth, cross out your character's name and replace it with "The Punctured Dove." Whoever you were is lost.

• A lonely firetender hangs around on retainer to smash the bubbles. She can't reach the floaters by the ceiling and so contents herself playing whack-a-mole with new ones as they're born.

---

A reason to be surprised

I think now that I've created a big obvious obstacle for entering the keep, I should add a side door with some kind of secret / puzzly method of entry.

• A massive face grown from the keep's pinewood walls. Its features twist spitefully; flaming spirals tattoo its skin.
  • An aura of anger emits from the face. While standing nearby, guild members feel a tug to snap and fight with their party members.
  • As long as truly mean words are spoken in its presence, the vines of the face's mouth curl open, allowing entry to the keep.

---

A reason to return

Last time in this slot I detailed the Super Special Secret Object that'll pacify the Weeping Moon. This time I'll do the same for the Dove. I'm thinking since the Moon's lung is in a different dungeon level entirely, I'll make this one a little more obvious and accessible.

• The Dove's anger is full-bodied, nurtured over years and years of rotting on her throne, and yet it all hangs on a single keystone - her tongue, bitten off by the Moon during their final kiss. She seethes now in her impotence, full of insults that she cannot speak. Return the tongue and her decades of venom will spill out in one long, violent tirade, until the flames are gone and there's nothing left to say.
  • The tongue is safe nearby, pierced through the left eye of Saint Etienne, former friend of the lovers and leader of the Mending Division. Removing it at this point would kill him, but he's happy to do so if the guild can manage this: find the Moon's lung, and promise to return it at the same time as the Dove's tongue.

---

The Meatgrinder Table

This is one of the game's most interesting innovations imo - a twenty-one entry random table that covers everything from rumors, lost light, encounters, and flavor. The first five entries are supposed to be torches guttering, taxing the guild's visibility, but frankly I don't think this part of the megadungeon is dimly lit. In this case the book suggests replacing it with hunger entries, which sounds solid to me. Unfortunately I've already titled this post after the torches thing because it's a phrase that sounds nice. C'est la vie!

Having two keeps with very different vibes on the same encounter table feels a little weird, so I'll do my best to ensure the results can be reasonably applied regardless of location.

Card Meatgrinder Event I Hunger strikes (everyone consume a ration) II Hunger strikes III Hunger strikes IV Hunger strikes V Hunger strikes VI [Curiosity] The smell of burnt flesh. Charred scraps wriggle towards the living. VII [Curiosity] A teeny glass beetle filled with a teardrop of bright blue liquid. It seems scared. VIII [Curiosity] A hymn on the wind. The singers' voices are ragged and torn. IX [Curiosity] There's a messenger on the ground, dead, wrapped in postal blues. Their letter is gone - they hold only ash. X [Curiosity] The moon above rotates suddenly, shifting the light to a different hue. XI [Travel event] A quicksilver statue of a man doubled over, as if coughing. Looking at it amplifies your current emotion to dangerous levels. How does the guild calm themselves? Anyone without a good idea is stressed. XII [Travel event] What looks like a nobleman's corpse is, on closer inspection, a wooden dummy. Touching it triggers the hidden bear trap underneath. XIII [Travel event] Gnarled black vines with long, angry thorns emerge abruptly from the ground, surrounding the adventurers. Kindness withers them. XIV [Travel event] A noxious blue gas emits from a crack. All nearby metal is rusted. The gas notches any armor passing through. XV [Travel event] The moon above begins weeping. Giant mercurial tears hurtle down. If not under cover, test Pentacles - getting hit spoils all your rations. XVI [Random encounter] Two Mementos, one of each lover, ripping each other apart, blindly crashing about the room in their furor. XVII [Random encounter] Three members of the Mending Division on a ritual hunt for the Weeping Moon's lung. They know it's not here, but "the joy is in the seeking". XVIII [Random encounter] A group of [discard] glass-bodied nobles deep in experimental fervor. All they need is a little blood and it'll allllll come together (take 1 wound and they'll leave without issue). XIX [Random encounter] [Adventurers - 1] cackling firetenders, spreading flame in an inconvenient spot just for shiggles. XX [Random encounter] [Adventurers] husks dancing around an unexpected flower. Their pinky fingers twist and bind like a rat king's tails. XXI [Quest Rumor] A clue for the next step of the guild's quest, delivered in context of the dungeon. What's Next?

The herculean task of actually finishing this shit out. I've got a week to do it which seems manageable. My plan is to whip up a quick map with Dungeon Scrawl, put together some cover art with some basic public domain stuff, and throwing it all together using the free creator's kit. After that, my next post should ideally be a return to my depthcrawl design series, which I'm itching to work on. Wish me luck, and take care!

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Worm Jam, pt 2 - Crime of Passion 15 September 2024

Note: this is part of a series on writing for the His Majesty the Worm Game Jam. Check out the intro post here!

Contents

• Contents
• Intro
• Keying the Dungeon
  • Recap
  • Core Thoughts
  • A reason to explore
  • A reason to flee
  • A reason to talk
  • A reason to fight
  • A reason to breathe easy
  • A reason to experiment
  • A reason to be surprised
  • A reason to return
  • Interesting Rooms
• What's Next?

Intro

Following on my last post, I'm going to start keying my dungeon using advice from the free underworld creation document. I took a break from writing to navigate a pretty busy month, so I haven't thought about this as intentionally as I'd hoped. Still, coming back and re-reading my first post, I remain happy with what the cards gave me, so the keying process shouldn't be so bad. Let's get into it.

Keying the Dungeon

I'm gonna focus on baseline ideas for right now and fiddle with tying in mechanics later!

Recap

Here's our seed from last time:

Sight:

Soft white hills. An icy river between two moons: one above, one reflected. Small lumps line the footpath - frozen messengers with cracked blue lips. Each holds a letter bearing the seal of a forgotten crown. Unseen counsel. They will not be buried.

Sounds:

Torn, ragged voices singing hymns with little talent - this is a soldier's chorus. Water trickling, drinks clinking. Solemn camaraderie muted by snow.

Smell and Taste:

From the north: ash, overcooked meat, burnt hair. From the south: astringent taste, like vinegar or spoilt wine. In the center: cider and spices, stone soup, warm breath.

Lighting:

To the south a translucent lighthouse stands proud. Dark blue fuel pumps through to keep the flame bright. Its counterpart up north: six soot-black pinewood towers dotted with cinders. The stubborn glows inside refuse to die. Cold stars blink up high, uncaring.

Structures:

Arrows coated in eternal flame stick from the snow. At their edges, thin wafers of ice continually melt and reform. The soldiers use these to build wobbling crystalline shacks. Fragile, but keeps the cold out.

Common Monsters:

Soldiers of Moon and Dove, bitter love phantasms, vengeful messengers, burned-out husks, endless flame wisps, fragile glass constructs, lighthouse tenders

Dungeon Lord(s):

The Weeping Moon & The Punctured Dove

---

Core Thoughts

So, we've got two (ex-)lovers stewing on their thrones from opposite ends of a battlefield. How do we deal with them? My lazy idea: each lover has some precious object that must be returned to them to end their hatred, BUT both objects ideally have to be given at the same time. Otherwise one will overpower the other and lead to a Bad End.

Character outlines:

• The Moon is an alchemist with a focus on glass, strange lifeblood, and warped creations
• The Dove is a witch with a focus on wood, fire, and anger.

---

A reason to explore

The straightforward first thought here is that there's some kind of great treasure or boon that can only be retrieved once the lovers are reunited. I'm going to refer back to our sight seed - I'm drawn to the idea of a moon in our underground space. Obviously this'll be written as, like, a prophecy that's communicated to anyone who enters the area.

• A haggard, scratched archway stands with unearned pride over a snowy path. Symbols of rejected violence litter the ground - swords, medals, torn standards. A moon is clearly visible through the arch, full almost to bursting.
  • Carved script lines the arch: ...but until true love finds the throne, I cannot bear to face you.
  • (translation: when two lovers sit in the throne of each keep, the moon will descend and grant access to its treasure)
  • The scratches are actually tally marks. They cover the available space. Clearing the snow reveals they've been etched into the stone underneath, up to a quarter-mile out.

---

A reason to flee

The underworld creation document is very thorough here.

OK, I guess I'll put a dragon in my dungeon.

• Prince Rupert's Drake: a freakish creation of coiled glass the size of a school bus. It's bulbous at the front, tapering down to a thin, quivering tail at the back. The beast's skin is translucent; its alchemic lifeblood glows within, blue nerves branching like frozen lightning.
  • Its head and body are completely impervious to all attacks.
  • A good strike to the tail will shatter the entire beast, killing it instantly. It knows this, and hides its weak point behind layers and layers of its spiraling body.
• Two main attacks:
  • Slamming its bulky teardrop head on the ground.
  • Refracting moonlight through its prismatic heart, channeling it into a devastating rainbow laser beam.

---

A reason to talk

By my reckoning, we've got three main factions in this dungeon: The Moon, the Dove, and the pacifist soldiers in between. The book suggests listing what they want and don't want. Seems easy enough!

• The Weeping Moon, ritual alchemist and so-called descendent of the moon above. Their body was shed long ago. Only glass remains.
  • Wants: to love the Dove; to kill the Dove; to understand every atom of their own self.
  • Does not want: to view uncovered flesh; to be ignored; to be forgotten.
  • Pacified by: TBD

• The Punctured Dove, witch of the earth, burning eternal on her pinewood pyre.

  • Wants: to love the Moon; to kill the Moon; to spread her consciousness among the soil and be a part of all things.
  • Does not want: the fires to go out; her rage to be tempered; to sow new life until the infection has been cut away.
  • Pacified by: TBD

• The Mending Division, former soldiers of Moon and Dove who rejected their eternal battle. They promised their lives to the moon above, and cannot die until she's back again.

  • Wants: to bring the Moon and Dove together again; true peace; death at last.
  • Does not want: to pacify one ruler but not the other, lest the kingdom be overrun.

Is it annoying that there's a character named The Moon and, separately, a setting-relevant moon? Yeah, a little, but I don't really care. I like the idea of players talking to the soldiers and having to double check which moon is being discussed. I'll use moon above to refer to the actual physical object.

---

A reason to fight

Just regular degular baddies. I'll use my common monsters seed from last post for this one.

• Mementos: twisted reflections of each ruler born dripping from their foreheads as they stew in hatred. The Moon conjures Mementos of the Dove and vice versa. These pathetic children never quite resemble their parents - their features are blurry, their voices distant, and those outfits haven't been worn in decades. The only things they get right, every single time, are the hands.
  • Openly hostile to any comers, whom they dismiss as unwanted suitors.
  • On seeing a Memento of the opposite ruler, they laugh (or cry?) and immediately attack. The resulting clash is ravenous and bloody as they are overcome with emotion unable to be expressed beyond violence. Without outside intervention, both will inevitably die from the ensuing wounds.

---

A reason to breathe easy

Seems simple enough to bring in our pacifist soldiers here.

• Fragile glass pillars sprout at uneven intervals inside the Mending Division's base camp. At its center, a massive stone cauldron simmers over lovingly tended flame. Scent profile: vegetal, earthy, warm.
  • Visible from above: an oblong, inedible piece of stone at the bottom of the pot.
  • The soldiers pour servings freely to travelers. Each member carries a personal spice packet to flavor their meals - sharing this is a sign of great intimacy.

---

A reason to experiment

My first thought turns to something in the Weeping Moon's alchemic keep. I was uhhh mostly just bullshitting when I wrote that bit earlier about wanting to understand every atom of their own self, but it's an interesting thing to pull from. I'll try this, pulling from our lighting seed:

• The top of the lighthouse. A set of telescopic lenses hang beneath the flame above a shockingly small chair. Nearby, on a glass podium: a notebook with most of the pages ripped out, a set of brutish levers, seven needles.
  • Fiddling with the levers rearranges the lenses such that they reflect the flame's light towards the chair, bathing it in an eerie silver-blue glow.
  • Sitting in this glow casts an X-Ray effect over the character's body. Their inner world - thoughts, wants, goals, needs - appears to those standing behind the podium in a great big jumble.
  • The needles allow one to surgically alter this inner world, although the process is tedious and exhausting. (Test Wands here?)
  • If a player sits here, hand their character sheet to the player behind the podium. The controlling player may (with consent) modify one word under Quest, Motifs, or Bonds.

---

A reason to be surprised

The seed I created was great for aesthetic details, but it's harder to rip from it directly for writing secrets, I think. But since we're apparently focusing on the Moon's keep right now, I'll just draw from that.

• A translucent statue of a bulky man, beautifully made, arms outstretched. A much more amateurish glass crown sits on his head. Dark veins carve through his body, but no liquid flow through them. His mouth is wide and inviting. Barely visible through his torso: a thin wooden door.
  • Pouring the blue liquid powering the keep's other mechanisms into his mouth activates him. He sweeps you into a big bear hug and opens the door, welcoming you to the Weeping Moon's treasure vault.
  • The powered statue politely waits for you to finish your business inside, then resumes his position and vomits out the blue liquid, powering himself down.

---

A reason to return

A reminder that this place exists as part of an interconnected megadungeon. I think this is a good point to flesh out the objects that will pacify our lovers. In this post, I'll work on the Weeping Moon.

• The Moon hungers for the Dove, but they worry only for this: the last piece of their old flesh, a lung, given to the Dove on a whim when they were as one. In their superstitious fretting they fear an enemy could use it to bring them ruin. Worse, they fear the Dove callously threw the lung away, and now it's God-knows-where. In their (infrequent) dreams they cradle it, softly, like a newborn.
  • In all their paranoia, they got this right: The Dove threw the lung into the river years ago, before the snow, and it floated down to an adjacent dungeon level.

...I've been reading Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova recently so I guess lung children are on the mind. Probably in the final document I'll add a suggestion for placing the lung inside this space in case you don't want to deal with putting it in an entirely separate dungeon.

---

Interesting Rooms

The document just says to come up with ideas and write them down, so I'll do that! I'm gonna spitball a few images here based on what we've fleshed out (the Moon's keep) and what we haven't (the Dove's), as well as a few bits from the seed that we haven't used yet.

• A banquet hall decked in polished glass. Coiled tubes descend from the ceiling, bearing nutritious paste from above; former nobles suckle at their ends. The mirrored walls reflect all.
• Arrow-like thorns plucked from sharp vines on the Dove's burning towers, to be fired at intruders. The vines regrow fast, hungry to hurt.
• Frozen messengers lining a pathway, huddling their unread messages against unbeating hearts.
• A gazebo, encased in ice, once used for weddings. No longer.
• The Dove's throne room, forever burning. She sees no visitor who cannot withstand the flame.
• A library, empty save for old history books. Mementos who stumble here learn, to their great sorrow, that they were born illiterate.
• Wooden husks, animate yet empty, dancing around an unexpected flower. Their pinky fingers twist and bind each other like a rat king's tails.
• Vats filled with eye-watering acid. Stooped attendants pour the ritual ingredients: salt, sugar, blood. Their incantations decant the contents into tiny vials of burning blue reagant.

What's Next?

There's a few key blanks to fill in:

• What treasure is on the moon above that's worth finding?
• What will pacify the Punctured Dove? Where is it?
• What's on this dungeon's Meatgrinder Table?

I think for the next post I'll do another pass of this keying process to bring life to the opposite keep, use all that new information to flesh out the Meatgrinder, maybe add a few more points of interest, and call it a day. My end goal is somewhere between 16-20 rooms for the dungeon level. After that I've got to force myself to sit down and lay everything out, which I'm not looking forward to. Luckily that's a problem for future me. Present me can look forward to the fun part of writing out the rest of the dungeon. See you soon!

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Worm Jam, pt 1 - Planting Seeds 1 September 2024 Contents

• Contents
• Intro
• Sensory Spread (Jam Edition)
  • Setup
  • Card 1: Spark
  • Card 2: Sight
  • Card 3: Sound
  • Card 4: Smell and Taste
  • Card 5: Lighting
  • Card 6: Structures
  • Card 7: Dungeon Lord
  • Card 8: Common Monsters
• Summing Up: Crime of Passion (Two of Swords)
• Final Thoughts

Intro

There's a game jam for His Majesty the Worm this month!

Last time I talked about The Worm ended with me making a quick n dirty tarot spread to mimic its dungeon seed format. That post was fun, easy, and produced what I feel are interesting results without much real work. I'd love to enter this jam and whip something up using the many great free tools Josh McCrowell has provided, so I think the obvious Step One is revisiting my spread and cooking up a new seed.

Just to recap, I'm going to be drawing tarot cards to flesh out the different categories below, plus one extra themer card I call the Spark:

Sensory Spread (Jam Edition) Setup

I'll be using the same woo-woo website as last time to draw my cards, again with the Hexefus spread + reversed cards allowed. For interpretation I'll be using Labyrinthos. I'd like to do one extra card to represent common monsters this time, but there's no option for an 8 card spread, so I'll just draw a single card and mulligan if I get a repeat.

The only other thing I'm switching up is the deck - I'd like to try out the Tarot of the Velvet Moon. The cards are smaller, a little more abstract, and full of beautifully bold art & color. The theming leans towards fantasy and whimsy, which I think is a good fit for His Majesty the Worm. I'm stoked to see how this change will affect the spread. Let's dive in!

---

Card 1: Spark

As a reminder, this is going to cover overarching themes / imagery for the spread. I'll be reflecting back on this card as I read through the rest. Comically the first time I did this I drew the Ten of Wands which is... exactly what I got for the Spark last time! I could use it again and still have fun, but I'd like some variety, so I redid the spread.

My (new) draw was the Two of Swords.

What's on the card?

Two arms piercing each other with blades. Spurting blood. An infinity symbol. Ouroboros vibes. First thought is the way the King of Hearts is usually depicted stabbing himself.

What does this card represent?

Upright: stalemate, difficult choices, denial. Reversed: indecision, hesitancy, analysis paralysis.

My take?

Pretty straightforward imo. The obvious first thought is a power struggle between two factions, but there's also room for, say, trolley problem theming, or romantic squabbles, or general stagnation. The infinity symbol is interesting. As a Fromsoft Gamer I am attracted to themes of endless repetition, violence, and decay. We'll learn more in the next reading.

---

Card 2: Sight

My draw was the King of Cups.

What's on the card?

Penguin stooped under a crown. Starry night sky and snowy hills. A fish in a cup, a crescent moon.

What does this card represent?

Upright: wise, diplomatic, advisors. Reversed: anxious, repressed, withdrawn.

My take?

The snowy imagery aligns with our spark pretty well - a resolution is both figuratively and literally frozen. I'm drawn to that crown on the penguin's back. But how to incorporate this meaning of wise diplomacy? That seems to clash, right? Here's what I've got:

Soft white hills. An icy river between two moons: one above, one reflected. Small lumps line the footpath - frozen messengers with cracked blue lips. Each holds a letter bearing the seal of a forgotten crown. Unseen counsel. They will not be buried.

---

Card 3: Sound

My draw was the Two of Cups.

What's on the card?

Two cups (duh), one moon and one sun. An arc (rainbow?) between them. Four-pointed star dripping into some kind of water feature below. Or a bunch of lemons, maybe.

What does this card represent?

Upright: unity, connection, close bonds. Reversed: separation, rejection, division.

My take?

Interestingly, another card that seems juxtaposed with my spark. This description came to mind quickly, so I won't fight it:

Torn, ragged voices singing hymns with little talent - this is a soldier's chorus. Water trickling, drinks clinking. Solemn camaraderie muted by snow.

...am I just making The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe?

---

Card 4: Smell and Taste

My draw was the Six of Wands, reversed. Worth noting: I had this card in my previous post (also reversed) in the Structures section!

What's on the card?

Some steps lined up towards a gleaming trophy. Torches line the path. A four-pointed star on the pedestal.

What does this card represent?

Upright: success, victory, triumph. Reversed: failure, lack of recognition, no achievement.

My take?

Well, this meshes well with the spark, but butts up interestingly with these friendly soldiers I was just working with. I'd like to flesh out the two sides of this frozen conflict. The imagery makes me think of cooking again, or just heat, while the meaning inspires bitter taste. Why not both?

From the north: ash, overcooked meat, burnt hair. From the south: astringent taste, like vinegar or spoilt wine. In the center: cider and spices, stone soup, warm breath.

---

Card 5: Lighting

My draw was the Seven of Wands.

What's on the card?

Flames under stars. A massive lit torch. Smaller torches in various stages of being overcome by flame.

What does this card represent?

Upright: protectiveness, defense, claiming territory. Reversed: giving up, defeat, yielding.

My take?

Love the art on this one. Those burning secondary torches are haunting. I think I'll build on what I was cooking in the previous section:

To the south a translucent lighthouse stands proud. Dark blue fuel pumps through to keep the flame bright. Its counterpart up north: six soot-black pinewood towers dotted with cinders. The stubborn glows inside refuse to die. Cold stars blink up high, uncaring.

---

Card 6: Structures

My draw was the Eight of Wands. What a weird run of cards! I also got this one with my previous reading in the Smell and Taste section.

What's on the card?

Burning arrows in flight. Stars in the background and geometric shapes. Icicles? Snow??

What does this card represent?

Upright: movement, speed, progress. Reversed: waiting, slowness, chaos.

My take?

Hm. This is a weird one to interpret. My first thought is vehicles strewn on a battlefield, or something simple like packed ice houses. But those burning arrows are such a strong image! I don't want to leave them out. Let's try this:

Arrows coated in eternal flame stick from the snow. At their edges, thin wafers of ice continually melt and reform. The soldiers use these to build wobbling crystalline shacks. Fragile, but keeps the cold out.

---

Card 7: Dungeon Lord

My draw was the Five of Cups, my favorite card!

Oh, how gorgeous.

What's on the card?

Three upturned cups spilling into an ocean, two upright in the water. Starry night. Five lemons. A moon shape, an arrow (hm) piercing the left wing of a bird (my first thought is a robin but I don't think that's right?)

What does this card represent?

Upright: loss, grief, disappointment. Reversed: acceptance, moving on, peace.

My take?

This helps answer the question asked by my spark: who's fighting? I'm feeling a bitter ex-lovers moment with this one y'all. But how to reduce two sides to a single lord? My gut says to let the lord be a feeling: the Burning Anger, the Jilted Desire. But also, why not just break formula and have two lords? I think that lends itself to a kind of fairytale vibe. Let's try this:

(a tale of) The Weeping Moon & The Punctured Dove

---

Card 8: Common Monsters

Trying this one out just for shiggles. Similar to last post, I have a pretty good idea of the average encounters for this area, but why not put a little stank on it?

My draw for this was The Magician.

What's on the card?

Rabbit in a top hat, stars (or glitter), one of each suit: a sword, a wand, a cup, a... pentacle.

What does this card represent?

Upright: willpower, desire, manifestation. Reversed: manipulation, cunning, trickery.

My take?

A rabbit in a top hat? Really??? Whatever lmao I can work with this. Desire is a great keyword given our theme of lovers in eternal combat. Combined with manifestation I'm imagining dregs of love from each of our exes, warped and given life. Do the lovers manifest images of themselves? Or twisted reflections of their former partner? Do their memories match up with reality? Maybe this is where the actual battle happens since the flesh-and-blood soldiers seem to have given up.

Summing Up: Crime of Passion (Two of Swords)

Sight:

Soft white hills. An icy river between two moons: one above, one reflected. Small lumps line the footpath - frozen messengers with cracked blue lips. Each holds a letter bearing the seal of a forgotten crown. Unseen counsel. They will not be buried.

Sounds:

Torn, ragged voices singing hymns with little talent - this is a soldier's chorus. Water trickling, drinks clinking. Solemn camaraderie muted by snow.

Smell and Taste:

From the north: ash, overcooked meat, burnt hair. From the south: astringent taste, like vinegar or spoilt wine. In the center: cider and spices, stone soup, warm breath.

Lighting:

To the south a translucent lighthouse stands proud. Dark blue fuel pumps through to keep the flame bright. Its counterpart up north: six soot-black pinewood towers dotted with cinders. The stubborn glows inside refuse to die. Cold stars blink up high, uncaring.

Structures:

Arrows coated in eternal flame stick from the snow. At their edges, thin wafers of ice continually melt and reform. The soldiers use these to build wobbling crystalline shacks. Fragile, but keeps the cold out.

Common Monsters:

Soldiers of Moon and Dove, bitter love phantasms, vengeful messengers, burned-out husks, endless flame wisps, fragile glass constructs, lighthouse tenders

Dungeon Lord(s):

The Weeping Moon & The Punctured Dove

Final Thoughts

Honestly? Facing Worlds vibes.

This is... still a really fun spread! Mostly I just ripped from the art + meaning of each card and put it all together without much thought, and it still turned out well imo. Stories want to be written!! I feel like I've got a lot of good stuff to bring into the Official Dungeon Checklist TM from the underworld creation chapter. The only thing to really flesh out between now and then is our horrible exes. I'm feeling alchemist for the southern lover (the Moon, probably), but the north (Dove) needs time to percolate. Next step will be keying out rooms - I'll probably split the rest of the dungeon across two different posts because smaller scroll bars are scary. Until then, take care!

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Depthcrawl Design, pt 4 - Death and the Comet 29 August 2024

Note: this post is part of a series! Check out the other entries here: 1 2 3

Contents

• Contents
• Intro
• The Comet
  • Layout
  • Getting There
  • Why Visit?
  • Assimilation
• Layers
  • The Sprawl
  • The City
  • The Manor
• What's Next?

Intro

Depthcrawls!

Following my last post, I'm going to be laying down the bedrock for my own depthcrawl. My plan is to synthesize what I've learned into a coherent whole while noting vibes / themes I want to touch on in the future. Unfortunately I still haven't worked out a good name for the City oops!! I've been mulling over the comet idea I was cooking with last post, so I'll use that as a placeholder for now. Let's dive in.

The Comet

"Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I will have to devise other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to the other.

I do not know which of us has written this page."

- Borges and I, by Jorge Luis Borges

They say: the Comet is the center of the universe, or at least our universe. They say infinities drape its core like soft webbing. It wasn't built (they say) but birthed fully formed from the feverish soul of civilization. They say we live inside a dream, but what does that mean? Some say it's a rising tide that will one day claim us all; others say it already has, and our lives are dying fragments in the Comet's memory. They say it's shaped like a city, and that's about all we really know. So they say.

Layout

Two infinite layers wrapped around a dense, stagnant nucleus. The Sprawl and the City fight eternal, borders grinding like rusty gears, leaving jagged semi-urban splinters where they meet; they crash around the Manor and extend forever in its wake. Yesterday's housing litters the endless horizon.

---

Getting There

Ride the Expatriate's Byway! Here's the ritual: take any land vehicle. Jerry rig her so you can refuel while she's still running. On any given midnight, put her on the road, face the East, start driving and don't you dare stop. The third time the sun rises, it'll be over the Comet.

The type of vessel doesn't matter - the ritual works for whatever fits your cultural definition of "vehicle". The Byway's been taken by carriage, wagon, car, bus, and motorcycle. Some folks have even tried on bicycle, for all the good that did.

Nobody knows exactly when your original road becomes the Byway. Most folks are too delirious to care. They say this, though: the first sign is the bodies. Those who failed the drive don't get a second chance - their vessels hang around, perfectly preserved at the moment their vehicle stopped. See them now, hands on the wheel, eyes closed as if asleep; the lights are off and they'll never come back on. Some lie in the road with hands outstretched, awaiting their fate. Keep driving.

---

Why Visit?

Wealth, for one. Infinity cooperates strangely with ideas of value. The Comet's inhabitants, with their desire for something new in the face of forever, are prone to obsession. They tinker endlessly on odd projects that crossed the border of outsider art long ago. Trifles for them, but to us their detritus is often valuable, sometimes useful.

d6 One Man's Trash 1 A commemorative coin bearing an old woman's face. While touching it, one becomes incapable of perceiving anything except for the coin. It is their entire world. 2 A radio locked to one station - a static-filled wave of numbers shouted in the tone of a preacher trying to save your soul. 3 A blindfold covered in concentric circles. Wearing it moves your soul a half-step to the right of your body. Causes intense vertigo. 4 An unmarked CD. Consuming it causes you to experience the life of its creator in real time. Eighty years of love, lived in one instant. 5 A hand mirror reflecting your unlived lives. The image changes every time you make a decision. Any decision. 6 A small button, held in the palm. Pressing it wakes you up. If already awake, your character disappears for exactly 16 hours.

And then there's the Manor. Not infinitely expanding like the other layers, but infinitely expansive. Between its walls waits an ocean of repeating hallways. They say if you walk this infinity long enough you'll reach a core of sorts, and from this core branches tendrils to every possible world. Some zealots believe that the tendrils don't exist until they're traversed, thus following these paths will birth a new universe whole cloth. More than that, they believe they can influence these new worlds in some way, and so are driven to creation. Such is the path to godhood.

---

Assimilation

"Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him."

- Borges and I, by Jorge Luis Borges

Every traveller knows the feeling of a city sinking its fingers into your heart. One day you're just passing through, the next you're married, buying bread from a man who was already old when you first met him, wondering when the skyline became so unfamiliar. The Comet, like any city, cannot survive without its people, but with infinite space to fill it hungers harder than most.

To represent Assimilation, set up a game of Hangman on your character sheet. When an event, effect, or failed save specifies that you assimilate, roll on your current layer's table, apply the result to your character, and draw a new limb for the noose. Let's count them out: left arm, right arm, torso, left leg, right leg. Save the head for last.

When the noose is full, your character is no longer yours, their desires overwritten by a yearning to settle down in the Comet. They slip between the cracks and are gone, forever. In the moment of annihilation, narrate their final, fading thoughts, and say goodbye.

Layers The Sprawl

"To the left and right of the automobile, the city disintegrated; the firmament grew larger and the houses meant less and less and a brick kiln or a poplar grove more and more. They reached their miserable destination: a final alley of rose-colored mud walls which in some way seemed to reflect the disordered setting of the sun."

- Death and the Compass, by Jorge Luis Borges

Suburban neighborhoods spiraling fractal-like away from the Comet's heart. Each district is only nominally different; they all share several key qualities: pristine architecture, manicured lawns, expensive water features, and a healthy disdain for outsiders.

I imagine this layer to play the most like a "standard" depthcrawl. The main faction is the Homeowners, nuclear communities easy to anger if you break their constrictive rules.

Sprawl Moods

These are mostly just off-the-dome ideas that I think can convey the tone of this layer while still being gameable or mechanically interesting.

• conformity
• stepford wives
• lots of wealth, no artistry
  • mcmansions
• a culture of fear
• evangelism
• bright outside, empty inside
• everything's new. there's no history.
  • everything that is old was built for a community that no longer exists
• homeowner's associations
• neighborhoods bleeding into each other with unclear differences
• dead shopping malls
• chain stores with a new coat of paint
• long commutes

Sprawl Assimilations d6 Effect 1 Your clothes no longer wrinkle. 2 Decorative piercings seal up. Any tattoos slough off the skin and sizzle on the asphalt. 3 You develop a sudden, powerful addiction to red wine. 4 You may only speak in a jovial "howdy, neighbor!" type voice. 5 You are psychologically compelled to report any crimes (real or imagined) that you see. 6 A spouse and 2.5 children (you choose which half) emerge from a nearby house and follow you from a distance.

---

The City

"I emerged into a kind of small plaza — a courtyard might better describe it. It was surrounded by a single building, of irregular angles and varying heights. It was to this heterogeneous building that the many cupolas and columns belonged. More than any other feature of that incredible monument, I was arrested by the great antiquity of its construction. I felt that it had existed before humankind, before the world itself."

- The Immortal, by Jorge Luis Borges

Ecelectic, maddening, a surreal cultural mishmosh. The City delights in cannibalization of the self, repurposing abandoned buildings and old trends for bizarre new uses. What else is there to do for fun in an infinite world? Its citizens swarm the streets like termites. To them, a fresh idea is as necessary as breath itself.

I'd like for the City to play higher-energy than the Sprawl. My goal is for it to be less of a hostile environment and more overwhelming, alien, difficult to navigate, threatening not because it hates you but because you just can't learn the steps to its dance. Honestly, the hard part will be doing this without just recreating Electric Bastionland.

City Moods

• intoxicating, suffocating, all-encompassing crowds
• juxtaposition of nicer tourist-y areas with utilitarian offices
• anything from invisible cities
• parades clogging up the streets
• neverending construction
• labyrinthine alleyways and subways
• some kind of old mill refurbished into a food court
• overstimulating advertisements
• very "if you know you know" nightlife
• condemned husks full of history
• sewer rumors
• plant life fighting for purchase
• interstate stacks and parking lots spreading like an infection
• statue from a battle nobody talks about
• no stars in the sky

City Assimilations d6 Effect 1 A company ID card appears in your pocket. Locals ask: shouldn't you be at work? 2 You're learning the language. Invent 1d6 slang terms to pepper into your speech - these endear you to city folk and enrage Suburbanites. 3 Your clothing (and home wardrobe) is radically altered to fit the local fashion. Describe it! 4 A candid photo of you with the party goes viral. Strangers flock while you're in public. 5 Your mental map is rewritten. When going deeper, you may add 1 extra depth to your descent at the cost of 1 new assimilation per use. 6 Your hand clasps around something - a key. Inserting in any door always opens into a dingy apartment. Technically safe but comes with 2d6 annoying roommates who steal anything left unprotected.

---

The Manor

"The diffusion of light guided him to a window. He opened it: a round, yellow moon outlined two blinded fountains in the melancholy garden. Lonnrot explored the house. He traveled through antechambers and galleries to emerge upon duplicate patios; several times he emerged upon the same patio. He ascended dust-covered stairways and came out into circular antechambers; he was infinitely reflected in opposing mirrors; he grew weary of opening or half-opening windows which revealed the same desolate garden outside, from various heights and various angles; inside, the furniture was wrapped in yellow covers and the chandeliers bound up with cretonne. A bedroom detained him; in the bedroom, a single rose in a porcelain vase -- at the first touch the ancient petals fell apart. On the second floor, on the top storey, the house seemed to be infinite and growing. The house is not this large, he thought. It is only made larger by the penumbra, the symmetry, the mirrors, the years, my ignorance, the solitude."

- Death and the Compass, by Jorge Luis Borges

The center of it all. Cold, repetitive, stagnant, shadows moving around every corner. I'd like for this one to play more tense than the other sections - violence ideally won't be an option at all. I adore the above quote, it feels like the transition point between dream and nightmare. Lonnrot's ultimate fate is hiding just barely out of sight. It's stressful. Can I capture that energy? Here's hoping!

Manor Moods

• symmetry
• mirrors
• repetition (small location table, large detail table?)
• old city buildings hollowed out as the manor expands
• identity or lack thereof
• the winchester mansion
• unexplained murders
• delirious wanderers, lost thieves
• stained glass with nothing behind it. just white light.
• thickets of statuary
• silent, ghostly cleaning staff
• miss havisham from great expectations
  • stagnant opulence
• meandering diary entries
• a lifetime of obsession

Manor Assimilations d6 Effect 1 Your right side is now the perfect mirror of your left. Freckles, birthmarks, scars, extra limbs, internal organs, stomach contents - all are mirrored in one indescribable instant. And yet you live. 2 A stooped servant delivers a letter. Inside is one word - your new name (what is it?). All IDs, certificates, contracts, friends, and family update to reflect it. You only remember the original in dreams. 3 Your facial features become unmoored. Keeping your eyes, nose, etc. in line requires pushing & holding them in place. 4 You no longer sleep. Each night at midnight you die and are revived 8 hours later. Visions of the afterlife hang around like breath on the neck. 5 Your reflection becomes... something else. Around broken mirrors, your reflection attempts to crawl out and replace you. 6 A knife blossoms from your ribcage - you die. Your killer absorbs your spirit and burdens, supplanting their own; you control them now. Who were they? What flickering memory of theirs still lives on? What's Next?

Roadmap!

• Intro (check!)
• Case Study 1: Emmy's depthcrawls (check!)
• Case Study 2: One or more other depthcrawls (check "one", but not "or more"!)
• Overview of the crawl -- themes, imagery, vibes, etc. (check!!!)
• Outer Ring: The Suburbs Sprawl
  • locations
  • details
  • encounters
• Middle Ring: The City
  • locations
  • details
  • encounters
• Inner Ring: The Manor
  • locations
  • details
  • encounters
• Playtesting
• Final thoughts & putting it all together (the dream!)

(tell me why I called the Manor a ring when it's not even surrounding anything. that shit's just a circle!!)

It feels good to actually start the process of Doing This Thing. Even if this is mostly just an outline before the hard part, I'm happy to have moved on from the pure theorycraft aspect of this series. Next post is going to cover the Sprawl (which I guess is going to be a ton of content? like a whole ass crawl by itself?) BUT per Josh McCroo's twitter there's gonna be a game jam for His Majesty the Worm in September. I had a lot of fun making a tarot spread to seed dungeons for that game, so I'd like to revisit that and cook something up for the jam. Just gives this series more time to percolate. Either way, I'll see you when I see you. Take care!

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Depthcrawl Design, pt 3 - New Blood 21 August 2024

Note: this post is part of a series! Check out the other entries here: 1 2

Contents

• Contents
• Intro
• Case Study - Downrooted
  • Setup
  • Structure
  • Summing Up
• Modules I Have Read But Am Not Talking About In-Depth
• Modules I Have Not Read But Are Worth Mentioning
• What's Next?

Intro

Depthcrawls...

Since my last post, I've seen a few bits of depthcrawl content posted elsewhere: Deep Delve by Dice Goblin Games and a post by Farmer Gadda prototyping a Nether-from-Minecraft-themed crawl. I'm not sure why all of us started thinking about depth stuff at once but I'm very into it. Must be something in the water.

Seeing other folks post cool shit does make me want to just get in and start writing, but I think one more (quick n dirty) post studying other material will be valuable. Today I'll be covering Downrooted, by Jason Christopher Burrows, which is unfinished but still has a lot of Good Stuff to study / steal.

Case Study - Downrooted

Downrooted is a module for Cairn, submitted to the Town/Forest/Dungeon jam (which I also wrote for!) although it is still in active development. It revolves around a massive, magical woodland area (once home to an advanced civilization) and the relatively simple town at its perimeter that sends expeditions inside for tools and materials far beyond their ken.

Again, this isn't going to be a review, because again, I don't have much to say about it as a product other than: "I'm a fan"! I was impressed with Burrow's writing and ability to wring a lot of weirdness from the fantasy forest premise. There hasn't been an update on the project in a while, but I hope he finishes it at some point because he's really got the juice.

Setup

A few things immediately stood out on my readthrough.

Multiple Layers!

I was stoked to see this one. Three layers of woods, each associated with different depth ranges, each overlapping. It's not far off at all from what I was thinking in my last post, and it's cool to see parallel ideas like this. The only thing I'm not a fan of is the advice for overlap, which is just "describe how they mix". What a missed opportunity to go big with it!!

Takeaway: build bespoke layer-mixing details into the description for each location.

Unique Locations

When rolling a new Location, a few areas can only be generated once. On rolling them again, the next spot up on the table is selected instead. These areas range from important NPC hideouts to weird puzzles to structures that crumble after interacting with them.

Takeaway: Would I use this? Eh. I think if I'm playing with the idea of infinity then truly unique stuff maybe runs counter to that. This is basically just turning location rolls into NPC encounters though, which is worth mulling over. I could add friendly NPCs to the Encounter table, or have them setting up temporary camp as a Detail. Which is more interesting? The latter, probably. It's kinda Dark Souls-y. I like the idea of NPCs making journeys of their own and following you into the deep.

New Movement

Rove aligns with my thoughts on adding a new move - something to roll a new location without moving forward. Farmer Gadda's post from earlier posits something similar. However, where Gadda's depthcrawl aims to incorporate (I believe) fast travel on an X/Y grid, and I introduced my move with the idea of adding blockages / others reasons to use it, I'm struggling to find a purpose for Roving.

My best guess is that it's to give you an extra shot on unique / quest-specific locations in case you missed them, but the players wouldn't have access to the depth tables, so how would they know to use it? Is it a way to get you back to the entrance if you get lost? That doesn't sound interesting. Not sure what to think about this, but it's got me feeling more convicted in the idea that I should build reasons to use a new move if I'm adding one at all.

---

Structure

Unlike the OG depthcrawls, this doesn't take place inside a pocket dimension that you can access wherever. The Erstwald Forest is a whole ass place in the world that you have to go out of your way to find. More than that, the border town of Brimton acts as a hub with sidequests, important NPCs, and events that play out on return from the forest.

The expectation here is that you make increasingly deeper excursions to the forest while doing R&R in town between trips, compared to the Stygian Library where you're mainly going in, grabbing what you need, and getting out. The module supports this via a few key changes to the quote-unquote established formula.

The map doesn't change

This may just be something the author forgot to include, but that's not my impression. Unlike in Ynn or the Library, the map appears to remain static whenever you leave and come back. Normally I think that would feel a little lame, but you're given an interesting form of fast travel in the form of Shaper Dungeons. These are actually also procedurally generated, which is really cool but not worth going into for this post. The gist is that they're each connected to a mycelium travel net and, once you explore your first, you'll recognize that a strange pillar in the hub was a Shaper Dungeon entrance all along, preventing you from having to retread old ground.

Takeaway: fast travel is a solid idea. I'm less interested in an unchanging map. Maybe have an optional fast travel unlock available at the entrance to each of my three layers?

Your depth rolls are smaller

1d6 + Depth instead of 1d20. My gut reaction to this was that a smaller die would result in a lot more repeated locations, so I wrote a quick script to test this out. The following graphs are the likelihood of encountering a location at least once, going straight down from depths 0-34, across 10000 tests.

I wasn't actually expecting this! Maybe my gut health needs work. The Downrooted results are skewed a bit because of unique locations, which makes sense, but otherwise the distribution is similar to Ynn's. These graphs also call attention to a funny detail: in these vast, unknowable environments, the rarest locations are actually the shallowest ones, because your increasing depth makes it impossible to encounter them after just a few Go Deeper actions.

Another fun fact: because the Stygian Library rerolls anything over 35 on 1d20+1d12+2, you get a nice little curve. According to this graph, the most likely locations to hit on a straight shot to depth 34 are the Phantom Databanks, the Spider Trapdoor, and the Ossuary. Sorry, Printing Machine, you'll get 'em next time.

Takeaway: is a smaller depth die actually the way to go??? Maybe you'll encounter similar stuff more often if you muck around at the same depth, but is that really that big a deal? Or is it a good excuse to add more flavor? I can't tell if I'm cooking with this or if I need to be kicked out of the kitchen.

I think as far as pure vibes go, this method is a good way to run a longer journey with slowly encroaching weirdness. You can tightly control your location/detail tables to make sure you're rolling milk before meat and not going too crazy, too early. But, ugh, I also want that possibility because it's more dreamlike and strange!!

There's a climax

Really there's two climaxes: one is at 36+ on the Location table, the Bleeding Heart. This is where the various forest NPC motivations are centered, and the character stuck inside is responsible for the forest's continued existence. One way or another, dealing with her is probably going to resolve the stories of Brimton and the woods. There's also the Nadir, the only non-procedural dungeon in the document, but it's still WIP so I won't yap about it.

---

Summing Up

That's not everything worth talking about with this module, but imo the rest is outside the scope of this post. Everything here combines to evoke a certain image: small, increasingly deep trips into the forest, slowly pushing forward, teleporting back to town when necessary, always heading towards the climactic encounter at the heart of the woods.

That... doesn't sound too different from what I want! It's got me thinking about what I can adjust from my last post, and here's what I've come up with. My original idea for having layers overlap on the depth table looked like this:

What I'm considering instead is this little adjustment:

With this, like, reach-around setup, explorers have a choice: enter a new layer at Depth 10 (and start from Depth 0 on a new location table), or push deeper into their current layer. Why? Better loot, helping out NPCs, setting up some kind of shortcut from Depth 10 to the surface (getting public transit up and running?), whatever. This feels like it scratches the itch that I'm searching for - the idea that a layer can both border another and also extend past it into infinity. I think ring is no longer the right term for what I'm thinking visually, but I'm struggling to find a better one. Comet, maybe?

Either way, using this method means I can maybe get away with not adding a new move at all, since the image I wanted to evoke could be better represented by this table alone. Makes me think: what if a possible location option for the back half of the table is just The Entrance? The next point on the infinite line where the spot the players' base camp is repeated, but with subtle differences?

Modules I Have Read But Am Not Talking About In-Depth

The Mausoleum of Memory by Unenthuser. This was an attempt to do a depthcrawl in a mini-zine - the whole thing fits on two pages. I think it's a little too small for the structure to shine, but still a worthwhile attempt.

The Cyclopean Organ by Glass Bird Games. This one's a funnel written for Cairn. There were enough overlaps between this and Downrooted that I didn't feel the need to dig in here. It's got some good stuff, but I'm not sure how much I like a procgen funnel - IMO the fun of the format really comes from bespoke gruesome deathtraps (I feel similarly about FIST's Hazard Function).

Modules I Have Not Read But Are Worth Mentioning

Nova's Hell On Rev-X, Dice Goblin's Deep Delve, Joseph R. Lewis' Undying Sea, Mothership's Hull Breach, and Cloud Crawl by AwkwardTurtle (for CBR+PNK). All look great, just not in the budget right now. My impression of the Undying Sea is that it has a similar hub structure to Downrooted, which seems cool, and I love the idea of sailing to strange, misty islands as a depthcrawl.

Too Dark by KNUCKLEPUNK GAMES, Caverns of Caarn by Lord Lint, and Yet Another Labyrinth - Troika! by Cdw0. These are all free, but like a fool I searched for games on itch tagged depthcrawl rather than games with depthcrawl in the description; I only saw them while finishing up here and tbh at this point would rather just send the post and move on to Actually Making Something. Whoops!!

Labyrinth: The Adventure Game by River Horse. This one's interesting. Everything I've seen about it comes from several posts of effuse praise from Dwiz. It's not styled strictly as a depthcrawl, but it shares a few similarities. You get a big bespoke d100 table and roll 1d6 to move along it, incrementing your depth by the result. If you "solve" whatever room you land in, it becomes your new checkpoint, otherwise you reroll from the previous depth. Rinse and repeat. I really like this structure on the surface, and if I weren't so excited about the random Location/Detail combinations I'd probably be emulating it instead of a more typical depthcrawl. A design series for another time? Maze Mechanics when??

What's Next?

Let's see that roadmap!

• Intro (check!)
• Case Study 1: Emmy's depthcrawls (check!)
• Case Study 2: One or more other depthcrawls (check "one", but not "or more"!)
• Overview of the crawl -- themes, imagery, vibes, etc.
• Outer Ring: The Suburbs
  • locations
  • details
  • encounters
• Middle Ring: The City
  • locations
  • details
  • encounters
• Inner Ring: The Manor
  • locations
  • details
  • encounters
• Playtesting
• Final thoughts & putting it all together (the dream!)

Next part is where this gets really fun. My plan is to solidify everything I've been waffling on and lay out the (hopefully) final structure, plus an outline of vibes & initial ideas for each layer. See you soon!

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Depthcrawl Design, pt 2 - Studying the Ancient Texts 14 August 2024

Note: This is part of a series! If you haven't yet, check out the first post over here.

Contents

• Contents
• Intro
• Case Study: Gardens of Ynn and the Stygian Library
  • Setup
  • Getting There
  • Hooks
  • L O R E
  • Movement
  • Layer Generation
  • Locations
  • Details
  • Encounters
  • Events
  • Tables and Other Notes
• The Big Question
• What's Next?

Intro

Depthcrawls.

A quick recap of my previous post:

• the world needs more depthcrawls
• i will be the change i want to see
• borges good
• i want to make a city-themed crawl with three distinct ring-like layers

Per my roadmap, my next step is going to be a study of existing depth literature. Since posting I've read through the OGs: Gardens of Ynn and the Stygian Library, both by Emmy Allen. Let's get into it!

Case Study: Gardens of Ynn and the Stygian Library

Quick note: this isn't intended to be a review of either piece as a product. I don't have much to say there other than: they're great! You should buy them. Instead, I'll be sifting through the books, trying to understand what I can utilize moving forward while noting any major questions / design considerations that pop up.

This post is pretty long, so if you don't care about the nitty gritty and just want what I think are the most interesting bits, check out my thoughts on assimilation, layer generation and how dangerous I should make the crawl.

Setup

Ynn and the Library are both infinite, extradimensional spaces that constantly shift and change, making them impossible to map. Ynn is outdoors in an open air garden world; the Library contrasts (intentionally) by being entirely indoors.

What's critical here? Being in a pocket dimension obviously helps - I don't think it's strictly necessary but some amount of magic or reality suspension is definitely needed here. After reading Dice Goblin's great post on the four types of dungeon design, I don't feel it's a hot take to say the two must-have qualities are infinity and unknowability.

Or are they? Let's hash this out:

• if your space is infinite and unknowable, you've got a depthcrawl!
• if your space is infinite and knowable, you've got something like a procedural dungeon that is generated such that anyone who runs it produces the same results. Think: Minecraft seeds.
• if your space is finite and knowable, you've got a dungeon, pointcrawl, or maze / flux space.
• if your space is finite and unknowable... you... still have a depthcrawl!

Skeleton Code Machine's depthcrawl overview briefly mentions the Hull Breach supplement for Mothership, which includes rules for exploring an interstellar mega mart. I haven't read it, but per the post this space is randomly generated with typical depthcrawl rules until you produce the Exit location, at which point you pop out and can reset at depth 1. Technically endless in the sense that your exit is randomly determined, but I don't think infinity is the intention.

What matters is this: you can absolutely use depthcrawl procedures to explore a small, bounded space. How small can you be while still utilizing the mechanics well? Unclear! Is that what I want? Also unclear. I mean, Ynn and the Library both definitely aren't intended to be explored past the lower depths - at a certain point you just start generating the prose equivalent of "turn back now" signs. A question for later on, maybe, but worth keeping in mind.

---

Getting There

In Ynn, you have a ritual - find a wall covered in vegetation, use chalk and charcoal to draw a door, write a magic phrase. Leave and return. Voila: your doorway now opens into Ynn! Importantly, this doorway only remains for a full 24 hours, while the Ynnian day/night cycle lasts for 48 hours. Stick around for too long and you'll be trapped until you generate an exit.

Stygian is less about ritual, more about location: you must be in a library / book collection large enough that parts are hidden from the entrance, and somebody must have died there. Anything that meets these requirements has a permanent (if well-hidden) entry to the Stygian Library, so getting stuck inside is less of a concern.

Design Question: How do people reach The City?

DAMN if I don't love a good arcane ritual. The problem with my city setting isn't that I can't do this, it's that there are too many enticing options. My first thought is a driving-based method similar to one of my favorite spooky stories, the Left Right Game, but that's not the only thing that comes to mind.

Just spitballing:

• hitchhike on an empty highway under the right conditions (outfit, moon cycle, party composition)
• stay on the subway until the crowds are gone and the lights are off, then pay a special fare
• get a car and drive towards the sunrise for three days without stopping once. on the fourth morning, the sun will illuminate The City on the horizon.
• fall asleep in the house that is furthest away from the heart of a city while still technically being inside its limits. when you wake, it will be on the outskirts of The City.

I think I'll get a better feel for this ritual as I spend more time on the themes / vibes I want to work with on this project.

---

Hooks

Ynn has basic hooks, but nothing major. You inherited a mansion and your dead relative left notes to get inside! You chase a thief who escapes through a doorway into the garden! None of these have anything to do with the deep lore, and there's no well-known hidden treasure to find. Largely the book is presented just for the sake of exploring.

Stygian has a suggested main goal: finding information. If you're on the hunt for specific info, there's a Progress mechanic of scalable difficulty to represent your hunt through the library. Various locations and encounters interact with this mechanic, pushing you closer to or further from your goal. There are no other presented hooks (a good thing imo).

Design Question: Why go to The City?

There's a kind of dreamlike ideal to not offering any hooks and just saying that exploration is its own reward, but that's not appealing to me right now. Thinking back to my three-layered structure, a couple of possibilities comes to mind:

• each layer has its own reason to snoop around (unique treasure, macguffins, resource gathering, whatever).
• only the innermost layer has a "reward", and the journey is what's important.
• there's one consistent layer-spanning goal. maybe somebody wants to be escorted through the entire City in order to study something at each layer? maybe something needs to be collected in each layer in order to activate something special in the center?

Stygian's Progress mechanic isn't out of the question - it could be used in one specific layer, at least - but I don't think it's a good fit for the Big Hook. Personally I'm leaning towards something major in the center because it fits what I want to encourage the most: keep coming back, keep going deeper.

---

L O R E

Ynn was built by beautiful-extra-perfect-your-sweet-baby-OC-uwu-uber-elves called the Sidhe. It was intended as a wonderful pleasure dimension, but now it's off the leash and overrun by Creatures and artificial garden-tenders. The reason for this is that the Sidhe were infected by a memetic brain virus called The Idea of Thorns. Importantly: some Sidhe are still around, and they're still infected. The Idea is only encountered at low depths, but it's a real problem - there's a whole timeline for how it annihilates civilization if the players let it breach containment.

The Stygian Library, on the other hand, is alive and well. Its inhabitants are active, thriving, unbothered, in their lane, doing their shit. The major faction are librarians, stewards of the library doing research on something called the Great Avernian Calculation in order to reveal some grand universal truth. Souls, entropy, and the written words are their main focuses. It's also got an entrance to Hell! With devils! Probably those are unrelated :)

Unlike Ynn, the Library does not have some big Problem or Threat that can end the world if it gets out. Both locations are vast, alien, and unkind to intruders, but the Library is much less of an overtly hostile space (in more ways than one - we'll get to that!)

Design Question: Who lives in The City?

I think it's critical that The City is heavily populated, but by who? Humanoid entities? Former adventurers who died there? Artificial constructs?

The first thing I'm leaning towards is humanoids, but I'd like to take a page from Ynn's idea of infections and workshop something like an assimilation mechanic. The longer you stay in the city, the more you become assimilated (physical mutations? mental effects?). At a certain level of infection, you become a Citizen and leave the party to live in the City. I imagine the vast majority of the population are normal folks who settled here this way.

This opens up a few possibilities.

• Different layers can have different assimilation effects - maybe the most human NPCs are in the Suburbs, and things get less and less identifiable closer to center.
• Maybe assimilation can be a long, drawn out process - I'm imagining a meter that, every time you fill it up, causes you to add a new line to a hangman-like figure. Each line is a mutation, and when the figure's complete, you're gone.
• Some faction deep inside The City can be behind these effects, manipulating tourists for some alien purpose.

---

Movement

Both books have the same movement mechanics:

• Go Deeper to a new (or previously explored) location at the next depth
• Go Back to an already visited location
• Stay Here and risk an encounter

New paths to locations can be generated via encounters, but for the most part your map is going to look a bit like a finite state machine.

Design Question: What should we adjust here, if anything?

If I want to utilize this ring structure, I think the movement is a good spot to look. I posit a new move: Walk the Ring, which moves you clockwise (or counterclockwise) along the circle, generating a new location at the same depth. By itself this isn't very inspiring, but I think it opens up space for some interesting mechanics.

• cities can have roadblocks, preventing you from going deeper along the current path.
• different "slices" of the ring can be controlled by different factions, making it advantageous to strafe to a less hostile part of town before going deeper.
• it allows for cool rituals - "walk clockwise four times from The Basketball Court, and you'll always reach The Speakeasy"

This would necessarily modify Going Back to be more about moving away from the center of the ring. Depending on if you've been walking the ring or not, you may need to Go Back into unknown territory in order to leave The City.

---

Layer Generation

Both books use roughly the same method: roll 1d20+Depth for locations, details, and (when there are any) encounters. Where they differ is the overflow logic for results >=35.

• In Ynn, locations & details have a special, singular 35+ entry. Encounters are rerolled at 1d20+1d10+1d6-2.
• In the Library, locations are rerolled at 1d20+1d12+2. Details have a special entry. Encounters are rerolled the same way as Ynn.

In some ways the Library is a little more infinite than Ynn, because it re-uses most of the table rather than sticking you in the overflow slots. Depths 34+ in the gardens will only result in the combo Ruins of Ynn / Tangled Madness, whereas the Library has most of the locations table open to combo with the Tangled Passages detail (potentially a dead end, but still).

Design Question: Anything to add?

As far as The Algorithm goes, I do like Ynn's special overflow results because it feels like Minecraft's Far Lands. If I really want to allow for an infinite crawl, I could just use that 1d20+1d12+2 on both tables and call it a day. This gives an interesting opportunity for a special overflow result on the Encounter table - maybe something like Stephen King's Langoliers cleaning up anything that makes it too far out.

Re: overall procedure, I don't think I'd add anything but there's room for new flavor depending on what ring you're in. In the Suburbs you could be generating neighborhoods, in the City proper you could be exploring intersections, districts, or blocks. It's something to consider because I think A Structure or A Place of Interest could definitely work, but it might not be playing to the strengths of this large, densely settled space.

Design Question: How do we handle our ring setup with the depth mechanic?

This is a big one. I've got a couple different ideas.

First up: each ring gets bespoke location/detail/encounter tables. These could be smaller (1d12+depth), or I could go whole hog and have full 1d20 tables bc that's more exciting. I imagine transition between layers would have clear cutoffs, either by randomly generating a transition point (similar to the Hull Breach example earlier), or by reaching a certain depth. Ex: Depth 6 is the end of the Suburbs, and at Depth 7 you start rolling on all the City tables.

Alternatively: one huge table, smaller die. Certain areas on this table could be "melding points" - spots where the layers butt up and/or melt into each other.

I'm more immediately drawn to the second idea because I like the idea of exploring these border zones between layers, plus this idea of, like, you can go into the City proper and then take a wrong turn and end up closer to the Suburbs because the layout is just that disorienting. A relatable experience for a suburban child like me!

HOWEVER unless we have a truly huge table there aren't going to be that many possibilities within each layer, and I think a big draw of Emmy's work is the potential to roll something cool among a large set of options. If I give each layer, say, 7 slots on the table, plus 7 transition slots between layers, we get 35 slots total. That's the same as Emmy's tables, but each layer only has 14 possible options. Does that still give them opportunity to shine? Is it exciting to look at the Suburbs and see just 14 location options, only 7 of which are fully bespoke??

Or maybe we could mix these ideas: each layer gets larger unique tables, and higher/lower results are blended with the other layers as needed? Something to think about.

---

Locations

I really like working with ratios because my brain doesn't have enough wrinkles to just wing a design like this. So I went through these tables and categorized each entry into three broad boxes: Safe, Odd, and Harmful / Inconvenient. Safe and harmful are obvious, but Odd locations have weird, maybe-good-maybe-bad things to interact with. This is an art, not a science, and I had to go with gut feeling for several rooms.

For Ynn:

• Safe locations: 10 (lawn, vine, gazebo, statuary, shooting range, fountain, incubation beds, vivisection theatre, winery)
• Odd locations (can help or harm, interesting stuff to play with): 12 (herb, ponds, hothouses, orchids, chess, kennels, mausoleum, tower, cemetery, masks, settlements, vats)
• Harmful / inconvenient locations: 13 (orchard, rose, silk-garden, hedge, woods, shadow theatre, gears, firepit, cliff-garden, ice rink, mushroom beds, steam-pipes, electrodyne, ynnian ruins)

For the Library:

• Safe locations: 15 (auditorium, catalogue, chapel, display case, help desk, jarred brains, map gallery, mausoleum, mummy vault, printing machine, reading lounge, skeletons, statuary, stuffed animals, tea room)
• Odd locations: 14 (boiler room, calculation engine, chained lectern, dissection theatre, entrance foyer, furnace, holding pen, ink vats, ossuary, phantom databanks, phantom pumps, orrery, sheol, vault)
• Harmful / invonvenient locations: 5 (infernal gate, beehive, spider trapdoor, steam vents, syphon)

I'm glad I did this, because I don't think I clocked how much less dangerous the Library's locations are when I first found it. Ynn has roughly even ratios, but that doesn't tell the whole story, because what matters is where they are on the table. Adding depth to your rolls means you're not getting a flat distribution spread across the whole thing. Both books have their lower depths weighted with more dangerous entries, which makes sense - you want things to get tough the deeper you go.

Worth noting: Ynn has something that the Library doesn't, which is locations-within-locations! Hothouses/orchids, hedge mazes, towers, and ynnian ruins all have unique procedures to generate or explore them within an already roll-heavy adventure.

I understand why these maybe didn't show up in the Library - it's a lot to ask a referee to generate the adventure on the fly and then throw a bunch of dice on the table to create some greenhouses. But, wow, it's also so cool and adds a ton of flavor to the world. Since one of my goals is eventually automating these rolls with Twine, maybe I can lean into that by adding a few roll-heavy locations like these in and letting the Machine take care of the grunt work.

---

Details

Same story, different boxes: Flavor (aka safe), Beneficial, and Harmful / Inconvenient details.

Ynn:

• Flavor details: 15 (empty, graffiti, maintained, nests, rumbling, lamp-post, frames, birds, ivy-covered, singing, glass-roofed, clockwork parts, churning, fleshy, luminous)
• Beneficial details: 6 (treasure, corpses, silver, skeletons, fertile, doorway out)
• Harmful / inconvenient details: 14 (tubes, flooded, burned, frozen, inverted, floating, chasms, smouldering, predatory, entrancing, hypnotic, parasitic, tangled madness, zero-grav)

Stygian:

• Flavor: 12 (candles, candlesticks, empty, glass tubes, lamppost, graffiti, lamps, scrolls, spirit illumination, spirit tubes, stacked papers, time-locked)
• Possibly beneficial: 7 (doorway out, fireplace, funeral urns, treasure, letters, rug, treasure, webs)
• Possibly harmful / inconvenient: 16 (chained, gaslamps, haunted, morbid, no gravity, portcullis, semi-corporeal, silent, smoking, staircase, tangled, too large, too small, gears, inconvenient, watchful)

Once again, the tables are backloaded with the more dangerous options, although in this case Stygian has a little more teeth.

Design Question: Which distribution should I use?

Well for shiggles I wrote a quick Python script to simulate how likely you are to run into something dangerous according to my vibes-based calculations. Note: I'm only interested in overt good or bad results here. A beneficial location and harmful detail cancel out into Unclear in this script.

We can see that Ynn has hands out the gate while Stygian has less bite. My read is that the Library is really expecting most of the danger to come from encounters / reaction rolls, whereas Ynn hates you personally and wants your lunch money.

Personally I lean more towards Stygian's distribution, but, worth considering: different ratios for different layers. Maybe the Suburbs are safe on the surface, then turn vicious deeper in. Maybe the Manor frontloads its scariest parts, then quiets down and gets more dreamlike as you get past the guards.

---

Encounters

Both books have two separate encounter tables. Ynn's are separated by Day/Night, Stygian's by whether or not you've pissed off the librarians. Every entry is delicious, no misses, but Stygian is elevated by Alec Sorenson's amazing art.

Something Ynn has that the Library doesn't: unique monsters! There's only one Jabberwocky, Questing Beast, Unicorn, and Worm - if they're dead, you reroll as lesser monsters. There's also the Idea of Thorns and the mindless remaining Sidhe, which are major issues in their own right.

Likewise, since the Library isn't a ruin, it has room for a bit of faction play. The Librarians, the Floating Brains, and the Neurovores all hate each other, giving you room to ally with one against the rest. Archivist Liches are dangerous in a fight but fully capable of helping you on your quest for information. Escaped Fictions are just weird and change the rules to fit whatever book they came from. It's all just so good I love table top role playing games aaaa!!

Design Question: How can we represent the split tables in the city?

I like the Library's idea of having an internal state that can get worse if you make the wrong moves. The obvious way to represent this in The City is with law enforcement: break the rules and somebody'll come gather your ass. There's room for flavor in each layer also - Homeowner's Association goons, cops, servants / hired guns, etc.

Another consideration is taking from Ynn's unique monsters and adding NPCs to this table. Other explorers, faction leaders, whatever, I just think truly unique stuff in all this mess is interesting to throw in!

Design Question: How can I incorporate creative nonhuman encounters?

All humans isn't inspiring, I think, and there's so much juice flowing out of Emmy's work that it'd be a shame not to go big. Just spitballing here:

• The Crowd as an entity (similar to my module FIVE A.M. PANIC!)
• Vehicles as encounters (construction cranes, possessed Bird scooters, parade floats, public transport)
• Urban constructs (trash golems, sidewalk mimics, streetlight traps)
• Animals (strange pets, mutant pigeons, window spiders)

I'm not impressed with any of these from the get tbh. I think this'll be the hardest part to turn the screw on and really make sing.

---

Events

These come early in the books, but I'm talking about them now because they exist in support of the rest of the rules. The Event table is by and large going to be how you're running into any of those cool monsters or hitting snags/shortcuts in exploration. Again, I like ratios, so I've categorized these here.

Ynn: 8 direct encounters, 3 treasures, 4 new shortcuts, 5 ominous other events

Stygian: 7 direct encounters, 5 treasures / beneficial, 3 shortcuts, 5 ominous / bad events

Once more the Library has a little less teeth, but both have ~60% chance of something bad happening. Not many design thoughts here - I like this distribution and might just take Stygian's setup whole cloth (minus Extraodrinary Book / Progress-related entries).

---

Tables and Other Notes

The books end with flavor, tables, rumors, dreams, and new character classes. Again, all great, no notes. My favorite addition is the Mummified Sage class, a borderline-undead quiet little scholar.

I'm also a fan of the Ynnian Alterations table, which can mutate you in such a way that you count as a vampire or fey when it's all said and done. Something to study when considering assimilation mutations, maybe.

In general I just like flavor tables, although they're the first thing to get cut on any project that's running long for me. These are another thing that might be elevated by my imagined Twine setup - click the flavor button, get a few random rolls behind the scenes, keep everything consolidated.

Design Question: What system to write this for?

Emmy wrote these in a generic OSR style with lots Armour as Chain and Save vs. Magic. This is easy to convert to Mark of the Odd systems, which are my main choice, but I don't actually know how easy it is to slot into your OSEs or Black Hacks. I assume it can't be that bad?

As far as my own writing, I could do this generic style, but I'd rather just write for a particular system I like bc that's more fun. The two I'm thinking of are Electric Bastionland and Liminal Horror, both of which seem like a good fit for this bizarre urban setting. Liminal is maybe a little bit more fitting, takes from Cairn's excellent inventory system, and, honestly, has more eyes on it than new Bastion content. Bastionland is what I have more experience with, and I would almost feel like I'd have to lean too into horror if I'm writing for Liminal, but all Mark of the Odd stuff is easy to convert between anyway so this isn't really a life-or-death decision.

The Big Question

Well, that's the whole book(s). There's only one more major thing to consider moving forward:

Why make this a depthcrawl at all?

Why not just make it a cool, intentionally constructed dungeon or pointcrawl or whatever? No randomness, no procgen, just well-tailored design. This is a question I ask myself basically any time I play a rougelite these days; I feel like many of them are not leaning into the strengths of the medium and instead are using procgen to cover up what is largely an uninspiring core.

I've got a few answers to this that I'll order by increasing potency.

• Because I want to. Depthcrawls are neat and I want to make one. Even if I had a bad core idea (which I don't believe is true here) I'd still be trying to smush a depthcrawl into that box and make it fit just because it seems fun!
• More than that, depthcrawls are surprising and delightful for both players and GMs. I like that Emmy specifically mentions in these pieces that they're intended to be used at the table rather than prepped beforehand. I enjoy writing dungeons, but I'm more interested right now in making a tool that everyone can feel coming together in the moment, like a strange picture book or weird toy you found in the woods.
• Lastly, I specifically want to evoke the feeling of being lost in an urban setting. I did a lot of solo travel in college and used to chase the feeling of wandering blindly through an unfamiliar city, not quite knowing the landmarks, walking down a side road and losing the horizon for a moment, stumbling on a store with no understanding of the path I took to get there. You could maybe, maybe get close to this vibe with a pointcrawl / flux space scenario, but I feel strongly that a depthcrawl is the best fit for this almost sickening, directionless wandering.
  • the closest I've found in evoking this feeling is Caro Asercion's i'm sorry did you say street magic. It's a KILLER game and one I might even play again for inspiration on this piece, but I'd like to hone in on the fear / lizard-brained decision making that comes from lethal dungeon crawling systems rather than a (still fun!) GMless storygame vibe.

What's Next?

Phew. Long post. Let's get that roadmap back in.

• Intro (check!)
• Case Study 1: Emmy's depthcrawls (check!!!)
• (ideally) Case Study 2: One or more other depthcrawls
• Overview of the crawl -- themes, imagery, vibes, etc.
• Outer Ring: The Suburbs
  • locations
  • details
  • encounters
• Middle Ring: The City
  • locations
  • details
  • encounters
• Inner Ring: The Manor
  • locations
  • details
  • encounters
• Playtesting
• Final thoughts & putting it all together (the dream!)

Looks like next up is non-Emmy depthcrawls, which I expect to be a much shorter post than this one. Amazingly, following my last entry (less than a week ago!), a new depthcrawling module was released - Dungeon Age Adventures' The Undying Sea. It features art by Hodag who also, funnily enough, worked on a different depthcrawl module - Nova's HELL ON REV-X. I haven't thumbed through the Undying Sea yet because GenCon ate my budget, but I love that we're still getting cool new depth content!

Right now the only module that's for sure on my list is Jason Christopher Burrows' Downrooted because it's free.99, but ideally I'd like to get one more in there. Until then: if you've made it this far, thank you for reading. I'll see you soon with Case Study #2!

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Depthcrawl Design, pt 1 - Borges and Basilisks 8 August 2024 Contents

• Contents
• Intro
• What is a Depthcrawl?
• Writing My Own
• Sidechat: Jorge Luis Borges
• Initial Ideas
• Roadmap

Intro

Recently while reading Nova's bathtub review of The Stygian Library by Emmy Allen I was struck by something she mentioned: there really aren't that many depthcrawls in the world. As far as I know Emmy invented the format with Gardens of Ynn (in 2018! pre-COVID!!) but, barring one or two modules, the format hasn't seen a ton of exploration.

Personally, both Stygian and Ynn beat my brain in a fist fight the first time I read them. I am, in many ways, drawn to infinity, and this strange, wonderful exploration had me barking at the moon. She nails this kind of otherworldly imagery that reminded me of reading books as a kid. Think: throwing your head underwater, opening your eyes, and feeling like you've entered another world.

What is a Depthcrawl?

They're a type of procedurally generated pointcrawl built for exploring infinite, extradimensional spaces. As far as vibes go: less roguelike, more tesseract. I haven't read any depth literature outside of Emmy's work, so I'm not sure how many details (if any) are codified, but I'll sum up what feel like the core points to me.

• the route through the space is randomly generated each time you enter
• navigation options are some variation of: Go Deeper, Go Back, Stay Here
• new points are generated with some variation of: Location, Details, Encounters
  • the group's Depth affects these rolls and leads to weirder results the deeper they go

Doesn't sound too crazy, because it isn't! What makes her work sing is how tightly Emmy themes everything. She's got an eye (and pen) for whimsy and clear experience with the old school playstyle, so despite a premise that can be hard to wrap your mind around, it all still feels so, so playable.

Writing My Own

I've been kicking around the idea of making a depthcrawl for a while (Sunflower River actually started its life as one), but it's intimidating! There's a lot going on, it's a type of design language I don't really speak, and there's very little documentation I've seen on how to actually write them. BUT there's no time like the present, and also I'm between game jams and kinda fiending for a Project, so I think it'd be exciting to write a series on depthcrawl design, starting with analysis of some existing Depth Material and working my way up to creating my own.

Sidechat: Jorge Luis Borges

It's going to be basically impossible for me to lay out my depthcrawl ideas (or: Deep Thoughts) in any meaningful detail without detouring into my primary literary influence on this topic. Borges was an Argentine writer writing proto-magical realism with a philosophical bent. Never read him? Start with the Secret Miracle, about a feverish author encountering something sacred moments before his execution by firing squad. His work covers a wide variety of topics but the dude was definitely a freak about certain core concepts:

• dreams
• labyrinths
• tigers (but not labyrinths of tigers!)
• infinity
• how much he LOVES Buenos Aires
• how much he HATES nazis
• bleed across fiction and reality (something Emmy has also written on!)

Et cetera. Why am I telling you this? Two reasons. Actually three, but the first is obvious - I like being self-indulgent! The others: Borges writes like the page is too small for his ideas. My favorite stories of his feel like unreality, or exploring a city with a deep fever, barely able to react, just letting it wash over you. He hasn't just shaped how I think of infinity, he's shaped the way I want infinity to feel. I don't plan on just ripping classic Borges symbols whole cloth, but the tone of his work is absolutely going to be swirling around in my primordial idea soup, and that's important to acknowledge!

The last is less important, but still relevant: when I first read these modules I was convinced that Borges was a major influence on Emmy as well, because two of his most famous stories are about:

• an infinitely expanding garden (i know the literal garden aspect is incidental don't @ me)
• and an infinitely expanding library

Comically, I didn't find out until I'd already started on this post that she doesn't include him anywhere in the listed influences across Ynn and the Library. But this odd coincidence has stuck with me while writing and I think it gives me an interesting springboard - if Borges' work screamed at me so much in my reading of Emmy's, why not use one of his many excellent short stories as the seed for my own depthcrawl?

Initial Ideas

Not to mince words but figuring out which story to start with was pretty easy because it's one of my absolute favs: Death and the Compass, a melancholy, borderline psychedelic murder mystery relating to the tetragrammaton - the unspeakable four-part name of God. This story whips. I want every word tattooed on the inside of my eyelids. Not only is the haunting / surreal tone directly aligned with what I want to capture in this crawl, but the labyrinthine imagery in the climax is some of Borges' best.

This shit could feed a depthcrawl by itself I mean come ON

The diffusion of light guided him to a window. He opened it: a round, yellow moon outlined two blinded fountains in the melancholy garden. Lonnrot explored the house. He traveled through antechambers and galleries to emerge upon duplicate patios; several times he emerged upon the same patio. He ascended dust-covered stairways and came out into circular antechambers; he was infinitely reflected in opposing mirrors; he grew weary of opening or half-opening windows which revealed the same desolate garden outside, from various heights and various angles; inside, the furniture was wrapped in yellow covers and the chandeliers bound up with cretonne. A bedroom detained him; in the bedroom, a single rose in a porcelain vase -- at the first touch the ancient petals fell apart. On the second floor, on the top storey, the house seemed to be infinite and growing. The house is not this large, he thought. It is only made larger by the penumbra, the symmetry, the mirrors, the years, my ignorance, the solitude.

I'm moved by the way each location in the story feels immense, from the wasteland suburbs to the tavern invaded by harlequins to the nightmarish manor. It makes me want to branch out from the relatively constrained themes of Emmy's work into something more expansive, like a city. What I'm imagining here is this: a multilayer crawl, structured as three rings (or spirals?). Each ring is infinite in one direction, finite in another. You can "strafe" eternally at the same depth, but if you keep going deeper you'll eventually transition into another ring.

I like this setup, and the seed of Death and the Compass, for a few reasons:

• I can explore the way different infinite regions butt up and transition into each other.
• I can pull from other influences dear to my heart, from Calvino's seemingly endless Invisible Cities to the CMYK-soaked murder dreams in Anthology of the Killer (sidechats for another time, maybe).
• Different layers can have different methods of traversal, or can tweak / reflavor the Location/Detail/Encounter structure in unique ways.
• Cities have lots of people, and I want to write about a crowded infinity.

Specific themes / vibes to incorporate are a post for another time, I think, but this covers the broad strokes! My ultimate goal: packaging all this up in Twine ala Snow's Sun King's Palace; I feel like depthcrawls are begging for automated rolling & consolidated information.

Roadmap

No plan survives contact with the enemy, but this feels like a solid overview of what I'd like to cover in this series

• Intro (check!!!)
• Case Study 1: Emmy's depthcrawls
• (ideally) Case Study 2: One or more other depthcrawls
• Overview of the crawl -- themes, imagery, vibes, etc.
• Outer Ring: The Suburbs
  • locations
  • details
  • encounters
• Middle Ring: The City
  • locations
  • details
  • encounters
• Inner Ring: The Manor
  • locations
  • details
  • encounters
• Playtesting
• Final thoughts & putting it all together (the dream!)

Phew. Okay. God willing the next time you see me I'll have a study on Emmy Allen's depthcrawls. Until then: stay safe!

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gen con rev iew 5 August 2024 Contents

• Contents
• Gen Con!
• Gen Con
• What I Played
  • CBR+PNK
  • Pasion de las Pasiones
  • Slugblaster: Kickflip Over A Quantum Centipede
  • Extra Ordinary (playtest)
  • Home
• What I Bought
  • Tabletop Games
  • Board Games
• Outside the Con
• Shard

Gen Con!

Gen Con!!

Gen Con

It's the big one! The big con! This was my first year going and I had no idea what to expect. My only other large con experience was a one day trip to Dragon Con when I lived in ATL. I met up with a group of 6 people who all dressed up as members of the Black Parade without telling me, so I mostly just wandered around wide-eyed looking like the goths were forced to bring their annoying younger brother.

I went with one guy I knew, a four-year Gen Con vet, and two of his friends I'd never met. They all encouraged me to ignore the panels and sign up for play sessions, so that's what I did. I attended five!! oneshot sessions across the con and left room in the schedule to wander the dealer hall. The four of us booked a hotel room with two twin beds and met up in Alabama for the 6-ish hour drive to Indy. It all felt very college boy road trip (complimentary).

The road trip aspect was, comically, a disaster. My friend contracted an insane musculoskeletal infection (???) that left him in so much pain he was out of commission for the entire first day of the con. He was so miserable that he actually caught an emergency flight home on day two.

Adding on, one of the other Dudes forgot to include the con as an unavailable period for work (????), so he also had to make an emergency flight home on day one before coming back on day three, leaving him out for half the con. This left me without my one connection, half our group gone, and sharing a room with one guy I hardly knew. Basically: a nightmare scenario.

Thankfully, both the remaining Guy + everyone I met at the con were super kind and easy to get along with. Even though my social battery drained pretty quickly, I never felt unwelcome with any play group or stopping at any booth. Any time I came across a familiar name I bombarded them with questions and it felt like people always had time to answer (thank you for bearing with me especially Graham, Warren, and Yochai). Basically I had a lovely experience despite the specter of my dying friend looming in the background waiting to become a part of my tragic backstory. Sorry, Paul!!

What I Played

I won't be going into much detail on the actual sessions because tbh I hate play reports and think they're about as interesting as someone telling you about that cool dream they had. This'll mostly cover vibes + what I thought did/didn't work about the game.

CBR+PNK

CBR+PNK by Emanoel Melo is a condensed Forged in the Dark game about runners in a classic cyberpunk future going on their big final mission. It's intended for high energy oneshots.

I actually almost refunded my ticket for this one because I was already feeling overstimulated / a little wigged out from the fraught trip to the con, and wanted a little more time to acclimate. I'm glad I didn't, because this was a blast! The condensed format is perfect for the con setting, and our GM had a big loud voice and great energy that drew us all in immediately. Unlike some later games I played, the mechanics here went a long way to keeping the narrative moving while still letting everyone inject their own personal flavor into the world.

I played BIG_D0G, a trash saint with pneumatic gun arms built to harvest and launch whatever junk he finds in the garbage; I felt the game supported this weird idea without issue. We ran the Dark City module by Ray Chou, where the gang finds themselves drafted into a city-wide violent bloodsport show. Frankly the only thing I want out of cyberpunk content is a bunch of good strong freaks to fuck around with, and this one's got freaks aplenty, so it gets two thumbs up from me!

Fun Fact!

Our GM, Metal Steve, clearly had experience and passion, but seemed a little unfamiliar with the module and occasionally had to take breaks to get familiar with certain bits. Not the end of the world, and he always came back firing on all cylinders, but still unexpected. I found out from talking with some of the Mythworks folks later that they had a very last minute dropout and had to source a new GM from their discord the week of the con. Metal Steve was who volunteered, so he was basically just as fresh on the module as the rest of us. And he still crushed it! You go, Metal Steve.

---

Pasion de las Pasiones

Pasion de las Pasiones, by Brandon Leon-Gambetta and produced by Magpie Games, is a powered by the apocalypse game inspired by soapy, overly dramatic telenovelas. It contains moves meant to showcase the over-the-top drama on those shows - flashbacks, shocking reveals, sudden violence, confessions of love, etc. Personally I'm a Gauntletpilled Brindlecel who doesn't feel like Magpie is doing anything interesting in the PbtA space (and am hoping they don't fuck up Fallen London!!). I hadn't read Pasion, but it still seemed fun and also like a hard sell to my regular group, so I was tentatively excited for how it would play.

Worth noting: everyone at the table, including the GM, was white. Nobody did an accent, thankfully. I don't have much to say about the experience of playing this with an all-white group, but I did find an interesting review that digs into some of the more stereotypical aspects of the game.

I played a doña (stern matriarch type) named Amaranta. The setup was that we were all adopted siblings under our dying abuela fighting over who would inherit the business after the will mysteriously burned in a house fire the day prior. The GM set the scene of us arriving one-by-one to the hospital and then largely stayed out of the action while our characters bickered. I'm not sure if this scenario is packaged with the book or made specifically for the con.

Looking back, I have no idea how this game is supposed to go. Every scene was largely us having some big dramatic argument or discussion, then asking the GM what happens next, only to get a shrug and a "what do you do?" Which would be fine, but my big takeaway is that the moves just don't work with the scripted TV premise. They're all related to big specific actions happening mid-scene, but there's barely anything that sets the stage for a new scene. I was really missing something like Trophy's hunt roll or Brindlewood's day/night moves - something generic that moves the action forward and sets you up for an interesting scene. We had silly fun getting loud and yelling at each other and then had nothing much to do when that energy fizzled out.

If I were gonna add anything to Pasion, it would be a Fade to Black / Cut to Commercial move - something that ends a scene on a cliffhanger and immediately cuts to a new one with a roll to decide the tone of that scene. This would ideally lead to a good A/B session plot while giving players the tools to keep things moving.

Fun Fact!

One of our players was wearing a mask. Power to him, but Magpie's gaming hall was packed to the point that they had to have a noise-resetting signal so everyone could actually hear each other. Our poor mask guy must have picked the most noise-cancelling material he could find because we could barely hear him even when the room was quiet. Every time he spoke we would see him getting really animated and wide-eyed and slam his fists on the table while being 100% inaudible. It was great.

Also, the GM kept calling my character Amaretto, which was annoying and I'll hold a grudge about it forever!!

---

Slugblaster: Kickflip Over A Quantum Centipede

Slugblaster by Mikey Hamm is a game about shitty hoverboard teens menacing an alternate universe quantum-tech 90s. It uses a stripped down Forged in the Dark system. The book is all bright colors, loud music, and bold design - probably the most attractive product I saw at the entire con. I'd seen this one on itch and planned on running a game for my friends until I signed up for this slot. I loved the art and premise, so I was super stoked going in!

I played a Grit named Fahey, an archetype meant to represent the determined, one-track-mind skater who beefs the same line over and over until they finally nail it. Our adventure was written by the GM specifically for the con - our characters wanted to hit the mall to grab the hottest new game release, but the only way to get there before the crowds was to take a portal shortcut through the nightmarish Blasteroid Lands.

Our GM for this was fun - really, really energetic, very physical, often standing up to add some oomph to the action - and I genuinely did have a great time, but similar to Pasion I also felt like this was missing a good strong stage-setting mechanic. The session opened basically like this.

• GM: The portal's on the other side of town. How do you get there?
• Us: we skate?
• GM: Do you do any tricks?
• Us: ...yeah?
• GM: Are they cool?
• Us: ...yeah?
• GM: Describe them and roll!

Maybe this is just a GM thing and we were supposed to jump into the action faster, idk, but I think there's only so many times I can aimlessly describe my wicked sick dickflips or whatever before I start to get bored, so it feels like the game has a short shelf life. The actual action in the Blasteroid Lands was fun with typical clocks, big descriptions, etc., although this game doesn't use mixed success which I thought was interesting.

Once we got out, we entered the mall and were given free reign to wander. Again, might be a GM thing, but it seemed like this was just optional roleplay. There weren't any real mechanics for shopping and no need to buy anything, so we sort of just talked with NPCs for shiggles until we got bored and went to buy our cool game. Is there anything wrong with that? Not really, but I was hoping for more stakes or goals or something outside of checking out what's available at Quantum Spencer's. I had fun fucking around, but I wouldn't be excited to play this game again any time soon.

Fun Fact!

Our GM said they had packed the session full of references and said we probably wouldn't get it, so it was mostly just for their own enjoyment. Then they immediately revealed we were trying to buy a game called Sburb and, once we got to the mall, they had fleshed out every store as manned by different Homestuck characters. I was the only one at the table who recognized this. Is Homestuck obscure now??? Comically they ended the session describing a meteor coming down towards us as we booted up the game - a critical plot thread in the comic but something that the other players had NO context for. It was super self-indulgent and the GM really went all in on it, so I was endeared, even if I'm waaaaaaay past my Homestuck phase. Thanks, Gabe!

---

Extra Ordinary (playtest)

Extra Ordinary by Kodi Gonzaga is an upcoming Belonging outside Belonging game about kids with strange powers on the run in a harsh world. This was a playtest - the actual game is being Kickstarted in 2025. Kodi themself facilitated the game and played with us.

My toxic trait is that the only games I love to run are highly lethal dungeon crawlers and the only games I love to play are tenderhearted GMless storygames. So, no surprise, this was my favorite session of the con. We spent two hours on chargen + collaborative worldbuilding, then two hours actually playing; this tracks similarly to my experience with Wanderhome. I played an Outsider named Andromeda (Ann for short), a character who "is not from here" (where is left up to interpretation), and I built her with divination/navigation based powers flavored after the stars in the night sky.

My big worry about playing this game at a con is that GMless games truly require everyone to be all in. If someone's not into it and killing the vibe then it drags the whole table down, but if everyone is on top of it the games feel ELECTRIC. Luckily, we had a fully engaged group from minute one, and worldbuilding was a blast.

We flavored ourselves as 1930's trainhoppers on the run from a proto-three-letter-agency called the Paranormal Investigation Service (fuck you, PISsers). Our powers came from a primordial elemental consciousness pushing back against encroaching industrialization, and we had recently lost a plant-powered friend to the PIS. Mechanically, this was straightforwardly BoB: make weak moves with negative story impact to gain tokens, then spend them on hard moves with positive impact. Interestingly, this was structured in such a way that every character gets a chance in the spotlight and is GMed by one other player as something called an Aspect (the Ordinary, the Danger, the Need, etc). Once you've played an aspect, your character gets the spotlight, and play moves on. Nothing much to say here other than I think it's a great structure!

Typically I'm not drawn to any games where you play kids, but I think this idea is just not as interesting with adults. Kids on the run and trying to make do is inherently a little more fraught and heavy than adults doing the same, and it also tugs on your heartstrings a little more too. Overall I had a blast with this one and I plan on backing the Kickstarter when it eventually launches. Not sponsored btw!!

Fun Fact!

A game that I adore but never get a chance to talk about is Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, a magical realist game about trainhopping across Depression-era America. As soon as we'd built our world it's all that was on my mind, and I suggested its title as the name of the place we were looking for. To my joy, for such a niche game, several other players were also familiar and were fully on board with the idea. That insane spark of Being On The Same Page as the other folks in a GMless game is exactly why I seek these kinds of things out.

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Home

House by Marn S. is a GMless map making game using cards as a mechanic about exploring a haunted house. It's heavily inspired by House of Leaves.

Home by Wet Ink Games is a GMless map making game using cards as a mechanic about exploring a haunted house. It has nothing to do with House of Leaves.

Because I have comic relief character energy, I signed up for Home thinking it was House and spent most of the con talking up my super cool upcoming House of Leaves session. Oops! I had a tough time hiding my disappointment going in, but was surprised to find that this game was a ton of fun. You create your characters given certain archetypes, collaborate on the setting, then draw cards to discover what you find in the house. The prompts are generic ("your foot crunches on some object, what is it? what horrible feeling does it fill you with?"), and typically ask you to create a new room without any details on what's inside, so it's up to the players to set the scene and ratchet up the tension. There are different card decks corresponding to different horror genres - aliens, haunted orphanages, blah blah. We went with a witchy, ritual themed deck.

The setting we decided on was an antebellum mansion in rural Kentucky. I played Blind Joe Death, an ardent believer in the supernatural. Unlike Extra Ordinary, this group skewed a bit older and everyone else was clearly a lot less comfortable with narrating themselves. I got the impression they all typically played mechanics heavy games where they could rely heavily on the rules to do the talking. What saved this from being a disaster IMO is how much work the cards put in. They offer flavorful prompts, interesting choices to make, and clear guidance on what feelings you want to invoke in each act of the game.

Interestingly, despite being GMless, the facilitator of this game didn't actually play, instead sitting off to the side offering nudges and suggestions for our scenes. This helped the less comfortable players bounce their ideas off someone with experience and feel more comfortable making interesting choices. Would this sing more with a group of strong improvisers? Yeah, duh, but everyone's gotta start somewhere, and this felt like a very accessible entry point into GMless gaming. I would go as far as to say that mechanically this was my favorite game of the bunch because of how much I saw it succeed in action with the other players.

Overall, not a game I'd play often, but still one I greatly enjoyed! The combo of this and my Extra Ordinary game convinced me that, if I ever go back to this con again, I should sign up for way more GMless games - they fit my ideal con experience almost perfectly.

Fun Fact!

Prior to this session, every GM I played with asked us for our Lines and Veils as a safety tool. Every time, I wrote the same thing under Lines: no violence against children/pets. Extra Ordinary was a minor exception because it had more nuanced lines/veils built in for how the kids can be affected by violence. This isn't a trigger for me, just something I have no interest in seeing.

Home was the only game where we weren't asked for Lines/Veils, and, lo and behold, we get two hours into the session and another player introduces mutilated baby skeletons in a room she creates. Of fucking course. Thank goodness it's not a trigger for me or I would have been livid. At the time I was in such disbelief that I had to laugh, and I still think it's funny, but also, PLEASE use safety tools in your games, especially horror themed games! It's not hard!!

What I Bought

Just quick n dirty overviews here!

Tabletop Games Beak, Feather, and Bone, bundled with Go Go Golf!

A map making game by Tyler Crumrine. I bought it bundled with an anime-y golfing system that I can't find online. Tyler's booth was great - he told me he tries to work with different artists for each product, and reader, the man's got taste. The different artstyles present such a bold image when seen together. My wallet was fighting for its life here. Wanted, but unbought: The Details of Our Escape, built with stunning art from someone who mostly works on graphic novels.

Candleberry Jam

A system neutral adventure by Glass//Cutter. I got this one from Plus One Exp's Zine Club booth, staffed by a tired but friendly Chris Air. I bought this one based on its cover alone - it seemed dreamy and maybe even sickening!

Into the Riverlands and Rise of the Blood Olms

A system neutral adventure setting from Ostrichmonkey Games, also bought at the Zine Club booth. Grabbed this one on Yochai Gal's recommendation after bumping into him there, but it wasn't a very hard sell. I just love a good twilit forest! He also threw a copy of the Cairn 2e adventure Rise of the Blood Olms at me, which was great, because I'd tried to sign up for his oneshot session with it but was too slow on the draw. Finally, I can learn what's up with those olms...

Old Roads Guidebook and Atlas

A system neutral adventure setting I picked up from the (Ennie-winning!) Cloud Curio booth. Brilliant art inspired by old public domain illustrations. I talked to the guy who made it for a good couple of minutes before realizing he was Kyle Latino of the excellent Map Crow channel. Fun fact: Kyle worked as college professor for a while teaching game design, but recently accepted a nerve-wracking new position as a writer for Larian Studios which is a nutty pivot!

Wishlist

I don't have infinite money, and as mentioned struggle to justify buying new systems, but if both of those weren't true I would definitely have picked up Gila RPGs' Hunt and World Champ Games Co.'s Necronautilus. I'm also a little cold on Troika, but I'm regretting not picking up the Cannon Fodder sphere by Enrico Gheller because the art alone is choice and I could adapt it to my fav systems pretty easily.

Board Games

Illimat is a trick-taking card game with gorgeous woodcut-styled art and design input from Colin Meloy of the Decemberists. Sync is a party game about guessing words with limited input (think taboo). It's basically the Mind Meld improv game with better art.

Not much to say about these - I wanted games that both looked beautiful and seemed lightweight enough that I could play with my wife and friends, since none of us skew towards complex games. Both of these fit the bill!

Outside the Con

I didn't do too much extracurricular stuff because games and shopping took a lot out of me. jay of Possum Creek games hosted a pizza party that I attended and was asking folks to describe their crunchy/soft game preferences in terms of food. I struggled to think of something at the time, but looking back now I'm imagining something like this: a bowl of Chex Mix that I've filtered such that my side has all the chex and pretzels and your side is stuck with breadsticks and rye chips.

I also went to a Modern Cthulhu oneshot performed by the Glass Cannon podcast network. I don't listen to the pod, but everyone I went with did, so we made plans to go as a group. Unfortunately, due to aforementioned Circumstances, it ended up just being me and one of the guys I didn't know well. I'm a bit of an actual play hater for two reasons:

• listening to other people have fun just makes me wish I were playing a game and having fun instead
• I spend the whole time thinking I'd do a better job than the performers bc I'm built different

Anyway, watching a live performance for a podcast you don't listen to is wild because a bog standard white dude in a hoodie can walk on stage and the crowd erupts like it's the fucking Second Coming. The show was fun, the drink I ordered was strong enough that I didn't care about not knowing the performers, and to my surprise they were joined by Ross Bryant who is one of my favorite improvisors! He killed it. In general I thought the show was super funny as an improv performance and was largely bogged down by them actually playing Modern Cthulhu. The character interactions were killer, and then the GM would call for a dice roll and it would completely kill the energy. I'd rather just see a normal improv show with these same performers, but that'd make a lot less money from people with Wizards of the Coast tattoos.

Fav part: the guy playing a nerdy kid character at one point looked at the crowd and said "I love to play a newly released game called Dungeons and Dragons!" to wild screams. Then later he said he had a copy of Keep on the Borderlands in his backpack and got crickets. Sorry, king, better luck next time.

Shard

Ok, I can't end without talking about Shard, "a roleplaying game of DARDUNAH, WORLD of the FALSE DAWN" by Aaron de Orive and Scott Jones. This is a heavy, heavy crunch game about exploring an Eastern-inspired world populated by anthropomorphic martial arts animals. The art is campy vintage schlock and the website is... amazing.

As far as I'm concerned this game has an audience of exactly one person and it was the dude at the booth. According to him he's been playing in a one-on-one game run by Aaron for TEN YEARS. He told me all about the racial options, the way your background hinges on the country your from, all the ways the game fixes exactly what he dislikes about D&D, and the recent release of the World Guide, a 450-page behemoth detailing the entire history of the world from the individual perspective of each country in the game. No new mechanics, just self-indulgence.

Let me be real with you: I have no interest in playing this game. It feels like it was designed by someone who felt D&D 5e didn't have enough bloat. But, wow, this kind of single-minded focus for a game that was released in 2008 just fills my heart with love. I could feel the passion both from the booth guy and indirectly from the game's designer and it was overwhelming. The only thing stopping me from walking out with $150 worth of useless books was the suggestion that I try out the free playtest on the website. I'm fully Shardpilled. I'll sing this game's praises til I'm gone. Aaron and Scott, if you see this, contact me and I will man your booth next year. I see the vision and I am all in.

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Dungeon Erasure 29 July 2024 Contents

• Contents
• Intro
• What is Erasure?
• Setup
• Dungeon Erasure - Winter
  • Something to Steal
  • Something to be Killed
  • Something to Kill You
  • Different Paths
  • Someone to Talk To
  • Something to Experiment With
  • Something the Players Probably Won't Find
• Summing Up: Winter Crag station
• Final Thoughts

Intro

After my last post on seeding dungeons with tarot cards I was reflecting on how much I enjoy incorporating art in my creative process. I've done this before with music and this sort of spiritual throughline has left a mark on me. Mining the details of a piece and the way they move me before translating them into an explorable space is a method for me to connect with art in a way that I really would never experience outside of this hobby, and on top of that I just think it's fun!! Now that I've done music and tarot, I've been idly brainstorming how to draw other media into this journey. Today, I'd like to try my hand at erasure poetry.

What is Erasure?

Basically: the creation of poetry by erasing or blacking out an existing piece. That piece can be anything from existing poems to an MtG card to the Declaration of Independence to every page of Infinite Jest, one by one..

Truthfully I have always been a little bit wary of erasure. Even though Danez 100% got her ass I feel what Jane is saying in that tweet - it feels icky to "silence" an author. What I'm hoping for with this post is to perform several different erasures on the same piece in order to see it from several unique angles while still, in some way, preserving more of the original. I'm not well experienced in doing this, so I don't expect the final results to be a major departure from the tone / content in the original piece, but I'm always happy to be surprised!

Setup

The work I'll be erasing is one of my favorite poems: Winter, by Michael Earl Craig.

My basic plan here is to perform a different erasure on this poem for each step of the classic dungeon checklist from Goblin Punch. I'll be editing in MS Paint like a true auteur. It's a short poem, which may be a problem, but it's so vivid and sharp that I don't think I'll have too much trouble filling things out. When I'm done, I'll put it all together into a bite-sized dungeon.

Dungeon Erasure - Winter Something to Steal

Something to be Killed

Something to Kill You

Different Paths

Someone to Talk To

Something to Experiment With

Something the Players Probably Won't Find

Summing Up: Winter Crag station

1 - the trainyard

• In the trainyard it is late, lamps light the trainmen and a small grey owl.

2 - fog-rest

• A long umber fog-rest. In its newly runed lamps one sees the thoughts of the trainman's cat Stamina.

3 - soaked red stage

• Long thought to be exctinct soaked men on horseback. In the brunette-colored lamps one of the men has a thought: all kin harbor rain. The man crunches gentlemen on stage dressed as a farmer.

4 - the other side

• Out the other side of the trainyard the train shudders, nearly thirty years late to the farm.

5 - icy harbor

• A kind of cow from a fog-soaked forest. Its red light like sin in the icy harbor. The cow continues out the other side of the man. Stamina 30.

• In the lamplit icy harbor the rainman's crest gently pleas to you. (The cow is led by a dreamer.)

6 - the young dreamer

• A small grey infant ever so icy. The rain runs in her dish. Now, nearly thirty ladies and gentlemen introduce you to the young dreamer.

• A statue of two shaking hands in the trainyard with its newly brunette-colored coal cars. One like a king, the other shudders in gentle pleasure.

Final Thoughts

Well, that's something. I think of the processes I've done on this blog, this one felt the most self-indulgent. But, wow, it came out so dreamy! What's a fog-rest? What does it mean for the cow to be coming out the other side of the man? No clue, but that's still enough for me to work with on game day! I chickened out in the final write-up and added some extra punctuation / changed some capital letters rather than sticking firmly to my text, but even without that I really like what came out here.

Something I loved about this is that with each new step on the checklist I got more familiar with the poem, letting me comb through it with new eyes each time and find words/phrases in unexpected spots. If I ran this back from the top right now I think, while the setting would still be this weird foggy train station, I'd still be able to find new, interesting details.

Would I do this again? No, or at least not on the regular. It's a lot of work even if I enjoyed it. And, tbh, I still don't quite feel right about performing erasures. Probably if I did this again I would erase either my own work or something in the public domain just to assuage my own stomach. It does make me think that an erasure game jam could be fun. What would it look like for a bunch of people to comb through, say, the old TSR adventures and find new life in the ancient texts?

If you liked this, I'd love to hear any suggestions on other forms of media to mine inspiration from. I'm always happy to experiment!

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Riffing on His Majesty the Worm 17 July 2024 Contents

• Contents
• Background
• My Thoughts
• Riffing on Seeds
• The Sensory Spread
  • Setup
  • Interpreting the Cards
  • Card 1 - Spark
  • Card 2 - Sight
  • Card 3 - Sound
  • Card 4 - Smell and taste
  • Card 5 - Lighting
  • Card 6 - Structures
  • Card 7 - Dungeon lord
• Summing Up - His Crystal Entrails (Ten of Wands)
• Final Thoughts

Background

Today (as of me writing this), His Majesty the Worm by Rise Up Comus released! It's a game with a tarot resolution mechanic that presents itself like so:

His Majesty the Worm is a new-school game with old-school sensibilities: the classic megadungeon experience given fresh life through a focus on the mundanities and small moments of daily life inside the dungeon. This post is part of a series of deep dives into the mechanics of the game.

I've distantly followed the game's development on Josh McCrowell's twitter for a little while now. It doesn't seem like the type of game I would play, but definitely felt like something with good guts I could rip out and be inspired by.

The game itself is a $40, 400-page behemoth that I do not own, but I was happy to see a few chapters were released for free. Specifically, I was interested in the Dungeon Seeds chapter, detailing how to lay out a megadungeon and some procedures for populating your regular degular dungeons. It also contains some sample seeds/vibes to get you started.

My Thoughts

Frankly, after reading through the chapter, I am... disappointed!!!

Maybe disappointed isn't the right word. Mostly it just doesn't scratch my particular itch. Here's the thing: the dungeon checklist and advice for putting your ideas together are great, but when it comes to sparking those ideas in the first place, you get nothing. So if you've got your ideas out of the way and just need help pulling them together into something gameable, you're in luck! The process of getting there, though, feels like it's missing the rest of the fucking owl.

This isn't a judgement call against the game. Sometimes you really do just gotta make shit up. But I do think for a game focused on megadungeons, I wanted little more zhuzh - something like Bastionland's spark tables. The dungeon outlines included in the chapter are great, but where's the procedure for making your own "seed"? That intial idea is usually the hardest part for me personally. This is especially weird to me because it's a tarot-based game. Like, the cards are right there!

anyway this bothered me enough that i was inspired to riff on it oops

Riffing on Seeds

So, the best things in the chapter IMO are the included dungeon seeds. Every one of these whips. Look!

That's what I'm talking about. I especially love the vibrant sensory details and the completely contextless dungeon lord called the "Bone Chandelier". I think, if I were going to generate my own seeds (which I am), this format is a good bedrock to build on.

To riff on this, I'm thinking of something simple: draw tarot cards in a spread of seven. Six cards represent a different one of these details: Sight, Sound, Smell and taste, Lighting, Structures, and Dungeon lord. The remaining card will be a "spark" to give a little twist to each of the senses. I'm skipping common monsters here - I would expect to have some good ideas of what to throw in there once the rest of the dungeon's background starts coming together.

And just to have a name, I'll call this process something easy like

The Sensory Spread Setup

I'm using this woo-woo website I found on google to draw my cards, using the Hexefus spread and with the "reversed" box checked. For my purposes I'll be reading the cards top-down in the way they're listed below the spread. For art and interpretation, I'll use Labyrinthos, because I love their black/gold default deck. Normally I'd use one of my own decks here, but this way I don't have to take a bunch of shitty phone pics.

---

Interpreting the Cards

My hot take on tarot in TTRPGs is that meanings are neat, but if you're not incorporating the cool art and interplay of the cards somehow then you might as well just use a standard poker deck.

This'll be my general interpretation process:

1. What's actually on the card? Any standout details or odd symbols?
2. What does the card represent? Is it upright or reversed? (pull from either/both meaning if it's more interesting)
3. How do I interpret this card through the lens of my Spark card? (more on that in a sec)
4. If I still need an extra turn of the screw: how do I interpret this card in the context of the earlier cards in the spread?

---

Card 1 - Spark

Traditionally I only read cards for other folks when I'm drunk at a house party - quick n easy stuff like Past/Present/Future readings. Afterwards I always offer something called a clarifier card, one additional draw that forms the lens through which you view the entire spread. For the Spark, I'm drawing that clarifier first. Since the other details are more physical and concrete, I like having an abstract read to start things off and form the Themes or Big Ideas of the dungeon.

My draw here was the Ten of Wands, upright.

What's on the card?

Cool scarab, eye in orb, lattice pattern (reminds me of weaving or crochet)

What does this card represent?

Upright: burden, stress, obligation. Reversed: failure to delegate, taking on too much, collapse.

My take?

Long suffering and duty are interesting themes to take away. I also dig that eye orb. We'll start working on physical details during the next read, but I'll spitball for a sec on this card alone. The first image that comes to mind is: underground mines, workers kept alive through magic, unable to escape the eye of a (long dead?) supervisor.

---

Card 2 - Sight

I'm looking at the art more closely here, along with any objects or atmosphere that the card's meaning evokes.

My draw was the Emperor, upright.

What's on the card?

Old royal, long cape, staff, Christian Orb? Google says it's a globus cruciger. Mountains in the background. Curtains of light on the side - beams from heaven? Abstract skyscrapers?

What does this card represent?

Upright: stability, authority (usually male), structure, discipline. Reversed: tyrants, rigidity, stubbornness.

My take?

These details feel in line with my previous idea about the mines. Thinking about those mountains, the structure/rigid interpretations, and that lattice on the Ten of Wands all lead me towards one idea: crystals.

Let's go with this:

Ramrod-straight hallways crisscrossing through a massive, pure crystal. Not cut so much as deleted. Your reflections are infinite. The whites of your eyes form stars in the imagined distance.

---

Card 3 - Sound

I can make some educated guesses based on the previous card, but I think it's more interesting to read for this.

My draw was the Two of Wands, reversed. I'm not gonna bother flipping this pic, sorry!

What's on the card?

Determined young man, sparkly globe, leafy sticks, castle walls, mountains (again!)

What does this card represent?

Upright: planning, first steps, risks. Reversed: overanalyzing, inaction, risk-avoidance.

My take?

I like the sparkles. Magic? Reminds me of the ambient noise in the Crystal Caverns from Dark Souls 1. The sticks are interesting, and bring to mind something organic. I'm still thinking about that initial Spark: duty, obligation. Combined with this idea of risk-avoidance, I like the image of the silence being broken by some ancient ongoing ritual that you can't see when you first enter. Probably the ritual has long outlasted the threat it was protecting against.

Hollow, cavernous emptiness. Far away: a soft patter or tinkling, like rain on mosaic. Occasionally a loud cacophany rips through the dark from deeper down. Discerning ears might recognize the sound of seeds rattling around a gourd in this noise; discerning minds might hear a long-forgotten ritual implement in the same.

---

Card 4 - Smell and taste

Again, we can make some educated guesses, but I like where that last one took us!

My draw was the Eight of Wands, upright (wand heavy read today I guess).

What's on the card?

Arrows, birds, clouds, the sun. The sun also reminds me of a flower, or maybe a spiked mace. The birds seem to be following the arrows, like they've just been fired themselves.

What does this card represent?

Upright: movement, speed, progress, excitement. Reversed: slowness, chaos, unpreparedness.

My take?

This is an interesting addition. The open sky and idea of movement makes me think of a breeze moving through the cavern, but what scents are carried on it? I'll keep it simple: cooked bird meat. Something used for the ritual?

A breeze snakes in, carrying mouth-watering scents from down below. Tantalizingly constant: mushrooms, burning oil, cooked meat. Less prevalent, but occasionally gracing your tongue: birdshit.

---

Card 5 - Lighting

My draw was the Ten of Cups, Reversed.

What's on the card?

Sun, a rainbow? Bubbles and stars. A fish?? Cups, obviously. Two trees.

What does this card represent?

Upright: Happiness, homecoming, fulfillment. Reversed: separation, disharmony, isolation.

My take?

The stars and floating bubbles are standouts. These reversed ideas make me imagine lighting is there, but sparse. Specifically, separation makes me imagine the light moving away from something, or leaving the area. Thinking of this through the lens of duty makes it feel purposeful, but that's something I'd flesh out while populating the dungeon.

Rarely, a brilliantly shining glass orb (and its million reflected cousins) floats into view at a little over head height. Uninterrupted, it will meander towards the nearest exit, growing more and more cracked before finally shattering as it leaves the crystal. The exits are littered with piles of broken glass.

---

Card 6 - Structures

My draw was the Six of Wands (another one!), reversed.

What's on the card?

Lancer and horse, army banners. A wave of light, like a flag.

What does this card represent?

Upright: Success, victory, rewards. Reversed: Failure, lack of recognition, lack of achievement.

My take?

This goes right along with our Spark. I'm not gonna overthink this one and just stick with the first thing that comes to mind: a failed army, or guard.

Endless bunkers and massive, empty meeting halls. Insignias carved in the wall: a scarab under an all-seeing eye. Beds carved directly from crystal, each bearing the corpse of a failed guardian. Their heads have been taken and placed on shining pikes. The polished walls echo their dishonor.

---

Card 7 - Dungeon lord

My draw was the Two of Pentacles, reversed.

What's on the card?

Hands cupping the pentacles in an infinity loop. An interesting floral structure. The top reminds me of a candelabra. The bottom looks phallic, tbh.

What does this card represent?

Upright: adaptation, flexibility, resourcefulness. Reversed: Imbalanced, overextending, chaos.

My take?

The book just gives adjective-noun titles, so I'll distill this down to the same. I imagine this is the guy keeping our ritual going and ordering all those birds killed. There's religious vibes plus a military angle, so I'll make him a paladin. I like the words chaos and overextending combined with that long, sinewy vine. Maybe he's producing those floating glass orbs? I'm picturing someone who has taken every responsibility onto themselves for so long that they are literally stretched thin, merging with the environment in strange ways and either dreaming these orbs into being or producing them as just part of the way his body works now.

Anyway, our title:

The Unspooled Paladin

Summing Up - His Crystal Entrails (Ten of Wands)

Sight:

Ramrod-straight hallways crisscrossing through a massive, pure crystal. Not cut so much as deleted. Your reflections are infinite. The whites of your eyes form stars in the imagined distance.

Sounds:

Hollow, cavernous emptiness. Far away: a soft patter or tinkling, like rain on mosaic. Occasionally a loud cacophany rips through the dark from deeper down. Discerning ears might recognize the sound of seeds rattling around a gourd in this noise; discerning minds might hear a long-forgotten ritual implement in the same.

Smell and taste:

A breeze snakes in, carrying mouth-watering scents from down below. Tantalizingly constant: mushrooms, burning oil, cooked meat. Less prevalent, but occasionally gracing your tongue: birdshit.

Lighting:

Rarely, a brilliantly shining glass orb (and its million reflected cousins) floats into view at a little over head height. Uninterrupted, it will meander towards the nearest exit, growing more and more cracked before finally shattering as it leaves the crystal. The exits are littered with piles of broken glass.

Structures:

Endless bunkers and massive, empty meeting halls. Insignias carved in the wall: a scarab under an all-seeing eye. Beds carved directly from crystal, each bearing the corpse of a failed guardian. Their heads have been taken and placed on shining pikes. The polished walls echo their dishonor.

Dungeon lord:

The Unspooled Paladin

Final Thoughts

This feels like more than enough to build a dungeon. I can see factions: the hunters bringing these birds in, plus the last remnants of whatever guard served this paladin. You've got odd crystal doodads or protrusions from this cursed paladin to toy with. Add in old religious treasures and the traps they used to keep this order of guardians on their toes, and you've got a (bird) stew cooking.

Off the dome monster ideas: crystal golems, dishonored ghosts, hallucinatory psychic figments from this poor paladin, starving old monks, enterprising hunters.

Was this procedure helpful? I think so. Frankly, all I was really looking for here was an initial jumping off point. I think I could've gone a long way off the spark card alone, but I appreciate the weird twists that each additional read brought in. Plus, tarot cards are just fun! I do think that the themes from my Spark would shine brighter when actually populating the dungeon, but I still feel it was worth having those ideas swimming in the back of my brain throughout writing this.

If you liked this post, I wrote a similar one a while back about mining music for dungeon ideas.

Lastly, despite my gripes, you should still check out His Majesty the Worm! It really does feel like such an impressive body of work, and seeing it release after its lengthy time in the oven is so cool!

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Creating a Pocketverse Pointcrawl with Rifts 15 May 2024

Recently I had an opportunity to go by an old favorite LGS that I moved away from several years ago: JC's House of Cards! As far as TTRPGs go, their selection is mainly limited to D&D 5e and its ocean of br&nded merch. BUT if you ask JC nicely he's got a cardboard box of rancid 90s RPGs that he'll kick out from the stock room and let you dig through. Most of it is hot garbage (complimentary).

I love the kitsch and unashamed creativity of this stuff, so I'm always looking out for fun stuff to steal. This trip's catch of the day was the Rifts® Dimension Book™ 7: Megaverse® Builder book from Palladium Games, written by Carl Gleba. I don't know shit about Rifts but the cover had some kind of fun Galactus knockoff and obviously I never want to be left out to sea in case I need to build a Megaverse®, so I picked it up.

What is Rifts?

I have never owned, read, or played Rifts. By my understanding it is a science fiction system developed by Big Math to sell more percentile dice.

Ok how am I actually going to use this?

Funnily enough, the actual procedures to build a Megaverse® aren't very involved and only take up a small portion of the book: ~10 pages. The rest of it has a few sample dimensions (including the infinite Garbage Pit world, which whips), a bestiary, additional class rules, and a weird section in the middle with some dramatized play reports from other Rifts GMs.

What this means for me is, even without any Rifts experience, I can reasonably use these procedures to rustle up something interesting without digging too much into the weeds. My first thought was to generate the backdrop of a pointcrawl, so I'm gonna do that!

Dimensional Characteristics

Each of these steps involves rolling a percentile die and consulting tables that range from shockingly small to shockingly detailed. I'm not going to go too in depth on the options I didn't get here, partly because this isn't a readthrough review, partly because the book emphatically states that I can't meaningfully reproduce the text on the internet, and I'm a weenie.

1. Size

The options here are Infinite, Parallel, and Pocket Dimensions. Parallel Dimensions are presented by the book as variations of Earth with funny adjectives in front, while Infinite and Pocket Dimensions are entire alternate worlds. I picked a Pocket Dimension here rather than rolling because I wanted to.

1b. Pocket Dimension Size

Options here include comically small (1d4 miles wide) to mind boggling (3d6x10 billion miles wide). I rolled a 26 here for a result of 2d6x10 miles, which then resolved into 80 miles wide. For those of you born in the Reagan years, that's 13 hexes.

2. Primary Dimensional Medium

This is where the magic happens. The book uses a fishbowl analogy for dimensional mediums: the primary makeup of a fishbowl is water, the secondary makeup is the gravel and ceramic structures on the bottom. Potential options for the primary makeup include Space/Vacuum, Void (different from space???), Atomic Energy, and a Millennium Tree (!!!).

I rolled a 30 here, which gives me a primary medium of Liquid/Fluid. The book specifies that any habitable landmasses here are found in magically bounded air pockets, while the chosen liquid fills every other available space. I don't want to go with water, so I'll take one step away and pick oil as my medium.

3. Secondary Dimensional Medium

This is the stuff where your adventurers are gonna set boots on the ground. I thought I understood this until I looked at the available options, which range from quote "Galaxies with Billions of Solar Systems" to quote "Death!" to, even, quote "Multiple Pocket Dimensions". It's pocket dimensions all the way down, baby.

Or not. I rolled a 9, which helpfully gives me the medium of A Single Solar System. Just a couple of landmasses and a sun in a sea of oil!

4. Density of Dimensional Fabric

This represents how difficult it is to enter into a given dimension, which obviously comes with a % based difficulty modifier that I'm going to ignore. I rolled an 81, which gives me a Strong Dimensional Fabric. I'm going to take this to mean it's got about as many tourists as your average dungeon - maybe a few environmental storytelling skeletons + a rival party.

5. Magic Level

This affects how jazzed your local wizards are gonna be about coming here. Magical energy concentration affects local culture, enemy creature damage, and the possibility of something called Ley Line storms. For my purposes I'm gonna focus more on the cultural impact.

I rolled a 56, which means I've got Intermediate Magic Energy. This means magic/weird stuff is accessible but uncommon, or at least uncommon enough that many mages perform "rituals or blood sacrifice" to get what they want. How exciting!

6. Dimensional Energy Matrix

Frankly I have no idea what this part means. Apparently there are positive and negative energy used to power technology, and they're mutually exclusive or otherwise have an oil/water relationship - positive tech can't function in a negative world, and vice versa.

I rolled a 53 which gives my world Positive energy. I'm gonna take this to mean that the Vibes Are Generally Good rather than evil.

7. Flow of Time

How fast does time pass here? Is it a year-inside-hour-outside situation? Does time pass at all while you're here?? This part's awesome because there's no way for standard characters to even tell if the speed of time has changed until you leave.

I rolled a 6, for Normal Time Flow, but tbh I'd probably just ignore this anyway unless I really wanted to make a wacky plot point out of it. Still, it's good flavor.

8. Dimensional Quirks

Here's some added spice, for all kinds of weird variation. Options range from warped laws of physics to a random number of Dimensional Triangles (no context given on what these guys are).

I rolled a 91, which gives me the relatively self-explanatory Dying Dimension - a world at the end of its life. The book says this process can happen over potentially millions of years, but I'm going to use it to add some tension to this pointcrawl.

Putting it all together

So, to recap:

• pocket dimension, 80 miles wide
• primary medium: oil
• secondary medium: single solar system
• strong dimensional fabric
• intermediate magic energy
• positive energy matrix
• normal time flow
• dying

At this point, the book takes a bow and says it's time for you to cook the rest of the meal (or use the special Rifts® Phase World®: Anvil Galaxy™ book for help generating planets). JC's box of magical garbage didn't have that book, so I'm on my own for making this pointcrawl.

A starting image that I really like is the idea of landmasses in a sea of oil surrounding a bright, bulb-like sun, starkly visible in the dark liquid. I think my high concept here is that the sun is slowly starting to crack - when it bursts, the fire inside ignites the oil, burning the dimension from the inside out.

I'll slap this together using my usual suspects and get back to you in the next section.

Pointcrawl - Milk of Oil

Overview

The world of Lough Berg, a vast ocean of pitch black oil. In the center hangs a white, bulb-like sun, shining coldly.

Each landmass sits in a bubble of oxygen maintained by Lactors, ten foot long slithering amphibians seemingly carved from bismuth. Angler lights sprouting from their foreheads give the impression of tiny stars zipping around the void. They feed on oil and the bubbles mark their territory -- if they smell oil inside of one they'll dive inside from every angle to eat it away.

The landmasses themselves are blackish brown, smell of tar, and squish like a mattress when you step on solid ground. They're connected by bulky cable cars that superheat their outer shells to slide through the oil like butter.

Deadline

Consider a turn to occur whenever the players travel to a new area or waste significant amounts of time. Every two turns, refer to this table to see what happens.

Turn Event 0 Someone with incredible eyesight would notice hairline fractures on the side of the sun closest to area 11, surrounding a blocky grey space suit. 2 A crackling noise echoes through the verse. A large crack appears on the eastern side of the sun. 4 The crack spreads. It can be seen from the western side now. 6 The crack spreads further. The whiteness of the sun is losing its uniformity. Something inside is roiling. 8 An earblasting sound like a wooden dock in storm, or creaking metal. At this point, area 10 is completely consumed by oil. 10 The sun bursts, finally. The white flames inside spread quickly. The Lactors are panicking. 12 The inner map ring is fully taken by flame. Everything inside is dead. 14 The second ring is fully taken by flame. Everything inside is dead. 16 The entire pocketverse has been consumed by flame. In an hour or so it'll be barren. Key 1. Entry

Circular stone pad covered in labyrinthine graffiti under a huge glass dome, the sun cold in the distance. Faded, tattered signage: "Welcome, travelers!" A glass newspaper stand by the door creaks open, full of hand drawn pamphlet maps.

2. Mothball Dock

Pristine metallic yurts in a state of quarantine on an otherwise empty landmass. Inside, notes are strewn on the floor covered in frantic drawings of a perfect globe. On the edges: long piers, seemingly made from a single block of steel, jut into the oil.

Shortly after arriving, Empty Maidens - brutal, blocky excursion suits made to explore the oil - emerge onto the pier. Their insides overflow with brown vines, a natural artificial intelligence yearning to clasp a human within to share their latest findings and never, ever let go.

3. Coolant Zone

Open air factory in disrepair. Half-formed cable cars litter the area like leviathan skulls. An alarm has long since eroded its bell, but the light still blares. Broken pipes spray liquid coolant everywhere, chilling you down to the atoms (DEX damage).

4. Glasshouse Island

Rows and rows of bulbous, fat flora. Their roots cut through the ground and taste the oil below. Petals the color of dried blood drip tarry sap. The whole place smells like a gas station. The bulbs spritz oil like a clown's prank toy when disturbed.

Off to the side, sealed in a hermetic chamber, is a sprig of bachelor's button, labeled as an "unknown gift".

5. Crypt Well

There is no heaven in Lough Berg. Every newlydead's soul spirals into this graveyard until the sun erupts to obliterate their essence. Their combined boredom has manifested a curious flower, the Ethereum Rose. Pricking your finger on its thorns causes everyone you know to firmly believe you're dead. The ghosts are desperate for any new stimulus and burn your thoughts from the inside out (CHA/WIL damage) if you leave without entertaining them.

6. Residential

The houses here are covered in oil, nibbled on by happy Lactors with the noise of distant crunching metal. The scent is overpowering, like stale milk at your grandma's house.

One house is oil-free. Its roof has blown off. Inside sits a blackened, rocket-strapped, cableless cable car prototype that can move freely to any landmass. 10% chance on use to explode, instantly killing everyone inside.

7. Cable Snipper

The isle is empty. Great rectangular dents, miles wide, litter the ground, alongside kaleidoscope tracks of bootprints seemingly roaming the entire space.

A Repair Droid stands by the car connecting to 8, tapping uselessly with a sparking stump. Its right arm contains various cutting implements which it has used to cut the connecting cable. Its left arm, used to repair and reconnect the cable, is detached, and floats 100 feet into the oil, barely visible by the lights of curious Lactors poking at it.

8. Rift Viewing

Circular glass petals blossom from the sides of a massive oblong spike, each reflecting a different vision: empty wastes, pristine wilderness, unknown starscapes.

The largest petal at the top has shattered - a Nexus Maw has broken through. The maw's horrifying body resides in its own pocket dimension and it sends enormous tentacles through weaknesses in spacetime to feed. A small beak occasionally pokes through the opening, nibbling on the Gristle Chestplate, a piece of armor that makes the wearer immune to being eaten.

9. Hub Station

Cable car stations ring this island, though most aren't connected to anything. The center of the isle has been hollowed out - a carved prayer labyrinth winds towards a stone stump in the center. Something was ripped from it. The debris looks recent.

The Archivist Spider crawls from station to station, drawing notes on the ground with spindly legs. It yearns for knowledge, and webs travelers with thin, silky wires until they tell it their life story (this takes a turn).

If the fire reaches this isle, it will fold in on itself until it's quantum sized, then escape the pocketverse.

10. Drowning Isle

Looks like a public park got hit by a hurricane - gazebos, benches, dune-like landscaping. Lactors litter the ground with clear bullet wounds. Without a school to maintain the bubble, the isle is being subsumed by oil. Great gobs dribble from above and the walls are closing in. By turn 8 it will be gone.

Each Lactor has a 1-in-6 chance of hiding a cryogenic landmine underneath (STR+DEX damage), triggered by moving the creature.

11. Visitor

Gunshots ring into the oil. There's static in the air, and a garbled voice. This place used to hold livestock, but it's unclear what kind. Metal obelisks stand like graves next to long, thorned tubes.

Outfield Soldier is here in opalescent power armor. A teleportation accident sent him from a pitched battle to this pocketverse. He's paranoid, adrenaline-fueled, and more alone than he's ever felt. He sits by the cable car going to 10, sniping anyone coming up the path from 6.

12. Solar Viewport

Semicircular amphitheater faces the solar bulb. The chairs are built to recline and bear the marks of use. Gutters line each aisle, caked in the cold remnants of blue fluid, leading down to a dried pool just before the edge of the isle.

Sitting in the pool: a broken, bulky heap of stone. There's a painting made from a similarly blue paste, although clearly fresher: a human, feminine head, looking away from the viewer, towards the sun. Her face and neck are covered in horizontal lines, which on closer inspection are the words "this will be the day" written over and over. Worth $1k to the right buyer.

There is a heap of clothing in front of the statue. Whatever was underneath has long since turned to dust.

Conclusion

The results I got from the generator weren't the wildest on offer, but I still think it helped pull together a cool place. I think if my well was dry and I needed to shock my system for some new creative juice, this isn't the first book I'd go to, mainly because the only actually useful bits here were the dimensional mediums and quirks. That's 3 steps out of 8! That said, something about this was compelling. I love the energy that Rifts is bringing to the table here. It's not clever, it's not beautiful, but it's fun, and that's more than enough for me!

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Field Guides #5 - The Feast in Weeping Alleys 22 March 2024 Contents

• Contents
• Intro
• What's The Vibe?
  • How do you pay for all of this?
  • Nutrients
• Dining Spots
  • wysh
  • Spitswap Chop Shop
  • The Garage (in Myra's Memory)
  • Other Banquets
• Notable Gluttons
  • Lockjaw And The Itis
  • Yellowbellies
  • Halloumi, Mendicant Fryer
  • Other Feasters
• Food That Fights Back
  • Skakes
  • The Fool
  • Taxworms
  • Encounter Table
• Hooks
• Touchstones and Inspiration

Intro

There are banquets everywhere, for those with stomachs to feed.

The Feast in Weeping Alleys is God's gift to gluttons. Once a year hordes of gourmands hijack Bastion's rattiest slum with their instruments of yearning: pounds of flesh, bulbous fatty organs, unmarked mesh sacks dripping with oil, and rows and rows of ragged teeth waiting to rip into it all. There's no leader, no advertisement - foodies worldwide simply know in their hearts when festivities begin. Their family members know the omens by now. A twitch of the nose and a cold sweat are your signs to say goodbye before your loved one is off, crawling slavering through the streets, following their stomachs to the beckoning feast.

What's The Vibe?

Sizzling ovens in crumbling shacks, pop-up bars making space in filthy apartments, pools of grease and offal cooling to sludge in the gutters. Someone to your left unhinges their jaw and throws back a drink the size of your head. Vendors beg for attention and live music rattles your skull; the crowd flows endless through bright tents and an obliterating wall of smell. Time is no object to gluttony - once the feast starts, it only ends when the food's all gone. Tired, shambling feasters dig through days-old meat with their bare hands for tasty scraps. They say it's the closest they'll get to heaven. And they're right.

---

How do you pay for all of this?

Your money's useless here, if that's what you're thinking. These chefs are in it for the love of the game. Feast culture suggests paying tribute to your favorite cooks by prosletyzing, and the alleyways are filled with sweat-soaked pigs spitting words of praise at all passersby.

That's not to say the feast is free, though. The Yellowbellies - the closest thing there is to a security force - wait drooling at all major exits, tapping a playful rhythm on the alley walls, syringes ready and waiting. If you want to leave, you'll have to give them the only thing they require: the nutrient cocktail swirling around in your guts.

---

Nutrients

Special: When a character eats feast food, roll on the table below to determine the dish's nutrient type. When they've eaten ten unique foods with that nutrient, their bodies produce a special effect.

It's not just taste that does a body good. Feverish back alley gastro-scientists have tapped into a previously unknown vein of nutrition, imbuing feast food with that little extra zhuzh we all love. Is it something in the air? A chemical combo brought on by years of slumline mistreatment? If those scientists weren't too busy stuffing living, screeching birds down their throat they might find an answer. Newbies just get a fresh kick to the hormones and keep eating, but true gluttons know this: a varied diet is the key to Nirvana.

Don't want these extra compounds living rent-free in your gut? You're in luck! Nutrients can be extracted via public access Yellowbelly tech. Their cleansing tool takes the form of long, chemically treated syringes inserted directly through the navel, sucking out all those foreign substances while leaving the good stuff untouched. Undergoing such a procedure is the only way to leave the feast through proper channels, but they're not the only ones to use the tools. Rumors abound of hidden markets dealing in strange trade with nutrients as payment, if you can find them.

Nutrient types and effects d4 Nutrient Effect at ten doses 1 Regic Acid Royals recognize you as one of their own. 2 Vitamin Aleph Can telepathically commune with the nearest god. 3 Jenganese Can identify the weakpoint of any manmade structure at a glance. 4 MUCHO Your voice can always be heard, no matter the ambient noise.

There is another, considerably less common, nutrient: Samsaridium. Its effect at ten doses is unclear, because it only exists in the body of single creature, the Fool, which has never been caught, harmed, or tasted.

Dining Spots

Local flavor's always better.

wysh

What do you consume when earthly delights have grown stale? The bold, forward-thinking gastroturges at wysh (pronounced wish) combine an unquenched hunger for more with a stretched-thin definition of veganism to bring you dream cuisine: the hottest innovation in brain-to-table style.

Each morning one lucky volunteer is harvested from nearby slums and hooked up to the Slake Mouth, a wetware circus made for one purpose: birthing raw, unformed dreamstuff into our reality. The Mouth works like a memory thresher, parsing through all the yummy feelings that swirl into your nighttime soup, collating them into physical material, and funneling them right out onto a sizzling grill. Sentient? Maybe. Tasty? Definitely! Mostly these little fellas only know a few seconds of life before the searing heat turns them into food, but escapes do happen, and half-formed dreams have intermingled with local fauna to unclear results. Some might see a mistake; wysh calls it giving back.

For slobbering customers, this means fresh, never-before-seen flavors with no harm to real animals. Yay! For the volunteer, it means permanent loss of potentially fundamental memories. Stay too long and the Mouth will leave you a husk with no past or present, still alive, just unthinking. But don't worry, their relatives are always fairly compensated. At wysh, community is family™.

What creatures have escaped from wysh's grill? d6 Escapee 1 Rolling eyeball, blush-red, anxious. When it's scared, touching it causes your teeth to start falling out. 2 Fuzzy, unclear copy of the current volunteer. Perpetually in slow motion with big, exaggerated movements. 3 Diseased, filthy hand, waaay too many fingers. Reproduces asexually - the fingers split off and grow new hands behind them. 4 Shambling, semi-transparent cloak under a ghoulish mask. Ripping off the mask always reveals a different one underneath. 5 Self-consuming replicant. Twisting, moldly flesh, eating itself just as fast as it's regrowing. Moves like a bull in a china shop. 6 Erratic fog of rutting insects. Each one has a lifespan of ten seconds. Tiny corpses trail in its wake.

---

Spitswap Chop Shop

Housed in an abandoned textile mill and muted by the trickling snowfall of asbestos flakes, the Spitswap Chop Shop feels closer to a temple than a butchery. Employees work with grave focus, wandering with bloodstained robes amid a forest of skinned corpses. Through solemn ritual they have discovered the means to carve edible meat from any living thing, thus condemning them to spend their lives surrounded by death. Sound is softer here, and easy to discern: knives sharpening, blood spilling into gutters, and hushed bartering from the crowd outside, clutching small cages to their chests, waiting to feed the guillotine.

The Chop Shop isn't killing animals for the sake of it, they're a business. Funded by renegade philosophers Lockjaw and the Itis, the shop facilitates their holy mission of consuming every possible creature. There's a bounty board out front offering hopeful hunters their next prey - the shop pays handsomely for animals on the board, but only if they're brought back alive.

The butchers' rituals don't work on anything that's already dead. The shop is a home for ferrying creatures from this life to the next, but they do their best to treat the little ones kindly. Each creature gets a last meal, a prayer, and a name. It's the least they can do.

What's on the Spitswap bounty board? d6 Bounty 1 Seezere Hawks. Communal birds with long, steely beaks. After laying eggs, the strongest in a group is held down and impaled by its fellows, seemingly willingly. 2 Bramblers. Spiny ratlike beings evolved from chemically treated pinecones. Drawn to the warmth of machines that are close to sentience. 3 Aldent Hogs. Fleshy, hairless rodent with limber, noodle-like spines, known to hide in ramen shops. The spines inject a drug cocktail when eaten - the hog can control the eater as long as the noodle remains in their mouth. 4 Ossets. Ancient reptiles that grow protective bone shells. The bone fuses with its surroundings if left alone. They're functionally immortal and often found at the core of huge bone superstructures. 5 A childhood pet at the end of a happy life. All species welcome. 6 The Fool.

---

The Garage (in Myra's Memory)

The Garage has accepted the Weeping Alley Feast as a corpse accepts flies. Once a labyrinthine set of storage units squirreled away below street level, the owner leased the whole place out to hungry feasters on one condition: don't touch the statues. A deal was struck, a pact was signed, and this vow was kept. The Garage stands today as it always has, filled with thousands of statues of one woman: Myra.

Joyful Myras dance between units. They hang upside down from the roof, faces frozen, smiles wide. Little Myras dangle their legs from shelves and hide behind vines. Marble Myra eyes dot the walls with candles in their pupils; a hundred Myra hands form an arch around the entrance, reaching always to your heart. The ground is paved with her teeth and stained with her ashes. She is inescapable.

With so much space taken by Myras, the Garage gets way less traffic than the rest of Weeping Alleys. This has allowed it to become a hub for the Feast's consumer underground, and abandoned units blossom with ragged stalls. They'll trade in anything you like, but only take one payment: nutrients, extracted on the spot. Most sellers say it's to get one over on the yellowbellies, but oldheads are quieter, referring in hushed tones to the same old phrase: Myra's Portion.

What's on offer at the Garage today? d6 Offering Nutrient type (# doses) 1 Boris Pupil, adventuring chef for hire. Uses uncanny sense of smell to find treasure. Regic Acid (2/day) 2 Shining chestplate of transparent glass. Nearby birds are drawn to run into it head first. MUCHO (3) 3 Twisted, contorted mask of a lost healer. Made from dried skin. Viewing it induces a paralyzing sense of longing in any creature that has just eaten another living thing. Jenganese (9) 4 Stake carved from a fallen star. Implant it in a corpse's sternum to reanimate it until the next new moon. Vitamin Aleph (12) 5 Telefragger (1d10, bulky). Rifle imbued with quantum energy. When the trigger is pulled, the shooter is fired out instead of a bullet. MUCHO (7) 6 The deed to the Chop Shop. Samsaridium (1)

---

Other Banquets d6 Eatery 1 A red liver stretched on the rocks near the sea. Feasters in bird masks hide nearby with knives, waiting. 2 House party with guests spilling out on the street. Each attendant has a bite taken from their forehead. 3 Alleyway crammed with food trucks. Each sells the same food (artisinal pizza). Their hatred for each other often births violence. 4 Tired little speakeasy, Undertow. Bartender only makes you a drink if he pities you. 5 Modern art museum ("a feast for the senses!"). Closed, locked, banned, heavily guarded. 6 Fasting baths. Elaborate sauna full of lilies. There's only one person inside, wasting away, still dreaming. Notable Gluttons

Everyone's gotta eat. Some more than others.

Lockjaw And The Itis

Former gangsters, current philosophers, the only blood on their hands these days comes from the Chop Shop. Twin brothers joined at the navel by their umbilical cord, Lockjaw and the Itis wrung a hundred necks together before finding enlightenment. Lockjaw can't eat - his trap's soldered shut with a big metal dome - so the Itis gets the fun work, passing on nutrients, taste, and memories from one belly to another through the cord.

What do they want? Food. Any of it, all of it, in any condition, age, treatment, seasoning, spice, whatever. Years of bathing in the blood of their fellows have, in a way, opened their eyes to the world's true nature. They say: the universe gave us life so that we may percieve it, and we can't leave until all of it is perceived. So now they eat, bite by juicy bite, each dish bringing heaven one step closer to earth.

What do rumors say hides in Lockjaw's jaw? d6 Rumor 1 Another, smaller brother, doing strange experiments between the teeth. 2 Bloody, festering wound from eating a hexed intestine. 3 Forest of bone splinters boring through his mouth. 4 Squirming microbiotic ecosystem growing in his saliva. He cares for them as family. 5 Yawning portal to the space where their true benefactor lives, waiting for its summons. 6 Cleft lip. Birth defect. He's really really really shy about it.

---

Yellowbellies

HP 4 | STR 13 | DEX 8 | Unclean Syringe 1d8

Critical Damage: target is deprived as all nutrients are extracted from their body.

Named for the jaundice-like effect that comes with one too many extracted nutrients, Yellowbellies are the Feast's most experienced gluttons. They wander Weeping Alleys in white satin suits, drooling and stained with viscera. Nominally guards, they protect the Feast for one simple reason: street fights make for bad meat. Yellowbelly forces often rip through backroads, hunting the unruly, dragging their syringes on the cobbles.

Nobody knows how they came to be. They've been stalking these alleys since the very first feast, breeding rumor and mystery all the while. Some say Yellowbellies don't retire, they undergo ritual dismemberment so their colleagues may inherit their storied flesh. A common thread runs through these tall tales: they take a special interest in talented chefs. Produce enough beautiful foodstuff and you might find a letter wrapped in satin, offering tantalizing hidden rituals in return for a private pop-up dinner at their underground nest.

What rituals can the Yellowbellies teach you? d4 Ritual Effect 1 Hungry Eyes Consume a creature's eyes to violently cough out a small friendly copy. 2 Sanguine Decanter Your blood becomes an earthy red wine that is deeply addictive to humans. 3 Room for Seconds You gain a small storage bladder above your stomach. Can eat items to store them and regurgitate at will. 4 Skinweave Yeast Your body expands gradually when exposed to high heat.

---

Halloumi, Mendicant Fryer

On warm afternoons when the feast's oldest gluttons step back from their meals, swapping war stories and spittle, they might dredge up memories of the legendary Chef Halloumi. Once a renowned fry cook and creator of wysh, she has now turned her knife inward, carving off her home, her career, and (some say) her dignity in the pursuit of universal truth. She emerged from this paring with a holy vow of poverty and a just-for-funsies vow of silence, and the restaurant industry has mourned her ever since. These days she lives on the streets cooking freely for anyone she can. Her body's a filthy saltcrust temple and the stomach is her god.

You'll know her from the common beggars by the massive oil tank strapped to her back - the Mother Vat. She's been feeding that thing for decades, never washing, only adding more, and the bacteria percolating inside are on some nightmare shit. She's not just bonding breadcrumbs to that meat, she's bonding an entire ecosystem. Results from eating her work vary wildly with a few consistencies: no memory of the previous day, a hangover like an electrical fire, and the taste of something indefinable at the back of the tongue, like faith, or rubber. The effects are hard to study because of Halloumi's single unspoken rule: she'll only feed you once. Come back for seconds and her eyes will pass right through, as if you've disappeared from her world altogether.

Where do you wake after eating Halloumi's food? d6 Circumstance 1 Ashen brick room one mile underground. Record player's spinning tinny opera. The elevator is on its way down. 2 Your soul has been separated from your body. It floats above you in an empty operating theatre flooded with roses. 3 On stage before a screaming crowd. Your throat is raw and filled with blood. They're selling your album in the back. 4 An offshore raft. Little glowing jellyfish swim by your hands. A voice underwater sings your name. 5 Slumped in a freshly dug hole. A harpist above plays a twinkling dirge. Someone gives a eulogy for you, and it's shockingly true. 6 At the top of a skyscraper-sized statue, in the palm of its hand, stained with birdshit. You're holding a bag of treasure worth $5k. Sirens sound from below.

---

Other Feasters d6 Celebrant 1 Sir Anno. Small with a hot temper. Yearns to run his sword through living meat. 2 Hammond Rye. Desperate to be eaten. Gluttons avoid him like the plague. 3 Petty Shoo, capricious devil. She steals food right before you eat it with an elastic sticky hand. 4 Brassica Carinata, veterinary phasmologist. Studies the ghosts left by butchered animals. 5 Jimmy Churry, secretary. Last week he ate the Perfect Steak but it was knocked from his hands. Now he crawls on the ground, licking the floor, desperate for another hit. 6 Tart Pops. Angry, but lonely. Pretends to choke on food so people come talk to him. Food That Fights Back

Dead meals are less fun.

Skakes

HP 7 | STR 8 | DEX 15 | CHA 8 | Muscles-to-Cake 1d8 DEX

Critical Damage: your weapon turns into cake.

• Skittering, chitinous wysh escapees, living in the gutters.
• Their compound eyes reflect a haunted dimension, slowly turning anything they focus on into cake. The surface remains the same, but it's cake underneath.
• Mostly just playful. The angrier you get about stuff turning out to be cake, the more they harass you.

Omens: Angry shouts; quiet chittering; the soft hush of matter being replaced by cake

---

The Fool

HP 3 | STR 10 | DEX 18 | CHA 18 | Potent Luck 1d10 STR

Critical Damage: By pure accident, your wallet ends up in the Fool's mouth as it hops away.

• Jaunty bipedal amphibian with bulging eyes. Croaks a ragged song everywhere it goes. Contains the nutrient Samsaridium.
• Obscenely lucky. Any attacks or attempts to capture / stop it fail through sheer coincidence.
• Pacifist and completely oblivious. Attacking it causes bad luck in your immediate area, like tripping on a banana peel or standing under a falling anvil.

Omens: happy croaking; yowls of a hunter's pain; wet, squelching hops

---

Taxworms

HP 6 | Armor 1 | STR 6 | DEX 6 | CHA 10 | Gnawing Hunger 1d8 Blast

Critical Damage: your stomach explodes.

• Mouthless freaks slumbering in mucus-y underground nests.
• Eat by warping reality to teleport food from your belly to theirs. While within a mile of a taxworm, you are deprived.
• Happy to subsist on their own, only attack when directly threatened.

Omens: a sound from underground, like crying; sudden unexplainable hunger; a section of the feast mysteriously empty

---

Encounter Table d6 Encounter 1 Three Skakes harassing gluttons from the shadows. 2 Two Yellowbellies laughing wildly as they brutally stop a street fight. 3 Completely empty stretch of alley. A hungry taxworm lies below. 4 A recent wysh escapee running amok through the crowd. 5 Six hungry gluttons holding down a seventh, convinced there's cake underneath their skin. 6 The Fool blithely causing chaos as hunters chase after it. Hooks d6 Hook 1 The party ate Halloumi's cooking and ended up somewhere odd. 2 The law got on wysh's ass, and they're hiring folks to round up all their escapees. 3 Lockjaw and the Itis got wind of some exciting new food and are calling all hunters to bring some in. 4 Someone at the Garage stole a valuable jade Myra and escaped deeper into the labyrinthine units. 5 Yellowbellies are starting to go on the offensive, attacking people for their nutrients in the streets. What do they need it for? 6 The Feast has offended every animal rights group imaginable, and they're converging right now to burn down all of Weeping Alleys. Touchstones and Inspiration

This post was written for the March 2024 RPG Blog Carnival featuring the theme Feasts, Food, and Fancy Drinks, oh my!

Hitmen for Destiny by Øyvind Thorsby.

Anthology of the Killer by thecatamites.

Nutrient mechanic inspired by Ultros by Hadoque.

"Dark red liver stretched out on the rocks" taken from The Feminine Urge by The Last Dinner Party

Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville. In particular the Slake Mouth was adapted from the Slake Moths in that book.

The Garage inspired by one of my favorite joints, The Garage in Birmingham, AL.

This post expands on some ideas I presented in a module for Hieronymus by Laurie O'Connel called The Gobbling Gluttons.

AI art generated by the bing create tool through Microsoft.

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Field Guides #4 - Muck Divers 27 February 2024 Contents

• Contents
• Intro
• Life in Dahlia Mosaic
  • Muck Divers
  • Diver Ingenuity
  • The City
• Layers in the Muck
  • The High Filth
  • The Middens
  • Far Chalcic
  • Grimy Surface Locales
• Freaks in the Muck
  • Barb
  • Mayor Hominy
  • Greenhorns
  • Other Foul Inhabitants
• Threats in the Muck
  • Flakes
  • Trash Birthling
  • A Yearning
  • Other Dour Encounters
• Hooks
• Trashborne Treasure And Where To Find It
• Touchstones and Inspirations

Intro

Come. Puncture the rotting flesh of the world and find treasure beneath its skin.

The places a city abandons hold a sickening kind of melancholy. In their bones we might see scars: extracted wealth, ghost towns, mining tunnels drilled through earth like an ice pick to the brain. Civilization is a half-corpse crawling slowly to absolution, ignoring the true life seeping from its torso. These wretched children fester, percolate, blister and writhe and cry out but God, they can't help but live. In this way the swamp outside Bastion was formed.

It's foul, obviously, a miserable place of many gruesome adjectives, but apart from that surface level filth it's surprisingly hard to pin down. Names don't stick - they slip off the mind, ignored through gut feeling or bad vibes. Common practice says to use the names of ex lovers. "You'll know her by the bitter taste," they say. If a map even shows her she will often be unlabeled, reduced to a smudge or a burn scar. The swamp's most common depiction is like a mole going wrong - misshapen, dark, and worse: growing.

Not outward - the wetland boundary is clearly defined, signposted, and avoided - but inward. Deeper. The bottom sinks and sinks into the earth. "Leaving?" the locals ask, "or returning?" Imagine: the carved imprints of a child's toes dug into the mud, flinching away from the surface a little more each day. A hundred years ago sunlight was already a memory. How deep will it be when we're dead?

Life in Dahlia Mosaic

The swamp's only settlement is a crumbling altar bound with spit and salvage. It's hard to tell if Dahlia Mosaic was built or simply birthed at the dawn of time alongside old favorites like gravity, or love. Either way, here it is. Lit by gaslamp at day and cackling wisps at night, Dahlia Mosaic stands as unfortunate proof to human perserverance.

Consider: as the swamp sinks always, so too does anything built within. Life on drowning foundation requires certain adjustments for the working stiff. Today's floor may be tomorrow's roof, so remember your ABCs: Always Be Cbuilding! The main hub would be a skyscraper in its full glory, but only two or three stories emerge from the sludge at any time. The rest of the structure, every bygone inch, forms a massive pillar spiking through the High Filth. Untold years of history and culture adorn that spinal column along with more modern shrines, choked with mud, guarded by flakes.

Everyone's got their favored styles. Some jerry-rigged apartments hang with thick cables from ancient mangroves. Others bulge from established buildings, offsetting their weight with gas-powered balloon or starving asceticism. Wealth moves fast with unstable Muck Diver profits, and fads move faster. There's always a good-old-boy trying to turn a profit on their newest non-sink architecture, but most locals do their own construction. You don't live here long without getting a little handy.

Muck Divers

Dahlia Mosaic's neurotic workforce. Anyone not a diver is likely a dedicated builder, and even they dabble. Each day at sun-up these peons crawl from their sinking abodes to flit wormlike through the sludge, hungry for scraps. Why? Aside from your standard bog assortment of carcass matter, Dahlia's roots are host to relics of our ancients. The entire history of this swamp is preserved in foul amber, and the record stretches down for miles and miles. The deeper you go, the more exotic your finds become. Anyone returning surface-side takes a deep breath, keeps what they crave, and ships the rest to the City. Most days the profit's just enough to keep your home above the mud and buy a few drinks, but the locals don't mind. Their yearning is enough to sustain them.

Some divers form small cliques or gangs, but there's no central office. The only rule is this: everyone - everyone - answers to Barb.

What's this diver's prized salvage? d6 Treasure They Say... 1 Censer. Chitinous. "Burn insects inside for a month while you sleep and you'll molt into something greater." 2 Lion's mask, half-melted. "Through its eye you can tell a man's moral code just by looking at him." 3 Child's doll. No arms. "When I wake I find myself thinking of her as my daughter." 4 Theatre coupon. Faded. A sly smile. "Pay with this and they'll let you perform. They have to." 5 Burlap sack with ripped eyeholes. "I killed a man while wearing it. He speaks to me every time I put it on." 6 Tarnished iron key. A word comes unbidden: "collar". "There's a church down there. It's, uh. It's still locked."

---

Diver Ingenuity

Swampland innovation is driven less by capital and more by an unhinged bond with nature. Our hearts yearn for connection in the strangest places. The first woman in Dahlia Mosaic to anthropomorphize her gut flora was branded a genius; her statue stood for three days before falling to the High Filth. So it goes. There are many problems in this world, but these few, in this place, are solved.

Breath: Mucksuits are the midpoint between a bad hug and a coffin. From the front, they're bulky diving suits carved from thick, sweaty canvas. The real party's in the back: twisting pipes and valves mount between the shoulder blades, housing swarms of leechlike fellas called skuggs. These hoary turds eat mud like an aphrodesiac and produce breathable air as a side effect of copulation. Their rabid gurgling haunts divers through the tubes, but a bashful few admit they can't sleep without it.

Sight: Canker mites, bulbous insects that live symbiotically in our stomach lining, are one of life's little miracles. Their reedy antennae allow them to filter feed through human skin, creating a bubble of clear-ish water around their hosts. The feeling is not unlike being dissolved, but, surprisingly, most divers feel a fondness for their cankers. Some even take algae baths on their off days as a treat for the tiny passengers.

Storage: Garfs are actually not native to the swamp - they were bred in a lab by city boys trying to smuggle pond weed, then dumped here when that became legal. Now with no known predators they've grown fat and happy in this rotten paradise. Fish-shaped, all blubber, zero IQ, the real magic lies in their gut: a system of eight interlocking stomachs surrounded by impenetrable fat. Perfect for storing muckborn treasures! Input's easy, output's harder. You've gotta squeeze 'em, and gripping through all that fat is a fool's errand. If you're in a pinch and need an item fast, roll 1d8 to determine which stomach gets emptied.

---

The City

Yes, the City, always glittering on the horizon. Its ridges buck and swell like a busted piano, keeping its bulk visible day and night. The swamp lives in breathless tension with Bastion. To the City, this grime provides an indescribable joy. What's the point of an ivory tower with nothing to look down upon? It's a rural backwater, the butt of every joke, the "at least we're not them" for those who seek out evil everywhere except their own hearts.

The swamp, in return, loves the City.

Loves is maybe the wrong word. It yearns, or hungers. The City is the cause and solution for all of their problems. Treasure goes in, money comes out - enough to know there's more out there but not enough to leave. There's a City shaped hole in each diver's chest and it'll never ever be filled as long as Dahlia keeps sinking and the world keeps spinning. These people want to improve their lives but it's all they can do to stay afloat. They can't be alive until they're out of the swamp, but leaving their homes to sink feels like another form of death. Life in Dahlia Mosaic mostly involves new and exciting ways for stress to rip your body apart at the molecular level until you're nothing but grey skin over an empty spirit and eyes always, always on the horizon.

Layers in the Muck

See what hides in the sinking decay.

The High Filth

Civilization still lingers in the High Filth. Dahlia Mosaic's central pillar spikes through the rancid water, linking the surface world to the Middens' foul darkness. Any hackneyed construction that falls from topside ends up here, caught on a muddy wall or piled up with the dreck on the bottom.

New divers cut their teeth here, usually sent to find childhood toys or wedding rings from older layers of Dahlia Mosaic. The late bones of the town are intercut with new construction made by flakes - divers who've rejected the surface world. They comb through the wreckage like vultures, creating gods and discarding them just as quick, littering the pillar with their shrines.

A thick, cloudy film separates the bottom of the High Filth from the Middens. You can scrape your way through, but it's a tight fit, and it regrows behind you. This gate is itself gatekept by a massive pile of garbage. Flake waste, discarded diver tools, homes, bodies - it all ends up here. As the swamp sinks down, the pile grows up, reaching always to its old life.

What signs of life lie in the brown haze? d6 Sign 1 Algae-covered kitchen and a flake shrine - mismatched shoes around a core of stomach fat. The muck smells sweet. 2 Blinking spherical pod stuck in a muddy wall. High tech. Voice inside sings corny love songs no matter who's listening. 3 Garf with a collar ("Fran!") flitting around a sunken office. Its stomachs hold eight different types of fish treat. 4 Three whole stories of the central pillar are covered with slimy, pulsing tumors. 5 Old old schoolhouse. Chalkboard's overgrown with flesh-eating moss. Divers use this spot for "burials". 6 Swarm of small fish nibbling on an ashen skeleton. The bones are picked clean. They're still eating.

---

The Middens

Most trash heaps feel gross; the Middens feels primordial. Its use as a dumping ground predates sapience. Light doesn't penetrate past the High Filth, so your only company is cold, squishy darkness. The potent cocktail of chemicals percolating down here for centuries have morphed the water into a dense slurry, thin enough to swim through, but thick enough to slow you down.

And then there's the garbage itself. Turns out that eons of rotting in a primeval cesspit was just enough to create new life, and now this entire stratum exists as a gestalt waste consciousness, affectionately called WC by local trash saints. It's been alive for probably a thousand years but in the grand scheme of things it's still a child, and boy it'll let you know it. WC doesn't take kindly to invaders in its territory and will manifest trash birthlings to send you packing.

Hardened divers know this: save your bottles, bones, and receipts for offerings to this lowbound divinity. At worst, WC'll leave you alone. At best, it'll take a shine to you, building curious little junk golems to float crumbling in your wake.

How does the Waste Consciousness block your path here? d6 Obstacle 1 Twisting maze of corrugated shipping containers, rumbling with dissatisfaction. 2 Hypnotic pattern formed with blinking fluorescent reactor cores. 3 Speaker system floating through the muck. Attached microphone painfully amplifies nearby sound. 4 Cracked, unstable fire extinguishers trying to spray into a skugg valve, killing your oxygen source. 5 Combining anything resembling a letter to send a message. Looks like an old ransom note. 6 Animated mucksuits with no body inside. Flimsy, but there's a bunch (1 HP, 8 STR, as Detachment).

---

Far Chalcic

If time is a flat circle then Far Chalcic is spinning faster than the rest. The weight of the world heaved itself onto this layer like a hydraulic press, gaining more pressure as the swamp kept sinking. Eventually the swamp could no longer go down, so it had to go... inward. Some say it's a new big bang, others say it's the afterlife. Diver reports of Far Chalcic are few and far between, but there's a few consistent notes:

• The water thins, like air, and becomes completely clear.
• There are no outer walls. Just emptiness, forever.
• Singing like a dying star below, in the far, far reaches: a yearning.

The only signs of life down here are greenhorns - wriggling fleshites struggling towards life - and echoes, where the real treasures lie. Echoes are reflections of the surface world placed haphazardly as if by a bored creator. They litter Far Chalcic's inky blackness like scattered dreams, all spiraling towards that distant star. The boys back in the lab aren't sure if these visions are fragments of our past or future, but they do know this: everything in them taken back to the surface is overrun with yearning.

What echo is that in the near darkness? d6 Echo 1 A shitty dive bar. The lights are on, and the bartender's already pouring your usual. 2 Massive pyramid composed entirely of worms. Long ago they saw the face of God and now form new holy shapes to draw Its attention again. 3 A church of unpainted wood. A word comes unbidden: "flea". It's locked. 4 Subway train twisting through the nether. Filled with copies of the players at different stages of life, all sleeping. 5 A mattress surrounded by grasping stone hands the size of buses. Sleeping on it produces no dreams; instead, a voice whispers in your ear, trying desperately to comfort you. 6 Cocoon, empty, six feet deep and twelve long. Scraps of mucksuit fabric line the inside. Placing an object in here disperses any lingering yearning.

---

Grimy Surface Locales d6 Location 1 Wooden cabin on stilts. Abandoned, smells of lilac. The stilts grow as the swamp sinks - nobody's reverse engineered the means. 2 Mangrove forest with a clear pond in the center. For every hundred people who die in the swamp, one is chosen at random to be reborn here. 3 Spit of dry land covered in humanoid statues, carved from salt, all facing the sun. 4 Crashed zeppelin on the swamp outskirts. A colony of foxes plays around a mushroom garden within. 5 Massive oak tree, proud and lonely. Every bee in the area makes its home here. Its branches bend humbly under the weight of so many hives. 6 Rotten amphitheatre built from twig and bone, rejected by the muck. Whenever it sinks, the swamp spits it out somewhere new within a week. Freaks in the Muck

Odd faces in odder places.

Barb

As the first diver to breach Far Chalcic, nobody was around to stop Barb from climbing into the first cocoon she saw and shedding her old life. When she emerged from the muck, shining with chitin, the locals dropped to their knees and wept knowing that in the annals of infamy they were living in a post-Barb world. They carved space for her to nest in Dahlia Mosaic, and that was that. Some folks say she's the top of the evolutionary ladder, but Barb's humble: she says she's still looking for the next rung.

Transcendence hasn't changed Barb too much. She's still an ornery, charismatic force with an ear for rumors and a taste for fruit; now she just has a few more eyes and an echoing, shrill laugh. Want a High Filth retrieval contract? Need a hot tip on the cool shit WC's hiding? Barb's got you covered. Want to get that yearning cured? Well, that's where things get interesting. Barb's new form is completely immune to yearning, but she has a strange revulsion - or appreciation? - for the feeling. Her price for a cure is sending you on a careful trip through her gullet, where swarms of sentient parasites inside her stomach will remake you according to their alien whims. "It don't hurt, honey," she'll say with a sheepish grin. "Just the cost of doin' business!"

How will Barb's passengers remake you this time? d6 Remaking 1 You become spiritually attuned to one of Barb's horsehair worms. Wherever it goes you can sense the nearby vibes, and vice versa. 2 You can speak through tiny mites in your own spilt blood until it dries. 3 You attract wasps while you sleep. 4 You, and everyone who knows you, becomes unable to describe your occupation as anything other than "parasite." 5 You gain nourishment from eating the eggs of any living creature. 6 Your soul is transferred to a small worm inhabiting your original body. It's incredibly fragile, but can leave its host and inhabit a new body over the course of a week.

---

Mayor Hominy

Mayor Hominy found religion the first time he met WC, a story he tells all the time. By the dirty twilight in his bubble of sight he was confronted with his own history. The construct WC hastily built to harass him was formed from Hominy's family tree - heirloom scarves, discarded boyhood clothes, a ragged and faded painting of his grandmother. Of course he cried, of course he worshipped - what else? His return to the surface marked the birth of the Trash Saints.

Now he sits above the surface, spreading his feelers across the world, looking for rare garbage. The stranger the better, he says. In his younger days he tried to guide WC by only presenting it with high-quality junk, but now he'll throw any old thing down there just to see what happens. If you've got something broken and need a quick fence, he's the guy to go to, and in return he'll help unlock the latent powers in your own detritus.

What hidden powers can Mayor Hominy unlock? d6 Object Power 1 Broken picture frame Slowly morphs to show the person who hates you the most. 2 Rusted bicycle Anyone touching it feels compelled to tell a touching story about their younger life. 3 Used milk carton The nearest kidnapped person appears on it with a map to their location. 4 Torn pants Count as high fashion no matter where you are. 5 Cracked egg Once per day a dead five inch tall version of yourself oozes out, covered in slime. 6 Doll with missing eye Name one person. They become fully convinced that the spirit of a loved one is trapped in this doll.

---

Greenhorns

Unfortunate fleshlings born in the crucible of Far Chalcic. These guys are like a dreaming mind's attempt at creating life. The shape of a living thing is there, and some of the noises, but for the most part they're miserable and short-lived. Their pathetic squelching inspires a certain disgust in the hearts of man, enough that your average Joe can't stand them.

Sadly, greenhorns are still useful - the strange cyclical forces at work in Far Chalcic have blessed them with the gift of prophecy. Not even the fun kind, like with riddles. Just straight facts. Given a mouth and a patient ear, one of these skinbags will jabber out truth after truth before perishing. Is a random fact about the future useful? You decide. In the meantime corporate pigs with fat stacks and a healthy fear of death are paying the big bucks for these guys, desperate to hear of their impending doom.

Who's paying for the latest greenhorn prophecies? d6 Querent 1 Fabulous Blud, circus owner. Skimps on safety features and worries it'll bite him in the ass. 2 Godswallow Crick, oil baron. He knows what he did. 3 Rodney, janitor. Saves money each year to buy prophecy contracts. Never sated. 4 Plastic Wiley, haunted wrestler. Knows his final match is soon from a previous prophecy, but not how soon. 5 Max Witness, witch. Resells juicy foretellings on the oracle black market. Already knows when she will die. In this way she is free. 6 Opportunity, robot. Has never heard a single prophecy about itself. Still, it tries and tries and tries.

---

Other Foul Inhabitants d6 Wacko 1 Balinda Miracle. Took up pottery after dying briefly in a factory accident. Unconsciously inscribes maps to hidden flake shrines within. 2 Leo Valentine, retired diver. Has some free suits for you in a pinch, but he'll only let you wear them if you change your name to Leo Valentine. 3 Petunia, canker mite breeder. Gut health: dire. Extremely knowledgeable about parasites. 4 Breadth and Depth, diver twins. Capture and raise WC's birthlings as pets. 5 Grotsky, drunk. Heard a greenhorn prophecy that he'd die an alcoholic and decided to get started early. 6 Steppan, Mayor's aide. Secretly burns trash on the town's outskirts as a small, directed act of spite. Threats in the Muck

Rarer than you think, but still here.

Flakes

HP 4 | Armor 1 | STR 10 | DEX 8 | CHA 13 | Harpoon Gun 1d6

Critical Damage: your oxygen supply (if applicable) is pierced and destroyed.

• Muck Divers who've gone rogue and rejected the surface, falling in love with the old world again and again.
• Build filthy underwater shrines from what they scavenge in the High Filth.
• Familiar with diver tech, obviously. Would rather attack your oxygen source than fight fair.

Omens: ragged breathing, old sea shanties hummed through the muck, underwater altars lit with glowing algae

---

Trash Birthling

HP 3 | STR 5 | DEX 15 | CHA 5 | Limp flailing 1d4

Critical Damage: all nearby birthlings merge into massive Trash Hulk (HP 8, Armor 3, STR 18, Junk Smash 1d12)

• WC's animated trash golems. Come in all broken shapes and sizes.
• Weak, but they swarm, and can move much faster than you through the Middens' sludge.
• WC needs to concentrate to make them violent. Left to their own devices they are filled with boundless curiosity.

Omens: idle squelching, muted rattling, crude childlike drawings

---

A Yearning

Yearning is a disease.

Originally documented in the depths of Far Chalcic, yearning was misunderstood for a long time. This is known:

• Yearning infuses unowned objects seemingly at random. The closer to Far Chalcic, the more likely the odds.
• Once you recognize the object as "yours", you're infected. Symptoms manifest on selling the object.
• Minor symptoms: melancholy, longing, daydreaming about how you could have utilized the object better.
• Major symptoms (manifest after one week): until the object is returned to your hands, you are both deprived and unable to die. Your saves bottom out at 1.

The swirling core of yearning at the so-called bottom of the swamp is accepted to be the disease's source, for no other reason than the dreams: it appears without fail in the infected's dreams each night. Infinitesimally small at first, it grows with each subsequent dream until it takes up all of the dreamer's senses. After about a year they can only see, feel, hear, taste, and smell the star. This is how they spend their nights: either becoming something else, or having something else become them.

Barb is the only known creature to transcend yearning entirely, and she's happy to cure you. Most divers actually choose to live with their infection, though. They whittle away eternity gathering late at night, watching the far off lights of the City, sharing could'vebeens and almosts, living forever in a dream of elsewhere.

Odds of yearning infection in found objects Layer Odds The High Filth 1-in-6 The Middens 3-in-6 Far Chalcic Always.

---

Other Dour Encounters d6 Encounter 1 City-borne mercenary (CHA 8, pet swordfish 1d8), looking to pick off weak divers. 2 Meclint, fungal diver (fungal spike 1d6) and spore cloud (mycelic rope 1d6 DEX), looking for the grungiest, grossest shrooms around. 3 Six Trash Saint prosyletizers delivering new specimens to WC on the mayor's orders. 4 Lone diver, mad with yearning, unable to die, gets attached waaay too easily. 5 The Squalid Seven (Armor 1, waterproof rifles 1d8), thieves and scoundrels in search of a good story to tell at the bar later. 6 Lowborn bloodsuckers (STR 5, grab 'n' leech 1d6). Only sense is sight - they lunge at anything that looks like blood. Hooks d6 Hook 1 Desperate bigwig is hiring for greenhorn retrieval, hoping their past won't catch up too soon. 2 Barb needs a mate. Someone's gotta go find a new cocoon deep down in Far Chalcic to sleep in or she'll go wacko. 3 Sweet grandma Joyce lost a cameo of her late husband years ago in the High Filth and is scrounging money for its retrieval. 4 Mayor Hominy has some extremely volatile nuclear waste to deliver down to WC, and his usual crew are too scared for the job. 5 An epidemic of yearning has afflicted the City, and people are massing to shut down diver operations for good. 6 Maverick flake scientists have enacted a plan to grow the swamp's area of effect, wanting the whole surface world to sink. Trashborne Treasure And Where To Find It d12 Layer Treasure 1 The High Filth China plate, colors faded. Always reflects the image of the viewer's mother. 2 The High Filth Piano, overrun by algae. Loud, tinny cheers emit when one finishes playing it. 3 The High Filth Record player converted to read fingerprints. Scraping a finger against the needle creates a perfect imitation of the owner's voice; levers and knobs modulate it. 4 The High Filth Mildewy wagon wheel. Seamlessly fits any wheel-shaped hole, no matter the size. 5 The Middens Discarded mucksuit. Robotically follows anything in a similar suit. 6 The Middens Armored car, toy-sized. Completely impenetrable. Hates being touched. 7 The Middens Spider-shaped trash compactor, animated. Weaves web from whatever material you feed it. 8 The Middens Walkie-talkie set. Allows communication over any distance, but a third voice interrupts occasionally to offer terrible advice. 9 Far Chalcic Antimatter starfish. Wraps around your dominant hand. The first person you touch each day dissolves into stardust. 10 Far Chalcic Mimic fungus. Fed a little donor DNA and attached to a living host, slowly grows into a copy of the original donor. 11 Far Chalcic Shyleech. Hairy mess of tentacles that attach to your scalp. Automatically hides your face from anyone looking at you. 12 Far Chalcic Martyr Root, a thin layer of moss that grows over your heart. You can always choose to take damage intended for someone else. Touchstones and Inspirations

Veniss Underground by Jeff VanderMeer

Perdido Street Station by China Mieville

The Zahir by Borges

Anthology of the Killer by thecatamites

AI art generated with the Bing create tool through Microsoft.

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Field Guides #3 - Disco Orpheus 28 January 2024 Contents

• Contents
• Intro
• Anatomy of a Dance Hall
  • How do you get in?
  • The Culture
  • The Beat
• Rooms in the Disco
  • The Dance Floor
  • Lamplighter's Catwalk
  • Purgatory Low Ten
  • Other Underground Hot Spots
• Faces in the Disco
  • The Bouncer
  • Mother LaBelle
  • "Slipstream" Footwork
  • Other Dancers
• Problems in the Disco
  • Moshbots
  • Shades
  • Culture Vultures
  • Encounter Table
• Hooks
• Touchstones and Inspirations

Intro

When you want to be exhausted, you hit the club. When you want to be obliterated, you find Disco Orpheus.

Bastion's hottest club embraces the city coffin-like from below. Part underground, part Underground, Disco Orpheus quakes the earth and cleanses the soul. You'll feel the beat before you ever see its walls: heart-throb, all bass, torching your worries like a hot coal to the lips. Feel that pain slough off, drain down, stain the floor, the walls. Who would ever want to leave?

Anatomy of a Dance Hall

The Orpheus wasn't built so much as grown grown. Like all great ideas it started at the dance floor before extending amoeba-like through bordering tunnels. The culture spread hot underground, co-opting old machinery, absorbing the past into itself, symbiotic with metal below and city above. Attendees are free to wander and add new rooms at will. The whole place is a freakazoid's fever quilt - a patchwork monument to endless expression woven into the fabric of time and space. Eagle eyed viewers know this: the shadows on the wall don't match up with the crowd.

How do you get in?

Where is harder than how, here. The Underground connects everything, so with mostly infinite entries you can always squeeze through the cracks with persistence. Most prominent entrances, though, appear in the dead places. Boroughs left to rot by time and greed, labeled behind sneers as lost causes, urban wastelands, death unchecked: these are where doors poke through the ashes. No matter how much life you stamp out it'll always grow back. The Orpheus reaches underfoot like ancient mycelium; the bouncer stands refracted at every door. And if you can't see the sign through the rubble, you can always follow the beat.

---

The Culture

Colors stay bright and spirits stay high. Start with Club Kids and go bigger from there. Identities bleed away beneath the costumes - your silhouette matters as much as what it hides. Tolerance for the bland differs in the sprawling tunnels, ranging from disdain to illegality the deeper you go. Artists find inspiration in the corpse of Bastion's history, giving decaying tech a new purpose and clothing themselves in the rust of yesterday. Decrepit AI remnants find odd joy in this ritual, let themselves be added to outfits and art, and leave their nests behind to join the endless dance. Ask anyone who they're wearing and they'll tell you the same thing: what Mother gave me.

---

The Beat

Special: if the Beat is ever silenced in an area, shades swarm in and go ballistic.

Heart's sweet blood drips from speakers, old pipework, cracks in the walls, flooding the static between spaces and bouying the crowd with holy rhythm. Is this what it means to be New Wave? How it sounds depends on who's spinning. Some nights it's trance, others it's bass so hard it could beat you in a fist fight. Always, music pumps through the Orpheus' veins and holds a candle to the dark. Silent tunnels get outfitted with sound tech or amputated like leprous limbs. This much is known: if the Beat is lost, so are we.

Where's the music coming from? d6 Output 1 Shitty boombox on a throne of cables. Dancers lay rose petals nearby as offering. 2 Giant moving mouth on the wall. Its echoing throat hums static. 3 Animatronic band interpreting radio waves. 4 Rattling claws of a dying AI, using its last reserves to keep the Beat alive. 5 Memetic virus compels everyone here to vocalize the Beat a capella. 6 A sieve-like digging machine originally used to shake the ground into dust. Now retooled it vibrates the Beat into the earth itself. You can feel it eroding your cheekbones. Rooms in the Disco

Squeeze through the crowd. Let the lights wash you clean.

The Dance Floor

Special: at the end of each song, the weakest dancer on the floor fades out and becomes a shade.

Orpheus' lynchpin and source of the Beat. Everything revolves around this. Bright lights, vivid colors - poison for your retinas, but great for the soul. Unending pounding feet have eroded away the original LED floor, leaving only a pit of washed out color centered around the DJ. Join the party, avoid the goons, and never, never stop dancing. Nobody wants to fade away.

Who's spinning tonight?

The music wasn't meant to last this long. Proximity to the Beat has warped the turntables, turning each night's host into a catalyst for metamorphosis. These effects come into play on the Dance Floor and anywhere else the music is especially prominent.

d6 Host Style Effect 1 DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ Sample-heavy EDM NPCs can only communicate using words in the last spoken sentence. 2 Max Grief Whale Phonics Must speak extremely slowly or people shun you for killing the vibe. 3 Ella Mayo Dongcore Crowd loudly complains that the music sucks. If they think you like it they beat you up. 4 Him Him Everyone in range of the music takes on the appearance of the same nebbish white guy. 5 HOLY ICON PLUSTASTIS Judgement Juke Constantly shouts "is everybody having a good time?" Anyone who says no gets their ass smote and instantly dies. 6 It's Mom! Spoken Word Morality Plays (Dub Mix) Must be kind to others. Anyone being mean gets teleported to the dungeon.

---

Lamplighter's Catwalk

Special: crossing the catwalk without incorporating the Judge's Category into your clothing gets you attacked by a canopy of wires (Taser Tips 1d8 Dex) and thrown in the river.

In decades past a machine was built (created? born?) under the earth with one goal: to inspect textiles for scant traces of divinity. Slowly its influence spread as people paraded themselves beneath for appraisal or laughs or maybe something deeper. Over time these visitors built procedures, decorated, left offerings to this Judge shaped as scattered poetry and vibrant dance. Is this religion or a prank? Does it matter? Either way the catwalk spills like ritual blood across a roaring river, flanked on either side by ancient miner's lanterns. The Judge as a half-born moth dangles from above, wires spilling from its blinking frame and bulging from cavern walls. Its stadium-sized TV face only displays two icons but each contains multitudes: a thumbs up, or a thumbs down.

At sunset the most enlightened catwalk acolytes open their minds and intuit the Judge's fashion desires, distilling terabytes of data into a single phrase: the Category. They'll post it publicly for the hoi polloi but won't help you throw together an outfit - passing judgment is all on you. Don't like it? Hope you can swim; the river flows straight down to Purgatory Low Ten. Or you could always find a way around.

What's tonight's Category? d6 Category Is... 1 WINGS AND THINGS 2 CAMPFIRE COUTURE 3 ECDYSIS ELEGANZA EXTRAVAGANZA 4 THAT THING. YOUR DARK SOUL. 5 TUMOR? I HARDLY KNOW ER 6 SHOW ME SOMETHING SO BEAUTIFUL IT UNMAKES ME.

---

Purgatory Low Ten

Special: anything left in the Orpheus' water long enough slips through the cracks and falls here.

Named after the paranoiac apocalypse bunker at its lowest point, Purgatory Low Ten is the waterlogged tunnel network where disco goes to die. She's built like a rambling ant hill and flooded to high hell. The Judge's river empties into here along with what feels like half the world's oceans. Dancers in the world above avoid this place like it's the next life, talking around it in muffled curses. It's the Doldrums, baby, the Bends, the scavenger in the Orpheus' ecosystem, taking in the dead matter that falls down the drain and keeping it enshrined or, in a sense, alive.

Is it any surprise that the dancers have a tradition of water burial? Cause of death doesn't matter, the PLT accepts all - just chuck 'em in a pool and send them to the next one. The culture vultures nesting here will break them apart, keep the parts that matter, and let the rest flow down to the bunker. Everything that passes in the Orpheus ends up here: people, places, ideas, all getting stuck on rare spits of dry land or exposed piping. Layers and layers of culture from the Before Times or even last week lay preserved in the tunnels, along with all the treasures therein. Nothing is truly gone until it passes through the bunker's doors. In this way the old world will never die.

What's that waterlogged relic? d6 Relic 1 Bloodied microphone. When plugged in can amplify or muffle all sound in the room. 2 Latex mask patched with human skin. Lets you see through the eyes of the last person to wear it, alive or dead. 3 Stiletto heels, caked in dust. You can always land a front flip while wearing these. 4 Miniature car with a broken door. Controllable with your mind. Has a functional radio. 5 Sports drink: MENERGY (ka-pow!). Half empty. Drinking it causes lightning to strike you, no matter where. 6 Empty cocoon. Moldy, about to fall apart. Stick a limb through its opening to get a cryptic tattoo foretelling your own death. If your character would die you can call on this knowledge to barely escape at the cost of losing the tattooed limb.

---

Other Underground Hot Spots d6 Location 1 Clownway Grotesquerie. The Beat is absent. Just mimes dancing and judging you for not following along. 2 Reverb Plaza. Giganctic open cavern. Any sound made here never leaves or diminishes. Drives you nuts without protection. 3 Sealed subway tunnel turned into a bathroom. Has an attendant who never leaves and knows all the gossip. 4 Abandoned disco ball factory. Withered overseer AI coerces people into dancing just to feel something. 5 Three mile long caterpillar molt. Sporadic puddles of irridescent juice lie throughout. Drink to gain a perfect singing voice and a strong desire to sleep forever. 6 Legendary Maul (sic). Textile market in a decommissioned arsenal. Only takes payment in imaginative insults. More vicious = more valuable. Faces in the Disco

Notable dancers in a sea of masks.

The Bouncer

Armor 1 | Holographic Pistol 1d8, damages all three saves equally.

Special: if killed, splits into two identical Bouncers.

The only way to patrol theoretically infinite entrances is to become theoretically infinite. So it is that the Bouncer (how brave!) obliterated his identity in grave ceremony to shatter himself across time and space. Now he waits behind each of the Orpheus' doors, everywhere, with only a little stool and ratty zines for company. "He" waits is maybe not the right word because it's more like a seed of him waits, something sent scattershot across the universe and taken root just to make sure you're old enough to drink. He (they?) is (are?) friendly enough but growing from the atomic corpse of a splintered man naturally leaves some holes in the psyche; these get filled in by whatever environ surrounds a particular entrance. As he has spread across the world so to has the world spread into him, and if you want that stamp on the back of your hand you'll have to figure out what he wants in return.

What does this version of the Bouncer want? d6 Surroundings Desire 1 Piles and piles of cicada husks "A song about me." 2 Desolate ruin "Water, please, God, just some water." 3 Illusory motel "Take my place? I need a nap." 4 Night sky. Old stars. A ragged banner. "Something to worship." 5 Abandoned borough, all rust and smog "A speech. Inspire me." 6 Overgrown, ravenous botanical garden "Some perfume? Yeah, some perfume."

---

Mother LaBelle

CHA 15 | Heart-stopping Shout 1d8 CHA blast

Orpheus' founder. Disco royalty, local legend, host, model, fashionista, HBIC. Mother LaBelle at the end of her long life now wanders the club's twisting halls with a bigass megaphone and a trail of gaudy sycophants. To some she might be a queen or even a god but in her own mind she is a clockmaker, someone who long ago set a complex machine in motion and fashioned herself into a gear. Such is the breadth of her experience that the sights and sounds of the Orpheus' clientele no longer catches her attention - she only cares about that new shit, the bleeding edge. She won't even talk to you if you haven't passed judgement, but the juice is worth the squeeze: her knowledge of dance extends past the physical and out beyond the veil.

It's tempting to say she's dressed as feverishly as the rest of the club but in my heart she just looks like Crystal Waters in the 100% Pure Love video.

They say: with a horrific engine in Purgatory's bunker she created the shades to ensure the party never, ever stops.

What dance can Mother teach you? d6 Dance Effect while performed 1 Galatean Two-step Nearby statues animate and mimic movement. 2 Jack in the Box Dancer can contort their body to fit in any container. 3 Buddha Stretch Dancer's arms elongate slowly. When dance stops, they snap back like a rubber band. 4 Third Eye Vogue Dancer can't be harmed by any attack. Lose 1d4 DEX / round while dancing. 5 Disarming Duckwalk Nearby weapons jitter and shake out of their owner's hands. 6 Blood Burning Stomp Everybody nearby feels a pressure in the head and can't hear anything but the Beat.

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"Slipstream" Footwork

HP 13 | STR 8 | DEX 15 | Pressure Point Pinch 1d10

Well, here he is: the last man on your nightmare blunt rotation. "Slipstream" Footwork is the guy you call when you need to get anywhere fast and don't mind paying for it. He's got a face like a dying car salesman and makes weird comments about how much food you eat. Everybody hates Slip and he relishes this because he has what they don't: the implanted thyroid of a rabid mutant. This thing spews otherworldly hormones through his body at all times, allowing him to navigate the Underground with perfect clarity and minimal tumors. The Orpheus' tunnels are inconsistent on a good day and prone to collapse, blockage, or general malaise, so he always finds work. His shortcut services start at $100 and go up if he's having a bad day. He won't help a lick if you run into trouble and he'll leave you behind if you even think about insulting him. Alas, such is the price of public transit.

Where does Slipstream's shortcut lead you through? d6 Space Behind The Walls 1 Toxic sewage runoff filled with acid-spewing roaches. 2 Quarantined dance floor. No music. Overflowing with shade. 3 Copper-lined bowels of a geriatric machine mind whose thoughts override your own. 4 Secret theatre performing horrific passion plays. Prone to dragging the audience on stage. 5 Dark nest of vampiric nightclubbers allergic to light. 6 Boring underground office specialized in live burials. Free demos available!

---

Other Dancers d6 Dancer 1 Escrow Malone. Loves to party on weekends. Will be shot dead if seen by his coworkers and he knows it. 2 Vlad Astra. Drunk on that God-killing shit. Desperate for revolution. 3 Michelin. 7'0" model. Thinks they're dead and wants to haunt the world. 4 Casey Hardtack. Fell down a sewer in Deep Country and ended up here. Needs a tour guide and pays in teeth. 5 Miss Biggs. Chunky radio on trundling remote-controlled wagon. Follows the loudest dancers and records their noisy steps "for government work". 6 Paralyzer Oh-One-Nine. Machine core housed in a fragile glass body. Wants to dance but terrified of dying. Problems in the Disco

There's always a party pooper.

Moshbots

HP 6 | Armor 1 | STR 13 | DEX 13 | Screaming Jostle 1d8 STR

Critical Damage: you go flying into someone else dealing an additional 1d8 to both parties.

• dying AI cores given chance at new life in humanoid metal bodies.
• each has the same unexplained reaction to the Beat: violent brutal dance.
• instantly shut down when exposed to calming music.

Omens: stopping feet, synthetic hollers, annoyed crowd

---

Shades

Static Hum 1d6 CHA | Critical Damage: target fades out into another shade.

• anyone who can't hang with the crowd fades out to let the new blood in.
• look like shadows projected on the wall. distracted and harmless as long as the Beat is playing.
• unable to be directly harmed; must be scrubbed off the wall like graffiti.

Omens: shadows don't match the crowd, mosquito-like buzz, vibrating in your molars

---

Culture Vultures

Scavenged audio equipment 1d6 STR | Critical Damage: target deafened as equipment sparks to life briefly

• unlucky folks who fell down to Purgatory, stay alive by pillaging equipment from cultures past.
• can't return to the disco proper for fear of getting shaded.
• guerilla fighters driven to survive, but will defend their relics to the death.

Omens: outdated clothing like shed skin on ground, lonely singing, tapping music on the walls

---

Encounter Table d6 Encounter 1 Two detachments of moshbots doing a wall of death. 2 Goldfoot, aggressive dance battler (DEX 13, Intimidating Breakdance 1d8 CHA). You get thrown out if you actually hurt them. 3 Three cops (CHA 1, regular cop gun 1d6) desperately trying to shut things down. 4 Pair of culture vultures, scared, exploring the disco for food. 5 Power malfunction! The Beat cuts out, and shades are angrily swarming in. 6 Single moshbot alone, with nobody to jostle, on the cusp of enlightenment. Hooks d6 Hook 1 The vultures are rebelling with plans to flood large portions of the club and expand Purgatory's reach. 2 Mother is searching for a successor. People flock in droves for the Judge's approval and a chance at an audience. 3 Two rival DJs are both performing at once, causing strange effects where the Beats clash. 4 Strange device in the club's far reaches is muting all sound, causing a plague of shade. 5 A strange Bouncer variant, plagued by prophecy, is panicking and kicking everybody out of the Disco. 6 An army of nuclear cultists is amassing outside to storm Purgatory's bunker and plunder its secrets. Touchstones and Inspirations

Club kids, ballroom culture, house music, and RuPaul's Drag Race

Anthology of the Killer by thecatamites ("is this what it means to be new waves?" quoted in the Beat)

DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ is a real artist, I just love their name.

All pics aside from the culture generated by Microsoft's AI tool through bing.

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The Mook Roll 3 January 2024 New year, new resolution

My entry in Prismatic Wasteland's New Year's Resolution challenge is the Mook Roll.

The Mook Roll

When to use it: any time you have more loyal dudes under your command than you know what to do with.

How to use it: name something dangerous and roll 1d6.

Results: The mooks always succeed. The d6 number is how many of them die in the process.

If the die is higher than the number of mooks, they still succeed but just get absolutely obliterated. That can't not weigh on your soul. Reduce your Charisma (or other bespoke leadership stat) by the difference. You can get it back by paying a blood debt to the surviving families or otherwise self-flagellating at your local church until your heart is healed.

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Musical Dungeons 29 December 2023 Intro

Most of my writing is inspired by whatever flavor of music I'm mainlining at the time. To describe it like a robot: music is accessible, an extremely diverse medium, and easy to mine ideas from. My favorite module I've written, FIVE A.M. PANIC!, came straight out of the feverish energy I felt the first time I listened to Panico a las 5am by Angel Rada.

Today as a little exercise I'm going to make a short dungeon based off a random song.

"Procedure"

I don't think you can proceduralize the act of being inspired by art, but I'll try.

• Note interesting lyrics, turns of phrase, images, etc.
• Name three feelings or images the song inspires.
• Synthesize into one strong "anchor" image
• Build outward from there.

Setup

I'm going to be making a six room bite-sized dungeon inspired by Marcia B's procedures in this post.

For the song, I'm going to practice the ancient art of shufflemancy and use the first thing that Spotify's AI DJ gives me.

The song that he gave me is Cynical One, by TV Girl. A pretty low energy, wistful song. We'll see how it goes.

---

Step 1: interesting lyrics, images, etc.

This part is usually all intuition for me, but it's an interesting exercise to write it all out. I don't think I would usually have this many details, but I wanted to extract a few tiny bits to show the breadth of inspiration available.

• the sound of a door opening in the first few seconds
• the looped sample from Song to the Magic Frog
• "house on the hill"
• "wine and roses"
• "you can't go trading me places"
• the voice being cut off at the very end of the song
• deadpan guy singing, more ethereal feminine voice backing
• the psychedelic, almost hypnotic album cover

---

Step 2: three feelings or images the song inspires

These are just off the dome. Don't put too much thought into them.

• pining. yearning, even.
• gentle self-deprecation. or blame?
• something pastoral under a starry sky, like a field.

---

Step 3: synthesize into an "anchor" image

A wooden house on a hill, surrounded by a field of red roses. It's night. A line of identical women dance out the front door and down the hill. They're flickering, ghostlike.

---

Step 4: the rest of the fucking owl

Rolling on the layout table in Marcia's post above, I get number 2: a triangular layout with a few branches.

Since we've got a house on a hill, I'll rotate this a bit to have a sort of path going up to the house, with a few locations branching off from there.

Now I'll add some locations: just reasonable things you might see in a rural space like this.

1. Bottom of the hill
2. Hill path
3. House
4. Windmill
5. Stable
6. Graves

Next up is a "special" room, a trap, two monsters, and two treasures. I'm using the details mined earlier here. This part's pretty iterative. While I was writing this, I started to get the shape of what I wanted from the dungeon, fleshing details out and editing little bits of earlier parts.

---

"Special" room

Inspiration: the looped sample; wine and roses

The graves in the back of the house. Two lots are open with rectangular holes. One is filled with dark red wine. The line of women emerges from the other. Submerging someone in the wine adds another woman to the loop. Filling in the wine-less grave frees everyone caught in the loop, spitting them all out at once.

---

Monster 1

Inspirations: deadpan guy singing, feminine backing vocals; pining, yearning even.

Farmer who looks like he hasn't slept in years. Dead eyes, messy grey beard. Ghostly, pale hands can be seen gently touching his neck and shoulders. Whoever he is, this is all his fault. Rather than hurting you, he will try and throw you in the wine-filled grave in the back. Carries a coin: ten years sober!

---

Monster 2

Inspiration: gentle self-deprecation. or blame?

Scarecrow watching over the hill path. It sags sadly from its perch, head hanging low. It's seen everything that happened here and felt so powerless to stop it. If you go up the hill it barrages you with painful psychic visions, hoping you'll run away.

---

Trap

Inspiration: the vocal sample cut off at the end of the song

In the stables, most of the guts have been ripped out and replaced with a huge generator. It's hungry for any fuel and emits a weird staccato high pitched noise, like someone coughing out the phrase "he-" over and over again. There's no noise otherwise.

If you talk near the generator, it eats the noise with a feeling like having a tooth pulled. The first syllable of the first word spoken replaces the "he-" noise, and you take damage as the wind gets stolen from your lungs.

---

Treasure 1

Inspiration: wine and roses

At the bottom of the hill, the line of women disappears into the field of roses where they dissolve into a puddle of pale white wine. Getting drunk on this stuff causes the original trapped woman, whose image is repeated over and over again in the line, to possess you.

---

Treasure 2

Inspiration: the looped sample

Jerry-rigged frankensteined raggedy-ass video camera with a slug-like glowing cathode ray tube on top. Recording someone with this causes a hazy, ghostlike image of them to repeat the recorded movements whenever you hit play. Footage lasts 6 seconds and there's enough memory for one stored recording.

---

Put it all together

1. Bottom of the hill
   • Roses. Line of identical ghostly women dance into field and dissolve into pale white wine.
     • Getting drunk on wine allows the ghost of the looping woman to possess you.
2. Hill path
   • Ghostly women dance down trail. Roses on either side.
   • Scarecrow hangs ashamed, driving away visitors as best as it can. Assaults with painful psychic visions.
3. The House
   • Women waltz in from backyard, through living room, out the door.
   • Bedroom reeks of death. There's a corpse, obviously. Long tubes filled with wine connect body to generator (5).
   • The Farmer sits in the living room, recording dancers with video camera.
     • The camera is magic: it records a 6 second loop of whoever's in front of it and can replay it at will. Holds one "loop" at a time.
4. Windmill
   • Creaky, rusting. Scraps of cloth are layered gently at base like a quilt.
     • When the Farmer adds a new person to the loop, he takes a scrap from their outfit and puts it here.
5. Stable
   • Big generator. Remnants of hay and old animal musk. No sound other than generator's coughing high-pitched "he-" noise.
     • Talking near generator causes it to suck the words out of your body, hurting you and changing the noise it emits.
   • Tubes go to bedroom in house (3) and graves (6)
6. Graves
   • Two mounds and fragile crosses. Two open lots. The source of the dancing women.
   • One grave is filled with dark red wine. Tubes of the stuff connect to generator (5).
     • Submerging someone in the wine traps them and adds another woman to the loop.
   • The women emerge from the other, climbing from the grave. They look real at first, but their color fades as they dance away.
     • Filling in this grave stops the loop. Everyone submerged in the wine is spat out all at once.

And that's that!

Hope you enjoyed this. If you use this method to make anything of your own, I'd love to hear about it.

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Field Guides #2 - Reflecting Eden 26 December 2023 Contents

• Intro
• Checking In
  • The Nail
  • The Dreamscape
  • Where Do You Sleep?
• Eden's Places
  • Dreamlocked Doors
  • The Sunset Engine
  • Ennui Horizons
  • Other Installations
• Eden's People
  • Darcy, Receptionist
  • Border Walkers
  • The Owner
  • Local Dreamers
• Eden's Problems
  • Outlines
  • Ceptors
  • Solar Flares
  • Encounters (Reality)
  • Encounters (Dreamscape)
• Hooks
• Inspirations and Touchstones

Intro

At the edge of sleep: dreams. At the edge of dreams: Eden.

The Reflecting Eden Spa & Resort rides parasitic on the Bastion coastline. From an expensive seaside perch it reaches with tendrils of metal and glass to the endless horizon. For too long (it sighs) for too long our pleasure houses and bath halls have focused solely on the flesh, and in this our delight is limited. Think of that other you, whose skin you wear at night, walking unloved in illusory halls. Your deeper half thanks you, says the receipt, and it's true: Eden caters to both the dreamer and the dreamed.

Can our dreaming selves feel love? Kindness? Comfort? Science says maybe, adverts say yes. Come, walk stone hallways lined with water still as glass. Cocoon yourself in wool, drift away under moonlit moss. Your body's in safe hands and your mind is free to wander. When one eye closes, they say, another opens.

Checking In

Go see Darcy in Reception and she'll hook you up with the basics: a silk robe, a sleeping mask, and your nail. No payment needed: the resort is free, as it should be. After that, the grounds are yours. Soak in the salty air, let perfumes tempt you down endless hallways real or imagined, wander the labyrinth until your eyes shut tight and your dreamself rises to do it all again. How does it all work, you ask? Look to the west: the sun's always setting in Eden.

The Nail

Special: when a player installs a nail, they name one sensation: a sight, sound, smell, etc. This sensation influences the dreamscape while they sleep.

This little ray of sunset is your key to the dreamscape. It drives into the dominant palm and offers an indispensible function:

• While awake, tap twice to sedate yourself and instantly fall asleep.
• While dreaming, tap twice to wake up.

Such a simple device is the soil on which Eden was grown. Most folks are going to have theirs installed by Darcy with a contraption resembling a staple gun. It glows red hot at first, then quickly cools into the steel grey of its namesake.

Each one is scarred with unique burns from their making, so they function as an ID when needed. Guests are forbidden from tampering with, removing, or replacing their nail. Remember, if you've heard rumors of nails recording data on one's dreams: no, you haven't.

---

The Dreamscape

The dreaming world is reality's vestigial twin. It can't exist without our worldly thoughts, but it yearns to be so much more. In most places it's ephemeral, forgotten on waking, a creation built to die.

Eden isn't most places. Anchored by the sun and shaped by our collective unconscious, the local dreamscape holds a mostly coherent mirror to the waking world. In the resort proper you'll get the usual effects - shifting clocks, sinuous architecture, unhinged otherworlds out the window - but everything'll generally be hotel-shaped. Everything you're holding comes with you, but if you want to shape the world or imagine anything new, you'll have to do that in a private room. The dream isn't yours alone to change.

The real shit, the words too big for reality's page, is gonna be shut tight behind dreamlocked doors. The weirdest you'll get outside of that is some influence bleeding through from nearby sleepers.

How does damage work in the dream?

When in doubt, use CHA.

Per the rules, CHA hitting zero makes you catatonic, and that's good enough for government work. Make CHA your default dreamworld consequence over STR and you'll be doing just fine.

What's influencing the dream here?

Every person sleeping in Eden affects the dreamscape in some way. When enough people with similar thoughts doze together, strange things can happen.

d6 Influence Effect 1 Fear Fog in the halls. CHA saves always fail. 2 Teeth Air feels brittle. Taking CHA damage makes a limb fall off. 3 Mirrors Hazy duplicates crowd the world. All attacks are impaired. 4 Tinnitus Silence you can hear. No verbal communication allowed. 5 Yearning Hush, little hearts. NPCs are too wistful to be of any use. 6 Public Speaking Everyone's in their underwear. Armor has no effect.

---

Where Do You Sleep?

Anywhere you like! There's a hammock in every garden and a couch on every corner, but local custom offers this: wrap yourself in robe and blanket, walk until a particular view lights your mind ablaze with wonder, and tap your nail to dream on the spot. Eden feeds on this practice - vast windows highlight the sea while skylights let stars seep in from above. Strange sculpture works with dizzying incense to overwhelm the senses. You never have to wander far to find new delights.

One small consequence: longer hallways are often littered with sleeping bodies. The guards do their best to clear a path, but nobody can be everywhere at once.

Eden's Places

A few islands in the sea of infinity.

Dreamlocked Doors

Not all of Eden's features, strictly speaking, exist.

What would you do if you could shape image into being with just a thought? The first thing Eden's pioneers did was live their wildest fantasies; the second was monetize the same. Whether it's an otherworldly installation, an idea that's too big for your budget, or just a private space to shape as your own, Eden is full of rooms that exist solely within the dreamscape, enclosed behind dreamlocked doors.

Most folks can tell you this much:

• Dreamlocked doors are identified by pastel sunlight fighting through the cracks.
• They can only be opened while in the dreamscape.
• Some can be used as shortcuts across the facility, but you'll still need to get your body to the other side. Don't wake up in transit.

What's behind this door? d6 World Strange Effect 1 Abandoned school. Halls full of mannequins. Mannequins are a virus - you touch one, you become one. Waking up cures it. Their creator lurks nearby. 2 Flooded, raining city. Endless neon signs fade into the depths. Water saps CHA (1d6/round) when touching bare skin. 3 Marble grave in a solemn wheat field. The stars are distant fireflies. Carving a name on the grave bans that person from Eden's dreamscape, but upsets the fireflies (detachment, Blinding Flash 1d8 CHA blast). 4 Technicolor prison cell. A thousand locks wrap around a lumpy cocoon. Wrapping an object in chain and locking it to the cocoon adds it to your real world inventory. 5 Small island in a vast ocean. Stone coffin lies in the sand. Any physical change done to someone in the coffin also affects them in the real world. 6 Ravaged, ruined garden. Cinders burn with melancholy. Lone angel (Armor 2, flaming sword 1d10 CHA) meditates in the wreckage. It'll aid anyone it deems worthy of worship.

---

The Sunset Engine

Special: while the Sunset Engine is active,

• All dreams in range are lucid.
• All dreams in range are shared.

Eden's crown jewel. Holy anchor, sacred moneymaker, the Sunset Engine shines eternal on the distant horizon. Her pastel light exhibits a dual property: it exists in both the physical and dream realms. With a wealthy benefactor, a shitload of Underground tech, and good old Bastiard ingenuity, the boys in the lab have harnessed this otherworldly power.

The good news: It works! The Engine keeps Eden's dreamscape mostly consistent. Sunspots can be shaved off to form nails. More complex extractions allow the guards to walk the oneiric border between real and dream.

The bad: this shit is dangerously unstable. All that influence has to go somewhere, and the sun sucks it all up like a black hole. She's one panic attack away from going nuclear in two worlds at once.

How does Eden protect its fragile child? Band-aids, mostly. The access tunnels are blockaded with alternating dreamlocked/real-locked doors, so only someone who can walk both worlds is getting through. Volunteers lay sleeping at the Engine's base, brains pumped full of happy thoughts to keep the dreamscape stable. It's enough. Barely.

---

Ennui Horizons

Special: The following effects apply to characters in the Horizon's waters.

• Swimming causes CHA damage. Start at 1d4/round, increase # die as they go further out.
• If a player's CHA hits zero while swimming, they become a layabout and are removed from play.

Ennui Horizons is Eden's most controversial feature.

Paint this on your mental map: a calm inlet, ringed by beachside greenhouses. For color, add the sun out west in all her glory, drawing reds and purples across the radiant canvas.

Now for the spice: bodies. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. All floating, all asleep, all with a look of pure bliss on their soft faces. The air hums electric. Mostly they're concentrated towards the shoreline, so densely packed you can walk on them. Things thin significantly further out. Turns out this stretch of ocean gets bombarded by the sun's energy. Swimming here brings your body to the exact midpoint between real and dream, and it's a one way trip. When you sleep here, you sleep forever.

There were only a few at first. Then came the rumors: Transcendence! Enlightenment! See something beautiful as you fade away! It's all bullshit, but it gets butts in seats, and new swimmers join the party every day. The staff hates these layabouts - they clog up the view and attract annoying next-of-kin. But they're too risky to recover, so here they sit, islands of bodies, smiling serene in the current.

And the chaser: soaking up the sun has imbued each body with some aspect of the dreamscape. Could be useful back on shore... if you can get one out of the water.

What effect is on this layabout? d8 Distance Effect 1 Near Colors are more vivid nearby. 2 Near Repeats everything you say with a 30 second delay. 3 Near Constant low-level static electricity. 4 Near Plays funky music when you rub its belly. 5 Mid Sleeping next to it causes you to take on its appearance. 6 Mid Floats two inches above nearest surface like a hoverboard. 7 Far Endlessly weeps water, seaweed, fish. 8 Very Far Hold its hand and speak a person's name to swap places with them, no matter the distance.

---

Other Installations d6 Feature 1 Bedroom choked with palm trees. There's no roof, and the sky's full of stars. 2 Poolside bar. Liquor sold in the real gets you drunk in the dream, and vice versa. 3 Someone set up a pillow fort labyrinth. People have been living there for weeks. 4 Dreamlocked hallway connecting two real spaces, filled with disco lights. Voices jeer if you go through without dancing. 5 Concert hall packed with snoring bodies in the real and a massive rager in the dream. 6 Medical wing. Nobody's here. Nobody's here. Eden's People

They're real, more or less.

Darcy, Receptionist

Day after day Darcy sits flanked by obnoxious smiling art and stabs nails into palms. Poke, poke, poke, yes sir, yes ma'am. Nobody pays her any mind - they're here for dreams. She's only got one fear, but it's a doozy: she thinks if she stays still and quiet long enough she'll burn her image into the wall and disappear.

She copes by treating dead air like a curse to be broken. Darcy runs her mouth from dusk to dawn, chat chat chatting the hours away. Off the clock she feverishly brews psychedelics to sell under the table, hoping against hope for repeat customers so she never has to hush up. Turns out she's an okay receptionist but a great cook: her products activate the 90% of our brains that are mostly mush, granting special effects while dreaming.

What's Darcy peddling? d4 Appearance Effect 1 Candied feather Flight while dreaming, sluggishness / slurred words in the real. 2 Mirrored pill Change appearance at will while dreaming, look pale and sickly in the real. 3 Splitting amoeba Create a clone while dreaming, grow an extra finger in the real. 4 Gummy fist Armor 3 while dreaming. HP 0 in the real (too overconfident).

---

Border Walkers

Armor 1 | STR 12 | DEX 10 | CHA 7 | Liminal Beatstick 1d8 STR/CHA (hurts both at once)

Paid to guard the facility but not to be happy, The Border Walkers live like unlucky hallucinations. Shivering under sunlit halos, their bodies exist simultaneously in both the real and the dream. The experience is, put lightly, fucking awful. Their eyes overflow with ephemera; colors unknown spill from their fingertips. Most don't last a week. These poor freaks shine bright and burn out fast.

Their miseries are endless. Their services are few, and costly:

• They can carry your sleeping body through dreamlocked doors.
• They can bring items between the real and dream worlds.
• They can create a private dreamlocked space and give you control over the inside.

The halos that make it all happen? Very fragile, and hard to replace. One more burden on their anxious backs.

---

The Owner

More rumor than human, the shadow of Eden's founder looms heavy over the sea. Who funds a free resort? And why? The Owner answers only with silence, leaving gossip to fill the blanks. These days the story garners more interest than the person - it's easier to worship a blank canvas. The most consistent thing you'll hear is this: they never leave the dream. As for the rest, nobody's digging deeper while the wine still flows and the checks still cash.

Whispers and hearsay about the Owner d6 Rumor 1 The Sunset Engine traps their child in its core. 2 They have two nails. The second takes them even deeper into the dreamscape. 3 You can influence them to appear by getting enough folks to think about them while falling asleep. 4 They record people's dreams using nails and sell the data to the living stars. 5 They were the first layabout, smiling body buried under the rest. 6 They were born a dream. Eden is their desperate attempt to walk the real world.

---

Local Dreamers d6 Dreamer 1 Bigby, accountant. Totally lost. Kicks people to wake them up and ask basic directions. 2 Gabriel, statue. Someone stuck a nail in it as a laugh. Turns out statues can dream. 3 Shasta, peon. Worships the Worm Moon. Wants a private room to dream it into being. 4 Belinda, grandmother. Shriveled and warm. Dreams to relive childhood memories. 5 Freakwick, alien. Escaped dreamlocked containment. Ageless, eternal, asks too many questions. 6 Bathos and Pathos, twins. Separate in the real, one person in the dream. Eden's Problems

Not even heaven is perfect.

Outlines

HP 3 | STR 5 | DEX 5 | CHA 13 | Vertigo Stare 1d8 CHA

Critical Damage: target can't sleep for a week.

• When your sleeping body dies while you're in the dream, this is what's left.
• Exact copies at first, but lose coherence over time like an instrument going out of tune. Can snap at any time for any reason.
• Only capable of saying a single phrase: can you imagine such joy?

Omens: static buzz; rhythmic tapping on useless nails; can you imagine such joy?

---

Ceptors

Armor 1 | HP 9 | STR 6 | DEX 13 | CHA 10 | Paralytic Needle 1d6 DEX

• Insomniac rebels against the tyrant Owner. Known for their bright red scarves.
• Stalk and paralyze targets while they sleep, then brainwash them to negatively influence the dream.
• Anyone they inject has a red noose form around their neck in the dreamscape.

Omens: trailing footsteps; a flash of red cloth; nail-less palms.

---

Solar Flares

• Sun-born fragmented thoughts. Appear in parts of reality where the dreamscape is less stable.
• Take the shape of everyday objects, never congruent with the rest of the space.
• Explode when touched, harming both the real and dreamworld nearby.

Omens: unfitting decor; a slight glow, like stars in fog; warm, gentle humming.

---

Encounters (Reality) d6 Encounter 1 Three border walkers trying to safely detonate a solar flare. 2 Single ceptor, needle deep in a sleeper's neck. 3 Someone brought a layabout inside. It makes people nearby trip when you pull its hair. 4 Hallway overrun with solar flares. One person sits in the middle of it all, too scared to move. 5 So many people are asleep here that passage is completely blocked. 6 Four ceptors, blending in with the crowd, waiting for you to sleep before they pounce.

---

Encounters (Dreamscape) d6 Encounter 1 Lone outline, drawn to the living like a lizard to heat. 2 Confused gaggle of folks trying to help a man with a red noose sprouting on his neck. 3 Couple of horrible teens (15 DEX, shitty knife 1d4 CHA) trying to tap people's nails and wake them up. 4 See-through lilies sprout on every surface. They erupt with spores (1d10 CHA) if anyone is rude nearby. 5 Twelve outlines acting out a domestic picnic. The static hum is so loud it shakes your teeth. They beckon you to join. 6 Escaped chimera pair (Armor 2, HP 6, 15 CHA, threefold bite 1d8 * 3) running amok, desperate to return to their dreamlocked nest. Hooks d6 Hook 1 Grieving widow wants a layabout recovered from the far, far end of Ennui Horizons. 2 Undercover ceptor is paying a high price for stolen border walker halos. 3 Rival resorts want to shut it all down, and are hiring anyone to infiltrate and destroy the Sunset Engine. 4 Rumors of dreamlocked treasure in an abandoned wing filled with the oldest, least coherent outlines. 5 Darcy's cooking again. She wants weird ingredients only found in guarded dreamscape gardens. 6 Someone found the real source of solar flares: a dreamlocked factory filled with strange mechanical elves. Go shut it down!

---

Inspirations and Touchstones

Music: New age, vaporwave, utopian virtual

The Anodyne series by Analgesic Productions

What's behind this door worlds 1 and 2 ripped straight from the Hypnagogia series. World 3 inspired by Lilith Zone's Day/Night Town.

Outlines inspired by The Outer Wilds.

Freakwick inspired by Qfwfq from Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics.

Images generated by Microsoft's AI art tool through bing.

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Field Guides #1 - Sunflower River Trail 15 December 2023 Contents

• Intro
• The Trail
• The Rules
  • No Driving
  • No Diving
  • No Dying
• Landmarks on the Trail
  • The Outer Reaches
  • Doc Warboys' Clinic
  • Black Forest Radio
  • Other Sights
• Pilgrims on the Trail
  • Misery (or Beth)
  • "Chloe"
  • Doc Warboys' Corpse Boys
  • Other Wanderers
• Hazards on the Trail
  • The Path Eaters
  • The Law
  • The Horse
  • Encounter Table
• Hooks
• Inspirations and Touchstones

Intro

The Sunflower River Trail is where you go when it's time to move on, but you're still here.

Most folks meet Death in quick, hot flashes - the warm carress after a gunshot; a hand over the eyes while a wire tightens around the neck. The lonely echo when you say: go on without me, and they really do it. This is the gospel: everyone's a poet when they're fading away.

But the Sunflower Pilgrims exist in cold. Death turns from them with covered eyes and heavy heart. She doesn't walk them home or sing them to sleep. She does not see them, and they do not see her. No matter how hard they try, they cannot die.

Everyone's got a different story. Paul fell into the woodchipper and awoke in pieces. Sue got her head split by a meteorite and ran out of her own funeral. Some rare few just woke up one day knowing their time had passed.

The directionless life after life is a weird thing. How lonely! Who wants to invite the should-be-dead to a baby shower? They're a morose bunch, ambition lost, not experimenting with their eternity because (they hope) they could collapse at any time. They're subsisting on unpaid electric bills and no idea when the power's getting cut. So, with nothing left, they follow the tug in their wanderer's hearts and seek out the Trail.

The Trail

Sunbleached, timeworn, eroded by settlers and left behind for greener pastures, the Sunflower River Trail limps through a valley between pustular mountains, the river to the north and what's left below. Dreams line the southern border: burned cabins, windbeaten tents, entire villages frozen in autumnal unlife, an unbroken line from yesterday to now.

Here is the only fact about the Trail: it starts and ends at the Holy Ghost Trailhead.

Here is a commonly accepted truth about the Trail: it takes about a day to walk its length.

Here is the rest: landmarks slip down mountainsides like oil on canvas, sidling around each other and shoving themselves into new spots. The Trail changes with age, shrinking and shifting. The shape is the same, but the innards are different. The pilgrims know that much, at least.

The Rules

The tourist sign at the Holy Ghost Trailhead has been beaten down into illegible static by the changing of seasons. A helpful pilgrim has carved the following into the sludge:

1. No driving.
2. No diving.
3. No dying.

No Driving

You've got to walk this lonesome valley. No carriages, cars, bikes, skates, or wings. Anyone traveling without feet on the ground finds the trail deadending at Darby's Antiques after a mile. Darby's a strange little man with a head of salty hair and resting anxious face. He huffs spores to predict next week's deaths and swoop in on estate sales before his rivals. He doesn't know shit about the trail, and his door always opens back to Bastion.

No Diving

Water's for bodies only. Doctor's orders. Floating down Sunflower River always takes you to the water wheel at Doc Warboys' Clinic, and he hates it when living folk clog up his system.

No Dying

Centuries ago the Sunflower Pilgrims banded together and decided that if they can't die, neither can any fucking tourists, and that anger hangs in the air today like a holy vow. If you're walking the trail and your STR hits zero, your mortal soul will stick gluey and painful to its old body. Don't worry - Doc Warboys' Corpse Boys will toss you in the river, and the Doc himself'll get you fixed up right quick. For a fee, of course.

This rule belies a hidden fourth rule, burned behind the eyelids of every pilgrim on the trail: if you want to move on, you'll have to ride the Horse.

Landmarks on the Trail

There's still life between the ruins.

The Outer Reaches

Deepest dive this side of the Underground. The Outer Reaches is a bar that only stays in business because its clientele can't die and won't see a therapist. Their beer: dire. Their floors: sticky. Their vibes: rancid.

The only thing the OR has going for it is that it's a sort of convergence point within the multiverse. Every possible universe has its own Outer Reaches somewhere, somewhen, and each of those shitty bars overlaps with the other, however distantly. You always enter and exit to the same place, but the closest neighboring universes bleed into ours while you're there. Guests from these neighbors flicker in and out like ghosts in the static. Each night there's a new hazy band in the corner, echoing out across time and space, outlines etched in the old wood behind them.

Garl, one such guest, is bartender and head storyteller. He knows your name and usual order, and he'll talk your ear off if you let him, but hey, kid, he knows you've got places to be. Take this one for the road and come back safe, okay?

Which neighbor is bleeding through today? d6 Type Atmosphere 1 Noir Cigar smoke rots the ceiling. Crackly, static-y jazz. Smells salty, like a seaport. 2 Deluge Water and mold in every crack. Business as usual, otherwise. 3 Bloom Petals in the air. Laughs from a crowd outside. Garl says: ain't it grand? 4 Ruin Roof's gone. Air tastes sulfuric. The guests flicker nervously. 5 Hallowed Cloying perfume. Dour organ music. You feel ten pounds lighter. 6 Plague Thin layers of blue-green algae cover the interior. Everyone inside is collapsed, breath ragged.

---

Doc Warboys' Clinic

Converted from a decrepit sawmill to a decrepit clinic, Doc Warboys is as good as this county's gonna get. World weary and a bit of a mystic, he holes up in his office all day brewing potives from local algae and sending his corpse boys to dump bodies in the river - the old water wheel scoops 'em up and puts them on his table for easy fixing. He's resourceful with materials and lives off the land, but no doc has everything. Sometimes he just has to skim a bit of flesh off the top. Who knows? The next patient might need it more. And don't come to him with any booboos! He only works on corpses.

The revival fee is ($100 x your STR). If you can afford it, he'll heal you back up with no issues. Otherwise he'll have to patch you up with whatever he's got lying around.

What's the Doc fixing you up with? d6 Result 1 Rubber leg. Squeaky. 2 Hand replaced with crow's foot. Mildly possessed. 3 Felt skin around wound. Attracts mildew. 4 Oil for blood. Flammable. 5 Sentient heart. Fearful. 6 Piano key ribs. Play when exerted.

---

Black Forest Radio

Special: using the radio station calls The Law to your location.

There is no sound within a mile radius of BFR. It's not like sound from outside gets eaten or dissolved or whatever - it crashes into an unseen barrier like a brick wall, clattering to the ground and jumbling in constant cacophany. One side of the threshold is a pots-and-pans nightmare, the other is silent paradise.

The door's blocked up with a big STAY OUT warning. Inside is a mess. Mostly it's a crunchy hippie nest full of half-eaten food and crusty sleeping bags; feel's like it's just on the other side of a squatter eviction. The equipment's pristine, though.

Turn it on, feel (but not hear) the antenna hum, spin a record or two. Here's the thing: BFR beams its output straight into the minds of everyone on the trail and there's no option to tune out. All those unfortunate pilgrims are hostage to this place and they hate hate hate it when people break in and start spinning. Listeners can "call in" by thinking really hard about it, letting folks in the station taste vitriol in the back of their spines.

If you were inventive and an asshole you could extend the range back to civilization with a few repeaters, but who would want that? Better just leave it be.

What's on top of the record stack? d6 Record 1 Cavernous earth noises and uncomfortable nostalgia. 2 Screaming brokenhearted primal folk. 3 Somnic virus. Everyone in range falls asleep until it ends. 4 Strangely heavenly children's choir. 5 Deepest fears of everyone in range listed by mechanical voice. 6 Favorite childhood song of whoever hit play.

---

Other Sights d6 Landmark 1 Flooded trailer park and a family of snapping turtles. 2 Burned out cabin husk. Stepping inside lights you on fire. 3 Hole to the center of the earth surrounded by rusty mining equipment. 4 Rest stop. Completely safe. Soothing voice reads children's stories while you're inside. 5 Entire village sculpted from crumbling ash. 6 Pews and a lectern in the trees. Ghosts meet here for church each night. Pilgrims on the Trail

A few special faces on the path.

Misery (or Beth)

Misery drowned. That's half the story, at least - she keeps the rest under wraps. Her skin is wrinkled to all hell and her bloated, distended body floats a few feet above the trail. She has to reach down and scrape with her little fingers or ask other pilgrims to carry her along if she wants to follow Rule 1. She's nice enough despite it all and happy to shoot the shit with her smoker's rasp. She knows the old secrets, but only accepts stories in return.

What secret is Misery selling? d4 Secret Effect when whispered in one's ear 1 Broken Fog You and the listener forget their own name. 2 Strange Mask You and the listener view each other as nightmarish monsters. 3 Phasmal Transfusion You and the listener swap bodies. They keep the secret. 4 Star Crossed You and the listener instantly die.

Her identical twin, Beth, is a hateful snake in the same predicament. She ruins her fingertips day in and out to crawl the path and spews stomach acid (1d6 bile blast) on anyone who gets close.

---

"Chloe"

HP 0 | STR 1 | DEX 1 | CHA 1 | Snarl and bite 1d2

Special: the Horse will never naturally appear while Chloe's around.

Oh, pathetic creature. Chloe's walked the trail longer than anyone can remember. She's been sent to Doc Warboys so many times that eventually he ran out of bits to patch her up with, and now she's mostly just mush. Nobody's even sure what her name is, but someone at the bar suggested Chloe and it stuck.

Still she schlorps along each morning without fail, usually ending her day getting scooped into the river by the boys. She can't (or won't) speak outside of feral growls. Folks usually toss her a few scraps of food and let her by without incident.

---

Doc Warboys' Corpse Boys

(each) HP 6 | STR 13 | DEX 6 | Burly arms 1d8

Two classic goons the Doc hired to walk the trail and dump bodies in the river. The Guns are custom installed by the Doc himself - bigass anchor arms built to carry the heaviest stiffs. The Doc pays them in food and drink per body, so if they're bored they might... create a corpse out of available pilgrims.

They work for the doc but honestly will follow orders from anyone who looks like they have a medical degree.

---

Other Wanderers d6 Pilgrim 1 Lazaret, Death Cultist. Performs a living sacrifice twice a day to bait out the Horse. 2 Wormy John. Just wants to fish. Has an ancient hound named Lady. 3 Pastor Morell. Vertically bisected. Halves move separately and practice different religions. 4 Miss Ma'am, teacher. Part cannibal on her father's side. Eats flesh (politely). 5 Bramble, housecat. Unbothered. In her lane. Thriving. Undying. 6 Big Money. All legs, no torso. Always on the move. The people love Big Money. Hazards on the Trail

Even the deathless can fear.

The Path Eaters

HP 6 | STR 12 | DEX 12 | CHA 8 | Mummifying Breath 1d8 DEX

• Slithering shadows running from the literal past. Dubiously sapient.
• Accost anyone who wanders too far off the trail.
• Scream and dissolve if forced to stop moving.

Omens: Rustles in the brush; whispered numbers, an endless stream, with no rhyme or reason.

---

The Law

HP 10 | Armor 2 | Templar's Buckshot 1d10 Blast

Special: The Law knows a song which, when sung under a new moon, calls the Horse to you. He has vowed to never sing it.

• Burned skeleton, body packed with cement-like clay and thrown in the kiln, lives to enforce the Rules.
• Stalks the trail and tests each pilgrim's undeath with a few rounds of buckshot. It's okay. They'll recover.
• Perfect tracker. Can't move faster than a slow walk.

Omens: Stomp, stomp, stomp; slowly loading bullets; gravel voice humming hymns.

---

The Horse

Special: Won't attack. Can't be physically harmed.

Smoke-wreathed, coat like soot, bringing that cold mountain fog wherever it goes, every pilgrim knows from the moment they were supposed to die that the only way to move on is through the Horse.

Here's what little they understand:

• The Horse takes one person at a time. Sometimes none.
• When the Horse appears, nobody can leave until someone willingly gets on its back.
• Wherever it takes you, you won't come back.

If a player gets on the Horse's back, roll 2d6. On snake eyes, it takes them into the fog and their character is permanently removed from the game. Otherwise it whinnies mournfully, lets them off, and walks away in solitude.

Can you bait the Horse?

Sure. There's bound to be a record at the radio station that can lure it in. The Law can call it too, he's just too full of loathing to do so. Misery could know a secret that calls it at great personal cost to the whisperer. One of the guests at the bar could know a way, if you figure out how to talk to them. Never hurts to just try carrots and apples either. At the end of the day, it's still a horse.

Omens: white fog; cold chills; the North Star dims.

---

Encounter Table d6 Encounter 1 Roll again. On another 1, the Horse approaches. 2 Three Path Eaters skulking through a field of lavender. 3 Blind Joe Death (crusty rifle 1d8), assassin, assumes everyone is his target. 4 Detachment of miner's ghosts (psychic spike 1d6 CHA), insane with jealousy for the still-bodied. 5 The Law clattering down the trail. 6 The Taylor Gospel Train (choo-choo 1d20), off the rails, blaring hymns through a speaker, half a mile from crashing through Darby's. Hooks d6 Hook 1 The locals saved up to hire someone to help Chloe safely reach the Horse. 2 Doc Warboys needs some Mullwort, a mushroom that grows in the Path Eaters' moving nests. 3 Someone in Bastion wakes up when they should have died and just wants a friend to walk the trail with them. 4 Development company wants to raze the Trail and build a museum, but can't kill the undying pilgrims. 5 Someone's holed up in BFR broadcasting terrible music for miles around. 6 The neighbors at the bar are bleeding out the front door and into our world. Inspirations and Touchstones

Kentucky Route Zero by Cardboard Computer

The music of John Fahey and Reverend F.W. McGee

Un Lun Dun by China Mieville

The Path Eaters inspired by Stephen King's Langoliers.

The Law inspired by It Follows.

Pictures generated by Microsoft's AI image tool through bing.

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Field Guides - Intro 26 November 2023 Background

Over the last year, I cut my teeth on tabletop writing by making a few adventures. And I loved it! Specifically I loved the writing part. Actually putting everything together, laying it out, and presenting it sucked ass. Those jobs are not in my skillset and truly I did not care to learn.

In the grand scheme of this hobby I'm a fresh-out-the-womb child, but I've still tried with the time I've had to focus on finding the fun as a GM and player. There are a billion ways to bog yourself down in each of those roles if you allow it. But I think if I can gravitate towards low prep, big energy, and ease of use as somebody running games, I can do the same as somebody writing them. Plus, you don't have to playtest a blog post.

What are Field Guides?

Vivid, dreamy setting gazetteers in blog post format, focused on presenting enough information to inspire cool shit at the table and just leaving it at that.

I've got a few goals here:

• Work with settings / vibes I don't see often in adventure writing.
• Make a backlog of cool ideas I can look back on later for prep.
• Keep scope manageable so I can knock out one or two a month without burning out.

And I'm statting for Electric Bastionland + generally utilizing the larger setting (Bastion, the Underground, Deep Country) since that's my vice right now.

In case I don't list it elsewhere, assume unlisted stats to be these default: 3 HP, 10 STR, 10 DEX, 10 CHA.

How do I use them?

Each one's going to have a few fleshed out locations, NPCs, hazards, and hooks, with suggestions for more. Enough for a session or two out the box. Personally, I'll use them to inform creating boroughs.

What else?

I'm not the first to do this by any means. My initial inspiration was stumbling on Straits of Anian, but much more recently Gulch came out and knocked it out of the park. And even if it wasn't directly on the mind when I decided to do this, Ultraviolet Grasslands is almost certainly in the idea's geneology somewhere. I'm excited to walk in their footsteps and add a few prints of my own to the trail.

That's about all that's worth saying here. If you know any other blogs in this vein, let me know below. I'd love to see them!

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