Cringe Ye Be Lest Cringe Ye Become: A Nightwick Miscelany

 

Here's some random stuff from the long running Nightwick campaigns that doesn't really fit in the book and doesn't really have a coherent enough theme to be sorted into another kind of post.

Mumbletypeg
Of all the stupid amusements shared by both Bogdani and Realmishman there is none so stupid but also none more beloved as mumblteypeg. In the Dark Country variety the aim of this game is to throw a knife down at your own boot and the closest "without going over" (and suffering grievous injury) wins!

The mechanical representation of this is rather simple. Both players make an attack role against their unarmored* AC (10 + their dex bonus). The winner is the player who scores highest *without* meeting or beating their AC. Naturally this give an advantage to those with a high dex bonus, but games are never fair.

Usually a wager is involved, but some drunkards have been known to do it purely for the thrill of the thing.

Some say this was an import from some other realm, though the most likely candidate for its origins is the Kingdom of Vulgary to the north. Vulgarian rules may be different from those described above.

Songs of the Dark Country 
Over the years of the campaign both Nightwick Regulars/Howling Kommandos and the Weeknight Nightwick groups have been subjected to my butcherings of traditional songs to fit the Dark Country. Some are likely lost with G+ but a selection of those I can find are replicated below with some of their context.

The first is variously known as "the Brown Lady," "The Eunuch's Lament" and "Mab and the Madman" and tells the tale of a Zenopolitan Witch Hunter who heads into the 'Wood of Witches' to kill a fairy-witch queen. The parts in brackets noted are in a poorly formed, dog-bogdani.

The snippet opens with a part sung by the fairy-witch queen:

I can make thou feelest well,
[Walking in the wood],
And thou shalt never go to Hell,
[Where it's always autumn],

The Zenopolitan did say,
[Walking in the wood],
That his dick was made of clay,
[Where it's always autumn],

And he struck her right upon the head,
[Walking in the wood],
And the Elven Witch she fell straight dead,
[Where it's no longer autumn],

There is said to be an older version, written before the news of the victory at the Battle of the Witchfort, where the fairy-witch queen successfully tempts him. It is now lost to time.

This second one is commonly used as a marching song by the men known as the Howling Kommandos:

Well they were cast out of eaven when their bag became a burden,
So instead they made their garden where the banks of burdocks grow,
And there were was no gold or silver on the banks of the Dark River,
In the land of the Bogdani where the banks of burdocks grow,

Chorus:
Where old panes are broken and a thousand tongues are spoken,
And new saints awaken where the banks of burdocks grow,
So farewell cold winter we shall all go out together,
In the land of the Bogdani where the banks of burdocks grow,

There is no peace or plenty in the land of the Bogdani,
And the rain falls down so swiftly where the banks of burdocks grow,
And a pretty young maiden is a candle in the darkness,
But it’s a bright and blazing furnace where the banks of burdocks grow,

Chorus

Well the pope sent out his army to the land of the Bogdani,
And the soldiers they were weary where the banks of burdocks grow,
So they stormed the temple quarter and the glass fell down like water,
In the land of the Bogdani where the banks of burdocks grow,

Chorus

Third we have one that I didn't deploy at the time but was at least mentioned as being sung by knockers in mines outside the town of Blackleg:

It's dark and dank down in the mine,
And demons come out by surprise,
And none o' ye shall leave alive,
Ye dirty little miners,

Dunnae gang down in the mine,
Across the top we stretched a line,
To catch you throat and break your spine,
Ye dirty little miners,

Down here is a terrible place,
We'll rub wet clay on yer dying face,
And in the dark we'll run a race,
To catch ye little miners,

We'll grab yer duds, yer picks as well,
And hoy ye down the pit o' hell,
So down ye go and fare ye well,
Ye dirty little miners

Most recently the Weeknights in Nightwick group faced a trio of groans who sang a little song about themselves:

Oak of the clay saw many a day,
Fore e'er Acheron be damned,
Ash of the loam was a lady at home,
Before there was nary a man,
Thorn of the down so a little town,
From which was Lychgate born...

However upon hearing the approach of the PCs the groans ceased their songs and switched to lobbing rocks. 

Updates to the World of Nightwick Calendar
A combination of my inability to remember my own day names and a recent diet in the city of Koenigsburg means I have revised the days of the week thusly:

Sunday
Moonday
Swordsday
Wandsday
Cupsday
Coinsday
Devilsday

The Zodiac of the World of Nightwick
Warren had asked me to work up a list of astrological signs and so I did. They are in roughly the same order as those of our world - so the Undine being analogus to Pisces roughly overlaps with beginning of the month of Primes, being the start of the year in the World of Nightwick but representing March.

The Scitalis - the monster of the same name
Queen [sic] Moloch - A minotaur
Bophades - depicts a pair of twins whom Acherontic texts claims are... well now we say they're wrestling and it's Fine.
The [sic] Al Miraj - the monster of the same name
Aslan - A lion
The Uke - a beautiful male youth playing a stringed instrument
Ligma - two... weights
The Basilisk - the monster of the same name
The Measurer - a woman with a measuring tool in front of a 10x10 square
The Hippocampus - the mythical creature of the same name
The Torcherbearer - a youth carrying a torch
The Undine - in Acherontic texts it is said to depict a fish but all modern texts say it depicts a woman

* It is considered gauche to play while still in armor, though the specifics may be negotiated by the participants.

 

The Reynardine

Reynardines are foxes cursed to go about the world in the manner of men, or perhaps men that are cursed to go about the world in the manner of foxes. They are knaves and rascals, arch in their cunning, and some have used this to achieve even the semblance of nobility among the peoples of the World, despite their disadvantages. Most, however, make a living the way most who smile easily and stab even easier do - as con-men and bandits. They are of a kin with the Old Gods, who protect them from such woes as the children of Law may heap upon them.

In human form they look identical to a human, though they are universally handsome. It is said among some old women that they can be identified by the color of their hair - red, brown, black, silver, or shock white depending on the area and season. This is likely not so, but even if it were it would be difficult to identify them as such as all these colors are found among those mortals who grow hair in the natural way. In the form of a fox they appear... well, as a fox, of course! Sometimes they walk on their hind legs and  wear clothes, sometimes tailored for their small size but usually not, and can somehow carry such objects as they would carry as a man, again adjusting for size.

While they are found all over the World, they are most common in the isles of Cuccagna, Karse, and Noppin. Why they seem to cluster at archipelagos is a mystery to all.

Reynardine
AC 6 [13], HD 3+1* (14hp), Attack 1 x bite (1d4) or by weapon, THAC0 16 [+3], MV 150' (50'), ST D10 W11 P12 B13 S14 (4), ML 8, AL Neutral, XP 50, BA 1 (1d4), TT C

• Shapechange: May take the form either of a man or a fox during the day. Must be a fox at night.
  
• Mundane Damage Immunity: Will only be killed by silver weapons or, but will be incapacitated by non-magical weapons.
  
• Languages: May speak common, fairy, and the language of trolls regardless of form.
  
• Armor: Eschew for it inhibits shapechanging.
  
• Scent: Animals such as horses, dogs, cats, and chickens recognize a reynardine.
  
• Charm Person: May charm person at will (-2 save) but only once per intended victim within 24 hours.
• Surprise: In animal form surprises on 3 in 6.
  

Unfocused Thoughts on Operation: Mobile Armor

I like mechs and the various anime and video games that contain them. I haven't talked a lot about them on this blog, but in pretty much every other venue where I post about stuff they are a running theme of mine. The main reason I have not talked about them on here that much is that I have yet to find a ttrpg for mechs that I like. The ones I've seen are either too fiddly in a particularly 90s way - build points and all that - or are some of the more modern rpg designs I can't stand - pbta, blades in the dark, 4e, that kind of thing. I am also reliably informed by an expert that the particular niche I want for a mech game isn't currently being filled.

So what's a girl to do? Well since I am ostensibly a game designer now (gasp!) I guess I'll at least think about designing a game. So I'm going to list some stuff I'd want and try to express the general tone and hope that either gives me an idea of where to start or that some brave and intelligent reader will stop me from tilting at windmills by pointing out my expert was wrong and they missed or x or y game I should try.

• The series I most want to emulate with this is Mobile Suit Gundam: 08th MS Team and Fang of the Sun: Dougram as well as other real robot type anime like Patlabor and probably a variety of other UC Gundam series such as the original, Zeta, ZZ, and the other two in the gritty gundam trilogy, 0080: War in the Pocket and 0083: Stardust Memory.
• I want the PCs to be members of some sort of military org - whether regulars or irregulars - who perform various missions with action being both in and out of the cockpit. In researching for this I found out that there is actually some real world equivalent to the out of mech scouting we see in some episodes of 08th MS Team in the form of people dismounting British WWII cavalry tanks to scout. Neat!
• Sandro referred to this as the "Ace Combat" type after the series of jet fighter video games and yeah that sounds about right.
  
• I don't want heavy mech customization at the start but I would like some system where damaged mechs need to be jury rigged or refit with various new parts based on the campaign. Mech customization happens as the mech develops a story in the fiction of the game world.
• Rules wise I'm currently split one of two ways - either a version using the Cepheus Engine or some variant or one using BRP with some influence from the old and out of print BRP Mecha book.
• I do see the campaign idea as very similar to "what if you ran a traveller merc game where everyone were members of various tank crews" and I do think Cepheus has some pretty robust vehicle combat rules. The problem is figuring out how to make combat machines that act like they do in the shows I want to emulate and still function within those rules.
• I think I need something like both Dougram and Gundam have that explains why these machines can do things like make surprise attacks in an assumed technologically advanced future. Gundam has Minovsky Particles which jam stuff* and the planet from Dougram passes through a nebula which interferes with electronic communications - though apparently not the controls of mechs. I think having a planet be honeycombed with tunnel systems that mechs could retreat into (and which they were partially developed to navigate) might be a good idea.
• In my head I'm largely imagining the campaign frame I tried way back in college for a mech game where a proxy war is being fought on a far away planet with an imperial power fighting an insurgency on it and the insurgency being secretly armed by a rival power. The PCs in this old campaign were members of the insurgency who stole some mechs and then were going to use them to carry out quick but devastating attacks on the imperial flank.

That's it for now and I guess is not much but maybe someone will save me from having to write my own system by suggesting something I'll like in the comments!

* I think the initial fighting of the One Year War also seems like it would've obviously destroyed a great many satellites required for the normal kind of surveillance we're talking about.

A (Hopefully) Unique Complaint About the 5e Ranger

 Jessica, from Accounting*

 

I haven't talked about 5e much on the blog, even though I ran it for a few years. Still, I have some pretty strong feelings about the game (strong enough that I just run OSE now) and I thought I'd share one of them here because there's a broader point about game design to be taken from it and I haven't seen it discussed elsewhere. If it has been, I apologize in advance.

Most criticisms of the ranger, which is generally agreed to be one of the weaker 5e classes, center on the animal companion feature which I don't
honestly care that much about. The artificiality of companions in 5e bothers me in general so I'm much more likely to take a subclass that doesn't include them. The ranger, regardless of subclass, has a bigger problem: it eliminates the thing that should be it's spotlight.

My two favorite classes to play in D&D are Ranger and Rogue/Thief. Despite running a generally deadly game, as a player I am often overcurious and headstrong enough to put my head in holes it probably shouldn't go. These classes allow me to do that separated from the party so that I'm the most likely to suffer the consequences. They both scout ahead and check for traps.

In 5e, for the rogue this is fairly well done. You make checks, and the rogue is super good at those checks so they're more likely to succeed. You still have to make the check so there is sort of in game "on screen" time that the rogue is doing their thing and they're usually really good at it. Neat!

The ranger, on the other hand, cannot get lost in their favored terrain. This sounds like it'd be real useful, but in effect what it does is remove the spotlight from the player. DMs in my experience rarely describe this as a moment when the ranger's leading the party is super expert and cool. Instead it becomes a thing ignored - no mechanics so we don't need to talk about it. 

The thing the rogue is good at is a thing everyone gets to see because they make the roll and they're better at the roll than everyone else. The thing the ranger is good at nobody sees because it immediately fades into the background. It sucks.

*And honestly my default D&D character.

More Adventures in Cuccagna!

 No, not from the previous party, but (hopefully) from a brand new one! At the suggestion of one of the Weeknights in Nightwick crew I have decided to run Cuccagna on Start Playing! Here's the pitch:

From out of the past comes a legend - a legend of a mysterious island of wizards called... Cuccagna! The greatest wizard in mortal memory, Prospero the White, created this land of eternal summer, where strange beasts and stranger people roam endless, enchanted gardens. Then, in a fit of madness, he divided himself into many parts and spread them amongst the island - a Prospero for every color! Now you have been invited to explore this strange isle. Delve into the depths of the Lapis Vaults, last refuge of wizard gone mad! Battle the cult of Apollyon, beautiful demon father of snakes! Rob the House of the Gnoles, where no other thief is brave enough to tread! Raid the Palace of the Sea King, where mermaids swim through the very air! Cuccagna is a sandbox campaign inspired by the fiction of Jack Vance, Clark Ashton Smith, Lord Dunsany, and William Shakespeare. Players will take the role of adventurers in a hex crawl and dungeon campaign on a strange island full of wonderous wizards and beasts from medieval legend. The games rules are based on Old School essentials with custom classes for non-humans and rogues. HIGH ADVENTURE IN THE LAND OF PLEASANT LIVING!

So if you're up for it, why don't you join us? 

Stocking Procedure Appendix: Playful Void

A little after I posted my stocking procedure, Idle Cartulary at Playful Void posted hers. I find hers very interesting because it helps with initial ideas about what the rooms are going to be, which I sometimes struggle with. I was also pretty sure that they could be used in tandem and so I've decided to do some very simple (and probably fairly dumb) math to see how that would work out.

My procedure is based on the idea that a dungeon will be 30 rooms. Hers is based on the idea that the smallest area* she'd be stocking is ~6 rooms and the largest is ~12. Makes sense to me. Going down her list I find that my usual 30 room dungeon would have 11 monsters - one more than I usually would have - and probably 10 treasures - the number I would normally have - so the math is about the same.

Therefor one could easily combine our methods by populating her rooms with stuff from the lists you'd make for my method. Neat!

Notably her method also works extremely well for geomorphs or the complexes from the Pettigrew Selections, both of which I've recommended using before as the basis of a megadungeon. 

Shorter than usual from me, but I wanted to see if the two could be combined because I think her method could vastly improve the speed of my stocking.

*There usually being multiple areas a level.

Jennell Jaquays Memorial Campaign

 

Earlier today I had an idea I might post more on or even run in the future: to honor the legacy of Jennell Jaquays, why not run a campaign using material she wrote as the spine? Jaquays, like probably every creator, had certain tropes she returned to regularly and that means that a wide breadth of material she made is fairly thematically coherent..* I personally have physical copies of The Savage Frontier, Griffin Mountain, The Book of Treasure Maps I, and the d20 version of Caverns of Thracia, so let's use those as our basis.

The Savage Frontier will act as our setting, with hopefully little reference to the rest of the Forgotten Realms and maybe with some f/r for FR gods to change them to Earth ones given Thanatos, Ra, and Set's prominence in some of her work. Esteban Maroto's art also I think mirrors the swords & sorcery vibes of her stuff extremely well.

Book of Treasure Maps is the easiest to integrate into this campaign: just sprinkle the adventures around either as new locations or replacements for existing dungeons mentioned in Savage Frontier. The Tomb of Aethering the Damned could replace the Tombs of Dekon Thar, for example. The Lone Tower/Castle Clearmoon seems sensible to place in some wilderness near enough to access but remote enough not to bedevil Silverymoon, though it could also serve well as the basis for the Dungeon of the Hark.. Arcadia could be the delving of some Netherese guy. That kind of thing.

The encounters/adventures in Griffin mountain can, with some conversion, be added in the same way. Griffin Mountain itself could obviously be placed anywhere as a griffon lair. Gondo Holst's Caravan could be the basis for a Zhent caravan with similar motives. The Troll Tomb could be a troll (or orc) tomb anywhere in the region. The River of the Damned islands similarly could fit in any river far enough way from a settlement - which luckily is fairly easy to find in the Savage Frontier. The same could be done with Water Wyrm Island. If you want you could also make the Uthgardt barbarians be influenced by the Balazarings, especially their fondness for dogs.

The Caverns of Thracia I think I'd want to use for the Karse in the High Forest. The Netherese refugees are the ones who began to worship Death, whether under the name Bhaal or Thanatos is up in the air. The many animal men inside could be holdovers from the ancient Days of Thunder, and perhaps clues to some of the ruins from the Book of Treasure Maps.

For rules I would probably advocate for Swords & Wizardry Complete since that is what her most recent modules were published for and I believe the OD&D on the brink of AD&D vibe of those rules best suits the Treasure Maps and Thracia - the most directly usable of the material above.

Such a campaign would have material to last months if not years, and indeed one could incorporate more of her work (again rather easy to do since she had tropes she liked to return to) or of course incorporate your own. Perhaps Return to Perinthos could serve as the Nameless Dungeon?

*I was originally going to do a post about how I believed she had a kind of ur-setting these tropes came from (likely a part of the Wilderlands she ran early in her career) but further research on the Candlekeep Forums leads me to believe she merely reused these elements. It's not like I don't.