Quick News Updates

• I am one day away from my trial run of Nightwick Abbey and its houserules.  Whatever "bugs" I detect while running it for my old gaming buddies will be fixed before I present it to my hypothetical new group.
• Risus Monkey has permitted me to use his fabulous geomorphs for my newest side project idea.  I'll make another post about it shortly.
• Sorry about the lack of a Monster Monday post this week.  The drive from Knoxville to Hattiesburg is about 9 hours and zapped me of all energy.
• I'm probably going to be busy with Thanksgiving and gaming prep all week, and papers the week after.  I'll try to get the occasional post in here and there, but I'm unlikely to be able to blog regularly until the 12th of December.

Underworld's Underworld

A confluence of events has caused me to consider making a campaign dungeon of sorts for the Underworld setting.  First and foremost among these events has been my recent rereading of Empire of the Petal Throne.  M. A. R. Barker's discussion of how to construct an underworld for that setting has caused me to think about how one might map and stock such a beast in the land without a horizon.  I am especially intrigued by the number of Saturday Night Specials that might exist in such a place:  lost tombs, morlock villages, near-dead gods, etc.

Some changes might have to be made to my conception of the setting to account for a big-ass dungeon beneath a huge ruined pile.  Most notably I will probably have to ratchet up the amount of time that has transpired between Orontes's founding of the city and the present day.  Not too terribly difficult a task, but it may remove some of the wild west elements the setting had previously acquired.

I also must establish the overall nature of the campaign dungeon.  In a previous post  I hinted that their may be an extensive network of tunnels, caves, chambers, and catacombs beneath Ilion.  Perhaps the dungeon could be this series of tunnels.  Of course there are also countless ruin that lie in the steaming jungles, and it may be one of these lost cities that holds this endless labyrinth.  The location of the underworld will obviously change the contents of it rather drastically, so I must take great care in deciding where to place it.

My ultimate goal for this project would be a kind of spirtual successor to Sham's aborted Dismal Depths project.  I would present the dungeon sections in quick and dirty one page formats in much the same way he did.  One difference will be that I am probably going to use a number of dungeon geomorphs, particularly Risus Monkey's to create the various 30 x 30 sections.  This will most likely mean that the dungeon is a bit more packed than the Dismal Depths, but I doubt anyone will complain.  

I will also ditch the 2x2 section square format most One Page Dungeon megadungeons use.  Instead one level may be a 2x2 square, but the one beneath it has five sections in a cross pattern, and the one beneath that is composed of only three sections in a kind of pyramid shape.  This should make the dungeon a bit more unpredictable.

In the event that I decide to take up this project, I will contact the various organizations who I will be stealing geomorphs from and see if I can post the results on my blog for free.  I have not made any decisions yet, and since Nightwick Abbey is still my one true love the moments when I could work on these sections would be few and far between.

Thanksgiving Plans

I mentioned in an earlier post that I would be meeting with some old gaming buddies the week of Thanksgiving and playing some games.  I've finally decided that they'll be the guinea pigs for the current draft of the Nightwick Abbey campaign dungeon.  

We'll be playing two sessions, so they obviously won't be able to see much of the dungeon.  Still I want to try out some of my house rules and procedures before I meet with the face to face group.  I'll post a recap of both sessions after I return.

I've hit a wall creatively with Nightwick and its world that can only be overcome through actual play.  I fear that any further development that is made for anything outside the concerns of the table will overly limit me.  I could be wrong about this.  

I will continue to do articles like Monster Mondays and I have a few more to put out about the world in general before play starts, but there will be a bit of a slow down for the next week or so.  Once I start running this thing I have no doubt that the needs of play will cause me to generate more content that will be posted here.  I'm still very interested in this setting so don't worry about its future.  It just needs a party to muck around in it.

Underworld Systems and Character Types

Forgive me if this is a bit rambling.  My thoughts on these subjects are a bit half-formed, but I feel like I need to get something about them hammered down before I continue developing the Underworld.

In the days when the Underworld was called the Lost Lands, I went through a number of possible system options.  It was originally designed alongside a homebrew system created in order to fill the requirments of Matt Finch's Quick Primer on Old School Gaming while still being appealing to the new schoolers I played with.  It did this with some success, but it lacked the kinds of guidelines I like when making wilderness and dungeon areas (such as No. Appearing and Treasure Class).  I toyed with using the "Lost Lands" as the basis for a Swords & Wizardry based game, even going so far as to write up a pretty extensive house rules document that is now lost to the ages.  I've even considered using a combination of yellow book BRP and the Bronze Grimoire to power the setting, but nothing came of that either.

Now that I've picked it up again (as a side project) and given it a bit of a face lift, I need to think about what system I'm going to use to power it.  Obviously, I could go the route of Scott of Huge Ruined Pile and make all the material as systemless as possible.  I don't feel comfortable with that option.  The amount of  changes that would have to be made to any given system to accommodate just the monsters is pretty large.  Almost all of D&D's monster list is completely useless.  The only exceptions being certain undead and summoned monsters.  I'm fine making a wholly new monster list, but I wouldn't want to burden some other sap who decided this setting was the bomb and wanted to use it in his or her home game.  Therefore I need some system I can provide stats for, though I will probably put out little handouts on how to run this setting with other systems.

So what system?  I'm currently getting better acquainted with Labyrinth Lord since the group that I will be DMing for is relatively familiar with that system.  I'm also a fan of LotFP:WFRPG.  So some sort of B/X D&D hack?  Well... no.  I've never really been comfortable making monsters for those systems as I never know how much xp they should be worth.  The most likely answer is the Swords & Wizardry White Box, which is by far my favorite retroclone.  It has a bare bones sensibility that I think will lend itself well to tinkering and this project in general.

Of course I could pick up another side project that would fill a similar niche in my creative efforts but not be as arduous a task.  Possibly more on that later.

With that out of the way, I need to decide what character types I wish to represent with these rules.  Fighters and Magic Users fit in easily to the setting.  Clerics stick out like a sore thumb.  They fit great in Nightwick Abbey's pseudo-Medieval milieu, but their holy magic and mace wielding antics are a poor fit for a setting where even the nicest gods have terrible serpents for pets.  I could just stick to Fighting Men and Magic Users, possibly importing LotFP:WFRPG's encumbrance rules and lack of weapon/armor restrictions, but I'm not sure about that yet.  I feel like I want to allow some other class options for the players if only to give them more options.

That being said, none of the other classes developed for TSR D&D strike me as appropriate for this setting.  Thieves could work, but I find that they generally muck up OD&D.  Still they are an option.  The others work less well.  I'll probably have to create some of my own with the setting in mind, but I'll burn that bride when I cross it.

To close, here is an inspirational image for the setting:

Now back to thinking about Nightwick Abbey...

The Cult of Apollo

Apollo was the god of Troy and so too is he the god of Ilion.  As Aeneas brought the Lares to Italy so did Orontes bring the Farshooter to the Underworld.  They pray at his altars and sacrifice many shield-lizards on each of his feast days.  The cult of the Son of Leto is alive and well.

The stout sailors of Ilion take up the bow in his name.  Nowhere else in the Underworld can one find archers of their caliber.  They have learned they Farshooter's art and histories often claim they can leave whole ships depopulated before they come close enough to board.  These accounts are most likely exaggerated, and more than a few Ilionian ships have been captured by Thulian reavers.

The center of the cult is the fabulous marble temple that dominates Ilion.  Here the Brides of Apollo perform the various rites and dances that please the god.  They wear saffron colored garments and golden chastity belts decorated with rare and exotic jewels to symbolize their devotion to the Savior of the City.  They tend the Fuel-less Fire that is the lifeblood of the city and feed the sacred snakes that are the pets of Apollo.  These women are chosen by their ability to handle the snakes.  If the great basilisks devour the perspective maiden, then she was unworthy of Apollo's love.

Chief among these priestesses is the Pythia.  She, alone among their number, is allowed to wear white and go without a chastity belt.  It is said that if someone takes her maidenhead she will lose the powers granted to her by the Son of Leto.  There are those who say that she is bedded by Apollo once she becomes a priestess, but no mystes in the cult would ever say such blasphemy.  By breathing the smoke of the Fuel-less Fire, she can hear the voice of the god Apollo and relate his command to the litany of priests and male guardians who also inhabit the temple.

These priests protect the temple from would be ne'er-do-wells who seek to pilfer their various gems and golden statuary.  They are armed with strange sickle like swords and wear saffron like the Brides of Apollo.  They are rarely charged with sexual misconduct, but occasionally one is thrown into the Fuel-less Fire when a war goes foul.

Some claim that beneath the great temple is a frightening underworld.  Those who are initiated in the cult's inner circle are taken into these dark passages.  There they witness terrible turpitudes.  Some say that the depths beneath the temple are populated by strange half-formed snake creatures who bear a striking resemblance to human beings.  They have horridly man-like features and limbs but the inhuman stare and features of a serpent.  Their origin is the source of scandalous speculation, but most dismiss the possibility that they even exist.

Other cults exist within Ilion, and they too are rumored to have great underground chambers.  Some claim these even connect, but most assume this is rubbish.

New Poll

Since I'm rapidly approaching the point where I'll have a face to face group again, I was wondering if people wanted to read recaps of my Nightwick Sessions.

Vote for the person not for the party.

Monster Monday: Dragons

Dragons are terrible things who lack any kindness or empathy.  They are the physical embodiment of sin: Humankind's evils made flesh to stalk the world and devour their victims.  They are avaricious, slothful, prideful, envious, wrathful, lustful, and gluttonous.  They are almost as wicked as demons, and some even believe they are demons.  This can neither be confirmed or denied, but few sages actually associate Dragons with Hell.

Dragons are rare beasts.  There does not exist a "race" of Dragons, rather there is a handful of highly unique individuals.  No two dragons are alike, though certain lineages seem to exist that pace down traits from Dragon to Dragon.  Still, Dragons resist all attempts to categorize them into types, much to the chagrin of the various scholars of the World.  There are several books on the subject, but all are wildly inaccurate, sometimes laughably so.  Other times they are dangerously so.

One cannot accurately say that Dragons are encountered more frequently in the Dark Country than the West. This would imply that Dragons may be encountered frequently in the first place, which is a patent falsehood.  Most agree that you could count on one hand the number of adult Dragons lairing in the foreboding mountains of the Dark Country.  These make their homes in caves which they make more comfortable with strange beds made of the gold and bones of dead kings and warriors.

They sleep for centuries on these morbid pallets.  Indeed, many have slept for so long that the natives of the Dark Country wonder if they are still there.  It has been centuries since leathery wings brought fiery death to the squat villages and hamlets that dot the hills and valleys.  No one alive has seen a Dragon, for more reasons than one.  Despite the dangers, it is not for lack of trying.

Knights from the West often seek to test their mettle by slaying a Dragon.  Many knights dedicated to the Church believe that defeating a Dragon represents the defeat of their personal sins.  Many seek salvation this way, for the life of a knight is usually fraught with sin.  Most do not ever find a Dragon and those that do seldom live to relate their adventure.  Still, many songs, plays, epics, etc. have been written about knights on such quests.  They range from the darkly tragic to the comical, but they rarely end with the night achieving what he desires.

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EDIT: I forgot to put my design blurb.

I realized I'd been writing a Dungeons & Dragons blog for almost two months and I had only used the word dragon once.  That just could not do, so I had to figure out how to incorporate Dragons into The Dark Country.  I've decided not to use the different colored Dragon types in my setting, instead each Dragon shall be built on an individual basis.  Their offspring will be more or less identical, and most likely many of the Dragons will be similar to the different types, but you can't find Green Dragons in every forest you ever enter. They will only show up on Wandering Monster tables if there is a lair nearby, and then its a specific Dragon.  They should be special (though they are meant for killing).