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. 

Jennell Jaquays Memorial Game Jam

 

As most of you probably are aware, Jennell Jaquays passed away Wednesday. She was an absolute titan of both tabletop and computer gaming, and the OSR in particular is basically an exercise in iterating on things she pioneered. My intellectual debt to her is immeasurable.

Violet Ballard has set up a game jam to build a megadungeon in the spirit of Jaquays' excellent Caverns of Thracia. The proceeds from it will go to her family's medical and funeral expenses as well as to Trans Life Line. You should consider contributing and picking up a copy when it's available. I know I will be.

Games to Run Before I Die

Recent events in my life have made me think about things I'd be mad about in Hell if I didn't do them before I die. Some of them include games I want to run. There are also games I'd be ok with playing, but my favorite roll is definitely Referee and even playing in them would largely just make me want to run them. So here are the ones I want to make sure I run before I die:

Aquelarre 
In the lost days of G+ I waxed poetic about how much I wanted it to be translated into English and when it finally was I put my money where my mouth was. I am apparently even the first non-Spanish speaker to make something for the game. I've still not gotten to run it. My players have wanted me to use it for the World of Nightwick, largely to keep me from switching campaigns and to keep me focused on my baby. This makes a certain sense - there is some overlap in terms of historical material culture and devilry - but a lot of the mystique of the game to me is in the historical setting.

Though that comes with its own perils. I am far more versed in medieval France than Spain and would probably want to run it in the Languedoc, but that is probably a way to procrastinate and make the game impossible for me to run while convincing myself it's going to be easier. This is a common ailment among DMs.

I may be able to overcome this one as I have asked if some of my regular players would be open to playing it on Candlemas, but I'm worried the scenario I have devised is too big for a single session.

Pendragon
Oh hey another medieval historical one. So shocking! Specifically I want to run the Great Pendragon Campaign with it. It might be a good year to start what with Chaosium putting out a new edition, but promotional material says that they're cutting the Uther parts out of the GPC and I'm a bit sad about that.

I just worry my ADHD and "gamer ADD" will mean that any attempt to start this up will be doomed to failure. However I've been running Nightwick for almost 80 sessions now so who knows.

This is likely a lot of people's white whale. It's one of mine.

Kult 
I doubt it will surprise anyone that I'm a big Clive Barker fan, and Kult seems to be "Clive Barker the RPG." The newer PBTA version is very outside my wheelhouse but I also sort of want to try it because of that. I suppose I might be ok playing in this one, but I also have a scenario idea for it that I think is suitably dark.

Karse
Karse is my "Shittye Englande" setting. This one isn't that different from the Dark Country if I'm honest, which is probably why I haven't run it yet. However, I bellyfeel its vibes very strongly and it combines a lot of the things that got me interested in fantasy in the first place. 

Barrows filled with bogeys, lots of fog, turf houses, the king of the faeries. That sort of thing.

There are a few others I thought about including here - Harn, the Enemy Within, Masks of Nyralthotep - but I figured if I ran Aquelarre or Pendragon I probably wouldn't feel bad for never running Harn, WFRP has lost some of its shine for me recently as I've decided the kind of city shenanigans games I like to run with it work perfectly well in D&D, and I'd probably rather play Masks than run it. 

I'll probably revisit this in a few months and see if I still agree with it.

My Stocking Procedure

Dum-tee dum-tum-tum.

I recently posted a variant of this in a discord I frequent and was asked to do a blogpost on it in order to have it in one place. I also mentioned my strict stocking procedure in my recent interview... or at least I think I did. Dysphoria prevents me from listening to that episode. So here that is:

Step 1: I take the map I am going to use (whether drawn by me or someone else) and count the number of rooms - excluding sub-rooms that are marked with letters. 2 gets counted; 4a-4d is all just one room. I take this number and divide it by 3, possibly rounding up or just adding one if I'm feeling frisky that day. This is the number of monster encounters I will spread throughout the dungeon. It's also the number of treasures I will place. To get the number of traps, I divide the new number by 2. Easy peasy.

Step 2: I divide the monster encounters into groups of ten with the following spread:

• Boss
• Miniboss
• Miniboss
• Grunt
• Grunt
• Grunt
• Mook
• Mook
• Mook
• Mook

Mooks are monsters that are quite weak and usually occur in numbers about double the number of PCs (or more). Grunts are tougher monsters that occur in numbers roughly half of the number of PCs. Minibosses are the toughest monster that might show up on that level, with only one appearing, and Bosses are monsters that would be tough for even two to three levels deeper in the dungeon.

I decide what each of these encounters is going to be so that a level one dungeon might have...

• Boss: Ogre
• Miniboss: Grey Ooze
• Miniboss: Tarantella
• Grunt: Ghoul
• Grunt: Orc
• Grunt: Orc
• Mook: Goblin
• Mook: Goblin
• Mook: Stirge
• Mook: Skeletons

Note: this list is a little lackluster because I'm trying to do this for a very generic easy to understand example. I normally try to pick (or even make) more interesting monsters than these.

Finally for step 2,* I roll the NA appearing dice for the monsters I picked (with minibosses and bosses always just being 1 or maybe 1d3). So lets say we have...

• 1 Ogre
• 1 Grey Ooze
• 1 Tarentella
• 2 Ghouls 
• 4 Orcs
• 3 Orcs
• 6 Goblins
• 8 Goblins
• 10 Stirges
• 10 Skeletons

Step 3: If I had any rooms that had those subrooms - 1a - 1c and so on - I instead assign them to a lair of monsters. We have a lot of Goblins in this example so let's say we roll up a goblin lair: 35 goblins, 2 guards, and a goblin king. Dope! They get distributed among those rooms.

Step 4: I then generate a number of treasures equal to the number of monsters on the level. I use Courtney's treasure doc which apparently he sells now because the world is fallen. I got it when it was free though.

I generate the treasures assuming 250 x Dungeon Level or Assumed Level of Adventure for the treasure parcel. If I have a lair from step 3 I instead use the treasure type conversion guide in the doc. I count 19s as well as 20s as magic because that seems more fun to me but your mileage may very, as they say. For half the hoards I roll the size of the hoard without modifiers, but knowing half the hoards will be ungraded I only generate those as 1d3 parcels.

Step 5: I spread the monsters and treasure among various rooms, having half the monsters not have treasure (other than perhaps pocket change I'd roll in session) and having half the treasure be unguarded by monsters.

Step 6: I use the Dismal Depths traps document from Sham's Grog n' Blog - from the prelapsarian OSR - to generate a number of traps equal to half the number of monsters, placing some on their own and placing some in rooms with traps.

Thus ends the stocking procedure. I of course add specials and tricks and dungeon decor, but that stuff is harder to make procedures for. 

If you want to know why I have such a rigid schema, it's because it 1) Quiets the Voices in my head. This is it's primary function but 2) it works. I am at least going to get a solid session (or more likely several) if I follow this procedure.

*Step 2 sure had a lot of steps!

Into the Megadungeon

I am the latest guest on Ben L's podcast, Into the Megadungeon, where I talk about Nightwick Abbey. I always wanted to be a Hallowe'en episode!

 You can find the episode here and Ben's post about the episode here.

Nightwick Abbey: Secret Origins - Rose Red

We say haunted, but what we mean is the house has gone insane.

I somehow have written for this blog for 13 years and not mentioned what is maybe the most influential text on Nightwick Abbey. Honestly, it's probably because I was embarrassed to admit how big of an influence it was, or maybe because I myself forgot what all I stole from in the eight years between when I saw it and when I started the blog and the dungeon. Who knows?

Before I begin further discussion, I should note that I am pretty sure the miniseries' treatment of Autism is godawful. I don't think I'm really in a position to say, but King's general representation of neurodiversity is notoriously "yikes" and this is again an instance of his imbuing such a character with powerful psychic powers. I'm not going to comment on it further in this post because, as I said, I'm not really in a position to comment on it and it was not one of the things that contributed to Nightwick Abbey.

I have often compared Nightwick's shifting, growing, and possession of consciousness to Rose Red in conversations with players, but apparently have never stated that on this blog. Earlier this month one of those players pointed out to me that the show is currently on Hulu. I responded that I was doomed to watch it. In response he made this image he made:

It's 2002. It's 2023.

I had only seen it when it originally aired in 2002 and thought that it would likely have aged poorly and that my decision, conscious or otherwise, to ignore it on this blog would be the correct one. When I rewatched it with my wife I found that it was a melodrama in a style rarely seen on television anymore that is indeed dated and corny, but the practical effects at least were charming and some of the ideas still echoed with me the way they did when I was 14.

Rose Red, you see, is a miniseries about a house with a consciousness of it's own. As they say near the climax, "the house is the vampire." Based loosely on the Winchester house, the fictional house of the movie was constantly under construction due to the belief by the lady of the house that her daughter would not die so long as the house continued to be built upon. Even after she disappears the house persists under construction, at first with mortal workers and then only with spectral ones.

A college professor who has moved from regular psychology to parapsychology plans on bringing a bunch of psychics to the house to wake it up. It goes poorly. Practical effects are used along with the worst CGI you've ever seen. It's cheesy but I still liked it.

More important there are several lines that are definitive in how I view Nightwick Abbey as a Nightmare Realm. ""You can count [the rooms] one day and it's 74 and another day it's 87 or 96." In Rose Red, space is psychological. Rooms with their own obvious histories appear that are on no official plans and which no present inhabitant has ever been inside. Visions appear to lead you into traps - either to die or to be absorbed by the house, depending on what it thinks of you.* The psychic powers of the team bring the garden in the solarium back to life. It's neat!

In the years since 2002 I've been very into stories about evil places. Netflix once said my most watched subgenres were "Strong Female Character" and "This Place is Evil." I have to think some of that is watching this show at a formative age. It seems to have cemented the idea in my brain of a place that actively hates you. A place with more rooms than you can ever count. A place haunted by the spirits of the dead. I wonder if there's a term for that.

* It's stated that its opinion of you is largely gendered - it likes (and therefore absorbs) women and hates (and therefore kills) men. In the intervening years this haunted me for reasons, but upon rewatching it the statement in the dialog is not supported by what actually happens to any characters on the show. At least three men seem to be absorbed by the house. Weird!

A Vision Occasioned by the Movement of Celestial Bodies

There was a solar eclipse in North America today. It was a partial eclipse - the ring of fire type - which I mention both for posterity and because the effect is related to the thoughts I had while viewing it. I happen to live in one of the best cities for viewing it, and the building in which I live has a beautiful courtyard that made perfect viewing for it. My wife and I joined several neighbors in watching it in that very courtyard. While the others stared at the Sun for most of the duration - in stark disobedience to the warnings on the glasses we had - I looked behind at the sky and the garden in the courtyard.

Regular readers of this blog will know of my great affection for the works of Clark Ashton Smith, particularly his Zothique cycle. I'm also a great fan of Jack Vance's Dying Earth, probably to no one's surprise.* In their descriptions of the last days of Earth they describe how the dimming Sun sits in a sky of deep cerulean blue and that all the colors and shadows are somehow more lush and beautiful in that final, fleeting time.

And that's what I saw - the deep blue sky, a hue I'd never seen before. The courtyard with its magnolia trees bathing in it in shadow - cast somehow as though it was lunar midnight but with the vibrant colors of noon. The bricks were redder. The pale stone of the statues whiter. The leaves on the trees darker but with the vibrancy of summer even in October. It was as though I could see Mazirian's garden or the shadowed palace of Adompha, right here in southern Texas.

Then 20 minutes later it was gone. As fleeting and fragile as the Earth in those stories. The beauty of the thing more precious for its impermanence.

*Especially since it is one of the primary influences on one of my current campaigns.

In Fair Cuccagna: Lost Adventures

My typical readership will probably be surprised to learn I'm still running Cuccagna. Given my failure to blog about the escapades of the various characters and my propensity for both gamer and actual ADHD behavior, one would be forgiven for thinking this game had been shelved. But it's not true! 

I will try to briefly recount the major points I missed.

The House of the Gnoles

• Two expeditions were made against this ignoble house of tar-covered beasts! Both involved significant combats occurring on the front lawn. 
• During the first, they also encountered a spooky sheet ghost and a bunch of animated knick knacks.
• A fairy sword of great puissance was won and is currently carried by Lord Saurr. It's powers are such that it was perhaps unwise for me to hand it out as treasure, but alas the deed is done.
• On the way to their second expedition, Saurr almost got eaten by an alerion, the lord of all eagles.
• The second expedition was mostly mopping up after the first, though a second - and more formidable - ghost was encountered in the attic and teleported using The Sword of Elfland to the manse of Prospero the Orange.

The Temple of Apollyon

• All the men in the village of Serpentona had gone missing (and many of the women too). Oh no!
• Turns out there was a cult of maenads worshipping Apollyon there!
• They were squatting in an Acherontic ruin.
• They fought a lot of serpents - with at least one causing them to debate the taxonomy of "serpents" vs "snakes" in the World of Nightwick.
• The also fought, and sometimes captured, a bunch of maenads with snake-like appearance. Weird!
  
• The most dramatic fight was possibly with a group of harpies in the second delve (of 5), who attempted to pick up and drop several of the party from a great height. It was clear they had done this with the men of the village.
• During their stay in Serpentona they met Prospero the Red and found out he is both sexist and totally whipped. What a loser!
• In keeping with the strategy developed in the House of the Gnoles, both an amphisabaena and a creature I will only call "the Shining One" were both teleported to the manse of Prospero the Orange. I bet he's mad!
  
• In the largest treasure hoard of the dungeon they found a treasure map leading to seemingly somewhere in the middle of the Starry Sea. Jules' research showed this place was likely to be the Palace of the Sea King, an Old God formerly venerated on the island chain.

I forgot When Exactly

• A village the party had been visiting was discovered the village of strange duplicates is called Divisia.

Current Hooks and Loose Ends

• Noble men (and a few women) have been building strange seaside doors on their townhouses. Soon after they go missing. Mysterious!
• Prospero the Orange seems to have moved men into both the Lapis Vaults and the House of the Gnoles. Who knows what he's up to?!
  
• Speaking of which, a lot of the lowest level of the Lapis Vaults remain unexplored. I wonder if they'll ever go back.
• They have a treasure map! Exciting!
• Prospero the Green's chief henchman Mercutio told Skleras the Stray  to sneak into Castle St Swail to spy on the Knights in White Satin. He hasn't done it yet. I hope Mercutio isn't mad!

The Spiral of Horror - A Campaign Frame

I don't think this has anything to do with mermaids

I've been playing World of Horror, which officially releases next month (and which you should grab before it's price goes up with that official release), and it's made me think about an old campaign frame I once discussed with one of the Nightwick Regulars but still haven't been able to pull off. Here I wish to revise that campaign frame into something more concrete and see how it sounds to my gentle readers.

First, we need the equivalent of the Spiral from Uzumaki, the overall theme and phenomenon that will drive the strangeness of the campaign. Here is the first place I wish to borrow from World of Horror: we're going to have the imminent return of a Great Old One. For my example here I'm going to pick Cthulhu but I think you'll see any of them can work. An important thing here is we don't want one organization that is trying to summon Cthulhu, but rather he is coming and his influence is spreading throughout the world. If you're playing Delta Green, we can do that literally, but if we're doing more traditional Call of Cthulhu or Liminal Horror, or especially if you're doing Liminal High School, we're going to be focusing on how this effects one town.*

Why a Great Old One? They're thematically broad, like the core phenomenon of Uzumaki. Cthulhu is most utilized in scenarios in the form of Innsmouth/Deep Ones stuff, but remember that the story the Call of Cthulhu is about his effects on dreamers and artists. The madness of dreams could certainly show up in a number of scenarios, as could ancient artwork that seems to resemble the modern, or what of the "white pulpous thing" in the swamps of Lousiana or the stellar nature of his star spawn, or even his defeat of other intelligent races in Lovecraft's Mythos? Maybe a Elder Thing ruin activates an ancient weapon meant to stop Cthulhu's return based on math created by that ancient race but now it will destroy the town the PCs occupy. I dunno. Lots of stuff. If you need ideas for expanding the meaning of your respective Great Old One, check out the section on them in Trail of Cthulhu or, if you have it, the d20 version of Call of Cthulhu.

The stars are right

Next we come up with 1d4+2** of mysteries around the town.*** In my head players will have access to the hooks for these all at once. In my original Lerouxville campaign the analogous list of hooks came in the form of the notes of a missing friend. He had collected a number of notes on the outer layers of various mystery-onions**** and the players could kind of pick which one they wanted to investigate. Unfortunately I did not have these as thematically consistent as we want here - they were just a bunch of weird things - nor did I have the intention of ever revealing the fate of the missing friend. In hindsight I should've probably made that explicit - "you're never going to actually find out who killed Laura Palmer, that's just the frame for the other stuff" - but the first part is remedied by this campaign model. How you develop these mysteries is up to however you do it normally. I'm a fan of the method in the DG Handler's Guide, but you do you.

For the sake of our Cthulhu example, and because I have Liminal High School on the brain, maybe some high school Wicca types were all visited by him in a dream and now they're out in the swamp feeding people to those polypous things. Get a list of NPCs, leads, maybe a handout for one of their dream journals, and you have a scenario.

Do you read Sutter Kane?

Finally, at least prep-wise, we have the main innovation I have taken form World of Horror. In World of Horror, every time you investigate a location some event happens. Often these are related to the case but often they aren't and sometimes an animated head or the missing class of 1971 just pops out of nowhere and you have to run away or fight it. That's a bit... too much if we want to be thematically consistent, but there is something we can take here. What we're going to do is come up with a list of kind of one off random spooky encounters that can be inserted into any investigation. These are tied thematically to the Great Old One.

As I hinted at above, our example for this is going to be a dream-driven deep one with a fire axe that'll attack the PCs during one of their investigations. What's his deal? Unfortunately for the PCs, that's likely to be a dead end; however, he sets up the broader theme of the Great Old One thematically and introduces an element of horrific synchronicity into our game. 

Investigation!

So mechanically what you'd have is the PCs select the scenario - "let's check out what those witchy girls were doing in the swamp our friend seemed so interested in. Maybe they killed him?" They ask around and find out that a fellow student who works at the Shell station***** has seen them meet up in the gas station's attached Subway every weekend before leaving for somewhere else. Thinking they might be able to follow the The Craft wannabes from there, the players decided to stake out the Shell station. The Keeper (or whatever you want to call them) rolls a die - let's say a d6 for old time's sake - and getting a 6, rolls a second die to determine which of his unplaced weird things happens at the Shell. Oh look, it's the fire axe maniac! How convenient for our example! He asks if they read Sutter Kane. They look confused. He attacks them with an axe. Gameplay ensues.

So why do this? What do we get out of it? Well from our example one thing we get out of it is potentially a higher density of weird moments instead of mundane detective work. I know a player who has disliked most of the CoC/DG games run by the Nightwick Regulars because of the lack of relative action. This perhaps does something to remedy that. Hopefully. It also sets up foreshadowing for the final bad thing in our Uzumaki spiral. And if you want to be real pretentious about it, and this is hack work, remember, it adds to the horror of the unknowable or some shit. Spooky!

* You could probably do that with Delta Green too.

** Not necessarily literally rolling dice but I wanted to be more concrete than "a handful." 

*** Or world. Whatever.

**** To slightly borrow a metaphor from some asshole.

***** Get it? Because of the ocean?

Combat Hack for Liminal Horror

I'm currently playing in a Liminal Horror game run by Evlyn set in a high school in a spooky Pacific Northwest using her excellent Liminal High School. I liked it enough that it has put me into my terrible "monkey see, monkey do" mode so I've been thinking a lot about Liminal Horror. Normally I'd use Call of Cthulhu for this sort of thing, but 7th edition and Delta Green have complicated my "which version do I choose?" arithmetic and added to that thinking about Sandy Petersen is a bit more fraught given certain events.

So why not try the game she wrote the supplement for? A cursory read showed me there's nothing I found too unpalatable about Liminal Horror. The magic system isn't necessarily my thing but not in a way that would ever be a deal breaker. However, on rereading it I discovered it has a mechanic I hate:* no to hit rolls, only damage.

I'm not a fan of this for a number of reasons, but I actually think in a horror game it matters a bit more because the certainty of a hit takes out some of the tension. I am not generally a big fan of things that move rpgs more towards perfect information games and I think that movement is worse for horror.

A conversation about this issue with some of the Nightwick Regulars led to Huth, Anthony, and I putting our brains together and (mostly Anthony) providing this hack: To make an attack roll, compare your STR or DEX (depending on weapon) with the target's DEX. To hit the target, roll under 10 modified by the difference between your two stats. So if you are trying to shoot someone and you have a DEX of 10 and they have a DEX of 13, you need to roll under a 7. If you are hitting someone with a baseball bat and you have a STR of 15 and they have a DEX of 8, you need to get under a 17. Always treat a natural 1 as a success and a natural 20 as a failure.

There. Now it's palatable to me again.

*I should've known this due to its Into the Odd lineage, but I am perhaps less up on the NSR than I should be.

I worked on a thing!

 

Hey, if you wanna see something I worked on that isn't Nightwick Abbey, check out Where Once Was the Sea aka Fish Hole. I wrote a room for it! It's a pretty neat (if dense) little dungeon location for Simple DeeEnDee but is easily runnable with stuff like OSE or whatever your old school rules of choice are.

In Fair Cuccagna Session 21: First Steps in a Larger World

 

Miles and miles of manicured garden

Provisions - Off into the "Wilderness" - Thoughts on Rangers - A Bed of Soft Grass - A Village Divided - A Second Campsite - Torches in the Night - A Debate - The Peril of Facing Wizards - Into the Hills - ON Gnoles - A Tree of Strange Aspect - Plans Made but Not Executed

Characters Present
Jules Mozarin, Averois Conjuror
Emmelot, Averois Seer

Maglor, Changeling Seer/Warrior (Determined this session to be Averois)
Prestidigitorio, Karslish Medium (Though he claims to be a local)

Lord Saurr, the Crowned Cat of Karse, Grimalkin

Hirelings
7 men-at-arms (non-classed fighting men)
6 porters/linkmen
Tomantha Peggifer Shones, Karslish Medium in the service of Lord Saurr
Baldassare, Cuccagnan Seer and apparentice to Jules Mozarin

Events

• This week the party eschewed returning to the manse of Prospero the Blue and instead sought to make their way into the interior of the island. Their goal was the mysterious House of the Gnoles, which Lord Saurr had earlier heard was the site of several unsuccessful break ins.
  
• Jules and Prestidgitorio debated the best methods for buying provisions, discussions of herding goats and using goat milk to feed the large number of hirelings the party possesses, but ultimately they decided on purchasing a large number of normal rations.
• Emmelot saw to the purchase of two wagons and two teams of 4 draft horses to pull them, hoping to make the trip easier and to provide transportation for the copious amounts of precious lucre they hope to gain in raiding the gnoles.
• Lord Saurr purchased a large amount of rope.
• After these were all purchased the party set out and found that the manicured gardens of the wizards of Cuccagna stretch for as far as the eye can see. Only occasional shifts in style of garden served to break up the monotony for those characters more used to the wilds of the continent.
•  Prestidigitorio wondered if a ranger would be useful at all in such an environment, though it should be noted that despite the gardens and occasional appearances of out buildings and sheds, they saw not a soul on the twisting paths.
• Emmelot, being the most accustomed to greenery, was able to find them an area of especially downy grass for them to sleep their first night. This they did without incident. 
• The next morning they awoke and noticed two gleaming white towers about a hex away and decided to make their way to them.
• Betwixt the towers was a village where the manicured gardens gave way to fields of barley, olive orchards and vineyards.
• The party noticed that the inhabitants of this village were dressed either in all red or all blue. At first they took comfort in the fact that these people seemed to be mixed among the fields, meaning that at least they weren't "racist;" however, they soon discovered something very odd about the inhabitants.
• Calling out to one they quickly found him abrasive but at least somewhat willing to help; however, after they had spoken a few words with him a seemingly identical man in the opposite color came up and asked who they were speaking to. This led to some confusion as the party attempted to communicate with both identical men who seemed unable to perceive each other in any way. Prestidigitorio lamented that this is a thing that belonged more to the future/past than to the island's breed of strangeness.
• This strange encoutner turned stranger still when the two men were asked to draw a map to the house of the gnoles and, coming forward to do so, they clipped into each other in a hideously uncanny way - each as though the other was made out of nothing at all. Despite this they still were both able to draw in the dirt (though annoyingly close to each other such as to make the map somewhat difficult to read), meaning that they likely were made of solid matter. Curious.
  
• When asked where their master lived, they each indicated a separate tower - the conical rooves of which matched their attire. 
  
• The party then tried to follow the map, heading southeast and again having to find a place to camp. They set up watches with the Crowned Cat of Karse taking the middle watch due to his uncanny night vision.
• In the night he saw, several miles distant and across the strangely rolling gardens, a troop of horsed men - he wagered about 20 in number - carrying torches and heading towards the strange village which they had visited that day.
• He immediately awoke his companions to discuss what to do, fearing these men were up to no good and that innocent villagers would suffer. The general counsel of the other characters was that the intent of the men-a-horse was unknown, and while they had a party in similar size it would likely deplete precious resources needed to steal from the gnoles. As such Lord Saurr reluctantly relinquished his watch and went to bed.
• During his watch, Maglor saw great explosions and heard great peels of strange thunder from the direction of the village. Soon after he saw a much smaller band of horsemen slinking way. Lord Saurr, when told of this later, commented that he should've known the wizards over the village would be puissant enough to take care of such raiders.
• They then rode their wagons up from the gardens and into the scrubby hills of Cuccagna, and saw that the land was quite arid with mostly bushes and the occasional lone and forsaken tree.
• Lord Saurr, who seemed knowledgeable in the ways of gnoles, said that they may seek to watch them through a tunnel system which connected the trees.
• This prompted a debate on the nature of gnoles, with Prestidigiatorio, who claimed to be a local, stating that they are men with the heads of hyenas, while Lord Saurr said they are more like "an artichoke made from India rubber." None could say who was right, except the referee.*
• In the meantime Emmelot inspected a nearby tree and found it, indeed, came with two little eye holes for peeking and a door granting egress to a sheer tunnel that descended into the earth.
• While debate initially covered how one descend into the hole, it quickly turned to what kind of tactics the party should adopt more generally. Lord Saurr suggested at first that he should go and attempt to sell them rope** while the party navigated the tunnels beneath and took them by surprise. Maglor suggested this was maybe not the wises course of action but the inverse - where the party approached in the open and Lord Saurr attempted to sneak in with his greater stealth and dark vision - might be more amicable.
• However, seeing the whitewashed walls of the  house several miles distant, it was realized by all that leaving for the house now would make them arrive sometime after dark - when the gnoles would likely have an increased advantage. Pondering this, we agreed to pause the game and make new plans for next week.

* She did, in fact, confirm that they didn't have hyena heads.

** Lord Saurr's player insisted that it was a coincidence that he had bought so much rope, and that it was more about the cheapness and usefulness of rope in wilderness settings.

Cuccagnat Catch Up 2

Yep, I'm still running Cuccagna, and I have been quite neglectful in posting session reports. I want to resume my posts of the sessions, but I don't have good notes on a lot of the ones I've missed. As such I will try to do some highlights from the ones I've missed. So instead I must offer a list of highlights from previous sessions and hope that's enough for anyone who for whatever reason wants to keep up with the adventures on that strange isle.

11*: The party investigated more rooms on the ground floor of the Lapis Vaults. There they found a trio of rooms that appeared to be inhabited by a strange and beautiful sorceress. These were illusions crafted by Prospero the Blue and seemingly depicting a romance with the woman in question, including a nice picknick on the beach, a night in the boudoir, and her cuckolding him with a man capable of casting fireball.** The party in general recognized the man from one of the portraits they had taken in an earlier session and Jules de Mozarin recognized the woman as the subject of the crystal ball they had found.

12*: A strange "knight" from a far off land joined the party. He insisted that all things should be done chivalrously, and that Prospero the Blue should be met openly. The rest of the party gingerly tried to play around this, not admitting they were there to loot the place. Notably he confronted a group of giant bees who were doing something to the bodies of hirelings that had been left in the dungeon long before, and remarkably survived. Alas soon after he fell to a group of backwards Blemmyes. Then it was revealed this remarkable man was a living harness! No more will his like be seen again on the World of Nightwick.

13*: The party took to the upper floor of the vaults. There they found a foraging party of pseudopods which they learned were looking for food as the Kingdom of the Monopods [sic] is lacking such. They deceived these creatures into believing they worked for Prospero the Blue and were sent to reclaim objects to be moved to a new manse. Shortly after they found the lair of the toy dogheads and decided to face them in open combat. I think Oro the dwarf died in this one, but overall the party was victorious. They also found the strange room they believe to have once been the home of the intelligent rats that people the dungeon, and found primitive tools made for tiny hands used to escape it. 

14*: Lord Saurr decided it would be a good idea to start bringing food to the pseudopods to win their favor. Jules wished to explore the second floor and see what a room he had seen off of the Doghead lair was, but they were interrupted first by giant rats and then a rotten room full of shriekers. The shriekers summoned a number of glass statues similar to the ones the party had previously encountered. Lord Saurr was knocked unconscious but the party prevailed. A group of pseudo also appeared to watch the combat and then hop off without participating. Shortly after the party found a large number of glowing vats containing misshapen beings - prototypes of the creatures seen elsewhere in the manse. Beyond this they found a secret door in which were a group of magicians they quickly slew in a battle of magic. From this they obtained a fair amount of treasure and a spellbook containing spells from the continent.*** A karslish fighting man pc named Thomus was also killed this session in one of the struggles.

15*: The pseudopods are once again given food. Jules finally gets his wish and the party, with some fights against intelligent rats, finds its way to the room that seems to have been a doghead prison. The blemmye he saw in the room had been killed by someone else searching the room. Feeling they had finished exploring the upper level the party at last descended into the tunnels beneath the manse. They found a wine cellar, the door to which was trapped and killed an Averois fighting man PC whose name I do not remember at this time. They carried a great deal of the wine out using the obscene number of hirelings they now possess - the party now contains some 20 odd members including mercenaries and porters. 

16*: The pseudopods are once again given food, but seem kinda squirrelly for a reason unknown to the party. The party then fought more intelligent rats on the way to the tunnels. They then tried to get a wagon in the tunnels to the surface level so that they could bring the last of the wine out and make bank. During this they were again attacked by intelligent rats who skirmished with them, shooting and then retreating into the darkness. They eventually got the barrels out with their huge number of hirelings and the wagon. They then returned and found a number of barrels containing "the black blood of the earth" which they also took to the surface to sell.

17*: Pseudopods fed again. More of the tunnels explored. A large cave filled with strange, iridescent stalactites. This room proved to cause strange vision if any noise echoed of the stalactites, as the cleric Skleras found out to the party's peril.  Maglor believed he heard a large number bees coming from one cave, and Lord Saurr found the site of an old battle between several of the creatures from the dungeon. The cat was then chased by some mushrooms he believed to be shriekers, though why they were chasing him he wasn't sure. Finally they found a cave containing a number of spider webs that, surprise surprise, was home to a tarentella. This they slew but then Skleras fell down its trap door lair into a nest of its sprawling children. Numerous bites sent him into a dancing frenzy but the hireling Tomantha was able to cast sleep on him such that they could pull him out of the hole without interference.  In the lair they found the corpse of a magician and his spellbook.

19*: Jules de Mozarin was summoned to the Viridian Palace by Prospero the Green. He brought with him the entire party as a display of his own importance. Prospero the Green offered him the chance to have have the great wizard serve as a mentor**** if Jules and company would perform two related tasks. First, find the petrified body of Sir Wint of Dril, spy for Prospero the Green who had been captured by Prospero the Blue, and prevent a party sent by Prospero the Orange from doing the same. In the dungeon they again gave food to the psuedopods and this time asked them where the body of Sir Wint could be found. This they provided and soon the party headed to the sitting room and strange room of statues where they had previously fought a Scitalis. This time they fought a group of magicians and their hired men-at-arms. These they defeated, gaining spell books and a scroll with a great deal of Cuccagnan spells. Jules used a scroll provided by Prospero the Green to debrief Sir Wint, learning that Prospero the Blue used a strange blemmye with the head of a cockatrice to petrify suspected thieves and spies. They then spent some time carving his statue out of the wall in which it had been placed and returned to their wormship and back to the Great Wen where Sir Wint was returned to flesh.

20*: Psuedopods again fed. This time they discussed the blemmyes and the tunnels. Lord Saurr hoped they could be made to attack the Blemmyes but the pseudopods are too afraid of the backwards anthropophagi. In the tunnels below they had a brief fight with some Blemmyes after a hireling fell in a pit. They seemed to be guarding an area with the mounted heads of their enemies.  Beyond that they found a strange trapped room in the cave covered with depictions of satyrs. The phalli of the creatures produced arrows when someone stepped on the tiles. They found a room with a statue and a large number of shriekers, that Maglor was able to see without disturbing thanks to his dark vision. After some discussion they decided against fighting the shriekers and instead made their way to the area where Maglor heard the bees. There they found a strange device, pictured below.

The strange machine

Little could be ascertained from it other than that it would require thieves' tools or the claws of Lord Saurr (who was not present) to open. After contemplating the device the party returned home more or less without treasure.

* Numbers are somewhat speculative as I'm worried I missed one or two.

** This spell was an illusion and merely caused a number of members of the party to pass out.

*** Continental spells - those found in the OSE core rulebook, are only available to starting characters.

**** Mentors are very important for the magician class, assuming you want to control which spells you gain as you level.

It's happening!!!

It really is!