Monday 22 January 2024

Marmoris Carcerem - Chapel Tower

 So couple of weeks ago I got infatuated with the idea of taking Kindap the Archpriest and using it instead as a downwards going spire of a prison complex rather than a high tower of an archpriest's palace.

Around the same time, if not a bit before, a friend of mine was showing interest in dipping their toes to a more OSR styled game so I was also looking for something to run as a little introduction to the style.

Ideas ruminate and I ended up realising I was already building up the "Inverted Kidnap the Archpriest" inside my head not long after.
And if I was already taking the maps from KtA, I might as well staple on some bits and pieces from other modules as well. One suggestion I really liked was taking some choice lairs from Caves of Chaos and stapling them on to the sides of the downwards spire as additional prison wings.
And of course if I was already inverting KtA, the premise could also be swapped onto it's head. Instead of kidnapping an archpriest, what if the PCs are there to rescue some specific person from this prison complex.

It's just Fear & Hunger, isn't it? Especially with the style I tend to run my games, leaning towards more horror-y aesthetics and presentation of locales.

I needed some illustration or the post looks barren, haven't used this one yet iirc

As such, I've been slowly working on keying out rooms and modifying the stitched together maps to better fit my needs for roughly two weeks. Last saturday I got to run the first session of this mess too!
Always a lot of fun to run stuff that I've built together myself as opposed to just bridging gaps between numerous published modules in an open sandbox.

Now that the rambling is out of the way, here's the section of the dungeon the players mostly cleared in that first session so I can even say it's playtested for the most part!

Marble Cage - Chapel

Two storey tower adorning one of the four corners of the hefty walls surrounding the Marble Cage.

Random Encounters: Check every 2 turns
Area Boss: Self-Mummified priest
Where is the Priest headed:
1. Pyre outside chapel, burning more books
2. Common cell (8), collect more bodies for her flies
3. Underground Shrine, to commune with God (yet unkeyed location)
4. Relic Hall, to inspect the sacred text (53)
5. Headed to party's location
6. Lair (44)

Random Encounters: The way this works is it keeps the boss monsters roaming around the place, potentially creating opporturnities for encounters with them. Fighting might not be advised.
1 - 3. Area Boss (roll to see where they going next)
4 - 5. Random Monster (appears from somewhere)
6. Random Boss from different area (roll to see where they going next)

42 | Entrance
Timeworn wooden double doors, barrable from the inside. Faint smell of incense & something going bad.  Heavy marble pillars. Large censer-like metal orbs hanging by chains from ceiling, chains attached to an overlook (47) above.

43 | Altarside
Stench of death and near-deafening buzzing of flies. Stained silver candle stands. Marble steps lead up to altar covered in candles. The back wall behind altar is covered in numerous tumour-like hives oozing red-black liquid (honey). Six robed figures prostrating in front of the stairs (each with a polished metal spike cracking the back of their head open, in severe state of rot).
- Silver holy symbol clutched in the arms of each priest

44 | Crypt & Wall Fountain
Smell sweet enough to feel at the back of your throat. Heavy marble pillars. Lit torch scones.  Modest sized wall-fountain & pool full of blackened-red honey. Entire back wall covered in slowly dripping blackened-red honey.
- Black Honey heals for 1hp per handful
- Start receiving the total amount healed during single day as ramping up damage on following days (day 1 - 1dmg / day 2 - 2dmg / day 3 - 3dmg etc etc.)

45 | Chapel Cells
Row of confessionals, painted wooden doors defaced with carved symbols.
From left to right:
1. 3d6 cut open and composing corpses covered in ashen dirt, white bell-flowers growing from them like on flowerbeds.
2. Barrable from outside. Walls scribbled full of incomprehensible passages and symbols, In the middle of the back wall a palm-sized symbol sticks out amids the scribbles.
- Looking upon the symbol causes nausea -> Save vs Magic or vomit out the contents of your stomach, taking 1 damage and an entire dungeon turn doing so.
- Studying the symbols and scribbles for a dungeon turn reveals this to be notes about some sort of ritual.
- Spending an hour studying the ritual reveals the spell Summon.
3. Single bible, pages from other books glued onto it's pages with black-red honey.
4. Barrable from outside.
5. Empty.
6. Barred from outside, peephole hacked into the door covered in dark red sticky residue. Three prisoners, mouths peeled of skin and crawling with flies.
- Tell that their insides feel like they're burning, says they have been fed strange stuff that tastes like ash and honey.

46 | Library
Scattered books, piles of tomes, fallen bookshelves, torn pages & loose papers with strange symbols. Tome glued together with red-black honey laying open on a lectern. Several books have been glued shut with black-red honey. Others have their contents altered by gluing pages from yet other books inside them.
- Tome on lectern is full of rambling gibberish and symbols, open on a page reading: "Anointed with life, a body submerges in nectar. Spirit trapped in viscous balm does not ascend. What returns is no longer just sum of it's parts. This is but one of the paths a man may walk to leave mortality behind."
- 3 cleric prayer scrolls mixed in with the papers: Sacrifice, Sanctuary, Insect Plague

47 | Overlook
Body with it's back flayed open, dozens of flies crawling on it.

48 | Balcony
Ornate wooden door with stained window panelling, locked but easily forced.


Self-Mummified Priest
HD: 5✝ / AC: 18 / Honeyed Touch @ +5 -> 1d6+2 dmg. | Damage from touch does not heal
- Sloppy, sticky footprints. Accompanied by buzzing of flies.
- Long priestly robes with ashen sash. Sticky black-red handprints.
- Sunken features, translucent skin clinging onto cheeckbones and hollow eyesockets. Once a woman, now a walking festering wound.
Priest's Key - Around her neck.
Supernatural: Only tracks hits dealing 6+ damage, after receiving equal to or more such hits than HD it crumbles into honeyd jerky.
Spells:
Drown in Ashes (F&M p. 114)
Duration: Permanent | Range: 0 | Area of Effect: 50ft radius | Save: Vs Breath
A wave of ash, 1m (3ft) high, fills the area of effect. 
Any living being with it's head below the surface must save Vs Breath or be buried, taking d4 choking damage per round untill they do save.

Sunday 7 January 2024

Solo game journal - Session 3

Sessions 1 & 2 here.

Continuing up from where the last journal entry ended with me having spent my Grit in order to make it down the elevator shaft safely.

Again, this is simply me copying my journal entries for all of you to read so it lacks notes about what is going on mechanics-wise such as the use of the loot dice to determine if any of the sword in a room I find are usable as replacement weapons.
The "Doom Dice" is just me keeping a track of dungeon turns as they pass and doing an automatic encounter of some kind every hour within the current adventuring location.

Session 3 - The Thing Wrapped in Cloth

I decide to check the door to my left. I hope this amount of ash is limited to only this corridor and not beyond the door.
No luck, the doors are large and heavy and refuse to budge. Thinking about it, it looks like they would open towards the corridor in which case the high tide of ash must be blocking them.
I have nothing to attempt to break through with either.

Thwarted, I can only turn around and climb past the bits of collapsed ceiling instead. The amount of ash covering the ground feels less here, although I am still unable to see the floor.
As I pass through the fallen stonework I enter into a small chamber. The ceiling is still absurdly high here, nearing seven metres by my best guess. Now however when looking up I am seeing something truly bizarre.
Sword after sword hanging from frayed ropes and what looks like long curtain strips have turned this chamber into an enormous wind chime. And in the middle of the room, extending much further down towards the floor than any single sword hangs a cocoon of faded red curtains. It is tied together into a roughly man-sized bundle and held hanging from the ceiling by several fraying ropes.

Before investigating further, I take a further scan around the room. No other exits. Not even windows. Looks like I'll have to figure out a way through that door if I want to get anywhere from here.

The lowest hanging swords can't be higher than a metre off the level of the ash. I untie one from the curtain strip that it's hanging by. It might lack a scabbard, but at least I'll have something to defend myself with this way after the unfortunate loss of my maul.
I give the blade couple of test swings to gauge out it's balance. The craftsmanship is fine, although I fear it might not be able to take much abuse should I end up relying on it extensively in a fight due the it's apparent age. Not that any of the other swords left hanging here seem better either. Well, at least I know where I can find more should it come down to that.

Then the cascading sound of numerous blades clinging against each other chimes through the chamber.
Alert, I quickly take a look around.

The red cocoon, a man-sized bundle of faded red cloth hanging from the middle of the room almost touching the ash below it is squirming and wiggling, causing the blades around it to sway and impact with each other.
Cautiously I bring my newly acquired sword in front of me and start to approach without a sound. My footsteps, as I have noticed from my wandering thus far, procure no sound for some reason.
I weave through the hanging swords chiming against each other and upon reaching the cocoon firmly press the tip of my sword against it. As I do so it starts to squirm and shake even more vigorously, causing my blade to sink in deeper untill the faded cloth starts to slowly dye a more deeper red around the entry point of the tip of my sword.
I hear a muffled cry or a scream from within the cocoon.

Quickly, I pull back my sword. The muffled noises continue. Whatever it is, it sounds hurt.
I cut the ropes holding the cloth cocoon in the air and it thuds down onto the ashen dunes covering the floor. As I watch, it slowly starts it's wriggling again.
Hoping that wrapped in the cloth is a person, I try raising my voice and asking out who is it but all that comes out is a dry, rasping "Who..?"
It feels like even my throat is full of ash.

No answer. The wriggling grows more violent, but the "cocoon" is tied together with rope so try as it might I should be safe from whatever is inside.

I clear my throat. Another attempt:
"Is there someone inside?"
A bit better, still feels like gurgling with sand though.

A single wriggle, accompanied by a muffled sound.

"You are bound and tied with cloth. I will now cut you free, so do not move."
I carefully start to cut the ropes that tie this bundle together. After a bit the wriggling of whatever was bound up inside is enough to loosen the rest of the cloth and from one end of the "cocoon" emerges an ashen gray, bald, head. It is completely devoid of hair, but also lacks any protruding features such as ears or a nose. There is no lower jaw either, instead a single large eye fills it's place.
It strains backwards it's neck, covered in what I assume to be some sort of viscous fluid from it's eye, revealing a pathethic small mouth that is more akin to a long wet slit along the length of it's throat.

By reflex alone I step back, shuddering, while bringing up my blade to keep it from approaching me somehow.
It's single eye turns towards me, a wet gurgle from what should be a throat forms what sounds like a question: "Who..?"

It is enough to send shivers down my sides realising that I understand it's attempt to communicate.
I stop for a breath's time to consider my options.
Do I kill it?
If it can communicate, I still have no idea where I am or what has happened here.
I could simple turn back and leave it here, but I am at a dead end untill I figure out a way through those doors.

I decide to swallow my disgust and attempt to communicate with the thing. Unlike the spectres it has yet to attack me, so perhaps it can be reasoned with.
"My name is Dyrkyr. I cannot say much more than that, as I know not how I ended up here."
Hopefully I am not laying out my cards too bare here.

Still mostly wrapped in the curtain sheets, the thing continues it's attempts at wriggling free. I can now see loose gray skin with gaunt bone structure poking through it, like a foot inside a sock several sizes too large. Where there should be shoulders are just two tiny stumps, as if arms had never developed despite the human-like anatomy suggesting they should be present.
As it squirms free, emerging from this cocoon of red cloth, it's long mouth more closely resembling a long wet wound gurgles a response.
"Dyrkyr, thank you. Ghrlhhglr."

(End of session 3 @ doom dice 5/6. Loot Dice has been used and is now stepped down to a d10. What is the strange creature and will it prove to be of any help?)

Saturday 30 December 2023

Trying out solo play

Yesterday I was scrolling through Itch looking for anything interesting, as one does, and happened upon Tales of the Burned Stones. I've never really been one for solo games, but recently I've been feeling the itch to revisit my Souls-inspired world that I ran for some of my friends back when I was first testing out Have Axe, Will Travel.

A world that is essentially a kind of "shadow real" based on my current sandbox campaign world. A place that is forgetting itself and thus allowed to be just bits and pieces woven together. Place where memories are tangible things that one can collect, and the more you have the more sure you can be that you exist.

And as such I thought I might as well give this solo play thing a try, since with my current schedule I'll more than likely not be able to shove yet another game in there.

What am I using?

For the base system I am going with the aforementioned Tales of the Burned Stones, but forgoing the implied setting even if it is extremely loose since I have a world in mind already that I wish to play in.

To supplement that, I am using Print Weaver for generating my stats based on which prints marks i have the most and the least rather than the method in Burned Stones that suggests rolling dice on a table and seeing which lands the furthest and which closest to you.
I am also generating my starting equipment based on my finger prints on top of taking the one Lasting Item from Burned Stones character creation.
I'll likely be leaning on Print Weaver for more things as well as I think it's got a very nice vibe despite being a bit too overtly mechanical system-wise for my own tastes.

For oracles I have a Rider Waite tarot deck, the oracle tables in Burned Stones, as well as Chris McDowall's Ask the Stars.

That being said, from this point onwards will be my journalling of the journey of Dyrkyr as I stumble onwards trying to make sense on how to generate things on the fly for myself. The journal bit might have typos but I at least try to write something that can be understood when read by someone else than just me.

The Character

----Dyrkyr - Silver Foot----
Resilience: 6 / 6
Coins: 200
Heritage: Human
Background: Strider

Grit: Available

Str: d8 / d8
Dex: d6 / d6
Wil: d4 / d4

Inventory:
Great Maul - d6 - Lasting item
Plate Mail
Short Bow - d6
Quiver w/ 3 arrows
Book w/ 3x random scrolls:
    - Hammer - conjures a large phantom hammer to crush it's target (d8)
    - Salve - heals by 1+[dice result over 4] (d8)
    - Hitbond - grants two targets a shared pool of extra Resilience equal to 1+[dice result over4] (d8)
Ring of Secret - Causes silent footsteps (Memento)
Globe Compass - Reveals cardinal direction and elevation

----Abilities----
Spotter
Look for exploitable weaknesses in opponent by rolling d10. On 1-2, find a weak point and future rolls can be done with Good Positioning, but you've been Spotted yourself. On 3-4, find a weak point and future rolls are at Good Position. On 5+, find multiple weak points and future rolls are at Excellent Position.
Cost: 2 Steps

----Looks----
Frame: Muscular & Athletic
Head: Round & Angular
Hair: Dreadlocks
Memento: Ring
Appearance: Exotic
Virtue: Patient
Flaw: Cowardly
Financial Background: Noble
Motivation: Creativity

The Journal

Chapter 0 - Where am I?

Somewhere where there are no rulers left, the proverbial throne has been emptied by the way of the sword. That much is what I remember.

There's an empty throne room, wands and staffs broken and scattered on the floor. But no bodies.
Wrong.
There's a single dead person here. Emptied out eye sockets stare from hollowed out cheecks and rubbery mummified skin. He, or she, has been wrapped in heavy wallcloths and placed laying on the throne.

I choose not to investigate any closer, instead opting for the wrenched open double doors barely standing on their hinges. They lead to a hallway.
The light coming in from the windows is meager, it must be late into the evening right now.

Wherever I am, I have no recollection. I barely remember my name. Dyrkyr.
The corridor take a turn to the left from here, it appears this room is at the end of it. Whatever devastation had come here is not present outside the room. All I see is moth eaten and mouldy carpets, enormous roots poking through the ceiling and having crashed through the walls as well as the debri of stone brickwork they have strewn about.

I choose to inspect one of the larger roots more closely, try to figure out what it is.

The root is dry, fine ash gathered on it's uneven surface. Was there a fire here?
Glancing back at the corridor, blackened streaks and the disappearance of the long carpet past a certain point suggest it's possible. Just that the fire for some reason hadn't reached all the way here, which is why I hadn't realised it at first.

Now, time to move on. I still have no idea of my bearings.
Where does the corridor take me?

The corridor is dotted with windows on it's left side, letting in the orange light of dusk or dawn.
At the end of it an open archway where stands a rusted metal cage, like a birdcage but mansized. It hangs precariously over a dark pit on thick metal chain stained with rust. On the floor of the birdcage, there is a large pressure plate.

I carefully prod at the bars of the cage with the pole of my maul to see how bad the rust is.
Couple bars clang free from their frame, bouncing off the stone walls and making a terrible racket on the way down.

If there's anything in here apart from me, it now knows it's not alone. The clattering was loud enough to raise the dead.
And this contraption does not look safe.

Now what?
I start trying to ascertain if the pit itself looks climbable, there are the enormous roots breaching through the walls of this place after all.

Yes, my intuition was right. I might've not heard the bars bounce off of them but the longer I spend looking down into the darkness the more I can make out roots of differing sizes invading into it from the sides.
However, it's pitch dark down there and I have no light with me.

I start checking through my gear, looking for something to start a fire with.
No luck, although hanging from my belt in a small leather harness is a book I don't recognise. I only vaguely remember it's supposed to contain magic.
Perhaps something that might help, I hope.

I take a couple of steps back from the birdcage contraption and sit down, the large maul I have been carrying rested against the wall and ready to be grabbed should anything startle me.
And begin studying the contents of the book.

It contains the following spells:
- Hammer - conjures a large phantom hammer to crush it's target (d8)
- Salve - heals by 1+\[dice result over 4\] (d8)
- Hitbond - grants two targets a shared pool of extra Resilience equal to 1+\[dice result over4\] (d8)

// (End of session 1 @ Random encounter. Did it come from the elevator drop? Yes, but... it was silent enough to get a jump on me)

I am too absorbed in studying the book and the spells within, several ashen spectres like dust and sand in the vague shape of a man are swarming out the archway and obscuring my view of the birdcage contraption.
The position is bad, there are more of them than there are of me and they are already within striking distance.

I choose to employ my strength, the one thing I have going on for me right now, to swing my maul wildly at the many-faced cloud of ash and dust now lunging at me from the archway.
I manage to repell them, but at a cost. The maul slips from my hands, sent flying towards a window on the left hand wall by an unexpected lack of grip strength. It mashed through the windowsill, leaving a cloud of plaster and flinging stone shards in every direction. And then is to not be seen again.
Fuck.

The force of the swing dissipated the form of the spectres, but they now start to emerge again from the scattered ash swirling in the hallway.
I am surrounded.

I flee, turn tail and dash straight through the one that had gotten behind me.
I am left with my eyes covered in stinging ash as I leave the spectres behind, half stumbling and half running back down the corridor towards the throne room.

I attempt to outrun them, there were staves laying in the room. My hope is that I can use them to fight off these things.
They are fast, soon enough I see the gray ash swirling around me at the edges of my vision. They are too fast, skeletal hands with no solid form claw against my sides and slip in through the cracks and joints of my plate armour causing stinging burns.

I arrive at the double doors leaning off their hinges, the room is like I had left it. Empty, save for the once-royal carpet leading to the throne occupied by it's mummified sovereign. And the ground, littered with staves and wands. I quickly dive down, grapping a staff in both hands and start swinging them wildly in order to scatter the phantoms tormenting me.
Unfortunately all this achieves is spreading their forms all around me, causing myself to once again be surrounded.
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, several of the wands and broken staffs on the floor start to stand up and float into the air like as if pulled up by strings.

Before I have the time to react, several staffs come flying through the ashen spectres and straight into me. My armour takes the brunt of the blows, but my body definitely feels the reverberations as they tenderise my muscles. 
Worried for my own life, I slip through a gap in the swirling ashes that I have those flying staffs to thank for and bolt towards the door. Back into the corridor.
By the time I've broken visual contact with the spectres I notice my belt feeling lighter. A pouch hanging from it has torn open and is now empty. I think I remember keeping money in it.

Never minding the pouch, I continue running. My mouth dry and eyes filled with ash. Heaving for air, I collapse onto my knees by the end of the corridor.
I look behind me but see no signs of the swirling cloud of ash that had been tomenting me. I do however notice the contents of my quiver, my three arrows, scattered halfway through the corridor.

I choose not to retrieve them for I fear the floating staves or the reappearance of the ashen spectres.

I weight my options.
Going down the pit would require light which I do not have.
The windows look wide enough to fit through, but the view from here opens down to a sprawling city. I mist be several hundred metres high right now, a fall that I cannot afford to take.
Going back is a dead end, both figuratively and literally.
I need a weapon.

I come to the conclusion that attempting to climb down the dark pit is my only option. There are footholds in the form of the number of roots penetrating through the walls, but beyond the first few meteres there will be no light.

I begin the climb, making may way past the man-sized birdcage hanging inside ths shaft and lowering myself to the nearest root.
Gritting my teeth, after the first few metres it no longer matters wether my eyes are open or closed. At that point I'm doing the climb based on my sense of touch alone.

The dark gives me time to think and be immersed in myself and I come to realise how little I know or remember about why I am here. In fact, I realise I barely remember much of myself at all.
Digging deep inside my head, out of the small number of things I am able to conjure up the memory of a grand gallery filled with paintings and beautiful wall cloths swells to the top. A very warm and loving memory, certain type of fondness and appreciation for the work put into those things and the different things they attempt to convey.

After what has felt like an eternity, I start to notice light filtering in through my eyelids again.

I'm standing in a passagaway drowned in ash. The floor isn't visible, the scene looks like a gray beach conjured into the high arched corridor running left to right from where I'm entering.
This must be where those phantoms had originated from. I shudder at the thought of having to wade through here.

Cautious still, I keep scaning my surroundings for clues as to where I might be or where I might wish to go.
The stupendously high cathedral-like ceiling has collapsed in several places, letting in the same orange dusk-or-dawn light that was seeping in through the windows earlier. Several long polearms poke out from the mounds of ash, all rusted beyond use.
Whatever has happened here must have happened a long time ago.
To my left, the corridor terminates after maybe twelve or so metres in narrow double doors the height of half of the corridor.
To my right, the corridor continues straight beyond what I can see. Larger pieces of the collapsed ceiling blocking my view. Definitely looks like something I could go around and climb over however.

// (End of session 2 @ doom dice 3/6. Grit is used. Now have to decide which way to go)

Conclusion

So far the adventure has definitely been intriguing, and I am slowly starting to figure out where this must be. Finding out that the room I started my journey in was some sort of a boss room or the end of a dungeon was a rather cool one.

Still definitely need to figure out how to properly run the game system-wise since Burned Stones suggest handling combats as challenge checks when playing solo but in the fight with the ash spectres I wasn't sure how to adjucate for how they should be defeated. If running it as a challenge which I did, I needed to succeed five checks but that to me felt like just buying time would mean they would eventually get brought down by time rather than my character.
The next combat I run into I'll be trying to run with the actual combat rules and see how that feels instead.

One difficulty that I realise I'll also be definitely running into is generating the rooms and corridors of the place I am currently exploring as so far I've simply been asking the stars if the corridor continues, does it continue straight, is it a junction, does it bend left, does it end in a large room etc etc.

Session 3 here.

Saturday 25 November 2023

Churn Stroke Burn impressions - This town is not going to exist in two weeks

To get the disclaimer out of the way, I received a pdf of Churn Stroke Burn from it's author and promised I'd in return write not-quite-a-review but rather my impressions on the adventure scenario after having read through it once or twice.

The reason this will have to stay as not-quite-a-proper-review is because I've only read through most of the book with proper thought, occasionally glancing over things, and because the time I'll get to run this scenario at my table will likely be somewhere in the foreseeable future so I can't really give any commentary on how well the stuff put forwards in the book translates to a game played at the table since as we all know, no plan survives contact with players.

Edit: This might just be me incessantly rambling about the book while trying to not give out the contents of the adventure at all which in retrospect may not be the best way to get people interested in an adventure, but apparently that is the way I decided to go abou it.

So, what has Sean Richer been cooking?

What is Churn Stroke Burn?

Churn Stroke Burn cover, Asmo Grimae
First of all it's a gorgeous looking book that originally caught my attention while browsing the Exalted Funeral store. The cover art is this golden sketched out view of the salt witches that play a central role in the adventure, made by Asmo Grimae whose art I absolutely adore (and don't really see that often anywhere anymore after having left twitter myself).

The interior has the aesthetics of a scrapbook filled with views and memories from the adventure scenario itself, being this mixed media collage of sketches, images and tape holding it all in piece but without making the text illegible. In fact the book is really readable despite the chosen visual style for it, as as far as readibility goes my only complaint is the map for the "second act" point crawl with the map being cut into two to better fit the two page spread, but for some reason the two halves of the map aren't aligned at same height so seeing where some of the arrows between locations are pointing takes a bit of parsing. (And for those wondering, the reason why it's laid out like that is likely to make it more coherent with the visual of scrapbook the book is going for.)

The base premise is that somewhere out at the sea something is happening. The sea horizon archs upwards instead of diving down and disappearing into the distance, salt witches have appeared in town, the storm cult that reveres lightning is acting up and weird storms and horrible monsters strike against the town time and time again from the sea. Not to mention the ships being washed up on the beach or crashing against the rocks when the lighthouse refuses to function, or the worrying number of vessels out on the sea flying strange flags, a telltale sign of pirates.
And all of this isn't the real problem, for that lies in the eye of the storm. Way out at the sea a leviathan of a whale dreams of storms and floods.

But let's get to the meat and potatoes, what are these "three acts" the adventure scenario consists of?

Like said, the adventure scenario is essentially a three act structure that moves forwards as players proceed along further and further in finding out what is going on and why and maybe even get to resolve the whole mess, potentially doing some initial back and forth between the "act 1" and "act 2" before going for a finale of chaos, stormy waters and crashed ships in the "act 3".

Starting from the act one of the town and getting to know the gist of roughly what is going on as well as getting introduced to the few different factions, the players will eventually head on to the "second act" stuff once they have accrued enough reasons to go out to the sea (and believe me the're a ton of stuff in the town that give them reasons to go out to the sea).
Going out to the sea isn't made particularily difficult either despite the fact that the PCs likely start without so much as a makeshift raft to their name as opporturnities arise left right and center to either acquire different kinds of vessels to go out to the sea with, hitching rides from other people going out to the sea, assembling your own vessel from the numerous beached ships around the town or even finding secret underground tunnels extending all the way under the sea.

And at the end of it all is the quite literal eye of the storm, the thing that is getting teased and hinted at here and there throughout the entire adventure. Once you step in stepping back out will be difficult, and unless you've ended up there very early you likely won't have time left to really turn back either.

Sure, but what are the "three acts" in terms of content?

The first act, like explained before, is a town stocked with fourteen distinct locations. Each of which have at least two encounters or events associated with them, one for when you go there the first time and another one for when you visit there a second time.
I really like this, makes the town feel alive without needing to give detailed schedule or timeline of what happens during each day in the town. It gives the town a very similiar feel to how Witchburner ended up feeling when I was running that for one of my groups.
There's also a d30 table for daily events, as well as a well as a d30 table of "nightly raids" which spells all sorts of disasters and monsters to encounter for those staying up all night doing investigating.

Example of the d30 event table, as well as the scrapbook aesthetic of the product.
All the page numbers you see in parentheses are links inside the pdf, yay for ease of use!

The second act is a point crawl of eight locations with each of them presented in a similiar fashion to how the town is, except this time each location is more concerned with how the players are approaching them (by the sea or by the hidden underground tunnels) as well as how they are leaving from the locations (again, sea or tunnels) with information about the location (and surrounding ones when leaving) is given within the context of their choice of approach, with some approach-specific encounters and events sprinkled in here and there.
Just like with the town, a setup that is very runnable without too much preparation or needing to memorise a bunch of stuff about each location. If the players decide to visit one of the locations out on the sea again, their first visit has already defined within the fiction how that place is and what can be expected to happen there so the GM has bunch of things to work with to come up with their own spice if they wish to keep the locations alive.
Like with the first act, the point crawl section also has d30 tables of happenings to roll on as the PCs move between locations. One for when they are moving from place A to B on the sea and a separate one for when they are moving from one location to another through the tunnels.

The third act is the most chaotic one, as is only thematic for the scenario as a whole. It is a location at the end of the small point crawl that is the second act, containing within a depth crawl similiar to what Gardens of Ynn and Stygian Library are.
The depth crawl is generated with the help of four tables. One for the location, one for an encounter, one for a complication and one to see what of value is left in the place. There are thirty entries to each of the tables. And of course one more d30 table to roll as when the PCs are moving from one location to another.
And of course, the goal here is to go all the way to the deepest end in hopes to resolve all of the storm and weird happenings centered around this very place.

Some things of note

One thing that I want to highlight about the book is just how tied in everything in here is to the DCC dice chain. Love it or hate it, this entire adventure is very clearly written specifically with DCC in mind. 
For me personally this means I'll have to come up with some effects for things that don't rely on manipulating the dice chain if/when I get around to running this adventure as my system of choice still remains to be LotFP. Not any gargantuan undertaking by any means, but just something to keep in mind if you happen to run some other system for your game as well.

Another thing I wish to get out of the way, and this is a very minor gripe with the book, is that while the art style and visual coherency of the book overall is amazing and it oozes style and vibes that already give you a feel for how the author might want you to present the world, the maps for both the town and the point crawl by sea stick out like sore thumbs.
There's a very limited number of other things that pop out as breaking the overall art style but the maps are definitely the biggest offender, which for me just means that if I get the opporturnity to run Churn at some point I'll make my own maps which is something I like doing anyways especially since there really isn't anything in the book that the players should have to map for themselves.

The pointcrawl map, biggest offender in clashing art styles in my opinion.
Looks very scifi in what is otherwise old-timey scrapbook in my eyes.

I should probably also finally mention the Drain Die which is a very central mechanic to keeping the chaos of the whole adventure ramping up as time goes by.
Whenever there is a random d30 table in the book, more often than not instead of rolling a d30 on it you roll on the table with whatever the current Drain Die is at. The Drain Die starts at d3 on the first day of the adventure and steadily grows by size with each passing day along the DCC dice chain before finally reaching the full d30 on the thirteenth day.
The first few entries on each table are usually rather mundane and don't have that much anything weird or eye catching, but the higher the entry is on the table the weirder and more chaotic things get. Get high enough results and you might even get some of the results might even contain hints as to what is truly going on and what is causing all these terrible storm and other happenings, or in the worst case scenario just straight up spell doom and destruction to the town and it's surroundings as they get wiped off the map.'

And a neat little detail to finish off this section, the back of the book has the DCC dice chain incorporated into it's design so if you get the physical book it'll be really easy to reference should you forget how your d3 turns into a d4 followed by d5, d6, d7, d8 and all the other weird in-between dice no other system uses.

Overall thoughts

In case it wasn't clear already, I love the general aesthetic the Churn Stroke Burn has. It oozes the spirit of a miserable town where things are only goin to get worse as time goes on but that may once have been a rather nice place to live at. The amount of weird in there is definitely way higher than I usually have clearly visible in broad daylight in my games, but it's justifiable by the current conundrum the town is facing as the scenario kicks off.
This is something I could definitely just drop in to my pre-existing sandbox and run as is with minimal changes to anything, just some mechanical tweaks to fit the DCC specific things in a more general B/X framework.

I'll have to admit I was slighty worried at times about the tone of the whole scenario, seeing things like albatross men or giant sea otters in the bestiary but having read the thing through I think they are justified well enough that they won't come off as overtly silly or out of place, especially when the whole premise of the adventure is that things are getting progressively more and more out of hand and chaotic as time passes.

Then there's one elephant in the room, the price of the physical book. Yeah, $100 is quite a steep one but also somewhat understandable considering just how much art has been crammed inside the book from various different illustrators. Not only that, the book runs thick at 233 pages so the printing costs for producing the product istelf are surely not super cheap either.
Would I pay the $100 for it myself? After having read through the book, despite really liking the content I honestly couldn't recommend it for that price. The pdf is absolutely worth the asking price of $30, but personally I'd be willing to pay something closer to $60 for the physical book so perhaps if I catch it at a sale I'll grab one.

There definitely is a lot of content and play hours crammed inside the adventure, running my own games at a very slow pace I could see it taking a good several months to run my players through the scenario with our usual schedule of one session every two weeks.

Overall a big recommend, grab the pdf from DriveThruRPG or keep an eye on any sales on the physical book and dive in - but do try not to drown.

Wednesday 15 November 2023

Dungeon Dilemma - Medusa Curse

 So these kind of small detached encounters or dilemmas are something I've been wanting to see made for a while now after I thought one up and never really shared it other than in a passing conversation on discord.
Now however I had come up with a second one too ad instead of just leaving these bouncing around inside my head I thought I'd write one of them down in an attempt to start a small trend in the blogosphere that I could then harvest the cream of the crop from since surely other people have bunch of interesting ideas to throw into the pile too.

Thus I present to you:

Medusa Curse

A relatively simple prison that can be dropped within a dungeon or temple or shrine or whatever your adventurers likely are going to be delving, constructed with sacrifices of eight individuals to bind a monster/villain/whatever to a place.

Setup:

  • 3x3 grid of 15' by 15' rectangular rooms, each linking up to their adjacent ones and each separated by heavy curtains rather than doors.
  • Each outer room has a statue of a mage/priest/whoever were the ones to seal the bad thing here.
    • These statues each are facing in towards the middle room.
    • Statues in corner rooms have a 50/50 chance of looking towards either of the doorways leading in.
  • In the middle of the middle room stands a statue of <insert whatever ancient evil was sealed here>, bound up and with a hood or a sack of some kind covering their/it's entire face.

How it works:

The statues are a result of a "medusa curse", an affliction which transfers from one person to another through sight, mimicking the way a medusa's gaze works.
When something roughly the size of or larger than the affliction's current host enters within the host's line of sight the curse will begin transferring to it's new victim, un-cursing it's current host in the process.
  • Treat this in the same way you treat regular petrification in your games, except additionally if somebody gets afflicted by it the "statue" they got it from is now un-petrified.
  • Yes, this means halflings and dwarves are safe if you decide all the outer "statues" are human sized.

Mixing things up:

Something to consider is how would other denizens of whatever dungeon you drop this into have interacted with it in the past.
Are there perhaps petrified adventurers frozen in weird poses in the first few rooms with the original "statues" missing from those rooms? Did the evil that was sealed here get freed and is now roaming the dungeon, luring it back here and tricking it to get re-petrified being a potential way to deal with it?
What if instead of something immesurably evil being sealed here, it's evil cultists that have sealed an angel or a hero of old in this place?



Tuesday 22 August 2023

Sometimes you just can't get the PCs to take part in adventuring

What follows is a short retelling of the not-even-quite-misadventures of a particular group of PCs from what was intended to be me running an adeventure module I had recently acquired - Chaotic Caves.


Anything but Chaotic, and especially not Caves

They've already broken out of the sandbox I originally prepped for them for running Chaotic Caves, instead hightailing it out of the town and back towards civilization.

This because they went to the other side of the river, had an unfortunate encounter roll during their first night camping an a charging goblin-analogue with it's d4 damage managed to oneshot their MU during the encounter.

As a result the party had sworn off from going into what was like 3/4 of the sandbox laid out for them, instead returning to town where I tried to give them something to do by having a local cleric hire them to hunt down a witch that was occasionally dropping by the town according to rumours.

They found the witch, had a nice little talk with her and even ate some soup as it was offered.

Upon their return to the town they dropped by the cleric to try to convince her that this is a nice witch so there's no need to do anything, which of course got them on the cleric's bad side.

That escalated since their new MU kept insisting to the magic hating cleric that the witch was a nice person which culminated in the party being given an ultimatum of either the witch dies or the village gets burnt down for heresy since locals are colluding and dealing with the witch.

After that they just up and left the town fearing the church might now come after them.


Out of the sandbox, and beyond

They since have travelled to another smaller village roughly half a week away from from the original sandbox location, a village where people are taken by a wave of interest in writing poetry.

An abandoned church with a weird marble orb of roughly one meter in diameter crashed through the floor of it, the orb growing physically larger the closer one gets to it and when poked with a dagger the blade would effortlessly disappear inside the object.

There too they heaved and hummed around the orb for almost an entire session before leaving it be and going back to the village.

The game is seven sessions in and the only adventure the party has had has been delving through a small series of barrow mounds which had a single monster inside it, a ghoul they slew on their first delve but due to their poor mapping skills they've dedicated another session to continue delving through.

At the very tail end of last session it took me "trapping" the party inside an abandoned stone hut with a single door, onto the inside of which was written "To Ynn by the way of Resting Woods" to get them to finally resign to doing something risky with their lives and try a bit of good ol' adventuring.

And even this is because outside the hut it's a downpour and the only ways out are the door that now leads to Ynn when opened from this side and the few shattered windows.

And even that is a maybe since we had already spent three hours of the session helping out with small tasks in a dingy backwater village surrounded by adventure hooks that nobody would look into or poke at, the only reason they even ran into this hut in the first place was that they wanted to move to a larger city and decided to cut through some forests and open plains rather than spend a month's detour on actual road.

I pray they don't remember the hut has windows they could crawl out through.

Thursday 20 July 2023

Magical Trinkets & Curious Baubles

Inspired by a recent community challenge within the Alexandrian community.
6 of each for your convenience, all of them something that could fit a location or a faction in my ongoing sandbox.

Magical Trinkets 

Spearhead - Copper, Rusted

  • Anything the spearhead can be attached and fastened snugly onto will grow to the perfect length of a spear in relation to it's wielder's height
  • Once unfastened, whatever the spearhead was attached to will rust away

Black Lotus Flower - Delicate, Quick to wither, Addictive

  • Placing a single petal underneath one's tongue will cause their consciousness to slowly drift out of their body and slip into the space between planes
  • Placing two petals underneath one's tongue will make the effect instantaneous
  • Any more petals would kill a mortal man, severing the connection between their consciousness and body irreparably
  • If dried and ground into powder, will instead forcibly pull the consciousnesses of other beings into one's body which can potentially grant them power comparable to a god for a fleeting moment

Everburning Candle - Otherworldly, Self-sustaining

  • As the wick burns from the top, more appears at the bottom of the candle encased in candle-wax
  • The bottom of the candle gets progressively wider as this "replacement" of wicker takes place (the candle is cone shaped)
  • This can cause candle holders to get encased in wax or things to get crushed under the candle's increasing weight

Yellow Gunpowder - Susceptible to dampness, Exotic, Animalistic smell

  • When burnt will explode as normal, but procures a roar like that of a lion instead of the noise of a tearing explosion
  • Being caught in an explosion of this substance will leave victims mauled as if assaulted by wild beasts

Hog Bristle Brush - Old, Worn, Slightly oily

  • This brush is capable of extracting pigments out of things with it's strokes
  • When dipped into oil the stolen pigment will seep out of the brush and onto the liquid
Wicker Effigy - Small, Fragile, Pagan
  • Grows increasingly warmer as wild beasts or monsters draw close, hot enough to burn a hole through a pocket or sear flesh when within few metres of such beings

Curious Baubles

  • Silver cutlery set, anything eaten with them has a slight metallic aftertaste
  • Stuffed and mounted horse head, always in minisculely different pose than when it was last observed
  • Small coil of spiderweb the thickness of string, and just as easy to handle without breaking
  • Prayer beads that appear always covered in shadows despite any nearby light sources
  • Old misshapen glass bottle, covered in barnacles and filled with seawater
  • Small travel bible sized book with no title, pages inside are covered in rows upon rows of small holes (braille writing)

Picture unrelated, but blogposts without ones are boring.
Composite edit made of public domain assets, by me.