Why am I adventuring? 1d30 reasons not to turn back

 Sometimes you just need that little bit of extra motivation to not turn back from your adventure into the depths of Death Mountain of Doom and Eternal Damnation after things start turning bad, or if you do you should at least have a reason to gear up better and go back there.
After all, adventuring is something that no-one sane and concerned for their well-being would pick up as their means of income, even if the coin from a successful venture might sometimes be enough to significantly improve one's standards of living.

Adventure often times take place in locations where after seeing a bit of the dangers, a lot of sensible and careful people would choose that they've seen enough and turn back. Even in the tower of the stargazer game I'm currently running the party is starting to lean towards that conclusion even without having really found that much worth of loot or anything (their reason for being there, getting hired to bring back arcane artifacts), and that's with them having managed to avoid most of the bad things in that place.

For this kind of situations I present to you a 1d30 table of answers to the question: "Why am I adventuring again?"

Roll, choose, or invent your own reason.

1.  Woke up from a ditch, got told that all those rounds for the entire tavern won't magically pay themselves.
2.  The smith's daughter was snatched away, someone had to stand up and do something about it.
3.  "You know this one place? They say it's full of treasure just laying around and nobody's been there yet."
4.  The village is small and can't feed everyone, you drew the shortest straw.
5.  Sent on a mission by your church. You don't think they really expect you to come back.
6.  A wizard's apprentice. Does he really expect you to go collect that...?
7.  A war has broken out and you've heard the army is marching towards your town. Evacuate while you can.
8.  There was no work to earn a living in your town so you moved. Now nobody trusts any work to the outsider so adventuring it is...
9.  A stranger in a strange land, fled away from your homeland. Now you need an income though...
10.  You were sentenced for hanging but managed to escape with few of the other prisoners. You have no idea where they dispersed to but staying in this place can't be a good idea.
11.  The village has a tradition of offering someone as a sacrifice to their pagan god every spring to ensue plentiful harvest. It was about to be your turn as the sacrifice.
12.  Simple menial work never could hold your attention, so you started to seek for a proper thrill.
13.  Your father paid for the whole expedition, but none of them survived but you. There's no way you can go back home empty handed, he'd have your head...
14.  A mercenary, one of the last surviving members of your company. You were used to ensue a nobleman's escape, but at what cost?
15.  A far-off land is supposed to have medicine that you desperately need, but how will you afford to get it?
16.  She is dead, all you have left is the empty house and bottle of cheap alcohol. Might as well go down in a blaze of glory, eh?
17.  This is what you live for. The excitement, the experiences, the money! Why in the world would people say this is a job for madmen?
18.  You've been hired to collect information on this assortment of eccentric people. No idea why, but the pay is good and all you gotta do is tag along to their misadventures.
19.  The jitters never stop. You're an old veteran who just couldn't settle down. You can't stand this calm any longer.
20.  Young and full of dreams, you've left your village behind. It is time to strike out on your own and carve a name for yourself.
21.  Your home burned down, along with everything you weren't wearing.
22.  You're a criminal condemned to death, but have been promised a pardon if you succeed on your mission.
23.  Remember all those stories about adventurers retiring to live almost like small nobles off of the treasure they've amassed? Betcha anyone can do that if they just try a bit!
24.  You owe a debt, a big one. You're broke after your last payment and need more money for the next one, fast!
25.  Woken up at a battlefield littered with corpses and carrion birds with no memory of who you are and why you were here.
26.  You accepted the request on a whim, but by now it's too late to tell the others that and head back.
27.  The last job of yours was a total disaster. You can afford a room at the local tavern for few night but after that you need a new job or sleeping in the gutter it is.
28.  A relic of your church or something the church wants to lock off is supposed to be held here, stolen or abandoned. The orders weren't exactly clear...
29.  A noble has bought your pardon from crimes you've committed so that you would go delve for exotic artifacts for them.
30.  Your master has disappeared and according to the rumors this place is where they were last seen.

 Some of these are a bit more of straight up adventure prompts or ways to start a campaign for the whole party, but the common factor here is that they should all prompt you to action and give you a reason not to turn back to just safely tilling fields or hauling cargo for a living.

Of Sea and Creation

 "Men fear sea because of things in it that they can't explain and refuse to sail out far from coasts, leaving overland as the only option for travel. The church has taught us that the land was formed by Varchic, the first to climb up from the Pits of our earth and who gave us land to build and live on. There's now an offshoot cult of the church promoting seafaring and venerating the things from the ocean that nobody's been able to explain that has been causing unrest and gathering concern from the conventional church. They speak of Leviathan, a rotting carcass deep in the depths of sea that holds an infinity of secrets and answers.

They must not get to it..."

This madness was given rise at the OSR discord server, and I shall now deliver you excerpts and my interpretation of it. It is a tale of Land and Sea, or Light and Deep as some may call it. A glimpse into the beginnings of the faith of the First Church as well as the longing for the deep by their offshoot believers who would turn towards the sea and forsake the land.

"Those of the deep are never to be seen in the light of the sun, for that is our only blessing as children of Varchic.

Amen, amen."

In the beginning all there was was a sea. A sea and a pit deep into the earth. Out of this pit crawled Varchic, lead up by the light shining from above. As he rose from the pit, Varchic created land amidst the endless sea for his people to stand, live and prosper on. That is the land that is blessed by the light from above. As Varchic grew hungry, he cast his hands deep into the sea and fished up Leviathan. He roasted the great infinite whale over a flame, the embers of which were put into use by his people. When Varchic was sated he cast the corpse of the infinite whale Leviathan back into the sea and laid to rest, his calm breaths giving his people winds and seasons. And thus his people prospered.

This is what the church teaches you and what nearly all of the land's citizens believe. They live their lives fearing the sea for that is where the great infinite whale Leviathan was thrown back and pieces of it's rotting carcass drift endlessly in the sea. As a direct result of this the amount of coastal towns is very low and nobody sails out to the sea. Travel by sea is regarded as something only madmen would attempt, although in the rare coastal towns fishing is still a popular way to provide food for the community.

"The Demon King of the Undersea is not yet dead, though your kind claims to have killed him.

You are not worthy to speak his true name."

Within the church there have long been different views on the story of Varchic. While some see him as the figure to have lead his people to land and given them the tools to forge their prosperity, there have also been interpretations of the great infinite whale Leviathan's role in the myth of creation. Some claim the whale to have been a symbol for infinite wisdom and knowledge which Varchic ate of, thus blessing his people with the knowledge to use what he had provided for them. Another theory suggests that Leviathan's nature as the great infinite whale held within itself everything, even the real beginning of creation from which Varchic is but a mere detached fragment.

Such claims have always been a hot debate within the higher ups of the church but largely gone un-noticed by the masses until recently, when a section of the church broke off claiming they had been called by Leviathan to fix the wrongs of the First Church. They spoke of infinite warmth within the deep, of the Infinite Leviathan who yet lives on within the deep and of Varchirc's vain attempt to tame the infinite sea with his finite land for his finite people. They would strike out to the sea and to the deep to find their rotting lord of the undersea of whom Varchirc had eaten.

"The hero rose from the pits of the earth and gave us land, gave us stability and things to put our faith in. Yet you would so readily refuse the blessings of him and his kin?"

The current state of religion has now become fractured. The new sect of Leviathan is slowly gathering a following, but convincing people out of their beliefs and generations of fear for the sea and the deep takes it's own time. Meanwhile the First Church is hunting down followers of Leviathan, for not only do they disrupt order and cause unrest within the people, the church with it's beliefs is afraid of what might happen should this new offshoot sect manage to find or contact whatever might be left of Leviathan's rotting carcass in the deep, or worse yet if the great infinite whale does in fact still live.

"Seek thee not the warm blanket of the Ocean and the Deep, where all things are peaceful? Peaceful until Varchic came, indeed."

"You come here, speak such things about the very blessings by which's grace you've lived your good life and turn down your God. There truly must be no place than the Deep that would even take you in no more."

"I am no child of Land, my place is in the Deep!"

"Then you have forfeited your humanity and become something lesser."

"No! I have become far greater than I was before!"

Thoughts about starting a campaign

 Often do I think about this, especially whenever I see someone having a cool idea that I wanna steal and run a game with or even on the rare occasion that that cool idea comes from my own head.
Then I start to think about getting players or finding/hacking a system that would support the idea...
And then I give up.

Actually starting a campaign would also be a great reason to do more world building, but that would require a campaign that keeps moving forwards and giving me ideas for things to put into that world.
I'm not a fan of writing the world first and then dropping the players in it, I'd much rather drop the players in an introduction adventure or some module I have laying around and then start building from there based on what I feel would be in the world that this adventure has started to take place in.
Pre-writing stuff for a world with no players in it yet just feels dirty to me. If I pre-write in religion, what if the cleric player had a different idea for what kind of cleric of what kind of faith they wanted to be for example?

Systems-wise I'm still test-driving Lamentations, hopefully getting to see how it'll preform with the players in a bit more abstracted and less hostile environment this upcoming monday as I'll get to run my oneshot that I've been writing.
Been collecting some homebrew adjustments for it that I also would want to test or just throw at players at session zero and tell them to flip through all of them (or probably just go over each one quickly) and ask which ones they would like to include.

The issue with getting a campaign together though is that even in the Tower of the Stargazer game I'm running we've already had to skip three game nights in a row and there are people who are voicing concerns about the system. The system concerns are part of the fact that none of us has really played OSR stuff before, all of us coming from 5e, but I also feel like a lot of the people in my friends circle aren't looking for the same kind of gritty experience of not being the hero in the story but instead a person who might become the hero.

One day I'll do the brave and ask somewhere more public than just a discord server full of friends, but we shall see.

Cannibal Children and why I think humans make great monsters too

I started writing this with the idea of having a quick showcase of how I feel like tying humans to adventure scenarios and using humans instead of generic fantasy monsters fleshes out and gives the adventures more flavour as well as amps up the creepy-factor but at this point I'm not sure whether or not this is just ramblings of some edgy grim-fantasy fan drawing pentagrams in a corner of the room while screeching incessantly, but here we go.

In my preparations of learning how to play the part of a referee I've gone through all sorts texts and youtube videos and have picked up on one or two tricks that I wish to get to try and play around with at the table, but this one idea I've really taken a liking to, which is to "keep things grounded".  Why use monsters for your scenarios if humans would work just as well if not even better? When you tell players that goblins have kidnapped the daughter of the village blacksmith the players will immediately know roughly what to expect out of the creatures, same as when orcs or trolls or hill giants are razing towns near the mountainside which has been why there have been so many refugees coming to the close by cities. 

Of course I'm not saying you can't do interesting things with such scenarios but hear me out here, what if instead of goblins having taking the blacksmith's daughter it was a band of children covered in mud and dirt and wrapped in hides?

You could essentially run this band of feral children just as you would your goblins but now you also have your players second-guessing what might happen when they find wherever the missing girl has been taken. Who are these children? What are they doing? Where and how have they been living and are there adults with them? Maybe this is a band of children gone feral that now live with wolves and have stolen the girl as food for their wolf-mother, or perhaps a long time ago some children had enough of adults telling them what to do and disappeared from the village deep into the forest and hid there living off of the land. Other children playing in the forest would occasionally join their "tribe" and that's how they've gradually grown more and more feral while still remembering the hatred the first kids of the tribe had for grown ups.
And if you really wanted to throw a curveball at your players, see how they react when they learn that this tribe of feral children is cannibalistic and when the kids grow too old and start to become too much like adults they willingly offer themselves as sacrifice for the rest of the tribe as this is just how much they've learned to hate grown ups, which is why they now keep snatching children from passing groups of travelers and even from just outside the local town since the numbers of their tribe are dwindling as children no longer come to play in the forest as often as they used to. These children probably have some sort of fruits, plants or other source of either addicting or hallucinogenic substance that makes the new children they snatch into their tribe to join in more willingly after being subjected to them for long enough time.
See, we've now got a whole tribe of little murder-children hiding deep inside a forest that the players will not be anywhere as sure how to handle as they would be with goblins. Not only are they likely unique to this location but they got some backstory too just from thinking a bit about why they are there, although just like with the goblins that would not have been necessary if you just wanted feral knee-shanking little-people running around in a cave.
Just like that. Band of marauding orcs? Band of thugs, bandits, deserters or escaped convicts. Zombies? A bit more case-by-case but why not try thugs so high on drugs and/or other substances that they're not feeling the pain. Going up on the list towards things like griffins, dragons, beholders and such are obviously something where this trick stops being feasible to pull of, but the idea in the first place is to use monsters just a bit more sparingly. Sure there might still be goblins and orcs and zombies out in the world but especially when first starting off I would be more inclined to not immediately shower players in them and only start to introduce them gradually as the party gets more experienced, searches more dangerous places and overall establishes themselves above just common travelers.

To get to the part about why I personally think using humans instead of run-of-the-mill and expected monsters to be more evocative and horrifying is that you as a player expect the goblins to be capable of horrible deeds such as kidnapping and eating humans but when it's other humans that are just slightly off from what you would expect them to be, that's where the nagging feeling of "okay this is not right" starts to set in and things might start giving you the chills. Also, now you're facing the moral dilemma of "these are other humans as well" and maybe even wondering how they came to be like this.
This of course can backfire, especially with the goblin example since it's using children, so it'll be good to discuss things with your players before dropping them into your game on what they are comfortable with being depicted (there's a reason I will never take part even in a game set on the high seas, and neither will I ever put my players in a situation where I'll have to use too much imagination describing them at sea), but still even with using monsters it might not be a bad idea to remind them from time to time that they're using sharp and/or blunt objects to inflict major bodily trauma on whatever they're fighting with.

Anyways, I hope that wasn't too rambly or besides the point that I was hoping to make. I am now thinking that I should just make the feral child tribe into a post of their own and elaborate on it even further but I've already written all of this down and just tossing it away at this point felt like a waste so hopefully you got atleast something out of this.

Tale of Mermaid and thoughts on pacing

 This will likely be my longest post for a while since I only really have one more idea left to share from my old world building notes, but this isn't the post for that.

As I had mentioned in my first post I recently had had the pleasure of starting a run of Tower of the Stargazer for few friends of mine, the game in question being the first time for me stepping behind the GM screen as well as first time for the players stepping into something as dangerous as this where not everything is designed for the PCs to be able to overcome. Not head on at the very least.
Now I'm not a completely heartless person and had thus warned my players that death would be a very real possibility in this game, which was also why I made everyone roll their own parties of three adventurers out of which I would let max two into the tower at a time per player. I do think I got the point across pretty well since good 30 minutes of the first session was spend on getting up to the tower and carefully examining the front door.
To cut a long story short (and maybe tell it in full some other time) I had expected to be able to run this as a oneshot but it quickly became apparent that this adventure would stretch for atleast four sessions with this pacing, and after the second session one of the players did say that while she was very intrigued by the things they were finding the pace was very much a crawl as others wanted to double and triple check every single room and door before carefully proceeding forwards. Not necessarily a bad thing per se as long as people are enjoying themselves, just some mismatch on preferences between players, but definitely something that I am looking to address in the next game I'll run, which will be an attempt at writing an actual oneshot to be played in one session now that I have an idea of how atleast these particular players handle delving into unfamiliar places in an assumedly deadly setting. The hope here is that since they'll not be inside a dungeon for the oneshot but in a town that is much more abstracted place with no grid map to fall back to they're A) in a more familiar environment and not on constant lookout for traps and hijinks and B) not as concerned about where exactly they're standing in relation to their environment and the exact pathing they're taking to reach parts of the town.

Something in her ear - an encounter in the current Tower of the Stargazer game

And that finally leads us to the meat of this post, the aforementioned oneshot that I've been working on and that's been given the working title of Tale of Mermaids.
The base idea for this adventure I've ripped pretty much straight from the Macabre Memoir of Morbid Mermaids mystery in World of Horror (neat game btw, check it out if you like things like Junji Ito and roguelikes) and adapted it to a fantasy world to the best of my abilities.
The oneshot is heavily based on a rather simple investigation as a local shophand has disappeared and the sailor she was supposed to be with last night turns up drowned. After asking around a little as well as hopefully picking up on a lead given to the PCs before the aforementioned events they should be headed to a somewhat remote fishing hut outside the town where they'll find the place to absolutely overpower the fresh sea breeze with stench of rotting fish as well as hear faint chanting from inside. The hut itself will be filled with depictions of all sorts of strange mixes of fish and women, and in the basement they'll find an old sailor hunched over a figure with a crude tail of fish half-sewn onto her and her head resting in a washing basin filled with sea water. Roll initiative! Old sailor grabs a rusty harpoon as the PCs have invaded his home and seen something they shouldn't have.
A simple idea really, with room to play around and for the PCs to first go around the town a little as they ask the locals as well as the sailors who recently arrived in the port for what could possibly have happened and who could possibly have done it. I've been toying with an idea to throw in some thugs or corrupt guards that'll try to rough up the PCs as they snoop around as a bit of a "combat tutorial" so that the encounter at the finale of the oneshot would hopefully go more smoothly but am still bit on the fence about this idea as some people have voiced concerns that it might give the wrong kind of signals to the players as to what they're expected to do.

For a more complete look into the story and notes I have prepared for this oneshot I offer you this: Google Sheets - Tale of Mermaid
Any feedback on the idea, delivery of it or the flow of the investigation is very welcome as I'm still working on a reason to get the PCs properly involved should this ever be ran in a campaign rather than as a oneshot where the players are specifically told "we're doing investigation game tonight, so don't go turning this into a farming simulator".
Other prep I've done for running this is having four pre-statted and geared LotFP character sheets since in Tower of the Stargazer I learned that simply choosing the gear for your character can take a surprising amount of time as well as scouring the internet for some nice art to throw at the players 

Fish people and strange symbols, definitely thematic while not entirely related.
Or are they?

Godsayers - on the subject of extreme worship and prayers

 Here's another one of the few things that I feel might be interesting to lift from the world building that I've done some years ago, it's basically an idea about people who are extremely devoted to their chosen god in a world with multiple deities or have other reasons to give away part of their humanity for divine favor.

Godsayers, living prayers

People have used different forms of prayers as a medium for requesting aid and miracles from their gods since the beginning of religion, and in time these requests have been performed in a variety of ways. Mass prayers, chanting choirs, rituals and different ways of dedicating oneself to your god. Godsayers are one such practice, being individuals who have offered their everything to their deity including their very bodies for them to act through.
Becoming a godsayer  would in essence turn one into a living prayer, your body now belonging to your god instead of you so everything you see, hear, feel or say is directly felt and heard by your god. Depending on the religion this might be done for variety of reasons ranging from ensuring there will always be an oracle of god for people to ask for guidance, to being given as an alternative choice for criminals facing death penalty.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Originally I had designed these godsayers to be a replacement for magic users, being able to talk freely to their god who would almost always be there to listen and thus allow them to perform feats comparable to casting magic. This of course could then have come around to bite the PCs in their backsides if for example the godsayer ever claimed they were lost in wilderness or that it was too dangerous to keep heading forwards as their god might just make those things true.
Looking back at the concept though I nowadays would probably let each religion have maybe one or two godsayers that would be central to the religion, and certainly not as player characters.

Bloodstones and my dislike for health potions

 To preface the ideas I'm about to explain here, I've never really been a fan of the PCs stacking up on health potions in town that they'll then start chucking down when shit hits the fan, especially since my interests lean more towards the grim fantasy side of things akin to such things as Dark Souls or Darkest Dungeon.
Sure it's one way to drain their money and maybe you can't get someone back up if their wounds are too massive and different sorts of OSR games likely have their own ways of making healing potions not trivialize the damage the PCs have taken when they can just uncork a potion at the end of combat and be back in fighting shape, but this here is what I had been toying with some years back while still doing some world building for a setting that's by now long abandoned.

Bloodstones

Small red and dimly glistening objects that are smooth to the touch yet show numerous small edges along their surface, almost like ripples running through them. Some may even have pockets of air or other materials trapped inside them.
Bloodstones as they've been named, or just red stones for some, have been found in sizes varying between ones you could fit on your fingertip to those sizing up to a human head, as well as in different shapes from clumps of all sorts to what has been described as "a small pond or puddle that's frozen solid".
The stones haven't been reliably identified, some claiming them to be an organic living material while others claim them to be nothing but pigmented glass, but that hasn't stopped various craftsmen working this amber-like substance into all sorts of vanity items. There's even records of such stones being used for beautiful mosaic windows when large enough chunks have been found.
For adventurers though, the most notable feature of these stones is how they act when applied to exposed flesh. The stone slowly creeps into the wound and crystallizes, making them an ideal alternative for bandages and other treatments that might take too long to apply while out in the wilderness or deep in a dungeon. Bloodstones can also be found from time to time at sites of violence or death which makes them both a blessing on a long delve as well as a warning for those in the know.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Mechanically speaking bloodstones are what I had in mind for replacing health potions in my games. An excessive use of the stones would leave the adventurer's body riddled with red crystallized clusters, each one marking a use of a "health potion" that the person had taken. Maybe some less reputable individuals would even go after such people in hopes of getting their hands on a stash of them that they could harvest from the body. 
The stones I had intended to work more as "stored up hp" than straight up potion replacements though, you would roll the amount of hp stored in the stone which in turn would give you an idea of it's size. Larger stones equal more stored up hp which could be used either all at once or in smaller segments, but the stone would always attempt to heal you to full hp regardless of it's size. Smart adventurers might even keep small bloodstone shards sewn under their clothes to quickly heal up any wounds taken during a fight.
These stones could be found on or near dead bodies in the wilderness or dungeons, formed from their blood. Only human bodies produced bloodstones upon death, and the formation of them was slow as the blood needed to be left undisturbed as it crystallized so any wild animals or monsters that would use them for food would disturb the process and bloodstones could really be only found where people had been long dead.

Looking back on this idea now and having slightly re-written and refined it here I would probably still allow potions in my worlds, but I'm intrigued by the idea of only allowing them to work as something that would numb you from the pain and thus give you temporary hp, while the bloodstones or proper medical aid, rest and healing magic would be the only options for regaining lost hit points.

Hello World, and other such greetings

 There's first times for everything and the best way to learn how to use things is to prod at them and see what happens, so this is exactly that.

I've recently gotten myself sucked down the OSR rabbithole after looking for something with a less cartoony feeling than the unfortunately few dnd 5e games that I've been taking part in, and managed to find some reviews for Lamentations of the Flame Princess. The system promised things that I was looking for in roleplaying games myself, deadly combat for both sides involved and a world that wouldn't be scaled to the players if they decide to poke their heads into the wrong place.

I thus grew more interested in the whole OSR sub-genre within ttrpgs and have been stumbling my way forwards in this space to the point of recently getting to referee an adventure into Tower of the Stargazer module for few of my friends, whom I'm now following with great interest on their first outing to this type of games.

And with that I've also found myself here after a night of socialising on discord and atleast one person telling me they would be interested to take a peek inside my head. So join me as I prod around and work out how to use this thing, learn to write comprehensible blocks of text, as well as for what ever weirdness will spill out of my head.

So far I've got a oneshot that I've been working on that explores an idea about mermaids, a hack on the LotFP elf class into a warlock-esque one inspired by a blogpost all the way from 2014, as well as some old world building notes from way back that had a few interesting ideas buried into them that I would like to explore.