Apocalypse Then, Sand and Rust

The player characters met in an ancient graveyard occupying the salt flats of a forgotten corner of a fire swept world. Each had a secret they swore they would never share, information about the long lost crypt of a dead sky pirate that once traversed the Rust and Sun Wastes in a ship fueled by the very fire that scorched the planet into the desert it was. None of them trusted each other. How could they?

A party of scavengers arrived on the backs of reptilian birds, two legged with sweet faces and bulging eyes. Weapons were drawn. Obsidian, stone, bone, stinger. Nothing made of metal more complex than copper. Armor made from scavenged hide and insect carapace. The fight ended quickly. No one wanders the wastes unable to care for themselves.

But what would this ragtag band find in the depths of that ancient pirate’s crypt? The usual horrors that the world has to offer. Forgotten technology turned to life by magic. Sand Ghosts trapped in an endless labyrinth of darkness, scratching their way along sandy walls. Light Stalkers blinking in and out of perceivable time, hunting those they know carry the gift of magic. An ancient spirit of the long forgotten feywild, perverted and bound to rusted iron junk in a scrapheap of collected memories from a long dead world. Behind all of it, a secret Vault of hidden elemental power that entices the scavengers of the world with promises of splendor.

Sand and Rust is a unique setting created for Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition. My co-writer and I joked one day while watching Mad Max: Fury Road that a D&D setting in an endless desert with punk elves and desert pirates sounded pretty cool. I’m fan of the Dark Sun setting, had been playing a bit too much Fallout: New Vegas at the time, and had just finished reading the Princes of the Apocalypse module from Wizards of the Coast so my brain was primed to generate a world of this exact quality.

We generated a few idea sentences, some explanation paragraphs, and some cool ideas. I’m going to dump them here for all of you to enjoy and hopefully inspire you to like the Sand and Rust setting. This is one of the two unique settings I will be expanding and creating professionally to make widely available to the world so if you enjoy this definitely head toward Patreon to help this dream come true.

Setting: Post-Apocalyptic, Desert Wasteland. There is no water in sight, just seemingly endless dunes, scrubland, and savannah. People have formed small tribal type villages with lively trade routes, since that is the easiest thing to sustain in a harsh environment. Between these villages, run various sand vessels carrying goods and travelers. Good money can be made by quickly traversing the waste, but the risks are many.

An enclosed wasteland of sand and stone dominated by cities on stilts, high plateaus, cities sunk beneath the earth, and wandering nomads navigating the sand seas on striders, skiffs, and flat-bottomed sand skimmers. Caravans haul vegetables, water, spices, and metal between greenhouse monasteries and skyscraper mines. Elemental magic is at its strongest. Water Shamen are prized in their tribes. Windmages pilot the dangerous, primitive sand skiffs. Those with control of the Earth and Sand have plenty of tools to control and Fire is what scorched the land.

Notable aspects of the Sun Wastes:

Greenhouse Monasteries: Adherents to ancient nature gods and goddesses that no longer walk the earth hide away behind high sandstone walls and beneath great domes of glass. Their greenhouses produce the most food and they guard their secrets of production jealously. Templars, crusaders, and knights defend the monks and clerics that work the greenhouses. Villages and trading hubs tend to grow around the Greenhouses. Smaller greenhouses are secreted away in mountain retreats. The leaders of the Greenhouses are called Elders.

Skyscraper mines: Before fire scorched the earth and sand came to cover the land there were buildings tall enough to scrape the sky. Then the earth swallowed and buried them along with the temples, castles, and other great wonders. The tallest of these Skyscrapers sometimes poke out from the sand. Daring individuals run mining operations to dive deep into these towers to locate metal, paper, clothing, and any relics or artifacts they can pull out of the past.

Culture: People have adapted the customs of the once isolated desert cultures to survive in this new world. Resources are scarce, causing many people to take up nomadic lifestyles. Herding has gained popularity, so most things are made of cloth and bone rather than wood and metal.

Villages: Most villages are built up out of the sand on platforms or in cliff sides to ensure that the shifting sands won’t bury them overnight. Others are underground, accessible only by a few poorly mapped access hatches.

Wind Cities: The very largest cities are found atop high plateaus, safe from unrelenting sandstorms and the most dangerous predators that stalk the wastes. Wind Cities make use of windmills to pump water up from deep within the earth to sustain large populations. They grow the cheapest of grains to sustain the largest of populations and they almost always have castes of slaves and gladiators to serve and entertain. Some sell themselves just to have a regular drink of water. No two Wind Cities are the same and no two call the same person ruler. Some titles that might be used: Caesar, Empress, Maharaja, Sultana, Prince, Emir, Archon, Pharoah

Pirates!: One of the many risks that traders encounter is piracy. Poorly protected goods are there for the taking, and the pirate’s life is attractive to many of the disenfranchised. Their vessels tend to be the fastest and the best armed, and the lack of law enforcement in the waste means there is little risk and much potential reward. Other crews ignore the traders and focus on bigger, more dangerous scores. The remnants of civilization live under the sands, if only one is brave enough to go get them. Turning to piracy is a powerful decision in the Sun Wastes. Caravans can opt for speed or security. Rarely both. Secure caravans are slow targets. A good pirate can stalk one for days, perhaps a full week, planning how to deal with siege weapons and hired guards. Fast caravans can’t hire too much security or they’ll cover cross the wastes in time. Enterprising pirates with a fast skiff might be able to take out an unprotected caravan if they’re lucky. Plenty of pirate crews roam the wastes and when they return to their secret caves laden with vegetables and metal they live like kings.

Elemental Cairns: Many magical individuals saw the apocalypse coming. They hoped to escape the effects of unbridled elemental turmoil. The 99 Elemental Cairns were created by 99 enterprising wizards and sorceresses working together to save knowledge. Each experimented to create the perfect Cairn that would preserve their power, knowledge, and lives past the destruction of the world. Some succeeded. Some failed spectacularly. Some preserved the wrong things.

Inspiration: Mad Max, the Bazhir from Song of the Lioness, the sandbending culture in Avatar, also pirates. Fallout. Dark Sun. Apocalyptic Fiction such as Alas Babylon.

Inspiration concepts:

Elf Raiders riding constructs of metal and rust powered by twisted fey spirits (motorcycle raiders)

Goliath Pit Fighters using giant shards of steel as swords, axes with obsidian heads, and maces made from giant bones.

Gunslinger half-orcs serving justice when the law is shown to be corrupt

Tribal cannibals stealing gnome inventors to keep their water pumps working

Dwarven excavators delving deep into the lower levels of a sand submerged skyscraper searching for power crystals, salvageable gold, tempered glass, metal wire, etc.

Genasi shamen braving the deep desert on skiffs made of scrap metal and precious wood, held together and brought to life by the captured, tortured soul of an elemental.

A cleric hurrying to hide an intact book before the attacking hordes of sand ghosts can strike.

Sorcerers in desert robes trying desperately to fend off a fire tornado that threatens their cliffside hovels.

Aarakocra darting in and out of battle in their canyon home to keep a giant from drinking up their oasis.

Fire scorched corpses rising on the side of a desert road to ambush a caravan of elemental rigs.

Makeshift airship pilots hauling miners up to harvest lightning and water from the atmosphere.

Falconers using their trained birds to hunt meaty insects in dusty badlands.

Druids preserving small plants in glass jars tied to their belts and hanging from their necks.

Halfling salvagers selling scrap with junkyard golems serving as their muscle.

Elemental monks with hydroponic monasteries, using their control of the elements to grow plants super-efficiently.

Common Items: Leather, Bone, Sandstone, Glass, Wool, Chitin,

Uncommon: Plants (Most kinds used for dye or medicine), Feathers, Furs

Rare: Metal, Certain Plants, Paper, Gems

Nearly Non-Existent: Certain Metals or Large Quantities of a Metal, Wood, Complete Books

Blade materials: Sharpened Bone, Obsidian Shards,

Arrow materials: Cactus Thorns, Bird Talons, Insect Stingers

Armor materials: Insect Carapace, Spider Silk, Boneplate, Hornmail

Solar Fever: I’ve seen madmen wander the sands with only the skin on their backs. Their shoulders crack from the strain. Their skin blackens and bubbles. Solar Fever at its worst. The tribals sometimes take in these sun pilgrims but most will die and become the Sand Ghosts that haunt the wasteland. The lucky ones will never rise to plague the living again.

Soulburn: We stayed in the ruins too long. Elemental fire permeated the metal, the dust, the rotted wood. Burned gods we breathed the damn stuff in even with our filters on. It hurts so bad to cough but every time I try to breathe I am wracked with them. I’m going to die soon, well before my comrades. Stay away from that cursed place. The ancient cults must have ushered fire into the world there. Burned gods let me die

Remember to pledge a little bit of support if you like the blog! Thank you everybody!

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Games of Skill and Chance II: Towers

Do you find Checkers too limiting?  Does Chess have too many different pieces and rules to memorize?  Were you too poor to afford Tak on Kickstarter?  Have you heard of Go?  How about Arimaa?  Welcome to a new abstract strategy game that might be just for you!  (All of those other games are fun too and you should go learn about them.  Later.  You're here now.)

Our first new game, Hobbits, was a game entirely of chance.  Today we present a game entirely of skill: Towers.   The idea was invented by farmane to pair with the world that goes with his Real 8 gaming system, and it is a lot of fun while being pretty simple.  Towers is still somewhat in progress, so please give us feedback if you sit down and play!

Towers

Towers is played on an 8 by 8 grid of squares.  There are games played on other things, we promise.  Chessboards are just so easy to find.

Each player needs 8 chess rooks of opposite colors.  What?  You don't have that many chess rooks?  We'll wait.  Or just get a buttload of coins or Tak pieces.  You just need to be able to flip them over or tilt them sideways.

Phase 1: Players alternate placing their towers on the board until all towers are placed.  No, it doesn't matter which color goes first.  You can't pass and you have to place all 8 towers.  Think of this phase as sending out a bunch of surveyors to avoid building your towers in swampland.  Below is a picture of what the board (made out of an old wine barrel by our grandpa!) might look like after all the towers are first placed.

Phase 2: Now players alternate moving towers, starting with the player who placed second.  Towers move like rooks in chess: forward/backward or left/right in a straight line, no diagonals and no moving through other pieces.  After you move a tower, flip it over (or tip it on its side, whatever).  The tower is now built and you can't move it again, cause that's how buildings work.  Again, passing is not allowed, and you have to move all your towers by the end (unless you're the kind of doofus who lets your opponent pin one of your towers, in which case you get laughed at by the rest of the Internet).  Below is a picture of the board from above after each player has made two moves; the moves are highlighted with adorable arrows!

Phase 3: There is no phase 3, the game is over.  You get points whenever there is an unobstructed line of sight between two towers of your color.  Again, diagonals don't count--what are we, clergymen?  You get one point for each empty square between every such pair of your towers.  If there are any towers in the way you get nothing.  What good are towers that can't signal to each other?  You were dumb for building those towers there.  Below is a picture of the final position of the board from above, with more adorable lines to show points.

Whoever has the most points is the winner.  Huh, I really wrote that sentence.  You really read that sentence.

You are now a master of Towers!  Play again, switching who goes first, then add up your margins of victory to determine the true winner.  Still not bored?  Just keep playing, what else are you going to do, get a job?  Or, like my brother, you could be supported by generous donations from viewers like you: Farmane's Patreon.

Real 8: Bioforge and Willpower Month

After hiking through a snow swept winterscape of pine and birch trees our beleaguered, lazy college physique sporting party of extra dimensional wanderers spies a plume of smoke rising from the forest to the west. Keane is ready to spring into action, always eager to save those in danger in real life as well as in his teleported alter-self. Sam, his girlfriend, is not having it. He can’t go risk himself like that he could die. Keane runs off anyway, accompanied by Billy, Scott, and Ashley. Will, Sam, Liz, Jacob, and Annika stay on the path because Will got saddled with a severe penalty to long distance travel. And short distance travel. And all travel. Asthma’s a bitch.

The party of four comes upon a woodcutter’s house ablaze! Coughing from inside reveals a man trapped beneath a fallen support beam. Keane’s not supposed to do anything dangerous. Billy either. Scott is sensible. Ashley is there for moral support. So what do they do?

Of course Billy and Keane run into the building. Where did you think this was going? Keane hefts the beam up with an incredible Strength roll. Billy hauls the trapped woodcutter, Carver, out into the snow while Keane catches up. They cough up huge lungfuls of smoke and watch the small cabin smolder and turn to ash. Keane’s gonna be in so much trouble when Sam finds out …

This is all inside a game, remember that. The real life player was upset at her real life boyfriend for risking his in game self to rescue a woodcutter. Some people would mock a person for doing that. I wanted to reward it.

The thing that made us all really interested in devoting portions of our time and lives to this Real 8 experiment was the idea of playing ourselves and getting to explore a unique fantasy world while our actual, real life skills would guide us and give us the tools needed to continue ever onward.

I gotta tell you, folks, people got into it. People forgot that they were playing a game as soon as their lives were on the line. Not on the line for reals. On the line for fakes.

In the entire six month span of playing Real 8 we got into exactly 1 fight. We avoided fights, we provoked armored guards into taking a fight for us, and we intimidated bandits through clever use of archery and in-world lore that we had picked up. We did not want to fight. We did not want to die.

This all ties into the rule system that my friend and player Keane helped devise for the Real 8 setting. He called it Bioforge. Basically, we would analyze our abilities out of game and use them to generate the statistics we would need to figure things out.

Let me explain the system a bit further.

There are 8 Ability scores in Real 8:

Strength (how hard I hit and how much I can carry)

Dexterity (how skilled I am with my hands and with small scale tasks)

Agility (how skilled I am with my body *wink* and large scale tasks)

Constitution (how much physical energy I have and how much can I resist attacks)

Intelligence (how much I know and how easy it is for me to process new information)

Wisdom (how much I perceive and can infer from prior knowledge and my surroundings)

Charisma (how strong my personality is and how it affects others)

Willpower (how much mental energy I have and how much can I resist mental attacks)

These scores are on a range from 1-20. If your score is 1 you are the least possibly skilled in this ability. You aren’t dead but you’re not going to ever win any awards or impress anyone. If your score is 5 you are an average human being. It is expected that most people would have this score. If your score is 10 you are an exceptional human being that must put a lot of time and effort into this ability, to the point that you are at a peak in regards to this ability.

The range of 11-20 was reserved for monsters, mutated creatures, and any creature that had been altered by alchemy or magic. No person was ever supposed to be able to reach those scores without help from magical means. Let me give you a real life example:

A bodybuilder that does everything right, eats the correct mixture of macros to get their protein intake perfect, exercises daily and does a beautiful job targeting muscle groups, should have a 10 in Strength. A bodybuilder that does Steroids should be able to get higher than this. A bodybuilder that has a wizard work on their muscles daily to cause safe growth should get pretty dang close to a 20.

But we’re regular humans that don’t take steroids and, before entering the world of Real 8, didn’t have magic. Most of us were pretty sedentary. So we all knew our ability scores would be somewhere in the range of 3-8. We just needed a way to test this.

So we devised a series of tests. I’m going to go in-depth on 1 of the tests but I’ll explain them all.

Strength: We wanted to figure out how much weight a person could lift and carry for a period of time but we never had a chance to test this so we all just did Maximum numbers of the following exercises and Keane did some math for us to get good numbers: Squats, Sit-ups, Push-ups, Pull-ups. We did our best to estimate numbers. We weren’t perfect. Stop judging us!

Dexterity: I was really pleased with the test I designed for this one. I was going to fill a bowl with various sized beads, around 50, and your task was to use a pair of pliers to move the 50 beads to a nearby bowl. Then, once the beads had been transferred, you would switch hands and move them back. Both of these would be timed, giving you a clear indication of how dextrous your two hands were. We never got to do it! But I totally still want to do it.

Agility: Timed obstacle course. Never happened. We did visit one of those Trampoline centers where you can bounce around and they had a trampoline obstacle course that we all ran. We mostly learned that we all get tired really easily and are out of shape. We also learned that foam pits suck.

Constitution: We actually did this test! But we got bad data from it. We played the same track of Mario Kart sober, slightly tipsy, and drunk and recorded our times and how much alcohol we consumed to see how the alcohol affected our systems. We all got better at Mario Kart the drunker we got. So … bad data. Should have gone with the tear gas option one of my military buddies suggested. Would have worked so much better.

Intelligence: I was going to write a multiple choice test based on a 20 page packet of world information the party would have gotten while spending time at the big magical University we wound up at. The players would have had a week to prepare for the test. I never wrote the packet. Nobody bugged me about it. It just fell apart. We all agreed to take the average score for intelligence because we didn’t want to fight about it anymore.

Wisdom: I’m very proud of this test. My co-writer on this blog used to work at the local game store so we had access to it overnight. I chose 8 large landmark type items in the store and told everyone to memorize their locations. Then, one at a time, a person would be blindfolded, spun around in the middle of the store, and told to touch one of those items. The idea was to test our ability to perceive our environment and remember the locations of objects. It worked pretty good! We got good data!

Charisma: Our group had the largest fight over this score. I wanted everyone to make a prepared speech that would be judged by three other party members and then make up an impromptu speech on the spot after being given a topic. Everyone was … on board but not enthusiastic. Never got scheduled. Never got done. Life happened.

Willpower: This test not only happened but gave us the best data, in my humble opinion. We decided to really test our Willpower by doing it over the course of a month. Last August, every member of the group agreed to give up Recreational Internet use and Videogames. This means no streaming services, no Tumblr or Reddit, no Facebook, nothing that required an internet connection and was fun. We could still check email and if our work required it we could use the internet but for one month we had to record every infraction. It worked amazingly! A lot of us kicked some addictive habits, some of us got crazy productive with projects, some of us even got healthier. It was nuts. We definitely hated it a bit but it was good for us in the long run. Some notable things that happened:

Scott: Scott’s fiance wasn’t involved in our Willpower month so he broke constantly to play video games with her. We didn’t judge him for that. He just got a low Willpower score.

Keane: Didn’t break at all. Zero infractions. Amazing.

Billy: Most major infraction was that Google Chrome dinosaur game where your internet isn’t working and you jump over cactuses. He forgot it was Willpower month and played for a full minute.

At the end of all of our science and dedication we really only had good data on 2 scores, bad data on a couple scores, and 0 data on most scores. We self-assessed and ran with it to get the game moving and that turned out to be for the best. We just needed to play and get out of our heads about how much science should be involved in making a game fun.

So if you are reading this and are interested in game design and game creation then I hope you take this lesson to heart. If you have dedicated friends that are willing to help you, cut them some slack after they willingly give up internet and video games for an entire month to help your tabletop gaming experiment.

Remember to pledge a little bit of support if you like the blog! Thank you everybody!

https://www.patreon.com/Farmane?alert=2

Game of Tones

Our party of wayward, island hopping swashbucklers has arrived at the city and island of Severanthor. After week long voyage they wish to know the interesting sights and sounds of the island. But before they can hear about the wonders they spot trouble on the coastline! Kua-Toa slavers are dragging people out of the docks, wrapping them in rope, and taking them back to the sea.

They load into their small sailboat and thanks to a bit of wind magic are hurtling toward the shore at breakneck speeds. The hull hits the shallow sands and the party’s orc flies off toward the Kua-Toa for dramatic, acrobatic action!

They fight off the Kua-Toa and save the people. Heroes are rewarded a small purse of gold and the people return to their lives as though nothing had happened. Then I get the chance to tell them about Severanthor.

A city of seven temples, built in a spoke-wheel fashion with one temple in the center and the other six on the outer edges. Elven terrorists are being hunted throughout the city by Dragonborn special forces. There are rumors of a powerful lich living in the city.

The party is amazed! What a rich and vibrant place. Thank goodness they think so. I made all of that up while they were fighting the Kua-Toas.

I am very much an improvisational Dungeon Master and I learned that I preferred that style of gameplay after my first campaign. Like many foolish youths in college I believed that my ideas and stories were perfect and that everyone was blessed to have a chance to hear them play out. I realized, fairly quickly, that unless I was writing a 14-book series about dark fighting light that I was wrong.

I suffered from railroading issues. Driving the players from event to event, city to city, encounter to encounter, without really giving them a chance to choice. I gave them the illusion of choice, sure, but nothing ever substantial.

My second successful campaign was a healthy mix. I made it clear to the party that they were being sent on missions for a faction they belonged to and that those missions had a goal but they were free to choose what to do and how to do it within that context. It led to some of the most amazing gaming sessions I have ever experienced. Most of them have already been recounted on this very blog.

My third successful campaign was player driven. I sat down with only the knowledge of the world in my head. We made characters and through that I realized a good place to drop them would be a gangster controlled island where slavery was prominent. They rose up and freed slaves, took advantage of foolish tavern patrons to acquire a ship, and headed for the high seas to find adventure and plunder. I did zero planning between sessions. I made everything up as it happened.

The city of Severanthor, a place they came to love and explore, was created because of a few rolls on the city creator in the Dungeon Master’s Guide for 5th edition. They had a few intense sessions there, some battles with elven barbarians, and left for the promise of treasure elsewhere.

Improvising that much turned out to be kind of stressful, though. I started to get worried that I wouldn’t be able to come up with new and interesting things on the spot. I needed a solution to this problem and it presented itself when the co-author of this blog and I remembered that we like dragons.

The title of this blog entry is about to make sense, I promise.

Work gets in the way of creative enterprise. Whether you’re teaching students history they don’t care about or answering phones and fixing the problems of people who actually do have access to Google to search their own shit, work keeps creativity from being expressed and expanded on easily.

My co-author and I accidently started playing writing games via text message (Game of Tones!) while at work. Through the wonders of a list I am going to introduce you to those writing games!

• Dragon Creator: Make some strange, garbled syllables. Type them out. Fix some of the vowels and the flow so that it looks like a reasonable dragon name. Like Vixrathes or Casrothrang. Got a good dragon name? Awesome. Choose a descriptive word, location, item it hoards, or whatever. Vixrathes, Playing Cards. Casrothrang, Deep Forest Cave. Here’s an example one:
• Authzavan is a trickster dragon, often taking the form of an ancient old elf woman. In this form, she sells magic monkey paw candles at markets that cause mischief, disappearing as soon as the market closes. She does, however, actually possess real useful magical candles and if you venture to her hut deep in her swamp island, you can barter with her. (I'm totally picturing old crotchety Toph)
• Dungeon Creator: Give your writing friend a location for your dungeon and a kind of dungeon that they need to write about. Like an Underground Lost City. Or a Jungle Temple. Then they have to provide you with a description of the dungeon, the main boss, and a weird feature. You won’t be able to run the dungeon in the next hour but you’ll have a good enough idea that you could make it a full fledged one in the future. Here’s an example:
• Description: at the base of the world's tallest mountain pilgrims meet to attempt a dangerous climb up the mountain slopes. A stairway was carved there eons ago but no one knows by whom. Most pilgrims make it to the first landing of the steps before ominous warnings turn them back. Climbers are constantly assaulted by snow storms, ice elementals, and the reanimated bodies of those who have died on the slopes.
  Main boss: at the top of the stairs is a humble temple where an abandoned Angel has waited for someone to challenge them for a relic that allows the bearer to speak to the gods. The angel is joined by a series of angelic hounds.
  Halfway up the mountain magic will create a physical representative of every persons worst fear to make them turn back.
  Weird feature: a Pilgrim that nearly made the journey but was driven mad stalks the stairway, hunting pilgrims it deems strong enough to make it to the top.
• Set Piece Generator: This one started as an item creation game but evolved to include locations and NPCs. You provide your writing friend with the basic description of an object and they have to come up with why it looks the way it does and how it is a magical item or a part of a D&D style world. Same with people or locations. I’m gonna give you two examples:
• Your set piece: a cursed dagger with a vine motif handle that wraps around the user's wrist and will continue to grow up the arm. The dagger is a relic of an ancient tribe or forest people who were slowly being wiped out by a werewolf curse. Their greatest sorcerer created the knife to protect the user from the curse but it came with a curse of its own, driving the user to become one with the forest. The curse can be fought but eventually the bearer will be driven to return the dagger to the final Glade of the forest people where it was found. At that point they will realize that all the nearby trees are actually the former dagger bearers who have become entombed in vines forever. The dagger itself is powerful, dealing double damage to lycanthropes. It can be thrown and returned because it is attached to the vines that have rooted into the bearers arm. The longer the dagger is held the more benefits given. Natural armor, resistance to poison, and eventually healing through sunlight. But it is a death sentence no one has lifted yet. The dagger is found by the party in the depths of a dungeon where its last user was liked before it could take him back to the forest.
• Your set piece: an antique Bell from a sailing ship that emits the most alluring sound when rung. Some would say too alluring. Decorated along the bell are waves and shoals and cliffs with just the hint of something hiding among them. The captain of the ship was a lovely selkie and the gift was given to her by her family to both remind her of her home (hoping to convince her to come back home) and give her safe passage around unfriendly sea beasts with its calming tones. It was so effective that many captains hired the selkie to guide their ships through the most dangerous areas of the sea. But this angered the sirens of the rocky cliffs who fed on the crashed ships. They began a struggle against the sailors and the selkie captain, fighting the charm magic of the bell and capturing the selkie. The bell had not just been charming the sirens though. A sea lich, long living beneath the waves, had been soothed by the bell as well. He rose up from the sea and used his magic to save the selkie, binding the leader of the sirens to the bell. The selkie returned home, giving the bell which now rang on its own with a more sinister sound to the lich. It has a stronger pull, allowing the holder to draw in and hold in thrall creatures of the sea.

We have another game that is simply for creating materials and resources for the Japanese Tabletop RPG Ryuutama but I would rather save posting about that game until my co-author has revealed how amazing that game is in a post of her own.

In the meantime! Monday means the Patreon should be updated today with new resources. Continuing the theme of Random Generators I will be posting a few tables to help Dungeon Masters create Nemeses for their characters, Friends for their backstories, and Traits to flesh those people out and make them interesting.

Remember to pledge a little bit of support if you like the blog! Thank you everybody!

https://www.patreon.com/Farmane?alert=2

Iron Dungeon Master

The party of mismatched races and adventuring archetypes had traversed the dreaded dungeon of Wrathrone, the Dragon Aspect of the Night. After a dangerous corridor collapse leaves them stranded in the dungeon’s depths they discover the throne room of Wrathrone is largely abandoned. A young girl with cyan skin cries in a cage. A mound of treasure waits for an eager hand to take it. A dragon sized pathway leads behind the throne.

The party’s wizard and druid investigate the strange girl, learning that she is also a dragon and the Aspect of Knowledge, capable of knowing all things. They are hesitant to release her.

Behind them, the bard starts playing a song to calm everyone’s nerves and the rogue starts dipping his hands into the treasure pile. What’s this? The treasure pile is a mimic! Time for action! The party burns the mimic down quickly, It really only got about a turn to act. Why did it back into a corner and whimper? Was it scared? Was it trying to escape? Wait … are we the baddies?!

Phoenix Comic Con can be a real hoot and a half (that’s nearly two full owls worth). Last year I got to stalk Patrick Rothfuss at his many panels and buy some cool artwork and basically waste a weekend doing nothing important in an awesome way. It was great.

This most recent Comic Con was bogged down by security issues, the banishment of lightsaber vendors, and a series of guests that I just couldn’t get excited about (got to shake Timothy Zahn’s hand, though. That was sweeeeeet).

What I did get excited about was the Charity Poker tournament (23rd place!) and the Iron Dungeon Master competition. Today, we will be discussing the latter event.

If you’ve ever seen the Food Network Channel original television drama known as “Chopped” then you understand a group of cooks with tragic backstories are given wild and outrageous ingredients and asked to turn them into various meals for a panel of judges that are able to discern tastes I have never heard of. The ice cream machine is usually broken. Someone usually cuts themselves. Their plating is terrible. Oh no! One of them forgot one of the ingredients. Now they’ll never get the $10,000 prize to appease the ghost of their grandmother that haunts their kitchen until they get a better island and a gas range. Grandma ghost’s are picky about kitchens.

At Comic Con they did a similar style of competition but for Dungeon Masters. Eight of us were corralled together against our better judgment and presented with ingredients we would have to mix into a 4 hour long D&D/Pathfinder adventure to entertain and entice a group of players that were randomly selected for us. I didn’t get to hear anyone else’s tragic backstory but I just really needed to win this year so that my Dungeon and Dragon’s themed food truck, Rolling for Initiative, could get off the ground and I could take my traveling tavern on the road.

The ingredients:

• A picture featuring a beautiful sunlit forest scape. Within the forest there was a mighty tortoise, trudging along. Within the turtle’s shell was a starlit, red veined mountain with a great and mighty dragon surging alongside it.
• A phrase. I don’t remember it exactly but something along the lines of “who are the true villains?”
• An NPC: “The child that knows.”

We got 30 minutes to help players make characters using our preferred system. I had a great group of men and women who were excited to play and had very wide ranging degrees of familiarity with Dungeons and Dragons.

We then got 30 minutes to design our campaign. I decided to drop them in the lair of a mighty Dragon that was also the spiritual embodiment of the Night who had captured and imprisoned the childlike embodiment of Knowledge. In the dungeon the player’s found a turtle statuette that turned out to be the embodiment of the Day, imprisoned by the dragon to maintain his control over the darkness. Darkness had overtaken the land for days and weeks at this point and they were hoping to find a way to cure this problem.

Every conflict or NPC they interacted with was largely neutral or just doing their own thing. The mimic they murdered wanted to be left alone. They didn’t give it a chance to really show that, being a bloodthirsty group of murder hobos like any good Dungeons and Dragons group, but they definitely felt bad after the fact.

The next major conflict they ran into was a room filled with Wrathrone’s dragon eggs. Anytime they got too close to one or touched one it made that egg more likely to hatch. They had a fun time trying to figure out ways to safely cross this room and when the rogue landed face first in an egg they started to figure out that this wasn’t a usual “good vs evil” kind of campaign. The baby dragons had no scales and couldn’t see. They whimpered and whined and were easily hurt. They attacked the group but it was wild and uncontrolled. They wound up healing the baby dragon more than they hurt it.

When they came upon the cultists that worship Wrathrone they learned that they really just enjoyed the beauty of night time. They didn’t despise the day and they knew that the day would have to return at some point. They just wanted the world to see that the night is beautiful and to appreciate it. So the players snuck past them, pretending to be cultists.

When they released an illithid prisoner from an eternal magical cell they didn’t kill it. They just pointed it toward a room of unsuspecting cultists. Morally grey, right?

They added a plot twist in the final hour and half that we had to incorporate: “The players will learn the true cost of friendship.” What am I supposed to do with that right? Force one of them to sacrifice their identity to gain dragon powers and fight a larger dragon? That’s totally what I did it was awesome.

The finale was an intense dragon battle. The dragon child revealed that one of the party members could take on her aspect, becoming the embodiment of Knowledge and gaining a dragon form, while other aspects arrived to help them battle Wrathrone long enough for the turtle statuette to hatch and bring about the new day.

Players got to ride on dragons and use their breath and claws as though they were their own. One player got to turn into a dragon. They fought a creature way, way above their skill set and brought it down. It was rad and climactic and awesome.

I got 2nd place.

Still netted me a butt ton of swag (books, dice, some minis, some more dice, a DM screen, some dice). It is the main reason I’m going back to Comic Con next year and I hope as many of you go out as well. They need players as much as they need DM’s and the players got prizes for creative thinking and being valuable at the table. The co-writer of this blog won MVP at her table and got a dice necklace and a gift certificate. It was pretty sweet.

Here’s what I learned and what I want you to learn from that awesome day.

• Improvisation can lead to some really cool moments: I had a full hour of prep time for this and I had to make up a lot of stuff on the fly. I realized I wasn’t going to make it the full four hours and had to invent a puzzle room on the spot. Seven orbs, each with a strange descriptive term, and one alcove in the wall that an orb could fit into. Each orb was cursed, though, and would do something horrible to a player that touched one. They wound up touching them all and getting cursed in fun ways. My group thought it was one of the best parts of the dungeon. An Orb Room is something I’m going to devote its own article to at some point so look forward to that.
• Playing with new players gives you perspective: I have a very tight knit group of nerds that I play Tabletop Gaming with. For my One-Shot Verse Campaign the same group of 4 people played weekly for a year and a half. I ran a random bunch of players through Hoard of the Dragon Queen at my local game store and had a blast. I had never met the players for my Iron Dungeon Master competition but I had a great time getting to know them and seeing what was important to them. It was a struggle to find ways to incorporate each and every person in the party when I barely knew them. One player had literally never played Dungeons and Dragons before and was just there with her boyfriend. She wound up having the most fun and was the person that sacrificed herself to become a dragon.
• Giving yourself random elements and making a story from them is really, really fun: Creativity is a game, sometimes. My brain loves to come up with cool ideas but it needs catalysts. I need a kick to get my brain turning a puzzle piece over to figure out the rest of the puzzle based on it. My co-writer and I play a series of writing games while working in order to keep ourselves from being bored out of our skulls and to create resources for our various Tabletop Endeavors (yes, this will be an article soon). Taking a random element, like a picture, and making an entire D&D game based on it sounds like a daunting task but it was great inspiration. I encourage any and all creative peoples to give themselves little writing games to help spur their mind into creating.

Iron Dungeon Master was awesome. I wish there were weekly versions of it. Weekend time!

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