Twenty Questions on the Sorrowfell Plains

Barking Alien's campaign tour is a little more deep in the weeds than I tend to get on world-building, but it's still good to review the state of the campaign setting every once in a while. Almost fifteen years ago, I answered Jeff Rients' twenty questions regarding the Sorrowfell Plains. As often happens, information blooms, changes, and evolves over expanded timeframes, so those questions now have different (and hopefully more precise) answers.

1. What is the deal with my cleric's religion?

It's the standard Renn Faire, D&D-style polytheism nonsense. There's a whole pantheon of gods great and small, but people traditionally choose a patron deity (or two) and worship them like household spirits or patron saints. (Although plenty of folks venerate the whole pantheon, as needed.) Individual temples aren't typically networked into organized religions, but they're also not not networked; a cleric of Ioun can pray at any temple of Ioun without risk of defying tradition. That having been said, if a church has a seat of power, it's probably in Scandshar; a pilgrimage is likely in order if you have the time and money.

2. Where can we go to buy standard equipment?

There's bound to be at least one general store in your average city or town. Villages are a little more dicey, and might only have supplies if a merchant caravan passes through. (Or if Old Harold is willing to part with his grandfather's breastplate.) There are some trading posts in the borderlands, but it's best to stock up before your next expedition.

3. Where can we go to get platemail custom fitted for this monster I just befriended?

Scandshar, the major city in the region, is still your best bet. Grimwald, far to the northwest, mostly comprises what hardliners still sometimes call "monstrous humanoids" and so has many armorsmiths who cater to inhuman body plans.

4. Who is the mightiest wizard in the land?

A surprisingly difficult question. Historically, the answer is Archmagus Iandak Voiddrake, Supplicant of the Quaint and Curious Spheres, but he has been unseen so long that it is no longer even clear if he's alive. (Of course, he held so many secrets and so many magical contingencies that it seems unlikely that he's actually dead.) Ebenezer Cascata Mararnith Jepson, headmaster of the University of the Study of the Arcane Arts and Sciences in Duchy Jepson, is the "safe" answer.

Of course, Baron Adeptus Bezaldooz of the adventuring company known as the Shields of the Sorrowfell might have surpassed the Headmaster and the old Archmagus. And nobody is entirely certain what to make of recently-seen planar travelers like Barnabus Sleet or Pete Loudly.

5. Who is the greatest warrior in the land?

Also a difficult question. The best answer, assuming he's a real person and not just a legend, is probably Swordsaint Rishi, an immortal devotee of the god Kord who is alleged to be such a skilled swordsman that he is capable of fighting Death itself to a draw, preventing it from claiming him. (If the tales are true, he's been alive for millennia.) The gladiator Thalia the Bloody-Handed is perhaps better known, although with the uncertain future of the gladiator matches in Scandshar, who knows what that means? Although she is not as well known as the previously-listed people, the fey noblewoman Lady Graunwen Dwin'altin is also an incredibly formidable warrior.

Of course, Baron Sergeant-at-Arms Peren and Baron Sergeant-at-Arms Torinn, both of the Shields of the Sorrowfell, might be more accurate choices. Some also claim that recently-seen planar traveler Malice A'forethought fits the bill. Still others wonder at the bloody swathe carved by the escaped gladiators of the Scandshar Six, especially Nobody or Southie.

6. Who is the richest person in the land?

Until recently, the answer was probably one of the lords of the crime syndicate known as the Illustrious Menagerie of Peacocks — most likely Lady Victoria Loveless MacBeth, also known as Lord Key. However, with the collapse of their operations and the death of their leadership, the answer is probably someone with access to government treasuries: Duchess Sophia Taika Jepson, Governor Svetlana Zupan, or similar. It could also be a merchant or a noble whose intrigues lead them to avoid disclosing their true wealth.

Of course, groups like the Shields of the Sorrowfell and Those Who Remember have been pulling treasure out of the depths of the earth, so it's possible the actual answer is one of those nouveau riche adventuring companies.

7. Where can we go to get some magical healing? 

Several villages have a faithful priest or a village witch who can aid you, but if you want The Good Stuff™, a major temple in a city or town is your best bet. Expect to "donate" or pay, of course.

8. Where can we go to get cures for the following conditions: poison, disease, curse, level drain, lycanthropy, polymorph, alignment change, death, undeath?

As above. Some of those are easier to heal than others, so the village witch might be able to help you with a minor poisoning, while you might need a priest of great faith in a major population center to heal some curses. Some of these things are beyond the ken of most established religions, even in major population centers like Scandshar.

There is a recent tale that if you can find the lost city of Argent, Valna of the Shields of the Sorrowfell resides there and can heal any ailment.

9. Is there a magic guild my MU belongs to or that I can join in order to get more spells?

The University of the Study of the Arcane Arts and Sciences in Duchy Jepson is the appropriate answer, although critics say that it's just a "wizard mill" designed for rich patrons in Scandshar, so there might be an expectation of service after graduation. Dirthzea'via University in Scandshar and Morgrave University in Sorgforge both have minor magical colleges, but you won't gain much in the way of arcane secrets there.

There are, of course, always rumors of secret societies that may function more like magic guilds. (Maybe skip ahead to Question #17 if you want a more nuanced answer.)

10. Where can I find an alchemist, sage or other expert NPC?

Any of the three aforementioned universities (Dirthzea'via University, Morgrave University, and the University of the Study of the Arcane Arts and Sciences) are good sources, as are most major temples. Of course, specific subjects might require specific sages, which could be very rare indeed. You might have to travel to a remote village or monastery to learn answers to the most obscure questions.

11. Where can I hire mercenaries?

Back before they collapsed, the Illustrious Menagerie of Peacocks was the preeminent mercenary guild in the region. Of course, the economy is bad enough that plenty of folks are looking for work; major cities are more likely to have people with actual martial training, but you can always outfit a crew with your own money and get them experience that way...

Weirdly, there are a handful of reports regarding a Blackearth Mercenary Guild, found primarily in the northern Sorrowfell Plains and the Hoarfrost Ridge. They're all alchemical automata, leftovers from the Cackledread War, and they're soldiers in search of a war to fight. That might not be a terrible place to look if you're trying to build a warband.

12. Is there any place on the map where swords are illegal, magic is outlawed or any other notable hassles from Johnny Law?

The roads are dangerous enough that armed travelers aren't considered all that strange, although they might expect to be questioned if a crime is committed in the vicinity with no obvious culprit. There are some foreign lands where arms and magic are more problematic, however.

It is also an unfortunate truth that the law is more likely to hassle certain sorts of demihumans depending on how rare they are; best not to travel alone if you're from the Deepearth or some similarly exotic place.

13. Which way to the nearest tavern?

It's probably close. If a settlement is too small for a tavern, there's probably a public house. If there's no public house, perhaps the one of the locals will give you a meal and a pint of homebrewed beer in exchange for work or a bit of coin.

Of course, if you want a proper tavern, head to your nearest city or town and go wherever the tourists and merchants hang out.

14. What monsters are terrorizing the countryside sufficiently that if I kill them I will become famous?

Gnolls. Despite the time that has passed between now and the Cackledread War, enough people remember the war that gnolls are still among the most feared creatures around. You could make a career as a professional gnoll hunter, no problem.

Also, there's still technically a sizable bounty on the Scandshar Six even though no one has seen them in months.

15. Are there any wars brewing I could go fight?

Pundits and armchair sages are always running their mouths, saying that the future trouble is coming from the gnollish warbands scattered across the borderlands, as well as the various goblin and orc tribes to the east. Plenty of respected tacticians have made careers saying that the gnoll or orc attack is coming "any day now."

But it's hard to actually see what's happening in the borderlands when you're a philosopher going to aristocratic parties. Here are some spots people should be worried about, but aren't, in order of most threatening to least:

• A couple of traders are sounding the alarm about massing goblin armies to the south. The adventuring company known as Those Who Remember has recovered intelligence referring to a new "Boss" and "Asset" that appear to be driving this rapid militarization, but apart from a few tantalizing glimpses, there is relatively little information on this emerging threat. But rest assured: if not handled soon, it will become a problem for everyone.
• The Blackearth Mercenary Guild isn't well-known and isn't causing trouble, but everyone should probably be a little nervous about a growing group of immortal soldiers with no war to fight. Why are they gathering now, fifty years after the war ended?
• Nainimdul also isn't currently a problem, but this backwater burg features some weird, isolationist elves. If an elf supremacist is going to emerge anywhere, they're going to start in Nainimdul.
• It might not help that faith in a new half-elf deity has started to appear. Religious schisms always make for unstable times.
• Slavery is outlawed in Scandshar, which means that the economy of the Plains and the Sea of Sorrows just reorganized overnight. That is likely to increase tensions among 'Ichi, Nadhi, and the Sorrowfell Plains, which could result in a trade war or even an open naval conflict.
• There are always a bunch of conflicts brewing on the Isle of Anhak to the west. Fortunately, those conflicts don't tend to spread beyond the island, but if you really want to be a professional mercenary right now, board a boat to one of their major port cities. (Just make sure you don't get shipped off to demon-haunted Qelong.)
• There's a rumor that dark elves were organizing warbands of giants in the Hoarfrost Ridge, but the Shields of the Sorrowfell put a stop to it. But they didn't massacre the giants: the Three Corners withstood a siege while the Shields killed the giants' leadership. That means the routed armies are still out there, waiting for some charismatic leader to organize them. That probably won't happen soon, but someone should be thinking about the next couple of human generations...
• Speaking of the dark elves, a lot of Scandshar war hawks want to launch a campaign against the dark elves for their attempted invasion of the surface. The only thing really stopping them is logistics: outfitting armies and building supply lines for an extended foray into the Underworld is a foolish proposition. But if somebody figures that out — or if the right politician can effectively use the drow as scapegoats for enough problems facing Scandshar — then the tacticians are going to start training Scandshar Militia as tunnel-rats.

16. How about gladiatorial arenas complete with hard-won glory and fabulous cash prizes?

All that stuff is in Scandshar. It's not entirely clear how the gladiatorial combat system is going to work now that slavery is outlawed, but that probably just opens the door for gladiators to get a bigger slice of the pie. Lucky for you.

17. Are there any secret societies with sinister agendas I could join and/or fight?

The official word on the street is that the dread conspiracies are shattered. The Illustrious Menagerie of Peacocks was equal parts organized crime syndicate, pyramid scheme, and freaky apocalypse cult, but the group folded and its members scattered when the top brass was all slain over the span of a handful of months. The Broken Chain, a terrorist organization that was also a cult of personality around Morana the Forsaken — yeah, the same "Weeping Morana" from the child's nursery rhyme — likewise collapsed around the same time when a couple of members died and Morana the Forsaken was destroyed. (Uh, I guess she was real, by the way.)

But if you know the secret signs, there are a bunch:

• The Zookeepers/The Children's Crusade/The Sisterhood of the Swan. Not sinister, but they are technically secret societies. Primarily focused on slavery abolition (among other things), it is unclear what will become of them in the coming years. (One expects the Sisterhood of the Swan to keep defending the natural world, while the Children's Crusade will likely become a thieves' guild in the Peacocks' absence. It isn't entirely clear what will become of the Zookeepers, however.)
• The Banite Inquisition. A "secret" cult dedicated to the tyrannical god Bane, positioned at the top of the Scandshar Watch's leadership. (As the air quotes suggest, this isn't common knowledge, but the Banite Inquisition isn't exactly secret, either.) You have to be a guardsman in Scandshar to join.
• The Saraman Voluptuaries. A secret society with ties to organized crime and the literal Hell, they've been trying to position themselves for years to take out the Illustrious Menagerie of Peacocks, even having infiltrated their organization. Now that the Peacocks have fallen, they're in the best position to take advantage of the chaos.
• The Raktamar. Although not native to the Sorrowfell Plains, their plans are far-reaching enough that you might still brush against them. Organized under the ancient vampire known in legend as the Blood Lotus, this cabal of vampires have co-opted Nadhi's state religion for their own purposes, essentially turning the whole continent into their private game preserve. With ties to undeath, infernalism, and Orcus-worship, they maintain fingers in many pies via their relatively ironclad control over Nadhi's government.
• The Bulwark of the Hypostases. This is the cabal of illusionists and enchanters teased a few years ago, and their aims are vast and cosmic: they're altering memories and manipulating geopolitics in the hopes of a total paradigm shift. In the long-term, they hope to bolster the membranes among the planes, finally allowing humans and demihumans to stand on their own two feet without extraplanar entities interfering in their affairs. It's a lofty goal, and it is unclear as to what would happen in the long-term. Would there still be magic? Would demihumans survive?
• This isn't a bad choice for a Magic-User guild from Question #9, if you plan on becoming an Enchanter or Illusionist. And don't mind having bosses with weird agendas.
• The Sodalicium Remegni. A group of vampire wizards, formerly a secret faction embedded in the University of the Study of the Arcane Arts and Sciences but forced to leave for greener pastures. Their current whereabouts are unknown, but since the rumors say they traditionally number thirteen but are down a member, they might be recruiting...
• They have ties to the Raktamar, which should be troubling to absolutely everyone. 
• This might also not be a bad choice if you're looking for a Magic-User guild from Question #9, as long as you're whimsically evil and willing to become a vampire.
• The Disciples of the Barrens. A cult dedicated to the demon lord Oublivae, they seek the downfall of Scandshar as part of their program to dismantle civilization as we understand it. They weren't taken all that seriously until they purged most of the other demon cults in Scandshar over the past year or so.

In addition to the above factions, the noble families of Scandshar and the mercantile families of Sorgforge probably also count as secret societies, given their vast resources and far-ranging schemes.

18. What is there to eat around here?

Culturally, the Sorrowfell Plains are the standard European, Renn Faire-style amusement park you have come to expect, so the food is an anachronistic morass of things that should never share an ecosystem. (Especially since the presence of the Olman suggests that the oldest human cuisine in the area is similar to Aztec or Hispanic food.) Root vegetables, grains, and meat and dairy harvested from livestock form the base of the diet. Beer and clean water are plentiful. Trade with 'Ichi, Anhak, and Nadhi mean that urban centers or trade routes may enjoy exotic dishes, while local customs (such as the corpse cakes of the western Sorrowfell Plains) may prevail in certain spots.

19. Any legendary lost treasures I could be looking for?

A few. Some claim the Crux of Eternity, the weapon forged by the gods to slay the Primordials, has recently reappeared in the Sorrowfell Plains; if true, it is a treasure with powers beyond measure. Its antithesis, the Doom of Divinity, is also a frequent target for Primordial cultists and blasphemers. Other legendary treasures include Cage (a luckblade that imprisons the efreeti Padishah Nurhan Solak, allowing the wielder to utilize his wishes); the Giantbane Hammer of Onyxarm (a standard dwarven thrower but with a legendary backstory rendering it as dwarf Excalibur); the Seeker's Staff (a wizard's staff developed by demonologist Gingor the Seeker and possibly containing his soul); and the snailstones (artifacts from the Temple of the Snail that draw dreamers across time and space to ally with the holder).

20. Where is the nearest dragon or other monster with Type H treasure?

Make no mistake: dragons are here, but they haven't been seen in a long time. Go back a few hundred years and the big news in Scandshar was the reign of terror of Benthosruthsa before he either left the area or went to sleep. More recently, there are a few sightings of younger dragons like Vilustuminen the White (which has since been slain) or Daurgoth the Toxic Foetor (last reported in the Feywalk Woods). A few legends of mature dragons spread, but they are likewise spotty (like sightings of silver and topaz dragons in the Hoarfrost Ridge) or describe dragons that have since been slain (like Urytenurarveia the Bogbeast of the Bogbeast Fens). In theory, Urytenurarveia's sister Silhouette is still at large, although she has not been seen in many years.

But if you want to go after big game, here are a few of the tales occasionally told around campfires:

• Hjertavbeybrannen the Smoldering Ember. Said to have disappeared many centuries ago. This raises the uncomfortable possibility that it is sleeping, and may yet awaken. Interested parties look to the recent schisms in the kobold lair of Okarthelvrant in the foothills of the Hoarfrost Ridge with no small amount of trepidation.
• Jalanumerrurr the Bastion of Bahamut. Said to lair in a secret place guarding a treasure known only to the dragon-god Bahamut. Clues in old tomes suggest this secret place might be in the Sorrowfell Plains, and the occasional tall tale is told regarding a gold dragon of enormous size in the borderlands.
• Stórskjaldbaka the Invincible. A dragon turtle of enormous size, worshiped as a god by some tribes and said to be the offspring of the World Turtle described by the sea peoples. If it exists, it is both ancient and powerful, and might not even reside in the world anymore. (Some obscure records suggests it makes its home "among the stars.") Some tales claim the lost city of Orpokoti rests on its back, so it likely carries its hoard with it.

Other monsters with large amounts of treasure might include the legendary vampire known as the Blood Lotus; the lich Lazghul, the Opal of Chaos with Teeth of Jet and the Dress of Silence (presumed destroyed, but a couple of recent anecdotes suggest he is still around); and the undead beholder Lord Sepsis, one of the few remaining lords of the Illustrious Menagerie of Peacocks.

Secret Paths of Silver

Man and the related humanoids are pattern-sensing creatures, time-binding animals. So it is of little surprise that they determined how to bind concepts into words, how to bind words back into concepts, and how to link these to the Tapestry that holds reality together. (Modern physicists would call this Tapestry "spacetime," but fantasy sages don't usually include spacetime in their worldken.)

The first humanoids to do this can be considered the first natural philosophers, as their conclusions arose from careful study of the natural world. Beyond the mere archival qualities of the sage, however, these were experiential, empirical philosophers. They go by many names, but players and game rulebooks typically call them druids.

The druids of Khaldun were the first to wrest the secrets of magic out of the land, the root from which the other magical traditions spring. (It makes sense when you think about it. They channel divine magic from the land like priests, but wrap their arcana in secrets and codes like wizards.) The druids were among the first to enumerate (and then, over the aeons, forget) the slow, green war. And in the Age Before Ages, they were the most powerful magic-users on the face of Khaldun.

They shaped the world.

Before the war between gods and Primordials, they created strange wonders, chief among which is the system of Moonpaths that once connected the far-flung corners of the world. Available wherever moonlight shines, the Moonpaths were relatively stable shortcuts allowing nearly instantaneous travel among disparate locations. They usually connected between druidic sacred sites and other important places, allowing druids to meet and defend these strategic locations at a moments' notice.

But such magic was long ago. The gods and Primordials made war, the Tapestry changed, and the Moonpaths collapsed. Most that remain are broken, dangerous, and unstable, often appearing only at certain times or when summoned by ancient chants and blood rites.

Strangely, archaic records suggest that druids often met on Khaldun's moon, implying that it was not the lifeless ball of rock it currently is. But this may be poetic, as archaic records often claim many metaphorical things that are not true, like saying there were two moons.

(Of course, some of these things may be true. The Dark Powers of Ravenloft claim that the ancient elves hid thousands of years of history in the hopes of destroying a potent world-emperor. And while most sages blame the ancient war between thought and matter for catastrophes like the convergences, they were instead caused by this forgotten empire — meaning that all manner of history might be lost to time. Likewise, the Archfey Vance recently informed his subjects of a civilization on the Faerie reflection of the moon, so maybe there is something to the moon once having held life...)

The Slow, Green War

The slow war is all around us, but few of us can see it.

Some few druids of Khaldun know about it; those who can cast speak with plants or awaken sometimes come to understand the outer edges of the slow war. The dreaming druids of the Foxfire Forest were vexed (but somewhat sympathetic) when their fellow druid Bardo Urrok announced that the slow war of the wood is too noisy for him, and left their company for less-forested climes. Some travelers have since reported running into the eccentric halfling in the Hoarfrost Ridge, above the timberline.

Those Who Remember awakened a hawthorn bush, and were surprised (and amused) to learn that its morality was totally alien, with a very pragmatic view of murder and a lack of understanding of their own, seemingly-contradictory moral stances. (The bush didn't understand the elf druid's concept of an "invasive species," for example; a creature that outperforms others in an environment is clearly the victor to be lauded rather than lamented.) The bush's exploration of animal-scale life was sadly cut short by a group of dark elves as part of the far-reaching consequences of the Battle of Scandshar.

The key is this: plants are involved in an aeons-long struggle to survive amidst dwindling resources and increasing predation. There is plenty of sunlight and nutrients, but "arbitrarily large" is different than "infinite." They have defenses against herbivores, and are evolving new ones all the time, but herbivores are also adapting at the same glacial pace and move much more quickly. Humans and their ilk choose some plants and inhibit others, seemingly with no rhyme or reason. (And those selfsame creatures will often cultivate land in ways that make it inaccessible to plants of any sort.)

All of this to say that there is a war out there, happening much more slowly than any of us can readily bear witness. This is the slow war of plants. And while plants in folklore and stories are often ancient and placid, depicted as living in harmony with their environment, real plants are bloodthirsty, impatient, and downright Darwinian. They compete for resources, parasitize each other, or even engage in biological warfare. (To say nothing of defenses against herbivores such as poisons and spinose teeth.)

More grist for the mill of common druidic misconceptions.

What Happens When I Eat the Corpse Cake?

In the Sorrowfell Plains, the locals often call confessors or counselors, "sin-eaters." As with many terms, the origin is obscure to the average pseudo-medieval peasant, but scholars recognize that the villages of the western Sorrowfell Plains still maintain traditional funerary rites*, including leaving an offering upon the decedent's body which is then consumed by the mourners.

While this is often a celebratory practice, hoping that one will gain some of the positive qualities of the deceased, there is another aspect to the ritual. Those families who worry that their loved one's sins will cause them to rise as undead, or who have heard the heretical claims that the dead (called "petitioners") spend their afterlives in the Astral Reaches, will often feed this bread to a priest or other confessor, hoping that such a person will be able to take their loved one's sin and purify it. Other families or villages, cleaving more to the scapegoat model of morality (or lacking a local priest), may instead pay a poor person or a traveler to eat it in the hopes that they will go elsewhere and take the sin with them.

(Astute observers will also note that this trend is repeated across many such times and places. Interested parties are directed to examine sin-eating as practiced in historical Europe over the past few centuries.)

This sounds like the perfect excuse to put a funeral on your "What's happening in this random village?" chart, and have the locals try to sell the funerary bread to the adventurers passing through town in the hopes that they will take the sin with them. Locals are unlikely to offer much for this service: the traditional pay in Wales was six pence, and while I expect pseudo-medieval peasants and their ilk to not offer more than a gold piece for such an act, nobles might be willing to offer outrageous sums to travelers willing to eat the funerary bread.

If your system of choice offers XP-for-gold, it's up to you whether you grant XP for the gold given. I probably would, given that there's risk involved and since the money is likely to be low: a concerned and desperate noble will ensure your room-and-board for the night and might be willing to pay up to 100gp. It is unlikely that they would pay more unless they are certain the decedent's sins are truly grave, but what are the odds of someone doing something that horrible in private? Unless the characters are foreign and so are completely ignorant of the decedent's reputation...

So what's the harm? A free meal and ten gold pieces for your trouble? Why would you say no?

What Happens When I Eat the Corpse Cake?

Each player who partakes rolls 1d20. (The GM may prefer to roll, since a lot of these changes aren't immediately obvious.) Being under the effects of a spell like protection from evil completely prevents the following effects, which is why clerics are often preferred as sin-eaters.

1d20	Effect
1-12	No effect.
13	Roll a save vs. spell (BECMI) or a DC 13 Charisma save (5e). If you fail, your alignment inverts: Lawful becomes Chaotic (or vice versa) and Good becomes Evil (or vice versa). Neutral stays the same.
14	Roll a save vs. spell (BECMI) or a DC 13 Charisma save (5e). If you fail, your alignment changes to Evil, although the Law vs. Chaos axis remains the same. (If you're playing something like BECMI with only Law vs. Chaos, your alignment changes to Chaotic instead.)
15	You now detect as Evil/Chaotic/fiendish/bad for the purposes of spells and effects such as detect evil.
16	If there's a Bad Place™ to go when you die, you're headed there. Resurrection spells and other such effects don't work on you unless your party figures out how to get your soul out of cosmic impound first. (Revivify-style magic still works as long as the soul hasn't departed the body yet.) An appropriate purification ritual or quest can also free you from Hell, but since this corruption has no outward sign, you might not know until it's too late.
17	A small fiend — an imp, a quasit, or even just a regular animal with some weird demonic traits — starts following you around, serving you as a familiar. It hates you and wants to tempt you into evil acts, both to increase the net evil in the world and to condemn your soul when you die.
18	The decedent's sin pools in your head, giving voice to the worst, most self-destructive parts of you. (If this sounds similar to Shadowguiding from Wraith: The Oblivion, you know exactly how to play this.) Your bad side can consult with you telepathically and offer you advantage on any roll (roll two dice and take the better result), although it is under no obligation to do so and you are under no obligation to take the advantage. Once per day, it can attempt to possess you, controlling your actions for one hour: make a save vs. spell or DC 13 Charisma save to resist. The difficulty of the test is modified by the number of times you accepted advantage that day. (So if you accepted help twice, you're at a -2 to resist possession.) Smart evil sides do not volunteer this fact and do not attempt possession often. Your evil side can potentially be exorcised by appropriate spells (such as dispel evil), abilities, quests, and the like. It will attempt to pressure you into performing its own agenda, which may be your worst impulses and secret desires, the original decedent's worst impulses, or a mix of the two.
19	Corruption takes root in the flesh. Roll a save vs. paralyzation or a DC 15 Constitution saving throw or gain a mutation from the GM's favorite mutation table. (I personally recommend The Metamorphica, Realm of Chaos, or Tome of Corruption.)
20	No obvious change, but at midnight, a powerful fiend comes to tempt you. It can offer you anything the GM considers appropriate. It ultimately wants to purchase your soul, but might be willing to settle for less if it thinks it can goad you into corrupting someone or making future purchases later.
21	I don't know what qualifies for a +1 on this chart — maybe you ate all the funerary cakes by yourself, or the decedent was a really wicked dude, or you made a real ass of yourself at the funerary meal and someone surreptitiously cursed you — but if you somehow roll this, you die at dinner. A fiendish creature (again, maybe a fiend on the GM's demonic list of choice, or a weird mutant animal) bursts forth from you like the xenomorph to start terrorizing the countryside. (Or maybe you turn into a Deadite or something. Any option is fine, so long as it births a new monster from your flesh.) To add insult to injury, your soul is probably consigned to whatever bad corner of the afterlife exists in this world, and your flesh is so corrupted you can't be resurrected.

* According to the scholars, these funerary traditions were adapted from Olman rites into their current form. Contrast with the folk of the Feywalk Woods: the Maiavainrua elves are known to use magical rites to keep their dead around as counselors and honored ancestors, so many of the local villages in and around the wood maintain traditions involving prolonged mourning practices and embalming. Drigbolton, found on the northern edge of the Feywalk Woods near the elven town of En'amanisrahd, is cited as one of the most starling examples of these practices, at least to outsiders.

Developer Commentary: The general idea is that the characters get a free bed, a free meal, and some pocket change with a 40% chance of getting what is hopefully a weird and interesting curse. If you want to make D&D cosmology more present or turn this into more of an enticing gamble, expand this table into a 1d24 chart with eight additional entries for Good, no effect for Neutral, and the entries for 13-20 representing Evil. (Or expand the chart to your heart's content. Maybe true Goodness and true Evil are so rare that it's a d100 chart with only eight entries on one end, eight on the other, and eighty-four nonentries in between.) Also, in case it needs to be said, this assumes the generic, Gygax-style vague Christianity endemic to D&D and its imitators. If your setting or fantasy elfgame of choice has different assumptions, this will likely be tonally dissonant with the rest of your setting. (Unless you decide Hell is real, but only to the residents of this one village, which sounds delightful. "Hell is real, but only in Gawkes Mere," is a fun potential plot hook.)

It Is Finished

It is done.

After eleven years, we finally wrapped the Crux of Eternity campaign last Saturday, May 21, 2022. If you want to read the session reports, you can find the whole thing at Obsidian Portal.

It's certainly the longest campaign I've ever run in terms of the number of years. Even though there were some significant breaks, I would still estimate the whole campaign at around 800 hours, which is probably about how much we would have played if we played regularly for eleven years. (Assuming roughly once every two weeks at three hours a session.) In contrast: my next-longest campaign is the occasionally-mentioned The Imperial City, which lasted about eight years. We played irregularly, but very often — I expect we were gathering roughly twice a week at the height of that game, so in terms of hours, it likely blew Crux of Eternity out of the water. Rounding out the other completed campaigns are Bread and Circuses at just over two years and False in Some Sense at about a year-and-a-half.

I have talked about the origins of this game elsewhere, but the key points are that we started in May of 2011 in fourth edition, updating to fifth edition in December of 2015. The humble seed of this campaign sprawled into my typical nonsense: an elaborate cultic criminal conspiracy corrupts the heart of the largest city in the region, and it is poised to spread if the player characters can't stop it. I didn't know then at the time that we were going to spend eleven years fighting slavery and delving the dangerous wilds of the Sorrowfell Plains, but here we are.

Since then, that game has spawned many others and has ranged across several different systems: in addition to a couple of one-shots and side stories and budding campaigns, we have explored a tale of escaped gladiators trying to find their way in the world, a conspiracy tale about high-level enchanters doing... something, and a tale about poor wanderers trapped in a land of arctic horror. I'd love to run a proper old-school, open-ended hexcrawl with, say, BECMI or Old-School Essentials one of these days, but most of my players respond way better to concrete objectives, so we keep riding the fine line between new-school and old-school.

(Although I can't tell you how badly I want to run a BECMI campaign that runs all the way from level 1 through the Immortals box set twice until the players ascend past the Immortals tier. A massive undertaking, but one that I imagine would be very fun with a dedicated group.)

While I'm always worried that my players aren't enjoying themselves, they kept returning after eleven years, so I suppose we made something we could all enjoy. They certainly seemed to find the final battle against the Khan of Nightmares dramatic; the umbral blot was a terrifying opponent, and the Khan's personal hound turned half the party to stone before they finally managed to defeat the Khan and take over his Coliseum Morpheuon.

And then they fade into the mists of history to fulfill their own agendas and inevitably return as NPCs in some future game...

The Obligatory After-action Report

This was my first time running fantasy in general or Dungeons & Dragons in particular, and since it lasted over a decade and spawned many spin-offs, I have to assume it was a rousing success.

I have to assume the players were engaged if they stayed with this game for so long. For all my uncertainty, they certainly seemed like it; it wasn't as anarchic as The Imperial City, but every month or two, I would get a message in my inbox from someone who wanted to do something on their own time.

Having played both extensively, I vastly prefer fifth edition to fourth, and ultimately think it's a decent game. (As with most things, it's better than the haters claim it is but not as good as the fanatics seem to think.) It's certainly more suited to the sorts of games I like to run than some other editions, and not as focused on combat as third or fourth edition. If I could have run this entire campaign in fifth edition, it definitely would not have been as linear and structured.

However, I also tend to prefer old-school play to new-school play. As noted above, I wish I could have done more what I did with Of Kith and Kin: start the characters in a town, seed a couple of adventures, and see what direction they go. Some players respond better to that than others, but I preferred the sprawling, open-ended game Crux of Eternity became rather than the plot-driven quest it was at the start.

The game went largely as I expected, for better or worse, although we had a couple of side-quests that took me by surprise. (The battle against Kiaransalee and the Khan of Nightmares were both largely or wholly player-driven activities.) We've also done enough world-building that this game will no doubt spawn several others for as long as I care to run fantasy games and my various gaming groups care to play them.

My only regret is that we didn't have a more open table. We had a handful of guest stars over the years, but I like the energy that new people bring to the table. A possible consideration for future games. (Then again, I'm thinking of eventually following this up with a West Marches-style Blade in the Dark game, so then I can accommodate a truly sprawling number of players.)

And Now: Some Advice

This game has been marked by me becoming more active in the RPG internet hobby space, and so I see lots of comments, complaints, and critiques about long-running games. (Or trying to organize games in general.) Mainly, prospective Game Masters seem mystified as to how to get a group together and to keep them interested. I find that getting a group is the hardest part, especially if you live somewhere that's a trifle remote, but keeping them around and engaged isn't especially challenging. Trawl hobby spaces, be active, talk to people: the usual stuff you do to make friends in this wide world of ours. Beyond that, contemplate these tips:

• Don't get discouraged if your player group isn't interested in playing your favorite RPG. Compromise is part of life, and the rules typically aren't as important as the culture at the table. If you build a rapport with your group, you can eventually convince them to play any game you like. But you have to put in the work first to build trust.
• Be excited. Even if you're, say, a Monsterhearts GM who is stuck running this vanilla fantasy D&D game, put stuff you like into the game. There's plenty of room for queer romance and interpersonal drama even in the hardest sci-fi dogfighting game. I cut my teeth on World of Darkness and fell in love with Unknown Armies, so my D&D games are full of secret societies, Gothic horror monsters, obsessive wizards, moral ambiguity, and de-emphasized combat. There is a lot of room to explore the sort of stuff you like; traditional games usually have room for all sorts of campaigns in them, so there's room for the stuff that excites you.
• It's pretty easy to challenge high-level D&D characters: give them real stakes, follow through on your threatened consequences, and put them in impossible (but open-ended) situations. The real magic is when players surprise you. (This is good advice for any game, by the way. Most traditional sorts of pen-and-paper RPGs assume characters become more powerful as they age, so there's likely a "high-level" option for your favorite RPG, as long as it isn't too esoteric.)
• One of the reasons why good published high-level adventures are so rare is because high-level games seem to grow logically out of the consequences of your players' actions. Also, what might be a suitable challenge for one group might be too easy, too boring, or too difficult for another. The variables are so great that it's difficult to predict that sort of thing.
• Don't punish the players for good ideas. Throwing a bunch of qualifiers at them or making every outcome negative really hurts player morale. Every character choice is a vote for what players want to do and be good at doing in a game, and you shouldn't invalidate that.
• The players are the stars of the show, and what they choose to do in the game is a vote for what they want to see. If they fall away from certain challenges or characters, don't force them to interact with them. If they hang out with certain NPCs more than others or gravitate toward certain places, encourage them to do so.
• As an example, I'm not a romance-heavy GM, but my games often include romance because many of the players seem to enjoy exploring it. Give the people what they want.
• Make the players' choices matter. Good or bad outcomes are less important than agency, and the players are going to remember the puppy they saved or the tavern that was named after them more than the big, epic set piece battle with the Dawning Lord of the Nine Suns. Saving the world isn't half as cool as when the tavern server remembers your drink order.
• Although you can make saving the world matter when the world reacts to it. If people tearfully thank your players for saving them, or hide them when they're in trouble, then their choices mattered.

Final Thoughts

As I write this, it still hasn't really hit me that it's over. Admittedly, it's not really over for me: I have a session of Of Kith and Kin on Sunday, so my head is still very much in the Sorrowfell Plains.

In a very real way, this blog only exists because of this campaign, so if you've ever enjoyed anything you have read here, you can thank this sprawling epic and the dedicated players who saw it through to the end. I learned a lot from running it, and those lessons will hopefully inform whatever happens next.

I'll hopefully also have more time to curate the blog and write stuff as some of the existing campaigns wind down. That's always the dream, anyway.

Be seeing you.

No, Seriously, Enchanters and Illusionists Rule the World

Over four years ago, I alleged that enchanters and illusionists rule the world.

And finally, there is proof!

My players in the Sunday night game are on the cusp of learning The Awful Truth™: a secret cabal of enchanters has altered their memories to obfuscate the fact that the player characters accidentally stumbled upon their operations a few months ago. (In fact, the cleric has already cast greater restoration to restore his own memories, and so has already learned this secret. He currently plans on doing it to the rest of the party the next time they get to rest.)

They have previously received hints of this conspiracy:

• They keep finding the same symbol everywhere they go. It usually appears on articles of clothing or jewelry, and on one notable occasion, as a tattoo.
• They received a picture from an oracular dwarf girl depicting a creature none of them could perceive. (They managed to determine this because the henchmen in the party seemed a little weird when confronted with the picture, so then they started asking everyone they met about it. Once they determined that their description of the picture differed from everyone else's, they started interrogating the problem further.)
• The campaign's arc words are, "Are you forgetting something?" (In fact, this and other secret messages appear if you Select All on the campaign's front page on Obsidian Portal.)

Currently, we don't know why the characters' memories were altered, but next session, we're going to do a brief flashback to find out the sordid details. (We'll be using a more narrative system for that to cover the fact that they clearly can't die in the flashback. And then we'll return to the present, in the midst of a deeply complicated standoff — roughly half a dozen factions are involved with some trying to enter the Temple of the Frog and others trying to repel them. It's a glorious mess that I am very excited to run.)

The only information the player characters currently have is that one of the cabal's agents is currently attempting to retrieve the Book of Salientian Hours I mentioned in a blog post last month. This artifact has only just been introduced, but the players currently know that it is the Froggies' prayer book and that two other factions also want it: an unknown elf who claims it was stolen from him, and the warlock's patron who has not yet been identified as Graz'zt himself. (While the players are aware of the aforementioned facts, the characters don't yet know this information, because only the warlock knows this as part of his patron's secret agenda. Graz'zt has promised the warlock the staff of a powerful wizard if he can retrieve the book ahead of the other factions.)

I love it when a plan comes together.

Once again, my bog-standard sandbox-y fantasy game turns into a sticky morass with plots and intrigues and secret histories.

As for what this secretive cabal of memory manipulators seeks with the Temple of the Frog's prayer book — not to mention their other nefarious plans — remains a mystery. For now, anyway. (Although readers may take note that Dark, Utopia, and the Southern Reach Trilogy had outsized influences on this thing, even though I watched and read them after the game started heading in this direction. Hopefully this thing will take shape with the fullness of time.)

As for the other games I run in Khaldun, this secretive cabal has only directly interacted with one other group of player characters, although they didn't know it at the time. But there is always the possibility that other groups will follow...

The Lost Epoch of Khaldun

One of the original building blocks of Crux of Eternity was the existence of convergences — places where other dimensions leak into the world. (They're always written in bold. I don't know why; it just feels right. A tip for new GMs: not everything you do needs to have a reason.) Although this was a cool, mysterious detail, the real reason for this is to provide a plausible framework for including other people's content without stretching credulity. Your FLAILSNAILS character comes to Khaldun and finds another Tomb of Horrors? Blame convergences. The fungi from Yuggoth show up, even though they're really not from around here? Again, probably convergences.

I can introduce all sorts of hot nonsense, and when the PCs ask why winged cyber-boars are attacking, I just throw my hands in the air and say, "That's convergences, babey!"

(Convergences have steadily been getting worse and more numerous over the past couple of centuries, but that has an easy explanation: Morana the Forsaken has been tearing open convergences, hoping to open the right doorway that will resurrect her dead family while remaining utterly heedless of the cost. Now that she has been destroyed, that problem will probably get better. With the possible complication that a complete list of convergences exists in the Archive Adrift's Codex Canalium... which has already been seen by mortal eyes at least once before to scribe the Book of Salientian Hours for the Bogbeast Fens' Temple of the Frog. Among other blasphemies, it's how the cultists knew where to find The Egg.)

Well, a year or two ago, a player learned about the convergences and the fact that they were getting worse, and idly wondered why that might be. The campaign ended before it became important, but it occurred to me that I didn't know why they existed in the first place. (Once again, kids: world-building is fun, but only useful inasmuch as it gets used at the table or informs your decision-making. If it doesn't need an explanation, don't feel the need to give it one.) The immediate answer my brain conjured was some vaguely-considered idea that reality was damaged when the gods and primordials were fighting, and that damage is still ongoing. It didn't feel 100% satisfying, but if someone dropped a legend lore right then and there, it's something for me to riff on and develop further.

Ultimately, no one asked, and so I neglected the question, instead focusing on other activities.

However, I was recently inspired by a detail introduced into D&D lore by Fizban's Treasury of Dragons. They introduce dragons as consummate creatures of the Material Plane, so much so that they (and things tied to them) tend to recur across various alternate Material Planes in the multiverse. So, there might be a version of Benthosruthsa from Castle Whiterock on dozens of Prime Material Plane worlds — an easy excuse as to why several different GMs have run that adventure in their home campaigns and yet all those campaigns represent different fantasy worlds if taken holistically. (In terms of "things tied to dragons," the book gives the example of the many manifestations of the Tomb of Horrors occurring because Acererak killed a lot of dragons to help make it.) Some especially potent dragons even have dragonsight, allowing them to communicate with these extraplanar manifestations. Those dragons might engage in plans that span multiple worlds simultaneously.

To tie this all together, they introduce a new mythology of "the First World," wherein the dragon gods made one world, something happened to sunder it, and that made the sprawling multiverse in which all fantasy games take place.

(I stick with a Planescape-esque "all myths are true" vibe in my fantasy games, so even though the First World isn't necessarily the truth, it is still potentially true, you dig?)

That spiraled in my head to form a rationale for the convergences: a lost epoch of Khaldun, wherein a potent and despotic draconic emperor attempted to reunite the worlds in a grand ritual. (While this would have greatly amplified said dragon emperor's power, it would have destroyed the cosmos as we know it, collapsing all potentials down to just one.) The ritual failed, but the convergences remain as residual echoes of the attempt, linking various dimensions on a fundamental level. Since the gods weren't especially keen on having anyone attempt to reunite (and destroy) the multiverse again, all records of the world-spanning empire were destroyed, and it now exists only as a series of curious anomalies in the historical record. (And perhaps the occasional artifact for a delving adventurer to find.)

Of course, that assumes we can truly be sure that a nearly-godlike dragon emperor with potent sorceries and a consciousness spanning whole worlds is truly dead and not merely sleeping...

The Joesky Tax: A Game Anecdote

After a lot of lead-up, I'm finally running DA2: Temple of the Frog for the Sunday night crew. In an ideal world, I'd run the original version, but it requires so much work to bend it into shape that I might as well write my own adventure.

To explain the lead-up: the classic Crux of Eternity crew ran through a modified version of S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, and informed the local university about it. Since then, the university has been running a research program to fully investigate the crashed spaceship, and have subsequently learned that there are other pieces that were scattered across the Sorrowfell Plains when the thing passed through the atmosphere. The Sunday night crew has since been tasked with researching the other pieces. One such piece landed in the foothills of the Hoarfrost Ridge and allowed me to run Lost Laboratory of Kwalish. Another landed in the Bogbeast Fens and was discovered by cultists of Bobugbubilz, who proceeded to call it, "The Egg," and ascribed religious significance to it. Five years ago, this minor frog temple proceeded to become more organized and militarized, and is now proving to be a notable nuisance in the region with ties to slavers in the big city up north. (Which, if you know the adventure, you'll recognize as the basic setup of DA2: Temple of the Frog. Astute observers will recognize a couple of differences — like the whole thing about The Egg — which will likely be revealed with the fullness of time.)

In addition to the original goal from DA2 (rescue a high-value prisoner), the university has tasked the player characters with capturing any extraterrestrial technology they can find. The PCs decide to sneak into the City of the Frog — ignoring the original adventure's infiltration hook, assuming (probably correctly) that they probably won't be able to pass themselves off as slavers or wannabe frog-cultists — and they prioritize rescuing the prisoner because she and her men are skilled fighters, so they can outfit her and her men and double their party's fighting force.

The plan goes to shit pretty much instantly.

They sneak up the canals using a combination of water walk and control water and are almost instantly spotted. They switch from stealth to speed, and their main asset is that it's foggy and the middle of the night, so there's a lot of confusion, so they don't get murdered by crossbow bolts. They make their way to the middle of the town so they can cast locate creature on their quarry, hoping to find her in the warehouses and barracks.

She's in the basement of the Temple of the Frog, of course. The precise place they didn't want to go.

They cut west, get pelted by some crossbow bolts, use control water again to get over the wall, and are now in the courtyard of the temple. On the plus side, they neutralize the guards and the alarm is sounded, so no more guards can easily approach from the City of the Frog. The bad news is that they don't have a control ring to actually enter the temple, so they're just. Stuck there. With a temple full of cultists at their backs.

Their current gambit is to hopefully trick one of the cultists in the City of the Frog into approaching, then stealing a control ring to enter the temple. We'll find out how that works on Halloween!

Firehold Megadungeon

This might turn into yet another project I don't have time to write or run, but it's been on my mind lately, so I might as well put it here. (Long time readers might recall my plans for a Carcosan megadungeon; apart from a single session nested in my long-running D&D game, I haven't had a chance to initiate it. Although there is always the future.)

When the dwarves fled from bondage under the tyrannical rule of the giants, they settled across the Sorrowfell Plains, most of them settling into cities and towns that are now familiar to the folk of the world (such as Khuragzar or Sorgforge), but one group of now-forgotten clans settled beneath one of the mountains of the world. 

They called this place "Firehold."

Industrious and versed in runecraft, they made wonders unknown even to other dwarves. The secret of their success was the beating heart of the mountain itself: a uranium deposit beneath the mountain, creating a naturally-occurring fission reactor. When they initially found it, they realized only that it generated heat and made the miners sick. (Although their superior dwarven constitutions protected them somewhat, many of them still died, but they were given heroes' burials for their sacrifice to the clan.) But the industrious dwarves soon learned how to harness this energy for their own purposes, building containment units and enriching centers and steam engines. They were the most advanced civilization on Khaldun.

But no one has ever heard of them.

When the lands of Men fell to corruption and devil-worship, the dwarves consulted their histories and feared what they saw coming: another cycle of darkness and subjugation beneath the whips and chains of another oppressor. So they did the most sensible thing they could consider: they withdrew. They secured their gardens and redoubled their mining efforts and ensured that they had supplies for centuries — millennia, even — and then they sealed their highways with rune-magic.

This was their folly.

The corruption of the surface empires did not last long before heroes rose to stop it, and before long it was washed away. But the lost dwarves did not know of the turning of ages; they merely waited for a sign, some manner of augury to return them to the surface.

They never received it.

Whether the gods did not speak to them or they merely misinterpreted the signs, the old priests refused to risk the safety of their clans, and so the dwarves stayed underground in their secure shelter.

But the deep dwarves were builders, not soldiers. One by one, monsters emerged from below, and one by one, districts of the city fell. The deep dwarves were forced to retreat, refugees in their own city, withdrawing to the safety of centralized, defensible locations. Now, the last of the dwimmer dwarves take refuge in the quays and the foreign quarter, praying for a sign to save their civilization.

And all the while, the danger grows beneath their feet, for no one has tended the reactor in generations. If the reactor burns hotter than the reservoir replenishes, or if some tunneling wurm or ambitious underdweller should damage it, it could cause a meltdown or an explosion, contaminating the ground water or spreading radioactive fallout across the Sorrowfell Plains.

In addition to references in ancient archives, there is one other hint as to the location of lost Firehold: the rocs that lair upon the mountaintop build their nest over the exhaust port, so that the steam keeps their eggs warm while they are in flight.

Rules Notes:

A player character who delves into the right archive or uses the right divination spell or asks the right questions might find and unlock Firehold as an adventuring location. A lost megadungeon of advanced dwarven technology, it has long since been overrun by monsters, but is a palace of wonders. (In addition to the standard treasure, the dwarves of Firehold potentially hold lost secrets of arcane, historical, and technological varieties.)

Anyone who finds lost Firehold also unlocks a new playable variety of dwarves: called dwimmer dwarves or bone dwarves in my notes, they have a facility with rune-crafting and artifact manufacture that most modern dwarves lack. (In old-school games, they would be able to craft magic items and undertake other sorts of spell research. In 5e-ish games, they have innate transmutation spells, and are best suited for the wizard or artificer classes.)

Anniversary

I provide occasional updates for my long-running D&D game on the blog, so here's this one:

Crux of Eternity turns ten-years-old today. (The blog itself doesn't turn ten until August 9.)

What started because one of Nicole's co-workers asked if she played Dungeons & Dragons (neither of us did at the time, but we were very aware of it) has since sprawled into something both wonderful and strange. The request hit at the perfect time: I had just picked up the fourth edition books and I had just discovered the OSR blogging scene. The game has since spiraled out into at least eight other games (across at least five separate rule systems!) with the eternal possibility of more in the future.

The game started with just a handful of prompts, including:

• Could I run a D&D 4e game from levels 1-30?
• Could I include classic content and an OSR feel for new players so that they would get a reasonable facsimile of a classic dungeon-y, dragon-y experience?
• For those of you following along at home, I included adaptations of Bleak House, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, and Queen of the Spiders.
• I also included a handful of references to The Gates of Firestorm Peak, the Slave Lords series, and the Tomb of Horrors.
• Could I include Seekers of the Ashen Crown, which one of my players bought and wanted me to run?
• Could I include a wicked, decadent, pulp fantasy city?
• Could I use this sweet ultimate tyrant mini Nicole bought me?

I think the experiment has been successful, although only the players can say for certain. We switched to fifth edition partway through the campaign, which helped streamline some things while making other things more complicated. (Most notably, 4e games are very linear, but 5e is a little more forgiving of sandboxes, so we've had more improvised and sandbox-y game stuff since the switch. Honestly, it's my preferred mode.)

Back on May 1, the players finally faced the ultimate evil of the campaign after almost a decade of play: the Esteemed and Omniscient Peacock Lord, the aforementioned beholder ultimate tyrant and mastermind of many of the miseries that have infected this particular campaign. (Ironically, due to COVID and social distancing, I never got to use the actual ultimate tyrant miniature; we ran the battle using digital tokens over Roll20. So it goes.)

(The campaign isn't quite over yet, though; I introduced content from Coliseum Morpheuon several sessions ago, and the PCs decided that they hate the Khan of Nightmares and want to kill him as a coda.)

As always, if you're into Actual Play and session writeups, you can read the whole shebang at Obsidian Portal.

While I expect I'll be dealing with this setting and the fallout from its many campaigns for years to come, I'm sure I'll move onto some other long-form obsessive campaign for the 2020s. If the 2000s were dominated by World of Darkness and the 2010s were dominated by D&D and OSR stuff, what do the 2020s hold? (Potential predictions: my long-running Unknown Armies game, Tip the World Over on Its Side, turned five-years-old on May 2, so the idea of running a sprawling, inter-connected series of Unknown Armies games is very much on the table. Additionally, I'm leaning towards using Forged in the Dark stuff for the official follow-up to Crux of Eternity.)

If you want to see what happens next, watch this space...

The Migration of the Oni-Wives

The oni-wives migrate on schedules unknown to mortal scholars.

"Migration" probably isn't even the right word, as it implies something regular, instinctual, inevitable, and purposeful. But the coming of the oni-wives is none of those things, save perhaps "inevitable."

The migration will happen, and the oni-wives will come. Will you be ready when they do?

They emerge from their mountain caves and redoubts and fastnesses, gripped by wanderlust. And where they wander, things change.

The changes are small at first. One of the witch-ogres arrives in a village and saves a child. Another finds a wolf whose leg is stuck in a trap and she sets it free.

But soon they grow large. An oni-wife destroys a slaving ring. An oni-wife faces down an army. An oni-wife destroys a city.

And before anyone can fully adapt, they disappear, returning to their mountain holds (or sometimes slain by angry mobs) and waiting for the next cycle.

Why do they do this? The few scholars who know of them have many theories but few answers. Some say they are emissaries of the numinous, go-betweens and messengers among the gods, the primordials, the folk of the world, and the forces of magic. Others say they are entropy incarnate, yet another mechanism by which civilization is doomed to fall. Still others claim they are the immune system of a healthy cosmos, a process by which the world keeps its systems vital and keeps its ages turning.

(Sages also wonder at their names. Are they truly kin to ogres or oni, or are these just poetic epithets? What do they do when they are not in the world? What drives them to come and bring change with them? Do they hear the songs of the gods and the music of the spheres keening constantly in their minds?)

It ultimately does not matter from whence they come or why they come or even when they come. What matters is that they will come, and you (or your children, or your children's children) will have to adapt to the change they bring with them.

When they come, will you be ready to greet the world they bring with them?

A Sense of Perspective

I have now run the Battle of Scandshar five times, all told, for different player groups who all had a different view of events. (There could be a sixth or seventh on the horizon, for all I know. I have a group still running around before the Battle of Scandshar.)

Admittedly, I didn't plan it that way — a death-god appearing in the mortal world and leading an invasion force of a major city was just a plot hook for my core, high-level group, not something in which I necessarily expected other player groups to participate. I figured they would hear about it, but not necessarily experience it from multiple, overlapping perspectives.

But here we are.

It's been an interesting experiment, largely because I often include multiple groups in the same world for verisimilitude, but rarely do so many of them interact with the same event from so many different vantage points. (In my old Mage: The Ascension game, the cabal heard about a massacre from my Sabbat game and investigated it, before determining it wasn't connected. That's roughly as intricate as previous encounters have been — ships passing in the night, or the occasional meeting between two groups.)

Here's what we've seen so far:

1) The Shields of the Sorrowfell are shopping, contemplating two apocalypses on the horizon, when they receive a panicked sending from a patron, saying only, "Wherever you are, you need to come back. Something is attacking Scandshar. It’s bad." They arrive and feel the horrible dread that comes from being within a few miles of a death avatar, eventually making their way through deserted streets until they find the death-god and her cohorts. When they make contact, the battle lasts maybe half a minute, but it's an intense thirty seconds before the goddess is banished and her cohorts are all slain. They take out the rest of the invading army between sessions, because running thirty combats doesn't sound like anyone's idea of fun. They leave behind one dark elf to be interrogated by city officials.

2) FLAILSNAILS muscle wizard Barnabus Sleet is working on a scam to claim the bounty on the Shields of the Sorrowfell, and the timing is such that he contacts them just as they're moving into the city to fight the dark elf invasion. As such, Sleet actually arrives on site first, and begins fighting dark elves and trying to get building fires under control while also trying to figure out just what happened here.

3) FLAILSNAILS Specialist Ribbon, her girlfriend (Sapphira), and a dark elf ally (Alaic) spent the morning of the Winter Solstice running from assassins. When they used a teleport to spend solstice with Sapphira's family, they missed the battle, although sometime in the late afternoon, everyone in the settlement of En'amanisrahd could feel the creeping dread whenever they looked at the cloud bank forming north-by-northeast. By midnight, they learned what happened; they also learned Alaic was a turncoat elite assassin from the invasion force, who fled ahead of the coming of the death-goddess because she started to doubt her mission. In the aftermath, however, she will reveal all she knows to the intelligencers of En'amanisrahd.

(Spoilers for Castle Whiterock: the FLAILSNAILS crew saved Alaic Sorethin before she bled to death in the secret domain of House Forlorna. In my game, since I knew the drow invasion was coming, I made her one of the drow harlequins sent ahead to help make sure the city was ripe for invasion. Alaic and some allies made a detour to the megadungeon ensure there was no interference from House Forlorna. The superweapon House Forlorna was attempting to torture out of her was actually intelligence regarding the approaching death-goddess; they only knew the dark elves of Cinlu Tlurthei had acquired some manner of trump card that would let them invade the surface, although they did not know the particulars.)

4) The others in the FLAILSNAILS crew were at Castle Chilikov when the invasion hit, and so maybe noticed the storm clouds and the weird sense of foreboding, but otherwise only heard about it after the fact. However, a small trickle of refugees has since populated the castle as it's being rebuilt.

5) Fresh from a delve into the Barrowmaze, a group of lower-level adventurers happened to take an extended stay in Scandshar in the hopes of finding a black market for magic items. This extended investigation took them through Winter Solstice, and so they were at ground zero when it started. (The only reason why they weren't in the Market Square when the drow goddess first emerged is because they noticed something was wrong, and started heading back to their inn rooms to resupply.) After battling their way through dark elf assassins and rampaging ghosts, they finally found a safe place to hide, only to be totally surprised that the invasion was already over when they checked the street the next morning.

I found that the players in scenarios #2 and #5 were initially confused by what was happening, as they had little context for it. (I haven't determined if this is good or bad yet — the characters should certainly feel confused and overwhelmed, but I don't necessarily want the players to feel that way. On the other hand, how do you prepare someone for an outside-context problem?) Scenarios #3 and #4 were much more gentle, as people heard about the aftermath rather than participating. (And those sets of players knew something was up by the time I broke the news in-game.)

Scenario #1 of course had the highest stakes — this was their city and their allies, and if they lose, it might mean the collapse of the whole world, given time. (The FLAILSNAILS people can always leave if the world becomes an uninhabitable thanatopic theocracy, but for everyone else, they live here.)

It's probably also noteworthy to mention that the fight with Kiaransalee had five potential phases, each with varying levels of difficulty and stakes. We only encountered four of these potential outcomes:

1) The Shields of the Sorrowfell stopped the goddess' cultists from acquiring ritual components in the giant tombs beneath Tovelka, the event which kicked off this whole plotline.

2) Someone (probably the Shields of the Sorrowfell) stopped her cultists from performing the ritual in the Vault of Gnashing Teeth.

3) Someone stopped her while she was freshly summoned in the Vault of Gnashing Teeth. The death goddess is still here, but in her weakest form.

4) Someone stopped her when she was freshly summoned on the surface. She has gathered power from annihilating a city in the Underdark and from killing people in the streets, but she is not at her full deific strength yet.

5) The occupation of Scandshar grants enough supplicants and notoriety that her presence in this world now bears the strength of a fully-incarnate deity.

Also, note that the defeat of a drow goddess of death and slavery did make the world a better place; slavery is likely to be outlawed in Scandshar after centuries of somehow remaining legal. Sometimes, just punching the symbolism makes a difference.

Greed in the Heart, Doom in the Mouth

I published a post on Monday and will publish another on Friday that are both blathering about the state of the industry. (The Short Answer: It's the same mess as it ever was.)

Both pieces elsewhere in the week are serious, so I'm hard-pressed to pay the Joesky tax on those posts, but I'm posting it here. Since a lot of my current content is bound up in scattered notes, 5e statblocks, and other such ephemera, I went with the recent Joesky tax writing prompts from Throne of Salt. (I rolled a 16 and a 52, if you're into that sort of thing.)

Timely!

The Avarice Beast

Have you ever met someone who hates? A real Ebenezer Scrooge-style bastard, someone who just takes and takes and takes. A bottomless pit for food, money, and affection.

Most of the time, these are just standard-style jerks, but occasionally, their festering hatred is almost a disease unto itself. (This usually occurs in men and always in humans. Whatever affliction menaces men is unknown to demi-humans. So far as we know.) Physicians have occasionally found small calcified stones in their hearts, the beginning of some sort of bezoar. (These bezoars are prized by alchemists for love potions, potions that allow the imbiber to smell gold as some dwarfs do, or other preparations that enhance the user's ability to covet.)

But the bezoar is less an accretion and more an egg. If the avaricious wretch continues on its path, the bezoar will continue to grow. (Any amount of genuine affection will halt or even reverse the bezoar's growth at this point. It's not too late for a redemption arc.) During this time, the person might notice a shortness of breath or increased fatigue, but most of them are so sedentary that they never notice the change.

Eventually, the egg will hatch.

If it hatches, the miser is living on borrowed time. The creature always hatches in the person's sleep and latches into the heart muscle. From there, it starts taking over the function of the heart over the course of a month. (It is apparent as a dark stain in the heart muscle, eventually turning the heart completely black. Once it has devoured the heart and assumed its function, it looks like a shriveled but overlarge dead fetus implanted into the circulatory tissue, curled in the middle of the victim's chest.) If the person is slain during this time, the creature cannot survive without the host, and will probably die within a matter of hours.

The creature will continue to consume additional nutrients (and negative emotions) from the host, growing to full size in 4d4 weeks. At that time, it messily tears itself out of the chest cavity, unfurling to the size of a small dog, all black skin and gristle and bone. It seems slick with moisture, but whatever is upon it either evaporates quickly or is merely the sheen of its skin.

(No doubt a number of alleged serial killings and botched robberies are actually the work of avarice beasts birthing themselves.)

From there, it begins its nightly hunts. It is a patient and cunning predator, seeking not only food but to cause the most harm possible. It typically targets people who will be missed, often children or lovers, stalking a lone child or half of a couple silently. When they are alone, it will strike quickly, snatching them away to be swiftly devoured. It will either leave their remains near where they disappeared, or in some other place where the family can find them.

Within the span of a week, the avarice beast will hunt enough to grow to roughly the size of a human. The upper limit of its lifespan is unknown.

Avarice beasts are intelligent, and understand the languages of their former hosts. They cannot speak, but can attempt a sort of mimicry, often mimicking children's laughs or cries, or speaking words and phrases of a couple of syllables. ("Come here" or "help me" are frequent favorites.) When the creature becomes aware that people are becoming aware of its activities, it often hitches a ride underneath a cart or other conveyance to leave town as soon as it is able. (On the road, it will hunt by night. In a bit of dark irony, having an avarice beast silently hiding among a caravan is good luck, as the creature often hunts or frightens any random encounters that might occur by night.)

It is entirely possible an avarice beast may not even originate from the town in which it is found.

The Avarice Beast: AC 15, Move 120’, HD 3+3, claw/claw/bite 1d6/1d6/1d8, Morale 10. Climb walls 99%, hide in shadows 95%, move silently 95%. Surprises on 5-in-6.

The Conch of the Damned

Recovered from an ancient shipwreck in the Weeping Bay outside Sorgforge, the conch of the damned is a wicked version of the horn of Valhalla, a way to summon the spirits of the dead to defend the user.

The conch's interior is gilded, and the exterior is decorated with black opals carved to resemble human skulls. When blown, 4d6 zombies arrive within 1d3 rounds, either staggering from the sea if it is in range, or arising from the ground if it is not. (If you want to draw parallels between the conch of the damned and the horn of Valhalla, make the zombies appear as draugr, dead Norse warriors.) They will follow the conch owner's commands for one hour; at the end of this time, they will turn and attack the blower of the conch and their companions, seeking to seize the conch. Where they take it afterward is unknown; in all likelihood, it is placed in some other remote place to cause ruin.

Assuming a conch blower survives the shell's curse, smart conch blowers will typically use the zombies for one task, then order them to destroy one another. Still, there is always the chance that one will not have the opportunity to do such a thing, or that the dead will still come for the conch eventually...