The Mould Junkies of Rutland

Mould just feels good. It amps you up, makes you feel happy and connected to everyone around you. Gives you a sense of what everyone else on it is feeling, brings you up to their level.

It's just a great fucking time for as long as it lasts and it lasts a good few hours at least.

The comedown is savage though. Not just the nausea and the sweating, but the inability to feel empathy for others. If you can't keep the high going you'll come out of it feeling pretty dismal until you can get another hit. Other addicts are going to know what you're going through because they're feeling it too, but you'll seem super weird to any non-addicts because you're constantly misjudging intentions and overcompensating for your inability to read emotions.

This is an issue because the only way you can get high is by being present when the infestation speads to another person, and it's hard to persuade someone to try it out when you're a twitchy scuzzbag with a spreading skin infection.

That's an issue, actually. It'll start growing out over your skin if you don't get a regular fix. That's not such a bad thing though, the comedown's less brutal and the pheromones floating out of your body let your fellow addicts feel what you feel. They want to hang out with you because it's the only way to actually know how someone else feels when you're off the mould, and they want to make you happy because that physically makes them happy too.

It makes you feel connected.

If you go longer without taking a hit the mold gets thicker, bulks up more, fleshy fruiting bodies spreading out in spiraling curlicues across your skin and encrusted clothes. It fills your throat with soft rich loam, softens your movements and motions. You haven't had to eat for a long time and now all you really want to do is find somewhere dark and safe and soft and comfortable, coccooned in a cushion of mould.
It feels nice, really nice, and even nicer amongst others of your own kind. You just want to crawl into a little lump with them, be warm and safe and cozy together. You'd tell your other friends how happy you are but you can't speak through the fungal mass filling your mouth.
They can feel it, anyway, and you can feel them. You can feel the moods and emotions of all the addicts around you.

It's very nice and safe and soft, until a gang of three to eight malevolent psychopaths come in and kill everyone's buzz.
You can feel the anger and pain of all your friends as it spreads through the whole network, as they come into your soft warm place and discuss their dead and share their grief. Their sadness is yours and your sadness is theirs. The interlopers must be stopped, so you can go back to the soft warm happiness you're scared you've lost forever.

Mould junkies seem harmless at first, just the DM doing an impression of a sketchy dealer or Otto off the Simpsons. But they'll do anything to get a fix.
They have unbreakable morale until they manage to infest someone, then just collapse and tell the others to sit back and enjoy it, maybe get some music going. If threatened they'll run off and escape together, nobody wants negativity while they're tripping.

After a while, if an addict can't get a daily high, they'll start to become a Mould Vessel. These guys have 2 hit dice and are surrounded by a cloud of empathogenic pheromones that transmit their emotions to other addicts. This is usually fine, but if they get angry or sad they transmit that to others and suddenly your mob of feel-good junkies are getting vicious.
If threatened a Mould Vessel can excrete a thick cloud of spores rich with pheromones, acting like a smokescreen that also creates a powerful emotional punch in their buddies.

The final stage is the Filled Man, very rarely seen outside in the day since they prefer moist, damp spaces in the company of others of their kind. They clump up into big mounds of mould unless there's something to rouse them.
They're completely silent in their footsteps and their breathing. They have five hit dice and the mass of mould upon them gives them armour as chain. Even in death they continue the cycle, if slain they explode into a cloud of infestation-spreading spores that float on the breeze.
Left undisturbed they will form cysts with others and eventually die in their comfortable embrace, ready to be discovered in years to come and begin another cycle of addiction. 

Funerals for the Fallen.

Something I put in my house rule doc but never actually made a post about:
Funerals.

In essence:
Take a dead character's remains to a safe place with a church (or cultural equivalent) and you can buy their experience points on a 1:1 silver-for-exp basis.

This represents money spent on funeral rites and memorials and bar tabs and other things purchased in their memory. The player spending the money does, of course, say what they're spending it on.
It basically pans out as a limited but consequence-free version of Carousing.
Bear in mind I'm on the silver standard here, if you use the gold standard you'll want to make that gold-for-exp.

After some testing it's been a remarkably good little rule!

It encourages the retrieval of your buddy's corpse from whatever horrific death consumed them, accomplishing my favourite little trick of merging the intentions of player and character together.
"We've got to go back for Larry's body! We've been through too much together to let him rot in this hellhole!" and "We've got to go back for Larry's body! He's a big sack of easy exp!" end up resulting in very similar behaviours.
You get the same sort of thing with Level Drain. "Holy shit, A GHOST!" and "Holy shit, LEVEL DRAIN!" both induce the same mixture of fight and flight. The trick is to make sure the player knows the mechanics at the time.

Some other impacts:

It's much more worthwhile to take higher level characters' corpses with you.
Nobody really cares about Jimmy Newguy the Level 1 Thief, so leaving his corpse to be eaten by Carrion Crawlers isn't a big deal.

But Big Bill Ballswinger the level 5 Fighter? He's been with the party for a year! He's seen more newbies get eaten than I've had hot rations and saved my life on fifteen separate occasions! He needs a proper burial with a parade and a statue and everything!

On that note, higher level characters "deserve" more lavish send-offs than their lower level brethren. Nobody's going to do much for a level 2 Thief, but that seventh level Cleric is getting a whole damn church raised in his honour.

Getting a corpse back out of the dungeon is interesting logistically, especially if you didn't manage to kill the thing that killed them. I had players venture, against their better judgement, into a spider lair to retrieve a corpse. A corpse! Usually I only see rescue missions to retrieve still-living hostages!

It acts as a way to let long-running players start their next character at a higher level.
In my game, you can put money in the bank. This is for safe keeping and a wild 2% p.a. interest rate, but mainly because you can pass the money (less a 10% death tax) on to your successor.
This means a new character can swagger in, burn all his money on buying up his long lost twin brother's exp, and be back on his feet minus a huge chunk of his inherited fortune.
And getting rid of that fortune is, perhaps, the real point.

I'm Writing a LotFP Thing!

So hey, this is exciting. Not only have I got a magic item and a monster into the Referee book, as a result James Raggi himself asked me if I want to make a thing.
I SURE DO!


So the general outline so far is like:

The Royal Forest of Rutland once existed across a vast swathe of south-east England. In the 13th century, most of the laws protecting the royal forests were removed.

In time the Forest of Rutland would be deforested.
It should not have been.

Deep inside, protected for centuries by the Verderers and the Forest Law, a great wen of rotting mould and organic matter swells and pulses.
It does not hunger, for hunger implies sentience.
It does not wish to infest all mankind, for wishes imply will.

That it consumes us, fills us, causes us to spread it across the land and reduce our civilisation to dust. That is not its will.
It is simply what the mould has evolved to do.

PLANNED TO CONTAIN:

• A sandbox on a similar scale to Better Than Any Man
• A slow (but random!) spread of infestation across the countryside
• Less "fungal zombie plague" and more "gin riots". A cheap drug-analog causing societal fuckery and breakdown of the status quo
• A focus on relationship maps and human-scale issues over dungeons
• Still some dungeons though, let's be real
• LotFP-grade world fuckery possible
• Ergot poisoning for good or ill
• Witchhunters
• Opportunists
• Addicts and madness
• Prophets and loss

TITLE AS YET UNKNOWN
But The Doom That Came to Rutland amuses me. 

Rutland Water drowned a whole lot of villages when it was formed which means I can say THIS IS WHY, and the tiny county's motto means Much in Little which would surely be easy to twist into ominousness.

So I Ran a crappy free dungeon but it's ok I made it better.

I've been incredibly lucky with the modules I own.
One Page Dungeons, LotFP offerings, Last Gasp, various megadungeons, everything.

I did not realise this until now.
Behold The Tomb of Rakoss the Undying. A free thing that I picked up because it was free and billed as an adventure for levels 4-6, which is a bit of a hole in my collection now that my players have leveled up a bit without dying.

My players entered the dungeon by surprise so it is really my own fault for placing it without reading it properly. I was blinded by the radness of the cover.

It contains such wonders as:
- Giant fucking explanatory text bit about an evil army general.
- Giant fucking monologue from a quest-giver guy that runs for 500 words or so.
- Giant gaping wasteland of an overland map that takes two weeks to go from Generic Fantasy City to the dungeon. There is nothing of note in between except some legitimate quantum ogres who attack automatically when the party is sleeping within a day's march of the dungeon.
- Top tips like "Randomly roll dice at key moments behind the screen to give the illusion that they are in a dangerous area".
- Tons of awful boxed text.
- Arbitrary "these spells don't work here" effect on the dungeon because god forbid somebody use Teleport in a 10 room dungeon. "This curse is a plot device and cannot be overcome by spells or abilities of characters of this level".
- Just random stock monsters everywhere in the actual dungeon that just kind of hang around until you trigger the encounter.
- Every single monster appears and attacks, no question.
- +1 weapons and armour like it's going out of style.
- Spellbook that contains every spell up until 5th level. So unique. That's going to be real fun to list out to the player.
- The radical lich dude looming over the dungeon in the cover isn't even in here.

I now see how far the OSR has come in game design and playability, rather than simply aping the worst of the past. This dungeon could have been designed by any number of random dungeon generators.
But it was written two years ago, maybe it's taken that long for things to percolate.

Let's fix it

New background

I'd placed this dungeon behind a statue in a mausoleum in a large, ancient graveyard for rich families. There's a smallish village next to it that is built around maintaining the graves.

The biggest mausoleum is for a family of career soldiers (the Jingois), and the dungeon itself is accessed from inside it as a sort of combination bunker/war room/temple.

The family have deep ties to a family of smiths (the Smiths, naturally) who also have a mausoleum in the graveyard.

Jingois is pronounced "Jin-go-iss" unless you are pretentious like Alex (below) who pronounces it Frenchily like "Jing-wah".

The main wrinkle is that Alex Jingois, dweeby descendant of the soldier family, has styled himself Ave Myxylyx and turned to Necromancy while his parents are away fighting in the wars.

He's got the keys to the dungeon so he's been experimenting with the dead and trashing the place and stealing his corpse-based material components from the graves.

He's incompetent and level 1 but has the vicious streak of the cowardly. If he finds out people have been going into the dungeon he'll try to trap them in there so he has someone to blame for the mess when his hero parents return.

Everyone in the town thinks he's an alright guy who keeps himself to himself, if a bit of a black sheep of his family. He hasn't been showing up at the alehouse lately though, so people are starting to wonder if he's getting depressed without his parents around.

I usually avoid magical weapons as loot, but this is a dungeon belonging to a long line of warriors.

The Mausoleum
The Jingois Mausoleum contains a bunch of valuable grave goods, the most chief of which is the Red Rapier. It's clutched in the hands of a shrivelled body in a stone coffin with a glass lid. The lid can't actually be removed, so must be smashed in order to get the sword.
The Red Rapier gets more powerful the more blood it consumes, but eventually turns its bearer mad with bloodlust.
The Red Rapier has turned the tide of many famous battles. Ensuring it is only used in times of dire need is the charge of both families.
Alex thinks he's doing a good thing by meddling with Necromancy, the Red Rapier feeds on blood and skeletons have no blood, so they're the perfect way to stop the Rapier's wielder if they go out of control. He thinks his parents wouldn't understand.

Also here:
- Two sets of good quality leather armour. One's chest is painted with a surprisingly christmassy reindeer leaping in front of a fir tree. This is the Jingois family crest. The other is painted with an acorn in front of a crown sitting on top of an anvil. This is the Smith family crest.
- 4 silver-tipped mahogany spears.
(These things courtesy of Abulafia)

At the back of the mausoleum is a statue of an armoured warrior holding a big black axe. In the light of a torch it seems to move menacingly, although it does not. The base hinges down (and has been used often and recently), revealing a crawlspace that heads into the dungeon proper. Someone in heavy armour can just about fit if they've got people helping them through.

The map is alright though.

The Dungeon in General

The walls, floors and ceilings are absolutely covered with carvings of famous battles. They're all painted in a variety of colours like gaudy greek statues.
The one thing they all have in common is a man with a red sword at the forefront of every battle, always striking the killing blow.

Notes on the famous battles are on the room key.
Considering my campaign world backstory is a mixture of Dwimmermount, Hammers of the God, and a sort of mangled real world alt-history, you might want to change the details.

Alex heads down to the dungeon every night when it's getting dark (7ish), changes into his necromancer costume, and experiments with spells. He's not evil, just fascinated and a bit obsessive like that kid who tried to build a nuclear reactor in his shed.
If he finds evidence that people have been down there: (ie. basically any normal dungeoneering activity) he'll try to set things up to repel them. Next time people enter the dungeon, he'll turn up an hour later with five recently-animated zombies, along with any surviving skeletons he can find.
If he wanders down after the party enters the dungeon: he'll drag some coffins to block the the crawlspace and run home and dither, coming back in an hour with the zombies.
If he's in the dungeon when the PCs enter: He'll be in Room 7 behind the secret door. Unless the party is super quiet, he'll hear them and run out of the dungeon as soon as he thinks they've gone into another room. Then he'll do the above.

"Ave Myxylyx" is a level 1 Necromancer with Darkness 15' Radius prepped. He wears a shirt with the leaping reindeer-against-fir of the Jingois family stitched on in fine thread (until he changes into his necromancer duds). He carries a mahogany spear tipped with silver and a crossbow with a full quiver. He's got keys to all the doors and both mausoleums and knows where the secret doors are.
His shirt is worth 600sp, spear 200sp.
In his spellbook, Eyes of the Dead, Repair Skeleton, Darkness 15' Radius, Subjugate Undead.
Has 2 scrolls of Animate Dead left.

Room Key

I use Excel for room keys usually, makes it easier to take notes and change stuff.
So you can find the room key here.
Loot is in silver standard, read sp as gp if you're that way inclined.

On-the-Fly Village Generation

Ah yes, the humble generic D&D village. The well, the washerwomen, the loosely described homes, and who can forget the remarkably large tavern?
This is all especially true since the nearest adventure locale is a few miles away and so you haven't really thought about this place. You can just sit back and say "uh yea uh sure" to most requests the players will make about local village services, so it isn't a big deal.

But! What if it could be ever so slightly more interesting? Here's a way to do that.

Some notes:
- This is meant to spice up a generic village, not create a proper adventure locale like Scenic Dunnsmouth. If you want a proper adventure locale, Logan at Last Gasp has got you covered.
- This is for creating a village quickly at the table when your players stop in. If they hang around, definitely bulk up the descriptions in the place between sessions.
- This is for making a small village of a few hundred people, most of whom the PCs won't meet immediately.

Procedure

• Throw a bunch of stuff onto the table. These are the buildings in the village centre.
• I use a handful of the ever-useful Jenga blocks due to their excitingly chunky shapes.
• You could also use dice, cards, or possibly snacks.
• Don't worry too much about how many, 10-20 is about right. You can always add more later.
• Every village will have a watersource, a church, and an alehouse. Place these wherever.
• The Watersource depends on the area. Mostly this will be a well in the largest open space in town.
• If you've got a range of socially acceptable gods, feel free to roll for which one the Church is devoted to. Otherwise it's the prevailing religion of the region.
• An Alehouse (or Public House from where we get the term Pub) was the current house in the village where someone's wife (an Alewife) had finished brewing up a whole lot of ale. This was important because the water all stank like shit.
  In medieval times this could be any woman who wanted to make a living, but in the Early Modern era it was married women working alongside their husbands in an increasingly male-dominated industry.
  If the village is on a thoroughfare the alehouse will likely be the classic country pub where the proprietors live upstairs. In a backwater this is definitely just someone's house.
• Every village will have three interesting tradespeople amongst the Generic Townfolk who are probably farmers or something. Place these wherever.
• Three tradespeople probably isn't that realistic, but it's enough choice without being overwhelming.
• I drop some dice on the Vornheim buildings chart to generate these tradespeople, but you could roll on my failed medieval careers table and re-roll anything that's dumb. Or not! It's up to you!

You're done! You just tossed some stuff on the table, added a few key buildings, and added some random tradespersons. That's enough to get going with and only took a minute or two.

In the example below, there was a house way out to the side so I made it the Church. The standing block totally represents the steeple.
The blue gem is the location of a well in the village green.
I usually make the Alehouse one of the blocks that lands on-edge (marked with coin in picture) but if you're using dice pick one of the 6's.
Rolling for tradesmen I got Mason, Fortuneteller and Furrier, so I marked them with the coloured disks.

Example!

Now the PCs can enter the village and start deciding what to do. When you've got a chance, you can quickly establish some relationships between people in the town. I use whichever people the PCs have interacted with so far, which usually ties the Alewife and a few of the Tradespeople into a little web of intrigue.

Vornheim, again, has a Connections Between NPCs Diagram which is very helpful in this regard.

Alternatively Logan has a list of relationships in the post I linked to before.

Make sure to add some sort of small-town intrigue in case the party ever comes back. It doesn't always have to be secret cults and mutant children chained in basements, just a bit of simmering jealousy brought to the boil by the sexy Fighter when he passed through or maybe a kid who wants to learn from the Magic User in spite of his apprenticeship to his father's trade.

So I Ran Deep Carbon Observatory

... and my players want to go back?!

Usually I'd start this off with a few choice quotes from my players, but I got 7 sessions out of this with potentially more if they return.
Instead, here's a list of where characters and retainers died.

• Davril Burtey of Thujin Vale, Level 1 Magic User. Saw two wizards dueling on a sunken bridge. Jumped into Wall of Fog, shanked one in the back but was thrown into the water where he was attacked by a giant 3-metre pike. Managed to put out its eye before being devoured. Rest of party booked it out of there when his familiar erupted into a smoke demon.
• Wit "Simon" Tamdoun, Level 0 Lovable Urchin. Tied to a rope and sent diving down into the river to inspect a suspected golden boat. Accidentally used as bait for a giant 3-metre pike with one eye which dragged the skiff into greater danger.
• Dwain William Arthus Remus Froide (aka D.W.A.R.F), Level 2 Dwarf. Lowered on a vast chain into the infinite blackness beneath the earth. Attacked and eaten by a giant bat creature after an hour of descent. He never saw the bottom.
• Labradoodle, Labrador 1/Poodle 1. Thrown at living tapestry woven from silk and bones because dogs eat bones. Dog's bones added to tapestry in short order.
• Titus DeCosta, Level 2 Cleric. Crassly asked a bunch of skinny chemical ladies where the nearest treasure was. They snarkily replied that he could find it by jumping off the nearby ledge into infinite blackness. To my incredulous amusement, he believed them.
• Jack "Danger" Wilbur, Level 1 Fighter. Fought chemical women to avenge Titus' death. He fought well despite being occasionally charmed, but was slain when their burning chlorine fingers turned his heart to glass.
• Fungonius, Level 5 Cleric. Asked toxic beings from the elemental plane of poison to coat his blade in a poison so virulent that it can kill anything is touches. Accidentally released said toxic beings and exploded in a cloud of poison so virulent it can kill everything it touches. They were very embarrassed by this and shouted their apologies to the rest of the rapidly fleeing party.

So what's the deal?

You probably already know the content because if you read my blog you likely move in the same RPG niche-in-a-niche as me and so own it. 

If you don't, please read a review from one of those scrubs who reviews something without running it first. Ha ha.

But really, do. I don't want to retread old ground and other people review things way better.

Gus' Dungeon of Signs

Courtney's Hack and Slash

Ramanan's Save vs Total Party Kill

Luka's Cauldrons & Clerics

Daniel's Basic Red

ok jesus lots of people did reviews

Oh shit some people did run it before reviewing it.

Robin's Renfield's Cat

Kesher's Sandbox Empire

So after that you will know that it is four main areas, the flooded town of Carrowmore, the more widely flooded area before the Dam, the no longer flooded area behind the dam, and the eponymous dungeon at the end.

It is basically a humanitarian disaster zone filled with wacko giant animals and crazy people. Everything will kill you so stay in the goddamn boat.

This is my favourite monster text in the world.

The Writing and Art.

You've got to talk about the writing if Patrick is writing something.

And the art if Scrap is drawing something.

These are both things you must get to appreciate them.

I would show my players a picture of a giant killer platypus or a newt man and they would say "it looks like a child's drawing" or something to which I wanted to say "Do you not SEE the FURIOUS ENERGY in these penstrokes!? Do you not FEEL the lines STRUGGLING TO ESCAPE THE PAGE?!?" but obviously this is an in-crowd thing.

Patrick's writing is often difficult to parse in the heat of play, to the point where I would often miss something or fill in a gap only to find myself having to paper over contradictions later. Luckily I had read the thing a bunch of times but you still miss stuff.

But it is really nice to read and jams PSYCHIC ENERGY into your head. Reading through the book the first time there is no overview or explanation of events so your first reading is the same experience that your players get when they're playing through the thing.

If I wasn't into his writing already I'd probably find it irritatingly difficult to parse.

I think that's an in-crowd thing too.

I like it and you likely like it and if you don't like it you are not part of the social clique and thus likely too ill-bred to take part in a discussion of Stuart's work. Harrumph.

Anyway, you've definitely got to give it a good read before you run it for real. It's dense and hard to parse but there isn't ever a wasted word. Everything is beautiful desolation and sadness.

Back to the art, it's scribbly and Scrappy. I like this because I appreciate stuff where it's close enough and you have to fill in the blanks with your brain.
Somehow wooden jenga blocks create a more realistic dungeon environment than the most badass modular terrain. Same thing with these things. The golem looks like a scribbly motherfucker but he's big and blocky and imposing and that's enough.

It's the same amount of detail as the players need in their heads, basically. I'm a fan.

The only thing is THE MAPS. Other people have said the maps but THE MAPS.

It's actually all fine and usable. No scale, but I didn't actually notice that myself! My Drowned Lands were big enough to get from Carrowmore to the Dam in half a day or so by boat. Especially boat pulled by horse until horse is eaten.

BUT THEN. The Observatory dungeon itself. Room sizes don't line up being the main thing, there are descriptions that imply a much bigger room than shown. I kind of messed up the first room due to accidental map problems, and made the mistake of demarcating the room then looking at its contents.

I stuck with the side view rather than go the top-down route. 

For a game with a fair amount of gameplay based around depth, we haven't really cracked the 3D space problem yet. That's not Scrap's fault though.

See? Perfectly workable!

Things that make this thing special

So the main thing with this module is how fucking awful it is to get to the actual dungeon.

This is so abnormal as to be almost unique. At least as far as I know.

Most times there's an outside-dungeon area detailed it's a hex map around the dungeon with a few landmarks and factions based on the dungeon's factions and the occasional joke encounter.

Here the players were like "Dungeon full of ancient treasures? Let's go!" and found themselves slogging through the worst place in the world. Every time someone suggested turning back others said "we haven't even reached the dungeon yet!".

Deep Carbon Observatory is typified by its complete lack of shit-giving. The dungeon is completely unrelated to all the stuff happening in the valley. The creatures in the overworld are completely unrelated to the dungeon. This isn't "goblins are attacking the village please clear the goblin dungeon", it's "the dam broke and now everything is horrible and you are part of the problem".

To get to the dungeon you've got to slog your way through a mile of grim yet impersonal horror. Everything is starving or will starve. The people, the animals, even the immortal golem guardians of the dam. Things are terrible but they don't care whether you think they're terrible or not. They just Are, and here's you trying to make a quick buck off the situation maybe while also hopefully not spending any time rolling up a new character.

This fits my M.O. perfectly, by the way.

Another thing that doesn't give a shit about you is the giant. When you get to the actual dungeon this fucking giant follows you around squeezing through passages and being a scary fucker.

My giant pretended to be a freaky frieze that moved about when the players were in another room, until someone got close to inspect him and he tried to scoop them up and gobble them.

My players rolled impeccably with this guy, but damn were they scared.

My favourite tactic was to have the giant form a tube with his hand atop a ladder hole. When someone climbed up the ladder I'd say something like "The rung holes stop, and now there's a lumpy rippled stone tube going up to the top. There's sort of three regular striations you could climb quite easily though so it's no big deal" and IT WAS THE GIANT'S HAND THEY WERE CLIMBING INTO.

This worked twice (two separate sessions) but the players rolled annoyingly well and the giant killed nobody.

They killed him with one of their hyper-poisonous crossbow bolts "blessed" by the Poison Dimension's Tox-Men in exchange for their freedom. Now there is no giant but there are three naive and curious beings formed of the platonic ideal of poison down there. They promised to give the players a head start of one year before they emerge to explore the world which is like the 15th player-created apocalypse scenario in my campaign.

Just look at this fucker.

Another fairly special thing is the Crows who are a rival adventuring party.

My players sped through the area so fast that they only saw fleeting glimpses of the Crows in the distance, it was when they emerged from the dungeon that they encountered them properly.

I played them as real dicks, Hooloch stood out in the open atop the wall where nobody at the bottom could hit him and chatted obnoxiously to gain information.

This was my downfall since someone critted him with a crossbow bolt made out of super-poison. My bad. At least Ghar Zaghouan got someone with the eye-bolt that allows him to see out of their eye.

If my players had been slower I would have started smacking them with the Crows but there was no need.

There's also a sequence of events at the end which tells you what will happen in the ensuing weeks, months and years if the players don't stop it.

It's basically Raggi-level your-world-is-fucked events, but at least it's over a few years so your players can totally try to stop it.

This is all good, adventure-generating stuff.

A final thought - everything is very scientificy.

The dungeon is not properly magic, it is mainly deep and warped fantastical science. You've got core samples of strata showing a geological layer of compressed vampires and women wearing robes of chlorine. If you kill said women an Elemental of "high atomic weight" pursues you.

And in terminology terms, from the Profundal Zone to Insolation, I needed to whip out Wikipedia a few times just to look things up.

Nobody glimpsed the weird stuff through the telescope (yet?) but I think the Underdark here could be typified as deeply fucked.

Actually Deeply Fucked would be a fantastic name for an Underdark/Deep Sea module.

I had the giant's face look like this.

Stop rambling! Was it fun in play?

Yea it was great fun.

The opening choose-the-least-worst-option thing worked incredibly well. Everything the players did was balanced out by at least one horrible thing happening that they couldn't stop.

The drowned lands were good because everything in the water would eat them and was probably giant. There was no potential recourse to stabbing things.

I love the witch. The witch is amazing. I had the children all yell out "Nooooo!" and things like it's a kid's show, all the while their parents patted them on the heads and said "quiet dear" and tried to bargain for food and passage back to town for their children.

All the while the witch slid under the water, making ripples in the black corn.

The players spent a good while thinking of how to kill the witch and eventually just said "fuck that, I'm not messing with this chick" and rowed away.

On their way back they discovered half the children and parents on the roofs had blank, dead eyes and stared silently at them as the party drifted back in. They gave their spare skiff to the non-creepy parents and kids, spent another good while thinking of how to kill the witch, then said "fuck that, we're still not messing with this chick" and rowed away.

If (when) this comes back to bite them, at least they'll have some foreknowledge.

They baited the golems around the place for a while but didn't want to attack, so they climbed the dam and got in that way. Pursuing golems were forestalled by skillful use of oil and some lucky rolls.

That means they never entered the dam itself.

The profundal zone behind the dam was quieter. After the constant we're-gonna-die of the drowned lands, it was almost relaxing.

They ended up not helping the People of the Reeds vs the Kapeks. I had the Reed People with shitty weapons, sort of long umbrellas made of reeds that they'd ordinarily use to just push the Kapeks off their floating reed houses.

The Kapeks themselves had no weapons, just gummy bites and tiny claws.

The players watched from their camp in a sun-scoop as the two ancient peoples slowly fought to the death like tired octogenarians.

Later they emerged from the dungeon to find the Kapeks had won and the surviving Reed People had been driven back to their ancient chieftains. I had the chieftains be bumbling and confused and amazed by modern technology and apparently unable to understand that the village was threatened. The Reed People said they had lost their souls.

The players tricked the Reed People into thinking that the Halfling had given a chieftain's soul back by mind-controlling him into marching across the river and assaulting the reed village.

"Finally, we did something to help people!" said one player.
Ha.

The Dungeon itself is awesome. I've already talked about the giant, but there is a dense profusion of cool stuff here.

It is like a funhouse dungeon that ties together. Everything is wacky but related to the fallen underdark empire theme.

There are no truly empty rooms and each place speaks of what this facility might have once been.

They'd barely explored the smaller stalactite before getting out of there alive, but they completely understood that this is all weird shit from deeper underground that they could barely comprehend.

It helps that the minor treasure they took (silk bales, diamond hearts of salt dryads, bags of heatproof ceramic, a mining machine that runs on blood) was worth more than any treasure hoard yet seen.

Being chased by the giant was a lot of fun (for me) and basically God That Crawls 2.0 for them. Luckily the group composition has changed significantly since I ran God That Crawls last year so it was a new experience. The giant was shutting them off from a known exit, rather than chasing them as they tried to find an exit, so I think this is the superior being-chased-by-an-amorphous-horror experience. Plus a man shaped thing that wants to eat you is for more horrific than an amorphous goop that wants to eat you.

I enjoyed the Salt Dryads a whole lot. I figured that they'd act nicer towards people with higher charisma, but apparently everyone's an uncultured oaf in the party at the moment. Persuading a character to jump to his death was possibly one of my finest moments, the fact that a terrible elemental will now be hunting them down for the hearts (which they've already sold) is even better.

The Tox-Men in their sealed glass container were fun. I had a pressure-sealed hatch in the floor that allowed them to exchange stuff with the players, and they totally wanted to explore the world and begged the players to let them out. Any object they touch turns completely to poison, so a player exchanged 20 hypertoxified crossbow bolts for a promise that he'll open their escape hatch as long as they give the party a head start to get out.

"A year? How about a year?" they said, and the players were all "oh awesome we were going to say an hour but that's much better." 

If you touch a crossbow bolt directly you have to Save or Die. Anyone pierced by a bolt explodes into a cloud of noxious green gas, no save.

Another player tried to exploit them by making them turn his sword into super-poison, but they thought he was letting them out and got exploded into poison himself. C'est la mort.

Can you tell I enjoy dangerous monsters that talk?

Final Scores:
7+ sessions of play
Average of 0.7 PC deaths/session.
2-3 apocalyptic scenarios inbound.

It is good and you should run it.

The Ten Foot Polemic Unified House Rule Document - 2015 Update

It's that time again! A year since I last piled all my house rules into a single document, and thus a year of continued FORGING RULES IN THE CRUCIBLE OF PLAY.

My house rule page has been updated and the house rule document along with it.
I also changed the pages around because I've printed them out into cute little A5 booklets for table use.

Check this out

Changes and reasonings thereof follow in a sort of changelog:

Char Gen

• Your Random Failed Profession now gives you two skill points to be assigned as you wish, so long as you can justify using them in your job. That's all you get forever unless you're a Specialist though.
• Changes to ammo dice:
  Gunpowder and shot are now bought together (though the shot pouch and powder horn are two items for encumbrance purposes).
  1d12 is now the biggest ammo die because anything bigger is boring and never runs out.

Living Standards

• All new stuff! See the Living Standards post for more.

Rations

• Rations are for healing, unless you're in a situation where food isn't relatively plentiful like a desert or far beneath the earth.
• Spend a turn eating a ration during the adventuring day to heal 1d6 HP. This is limited only by your number of rations. Standard rations must be cooked for half an hour before eating so they're bad for dungeons - especially since cooking creates smoke and delicious scents that wandering beasts might follow.
• Rations and camping gear in the wilderness count as Comfortable conditions for healing. This is to encourage hunting and/or bringing food with you for long trips away from civilisation. Tents and cookpots are a must. (Living Standards again)
• Hunting is slightly simplified from base LotFP - success takes half a day's overland movement, failure takes it all.

Downtime Activities

• Now with more things! Check out the Downtime Activities post.

Combat Options

• Gambits have been messed around with since Logan's original house rule post.
  Now I have both hit as "it happens", both miss as "ironic reversal", and one-hit-one-miss as "minor success or success at cost".
  This means that the positives and negatives can naturally balance out. Try to trip, they could trip you. Try to jump across the room and shank them straight in the throat, they could turn at the last minute and stab you right in the heart.
  Naturally players are told the potential consequences of success or failure before they roll.
• Wrestling has been better codified as per this wrestling post.

Big Purple d30 Rule

• The original big purple d30 rule has one minor issue, scalability! With higher player numbers literally any creature can get burst down by a gang of hoodlums hopped up on the Big Purple.
  Now it's a stake-raising fate-tempting thing.
  The big purple d30 starts on the player's side. Anybody can use it to replace a roll, but if they do it goes to the DM. The DM can use it to replace the same sort of roll at which point it goes back to the players.
  If you use it to hit, I use it to hit. If you use it on a fumble roll, I use it on a fumble roll.
• Alternatively buy me a beer to get it back for free. This works super well because somebody will use it for damage and I'll keep eyeing it evilly until I get a free beer.

Funerals

• New! Take a dead character to a safe place for burial and you can buy up their experience points on a 1:1 exp-for-sp basis. Money is spent on grave goods, parades, bar tabs, the works!
  It's like a no-consequence carousing.
  This makes higher level characters get way better funerals than low level woobies, and means Johnny Newguy gets left in the dungeon because nobody cares about him, whether player or character.

Inventory

• I was letting people stack up to ten smallish items (torches, rations and oil flasks mainly) into one encumbrance slot. That's down to 5. This feels like a happy medium between my original misreading and LotFP's actual brutal no-stacking-torches thing.
  I was going to go with 3 but that makes adding things up harder.
• I had a thing originally where you got three pouches of quick-access items which ended up lame. I cut that out. Now it's just "in your hands" or "in your inventory". Weapons are always in scabbards and stuff and can be grabbed and used in one round as per base LotFP.
  Sleight of Hand is the way to instantly grab anything out of your inventory. Specialists can be people who have exactly the right thing at the right time. Sleight of Hand also lets you sheathe a weapon, whip out another, and attack with no penalty. Dem hands.

Melee 

• Added whips.
• Removed flails.

Investments and Business Ventures

• Tweaked from LotFP! Investments kick in every month and you can influence how well the business does through in-game actions. Business Ventures post here.

Property

• New! A combination of 5th edition building costs and LotFP property buying.

New Skills

• Added Arcana to replace Architecture. Arcana skill post here.
• First Aid now causes 1 point of damage when you fail on a 6. This is to make First Aid more of a gamble for poorly trained schlubs. One time I had a guy argue that he should regain 1HP per hour on average by First Aiding himself on an off-day, so this is for him.
• Successful Music now gives a +2 on reaction rolls for music-appreciating creatures. It still sucks on purpose. I put quasi-magical sheet music in a dungeon to enable bard shenanigans but the players missed it.
• Stealth is now rolled when someone might see you, not before the fact secretly by me.

Class tweaks

• Clerics can create talismans.
• Elf abilities are slowly filling up as more people take Elves of different types.
• Goblins get buddies from second level. Down from third because buddies is kinda the goblin gimmick.
• Necromancers require Last Breath to give orders to undead under their control. Each dose lasts ten minutes (and thus generally lasts a whole combat) but if you want to micro-manage your minions you'll need to kill a bunch of people
• Otherwise, these classes are holding up really well! And none of the players have gotten bored with the options yet.

Talismans for the Faithful

After having only a single Cleric in my group for a while, suddenly I have four.
A TPK will do that to a group.

One of them, after a couple of sessions, wanted to know if he could differentiate his guy by giving his converts of his Crossbow God some sort of bonus with crossbows.
And so, talismans.

A Cleric can create talismans from second level onwards.
The power of a God's talisman is chosen by the Cleric’s player. It should be specific, conditional and related to their god. Mechanical benefits will not exceed a +1 bonus.
The God of Thieves might grant a bonus to hiding in shadows, for instance, or the God of Light might give a benefit to AC when standing in direct sunlight.

To gain the benefits of a talisman the bearer shalt have no other gods before the Cleric's deity. They must convert to the Cleric's religion and follow any holy strictures thereof. It is the Cleric's player who has final say on whether a character has been living up to their god's standards enough to benefit from a talisman.
A character who converts to another deity may never again benefit from the talisman of their former religion, even if they convert back later. The gods will not be mocked.

Talismans can be created only on a Sunday.
To create a talisman, simply cast Bless on a holy symbol of your god in a place sacred to them.
The value of the holy symbol and the quality of the altar do not matter, only that the Cleric believes in it.
A Cleric of the Moon could enact an opulent ritual with a finely crafted half-moon diamond necklace blessed at the lunar cathedral of the Moon Goddess, or a simple ritual blessing a crudely worked moonstone under the night sky, or anything in between.
The talisman's powers last until the morning of the following Sunday.

A cleric can, of course, benefit from his deity's own talisman.

The idea here is to allow Clerics to be a bit more unique, and give benefits to party members who convert to their god.

Making talisman-crafting a Sunday-only activity is meant to encourage parties to have a day of rest while the Cleric blesses a bunch of talismans. This amuses me.
Making talisman-crafting reliant on the Bless spell means that Clerics can only make as many talismans as they have spell slots. The higher level the Cleric, the more of their flock can benefit from their holy gifts.
The week-long time limit is to make sure that Clerics won't just stockpile these suckers, and means they'll run out of juice after a while when the Cleric is dead.

Having multiple Clerics means that they might compete for converts! This also amuses me.

The intention behind characters never benefiting from a talisman ever again if they swap gods is to encourage faith.
But mainly, if I'm honest, it's to forestall the inevitable bit where someone tries to deck themselves out in five holy charms and swap gods on the fly to get the best benefits.


Currently in my game I have the following depending on who's shown up today -
Crossbow God: +1 to hit with Crossbows
God of Darkness: +1 to hit when in the dark
Mushroom God: +1 vs fungus-related saves
and another Cleric who hasn't decided on his god but has decided that his talisman makes his censer-mace warm enough to heat incense.

Investments, Business Ventures, and getting the players involved with the world.

To my surprise, several players in my game have independently decided to open businesses.

LotFP has rules for investments, but apparently that's too hands-off for players who will give me a list of the wagon prices, wages, and other sundry costs they're paying per month for their speculative mining business.

And thus, this.

Grab the pdf here and the word doc here.

As per LotFP, you choose (or if you don't know, the DM chooses) a level of risk.

Choose between Stable, Risky and Wild. This table might help.

Risk	Maximum Monthly Growth	Risk Dice
Stable	10%	3d6
Risky	20%	2d6
Wild	100%	1d6

Hey woah, what are risk dice?

The idea is that more dice skew towards the middle result or whatever.

On 1d6 you've got an even chance of every result oh no.

On 3d6 you're likely getting a 9-12.

So here's the risk table.

Safe (3d6)	Risky (2d6)	Wild (1d6)	Risk Table
-	-	1	Bankrupt! Lose every last copper piece.
-	2	2	Terrible Catastrophe. -1d20% value.
3-4	3	3	Major Calamity. -1d10% value.
5-6	4	-	Mild Setback. -1d6% value.
7-8	5	-	Bad Omens. -1d4% value. -2 to next risk roll.
9-12	6-8	-	Business as usual. +1% value.
13-14	9	-	Encouraging Signs. +1d4% value. +2 to next risk roll.
15-16	10	-	Good Fortune. +1d6% value
17-18	11	4	Excellent Luck. +1d10% value.
-	12	5	Massive Windfall. +1d20% value.
-	-	6	Huge Profits! +1d100% value.

As per LotFP, an accountant gives you an extra +1d10% profit, but takes 5% of money handled as payment.
Damn accountants always know exactly how much to charge.

Isn't this still hands-off, just laid out in a different way?
Ahah! Not quite. The big advantage of this versus regular LotFP rules is that I can give people bonuses or penalties to this risk table based on their actions.

So if someone's failed career is pie making, they'll get a +1 to their pie business.

If someone dies and transfers their holdings to their successor character, a change in management is going to mean a -2 or whatever.

If there are zombies everywhere they'll get a penalty until it's sorted out. If a competitor's business mysteriously collapses, they'll get a bonus.

Just play it by ear, you're good at this shit.

If your business venture is Wild you've got way more risk but your actions will have way more impact, and vice versa for a Safe investment.

The other change from LotFP investment rules is that the investment matures every month, not every year. My campaign doesn't usually move quick enough for yearly stuff to matter, but a month tends to be every few sessions so it works out fine!