Elves Fallen Further

Every elf was once a human. Each experienced the touch of the Fey Folk as a child, though this experience differs from person to person and elf to elf. Some are plucked from cradles in unwarded rooms or are the children of women seduced by the fey, others play too long in fairy circles or witness things unknowable through frosted windows when up too late. In each case, a spell is planted upon their heart, dormant and waiting.

Often the circumstances are forgotten as the child grows, justified to themselves and their peers as dreams or overactive imaginations, but as the child reaches maturity strange coincidences and unexplainable phenomena start to manifest in their daily lives. The spell planted in their heart begins to fill their blood and bone with magic, growing ever stronger, until one day the child learns to harness the power of their heart-spell.

This is usually discovered during puberty under times of strife or duress.

Eventually as the elf grows in power their otherworldly nature overcomes their humanity until the person is gone and only the elf remains. 

The final form of each elf depends on their heart-spell. These final forms are detailed here.

 

Heartspell sounds really lame though, like it should be the title of a torrid romance novel or something. Any input on improvements is appreciated.

So Anyway, How Do They Work?

A new elf character has only knowledge of their heart-spell and Read Magic. They may use spellbooks, although they begin play without them.

They can swap any spell for their heart-spell as they cast it.

If they cast all of their spells for the day they look entirely human. Otherwise, they look increasingly alien for every spell they have in their head. 

One memorised spell in any type of elf causes the ears to go classically pointy and leaf-shaped. This is because I haven't worked out what happens at each level for each spell yet, and don't plan to do so until it's immediately relevant, but suffice to say that it will be related to the spell in their heart.

Save for the pointy ears thing, each mutation will be associated with a benefit. 

For instance, a second level Light-spell elf with two spells in their head might have infravision and glistening eyes. Cast one spell and you lose the glistening eyes and the infravision. Cast your second spell and you lose your pointy ears and can pass as human without having to wear a hat.

They instantly regain their spells in the light of the moon, but lose their minds and cavort and moon worship and gallivant and scare good god-fearing folk for one hour per level.

Their powers wax as the moon wanes.

They do not need to sleep.

They fear cold iron, for its touch makes them unable to use their magic for 1 round per spell level still locked in their heads.

They cannot pass thresholds warded with cold iron (such as doors hung with horseshoes) unless they have no spells left and as such are functionally human.

Cold iron is simply pure iron that is cold to the touch. It is not iron forged without heat or iron mined in the depths of the world or anything silly like that. Elves themselves tend to use blades of steel if trying to blend into human society, or elf-forged blades of bronze if they do not care for Man.

They do not age unless all of their spells have been cast.

Eat the heart of an elf and you gain its bone-deep mastery of its heart-spell and a measure of its longevity. On the night of the New Moon, the Wyld Hunt will come for you.

I have quick class breakdown sheets for my players, it makes it easier for them to pick a class in a hurry after I've ripped up their sheet.

Here’s my new breakdown for elves.

Elf

Be this if

You want to be a changeling slowly losing your humanity, able to both fight and cast magic.

Being an Elf

If it is true that the average man fears the Wizard, then it is also true that he is terrified by the Elf. For elves are magical beings down to their bones and blood, changeling children stolen beneath the blind eye of the new moon and bewitched by charms and bonds both gentle and vile. They are terrible, and beautiful. Dark kings in their dark courts. Half-glimpsed shapes and shifting colour. Crow-beaked shadows. Shining eyes. Fear in your throat as you stumble home in the moonless night.

But this is not you.

This is what you will become.

Alignment

You detect as Chaotic.

Spells

Each elf holds a spell in his heart, cut it out and you’ll see. Roll a d20 and tell me the result. That is your heartspell, it defines what you are and what you will become.

You do not sleep, but every night at moonrise you must spend an hour or more cavorting and yammering in the moonlight to regain your spells. At first level you can channel one spell per day.

You can’t have two of the same spell in your head at a time, but you can cast your heartspell in place of another spell at any time and you can flip a reversible spell on casting.

Your powers wax as the moon wanes.

Spells take a round to go off. Declare that you’re casting at the start of a round before initiative is rolled, the spell goes off at the end. If you’re interrupted mid-cast the spell goes wild and you release a Chaos Burst. Pass an INT check to wrestle it back under control and maintain casting.

Changeling

The magic inside you is transforming you from within. For every spell you have memorised you gain more and more otherworldly characteristics and abilities, you lose them as you cast the spells. An elf with no spells is human once more, at least until the next night. 

The first characteristic for all elves is pointed ears, lending you a 2 in 6 Search skill. Further markings and abilities depend on your heartspell. Further markings are harder to hide.

Cold iron is elf-bane. Its touch mitigates your magic and dulls your senses, giving you -2 to attacks and making you unable to cast spells for as many rounds as you have spells left in your head. You cannot pass thresholds warded with cold iron (such as doors hung with horseshoes).
Neither of these limitations apply if you have no spells left and as such are functionally human.

Gameplay Stuff

Hp	Paralyze	Poison	Breath	Device	Magic
1d6 – min. 4	13	12	15	13	15

Taken and run with via Middenmurk.

Fallen Elves for LotFP

After seeing this and breathing heavily whilst devouring it with my eyes, I decided to introduce it to my own game.
Elves are pretty boring in my game because they just look like pointy-eared people. I've already changed Halflings to Goblins, now it's time to change Elves into something fundamentally Alien and Other and Weird. I really really like this idea that elves are the bogeys and milk-curdlers and haunting things that the mind imagines when you're paranoid and alone at night.

The only problem is that Middenmurk's Fallen Elves cover only the Labyrinth Lord starting spells, and Flame Princess has 20 plus Read Magic. I've nicked his stuff whole cloth, shifted some entries to other spells if they aren't in the spell list, and I've tried to emulate his excellent writing as best I could for the rest. Hopefully it fits in fine!

1. Bookspeak.

Canny Childe: Diminutive starry-eyed archaics of cherubic seeming. Like unto a child of ten or eleven years in aspect but with a wry glance and a knowingness beyond their apparent youth, the Canny parasitise human dwellings where they can creep about seeking the glyphs and sigils of arcane witchery and abuse the trust they elicit in their hosts to worm their way into vaults of secret gramarye.

2. Charm Person

Brackenfrau: Burnished nut-brown moon-faced wenches with crinkly hair that lurk in the withery drears and fern-brakes of a grey autumn. Out in the dappled half-light they dwell in hovels and weave plots to capture comely admirers. They trade in stolen children and seek to use their powers of persuasion to encourage the starveling poor to part with their offspring.

3. Comprehend Languages

Sloomit Waghorn: Conspiratorial manipulative lurkers in alcoves. Hidden in the Bounder-Keeps of the imperium's tattered brink are the fey and crump-horned scholars of the dead years. They keep chronicles kept in dusty archives in which are remembered the aeons of the Earth's dark prime and dynasties beyond. They seek runestones and ogham-staves and other archaic inscriptions.

4. Detect Magic

Hollowback Ylfen: Fair to look upon from the front but weirdly hollow and cow-tailed behind. The Ylfen pass briefly unnoticed among humans seeking articles of spae-craft hidden among the detritus of decaying civilisation. To them, all magical trinkets are their province, to be purloined and returned to the barrows where they reign in solitude.

5. Enlarge

Galumfy Dotard: Long-armed simians, cruel and stone-browed.  Stumpy pachyderm-hands pull great oaks into sheltered bowers. Ever-shifting size seems greater with distance. Stamping steps approach to reveal a grey-clad child of mannish visage. They take delight in inflicting painful ravishings upon foolish women who wander alone in the sylvan moonlight.

6. Faerie Fire

Lunting Boggart: Willow-thin lilting wayfarers beset by eternal wanderlust. Wanderers and vagrants, all. They smoke strange herbs in curling pipes during their long-legged jaunts through distant dells. Tall and uncanny, they visit villages on cold moonless nights, tapping thin fingers on windows as they create intricate traceries in the frost.

7. Feather Fall

Flitting Gad: Silent footed and hollow boned, the Gads play strange games in the tall places of the world. They swoop like swallows to catch midges in their baleen mouths, and take to fluttering from rooftops on their two-knuckled hands within eyeshot of a wide-mouthed child. Stay up past bed and you might join them.

8. Floating Disk

Ouphe: Gawping outlandish pudding-headed wanderers. Mostly harmless, ouphes prance uncouthly around the peripheries of the world and laugh at thunder and cry at sunlight and sleep in ditches. What they value is hard to gauge but they have little to offer anyone that makes any sense so it matters little.

9. Hold Portal

Misergeist: Hooky emaciated gloating buzzard-folk; Long and twisted are they and keepers of secrets . The geists are melancholy avarice embodied, hook-nosed and sallow flinthearts that spend their lives gloating over tarnished pewter in the dim and secret cysts of the margins of the world. Misergeists are vanishingly few and bereft of generative vitality; always they seek brides and bridegrooms favoured by the heavens.

10. Identify

Bibliognost: Ophidian-eyed seekers of artifacts, immortal and aloof. Strobiloid cone-bodies creeping slowly through cavern depths on gastropodic feet. They circulate unknown and impossible relics into the world to determine their effects, then hide them away to ensure objectivity.

11. Light

Worriganger: Light - Feral outcasts shrouded in rags and dusty fur who live alone in desolation. They are dusky and angular strangers who mutter in their solitude and follow after the wayward with wolfish intent. Worrigangers are feared and abhorred such that the name is a malediction cast upon the rapist and the hearthless vagrant.

12. Magic Aura

Langrel: Lazy scabrous salesmen adept at making the unseemly seem wonderful. Lamp-carrying dealers granting likely stories and too-good-to-be-trues to the dispossessed and easily led. They deal in any place in any currency and give concessions for prices paid in souls and firstborns.

13. Magic Missile

Gluntie Queyne: Gangling, bristly and ungainly fairy women. Horse-faced and haggard and possessed of an abrasive angularity of demeanour. The Glunties dwell apart in realms of fearful loneliness as their capacity to strike men dead with elf-shot makes them formidable and hated and their tendency to imbibe inebriants immoderately makes them unpredictable.

14. Mending

Gremling: Diminutive borrowers of toys and intricate things, petty breakers of tools left too long in forgotten drawers. Spirits of the unfinished task, cut short by the bent nail or the wrong screwdriver. Mischief achieved, they make amends by mending what they had broken, and sometimes more besides. Many a broken marriage has been mended by the ministrations of a Gremling, forecasted by unexpected annoyance and woe.

15. Message

Flibbertigibbet: Far too slender and unearthly to be beautiful -glittering dark and furtive craven wispy fey who haunt the fen-lands and spinneys. They have an unwholesome predilection for leadings-astray and yearn merely to caress the placid faces of the wayward dead. The living are too too coarse and earthly for them.

16. Shield

Habberjock: Thick-lipped grotesques of apparently majestic stupidity. Habberjocks are outlandishly ugly changeling children grown man-high and uglier still. Their voices are thick and unctuous and their eyes dull and gleaming. They delight in the company of geese and mules and in the slow-worm and eft.

17. Sleep

Scalbert Gumph: Sleep - Shambolic fae manifest as slobbery dullards that sleep under bridges and in abandoned mills. They shamble about in the drunken twilight seeking the unwary with groping fingers and muttering dark lullabies. More than anything they desire comely sheep and black roses and locks of maiden's hair.

18. Spider Climb

Alpdrucke: Flattish semi-shadows forming uncanny shapes on the wall, blinking with black eyes from within the wardrobes and beneath the beds of unruly children. Fingers tipped with gossamer strands float down, touching skin through fabric and causing tiny itches that are all too easily scratched. Wake too soon and you might feel it crouching on your chest, trailing its subtle threads across your face and ears and throat. Hide under the covers and it will crawl in with you.

19. Summoning

Capripeds: Unctuous epicurean blackguards who traffick with strange forces. In the high hills the Capripeds dance in the new moon's dark with godless things from elder aeons, for the shades can touch them not and the awfish nymphs of the unbegotten prime harm them not for they wrap themselves in webs of glamer.

20. Unseen Servant

Hauntling Glister: Truculent petty vengeance seekers, pursuing perceived slights until satisfied or distracted by further devilments. Translucent skin and bone nearly invisible in the crepuscular morning light. Movers of keys and flicking shadows fleeing late-night investigations of shifting crockery. Long of leg and fleet of foot they escape with the dawn, leaving wrong-sized footprints in the dew.

That was actually a lot of fun! I hope I did a good enough job, even though I blatantly added l's and f's to make words seem more olde.
Expect a post soon about how I plan to use Elves as PCs. It involves them starting as pointy-eared classic elves, and ending up as these things.

Thing: Witch Coins

Witch Coins are cursed gold coins, given by witches to misers, enemies, and those who they seek to teach a lesson. They look much the same as normal coins, although often close inspection will reveal the witch's profile in place of the ruler or monarch they were minted under.

Every night, witch coins split all other money in their container into its value in a lower denomination. Gold coins split into silver, silver splits into copper, and copper splits into lead slugs.

The sheer volume of coins created this way is usually enough to explode coin pouches, burst open chests and safes, and cause a whole bunch of transport problems due to weight and volume.
No value is actually lost unless they turn to lead, in which case they might maybe be able to be used or sold as sling bullets.

Anything purchased with a Witch Coin will invariably have problems with workmanship and quality, even if it looks fine on the surface.

The curse can be broken via Remove Curse, or by giving the coins away.

LotFP Encumbrance Calculator: Part Two

Alright, time to finish this post off!

Once again, you can find the calculator here. Duplicate or download as you will.
And if anybody's out there who wants to know how all the parts fit together, follow along in your exercise book. There will be a quiz.

Part 1 is here.

The Second Sheet

This section is simply for unencumbering items and other notes on the things the players have. Moving on.

The Third Sheet

A separate encumbrance sheet for henchmen, also includes loyalty value. Otherwise identical to the first sheet.

The Fourth Sheet

Total Wealth

Total Value is a useful one. Since everybody is bad at maths at my table, knowing how much value they have total amid their innumerable coins is a good thing to know.

=SUM((B2*50)+B3+(B4/10))

Silver standard with 10 copper to the silver and 50 silver to the gold.
If you use different monetary values, you'll want to change this.

Total Coins

 =SUM(B2:B4)

 Merely adds up the actual number of gold, silver and copper pieces.

Encumbrance

=MAX((ROUNDUP((C7/100),0)-1),0)

100 coins of any denomination to the Encumbrance slot.
So this divides the Total Coins by 100, then rounds up to the nearest whole number.
Subtract 1 because otherwise a single coin takes up a slot.
This would make someone with no coins have a negative encumbrance slot, so MAX means the cell has a minimum value of zero.
Change the 100 to however many coins you think somebody should fit in an encumbrance slot.
   
Gold Wealth
This is just their total wealth in terms of gold.

Bank Balance
This simply pulls from the next page so I can read everyone's fortunes at once

The Fifth Sheet

I added this one after the players started banking their cash to make it harder to steal. Turns out you can use it for proper banking in real life too!

Initial Deposit
The amount deposited. If they deposit more cash just treat the new total as a new initial deposit and start it over.

Interest Rate
The interest rate in decimal. This bank gives a mere 2% interest but it turns out that's normal outside of Australia. Who knew?

No. Months
Self explanatory. My bank clocks over profit at the end of each month because it's already more complex than it needs to be. Not that the players know that of course.

Current Total
The standard compound interest formula, outputs the amount of money in the bank, with interest.

Profit
Because sometimes players want to know that they've earned 5 copper so far on their investment (wooooooooow).

The Sixth Sheet

This one is just for tracking some general stuff at the game table.

Dice Roller

=RANDBETWEEN(1,100)

Oh but this one's good to know! Pick a random number between 1 and 100 in this case. Good for rolling funky dice which you can't find or went under the table or for using d30 tables if you don't have one.
Change the last number to a die size to roll a die with that many sides
I use it at work when I'm on my lunch break if I feel like prepping.

HP
A simple HP tracker because my group reeaally sucks at maths.

I also track who has what spells here, mainly for the Muscle Wizard who gets bonuses based on the spells he hasn't cast.


Phew, done! Next time: Something you might actually find not boring.

LotFP Encumbrance Calculator: Part One

I've been grabbing free, eminently gameable stuff from the OSR for a good couple of years now.
This is my first attempt at giving something back.
If you use it and it's good, let me know! It'll be like lotion for my ego.

Without further ado, behold my LotFP Encumbrance Calculator!
If you don't use the LotFP encumbrance system, you're missing out. It's the only system I've ever used that reduced resource management to a not-annoying level without resorting to the classic "Fuck Encumbrance" and/or "Everything is in my Bag of Holding" systems.

Anyway, edit any yellow rows on the spreadsheet and the blue stuff should update itself. I just noticed those colours didn't appear on the google doc, guess i'll do that in a sec.
For those who use LotFP straight up, that should be good enough for you!
For others, prepare for a huge fucking post where I explain the nuts and bolts for no good reason.

Skip to things in orange for things you're most likely to change.

If you're reading this now, over a year on since I made this, I later used the Excel knowledge I gained from this to get a job where I am the Excel Guy. Turns out D&D made me more employable! Who knew, right?
Reading this now and seeing how proud I was of a few nested functions is like so adorbz.

The Actual Game: Random tables everywhere

It's finally happened, I'm at the point where I have enough tables, charts and content to run an entire session off the cuff.

And it feels good.

Last session, only two people could show up. Luckily they're both new to old school dnd and have none of the caution the others tend to show.

So the dwarf and the goblin chick sitting on a gutter in the capital snorting as much Purple Lotus as they could fit in their nostrils.
Purple Lotus has a whole d100 table for its effects in Death Frost Doom, and thus began the random chart madness.

After the level 1 dwarf lost 3 levels and overdosed, a player death within ten minutes is a new high score! The goblin got so high she lost 3 wisdom and Communed with her god. Unbenownst to her, all of his answers were lies. During her questioning, she discovered that down the nearby manhole there was a machine that would make her live forever.

Meanwhile, the other player has rolled up a Muscle Wizard, and gets random spells. "I've got sleep today!" he says, shoving more Purple Lotus into his nostrils. He gets "Character goes suicidal" on the chart and starts punching himself in the head before he sets off his sleep spell and puts himself and a bunch of bystanders into a deep magical sleep.

Somebody stole their drugs while they were sleeping, so they dust themselves off, collect the dead dwarf's belongings, and climb down the manhole.

I've been flipping through the One Page Dungeon contest pdf's this whole time in the abscence of James Raggi's upcoming Another Shitty Adventure book, looking for something that fits the bill. I find the perfect thing in '09's Old City map with its rivers of filth and general sewery nature. Just in time!

it's actually really great

They get a grid for mapping purposes despite the dungeon's decidedly ungridlike nature, and explore a short distance. They inspect a six foot wide river of poop and probe it with a staff (hee hee!) to see how deep it is. Then the Muscle Wizard uses his great strength to throw the goblin over a poop river, and critical fails to jump over himself and keels over into it. Excellent.

Next room: Spider eggs in the middle of the room. The goblin tries to torch them for whatever reason and four big old spiders jump out! Oooh no. Luckily the muscle wizard is quick on his feet and punches one so hard that its friends get knocked out as well.
They search the room for things. Table time! One of my own, so I can't link it because I haven't been bothed to digitise it, but I made it years ago and finally it saw some use. Random armour came up and so the wizard finds some leather armour and a whole bunch of silver, and the goblin found a set of adorably goblin-sized full plate, fit for goblin spider-jousting. She leaves it behind because "I'd only fall into the shit river and get shit all inside it and can you imagine how bad that would smell? It would smell like shit all the time" and also because encumbrance.

Then a random encounter came up, fantastic! And a bumbling old city surveyor comes past through an alleyway. He's got a shitty map, so each player gets to look at my map for a few seconds but they can't work out where they are other than "fuck, none of these passages are square are they?"

As he walks away I realise I put Arolohnso from Petty Gods into my rumours table, and that they totally just met him without realising! Very good. They follow his moist brown footsteps to a secret door, and look across another poop river. Once more, the goblin is thrown across safely and the wizard falls short. It's a theme! It is now decided that the wizard's name is Modor, as in Magical Hodor.

this image brought to you by google image search and five minutes

The building nearby seems inhabited, and they knock on the door only to find that it's a thieves' guild and they don't know the password. After the goblin opens the lock anyway with her intrinsic Tinkering skills, they let her in.

The old, blind Thief Master with an enormous cowl sits across a sputtering fire made from soggy wood, they sit on chunks of masonry and he asks to inspect their valuables which keep mysteriously disappearing before he can hand them back.
The thieves of course have come up behind them at this point and try to knock them out with blackjacks. Once again, the wizard is too fast! And he leaps over the fire and holds the Master hostage.

"I never planned beyond this point"
 - Actual quote.

He pulls back the cowl and - oh no! The Thief Master is a ratman! The goblin stabs him in the foot to make sure he can't get away, and crits. Crit table time - "Max damage and enemy is immobilised for a round", guess she stabbed him so hard he got nailed to the floor!
The ratman throws wide his robes and sends money and loot everywhere as a distraction. Enemy thieves start scrabbling through the coins, players grab some more things, then ask if there's anything other than coins.

Roll roll random mundane loot table.
Roll roll "An impossibly fancy hat", an entry penned into the Vornheim "I search the body" table years ago.

Player is beaming, but then I remember that it gets better because I found a random hat table literally yesterday.
Player is gobsmacked "no way is that a thing".
Roll roll.
"It's a deep purple ninja hood, probably with extra filligree and designs and stuff to make it even more incredibly fancy."

They hot foot it out of there, back to the entrance, spiders still asleep, wizard throws goblin over the river and fails it, goblin lands in shit, "I told you this would happen!" she says, before the wizard jumps off her head to the other side.

They go out the way they came, emerge onto street level, and hit up the public baths where they are hosed down before they can even go in.

Modor decides to spend what little cash he has on a big night Carousing in the capital, rolls numbers bigger than he has the money to cover so he's in heavy debt to a drug lord, fails his poison save vs. alcohol, rolls badly on my slightly altered carousing table, and ends up in jail.
"Wait, but I totally smashed some purple lotus while I was carousing in the drug capital of the world"
Alright then, roll roll, "You wake up purple".
"Holy shit I match my ninja hat!"

It was a good night indeed.

Monster: Packed Wolves

For The Hexenbracken.

The Packed Wolves, sometimes known as Wolves in Wolves' Clothing or Matryoshka Wolves, are a bizarre type of magical creature occasionally found in areas inundated by magic and cold.

They can go unnoticed in areas for some time since they seem to be normal wolves, save for their ravenous appetites.

However, whenever a Packed Wolf is hurt, an entire other wolf bursts out of its mouth, and so on.
It is unknown just how many wolves a Packed Wolf can contain within itself, but sages agree that it is "too many".

Once their prey is defeated, the Packed Wolves devour its carcass together. Then they jump, one by one, back into the mouth of the least hurt wolf to rest and recuperate.

Tales are told of a clever farm boy luring a Packed Wolf into a deep pit of jagged spikes and thereby feeding his village throughout the winter.

This is the best I could do

Stat block as wolf.
MV 60 AC 14/7 HD 2+2 ATK 1 DMG 1d6 SV F1 ML 8

oh my gosh they're real!