Goblin Punch

So settings have a prehistory--the stuff that happened way before the common era. They're usually either:

(a) tediously enumerated with faux-mythology, or
(b) just sort of ignored, and assumed to be the same as Vanilla Earth

Both of them are fine, but there's a lot of fertile ground between those two fence posts.

None of this is canon; I'm just spinning my axles.

The Age of Stars

In this Age, the Authority arrived in the sky above Centerra and constructed his throne: the Sun (which was a golden disc, and not yet illuminated).

He decided that he would create Life, and that the purpose of that Life would be to Worship. That would be what Good was.

The Authority decided to organized the luminous heavens into stars, which would be arranged geometrically in the heavens. The star-lines would be worshipful in their repetition. They would be made to twinkle according to mathematical sequences, forming great cathedrals of logic, the grids from which they would conduct the dignified business of worship.

Eventually, the Authority became tired of his sublime geometries. They composed beautiful chords of light, but they never produced anything that he didn't teach them. They had become repetitive.

And so the Authority decided that he would create better servants. They would have to have an element of randomness to them, so that they could compose better praise. And they would need to have the ability to self-refine, so that the most successful types of worship would become abundant and successful, while the least successful types of worship would shrivel up and become extinct.

He almost got it right the first time.

The Degenerate Age

This is where the Authority fucked up. The first organism he created was Sathla, a vast and impossible creature that covered a continent and contained all possible biologies.

She was meant to be iterative: each brood she produced would be judged according to their fitness (the acceptance of their worship). After receiving their judgement, Sathla would then reabsorb all of her children (which was easy enough when you cover the entire continent). She would then spawn the next generation based on the most successful individuals, as well as some permanent worshippers.

This is pretty similar to how life works now, except that the continent would eat you when you hit middle-age and force you to mate with all of your friends inside your mother's cavernous fallopian tubes, followed by a debriefing and swift (but not unpleasant) digestion.

Sathla was quite clever with her flesh--there was a great deal of neural sponge cradling her uterine cathedria. She would learn what worked and adapt. This would not be a blind process.

In this way, Sathla would eventually produce the most elegant worship of the Authority possible, even accounting for the fickle metagame of the Authority's changing tastes. (Bacchanals are out. Sestinas are in.)

This plan got fucked up almost immediately. Many of Sathla's children escaped reabsorption. Many abhorrent biologies were produced that were offensive to the Authority. And with directed intelligence came a sort of manipulation. Sathla never worked against the Authority (she was incompatible with the very idea, in fact), but she worked hard to ensure that her children met with more approval than the actually deserved by using such tools as guilt, flattery, and loose definitions of identity.

Besides, she loved her children, and preferred to transform them rather than destroy them, and would do so whenever possible. Additionally, she had her own ideas of what the Authority preferred, which differed from what he said he preferred.

This isn't to say that Sathla didn't find some success: some of the most ancient angels were actually created by this process.

When the Authority closed the door on this misbegotten project (a few million years too late) Sathla was nearly destroyed by his withdrawal. Without unity, her body tore itself apart again and again, as a million competing cancers struggled for escape and dominance.

She split into competing schools of flesh in a process that was simultaneously mutiny, cancer, and evolution.

A great many animals evolved in the Degenerate Age as creatures tore themselves in half. The Serpicant, the Black Pudding, and the elder chimeras. (It is a common misconception that chimeras are formed by lesser creatures that fused together into the greater. They have it backwards.)

Most were composed of pieces that would seem to be singular animals today. A living tank that rolled around on tank treads composed of fused elephants. Enormous bi-directional tortoises whose shells were filled with conjoined snakes that served the same function as a nematocyst on coral.

Nearly everything had an surfeit of heads.

This is the process that spawned both the Serpicant, the Black Pudding, the Unfinished Leviathans.

One of Sathla's surviving offspring is Elcoroth, one of the founding members of Zala Vacha.

Anyway, the Authority turned the planet inside out and put all of this mess in there, along with a few of the most disappointing stars.

It was a bit like flipping over a piece of paper in order to draw on the other side, except it took 200 million years and nearly everything died.

The Age of Mounds

Having learned from his mistakes, the Authority decided that he would reward Good Deeds with Calories. What was Good would be rewarded with Calories, so that it would be able to produce more of itself.

Just like the last Genesis, this one would be iterative.

He didn't realize it, but this time the Authority had accidentally invented evolution.

This age favored sacrosynthetic metabolisms, and after a few hundred million years, This caloric distribution scheme eventually produced the Holy Mounds. They were soil-dwelling networks of flesh that great to incredible sizes simply by thinking holy thoughts and avoiding all violence.

They resembled small hills with a wind tunnel scooped through the middle of them. Ringed with forests of flagellar villi, these wind tunnels blew air through their midsections. This allowed them to sing praise to the Authority while simultaneously absorbing carbon and nitrogen from the air. (Their holyness only gave them calories. They still needed to pluck carbon from the air.)

Their offspring were flying worms that crossed continents, powered by a similarly powerful inner wind tunnel, until they burrowed into a promising section of unclaimed land.

Some say that the Holy Mounds were the predecessors to the Paladins of the Voice.

Another type of creature was the Suffer-Blob. They survived by being hyper-sensitive to pain, and thus surviving on the modicum of karmic calories that their suffering provided. Their lives were so miserable (it hurts to breath, it hurts to blink) that the Authority felt bad allowing such horribly disadvantaged creatures to starve.

There were also Nurses, gangling creatures that survived by taking care of Suffer-Blobs, and thus earning some karmic calories through these good deeds.

The Authority eventually realized that this process was just creating ecosystems that were born to suffer, take care of suffering things, and eventually die noble deaths protecting their young. It was all so. . . unnecessary, and yet it was the natural consequence of the natural laws that he had designed.

And so the Authority discovered Moral Ecology.

He decided to try making calories transferable, so that creatures could use them as currency in exchange for goods and services. This quickly led to parasitism and carnivory, which nauseated the Authority. (Violence existed prior to this, along with teeth and fangs. But the consumption of other creatures, this was new.)

And so the Authority discovered Regular Ecology.

He decided that this whole mess was rather fucked, and would go back to Worship instead of Good Deeds, this time incentivized by caloric inputs.

The Suffer-Blobs died quickly when the caloric distribution schema was changed, but the Holy Mounds survived for a long time.

The Age of Trees

Calories would be appointed to the creatures that displayed the most worshipful displays. He would turn the planet into a peacock.

The first creatures that evolved to take advantage of this caloric distribution scheme were things that covered the ground like tarps, covered with colorful mandalas. But them some of them evolved to stand atop little stems, and to spread their patterns like an umbrella, not unlike a small tree.

This evolutionary arms race continued for millions of years. The trees eventually became taller, and the patterns bigger. In order to avoid being blown over by the wind, they split their spreading patterns into smaller leaves. And they grew in such a way as to show the most of their leaves to the Authority.

Trees didn't maximize their photosynthetic areas in order to absorb photons from the sun, they maximized their sancrosynthetic area in order to show the sun pleasing images.

The colors and patterns were riotous in those days. The trees were priests, of a sort. They contemplated holy things (like their predecessors, the Mounds) and preached to all the animals who would listen, which was normally only the creatures that parasitized and/or ate them.

<digression>To this day, aphids still remember fragments of this ancient wisdom, passed down through a billion generations. The aphids know that they are special, and they may even know the true name of the Authority, who the humans call Dumadiyei (rhymes with 'my ma says hey') when they use his name to work miracles.</digression>

This is also the age when the Authority first lit the sun. More light would allow him to see what beautiful things his children were showing him.

After 400 million years, he had grown tired of all possible designs, patterns, poetry, hues, fractals, compositions, chromastrobic follies, and synthetic para-colors. The only thing he still enjoyed was a single color--his favorite one. From then on, calories would be distributed to whatever organism showed him that color.

You can guess what color it was.

The Age of Disappointment

The Authority began to lose hope that he would ever redeem this mess. He contemplated destroying the whole thing, but was halted by the prospect of the massive amount of suffering that would entail, as well as the billion years it would take to do the job properly. He was getting older, after all.

Perhaps there was another unspoiled planet somewhere else? An egg that he could pull a more beautiful hatchling from?

And so the Authority departed Argosa. He would not return for a long time.

Bonus Links

Other people have done similar posts about fantastic prehistory, staring with a couple of people that were talking about it before I was thinking about it.

If you want more. . .

False Machine extrapolates ancient life-forms.
Scrap Princess extrapolates nonsense myths into semi-nonsense.
Skerples talks about troll epochs.
Dan makes everything weird and a little funny.
Dunkey tells us of the Second Bird Age, unfortunately. (I hope that's your most enduring creation.)
Skerples takes several thoughts to their conclusions.

Early in my D&D career, my character Skull Boy walked into a room and was instantly killed when two skeletons surprised him with a pair of crits. I didn't have a chance to react. I didn't even get to roll any dice. Needless to say, I reacted poorly.

And yes, this was an inexperienced DM. And yes, you could point to this and label it as a flaw of the death/dying system (perhaps this could be circumvented by giving characters three rounds of death saving throws or whatever). And yes, you could argue that this is a good thing, and that games benefit from that level of chaos.

by Dusty Ray

Thesis: I don't think the game benefits from surprise rounds where the monsters just unload damage.

Rationale: enemy surprise rounds don't offer the players any interesting choices. They just happen. It's a miniature version of "rocks fall; everyone dies".

Yes, I know that surprise rounds have been a staple of old-school play for a long time.

Yes, I'm still okay with giving the players a surprise round where they unload damage on enemies. (My rationale this is that they are creeping through the dungeon at a slow pace, quietly listening and mapping. They are being very cautious; this is why it parties move so slowly through dungeons.)

Yes, I'm aware that allowing player surprise rounds while banning monster surprise rounds is sort of asymmetric and unrealistic (whatever that means).

I recognize that D&D is a game that benefits from a carefully controlled level of chaos. (That's why we roll dice.) I believe that rolling for initiative on the first round of combat already provides a sufficient dose of joyful uncertainty. There's already enough opportunity for things to turn to shit on the first round.

Exceptions

Surprise rounds are acceptable (and desirable) if they already incorporate an element of player choice.

If the player chooses to do something that has the potential consequence of "a monster surprises me", then they have already enjoyed their agency when they made the initial action. For example, a character who reaches their hand into a burrow will still surprised by the rattlesnake at the bottom.

If there is informed consent. I've previously argued that level drain is great as long as the players know what they are getting themselves into, and are given an opportunity to decline. For example, if the players hear that the jungles are full of ambush birds (who often get surprise rounds) they might still choose to explore the jungle, while just keeping their HP topped off. (I guess this is fun maybe?)

There is a counter-argument here: if the players know that surprise rounds could happen at any point throughout the game, with any enemy, isn't that already informed consent?

Yes, but I don't think it drives the game in a good direction. It leads to more cautious play, and earlier retreats. Players are incentivized to keep their HP topped off, and are more likely to retreat when they can no longer keep their HP at the maximum. (This is a design decision. If you want your adventuring parties to be more cautious, then ignore this blog post.)

by Dusty Ray

Alternatives

Surprise rounds are still very fun. And they make sense logically and thematically. Mostly I want to avoid monsters that attack HP during a surprise round, because we want HP to be a resource that players (indirectly) spend. HP is the coinage that the players wager whenever they take risks in a dungeon. If the characters lose HP in an ambush, it feels like robbery because they never decided to take on that additional risk. (Although that's debatable, since they took on some risk by entering the dungeon in the first place.)

Instead of attacking HP on a surprise round, monsters should do other things. They should either (a) change the battlefield, (b) deprive the characters of a resource, or (c) create a new risk or reward.

Some of these examples are dumb, but I think they get the point across. Some of them are also a bit heavy-handed ("locking your weapons in their scabbard") but I would also argue that pouncing surprise lions are pretty heavy-handed, too. I mean, they're not all excellent, but they're better than having your HP attacked.

Changing the Battlefield

A terophidian who creates a wall of fire, splitting the party.

A giant antlion who collapses the floor, trapping the party in the bottom of his pit.

Goblins who pull the lever on the crushing ceiling trap. It'll probably crush everyone in the room unless someone reverts the lever within 3 rounds.

Gladiotrices who throw nets.

Depriving the Characters of a Resource

A vampiric wind who uses its surprise round to extinguish all the torches.

Some fucking elves who lock your weapons in their scabbards with a well-placed arrow shot.

Goblins who carry a surprising amount of caltrops.

The slime puma who pounces on a player, pinning them to the ground.

Creating a New Risk or Reward

The evil knights who offers a one-vs-one duel as an alternative to total warfare.

The rival adventuring party who attempts to steal an item and then run past the nearest locking portcullis.

The goblins send a runner for help, while the other goblins spend the round powering up their logging saw.

The orcs start torching the valuable paintings.

by Dusty Ray

1. The ichor of Ectalion. An incredibly dense orange fluid in a copper vial. It turns freshly-killed creatures into weapons. Melee or ranged (50% chance each). Ranged weapons are usually similar to organic harpoon guns unless you can think of a better one. They deal the same damage as the living creature would have and only have 6 shots before they become useless forever.

2. A mirror that will makes you younger the longer you stare at it. You lose XP, but mutations and mutilations will also be undone. Make Saves to avoid forgetting major things. Minor things are all forgotten. About one year every hour spent staring. You will always appear to be your true age in the mirror. If the mirror is ever broken, all of its effects are undone.

3. A soft blue humanoid. They are boneless and crawl, roll, slither across the ground. They will mewl like newborn goats and seek to touch your face gently. If allowed to do so, their faces will crumple with sadness and their bodies will writhe as they convert themselves into a replica of your most valued lost possession (including, possibly, a living creature). The object is created from your memories of it. They have some magic, but it cannot imitate everything.

4. The Arm of Lukashane, the famous swordswoman. It is intact inside it's golden case, and the gold thread stitching has already been started. The Arm will allow you to wield a sword as if you were a fifth-level fighter. It will not perform any other task. It will not perform if it is insulted. It will only wield swords, and only one-handed.

5. Dancing bananas. They bifurcate like a pair of legs. When music is played, they dance. When they are eaten, you dance. After every minute, you may Save to resist dancing, if you wish.

6. Oil of Time Trap. Can be applied to basically any noun to freeze it into place. Small, non-living things can basically be frozen permanently. For example, a rope can be turned into a pole, or a waterfall could be turned into something climbable. Creatures and large objects have a 1d12 round duration. Large creatures have a 1d6 round duration.

7. Orb of Vanderost. Looks like a black Christmas ornament. When shattered, creates a cloud of black dust. Lasts 1d6+1 rounds. All objects that remain in the cloud age 10 years for every round they remain in the cloud.

8. Music box ballerina. Once wound, goes faster and faster until suddenly it stops (takes 1d6 rounds). One random creature nearby explodes into a shower of gore (save negates). If the creature makes its save, the effect instantly jumps to another adjacent creature. Someone's gotta explode.

If at least 3 creatures make their save, the ballerina's enchantment breaks and she returns to full, living size. She is Radiant Basheen, the world's most famous dancer, imprisoned by her father's wizard so that she would never fall in love with one of her suitors (who are now all long dead).

9. The Skull of Angorogon. A black skull with no eyeholes or lower jaw. All sunlight within 1000' becomes invisible. All creatures within that range must save or be compelled to immediately consume any corpse they come across. (You can still see during the day, you'll just need a torch.)

10. A small metal top. When spun, a horrible grinding noise comes from deep underground. Flight is impossible within 100'. Living creatures believe that they are in an earthquake (and they fall over if they fail a Dex check), but there is no earthquake.

by Finnian MacManus

11. A hungry hole. Capable of moving over solid stone. The interior looks like a kaleidoscope of teeth and gullet, spiraling away into fractal depth. Hungry and dangerous, but also semi-trainable. Doglike. Likes round objects, both to chase and to eat.

12. A black nail. If hammered into someone's shadow, it immobilizes that shadow and that person. If the shadow vanishes (either from too much or too little light), the creature is freed.

13. The Yawroo Doorway. A mirror inside a doorway. Anything that passes through it is reversed, like a mirror image. (If you want to be a dick about it, mirror-reversed people will starve to death, as most proteins and sugars will have the wrong chirality to be digestible.) Useful to make foods with no nutritional value. Magic objects that are also chiral (such as a unicorn's horn) will have their effects reversed by the Doorway.

14. Iron spikes. When hammered into the eyes of a corpse, it will reanimate and pursue its killer. If it does not know its killer, it will just go after the next best thing. It will be unable to communicate this or do any other task. It will use weapons, though. Lasts 10 minutes.

15. A murky tank. When touched, a red glow suffuses the filth, and an disembodied brain is revealed inside, attached to an articulated set of limbs, with small hoses travelling from its brain stem up to the apex of the tank. It has a pair of eyeballs. The brain is a duplicate of whoever activated it. It is capable of speech and has a sense of both sight and hearing. It has no ability to move the tank or do anything besides talk, honestly.

It will probably be resentful of it's able-bodied copy. ("Why do you get to be out there? We're the same.") Decent chance it quickly goes insane. If not fed (about a liter of blood per day), it will fall inert, and may be reactivated anew by another person touching the tank.

16. Vorpal Curse Collar. When worn, all slashing weapons that are used against you are treated as if they were vorpal. If you are killed this way, the collar appears on your killer's neck.

17. The Targlass. Must be eaten (this is difficult). All damage that you take is reduced by 50%. You cannot regain HP by any means. This lasts for 1d6 days (exploding).

18. Diamond of Death. As soon as you hold it, you learn the rules. If you ever go a minute without holding the diamond, you will die. The diamond will then turn into a ruby for the next day as it feeds on the soul it has just captured. During this time it is safe to let go of the ruby, as the ruby has released its hold on all other victims If the ruby is ever broken, a powerful demon will be released.

If you get trapped by the ruby, the best scheme it to get some poor goblin to hold it for a while, then take it away.

19. The False Guillotine. It lacks a blade, and there is no place to attach one. Nevertheless, if you put your head into the notch, there is the sound of a blade falling, the dull thunk of metal biting into wood, and a brief moment of unmitigated pain and horror. Afterwards, nothing seems to be different, except for a vague sense of loss and the notion that the world seems somehow flatter than it was a minute ago.

Thereafter, you have no soul. You are immune to all magic that affects your mind except for possession (which automatically succeeds on you). You are immune to level drain (and similar forms of XP loss). You lose all connection to the divine (you cannot cast cleric spells). And lastly, all XP gain is reduced by 50%.

20. The Apparatus of Balanax. A cross between a snail shell and a tuba. A full 30 across, a maze of leather-coated bronze. An oily tunnel that only narrows as it grows deeper. At the very back is a voice that will answer any question, but only if you can tell it a significant secret that you alone know, and that is not recorded anywhere else in the world. Once you speak the secret, it vanishes from your memory.

I wrote 20 more artifacts. (Here's the first batch.) Some of them aren't really artifacts, but most of them are. (Here's the first batch.)

21. A black cube of basalt, floating 10' off the ground. It is 5' across and hinged like a chest. Anything placed inside it will be dehydrated (all liquids bursting from the seams of the cube as if from a juicer) and converted into an art object. Rare objects and powerful creatures are converted into more elaborate (more valuable) art. Most are easily transportable.

22. A mummified monkey's paw. While you wear it, you will hear small footsteps trailing behind you. No other evidence of a monkey will ever manifest. If you leave a bowl of sour milk out overnight, the "monkey" will attempt to bring you a nearby object that you desire. It has the same chance of success as a regular monkey of human intelligence would if you sent it out on a similar mission. If the monkey would be successful, the item appears in your pockets in the morning. It item doesn't actually move, it teleports along with the effect. You must offer the monkey something every night. If you fail to do so, you will take 3d6 damage as the monkey attempts to strangle you and the paw will never work for you again.

23. Tightly-wound scroll of Goxlagon (Ogremoch, basically), the primordial earth demon. If dropped on the floor, it bursts open and the words spill out, covering the floor (up to 2500 sq. ft.) with thousands of copies of his name. Anyone falling on the floor (even falling prone) takes an additional 2d6 fall damage as if they had fallen an additional 30 feet. Actual fall damage is quadrupled.

24. Circlet of the Diplomat. When you would be struck a mortal blow (dropped to 0 HP) by a sentient creature, time pauses while you two communicate telepathically for 2 hours. After this time, the attacker (usually paused with their blade an inch from your neck) can follow through with the blow, or choose to do something else.

25. Telluric Dagger. Reflects stars and nothing else. When stabbed, you take damage based on how far you are from where you were born. Within a day's travel = 1d4 damage. Less than a week away = 1d8 damage. Less than a month away = 2d6. Less than a year away = 2d8. Longer than that = 3d6.

26. Cones of Alternate Self. Summons a version of you from another timeline. The alternate version is fucked up in some one (gain a random disability). You can control both characters, but the original will begin to painfully melt, taking 1d6 damage every turn. ("What's wrong with this place? What's wrong with your air?") This is psychically traumatizing for you, and each time you use it, you must Save or gain the (imagined) disability of your dead clone.

27. Ring of the Fool. When worn, your face becomes innocent and trustworthy (+4 to any roll that benefits from you being likable and trustworthy). You die the first time you take damage. You gain double XP.

28. Hand Mirror of Lies. Whoever holds it controls what it shows.

by Cosmic Nuggets

29. The Hunting Sound. There is a room in the Ziggurat of Khuum where you must never speak. If you do, the Hunting Sound will hear your voice and begin to seek you. Space is no obstacle. You will hear it coming for you. At first you will only hear it in the quiet of the night, but as it nears you will hear it more often, louder and closer. It is a groaning and a creaking and a grinding and a certain murmur that sounds like muffled screaming coming from underground. After 1d6+4 days, it will catch you, and it will pull you into its chambers through a fist-sized hold in the air. It's a bit like a chicken breast being sucked through a keyhole. The people of the Ziggurat use the Hunting Noise to assassinate their enemies, combined with exceptionally accurate parrots.

30 . Ambrosia. A vial of glittering orange froth that confers the powers of godhood. After 1 turn, you gain the power to cast firebolt at will. After 2 turns, you gain the power of flight. After 3 turns, you become locally omniscient (range 50'). After 4 turns you gain an extra 50 hit points. After 5 turns, you become aware that this world and everyone on it is utterly trivial in the cosmic scale of things, and that every soul here is wasting their time for as long as they remain trapped in this banal soul-trap of life and 'death". You spend the round stunned, telling your companions what you have learned. Beginning on the 6th turn, you must make a Save every turn to resist the temptation to turn into a being of pure light and depart the universe forever.

31. Fossilized Angel Egg. Blackened as smooth as oiled leather. Hold it tightly to your chest and think bad thoughts about someone. It appears in their stomach. 1d6 turns later, they spend a turn painfully regurgitating it (stunned for a turn). On the surface of the egg is written a secret of theirs.

32. The Enigma. Defies description. Attempts to learn more about it result rapidly results in madness. All that is known is that it fits into a single inventory slot. Best not to look at it too closely.

33. Ossuglop. A thick wax that rapidly increases the weight of things (up to 100x). No effect on organic material. It is stored in a goat bladder bag.

34. The Sword of War. On a hit, target must save or take an additional 3d6 damage. If the target dies from this damage, the wielder must also save or take the same damage. The sword is sheathed in a great and glorious red banner, which flies above the wielder's head in battle.

by Cosmic Nuggets

35. The Sword of Peace. Deals an additional 3d6 damage. Anyone who possesses it will desire nothing more than to seek solitude and quiet. Anyone who interferes with this reasonable desire will be met with rapidly escalating violence. The sword appears to be made of wood, impossibly sharpened to such a degree that the cutting edge is nearly translucent.

36. A set of three nearly translucent knives. They pass through objects without leaving a trace. When a knife is broken (they are as fragile as glass), every cut that it has made manifests as real.

37. The Sun's Eye. An iron sphere that is perpetually red-hot. When held in your bare hands, you can control the sun. Position, brightness, proximity, etc. When you gaze through it, you can see from the sun's perspective. (This does not actually move the sun--it merely bends light in an ingenious way.)

38. Space Grenade. Resembles a bunch of needles jammed into a glass sphere, with a steel thread through the center that is pulled to activate the grenade. When it detonates, all space within 20' is magnified 1000x. If it explodes in a 20' diameter room, the room is now 20,000' feet across. If it explodes in a 30' diameter room, the room is 20,010' feet across the center and 92' feet to the far side if you stay along the wall. Visually, it resembles a strange lensing effect, and yet humans can safely comprehend the non-Euclidean space in front of them. Objects are scattered by the expanded space, but surfaces are tessellated outwards to account for the new expanse of space. (You don't get giant blades of grass, you get more grass.)

39. Ring of the Hallucination. Resembles a reticulated band that continually crawls across your finger like a tiny treadmill. When you wear it, you become a pseudo-hallucination. The only real effect that this has is that you cease existing when no one is looking at you. You can remove the ring normally, but only while you exist. (Basically, you just vanish when you are alone, or when no one is paying attention to you. When they return their attention to your location with the expectation of seeing you, you reappear.)

40. Wizard Egg. When a wizard learns too much about spells, the knowledge infects and recombines inside his subconscious. As his mind is eaten, newborn spells flee into the ether. Occasionally, the runt of the litter gets tangled up in the wizard's physical matter and is too weak to escape.

Wizard eggs are laid by wizards who are in the late stages of wizard madness. (This is not the strangest symptom.) During the most exciting part of each session, the egg has a 2-in-6 chance of hatching. (Basically, the DM says "this seems exciting, let's see if the egg hatches. It can happen 2x in a session if you really want it to.) When an egg hatches, roll a d12 to see what it contains.

A minor magic item. Roll randomly.
A major magic artifact. Roll randomly.
A baby monster. Probably trainable. Roll randomly.
A swiftly growing adult monster. Probably aggressive. Roll randomly.
A sudden turn of bad luck. The magic sword breaks, the dungeon boss enters the room, etc.
A sudden turn of good luck. The bad guys scatter, the dead PC wakes up, etc.
A lump of gold shaped like the wizard.
Cloudkill shaped like the wizard's face.
Everyone loses 1000 XP.
Everyone gains 1000 XP.
A spellbook full of mutant spells, based on what the wizard had memorized.
A living spell spirit. It's basically a HD 1 pokemon. It's friendly, and if the dead wizard was friends with one of the PCs, the spell spirit will inherit that affection. They usually look like either a fishbird or a birdfish, with some of the dead wizard's features and personality quirks. The spell spirit can cast one of the spells that the wizard knew, and its form is influenced by the inherited spell. For example, a divination spirit might have enormous eyes and the wizard's mustache. They each have 1 casting die.

by Cosmic Nuggets

I suppose I'm in the business of writing a dungeon today. This post is just a collection of fragments.

I didn't start with a map or a plot or a villain. I start with all the interesting ideas, the revelations that you hope will give your players pause, the spectacular moments that may or may not happen. I collect a few of these and then I try to stitch them together.

This time I started with a list of body part monsters, and then invented a story to go along with them. Here's the story first. . .

by Juan Valverde de Amusco's Anatomia del cuerpo humano (1560), who plagiarized most of them from Andreas' Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica.

The Story

Dannerhall was a lonely town, isolated by snow and crag, a rustic cousin on the wrong side of the Nothic Mountains. It was known for blackberry wines and a famous musician, who had long since mouldered. Their nearest trading partner is Havenholt, a long journey away through an unfriendly forest. They hunt the Poison People. They war with the Red Caves.

In the short days of winter a prophecy went winding through the streets, and it reached the ears of the king. The prophecy told that the king of the Red Caves would topple Dannerhall and sit atop its throne. The king, and his three sons, would all be dead before spring's full bloom.

Word reached the king, as it must. So great was his fear, and so terrible his fury, that the sun dared not show its face that day.

The warriors were marshalled. Wrapped in bearhides, they crossed the icy gaps and sky-bitten passes that led to the Red Caves. Their mission was to kill the king of the Red Caves, and only return once he had been beheaded.

The small army reached the Red Caves without any losses, against all expectation. No counterforce rallied to meet them in the murderous chokepoints. Their terraced farms were found to be abandoned. The stormed the gates and slew its few defenders with relative ease. The city seemed to be largely abandoned. A few people seemed to be residing in its halls, but they fled at the coming army. Cave goats bleated in the streets, their udders stretched and unmilked.

More caves, more portcullises, more poisonous gases. There seemed to only be a handful of defenders. Had they caught them during a migration? A religious holiday?

The invaders were initially amazed at their luck, which turned to boorish joviality, which finally gave way to a creeping sense of dread that only grew as they descended.

Standing outside the throne room, their ears pressed against the bronze doors, they heard gutteral voices. A crowd that whispered and laughed. Not a syllable was understandable.

When the door was flung open, their lanterns revealed an empty room and a mad king, wide-eyed and babbling, squatting beside the ashes of an offering pyre. Silks and robes were piled around him like so much detritus. Of the numerous voices, there was no sign.

The king of the Red Caves was decapitated. His body was burned and the soldiers returned with his head.

They brought with them rich treasures from the vaults, a line of newly-caught slaves, and the youngest and fairest princess of the Red Caves. Her elder siblings had been cut down, attempting to defend the vaults.

In the castle of Dannerhall, a feast was thrown. It was a great victory over an old enemy. The treasures were added to Dannerhall's own and the slaves were distributed among the king's allies. The orphaned princess was to be wed to the king, in a ceremony that would take place in a mere month.

The girl wept and pleaded at this isolation from her people, and so the king allowed her to keep a servant from the Red Caves. The one she chose was an old man that she knew from earlier years. The slave was made a eunuch, and allowed to attend to her.

A week later, a smaller army was sent back to the Red Caves along with some peasants who hoped that they might claim the land for their own. Of them, nothing was ever heard from again.

The day of the wedding drew night, and the castle once again took a deep breath, readying itself for another great feast. The candelabras were filled with fresh candles, a pair of hogs were fattened, and newly-woven tapestries were hung. A thousand preparations and it was done--the wedding would occur tomorrow.

The survivors spoke of the noises that occurred at exactly midnight. At first, the news was that the orphaned princess' eunuch had gone mad and cut off her head. Or perhaps he had dismembered her entirely. The eunuch had been killed. No, the eunuch had escaped into the night.

Whatever the details, the pieces of the dismembered princess must have swelled and thickened with unnatural growth. Perhaps they fell off the blood-stained bed where they still rested and plopped on the floor where they continued to grow, instructed and fattened by whatever unearthly power that also gave them animation.

Nearly everyone in the castle died. The few that escaped spoke of gargantuan body parts and colossal organs, slithering down hallways and gallumphing into the courtyard.

That was two days ago. The castle is dark, the drawbridge is still halfway raised, and the screams have stopped. Everyone that has ventured inside thus far has failed to return. The villagers are already speaking of departure. All agree that the town is cursed, and no one wishes to stay another night. The mountains roads are treacherous at this time of year, but perhaps less treacherous than remaining.

The Monsters

They're in the dead castle. The orphaned princess has been dismembered and every hateful part of her stalks the castle, empowered by fell magic.

The Slaves

Former citizens of the Red Caves. They are pale and their speech is dense, turbulent. The princess has so far not killed any of them. They would leave the castle if they could, but outside the castle are mobs of people who would quickly kill them.

The princess--now the rightful king of the Red Caves--calls for them from the throne room. Some avoid that horrible place. Some enter, where they are made to swear fealty to the thing in the chair. All of them have armed themselves and are likely to attack anyone else they find wandering the castle.

The Prince and His Knights

Probably holed up somewhere. A tiny handful of trained killers, terrified and easily manipulated.

The Warlock Eunuch

He is almost certainly still alive. Things have gotten a little out of hand, perhaps, but he is very adaptable and utterly determined.

At Least One Actual Demon

Who did you think was behind all this?

The Hands

Each hand is large enough to grab an adult human around the torso.

HD 3 Def chain Slap 1d8+grab

Fly dwarf Int 5 Mor 20

Abilities -- Whenever a PC attempts to harm one of the Hands with a hand-held object (or their bare hands), their hand cramps and prevents them. (The Hands cannot be harmed by hands.)

The Feet

HD 4 Def chain Kick 1d8

Fly dwarf Int 5 Mor 20

Abilities -- When the target has at least 30' of clear space above them, the Feet can turn their kick into a stomp, doubling the damage and causing all other creatures within 10' to take 1d4 damage (Dex for half).

The Feet are initially encountered in the courtyard, where they can make use of their Stomp attack. If they can be lured indoors, they become a lot less threatening.

The Torso

It is a hostage taker. Without any hands, feet, head, or internal organs, it lumbers through the darkened halls atop bloody stumps, blindly and clumsily. The queen of Dannerhall is trapped inside of the rib cage. She will beg to be released, a pale hand poking out, grasping at nothing.

When the Torso is damaged she will scream at them to stop--the Torso is crushing her alive. And if the party continues to attack, it will.

HD 8 Def leather Slams 1d10/1d10+swallow

Move human Int 10 Mor 10

Abilities -- The Torso can hold up to two people. Swallowed characters are allowed a single Str check at a -8 to escape. The Torso can damage any passenger as a free action, doing as much damage as it wishes. It is capable of breaking a passenger's body as easily as a grown man can snap a kitten in half.

It is too large to move down any passage less than 10' wide, limiting it to the larger rooms and hallways.

DM's Note: I'm not really sure how the party is supposed to rescue the queen. Perhaps the torso compulsively attempts to swallow its missing organs, so if the PCs present it with the corpses of say, the heart and the lungs, the Torso will swallow them and, lacking the capacity to retain her, eject the queen. If I want to do this, I should put the Torso early in the castle so that avoidance becomes the smart option early on, and killing it becomes more viable later.

Alternatively, perhaps the ribs could be restrained with lassos? Or perhaps a suit of armor given to the queen, to protect her from being crushed.

Honestly, I don't need to think of a way for the players to rescue the queen, because (a) I've already thought of some possibilities, and (b) it isn't essential for them to rescue the queen anyway. Fuck it.

The Heart

Less of a monster, more of a trap. It blocks a vital passage.

HD 4 Def none Atk none

Move none Int 5 Mor 20

Incite Rage -- Usable 1/turn. Target must save or fly into a barbarian rage. Like a barbarian rage, an affected target must attack a creature every turn. Ending the rage early (before all opponents are slain) requires a successful Save.

Blood Calls to Blood -- Whenever the Heart takes damage, that damage is mirrored onto the person that struck it. Indirect damage (starting a fire that then spreads to the Heart) does not trigger this. Throwing a molotov directly onto the Heart does.

One passive ability and one active ability. Looks like a pain in the ass to fight. Good. I'm done here.

The Lungs

Frothy sheets of pulpy membrane, pulsing through the air like a dying butterfly. The trachea waves through the air like a searching head. The wind blows over the cartilaginous lips like breath over the top of a beer bottle.

HD 4 Def leather Slam 1d6

Fly crow Int 5 Mor 20

Envelope of Wind -- Arrow are at -4 to hit. Once per turn as a free action, the Lungs can redirect an missed arrow attack at a target of its choosing.

Gust of Wind -- Usable 1/turn. Strong enough to throw objects at people, or throw people off of the tops of battlements.

I guess I should put this guy up in the battlements, huh?

The Liver

The liver makes you drunk when you fight it.

HD 7 Def leather Slam 1d6/1d6

Move dwarf Int 5 Mor 20

Alcoholic Fumes -- Every creature within 50' gains 1 point of drunkeness every turn. (Holding your breath doesn't work; it soaks through your skin.)

Immune to Poison

<sidebar>Drunkeness Rules: For every point of drunkeness you get, your critical miss range increases by 1. Decreases by 1 point every 2 hours.</sidebar>

Since everyone will quickly get very drunk fighting this thing, the strategy is to either kill it quickly, or defeat it using methods that don't rely on die rolls. The debuff can stick around all day.

The Stomach

Okay, it's an ambulatory stomach that barfs a cone of acid. Is that sufficient on its own?

Nah.

The stomach is in the basement, vomiting up a huge cloud of acid gas that fills the whole level. Once you kill it, the cloud dissipates and you can explore the basement safely.

There's no trick to it. You just hear the thing vomiting somewhere in the darkness and you charge in there and kill it while your skin begins to melt.

Alternatively, throw molotovs at it until it comes charging up the stairs, acid nozzle all a-whirl.

HD 4 Def leather Tackle 1d10+trip

Move dwarf Int 5 Mor 20

Barf -- 20' cone, 1d6 acid damage.

Acid Cloud -- Constantly emits a cloud of acid. Will eventually fill the room, and all adjacent rooms, with an acid fog that does 1 damage for every round of exposure. Fog will not go up stairs. If the Stomach is killed or removed, the acid cloud will dissipate within 10 minutes.

<sidebar>Acid Rules: Acid damage repeats on all subsequent rounds, dealing the same damage -1 point for every turn its elapsed. This lasts until no more damage is possible, or until a PC is washed off with water. This depletes the waterskin.

For example, a PC hit by 1d6 acid damage takes 1d6-1 acid damage at the end of their next turn, and 1d6-2 acid damage at the end of the turn after that.</sidebar>

The Intestines

Two horrible snake-things. They hunt together, trying to split the party. One tries to pull a PC up into the rafters, another tries to drag a different PC into the next room.

HD 5 Def leather Bite 1d6+grab

Move dwarf Int 5 Mor 20

Serpentine -- 20' reach. Can grapple up to 3 opponents simultaneously.

The one with more HP is the large intestine, obviously.

Don't need to load this one down with mechanics. The encounter is interesting enough, with a giant snake thing trying to pull a PC up into the ceiling.

The Pancreas

It blocks another key point in the dungeon. It's more of an obstacle, less of a monster. It has a powerful regenerative ability, and can scream for help, but it has no other abilities.

HD 6 Def none Flail 1d6

Move 0 Int 5 Mor 20

Regenerate -- 10 HP per round!

Cry for Help -- Roll on the wandering monster table at the end of every turn in which the poor Pancreas takes damage.

The Gallbladder

Another obstacle monster. It occupies a key intersection in the dungeon. It serves as an artillery piece, raining gallstones and digestive bile down on anyone who approaches it. The best way to get past it is to approach it from two directions, since it cannot fire down both hallways simultaneously.

HD 4 Def leather Shoot gallstones

Move 0 Int 5 Mor 20

Shoot Gallstones -- 1d10 damage and the target must succeed on a Difficult Str check or be knocked backwards 10' and fall prone. The Gallbladder is smart enough to ready an action to shoot whoever approaches it.

(This makes it difficult to approach the Gallbladder. It takes two successful turns of charging at it to reach it.)

Meh. I might cut this one.

The Eyes

HD 2 Def none Slam 1d6

Fly dwarf Int 10 Mor 5

Permanently Invisible -- It makes a squelching noise when it casts spells, though.

Spellcasting -- illusion and telekinesis. As a level 3 wizard (3 magic dice).

They should probably be accompanied by a 1d3 escaped slaves.

The Mouth

HD 4 Def chain Bite 1d6+swallow

Fly horse Int 5 Mor 5

Teleport Trap -- Anyone swallowed by the Mouth is teleported to the room with the Gullet.

Runs around, teleporting PCs into terrible place. Low morale, so it probably flies out a window as soon as things get hairy. Fun.

The Gullet

Same stats as one of the Intestines.

It lives inside a locked room.

When you kill it, dozens of bloody corpses will come slipping out, like a waterslide.

The Head

No eyes or jaw. Huge, crumpled, wet. Possibly atop the throne. Is it the princess or the princess' possessed remnant?

Probably another stationary monster. Is it the dungeon boss? Sure, okay.

I need to think about this one for a while. I don't need to come up with the details tonight. I think I'll write the rest of the dungeon and then come back to this one.

Perhaps it'll be the ol' switcheroo: the princess regrets her agreement with the warlock and now only wishes to die. Perhaps the real threat in the room is the Brain, which hides inside the skull before it comes levitating out, glowing neon blue and firing off mind flayer effects.

Witches possess a uterus, which was an organ invented by Flesh to ensnare souls, in order to steal ambition and intelligence for its unruly tissues.

Witches also tend to possess an acute knowledge of how to adapt this process to their needs.

And lastly, witches need good help. While some of them operate in large covens (often familial or clan-based), many more witches live at the outskirts of their communities where they have been exiled. These women learn at the feet of their familiar. A knot of serpents, perhaps, or an eyeless crow.

But as for actual laborers? They often must manufacture their own.

A jenkin is made by a witch. She must be impregnated and then, three weeks before the child is due, a drop of the husband's blood fed to a fertile female rat.

The witch and the rat will give birth simultaneously. The witch will birth a clotted thing of bone and hair. It must never be named, nor given a consecrated burial, else the consumed spirit depart from the rat. If such events come to pass, the whole attempt descends into ruination and the jenkin is undone.

After a few days of nursing at the witch's teat, one of the baby rats will begin to speak as newborn infants do. This is the jenkin.

by Carlos Garcia Rivera

Jenkins grow large, as large as a cat (who flee at the scent of a jenkin). They are quick and clever and cruel, and they love their mother very much. Anything she tells them, they believe.

HD 1 AC leather Bite 1d6
Move as monkey Int 10 Mor 5

Escape -- Once per day, a jenkin automatically escapes something that they could feasibly escape. Restraints, a grapple, an awkward social situation, etc.

If that was the end of it, it wouldn't be so bad. Just a large, talking rat. But the loyalty is partially bought by "gifts", promised to them by the witch and then delivered. And there is only one thing that a jenkin desires.

At first, the victims are all children, because the jenkin is still very small. A body part is cleaved from each child and delivered to the jenkin. The jenkin then wears the body part, which then becomes the jenkin's own.

Once a hand is stolen, the jenkin will have a hand that it can use to caress its mother's cheek.

Once it is given a face, it can tenderly kiss the neck of its mother.

The children that these things are stolen from are usually kept alive, and retained in a cage. Children have many uses, and witches know all of them.

Some jenkins maintain good relations with their less uplifted siblings. Sometimes this manifests as an allied swarm of rats. Sometimes it manifests as a steady dribble of gossip from the local metropolis.

Jenkins that have begun wearing human parts gain a new ability.

Puppeteer -- You control one of an opponent's body part for as long as you concentrate. You must have the appropriate human body part. Save negates. Usable 1/min.

A jenkin with a human hand could make you drop your sword. A jenkin with a human foot could make you trip into the fire. A jenkin with a human mouth can make you speak damning words, and this is the greatest threat of all. (However, such words will emerge with the jenkin's voice, and while it may try to imitate its victim's tone, most are not skilled impressionists.)

Eventually, a loyal jenkin may have its entire body replaced with human parts. When completed, a jenkin looks exactly like you or me. You may talk to a jenkin and never realize it.

There is only one part of jenkin that is never replaced. Their heart remains the heart of a newborn rat, a small knot of black tissues, shuddering with a terrible energy, desperate to maintain the charade, to become human.

from Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Fuck that scene, man.

Chris wrote up a list of some traps that don't suck. I'm going to write some more, since that seems like a good thing to make a list of.

What makes a good trap?

It should follow good OSR principles (similar to the obstacles post I wrote way back).

No obvious solution.
Multiple possible solutions.
Solution depends on common sense (rather than system mastery).
No specific tool required (no McGuffin, no singular spell, etc).

What is a trap?

A trap can be obvious, such as an open pit. With obvious traps, the puzzle becomes how to best get across the trap. Traps don't have to be difficult. Easy traps can be fun, too. AND easy traps can become weapons that you later use against monsters in the dungeon.

Obvious traps are probably the hardest to write, and the most fun. They kind of blur the line between obstacle, puzzle, and trap. An obvious trap needs to have (a) a reason to engage, (b) a visible mechanism, and optionally (c) an explicit risk.

A trap can be surprising, like a subtle pressure plate. With subtle traps (where the PC is likely to stumble into it) make sure that you give the player a chance to react before the trap goes off. We want to give the players interesting choices to make, not just tax their HP.

A boulder rolling towards you is good. You still have options. Compared to. . .

A subtle pit trap in a random location sucks. It sucks because the "solution" to them is to spend your time tapping on the floor with a pole, or pouring out water and seeing if it seeps between the stones. (I know there is a whole branch of old-school play that enjoys this style of play, but it's never appealed to me, since I believe that there are more interesting ways to challenge players.)

Where should subtle traps be hidden?

Please don't hide them willy-nilly. Putting a pit trap in the middle of a well-traveled corridor threatens verisimilitude (since aren't orc patrols passing over it every thirty minutes?)

Place traps in logical places. A kitchen cabinet is probably not going to be trapped, but the chest in the shaman's room probably is.

If you are going to hide damaging traps, try to build up to them. Telegraph the possibility before the traps appear. Before you have complicated double pit traps and slides, it's good to have a room with a small pit trap (to inform players that hidden pit traps exist here). Or better yet, a room with a broken (exposed) pit trap.

You don't have to telegraph the danger, just the mechanism.

For example: a lever might open a hole in the ceiling, dumping spiders down onto whoever is below. A smart party will pull the lever with a rope lasso from 20' away.

This is a good trap. A player who dies from spider bites will (hopefully) sigh and say "I guess I deserved that.".

That's what you want from a trap.

Some Traps

Not all of these are technically traps. Some are just interesting dungeon features.

Horrible Hallways

Wall of fire.
Zone of unconsciousness.
Climb a diagonal shaft, rotating.
Crush hallway. Find a way to survive the crush, or at least move really, really quickly.
Portcullis that slams shut to split the party. You can reunite 1-2 rooms away (don't split the party for too long).
Obvious pit trap. The correct path is hidden at the bottom of the pit.
Insanely hot hallway (or room where you have to perform some activity). Anyone trying to sprint through it unprotected is probably going to burn their feet and die. Things that reduce damage: being soaking wet, air circulation, walking/standing on soggy leather.
Subtle pressure plate. The trap triggers when weight is taken off the plate.
As above, except there are several pressure plates in a row.
Goblin barricade staffed by several bow-wielding goblins.

Wretched Rooms

Obvious trigger: taking the sword off the pedestal. Two copper spears shoot out of the wall, impaling an incautious explorer. A round later, lightning begins to arc between the spears. A round later, the room begins to fill with water.
Poisonous gas seeps from a crack in the wall.
Lake of acid. Get to the island.
A dripping wet door. Opening it floods the room with ancient, rancid water and 3 zombie sharks.
Lock that can only be opened at a certain minute each day. Adjacent, a lock that can only be opened at a certain minute each week. Adjacent, a lock that can only be opened at a certain minute each year.
Archway. Anyone who passes through it is transposed with a ghoul in a nearby room.
Climb a frictionless wall. (Have fun collecting large furniture. Shitty tables are treasure now.)
The floor of this room is laminated with symbols of disintegration. If a symbol is touched, all non-stone material in the room will take 3d6 Con damage each turn. In the room, an (unsupported) pedestal with a stone McGuffin on top. In the ceiling: spiders and spiderwebs.
Everything appears distorted in the mirror. Humans appear to be orcs, swords appear to be hammers, etc. The trick is to notice that the pen appears to be a key, and the mouse skull appears to be lock. Inserting one into the other will cause the door to open.
Huge wooden bowl, lined with thin, insoluble gold foil. Filled with horrible, fuming acid.

Obnoxious obstacles

The magic stein can only be carried by someone who is colossally, totally drunk. They have to carry themselves--no one else can help them.
Carry a baby out of the dungeon. No, carry ten babies.
When the lid of the sarcophagus is placed back on top, the bottom of the sarcophagus opens.
Sign says "teleporter" but it's really just a big blender.
The dragon is sleeping! Steal things quietly. (Common sense: it's quieter to carry a chest away than it is to open it, a sack of coins is guaranteed to clink, etc).
As above, except some goblins just showed up. They want to kill you quietly, but if the dragon wakes up, you're all probably going to die.
Crossing an underwater lagoon. Hope you brought a canoe. Of course something attacks during the crossing. A fast boat can escape it, a floating table is easily capsized.
Functional teleport brings organic material to one place, and inorganic material to another. Allow teleported people to communicate this (possibly by shouting, roll for random encounter) so they can make a more informed decision. An incipient threat hastens plans.
The door can only be opened in your dreams. If you open it in your dreams, you can pass through it in real life. While your body sleeps on the altar, it is inhabited by the spirit of an ancient wizard.
Before you can run through them, you need to observe the swinging pendulums to determine their pattern. Anyone observing the pendulums is hypnotized by them, staggers safely through them, and begins to self-mutilate by dancing in the middle of all of them (1d3 damage per turn).

People will draw an 'S' on their dungeon map many times before they start thinking about what makes a good secret door.

Secret doors are an absolute cornerstone of D&D, and yet they don't get as much attention as other common dungeon elements. I guess they're a little boring (compared to traps and magic swords).

Here's the thing: secret doors are an excellent opportunity for OSR-style gameplay. A secret door is a common dungeoneering problem that is usually solved through observation and intuitive solutions (as opposed to system mastery, or having silver weapons).

Sidenote: Courtney has written a couple of good posts but I wanted to write my own.

Tip #1 - If it's essential, don't put it behind a secret door.

Sort of general disclaimer: if finishing a dungeon requires the PCs to go past a door, don't make it a secret door. The reward behind a secret door should be optional. This avoids frustration and allows secret doors to perform their primary function: rewarding players for skillful dungeoneering.

(The secondary function of a secret door is to be cool as fuck; don't underestimate the impact when the wall of the cramped cellar swings away to reveal a forest of glowing fungi.)

by Peter Mullen

Obvious Door, Hidden Lever

These is my preferred archetype. There's three parts to this.

The Door: A sealed door makes the PCs suspect a trigger is nearby.

The Trigger: They search the room to find the trigger.

The Reward: They are rewarded for opening the door.

The Door is obvious. It might be a huge metal door with no way to open it except to discover the mechanism. It could be a stout wooden trap door that can be smashed (at the cost of noise and time). It might be a wall of flame that they can jump through at the cost of damaging themselves.

An obvious door allows the players to focus their search here. Instead of searching every nook and cranny of the whole dungeon, obvious cues like this allow the players to focus their time and attention on key places.

The Trigger is hidden. This is the part that tests the players. They can deduce the trigger from clues, figure out comprehensive ways to search the room, or discover some way to interact with it. This is the fun part, because this is the challenge. In the dungeon, this is where the gameplay is. (One of many.)

Remember that the trigger doesn't have to be super-hidden. Simple triggers can hide modest rewards. That's also fun.

The Reward can be:

Loot.
A shortcut to deeper levels.
An ambush opportunity.
A place to spy on the orcs.
A way to slip inside the statue so you can shout at the cultists and impersonate their god.

Hidden Door, Hidden Lever

I don't like these as much.

To be sure, they have both precedent and placement reasons, but they're easier to miss since the players are more likely to walk past them.

True, you can train you players that you have lots of hidden doors in your dungeons, but then you are also training them to spend their time fully investigating every room in the dungeon. I'd rather train my players to investigate the things that seem interesting (since they often are more interesting). We can cover more dungeon that way, and I spend less time saying "you don't find anything".

Hidden Door, Obvious Lever

I guess these exist? You pull a lever, hear a grinding sound, and then you have to backtrack to find where the door opened.

These are only fun if you have a good wandering monster table, you want to show players have rooms have changed since they were last visited, or time is one of the fun challenges in this dungeon (e.g. the dungeon is literally sinking in the ocean, do we really have time to backtrack).

Meh.

Semi-hidden Doors

There is an opportunity here to make it a two-step process, with doors that are semi-hidden and then triggers that are more hidden. It's also a gradient--you can have a semi-hidden door with a semi-hidden trigger.

Heck, you can even have a semi-hidden door with no trigger (i.e. push to open). These are also good.

Semi-hidden doors are defined as ones where the DM uses cues (breadcrumbs) to lead the PCs to discovery of the hidden door, or at least to get them to suspect its existence (so they'll know to search the room).

Cues for a Semi-Hidden Door (roll a d10 or a d12)

Scuff marks or footprints.
Hollow sounds as you walk across it.
Old stains, or fresh blood dripping through the seams.
Breezes.
Sounds.
Smells.
Temperature changes.
Anomalous architecture (e.g. discolored stone, sagging walls).
A dead end in a hallway (especially if the hallway seems well-traveled).
Obviously passable surfaces: waterfalls, curtains.
Seeing a creature flee into a seemingly dead-end room.
Put a clue on a map.

Using Maps to Indicate Secret Doors

Remember, the whole point of having obvious doors is so players know to concentrate their attention in a specific area. The clue doesn't have to come from the room itself. It can come from the mouth of an NPC

Sometimes the clue comes from the map. OSR dungeoneering is full of shit like this, which is why you'll see so many people making these meticulous maps (as opposed to a quick diagram of which rooms connected by lines). Examples:

Symmetry implies a room. (e.g. the lower floor seems to share a floorplan, yet this room lacks a counterpart on this floor.)
The shape of the adjacent rooms (and exterior wall?) imply that a room should be here.
Necessity: if you know the tower has 5 floors, then you know there must be a way up from the fourth floor.

Triggers (d20)

Remember that a trigger might just unlock a door, not necessarily open it automatically. The trigger might also need to be held (if you want to be a dick).

A lot of these options aren't necessarily exclusive. You could combine some of them into better triggers.

Obscured By Object

1. Recessed lever behind painting.

2. Switch beneath rug or behind tapestry.

Challenging Environment

Some of these can get into puzzle territory. Good.

3. Hidden underneath really heavy statue.

3.1 A pressure plate is only depressed when a really heavy statue is placed on it. The statue may be in a different room.

4. Trigger located beneath the surface of the boiling mud.

Integrated into Object

5. The door unlocks when the statue is rotated to point at the door.

6. The trigger is in the hinges of a different door. When the first door is fully closed, the secret door unlocks.

7. Pull the torch sconce, ya turkey.

Instructional/Riddle

8. The offering bowl is full of ancient blood stains. Fill the bowl with blood.

9. The mural shows dancers at a festival. Imitate their dance.

10. The plinth reads "ten men's length, ten men's strength. Ten men can't break it, a child can carry it." Place a rope on the plint.

Simultaneous Triggers

11. Both discolored bricks must be pushed simultaneously for the door to open.

Trial-and-Error

This covers situations where there are multiple things to try, and the players just have to guess which one is the correct one until they figure it out. And because there has to be a cost for wrong answers, pulling the wrong lever usually results in a trap being set off.

Sometimes there's a pattern or a clue that allows intelligent players to deduce which lever is the correct one. In this case, pulling all the levers is just the (costly) brute-force solution.

If there's no clues to which is the correct lever, then the puzzle becomes: how do we protect ourselves from whatever trap is going to trigger when we pull the wrong lever? (Hint: use a 10' pole.)

This is actually getting away from strict secret doors and into the trap/puzzle spectrum.

12. Three levers. The first causes acid to fall from an (obviously discolored) crack in the ceiling. The second is electrified. And the third opens the door.

Symmetry

One of the common types of Zelda puzzles.

13. The room contains a lit torch and an unlit torch. The door unlocks when both torches are lit.

14. The room contains a dozen levers, arranged at different heights. The door unlocks when all of the levers are set to the 'up' position.

Brute Force

This covers kinds of switches where the biggest limit is how much time the PCs are willing to use. At worst, this can be pixel bitching. At best, this is a resource-management choice.

DM: It'll take you 90 in-game minutes to attempt all the combinations. Do you still want to do it?

Player: Yeah, sure. Go ahead, roll your wandering monster checks.

And in this case, finding the trigger is only as fun as making the cost-benefit analysis of cost vs. reward.

Like the trial-and-error triggers, this can be an acceptable brute force solution for puzzles where the players didn't find the clue.

Example. The door will not open unless the correct demon's name is spoken. The walls are covered with the names of thousands of demons, including the correct one.

Anomalous Architecture

These are basically solved by noticing that something is out-of-place and then interacting with it. If a player says "I inspect the X closely; tell me more about it" they're 90% of the way there.

15. One of the bricks is a different color than the others. Push it.

16. A small hole in the wall is revealed to be very deep. The trigger is 5' deep in the hole, and must be activated with a pole or spear shaft.

17. Investigation reveals that the chandelier chain goes into the ceiling. Pull the chandelier.

18. Outside the castle window, a small bullseye can be seen on one of the exterior bricks. Hit it with an arrow.

Repetition

19. One of the bricks is a different color than the others. Push it three times in a row.

False Backs / Nested

20. The first secret door reveals a small chamber full of garbage. If the garbage is cleared away, one of the bricks can be seen to jut from the wall. Pushing this brick opens the second, actual secret door.

21. The cabinet has a false back. The false back can only be opened when the cabinet is closed.

Deductive

There's also cases where a party might realize late in a dungeon, based on some new evidence, that they might have missed a secret area early in the dungeon.

For example, they might see multiple blue tiles throughout the dungeon. Later one, they see where a blue tile has been smashed and an empty cavity revealed. Now they can go back, smash all the blue tiles they saw earlier, and grab the small treasures inside.

(I'm not really sure how to code this one, and since it relies on dungeon design, it doesn't really belong on a "d20 secret doors" generator.

by Peter Mullen

Bad Secret Doors

Just Checks

Roll a Perception Check. Roll a Search Check. Roll a Disable Devices Check.

If this is all you are doing, then you are only challenging the character sheet, not the player. This is boring.

Pixel Bitching

Basically, when the player spends a lot of time doing a boring task to track down some trigger, with no clues to lead you to it.

Here's a bunch of identical tiles. Roll for each one.

Here's a room full of boring things to investigate. Spend time describing to me how you're going to investigate each one.

At best, this is a Brute Force trigger (see above).

Tip #2 - When you expect players to be searching a room carefully, choose carefully how many interesting features you want to put in that room.

I try to limit myself to no more than 2 or 3 significant things in each room.

Sometimes a room has lots of objects in it by requirement, e.g. a kitchen. Be careful hiding triggers in kitchens. The players will remove every drawer and break the sink before they notice the switch at the back of the oven.

Searching dense room isn't necessarily bad--and it may even be fun if the kitchen is interesting--but it does take time. Just be mindful of it.

Compare that to a room that is empty except for two discolored bricks and an obvious secret door. The players will come in, and one of two things will happen.

(a) They'll figure out that they need to push both bricks simultaneously.

(b) They won't figure it out, and they'll move on to the next room.

Either way, it probably won't take as long as the kitchen scenario. And if they think of the solution later in the dungeon, they can always come back.

Final Note

Spend a moment to think about what is behind the secret door. A party is usually pretty invested in finding the trigger for a secret door (it's an activity anyone can participate in), so when the door finally swings open, you'll probably have their attention.

Lastly, the reward doesn't have to be treasure. It can be something bad, like a bunch of zombies. Zombies are their own reward.

If you still want some more secret door stuff, here's a couple more other sites.

Raging Swan

Dragon's Flagon

Drume is a city on the Sea of Fish. For the last few generations, it has avoided any major wars, plagues, famines, and excommunications. They have a merchant fleet supported by airships. They have the highest literacy rate in the world, and have the largest secular school: the Pillar of Academy. Their politics are mild and very accepting of other cultures.

This is all very unusual.

The architecture is late Neropic, with many buildings resembling bulbs and squashed domes, while others are mudbrick with exposed wooden supports. The cuisine features a lot of rice and seafood (especially squid), with a healthy influx of cuisine from their three biggest trading partners: Abasinia, Kaladar, and Charcorra.

Drume is also the only city where you'll find a superhero. Her name is Lulu, and she fights crime. She flies across the city on magic wings, and she wears a squid mask. Everyone loves Lulu. Children wear imitation masks; sailors get tattoos.

Hexaplex cichorium

The Quadrumvirate

The city is ruled by the Quadrumvirate: four wealthy families. Every five years, one of the seats is up for election. Each family is then responsible for providing someone to sit at the Quadrumvirate.

Craftau Warlov - The Warlovs were founding members of the Pillar of Academy. Mages, heretics, rebels, and priests. A family of dissidents. They have awkward family dinners, but they do their best to present a unified face. Craftau is a mage, and is usually accompanied by her husband, an exiled knight from Noth.

Guster Lethok - The Lethok family deals in airships, and holds the second membership. The matriarch of this family, finally grow too old to attend, appointed her youngest son to fill the role. Guster has spent most of his life abroad, studying. While the Lethok family is popular, Guster is unknown, and therefore untrusted.

Kashtan Larksmith - A family that deals in banking and land ownership. Kashtan is fiercely loyal to the city, and wary of outside influence. She's killed at least two people in duels.

"Eb" Alazed - An ancient and enormous old man, who operates a dozen merchant ships. His sons manage most of Drume's modest navy.

Hatred of Orcs

Drume was conquered by orcs and did not win its freedom until a century ago. Noth helped.

The city's famous tolerance does not extend to orcs, which are despised and hunted at every turn. There are a few remnants of orcish rule in the city. Shumish art tends to mirror the brutality of orcish art. A number of orcish words persist in the Shumish vocabulary. And the rapid assembly of human thrones persists as a popular sport.

The Hum

On very quiet quiet nights, you can can hear it. Not in your ears, but in your bones. A subsonic thrum that permeates everything.

Visitors hate it. It keeps them up at night. Locals speak fondly of it, for the most part.

Most people are convinced that it is caused by something deep in the Pillar of Academy. They are correct.

an Ionic columm

The Pillar of Academy

Looks almost exactly like a Ionic pillar, magnified a hundred times. A stone skyscraper of antediluvian construction, every floor marked by a row of pin-prick windows lancing their light out into the night sky.

The top of the Pillar emits steam. Illuminated by light, the cloud is bright enough to illuminate the city at night.

The basement of the Pillar is filled with light. Most assume that it is some sort of mechanism that the mages invented.

The deeper down you go, the brighter it gets. Blindness becomes a risk. The marble walls become reflective. The light becomes painful even through closed eyelids. Eventually the heat becomes an issue as well. The lower levels of the basement are where the Pillar keeps its secrets.

The Egg of Drume

According to anyone's best guess, the Egg is an extraterrestrial mollusk.

It was found in the lake of Zaotan a long time ago, and stolen from the dragon Tar Lath Lien. (This was back when the Egg was still small enough to be hidden under a cloak.)

It sits in the middle of a secret dungeon beneath the known dungeon beneath the Castle of the Pearl. It has grown so much in the last 50 years that the vast crenellations and creases of its shell form a small labyrinth around the animal inside.

The central chamber resembles the inside of a conch shell, with the far wall filled with a folded, protruding shell. This wall is full of symmetrical apertures, from which the Egg can extrude its nearly-translucent tentacles. Somewhere in the pulpy mass of its cryptic head is a five-toothed mouth, surrounded by what can loosely be described as a face.

The Egg eats a steady diet of eggshells and fish heads (so many fish heads). It communicates through local telepathy and is the most intelligent creature in Centerra.

Here is the reason for its genius: it is capable of absorbing the intellect of any fresh brain that it consumes, which is then integrated and aligned with the Egg's own goals. It is also utterly evil.

When asked about what it would do if it were given a choice, the Egg described a scenario that involved the annihilation of all other life on the planet except for its own, the consumption of all resources, and the launch of its offspring into the ether. The ultimate justification for this was to minimize ignorance and suffering (two cornerstones of the human condition) and also to prepare for the end of the universe. (The Egg intends to survive.)

The Egg is honest. If it were capable of lying, it hasn't revealed it yet.

Credit for the city's success lays squarely with the Egg. The Quadrumvirate ask the Egg questions, and it answers. "What would the outcome of this taxation policy be?""How much should we trust Noth?" "Where should we deploy our Navy?"

It doesn't make decisions. It simply provides answers.

The Quadrumvirate has had to make very few concessions in order to secure the cooperation of their prisoner. As the Egg will point out, this is unjust.

Assassins have attempted to kill the Egg on past occasions. They have all failed. Even without any psychic powers, the Egg is fully capable of defending itself.

And of course, it's usually trivial to figure out who hired the assassins once the Egg starts eating heads.

Containment

A huge array of containment systems have been arrayed around it, both physical and magical. Dozens of barriers prevent the escape of Drume's most important citizen. The creature's brain is also tattooed with dozens of explosive runes, set to explode if the right command word is uttered.

The Egg actually cooperated in designing its own prison. It gave good advice, and the mages who designed it were impressed by its thoroughness and innovation.

Quest idea: thieves hire you to break into (what they assume to be) the secret vault beneath the Castle of the Pearl.

There are also many rules in place to prevent the Egg's abilities from being abused. No one may speak to the Egg unless the entire Quadrumvirate is present. Questions are best formulated by telling the Egg what your objective is, and then asking the best way to achieve it. And lastly, no one should be fed to the Egg who might know the details of the Egg's prison. (This last rule has only been slightly broken a couple of times. Sometimes its important to know what a mage was lying about.)

The Hum, Part 2

Craftau Warlov manages the Benevolence Engine beneath the Pillar. It is responsible for five things.

1. The everpresent, luminous clouds above the city and the light-filled tunnels beneath it.

2. A great deal of heat.

3. A great deal of thermal pollution downstream, in the underground river.

4. A calming effect on the city's population, making them less prone to anger and despair. It does not suppress happiness or creativity.

5. The suppression of the Egg's latent psychic powers.

The Retrievers

Kashtan Larksmith manages the retreivers, who are an artificially created race of human-Egg. They resemble winged women with eyeless squids for heads. (They can see, despite appearances.) They are empaths and psychics. There are six of them.

They are used to hunt down threats to Drume, typically criminals. Once captured, the retriever will immobilize her prey, stretch her mouth over the victim's entire head, and neatly bite their head off. This is made possible by a boneless jaw and a radula similar to a wire saw.

Swallowed heads are diverted to a second stomach, where they are kept alive and fully conscious until they can be delivered to the Egg.

To prevent injury to themselves, retrievers are instructed to break the jaws of their victims before decapitating them.

Each retriever is different. Duvadembra refuses to kill anyone. Yoctalys is defiant, and considers the Egg to be her true father. When Ovia catches a criminal, she punishes them with their own crime before killing them. Zenziss despises her body, and wishes to be human. Ulmara and Japherine play musical instruments and are probably in love with each other.

The common populace believes that there is only one of them, who they call Lulu. The Quadrumvirate encourages this farce.

Everyone else is writing good posts about depletion so here's my take on it.

Here are the expendable/depletable resources that adventurers rely on:

1. Food, water

2. Torches, lanterns

3. Arrows, sling stones, weapons?, armor?

Triple X

Whenever something gets depleted, put an X next to it. After three Xs, it's gone. This is pretty close to "each slot can hold a bundle of three rations" but is more unified and probably more elegant.

Food - Depletes when you eat lunch or sleep. Replenishes when you buy more: 1 silver to remove 1 X.

Water - Depletes when you eat lunch or sleep. Replenishes automatically when you are out of the dungeon, unless your DM tells you otherwise. (It's assumed that water sources will be available, or at least, it isn't usually interesting to track down where the nearest creek is.)

Note: When you eat lunch, you can choose to mark off either food or water. When you rest for the night, you need to mark off both.

Torches - Depletes according to the depletion die (rolled every 30 minutes in a dungeon). Replenishes when you buy more: 1 silver to remove 1 X.

Lamps - Depletes according to the depletion die (rolled every 30 minutes in a dungeon). Replenishes when you buy more: 50 silver to remove 1 X.

Note: For simplicity's sake, I'm just going to assume that all of the lamps are basically slow-burning molotovs, where the fuel container and the lamp are the same thing. A lit lamp can be thrown just like a molotov.

Bow - After every combat in which you used arrows, flip a coin. On tails, your arrows deplete. Replenishes when you buy more: 1 silver to remove 1 X.

Sling - Whenever you fire a sling stone, you gain a single depletion. Replenishes whenever you have a moment to pick up some stones or stony debris. (Basically as soon as combat ends, in your average dungeon.)

Melee Weapons - Whenever you roll a 1 or a 20 on an attack roll, a melee weapon gains an X (in addition to the other effects of the fumble). It breaks when it gains the third X. Replenishes whenever you stop by a blacksmith: 1 silver to remove 1 X.

Armor - Whenever you roll a critical fumble on a Defense roll, your armor gains an X (in addition to the other effects of the fumble). When you gain 3 depletions, you lose two points of AC, erase all of the Xs, and your armor takes up one slot less. (Basically, your plate just turned into chain.)

Simplified Armor

This is what I'm running with these days.

Leather - 1 slot, AC 12, swim automatically

Chain - 2 slots, AC 14, Str check to swim

Plate - 3 slots, AC 16, sink automatically, must be custom-made

Each character has a number of slots equal to Str.

You can also build your armor as a hodgepodge, from armor pieces. Each regular armor piece gives you +1 AC, while well-fitted armor pieces can give you +2 (usually requires time and proper tools), up to a maximum of AC 15. Only custom-made plate can give you AC 16.

Depletion Rolls

Every thirty minutes of dungeoneering, the DM rolls a d20. On a 1-5, all light sources deplete.

Note: I've played around with more complicated versions of this. 6-10 used to be spell expiration, 11-15 used to be a morale challenge (e.g. hirelings get scared). I might bring those back, but this seems sufficient for now. Light is what I care about most. (Although the morale challenges were interesting.)

(Brian Harbron write one that I liked, based on some Chris McDowall stuff.)

Encounter Rolls

While the DM rolls for depletion, the players roll for wandering monsters. Basically, roll a d20:

1-3 - encounter

4-6 - tracks

Encumbered characters increase the chances of a wandering monster. Rangers increase the chance of finding tracks. A full explanation is detailed here.

More Rules

Whenever you use an item for a special use, it automatically depletes. Using a sword to chop through a door, using water to put out a fire, dropping food to distract monsters, etc.

If you loot the arrows off a dead archer, your bow regains one depletion.

Magic arrows take up inventory spaces. You can bundle them, though, as long as they're the same type.

Magic weapons and armor last twice as long, so one depletion gives an '\', while the second depletion turns it into an 'X'. Magic weapons and armor can only be repaired by insane blacksmiths. The price for repair is never money.

Shitty weapons and armor break instantly as soon as they gain their first X. Scavenged weapons have 0-2 depletions when they are looted.

If you need to convert depletions into exact amounts for some reason, then assume that each X equals

A meal's worth of rations.
A pint of water.
5 arrows.
1 sling stone.
A torch (2 hr).
A pint of lamp oil (2 hr).

Attack Roll Fumbles

It is possible to deplete your weapons and armor by rolling fumbles on your Attack and Defense rolls, respectively. That sword might break sooner than you think!

Here's what I'm running these days.

Critical fumbles represent a tactical misstep that gives an opening to an enemy. When you roll a critical fumble, the most threatening adjacent foe takes advantage of it. Yes, this means that is possible to fumble against a goblin and get whacked by the ogre adjacent (perhaps you turned your back on him, or stumbled).

Enemies have three basic options, and intelligent enemies will choose whichever one makes the most sense at the time. Stupid enemies will behave more randomly.

Free Attack (by the most threatening adjacent opponent).
Free Combat Maneuver (such as tripping, disarming, etc).
Free Sunder Attempt (a type of combat maneuver).

If a weapon would gain a fourth depletion, it instead shatters into pieces.

If you show up with a dragon-killing spear, expect the dragon to spend a turn biting that shit in half (assuming they don't just knock it out of your hand and then stand on it).

The number of depletions depends on the size and strength of your opponent.

Human (HD 1) = 1 depletion
Ogre (HD 4) = 2 depletions
Giant (HD 7) = 3 depletions (instantly breaking a brand-new weapon)

Regular weapons accumulate these depletions automatically, but magic weapons have a 3-in-6 chance of ignoring them. Roll each separately. (So if a dragon attempts to sunder your magic spear, roll four times, with each roll having a 3-in-6 chance of resulting in a depletion.)

Golems specialize in destroying weapons, and will always choose to sunder your weapon if you roll a fumble against them. They are terrifyingly good at it.

Golem (HD 5) = 5 depletions

Special Weapons

This also opens the door to modulating weapons according to durability.

Chargale blades are made from a special type of clay that is baked for years (or decades). They deal damage as a regular sword, but they will never break.

Crysmere blades deal damage as if they were a magic sword, but they have the durability of a regular sword. They cannot be repaired. You can cast spells (of any range) through crysmere weapons. (Crysmere arrows are especially coveted for this reason.)

Both of these types of blade are immensely valuable. You may just want to sell them.

Common Knowledge

The Shendru are a species of omnivirous tree. Their branches are subtly articulated, and they have a toothed maw atop their barrel-like body. They have the ability to enslave other types of plants, and are sometimes served by brackles or treants. Although they don't have nooses, they're sometimes known as hangman trees by very old pedants.

Brackles are a species of humanoid plants that are capable of spitting thorns. They are narrow and sharp, all elbows and fluted snouts. They travel the world looking to exchange pollen before dying in winter, as each brackle only lives a single year.

(I'm retconning my Brackles.)

Marilanths are another species of humanoid plant. They are large masses of flower-covered vines with four clumsy arms. Like Brackles, they are itinerant, travelling the world while looking for places to set down their roots. They sometimes sell drugs.

from the 2nd edition Monstrous Manual

Uncommon Knowledge

We now know that they are both members of the same species: the Shendru.

This is not common knowledge because brackles and marilanths don't speak of their sexual habits, a cultural taboo that is even stronger among Shendru than among humans. (Shendru are not a monoculture, but this is true among the cultures of Mothmoria and Greenmarch, which are two populous "cities" of the Shendru.)

Shendru Biology

Brackles tend to wander. Perhaps they just want to experience as much as they can in the brief year before they die. Perhaps they're driven by a desire to pass their pollen on to as many marilanths as they can. Perhaps they are driven to protect the groves and farmlands of their families by searching out threats. Or most likely, all of the above.

They have faces like seahorses and don't eat very much. They lose weight steadily over their year of life, and are usually quite gaunt by December, when most of them die.

Brackles write very good poetry. In winter, many brackles choose to inscribe their death poems along the lengths of their limbs.

Marilanths can grow much larger than a human if food is plentiful. In this case, they usually also grow a second pair of arms. Marilanths also tend to wander, although perhaps not as far afield as brackles. They tend to be more interested in gustatory experiences.

All Shendru can talk to plants, but marilanths are exceptionally persuasive. This gives them a good deal of control over their farms.

Brackles who form strong bonds with marilanths will usually "marry" them. This involves collecting ingredients for a feast, a night of dancing, and then a meal that includes the brackle. There few cases where a brackle and a human have fallen in love have followed the same pattern.

When a marilanth is ready to settle down, or when she begins to starve, she sends down roots and becomes a tree. Her children are the product of her own eggs as well as the pollen that she collected over her lifetime. (She can continue receiving pollen as a tree, but in some cultures this is considered unseemly, as shendru exist in a dreamlike state most of the time, and not fully aware of everything that happens around them.)

Shendru trees can grow brackles and marilanths whenever they wish, but they can also grow fruits that imitate the substances that they have eaten over their whole lives. A shendru who has tasted coffee can grow a caffeinated fruit that tastes similar.

Marilanths also possess this ability, albeit in a much smaller capacity. This is why they often sell drugs, which is why they are often chased away from civilized lands.

Shendru Lore

The scholars will tell you that Shendru were created by the old spirits of the forest, in order that they might fight back against the incursions of mankind. Treants were too slow to grow, too slow to anger. Why else would brackles have such deadly thorns?

The Church will tell you that the Shendru were created to serve humanity, but when we accepted sins into our hearts, the forests turned against us. Why else would they bear such pleasing fruit?

The Elves will tell you that the Shendru were bred to be farmers. What better to tend to a farm than the farm itself? It fits their model.

Shendru Cities

The two major homelands of the Shendru are Mothmoria and the Greenmarch.

<sidebar>When people invent their own races, there are two things that annoy me. First, presenting any intelligent species as a monoculture. Second, not giving them any settlements of their own, or only giving them a single place of origin.</sidebar>

The Mazes of Mothmoria

The Shendru of Mothmoria are waiting for their masters, the giants. They have been entrusted with the gardens, and they have kept them immaculate for centuries. They have done more than maintain, actually--they have expanded. Every generation of caretakers have measured their success in the increase of Mothmoria.

It is a garden maze the size of a forest, filled with hedges, contemplation pools, mossy statues, iron gates, and softly bubbling fountains. With all of the local plants charmed by the Shendru, weeds don't even poke up between the stones.

Mothmoria is beautiful, tranquil, and useless for anything except for quiet contemplation. Somewhere in the middle of it, behind the endless terraces of waterfalls and lilies, are the stone houses of the giants. They are quiet now, even the Shendru have only the vaguest idea of what is contained within. They aren't allowed in the houses.

To the west is the Great Forest Yava, the eternal stronghold of the elves and the most beautiful place in the world. They fight a slow war against the Shendru of Mothmoria. Both sides are loathe to disrupt the peace of their forests, and so the war is fought at the pace at which trees grow. Outsiders could be forgiven for thinking that this war is gentler or less bloody.

The Dukes of the Greenmarch

The Shendru of the Greenmarch are organized into plantations, each one a zone of land controlled by a Duke or Duchess. Each one has a longhouse built around their progenitor. The brackles and marilanths of that place are organized along familial lines, with the male brackles traded among houses as workers, soldiers, transporters, or arranged husbands.

Visitors are often struck by how human the society seems. They even have their own currency: black brass coins.

And humans are welcome there. The Greenmarch conducts a fair amount of trade, in crops, spices, cotton, and wool. (Their power over plants simplifies many of these enterprises.) They even maintain a silver mine. Most of them are Hesayan, although doctrine dictates that they lack the seventh soul.

There are a few oddities: the bounty on bees (to prevent accidental pregnancies), the ritualistic skirmishes between brackles trying to earn fame, the drug tolerance contests, and/or the mutually cannibalistic friendship ceremonies (of which humans are expected to participate.

Humans are given new names when they arrive in the Greenmarch. Human names are considered vulgar within their borders. Human reproduction is also a mild taboo (since many of the younger brackles don't know about it), and it is polite to pass on the mythology that humans reproduce the same way that Shendru do.

source unknown?

Kasrosassus and the White Woods

Pale trees lean over streams lined with dolomite. Their leaves are red. White roots grip chalky hillsides, and the straw-yellow grasses are as thin as a newborn's hair.

The ecology of the White Woods is essentially vampiric. From the smallest mouse to the thickest bear. Even the deer suck their meals. Mostly hairless, entirely albino, and with a universal aversion to sunlight, which pierces the thick fog only rarely. On especially bright days, most of the animals retreat into the extensive karst caves that dot the forest, like antelope huddling near a watering hole during the dry season.

At the center of it all is Kasrosassus, a botanic titan whose red eyes can see the dead, and whose crocodile mouth vomits forth huge clouds of fog. Inside his vast vegetable bulk nest families of bats. Kasrosassus claims to be the progenitor of all vampires.

Kasrosassus is perhaps the most powerful necromancer in the world. It is said that Shadoom plucked his seed from the darkness behind the sun and planted it in Centerra. Even Queen Yama studied at the knee of the leviathan.

All creatures that die within the White Woods immediately rise as undead under the control of Kasrosassus. They walk to the middle of the woods, where Kasrosassus plucks them up and sucks them dry. The dessicated undead is then stored in the cool, dry caverns beneath his roots, where he stores the rest of his armies.

In bygone days, Kasrosassus marched on the cities of Brynth and Belgast. His "sons" were white trees, conveyed in hundred-wheeled chariot-urns, pulled by an ever-growing army of undead. Their powers extended for miles around each one.

The Church broke the Sons of Kasrosassus into splinters, and drove the hordes back into the pale arms of the White Woods. They never uprooted the great necromancer from his stronghold, but he has not ventured from his stronghold in any of the days since.

Travelers who would pass the White Woods would be wise to seek safe passage. Those who would do so are advised to bring a human corpse with them as they travel (or make their own). As soon as they cross the threshold of the forest, the corpse will sit up and speak, and they may communicate with the great necromancer directly.

The usual fee is a single cow for every traveler. Simply slit their throats and they will walk off themselves.

Government

Societies have power structures. There is usually a top and a bottom to this power structure, but all of this power and legitimacy ultimately flows from the people below them. (At least until we start talking about robot armies.)

A prince is never going to be crowned without the support of the mob/aristocracy/army/pope, and those people are never going to support that prince unless they think that the prince can help them in some way.

Essentially, political power is never free. It exists only within the boundaries set by the people who put you into power. If you start to go against their interests, those same people will remove you. Even a king has constituents, of a sort.

Writing Interesting Fantasy Social Structures

1. It should be interesting. If it's boring, don't spend time writing it, much less running it.

However, even a generic kingship can be interesting (knights! political marriages! inheritance!) and those are the parts you should focus on.

2. It should be semi-plausible. This depends on how gonzo/historical you game is, but spare a thought for "realism" when you're describing how the kingdom is ruled by an ordinary chicken.

3. The players should be able to affect it. Tabletops are simply more fun when the players can interact with what is presented.

There should be methods for the players to incorporate themselves into the power structure, or at least to break a few teapots.

Ideally, the disruption should be a natural conclusion of the governmental structure itself. Good example: becoming a baron by finding the sacred chicken among a flock of thousands. Less unique example: becoming a baron by assassinating the old baron.

from the Wonder Woman movie

Concubocracry: The Nothic Empire

Originally, the Empire was ruled by an emperor who possessed ultimate authority in wartime, but was limited in all other areas by his senate, who held veto power over many of his actions.

During the war against the frost giants and their client cities, the entire senate was killed. (Many say that the Emperor allowed it to happen, or possibly even did it himself.)

Because the emperor requires a senate to have any authority, the emperor appointed an emergency senate: his entire harem.

Precedent holds strong sway in Noth, and that action codified itself. Now, the harem is the senate, and the senate is the harem. The two are interchangable.

Senators are elected by different subsections of the population. Appointment is for 10 years, or until death. The only people who are eligible to run as senators are those born of noble families (or at least adopted).

In actuality, senators are usually just representatives of their families, and act in their family's own interests (but not always).

A senatrix can also be appointed by the emperor at his discretion, up to a certain limit. Many defenders of this system argue that this is a superior method--if the emperor wants to fuck someone, then he also has to listen to them.

Additionally, since the emperor is required to make regular visits to the harem (in order to ensure a good supply of imperial offspring), the emperor and the senate have regular opportunities to interact. And the emperor has an additional motivator not to antagonize his harem--they bear his children, and are entirely responsible for the health and education of those resultant children for the first four years of their life. In a semi-medieval world where childhood mortality is common and smothering is easy, infanticide serves as another check and balance.

The senate is officiated by the infanta, who is elected from among the daughters of the previous emperor.

The empress has no governmental power, unless her husband dies. She is an understudy.

Necrocracy: Mondaloa

The peaceful, crumbling city of Mondaloa is ruled by the dead. Not the undead, who are abominations in the eyes of Mondaloa (the deity that shares his name with the city), but the actual dead.

Seven ancient families rule the city, and each family has a Speaker for the Dead, who speaks on behalf of their honored ancestors. Each speaker has a rank. Their ranks are decided like this.

Each speaker must be buried alive and then resuscitated. The people who bury the priest must be different than the people who dig him up. Rank is decided by how high up the mountain you were buried.

In practice, the priest will walk up the mountain with his diggers, along with a specialized coffin and numerous mechanisms to survive the ordeal, both magical and mundane. Once they have climbed as high as they dare, they dig a hole, bury the priest, and run back to Mondaloa.

The team of exhumers waits for their arrival, and then sets out as soon as the last digger returns, like a baton pass. The go to the point specified, and exhume their brother. If they are swift, the city has a new speaker for the dead. If they are too slow, the honored dead gain another member, and a small cairn is built.

In cases of real deadlock, the actual dead are summoned to settle things. This is generally unpleasant for everyone involved, and the speakers will try to avoid this.

It turns out that when actual ancestors are consulted, they tend to be weirdly conservative about certain things, weirdly uncaring about certain modern concerns, and racist along lines that aren't generally recognized anymore. They are also fairly pissed off at being brought back.

The city sends out sanctified necromancers, who seek to coax the restless dead back into their graves. After all, that skeleton is someone's beloved grandmother, and deserves to be treated as such.

Agonocracy: Fangol

The horse lords of the Fangolian plains decide their leadership through a race. Since the race crosses the territories of all of the clans, and since there are essentially no rules, clans can "vote" against enemy clans by trying to kill them.

These races don't happen often, since the horse clans are fiercely independent, and rarely see the need to unify against anything less than an existential threat. And when they do seek to unify, they usually already have one or two candidates that they support, and so most clans don't even enter the race out of politeness.

One caveat is that it is the horse that is racing, not the rider. As long as the horse crosses the finish line, alive or dead, that clan is the winner. The riders usually wear masks to emphasize their own unimportance relative to their clan's horse.

Gamocracy: Tatzulon

All positions in government, from tax collector up to king, must be held by a married couple. The reasoning behind this is that anyone who is unable to navigate a marriage is certainly unable to navigate a political office.

If one of the two people die, or if they divorce, they become ineligible for the position and immediately retire.

Infidelity also causes a divorce, even if both members of the married couple wish to remain married. However, infidelity has a very specific definition in Basharna, and there is always the matter of proof.

Kleptocracy: Shangrilore

Shangrilore has one king, three dukes, and eleven barons. The crowns can be inherited, but the noblest way to obtain a crown is to steal it.

Only a duke can steal the crown from the king, and so become the new king. Likewise, only a baron can steal the crown from a duke. Anyone can steal from a baron, as long as they first undergo a ritual purification at a local church, first.

Violence is not permitted. Spilt blood stains the transfer, and a murder invalidates it. A thief who kills someone on a botched attempt is a common criminal, nothing more.

The wearers of the crowns must engage in certain pilgrimages across Abasinia, and to Casmir, where they perform certain duties, such as blessing the fishing fleet and receiving blessings from the vestal virgins. All of this travel requires them to wear the crown, and allows for many opportunities for thievery to occur.

Ranking among the dukes and the barons in determined by the method in which the crown was stolen. Much more acclaim is given to those who obtained their crowns through bravery and brilliance.

When a crown is stolen, you must leave your own crown behind as proof.

Prestige is also gained by stealing things from your rivals. The more outrageous the theft, the better. Stealing things from people who can't afford it is considered a sin, as is the theft of money, gold, or jewels (unless you compensate the victim the dollar value of the item immediately). In fact, things that are stolen are often immediately returned, usually in a respectful and/or cheerful manner.

An example of a prestigious theft would be to steal your rival's distinctive clothing, alter their calendar, and then show up to their appointments while prancing around and mocking them, while your rival shows up an hour late for all of their appointments. Classic.

Geriatrocy: Elvish Cities

Elvish cities are often pure democracies, decided by a straightforward vote. Each person's vote is proportionate to their age, so an 80-year-old man casts twice as many votes as a 40-year-old.

Elves pride themselves on their wisdom and fairness, and justify this rule by saying that age is wiser than youth, and so the extra voting power is deserved. In practice, this usually just means that younger elves get little representation, to say nothing of the few humans who sometimes live in elven enclaves ("half-elves").

Elections follow a rolling total, with votes coming in until a clear victor is determined. This process takes as long as it must, and sometimes it takes years for wandering elves to return home and cast the deciding vote. Sometimes children and babies are dragged to the ballot boxes when a vote is especially close. And of course, sometimes the vote changes as people's age's change or certain voting members die. (Consider an 80-year-old opposed by two 40-year-olds--the younger cohort will have a distinct advantage next year.)

Dead (and undead) are not allowed to vote. Resurrected elves are allowed to vote, and vote at their full (calendar-calculated) age. And in fact, sometimes especially ancient elves will commit suicide in order to leave some mileage on their bodies, so they can be resurrected at a later point in order to influence future politics. (You cannot be resurrected if you die from old age.)

Elves from the temporal elven kingdoms at the end of time are from a different class of elf, and do not mix with the "low elves" of Centerra, which simplifies matters for the elves who are not stuck with the task of calculating the age of elves who have looped through the timeline so many times that they are several times older than the universe.

Lottery: Great Zyro, Worthless Zyro, Ziga, and Manamar

Exactly like what it sounds like. Everyone's name is put into a hat, and then a name is drawn for every single position available.

This is includes the expected governmental positions such as master of ships and high priest, but it also includes unexpected roles such as village idiot and bandit.

Bear in mind that this madness only encapsulates the Zyroleans who live on land, who are already considered to be mad. All proper Zyroleans live aboard their ships, and follow proper naval laws.

Magocracy: Meltheria

Whenever one of the high mages dies, his surviving family picks his successor, who must be from outside of the family.

Of course this leads to some biased judging, since the departing family seeks to install a high mage who is sympathetic to their goals, but everyone likes to pretend that the judging is unbaised. Because of this, flagrant partisanship leads to angry mobs and a legitimacy struggle.

The successorship competitions are always public, and they are always spectacular affairs, usually a blend of scholarship, showmanship, and raw magical power.

They also tend to be crowd-pleasers. A popular display might be a parade of animals made of cake, who march through the city until they are eaten by the populace.

Each of the high mage's rules over one of the city's towers, and each tower has a different focus, from warfare to history. The performance is expected to conform to the theme.

Some towers are more stable than others, with the position of high mage being traded back and forth between two or three families for centuries, while other towers are more chaotic.

Government in Exile: the Anti-Pope

A generation ago, a long-festering schism within the Church finally spilled over.

The Church was split between the conservative Orthodox faction that wished for the Church structure to remain as it was, and the Reform faction that believed that the Church had become too corrupt and worldly, and would be better if it fragmented into smaller, decentralized churches. It's opponents simply said that the Reformers were seeking to seize power for themselves, and had no moral motivation.

Both sides accused the other of being illegitimate, and both appointed their own Pope.

With strong support from allies in Noth, the Orthodox faction eventually triumphed over the Reformers. Most recanted. A few were tried as heretics and killed. And some fled the city of Kaladon and the Church that they saw as corrupt.

The who became labeled as the False Pope, or Anti-Pope, was a cardinal named Odrial. He was immensely popular in the north, which is where he fled.

He is believed to be hiding out somewhere in Guilder or Gafferdy, still preaching his doctrine in secret masses. He is the most dangerous heretic in the world, and is known to have a small circle of anti-priests and anti-paladins.

Map of Centerra

Here's an updated one, in case anyone is interested where these places are located relative to each other.

Why Do We Need Rules For Social Challenges?

We don't.

Social encounters in D&D work nicely--you can model them at the table by talking to each other. You don't need a rule system to know how to talk, negotiate, or make threats.

This is a very different from combat, which can't be emulated at the table (unless you are prepared to crawl over your minis and wrestle your DM), which is why combat requires a robust system of resolution.

However . . .

I still think there is a place for social challenges, specifically for cases that involve (a) an extended persuasion attempt against (b) who must be convinced on multiple points. These types of social challenges sometimes feel too complex to be resolved with a single conversation--there are too many small considerations, and a single DM ruling can feel arbitrary. A formal system for resolution can allow for a numeric description of progress and can add legitimacy to what might otherwise feel like DM fiat.

This is a rather narrow scope, and that's okay. I can expand it later.

Why Combat is Great

Across different systems, combat is usually broken up into a pattern that is repeated every round.

1. We consider the state of the system. How much health do we have? How tough is this vampire? How many potions do I have left? Can I trick the vampire into the sunlight?

2. We make decisions based on that information and roll some dice to determine the outcome.

3. The DM describes the results of the dice rolls, then the series repeats. A player loses 8 hit points. A goblin dies. A spell is expended.

This cycle of information gathering followed by decision making is the beating heart of an RPG--any RPG.

You formulate a plan, act on that plan and then (and this is important) change your plan if it does not seem to be working. The status of your combatant (and thereby your chance of success) is calculated through discrete factors like hit points, which are important for players to know, in order to make decisions and schemes. (This is true even if enemy HP is given ambiguously, e.g. "the goblin appears to be almost dead".)

Good rules for a social challenge should be designed according to similar considerations.

painting of Vercingetorix by Lionel Royer

Social Challenges

You are trying to persuade an NPC.

The NPC has Patience. Every round that you stay in the social challenge, you risk depleting it further. Once Patience reaches zero, the NPC has run out of patience and you have lost. Patience is comparable to player HP.

The NPC has Opposition. Every round that you stay in the social challenge, you have the chance to make arguments, which will deplete your opponent's Opposition. Once Opposition reaches zero, the NPC acquiesces and you have won. Opposition is comparable to monster HP.

After each round of the social challenge, the players have the opportunity to assess how things are going and choose what argument they want to use going forward. You can decide whether you want to communicate the two scores to your players directly ("The dwarven king has 3 Patience remaining.") or obliquely ("The dwarven king is tapping his foot, looking annoyed.")

I'm lean towards a full disclosure of the two numbers, since more information helps players make better decisions. (It's about as realistic as a player knowing their own HP total, and besides, humans are already decent at determining if they are persuading someone or merely annoying them.)

The Social Interval

An exploration turn is 10 minutes, a combat round is 10 seconds, and a social interval takes as long as it has to.

Every interval follows the same basic cycle as combat.

1. The characters are free to attempt to gain more information. If you walk away from a negotiation and then return later, expect to pick up right where you left off, albeit with 1d4 less Patience ("Didn't we already settle this?").

2. The characters are free to make their argument/offer/threat. The DM decides how likely the argument is to succeed, then tells the players to make their roll. Automatic successes and failures are common. If the players have helped the dwarven king in the past, reminding him of their previous loyalty will soften his position--the only question is how much. Similarly, everyone likes gifts, and everyone hates to be insulted. Use your common sense.

3. The players make the roll. The DM informs the players of their odds before the roll, as well as her reasoning. ("I figure goblins are easy to intimidate, so you succeed with a 14 or less.)

4. If the persuasion succeeds, Opposition is reduced by 1d6 points. If the persuasion fails, Patience is reduced by 1d6 points. The die size can be adjusted up or down as you please, but something must be reduced every turn.

Roleplay every step.

An important part of this is the actual persuasion roll, in step 3. The chance of success is based on the argument put forward, not on external factors, such as how much the NPC personally likes you, or your high Charisma.

Those types of external factors will affect how much Patience the NPC starts with, but once negotiation begins, they no longer play a part. The queen will listen to her lover's propositions all night, but if none of them have any merit, she will agree to nothing.

Setting the Persuasion Roll

At it's heart, this is the NPC asking the players "Why should I do as you say?"

If something is certain to have an impact, it's automatic success. If it is something that the NPC absolutely doesn't care about, it automatically fails. If its something that you can imagine going either way, then you need to set a Persuasion that the players need to roll under.

Follow your heart on this. A decent argument should have a decent shot: a 10-in-20 chance.

There is potentially an asymmetry to the information here. You know your NPC, and the players don't. They can potentially investigate their target before negotiating with them, but even if this step is neglected (an ambush), they can still learn about the NPC through conversation, or by observing how the NPC reacts to their earlier Persuasion attempts.

Setting Up the NPC

You should already know some facts about your NPC. You should know (and have written down somewhere)

their desires and goals
their fears and shames
their values and agenda
their personal friends and enemies
their supporters and opponents (if political)

If you don't have anything decided for your dwarven king, you can always fall back on the generic.

Setting Up the Patience Score

This is where personal appeal (rather than rational appeal) comes in.

Patience begins at 6 points, and is adjusted up and down according to circumstances. There are three factors, which are usually worth not more than +/- 2 points each.

Who

Friendship is worth a couple of points. Proven loyalty is worth is a few more. If they frown as soon as they see you, reduce Patience by a few points.

How

The approach is important. This is where players can make personal appeals, and where they can use their abilities to gain an ear. A Charisma roll is the traditional way to open a negotiation, but other stats can be used, and even cultural elements (such as invoking an ancient right of parley).

When and Where

There is a bad time for everything. An appropriate venue helps, while walking up to the king before he's had breakfast is worth a penalty.

Setting Up the Opposition Score

This is how much the NPC would rather say "no".

Opposition begins at 10 points, and is adjusted up and down according to circumstances. This is a guideline, and when deciding how to adjust it, be sure to consider the following things.

Cultural Taboos. The fun thing about taboos is that they often have exceptions. If no one is allowed in the Royal Crypts except priests, one of the PCs might want to become a priest before they ask the king for access to the Royal Crypts.

Pride/Shame. There's a lot to be gained if you can phrase your request in a way that saves face for whoever you are asking. No one likes to be humbled.

Direct Cost. A resource that is immediately lost. Money, items, troops, etc. These are usually pretty obvious.

Indirect Cost. A linked resource that is spent. Popularity, allies, patronage, risks, etc. Allowing you into the Royal Crypts might anger the Imperial Cult, and that will have knock-on effects for the king down the line.

Opportunity Cost. It might not cost the king anything to let you marry his daughter, but if he does, then he loses the opportunity to wed her to some other prince. He loses the opportunity for a political marriage down the line.

Discussion

It's not hard to make variations of this. Anything that is a multistep process where each step holds an ambiguous amount of progress. If you don't want a "ticking clock" that indicates failure, use only one progress score. Candidates:

Building a castle. Progress vs Money (which depletes in a mostly-fixed rate each interval).

Researching a new spell. Progress vs Danger. A crude proto-spell is available at 50% Progress, representing a partial success in your spell breeding program.

Navigating a trackless waste. Progress vs Supplies (which depletes in a mostly-fixed rate each interval).

Killing a Zondervoze. A zondervoze is roughly described a city-spirit, composed of a large chunk of a city's population, which function as the zondervoze's "cells" without being aware of their role. A single progress track might be appropriate here--every mass killing or deculturation event will bring a Zondervoze closer to death. You'll attract its full attention from the first event, so there is no competing progress track for failure, since it will be trying to kill you at every turn.

The Heart of the Matter

Essentially any complex task can be broken down into 1 or 2 progress scores.

First archetype: a single progress score that you attempt to increase. Each attempt (or time interval) brings a cost.

Second archetype: a pair of dueling progress scores. Fulfilling the first one generates success, while the fulfilling the second generates failure.

You can layer a thousand complications on these simple constructs (and a thousand RPGs have done exactly that). But I honestly believe that this is the beating heart of most tabletop RPGs.

This is a continuation of an earlier post.

Dungeonocracy: The Revanwall Kings

The tribes of the Revanwall coast are pagans who worship the Revaydra, a living mountain. During times of peace, the mountain dwindles. The sides become smoother and the stones fade to blue, and mosses grow over the summit as the altitude drops. Dreams stop appearing to the tribe's shamans.

During times of war, the mountains swells and darkens. New peaks grip the sky like claws, and dark clouds die in its grip.

Every king of the Revanwall tribes is given back to the mountain, buried in a cave near the peak which is believed to swallow him.

After the king is swallowed, all the caves on the mountainside slide lower, and the dungeon inside grows. The dungeon grows a new level, that corresponds to the newly buried king. His body becomes the dungeon, and will tend to follow the shape of the king's body. For example, the level that appeared after the death of Ivak the Legless was said to be smaller than average.

Each floor is stocked with the trappings of the king's life. Scenes are recreated, and people from their memories are imitated (sometimes well, sometimes poorly). Enemies, both real and imagined, are recreated as well.

Somewhere in the dungeon is the crown. It is never on the floor corresponding to the dead king, but always somewhere deeper. Whoever returns with it will crown the next king.

It is customary for each tribe to allow their neighbors time to explore the dungeon in order to find their crown. But there have been times when multiple tribes have plumbed the dungeon simultaneously, during honorless wars, or when two kings have died at the same time.

It is less chaotic than it seems.

Generally, all the tribes work together to keep outsiders away from the Revaydra, and only allow one or two parties in at a time. The mountain is sacred.

Furthermore, it is very difficult to find the crown without a good knowledge of the dead king's personality, his life history, and where he would think to hide a crown. Because this sort of knowledge tends to cluster closely to a particular tribe, outsiders have an even more difficult time making progress within the great mountain.

Large armies, and those who show disrespect to the mountain, are swallowed by the steep jaws of the mountain.

by Timofey Stepanov

Pure Plutocracy: Bar Chakka

The Beastfolk have a simple form of democracy. One gold coin, one vote.

Voting is held at the Cloud's Fountain, a natural spring inside the royal compound. Once the exact terms of the vote have been decided on, and the vote has been pared down into a single yes/no question, the vote is held.

Voters walk down the dock to the middle of the Fountain, display their gold to the authenticators, announce their vote to the tally-beasts, and then throw their coin into the Fountain with as much pomp as they can muster.

There is applause. There are jeers.

If a great amount of gold is deposited at once, it may take a very long time for all of it to be authenticated and counted. This has happened for votes in the past, when there is a high amount of public interest.

Voting days are also festival days. Many have traveled across the island in order to cast their coins into the Fountain. What else will they do?

The Cloud's Fountain also functions as the vault. It is deep, and even a talented diver can only bring up a small amount of gold with every dive. The theft of any appreciable sum would require many divers working for many hours, which is as intended.

The money is not carefully inventoried; no one knows exactly how much lies at the bottom of the Fountain. Embezzling smaller amounts is very easy, which is also as intended.

The king is an elk-man, Mad King Ketch. Like his predecessors, his job is only to carry out what was decided democratically. This is a auxiliary duty, as his job is primarily a religious one.

The beastfolk consider their system to be the best and most honest in the world. All governments are ruled by money. If you pretend otherwise, you make the process even murkier and dishonest.

Judiciocracy: Brynth

Long ago, Brynth's last king was strangled with the intestines of its last priest.

In fact, kings are despised in Brynth. Their citizens are known to be powerfully patriotic, and take a large amount of interest in their own governance.

Priests are likewise scorned in Brynth. If the gods are a concern for every citizen, then religion is certainly something that is worth administering personally. Religion is just another civic duty, and an honorable one.

The government is built entirely from the judiciary.

There are different types of judges. Some are elected, while some are appointed by other judges.

Judges make rulings on cases. These precedents become new laws, and so each old law spawns new ones.

Brynth is also famous for its legal system--it is strictly gladitorial.

Cases are argued by barristers, a specialized caste of warrior-lawyers. The judge hears both sides and then makes a ruling, informed by precedent. The stronger case is given advantageous terms in the ensuing gladitorial combat, while the party found to be at fault begins at a disadvantage.

In the most severe scenario, a murderer will be blinded and emasculated before fighting the victim's family in the arena. In a case where the case is less unambiguous, one party might begin armed with a dagger, while the other begins with a spear, a sword, and a shield. The judge decides the terms of the combat.

When possible, the combat is made to suit the crime. Liars are strangled, conspirators are forced to fight with hoods over their heads, and traitors are forced to fight against their own loved ones.

Its practitioners describe the system as fair. No one describes it as kind.

Barristers often stand in for their clients, during these fights. Aside from the accused, they are the only ones allowed to do so.

After a great deal of research, discussion, and computer-aided simulations, I have discovered that the best mutation is a lobster-claw arm.

I then turned my attention to writing the best possible mutation table, which I've posted

>HERE<

and now I'm going to talk about the design process because that's what you do with a blog.

So, Mutations. . .

Mutations are very OSR, because they're (1) random, (2) impactful, and (3) modular.

(1) Yes, you could make a mutation table that was small and/or linear. Like a mutation track for turning into a fish man. But they're usually random, with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of entries. Mutations are essentially chaotic, a fact supported by both biology and Warhammer. The less predictable mutations are, the more genuine it feels.

(2) And while mutations are often cosmetic (new skin color), others are very impactful, conferring new abilities or slaying characters directly.

Most games "play to find out"--we roll dice during combat to for the sake of emergence--but games vary in how impactful they are. Some games limit you to the boundaries of the arena, while others are happy to let you kill your characters, turn important NPCs into bee swarms, and/or sink a continent.

Those two traits (random, impactful) are also shared by the the Deck of Many Things. People who hate the Deck of Many Things also tend to hate random mutations, because both can derail an expected adventure so quickly.

(3) And mutation tables tend to be modular. They aren't bolted onto any other subsystems, and don't usually depend on a particular setting.

People have written some good ones: slack ratchet, Scrap Princess, Sker ples

How Big Should a Mutation Table Be?

A small mutation table (< 100 entries) will tend to have more good entries, and less chaff.

A large mutation table (> 100 entries) will tend to feel more random, and have enough variety to please Nurgle.

That's basically my justification for writing a d100 table. I'd love to write a d1000 table, just for the bragging rights, but around 150 entries I started found myself writing down some mediocre entries. There's a sweet spot, I think.

How Lethal (and Beneficial) Should a Mutation Table Be?

That's a great question. I originally had it right in the middle: 30% good, 40% neutral/cosmetic, and 30% bad.

I went on to split the bad into 20% bad, 10% lethal, because I really like the idea of someone losing their ability to breath air in the middle of combat, or burning a hole through the floor as they die painfully.

Mutations should be rewarding enough for players to be tempted, and dangerous enough for them to be reluctant.

So if the worst possible result is basically just death, how good should be best result be? Originally I had a couple entries that were basically just superpowers. Those have been toned down or removed.

On Centerra, everything is alive, to a greater or lesser extent.

Every mote of dust has something of a soul. It would be a stretch to call it sentient, and yet even even that speck has something of experience, of a felt history. (These micro-minds are what goblin filthomancers rely on.)

Humans have an easy time personifying fire, wind, and water. Even a simpleton can often divine the intentions of these things. The wind can be playful. The sea can be angry.

The lives of stones are rarely given a thought, and yet they exist, just outside of the light of our cultural campfire.

Two things prevent humans from appreciating the stories of stones.

First, the life of a stone is very slow. So slow that it is almost impossible for us to appreciate it. A grain of sand will be born, incorporated into a sedimentary rock, and eroded an average of six times before it is truly dead. This takes hundreds of millions of years.

Larger stones have even slower lives, and slower minds. The Fighting Mountains have been locked in a deadly melee for almost a million years. For them, this is a frantic struggle. To us, it is scenery. (This hasn't stopped the local monks from studying the mountains' actions, however, and learning kung fu from them.)

Far beneath Clavenhorn, at a place called the Second Omphalos, the Church operates a system of tubular "bells" that penetrate deep into the planet's crust, along with a separate system of parabolic caverns that grow a certain type of crystals, their growth visibly affected by telluric currents and the subsonic groans of the tectonics plates. They are talking to the planet, at a rate of a single word every century. Her name is Phosma.

Second, the life of a stone is inverted.

They are born huge, powerful, and wise. Cut from the magma and shaped by the subtle designs of the planet herself, the mountains rule over their brethren. (Every snow-capped peak is a crown, and that is why Centerrans never tread on the mountaintops.)

As they age, they dwindle, crumbling into feebler boulders and grains, each only a fragment of that molten wisdom which once fattened and instructed them. Of all the secrets of the deep earth, the youngest stones know the most.

Compared to us, their senses are dulled. They operate on a slower timescale, and their only sense that truly overlaps with our own is touch. (Sound is approximated through long periods of resonance.) Truly, you could dance atop a boulder for a month before it noticed you.

by Yefig Kligerman, for God of War

Earth Elementals

I bet you're only interested in how to fight one. You brute.

I've already written about how you would fight wind. You must trap it, smother it, chain it. Immobilization and death are synonyms.

And fire elementals are destroyed as directly as you might think--you must deprive them of their fuel, or of their oxygen. Little else can damage the inferno. And yet this is complicated by the tremendous energy of a fire--it's capacity to throw embers, suck wind, break windows, and escape into the forest where it can become unstoppable.

Earth elementals are an aberration among their brothers. Usually born from some great insult or fear, many are created specifically to fight mankind, which is now slowly becoming recognized as an existential threat.

Compared to other earthen creatures, they are blindingly fast, and absolutely suicidal in much damage they do to their own bodies in the process. They are similar to a human who could run 100 miles an hour, even as their tendons snap and their skin peels off from the cruel velocities, which their substance was never meant to take.

Earth elementals are most often made form quartz. It has the extreme durability that their berserk metabolisms require. Other elementals are made from similarly durable rocks: moissanite, chrysoberyl. They throw themselves into their tasks with suicidal intensity, grinding themselves into dust in the space of only a few hundred years--a heartbeat among the mineral spirits.

Compared to humans, an earth elemental moves at a crawl. A man with two broken legs could pull himself faster than an earth elemental's sprint.

A small earth elemental (the kind that you will encounter in a dungeon) is going to be 3 m tall and weigh 10 tons. They will have the "lower body" of a tank, or perhaps something like a many-legged tortoise. It's "upper body" will be something of the body plan of a crab, with broad arms ending in crushing claws.

The arms move a good bit faster than the legs, but still extremely slow by our standards. An earth elemental trying to crush a human is comparable to a human trying to catch a flying mosquito with their bare hands.

You are safe from them as long as you stay out of melee range. You will not be able to chisel them to death unless you get inside melee range. A fight with an earth elemental will likely be a running battle, crossing many rooms of the dungeon as you find ways to wear down the implacable stone.

Earth elementals are intelligent and capable of speech, but you must talk to them very slowly. About one word ever 10 minutes.

Lvl 8 AC - Grab x2
Mov snail Str 24 Int 10 Mor 10

Any attack against an earth elemental is going to hit it.

Explosives deal full damage. Pickaxes deal 1d6 damage. Bludgeoning weapons deal half damage. Pretty much everything else (including lightning and acid) deals 0 damage.

Each turn, it tries to grab two adjacent enemies and crush them to death. The earth elemental attacks with a -10 penalty to its attack. On a hit, a target is grabbed. If the target is still grabbed at the beginning of the earth elemental's next turn, the earth elemental automatically deals 4d6 damage to them. It can then drop them as a free action or throw them for another 4d6 damage.

They can move through one dungeon room every 10 minutes.

some Notre Dame gargoyles by Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc

Gargoyles

Like humans, stones are also susceptible to demonic possession.

Gargoyles do not appear to be made from stone. They are cold-eyed beasts that spend a millennia carving a body for themselves, and another millennia digging themselves free from whatever vein spawned them. No two appear exactly the same, and yet they tend to favor the same features, sculpted accord to terrify the primeval mammal at the heart of man.

Powerful shoulders, low-slung jaws, talons as thick as a shovel, and spiked tails are common. Many of them wear wings to honor their Satan, although none of them can fly.

After the Church successfully invaded Hell in 788 TFM and overthrew Satan, many demons were forced to take the Oaths, becoming devils. Gargoyles were included in that number, and to this day a great many of them have been installed on cathedrals, in order to serve as guardians in the cathedral should ever be attacked. (They are usually awoken by ringing a certain bell, within the church.)

Many gargoyles chose their bodies before they had a chose their purpose. Many are insecure about their lumpy, plodding bodies that would built to terrify uncivilized, brute humanity. Many are ashamed to sit beside the carved angels of a cathedral's walls, and can only be glimpsed lurking in the recesses.

HD 4 AC plate Atk 1d12
Move human Climb ape Int 8 Mor 12

Autopetrification -- In place of a move action, a gargoyle can turn from flesh to stone, or vice versa. Their senses are dulled while in stone form. If killed, a gargoyle instantly turns into stone, trapping any piercing weapon that was used to deliver the killing blow.

When most people think about cosmic monsters, they probably go to Cthulhu and other Lovecraftian horrors. Big, incomprehensible things that cause insanity when you look at them.

This is a pretty limiting definition, which is too bad. It makes it tougher to use those themes at low levels.

not cosmic in any way, I just like this pic

Anyway, here's my attempt at some otherworldly monsters, who clearly aren't from around here. My design guidelines:

1. Weird Biology

Not just "it has tentacles and a bunch of gibbering mouths". Those things are weird because they differ sharply from normal terrestrial biology. They are highly unnatural (perhaps even impossible) without being hard to conceptualize. Impossible biology is the goal.

2. Weird Mechanics

Let the mechanics fit the theme. I don't want them to attack and defend the same way that regular monsters do. Their mechanics should reflect how unnatural they are. Ideally, the players would have a moment where they say "oh fuck, I just realized how this thing fights".

3. Threatening

I'll admit that this one is debatable. I mean, you could write a good story about a warlock summoning some fucked-up abomination that merely drags itself around for a few pages before dying messily, poisoned by our atmosphere or something. But I want monster.

A really good follow-up post to this one would be Non-threatening Cosmic Monsters. Or at least, monsters that don't kill you. Can you write a monster that would horrify the players without threatening them? (Of course you can. That's why this is such a good prompt.)

Dendricules

On the wall of the dungeon, what appears to be a tiny tree grows sideways. It has no leaves, and its limbs are translucent as the thinnest skin. If it were standing on the ground, it would be about 3' tall.

All at once, the tree flies apart, and the separate branches come twisting through the air like stiffened bubbles. They hunt like a flock of fallen leaves, close to the floor. Some are wobbling forks, while others are linear, and coil through the air like arthritic worms.

HD 1 (HP 1) AC leather Bite 1d6
Move as butterfly Int 6 Mor -

Breed - On a hit, a dendricule creates a new dendricule with HP equal to the damage dealt. This ability works on any creature with a fleshy body.

If no other prey is available, dendricules will eat each other, eventually producing a mass of 1 HP dendricules. Then they will reform the "tree", and wait. They can wait a very long time.

Noctule

It looks like a flat piece of ash, the size of your hand. Or perhaps a shred of black paper, something a magician could easily fold up and conceal between his fingers.

It flies through the trees like a hawk, and all at once it pivots along some invisible seam and heads towards the knights.

It corkscrews as it flies, spinning like a pennant in the wind.

HD 1 AC chain Attach -
Move as hummingbird Int 6 Mor -

Eyeball Attacker -- Regular armor is useless against a noctule. Instead, it attempts to burrow through the eye sockets. Fitted goggles give +2 Defense. Eyes clenched shut = +4 Defense. Eyes clenched shut with both hands covering sockets = +6 Defense.

Papery -- Any fire damage instantly kills it. If it would take any piercing/slashing damage, it instead splits into two smaller noctules, each one with half of the HP (round down). If this would result in a noctule with 0 HP, it instead dies.

Burrow -- After attaching to its target's face, it burrows in through the eye socket and consumes the brain through the optic nerve. This occurs automatically on the next turn, and in invariably fatal. The person's life can be saved if a torch is applied directly to the noctule (and the eye) during that turn.

Once a noctule has killed a target, they remain in the back of the eye socket for several hours, digesting the cognitive properties of their prey. During this time, they are iridescent, and fragmented memories can be seen on their skin. A careful hand can carefully remove a dormant noctule from the back of an eye socket and store them in a jar.

They reproduce asexually, by making nests in porous materials, often in a corner. These nests resemble inky stains.

When killed, all that is left of a noctule is a small amount of foul liquid.

The floor was spotless a minute ago, but now a yellow spatter blooms in the stone. They look like yellow carnations, trampled in the mud.

They do not move--each stain is stationary--but the whole pattern moves, like paint spots dripping from an invisible brush, slowly spreading away from the closed door they seem to have crept under.

They pause for a second, after entering the room, thickening as they darken. And then then the stains head straight for the two thieves. They appear like footprints.

From all around them, they can hear the stone groaning in its sickness.

More yellow spots gather, like clouds on the horizon. They creep up the walls and dapple themselves across the lintel. The stains are reaching, like the arm of a leper.

Finally, one of the thieves can bear it no longer. He throws his pack on the ground and sprints across the stain. He will kick open the door and sprint out, where the sunlight will warm his pale face.

His first three steps cross the yellow stain without incident, but on the fourth, his foot passes through the floor as if it wasn't there. There is the sound of snapping bone and then the thief is prone. His leg missing beneath the knee.

There is a moment of cross-section, where the entire meat of the calf is visible, before it is obscured by the profusion of blood.

A second snap, and then his arm is vanished. Another snap, and another.

Soon there is nothing left of the man except crimson pools. There is a small sound, like many cats drinking milk at once, and then the blood is gone as well.

The stain has fattened itself, and now the spots are thicker, darker, and more complex. There is no longer any clear stone between the individual stains, which cover the floor like the roiling of slow smoke.

The second thief watches the murky roses of the stain creep closer. There is some larger pattern to it. Here he can see where a certain thickening hints at a low-slung jaw. On the far wall, there are implications of an enormous eye.

The thief backs into the final corner, an island of grey that is slowly sinking into a yellow sea. Unless he thinks of something quickly, he will die.

Xantherium (Stain Form)

A xantherium is more like an infection that materials can catch. Just like rhinovirus colonizes the wet epithelial lining of our throat, so does a xantherium move along the interface of two different materials of vastly different densities (most commonly air and stone). This is an oversimplification, but it's a start.

It's large. Maybe 500 square feet (~50 square meters), if it was all gathered in one place. But it isn't all gathered in one place. it's scattered around a denser core, like a flock of birds.

You can deal trivial damage to it by damaging the material that it moves through (e.g. chipping away at the stone floor) but it is likely to encircle you before you can deal more than a point of damage to it.

It moves at the pace of a tortoise. It is attracted to the smell of meat, and a trail of blood can be used to lure it.

Attacks -- It gets 3 bites per turn, no two of which can be made within 5' of each other. Each attack bites off about a foot of material and swallows it, dealing 3d6 damage. Imagine a crocodile sticking its snout out of the floor and taking a very fast, very sharp bite.

Weakness -- It has a weakness. You can pick your own, but I like sound. Vibrations in the stone. These drive it back, but they do not damage it. Any sound lound enough to drive the Xantherium back is also loud enough to incur a roll on the wandering monster table.

Sound doesn't cause it pain. It's closer to disgust, or religious revulsion. (Simpler creatures are motivated by things such as pain and pleasure, but the Xantherium is a philosopher, and its prime motivators are philsophical in essence. However, the mind of a Xantherium is so alien to us that this information is almost meaningless to a prospective interviewer.)

If it is ever cornered by the disgusting chimes, it will manifest itself (nearly) fully in our own dimension. See below.

Xantherium (Beast Form)

Eight arms sprouting from a shared nexus, shaggy and bilious yellow. Each terminates in a trio of spade-like claws, which it normally uses to pull itself sideways through space. (It is a mole, deep down. If you have a mole in your party it may be able to communicate. No other creature has a chance.)

Four arms point up, and four staggered arms point down, but they are all the same arm. (This is literal--any injury to one arm is mirrored on the others.) It is about 10' tall.

You will only see this form if it is desperate. Expect it to fight as a desperate animal would.

HD 6 AC none Claw 2d6
Move dog Int 6

The Staff of Quiet Bells

A metal quarterstaff, hollow and with an octagonal footprint. When held against the floor and rung, it creates a muffled chiming that drives the Xantherium away without provoking any wandering monster checks.

If held in the middle and rung overhead, it makes such an ungodly clangor that you can basically pick how many wandering monster checks you want to invoke. It can be heard up to 3 miles overland, on a dry day.

Discussion

Honestly, you could leave out the Beast Form and it would probably work better as a Lovecraftian horror. (If you can kill it with a sword, it's not very Lovecraftian.)

I only included the beast form because that was how I originally conceived of it, and now it persists as a vestige. I also like being able to make everything in the dungeon theoretically killable, because I'm a completionist at heart.

Is the weakness to sound a good idea? Maybe. It's better than fighting the stain with a sponge and soapy water.

You could do light. Daylight is a little too scarce for a dungeon, though, and the party's only option would be to flee. Torchlight has the opposite problem, and is a little too easy to provide. (Sound at least, incurs the cost of a random encounter roll.)

If you were going for something truly Lovecraftian, the worst you could do is something like an emotion. I mean, it might be fun to have the PCs make out and confess their feelings to each other in order to drive back the stain, but a cornerstone of Lovecraftian horror is that there is absolutely nothing of any value in a human's mind, body, or soul.

Water might be a good one. (Holy water, perhaps.) But then you run the risk of the party buying gallons of water in order to trivialize the Xantherium. (This may be acceptable or possibly desirable, depending on the dungeon.)

This absolutely isn't something that you can just drop into a game. It requires careful consideration of two factors.

1. What can drive the Xantherium back?

2. How will the players learn of this weakness?

Something like a reptilian crab. Instead of claws, a pair of eyeless jaws lunge and snap at the end of its "arms".

Atop its back is a metallic membrane that curls and flexes, like a crown, or perhaps the sail of a dimetrodon. The flesh of the shoulders blends evenly into the semi-translucent metal of the sail.

Light is reflected off the reflective sail and into a non-Euclidean direction, where its true face is. This is how it sees.

When it wants to get a better look at its surroundings, it stretches and turns its sail, like a man holding a mirror around a corner. As it moves, you can glimpse reflections of its real face.

It uses mirrors to copulate with itself*, and then lays its eggs in the same mirrors. An egg embedded in a mirror appears as an optical distortion that sometimes pulses and crawls, like a lazy maggot. Note that the egg doesn't bend the mirror or have any mass--it exists only as a bizarre lensing effect.

If the mirror is cracked, it will bleed. If it is broken, it will disgorge the mangled larva and alert the parent.

This is the first cosmic monster that I've written about that is capable of easily communicating; you may want to brush up on your outsider psychology.

from MightyToy.com

They are often called here in order that they might be coerced into guardianship, hence the name.

Apotropaiadon

HD 5 AC chain Bite 1d12
Move human Int 6

Rewind -- Can undo the last 6 seconds (a combat round), at will. Creatures who are engaged with the apotropaiadon will eventually notice this time-jump, while other creatures won't.

Option: Subtle Rewind -- The apotropaiadon begins combat (or negotiation) already knowing a good chunk about the party's abilities (or disposition), since it has already used this ability a few hundred times before the party noticed, learning by saying provacative things and making bold attacks.

Discussion

Yes, the apotropaiadon can easily stalemate forever.

Yes, the apotropaiadon can easily just reset the combat round until the PCs all have missed their attacks and the apotropaiadon has succeeded on it's attack rolls.

However, you can't just say "the apotropaiadon is going to keep rerolling the combat round until it gets the results that it wants, so let's assume that all of your attacks are critical misses and all of the apotropaiadon's are critical hits", since there is a chance that the apotropaiadon might die from a critical hit on one of the rounds. If it gets stabbed in the heart, it dies instantaneously, and never has a chance to use its ability.

My party eventually killed it by trapping it in a room with a crush-trap ceiling for six seconds, and then activating the trap. Since the apotropaiadon couldn't rewind to a time before it was trapped in the room, it couldn't escape through it's rewind ability.

After rewinding time several thousand times and attempting everything it could think of (attacking different parts of the door, trying to jam the mechanism in different ways, pressing every brick in case it was a secret "off" switch) the apotropaiadon gave up, and died cursing the party on the other side of the door.

At this point, the party was not far from giving up themselves, having pulled the same lever a few thousand times. (At least in the fiction. The players around the table were like "fuck this guy, my character is going to pull the lever a million times, and talk shit every time".)

The Joga

The joga are a race of constructs, although they would never describe themselves as such. They look like stylized humanoids made from brass and wood. They take pains never too look too similar too humans, as they would never like to be confused with a human, and they would never like a human to treat them as more than a tool.

They live inside churches, and rarely leave their designated chambers. They are memory-keepers, able to record their memories perfectly, copy them quickly, and trade them among themselves. These memories are stored as copper rods, which are kept into their chest. (Their heads are usually full of their bulky optical and vocal apparatuses.)

The downside to their impeccable memory is the size of it. Each joga's capacity for memory is much smaller than a human's, and surplus memories must be stored outside of their body. Each joga must decide what knowledge/memories/goals are important enough to keep loaded (in their body) and which must be kept on the bookshelf.

Because daily activities are seldom of any great importance, it is common for a joga to fail to recognize you from day to day. They are like a microscope--seeing a tiny part of their own history, but with an immense level of detail.

Joga: "Good morning, brother. Have you come to worship the prophetess (may she live again)?"

Korgoth: "I was here on April 9th, asking about a demonic weasel. You said you would research it for me."

Joga: "Seek patience." [finds and inserts the relevant memories] "Ah yes, the musteloth. It was described by St. Gwinnious of Fynn. . ."

Each Joga usually keeps an index of their important memories, usually a tome of some sort.

They "replay" their memories by speaking. Each of them is an impressive caricaturist and vocal impersonator. It is believed that they can never lie.

They illustrate their memories by painting. Each of them is a technically masterful painter, and each of their fingers is capable of wielding a paintbrush independently.

Each generation of Joga is built by the previous one. The secrets of this manufacture are not shared with humans--it is the only secret that the Joga keep.

This is their rationale for such secrecy:

The joga are perfect, and exist only to serve the Church. Humans are not perfect. If humans were allowed to create a joga, they might create an imperfect joga, and thus corruption may spread down our line.

It is a mistake to think that they are creatures composed entirely of logic, without any emotion. They are stoic, yes, but they also mourn, laugh, and grow wrathful.

Above all, however, they insist that they are not alive. In their own words, they are just "mechanisms undergoing a very complicated unwinding". They will destroy themselves if ordered to by a high-ranking member of the Church. (They will cry during this, although they will deny that they feel any sadness.)

Usually, however, the Church will order the joga to simply melt down their brass rods, effectively rebooting the joga.

Because their memories are so easy to isolate and erase, the Chuch usually employs them to identify and catalog heresies.

Because heresies constitute a moral hazard (they imperil your soul's ability in the afterlife), it is not uncommon to spread knowledge of a heresy across multiple joga.

Alternatively, heresies are sometimes summarized through several joga (or more reasonably, the same joga in different states), by wrapping the heresy in layers of summary and encoding (such as translating parts to a different language that the joga currently has no understanding of).

For example, each paragraph of a heresy can be encoded in a different language. By cycling languages, a joga can access each paragraph quickly and individually, without being exposed to the corrupting effect of the whole.

Joga were purchased from the Tamberlanders, who are their ancestors.

The Tamberlanders

Most people know them as the balloonists: mad, goggle-eyed men who fly across Centerra in harnesses suspending from balloons.

The balloons are (mostly) alchemical, and can fold up and fit into their own backpack, which is attached to the harness that each tamberlander wears. The balloons quickly break when not in the possession of the tamberlander. They are tricky devices to maintain, and the tamberlanders maintain their secrets well.

This allows them to drop in and out very quickly.

Their faces are fake, and their fingers are cold. They will remove both when they believe themselves to be alone. They communicate to each other by sticking their rod-like "tongue" into the ground--which is inconvenient for a race that spends so much time airborne. (Or at least, the tambermen you meet in Centerra will most likely be travelling balloonists).

Sleeping is performed in a similar way. Face in the dirt, anchored by their tongue, feet in the air, body stiff as a rod.

Like the joga, they are primarily made from wood and copper, along with clever prosthetics they use to hide their nature. They are also a race of constructs, but believe themselves to be people just like any other. Most are mildly contemptuous of the Church. Most of the ones you'll meet in Centerra are a bit mad, and tend to have strange obsessions.

They're renowned as scouts and traders. Most will hire themselves out for a high price, or trade in small, transportable valuables: saffron, sapphires.

In their homeland, power is correlated with having the most descendants, who are (mostly) loyal to their creators. But since it takes a tamberlander over a year of labor to build a child, and the parts required are costly, it is not easy to quickly raise an army.

Parts can be quickly obtained by killing another tamberlanders and scavenging their parts, but this is as risky as murder is in our society. Although this does seem to be the prior norm. Only the current power structure in Tambool seems to restrain them, allowing (because of) aggression against Yog.

Their homeland is far to the north, across the deserts of the Madlands, past the Infinite City of Yog. They live on the Isle of Tambool, which is not an island but a mountain.

Tambool is described as an island because it rises above a sea of poisonous fog. The tamberlanders produce the fog themselves through their alchemy, as a defense against invasion. Being constructs, the poison doesn't harm them directly.

The tamberlanders have declared war on the Infinite City of Yog, which has not yet noticed. (The messenger is, presumably, still threading his way to the throne room of that great city). But they will, eventually, and when that happens, it is best to hide behind a giant poisonous cloud.

Until then, their bombing campaign continues, which is similarly unnoticed in Yog.

A city has a great deal of needs, besides food and farmland, and for this reason the tamberlanders are constantly venturing out on their balloons and ekubas (undead horses, usually purchased from Kel Dravonis).

It is not known how the Church came to purchase the children of the tamberlanders, what they paid for it, or how their progeny was ultimately transformed into the (very different) joga.

Dinosaurs Fuck Off

You're Doing Surprise Rounds Wrong

d20 Magic Artifacts

d20 More Magic Artifacts

The Doom that Came to Dannerhall

The Jenkin

Some Traps

A Comprehensive Guide to Secret Doors

Drume and the Egg

Triple X Depletion: A Unified Depletion System

The Plant Kingdoms

Government in Centerra

Social Challenges

More Government in Centerra

d100 Mutations

Earth Elementals and Gargoyles

HD 1 Cosmic Monsters

Cosmic Monster: the Xantherium

Cosmic Monster: the Apotropaiadon

The Joga and the Tamberlanders