Megadungeon the Holidelve

So I have enough layers with my last post and this to allow for all the adventuring needs for a while.

The plan is to have enough here for at least a few long sessions. It should be, I hope we can have multiple sessions between Thanksgiving weekend, Christmas Week, and New Years. 

Just to make the players less squishy, we are starting at 3rd level in 5th edition. Hopefully they don't die right away. I will post some information on what goes on the layers, but after they have been played through.

What Walks into Town - Book Scorpions

So there is this thing called an RPG blog carnival. So here is my entry for this month's What walks into Town.

 Book Scorpions
While usual book scorpions will eat mites that eat bookbindings, when they begin to defend ancient tomb's of magic from dust mites, they can often begin to absorb strange powers. Brought into town by an uncles old book, a recovered library, or a strange gift in the mail. A book scorpion can emerge to terrorize a town. While not all wicked, they are usually perceived as such.

Each book scorpion is unique in how it absorbs magic and gains powers and unusually long life (for a scorpion.)

Sample book scorpions: (1d6 to select one at random)
1. Libram Terram: This book scorpion on emerging will generate offspring who bury into the ground and cause plants to die and people to take ill  if eating plants grown nearby. The disease will cause extreme lethargy (sleepiness) and slow creeping words moving on their skin.  For magic users taken ill they have random events (5e Wild magic table) or possible corruption (harder roll in the DCC system) accompany any spell they cast. Once the person stops eating things from nearby the symptoms pass in 2d4 days.

2. Libram Occultus: This book scorpion has lived hundreds of years and absorbed the wisdom of the ages. It is driven to find more books and absorb more information and will use any abilities to get more. It can charm a person with moderate difficulty to resist, in order to get more books. It is found stealing spell books if at all possible. Over the course of weeks and months it can acquire a horde of books in a random basement defending by charming would be assailants to it's horde. When it feels it has exhausted the supply of information in the town it will charm someone to take it on a trip infest another town. It knows 2d4 cantrips and/or 1st level spells that it can cast each once a day.

3. Libram Corpus: This book scorpion extends it's body by animating books and scrolls. Often flying books and scrolls around to maximize access to the tastiest book mites. Generally this freaks librarians out and they will panic by trying to move things back. This book scorpion can use mage hand / telekensis without any visible signs except for a random odor (roll on the table below)

	Random Odors
1	Fudge
2	Sour pickled vegetables
3	Petrichor (the smell before rain)
4	Sewer
5	Baked bread
6	Wet Dog

4. Libram Resono: This book scorpion generates crazy sounds often leading people to become insane or crazy. It desired noise, and in the lack of noise it creates it's own. So typically during a busy loud day it will remain silent, but at night or in a quiet library it makes sounds. It acts like a minor illusion that can be cast 2d6 times a day and the sound is random and changes every 1d4 days or is always the same type.

	Random Sounds
1	Ringing Chimes
2	Voices in a strange language
3	Grinding stones
4	Mellodic strains
5	Thousands of crickets
6	Sounds related to a character's youth

5. Libram Amorum: This book scorpion is perhaps misnamed, it doesn't just thrive off love, it thrives off of drama. It mimics other people's voices to instigate all possible drama. It also loves to find it's way to personal diaries and histories. Roll on the table below for it's preferred form of drama.

	Drama
1	Love
2	Betreyal
3	Jelousy
4	Vegence

6. Libram Indium: This book scorpion loves art and finds books with art and pictures best. It also encourages new art in a violent, possessive way. It will possess anyone who displays artistic talent of the painting, drawing or calligraphic variety. It will possess them for 48 hours at a time, preventing the person from sleeping and cause them to create amazing art everywhere. Creating art in  books, walls, carpets, walls or anything avaliable. Then the possessed will be exhausted for days and not recall anything that happened. Roll for a random theme of the art.

	Art
1	Female bodies
2	Male bodies
3	Bizzare plants
4	Abstract patterns
5	Harsh angular geometries
6	Spell like diagrams
7	Mutated forms of plants, animals and humans.
8	Bright, eye popping splotches
9	Poetry of (roll on Drama table above)
10	Long passsages of nonsense in many languages

If you use any idea let me know how it went.

Xicovan - the Dwarves Mining expedition village

As part of my Adventure the Colorless pool, I have the village Xicovan.

Paladins and Strange Botany, Inktober

Another few pen things.

I opened a deck of Paladin Spell cards for 5th edition (published by Gale Force Nine) and the title of the first card was....

Related to yesterdays map with the lantern tree. A secret players can find is this:

When I freehand stuff the lines are all over the place, I need to be more consistent in my letter formation and staying strait across the page.

The Embachnala Compound

What do you get when with a strange elven druid sets up camp in a high desert steppe? A walled brambled compound.

Part of an adventure I have been making called The Colorless Pool

RPG a day 16

Game you wish you owned: at the moment I am good. Between my brothers and my neighbor we have a ton of material between pdf and physical. Most of the things I want I can purchase, but much of my time is hunting down ideas and writing my own stuff, so not a ton is driving my interest at the moment.

Longest game session played: one year a bunch of cousins and I played for something like 5-6 hours in camp chairs in the middle of the desert while camping.

When last I posted I mentioned how my currently developing campaign is being put togeather. Once I had the concept of 9 planets in a binary star system that are habitable. The other thing of interest was basing a campaign off a world with mysteries, with xp awarded for the standard dungeons and dragons things, but also for completing personal goals and discovering mysteries.

While I have not finished how to create random mysteries in addition to world and national mysteries, it remains a compelling ingredient to my campaign. I am compiling interesting tidbits, like this interesting flask I saw at the ren faire.

 

RPG a day 15

Today's questions are very boring. Having never played a convention game nor had campaigns last longer than a month, there is not much to tell.

Favorite convention game: none

Longest campaign played: 1 month

So instead let me talk about how I have started my current world building. Over many years I have had disconnected ideas never used, then when drawing with my kids they took my paper and put a bunch of random dots and told me to do something with them.

So I did. One of the things I added was a location called The Cradle, next to the great barrier nebula.

Then my thought was to make it a place of mystery, and locate some of my various ideas there. While this is where it started, my only focus has been the fantasy setting in The Cradle. A binary star system with 9 habitable planets, makes for a great place for possible spell jamming style adventure and more.

 

RPG a Day 8

Favorite Character: Oh boy. I am quite fond of Dex the Dormant my current Wizard in 5e.  Fond of sleeping in trees, he is an acrobatic wizard wearing pants not a robe and mostly having stole his instruction in magic by hiding in rafters of wizards as a street urchin. In my background, while an orphan I am somehow related to someone with a symbol of an opinicus dormant.

So of interest on the Opinicus:

Image from wikimedia

From Wikipedia: A type of griffin with the four legs of a lion was distinguished by perhaps only one English herald of later heraldry as the Opinicus where it also had a camel-like neck and a short tail that almost resembles a camel's tail.

From Mythology Wikia: An heraldic opinicus is shown as a male creature, whereas the winged griffin is female.

From Advanced Dungeons and Dragons: An opinicus appears to be a mixture of monkey, camel, lion, and eagle, with prehensile forepaws.

From Me: In my game I would run it as a combination of the above. the description of monkey, camel, lion and eagle. But I would make it the male counterpart of the griffin, where mating happens rarely and most of the time they live apart. While the female griffin are proud warriors, the male opinicus is a creature of magic and perceptive thought. Both speak the same language but only the males have a written language, which is written with their prehensile monkey tails. The griffins have instead a sign language and limited memory transfer abilities.

Another Aside:

Previous to that character, as in back in junior high and early high school. I had created a large family tree of Jedi for a Star Trek/Star Wars crossover adventure using West End Games Star Wars D6 ruleset, of whom I made a pair of twins to play as I was the game master (it is hard to play with only one other player, my brother). While the campaign consisted mostly of making up our own story lines and arguing about stats for ships, the characters were interesting. Even if we changed their names several times.


Favorite Appearance of RPG’s in media: Tough one. Perhaps Dungeons and Dragons in E.T. I didn't even remember it as a salient feature, it was just obvious. Until years later when re watching it and I realized it was an unusual reference.