I have been reading Ultraviolet Grasslands recently (expect a post or three about this once I get done reading it.) I have been enjoying its format a lot. It tends to go into the big-ticket locations in the setting in some detail, maps, random encounters and occurrences, places of importance, how to get to and from the location. It’s usually built with enough randomness that your “Last Serai,” for instance, will be very different to the next party’s.
But there are a few locales described towards the end of each of these sections that branch out from the one central location, providing you with adventure spots in the surrounding area. Descriptions of these in UVG really depend on the type of area they are in. If it’s a heavily populated spot, you are likely to get a bunch of NPCs for the players to deal with, but in more remote places, it will probably mention more environmental hazards, enemies and traps. Importantly, it never goes into much detail on anything. The details, as with everything in the book, are left up to those gathered around the table. You just get a mention of a particular type of creature (and maybe a level and tag in parentheses beside it,) a monetary value for the treasure or resources you might find there, or a distance (in number of days’ travel) from the main location.
These really reminded me of something: Heart Landmarks. Not necessarily because of the format of the descriptions or the writing style or anything like that. It was mainly just due to the looseness of it. Heart Landmarks also provide you with a few sparks to light your imagination. They might tell you the type of haunts you have there and vaguely hint at a couple of NPCs, but it’s up to you to bring them to life at the table. I am aware this is not that unusual in modern RPGs but I have been reading and playing a lot of trad games recently, so the similarity really struck me here, in comparison.
Anyway, it got me thinking about something I started quite a while ago, before I even started my first Heart campaign. I have a file on my computer just called Heart Landmark Ideas. It had one entry in it, and even that was incomplete. So I thought I would make this a little series of blog posts.
DIY Heart Landmarks
What is a Landmark? In Heart, the City Beneath, the characters are delvers, idiotic adventurers who are compelled for one reason or another, to plunge into the red, wet heaven that is the Heart, the esoteric core of all weirdness. Nothing remains concrete or stationary in this underground “city” for very long, but, as long as a place has a sufficient number of sentients there to believe in it, to desire its safety, that will anchor it. These become Landmarks. Some of them are havens where delvers can rest and recuperate, some are terrifyingly dangerous lairs of nightmares and dark magic.
What does the Heart book tell us about making our own landmarks? Make sure your landmark includes one or more of the following:
SANCTUARY: Haunts are places within a landmark where PCs can relive themselves of stress or fallout and can often involve a major NPC to interact with.
MATERIALS: Resources can be procured here.
ADVANCEMENT: Not every chapter beat is achievable on a delve. Sometimes, landmarks are the perfect places to hit your beats.
EMPLOYMENT: NPCs, mysteries, required items etc. You get the idea.
DANGER: Not every landmark is restful and commercial. Sometimes you need to endure them to achieve your goals…
WONDER: Reveal something of the Heart of just dazzle the players with your imagination!
Other than that, the format of each Landmark entry is pretty much set:
NAME: ‘Nuff said
DOMAINS: These are broad areas of interest or influence: Cursed, Desolate, Haven, Occult, Religion, Technology, Warren, Wild
TIER: The Heart is split into tiers designated 0,1,2,3 and Fracture. 3 is much stranger than 0. Fracture is a movable feast of rumness.
HAUNTS: Places to rest and heal or people who will facilitate that. What kind of stress/fallout can be cured? Also, this should include the max dice size of healing.
DESCRIPTION OF LANDMARK: Part history, part current state of affairs. Maybe some hooks to bring the PCs there.
SPECIAL RULES: This could involve particular dangers or custom-fallouts.
DEFAULT STRESS: What is the normal amount of stress to inflict for action failures? Indicated by a die size.
RESOURCES: What type and die size of resources are available here.
The Blistered Basilica, a polyp on the inside of the blister. The devoted gather inside to worship (d8 Echo)
Rose’s, a restaurant with a good reputation and a worryingly good chowder (d8 Blood)
The Blister Pack, a general market that specialises in building and delving equipment (d6 Supplies)
Description: An enormous, fleshy blister on the inside of an enormous, fleshy chamber. Blister is pierced near the base by a hole that allows delvers to enter. From this hole there is a ramshackle wooden ramp that leads to a series of old platforms requiring constant repair. It has some residents, known as platformers, who are more or less permanent and mostly have no sense of smell.
At the base of the blister is a fetid lake of stinking pus. A whole ecosystem of pus creatures live in the lake. They generally leave the platformers alone.
The platformers worship the blister as though it were a god and as long as they do, they say the denizens of the pus will leave them be. But outsiders and heretics should not stay long, they say.
Special Rules: If you spend a bit of time in the Blistered Basilica in order to remove Echo fallout, make an Endure/Religion check. Consequences of failure as below: Fallout: Pus Magnet (Minor Mind) You have come to understand the Platformers’ devotion to the Blister and you feel a kinship with the pus-beings. They are there for your protection and you are there for theirs. You feel an urge to descend to the lake, befriend one of them and take them with you on your travels (Ongoing.)
Getting too close to the pus lake will require an Endure/Haven or Religion check. On failure/mixed result: Fallout: Blistering Barnacles (Major Blood) You’ve been infected by the pus. You are covered in hard, black blisters which hurt and stink. They make all social checks one difficulty rating higher (Standard becomes Risky, Risky becomes Dangerous etc.) (Ongoing.)
Resources:
Gathering Blister pus (d4 Religion) can be dangerous. See Special Rules.
Potential Plots:
Deacon Delicia of the Blistered Basilica has startling news for any PCs that visit. The Blister has revealed an existential danger to her. A stalactite-like calcium deposit has formed above Blister and a group of heretical pus-haters are preparing to climb up there and knock the spiky peril from its perch. This would spell the end for Blister, the Pus Lake and the Platformers. She is offering the church’s most prized possession as a reward to anyone who can stop the heretics. It is a wooden spike known only as the Splinter (Kill d8 Piercing, Debilitating)
It’s been quite a while since I’ve done one of these posts. I think my Dragon Age Character Creation post was the last one. And it was very useful to me in figuring out how that game worked before I started a campaign of it (which is ongoing. The PCs have all just become Grey Wardens without dying during the Joining!) Well, I’ve got a short game of Dungeon Crawl Classics coming up this weekend so I thought this would be a good opportunity to create a character using the DCC rules to help familiarise myself with them.
I’ll be running the iconic DCC #67 Sailors on the Starless Sea for a group of four or five players. To be honest, I don’t expect any of the PCs who survive this 0-level funnel (this is a module where the players play three or four 0-level peasants who delve into a dungeon. Whichever of their PCs survive get to advance to 1st level in their chosen class, normally) to go on to choose a class or progress to 1st level as its more of a one-shot deal. But, you never know! If it proves to be popular or any of them get particularly attached to one of their characters, maybe I’ll brew up a campaign for them. I certainly have enough DCC resources and modules to run campaigns for the next ten years straight! Anyway, the point is, I think I’ll still get something out of creating an actual character using these rules. So here we go!
Funnelling
For the purposes of this post, I am going to roll up four 0-level characters and then roll 1d20 for each of them. The character that rolls the highest will progress to 1st level while the rest are assumed to have died a gristly and unfortunate death in some stinking hole beneath a castle or in the gullet of some demon lord. To roll up the 0-level characters, I’m going to use the fabulously useful purple sorcerer, which will do it automatically for me. This is what I expect my players to use when generating their own PCs.
But first, a note on what’s being generated:
Ability Scores – These are Strength, Agility, Stamina, Personality, Intelligence and Luck. All DCC ability scores are generated by rolling 3d6. There are no alternate methods of generating them, no point-buy, no 4d6 and drop the lowest… it’s brutal.
0-level Occupation – there is a d100 table that covers a page and a half of the book to determine this. Your Occupation also determines your starting Trained Weapon and which Trade Goods you begin with. It will also indicate the type of skills you are trained in.
Money and Purchased Equipment – a 0-level character starts with 5d12 copper pieces. On top of the weapon they start with, they can use these to purchase other stuff
1d4 hit points, modified by Stamina
A +0 modifier to attack rolls and saving throws
A Lucky Sign – DCC characters begin with a Lucky Sign, which you roll for on a table. This can give the character a +1 to a particular type of roll forever!
One thing that’s not generated is alignment. For D&D type games, I don’t normally bother with alignment. But I think it is so integral to so many of the mechanics of DCC, that I can’t avoid it. The available alignments are Chaotic, Neutral and Lawful. I am going to roll for this on 1d3. I rolled a 2, so this character, whoever they turn out to be is going to be Neutral in alignment. So, without further ado:
I rolled up one Dwarven blacksmith, a Minstrel, a Herbalist and a Butcher. I’ll quickly go through the high points and low points of each:
Dwarven blacksmith – I’ll name them Grund. Grund has a Personality score of 13! That’s his highest. However, his Strength, which would be one of the main abilities of the Dwarf class, is just an 8. Even more alarming is that they have the approximate intelligence of a fence-post, with a score of just 3. Since their Luck modifier is 0 they don’t get any Lucky Sign bonus
Minstrel – I’ll name them Flor. Flor’s ability scores are generally very high, strength 12, stamina 14, personality 14 and Luck 15. Only Agility lets them down with a score of 7. They start with 5 HP! Also, Flor as the Lucky Sign, Raised by Wolves, which gives them a +1 to Unarmed Attacks.
Herbalist – I’ll name them Bud. Bud’s ability scores are incredibly average. Only Luck gives any kind of bonus (+1) and only Agility gives a minus (-1.) They do have the Four Leafed Clover Lucky Sign, which provides a +1 to Find secret doors. Only starting with 1 hit point, though…
Butcher – I’ll name them Cutter. Cutter is weak, (strength 7) clumsy, (agility 8) and unpleasant to be around, (personality 5) but is pretty smart, (intelligence 15) so they’re probably pretty annoying. Luck provides a 0 modifier so no Lucky Sign bonus here.
OK, I’m not going to lie, I’m holding out for Flor to survive the funnel but it’s entirely random so there’s really no telling…
“Funnel” Rolls
So, it all comes down to a single d20 roll for each PC. In case of a tie, I’ll just re-roll both.
Grund the Dwarven blacksmith – 17 (oh no)
Flor the Minstrel – 4 (wah!)
Bud the Herbalist – 18 (a reprieve!)
Cutter the butcher – 6
So, Bud, alone, bleeding and traumatised, crawls out of the crumbling remains of the ancient temple having, with the help of the heroic and now deceased Grund, Flor and Cutter, defeated the ancient evil beneath it. Grabs some treasure on the way out too!
Choosing a Class
So, since Bud is a human (all 0-level characters are assumed to be human unless it’s clearly stated in their title, i.e. Dwarven blacksmith) they can choose from any of the classes except Elf, Dwarf and Halfling, for obvious reasons. Yes, this is another one of those old school games in which “Demi-human” races are treated as classes, kind of like in Old School Essentials. You can check out my disastrous OSE character creation post here.
Anyway, that leaves the following classes to choose from:
Cleric
Thief
Warrior
Wizard
Now, Bud’s ability scores are as follows:
Str: 9 (0)
Agi: 8 (-1)
Sta: 12 (0)
Per: 11 (0)
Int: 9 (0)
Luck: 13 (+1)
Normally you would go with the class that matches your highest ability score, right? Well, I could do that, but Bud’s highest is 13 for Luck, which is useful for all classes. Next is Stamina, on 12, but, once again, no one class relies on that. You could argue for Warrior there, but with a Strength score of 9, I don’t think it makes sense. So, instead, I think I will go for Cleric, since they use Personality to cast their spells and that’s Bud’s next highest Ability score, at 11. They don’t get a bonus from it, but it’s as good a reason as any to choose a class, I think. Oh, also, the Herbalist already started with a Holy Symbol, so it seems fitting.
From the DCC book:
An adventuring cleric is a militant servant of a god, often part of a larger order the faithful, they wield the weapons of their faith: physical, spiritual, and magical. Physically, they are a skilled fighter when using their god’s chosen weapons. Spiritually, they are a vessel for the expression of their god’s ideals, able to channel holy powers that harm their god’s enemies. Magically, they are able to call upon their god to perform amazing feats.
Hit Points
Each class rolls a different die for hit points, just like in D&D and OSE. If you’re a Cleric, you roll 1d8 per level.
Bud rolls a 6 on their 1d8 and adds it to their 1 hit point from level 0 to make 9.
HP: 9
Choosing a God
If you choose to be a Cleric, you have to choose to worship a God of similar alignment to you. In Bud’s case, that Neutral. I am going to consult the Gods of Eternal Struggle table and choose one of the Neutral deities from that. I have recreated the Neutral gods section of the table below:
Alignment
Gods
Weapons
Unholy Creatures
Neutral
Amun Tor, god of mysteries and riddles. Ildavir, goddess of nature. Pelagia, goddess of the sea. Cthulhu, priest of the Old Ones
Dagger, mace, sling, staff, sword (any)
Mundane animals, un-dead, demons, devils, monsters (e.g., basilisk or medusa), lycanthropes, perversions of nature (e.g., otyughs and slimes)
With their background in herbalism, I feel as though Bud would lean towards the worship of Ildavir, goddess of nature. As you can see from the table above, they get a semi-decent selection of weapons they can use. It is also interesting to note at this point that Clerics can wear any armour and it won’t affect their spell-checks. Finally, you can see they are able to turn an array of interesting creatures, not just undead.
Magic
In DCC, when you want to cast a spell, you have to roll a spell-check. This is an obvious departure from D&D. Another difference is that they don’t get spell slots. However, there is a downside here. If you fail in your spell-check roll, you risk the ire of your deity. In the normal state of affairs, if you are trying to cast a spell and you roll a nat 1 on your spell-check, the spell auto-fails and you get to roll on the Disapproval Table. This can lead to consequences ranging from this:
The cleric must atone for their sins. They must do nothing but utter chants and intonations for the next 10 minutes, starting as soon as they are able (i.e., if they are in combat, they can wait until the danger is over).
To this
The cleric’s ability to lay on hands is restricted. The ability works only once per day per creature healed – no single character can be healed more than once per day. After 24 hours, the ability’s use reverts to normal.
Worse still, your chance of auto-failing goes up by one, meaning auto-failure and a Disapproval Table roll on a 1 or a 2. It gets worse; for every spell-check failure in the same day after this, that auto-failure range increases by another 1, with no real upper limit.
You can also piss off your deity by “sinning,” e.g. acting in a way that contradicts the god’s teachings or benefits one of their enemies.
Now, there is a way to offset these consequences: sacrifice. Yep, all you have to do is destroy or give away 50gp worth of wealth in your god’s name to reduce the failure range by 1 point. They might also accept a great quest of undertaking of faith instead.
Spells
Anyway, back to the spells! Bud starts knowing four Level 1 Cleric Spells, according to Table 1-5: Cleric. So, let’s choose them!
Blessing – this can be used to bestow all sorts of boons on the cleric themself, an ally or even an object. Since every spell in the game comes with its own table to determine the exact results, I’m not going to get into it here. Suffice it to state that you can get anything from a +1 to attack rolls for a round, right up to getting a permanent +1 for the whole party to any actions to do with a sacred endeavour they have undertaken.
Holy Sanctuary – this creates a place of safety for the Cleric and their allies. It might simply make it harder for enemies to hit them in that space, or it might allow the Cleric to create a permanent place of sanctuary, such as a temple, where powerful enemies cannot attack the faithful at all.
Second Sight – the Cleric gains divine insights into the results of their own actions. It might be a +4 bonus to a single action roll or it might be able to divine the outcomes of great events for a month and also receive a +1 bonus to all actions taken during that period!
Word of Command – Use a single word to command a creature to do something. The effects range from just that to it targeting all desired creatures they can see, who must obey it for a number of days.
All Cleric spell checks are made like this: 1d20 + Personality modifier + caster level
Turn Unholy
You saw above the range of creatures that Bud can turn with a Turn Unholy roll. This roll works the same as a spell check, so 1d20 + Personality Modifier + caster level. However, when Turning, the cleric can also add their Luck modifier. In Bud’s case, this is good because they have a +1 in that.
Failing a check can incur the Disapproval of their deity just like failing to cast a spell.
On a success, there is a fairly complicated set of potential outcomes depending on your turn check roll and the Hit Dice of the creatures you’re trying to turn.
Lay on Hands
Bud is a healer as well, of course. In fact, the Lay on Hands power is the only real way they have to heal anyone. But! They can use that to heal them of hit point damage, disease, poison, broken limbs etc. They can use it to deal with pretty much any condition.
Of course, just like with Turn Unholy, you have to make a spell check to use this power, 1d20 + Personality modifier + caster level.
The dice you use to heal someone depends on their class/type of hit dice they use. So, for a Warrior, who uses a d12 for their HD, healing is also rolled on a d12, which I think is neat. Although you can never roll more dice to heal than your target has in HD already.
Alignment is a factor in healing. If you try to heal someone of different or even opposing alignment to your character, you are going to probably do less healing than if you were healing someone of a similar alignment. As a Neutral Cleric, Bud is probably in the best position in this respect, as both Chaotic and Lawful creatures are considered adjacent to him on the alignment table, which I have reproduced below:
Spell check
Same
Adjacent
Opposed
1-11
Failure
Failure
Failure
12-13
2 dice
1 die
1 die
14-19
3 dice
2 dice
1 die
20-21
4 dice
3 dice
2 dice
22+
5 dice
4 dice
3 dice
Divine Aid
You can just ask your god for anything really. But it must be a truly extraordinary act to get them to intervene on your behalf so directly, when they are already giving you spells and other powers. So, to achieve this, you make a spell check as normal, and, even if you succeed, you are lumped with a cumulative +10 penalty to future Disapproval range… the Judge (DM) gets to decide the exact DC and effect of the request depending on what the intention was, what the god might want and how big the intervention needs to be. This seems like it could be used in some really clutch moments though.
There are a couple of notes right at the end of the Cleric class description. One relates to Luck and how their Luck modifier can be added to Turn Unholy rolls. The other indicates that their Action Dice can be used to attack or cast spells.
Equipment
The Equipment Chapter starts with a table that indicates how much gold your character stats with if you decide not to opt for the 0-level funnel method of character creation. If a Cleric starts at level 1, they get 4d20 gp. So let’s roll that:
20 (yep, out of a possible 60 gp)
At least I can add the 48cp I rolled up on their level-0 character sheet. Well, let’s make the best of it. I am going to buy a decent weapon, since Bud started with nothing but a club, and hopefully some armour.
I think I am going to go for a modest
mace (1d6 dmg)
and back it up with a
sling (1d4 dmg)
That’s a total of 7gp. I had also better get some
sling stones
for another 1gp.
Finally, the only armour poor Bud can afford is
padded armour (+1 AC) That makes Bud’s AC 10 because of the -1 Agility modifier.
That costs 5gp. So, Bud has 7gp and 48cp left.
So, let’s grab a
Backpack for 2gp
Flint and steel for 15cp
10 torches for 10cp
5 days of rations for 25cp
a waterskin for 5sp
50’ rope for 25cp
A grappling hook for 1gp
For a total cost of 3gp, 5sp and 75cp. Which leaves Bud with 3gp 2sp and 3cp.
So, that’s pretty much it for Bud the Witness (that’s their title as per the Cleric Table) I like Bud. They’re a survivor and a true devotee of Ildavir, goddess of nature, but they will never forget their humble beginnings as a herbalist, nor their old companions, Grund, Flor and Cutter.
Thanks to Soxzilla2 on reddit for the form fillable character sheet! You can find that here.
I have been a fan of the Ain’t Slayed Nobody podcast for as long as it’s been around. They launched back in 2020, right at the outset of the pandemic, which was a creative miracle in and of itself. The podcast, which started out as a Call of Cthulhu actual play, is the brainchild of Cuppycup. He started out running a few of his friends through a Down Darker Trails campaign. That’s the Old West setting for Call of Cthulhu. Apparently, not only was this the first time he had acted as Keeper, it was his first time playing any RPG! Go and listen to those early episodes now and I think you would be hard pushed to detect that level of inexperience. It was a fun listen too! The production quality has been consistently high from the beginning but the players and the laughs really make it.
Since then, ASN has had a rotating cast of players and characters in a range of short campaigns and one-shots. They have branched out with regards to systems too. They had a classic short run of Blade Runner, where cuppycup ran Electric Dreams, the case file from the Blade Runner Starter Set. Listening to this made me want to run it myself. This one had a great cast too: Ross Bryant, Nic Rosenberg and Danny Scott played the blade runners. Since then, both Ross and Nic have become regulars in the cast. I highly recommend this series, especially if you’re interested in running Blade Runner, the RPG.
A photo of the front of my copy of the Blade Runner Start Set box.
Another regular, Scott Dorward, is a renowned podcaster and game designer in his own right. His long-running show, The Good Friends of Jackson Elias is well worth a listen. When he first ran a game for Ain’t Slayed Nobody, it was his own Cthulhu Dark scenario, Fairyland. This was really the first time I had been exposed to Cthulhu Dark as a system. The impossible lightness of the rules and the effortless creepiness that Scott brought to it drew me in. I eventually did get to run Cthulhu Dark myself last halloween, though it was a different scenario.
Darker Still
Recently, Ain’t Slayed have piqued my interest yet again. This time, it’s with another game from Cthulhu Dark creator, Graham Walmsley, Cosmic Dark. Graham is the Director for this campaign too, in fact.
Cosmic Dark is a game of weird space horror that is Graham’s commentary on the times we live in, according to him. The PCs all work for an interstellar corporation called Extracsa. I feel like the name does a lot of the heavy lifting in conveying the type of company we’re talking about here. Each assignment is completed in an episode or two, which is very satisfying, but the characters do continue through the series, except when things go really wrong for them.
What have I liked about it so far?
The heavily anti-capitalist horror aspect is compelling to me at this point of my life and of human history. The themes and events of the game, despite taking place in some unknown future in space and on alien worlds, feel all too real, far too possible.
I love the character creation method. You don’t start this game by writing up a character sheet, you don’t even come up with a name or occupation like you might in Cthulhu Dark. No, you dive straight in:
This is the Extracsa transport ship. You are descending to the surface of C-151. Medical officer, please acknowledge.
The first scenario asks the Director to read this to the players and then tells them to wait for one of them to respond. That player is then the Medical Officer. This continues until all players have chosen an Employee Specialism. You then continue with a quick overview of the very light rules before delving into a series of flashbacks from the PCs’ childhoods using prompts to sketch the sort of characters that you need for this game. It’s an ingenious method and extremely fun to listen to people improvise on the spot. And it doesn’t stop there. Character creation continues throughout the character’s Extracsa career, usually in the shape of flashbacks to their lives before their current job.
The scenarios themselves are weird and scary and psychologically affecting. They deal with things like the reliablity (or otherwise) of your own memory, machines treating humans like infestations, and, honestly, just good old-fashioned space madness in the best traditions of things like Solaris.
So, I joined Graham’s Patreon. Doing that got me access to the early versions of the rules for the game and the scenarios that have been written so far. I’m hoping to get a group together to play it in a couple of weeks.
Listening to this series gets me excited to play Cosmic Dark. As a lover of weird space fiction, it is exactly up my alley. And it is very different to the other games I am running at that moment, so it will make a nice change.
One last thing, Graham will be launching Cosmic Dark on Kickstarter soon! If you want to support the project you should follow it here!
I’m not really a big fan of “tricks.” The word gives me the feeling of something rather mean. And, as a GM, I would rather not be mean to the PCs. Challenging, sure, occasionally lethal when called for, absolutely. But not mean. The closest I have come in recent years was when I had the corpse of a recently deceased player-character possessed by a demon in order to wreak havoc at their own funeral.
The Death
Merideth, played by Isaac was the sort of tiefling barbarian that every D&D party needs: utterly heedless of danger, first into the fray every time, usually naked with naught but a bevy of rotting heads dangling from her belt. She was one of an intrepid crew of adventurers who had recently turned up on the shores of the great orcish nation of Tír na nOrc. They were convinced by a patron to assault the hideout of one of the capital’s under-city gangs. There, Merideth was murdered, predictably enough, as she charged headlong into the guards in the entrance hall. Slightly less predictably, it was a stray crossbow bolt from one of her own companions that really did for her in the end.
Merideth’s companions continued on regardless and explored the rest of the gang headquarters, as well as the maze of traps below it. There they uncovered a secret pact between the gang, An Fiacla Dubh, and the Demon Lord of the Hunt, Baphomet. This would soon bring the eternal Blood War of the Lower Planes to the streets of the city. While they were at it, they released a dybbuk that had been imprisoned in the burnt and blackened body of a prisoner chained in the maze. It escaped, but that would not be the last they would see of it.
The Funeral
The dungeon over and done with, the next session we agreed that it would be a nice gesture if the PCs, along with a collection of major NPCs from the city of Ráth an Croí gathered at a private dock to bear tearful witness to the funeral of Merideth. A Priest of, Kaigun, God of the Sea, was employed to complete the ceremony. The barbarian was laid out on a raft and pushed off after everyone had said their words of tribute and farewell. Then, viking style they shot flaming arrows at her to send her off in fire and glory to the after life.
But, just before any arrows managed to hit, the dybbuk emerged from the waters of the dock, shadowy and incorporeal. It seized the body of the tiefling and propelled her at her former comrades. Isaac, represented in this scene in his new, bardish guise, was forced to fight off his former character as were her former companions. As moments of surprise and shock go, I have rarely been prouder to present this one to the PCs. It was only improved by the nature of the dybbuk. The demon, (the 5e version can be found in Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes) which appears as a translucent, flying jellyfish in its natural form almost always appears, instead, in possession of a corpse. One of its features is that it can plunder the mind of the dead one for details of its life, memories and bonds to mess with their loved-ones. I used this to good effect, particularly on her long-time adventuring pal, Antoinette, and the poor PC who accidentally killed her, the Outlaw, Josie Wales (yes, really.) Another of its features is that it gets to use the abilities of the body it possesses, meaning they had to face the formidable might of the undead/possessed barbarian as well as a plethora of other enemies who showed up for the fun.
Luckily, they other PCs all survived and they got to kill Merideth all over again. Ah, good times!
What about you, dear reader? What was the dirtiest trick you ever perpetrated in the context of an RPG… or otherwise?
Character options in D&D 5e have always felt pretty thin on the ground to me. Official ones at least. Of course there are hundreds of subclasses, species/races, backgrounds etc. out there from third party creators but it has always seemed as though WotC have deliberately limited the number of official options they put out. I sometimes wonder if I only feel that way because 5e is not my first edition of the game. Because, in comparison 2e, the various classes and species are woefully underserved in my opinion.
In the late 80s and early 90s TSR released a set of books designed to complement the basic character options presented in the 1989 Player’s Handbook for 2nd Edition Ad&d. there was one for each of the classes. These generally focused on fleshing out the possibilities for the classes with “kits” background options, class-based campaigns, new abilities and features, class-based organisations like thieve’s guilds. There were also several supplements that dealt with AD&D races. The elves got one, the gnomes and the halflings got lumped together in their own book and they even had one called The Complete Book of Humanoids, which featured a plethora of “monstrous” races as PC options.
Back in those days, my table got a lot of use out of most of these books. The character kits from the class books became standard choices in many cases and the extra racial options were very popular for rounding out PCs. But my favourite, by a pretty long way, was the Complete Book of Dwarves. I had been a fully paid up member of team-dwarf since I read the Hobbit as a kid. I loved their aesthetic, their toughness, their curmudgeonliness, and, of course, their beards. I had a few dwarven characters over the years across multiple games and systems but I don’t think I ever got to have one in AD&D as I was almost always the DM. So, instead, I used the Complete Book of Dwarves to make up Dwarven societies, kingdoms, mythologies, NPCs and Strongholds. The book contains chapters on the mythical origins of the dwarves, dwarven subraces, “Your Life as a Dwarf,” Character Creation, Proficiencies, Dwarf Kits, Role Playing and Personalities, Mining, Equipment and Designing Dwarf Campaigns. I remember getting fully immersed in dwarven world-building in a way that my players probably did not entirely appreciate. But, if I’m honest, that was for me anyway, not for them.
Stronghold Creation
So the Complete Book of Dwarves has a whole chapter devoted to generating your own Dwarven Strongholds and I have a distinct memory of being wrapped up, sick, in a duvet on the couch rolling up stronghold after stronghold. I must have recorded them somewhere but those records have been lost to the mists of time along with Cold War and white dog poop.
Now, I haven’t had a copy of the book in years. I’m not really sure what happened to the one I had, but there is a good chance it was borrowed by one of my good friends a mere thirty years ago and they haven’t gotten around to returning it yet. Understandable. Anyway, it was my birthday on Tuesday and my friends Tom and Isaac gifted me a copy of it! I had recently been going on about my particular love for this book and they’d actually listened to me!! True, true friends.
So I thought we could create a stronghold together now that I’ve got it. Strap in! According to the opening section of the chapter:
Strongholds are the homes and workplaces of the dwarves. They can range from simple family residences to huge subterranean cities. The stronghold design sequence allows you to design a stronghold, either by making a series of choices, or by random die rolling. You may also combine the two methods.
Dear reader, if you have been here for any of my character creation posts, I think you will know which way we are going. Random all the way!
Here’s the Dwarf Stronghold Design Sheet:
You can see that we are going to start with the name. Now this actually requires us to turn back to Chapter 4 first and locate the Dwarf Name Generator.
We then roll 1d4 to determine the number of syllables in the stronghold’s name – that’s a 2.
That means we roll 1d20 twice on the Dwarf Name Generator Prefixes table – that’s a 7, Dal- and a 16, Nor-
We go ahead and combine those in the most pleasing sounding configuration, I think that would have to be “Nordal” for me
Then we flip back to Chapter Ten and roll 1d20 once more on the Stronghold Suffix Table – 15, -lode
Put em all together! Nordallode! It definitely has the sound of a place name made up for D&D but we are going with it
Next! Subraces Present. Ugh. Yep. This is the bit where it becomes a little problematic. Obviously, the whole subrace business in D&D is slightly odd. If you applied it to humans you would be talking about different ethnicities, but D&D doesn’t do that with humans, does it (I mean thank fuck, right?) (I’m deliberately skirting around the variant human unearthed arcana options because I think it’s best to do that.) Anyway, the Subraces Present section wants us to make sure we know which is the main subrace (i.e. the most numerous,) the dominant subrace, and which other subraces exist there. This section also includes a table that tells you how many of the dominant subrace are in your stronghold, while pointing out that this only refers to the number of male dwarves. The number of females is, for some reason, half this number and the number of wee dwarflings is half that again. Look, I don’t know. How they came to such decisions is beyond me and clearly did not even strike my tweenaged mind as something noteworthy at the time.
OK, so, I’m going to roll on the Subrace Table to figure out which is the Main Subrace in Nordallode. The same table determines their numbers. Once again, the table has different potential populations of subrace for each (Deep Dwarves can have 3d100+50, whereas Gully Dwarves can only have 1d100+50.) As for numbers of males to females, I see no reason to abide by the nutty, unexplained logic in this section. I’m not even going to split them up.
Ok, Subrace Table, roll 1 – 32 – Gully Dwarves.
Number – 1d100+50 = 108
Now to find out which is the dominant subrace and how many other dwarves subraces live in the stronghold. Let’s roll on the Dominant Subraces Table.
61, Hill Dwarves
This means there are 1d4 Other Subraces in the stronghold according to this table. I rolled a 2.
I’m beginning to get confused and frustrated by this whole subrace business. The first table got me to roll to determine which was the main subrace and how many of them were in the stronghold. Now, I’m told to roll on a different table to find out which is the dominant subrace (is this not the main subrace?) and then roll to find out how many other sub races are in the stronghold? But, so far, I have rolled two different types of dwarf for main and dominant…
If I continue on to the next page, it tells me to reduce the number of the dominant subrace by a percentage depending on how many other subraces are present. But, I have not actually rolled the number of the dominant subrace yet.
Forget it. I am scrapping the Hill Dwarves. Long stand Nordallode, home of the Gully Dwarves!
I will keep everything else the same. Now, with 2 other sub races sharing their home with them, the Gully Dwarves must reduce their numbers by 25%. That brings them down to a mere 81.
I’m now going to find out how many and what type of other subraces are present.
I roll 1d100 on the Gully Dwarves Subraces Table and get 74 – Mountain Dwarves. I roll 2d10 to determine their numbers and get 14.
I roll again for the second minor subrace and get 52 – Hill Dwarves. There are 3d12 of these beardoes – 20
New population of Nordallode – 115
From the book:
Hill and mountain dwarves may be found at any depth and living with any other subrace. They are clannish and keep to themselves. They are likely to be the employers of other sub races. While these others will likely be in the stronghold on a fixed term contract, it is not unusual for a stronghold to have enclaves of other dwarves who have been there for generations.
Time to figure out the stronghold’s overall alignment. This does not determine the alignment of every member, just the general outlook.
2d6 – Obviously this table has each of the sub races along the top as some of them are more likely to be evil than others (aaaagh.) Nordallode turns out to be Chaotic Neutral.
Let’s move swiftly on from all that nonsense.
Let’s figure out the Type of Stronghold we are building:
Another d100 roll and I get a 14, which means it is a Secondary Stronghold and gets to increase its population by 100%
New population of Nordallode – 230
Secondary Strongholds are second only to Major Strongholds and can be independent or allied with a Major one. I think we will call Nordallode an independent stronghold!
How old is our stronghold? Good question!
For Secondary Strongholds we roll 2d6 to find out how many generations of age Nordallode is – That’s 8. Pretty old… except, there is a Racial Modifier. Gully Dwarves subtract 2 from that number. So its 6 generations (no fucking idea.)
And how old can the dwarves of Nordallode live to be? No roll here:
Gully Dwarves – 250 years (this is the lowest possible life expectancy and its determined entirely by subrace…)
What type of government does our stronghold have?
It’s back to the d100 rolls – 89 – Oligarchy! Why, of course! How fitting! (Wah!) Oh wait, there are more modifiers here. Gully Dwarves add 10 (for whatever reason) and we have to add another 10 for being of Chaotic alignment! That makes it 109. It’s Anarchy baby!
Time to roll on the Attitude Table to find out what our problem is.
It’s a d20 roll this time. That’s a 112 – Isolationist. Lock those gates!
This means that 75 – 100% of the population is in the frikking militia.
What are our major resources in Nordallode? Well, the book shies away from telling you exactly what you’re rich in, instead, just giving you an idea of its monetary value.
It’s 1d20 on the Stronghold Resources Table and I got a natural 20! WOOHOO! Things are looking up for my poor little Gullies. That means it’s Rich!
There is an optional part of this table – the starting gold modifier, that applies to PCs who come from this stronghold. So, if your character did come from Nordallode, they would start with an extra 1d10x10gp. Pretty sweet. But wait! Another racial modifier means that you take away 10 from the original d20 roll because Nordallode is a Gully Dwarf stronghold… Born to lose. So, this actually means that my downtrodden dwarves start at Average Resources and so get no starting gold modifier at all. FFS. There is a +1 to the roll for being a Secondary Stronghold, but that doesn’t improve it from Average anyway.
OK, time to find out what Nordallode’s Relationship with Other PC Races is. We need to roll 1d20 four times on the table of that name. I am going to factor in the modifiers at the start this time. I get a +1 for being Chaotic Neutral and, for being Isolationist, I must treat any roll of 4 or less as a 9:
Elves – 12 – Threatening
Gnomes – 13 – Cautious
Halflings – Nat 20, becomes 21 – AT WAR!
Humans – 12 – Cautious
Nordallode, not friendly to outsiders.
Properly, this should only be rolled for the races that live nearby but since this is entirely experimental, I rolled for all of them
OK, we have figured out who we hate above ground, time to go to war or peace with someone underground too. Love the War/Peace Table:
Its another d20 roll – That’s a 1 which actually means Nordallode is at peace!
The next table allows us to see how long that unlikely situation has persisted
Peace Table – 1d10 – 7 – 2d6 generations! – That’s 4 generations of peace! Just not with those fucking Halflings obvs.
There is a War table as well but I think we have just determined that we don’t need to roll on that.
Nordallode has to defend itself from the depredations of those vicious, hairy-toed bastards. How do we do that? With our Military Forces!
Gully Dwarves have an Unsteady Morale (7)
Apparently the first reaction of Gully Dwarves to danger or conflict is to run away, whether they are members of the militia or not…
Their weapons are… “any they can scavenge,” which is not great for a militia but may make sense in a stronghold where anarchy reigns
With 230 dwarves in the stronghold, I’ll assume that 200 are in the armed forces. That means that, of their Leaders, there are 50 Thieves (level 2-6), 40 Warriors (level 2-4), 20 Warriors (level 2-6), 4 Warriors (level 8), 2 Warriors (level 10) and 2 Priests (level 1-10)
Special Forces – It says 10 to 20% of the militia have some of the specialised Class Kits from the book. I’m not going to get into that right now though as it would require the sort of dive into more general AD%D rules that I’m not prepared for. But, numbers wise, that’s at least 20.
War Machine Table! – We get 4 rolls on this because of the size of the militia and we get a +1 to our rolls because of our cool Isolationist attitude. It’s a d10 table – that makes 11 for the first roll giving Nordallode 3 War Machines, 8 for the second roll for another 1 War Machine and finally a 6 for 1 more. That’s 5 War Machines, total. Noice.
You can have Animals to defend your stronghold. The specific animal depends on your subrace, unsurprisingly. Let’s a have a cadre of Giant Beetles for the Gully Dwarves of Nordallode. That’ll scare the bejeezus out of those pipe-smoking tyrants!
let’s figure out our Total Strength
That’s Number of Leaders in the Military (118) + Special Forces (20) + Number of Dwarves in the stronghold (230) = 458. I am not sure what this number means. It seems incredibly abstract.
Conclusion
Every time I revisit one of these old AD&D 2E books, the realities of the western world, the industry, our polluted minds and questionable thought-processes of the writers of game materials largely marketed to children, smack me around the face again. When I first read this, I didn’t see anything wrong with it. In fact, I specifically remember deriding the mere idea of playing a Gully Dwarf when I was 12 years old. But I am giving that me a pass. He was a child. So, it’s harder to hand out the get-out-of-jail-free card to the creators of the books. They, perhaps unthinkingly, used their creations to perpetuate racist ideas. And I know they are fantasy races but there’s no excuse. Those subraces, as I wrote above, are the same as human ethnicities. According to the writers of this material, only some of them are fit to be the employers of the others, some of them consort with beetles and are cowardly and some are inherently evil… Need I say more?
I had a lot less fun with this process than I remembered having when I was a kid but there are still elements that spark the imagination. I like to imagine the Gully Dwarf heroes! Those few high level Thieves, Warriors and Priests, perhaps riding out on their War Beetles. It makes me wonder about the generations that came before, the founders of Nordallode, and what their lofty goals were. Would they be disappointed in their descendents or proud?
What’s your opinion on these old, race obsessed books, dear reader? Do you just shake it off or do you embrace the stereotyping and run with it?
I recently finished reading through the new campaign book for Heart, the City Beneath. Dagger in the Heart from Rowan Rook and Decard was written by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan and illustrated by Sar Cousins and came after a very successful crowdfunding effort last year. I backed it because I back everything from RRD but also because I was curious about how they were going to go about constructing a campaign for a game like Heart. In my experience, A campaign for Heart is something best dealt with one session at a time. Looseness and improvisational ability are qualities you will benefit from when GMing this game. The character beats that drive the events and the plot and the characters forward might have one PC searching for someone to kick off a tall building while another might be looking to get into a situation that’ll garner them some major Echo Fallout. So, maintaining any sort of direction can be a challenge. This is one of the game’s great strengths, of course. It makes it feel quite organic at the table and allows your players to feel as though they are the focus of the evolving story.
So, how to you translate that style of play into a coherent campaign? Well, you get Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan to write it for you, obviously. What he has done with Dagger in the Heart is provide the GM with a trio of inspired villains that I can imagine the PCs will love to hate and built the campaign around their plots and goals. In the introduction, he also gives you a guide on how to use these villains, depending on the length of campaign you want to run and some other factors. You don’t need to use them all, and, indeed, you are encouraged not to. Importantly, the campaign will work no matter which ones you use. They mostly act as foils to the PCs plans and actions and you are given suggestions, throughout the book, on how to use them in each area and during each major event. In Dagger in the Heart, the villains have their own beats they’re working towards, which helps in keeping track of what they are doing most of the time.
After the intro, you get seven chapters, each of which focuses on the areas of the Heart (or, indeed, the City Above) that are important at different points in the campaign. A chapter features an overview section which briefly explains what is contained in it and what the PCs are expected to be doing while they interact with the places, people and events contained in it. After that, you have a Staging section, which gives you options on how to get the PCs to move the overall plot forward while they do the usual Heart stuff of delving and hitting their Beats. This might include descriptions of major NPCs or stat blocks for enemies. After this, you get your Landmark and Delve descriptions. There are so many Landmarks in this book. I am pretty sure there are more Landmarks in this than in the Heart core book. But the delvers are not required to visit all of them. Instead there are just a lot of options. Indeed, because of the very loose nature of the campaign, the Landmarks can occur in any order, within any given Tier of the Heart, at least. In fact, they can mostly move quite freely between Tiers as well. So, despite the plot focusing so heavily on the occult and defunct underground train system known as the Vermissian, Dagger in the Heart is anything but Railroady. What it does, is provide you and your players with a plethora of options for how the story of the campaign could play out at your table and, indeed, how it might end, taking into account what your delvers might do.
After reading it, I was energised and inspired. I wanted to get some players around the table and send them back into the Heart as soon as possible. It will have to wait a little while, though, while other games come to an end. In the meantime, I get to read it again and prepare something really special.
Heart GM Screen
I also got the new Heart GM Screen from the Backerkit. It’s exactly what you would expect from RRD. Very high quality and totally over the top. There are no useful tables or common rules on the screen itself. Instead it comes with a booklet that you can rip the particular pages out of or, I suppose, photocopy and attach to the screen as you like. That way you can switch out the items you most need, when you most need them. It’s a nice idea and I think it will be useful.
Heather joined our campaign a bit late. She decided to sign up about the time the rest of the party popped through their very first portal to Sigil. This worked out well because her character, Panasonic (no relation to the Japanese electronics manufacturer of the same name,) was already there. This Half-orc Bard hadn’t always been there but she had made a home in the city and even gained something of a reputation as a controversial singer/songwriter. She had written and performed a tune that was perceived as being particularly critical of the self-appointed police, the Harmonium, a Faction that was philosophically devoted to the notion of laws and the act of upholding them. Unsurprisingly, this made them less than popular with many of the city’s population. So, when Panasonic first performed her song “The Safety Dance,” (for copyright reasons, a song that is legally distinct from the 80s hit by Canadian icons, Men Without Hats) a riot erupted, followed by anti-Harmonium acts being perpetrated all over the city. So, on the night when the rest of the party emerged from the end of a pipe (other side of a portal) in the the swimming pool of the Gymnasium, Panasonic found herself taking a shortcut through that very place, with a squad of angry Hardheads (a nickname for the Harmonium) hot on her heels.
Luckily, the party came to her aid, and she, in turn, acted as a sort of guide/ally to them in the alien and bewildering city.
The thing about Panasonic was, she had a fascination for Sigil and the planes in general. She was fascinated by the doors, the portals, how they worked. She always felt there was something musical about them. Also, she had been trying to find a way home for a long time. She had been shanghaied in Sigil by her sister, Sony (once again, no relation.) Sony was jealous of Panasonic’s growing popularity and so got a wizard to send her off plane so she could take her place at the front of their band. When she ran into the party, who just-so-happened to come from the same prime material world, she latched onto them as her ride home.
So, the culmination of Panasonic’s story, unlike the rest of the party, came when she emerged through the portal to Erlendhaim with the others. It was a big moment for her! She even found her sister there and somehow made amends just before they were violently assaulted by a bunch of devils.
It was then that she gained her new bard features, having fulfilled all her major character beats.
As with all of these character options, I didn’t spend too much time considering the balance implications of these. But if you like them, and you feel like you could use them in some form or other, please feel free.
New Bard Feature – Music of the Planes
Magical Notes
From 3rd level; the Bard uses an action to strike a cord on their musical instrument and summons a tiny portal which projects, from the instrument, an ethereal glowing rune in the shape of a musical note. As the the Bard continues to play, notes emerge in a stream from a plane of pure, living music. This stream of notes can have one of several effects that the Bard must choose before using this feature.
Face-melter – Attack roll using the Bard’s spell attack bonus – Range: 60ft, Damage: 1d8 + Charisma modifier thunder damage. At 6th level this increases to 2d8, at 9th level to 3d8, at 12th level to 4d8 and at 15th level to 5d8.
Break/Dance – Affect a single creature in range (60ft) causing them to dance energetically unless they make a Charisma saving throw (using the Bard’s spell save DC.) On a failure, the creature’s AC is broken, reduced by 2 as they leave themselves open to attack. At 6th level the Bard can affect two creatures or reduce the AC of one creature by 3. At 9th level the Bard can affect three creatures or reduce the AC of one creature by 4. At 12th level the Bard can affect four creatures or reduce the AC of one creature by 5. At 15th level the Bard can affect five creatures or reduce the AC of one creature by 6.
Mosh Pit – From 12th level the Bard can affect a group of 1d8 + Charisma modifier creatures to attack the closest creature to them if they fail a Charisma saving throw (using the Bard’s spell save DC.) This effect lasts until the end of the Bard’s next turn.
Transported by the Melody
From 9th level, once between long rests, the Bard can use an action to play their instrument in harmony with the planes allowing them to cast the Contact Other Plane spell. From 13th level, once between long rests, the Bard can use an action to play their instrument in harmony with the planes allowing them to cast the teleport spell. From 15th level, once between long rests, the Bard can use an action to play their instrument in harmony with the planes allowing them to cast the Demiplane spell.
Monsters of Rock
From 7th level the Bard plays a melody that opens a portal to one of the outer or inner planes to summon an elemental, fae, celestial or fiendish creature of up to CR 2. 10th level, CR 3. 13th level CR 4. 16th level CR 5.
List of Elemental Creatures
Steam Mephit (CR 0.25)
Dust Mephit (CR 0.5)
Ice Mephit (CR 0.5)
Magma Mephit (CR 0.5)
Magmin (CR 0.5)
Azer (CR 2)
Air Elemental (CR 5)
Earth Elemental (CR 5)
Fire Elemental (CR 5)
Salamander (CR 5)
Water Elemental (CR 5)
Corn (CR 5)
List of Celestial Creatures
Couatl (CR 4)
Pegasus (CR 2)
Unicorn (CR 5)
Hollyphant (CR 5)
List of Fae Creatures
Sprite (CR 0.25)
Dryad (CR 1)
Sea hag (CR 2)
Green Hag (CR 3)
List of Fiendish Creatures
Lemure (CR 0)
Dretch (CR 0.25)
Imp (CR 1)
Quasit (CR 1)
Bearded Devil (CR 3)
Hell Hound (CR 3)
Nightmare (CR 3)
Barbed Devil (CR 5)
Night Hag (CR 5)
Conclusion
This is the last of my D&D character options from Erlendheim series, dear reader. I really enjoyed coming up with these options in collaboration with my players and it was a lot of fun introducing them to the campaign with big personal story moments for the characters. I highly recommend that as a way to make your players feel very special.
This is the latest in a series of posts on the new character options I introduced for the PCs in my D&D campaign known as Erlendheim. It was based on a home-brew world of my own but intersected with the 2nd Edition AD&D version of the Planescape setting. This was very special for me as I had always loved that setting and the Planescape products from that time. It was very exciting for me to explore it with my players and I wanted to make it special for them too. So, I created, with their help, new features and class options for each of them. They have little or nothing to do with balance in the game, and most of them are overpowered but that didn’t bother me. It just meant I could ramp up the challenge of the situations they ended up in. You can take a look at the previous entries in this series here.
How to Resurrect a God
So, at a point during their adventures through Sigil, the PCs in my D&D campaign of a few years ago discovered that the god to whom most of them owed their devotion, Helm, was, in fact, dead. Or, at the very least, gone. In the Parted Veil bookshop, the proprietor and confirmed atheist, Kesto Brighteyes, confirmed this for them. This shook our Bariaur cleric’s beliefs to their core. As a senior priest of Helm, Menuk had been praying to his god all his life, and receiving spells and other abilities in return. So, if his god was dead? Who had been answering his prayers? The answer was Aegir, the elemental spirit and Fathomless former patron of our Warlock. They had been intercepting the prayers of the people of Erlendheim and gathering power from them for centuries, posing as Helm and controlling the populace. This revelation rocked Menuk to his core and he immediately lost access to all his priestly spells and features. But at that moment, he also started to hear a noise, as of a plate gauntlet scraping against stone. Only he could perceive it. And it got him thinking there must be a connection to Helm.
This set the PCs off on an investigation, following the trail that began with the sound in Menuk’s head. They had already heard of a portal to the Astral Plane, where they might find the body of Helm floating forever through that wispy sea. It was in the Shattered Temple, headquarters of the Faction known as the Athar, a fiercely anti-deity group. So, they infiltrated the building and jumped through that portal onto the petrified body of a god. Here, the noise in Menuk’s head became clearer, beginning to sound like the words, “Pray, pray, pray, pray, pray to me.” They fought an Astral Dreadnought, which had taken up residence in the region, while Menuk used the power of prayer to awaken Helm.
I inserted a “god-resurrection” mini-game here. This gave the otherwise de-powered Menuk a goal and a focus for the fight while the others struggled with the Dreadnought.
When his prayers finally woke the god, Helm’s great, mailed fist rose and crushed the Astral Dreadnought. He then transported the PCs back to his home plane, Mechanus, where he appeared to them, once more restored to his throne. And this was when he declared Menuk to be his new Right Hand, and imbued him with a new set of Clerical abilities along with all those he lost earlier.
This was one of the most epic and grand encounters and scenarios I have ever run and it was a joy to bring this chapter full circle.
New Cleric Features – Helm’s Right Hand
Below are the details of the new Cleric features that he got. As always, these were written specifically for this particular Life Domain Cleric of Helm so their usefulness might be limited. But, if any of them catch your eye, please feel free to customise and use as you want.
Channel Divinity: The Watcher Over the Fallen
From 2nd level the Life Domain Cleric can use this feature once between long rests. When any creature that is within the Cleric’s line of sight falls to 0 hit points, as a reaction, using Channel Divinity, they can choose to restore them to one hit point instead. This feature cannot be used to heal undead or constructs.
Tough Love
From 6th level, when the Life Domain Cleric summons a weapon using the Spiritual Weapon spell, it can be used to cast any of their healing spells.
Channel Divinity: Helm’s Shield
From 8th level, the Life Domain Cleric gains the ability to summon Helm’s protective power in the form of a shimmering bubble of light. Helm’s Shield surrounds them or any creature the Cleric chooses and can see within thirty feet. The Shield has an AC of 10 and hit points equal to 10 + the Cleric’s level.
Helm’s Mailed Fist
From 14th level the Cleric gains the ability to transform into the physical embodiment of Helm in the world. They take on the form of a glowing, platinum warrior, adorned in full plate and standing 14 feet tall. The Cleric can take this form for a number of rounds equal to their wisdom modifier (minimum of 1.) The form grants the following: AC bonus: +3 Temporary Hit Points: 15 + Wis modifier Spell Slots: 1 extra spell slot of any level available to the Cleric Channel Divinity: 1 extra Channel Divinity Attacks: Add +5 to hit and +5 to weapon damage (damage counts as magical damage)
One of the central mysteries of my Erlendheim campaign was the PCs’ hometown. Dor’s Hill stood out like a boil on the perfect skin of an elf. The town stood atop a tall hill in the exact middle of the island of Erlendheim, surrounded by plains and forests. There was something else about it that was odd. A legend, or false history existed, indicating that, many generations ago, a number of very different people appeared in the vicinity of the hill, supposedly sent by the islanders’ primary deity, Helm, to act as guardians of the island. The native people were humans with a Nordic type of culture. The new people that appeared also included humans, though very different to the Erlendheimers, but there were also the goat-like Bariaur, a contingent of Githzerai and several Tieflings too. The legend told that they built the town of Dor’s Hill on top of the hill and swore to live in peace with the people of the island while acting to protect it at the behest of Helm.
As usual with such stories, there were elements of truth mixed into this largely fabricated tale. It was mostly made up or confused or deliberately mis-told over the centuries. In fact, the hill never existed prior to the coming of the new people. Because they arrived in it. It was a building, formerly of the city of Sigil, at the centre of the Outer Planes. It was the old headquarters of the Faction known as the Believers of the Source, or the Godsmen. It had been plane-shifted to the island by one of the Factions’ great rivals, along with everyone in it. When the Godsmen found themselves on Erlendheim, they also found there was no way back. So, rather than despair, they set themselves up on the island, allying themselves with the locals and assimilating.
The Foundry Tower, as it was known while situated in Sigil, had been rather brimming over with portals to other places and planes of existence. It had been renowned for being the most portal-dense building in a city filled with such portals. In Sigil, any door, window, pipe-opening, sewer grate or picture frame could also be home to a portal. You just had to know the key to activate it. So, although the PCs discovered the tower under the hill and uncovered the fact that it was home to dozens of portals that still worked, they had no way to activate them without some guide to the keys required. And they had to find them because the Druid’s kids had been kidnapped and transported through one of the doors. After losing access to the only extant copy of the book describing the keys on the island, they had no choice but to travel to Sigil in the hopes of finding another copy. So that’s what they did, through an underwater backdoor portal that happened to exist off the coast, conveniently.
Now, the fun thing about the doors in the City of Doors, was that the keys needed to open them could be almost anything, from a verse of poetry to the lost sword of a dead king. As a result, I thought I would let my imagination run wild with the keys needed for the doors in the tower. It turned out I didn’t need most of theses. I think they only ended up entering two or three of them in total, but it was still a fun exercise and I think it could stand to me in the future if I ever have another Planescape adjacent campaign.
So, as a break from the Erlendheim Character Options series, I thought I would present here “The Book of Doors and Keys.” If you can get any use out of this in your own Planescape campaign, that’s great! You may even be able to use them for some other purposes, I guess.
Bear in mind that the “Door” entries are specific to a map I was using for the tower. I’m not going to present it here as I think its usefulness to others is negligible, so you can just ignore those.
Also, please note that any destination with “Scatterhome” in it is from my own home-brew world, so you can safely substitute it for some other place.
The Book of Doors and Keys
Door: Doorway in Level 1, Room 3 Destination: Nidavellir, Ysgard Key: The thought of your most beloved person
Door: Eastern Doorway in Level 1, Room 6 Destination: Abellio, Arcadia Key: Eat a plate of ribs at the doorway
Door: Doorway in Level 1, Room 11 Destination: Pandemonium Key: Be drunk
Door: Doorway in Level 1, Room 13 Destination: The Shadowfell Key: Whisper a secret to someone else which will make them think less of you
Door: Doorway in Level 1, Room 16 Destination: Para-elemental Plane of Smoke Key: Smoke a strong joint
Door: Doorway in Level 1, Room 18 Destination: Chaste, Vitrean Empire, Scatterhome Key: A symbol of Kaigun, God of the Sea, from a dead priest
Door: Well near Level 1, Room 20 Destination: Mechanus Key: A gear from a magical construct from Sigil
Door: Doorway in Level 1, Room 22 Destination: Goldenfields, The Sword Coast, Faerûn Key: A red ribbon tied into a knot
Door: Well near Level 1, Room 24 Destination: The Caverns of Thought, The Outlands Key: The memory of a parent that is the most enraging
Door: Doorway in Level 1, Room 26 Destination, The Elemental Plane of Fire Key: Dragon-breath
Door: Doorway in Level 1, Room 31 Destination: The Nords, The Outlands Key: Crush a bunch of peck-berries (only obtainable from the Fae-wild) under foot before the door
Door: Doorway in Level 1, Room 33 Destination: Aquallor, Arborea Key: Whistle the tune to the Hymn of the Mother
Door: Doorway in Level 2, Room 1 Destination: Elemental Plane of Air Key: Eat a turtle cake and burp in the doorway
Door: North Archway leading to the statue of a Githzerai in Level 2, Area 2 Destination: The Astral Plane Key: Break a bottle of healing potion in the doorway
Door: South Archway leading to the sculpture of a great palace in Level 2, Area 2 Destination: The Factol’s Palace, The Ethereal Plane Key: Tell someone a secret that will cause emotional harm to them
Door: Doorway in Level 2, Room 4 Destination: Tír na nÓg, The Outlands Key: Tell a joke
Door: Doorway in Level 2, Room 5 Destination: Khalas, Gehenna Key: Stab yourself in the leg and spread the blood across the door before the doorway
Door: Northern Archway in Level 2, Room 6 Destination: Strixhaven University Key: Frustration
Door: Doorway in Level 2, Room 8 Destination: Neverwinter, The Sword Coast, Faerûn Key: Dance the Neverwinter Axe-dance
Door: Doorway in Level 2, Room 9 Destination: The Infinite Beerhall, Demiplane of Celebration Key: Put a sausage somewhere it does not belong in front of the doorway
Door: Doorway in Level 2, Room 11 Destination: Elemental Plane of Water Key: Speak the name of the person you would most like to have sex with
Door: Doorway in Level 2, Room 13 Destination: Malbolge, The Nine Hells Key: Burn a book and throw it through the doorway
Door: Doorway in Level 2, Room 14 Destination: Minethys, Carceri Key: Inscribe an arch around the doorway with the tip of a steel sword
Door: Doorway in Level 2, Room 15 Destination: The deepest dungeon of the Imperial Palace in Vitrea, Scatterhome Key: Cut off a left hand and place it in the doorway
Door: Doorway in Level 3, Room 1 Destination: Krigala, The Beastlands Key: Throw a beast’s tooth through the doorway
Door: Double doorway, Level 3, Room 3 Destination: The Arena, The City-state of Tyr, The Tablelands, Athas Key: The tortoise blade of a Mul Gladiator left in the doorway
Door: Doorway in Level 3, Room 4 Destination: the Feywild Key: Play the pan-pipes in front of the door
Door: Doorway in Level 3, Room 8 Destination: The Positive Energy Plane Key: Roll two sixes on a pair of dice
Door: North Doorway of Level 3, Room 10 Destination: Krangath, Gehenna Key: Wear a crown
Door: West Doorway in Level 3, Room 13 Destination: The Opera House, Rath an Croí, Scatterhome Key: Place a diamond in the doorway
Door: Doorway in Level 3, Room 12 Negative Quasielemantal Plane of Ash Key: A handful of Yugoloth ash poured on your head
Door: Doorway in Level 3, Room 15 Destination: Amoria, Elysium Key: Pay a compliment to the person you find it most difficult to compliment
Door: East Doorway in Level 3, Room 16 Destination: Niflheim, Hades Key: Cry genuine tears of sorrow
Door: Doorway in Level 3, Room 17a Destination: Mercurua, Mount Celestia Key: Tell a sad story in celestial
Door: Doorway in Level 3, Room 17b Destination: The Mortuary, the Hive, Sigil Key: Crush a cranium rat’s brain in your hand
Door: Doorway in Level 3, Room 17c Destination: Limbo Key: The memory of your most embarrassing moment
Door: Doorway in Level 3, Room 20 Destination: Avalas, Acheron Key: Burn your skin and allow the heat from the burn to kill an insect
I began a series of posts last week detailing the character options I introduced to my Planescape flavoured D&D campaign a few years ago. It was quite epic in scale and involved gods and legendary monstrosities and elemental powers as well as travelling across multiple planes of existence and saving the universe from the domination of a narcissistic sea spirit. I hadn’t planned it in advance but, at one point, the Warlock needed to switch her patron so I came up with a new one which you can read about here. After that, I was hooked. I started making new character options, features and powers for every PC in the party. You know when you max out your rep with your party members in CRPGs like Dragon Age and Mass Effect and they get access to new abilities? That’s the way I was thinking of it. As a result, these new character options were designed with our specific players, characters, shared world and story in mind. I left balance at the door. Balance was not relevant to what I wanted to achieve. In fact, I wanted the PCs to feel special, powerful and impacted in a very concrete way by the events of the campaign. I think I largely achieved that. Take a look, here, at the powers I gave the party’s Druid when he became a kind of a shitty god. I think it exemplifies my philosophy when designing these abilities.
Celebrating the Mundane
I think the next big character advancement arc to culminate was that of Xarune, our Githzerai Fighter. Xarune, despite his background as an adventurer in his younger days, had a solid view of the world. He believed in the shield in his hand, the guardsman at his side and the firmness of the ground beneath his feet. He had developed a dependable reputation in a position of some responsibility as a sergeant in the Yeomanry of the town of Dor’s Hill. Magic was anathema to him and, indeed, he went to extremes to explain away magical phenomena in entirely mundane terms. But then the ground beneath his feet turned out to be the ancient tower of an unknown faction from a city in the shape of a donut floating above the top of an infinitely tall spire at the centre of the Outer Planes. It became increasingly difficult for him to hand-wave the obvious magic in the world around him, especially once he ended up in Sigil. In fact, I instituted a special mechanic, specific to Xarune. Each time he witnessed something truly magical that he could not explain, he would roll a Wisdom Saving Throw. When he failed, he lost a point of Wisdom, making it more-and-more likely that he would fail with each successive failed save. My goal here was to get Xarune under 10 Wisdom. Once that happened, his aura of confusion and his inability to square his beliefs with the facts of reality brought him to the attention of a small, new Faction in Sigil. They were called the Mundane. When Xarune ran into their leader, another Githzerai warrior named Sarafem, who noticed his unique state of disorientation through her natural psychic abilities. We had another short mini-game at this point, after Sarafem introduced the Faction and its tenets. She presented to him her shield, with, emblazoned upon it, the emblem of a shield. She asked him to take and examine it.
Here is how I presented Xarune’s inner struggle in my notes:
Sarafem will encourage Xarune to use detect thoughts while examining the shield. In essence, this will allow Xarune to detect his own thoughts, to interrogate his own beliefs. If he does so, he will replay some of the more recent encounters he has had with “magic.” Ask him to recount them and indicate that he is unable, in retrospect, to lie to himself and his own feelings. The truth is that the spells and magical effects did happen. In some cases he was able to shrug off the effects and in others he bore the full brunt of them. What becomes clear as he remembers these incidents is that, it is not objectively true that he or anything has to be subject to such effects. He begins to get so in touch with his feelings that he feels a new understanding blossom. He is able to apply the force of his will against this magic, a will that is every bit as strong as any wizard or demon thinks they are. For that is all it is in the end, a battle of wills. He will want to fail his saving throw against detect thoughts. Give him three chances to fail it at various points through the process. Of course, it is a Wisdom saving throw but this time the DC will be 2 points higher than Xarune’s normal DC as it gains a bonus from the shield. Whether he succeeds or fails, Sarafem will present to him the shield with a bow. It is a mundane +2 shield. There is nothing magical about it, but it is exceptionally well made from the hardest, lightest wood they have ever seen. (It is made of what she calls Steadfast.) If he fails, with a barely perceptible twinkle in her eye she will ask him to join her budding faction, which she calls, “The Mundane.” She says they are still workshopping it. There are not many of them so far, but each of them has a very firm grasp of their true feelings and they know what is real. If he decides to take her up on her offer, they are usually to be found meeting in her house near the Statue of Bigby in the Lady’s Ward any evening. Also, he will regain his lost points of Wisdom and he will gain the new abilities presented [in the section below] If he succeeds, however, he will go on as before, he will not regain any points of Wisdom and he will continue to risk losing them. If he ever reaches 0 Wisdom, he will lose his mind completely and reject reality entirely, thus becoming an NPC. However, he can continue to attempt the trick with the shield, trying to detect his own thoughts. He can do this whenever he has downtime using the same rules as are presented above.
Thankfully, he failed all his saves and his outlook and philosophy changed as a result. Not completely, it was still quite compatible with his no-magic stance from before, it just morphed into a more anti-magic one, bringing a few new abilities with it. And you can read about those below.
But that wasn’t all. Xarune’s player, Isaac, took the idea of the Mundane and ran with it. He quickly took the ideals of the Faction and began to codify them, even going so far as to write up a Mundane Manifesto! This did my withered old heart good to see. The campaign gave his character a concrete, mechanical advancement directly related to Xarune and the way he played him, and he gave back to the campaign and the world, adding to its story and its depth. Sigh so good.
New Fighter Features – Nullification (Anti-magic)
Erlendheim #DND
So, as I pointed out in the intro to this post, I created these features and options for, not only a specific class, but for a particular character. As a result, the features prestented below are unique to Xarune’s flavour of Fighter, a Battle Master who focused on using the Defense and Protection Fighting Styles. As always, if you think you could make use of any of this stuff, please feel free.
Fighting Style
Defense
Also add a +1 bonus to saving throws against magical effects
Protection
In addition to the regular advantage of this fighting style, if a creature you can see casts a spell that requires a saving throw against a target other than you within 5 ft of you, you can use your reaction to add your shield’s AC bonus (including magical or other bonuses if it has them) to their saving throw.
Martial Archetypes
Battle Master
Maneuvers
Deny
When another creature hits you with a spell attack or you fail a saving throw against a spell effect or magical effect, as a reaction you can expend a superiority die and reduce the amount of damage you take by the superiority die roll + Con modifier.
Reflect
When another creature hits you with a spell attack, as a reaction you can expend a superiority die to reflect the superiority die roll + Con modifier damage back at the spell caster.
Wake-up Call
When you take the attack action on your turn you can forego one of your attacks and instead use a bonus action to direct another creature who can hear you to make an immediate saving throw against a spell that they are currently affected by. You expend a superiority die and they can add the roll + your Con mod to their saving throw roll.
Indomitable
In addition to the regular benefits of this feature, starting at 9th level, if the Nullifying Fighter is subject to a magic spell or effect, they can roll any saving throw with advantage.
The Dice Pool 