The Ginger Star by Leigh Brackett
D&D-ready encounters of note:
Overall, the book gives the impression of a world, like Middle Earth, that has more and less dangerous “zones”. Eric John Stark is a typical pulp-fiction badass, and in the beginning of the book, in the South, he is the baddest ass in the room. As he heads north, he travels through progressively higher-level areas until he is routinely being defeated and captured.
African Civilizations by Graham Connah
Some West African kings were buried in a manmade hill. First the king and his treasures, along with some unlucky servants, were interred in a wooden dome. Then tons of earth was piled on the dome. Finally the new hill was covered with clay and fire-hardened. This was a difficult tomb to rob – although a narrow vertical chimney was left. (Why? For the soul to escape, as in Greek tombs?)
This chimney could make a good tomb/dungeon entrance. It’s wide enough for one PC to squeeze down; then there’s, say, a 30-foot drop to the floor.
What’s to protect such a tomb against robbers? It’s easy to climb down to the floor on a rope. Let’s say that in the center of the tomb, right under the shaft, is a rune-covered seal; anyone standing on it is paralyzed and takes ongoing damage (no save!) until they’re somehow moved onto a safe square.
I’d play it like this: PC 1 says “I climb down the rope.” The DM doesn’t say that PC 1 is paralyzed; he says, “OK, we’ll get back to you” and asks the other PCs what they are doing. If they yell down into the tomb, they get no answer. Based on how long the PCs spend waiting and talking before they take action, the paralyzed PC might take one, two, or three rounds of ongoing damage. (A mean DM would secretly time the PCs’ discussions and dithering and deal damage every 6 seconds of realtime, but try as I might, I just can’t play D&D like a World-Class Jerkwad.)
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African Civilizations by Graham Connah
Re-inventing common objects and foods is a worldbuilding rookie mistake. In a novel, it’s annoying if the main character drinks k’jinn instead of milk. It exoticises the main character and distances the reader. In RPGs, it’s even worse. If you say, “In my campaign world, milk is called k’jinn”, players will not start saying “Legolas takes a drink of k’jinn.” You’ll be lucky if you get “Legolas takes a drink of ka-spoon, or whatever milk is called.”
There is, however, a place for exotic foods and names. If a drink has a made-up name, that should mark it as exotic to the characters. If the PCs travel to a new continent, and everyone who meets them offers them a glass of k’jinn, this might make them feel like they’ve actually traveled somewhere.
African Civilizations by Graham Connah
The existence of a powerful Christian nation in Africa may have influenced the medieval Europe myth of Prester John, the magical African king who ruled a land filled with gold and gems where there was no poverty. Apparently envoys to Prester John occasionally delivered their messages to a king of Ethiopia, to his confusion.
Ethiopia has an interesting geography: it’s largely highlands, and the elevation means that there are a lot of climates very close to each other, from Alpine to temperate to swamp to desert to seashore (if you count Eritrea as part of Ethiopia, which it was until the 90s). A campaign set in an Ethiopia-like area would put the PCs in a few day’s travel of almost every terrain type that has its own map icon in the D&D Expert set.
Ethiopian Adventures
Here are some ideas I have for adventures in an Ethiopia-like environment.
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African Civilizations by Graham Connah
African Civilizations by Graham Connah
I’ve been slowly reading this book for a while. A few months ago, I used a map and a description of a queen’s burial chamber as the centerpiece for a dungeon. Today I was struck by a passage about the ephemeral nature of archaeology. Archaeology, after all, is what PCs do (at least, the Indiana Jones style of archaeology).
Because of the extensive excavation of the Aswan High Dam, we probably know more about Meroitic life in Lower Nubia than in either of the other two provinces.
That got me thinking about the plight of archaeologists, doing hasty, non-methodical excavations on a site that was going to be covered with water and totally destroyed. Unlike normal archaeology, you don’t take your time, catalogue, dig with a spoon. You dig up everything as fast as possible. Whatever you miss is gone forever.
Transfer that kind of pressure to a dungeon. Prepare a big, sprawling dungeon with lots of monsters, traps and treasure. Now place that dungeon in the bottom of a valley that’s about to be flooded forever: maybe one of the ancient dwarven dams is about to break. Make sure the monsters who live in the dungeon are nonsentient or eeevil, so the PCs don’t have to spend their time conducting an evacuation. The PCs have a limited time, say a day, to loot whatever they can from the dungeon. Heck, let’s make it an hour. That should turn up the pressure.
How can you structure this dungeon differently from most? You might be able to stock it more richly with treasure than most, because the players won’t have time to get to every part of it. When they stand on a nearby hill, watching the waves crash over the dungeon forever, you want them to be thinking regretfully of all the loot that’s still in there. To that end, you might want to tell the PCs exactly which of their wishlist items are fabled to be in the dungeon.
This would be an ideal dungeon to use some old-school, first-edition-style dungeon timekeeping. Determine how long it takes to search a room, how long to pass through a room, and how long to run a combat. I don’t like counting rounds, so I’d establish rules of thumb: every search check takes a minute; every combat takes a minute. In 4th edition, a short rest takes 5 minutes; that’s a pretty significant chunk of time if you only have an hour to explore.
Now that time is a resource, we can use it in ways we normally can’t. Normally the PCs can spend as long as they want on a task. If it takes 20 minutes to gather up all the silver pieces from the floor, the PCs will spend that long. But with the sand slipping through the hourglass, PCs will have to judge the possible benefits of skipping the silver.
You can also put something interesting in nearly every room, something that would repay careful investigation. Normally it’s not much of a roadblock for a PC to say “I keep on searching till I find something”, so hiding something is approximately the same as giving it to the PCs. Not so here.
Other ways to monetize time:
And then, of course, you dangle a big treasure before the players right as they’re planning to leave. If they take the bait, that will lead to more delays, and finally, a wild dash to safety pursued by a roaring tidal wave.
Mossflower is a young adult fantasy about some mice on an adventure. The two main characters are routinely described as “the warrior” and “the thief”, so you don’t have to look far to find the D&D roots here.
An interesting difference between mice and human heroes is that mice don’t have the sense of entitlement that comes with being on the top of the food chain. Humans expect to be able to kill any monster, even dragons; but there are a lot of predators that mice, even mice warriors, flee.
At one point, the rodent heroes fight a crab. They’re forced to flee because the crab’s shell makes it impervious to their attacks.
Obviously, Mouse Guard is the appropriate system to model such a battle, but as a D&D battle, it could still make a memorable encounter. A fight with a creature with an unreasonably high AC could potentially be more like a puzzle than a traditional battle. How can the PCs triumph if they can’t hit? The AC would have to be very high, though: if it were just, say, 5 points higher than average, the PCs probably wouldn’t change their strategy. They’d just bang against the creature for turn after turn, missing on a die roll of 15 or lower, and blame the DM for a boring encounter.
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Elsewhere, I’m reading Little Women – slowly – and blogging about it in excruciating detail. Little Women may seem like an unlikely source for D&D inspiration, but that’s because you’ve forgotten that Every Book’s a Sourcebook.
Here’s a passage that Little Women‘s author, Louisa May Alcott, liked so much that she put it, or something very close to it, in two books (Little Women and A Long Fatal Love Chase):
Valrosa well deserved its name, for in that climate of perpetual summer roses blossomed everywhere. They overhung the archway, thrust themselves between the bars of the great gate … Every shadowy nook, where seats invited one to stop and rest, was a mass of bloom, every cool grotto had its marble nymph smiling from a veil of flowers and every fountain reflected crimson, white, or pale pink roses, leaning down to smile at their own beauty. Roses covered the walls of the house, draped the cornices, climbed the pillars, and ran riot over the balustrade of the wide terrace, whence one looked down on the sunny Mediterranean, and the white-walled city on its shore.
Valrosa sounds like a beautiful city: overgrown with flowers, perhaps so overgrown that it is in fact abandoned. What if my campaign’s Undead City, instead of being a depressing gray ruin overrun with ghouls, is a beautiful, sweet-smelling garden city overrun with ghouls? White roses climb up the city’s walls and choke the alleyways. They blossom through the eyesockets of ghoul-devoured corpses in the street. A cool grotto with a flower-covered marble nymph sounds like a great place for the fleeing PCs to get beset by skeletons.
(continuing my goal of using every book as a D&D sourcebook)
The Riddle of the Sands is is a pre-World War I British spy adventure, written by a real British spy who was later EXECUTED FOR TREASON. I think this adds a lot of authority to a book. Imagine if Naomi Novik, author of the Temeraire novels, died by FALLING OFF A DRAGON. That would give her a little something called AUTHENTICITY.
The characters in The Riddle of the Sands spend a lot of time poking around the German coast in boats, and there are a lot of details about Admiralty charts and tide tables. Some sailing exploits, and sights, are only possible at high tide. For instance, there’s an abandoned church on an island: at high tide, the island is underwater and the church can be seen sitting on the surface of the water.
Imagine the temple crypt below such a church. A macguffin entombed in the deepest part of the crypt might only be accessible at low tide, for, say, an hour; soon afterwards, water would start flowing in, giving the DM a great excuse for the classic rooms-filling-with-water hazard. On Earth, it takes about 6 hours for a tide to come in; so in a reasonably-sized dungeon, the PCs won’t be in danger of drowning unless they get caught in a trap or there is some sort of delaying terrain. This dungeon should probably have both.
What monsters would be in such a dungeon? In order for water to flow into the crypt, there must be an outlet to the sea somewhere. Mermen and other aquatic creatures can definitely be hanging out in whatever portion of the crypt is currently underwater.
The currently-above-water part of the crypt is more difficult. It must only be inhabited with amphibious creatures – which, luckily, includes undead, the most obvious dwellers in a church crypt. Imagine a skeleton which has spent half its time underwater for hundreds of years. It and its axe would be trailing weeds and slime; it might or might not be part coral (depending on how much you like The Tempest: does that sea change stuff actually happen?); and it would undoubtedly have something gross in its eye socket, skull or rib cage: a dead fish or scuttling crab.
The rest of the dungeon would be pretty unpleasant too: the church itself, up to a few feet up the walls, would be coated with weeds and slime, and paved with muck and stinking fish. Every level down would be successively more unpleasant.
I have a theory that any book -any book at all – can be used as a D&D sourcebook.
This is the second time I’ve illustrated a Blog of Holding post with a Babysitter’s Club cover. That’s because there are a lot of them around the house. Babysitter’s Club books are my wife’s slumming comfort book, just as 1970’s fantasy/horror novels are mine. “The Fire at Mary Anne’s House” kind of looks like it could be a genre crossover.
I’ve never read “The Fire at Mary Anne’s House”, but I don’t even have to open it to find inspiration for a supernatural horror D&D game. Look at Mary Ann! Her face and posture bespeak guilt, fear, or a deceptive faux-innocence. If she’s not a psychotic or possessed child, there’s a good chance she’s an evil spirit. In any case, I think we all know she burned down that house. From the title of the book, we can infer that she burned down her own house, unless she’s not really Mary Ann.
And how about that tag line? “Can Mary Ann rise from the ashes?” OK, so clearly Mary Ann was burned alive and is returning as some sort of vengeful ghost.
I think that what happened is, people whose bodies are burned but whose souls are unquiet (possibly because of some unfinished baby-sitting business) rise as spirits that the common people called “firebugs”. (Maybe the girl firebugs are called “fire Marys” or “fire Annes”.) Firebugs usually return at night, holding lanterns or candles. A firebug’s only desire is to burn their former homes, enemies or loved ones – everyone and everything they once had strong feelings about.
This is why, in a world where corpses can rise as zombies, cremation is not universal. Cremation can produce a firebug, juts as burial can produce a zombie.
An adventure idea: the PCs enter a village on Lantern Night, a festival where everyone carries a lantern or candle to protect themselves from the spirits who haunt this night. The first person the PCs meet is a solitary little girl with a candle, who speaks confused words about “saving the little ones” and runs towards an abandoned, half-burned house. If the PCs follow, they may be able to stop her from setting the building ablaze. If they don’t, they will have to deal with a fire sweeping through town.
From now on, I’ll try to record one d&d rule, adventure, or encounter idea from every book I read. This should be pretty easy, since about 1/2 of what I read is crappy pulp fantasy and sci-fi: the other half is, for the most part, 18th and 19th century novels and early 20th century adventure fiction, most of which has some swashbuckling. So for the most part it won’t be a stretch at all. If I somehow end up with a biography of Carol Burnett, or something, I’ll do my best.
I reserve the right to suppress any super-awesome ideas that I plan to use to surprise players. After all, if I don’t blog about a book, you poor bastards won’t even know I read it.
