Light is Initiative

So, having multiple kinds of Lume (Bio, Chem, Oil etc) is bullshit. Its like having people keep track of different kinds of currency. No-one is going to do that in D&D.

Keeping with my pattern of forcing complexity off the roll and onto the system, I will be making all Lumes transferrable into each other, no-matter what kind of lamp they power.

My ‘logic’ for this is that people will swap lumes back and forth depending on what they need, will keep a stash of different kinds and that any merchant or non-hostile NPC will be so used to exchanging one kind of lume for another that the process passes without comment.

Now this is bullshit, but it’s a better kind of bullshit than having like four or five kinds of different light on your sheet and they do not interact.

Now Lumes power Lamps.

Your lamp is particular to you, they all have different qualities and are a bit special in different ways. Its one thing you have to remember and its yours. Like a weapon. Lumes just power the lamp. (Look out for Lamp table next issue.)

Other kinds of light-producing thing are hived off as particular items.

And lamps, or lights, are initiative.

If someone does not have a light they must be with someone who does, not alone. A PC is either carrying a light, or states they are ‘with’ someone who is. They are assumed to be within the radius of that light when they perform their actions.

This makes sense because if you are exploring an underground area with no light you will need to stay near people who have it. You don’t have much of a choice about that.

During normal exploration all you need to stay aware of is who you are with. If Tom and Joe are holding the lamps then you say ‘I am with Tom’ or ‘I am with Joe’. You are assumed to be within their radius during exploration.

Then a fight breaks out. Roll initiative.

Group Initiative

Whoever has the brightest light is ‘caller’ for that side. They roll the initiative die.

During that sides turn, the person with the brightest lamp decides who in their group will go in what order. They cannot control what the PC does only when they act. Obviously groups can and should negotiate this and talk about it.

In our example Tom has the brighter whale-oil lamp. The players win initiative. Tom has Lisa and Jerry in his group. He decides Lisa goes first, then Him, then Jerry.

Then Joe, who has a less-bright candle lamp, has steve and bob. Joe decides who goes fourth fifth and sixth. They take their actions.

Individual Initiative

Only people with lights roll initiative. If the group are facing some Drow with one low-light lamp then the Drow, Tom and Joe all roll. No-one else does. Tom wins, then Drow is second, Joe is third.

Tom decides who out of his group will act in what order. Then the Drow act, then Joe decides his groups order and they act.

‘Dark’ Players

If someone wants to go off on their own into the dark, they can. They act after every lit person. So if there was a seventh player in out example above, they would act after everyone else.

One Side Dark

Some underground creatures use no lights.

In this case, if the PC’s have lights then they always move first. Light is a bitch to carry around but it does have some advantages, it transmits sensory information faster than anything else so a lit group will always be a fraction of a second faster than something which does not see.

These animals can still get in a surprise round to begin with though.

All you have to remember is who you are with.

If you have a lamp its qualities will be written right there on your sheet. (I will put it under the right of the stat-encumbrance system.)

You have to fight as a team but you should be doing that already.

Lifting a lamp up will almost always take one hand. So you lose the use of that hand, but you gain a superior strategic awareness and a lot of responsibility. You are the caller for your little mini-group.

Yes you can hold your action if you absolutely insist. But only within your group. You can go last of your lamp-group if you must seize control not only of what you do, but also when you do it. Of course you could just talk to your lamp holder about that. Or get your own lamp. Or join Joes group and explore with him for a while. The lamp-holder decides but they don’t decide alone, they just have final responsibility.

I Search The Body UNDERGROUND

*1.- 3 Climbing harness. Reduces fall damage from ropes. Helps with abseiling. With carabineers can be very handy when clamping things on and off quickly and safely. Makes you look like a tit.

*4 – 5  2d4 Functional Duergar carabineers. Can now clip on and off ropes easily.

*6-7 A fuel brick. (Easy light, 1 hr of flame.)

*8- 9 Dynamic spidersilk rope. Absorbs 50 hp falling damage then wears out.

*10-11 A climbing pick. No bonus but can be used to climb without any minus and also used as a weapon during climb. (d6 damage)

*12 -13 A Clock Bow. All-metal crossbow. 20ft range. Fires flechettes (d6) High tension clockwork auto loads from magazine holding ten flechettes. Wire string must be replaced every 50 shots. Must be wound pre-battle. Loud. On a fumble explodes in shower of clockwork. Can be fired one handed.

*14-16 A Lamp. See Lamps table.

17-46 This many Lumes.

47 - A ‘Miners Friend’. Little yellow canary in a bamboo cage. Imported a long way from Yoo-Suin. Warns of dangerous vapours by fainting , then dying.

48 – Aboleth Memory Key. Does d6 damage to you as you open your own head. Allows you to walk through all of your previous experience as an observer, observe as if you were there, recall anything. Memories of others are incomprehensible.

49 – Looserope, 50ft. Whisper a word to each know of this rope as you tie it. . If you speak that word aloud then that knot will spontaneously unknot.

50 – Insane diary describing the workings of a Derro mind-control machine. Can be used to find and destroy the machine but, the closer you get to it, the more fully it works on you..

61 – A Neolithic man-shape in clay that can take damage instead of the holder. If it ever breaks, all the damage suffered will be yours at once.

62 – A dart that works once. Casts ‘Flesh to Chrome’

63 – A wedding ring. If you put it on you immediately become aware of the psionic attention of the bodies spouse. A mental voice asks. “Who are you? What has happened to my husband/wife?”

64 – A can of spray paint (Duergar make)

65 – d6 demonic pacts. This may be the most evil person you have ever killed. Gain xd20 of the basic XP and the formal title ‘Slayer of (name of searched body). The d6 Daemons will now gate sequentially into the area. Starting at Type 1 and going up from there.

66 – Body has a list of names tattooed. All are crossed out. The penultimate uncrossed name is yours, the last is that of (Notable NPC opposed to the party)

67 – Grapple Spider. Iron grapple, spider shaped. Clings on when thrown. Must be fed blood.

68 – A Vampire Court subpoena for a random NPC.

69 – An unassigned slavehunters license, warrant and badge*.

70 – Instructions and countersigns for a secret rendezvous with a race totally opposed to the holder.

71 – Shifting Archean dagger that rusts blood. If it touches metal, both the metal and dagger rust to nothing.

72 – A myco-lucent necklace 2d6 jewels, produce spore-effects when crushed.

73 – d6 Yoo-Suin Smokerope cigarettes. When lit a strand of black smoke slowly reaches directly up. When it contacts a surface it adheres and transforms into a climbable black rope.

74- Book of Acid. The optical illusions in this book make you woozy when you look at them. You then vomit up a pin of strong acid.

75 – Pulsar Stone. Hand-sized crystal rock. Sighting through it allows you to see the flickers of distant pulsars. With time this can be used to tell direction underground.

76 – Set of silver blades for flensing precisely the skin of the human face.

77 – A baby brain in bottled brine. Illithid bugging and communication technology.

78 – d4 vials of Heroin with Drow syringes.

79 – d4 Myconid Mind Spores (Thumb sized, fractal, soft) casts ‘Speak With Mushrooms’ on consumer.

80 – Duergar mushroom vodka. Icy clear. Enhances any save against magical effects. Drinker cannot let any argument lie, pursuing every tiny detail with agonising relentlessness.

81 – Derro Conspiracy Pills. The character can hear the players and DM talking round the table. They must give no sign of this or save vs death.

*82 – Pair of dice.

83 –Loaded pair of dice.

84 – A Svirfneblin, gagged and tied up.

85 – A razor, mirror and soap.

86 – Steel mirror on extendable (4ft) brass pole. Mirror can be angled.

87 – Olm-carved slender short-sword made entirely of bone.

88 – A chunky brass cylindrical finger ring. Actually a silent and reliable clock that pricks the wearers finger each hour.

89 – 50 feet of nightingale chain. Slender, light as rope. Sings softly under pressure.

90 – A spoolable fishing line with elegant chemiluminescent lures.

91 – Elegant Meershaum miners pipe with lid. Holds tiny firel elemental and never goes out. Can only light small things (lamps, fuses) and complain.

92 – Drow SpiderClimb ring. Save vs spells at least once per every use, and once every minute after the first or vomit a torrent of poisonous spiders.

93 – Drow ‘Arak’. Must be allowed to settle. Top layer gives penetrating insight but curses player. Bottom layer removes curse, makes instantly violently drunk, wipes 2d6 hours of memory. Insight must be communicated during drink.

94 - Drow ‘manacles’ Syringe-thin interpenetrating bars, driven through forearms like hairpins. Linked by slender chains.

95 – d6 Duergar manacles. Gitmo-style plastic zip ties.

96 – Drow climbing harness. Like a normal climbing harness but doen’t make you look like a tit. Looks kind of cool actually. Slim fit only.

97 – Cloakersmoke. Pungent incense. Makes all Cloakers roll themselves up into cones and become piercers.

98 – Geophone. Delicate Duergar make. With practice, can hear sounds in 200 foot radius through the stone.

99 – The genes of a Cambriman. Like a helix of tiny wet pearls. If you fool around with them and stick them in a live Cambriman you could make a baby. Or a mutant.

00 – An Occultum coin.

*Pretty much the only legal right that Underdark civilisations think is truly universal is the right to recover slaves. This is as close to cops as the Underdark gets. Of course the slavehunters guild will track and horribly destroy anyone who makes free with their warrents.

Procedural Vornheim Mapping for the Underdark

(OK this looks fucking stupid but maybe it isn’t.)

So doing a procedural-generation Vornheim style map for the Underdark is fucking insane. It’s a little like wilderness (you can go anywhere potentially), a bit like a desert (not may people around, alien environment, always running out of resources) and like a dungeon (movement severely constricted locally.)

So on the macro scale you can go anywhere, I the immediate sense you can only go to a few specific places.

But you could maybe find a way anywhere, if you looked hard enough.

Blah blah blah

So the idea is of a cave-bearing substrate.

First, take a clean A4 sheet. Roll up a complex from the experimental generator. Write the complex rules in the top.

“The Torrenting Torment of He Who Seeks,

 always exposes the tracks of those who passed last

but never hides the innocent or lets the guilty flee.”

Next you need a number of directions between 3 and 5. Right now it’s a d3+2, which is awkward. We will assume four directions for this map. Put little arrows or signs so that the directions cross each other, are reasonably evenly (but not exactly) spaced and are not parallel. Now our map looks like this.

Now in real use you wouldn’t see those arrows. They are just there to indicate the directions you chose.

Now we go through each direction in turn and again generate a number for each one. In this case we will postulate 3, 4, 5 and 3 again. Then we draw that many swift freehand pencil lines across the page in that way. Like this;

There are three lines in the first direction. Now we do the other directions.

So now we have a blank page divided into some semi-random semi-regular shapes. Each of these shapes is a section.

One thing we need to do is decide which direction this map is facing. I will add a compass.

Now we begin mapping caves. A cave is just a blob right now. (I may give it more complex glyphs later on.) We start the first cave anywhere on the edge of the map, but probably on the top. I will draw this one in green.

We can do this with the Cave Generator. This tells us how many exits and entries it has and where.

Now an important rule comes into play.

Every section with a cave must have one section next to it that cannot have caves. Simply, if you have a cave in a section, one section touching it must be coloured in. You cannot place caves there, you cannot pass through it. It can be touching edge to edge or at the sides.

So, depending on how big a section is, we may have multiple caves in it, or only one.  While you are still in a section, all the caves in there are considered to be closely related, they can be explored in ‘real time’.

When a cave passage leave a section, it really matters how it leaves. If the passage leaves across a line, that means those caves are on the same level, at a similar height.

I’ve labelled that as 1 in the map.

If a passage leaves a section across its join, that is across the pointy bit, that means that passage is strongly vertical. It may be an easily manageable chimney or simply a passage at a strong angle but it goes up and down more than it goes across.

I have labelled that as 2

Now we continue to fill in the rest of the Torrenting Torment of He Who Seeks. Remember the rule about un-navigable spaces.

Ok I got bored doing that but you get the idea.

Obviously this looks really shit but it is meant to be done by someone really really quickly with a pencil in about 20 seconds.

Why the dark spaces?

Fuck, I can’t even remember my reasoning but it was good. I think.. it’s important that there be places you can’t go? Where caves can’t be and could never be? So you can’t just race around the map, you have to find your way a bit.

And you can’t race anyway because the caves will only generate in certain configurations.

Rivers could move through the grey spaces. If there was a river on the map you would just draw it through after the substrate was added. If a grey space pope up, the PC’s can’t follow it. If it goes over a line that’s maybe a sump, if it hits a diagonal then a waterfall?

And if they can get breath under water and anti-cold spells and underwater lights maybe then they could reach those areas?

The lines crossing diagonal joins should have arrow on them to remind the DM if they go up or down. In case the players come back.

(There was more but its late and I'm tired.)