BEST ENEMIES

THE SLOW INEVITABLE SKELETON MARINES

"You are marked for death and the mark shall be the target of my Skeleton Marines!"

In the Degenerate Era, the dark doomed obsolescence of the Cosmos when the stars have burned to death and dying civilisations cluster round the embers of the white dwarf suns, the Grail Queen rules and holds a jealous memory of the single world that once defied her will. A pearl-world, blue and white, that lived long ago when the universe was bright with suns. Brooding on the burning memory of this ancient wrong, she summons from the corpse of the fated planet Melpomene, the giga-troubadours of doom and sends forth her legions of the Skeleton Marines. Floating in the famine-black and unrelenting cold, the slender Skeleton Marines cannot be stopped. Drifting through the ocean of deep time like plastic flotsam on a seeping wave, and cast into our reality like driftwood on a beach. Rising like the corpses of undead machines they advance implacably like the tick-tocking of a clock, wielding their entropic guns their black scanning eyes set now on earth!



THE CARAPACED GOD

"Bow to me heroes, for only by my will is your reality sustained!"

Clad in infinite unending onion-rings of trans-uranic iron teased from the torn hearts of worlds spiralling to nothing in the flensing event horizon of a cherenkov-strobing black hole. Armour flaked and abrading with the touch of unspeakable eons yet ever growing by the substance of his own dark thought. Each layer riveted with unique gnosis etched in sacred languages invented by prophetic monks. From his palace of shadow and slow-decaying waves at the end of all realities the Carapaced God rules and turns his hidden eye to earth and is displeased. Perhaps he wishes a continent moved, a second sun created, a nation drowned or time reversed. Or simply the slate of history wiped clean. Seeking some alteration he sends forth his sombre legions. Insect Priests, Twilight Knights, Tense Fetish Nuns and looming PanzerSnaelgle. The heroes oppose him yet he is an enemy that can never truly be defeated for should he fall, all reality would collapse into a screaming chaos.



THE CRYOGENIC RATS

From the decadent solar cubes of the Galactic Rim where ancient civilisations force the stars to burn as hypersquares comes an invasion force like no other, a force of frustrating anarchist women riding the reclaimed punked-up relics of a thousand years of fruitless war! Yet, these women claim no territory, seeking only the adventure of battle, bating the forces of mankind from the cockpits of their decaden-tech mechs and ion-drive-dreadnoughts, a battle the nations of the world are happy to join lest the foundations of their power be shaken by the Anarchists from Space!



THE HOUR GANG

United by a madman, twenty four of earths most ruthless gangster criminals team up To steal the Sty-le of ultimate control made long ago by ancient priests to help man fight the time titans who wish to speed up entropy and doom. Against all odds, they succeed! But the thieves bargain and backstab. No one trusts the other. The sacred Style is smashed and divided into twenty four pieces. Each of the gang is imbued with a distinctive extra-real ability which they use to do crimes worldwide. But each power reaches overwhelming unbeatable force for only one specific hour a day! Now the power to battle the Eons lies with twenty four criminals who care only for themselves. If they ever get together the Hour Gang will be unstoppable,but if they do not, doom calls for all of earth! Only their leader Mister Midnight imprisoned in a mirrored cell can unite them.



GREEN BEE - EARTHS SECOND GREATEST THIEF1

"I will be the greatest Fost Mask, I WILL!"

Using only his natural criminal ability and his distinctive hive of trained green bees Green Bee seeks to prove himself the greatest criminal of all time by stealing Frost Masks mask! He has never come close yet, but as his wounded pride burns ever hotter, his schemes grow ever more daring and complex. Perhaps this time?



THE TAN ARMY

The mad golemist that made Army Man had only a certain supply of strange green clay. Army Man used his problem-solving thinking skills to solve the problem that he was. He joined up with the heroes and fought his bad maker. The mad man secretly escaped and went into a secret cave only he knew about. He used the clay of a magic underground river to make the Tan Army. Fearless and strong. The toughest army on earth to beat. The Tan Army are perhaps the greatest military force yet assembled. Made to fight and be the strongest and best but without the rebel thoughts of Army Man. Who will they fight and where will they strike? No-one on earth knows....



THE ELD KING2

In the barrios and music halls. In the classrooms and social service offices. In the police cars and telephone booths. Hidden in the mirrors of the shop front windows. Through secret doors in the corners of rooms. Only children can see the Eld King who steals their souls and builds an invisible empire in the gaps of the adult world. To battle him, Monster Princess must use the Kinderagulator Ray to transform the Best Heroes into child versions of themselves!



THE LEAGUE OF THE YELLOW SIGN3

The Yellow Sign can be anywhere and you would not know. They are a secret conspiracy of mad cultists but they know how to act just like normal people. Some are doctors that pretend to cure the insane. But really they drive mad people more insane and give them the ability to seem normal. Underneath they are now part of the Yellow Sign. Mad people living in the real world. From decaying tenements and the corners of old bookshops, the League of the Yellow Sign seeks to infiltrate all governments. They will overturn the whole world and restore the lost monarchy of Carcosa, the line of Hastur from the shores of the lake of Hali where the black stars rise.



THE MASK OF THE MAD GOD

The mask lies waiting, ready to imbue its wearer with incredible power yet also with a terrible madness. The archon of some higher reality lost and locked within a mask. An exile poisoned by loneliness and hate whose spirit moves across dark waters. Anyone who wears the mask will gain the powers of creation itself with the power to make great heroes and villains with every touch or breath.
Every word the mad god speaks births original and independent life from raw cosmic nothingness. Even their unspoken thoughts are halos like dark oceans of black fire. Crazed and evil the Mad God makes only evil and destructive beings. Its screams are monsters, furies. Its words are villains, they are now as real as you and me. Yet, once the god was good. Its gentle words were peaceful animals that heal. Its joyful laughter birthed heroes of burning gold strong enough to challenge any evil thing it made. Should it sleep and speak within its dream the words make silver prophets. But who can make the made god laugh?



ENNUI

The sister of Frost Mask was an underground explorer. She wanted to be the best ever. She went too deep fell into a Dero cave. The perverted underground monsters drove her mad with terrible tortures and secret machines. She did not give up. She stole an influencing machine and escaped. Now she lairs in a decaying observatory somewhere in the Hindu Kush. There she places her influencing machine, able to detect any thought on earth and focus its influencing powers upon it. She has set it to detect thoughts of herself. Anywhere in the world, whenever anyone thinks of Ennui, the mighty silver alien device twists in its cradle of bronze and focuses its mind-altering powers. The ray of the incredible machine decays any thought it is directed at. For as long as it has power, no-one on earth can even think of Ennui. But the tortures of the Dero and the radiating waves of her machine have made Ennui strange and mad. As ruthless and dedicated as her sister. Perhaps more intelligent, but with even less sympathy for normal human people. She intends to re-invade the centre of the earth and lay claim to the empire of alien devices there, freeing mankind from their hideous grip, but placing humanity under her own control. Surrounded by her palatial expanse of junk and frantic ruin, she plots how best to continue her invisible war. Only the Selenium Princess, watching from her city on the moon, dares to try and penetrate the nightmare visions of Ennui.

lichJammer

Spelljammer was good (Elves in undead bug-suits) and also kind of shit (cheery Space-Gypsies). Instead, here is an LotFP-ised version. lichJammer!

click for source

The rules of lichJammer are:

·         The solar system and galaxy are exactly the same size and shape as we currently understand them to be.

·         Magic as described in the LotFP rulebook exists.

·         Other than that, the rules of physics remain in effect.

·         Faster Than Light travel is impossible (other than magic as described above.)

The background of lichJammer is:

Space is full of Undead. That's why earth isn't. High level magic users mummify themselves and take to the stars. There are undead out there from every era of human history. Akkadians, Han Chinese, Pharoh's Sumerians, Maya, Inca, Celts etc.

This is what happened to all those ultra high-level players from ancient games. It’s also the reason earth isn’t ruled by immortal Lich Kings.

The assumed power differential between lichJammer and standard LotFP is about twenty levels. Player Characters are considered to start at about Level twenty, this is the entry level for lichJammer. If an entity is less than roughly ten HD. That is, a group of less than ten skeletons or two 5HD monsters, then you can just affect them without rolling anything.

It's like that samurai game where you don't have to roll to kill peasants, you just declare that you are doing it and it takes effect.

In a sense undeath is the perfect form of man in which to explore space. You don’t need to breathe or eat. You can't be poisoned by radiation. If you need to spend six months moving between planets in the solar system then you just wait. (Arnold K had this idea first.)

The basic lichJammer is a segmented wooden cylinder effectively open to the void (though it will have enclosed spaces they will not be air-tight). A hollow tower of bone and petrified wood. Looks like the spire of a gigantic wooden church, except full of skeletons. The segments counter-rotate to provide the illusion of gravity when that is required. It’s driven by vast Solar Sails. The sails are the skins of fantastic beasts. White AngelSkin, translucent Shoggoth Skin, ribbed Dragon Wing etc.

The crews are skeletons, the officers are mummies.

The main weapons for ship-to-ship combat are massed arrow-fire (surprisingly effective, in the void a flight of arrows can travel hundreds of miles), catapults, magic and boarding actions. The barbs of arrows are made from ice.

Mass is expensive, you only have so much and captains won't expend it without good reason.

Mass is currency, time is also currency. There are nth-level spells that take even a Lich months and months to jam in their dead head. So if you take six months to move between the moons of Jove and Mars then you have to decide what mega-spells you will memorise.

(A huge range of normal spells are just taken as assumed abilities.)

Since most captains are Liches, sending masses of low-level undead to attack an opposing ship wouldn't work, the enemy captain would just take them over and double his or her crew. Instead you need to send independent operators, entities the opposing Lich cannot simply or easily control, this also makes them beings which cannot simply or easily control.

The available classes for lichJammer are:

• Lich
• Nazgul
• Daemon
• Auto-Golem

The Lich is a turbo badass spellcaster and probably the Captain of the lichJammer. They are effectively the ships artillery since spells will be more powerful and have a longer ranger than most weapons in space. Like magic-users of all time they are shit-hot at range but vulnerable at close range. You can choose which earth culture you come from, maybe you were an Egyptian priest-king or a celtic druid mummified in a bog or you ruled an Inca temple-city.

Nazgul is just shorthand for any Wight/Death Knight/Skeleton Warrior/Unusually frisky mummy. Any human based embodied undead that focuses on combat and is not a magic user. This is the Fighter equivalent. You jump between lichJammers and beat things up. You are a hardy motherfucker.

Daemon. You are an actual (low level) Daemon. You are probably a refugee from infernal politics. You have Daemon powers, can shape change, fly, survive in space. You probably can't move as fast or with the reliability as a lichJammer though, but at least you have some manoeuvrability out there. Souls are currency to you. This one doesn’t have a close equivalent in the basic classes but your abilities suggest a mix of Thief and Bard. inherent abilities plus Charisma. You are less tough than a Nazgul but get more bennies or skills. Not being undead you are the only member of the crew that might get bored with the year-long journeys between moons.

Auto-Golem. You are a self-programming Golem. You may be made of different materials. You can upgrade yourself by getting different parts and adding them on. You are kind of a robot. A mixture of Scotty and Commander Data, you can repair the ship and the skeletons. You might be the bosun, in charge of ship defence, or you might launch yourself at the enemy from a dorsal catapult and land on their superstructure, converting it into mini golems. You can learn new skills and abilities by upgrading your glyphware.

Setting:

Moons are more interesting than worlds. Worlds are hard to get to. You need to put your lichJammer in orbit then Teleport to the surface. If you don't know the target well you need to wait for clear weather so you can see the spot you are teleporting to. Then to get back out you need to Teleport back to your ship and hope nothing has gone wrong there while you were away. Plus you can't take much with you. Plus if you fuck up a Teleport to something in space and end up in the wrong place then you are just floating in the void, maybe undergoing re-entry. Even for a Lich that’s a bad situation. This is why lichJammers exist.

All the moons of Mars, Saturn and Jupiter have individual cultures of either human undead, elementals, extra-dimensional beings, or just weird as shit stuff. Asteroids and comets have their own weird shit going on.

The skies of Jove are home to numerous airborne empires but they can't get their Jovian gigafauna up into the void and you can't get your lichJammer down into atmosphere so the moons is where you meet and trade.

Everything in earths Solar System is exactly as far away from everything else as it is in real life.

To get your lichJammer closer to the sun you have to tack against the solar wind, slingshot yourself using planetary gravity or catch a ride with a comet or asteroid heading the right way. The good slingshot positions and useful comets are much sought-after and lichJammers fight to get effective positions.

Space Combat:

This is a little like the age of sail in three dimensions, with the sun the main source of 'wind'. Rounds take a day, you can try all kinds of Patrick O'Brian bullshit like stealing the light from your enemies sails and crap like that.

Interstellar lichJammer:

If you leave the system to go to another star it can take hundreds of years. Relativity is in effect so even if you come back, things will have changed a great deal, so each sun is like a little campaign of its own without much connection to another.

Hyperdrives: I'm not sure if these should exist at all but its possible you could take a detour through the skies of Hell, cast Time Stop on yourself for a century while you travel.

Hwæt Mike Mearls

Ok, Mike Mearls here is a way to manage the inevitable crushing system bloat of 5e without it making the whole thing both byzantine yet also somehow bland.

We all know player options sell more than GM options. So any corporation is going to end up overproducing these and jamming out splatbook after splatbook with crap you can add to your character. This will both increase the amount of complexity and powergaming and yet also, somehow, make everything a bit more vague and woolly.

A game where everyone playing is a weird living crystal of some kind might actually be kind of good. But a game where a living crystal teams up with a Minotaur and a Doppelgänger  and a Hill Dwarf probably won’t be. It takes a kind of pressure off the creation of the world. None of these things can be truly strange or 'other'. The charge of their discovery is lost. The fusion-like power you get when you introduce something utterly unpredictable into a coherent world system is lessened.

But this is a tide in the hearts of men and especially in the hearts of Americans. Because in America everybody must have access to every choice. Taking away or limiting choice can never be considered a good thing. Oh, small groups of individuals might cling together on a temporary basis to play games with highly-focused limited options. But doing this makes them perverts and they know it. They will always be the minority for such a thing works against the spirit of the land. Why can't you be a Ninja in FauxEurope? WHY? THIS IS AMERICA AND YOU CAN BE ANY DAMMN THING YOU WANT.

In the same way, for a variety of reasons, people, and  Americans in particular, will never be entirely comfortable with the 'Other' as a powerful presence in serial fiction. The Borg can be terrifying once, but then you get a sad Borg, and a sexy Borg and a conflicted Borg who feels odd about being a Borg and Borg babies.

Can Orcs be 'evil'? It’s a stupid question in some ways but it will never ever be gone from the communal mind, partly because its the West* and partly because its America and you just said that an entire race/species can be evil. And it doesn’t matter how far the representation gets from reality, it nudges a wound in the nations soul. It will never be an entirely comfortable idea. There will always an exile Drow, there will always be a Noble Savage Orc there will always be a bad guy that it-turns-out-has-a-point-and-who-are-the-real-monsters-anyway-could-it-be-MAN?

And the corruption, or, in this case, blandification, or humanising of the 'other' makes for bland boring stories of adventure because the whole point of adventure, its central charge, is to come face to face with Something Else, something from Outside.

So, to recap.

1. Hasbro will be producing lots of Player-Facing stuff.

2. Everyone must have MAXIMUM CHOICE because FREEDOM.

3. The charge of the Other will always be lessened.

This is a way to ride that wave in the least frustrating way. Instead of turning the wheel of liberalism half-way round to its customary middle-volume position. Spin that motherfucker 360.

Instead of producing books about other worlds or realities where the Player Races are different but the Others are the same array, produce books from other moral worlds and cultural realities. Produce books from the perspective of these cultures where they are the heroes and we (and elves, dwarves and hobbits who are our aspirational shadow selves) are the other.

Lets look at how this might go.

SAVAGES**

Player Races;

Orcs, Goblins, Gnolls, maybe Thri-Kreen

Normal D&D is the points of light pressing out into the surrounding darkness like a spider web.  Instead, this would be a collapsing natural world. A world of tundra, mountains, forests and ancient sacred deeps slowly being strangled by an encroaching and consuming civil order. The races that live here are not reaching out, but being pushed back in irregular patterns. They are martial, vital cultures who, yes, might eat a guy but it’s nothing personal.

Adventures are, instead of going into dungeons: breaking into villages and towns, and even cities in the end game. As well as dealing with monsters and all the usual D&D stuff. Treasure could be food or land. There could be multiple civilised peoples with different attitudes and a patchwork of old/new lands with different challenges.

'Monsters' sneaking through a semi-civilised area is like Heroes sneaking through the wilderness.

(If you want to be extra-sure to not offend the parents, make the evil empire extra evil, fascist, racist and nasty even to its own so when you take it on its all right really dad.)

UNDERDARK

Player Races;

Drow, Duregar, Svirfneblin, Myconid, Olm, Kua-Toa? Quaggoths?

Ok even with a lot of fudging this one is going to be a bit evil. But, all you need to do to make it acceptable is have the players face off against things that are even worse and do it in ultra-dangerous circumstances. World-conquering daemons, Mindflayer Crusades.

Cunning members of ancient hidden cultures battle and destroy immortal evils deep beneath the surface of the earth. Decadent but brilliant badasses pull mad intrigues against even-badder scum. Or just: a mixed group of low status adventurers put aside racial resentments and, to everyone’s surprise, become ultra-competent league of problem solvers. It would be a bit like mid-run Breaking Bad crossed with the A-Team.

THE DEAD

Player Races;

Skeleton, Vampire, Revenant, Ghost? Lich? Mummy?

Skeletons level up into Skelton warriors and Death Knights, or become Liches if they get good enough at magic. Non-corporeal is tricky but could give them increasing abilities to affect the world as they get stronger. Basic spirit can level up through poltergeist, to shadow or ghost.

A city of the dead like Mievilles High Cromlech. Obsessive ritualised timeless society.  Missions based on memories or sorrows or requests to retrieve particular relics and fragments of the dead. Down time periods take place over centuries, not years. Char Gen could be you are all made in the same dungeon by the same necromancer, then heroes attack.

THE BLUE WORLD

Player Races;

Tako, Triton, Merman, Sea-Elf?

(Ok I read through all the 'good' underwater player races and they are rubbish.(Except maybe Tako))

Ixitxachitl, Sayhuagin, Locathah.

No-one ever does the ocean as it is meant to be done and that’s because they treat it as a big dish. Like an alternate map, but underwater. It's a complex, fluid three dimensional flowscape. The real continents and nations are not the shape of the land beneath the sea but the currents and layers of the seas itself. The different trophic zones are like bordering countries, the great oceanic flows that bring warmth and cold around the globe are like continents.

Different races and cultures dominate different vectors and layers. Many of the cities move. Everyone underwater thinks of it as the 'real world' not as an addendum to the land. Because you would if you had access to the majority of the planet.

There are numerous deep-sea caves, so that solves that problem. Missions could be to the ruined palaces carved upside down under the arctic ice, to the lightless trenches, to the undersea volcanic borderlands where fire and water meet. Plus, numerous sunken cities. Floating cities built underwater and lost or abandoned, drifting, full of ghosts and a thousand years of accumulated clumped together history. Like undersea Space Hulks. The cursed city of Repak-Noh appears drifting silently on the borders of the Troposphere, before it inevitably falls back into the midnight zones and is lost for another millennia. Who shall investigate its gleaming portals? You. You shall. Underwater D&D, not as a holiday, but as the main game.

OUTSIDERS

Player Races

Ehhh, Githanki aaannd the other space/psionic ones? Shardminds? Ok this ones a bit of a reach.

I suppose your base is the realm of madness and dreams and reality itself is the dungeon. A nest of freezing time knotted space inhabited by strange beings.

Anyway. To sum up.

The point is that you could have all of these in the same world, but they would remain different and powerful to each other because the each inhabit a different kind of moral and experiential universe. Yes, you can do crossovers, but the dead are always strange to the living. The sea is always strange to the land. The 'savage' is always strange to the civilised.

They are all heroes but they are heroes inside their own worlds like everyone is, and the difference between those worlds lets you have difference and diversity whilst keeping them strange to each other, so when they show up in each others stories they are still reasonable monsters.

Kids are used to this because they know it’s from Warcraft and its ilk where everything is playable, yet separate.

Each would be a different kind of game, but all you would need for each one is a new players handbook. The basic engine underneath would remain the same. Maybe new ideas for missions and xp. And your items and treasures from one book can be the treasures and monsters for every other book.

*Yes I'm sure they have this kind of thing in the 'East' as well and that 'West' and 'East' are troubled concepts, thank you Richard.

** I know Richard, I know.

What to do?

A long time ago I wrote a possible index for Veins Of The Earth. It’s here.

I have done quite a lot of work on it and a lot has changed. The rest of this is an assessment of the work I have done so far and estimation of what I still need to di, with an idea of what the finished book might look like.

All of this leads up to a question  about what to do with all this. That is an argument about money. I invite you all to contribute your thoughts to this argument about money on the internet. Remember my rules.

So. First I needed an encounter table. I decided it needed living parts, so I started making monsters. Got a little side-tracked.  

The bestiary, ‘Pariahs of Creation’ is looking like a 1^st draft might be done in the next month or three. Then I need to go back to the table and the caves and re-order those. The whole thing together looks like a combination of these things.

3 life without light extremophile and fungal personalities, treasures, magic, politics. Cracked and ancient evolutionary paths. Ancient genetics from the dawn of life. Forgotten Phylum.

10 the shape of the space small scale immediate/tactical cave generator.

17 people you meet and why they want to kill you npc's (is there such a thing underground?

19 encounters 2 part encounter table, geographical and animate

What else needs to be done and what would the book as a whole look like?

I am thinking I will probably end up combining these three things

2 corpse of a river in the body of the sea. Karst diagram, most likely entrances. How Karst works, what it's like.

15 nobles of the deep Random table for generating rivers, water features, water generally.

24 larger cave system equivalent to street system.

They will become another large table I am currently thinking of as the ‘flows’ table. Its purpose would be to give you a larger scale view of the systems of caves around you, how they were arranged, how they came to be.  It wold tell DM’s the pattern in which to arrange their systems, not exactly, but a general format. So that, when people moved from system to system, they could tell they had gone into a different area, just from the arrangement of the caves.

It would also be a table of rivers, and of mines and some other things. This is not as stupid as it sounds.

Cave systems are only created a number of ways.

- Rivers and water. (In the real world this is the major way. Water + limestone = caves)

- Mines and workings (In a fantasy world there could be layered millennia of these)

- Lava tubes, theoretical chemical bleeds from beneath the earth (Could be true, there are sulphur created caves in (I think) Mammoth cave system in America that may be there even without water coming from above.

- Weird magical shit (God Ichor caves, magical re-ordering, Godzilla-warrens e.t.c)

What combines these things is that in every case something flows and it creates spaces in the rock. The nature of the flow changes the patterning and arrangement of the caves. Water and Lava and god Ichor are obvious Strange chemicals from beneath also. Mines follow the patterns of minerals, so that sort-of works too. With deliberate workings it gets a bit more complicated, be we could (at a pinch) say that capital, or trade or political will flows like water or like a river so the nature of the intangible abstract affects the formation of cave systems in the same way.

What else would be in the book?

I wanted a series of small dungeons that would give people places to travel between and reasons to travel. Currently I think of this as the SpiderSilk Road. It would combine elements of the following things:

5 the vampire court/and others

6 the fungal underground railroad

7 the hive of glass

One dungeon is half-done. Sky-Stone-River-Place. It needs a lot of work to make it any good. Ultimately I want one dungeon for each intelligent race and maybe one or two more. Thinking of adding the Deep Carbon Observatory and Dark Biosphere Investigations. Though those may end up as introductory rival organisations that give you reasons to go deep underground. (Of course the Civillopede will appear as an NPC. A Monster and a mini-dungeon)

What else?

1 Grow Your Own Planet – I still like this idea, both as a way of bringing players into generating a larger scale game space and also as providing a ‘world map’ that lets you know where you are and where you could go. My current vision of this is like an earth-curve with upside-down trees.

4 his body blocked the route

8 classic climbs

9 Cave Crawl Rules

14 breakdown Including

Hallucination table

21 dying in the dark what happens when the lights go out or (they search your body)

I imagine these all being combined into ultra-simple cave crawl rules. (At it’s most basic, half your players encumbrance budget, a big list of things to go wrong when they go over budget, build the sensory/detail aspects into the failures list for people who don’t want to actually have to learn everything about caving before they go pretend caving) The purpose of the rules should be to encourage people to to properly paranoid/obsessive about rope, light and encumbrance, to reward those who are, and punish (in interesting ways) those who are not.

Hallucination is an actual monster now, the Rapture. I think I will make that a more potent presence in the game. Not an actual monster like the Pariahs but an intangible living thing, waiting and watching, always present, ready for you to get tired and make a mistake, insinuating itself into you silently and invisibly. It’s more fun (I think) for players to have a kind of active relationship with insanity rather than it just being a blank force like gravity.

There should be benefits to being close-to-crazy as well. You adapt to the Underdark mentally (and perhaps Physically). If you come out you are like an Underworld veteran, wearing smked lenses in the sun, agoraphobic, hypersensitive, pale and dark-adapted.

12 black market

16 extremophile/fungal treasures and tools

18 maps and guidesv

20 I search the body

Stuff and things. These will need work. Could be one table maybe.

13 the impossiblity of darkness  - This one is important. I still envision a Light Economy as being a very important factor in driving/limiting exploration and travel. Light is a quasi-currency in fact. Always running out, always needing to get more. This should also key into making the players obsessed with light and the kind of light they have. It should highlight an important factor which is the living, liquid relationship between light and darkness. Players in this book should not simply be moving into a dark space, they are divers in a tiny fortress of light. Dark follows them, worms its way into every available crack, retreats unwillingly before them. Each kind of darkness is different and each kind of light is different. It seems impractical to write about but I am not sure that anyone has written about it in that way before, anywhere. So that would be nice to do.

Other things

11 whispers in the dark – not sure about this one, I like it but maybe at the end.

22 speliothaumaturgy

The Question(s)

Should I sell this stuff?

How should I release it?

(of course these questions interrelate.)

Selling Pro’s

- People are more likely to pay attention to something if they pay a nominal amount of money for it, I want people to actually read it not keep it as a pdf on a forgotten drive..

- Can have a big fancy copy with hardback covers and art in it. (I designed it not to need art but I would like to have it.

- I would technically be a published writer.

If I did want to sell it for money should I do it myself, lots of work at stuff I am not good at (ie layouts) and no idea how to market anything.  Or offer it to a publisher?

Not-Selling Pro’s

- I did tell my friend months ago that I might give it away free,

- If you want people to use it then just put it in people’s hands, let them decide if they want it.

- People all over the blogs have given away stuff that is often better than this.

- If it wasn’t for the blog and the people reading it and commenting then this would never have happened or been done.

- HONOUR. Would Worf sell it? Would Picard? Sometimes you play the game, sometimes the lesson is not to play.

- Won’t make any money, will die poor anyway, may as well do the right thing.

- Scared of Kent.

How should I release it? Bits-and-pieces, or all-at-once?

In-bits-and-pieces Pro’s

- Oh god it took so long to do, so, so long. The rest may never be finished. Can I wait another year? Two? I feel like I’m going crazy working on this dark weird thing no-one cares about. I need my madness validated. Have to get something out there.

- I want something out there with my name on it so I can point to it and say ‘look, this is something I can do’

- The full thing may be massive. Even the bestiary is going to be about 70 pages? Will anyone want the giga-thing?

-Paraiah’s could stand quite well on it’s own.

Bit’s-and-pieces cons.

- It will have a much bigger impact as a whole thing.

- Just because the bestiary got massive you have no idea if the rest will. In fact you will be actively trying to keep it under control and shorten it. So you could end up releasing a thing, then a petty little extra thing to go on top.

- You have absolutely no emotional self-control. You eat every biscuit in the pack. You drink everything in the fridge. The only reason you’re not fat is because you stopped buying food. You should listen to other people on this one.

- It feels more aesthetically and culturally potent to have a big, whole thing that is distinctively itself and nothing else. It creates a powerful nexus of attention that draws people into the imagined world in a deeper way, therefore becoming a better piece of art. (This is the vast-tome, welcome-to-my-alterworld school of RPG design)

The AntiRaggi

So calm, so good. You'd leave your children with him if you went to the shops. If he stayed the night over you'd find him doing the washing up in the morning.

Whenever I hear Vincent Baker in a podcast or see him explain something in one of these videos I always get the impression that if you asked him if he wanted Brown sauce or Tomato he would purse his lips, look down and to the right for a second, nod, and say 

"That.. that's a really interesting question. Thanks. Thanks for bringing that up. You've really shown me a new side to this. I'm going to think about that."

Then a week later he releases a hyper-focused pdf-only rpg where Genghis Khan has to choose between brown or red sauce and the decision changes the future of the whole world and you play the sauce but you are also in the future betting on the outcome. It would be called Sauceoscope. The Forge would love it. Knowing the rules would get you laid at Gencon.

I really really liked Apocalypse World, which he made, and I really really like LOTFP, which it's for, so if anyone out there feels the same and you have $20.00 to spare go and fund his Wizard Tower thing here-

I want to play in that goddammn wizards tower so bad!! Even I spent 20.00 on it and I am a fucking prole with a part time job.

ITS BASED ON JACK VANCE! YOU ALL LIKE JACK VANCE DON'T YOU NERDS? Come on, some of you have real jobs and lives and stuff. You can afford this.

They Must Be Fought

Jeff Rients posted about a D&D world where the only gods were the Evil Boss-Monsters from the Fiend Folio.

Lolth - Spider Queen of Demons

Cryonax - Prince of Freezing Blood and Shattering Ice

Imix - Prince of All-Consuming Flame

Ogrémoch -Prince of Crushing Stone

Olhydra - Princess of the Drowning Waters

Yan-C-Bin - Invisible Prince of Thunder and Lightning

Ssendam - Lord of Insanity

Ygorl - Lord of Entropy

For some reason I started thinking about this Quote from Dr Who -

'Some corners of the Universe have bred the most terrible things, things that stand against everything we believe in. They must be fought.'

Then I thought about dark heroes in a world ruled by evil gods. Roguish bastards putting cold steel between the people and the gods that would destroy them. And about sanity points and stuff like that. Then I thought about the horror of trying to be honourable in a world where the only gods are bad. It sounds fucking awesome.

Then I thought about saving throws and how little sense they make.

Saving Throws

Breath

Poison or Death

Petrify or Paralyse

Wands or Device

Magic or Spells

They stand between the PC and death, but what do they represent? They are totally disconnected from the stats, chilling out there on the side of the character sheet, so it can't be that. So I came up with this.

Breath – the favour of Olhydra

Poison or Death – the boon of Yan-C-Bin

Petrify or Paralyse – the eye of Ygorl

Wands or Device - the favour of Lolth

Magic or Spells – the word of Ssendam

Will you serve the gods and gain their favour?

OR DEFY THEM LIKE THE BASTARDS THEY ARE?

I will call it 'Swords Against Madness' or 'They Must Be Fought'