January 7, 2024 hex culture adventures, afternoon espresso, amateur hour, encounters, monks, monsters, Uncategorized

food web

I have been thinking about two wildly different shows: Mrs. Davis (a stage magician hunting nun / mystic from Reno, Nevada) and Scavengers Reign (space colonists get marooned on a planet with a mysterious and infinitely complex ecology).

What they have in common is a strong sense that something strange is going on deep behind the scenes. This often manifests as a snowballing series of semirelated or ambiguously related encounters. Sister Simone in Mrs. Davis keeps on running to a number of feuding secret societies and their agents who have an intense but unknown interest in her and each other. When you have a run in with the superintelligent AI app, the weird German treasure hunters take notice, which leads to an encounter with yet another faction when they intervene in ways I don’t want to spoil.

Similarly, the survivors in Scavengers Reign stumble across a creature that’s hunting or being hunting, which then kicks off a long series of encounters as predators and prey get involved and entangle/endanger the survivors further.

I’ve modeled how this could work in games in a short encounter table. Basically, you have encounters as normal, but certain reaction roll results either guarantee a certain encounter the next turn or guarantee that the next rolled encounter will be with a certain creature. If you run into a stressed out and Unfriendly prey animal, it means there’s a predator nearby. This means you can have normal encounters, but some make you fall forward into another encounter that demonstrates the relationships between creatures. There’s a little extra bookkeeping, but you just have to make note of what happens next turn and what replaces the next encounter, which isn’t too complex.

1d4 Indigo Steppe Encounter Table

2d100 Carrot Snails
3d6 Humpbacked Oryxes
1 Langouste Leopard
2d4 Big Scarlet Crawler

Carrot Snail

Roll	Result
2	Highly stressed by a nearby predator; will vent harmless but foul-smelling oil out of their eyespots on anyone who enters melee range. Next turn is a guaranteed encounter of humpbacked oryxes in addition to rolled results. Next rolled encounter is replaced with langouste leopards, attracted by the scent of snail oil that humpbacked oryxes are often drenched in.
3-5	Being hunted. Next rolled encounter result is replaced with humpbacked oryxes that are on the snails’ trail
6-9	Photosynthesizing, unbothered.
10-11	Senescent. These snails are at the end of their lifespan and full of seed-larva. They offer themselves up to likely predators in hope they will be eaten, thus spreading their larva (which gestate as they pass harmlessly through the eater’s digestive tract).
12	Will warble and approach with adorable little hops. They are infected with megaplasmodia; their eyespots will erupt into plumes of bacteria-bearing aerosol upon entering melee range of any uninfected creature. Save vs Poison get infected with megaplasmodia.

3d6 Humpbacked Oryx

Roll	Result
2	Moving quickly because a langouste leopard is in the area. Next encounter is replaced with a langouste leopard.
3-5	Protecting their young. 2d6 oryx calves are hidden nearby; the adult oryxes will go berserk if they are approached.
6-9	Grazing. Next rolled encounter is replaced with big scarlet crawlers that want to scavenge their shit.
10-11	Hungry, scavenging. Will nose through pockets and bags looking for food and positively remember anyone who gives them something.
12	Will amble up amicably. They are infected with megaplasmodia; their eyes will explode into plumes of bacteria-bearing aerosol upon entering melee range of any uninfected creature. Save vs Poison get infected with megaplasmodia.

1 Langouste Leopard

Roll	Result
2	Starved, sick. Can’t fail morale checks.
3-5	Hunting. Will attack but retreat if faced with any real violence. Until killed or fully chased off, it will secretly accompany every subsequent encounter, waiting for a chance to ambush.
6-9	Hunting something else.
10-11	Just ate; curious. Will accept bribes and is less likely to hunt anyone who bribes it with snacks.
12	Will act like a big cute cat. It is infected with megaplasmodia; after frolicking for a little while, it will turn to leave just as its tail explodes into a giant plume of bacteria-bearing aerosol. Save vs Poison get infected with megaplasmodia.

2d4 Big Scarlet Crawlers

Roll	Result
2	Confused. They are infected with megaplasmodia and will detonate into a sticky spume of bacteria-bearing purple ichor as soon as they ram into an uninfected creature. Take 3d6 damage, Save vs Breath for half; Save vs Poison or get infected with megaplasmodia.
3-5	Performing a mating ritual. Will attack only if approached.
6-9	Busily sifting through piles of oryx dung.
10-11	By chance unthreatened by the PCs; if offered food, they will trail behind by them until the next time the party rests, effacing all trace of their passage; negates all impending encounters. If there are no impending encounters, players can choose to reroll the encounter die the next time an encounter is rolled.
12	Will trail the PCs, effacing all trace of their passage; negates all impending encounters. If there are no impending encounters, players can choose to reroll the encounter die the next time an encounter is rolled.

Uses

This is probably best for relatively small encounter tables in places that PCs will be spending a lot of time in; if they’re just passing through or there are a lot of different kinds of encounters, I think it could end up as just a bunch of weird stuff happening. PCs have to linger long enough to understand how different behaviors are associated with different outcomes for the interesting part of this mechanic to really kick in.

This example uses animals to model an ecology, but you could model some fun Mrs. Davis / Crying of Lot 49 shenanigans where Neorosicrucians are always encountered on teal Vespas and when they’re Neutral it’s because they’re too busy fleeing from Retrotheosophists to try to throw fake blood on you, and everyone is getting chased around by the local SETI chapter, which is trying to whisk people away in their ice cream truck without getting nabbed by the IRS.

You could also do fun stuff like having certain creatures that aren’t on the encounter table at all and only show up as consequence to a prior encounter. This could be good for rare, especially dangerous predators or especially mysterious NPCs.

April 27, 2017 jacinto adventures, afternoon espresso, flowerland, monsters, npcs

The Bode

Very quickly wrote a brief adventure for Flowerland/Horror Florida using a Monsterparts-y hack that I will run this weekend, or at least offer as a hook. There’s not a clean way to resolve the situation besides “rolling a huge boulder in front of the dungeon”, but that’s okay I guess.

There is a hill north of town where the pine trees grow and nothing else. It’s dark there, and too quiet, and too cold, even in the thick of summer.

If you are playing close attention, you might notice that all traces of the most recent wildfire stops short at the base of the hill, where the pine forest begins. If you have spent a lot of time in the woods, you might expect there to be palmetto scrub under these pine trees, not just the dead needles heaped there now.

At the top of the hill, where it is darkest and coldest, where the trees grow so dense your shoulders always brush their trunks no matter how you turn yourself, stands a temple built from roughly hewn basalt, furred with moss and crusted with lichen. There is no light inside, and the faint draft blowing from its low entrance smells foul and mineral, as if the earth started to rot like flesh. Water dews continuously on the interior walls, making the steps down to the inner chamber slick.

At the bottom you’ll find a circular room, maybe twenty feet in diameter, spiderweb cracks radiating from the jagged-edged pool of water punched into the slab floor at the center. Arranged in a circle around it are twelve deformed animal skulls: too many eye sockets, two or three mandibles fanning out from a twisted jaw, melted-wax contours and clusters of horns. These skulls are cursed, they are a curse, they are best left untouched, they are called The Bode.

IN THE TOWN OF VER
Pretty much everybody in town is talking about a bunch of messed up stuff happening in the wilderness to the north of Ver, known locally as the Old Church Wood. It’s always had an unsavory reputation, but there’s has been a spate of disappearances and bad omens associated with it.

Shrinekeeper Trinidad, the town’s cleric.

Despite his warnings and the Woods’ ominous reputation, a pair of hunters–Trinidad’s friends–pursued a deer into the pines to the north. They haven’t returned, and that was a week ago. That was the start of the trouble.
Every sunset, Trinidad lights the ritual lanterns along the perimeter of Ver. The northernmost ones have been blowing themselves out by midnight, when they should last until sunrise.

Rudriq, hunter.

Rudriq stopped hunting around the Old Church Hills when he found animal skulls wedged between tree branches there.

Pilar, witch.

Distrusted by people of Ver, considered possibly to blame.
She claims she saw an oddly proportioned creature–something on all fours, like a deer or a coyote, it had a pale face and an awkward gait–the night after the hunters should have come back.

Odesa, the town’s mayor.

She had mediated a fight between the two hunters over the game they caught a month ago, and believes they got into some sort of fight out in the woods, or else it’s bandits. She’s dealt with a lot of bandits over the years.
Odessa thinks everyone is seized by superstition and is ready to led her band into the Old Church Wood to solve this once and for all–but has been so far dissuaded by Trinidad’s pleadings.

Katarina, general store propietor

Her caravan hasn’t come back since this whole mess started. See if her idiot employees got eaten by a ghost or not.

Luis, farmer

missing from his farm since yesterday. He had been complaining that something had been going after his livestock, but not like most predators–they were killing for sport.
His farm is to the north, a few minute’s walk past Trinidad’s torches. If the players investigate, they will find his house unlocked, but his barn locked from the inside. His goats are cut apart–like they unraveled off of their own bones–and all of their skulls are missing.

THE OLD CHURCH WOOD
Dense pine trees on a steep hill. It’s dark and chill.

Encounters.
1-2: Mutilated… 1-deer 2-coyote 3-bobcat 4-black bear
3. Abandoned caravan, horses beheaded and cut to pieces, goods untouched. This is the only treasure in the whole adventure, now that I think about it.
4. Tree laden with animal skulls wedges between branches
5. Body of Luis or caravaners
6. Brood of Bode

Brood of Bode

HD: d8
10 EP
Defense 14
Naked, wiry man, running on all fours far faster than a person should be able, wears a filthy deer skull over his face
Spells: Can cast one spell per encounter from its list:

Fog Cloud
Phantasmal Force (a dark presence like a passing cloud, moving through the trees like the first cold blast of wind from an approaching thunderstorm)
Snuff (extinguish all torches, lamps, etc within earshot of its scream)
Inflict Light Wounds (what it’s been using to cut its victims apart),

THE OLD CHURCH
Brood of Bode will not enter, at least at first. One of the hunters is in this chamber, his head and torso submerged in the central pool. If approached, he will slide all the way in.

The Bode can speak in this chamber. Their voice is subaudible, like something half-imagined. They will offer their power to the strongest fighter in the party in return for a sacrificed comrade, and they are not lying: the sacrificer will become another Brood of Bode.
The skulls of The Bode are cursed. Anyone who breaks their skulls will never be able to recover from their wounds. The skulls come back when nobody is looking, anyway.
The Bode can see anything in the pines of Old Church Wood.
The Brood is the other hunter, who sacrificed his friend. His mind is lost to The Bode. The Bode will tell a PC what the hunter did if the PC keeps them talking.
The pool is cursed. Anyone who tries to swim in it will sink to the bottom and drown, and all attempts to haul them out have disadvantage. The body can be retrieved by any other method.
Anyone left alone in the Old Church must make a save or vanish. This increases the Brood of Bode’s HD by one step
The Bode want more Brood, they want more skulls in the pines to see out of, they want the wards on Ver destroyed so they can claim its inhabitants.

May 16, 2015 jacinto adventures, afternoon espresso, angels, megadungeon murder mystery, monsters, san serafín, table

XIII

This is kind of an experiment. Every session there is a 1 in 6 chance of one of these things coming up or being mentioned or whatever. It’s a conspiracy generator. Not the best format, but it was fun to write so whatever.

by Dominic Alves, distributed under CC

I
There is a god, and its name is Thirteen. It is the lord of inversion and the architect of misfortune; its clerics wear yellow and hold power over doppelgangers, oozes, and devils. The Constables hunt its worshipers like animals, but there always seems to be more.

by Jerry Kirkhart, distributed under CC

II
There is a society, and nobody knows its name or its members. Everyone who matters has gone to one of their parties–they only invite thirteen people at a time, and it’s terribly difficult to secure an invitation. Sometimes people don’t come back, but that just makes it all the more exciting, doesn’t it?

III
There is a city where nobody goes, a city of sepulchers, a city by the sea. You can’t find it on a map, and no matter how far you travel, you won’t ever reach it. Some priests say the gods cut it out of this world like a tumor, but if you take a certain route, passing through certain cursed doorways and traversing certain cursed crossroads, you will arrive on one of its thirteen grand avenues, which intersect in the center like a spider’s web or a perverse star. The dead hang by cables from the telephone wires.

IV
There is a man by the side of the road, and he is shouting at you. He speaks of an angel with thirteen wings and a hydra with thirteen heads. He says he will be dead soon, but this is a thing that you all must know.

V
You found a book about a crow with thirteen eyes, scattered across its face like any ugly constellation. It is terrible old and utterly malign: a colossal rival of dragons, a gleeful anthropophage, a bearer of curses. It steals children from their parents, raises them and loves them with all its evil heart. They don’t grow up human.

by Anne-Sophie Leens, distributed under CC

VI
There is a syndicate with thirteen captains. They traffic in drugs, slaves, and precious metals; they are undercutting just about every major player in the city. Nobody can figure out who their suppliers are, or where their shipments are coming from, but everyone wants them gone. The Weaver’s Guild has placed a colossal bounty on the heads of their leaders, but it’s only resulted in a lot of dead assassins.

VII
Somebody murdered a Saint of Honey and Salt, carving a thirteen-pointed star into their chest. The local House has promised blood, and rumor has it they’ve had to purge their ranks of spies, though the details are fuzzy on who they were working for.

VIII
This buried and desecrated temple is the home to thirteen warlocks:

Gog and Magog, the hateful witch-children, each of which draws magic from the other
Illhammer, who casts spells with a mace fashioned from a devil’s femur
The Perfect Child of Man, who wears a yellow hood. The emissary of a god-city exiled from this world
Ratbelly, the red eyed waif, bound by her own oaths to the Forbidden Hour, which once sat between midnight and 1 a.m
Catbelly: the neurasthenic malefic, carried on a silk palanquin by 5 horned skeletons and empowered by a devil of smoke and blue fire
Murderboy: he walks on ceilings and weeps black tar; he was raised by a spider the size of a school bus that still sings him to sleep
Toothgirl: a creeping obsessive, built a god of neon tubes and rat bones that tells her who to kill
Gurn: she can unhinge her jaw like a snake and spit out almost anything she wants; cursed by her mother to be killed by a weapon of her own making.
Mammon: everything he does looks awkward and wrong, like a dog walking on its hind legs or a man running on all fours. A centipede lives in his clothes that teaches him the secrets of secret-eating and memory-killing
Nadir: wild haired troglodyte who lives at the bottom of a hole, which moves around when nobody’s looking. Sold her soul to a gravity angel, so she can’t pick herself off the ground.
Maculata: jelly-fleshed voyeur with a visible skeleton; holds congress with puddings, oozes, and jellies of all sorts.
Maastricht: a wretched old man with metal teeth, his pact with Satan makes him nigh omnipotent; his secret weakness is that he can only move when you’re looking at him

IX
There’s a series of thirteen pamphlets everyone’s reading. They make you remember things you’d forgotten, give you advice that makes you feel smart and capable and stronger, they make you forget your own inadequacy and weakness and stupidity, they make you want to find the other pamphlets, but they’re so hard to find and you can’t figure out where they come from. Everyone says something wonderful happens if you read all thirteen.

I’m tired of writing now. I’ll probably write more and I want to find a d13 for this.