Mont Sainte Bec

THE LAST ROOST OF THE BEAKED GOD

On the ungovernable border land between the North Eastern Crystal Frontier and the Imperial canton of Blackacre, the jagged Maiden Tomb mountains meet the sea, straggling out into the shallow, dark waters as a series of seamounts and spectacular cliffs. This land is home only to neolithic goat-herders, backwards fishing villages, and near abandoned outposts of various powers: Carceral Templars, the Warlock King’s Court, Imperial Syndicates, piratical Smugglers, and perhaps even the Ghouls of the Mud Isles. Rugged and fog shadowed, there are few reasons to come to this liminal land, beyond escape from elsewhere. Yet even here the hand of humanity has left a mark - a great ruin that constantly draws explorers, plunderers and tomb robbers - the ancient monastery of Mont Sainte Bec.

Built onto and within one of the pillars of rock that jut from the broad bay called the Black Mirror, Sainte Bec has stood from the earliest accounts of the region, a monastery that predates recorded history, devoted to the worship of the antediluvian avian deity … the enigmatic “Beaked God” whose worshippers once held dominion over a great dominion. Now in ruins, only two generations ago the monastery was still a place of opulent wealth, tithed by pilgrims for the cleansing songs of its choir and plied with generous gifts. A “Protected Hersey” under the laws of the Empire, the monastery had persisted, outwardly unchanging, collecting tariffs on sea trade and tithes, gaining a reputation for the power of its militant orders (falcon and ebon knights) and the availability of divine succor from its ancient god for those who could pay a high price.

Crystal Frontier - Ongoing Campaign - The Mud Isles

"Vpon the Seuentene Daye of the Seconde Moneth, that same daye were all ye fountaynes of the greate depe broken vp, and the wyir of ye heauens cast wyde."

- Late added marginalia in the Codex of Lead 7:11

Joseph Grady - The Bank of England - 1830
Imagining One's Capital in Ruins...

When the sky is clear and the rain breaks on the coast of Blackacre a brown smudge beneath dark clouds mars the horizon... The Mud Isles are scant miles away over the Silt Straits and Narrow Sea but they are a lost land. Now only known as home to the raft-borne raiders - bands of dozens or hundreds of “Ghouls” - who crash onto the shores of Blackacre almost every Fall. A watchword for cannibal horror and mindless barbarity, the Ghouls of the Mud Isles worship a vile devoured god beyond the understanding of any in the Empire or Resurgent Kingdom — except as a mirror reflecting the dark years of the Demon Emperors. The Ghouls are anathema, even more than the Blackheart cults they resemble and which still infect the Empire. Yet the the Mud Isles are not the waste of bone idols, stinking sucking mud, and festering midden of chewed bones that most imagine them to be. The Mud Isles were once a civilized place. A kingdom that traded with the Empire in ancient times, noted for its devotion to decorum, mercantile avarice, and delicate decor. Some few and foolhardy … or perhaps those who have made dark pacts allowing them the favor and acceptance of the rulers of the Mud Isles … trade there even now, pulling antiquities and treasures from the sunken ruins of the City of Lead.

Beyond the Crystal Frontier - A Gazetteer of the World

Fabulation, Tall Tales, & Lies.

The gem robbers and drifters of the Crystal Frontier come from every corner of the world, but they are often reluctant to speak of their homelands. It is difficult to learn much in the heat, dust, and desperation. Too many fear their own past: crimes committed, families abandoned, gods profaned, and lives failed. Others simply do not care to remember, living in the present, or in dreams of a future after some final big score. More have lost their memories to drink, lotus, chagga, mad weed, crystal poisoning, or sorrow. Perhaps it is simply the nature of places and times … they race towards change, but even unchanging each looks very different from the vantage point of a different life.

Information about the world beyond the Frontier is always vague, conditional, and disputed. Everyone knows that the Bull Kingdom is ruled by the Warlock King.  That to the South and West it builds his armies. Everyone knows that the port city of Aurum Ferro over the Maiden Tomb mountains is one of the great trade hubs of the world. Everyone has a different idea what all that might mean and everything else, all the detail and nuance is rumor and insinuation.

This doesn’t concern most people, who see five days or fifty miles travel as an epic journey. The roads are dangerous, and strange lands worse still — unknowns, filled with odd people and odd custom. Maps, while common enough in the past are no longer reliable, and the majority of travelers use only itineraries, lists of points along the road. The best itineraries mention rivers to be crossed, landmarks sighted, and the direction of roads ... but the majority are simple lists of easily memorized and often incorrect place names.

Inset is a newer map of the world, allegedly copied from the floor of the Library of Honorable Shipmen in the Capital of the Successor Empire. None have heard of the library, but the Capital has thousands of genteel ruins full of hidden knowledge. More detailed information is also available - usually in the rambling of drunks or from rag paper pamphlets sold for pennies and written with an eye towards the sensational.

1D8 Rumors About the Bull Kingdom

Moebius Drew One or Two Castles

The Bull Kingdom is to the South and West of the Crystal Frontier. Its capital is the great island city of Matricex, or “The City of Orchards” as it is called in the Kingdom’s popular romantic operas. Despite its youth, the Bull Kingdom is a powerful and growing ”Resurgent Kingdom”, led by its Warlock King and his court of sorcerers. While the land is ancient, the Kingdom was carved out from the Imperial Dependency of Kosse Sildar only 60 years ago when its ancient “Silver Princesses” and their military matriarchy were extinguished and overthrown in violent revolutionary upheaval.

1. The Warlock King is a horrific tyrant who rules through fear and dark demon pacts. He turns his enemies and allies alike into demon hosts and murders thousands a day in sacrifices to the Kings of Hell!

2. The Warlock King is a philosopher who cares deeply for the nation. He ended land indenture and opened the military, church, government and sorcerers’ cabal to all. Yes, there were excesses in the past, but the King did not order the massacres and has always regretted them.

3. The mountaineers are still loyal to Kosse Sildar and a secret Princess reigns among their villages, they are not bandits — they are soldiers in a long war to return the Bull Kingdom to just rule.

4. The Bull Kingdom is a place of ancient chivalry, and takes honor seriously. Even the bandits and farmers believe in the code of the duel, the freedom of honorable persons, and standing by one’s word.

5. Magic is tightly regulated in the Bull Kingdom. Wizards and sorcerers must register and pay a bond price. Foreign practitioners risk having their spellbooks confiscated or worse if they are found without a permit.

6. The Kingdom is regimented like an army camp and the Warlock King’s armies are growing each year, he may have given each of his subjects freedoms and universal rights, but he’s also given them a soldier’s pack and a pike.

7. The peasants' ancient gods, The Red Bull of the Earth and the Honeyed Goddess are worshiped again! In the Bull Kingdom, Kosse Sildar’s Earth Serpent is not forbidden, but her church wanes.

8. Demon hosts haunt the Bull Kingdom’s hills, both remnants of the war and escaped from the King’s dungeons. It is always hiring monster hunters and knights errant to hunt them, but is a wild and harsh land without real governance.

1D8 Rumors About the Pyre Coast

Roger Dean

A narrow strip of Terra Nullis beyond Umber Havens. Nominally an Imperial holding it is a blasted land of fry hills that acts as a buffer between the Empire and the breakaway Maritime Province. It is notable as the abandoned battlefields of its Southern reaches are the desolation of Zubrab, a gigantic Sanguine Wyrm.

1. The Pyre Coast is a land out of time, broken, rocky and poor, inhabited only by goat herds with stone tools. Add the wreckage of a sorcerous war and a plague of wyrms and it is nearly as cursed and inhospitable as the ruined Heart Provinces.

2. Zubrab, the Everhungering Wind is a dragon of war, a bloody red wyrm birthed by human conflict, like all wyrms, a curse of the gods. Its desolation swarms with his hideous spawn, some almost as big as their parent. Yet the wyrm also calls to men and women maddened by war, and they flock to Zubrab’s lands. Beware of Red Riders, as they know only cruelty and violence.

3. The coast itself may be ruined, home to furtive herders, but the Pyre Sea is dotted with island ports, where trade flourishes: whalers, fishing fleets, smugglers and the privateers of several nations dart among its islands, all prey to sanguine sea wyrms spawned from Zubrab.

4. The drowned city of Angel Reef, once a wonder of floating squares and delicate spires that climbed from the warm blue sea, was destroyed by the Maratime’s. The wreck that remains, sunken or awash, ghost haunted and home to sea worms is one of the richest ruins in the world.

5. An island in the Pyre Sea is home to a tribe of sorcerous sports: golden skinned, 7’ Giant who heal wounds at an unnatural rate. These people live in hidden splendor surrounded by the luxuries of the old Empire. They seek guides for an embassy to the Capital — they wish to state their obvious perfection and assume the Imperial throne, as is clearly their due.

6. Ruins older than the Empire cover the coast, many carved into the likeness of birds and men. Most are empty, but some few still hold hidden caches of ancient gold.

7. There is something older than humanity asleep beneath the Pyre Coast, some spirit of wilderness and primeval power. It will never wake, but it stirs and dreams now, and its dreams hunt the coast, fel beasts that devour flesh and soul.

8. The people of the coast itself — skin clad, flint armed goatherds, are angry and tired. There are more of them then one expects and they have a leader in the sorcerer Nine Horn, called the Ibex King. A red harvest is coming.

Crystal Frontier - Ongoing Campaign - The Forest

“There are many worlds. Some have passed and some are still to come. In one world the Lui all creep; in another they all walk; in another they all fly. Perhaps in a world to come, the Lui may walk on four legs; or they may twist like snakes; or they may swim in the water like fish. Perhaps this is that world already."

 - Woundsmens’ Fable

The deep forests of Blackacre, now known as the Blackwound, are older than humanity, and perhaps older than the world itself. While the Old People of the deep wood are either extinct, mythical, or retreated into some unbreachable fastness within the mountains, the forests are still no friend of humanity. Rough Imperial logging towns and camps of prisoners, heretics, and undesirables under inquisitional and military rule are the limits of civilization, even close to the canal that tenuously connects the province to the Capital.

Along the Grande Gracht canal, noble and merchant dynasts once attempted to build hunting lodges or retreats, usually with the hope of being granted dominion when Blackacre finally “civilized”. Centuries after settlement Blackacre remains a brutal penal colony, despite minimal magical pollution, flowing wealth, and a ecclesiastical zeal. Blackacre, and especially the fecund Blackwound is winning... As the trees spread their gloom, the forest people are losing the trapping of Imperial culture, slinking back into fur clad obstinacy, and mere subsistence as they embrace cultic superstition and invent “old ways”. The province seems doomed to wither before it blooms into the bastion of Imperial faith that the province’s Nuncios aspire to.

The Blackwound resists the dreams of Imperial theocrats, devouring or transforming the young missionaries and curates that the See pours into it each Spring. Even generations of logging have failed to check the forest’s growth and tracts cleared mere decades ago are again choked with tall straight trees. Flash floods in the Autumn destroy camps and mills, ferns erupt among the stumps to devour fields, and in high summer, lightning fires rage through undergrowth to wash nutrients back into the soil allowing the trees to grow taller and encouraging the undergrowth erupt with new vigor.

Yet the Blackwound is simply a forest, perhaps unlike any other, grown on a grander scale grander, where the ferns, lichens, moss, and brambles of the floor often rise to near the height of a man, and the Great Trees sore until they are lost in the permanent green twilight. Entering the Blackwound is entering a hostile universe where paths lead in circles, the mists muffle sound, the trees confound invaders with their scale and conceal sudden obstacles: chasms, torrential creeks, deadfalls, sheer cliffs and bramble basins of wire strong thorn. The forest resents change, resents humanity’s dream of conquest, and resents intrusion.

Crystal Frontier - Ongoing Campaign Note: Templars of Blackacre

To the North and East of the Crystal Frontier, beyond the Bay of Fallen Stars or across the Maiden Tombs over the Road of Dead is the Province of Blackacre, sometimes known as the Blackmash. Grey salt marshes rising from the Silt Straights and beyond deep, wet forests of colossal evergreens and ancient malice. Blackacre was the last Imperial Province settled, and never much beyond wilderness. A wealth of lumber, fish and the rare dyes of found in the vast tidal pools along its shores provided impetus for settlement, but the climate, old sorcery and (according to heretic scholars and false prophets) the dogged resistance of the “old people'' who once lived in its forests has made it difficult to find voluntary settlers. The majority of residents in Blackacre are prisoners or the descendents of prisoners, sent to toil in the lumber towns fisheries and dye pools.Even the Imperial soldiery abhors Blackacre, long considered a dangerous punishment posting, and its 5th “Battle”, the Larks, who have been charged with Blackacres’ defense since before the rise of the Successor Empire, now exist only as a few hundred residents of canal and border forts subsisting on transit taxes. With the typical logic to Imperial governance, Blackacre, one of the few provinces that produces a surplus of wealth, trade goods, and raw materials is almost devoid of official protectors and most in need of them. The shores of Blackacre are directly across the murky shallows of the Narrow Sea from the Mud Isles … the Ghoul Kingdoms, now almost united under vile White God.

Bickering over resources between the elite of Dawn Rill and the Imperial Cult, mean that no colossi or lesser war machines have been redeployed to Blackacre, and the Cult’s fear of increasing the power of the military means that recruiting the 5th up to strength cannot even be discussed. Instead Blackacre’s coasts are protected from the raft fleets that come each autumn to reave and kidnap by penal templars. Sects of “Sword Saints”, devoted to Emperor Isacco Hydria, saint of tribulations and protector of the imprisoned, falsely accused, and repentant.

From five huge monastery-prisons, geomantically sculpted spires of sea basalt, and numerous smaller gaol hermitages, the penal templars watch the sea. An army of fanatics and felons that defend the shoreline’s dyers and fishers, but also extract dues and taxes in the form of food and raw materials. Those who have lived in the spires describe them as hellish. A cruel hierarchy, layered from top to bottom, where the newest prisoners or those of the lowest status live on a diet of kelp and barnacles in the half flooded galleries at the base. The cold seas seep and flood regularly into these dark vaults and the threat of drowning is as constant as that of the predatory gangs. Children of the galleries and the strongest fighters who survive the yearly gladiatorial contests are allowed into the dry stone above, where thousands of rock cut cells are home to a cruelly excessive creed of asceticism and martial training. When the training monks deem these unfortunates properly tempered and disciplined, they become part of the templar host, and move up to the temples, meditation halls, arenas, refractories, training halls, forges, and armories of the spire’s upper levels.

A Fistful of Crystals

Character Generation
and House Rules for My Home Game

I'm going to be running a Crystal Frontier game online, the first semi-public game I've run since the end of G+.  In preparation rather then introduce my house rules piecemeal I've prepared a character generation and basic rules document for the game.

It includes the major subsystems for my house ruled version of Original Dungeons & Dragons (the 1974 pre-Greyhawk version, but not using Chainmail). This is the system I've used for several years and I find it works quite well for dungeon crawls. The goal is a quick, low complexity system that makes exploration a coequal element of play and can be used for online two to four hour sessions in an expedition based (each session you must leave the dungeon) campaign.

They make significant changes to the base OD&D system, though I think most of these changes fill in voids in the original rules or streamline areas where the design doesn't support contemporary games. At it's core though it should still be that same sort of D6 and D20 based flatter power curve, high lethality system as the original.

Gus L. Free Adventure Archive

 

I've created an Archive of all the free adventures I've written since 2012 here:

FREE ADVENTURE PDF ARCHIVE

I also wrote a paragraph about each the adventures included to place them within my own design evolution and perhaps a larger story of OSR design from 2012 - 2020.

In Other NEWS Tomb robbers of the Crystal Frontier is available as a Print on demand version, on Drivethru for $16.00 (as of 9/22 - print costs change). This version includes an area map, added art and a new supplemental adventure.

Questing Beast Youtube Review

link for purchase

CRYSTAL FRONTIER - GYGAX '75 PART 1

A draft cover for a potential
Crystal Frontier adventure

A purchaser of Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier recently asked me how the adventure might fit into a larger setting. Specifically they inquired about the "Warlock King", ruler of the Bull Kingdom - who claims sovereignty over the Frontier but doesn’t seem to project much power into it. The Warlock King and Bull Kingdom have been mentioned in a couple of Crystal Frontier adventures, notably Marble Eye, the Bruja in The Bruja, The Beast and The Barrow is a refugee from the King’s court, hiding in exile from the his demonic assassins. Other then that we know of the King and his nation only through Jolly Diamond, the Bull Kingdom’s agent in Scarlet Town, a bad gambler and sore loser whose loyalty is enforced by a “demon mark” on his chest. There’s a few other tidbits of information about the Bull Kingdom and Warlock King scattered around Tomb Robbers, but nothing much, it’s largely a Swords & Sorcery cypher ruled by a powerful wizard who has a sinister reputation.

This is as it’s meant to be. Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier is a stand alone product, a dungeon with a minimal amount of setting to supplement it and maintain a Fantasy Western aesthetic. Hints and implications rather than a gazetteer with detailed descriptions.

Yet, The Crystal Frontier has been my home campaign for over a year, getting on to 25 sessions, with a 3rd and 4th level party. I’ve also written or at least written up notes on several more adventures for the setting, including the two large projects I’m working on currently covering the Frontier’s North Eastern coast, where fewer crystals fall, but the old history of the land is closer to the surface. So, while there’s only minimal published information on the Bull Kingdom and its Warlock King, The Successor Empire and its Syndicates, or the environs of the Crystal Frontier at large, I have a great deal of knowledge about it. For example I currently have enough notes and rough maps to quickly prepare, or run the following Crystal Frontier locations: The Tower of Musk (A manticore lair), Old Argento (Ruined former provincial capital), The Palace of War (A crashed yet mostly intact Empyrean invasion fortress/megadungeon), Cold Manse (ghoul infested haunted mansion), the Tower of Flints (pirates, owls, and a shrine to an Imperial sea god), Cold Water Hamlet, Stone Quay (a port ruled by cattle drovers), The Palace of Reflections (an extradimensional Empyrean villa accessible via a magic scroll and infested with a blue wyrm of unreason), The Bone Fields (ancient barrows being dug up to obtain ancient magic infused bones for fertilizer) and The Dead Colossus (a walking castle destroyed by the Warlock King himself during his ascent to power). Some draft art for these location illustrates this post.

I won’t reveal much detail about these locations or the factions and histories underlying them unless I get to publishing them as adventure locations (which is honestly unlikely in most cases), but I’m quite happy with this situation. These locations have evolved through my home game, and emerged from play because they make sense based on player interest and actions as part of what has been a largely emergent setting. Other people don’t need many details of the entire setting region, let alone the world its part of to run my adventures, and it’s likely best if they take the time to do their own world building as needed, taking or discarding the hints and vague outlines that my adventures provide.

 

Worldbuilding & Gygax ‘75
Setting is one of those popular aspects of RPG design that I enjoy immensely, but also don’t really find much use for. Like me, it seems that many referees and designers enjoy building their world, filling it with detailed minutia, histories, locations, and people. I’ve always found this both inevitable and secondary to, or worse inhibiting of play. There’s a great deal of advice on “world building” offered on blog posts and published in guides. Even most editions of the Dungeon Master’s Guide seem to contain a huge amount of suggestions about it. I don’t want to do that and I don't for my home games. At least not in the ways that it’s popularly suggested. I want the world of the setting to weigh lightly on my campaigns, to come through during play, but not demand a great deal of fidelity to some sort of “setting bible”. Instead my settings, especially anything I offer to others, should have big holes and unexplored spaces for me or another referee to add whatever they like. Most world building advice rejects this goal, and is often very “top down”: starting with the world, it’s cosmology, gods, and continents. This seems wrong to me.

I even made a little logo for
this nonsense!

Instead I like to approach things on a "just in time" basis, build from the ground up, design with the goal of creating what’s needful for play for the first session and building up from their. Back in 2013 I wrote a long post about this sort of setting design, but there’s a fine antecedent, the “Gygax ‘75” process, derived from a 1975 interview that Gary Gygax gave to a fan magazine, “Europa” titled “HOW TO SET UP YOUR DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS CAMPAIGN - AND BE STUCK REFEREEING SEVEN DAYS PER WEEK UNTIL THE WEE HOURS OF THE MORNING!”

I am usually not especially charitable to Gygax, I find his rules fussy, his ideas about refereeing antagonistic, his public behavior fairly odious (the litigiousness alone!), his writing frustrating, and the cultish fawning over him that still persists in parts of the hobby disgusting. However, Gygax also produced excellent adventures and championed the hobby of fantasy RPGs to great success and with obviously sincere love and conviction. I may not share his weird fixation on polearm variety, but I do appreciate that from the very dawn of a hobby he was one of the its primary inventors who got many things right in ways that have sometimes been too casually discarded. One such thing that Gygax did better then more contemporary sources (such as the 5th edition Dungeon Master’s Guide, which starts with a section titled “A Master of Worlds” and immediately leaps into designing a multiverse or entire world as a setting, cosmology first) was give setting design advice.The Gygax Dungeon Master’s Guide has a section about mid way through, “The Campaign” that begins with:

“What lies ahead will require the use of all of your skill, put a strain on your imagination, bring your creativity to the fore, test your patience, and exhaust your free time …Your campaign requires the above from you, and participation by your players. To belabor an old saw, Rome wasn't built in a day. You are probably lust learning, so take small steps at first. The milieu for initial adventures should be kept to a size commensurate with the needs of campaign participants … This will typically result in your giving them a brief background, placing them in a settlement, and stating that they should prepare themselves to find and explore the dungeon/ruin they know is nearby.”

Excellent and still trenchant advice which is better laid out and elaborated in the 1975 interview a few years prior. The “Gygax ‘75” process has become a bit of a regular challenge among designers who work with older editions of D&D, and it’s well explained here at DIY & Dragons. It’s also starting up again among several bloggers I enjoy, and spurred by the question regarding the Warlock King I’ve decided to apply it to the Crystal Frontier!