ONWARD!

Another year has passed, and my 11th blogging about old fantasy roleplaying games begins.  Looking around the classic RPGand Post OSR community today I see a lot of folks talking about 2021, what lessons they took from it, what they accomplished. I won't. I learned nothing in 2021.

2021 was a bad year.

Plague. Death. Fire. Flood. Ignorance. Malice. 

A year of mute calamity.

Sure, I put some adventures up on DriveThru RPG that got some ideas out of my head and which I hope some people enjoyed. I wrote some blog posts, including helping found the review site Bones of Contention, and managed to run 20 odd sessions of my Crystal Frontier home game, but 2021 is done.

NO PAST ONLY FORWARD

2022 is cracking from the egg now and I have some plans, hopes, and hobby aspirations. I've listed these projects below in rough order starting with the most possible and likely earliest to arrive.

 

1. CURSE OF THE GANSHOGGR

A 20ish page, fairy tale and saga influenced adventure for Ava Islam's Errant system. The Ganshoggr, a goose-dragon of prodigious size despoils the Goose Lands in the Empire of Birds as a mark of the avian gods' disapproval of the Goose King's war-making and misrule. The King wants it dead, his champions have failed and he certainly doesn't want to fight it himself. 

Where brave goskarls have failed perhaps waves of greedy errants may succeed. The Ganshoggr dwells in the ancient barrows of the Anser Kings, hoarding tombgold and plunder. Challenge the Ganshoggr to single combat, unravel its mysteries and weaknesses, murder it in its sleep, or simply steal its hoard and leave the gooselands are turned to a guano poisoned marsh.

I’ve currently written about 80% of the adventure and drawn the map, but still need to do layout and much of the art. Ganshoggr is primarily a work for a friend, but I am also using it to play around with fairy tale setting, mock the seriousness of most “viking” sorts of fantasy, and design a dragon adventure for low level parties/a monster hunting adventure. 

Powerful singular monsters in fantasy rpgs tend to be anti-climactic.  It’s hard to overcome the action economy or the players’ schemes without making something that can utterly destroy the party without a second thought. The Ganshoggr is an attempt to instead create a dragon that is 1) Very dangerous to confront, almost impossible even 2) Has clear fairy tale “rules” for how it acts 3) Offers alternative means to defeat and has discoverable weaknesses. 

 

2. CRYSTAL COAST EULOGY

Draft Cover

Tomb Robbers deserves a sequel, but rather then investigate further fallen fortresses and sepulchers of the Empyreans (though I hope to get back to that), I've decided to focus on another part of the blasted frontier. Around the Bay of Falling Stars at the Northeastern edge of the Crystal Frontier is a rugged coast, largely abandoned, but less magically poisoned then the plains where the crystal tombs fall.

Instead this land is mired in ignorance, feuds and old evil. The town of Coldwater rots inland, from the pirate shadowed cliffs and coves, once a plaything of the wealthy Cold family, and now isolated and failing.  Obsessed with their customs and artistic pretensions the people of Coldwater ignore the ruins of Cold Manse, burned by revolutionary violence and pretend that families don’t disappear from Coldwater in the night. The Manse is of course haunted, and despite the best efforts of their persecutors, the Cold Family endures.

Demon worshipers and beneficiaries/victims of the Blackheart Contagion, the Colds have endured because they are scheming, immortal cannibals hiding in the undercrypts of their ruined mansion and focused on their own aristocratic pretensions: religion, art, esoteric scholarship and gastronomy. Yet the Younger Colds chaff at the rule of their elders (and the cruel punishments that await family members who defy them) providing for faction conflict and intrigue as well as exploration and the catharsis of massacring ghoulish aristocrats.

Crystal Coast Eulogy is also an experiment for me, a break with Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontiers dense “Jewelbox” style in an effort to create an adventure that still offers faction intrigue and puzzle opportunities, but is less dense to support greater focus on navigation and classic exploration within the limitations of OSE or B/X’s movement systems and exploration procedure.  The main problem I have with the B/X exploration procedures is that like all early D&D exploration they seem to assume a far longer session time then online play supports. This is turn demands larger dungeons for them to function well, and larger dungeons are near impossible to write in my preferred style.

Interior Design Draft

My hope is that by using streamlined descriptions for many of the keys, and saving denser descriptions for around 20 important areas I can write a 100+ key dungeon without losing too much detail and setting. Likewise I want to see how well I can design a dungeon for these procedures that functions with shorter sessions which means lots of entrances, shortcuts and discrete sections of the dungeon. Not a full on nodal mega-dungeon, with small sections split by procedurally generated, scale enlarged or otherwise simplified empty regions, but a fully keyed large dungeon that is functional without ignoring movement speed and supply or demanding players explore it in six hour sessions.

While much of Cold Manse is a reference to the Ghormenghast novels, another aspect of Eulogy that I'm interested in is creating a haunted house - a close look at the cover image may see the influence of Disney's Haunted Mansion, and the interior is likewise intended to be filled with ghosts and phantoms that don't follow the standard Dungeons & Dragons structure for undead encounters. There's still a lot of work to do on Crystal Coast Eulogy, but I've play tested some of the first level, and it went well, so I think it's just a matter of sitting down and writing another 60 keys. Then the layout and art of course...

Draft Cover

3. CRYSTAL COAST REQUIEM

A companion to Eulogy, this is a regional point crawl with another dungeon (an abandoned lighthouse and shrine to the Imperial Saint of drowned sailors). Cold Manse from Eulogy will be the tentpole dungeon of the region, but it has other things going on, allowing referees with both books to run a region low level campaign. Rather then purely a gazetteer, Crystal Coast Requiem provides details and travel rules for a sub region of the Crystal Frontier, based loosely on the coast of Northern California. Faction and regional conflict, capable of quickly accelerating into a range war.

The core of Requiem is work I did in 2017 to support the re-release of Prison of the Hated Pretender, another dungeon with extensive notes -- instruction on the goal of the design or how to run it. Requiem focuses on faction intrigue, both within its dungeon and at the regional level, allowing the players to reshape the faction structure based on their actions.

I've also got a few other things planned or partially thought through, but the three projects above are the ones I hope to complete. For blog posts and reviews I'm currently writing up Part II of my look at treasure design, a post on the use of random tables in adventure design and another on the problems with nostalgia in the RPG community and design. For Bones of Contention I'm currently reviewing the re-release of Deep Carbon Observatory and looking at its place as an exemplar of mid-OSR design, as well as how it's various and varied experiments in adventure design hold up.

Tombrobbers of the Crystal Frontier - Play Report - Session 1

Adipose Mab
Expedition Leader

Below is the first play report for my current home campaign, a playtest of Tombrobbers of the Crystal Frontier, which I'm also working on for publication.  So far I've played five sessions, the first four within the initial location "Murkvey's Rock" - a starter adventure for the setting.

WELCOME TO THE CRYSTAL FRONTIER

Manny had been a ruffian, one of the big, tough bums that pushes the weak face first into Aurum Ferro's fecund gutters until they give up their green glass bottle of grog or the pennies they'd begged. Sorcha a run away villiene from the Solar Papacy, her horse sold, armor filthy and pockets empty, but still swaggering bow legged and proud. Tiny a hedge warlock from some nameless village, Feather, an exiled Priestess of some jungle bird good, blue skinned and lamp eyed. Coldway had been born to wealth, a fop still, but also, like the rest she was another destitute last chancer, gems pried from the guard of a battered rapier, and white crocodile leather breeches filthy.

A last chance to die or be redeemed on the Crystal Frontier. Adipose Mab, a thin, dusty knife of a women: scholar, surgeon, torturer, antiquarian and tomb robber had offered them and twelve other wine soaked gutter leavings a future. Act as scouts and plunders, or bait Coldway said, in the exploration of one of the Sky Tombs that fell across the mountains and get set up for a new life. The terms were generous: passage out of the Empire and over the Maiden Tombs in Mab's mule train, a purse of coin and a set of Tombrobber's equipment. If they did a good job, Mab might keep them on for a percentage or hand over information about a crystal or two they could crack and loot on their own. It was a dangerous deal, but a lot better than any other offers Manny, Sorcha, Tiny, Feather or Coldway could expect.

At the edge of the towering mountains, arrested by the vista, the mules halted: Mab, her bodyguards, Kotto and Karo, her 'gemcutter' Flash, the Aurum Ferro exiles and 12 other wretched fools. Below to the South lay the Frontier, behind the friable, wind-tortured peaks and beyond the resurgent Bull Kingdom, once and Imperial dependency, now the personal demesne of the Warlock King. The Frontier was excessive -- stark but the sandy land erupting with fierce color: oranges,reds,chartreuse and magenta spattered and strung across dune, badland and hill. The painted land sectioned by the thin white lines of the crumbling Imperial highway and a meandering reflective river, Rio Ahogo.

Still far above, the band would not reach the plain until the next morning, camping at the edge of the hills sheltered in the ruins of a fallen villa, overgrown in dead tangled vine -- a monumental bonewhite wall, cabled in late Imperial false pillars and sweeping sinuous arches to block the night winds. As the brush fed fire burned low o half buried mosaic depicting a red, fire winged woman slaughtering legions, Feather watched the sky blazing with meteors - streaks of pink and blue plummeting towards the Frontier. Mab claimed they were the crystal ships, coffins and fortresses of Empryean people, falling through a single aperture in the spheres that held the moon and planet, to strike this one region. Feather wasn't sure she believed the greasy haired scholar but the colors and vast expanse reminded her that she was far from the tangled indigo depth of her home.

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Two days later they were camped at the edge of a crumpling crater, floor growing waist high with prickly pear, and shadowed rim teeming with yellow lichen, red ice plant and tiny flowering succulents. At the center a cluster of pink crystal prisms, towering 30' or more from the dust -- a formation mostly buried by impact. Mab and Flash walked the crater floor, pointing at crystals and talking animatedly. Some of the newly hired scouts began to check the straps on their armor, readying themselves to delve whatever lay beneath the crystal spires, but Kotto, the more friendly of the Iceheller bodyguards, discouraged them, saying it would be hours before Flash faceted an entrance. Better to find some shade and wait.

The old gemcutter soon got to work, pulling lens, prisms and tuning rods from his case, tapping, shining light, examining the crystal and tapping again for hours before he started in with his hammers and pitons. It wasn't until the noon beans were boiling steadily that Flash's work produced cracking sounds from the crater, and sparkling slabs of crystal started to fall away from the spires. By mid-afternoon there was a gap deep tall enough to step through in the side of one high hexagonal prism, revealing a hollow interior. Mab cautioned against the cut crystal's poison dust and usher the five forward.

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