The Cult of the Aquatic Hunt

Figured it might be easier to break down my in-progress hexcrawl into smaller parts or posts. Plus getting some piecemeal feedback will help me make edits for the larger work.

Originally I was going to paste this post directly into blogger but it was screwing up my formatting.

click here for the cult

D6 ways to kill an ogre

 

D6 ways to kill an ogre

Ogre bandwagon

 

1 . reach your soft hand fully into its physical heart

2 . freeze its head in a solid block of ice

3 . rope 

4 . ask Little David at the Big Horseshoe tavern he knows a thing or two about taking ogres straight into the grave

5 . cigarettes 

6 . gamble over a suitably complex game

Bangshot Manor Reflection

I recently ran my oneshot titled Banghsot Manor. 

It was a modest success. 

Things that went well:
- crab window worked as an effective teaser as intended. Players saw crabs from outside the building, and seemed to regularly expect them
- dungeon felt sufficiently complex and nonlinear
- dungeon elements from different rooms were combined. Players got gasparde a tail from the auto doc, they took the treasure map to the island, and broke ice throughout the dungeon with the ice breaking throne
- the pacing seemed ok, without a lot of slack time
- there was some decent tension with the cephalopod creeping around
- the 10 odd rooms took about three hours of play time, which is about what I was aiming for

Things I might have done differently
- players may have been disappointed Mango wasn't actually there
- the adventure did not seem like it challenged the players much. With little or no dangerous traps, and no static hostile encounters, the players were only really threatened by the random encounter table. I rolled 8 encounter checks and got no hostile encounters, so I fudged an easy encounter
- the cyberpunk theming could have been stronger
- I think the whale skeleton could have been more "interactable" with clearly defined wants

grimoire of grimoires

bandwagon

i don't have a lot of experience balancing spells

1. In the murky depths of a crumbling tomb
caster blinds themselves and every sighted creature within twenty feet for [dice] rounds

2. Lies a gibbering creature in full bloom
target sentient must repeat every new sentence they speak thirty times, for [sum] hours

3. Wrapped in chains and wrapped in skin
for [dice] of the target's limbs: target's skin is replaced with chains

4. Its name aloud is a sin
target forgets their own name for [sum] hours

5. GRIMOIRE! GRIMOIRE!
horrible knowledge floods the mind of target sentient. They must save or spend [sum] rounds clutching their head in a fetal position while retching. Target gains a random spell from this list

6. You fill me with such sweet dread
target's stomach fills with [sum] pounds of sugar   

Bangshot Manor

I wrote this smallish adventure if you want to take a look.

 clicky clicky

The germ of this idea started awhile ago. I wanted to write an adventure in a medeivalish setting but with cyberpunk puns, tropes, or themes. Thought it would be funny if players were to hack into the net to progress, but with sharp tools and a rope net instead of computers.

The first version of this dungeon was an ancient underwater pleasure palace or temple with a chained kraken at its heart. The civilization or organization which had captured the kraken was long gone but the creature still lived and its psychic wails filled the dungeon.

I tried to fill it with some fun stuff like decrepit machinery and radical druids but it didn't seem to be coming together. Got too caught up in fitting everything together coherently and the dungeon might have been too big for the one shot I wanted anyway.

I still like some of these ideas but a lot of them weren't included in this second version, which is lighter in tone. I'm reasonably pleased with the current version, but I haven't playtested it yet so who knows if it's actually good. 

Why fantasy

I think one of if not the main reasons the medieval era has such a big hold over western fantasy is that it’s a pre modern time . Fundamentally strange, alien, and perhaps unknowable 

Ttrpgs are for me about exploration, seeing somewhere new and interacting with it . Combat can be interesting if done well, as can improv-type social games, but encountering the bizarre where it’s at imo

The past is a foreign country, and one rich with detail. It’s easier maybe to create a convincing place that breathes out of the past than to imagine and project one from the present? I’m not sure. Fantasy does seem to be bigger than SF in the broad sense though

Maybe because the premodern past is wild but still easily legible 

But the modern era has lots of good stuff! There are plenty of weird realities in the present and and future. Guns. Propaganda. Spaceships. None of that in the mud grubbing Middle Ages 

Cybernetic etymology

In my latest oneshot which has had a goalpost of “within the year” for about half a year, I’ve been interested in combining nautical themes with cyberpunk themes

Primarily because the central conceit and perhaps the main organizing idea of the adventure is to make one or more puns along the lines of having a fantasy setting where players hack into a literal net made of ropes 

Cyberpunk is the best genre (hyperlink) but I’m not actually interested in running a sf adventure 

this primary reason recently received a secondary jolt of positive energy when I realized that cybernetics comes from the Greek word for steersman

Clearly I’m onto something