Weird Revisited: Four-Color Fantasy Adventure Seeds

This follow up to this post first appeared in 2016. These aren't actual stories from comics (though some are close), but pastiches of the sort of thing that does show up.

1. A madman seeks a golden disk to bring life to colossal automaton, an ancient weapon of war, that lies half-buried in a remote desert.

2. A city under seige! Legend holds a magic gem will restore to life the mummy of the cities demigod founder. His body lies in a crypt in deep within the city's catacombs.

3. The jungle-choked ruins of an ancient city surround a vast, walled garden, an earthly paradise, inhabited by beautiful, golden-skinned youths. The brutish beast-folk that dwell in the ruins will let no stranger enter the garden, nor any of the garden's inhabitants leave.

4. An arboreal village of elfs is harassed by pale, giant bat riding goblins from a cave  high on a nearby mountainside, who raid the village for victims for their cook-pots.

5. A PC has a rare trait that fits a prophecy--a prophecy predicting the downfall of a tyrannical ruler, who means to ensure it does not come to pass.

6. A lake of lurid, swirling mists where time becomes strange. At it's center is an island with a castle where an immortal witch queen dwells with her eternally youthful handmaidens. No one comes to the witch's castle without being summoned.

7. A playing piece from the game of the gods falls to earth, perhaps accidentally or at the whim of a capricious godling. This touches off a race to acquire the piece with the rat-men minions of one sorceror contesting with the shadow demons of a cambion child--and the PCs caught in the middle.

The Christmas Specials

A few years ago, I managed to do three "Christmas Specials" in my two Weird Adventures campaigns (though I only did 2 write-ups): "Twas the Fight Before Yule," and it's sequel, and "Another Weird Yule." In 2016, there was a holiday related cameo in my Land of Azurth game.

I still haven't gotten around to doing the reskin of Slumbering Ursine Dunes involving the Weird Adventures version of the Tunguska Event, the mysterious Siberian cauldrons, a captive Father Yule, and talking bears, but I still think it would be great.

Looking for Adventure on the DMs Guild

While mostly I've been content to translate old school adventures for my 5e campaign, I decided to go looking for some adventures there. I haven't been too impressed with what I've found so far, though. They are no worse in basic conception than any number of older modules--indeed, they often have a more interesting high concept--but they tend to be sort of slight and written with a particular scene-based structure that doesn't give you a lot to work with if you're not going to follow their script.

While I don't absolutely reject a scene-based structure (if it's fairly "open"), as a general rule, if there isn't anything interesting about the setup or setting of the adventure, an author's pre-planned idea of a "cool scene" isn't going to work for me.

The DMs Guild 5e adventures I've read have one advantage over the Pathfinder adventures/adventure paths I've read in that at least they aren't as overwritten (though they aren't terse). They don't tend to be as interesting in details though.

Anybody got in 5e adventure recommendations?

Three Rooms in Amber

I've been running X2: Castle Amber for my 5e Land of Azurth game. As my session reports suggest, I've tweaked so things and changed other quite a bit. At times, I've got better ideas after I actually run it. I may post all my alterations at some point, but here are the the pertinent encounters in the "color rooms" in Castle Amber:

Overview: I envisioned these rooms as looking like more fanciful (maybe) version of the sort of rooms in Versailles or Schönbrunn Palace. I didn't have good reference in place to get that across to the players when I ran it, though, and it probably doesn't matter much anyway. I won't repeat everything Moldavy wrote that I kept, but only what I interpreted or replaced.

WHITE ROOM: The white carpet is crunchy underfoot with frosty. The walls are dusted with frost. Hard rime coats the furniture. In the center of the room, In the center of the room a giant salamander (over 10 feet long), white and striped with vein blue, lolls on a chaise longue. It's finned tail extends well beyond chair and lazy stirs up snowflakes from the carpet. 

I think actual salamanders are more interesting that lizards for magical creatures. 

GREEN ROOM: The room looks like it might be in an abandon home. The green wallpaper is peeling, vines are growing down the walls. The giant in the center of the room is entirely encased in armor with a vaguely floral motif, and that armor is complete covered in verdigris. He is easily mistaken for a statue until he moves.

I had in mind this image by Eoghan Kerrigan for the appearance of the giant, if it were patined. I want to put a little bit of distance from the Green Knight so it wouldn't be immediately picked up on, but the schtick was still the same.

RED ROOM: A large man (barrell-chested and bandy-legged) in crimson monk's robes over glittering, golden scale armor, sits cross-legged on the floor in a pose of meditation. His skin is charcoal black. His eyes appear to be windows into an internal furnace. His reddish blonde hair glows and smolders like coals.  The man has fallen from the sun; he's one of the countless throngs of dwarfs that make up the sun. They labor at the work of the cosmos and dance and sing radiant hymns to the glory of the gods. The man was into the void in a gout of ecstatic solar toil and fell to earth. 

I utilized the background of my reskins of the Azer here, since I had never put it in a game. I already had another celestial castaway in the adventure.

Again, the Giants!: Sanctum of the Stone Giant Space God

This is the second in a series of posts riffing of the giant theme of the classic Against the Giants:

Hightlights include:

1. The kirbytech festooned inner chamber of the helf-sleeping stone god--and his powerful telepathic signal.

2. Stone Giant partisans and the PCs with only the vaguest notion of what this alien conflict is about.

3. Weird wandering creatures escaped from some sort of ship collection.

Again, the Giants!: Wedding of the Hill Giant Chief

This is the first in a series (maybe) of posts inspired by the classic Against the Giants:

Highlights include:

1. Hill-billy Hill Giant father-in-law keeping the groom under lock and key so there's no cold feet!
2. Monstrous would-be Mother-in-Law!
3. Battle-hardened bridesmaids at a bachelorette party bash!
4. The Ettin moonshiner cooking up his "Catoblepas Kick" for the festivities.
5. And of course, the clan's prize pigs!

Closer to the Prismatic Peak

The first published adventure in the Land of Azurth, Mortzengersturm the Mad Manticore of the Prismatic Peak, is scheduled to drop in June. We're close now, so barring some unforeseen calamity, I feel fairly confident in that. Ideally (though there is less certainty in this), the physical copies will debut at North Texas RPG Con.

Mortzengersturm features art (like the cover above) and cartography by Jeff Call and layout and design will be by Lester B. Portly who made the Strange Stars series look so good. It's written for 5e, but that means its fairly easily "back adaptable" to older editions.

The Wreck of the Golden Dawn

This is an adventure idea for Strange Stars:

"Look at me honey, I'm using technology!
Ain't got no time to make an apology.
Soul radiation in the dead of night,
Love in the middle of a firefight." 

Seventy-eight megaseconds ago, a hyperspace traffic monitor AI recorded a vessel transponder signal from an unmapped node. The vessel was Golden Dawn, a pleasure yacht registered out of Smaragdoz and belonging to pop star Xeno Stardust.

Stardust, his band, and his entourage disappeared during a short cruise, ostensibly for the recording of their new album. When a search failed to discover their whereabouts Stardust corporate filed an indemnity insurance claim--a claim currently unresolved and under investigation.

The insurance company gave you the job, and it sounded like an easy one: IP salvage. Get to Golden Dawn and recover any new music. Bringing Stardust back alive would be optimal, but a partial brain download, recordings, or even partial recordings are worth something.

It isn't going to be that easy. Golden Dawn is stuck in the event horizon of a malfunctioning hyperspace node. At least some of the passengers are still alive, but drugs, ego, and isolation in warped spacetime have taken their toll. Making it out with a lost album? You'll be lucky it you make it out alive.

The Pleasure Palace of the Libertine Sea King

An adventure idea:

The King of the Sea is renowned for his Hugh Hefnerish lifestyle, maintaining an infamous nautiloid-shaped folly and gardens for his revels. Sometimes, he surrounds it in a bubble of airy water so land-dwellers can join the fun.

Sometimes the Sea King gets busy with important matters (or in this particular case, drama with his sea witch of an ex-wife), his beautiful and mischievous concubines take matters into their own hands, and invite illicit lovers of their own...

So this would basically combine Jason Sholtis's Secret Partyhouse of the Hill Giant Playboy with Leiber's "When the Sea King's Away". Highlights include:

Groovy architecture:

Vindictive Sea Wtiches:

Art by Arthur Adams

Octopus Guardsmen:

And b-list undersea celebtriy revellers.

In Doom's Wake Autopsy

Art by Jez Gordon

This weekend, I ran the piratical/Sargasso Sea adventure I've been going on about for a group I've never really gamed with: my girlfriend's regular group and a friend of her's from work. This was most of the group's first time playing 5e--indeed, several's first time playing D&D in years.

In brief, it was a large (7 members) and eclectic party, with two gnome spellcasters, a human cleric, a dragonborn fighter, a human fighter, a halfling thief, and a aquatic elf bard. They were drawn into the adventure by the promise of reward and the desire to save kidnapped children after a pirate assault on the coastal town of Raedel.

While overall, I intended to play the pirate's and their layer for a degree of horror, the broadly played miserliness and cowardice of Raedel's town fathers probably started things off on a humorous tone, as did the Rabelaisian portrayal of the alcoholic sea dog, Saltus Crimm, who took care of the sailing in the PC's borrowed pursuit ship.

Pretty much what Saltus Crimm looked like

Some of the player's were inclined to sympathy with the pirates, after hearing the legends regarding Ylantha and meeting the townsfolk. I had expected either a murderhobo indifference to morality but keen interest in treasure or a heroic desire to save innocents (or a mixture of the two) to motivate, but hadn't counted on the PC's possibly wanting to reach a settlement with the pirates. Of course, this sympathy didn't stop them from slaughtering pirates at every opportunity, so I don't know if an alliance was ever a real concern.

The crowd coming from mostly a non-D&D background had at least one interesting effect. There was no real dungeoncrawling-style investigation motivated by greed. They wisely avoided places where the danger to reward ratio seemed too high, but thorough searching for hidden treasure wasn't typically on their minds. I probably should have dangled some relatively easy to find items in front of them to condition them to look rather than assuming seeking out material reward would be a goal.

Something I noticed in my regular 5e game was well on display here: the 5e blaster cantrips make magic-using classes pretty tough in ranged combat. An encounter where the ranges were a hindrance to both the pirates and the fighters with light crossbows was like a shooting gallery for the warlock with an eldritch bolt. The large size of the party meant the opponents were never really able to concentrate their fire on the wizards, either. If I run the adventure again (or complete it with that crew), I thing a few more pirate spellcasters are in order to make it a more even fight.

Overall, I think the group enjoyed it and I know I did. It was both a fun session and a good test-drive of the scenario.

The Moving Pointcrawl

Over at the Hill Cantons blog, Chris has written a lot about the pointcrawl, which abstracts a map to the important points, eliding the empty places/boring stuff a hexcrawl or similar complete mapping would give equal weight. One unusual variation not yet explored is the crawling of moving points.

Admittedly, these would be pretty unusual situations--but unusual situations are the sort of stuff adventures are made from: Exploring a flotilla of ancient airships or the various "worlds" in a titan wizards orrery; Crawling the strange shantytown distributed over the backs of giant, migrating, terrapin. Flitting from tiny world to tiny world in a Little Prince-esque planetary system. Some of these sort of situations might stretch the definition of pointcrawl, admittedly, and to model some of them in any way accurately would require graphing or calculus, and likely both.

Let's take a simple case--something from an adventure I'm working on. Say the wrecks of several ships are trapped in a Sargasso Sea of sorts. The weed is stretchy to a degree, so the wrecks move to a degree with the movement of the ocean, but the never come completely apart.

The assumption (to make it a pointcrawl, rather than just a hexcrawl, where the points of interest move) is that there were pretty much only certain clearer channels a small boat could take through the weed--or maybe certain heavier areas that a person who wasn't too heavy could walk over without sinking in complete.

The map would look something like this:

Note that this map is pretty abstract, despite appearances. The distances or size of the weed patch aren't necessarily to scale with the derelict icons. Length of connecting lines is of course, indicative of relative travel distance. The colors indicate how "stretchy" an area is: blue can move d4, orange d6, and red d8 in feet? yards? tens of feet? Not sure yet. Anyway, whether this drift is closer or farther away would depend on a separate roll of 1d6 where odds equals farther and evens closer. Of course, they can't come any closer than the distance they are away on the map, so any "extra" distance would be a shift to one side or the other.

Zigzags denote a precarious patch, where there would be an increased risk of a sudden thickening (if I'm going with boat travel) or falling in (if I go with walking). Dots will denote an extra wandering monster or unusual event check.

So there are a lot of kinks to work out, but that's the basic idea.

Random Adventures in the Strange Stars

Mike "Wrathofzombie" Evans had suggest a few months ago that I do some sort of adventure inspiration creator for Strange Stars for the setting book. It didn't make it into that book, but I'm going to refine something of that sort for one of the game system books. Here's what I've got so far:

Setups:
 The Heist
 The Gauntlet
 The Unexpected

The Heist: [A] wants the PCs to steal [B] from [C]
A: 1 A neshekk insurance exec  2 Vokun lord  3 A zhmu collector  4 An eccentric Smaragdine celebrity  5 An Orichalcosan optimate  6 The Pharesmid Syndicate
B: 1 A proprietary genetic code  2 An Old Earth artifact  3 A work of art  4 a high-grade mind emulation  5 A weapon from the Archaic Oikumene  6 A mysterious box of alien origin
C: 1 a high security vault station  2 the interior of a Wanderer  3 the isolated asteroid estate of a rival  4 a stateroom safe on a luxury starliner  5 A Zao Pirate stronghold  6 an armored spacehauler

The Guantlet: The PCs must get [A] [B] despite [C]
A: 1 A Deodand hacker  2 An ibglibdishpan defector  3 A diplomate from the League of Habitats  4 A jook band  5 A group of Minga  6 A Wanderer avatar
B: 1 across an Interzone favela  2 off a prison asteroid  3 out of Vokun space  4 to an Alliance cruiser  5 home  6 off Deshret
C: 1 irate smugglers  2 a traitor in their midst  3 pursuing bounty hunters  4 a squad of kuath  5 moravec supremacists  6 a deadly outbreak

The Unexpected: When [A], the PCs unexpectedly stumble onto [B]
A: 1 responding to a distress call  2 exploring a derelict ship  3 on a routine intersystem flight  4 making planetfall for repairs  5 visiting an isolated station for supplies  6 on vacation
B: 1 a dangerous xenospecies  2 a cache of outlawed bioweapons  3 a hidden ssraad raiding vessel  4 a relic of the Archaic Oikumene  5 a new hyperspace node  6 a cabal of psi cultists

A Weird Dread Machine

Gus L over at Dungeon of Signs has released another in his series of free adventure pdfs, Dread Machine. As with all of Gus's products its got good layout for a free product and is enlivened by his appropriately stylized art and maps.

Gus says of the adventure: "Designed to be used in any fantasy setting, it is not intended to be especially strange or outside the norms for most traditional fantasy adventure games." While I think this is true, in the sense that it's implied setting seems to be a pre-industrial sort of world, I think it sells the the flavor of the module short. I would say that Dread Machine (like most of Gus's rpg work) has a vibe of the New Weird about it, like the world of China Mieville, Jay Lake, or K.J. Bishop. While I think many will view it as similar to the sort of gonzo flavor Old School D&D is often touted as having (and sometimes actually did) there is a coherence (or the illusion of coherence) that sets it apart from the mere gonzo, and an attention to (to coin a term) "fantasification"--seeing sci-fi elements through a fantasy lens. This is something I tried to do a lot with Weird Adventures and something that is different from the approach to sci-fi elements of say Expedition to Barrier Peaks.

Not that you have to be interested in any of that to enjoy the adventure. It's deeply "old school" in structure and setup but adaptable to any school you want. Check it out.

And while you checking things out, I think Dave Johnson's gonzo Grandpappy Cromdar's Whizbang Zoo! may not hit the same notes as Dread Machine, but could go on the playlist of "old school made new."

You Should Buy A Zoo

Specifically, you should buy Grandpappy Cromdar's Whizbang Zoo! by David Lewis Johnson. You should buy it because it has a cool tone and design sensibilities, and because it has great art by David (you've seen some of his work here before). You should buy it because it looks like a fun and sort of funny little adventure. And finally, you should buy it because it's only 5 bucks.

Of course, I'm biased because David's art work is going to be all over Strange Stars. Sure, I'm a fan, but let me tell you (and give you a taste) of what I think is good about the Whizbang Zoo on my read through. First off, the whole thing has a vibe reminiscent of Eric Powell's The Goon  to it, in no small part due to the grotesquery that is Grandpappy Cromdar (he's like the bastard child of Poopdeck Pappy and Cousin Eerie), the founder of the now-out-of-control monster zoo, but also bolstered by the slightly off-color humor, nonsequiturs, and cheerful anachronisms. The whole effect isn't so much Weird or New Weird, as mildly psychotronic. Take a look at this excerpt:

This image grabbed from the pdf may not do David's art justice, but it gives a good feel for his realistically rendered, portmanteau creature style, like something out of a bestiary written by William S. Burroughs. Note the irreverent stat-blocks and anachronisms in the text. This ain't serious world-building; the tagline proclaims it a "beer and pretzels" thing. Still, like Adventure Time!, its farce and anachronism hides little details dropped in passing and links between creatures that suggests there is a world there--or at least there could be. Of course, that sort of thinking will naturally come easier after a few of those beers and more than a few handfuls of pretzels.

Check it out.

Want A Science Fiction Adventure?

Last night I ran my first Starships & Spacemen: Star Trek game. Rather than do a post-play write-up, I thought it would be more interesting and maybe useful for people to turn it into a sort of mini-module. 

So here it is.

It's suitable for any science fiction game, really, but assumes Star Trekian universe.