Curse of the Wolf

Besides the usual sorts of lycanthropes, the City sometimes sees a rarer sort created by an elixir from the Outer Planes. Known as the Potion of Werewolfism, the magical elixir is thought to be brought to the Prime Material Plane by agents unknown from the Land of Beasts. It appears as a shockingly effervescent liquid of shifting color within a somewhat oversized test tube stoppered with a cork.

Imbibing the liquid has the immediate effect of transforming the drinker into an anthropomorphic wolf resembling the inhabitants of the Land of Beasts. Despite the startling change, people encountering the person for the first time in werewolf form will not react as if anything is unusual: such is the extraplanar magic of the potion.  This initial transformation lasts 1d100 minutes, but there is a 50% chance that the potion has given the imbiber the hiccups and each hiccup will bring a shift between forms. After the initial transformation, the imbiber will return to normal, but the wolf form will re-emerge ever night at sundown.

Persons suffering from this werewolfism aren't ravening beast like common lycanthropes but are compulsive carousers and cads. No attractive member of the opposite sex is safe from their crude come-ons. While in werewolf form a individual can be hurt, but quickly shrugs off any damage sustained (regenerating like trolls). They do not have any particular susceptibility to silver.

Victims of this “werewolf curse” often make themselves destitute with their spending and unwelcome in any night-spot in town with their skirt-chasing as they fulfill their wolfish appetites.

Wandering Through the Graveyard

Barrow Island now serves as the City's potter's field, but it has been the site of burials going back even to pre-colonial times.  It's located close to Empire Island in the Wyrd River.  Despite it's proximity, there are no bridges with the island as their destination.

The Mortuary Division of the City Department of Hospitals ships an average of around 200 corpses to the island weekly (as well as amputated limbs) from it's offices at Blackmoore Hospital.  The simple and unadorned pine boxes are laid three deep with a marker inscribed with a code by the barrow men.

The public is allowed limited visitation to the island. A ferry leaves from a terminal at the end of 14th Street.  Ferries leave from the terminal at ten in the morning and two in the afternoon.  The return trips from the Barrow Island docks leave at noon and four.  Non-official visitors at other times require special permission.

Here's a rough map of the island (scale: 1 in.=600 ft.):

The dark paths are paved or cobbled roads.  The lighter ones are trails or less well-kept routes.  The building at the junction of the paths is the mortuary headquarters.  Here photos and descriptions are kept on the unidentified bodies in the potter's fields, as well as older burial records of the other cemeteries (if they exist).  The buildings behind it are storage and some staff quarters, and the power plant (a former crematorium).

There are other buildings on the island: the decaying remnants of the former settlement and the shanties of barrow men.

In the south of the island, the dashed line represents the path of the Wychwire Bridge.  One support column of the bridge stands on the island and houses an elevator down from the bridge that can only be accessed with a key.

At night, when the barrow men cluster around their campfires and tell their macabre tales, the island becomes a more dangerous place.  Various forms of undead have been known lurk amid its crypts and mausoleums.  Ghouls (not undead--but cannibalistic) occasionally make in-rounds onto the isle before the Barrow Men can drive them off.  If the tales of the barrow men are to be believed, stranger less well-known horrors are sometimes encountered--but of course, the barrow men don't let truth get in the way of a good story. 

We've All Become God's Madmen

Art by Patrick Jones

[This view of clerics follows from my post "Apocalypse Underground"]

The clerics aren't priests. Before the underground was discovered, Man had priests--and gods whose intercession they sought. Their prayers had been in vain. The old gods had abandoned Man to the monsters.

Then the clerics came. Their gods were unyielding of personifications of law. They marked their chosen with fits, visions, and miracles of faith. Their precepts were few: Destroy chaos and evil, protect the innocent.

The monsters are (in the view of the clerics) chaos and evil manifest. The clerics wage a savage holy war against the denizens of the underground and are willing to martyr themselves in the service of their gods.

The clerics sometimes use titles of the old priestly hierarchy, but all clerical groups are cults founded around a charismatic leader who is considered strong in the faith due to the spiritual power he or she wields.

Down These Mean (Virtual) Streets

The inaugural session of my Google+ Weird Adventures game got off to a shaky start last night, plagued by several technical difficultes: we had sound issues, got kicked out of the hangouts, and had one would be player appear briefly and indistinctly like the monster reveal in a found footage horror film, before winking out never to return.

Still, I'm optimistic Lorefinder (the Pathfiner/GUMSHOE mashup) is going to work well for our purposes, and there was enthusiasm from the players despite the difficulties.

So far, the facts in the case are as follows:

A (self-styled) gentleman thief, a dapper wizard, and a bruiser of an urban ranger took a simple job for celebrity detective Heward Kane:

Kane was working for Viviane Vandemaur, a greiving widow, who was trying to take custody of the body of her dear departed husband, John.  John Vandemaur's Old Money family had never like his wife from the wrong side of the Eldritch River and had had him interred in the family crypt on Barrow Island against her wishes.  Viviane wanted her husband's remains moved a place of her choosing and had managed to get a judge to allow it.  Of course, that was only if the deed could be done before the Vandemaur family got word and put pressure on the legal system to change its mind.

So why hire three adventure-types?  Well, it seems there's been a bit of unrest out on Barrow Island.  Some sort of ghoul incursion.  The possibility of trouble.

Complicating matters even further, there's a debutante gone wild run off with a ghoul bad-boy.  What are the chances this wayward young lady is on the island, too?

I'd say pretty good--and the chance that it will mean more trouble for our heroes is also pretty good.

And what about that gargoyle the party caught sight off?  Was it shadowing them?  And why?

Stay tuned.

Warlord Wednesday: Full Circle

Let's re-enter the lost world with another installment of my issue by issue examination of DC Comic's Warlord, the earlier installments of which can be found here...

"Full Circle"

Warlord Annual #3 (1984)

Written by Cary Burkett; Penciled by Dan Jurgens; Inked by Mike DeCarlo.

Synopsis: When last we left our heroes, they had stopped a nuclear war and averted an apocalyptic future, only to get shunted outside of time. Hurtling out of control in the null-time limbo, two of their ships collide. Bouncing off each other, the two ships ricochet back into the timestream—at a point far from where they left it.

Morgan, Krystovar, Shakira, Reno, and the soldier Cole emerge relatively unscathed from their respective crashes only to be set upon by flying feathered reptiles. As our heroes do battle, they’re being watched by someone who looks familiar:

The Deimos lookalike sends his minions to get our heroes. They arrive on orange triceratops and call off the bird-things with whistles. The dinosaur riders tell our heroes: “Lord Daamon and the Red-Moon Gods invite you to the safety of the City of Challa-Bel-Nalla, jewel of Atlantis.”

Morgan and the gang go along. The Atlanteans use some sort levitation device given to them by the Red-Moon gods to bring the ships along, too. Reno figures these "gods" and their technology might be just what they need to free the rest of the ships from null-time.

When they reach the Atlantean city, Morgan sees the Deimos lookalike standing on a balcony and goes beserk. Sword-drawn, he leaps onto the balcony and is about to kill the man:

Shakira’s nose knows. The guy doesn’t smell like Deimos. It turns out he’s the aforementioned Lord Daamon, but he is descended from the Deimosian Dynasty. Morgan (somewhat hastily) assumes he must be an ancestor of Deimos.

Daamon sends our heroes off to refresh themselves. Hi wife Jezreen asks him why he didn’t kill Morgan for the affront. Daamon wants the ships (he intuits that they mean power) and he needs Morgan and the gang alive to understand them. Still, Morgan’s mistake intrigues him. He decides to consult the nether-spirits to find out what’s going on.

Later, in his ritual chamber, Daamon calls upon the nether-spirits. They tell him Morgan and his friends are from the far future—and that Morgan is an enemy of his and theis. They reveal how Morgan killed the last of the Deimosian line. They bid Daamon kill him.

At dinner, Reno tells Morgan they're stuck here. They dare not use the time ships again without repairs. Morgan thinks there may be something these “gods” they keep hearing about can do. Their conversation is interrupted when Jezreen arrives to give Daamon’s regrets and deliver his invitation to a hunt for the great dragon-lizard tomorrow. Morgan and Shakira accept.

At dawn, the three mount their hadrosaurish steeds. While Daamon has decided he’s unable to strike at Morgan directly, he’s planned on an “accident” befalling Morgan on the hunt.

Things to Notice:

• Atlantis here doesn't necessarily jive with the Atlantis seen elsewhere in the DC Universe (though admittedly, Warlord hasn't been explicitly placed in continuity at this point).
• This isn't the first time a hunt as a pretext to murder someone has shown up as a plot device in Warlord.  Ashir's enemies went after him the same way.
• Deimos's ancestor has the same fashion sense.

Where It Comes From:

Though not much has been revealed yet, this annual seems designed to tie up disparate plot threads.  It references old issues of Warlord more so than anything else  More on this as the review continues.

Games of Chance

The new HBO series Luck is about the world of horse-racing, from the owners and trainers to the jockeys and gamblers. While the show is interesting as a drama, I think I find it even more engrossing for its portrayal of the world of racetracks. It got me to thinking about gambling, whether at the races, with dice or whatever, within the world of a a role-playing game.

Gambling seems exactly the short of pleasure-seeking activity adventurers would engage in to blow off steam between brushes with danger. I’ve seen relatively few settings tackle unique or interesting games, though. The first chapter of the Pathfinder Adventure Path The Second Darkness, “Shadow in the Sky” featured a visit to a casino and opportunities for PCs to partake in several different games, but most of them seemed a bit silly to me.

While gambling appears in a lot of the source literature for fantasy role-playing games, most are only vaguely described as anything more than “dice” or “cards.” Off hand, I can’t think of any that are well detailed. There’s Dragon Poker in Asprin’s Little Myth Marker, but from what I can recall the details given are mostly for laughs a la fizzbin.

Anybody got any interesting forms of gambling making appearances in their settings?

Cities of the Red Martian Night

Drop the swords (or maybe keep the swords) and add a little spy pot-boiler paranoia enhanced by heavy use of strange drugs and you can get a Barsoom as envisioned by William S. Burroughs rather than Edgar Rice. Brackett’s Low Canal cities become even seedier as they blur with the hallucinatory Tangier, Interzone.

There’s plenty of material in the ERB corpus that needs only a slight twist: think of the rykors and kaldanes, the synthetic men, the planet men, or the realist and etherealist factions of Lothar. Ras Thavas might get along well with Dr. Benway.

No reason not to borrow from Burroughs’s spiritual descendants too: the atavistic drug shanga, Ramas’ mind-transference, or vampiric Shambleau hustlers. Living turbans from the Vaults of Yoh-Vombis would be all the rage.

You get the idea. It doesn’t take much and Mars gets a lot a more alien.