Slumbering Ursine Dunes

The Kickstarter for Slumbering Ursine Dunes will be coming to an end on October 14, so if you haven't got in on it yet, time is drawing nigh. I've been a backer since the day the Kickstarter began. While I'm sometimes iffy about rpg kickstarters (their track record isn't great), I know any reader of the Hill Cantons blog knows that Chris has been a critic of kickstarters in the past, and he and the Hydra Collect have done everything right with this one--like having the product actually mostly finished before starting the kickstarter.

Now knowing the guys involved and having played in the Hill Cantons G+ campaign in the past, I do not pretend any review I would give of Dunes would be entirely object. (If you're looking for probably a more objective one than mine, Gus L has given us one.) I can tell you while I like it and why I think it exemplifies what is good about DIY gaming products, in general.

First off, Dunes takes place in Chris's very flavorful and original campaign world, the Hill Cantons. The Cantons is one of those rich, long-running D&D that most of us wish we had, but don't have the discipline to pull off. The Hill Cantons is pulp fantasy setting, less Howard or Lovecraft, and more Vance and Leiber, infused with a strong Slavic flavor. It manages to avoid the "learning curve" problem associated with settings like Tekumel or Glorantha, while managing to be distinct from the Forgotten Realms also-rans. Dunes mixes bear gods and alien technology and makes it all fit together with a large amount of wit.

If that weren't enough, it's written in such away that it's easy to tweak or remove the Hill Cantons elements (great as they are) so that you can make it your own. Anthony (Straits of Anian) Picaro is adapting it to his fantasy Pacific Northwest (and that's going to be available through the Kickstarter to backers at some levels). I think I'm going to use it as the basis of my annual Weird Adventures Yule Special. It's going to be the inspiration and framework for a tale of combining Father Yule, Ruthenian Bear Folk, and the aftermath of the Weird Adventures version of the Tunguska event. It's robust enough to be what works best for you campaign.

So back it, already! The Kickstarter ends Wednesday.

Strange Stars Update and Contents

The Strange Stars systemless setting book is almost done! Here is the list of contents, and the likely order they will be in:

History
Categories of Sophonts
Starships & Travel
The Alliance
The Coreward Reach
The Vokun Empire
The Outer Rim
The Zuran Expanse
Psi & Psionics
Nomads
Pirates
Criminals

The book looks to be on schedule to come out late this fall. John "FATE SF" Till has the Fate Sytem Book virtually complete in draft, but having been focused on the setting book, I'm lagging on the Stars Without Number adaption, and both still need proofing and layout. I don't want to delay the setting book, though, so we're looking at a staggered release, with the system books following (hopefully) in a couple of months.

Azurthite Bestiary: Bugbear Nightmare

In dark places where nightmares thicken and curdle, bugbears are born. They're gangling things with burning coal eyes that stare out of snarled fur, black and featureless as the night sky between the stars. They haunt abodes of fear and shadow: abandoned houses, ancient ruins, sunless forests; they even squeeze into the recesses of children's closets and the forgotten world glimpsed in the gaps between floorboards. Any dark corner is a door to a bugbear. They crawl out with great sacks clutched in their spider-fingered hands. Snickering, murmuring, they snatch up children and small folk in their sacks and kill those who try and stop them. They drag the children back to their damp, subterranean otherworld, and what happens there is best not discussed.

Besides (one presumes) their kidnapped victims, bugbears subsist on such inedible provender as glass shards, potash, and the heads of rabid bats. They consider certain venomous toads an utter delicacy.

Azurthite bugbears are statted like regular 5e bugbears with the following differences:

Skills Stealth +6

Special Abilities:

Plastic. Bugbears can squeeze through spaces as small as 1 inch.

Shadow Stealth. While in dim light or darkness, a bugbear can hide as a bonus action.

Sunlight Weakness. In bright sunight, bugbears have a disadvantage to attack rolls, ability checks, and saving throws.

Wednesday Comics: Black Sun Rising

"Black Sun Rising"

Artesia #2 (February 1999) Story & Art by Mark Smylie

Synopsis: Artesia awakes from a dream--a portend, perhaps--of her mother being burned at the stake, telling her daughter to join her. It is morning. Artesia rises from between her two slumbering bedmates to greet her lieutenants. Some of the force have left them over night, but others have rallied to her, unwilling to accept the Divine King over the goddess Yhera.

She summons spirits to help her dress for battle. They whisper that their mothers, the goddesses of war are eager for the feast to come. Once dressed, she turns to deal with her bedmates--assassins sent by Bran. She awakens them from the magical sleep she put them under and tells them they have one chance to go for their daggers:

The assassins dead, Artesia and her company head for the field of battle. Besides their original foes, the knights of Agall and those that deserted them over night are under Bran's wolf banner--now arrayed against them. Artesia orders their own wolf banner taken down. They will only use black banners to match the black sun of Irré:

Artesia gives her troops a rousing speech. They must turn against their king because he's betrayed their land and their goddess to usurpers. The coming of Irré is a good omen for them. The speech works, and the battle is joined.

She uses her magic to cause panic and slays several Agall Knights herself. In the end, Artesia's enemies are routed, but after such an unnatural day, she fears the night to come.

Things to Notice:

• Like more than one hero, Artesia had sex with the assassin(s) before killing them. Priorities.

Commentary: 
Smylie's Known World is an interesting mix of historic sources, but the gods and goddess seem mostly Ancient Greek inspired. The name of the Known World's Queen of Heaven, Yhera, clearly shows its derivation from the Greek Queen of Heaven, Hera. Irré the Black Sun, is a sun god, but mostly has the negative aspects of Apollo's portfolio (he is the god of plagues, for instance), while his brother, Illiki Helios gets the more positive aspects. Besides the Greek elements, the two seem to borrow from Egyptian myth: the bull aspect of Illiki is reminiscent of the Atum-Ra, and the relationship between the brothers resembles myths related to Osiris and Set.

Azurthite Bestiary: Behir & Beholder

Continuing my series of monsters from the 5e monster manual rethought for the Land of Azurth:

Behir
The behirs of the caves and caverns of Subazurth are somewhat smarter (somewhat) than those of other lands, but they are no less malign. If anything, their pompous air makes them even more intolerable; being eaten by a reptilian monster is one thing, but being condescended to beforehand is really too much! Behirs crawl out of their hiding places, slithering along the ceiling and out of passages that would seem to be too narrow for their size. They are surprisingly quiet, too. Many travelers are unaware of their presence, before they introduce themselves from out of the darkness and engage the frightened folk in conversation.

The thinly veiled threat of being eaten is ever-present so most humor the behir as they hold forth on art and letters or current affairs. Their knowledge is woefully outdated and incomplete (coming as it does from conversation with previous victims or from books the barely literate creature did not read in great detail) when not completely made up. What makes this discourse even less tolerable is the superior air and snide tone the behir affects at all times. A guaranteed way to end the conversation is to point out an error on the behir's part, but this ending is unlikely to be a happy one.

Beholder
There is a strange kingdom in Subazurth called Beautia. The folk of the kingdom are human, but its ruler is the Beholder, an exceedingly unhappy alien monster, stranded in this world. The Beholder is first and foremost an aesthete, and its deep melancholy arises from the ugliness it perceives in the world around it. How it misses the natural beauty of its homeworld: the sharp dimpling of the pools of bilious ooze by the fierce shard-rains, the moans of the pungent flesh-stalks as the writhing, pulsating grub-parasites suckle at their ichor.

Being of an extremely sensitive disposition, the Beholder has been driven mad by its exile. Its mood seesaws between tittering hysteria and spells of sobbing depression. Mostly, it retreats into solipsistic denial and attempts to remake its kingdom into a more pleasing form, punctuated with the occasional disintegration of a subject who has failed to be entirely pleasing. To that end, its subjects wear spherical masks in imitation of their king's form and pretend to be pre-adult instars of its species. Many of Beautia's folk actually believe they are--spiritually, if not physically. Their state religion preaches spherification and eye-multiplication in successive reincarnations, until beholder perfection is reached.

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."

Azurthite Bestiary: Aarakocra & Azer

The 5e Monster Manual is a good book, but it has a lot of monsters I won't use. Or, one's I probably won't use as is. Here are a couple of with rethought fluff for the Land of Azurth, but I imagine they'd work anywhere:

Art by Yuriy

Aarakocra
There is an island, far to the east in the Boundless Sea, littered with broken, stone structures and monuments engraved with human faces. The builders of the temples and monuments are long gone, but small tribes of bird folk with feathers of dull bronze and crests like peafowl camp amid the ruins and hunt in the forests. These folk are the Aarakocra, and all found in the villages are female. The Aarakocra mostly avoid visitors, disappearing into the forests or flying to high perches, but they will fight fiercely against aggressors and thieves.

In the decaying grand temple, the few, more brightly plummaged, male Aarakocra make their homes. They are the priests and husbands of the females. They lead their harems in worship of their holy object: a great egg with a surface like polished marble, veined in rainbow colors. It is said to be the egg of the Simurgh, the God-Queen of All Birds. The Aarakocra allow no other race to view their religious mysteries, and will capture any defilers of their rituals and lock them away in aviary-like cages to be tended and observed by the priest males for the rest of their days.

Azer
Though the earth and the works of man are minuscule in comparison, the Sun is really only a dwarf amongst its starry kind. It is a dwarf made of dwarves, countless throngs of them, formed from the pure elemental fire of heaven. They labor at the work of the cosmos and dance and sing radiant hymns to the glory of the gods. Sometimes, a solar dwarf is snatched from the outer layer of the churning multitudes by magic, or a few are cast into the void in a gout of ecstatic toil and fall to earth. These visitors clothe their celestial fire in shells of aurichalcum and all give their name as Azer.