Weird Revisited: 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.

Universal Monster Ravenloft

Over at at Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque, Jack points out that it would be trivially easy to have Strahd meet Dracula given the underlying conceits of Ravenloft. I wonder why we need Strahd at all? Why not replace the Darklords with the Universal Studios classic monsters? We might call this version Karloft because... well, why not?

The Mummy, Dracula, and Frankenstein (the Darklord would probably be Victor rather than his monster), would fit right in. The Invisible Man and the Phantom of the Opera ought to have their place too. The realm of the Creature from the Black Lagoon would be a bit of departure from the usual Gothic horror trappings, but I think it could be done.

Hair-Raising Horrors in the Land of Azurth

Our 5e Land of Azurth game continued last night, with Kully and Shade plunged beneath the shop of the Demon Barber of the Sapphire City. They encountered a number of ill-tempered purple creatures, before the chair Kully was trapped in was whisked to a lower level: a subterranean barbershop of horrors!

The rest of the party saw the events upstairs through the eyes of Waylon's familiar and rushes in. Just in time, too, because the Evil Tom's assistant, a redheaded little maniac with a straight-razor had knocked Shade out. Under the assault of the full party, he was soon dead, as was Evil Tom. 

Kully was rescued, but he was behaving in a more bombastic fashion, and the party was concerned. Shade became convinced the barber had done something to him.

The party explored the various rooms in the barber level, discovering magical pomades and hair-dyes--and eventually, stone stairs descending in darkness. Also, hair like vines hanging over it. Hair that sometimes attacked. Knoggin's Pomade helped tame it, and the party descended without further trouble.

They encountered more of the purple creatures, this time with one of their witchdoctors, The party overpowers then pretty quickly, though, and takes a captive to interrogate.

The creature tells them he is a Znarr and his people serve a a beauteous female of their species named Zarvoola. Zarvoola is holding some very hairy creature captive and orchestrating everything that has happened in a bid for conquest...

TO BE CONTINUED

Weird Revisited: On Venus

This post appeared in 2016 and was itself an expansion of a post from a couple of years prior but with art...

Art by Luka Rejec

Wet where Mercury is desert and as fecund as that world is barren, Venus is covered by warm, shallow seas and dense, tropical forests. Its natives are women--or creatures in the semblance of women. They are seldom surpassed in all the Cosmos in beauty, if one can abide their inhumanly colorful skins and their hair the texture of flower petals. They go almost entirely naked, and chastity is not counted a virtue among them.

There is a ruler on Venus, recognized by Earthly and Mercurian powers, called the Doge, who is always from another world. This title may be held by a man or woman, but in either case, the floral and lovely native Venerians are the Doge's solicitous wives or concubines. The Doge's identity is always hidden behind an ornate mask of that durable Venerian fungal matter that resembles teak. The ruler scarcely wears any more clothing than the Venerian women, save for the notable exception of an impressive phallocrypt, decorated and enlaided with gold, for public ceremonies.

A Doge’s rule lasts only a Venerian day, as measured by the fixed stars, which is hundreds of Earth days. When the sun sets, the Doge is taken by the Venerians into the forest and is seen no more.

We Have Always Lived in the Megadungeon

 I have on occasion riffed settings which were small or at least smaller than the typical D&Dish setting. This goes against the grain of published settings which tend to want to give you big, as in a world big, and perhaps classic play which starts circumscribed, but is about expanding the frontier.

There is one archetypal D&Dish experience that doesn't quite work this way and that's the megadungeon. Certainly exploring the megadungeon means opening up more area, but the scale is so much smaller generally than the hexcrawl. Distance is not a primary factor.

It strikes me that the dungeoncrawl could easily combined with the player's living space. Megadungeons under towns are pretty common, but then the town becomes a place of relative safety and refuge that may or may not enter into actual play as anything more than "base camp." What if the megadungeon space and the living space bled into each other? Like say the PCs lived in a place like Gormenghast or Xuchotl from "Red Nails," or the starship Warden, and the exploration was progressively moving into rooms, levels, sections or whatever that were unknown? (You could perhaps include small settings with actually dungeons/underground spaces in this. See MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblins.)

This could be combined quite easily with the mystery sandbox. Indeed, the incremental accumulation of vast wealth is probably a bad goal for a smaller setting of this sort. Not that money might not be a motivator, but the real big payoffs should only come at the end.

Obviously, this sort of setting would differ from the standard D&D approach even without the downplaying of vast wealth. Parties would likely be less eclectic. The length of the campaign is probably somewhat limited without a change in approach unless the structure they reside in is really weird, but I think it would make for interesting low level play.

Revisiting the Wild Wild West Season Two

Jim Shelley and I are continuing our selective re-watch of the Wild Wild West weekly on the Flashback Universe Blog. We're now starting the second florid, full-color season.

You can catch up on installments here.

Star Trek Ranger: Patterns of Vengeance (part 2)

Player Characters: The Crew of the USS Ranger, Federation scout ship:
Andrea as Capt. Ada Greer
Billy as Lt. Cmdr. Sobek, Ship's Counselor

Dennis, as Lt. Osvaldo Marquez, Medical Officer
Paul as Cmdr. D.K. Mohan, Chief Helmsman

Supporting Cast:

Ensign Elana Duffy, Security Officer

Lt. Thera ch'Reith, Security Chief

Synposis: With Capt. Greer trapped on the USS Brackett with a being that calls itself "Unity" possessing some of her crew, Mohan takes Ranger to the icy planetoid of Mycena to try and determine what this has to do with the transporter experiments of Janet Hester. They discover the experiments in long range matter transmission may have lead to one or more of Hester's team being somehow trapped in dematerialized form.

Commentary: The Deneva Research Team which Hester and her ill-fated team were a part of are first mentioned in the Spaceflight Chronology. 

Within the Star Trek Universe, long distance transporter experimentation was attempted by Emory Erickson has depicted in the Enterprise episode "Daedelus," and has been depicted in use by other civilizations such as the Kalandans in "That Which Survives."

The away team encountered a monster that burrowed under the ice on Mycena that was inspired by the Delta Vega creature in Star Trek (2009).