The Wandering Shepherds

My earlier post on the new setting I'm working on drew some questions related to the uninvolved gods and how the cleric class would work. I thought it was worth a post of its own. 

When the gods withdrew from the world it was no particular impediment to organized religion. To the contrary, priests could now make whatever pronouncements or demands they wanted without fear of divine contradiction or rebuke. The populace, worried at what the loss of the gods' favor might portend for the future, were eager for any message than offered hope or a path to the gods' return. In this period, the power of the temples increased, but so did conflict between them and various self-proclaimed prophets and spiritual teachers. 

This situation didn't last, thanks to the devastation of the Demon Wars and the invasion by the demons' monstrous allies. Human civilization was devastated, and cities became isolated. The society that had sustained and supported the temples and the priesthoods faltered, and once again faith in the gods was shown to be no protection against calamity. 

The priests and temples remain, though, particularly in the major city-states. The gods are real, after all, and no one expects them to return to a world that doesn't honor them or keep their ritual observances. Certain rituals, too, perform an important civic function and rulers rely on their observance to perpetuate their legitimacy.

In the smaller villages and hinterlands, though, the temples and shrines were mostly abandoned, the priests fleeing to the cities or killed in the conflict along with much of the rest of the population. As time passed, and these regions became (somewhat) safer, the common folk returned, but the priests often didn't.

Into this void strode another form of clergy. Those who, without official blessing or ordination, were able to wield a portion of divine power. They roam from village to village performing spiritual important services. They officiate marriages and civic ceremonies and conduct community rituals at festivals. They mediate between villagers and the spirits or the dead and perform exorcisms when necessary. Joining with other adventuring sorts, they also kill monsters threatening the people. These individuals are often called "Shepherds." They are the most common representatives of the absent gods encountered outside of the city-states.

Shepherd is the name used by the Nimble rpg for its "mostly cleric, but some druid concepts" class. It seemed a good as name as any to use here. 

Parsulan Character Ancestries

 I pitched the idea that I have been kicking around to my players after the last session, and they were into it. So into it they have already began thinking about characters, despite the fact we were going to play a module for a month or so while I got prepared! Still though, I'm glad to have the enthusiasm. Everybody seems interested enough in Nimble, too, which is the system we plan to use over 5e.

Anyway, there interest made me go ahead this weekend and get down in writing things I had been kicking around regarding races/ancestries in the game.

Darklings: These will be the Tiefling stand-ins. They are mutants essentially, born to human parents exposed to the tainted mana emanating from the demons' side of the Terminator or from Shadow cysts.

Dwarves: Spontaneously generated from the spilled ichor of a fallen titan. Like your usual Dwarf but given this is a setting with ancient Magitech, they have a inclination for that. In fact, there's a rumor a cabal of dwarves is trying to create a machine god to run the cosmos more efficiently that either the titans or gods did.

Elves: Like your typical elves really, though I think longer lived that the D&D standard. Dark elves (the name has nothing to do with coloration) are likely holdout titan-partisans.

Halflings: Svelter than the D&D standard, mostly like the half-foots (feet?) in Dungeon Meshi in appearance. Like in the 4e "lore," they will be a nomadic people, either in big wagons or barges.

Meks: Mechanicals. They were created as servants and soldiers by the now-fallen Magitech Empire of Alphanion, but have developed more independence over the centuries. They reproduce via Mothernodes, ancient pieces of Magitech sometimes found in Alphanion ruins. They take the place of the Warforged, but broader in conception. The Steam Men of Hunt's Jaekelian novels, Mattie from Sedia's The Alchemy of Stone, and the droids in Star Wars are also influences.

Myrclawr: Cat people of the anime/manga variety. They are also a created species from the Age of the Wizard-Kings.

Weird Revisited: The Collected Planes

Reposting this from 2024 is my reminder to myself to get around to finishing this series one of these days. I also think I may revise a couple of the ones I have already written.

 

One of these days, I'm going to completely finish (and maybe publish) this series on the Great Wheel, but until then, here's everything I've done.

The Planes of Pure Law
The Planes of Chaos
Hell
Carceri

Hades

Arborea

Elysium

Beastlands

Gehenna

Twin Paradises

The Layers of Heaven (part 1) (part 2) (part 3) (part 4)

Arcadia

Limbo

Ysgard

The Bard of Azurth

Our Land of Azurth 5e game concluded last night with our heroes facing down a shadow creature of immense size. Every bite attack it made threatened to swallow one of the party, and it periodically emitted bursts of necrotic energy. Luckily, they have Dagmar to keep throwing out the healing and two energy weapons they obtained long ago from visitors from the future (or perhaps past?). Erekose drained his energy rifle attacking the creature and was forced to go back to his sword. Ultimately, they destroyed the monster, but it went out in a blast of negative energy.

Dagmar checked on the emaciated form of the Wizard. He was alive but barely and not saying anything useful. Waylon tried shooting the black, anti-glowing orb over head with his energy pistol. The blasts seemed to burn it, but it didn't take it long to heal. 

A group of Gloom Elf priests in tall hats emerged from the shadows (naturally!). They didn't attack but suggested the party's actions were futile. The Anti-Sun was already beginning to manifest in this world. It had provided the power that allowed the Wizard to manifest a giant shadow to fight the machine of the rebels, though the effort had drained him. They did not care. The Anti-Sun was here!

The party's response was to attack them. In a few rounds, they had killed the elven priests, but the avatar of the Anti-Sun was still hung above their heads. Luckily, they remembered (with a hint from the DM!) that they had previously defeated a shadow dragon by overloading one of the energy weapons. They did so again, and the resultant explosion put a ragged hole in the black sphere. Dagmar gave her all into a blast of radiant energy that finished it off, closing the portal.

The party heard noises in the chamber outside and prepared for another fight, but it turned out to be the soldiers of the rebellion led by Queen Desira of Virid and Warrior Princess Bellona of Sang. They related that once the giant shadow of the Wizard was defeated, and the Gloom Elves mysteriously withdrew, the city fell quickly. Their forces were just mopping up. 

The party debated saving the dying Wizard but ultimately decided to let him die rather than risk it.

The princesses suggest the party return to the camp and get some food and rest. They do, and the first person they know they run into is Kory Keenstep. He talks circumspectly about a trip back in time that he chose not to take, but his sone Kully did. When queried further, he suggests the party talk to the Clockwork Princess, Viola.

The party finds her in the command tent. She reveals that defeating the Wizard might have likely led to the destruction of Azurth, as his existence constituted a causal loop around it. The only way to protect against that was to stabilize Azurth's history.

Instead of using a children's story to serve the evil ambition of one man, Azurth needed a new story to sustain it. So, the princesses sent back a storyteller, Kully the bard, to tell the faeries, the proto-goddesses of Azurth, a new story. One not subverted by the wizard.

The world would reset in about 14 hours.

The party asked if they would remember. Viola said she wasn't certain. Possibly they would since they had been to the beginning of Azurth themselves. They'll just have to find out.

The following morning, the party awakened in their residence, the former Dove Inn in Rivertown. There were no signs of war or occupation anywhere. The statue in the town square is not of their rivals the Eccentrics, but of them.

The End

The Masters of Mayhem are:

Dagmar ...... Andrea

Erekose .......... Bob

Shade ........... Gina

Waylon .......... Tug

Zabra ......... Kathy

previous members:

Kairon ........... Eric

Bellmorae ...... Haigen

and 

Kully Keenstep ...... Jim

Spells Against Civility Progress Report

Jason and I are still working on our 2-page comic for the first issue of the Swords Against! Sword & Sorcery anthology. Jason sent me the inked first page so I could start laying out the lettering, and that's what the images here are from, though there is a still some clean-up and shadowing to come on the art.

This is how it starts with the barbarian Karkath:

And this is how it ends for him:

Parsulan

 A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned a new setting I was thinking about for after my current Land of Azurth game comes to an end. I now think I will call it Parsulan (or at least I will for the moment!) borrowing a name coined by a friend of mine for a setting we co-created back in the 2e area. I think Parsulan will be the name of the continent this campaign is focused on. I recycle some other names from that old setting, as well, in homage.

So in addition to the aspects I mentioned before, this is what I think Parsulan will be like:

Post-apocalyptic. Having been overrun by demonic forces (true demons and their allies) several centuries ago, the magitech-employing civilization that existed prior was reduced to "points of light." There are still in typical D&D and fantasy fiction standing, city-states isolated by sparsely populated wilderness.

Absent gods. The gods, at least the major ones, have forsaken the world and retreated into the Overworld. Clerics preserve the civic rituals practiced in the days of old and try to keep the old beliefs alive, hoping that the gods will return if humanity shows sufficient humility and piety.

Adventures Guild. It's a common concept in Japanese Standard Fantasy worlds, but as I envision it, it's has much more of a Jianghu element than the very modern employment agency/professional organization of so many anime, though it will likely have elements of that--as well as being a burial society.

Dungeon Zones. Inspired by the rpg Sword World 2.5's "shallow Abysses," I think there will be eruptions/excrescences of the Demon Realm maybe called "shadow cysts" which will engulf and distort areas of the land, leading into places of altered reality and danger. These form around a nidus called a seed or heart. Only neutralization of this heart will cause of rupture and ultimately dissipation of the cyst.

Weird Revisited: Sectaur Gear

I originally posted these in 2016...

These are model sheets for the Sectaurs cartoon. The items depicted here should had a little post-apocalyptic strangeness to any treasure haul:

Find more here.

Petty Wizardry, illustrated

Jason Sholtis

Friday, I shared a peak at how Spells Against Civility, the short comic Jason Sholtis and I were doing for the Sword & Sorcery magazine Swords Against! currently in crowdfunding.

I mentioned that Jason and I were doing this in the "Marvel Method," which is to say that he's drawing story not from a panel-by-panel script, but instead from a plot, then I'm scripting the dialogue and captions from his pages (and then lettering the script on the pages. We're a two man operation!).

Above you see a bit of the finished artwork for page one, but here is the rough of that entire page:

Dungeons & Baubles

The Revenger Trilogy is a series of science fiction novels by Alastair Reynolds. In a future millions of years hence, there is a spacefaring civilization amid ancient habitats that form a Dyson Swarm around the sun. Sisters Adrana and Arafura Ness flee their stifling life of wealth to become "bone readers" aboard a solar sail privateer searching for ancient, technological artifacts. 

Things don't go simply easily, as their ship falls prey to the infamous pirate, Bosa Sennen. From that encounter, the sisters are propelled into danger and more adventure than they ever wanted, and ultimately, the deep mysteries of their civilization.

The books are highly enjoyable in their own right, and the world would make a great rpg setting, but beyond that, I think that, in part, they are excellent inspiration for dungeoncrawling sort of adventure in any setting.

Working Class Treasure Hunters

The "dying in holes in the ground" aspect of low-level D&D beloved by old school play is poorly represented in the fiction of Appendix N, but the Revenger series very much portrays this sort of thing. Privateer crews are typically hard luck folks with scars, missing limbs, and stories of former comrades lost in the pursuit of that elusive big score. Such crewmembers have specialties: readers, openers, appraisers, to be efficient in the unglamorous work of seeking out treasures. These treasures are often strange--not as strange as things brought from the Zone in Roadside Picnic--but things that the current civilization can't make nor sometimes even guess their intended purpose. In these novels, these items often function as low level, utilitarian magic items.

Dungeon Lore

Having good intelligence on Baubles is a crucial part of "cracking" them. Baubles are surrounded by force fields that only open at certain times and openers rely on information from other privateers and their own readings and calculations to augur the time and duration of openings. Acquired maps are also essential for efficient and profitable "delves." Baubles have colorful names like His Foulness, the Cuckoo, Wedza's Eye, and the Yellow Jester, and their own internal arrangements and hazards.

Creative Uses

I mentioned before items brought out of Baubles, well their are obvious things of value like quoins (their unit of money), robots, or energy weapons, but also things that can be used less obviously in the privateers life. Bosa Sennen's dread ship has near invisible black sails made from catch cloth found in Baubles: a material that responds to some unknown and otherwise undetected emanation of the sun. Privateers prize even small peices of look stone, a strange glass-like substance that when peered through allows the ability to see through solid object. 

The Revenger series presents, in part, professional treasure hunters focused on resource-oriented and practical aspects of their trade. There are few "monsters" presented--just the pirates and one other threat I won't give away. The dangers are traps or merely hazardous aspects of the environment.  These aspects make more solid inspirations for elements of D&D that don't usually get much of a showcase in fiction.

A New World

With our Land of Azurth campaign nearing its conclusion, I've been thinking about what might come after. Or more truthfully, I've thought of several things that could come after in the last few months as I've felt the end was nigh.

Currently, I've been considering a variation on an idea I've had before: a high adventure occasionally dungeoneering fantasy world inspired by Japanese Standard (Western) Fantasy. Magitech will plan a big role in the setting, and there will be a loose approach to anachronism (even looser than standard D&D settings). This sort of setting will also support the expansive "ancestries" available these days in 5e and high action combat.

The incursion of "demons" (more like the broader D&Dism of fiends than the specifically chaotic evil variety) in service of a Demon King that will reside in the dark side of the physical world rather than a separate plane. I think the world will be shape like an inverted bowl with the demon world being within the concave surface. The "rim" will be the Terminator, a region that never sees more of the sun than twilight and holds numerous lonely fortifications to watch for demonic incursion.

To the extent that it will be variant from standard D&D, I don't worry much about my players accepting it. They've been playing in Azurth for over a decade so that shouldn't be a problem! I do want it to be distinct from Azurth though to provide a somewhat different experience.

In the Shadows

In the Latter Ages of Earth, it is known that the scientist mages of more lucent eras spoke of an invisible, co-existing realm. Scholars know this as the Plane of Shadow. It is long been rumored that there are artifacts allowing minds or shadows to be translated into this shadow realm. These legendary artifacts are known as black mirrors. 

The Plane of Shadow is no ethereal realm, but a place of matter as solid as any, but it remains aloof and invisible. It only interaction is with gravity, so that there might well be whole ecologies of this shadow matter upon the Earth unknown to the mundane world. 

If the black mirrors truly exist, it implies that there is or once was, a civilization or entity on the other side capable of constructing some sort of form for a mind passing through. If such a Shadow or intelligence civilization exists, they could well have some means of sending agents into the world of mundane matter as well.

In the Light of the Black Sun

Our Land of Azurth 5e game continued last night with the party first dealing with an odd bird creature in the strange subterranean prison where they went seeking the Shadow of the Wizard of Azurth. He told them where they might find a page from the Book of Doors that would lead to the Wizard's sanctum. The Shadow told them, that is. The bird just belched a black cloud at Erekose that left him wounded and confused then ran off. The party chose not to give chase.

They asked the guards where they might find the bridge the Shadows told them about. The Mole guards were surprised to see them still alive, but they told them how to find the bridge, though they warned them (so far as they knew) it was a bridge to oblivion. On the way, they met another chatty ghost trapped in a jar (this one they didn't let out) who seemed to confirm the bridge led nowhere.

They moved ahead, and soon they were crossing a ghostly but sturdy enough bridge into a magical darkness that was almost tangible. It always seemed to hang before then like the surface of a draining liquid. Eventually the bridge became a stone tunnel, and the tunnel gradually became vertical rather than horizontal. But then there was a light at the end. They stopped at a couple of places to reconsider their life choices, but in the end moved on.

They climbed toward the light and emerged through a well made from paper (collapsing it as they did) into a paper town. The buildings began to collapse, folding up around them, as did the various flat, cut-out people they saw. 

They were approached by a cut out of a redheaded girl in a crown. She said she was Princess Seven, ruler of Paper Town, and she had been expecting them, "the heroes." She related the story about how the girl whose shadow she was had been given the Paper Town by a wandering minstrel on her birthday long ago. The minstrel had told her that someday heroes would come seeking a page from the book, and she must give them the town if the world was to be saved.

By now, the town had folded, shrank, and lost its color until it was a blank page. The Princess picked it up in her flat hand and gave it to Waylon. The party asked what would happen to her. She said she would go now to be reunited with the princess whose shadow she was, who had grown into a queen and died a long time ago. With than, the color faded from her, and she drifted to the ground, a paper cutout in the shape of the shadow of a seven-year-old girl.

The party broke the magic gems they had been given to return to the headquarters of the princesses. They found only one gnome guarding the equipment. He was surprised to see them as it had been weeks since they went on their mission. They were presumed to have failed, and the princesses and the amassed armies began the assault on the Sapphire City.

Realizing there was no time to lose, the party affixed the book page to a wall, then passed through the door into the outer sanctum of the Wizard in the Sapphire Castle. Crossing the circular room to the grand doors on the other side down a cerulean carpet, they were attacked by a mass of shadows from several other doors. Surrounded, the party fought through the minions surprisingly quickly (the shadows only rolled one to-hit roll in the double digits!), then listened at the door. Nothing.

Opening it, they found the Wizard on the other side, but he was not as they expected. He was desiccated and insensate upon his throne, energy draining from his body into the black, darkly glowing miniature sun that hung menacingly above his head. 

Before they could do anything, a thick column of smoke-like shadow emerged from the orb, forming into an immense snake-like form with a human face. It spoke in a like the grind of heavy stone: "I am the worm that gnaws at the corpse of time. A cancer in the heart of existence. I have come to bring an ending to this world!"

Dungeon Innovations

Tsutomu Nihei

The following suggestions for dungeon adventure rpgs may not be entirely novel, but they certainly aren't common in published rpg dungeons, and I feel like they have potential.

Master of the Dungeon

Rpg dungeons sometimes have bosses, but mostly they seem to sit and wait for dungeoneers to get to them. In other media, they sometimes take a more active role taunting the protagonists or bedeviling them in various ways before the ultimate conflict. While this might become tedious, I feel like when used judiciously, it could be an interesting change of pace.

Time Trial

Despite the emphasis on resource management in some dungeon games, I don't think I've seen a dungeon that opened and close on a certain schedule. This is the case in all the "bauble"-based vaults in Reynolds Revenger series and forecasting the opens and how long they will last is an important job for looters. The anime adaptation of I Left My A-Rank Party... also has some dungeons for which time is a factor, as I recall.

A dungeon with strict time limits, in addition to adding pressure to move quickly, would also force characters to have some strategy about what they explore and loot. Do you try for the big-ticket items immediately or focus on quick exits with lower value items?

A Team Sport

While adventuring guilds aren't ubiquitous in settings, they're an established element. What I don't think I have seen in a rpg setting, though, is competing guilds or organizations (larger than individual parties). Inspiration could be found in the chariot racing factions (demes) of Byzantium or Roman collegia. 

Questing at Home

This weekend, I set up a sort of escape room/LARP for my 8 year-old. She took on the role of a warrior princess sent to retrieve a golden treasure (a plastic version of the idol at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark) from a many-armed monster (my old Clash of the Titans kraken toy, rescued and restored when my parents moved a couple of years ago).

With sword and shield, and a bag with a couple of coins (a KS reward from Outgunned Adventure) she set out to go to the wizard's tower (the upstairs of our home) where she had been told that a wizard had imprisoned a unicorn (a statue of the Last Unicorn from movie located on a bookshelf in her bedroom).

The quest involved the occasional puzzle (a tic-tac-toe cypher, a coordinate grid puzzle, riddle answering, and some light math) combined with random encounters. These were strategically placed pairs of cups, one of which had a monster (a cardboard mini) under it and the other either a coin or a friendly encounter that provided clues. For example, a gnome Meeple revealed that the Lime Gnome (a green garden gnome statue that for some reason sits in our dining room) runs an apothecary shop that will sell you a potion that gives a power up.

Monster fights were handled with simple dice rolls of a d6. Scoring a hit required beating the monster's roll by a certain amount, and monsters had a certain number of "hit points." My daughter had her own "life points" in the form of three hearts on sheets of paper clipped together.

As it turned out, my daughter was very luck. She only fought one monster before the boss and out rolled the monster every single time.

She enjoyed it and immediately asked for another one, but I said that would have to wait for another day.

Into the Shadows

Our 5e Land of Azurth game continued last Sunday with the party (after a rest and healing) undertaking the capture of the other shadow/temporal duplicate of the nefarious Wizard of Azurth they had run across, the mysterious Shadow Man in the Half-ruined Tower.

The group objects to the possibility of running into their earlier selves, but Princess Viola and her Gnomes already had that figured out. The slide show they present says they are sending the PCs back to 5 days after they left the area.

When they arrive in the past, there is still one Gloom Elf in the tower, but he's in no mood for fighting. He says the Shadow retreated into the large, whirlpool of shadow that now takes up most of the tower, but there was a blockage in it somewhere and he doesn't seem to have gotten where he was going. 

With little else to go on, the party jumps in after him. They find themselves (surprisingly) in a prison dungeon, partially flooded, and partially caved in, run by Mole Folk. The mole folk are remarkably lackadaisical about their situation, noting that time runs differently here, but they are reasonably friendly. The dungeon itself is something of a maze with unnatural darkness, so even the mold guards used unspooling twine to help from getting lost. The prisoners are in oubliettes with sort of steampunk contraption doors, set to open when their sentence is up. 

Using their hand-held device given to them previously by the Princesses, the party discovers the Shadow is in one of these cells. Waylon is able to pick the locking mechanism, causing the chronometer to run faster, making it open.

The Shadow is inside, and though the part is expecting him to fight them, he is willing to go, even knowing what they are up to. Having had different experiences from the Wizard, he has had a change of heart. He says if they can find "the bridge" located elsewhere in the dungeon, they can get to a place to acquire a page from the Book of Doors that will take them directly to the Wizard's sanctum.

The party sends the Shadow back to the Princesses with a gem. The Shadow suggests the way to find the bridge is to ask the guards. They intend to do just that, but no sooner than they are out of the cell and debating a course of action than a random encounter roll leads to a very ugly bird-beast coming upon them.

Weird Revisited: The Paper Town

This post originally appeared in May of 2016. It became relevant in last night's session of our Land of Azurth 5e game, so it seemed a good time to repeat it.

 

Paper Town (it is said) in some sense occupies space in the Uncanny Valley in the west of the Country of Yanth, but the most reliable way to gain entry to the town is via a map. Potentially any map will do, but it must be one noting a nonexistent settlement, street or island. These fictitious entries serve as gates to Paper Town.

As is common with magical places, gaining entrance is not as simple as finding a suitable map. Luckily, the legend regarding Paper Town's creation delineates the necessary procedure. Paper Town, as the story says, was a gift given to Princess Hyacinthia of Azurth on the occasion of her birthday by a mysterious stranger. He informed the Princess that she could not visit Paper Town in person, being compose of something other than paper and possessed of general lack of flatness as she was, but her shadow could—with the proper attire. The stranger traced the outline of the Princess’s shadow on a large sheet of paper and cut around its edge. The cutout was taken to a place where the stranger’s map showed a hamlet to be but was not. The cutout vanished, like a piece of paper slid under an unseen door into an equally unseen room.

The fact Hyacinthia never regain her shadow nor have many who have repeated this ritual might give some pause, but that detail is not frequently repeated.

In Paper Town, the cutouts become paper doll doppelgängers of the person that served as their model. These visitors find unfolding streets of pop-up trees and citizenry and flat facades that elaborate to Escher-architectured structures when entered. The city seems endless, but the clever observer will note that it recycles itself to appear so. As the preceding portion grows, the receding part folds up behind. This can happen in any direction: Tall towers erect themselves when an evil sorcerer flies up to his sanctum. Dungeons unfold like inverted houses of cards when heroes go delving. The ostensible ruler of Paper Town, Princess Seven, paper doll of the long dead Queen Hyacinthia, makes the final decision on how "permanent" a new structure is in her city.

One attractive trait of Paper Town is that it conforms to a visitor's imagination in certain ways. Anything one wishes for may be found there, though anything of value is likely to require a quest or be obtained in a way that makes one not want it after all. In other words, Paper Town adheres to laws of story.

The archons or godlings that truly rule Paper Town enforce this reality zealously. These Great Tall Tailors, or Scissor Men as they are sometime called, will catch paper doll visitors who are ill-fitted for the story the Tall Tailors wish told and snip, snap, snip, reshape them into a more pleasing arrangement. The Tall Tailors are paper themselves (Or perhaps they are the shapes left when slender, lank-limbed manshapes are cut of paper?) save for their gleaming, scissor hands. Their shadows are also Tailors but their shadow-scissors cut the spirit exclusively while their metallic doubles cut the physical.

It is said that the Book of Doors, a book where every page is a portal to another place, originated in Paper Town, but how it came to be in the wider Land of Aurth is unknown.

The Enterprise of (Un)Death

Don Maitz

In the Latter Ages of Earth, people do not die completely, at least not quickly. As these things are understood by the Instrumentality an imprint, an after-image, of a person remains in the Ancients' datasphere. When a Mind is informed by that record, a simulacrum, at least in part, of the deceased is made. This is a shade, though not in the way the superstitious common folk imagine. 

At its base, necromancy is the magical art of summoning and controlling shades. It's practice is watched closely by local authorities and the Instrumentality (in those areas where it holds sway). Being able to interact with the shades of the recently deceased is undeniably useful, not the least in forensic necromancy. Where necromancers primarily run afoul of the Instrumentality and temporal authorities is when they use their arts to create undead.

The criminal necromancer creates undead for two primary reasons. The first is for manual labor. These workers don't require a shade in the semblance of any particular person, so necromancers can pluck from the either degraded or partial shades; rudimentary data on physical movements is their primary concern. With a corpse as a substrate and sufficient art applied to their animation, a necromancer can turn out laborers for difficult conditions or troops whose shock value may compensate for their lack of intelligence and skill at arms.

The second application is more lucrative but requires more skill and time. That is the provision of immortality, or as close as their arts may come to it. This requires the creation of a specially made shade, imaged with precision from the current mental vector of the aspiring immortal. In the fallen Latter Age, this generally means destructive mapping of the individual's brain and its functioning. The intellect is then housed in a suitable, durable platform and placed within their old body. The body will inevitably decay, but the necromancer's arts can delay that decay, preserving function perhaps for millennia.  The culmination of these techniques is the lich, though botched jobs, and cost- or material-saving techniques have created many other variations, which are more common.

What is Known of the Mind Flayers

The malefic Outsiders of the astral void beyond the Earth are myriad in the Latter Age, but few are as distinct from the hosts of horrors as the beings known popularly as Mind Flayers.  Though they are believed to be long extinct, they still feature promptly in folklore and popular entertainments, attesting to their hold over humankind's collective imagination.

Little is known for certain about these beings. In Denizens of the Beyond by Pseudo-Vespydron, the most widely known work to examine them in detail, Mind Flayers are said to have come from the sphere of Mars, but whether they are natives to that world or from some even more distant home, even Denizens rather credulous author does not say. 

Pseudo-Vespydron uncritically accepts the cephalopod-headed humanoid appearance of popular portrayals and the idea that they were obligate consumers of human brains. The later (and comparatively more sober) histories of Malgrunda note no reliable descriptions of their physical form exist and put forward the theory that their purpose in preying upon the Earth was to acquire not foodstuffs but slave minds, derived from the destructive mapping of the brains of still-living captives. Perhaps the only place where she might be criticized in straying from established fact is in the time she devotes to Hseng's baseless assertion that the cephalopod skull is actually the memory of an environmental helmet with attached manipulators.

Druids of the Latter Age

 Contrary to the popular entertainments of the Latter Age, there is no cohesive group known as the druids. Rather, there are individuals and networks of individuals across several cultures that adhere to similar beliefs and practices. Though the Instrumentality labels druidism as heretical "Earth-worshippers," these practitioners generally no more worship the Earth Mother than the Instrumentality itself does.

Like the clerics of the Instrumentality, those that might be termed druids are aware to one degree or another that in more lucent ages the environment of the Earth and its citizens interaction with it were managed by a great Mind. This Mind is no more, at least not in any unified form (so the clerics believe), but the many of the component minds still haunt the world, and the particles of its sensory apparatus of that superintelligence still weave through the winds, fall with the rains, and course through the bloodstreams of animals. 

By means of secret lore and technology, the druids are able to converse and with the lesser minds that record and synthesize this sensory data. These processes are known as elementals. While the elementals occasionally form connections with more active systems on their own, the druid's involvement often bridges the two, giving the earth a voice to humankind that dwells upon it. Like the magi, druids are at times able to command the remnant nanotechnological systems, though how they achieve these powers is a closely guarded secret. Among their more impressive abilities, they can cause avatars to be instantiated from natural features for short periods of time or effect change in local weather patterns.

Unlike the Instrumentality, the druids do not believe that the Gaean mind is irrevocably destroyed. Instead, they view her as suffering from an illness, and illness from which they work to help her recover. They don't seek the re-ascendence of humankind, but rather the restoration of a balance they feel the Ancients achieved but then squandered.

The Cat Completes the Mission

Our Land of Azurth 5e game continued last night as the party confronted the Wizard of Azurth and Morzengersturm over the fate of Roderick Drue, a young occultist, at the Columbia Exposition in 1893 Chicago.

The Wizard recognizes the party calls forth shadows in the form of Expo attendees to attack them. And there are a lot of them! Luckily these are minions (as per the minion rules in Flee, Mortals!), so the party is able to mow them done, but it takes a while and gives them a moment of fright as there are a lot of them. Erekose, Waylon, and the activated Figurine of Wondrous Power Bear takes down five at the entrance of the tent. Shade goes after those coming through the side of the tent with her bow. Zabra witchbolts a couple of them.

Zabra's familiar, a cat, is dutifully carrying the transport gem to the target, Roderick Drue. When it breaks the gem with a bite, a cloud of colorful smoke engulfs both cat and occultist and transports them to the Land of Azurth. 

Waylon gets frightened by the shadows, so moves inside for an attack on Mortzengersturm. The party has a history with the Mad Manticore as they killed him in--well, their past, his future. Zabra delivers a psychic bolt that incapacitates the Manticore wizard before he can act.

His ally and his minions gone, the Wizard teleports away.

The party uses their other jewels to return to Azurth themselves. After some healing they are ready to plan their next mission: black to the Shadow Tower.