2019/05/29

Book Notes: The Proud Tower

Endon, the city-state at the core of Magical Industrial Revolution, is designed to be dropped into generic medieval-ish settings without too much disruption. There are no far-flung colonies and ancient historical facts to contend with. It's very focused. I've left out colonialism, state religion, adjacent ancient and integrated kingdoms, and many more things in order to focus on magic, industry, and the heart of the city.

The Proud Tower, Barbara W. Tuchman's collection of essays on the world before the Great War, is an excellent book. The essays are brilliant, self-contained, and endlessly re-readable. As a book it's less coherent than A Distant Mirror or The Guns of August, but it's full of wonderful details and insights. You can it online here.
For the purposes of D&D I'm going to stick to selections from chapters 1 and 7.
One of Tuchman's gifts is sketching a person or event from a few well-chosen details or anecdotes, and the aristocrats of Great Britain provided endless material.
The last government in the Western world to possess all the attributes of aristocracy in working condition took office in England in June of 1895. Great Britain was at the zenith of empire when the Conservatives won the General Election of that year, and the Cabinet they formed was her superb and resplendent image. Its members represented the greater landowners of the country who had been accustomed to govern for generations. As its superior citizens they felt they owed a duty to the State to guard its interests and manage its affairs. They governed from duty, heritage and habit—and, as they saw it, from right.

The Prime Minister was a Marquess and lineal descendant of the father and son who had been chief ministers to Queen Elizabeth and James I. The Secretary for War was another Marquess who traced his inferior title of Baron back to the year 1181, whose great-grandfather had been Prime Minister under George III and whose grandfather had served in six cabinets under three reigns. The Lord President of the Council was a Duke who owned 186,000 acres in eleven counties, whose ancestors had served in government since the Fourteenth Century, who had himself served thirty-four years in the House of Commons and three times refused to be Prime Minister. The Secretary for India was the son of another Duke whose family seat was received in 1315 by grant from Robert the Bruce and who had four sons serving in Parliament at the same time. The President of the Local Government Board was a pre-eminent country squire who had a Duke for brother-in-law, a Marquess for son-in-law, an ancestor who had been Lord Mayor of London in the reign of Charles II, and who had himself been a Member of Parliament for twenty-seven years. The Lord Chancellor bore a family name brought to England by a Norman follower of William the Conqueror and maintained thereafter over eight centuries without a title. The Lord Lieutenant for Ireland was an Earl, a grandnephew of the Duke of Wellington and a hereditary trustee of the British Museum. The Cabinet also included a Viscount, three Barons and two Baronets. Of its six commoners, one was a director of the Bank of England, one was a squire whose family had represented the same county in Parliament since the Sixteenth Century, one—who acted as Leader of the House of Commons—was the Prime Minister’s nephew and inheritor of a Scottish fortune of £4,000,000, and one, a notable and disturbing cuckoo in the nest, was a Birmingham manufacturer widely regarded as the most successful man in England.

Besides riches, rank, broad acres and ancient lineage, the new Government also possessed, to the regret of the Liberal Opposition and in the words of one of them, “an almost embarrassing wealth of talent and capacity.” Secure in authority, resting comfortably on their electoral majority in the House of Commons and on a permanent majority in the House of Lords, of whom four-fifths were Conservatives, they were in a position, admitted the same opponent, “of unassailable strength.”

[...]

Lord Salisbury was both the epitome of his class and uncharacteristic of it—except insofar as the freedom to be different was a class characteristic. He was six feet four inches tall, and as a young man had been thin, ungainly, stooping and shortsighted, with hair unusually black for an Englishman. Now sixty-five, his youthful lankiness had turned to bulk, his shoulders had grown massive and more stooped than ever, and his heavy bald head with full curly gray beard rested on them as if weighted down. Melancholy, intensely intellectual, subject to sleepwalking and fits of depression which he called “nerve storms,” caustic, tactless, absent-minded, bored by society and fond of solitude, with a penetrating, skeptical, questioning mind, he had been called the Hamlet of English politics. He was above the conventions and refused to live in Downing Street. His devotion was to religion, his interest in science. In his own home he attended private chapel every morning before breakfast, and had fitted up a chemical laboratory where he conducted solitary experiments. He harnessed the river at Hatfield for an electric power plant on his estate and strung up along the old beams of his home one of England’s first electric light systems, at which his family threw cushions when the wires sparked and sputtered while they went on talking and arguing, a customary occupation of the Cecils.

Lord Salisbury cared nothing for sport and little for people. His aloofness was enhanced by shortsightedness so intense that he once failed to recognize a member of his own Cabinet, and once, his own butler. At the close of the Boer War he picked up a signed photograph of King Edward and, gazing at it pensively, remarked, “Poor Buller [referring to the Commander-in-Chief at the start of the war], what a mess he made of it.” On another occasion he was seen in prolonged military conversation with a minor peer under the impression that he was talking to Field Marshal Lord Roberts.

[...]
His acquaintance with games was confined to tennis, but when elderly he invented his own form of exercise, which consisted in riding a tricycle through St. James’s Park in the early mornings or along paths cemented for the purpose in the park of his estate at Hatfield. Wearing for the occasion a kind of sombrero hat and a short sleeveless cloak with a hole in the middle in which he resembled a monk, he would be accompanied by a young coachman to push him up the hills. At the downhill slopes, the young man would be told to “jump on behind,” and the Prime Minister, with the coachman’s hands on his shoulders, would roll away, cloak flying and pedals whirring.

[...]

A stubby Pickwickian figure with short legs, red cheeks, white tufts of hair over his ears and a humorous expression, Lord Halsbury, despite his genial manner, was a hard opponent, implacable at the bar, with a relentless memory. He wore a frock coat, a square-topped derby hat, a “true blue” Tory tie and, according to a younger member of the Upper House, “invariably objected on principle to all change.” Owing to meagre family finances, he had been educated at home by his father, a barrister and editor of a high Tory daily paper, the Standard, who gave him lessons in Greek, Latin and Hebrew until 4 A.M. and was so upright that he refused an offer from the Duke of Newcastle, an admirer of his paper, to put his three sons through Oxford.

[...]
 

Spencer Compton Cavendish, eighth Duke of Devonshire, [was] probably the only man in England both secure enough and careless enough to forget an engagement with his sovereign. Edward VII, having informed the Duke that he proposed to dine quietly with him at Devonshire House on a certain day, duly arrived, to the consternation of the household, for the Duke was not at home and had to be hurriedly retrieved from the Turf Club.

[...]

...all year the house was open to the public, who tramped through the halls in thousands. The Duke liked to watch them, and thinking his face as unknown to them as theirs to him, would stand, unconscious of being recognized, “wondering why the housemaid who acted as guide and the whole party had suddenly stood still and were staring at him.” Though racehorses were more to him than books, he once astonished his librarian who was showing him his own first edition of Paradise Lost by sitting down and reading it aloud from the first line with simple pleasure, until the Duchess came in and, poking the Duke with her parasol, remarked, “If he reads poetry he will never go for his walk.”

[...]

He liked old baggy, casual clothes, never took the slightest trouble with his guests, deliberately ignored those who might prove tiresome, and once, when a speaker in the House of Lords was declaiming on “the greatest moments in life,” the Duke opened his eyes long enough to remark to his neighbor, “My greatest moment was when my pig won first prize at Skipton Fair.”

[...]
Arthur Balfour, prince of the Cecil line, nephew of the Prime Minister and his political heir apparent, artist of debate and idol of Society, was the paragon of his party and its official Leader in the House of Commons. He was forty-seven in 1895 and, when his uncle retired in 1902, was to succeed him as Prime Minister. Over six feet tall, he had blue eyes, waving brown hair and moustache, and a soft, bland face that might have seemed vulnerable if it had not been smoothed to an external serenity. His expression was gentle, his figure willowy, his manner nonchalant, but there remained a mystery in his face. No one could tell what banked fires burned behind it or whether they burned or even if they existed. Rarely seen to sit upright, he reclined in indolent attitudes as close to the horizontal as possible, “as if to discover,” wrote Punch’s parliamentary correspondent, “how nearly he could sit on his shoulder blades.”

[...]

Balfour was careless of facts, unsafe with figures, and memory was not his strong point, but he surmounted this weakness by a technique that never failed to amuse the House. When dealing with a complicated bill he would take care to be flanked by a knowledgeable minister such as the Home Secretary or Attorney-General, and if he floundered over details his colleague could whisper a correction. As described by Sir Henry Lucy, parliamentary correspondent of Punch, Mr. Balfour would pause, regard the colleague with a friendly glance tinged with gentle admonition, and say, “Exactly.” At the next mistake and whispered correction, he would repeat the performance with a sterner note in his “Exactly,” conveying the impression that there was a limit to toleration in these matters and the colleague could be forgiven once but he really must not go on blundering.
[...]
One of Lord Salisbury’s nephews, Cecil Balfour, disappeared to Australia, over an affair of a forged check, and died there, it was said, of drink.
"Remittance Men" were reasonably common in the history of the region where I grew up, inspiring tall tales, speculation, and endless mirth. A few went on perilous expeditions and maintained legendary unflappable calm in the worst possible conditions. More games should include options for remittance men.

Horses, too, are often overlooked.

[...]
Owning a stud and breeding racehorses required an ample fortune. When Lord Rosebery, having married a Rothschild, won the Derby while Prime Minister in 1894, he received a telegram from Chauncey Depew in America, “Only heaven left.” Depew’s telegram proved an underestimate, for Rosebery won the Derby twice more, in 1895 and 1905. The Prince of Wales won it in 1896 with his great lengthy bay Persimmon, bred at his own stud, again in 1900 with Persimmon’s brother Diamond Jubilee, and a third time, as King, in 1909 with Minoru. As the first such victory by a reigning monarch, it was Epsom’s greatest day. When the purple, scarlet and gold of the royal colors came to the front at Tattenham Corner the crowd roared; when Minoru neck and neck with his rival battled it out at a furious pace along the rails they went mad with excitement and wept with delight when he won by a head. They broke through the ropes, patted the King on the back, wrung his hand, and “even policemen were waving their helmets and cheering themselves hoarse.”

It was said of Mr. Knox, private chaplain to the Duke of Rutland, that he wore boots and spurs under his cassock and surplice and “thought of horses even in the pulpit.” The Duke’s family could always tell by the speed of morning prayers if Mr. Knox were hunting that day or not.
[...]
In their luxurious and lavish world, self-indulgence was the natural law. Notable eccentrics like the nocturnal Duke of Portland and bad-tempered autocrats like Sir George Sitwell and Sir William Eden were merely representatives of their class in whom the habit of having their own way had gone to extremes. But for the majority it was easy to be agreeable when everything was done to keep them in comfort and ease and to make life for the great and wealthy as uninterruptedly pleasant as possible.

"Nocturnal" doesn't come close to describing the Duke of Portland. He stripped all the furniture from his ancestral home, painted the walls a specific shade of pink, constructed an enormous underground labyrinth (refusing to speak to or acknowledge the builders), kept a chicken roasting at all hours, fled from visitors and guests, and... well, just read the wiki article.

Sir George Sitwell traveled with an enormous medicine case full of mislabeled cures. He kept seven studies full of disorganized notes, invented all sorts of slightly baffling and unpopular things, and loathed being contradicted. He was so overbearing that his children invented a mythical yacht and pretended to take long sea voyages to avoid his near-daily letters.


Sir William Eden appears to have merely been cantankerous, irritable, and depressive.

Chapter 7 covers the start of an era outside the scope of Magical Industrial Revolution. The facts below are similar but the need to act on them hasn't reached the halls of power.


Investigations and reports appearing all at once after 1900 made harshly visible the fact and the consequences of extreme inequality in possession of material goods. ...Evidence accumulated that the richest country in the world rested on a foundation of one-third of its population living “in chronic poverty, unable to satisfy the primal needs of animal life.” Chiozza Money showed that economic inequality was particularly wide in England. In France, whose population was about the same, there were twice as many small estates between £500 and £10,000 as in England, but in the United Kingdom three times as many large estates over £50,000 and four times as many over £250,000 as in France.
The investigators produced the facts: sleep, diet, sanitation, privacy, even respiratory air, were inadequate for basic human needs. Professor Huxley had calculated that 800 cubic feet of air space per person was the ideal. Even the Poor House provided 300. In the slums people lived three to a bedroom of 700 cubic feet or, with children, eight and nine in a space of 1,200 cubic feet. Vermin lived with them, a piece of paper on the floor served as a toilet, fish on Sundays was the weekly protein for a family of eight, at two and a half ounces per portion. Children were stunted and pale, with rotting teeth, and if they went to school, sat dully at their desks or fell asleep. Ignorance and apathy as much as ill health were poverty’s product; the slums were sloughs of wasted lives. Overcrowding in country villages was often as bad. In an Oxfordshire cottage a family of eight slept in two beds with a pair of thin blankets among them, in a Yorkshire cottage husband and wife and five daughters shared two beds and an attic floor, in Somerset a mother and three children slept in one room, five children of both sexes up to the age of nineteen in another.
For unskilled and unorganized labour, working conditions matched the slums. At the Shawfield Chemical Works in Glasgow in 1897, year of the Diamond Jubilee, workmen received 3d. or 4d. an hour for a twelve-hour day, seven days a week, spent amid poisonous vapors without a lunch-hour rest. They ate lunch standing at the furnaces and if they took Sunday off were fined the next day’s wages. Lord Overtoun, owner of the Works, a philanthropist who gave £10,000 a year to charity, was a leading member of the Sunday Observance and Sunday Rest Societies. In other industries workers could be arrested for taking a day off without permission. If they applied for it, the request could be refused; if they took it anyway they could be, and often were, hauled off to a day in gaol. Skilled workers organized in England’s craft unions, the oldest in Europe, were better off. Numbering about one-fifth of all adult male workers, a larger proportion than in any other country, they had their own insurance and pension systems backed by large funds and they benefited from lower prices in their own cooperatives. Nevertheless, vis-à-vis capital, they were still on the defensive and the dark persistent presence of unemployment at their backs made them vulnerable.
England’s economy since 1900 had recovered from the depression of the nineties and was on the whole prosperous, active and expanding. Shippers and shipbuilders, bankers and millowners were busy, coal mines were operating to capacity, and although in chemical, electrical and other new industries the British were not as enterprising as some foreign competitors, most businesses, despite ups and downs, were doing well. Yet the gap in distribution of profits was growing not less but greater. While the rich lived at an acme of luxury and leisure, the purchasing power of wages was falling and human material deteriorating. The minimum height for recruits for the British Army was lowered from five feet three inches in 1883 to five feet in 1900.

Something was wrong with the system. Somehow the great mechanical and material achievements of the recent past had twisted society out of shape.

2019/05/27

OSR: Veinscrawl Session 18, 19, & 20

Last session the party fled the fungid valley, fought some monks, lost Bill to a botched roiling polymorph attack, and fled into the Ruins.

The surviving party members are:
-Cazael the spiderling fighter. Hardened survivor of many perils and far too much "wizard business".
-Swainson the garden wizard. Turned into a Lamassu (lion-bodied human-headed flying sphinx). Has a cat-coat with pockets and enchanted claws.
-Tuck the flealing summoner. A little bit creepy.
-Klaus the barbarian-sorcerer. Turned into a brownie; very unhappy in current form.
-Alice the animist witch. A little bit mad.

After stumbling through the catacombs for several hours, fleeing from anything that glowed or looked threatening, the party eventually found a fissure in the wall that didn't seem to be deliberately constructed. They crept through and found themselves on a balcony overlooking an underground city.

It took them a few minutes to adjust to sights more than a lantern's light in front of their eyes. The city was lit by a green chemical glow from a fissure along its length. Some ancient catastrophe had tilted entire districts, shattered roads and bridges, and shivered monuments into fragments. A few very distant lights moved occasionally. Torches, ghosts, or something far stranger? The air shimmered with chemical fumes.

After making camp and trying to adjust to the newly expanded vista, the party decided to explore the ruins. "After all," Swainson said, "that fungal ambassodile said we could track down some missing dwarf miners here. If we do, apparently he'll give us a map to the surface."
"Do you think he's still alive? We did kind of explode that village," Klaus said despondently.

With Swainson flying ahead to act as a scout and rope anchor, the party began moving through the abandoned cityscape. They weren't the only ones trying to find valuable treasure in the decaying and chem-blasted hulls of ancient buildings. Emilio, a human speleomage and Jericho, a human elementalist wizard, had mounted an expedition of their own. Trained underground by separate (competing) cabals of wizards and sent off to find valuable items, the two mages didn't trust each other... but knew their separate odds of survival were poor.

Swainson, a flying sphinx-thing, made an unlikely diplomat, but when she blundered into Emelio and Jericho she did her best to ease tensions before the rest of the group arrived. Having just lost one wizard, Cazael wasn't pleased to see two more, but accepted that they'd probably be less trouble than the late and lamented Bill. A vague treasure-sharing agreement was worked out, and the newly expanded party continued their quest for valuables.

In their wanderings, they found:
  • ghosts (sprinted away from).
  • mysterious enchantments (ignored).
  • some friendly kobolds hiding in a toppled statue (lightly bribed.
  • an iron golem guarding a gold mask (smashed and looted).
  • pools of toxic flesh-devouring liquid (tempted to weaponized but ignored).
  • malfunctioning repair-golems and seemingly insane constructs (interrogated then ignored).
Until finally, after several days, they traced some segmented metal conduits to their source. Some sort of lightning-fueled engine had burst from the ground. A skull-shaped metal totem rested on top. Anyone who approached it felt warm and started to taste metal. The device's components were inscrutable, but Jericho spotted a large and tempting occultum sphere embedded in one side.

"I'm going in!" Jericho announced, as the party watched from a safe distance. Despite being blasted by lightning and burned by strange energies, he pried out the occultum and fled back to the group.

He spent the next few hours vomiting and staggering. All his hair fell out. "Wizard business," Cazael declared, and refused to stand near him. Still, the egg-sized lump of occultum was a magical treasure beyond compare.

Continuing their exploration, the party found some other raiders in the ruins. A group of six antlings had fortified a tower. They were willing to ally with the PCs provided the PCs were traveling deeper into the ruins. They had no food to offer, but gave some hints towards local treasure.

Following the hints, the party found a buried bunker, disabled a lightning trap, fought some gas-mask-clad ghouls, and looted some gold and relics. The main treasure was a 2'x4' cabinet door that opened into an extradimensional space; a "door of holding", in a sense. Items placed inside it didn't increase the weight of the door and frame. Jericho was asked to carry the door; it provided a convenient shield between the unhealthy wizard and his allies.
Emelio, tempted by the occultum floating around the group, decided to try a dangerous technique for enhancing raw spellcasting power. With Jericho's help, the speleomage melted an occultum coin over a magic flame and injected the semi-real mixture directly into their skull. While the molten occultum damaged a few vital brain regions, it also granted Emelio extra power. The other wizards decided not to try it... yet.

After another day of rest, the party began their descent into the lower regions of the collapsed city. They fought off an ambush by some sort of hook-skinned doppleganger-fishing-line-thing, narrowly avoided some very dangerous terrain, and got moderately lost.

While trying to get their bearings, the group spotted a mostly intact room suspended inside a ruined horizontal building. Reaching the precariously balanced room was a challenge. Klaus, the smallest party member, agreed to be lowered on a rope. One locked cabinet was both intact and promising; Klaus tried to open it and narrowly dodged a dart trap. Annoyed, he stuck his hand inside, felt a velvet bag, and was astonished when the cabinet door slammed shut, neatly severing his hand at the wrist. The other PCs hauled him up and bandaged his wound.

Tuck volunteered for a second attempt. He decided to attach his summoned rope, Postidon-Pru, to the building's spar and to the cabinet drawer. The plan was to command the rope to retract, pulling the door free without risk of further injury. The initial stage worked, but the force and exertion started a chain reaction. The building began to collapse. The drawer, swinging like a pendulm on the end of the summoned rope, bashed into the outside of the hanging room. Tuck grabbed for the velvet bag. He was still attached to the building's roof with a rope and harness; escape was feasible.

Unfortunately, Klaus decided to help. The sorcerer created an iron box around Tuck to "protect him" from the collapsing structure. The box neatly severed Tuck's rope and trapped him in a ready-made coffin. As the box began to fall, Klaus realized his mistake and used sorcery to add pillows to the box's interior.

It didn't help. The summoner plummeted off the building, smashed through several layers of ruin, and collided with an iron plate far below. A few seconds later the sorcerous coffin vanished, revealing Tuck's mashed remains. Swainson flew down to loot the corpse. The velvet bag, the source of all the trouble, contained a rich haul of occultum and diamonds.

Tuck's death had also deprived the party of their only perpetual light source. The antlings had a lantern and several PCs still carried oil, but if the lantern failed or their hirelings decided to leave, the party could only rely on magic and temporary light spells.

Would the party ever find those missing miners? What riches lie at the bottom of the Ruins? Would any other wizards inject occultum directly into their brains?

Find out next time.

2019/05/16

OSR: Academic Classification of Spells

Boff! Magazine, a weekly satirical periodical, ran a comic illustration. In first panel, a solemn conference of wizards sit around a table eating dinner. The caption reads "They have agreed not to mention the Question of Classification." In the second panel, the table is overturned. Wizards bludgeon each other with soup spoons. Dignified beards are yanked, hats are punched flat, dishes and spells fly. The caption reads, "They mentioned it."

The Question of Classification has consumed the theoretical magic community for a generation. The former system of eight "Grand Schools" (Abjuration, Conjuration, Divination, Enchantment, Evocation, Illusion, Necromancy, and Transmutation), a system that fit so neatly into the eightfold paradigm, suffered several esoteric but devastating blows. Transmuting base metals was shown to be a property of raw magic, not a separate school or class of spell. A huge number of spells were proven to be minor variants on force plate. Illusionists wrested light-magic away from Evocationists, who in turn split into Elementalists and a bewildering array of sub-factionalists.

Only a few hoary old souls still support the Grand Schools unconditionally, but no coherent system has emerged to replace it. In the meantime, tempers run high. Prof. Welpish and Prof. Curitan fought a duel over whether dancing lights should be classified as an Illusion or an Evocation. At a faculty dinner, a visiting lecturer was heard to shout, "If cure wounds is Necromancy then I am a jackass!" to which another guest sarcastically replied, "Pray ma'am, we are not discussing polymorph at this time."
Biffno
The table below covers all spells separately identified by the College of Endon. Spells in the same row share the same "family", in increasing potency or sophistication from left to right. Spells are further divided by "blocks" and "schools". The placement of any given spell on this table is subject to considerable debate and future revision. Some spells are given in a general sense (e.g. detect covers detect magic, detect traps, detect gold, etc.)

Hedge Magic covers all spells that don't fit into any other school or whose placement is so controversial that they can't safely be assigned a school without endless fights.

Nothing in this table affects practical wizards, who cheerfully reference spell-tables a century out of date... or a few decades ahead of the curve.

Note: If there are any (non-cleric non-druid) spells that aren't on this list that you feel should be included, please report them in the comments. Feel free to do your best outraged wizard impression. Ditto for misclassifications.


Spell Level: Low (0-2) Medium (3-5) High (6-8) Very High (9+)
Abduration
Countermagic Deflect Spell Counterspell Spell Immunity Antimagic Field
Lesser Restoration Remove Curse Greater Restoration -
Warding Warding Mark Warding Circle Banish Imprisonment
Impedence Resistance Protection - -
Alteration (formerly Transmutation)
Biomancy Alter Self Temporary Polymorph Permanent Polymorph Mass Polymorph
Minor Healing Major Healing Regenerate Mass Healing
Space Rope Trick Tiny Hut    
Time - Slow   Temporal Stasis
Creation Mending Fabricate Disintegrate -
- Minor Creation - -
Summons Summon Animal Summon Lesser Monster Summon Greater Monster -
Divination
Augries Guidance Commune Vision Astral Projection
Augry - Scry the Past Foresight
- - Vision -
Detections Detect Reveal - -
Identify - - -
Scryings Locate Object Locate Creature - -
- Scry - -
- Clairaudience - -
Seeings Darkvision Clairvoyance True Sight -
- - - -
Elemental (formerly Evocation)
General Control [Element] Wall of [Element] Control Weather -
  Summon [Element]al - -
Stone Earth Tremor Dig Earthquake -
- Stone to Mud Flesh to Stone -
Water Create Water Water Breathing Flood Tsunami
Ice Ice Knife Ice Storm Freezing Sphere -
Ray of Frost Cone of Cold - -
Chill Touch - - -
Frostbite - - -
Fire Fire Bolt Fireball Delayed Blast Fireball Meteor Swarm
Create Flame - Incendiary Cloud -
Scorching Ray Flame Arrow - -
Burning Hands - - -
Heat Metal - - -
Lightning Spark Lightning Bolt Chain Lightning -
Shocking Grasp Call Lightning - -
Acid Acid Arrow Dissolve - -
Acid Splash - - -
Air Gust Deflect Arrows Whirlwind -
Void/Vacuum Shatter Implosion - -
Thunderclap - - -
Force
Shielding Mage Armor Protection Immunity Invulnerability
Shield of Force Wall of Force Forcecage -
Manipulation Mage Hand Telekinesis Repulsion -
Floating Disc - - -
Hold Person - - -
Illusion
Light Invisibility Radiating Invisibility Mass Invisibility -
Light Continual Light Sunbeam -
Darkness Continual Darkness Maddening Darkness -
Colour Spray - - -
Dancing Lights - - -
Workings Minor Illusion Illusion Permanent Illusion -
- Hallucinatory Terrain - -
Illusionary Sound - - -
Mind-Altering (formerly Enchantment)
Charms Charm Animal Charm Monster Mass Charm -
Charm Person Dominate Geas -
Memories Enthrall Suggestion Mass Suggestion -
Forget Modify Memory Mental Prison -
Share Thoughts Mental Bond - -
Emotions/States Calm Emotions Induce Emotions - -
Hypnotism Confusion - -
Sleep Fear - -
Movement
Teleportation False Teleport Reciprocal Teleport True Teleport Permanent Gate
Gravitation Levitate Fly Wind Walk -
Featherfall - Reverse Gravity -
- Haste - -
Spider Climb - - -
Necromancy
The Dark Art Speak with Dead Animate Lesser Undead Animate Greater Undead Ressurect
Drain Life Cloudkill - -
Soul Curses Hex Bestow Curse Stunning Word Killing Word
Flesh Curses Enfeebling Ray Paralyzation - -
- Contagion - -
- Phantasmal Killer - -
- Feeblemind - -
Blindness - - -
Deafness - - -
Hedge Magic
  Alarm - - -
  Fog - - -
  Grease - - -
  Lock / Unlock - - -
  Magic Missile - - -
  Silence - - -
  Stinking Cloud - - -
  Web - - -

2019/05/15

OSR: Elsewhere Creatures and Elsewhere Rifts

There are three types of teleport spells. The first, the False Teleport, transforms the caster into a cloud of smoke, a tiny insect, or a floating spark. It’s used for short jaunts of 100’ or less. All transformative magic has risks, but the False Teleport’s short duration makes it relatively safe.

The second type, the Reciprocal Teleport, exchanges the caster and an approximately equal mass of air or stone at the destination. Safe range is a few miles. Botched Reciprocal Teleports lead to tales of wizards embedded in stone, split neatly in half, or dropped from great heights.

The third type, the True Teleport, has effectively unlimited range. The caster is “folded Elsewhere”. They vanish with a warp and a thunderclap of displaced air and, almost immediately, unfold at their destination. Sometimes, a little too frequently for comfort, the caster fails to reappear or emerges mangled and torn by unseen forces. Outside of Dread Necromancy, True Teleportation has the greatest number of cautionary tales attached to it. Merely memorizing a teleport spell is risky. A botched fireball might melt your earwax and painfully scorch your sinuses, but an accidentally triggered teleport can launch your prefrontal cortex into the air.


Even worse, creatures from Elsewhere
sometimes slip back into our world.
Aexion

Elsewhere Creatures

# Appearing: □ 1 □ □ 1d6 □ □ □ 2d6. (□ = tempo). Can be all of the same type or all different types.


The HD, Appearance, Voice, Move, and Damage of Elsewhere Creatures varies widely. See the Tables below.


Wants: completely inscrutable. To observe, to devour, to change, to freeze; who can say?

Morality: none detectable.

Intelligence: mechanical.


Move: equivalent to fly normal. 

Morale: 12

 or 1d12 or 2d6.

Elsewhere Creatures come from... Elsewhere. Other worlds, other dimensions, other planes; it’s unclear and a topic of wild speculation among fringe wizards. Classification is nearly impossible. They might be seed pods, angels, exploratory ships, or blind rampaging animals. They don’t obey local physical laws.

Sorry for the images. I usually prefer to post text, but it seems blogger doesn't like my formatting right now. Oh well.
Astronomers Bartholomeus Anglicus, ‘Livre des propriétés des choses’ (‘De proprietatibus rerum’, French translation of Jean Corbechon), Bruges ca. 1470 BnF, Français 134, fol. 169r

Elsewhere Rifts

Elsewhere Rifts are portals to other worlds. They are typically ringed with white fog and octarine sparks. Creatures and objects can pass through a rift, though the world on the other side may be hazardous, toxic, or actively hostile. There’s a rubbery forcefield across a rift. Objects require a little push to enter or exit.



Portals remain stable for  □ 1 hour □ □ 1d6 hours □ □ □ 1d6 days. Exploring the “other side” is possible and occasionally rewarding. It can also strand explorers.


 Read straight across for “sensible” rifts or roll for each column (6x d10s) for more unusual and esoteric worlds.

Igor Vitkovskiy

PDF Version

This post is also available as a fancy PDF. This content (after editing and additional playesting) will appear in Magical Industrial Revolution, but it might be useful right now for your games.
Aexion
I've tried to make a truly alien creature and environment generator that can still be used at the table. I don't expect it to be used every session, so I've tried to make it as compact as possible while still providing plenty of inspiration and flavor.

2019/05/07

GPT-2 Plot Generator

You may have heard about the GPT-2 language model. It's one those fancy new programs that generates reasonable-sounding paragraphs, essays, or news articles from a single prompt. Adam King (@AdamDanielKing) has created Talk to Transformer, a fun little site where you can enter a prompt and let a (weak) version of GPT-2 fill in a paragraph or two.

The responses don't make a lot of sense but sometimes they make excellent plot hooks or setting fodder for D&D-type games. Text in bold was my prompt; all other text is the response.

Let's just say I'm at sea...

Putting in "This promised to be an excellent [weird adjective] adventure" usually generates something good.



See what I mean? I suspect this thing could eventually give a few RPG publishers a run for their money.
You can see why the authors were worried their model could be used to create plausible but vacuous papers, newspaper articles, reviews, etc.
On the other hand it still has a ways to go...
Suddenly, Nixon!
Now that's how you introduce a psychic apocalypse.
Can any Lord of the Rings fans confirm if this is canon? /s
Seems it can do occult horror too.

It can even generate dialogue if it's given a prompt with the right format. Nobody told it what dialogue is. It just figured it out.

Anyway, give it a try! It's a fun little tool. Post links to really good ones in the comments or create a blogpost of your own.


EDIT: Folks, we're all out of work.

Yup.

OSR: The Wrothful Lemure - Harry Clarke Bestiary

For Emmy Allen's Harry Clarke Bestiary project.

Lamia
(a disfigured child-hunting monster), Lemure (a restless dead spirit), and Lemur (a tree-dwelling primate native to Madagascar) all share a common etymological origin: an "open-mouthed, devouring spirit". The nightmare mouth-that-consumes, the distorted face of pre-human nightmares and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

In our world, the lamia, the lemure, and the lemur were split apart. Other worlds were not so lucky.

Wrothful Lemure

HD: 9 (45 HP)
Number Appearing:
1


Appearance:
a human face and hair, beautiful but mad. An ape's furred body. A long tail ending in resplendent plumes and five delicate, unnatural fingers, each representing the five senses: one is an eye, one is covered in nose-hairs, one folds like an ear, one crinkles with sensitive pink skin, and one is wet and slithering like a tongue.

Voice:
a deep rasping inhalation, a reverse-roar.

Wants:
to devour things, preferably children.

Morality:
nightmarish.

Intelligence:
brilliant.


Armour:
as leather. Cannot be harmed by non-magical weapons.

Move:
normal, climb all surfaces, charge 2x normal.

Morale:
10

Damage:
1d8+1 stabbing insensate sword / 1d6 claw / 1d6 claw or 2d8 devour

The Wrothful Lemure is wrothful; it will attack every target it can see, including itself. If no targets are available it will stab itself through the brain with the insensate sword and lie, apparently dead, on the ground. The sword will draw itself out when a potential target approaches. No scavengers will approach a dead Wrothful Lemure.

Targets struck by the insensate sword must Save or lose all physical senses for 1d6 rounds. Even if they recover, they must Save a second time or have a random sense permanently dulled. If a target is small and particularly delicious, the Wrothful Lemure will unhinge its jaw and gobble it up.

The Wrothful Lemure attacks from ambush, striking and retreating, pursuing targets for days waiting for an opportunity to strike decisively and fatally. It haunts the outskirts of villages, desolate wastelands, unfrequented paths, half-collapsed farmyards, and old overgrown roads.

Kill one and you can wield its insensate sword, but beware. No one knows how Wrothful Lemures are born or made, and no one knows from where they get their dreadful narrow-bladed swords.


CC.BY.4.0