OSR: GOBLIN WAR ENGINE (!)

It's huge! It's impractical! It's wildly dangerous to both friend and foe!

PDF Link

The Goblin War Engine is a draft page from my current project: the Monster Overhaul. Patrons at the $5 tier get access to monsters like this hot off the ol' brain-press and replete with the highest quality spelling errors and lack of playtesting.

This one was just too good not to post.

Goblin Links
1d50 Goblin Warlords
Class: Goblin
Class: Many Goblins

Goblinpunch: 1d8 Shitty Goblin Weapons, WTF Are Those Goblins Doing, Goblins tag
Elfmaids and Octopi: Goblin Mine Zone (PDF), Goblins tag

OSR: HD(NA) of the Monster Manual + MMII + Fiend Folio

I'm working on a new project: the Monster Overhaul. This post is part of the planning process.

UP IN THE AIR, JUNIOR BIRDMEN!

In Volume 1 of Original D&D, Gary wrote that “There is no reason that players cannot be allowed to play as virtually anything, provided they begin relatively weak and work up to the top.” I’ve noted that I played several Balrogs, and way back in the Introduction, I told the story of Sir Fang, the first Vampire player character.

Note, however, that Sir Fang was not the LAST Vampire player character.

One of the gang at the U of Minnesota wanted to play a vampire. This was LONG before vampires were sparkly, and, for that matter, long before they were Brad Pitt. A vampire was Christopher Lee or Bela Lugosi in tuxedo and opera cape, period.

In D&D, if you wanted to play anything, you ALWAYS started low level and worked your way up. D&D undead had a correlation between type and hit dice; a Skeleton was 1 HD, a Zombie 2, etc, up through Ghoul, Wight, Wraith, Mummy, Spectre, Vampire… so our would-be vampire started, of course, as a Skeleton. But at long last he became a vampire, and then, per the rules, proceeded to make a bunch of slaves by “putting the fangs to them.” Of course, those killed would rise with 1 HD also… as a Skeleton.

Eventually the vampire got a cohort of slave vampires and spectres following him. Hooray.

Well, one dark moonlit night our PC and his henchpires were out travelling somewhere and had a random encounter… another band of vampires. PC decides he’s going to eliminate the lead vampire of the other gang and take them all over; the NPC vampire had much the same idea. And the fight was on.

Vampire attacks Spectre. Vampire hits; Spectre is drained 2 levels; Spectre becomes a Wraith.

Wraith attacks a different enemy, a Spectre, because it’s easier to hit, and hits. But wraiths drain one level, not two, so the enemy Spectre is drained one level… and turns into a mummy.

Oh, by the way… both vampire gangs had been flying, and were fighting at an approximate altitude of 1000 feet above the ground. And mummies are notable for their aerodynamics – “notable” in the sense of, “They fly about as well as a dessicated human corpse that’s had its internal organs pulled out and then been wrapped in bandages.”

And the hapless mummy plummets earthward, flapping its arms madly.

I’m sure you can see where this is heading. The aerial duel continued in something rather like “Night of the Living Dead” meets “Blue Max,” and as the combatants were drained levels, they would eventually hit a non-flying form… zombie, ghoul, wight, or mummy… and go hurtling towards the ground in the grip of that puissant incantation, “9.8 meters per second squared”.

I picture the peasants below, huddling in their wretched huts and praying as hard as they can as various half-decomposed bodies fall out of the sky to land with meaty thumps. On the other hand, all that organic material would be great fertilizer.

I’ve never needed rules for “comic relief” in D&D. Wait patiently and the players will provide it in abundance.

-Mike "Old Geezer" Mornard

Back in the original post, I took the AD&D MM and created a sort of phylogenetic tree, with monsters sorted into categories by HD and best guesses at related monsters.

Well, I went back and combed through the MM II and Fiend Folio, pulled all the monsters out, and created an updated chart. Click through for full size.

Using This Chart

For those of you joining us from other editions, "HD" are actually Hit Dice, the total number of d8s rolled to calculate a creature's Hit Points. Numbers in brackets are either extra HP added on top of rolled HP (+[2]) or total number of hit points ([1-3]) or, in the MM II, fractions of HD for some reason [1/4]. Don't worry about it too much.

This chart includes all creatures, with the following exceptions:

• Dinosaurs (too many HD, not too useful to list)
• Demons and Devils (already sequenced by HD)
• Angels and Divine Messengers (ditto)

Black is the AD&D MM, orange is the MM II, and purple is the Fiend Folio.

It's also a handy list of all the monsters everyone's forgotten... often for good reasons.

Leveling as Anything

Advance upwards each time you level. You can choose to move to a linked creature or stay as your current creature. If there are blank spaces above the creature, it indicates levels that must be gained without change in HD to reach the next creature listed. If an entry repeats, the creature gains an HD as it levels.
If 2 or more creatures share a HD band entry, any one of them can be chosen.

E.g. A 1 HD Vegepygmy levels up. It can choose to become a 2HD Vegepygmy, a 2 HD Barkburr, or a 2 HD Dryad.

E.g. A 3 HD Boar, Wild levels up. It can choose to advance one level towards becoming a Boar, Giant or become a 4HD Lycanthrope, Wereboar.

The blue lines in the 1 HD band connect to the Man entry.

Wait, What?

Yup.

A 0 HD Man can level to become a:

• 1 HD Man (Caveman)
• 1 HD Baboon
• 1 HD Dakon
• 1 HD Aarakocra
• 1 HD Merman
• 1 HD Skeleton
• (after waiting a level) 2 HD Lycanthrope, Seawolf, Lesser.
• (after waiting a level) 2 HD Ogrillion
• (after waiting a level) 2 HD Gnoll

Not all monsters are connected (it's a bit of a stretch as-is). Wherever possible, descriptions in the Monster Manual like "a distant cousin of" or "related to" were used to place creatures on the tree.

Some of these monsters are utterly forgettable. I've already forgotten what a Terithran is or how it differs from a Denzelian. So many duplicated designs, minor variants, and forgettable monsters. How many pixie-type-things and evil trees can anyone use? So many wasted pages. Still, it was a fun exercise rereading the books and finding unexpected connections.

Lucas Roussel

Life Cycles / Aging

If you interpret HD gain as aging, the charts reveal some fairly strange life cycles. Ogres go through an aquatic stages (presumably as they migrate for spawning?). An ambitious rat can level into a Wereshark. Mature Elves become Marids; mature Gnomes become Night Hags.

Does any of this make sense? Not really. But neither does the story above and that's canon.

Possible 0-Level Characters:

• Man
• Rat
• Jackal
• Cat (Domestic)
• Raven
• Weasel
• Skunk
• Squirrel (Ordinary)
• Kobold
• Ear Seeker
• Vilstrak
• Bowler
• Mold
• Oblivax
• Brownie
• Bookia
• Nixie
• Sprite
• Leprechaun
• Atomie
• Cerebral Parasite
• Eye, Floating
• Kilmoulis
• Webbird
• Tiger Fly Larva
• Pernicon
• Centipede, Huge
• Galltrit
• Goblin
• Bat (Ordinary)
• Phantom
• Rot Grub
• Throat Leech
• Gas Spore
• Gorbel
• Muckdweller

Forget Wizard, Thief, and Fighter. Go with a Brownie, a Rat, and a Tiger Fly Larva trying to make their way in the world. Get rich or get squished trying.

OSR: One Page Dungeon Contest 3rd Place Winner: The Roving Wheel V2

I put an updated version of The Roving Wheel into the 2019 One Page Dungeon contest. Apparently it got 3rd place!

Today is a good day.

It's a fun adventure for a slightly gonzo campaign. There's a huge iron wheel rolling across the landscape. Get inside and divert the wheel before it crushes a city.

PDF LINK

Thanks to Abigail LaLonde (Twitter, Patreon) for the art. Be sure to check out the other entries.

Edit: Garbor Lux pointed out that Echoes From Formalhaut #3 also has a (smaller, non-hollow, ghost-raising) wheel. I can't deny reading the article, but I didn't remember it until Gabor pointed it out. Anyway, Echoes is well worth a read.

OSR: One Page Dungeon: The Roving Wheel

I'm trying to write a few one-page dungeons. It's harder than it looks... and it looks hard. Every time I try, I appreciate Michael Prescott's work (and the fine entrants to the One Page Dungeon Contest) even more.

Here's a fun adventure for a slightly gonzo campaign. There's a huge iron wheel rolling across the landscape. Get inside and divert the wheel before it crushes a city. 

The Roving Wheel

The dungeon's a real page-turner.
I'll get my coat.

It's released under CC-BY-NC, so feel free to hack, edit, remix, translate, or whatever else you'd like. Here's a blank wheel image if you don't want to make your own.

Auctions, Schemes, and RPGs

Inspired by Dunkey's Black Auction.
Auctions are perfect for RPGs.

Fantasy Flight Games put out a lot of lousy adventures for their Dark Heresy game line, but "The House of Dust and Ash" from "Disciples of the Dark Gods" is fantastic. It's just 10 pages long if you ignore the handouts and statblocks. It's no longer available, but casual google search should get you a PDF copy.

There's an auction on a mortuary island. The items are from the estate of a legendarily mad and cursed bloodline (think the Heterodynes from Girl Genius meets Vlad the Impaler. Proper evil superscience), so naturally, all sorts of mad and dangerous characters turns up. Of course, everything goes to hell in a handbasket. The auction house seals itself. A volcano is set to erupt shortly. The entire thing was a trap, set by the bloodline's last and looniest heir, to kill any potentially living relatives of the bloodline, no matter how distant.

It's wonderful.

Thomas Pringle

Elements of a Good Auction Adventure

A good but narrowly defined location. An eccentric cast of characters with secrets galore. A list of dangerous valuable items. A set schedule of events. Mystery. Glitz. Heaps and heaps of money. Auctions have it all.

1. The Invitation
Being invited to something makes the players feel special. It connects them to the world and makes the setting seem proactive and alive.

Get baroque. Use evocative, ornate language. Leave the invitation as a bloodstained clue in a murder investigation. Have it delivered in the dead of night by a knight in owl-feather robes. Give it an air of drama and mystery.

Print an example invitation (on cardstock, if possible). Don't use a standard paper size. You can make your own one-use embossing stamp from a bit of carved plastic and a hammer.

longque Chen

2. The Location
Design it like a dungeon but with different considerations. You want a few loops, a few set pieces, and many secrets. A grand old mansion or hotel is ideal. Servants passages, rooms for private conversations, lots of obvious tools and options. A place to use as a stronghold. A central room or atrium with branches, to encourage chance meetings and collisions between rival groups. Ancient secrets, unmapped catacombs.

Ideally, the building should have relatively few entrances and exits.

• A hotel on top of a mountain accessible only by a long winding path (and not during the night, oh no, much too dangerous).
• A mansion on a marsh (with a storm like this? Could be days, maybe weeks before the road is clear.).
• A hotel sealed off by strange government figures in gas masks and white crinkly suits (stay indoors for your protection. Anyone who leaves this area will be shot. This is your only warning).

You can get even more exotic. A building warped out of space and time by an item in the auction deliberately or accidentally activated. A ship at sea. A dirigible. An old bunker. An express train. Whatever a rich, mad, and dangerous person could use to increase the prestige and drama of the auction.

Thomas Wievegg

3. The Characters
Groups of 1-3 characters. Lone professors, eccentric and hunted. Bickering couples (it's all an act, they're cultists). One guy in robes with two identical creepy assistants. Mash tropes together.

4-6 groups of participants, plus 1-2 notable members of staff, seems ideal. Any more and the players may lose track. Any fewer and there aren't enough connections to make the auction seem properly chaotic.

• Innocents (a bored socialite, a petty thief in way over their head, hired arm candy)
• Assassins (not here for the items, here to kill one specific person)
• Acquisitionists (here to get one specific item. Anything else is a distraction)
• Subverters (here to switch an item for a fake, destroy an item, prevent a sale, moralize)
  Knowledgeable People (professors, occultists)
• Potential Allies
• Potential Rivals
• Fakes (in disguise, impersonating others, could be benign, could be deadly.)

Feel free to add a few gormless and helpless NPCs, suitable for sacrifices, human shields, shouting "we need to get out of here!" and doing foolish things to show players where danger lies, and general massacre chaff.

The great thing about an auction is that anyone can turn up. Money is the universal social lubricant. Baronesses in silk and pearls will sit next to bloodsoaked pirates if it means they can bid on the lost von Splitz masterpiece. You can show up in bloodsoaked armour carrying a severed head and be politely asked to store your gory trophy at the coat check.

Everyone shows up in black ties and formal dress for dinner, no matter how incongruous.

4. The Schedule
Show up. Scout the crowd. Gather a few hints. Get a few superficial impressions. Auction off a few items. Possibly retire to dinner. Oh no! The twist! And not all the items have been sold!

Have people enter and leave the auction unexpectedly. Increase tension with red herrings. Someone faints. Someone makes an urgent telephone call. The auctioneer is replaced with an assistant for a few rounds.

Use charts to keep track of everyone. Kidnap the Archpriest has some good timetable formats you can use.

Whatever the PCs goal is - get a specific item, get information, unmask someone, get rich - they won't be able to acomplish it without acting. They can't just bid on the McGuffin, win it, and walk out.

Derek Jones

5. The Items
Go nuts. At least 20 items. Most of the really good ones should be evocative, powerful, mysterious, storied, mythical, and dangerous if misused. Some should just be cash. Fragile, inconveniently shaped cash. The useful items are a pile of spare parts. The PCs will use them to assemble their escape plan.

You'll want to include some hidden synergies. You can invent a few yourself, but don't overplan. If you put enough interesting items in the auction house, the players will figure out unexpected uses and ways to mash them together.

You can also play the auction straight. Make it seem like there will be a twist - a volcano, a summoning ritual, a landslide - and then don't deliver. Suddenly, the chaos the PCs were planning to use to get the McGuffin isn't present. Can they still get it? Of course, they can't afford to buy it, and even if they could an unscrupulous antiques dealer has replaced it with a fake, etc.

Final Notes
Auctions aren't great for new groups. The PCs need to know each other's capabilities. They aren't great for groups with lots of tools either; PCs who can teleport and summon hordes of angels will find an auction trite and the items on sale quaint and melodramatic.

OSR: The Shape of the World

My current game is set in the not-14th century. The world is largely unmapped and the campaigns are largely local.

I was thinking about maps, and time, and worldbuilding. Most settings have spherical worlds. Some experiment with discs or toruses.

How To Be A Sailor - 1944

Here's an early world map, drawn in 1502. It's one of the earliest maps to show the world in a format we'd recognize.

Cantino Planisphere - 1502

Here's the map redrawn in a simplified format.

Fairly simple, right? Cold to the north, cold to the south, water to the east, and who knows what to the west.

And eventually, people circle around west and end up in the east and the world is finally confirmed to be round, despite the protests of clever people who say it's been confirmed round for centuries because of math. The top bit is cold, the bottom bit is cold, and the middle bit is warm.

And that's all fine and dandy, but what if it's not true? What if the world isn't a sphere or a disc or a flat plane?

What it's a spiral?

In 1520, Magellan tries to cut south across the tip of South America and reach the Pacific. Instead, he runs into ice. After weeks of storms and backtracking, with no stars visible, he finds a wide navigable channel. He follows it south.

And after weeks of ice and bitter cold, Magellan's crew spots mammoths. A shore party is attacked by a sabre-tooth tiger. Giant beasts unknown to the explorers are seen on the shore.

The survivors return home, disappointed and deeply confused.

Later expeditions don't help. Eventually, all the people with clever math and theories about the shape of the world toss out their models and redraw their maps.

The Time Spiral
Graham, Joseph, Newman, William, and Stacy, John, 2008

The world is a spiral. The diagram above is literal.

Upstream there is only ice, as far as anyone knows. Arctic explorers are trying to see if there is an upstream passage.

But downstream, the world changes. You can sail there and bring back treasures. You can also be devoured by dinosaurs. Whoever made the world didn't count on sailing ships. A few strays won't cause any issues - this explains coelacanths and crocodiles, they crept into our region from a past age - but an organized expedition seems to be a new concept.

It's not easy. Each "segment" on the spiral diagram is, essentially, a new continent or set of continents. Some are separated from others by ice sheets, channels, volcanic fields, ash dunes, or glass deserts.

In the Age of Discovery, the past is literally an unknown country.

But...
"But what about eclipses, Skerples?"
Yeah well what about eclipses?

OSR: Sequencing the HD(NA) of the Monster Manual

D'you remember Fafnir? A giant? Well he's a dragon now, don't ask me why.

-Anna Russell

UP IN THE AIR, JUNIOR BIRDMEN!

In Volume 1 of Original D&D, Gary wrote that “There is no reason that players cannot be allowed to play as virtually anything, provided they begin relatively weak and work up to the top.” I’ve noted that I played several Balrogs, and way back in the Introduction, I told the story of Sir Fang, the first Vampire player character.

Note, however, that Sir Fang was not the LAST Vampire player character.

One of the gang at the U of Minnesota wanted to play a vampire. This was LONG before vampires were sparkly, and, for that matter, long before they were Brad Pitt. A vampire was Christopher Lee or Bela Lugosi in tuxedo and opera cape, period.

In D&D, if you wanted to play anything, you ALWAYS started low level and worked your way up. D&D undead had a correlation between type and hit dice; a Skeleton was 1 HD, a Zombie 2, etc, up through Ghoul, Wight, Wraith, Mummy, Spectre, Vampire… so our would-be vampire started, of course, as a Skeleton. But at long last he became a vampire, and then, per the rules, proceeded to make a bunch of slaves by “putting the fangs to them.” Of course, those killed would rise with 1 HD also… as a Skeleton.

Eventually the vampire got a cohort of slave vampires and spectres following him. Hooray.

Well, one dark moonlit night our PC and his henchpires were out travelling somewhere and had a random encounter… another band of vampires. PC decides he’s going to eliminate the lead vampire of the other gang and take them all over; the NPC vampire had much the same idea. And the fight was on.

Vampire attacks Spectre. Vampire hits; Spectre is drained 2 levels; Spectre becomes a Wraith.

Wraith attacks a different enemy, a Spectre, because it’s easier to hit, and hits. But wraiths drain one level, not two, so the enemy Spectre is drained one level… and turns into a mummy.

Oh, by the way… both vampire gangs had been flying, and were fighting at an approximate altitude of 1000 feet above the ground. And mummies are notable for their aerodynamics – “notable” in the sense of, “They fly about as well as a dessicated human corpse that’s had its internal organs pulled out and then been wrapped in bandages.”

And the hapless mummy plummets earthward, flapping its arms madly.

I’m sure you can see where this is heading. The aerial duel continued in something rather like “Night of the Living Dead” meets “Blue Max,” and as the combatants were drained levels, they would eventually hit a non-flying form… zombie, ghoul, wight, or mummy… and go hurtling towards the ground in the grip of that puissant incantation, “9.8 meters per second squared”.

I picture the peasants below, huddling in their wretched huts and praying as hard as they can as various half-decomposed bodies fall out of the sky to land with meaty thumps. On the other hand, all that organic material would be great fertilizer.

I’ve never needed rules for “comic relief” in D&D. Wait patiently and the players will provide it in abundance.

-Mike "Old Geezer" Mornard

I remember hearing this story years and years ago in a slightly different form from (I think) someone who hard heard it from someone else. A sort of IRC proto-meme. Anyway, I found a half-written scrap of paper with a rough HD list stuck in the back of one of my old notebooks, and I decided to finish the job once and for all.

Your Attention Please...

After the discovery of the Royalty Prism (capable of splitting Royal effusions into specially graded tones), there seemed to be little work left for the Illusionists. They'd detected Good and Evil, Chaos and Law, Lies, Inheritance, and even Luck. The fortuitous revelation of the "HD" changed everything. For years, thaumaturges, scholars, and mages had tried to discover why some creatures changed and others remained constant.

With the ability to detect a creatures "Heuristic Denomination" or "HD", a mage with a simple wand and a ledger book could categorize Nature. Small creatures, having no HD to speak of, are difficult to rate, but large creatures are easily detected, sorted, and linked. The grand web of life, formerly shrouded in the mists of ignorance and buried in the soft peat of muddled metaphors, was gradually revealed.


Thanks to many hours of research and a fortuitous burglary, the mechanism of HD gain has also been revealed. Gold is magic, as anyone who has been handed a large bag of the stuff can attest. It is condensed, solidified magic from the dawn of time. Get enough of it in one place and the world starts to bend. Looted gold (not paid or earned, it seems) triggers a morphological response. Testing is ongoing; owing to the nessesary secrecy and great expenditures, results have been neither consistent nor profitable.

There seems to be a method of gaining HD by combat, but it is both tedious, risky, and almost immeasurably slow. Nevertheless, in impoverished regions, this must be the only way for creatures to reach other forms. Nature, in her infinite variety, has creatures for all occasions. Just as the humble worm becomes a beautiful butterfly, or the noisome goose becomes a fish in midwinter, so do many creatures change and alter their forms for procreation, survival, or other, stranger, less obvious needs.


Creatures, it seems, can remain in one form and gain HD, but can also sometimes advance to other forms. Many men have been detected with 4 HD or more; not all become Berserk or Apes (despite what the peasants say).

Archmage Barkland speculates that, in a former age, gold was much more abundant, and was hoarded by both the Titans and by the gigantic lizards we have discovered embedded in the rocks of quarries and mines. These lizards, he suspects, hoarded gold for themselves and buried it underground for safekeeping, only to be trapped in a series of colossal cave-ins, leaving only their bones and distributed hoards trapped in the rock.

Testing on the "HD-draining" effect of some undead creatures is difficult, though not for the reason one might think. The late Alec Card, of the firm Card, Renfield, and Strumpet, has offered his support. His vampiric touch is very effective, but his hourly rates are ruinous.

Click for the full size image.

Using This Chart

For those of you joining us from other editions, "HD" are actually Hit Dice, the total number of d8s rolled to calculate a creature's Hit Points.

This chart includes all the creatures from the original AD&D Monster Manual, with the following exceptions:
-Dinosaurs (too many HD, not too useful to list)
-Demons and Devils (already sequenced by HD)

Leveling as Anything

Advance upwards each time you level. You can choose to move to a linked creature or stay as your current creature. If there are blank spaces above the creature, it indicates levels that must be gained without change in HD to reach the next creature listed. If an entry repeats, the creature gains an HD as it levels.

If 2 or more creatures share a HD band entry, any one of them can be chosen.

E.g. A 3HD Hippogriff levels up. It can choose to become a 4 HD Cocatrice or remain as a 3HD Hippogriff.

E.g. A 4 HD Cockatrice levels up. It can choose to become a 5 HD Manticore or advance 1 level towards becoming either a Griffon or a Lammasu or remain as a 4 HD Cockatrice. It does not gain an additional HD until it gains its next level and transforms into a 6 HD Griffon or Lammasu.

E.g A 1 HD Leech, Giant levels up. It gains 1 HD and becomes a 2 HD Leech, Giant.

The numbers in brackets are +[HP]. E.g. A creature in the 2 HD band with +[1] rolls 2d8+1 for HP. If there's no + sign, the number in brackets is the creature's total HP or HP range.

Anubish

 Possible 0-Level Characters (<1 HD) Starting Characters

For the weirdest group ever. Bear in mind that these creatures aren't nessesarily sentient.

Man
Become a Berserker, a Baboon, a Gorilla, and a Carnivorous Ape.
Or become a Gnoll, a Hyena, a Giant Hyena.
Or a Wererat, a Jackalwere...
Or a Skeleton...
Or an Ogre...
Or a Harpy...

Rat
Become a Wererat, a Jackalwere...

Jackal
Become a Jackalwere, a Werewolf...

Kobold
Become a Troglodyte, a Lizard Man, a Crocodile...
Or a Pseudo-Dragon, a White Dragon...

Halfling
Become a Dwarf. That's it.

Goblin
Become an Orc, a Hobgoblin, a Bugbear...

Sprite
Become damn near every small magical creature.

Gas Spore
Become an Eye of the Deep, a Beholder. Good luck; you need to gain 12 levels without exploding.

Mold
Become... oh screw it, you can't play mold. It's off the list! Off, I say. Anyway, if you do, you can become a Fungi, Violet, a Shrieker...

Cerebral Parasite
Become a Brain Mole, a Thought Eater...


Eye, Floating
Become a Barracuda, a Pike, Giant...

Centipede, Giant
Become a Carrion Crawler.

Ear Seeker
Become a Centipede, Giant...
Or become an Ant, Giant..
Or become a Stirge, a Tick, Giant...

Rot Grub
Become an Eel (Weed), a Lamprey, an Eel (Electric)...
or a Leech, Giant...

Alternative ecologies here.

OSR: Horrible Magical Candyland

So you've read Veins of the Earth and you want to try it out.

One problem; your players have read Veins too. Or they know about it by reputation. Or they wisely fear a huge evil-looking tome. Or the invitation to "visit Patrick Stuart's horrible twisted dreams" didn't appeal. Anything deeper than a broom closet and they flee. Any hint of a cave and they panic.

You could take content from Veins of the Earth and fling it into the clouds, making Lumps of the Sky.

Or you could do something even sillier.

Introducing: Horrible Magical Candyland

Step 1: Buy and read Veins of the Earth. 
Step 2: Build a gigantic factory. Seriously gigantic. Mostly underground.
Step 3: Run a slightly modified Veins game.
       Step 4: You might want to read Blood in the Chocolate too.
                 Step 5. Sing silly songs.

Wait, What?

Look, everyone knows candy factories are magical places. It's in the rules.

Caves, in a way, are kind of like the interior of industrial buildings. They are dangerous. They make no sense to an untutored visitor. Try walking in a straight line through an oil refinery or a paper mill and you'll see what I mean. There are mysterious drops, forests of pipes, clouds of steam, strange locked doors, rattling loops of chain, and plenty of hazards. 

You can use Veins of the Earth to generate a factory (if you're able to adapt cave descriptions on the fly).

Rules Changes

Light isn't a problem anymore. The factory is fairly well lit. Replace all instances of "light" with "water". The air dries you out. You need to keep drinking water or you'll desiccate. Water is Initiative. Does this make sense? No, but it's OK.

Generate caves normally except they are made of pipes and tubes and chocolate fountains and toffee waterfalls. 

Food is abundant, but Nutrients are rare. You can eat until you burst and still starve to death. Only a few creatures provide nutrients. 

All the caves are squashed close together. Everything is jostling for space. 

Creatures

Alkalion
Water-otter. Dribbles water to melt through candy. Wants to eat your bone marrow.

Anglerlich
The Master of the Candy Factory. Whimsical. Wants to teach people moral lessons. Some sort of extra-dimensional entity that feeds on unfairness.

Antiphoenix
N/A

Arachnopolis Rex
Chaotic city made of candy wrappers and discarded industrial machinery. Crewed by thousands of tiny child-clones made by the Master of the Factory and his Shrinkifying Ray. 

Archeans
Cinnamon elementals. 

Atomic Bees
Floating saltwater taffy. Horribly mutating side effects.

Blackfoot Gigaferret
Ferret transformed into a guard. Will wait until you sleep, tap you on the shoulder (mouth full of teeth, eyes shining) then tell you that sleeping is not permitted in this area. Will follow you until you lose your mind from lack of sleep.

Calcinated Cancer Bear
Rock-candy golem. Might be a child underneath; who can say? Big faceted blue crystals.

Cambrimen
Derpa Lerpas, the workers. They sing songs where all the rhymes in a stanza are the same word. Dumb as heck, but very hard to kill. 

Castilian Caddis Larvae
Deranged Dentist, living in a lair of teeth and steel implements. A larval tooth fairy. Wants to pull teeth. Horrible buzzing tentacle-drills.

Cholerids
People whose teeth have been removed by the Deranged Dentist. Wander around moaning. They want to steal your teeth. 

Civilopede
N/A

Cromagnogolem
Toffee golem. Sticky. 

Egg-Dead
Children transformed into Kinder Surprise toys inside of chocolate eggs. They are excitable, cheerful, and indestructible.

The Egengraü
Instead of stealing your memories it steals your words and your bones. Eventually you'll turn into a Derpa Lerpa.

Fossil Vampire
Carbonized children in a thick layer of industrial sugar-sludge. 

Fungal Ambassodile
Quality control auditor. Two heads. One is mercilessly capitalistic, the other is idealistic and quality-obsessed. They bicker. They want you to taste samples. 

Funginid Slaves
Various flavours of living chocolate people. White, rose, milk, dark, with associated personalities. Some have nutritious fruit inside. 

Gegenschein

Rescue Ranger. Mouse in a vest. Will pull you out of danger and drop you off elsewhere in the factory (no the surface, oh no, never the surface). The more perilous the rescue the better.

Gilgamash
Living statues of the Master of the Factory, containing bits of his vices. 

Igneous Wrath

Living industrial accident. What happens when you drop a ladle of molten tungsten through a time machine on a full moon on Friday the 13th. 

Ignimbrite Mite
Bits of souls. Like the soot-balls from Spirited Away. They are helpful but can only speak one word each. If you eat one you get a bit weird but can also speak to candy or do other neat tricks.

Knotsmen
Guests of the factory. Ragged tour group uniforms (the same as yours). Horrifically obese or wracked with sugar-related conditions. Scurvy. They deny this. Everything is just fine. They like it here. They want you to stay. 

Lamenters
Squirrels. Used to sort good nuts from bad nuts. Like all squirrels, they are powerfully insane, and will smash your head open if they think you are thinking bad thoughts. The madness effects from the Lamenters tables are just the side-effects of concussions.

Mantis Shrimp

Crystal-candy predator, sharp and thin and brittle. Long stabbing talons.

Meanderthals

The ghosts of the people you might have been if you didn't eat so much candy. Better, fitter, smarter, thinner. 

Mondmilch
Liquid sweetness. Traps you in happy cloying dreams, not nightmares. Comfortable. Cave full of skeletons, people who starved in their own happy worlds.

Olm
Bubblegum people. Sticky mouths full of moist teeth. They want to chew you.

Oneirocetacean

Really big Knotsman (visitor) trapped in diabetic fever-dream. Instead of tentacles, syringes. Medical nightmare zone.

Panic Attack Jack

Deranged kids on a sugar high. Their touch induces the Rapture.

Phantom Hand of Gargas

Some sort of mobile industrial accident or living safety warning. Tries to pull you from 3D-land into 2D-land, where it can mash you with gears or falling objects.

Psychomycosis Megaspores
Gumdrop megaspores. 

Pyroclastic Ghouls
Original board of directors, lovingly carbonized and coated in sugar dust. They think everything is going splendidly. 

Radiolarian
Everlasting gobstopper. Will outlast the stars and the gods. 

The Rapture
No change.

Scissorfish
Swarms of fruit candy. Kind of cute until they try to crawl down your throat and into your lungs. 

Silichominds
Workers in industrial suits. Will ask you pointless questions about "reciprocating turbines" and "sump-shaft eight". Voices are distorted, like a subway station announcement.

Sonic Pigs!
Marzipan Pigs! They make you participate in festive dances. 

Spectre of the Bröcken
N/A

Splinterlads
Cavity elementals. Ooooh, your poor teeth.

Spotlight Dogs
Safety Dogs. Hunt you with siren-faces and amber rotating lights unless you wear proper safety equipment for the area. This varies widely. Might need to kill some 

Still-Tor-Men
Horrible hooked cranes overhead, accidentally grab you instead of their targets. 

Stormsheep
Cotton candy sheep. Much less dangerous, but it will get all over your hands and you can't wash them easily.

Tachyon Troll
Child-man trapped in a time loop as punishment for "impatience". Has seen it all before. 

Tetracharcarodron
Butterscotch ooze.

Titanskull Hermit Crab
Gingerbread witch living in mobile gingerbread castle. Will trade for all sorts of things, but always tries to trap you in an iron cage. Fairly obvious, possibly apologetic about it.

Toraptoise
Sugar-adapted vampire tortoises. They smell nutrients. Their shells are beautiful layered hard candy. 

Trilobite-Knight
Armoured Virtue Inspector. Will quiz you on your faults. You'll always get them wrong. Will try to wrangle you into a machine for an appropriate punishment.

Trogloraptor
Golden Ticket Inserter. Sneaks into houses, give kids golden tickets in their next candy bar, escorts them to the factory. Then returns to erase the memories of the parents. Like a weird folded-up spider in a blue tailored suit.

Ultraviolet Butterfly
Lollipop butterflies. Suck on one to trip balls. Delicious, addictive. 

Zombie Coral
Chalk-candy children, fused and coated and stored in sacks.

Races

Aelf-Adal
Treacle Lords from the Deep Treacle Mines, mad that the Master of the Factory has pumped away their homes.

Deep Janeen
Replace "stone" with "chocolate" and make them another kind of chocolate elemental in vast underground palaces.

dEr0
Sugar-addled workers. They know what all the machines do (or do they)? Quick, this way. Aha! It was a trap! Oh no, it was a trap, we must flee!

Dvargir
Factory building golems. As cheerless as the factory is cheerful. Grey men building prismatic cathedrals.

Substratals
Nougat creatures from the world's nougat core. They whisper recipe dreams into your ears.

Gnonmen
Dietitians.

Table of Candy Words to Add To Your Cave Names and Descriptions

1. Gumdrop
2. Lollipop
3. Gumball
4. Chocolate
5. Jellybean
6. Mint.
7. Caramel
8. Cinnamon
9. Sour Candy
10. Fudge
11. Cherry
12. Lemon
13. Candy-coated
14. Nougat.
15. Toffee
16. Taffy
17. Peppermint
18. Peanut Butter
19. Liquorice
20. Sour