Terror in the Low Magic Wilderness

So my players are actually insane. They have created something truly monstrous that I'm going to try and do justice...

We'll see.

This past Monday, I had a session in which my party found themselves facing down bandits. They fought them, killed most of them, and drove the archers into the woods. It was a trouncing victory that surprised me and them.

After we began to go over the loot in the camp, I pulled up a random trinket generator and had them roll a few times. The setting is rife with little oddities and magical trinkets, so three "common" magic items really doesn't inflate their power level by much. One item, however, immediately changed their low-level paradigm.

In a game where treasure generates XP and getting things out of dungeons and back to a sanctuary is a priority, an item which enables players to move heavy objects can be a huge boon. This particular item effectively gave the party two mules' worth of carrying capacity that they could use to haul one object. The item was a pair of carved wooden mule legs that were enchanted to follow the owner in loyal fashion, plodding along, hauling whatever the legs are attached to.

The second trinket of three was a jester's mask that the rogue tried on. She immediately provoked an attack from a party member who failed his Charisma save against the magical effect: attacking the wearer of the mask exactly once. The effect is constant, only works on a creature once, and only works if a creature can see the mask. I spitballed the DC at 11.

In the next ten minutes, my players designed the following horror from a decapitated head, the mule legs, and the mask. Though they didn't make it in the game, they came up with such a visceral image and way to use it, I couldn't resist writing up stats for the damn thing. One of my players even gave it this weird little panting noise it makes as it totters around following its owner. My wife had the most appalled look on her face the entire time. It will fuel my nightmares forever.

 I give you, the Terror Totter.


Terror Totter
small n. construct
ac 10
hp 18 (4d8)
speed 30 ft.
+2 Str. mod/+1 Wis. mod/+0 Con., Dex. mod/-4 Int., Cha. mod
saves Str. +4
damage resist non-magical bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing, and necrotic
immune charmed, deafened, exhaustion, frightened, paralyzed, petrified, and poisoned; poison and psychic damage
senses darkvision 60 ft., passive perception 11
languages ---
challenge 1/2

Antimagic Susceptibility as Animated Armor (MM 19)
Undead Fortitude as Zombie (MM 316)

Actions
Incite Rage. As an action, the Terror Totter can force every creature within 30 feet that can see it to make a DC 11 Charisma saving throw. If a creature fails, it must immediately use its reaction to make a ranged or melee weapon attack against the Terror Totter. If the creature is unarmed, it must immediately draw a melee or ranged weapon and use it to make the attack. Once a creature has been the subject of this effect, it is immune to it forever.

Bite. Melee weapon attack: +4 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 4 (1d4+2) piercing damage.

The Magic of Ordain

This will be one of two blog posts today. The second will be the promised statblock for a construct creature that my players dreamt up at my Monday night game. This post is going to be somewhat of a brainstorm for me, but also -- hopefully -- a resource for other Dungeon Masters wishing to use a restricted or "low" magic alternative to the spellcasters presented in the core rules of fifth edition.

In my current game, spellcasters must seek out 4th, 5th, and 6th-level spells from the world in order to learn them. No one learns spells of those levels automatically. If a cleric needs to learn Greater Restoration, they can go find a priest with a thigh bone relic from an ancient warrior-priestess and attune to it for several days (or weeks, or months, or whatever's appropriate to your game) and make some headway into the item. Essentially, I'm making all spells of those levels "researchable," using a modified downtime system. A player might need to take that aforementioned thigh bone to a pool of water on a holy mountain and bless it in the still waters under a moonless night. Whatever is tonally and mechanically appropriate and feasible for your game.

Spells of a higher level than 6th don't exist at all in the world where they can be sought out. They exist in dungeons. Your god won't grant you the power to cast Divine Word; you have to delve the sunken fortress of Malga'tir and find the site of the planetar angel Sierissala's final confrontation with the archpriest of Orcus. It's there that you find the word blasted into the stone where she smote him, and it's there that you must face down the shade of the angel, corrupted by necromantic power. So rather than being able to research for these more powerful spells, you have to earn them.

Consequently, some spells are unique in the world, and might only be known by one person. That means a druid seeking the means to earn Plane Shift might have to find and stop the plane-hopping elemental terrorist that destroyed her family's village when she was young, then rip the spell from the villain by way of some vitality transference, ritual sacrifice, talisman, or other suitably potent magic.

So the way I have spells set up is basically this:

• 1st-3rd: You learn these normally. This is what common people think of when they think of magic; flying, healing, shooting fire and lightning, etc. Villagers might have familiarity with some of these spells. A town healer knows how to alleviate a hangover or purify rotted food.
• 4th-6th: You have to research these spells and complete quests to earn them from people who keep them. This magic is known of and thought of as the pinnacle of high wizardry and arch-clerical ritual. Common folk won't have seen this magic, they'll have heard of it. A master arcanist with the Order of the Black can Geas princes and dukes into signing treaties for the good of the realm.
• 7th-9th: You must quest for these, and nobody can teach you these spells in the common way. They exist only in places of power and in the minds, relics, or artifacts of the most powerful spellcasters or otherworldly denizens. Commoners have never heard of these spells, or if they have, it's in fables and myths. Controlling the weather is the stuff of demigods, and the last time the druid Ourathore came out of her sea cave a hundred years ago, a storm sank the coastal city of Clifftop.

So that's my system for making magic meaningful. Normally, players choose spells when they level up. In this system, that freedom of choice is replaced with system and setting interaction. This is not a replacement for normal games; this is an idiosyncratic way that I've chosen to respond to my players and their desire for more challenging, meaningful spellcasting and magic in the world.

Random Tables, Wilderness Exploration, and Setting Cohesion

That's a lot to a title. It's a lot to tackle in really any amount of blog posts. You could write a whole blog over just wilderness exploration, doing a deep dive on the various parts of the style and uncovering a lot of cool information that's useful for all games.

But that's not this blog, at least not now, and it's certainly not this post. Rather, it's an observation on how random tables (including encounter tables), wilderness exploration, and the setting at large can be tied together to give GMs a worldbuilding platform while not in a city, town, sanctuary, or NPC saturated area.

People on social media and on Reddit in particular often make posts that lament how boring the wilderness is as a canvas for exciting adventures. That's changed in certain circles as West Marches style games and streamers like Matt Colville embrace grittier fantasy, and with it the campaign styles that cater to those sorts of games.

But a GM isn't required to run a specifically wilderness/ survival game to get some meat out of that pillar of play. DnD has shifted to favor roleplaying recently, and that's a great advent. It spells good things for the future of the hobby, and it's due in part to streaming like the aforementioned Colville games, Critical Role, and so forth. Wilderness exploration has always been the last thing people think of when they run or play a game. It's the afterthought. There's a whole chapter of the PHB called Combat. There's a couple pages on exploration scattered throughout the three core books. That signals a stream of thought that trickles down from game designers and eventually ends up affecting the way we run our games. More than that, it affects how we think about our games.

It took me personally a lot of time (I'd say probably the last four years) to figure out how to be a Dungeon Master. I might've said it on this blog before, but I've been playing DnD in some form for over a decade. I've been DMing most of that time. And it's only now, in my most recent campaign, that I've been able to say with confidence that I'm excited to play and excited to help my players tell their stories. The last four years have been me getting to that place, where I hit "flow." That's a psychology term that refers to the place where an activity is challenging enough that you aren't bored but not so hard that you hate it, and where your levels of stimulation are at their zenith. It's essentially a measure of arousal (in the mental, not sexual, sense).

So this brings me to last night. I ran the first part of my six-person, second level party's christening adventure. They set out to recover a cargo plane pilot and her plane, repair it, and bring her home. I'm using GiffyGlyph's wilderness exploration rules with quite a lot of tweaks, and I rolled encounters under those rules. It wasn't until their first combat that everything I listed in the title folded together and the world became alive for my party.

To set the scene:

The party is travelling with Monopoly, their mule, and Ovrum, the hireling they brought along to watch their gear. They're travelling in the afternoon and they see three columns of smoke off the road in the forest. Three party members (sorcerer, barbarian, and seeker) stomp through the woods to try and sneak up on them. They roll some terrible sneak checks, two bandits spot them, and then we drop into encounter mode.

At this point, it's good to shout out to Angry. On his blog, which you can find the link to in the reel on the right side of this page, he talks about how combats aren't encounters -- they're conflict resolution. Encounters are dramatic questions. The encounter as I had set it up was this: "The party sees signs of other people in the woods. Will they investigate and discover that the bandits have scraps of a plane? What will they do when the bandits try to rob them of their silver?" I decided these bandits were hostile, swaggering blokes who were riding high on the thrill of having salvaged parts of Natalia's cargo plane. They had bits of a wing in their camp.

The party didn't immediately attack the bandits. The bandits didn't immediately attack the party. Even when the bandits loosed their weapons from their belts and started ordering the three heroes they could see into the camp, we still didn't roll initiative. The dramatic question still hadn't been answered. The party hadn't acted in a way to answer it.

Once the fight was joined and the players answered the question by deciding to rid themselves of the bandit nuisance, we dipped into the fight. We went around table afterwards, they picked the camp clean, and that's where the three elements of this post came together.

I used the plane wing to pose part of the dramatic question. It was a signpost to my players that they were on the right track and that these bandits might have answers to questions of what happened to the pilot. When they started looting, I pulled up Goblin Punch's blog post on slightly magical items and had them roll three times. One result was a parasol that, essentially, gave its wielder featherfall.

Now, taking that item at face value, it's cool. It's neat and gives the players a cool trick. It makes them feel powerful without "breaking the game." But if you can take what a random table gives you and add it to the theme of the world, you immerse that result in the setting and give players more signposts. So I turned it into a magitech backpack that deploys a parachute. Makes sense for a pilot to have on board their plane, no? But what's more: why didn't Natalia, the pilot, show up with her parachute? Now we have another layer added to the world. My players haven't put two and two together yet, but when they do it'll hit them like a truck full of bricks.

And all that takes is knowing your setting. Not dictating every element of every fight and every dungeon. Just knowing what you want from a fight, or a room in a dungeon, or a conversation. No fight should happen without a purpose, and no room should ever be empty (unless those serve your purpose -- just make sure that's what you want). This is a Zen moment for wilderness exploration, kind of like the Zen moments of Old School Gaming. Once you experience that moment for yourself, you'll awaken yourself to possibilities for your game that will enrich it and make your players come back to the table every time with goals, plans, and desires.


So that's the post for today. And you know what? It might be the first time I've posted something that feels useful to me on the blog. Next post will be about what my players envisioned for some other trinkets they pulled from the bandit camp, and will give you a terrifying low-level construct that can start a riot, disrupt negotiations, and even break enemies out of stealth and reveal their positioning and numbers.

Use My Gods

Last night I sat down and made the decision to really hammer down my setting's gods, religions, and faith practices. What I came up with isn't complete, but it is a sight better than just a list of names and portfolios, which is what I'm so often relegated to when brainstorming gods on the fly. I should say that these deities have been revised, inserted into and yanked out of world conflicts, and polished quite a bit to get them where they are. 

The gods take a significant amount of inspiration from Greek mythology, with gods having human-like emotional spectrum and a certain amount of fallibility that lends them to creative storytelling. 

This leads me to a little side piece on gods in gaming: I believe wholeheartedly that gods should be divorced from the alignment system. My reasons are the following.

• It's too easy for a character playing a paladin, cleric, of faith-based character to simply look at deity alignments, choose one that mirrors their own, and then jump ass-first into that character without considering the god as a character in the world. That is to say, what if your paladin values honesty and the lawful neutral deity she's chosen to follow is a renowned patron of litigators and legal loopholes? You might argue that such a god wouldn't be lawful neutral, but this is my example and in my campaign world I can do whatever I want. Nevertheless, that paladin would be ill-served by adhering to the god simply because of an alignment chart that is predicated on cosmic planar laws. That leads me to my second point...
• The alignment system is founded on the idea that the world you're playing in is part of a diverse array of cosmic planes which each have some predilection to chaos, law, evil, good, or an absence or mixture of those things. Your campaign world doesn't have to follow that model, so alignment can easily be a moot point.
• Finally, gods should be interesting individuals with grand stories to their name. The greatest stories ever told are the ones that involve them. We don't have to look any farther than pop culture to know that. But the gods in those stories (Kratos, Thor, Wonder Woman) are only interesting because of their fallible, human-like aspects. Simply calling the god of knowledge a bookworm true neutral deity with no care for relationships can work. But if there is a why embedded in there -- why is he a loner? why does he trust so slowly? why does he prefer automatons to others like him? where did he get that scar? -- and the alignment is removed from the equation, suddenly we have creative liberty to design the god however we want. However you want. 
• Actually finally, alignment isn't all bad and I use it to constrain myself when I want to subvert tropes, limit the impact a character or deity can have in a situation or narrative, and produce the familiar to make my players feel at ease when I want them to feel at ease. Nothing is more refreshing after a litany of trope-bending characters than one who meets exactly our expectations and then slowly shifts them over time. I still don't slap an alignment on my gods; instead I explore them in a framework provided by an alignment.

That turned into a long aside rather than the short one I thought it would be. Eh.

For your viewing pleasure, I offer you the Niovit. These are a pantheon of gods who did not create the world, but who created the living creatures that inhabit it. They are family, as befitting a pantheon which stakes itself in mortalkind's continued survival. And they are mythological deities, with tales and fables attributed to them to explain natural phenomena. The world is entering a new age, and as such gods like these help people understand their environment and model their lives. Most mortals will venerate at least one or two of the gods, though not all find them worthy of worship.

The faiths of the Niovit are communal forms of worship. They bring people together, joining them through commonalities and the need for support, and uplift each other. Individuals may pray alone, meditate, or consider the miracles of the gods in solitude, but they worship by engaging the community in their revelations. Chapels and large, physical edifices of worship are erected to the Gods of Society, the Church of the Three Mothers, and Rophion, though they hardly resemble each other in construction and purpose. Other gods have shrines, holy sites, and forums where worshippers come together to pray together, eat together, and discuss amongst themselves.

The Church of the Three Mothers builds holy houses where the sick, poor, lonely, and afraid congregate. These houses are usually existing buildings repurposed for the means of the Church, or are humble buildings built with donated funds and time from citizens. They resemble soup kitchens and homeless shelters, but the blessing of the Three Mothers prevents disease from spreading in their confines, and punishes those who would siege the houses themselves.

The Gods of Society have large, elaborate, beautiful stone and glass chapels built where idols to the three deities of civilization are arranged for the worship of large congregations. These chapels are modeled after the mosques of the half-orcs, who popularized the buildings before the Long War through mission work. In Ceilia, the chapels are less opulent and more utilitarian, resembling a single large building with numerous halls and rooms where the functions of the chapel are housed. Often, Ceilian chapels are circular and feature a promenade which encircles them, where trade and debate can be waged.

The churches of Rophion are less frequently a singular building and more often look like large, sprawling villas crossed with academic campuses. They are low to the ground, have numerous distinct buildings, and feature long outdoor walkways paved with stone and crisscrossing beautiful gardens and lawns. Oftentimes, the buildings have gardens on their roofs where people gather for lunch and talk about current affairs. Rophion's churches almost always have a chamber of the Holy Niovit, a small shrine built to glorify all of the gods of the pantheon, where worshippers of other deities may come and pay their respects. These chambers are dimly lit, quiet, and usually have one or two priests who attend the devotees by providing holy texts, incense, holy water, and garb appropriate to mediation and prayer. Rophion's churches are nearly always the location of a bath house and steam room, allowing travelers and citizens alike the luxury of cleanliness.

The gods are as follows.

• Maonos, god of dragons, is one of the most powerful deities. He is worshipped by the various intelligent dragons which reside on Ordain, as well as dragonborn and other sentient folk who rightfully fear and respect the mighty and terrible dragons. He has a son, the Wyvern King, who is the demigod ruler of the nation of Odetsa in Ahlvator. Maonos is said to have built the kingdom of heaven himself, using all the wealth of that realm to create a resplendent, shining city where all the gods now reside. It is his daughter, Tiamat, who led the first uprising against the city of heaven in what is known as the First War. Many angels followed her, including one who would come to be known as the Adversary of Igdione.
• The goddess of song and travel, Palanthia, is one of three gods known as the Gods of Society. The other two, Gideon and Talon, are venerated alongside her in the civilized parts of the world. They are the patron gods of the Ceilian empire, and are among the only gods to require churches or other edifices constructed in their name (other gods usually ask that worshippers construct shrines in their homes or in the wilderness). Gideon is the god of magic, while Talon is the god of light, law, and knowledge.
• Igdione is the mother of the gods, including Maonos and the Gods of Society. She is the goddess of stars, and as such she is said to be all-seeing and all-knowing. Her eldest sons are the gods of the sun and the moons, and because of this she is viewed as a goddess of fertility. She is worshipped alongside her daughters Heqdea and Palanthia in a faith known as the Church of the Three Mothers. Members of this faith come from all walks, seeking healing, wisdom, alms, and sometimes just a place to lay their head at night. The Three Mothers faith only allows women into the clergy, and commands numerous members to quest in the aid of families, mothers, and children who cannot help or protect themselves. Clerics of the faith are called Daughters.
• Phoberar and Akramhu are the god of the moons and sun, respectively. Phoberar is also venerated as the sky god, bringing rain, health, and seasons to the people of Ordain. Akramhu is known as the fertility god, as well as the god of protection and forethought. They are twins, and are often depicted fighting the Adversary of Igdione while their mother shelters the mortals of Ordain. Phoberar is a somewhat aloof god, who frequently muses over philosophy and art, while Akramhu is the passionate brother, loving and quarrelling in equal measure.
• Rophion is the god of the earth, crafts, rivers, and music, and is the patron of cities and towns across Ordain. People revere him even if they don't worship him, as he takes comfort from trade, craftsmanship, festivals, dance, and a strong family. He is also the god of brewing, and brewers, vintners, and distillers usually offer the first barrel or keg of a batch to him out of respect, blessing it and pouring the first cup into a specially prepared plot of earth. Some longtime brewers bury their loved ones in these plots, which more often than not grow bounteous fruit trees -- even if none were planted there.
• Heqdea is Igdione's eldest daughter and firstborn, and she is the goddess of fate, sleep, darkness, and forests, and is venerated by elves the world over. She was the first being to set foot on Ordain, and she is said to have walked every step of the land at least three times before she was sure of the world's safety. She is a watchful, silent guardian, and owls are her favored animal. She sees wildlife, especially the creatures of the forest, as kin, and her most devout are vegetarian, taking no sustenance from the flesh or products of animals of any kind. She was also the first being to give birth after Igdione, and she bore Acros, the god of paths, luck, and animals. Her son is the exact opposite of her pensive nature, and he fills the halls of heaven with dance, levity, and wit, and enjoys debating his elder aunts and uncles. He is not allowed to drink, however, as the one time he did he broke into Phoberar's vault of the sky and -- filled with uncharacteristic malice -- dumped a cup of wine on a model of one of the moons. Since then, both drink and the moon have driven men to madness, though each in their own way.
• Curphorian is Igdione's youngest son, and he is viewed with suspicion and distrust at best by his siblings. He is the god of war, storms, death, and the oceans, and was instrumental in defeating the Adversary in the early days of the world. He has sired sons among the world since the first days, and each of them has grown to great strength and influence. His siblings do not hate him, they simply see his ways of war and destruction as a necessary evil for the world to continue on its course.

The following are 2nd generation gods, and are more likely to be patron deities to cults or smaller religious systems.

• Atrix is the daughter of Rophion, and is the goddess of honesty, peace, and justice. She is the patron god of dwarves, and worked with her father to gift them with long life and memory so that they might never forget the lessons of their history, even after the history itself has faded. She is close to her grandmother, and the two are alike in their omnipotent vision of the world. Atrix is present at the swearing of oaths, ceremonies, and death, signing the final compact that puts a soul to rest. Ghosts are said to be those Atrix forgets or punishes, forcing them to live out a past evil until they can be absolved.
• Mortar, son of Akramhu, is the god of miracles, victory, and zeal. He is his father's passion incarnate, and he is one of the only gods who finds the company of Curphorian enjoyable. Together, the two have led many an army to glory, and together they have engineered the downfall of kingdoms and empires. Paladins of all kinds pray to Mortar for the conviction and strength to do right by their oaths and charges, and find that the god rewards those who take risks and punish the apathy of evil.
• Oziphan, god of reason and language, is the son of Rophion. He is the close confidant of his sister Atrix and of Phoberar, his uncle. Together, the three of them have stoked the flames of philosophy and learning among mortals, giving them the desire to learn and wonder at the mysteries of the world and worlds beyond. Half-orcs view Oziphan as their patron, though their relationship with him is less cozy than that of Atrix her people. Instead, they see Oziphan as the greatest teacher and thinker of all, and strive to emulate his intellectual ways.
• Hibelia, the daughter of Heqdea, is the goddess of thresholds. She guards every transitory space, be it the eaves beneath a home or the veil of life and death. She is invoked by name at the beginning of a journey and thanked when home at last. She is one of the most sworn-by gods, and many are fond of the phrase, "By Hibelia's keys…" in reference to her fabled ring of keys which unlock the gates between realms. She is said to be the only one among the gods who knows how to unlock the door between heaven and hell, and she presides over the march of souls that are shepherded through by the fey psychopomps, the faeries.
• Esparath, the daughter of Palanthia, is the goddess of martyrdom and suffering. She is said to have walked in the wake of her mother as travelers spread the first plague and borne the agony of those afflicted, granting them reprieve in lieu of her mother's folly. Since then, Palanthia has adopted the sick and the weary into her faith, and lepers and the cursed are said to sometimes be cured by making the Traveler's Pilgrimage. Esparath never fully recovered from the first suffering, and as a result she is also the goddess of pain. Her faithful are never with her for long, usually passing from the world. She soothes the wounded in battle as they die, and consoles mothers when their children are taken early.

Unfueled Ramblings

Today is going to be pretty stream-of-consciousness. I've not had my morning cuppa, and I'm entering my headspace for the day by blogging. It's new to me.

Monday night I had my usual game session with everyone, including a new player who takes my table to six (yikes) players. Everyone in the group is between the ages of nineteen and twenty four, for some context. They aren't grognards or veteran players. They cut their teeth on 5e and only played Pathfinder when I stripped away some of the "harder" concepts like skill ranks and combat maneuver bonus/ defense.

I function best with three players. I've decided that's my and my table's sweet spot. I can divide focus, attend conversations more actively, and take notes more easily. My attention is less frayed. With six players, I essentially increase the amount I'm tracking at the table by an order of magnitude. It isn't impossible, but it means my players need to pick up some of the table responsibilities so I can focus on story, reacting to player actions, and details of the world.

That said, our newest player has taken a shine to some of the darker aspects of my campaign world. She immediately started tweaking the backgrounds in the PHB to fit her idea of her character, asked if she could play a human (how refreshing), and settled on an assassin rogue who spent her formative years as a feral child. She was "protected by the forest," that's what I -- the DM -- came up with. Boring. She said, "Yeah, cool, but what if a forgotten god of the forest made sure I didn't die?" That's a great idea, I said. "Can it be tied to my trinket, the snake tattoo I have?" Absolutely, weave the trinket into your character! That's strong narrative thinking. "Okay, and that copy of of the Complete Psionic Handbook you picked up at the bookstore is going to come in handy for my character."

What. I had to stop and pick up the pieces before I realized that my newest player had inadvertently crafted a rich, whole character with plenty of mystique to her backstory, ties to the campaign world, and a cohesive theme. She's an assassin marked by the serpent god that was forgotten in the forest. It protected her as she grew up, even teaching her through subtle nudges the ways of poison, stealth, and guile. Maybe later she'll demonstrate psionic talent.

I'm boasting about one player, but they all have excellent characters this go round. It's only impressive due to the newest player being completely novice to tabletop roleplaying games overall.

The roster for the upcoming game is as follows:

Errhart, a female air genasi druid. Errhart is a keeper circle druid, meaning she has a familiar which she can target with wild shape. We flavored her familiar as a small mech leftover from a high-tech organization predating the war. Errhart wields a quarterstaff of metal shaped like a shepherd's crook, from which she hangs a lantern. She wants to repair her grandmother's plane and go back to the ruins where her father died.

Chimera/ Philos. Stone is a changeling sorcerer who woke up in a tank underground. He believes he was created with alchemy, and goes by the "name" that was written on the side of his tank. Unsure of why or by whom he was created, Chimera is a drifter who found kindred spirits in a travelling troupe of performers. He splits his time between school in Desert Wind, where he appears as a young teen, and the troupe. Chimera seems to crave experience and learning. Chimera wields a terbutje, or war club, set with pieces of strange glass littering the bunker in which he woke up.

Keur-1G is the warforged seeker discovered by our party's gnome alchemist, Quincy Sappledoop. The two of them work in an empty hangar in the airfield, where Quincy tinkers and seeks new treasures from the wilds beyond the village. Keur-1G wants to help all the squishy people in Desert Wind, and he does favors for the townsfolk. He likes to adventure and explore old ruins and dungeons.

Jormungand is the aforementioned human assassin, whose life in the forest remains a mystery which will be revealed through play. However, connections to the dark serpent gods seems to be a large facet of the character. Jorm entered Desert Wind and has been a part of the community since, sometimes lending her expertise with stealth and survival to the overall success of the town.

Aias is the only character which still needs a backstory, but the barbarian will certainly add some much needed front-line to the combat side of the party.

In the worldbuilding time I set aside this week, I accomplished a good deal of work. Most of it is in snippet form, but the amount of content I was able to get on paper satisfied the itch I had.

Some secrets from the campaign world:

The moon kingdoms went to war over a passing comet rumored to hold enormous power, and now one of the moons is a desolate wasted ruin with no one watching over it. I'll probably use this as a way to introduce aberrant creatures to the world, by having an appropriately powerful aberration claim the moon and send its agents into the world below.

The elves offended the archfey, and no one has seen faeries in the graveyards since then (almost a hundred years). This is a more open-to-improv secret, but I foresee players coming into contact with the fey psychopomps of the world, who shuffle souls between heaven and hell.

The frost giants found a fabled artifact of winter and have used it to retreat to their homeland, once inaccessible to them. They are deciding what to do now that they have their home back. Some giants will want to begin the war on their enemies once again, and others will want to live out peaceful lives. This is a political/ war scenario for players of a higher level. However, low-level characters might encounter bands of frost giant pilgrims making their way back to their homeland, which might be fun if they share a campfire or hunt together.


I also put together some one-sentence snippets about some exploration sites for my players to salivate over. A few of them area here:

The Ruins, an abandoned and ancient city in the forest, reclaimed by nature, where bandits scavenging for tech and wild animals fight for territory. This is where Errhart's father died, and it will feature prominently in the first arc of the campaign. It's a way to show the opulence of the world before the Long War and reinforce the languid, time-stuck world the characters are in now.

The Great Caves, which lead to an old dwarven city constructed prior to the rise of the Ceilian empire. This dwarven city gives context to the Long War, which began in part due to the dwarves throwing off the yoke of the Ceilian elves and reintroducing aethertech to the world. This ruin lets players see what dwarven civilization was like before the elves took over, and will cast the dwarves as a Roman analogue. They were philosophers, warriors, and artists who built a mighty empire by absorbing smaller peoples. When they bumped into the elves, they found an enemy they couldn't best, and the rest is history.

The Radio Tower, an ancient monument to the science of the world before the war. Parts can be salvaged, deep transmissions can be intercepted, and distress calls can be heard. The radio tower is a perfect way to add fetch-quests, expand the explorable world, and drop in Macguffins.

The Old Chapel, a church to a faith system that predates the Long War, where the scars of a great battle are still visible. Players will learn about the schism in faith that led to the elven civil war. This war saw the Ceilian empire weakened, which gave the dwarves the opening they needed to rise up from beneath their oppressors. Unfortunately, it also set the stage for the Long War, and pitted otherwise-allies against each other. It also led to the formation of a weirder part of the world, the islands of Pillonai.


Finally, the new campaign heavily features some expanded rules from the supplement, Darker Dungeons by Giffyglyph. Highly recommended reading for anyone wanting to add some realism, grit, or pacing to their game.

In particular, I'm using the Discovery, Adversity, and Recovery experience rules, which hearkens to old-school DnD by making the majority of XP gained come from recovered treasures. Magic items and gold pieces don't count, but art pieces, gems, and relics of the past do count. They generate income and XP, so they're doubly important to the would-be adventurer. I felt like this encapsulated the drive most people have to recover and observe the treasures of the pre-war world. Players want to pull that stuff from dungeons, and they only have so many item slots to do so. I figure they'll quickly learn to use pack animals.

I'm also using the Long Rest Variant from the DMG, coupled with the Journey rules from Darker Dungeons. This means the exploratory parts of the game are still tense, rife with opportunity for roleplaying and discovery, and meaningful. It doesn't tax players any more than usual, but it does mean that random encounters are hazards to be avoided rather than chump fights to be sloshed through.

Finally, I implemented a change to the rules of my own devising. Spellcasters who wish to learn 4th, 5th, and 6th level spells must find them in the campaign world by questing for them as rewards, learning them from a mentor, etc. Essentially, no one just "learns" these spells upon leveling up, like a wizard, or has them automatically available to prepare, like a cleric or druid. The only exception is sorcerer, which I've decided is the rarest form of spellcaster and a true anomaly. Characters have to earn these spells. Spells of 7th level and higher function this way for sorcerers, as well. For all other characters, 7th level and higher spells are assumed to not exist. The characters which can cast spells of these levels still gain slots, but must discover the individual spells they wish to know through gameplay. They can't learn them from mentors or find them in libraries. They can't get them from a druid as reward for a quest. They have to delve to the deepest pre-war ruins and battle old horrors for them. They have to earn them from the gods. They have to slay a lich in her lair and pry the knowledge from her spellbook, possibly going insane as they do so.

This means the world is inherently less magical than it used to be. The technology is spread out and is usually being used. The only place to find excess magic and tech is to go looking for it in the ruined world beyond the villages and towns. OSR, but new wave 5e OSR. The world isn't likely to improve at the hands of the players, but the world is filled with wonder and old legacies.


So this is my early morning hour long blog spew. I'd like to give a shout out to Sly Flourish for the idea of campaign secrets. This is an old post, but that blog is chock full of good DMing advice.

Giffyglyph gets mention for the excellent campaign tool that is Darker Dungeons. I can't value this high enough for getting 5e to where I want it to be. My players appreciate it, too, and they're excited about Active Initiative and the Ammo Die.

Finally, I have to thank u/DeathMcGunz for the awesome work done on Desert Wind, which heavily inspired me to just say fuck it and go for the idea of tech and magic and weirdness and not care whether it's incongruent. Players will reconcile anything if it sounds cool. Mine are stoked beyond belief about exploring a fantasy apocalypse world that nods to Ghibli. 


I listened to Seven Lions while writing this. It's good, epic electronic music.

Tone, Style, Genre

We talk about tone in writing a lot. We also use it to describe the general atmosphere and gravitas with which we approach campaigns. Tone can be whimsical, gritty, haunting, or noble.

Style is what I say to my players when I'm talking about what set of house rules or expectations mechanically we all bring to the table and agree upon before starting a game.

Genre is -- to me -- separate from tone. Some people say gritty is a genre; I disagree. Instead, genre is horror, pirates, eldritch, knights and castles, space opera. It's what I use to determine what pop culture references I'll make when I'm explaining the conventions of the world to my players. If we're in a swashbuckling genre with a gritty tone, it might be a pirate-laden seafaring campaign with seedy, dark ports of call and emphasis on survival at sea. There'll be a shipwreck, stranded-on-an-island part of the campaign where the players face down a weird cult performing sacrifices to an all-but-forgotten sun goddess. But if the tone is whimsical, it might look more like Pirates of the Caribbean.


This came up last night when three of my players and I decided to perform a tabula rasa on our games and we retired any and all loose character sheets floating around in their folders. Any one shots we'd done, the previous campaign, and even our Waterdeep heist -- which we're about halfway through, but it isn't scratching the collective itch any more -- are all in a safe binder in the office where they'll stay until we run our current adventure.

Now, we're playing a post-"apocalyptic" mid-industrial fantasy world with magic and machines, like a rural Eberron without the dragonmarks and scheming houses. We discussed tone, and agreed it would fluctuate according to what the story demands. For style, we decided on what I call New Game+, which is basically normal DnD with some journey rules, the long rest variant from the DMG, the option to play homebrew classes, and some other minor tweaks to inventory, initiative, and so forth. My players decided that technology was cool and they all made characters that are decidedly technological in some way. We began at 2nd level.

My wife is playing a druid subclass called the Circle of the Keeper, which Wild Shapes a bonded familiar rather than themselves. We flavored her familiar as a machine inhabited by a nature spirit, like a wood-and-metal Pokemon she can shift into any normal beast shape option. It hangs out in ferret form most of the time, and she found it in an old beat up plane she's trying to restore.

Two of my players formed a joint backstory: one is a gnome artificer fleeing an accident they caused which resulted in the death of their daughter, who settled on the surface world in a small agrarian village to escape the shame of their actions. We decided to use the revised Artificer rules from Unearthed Arcana.

They discovered the other character, a warforged seeker (which is a ruin-delving Lara Croft/ Indiana Jones half-caster) who participated in the apocalyptic war that scattered technology across the world. They don't remember anything before their deactivation, but that was so long ago that it hardly matters for the character anymore (or so they think).

I plan on starting them out doing some quests involving a "nature spirit" living near town, which is actually a drider druid that lives in the sticks and scares kids that play too close to the woods. We'll see what other plots we scare up. In all, I think the game is fresh and new and isn't just another fantasy game, which should help my herd of cats keep interest for a while.


Just an update post on current IRL games. There's not much to this post, so it feels a little shitty to be posting it without providing usable material or information to anyone reading. I put that diddy about tone and style at the top so I could trick myself into believing I wrote something worth reading today.

Vengeance: a series.

Today's featured idea is vengeance. Pay homage to the petty gods and find the last person that wronged you. That person is now the target of your divine wrath, your inspired ire, your rage and ruin. You will now raze their home and family to the ground, salt their relationships, and demolish their livelihood.

People who consider this a normal response usually have something Freudian going on in the old thinker. It hints at unfulfilled needs. Vengeance is a motivator that first world individuals rarely encounter. We get tastes of it, but rarely are the stakes ever high enough that we would consider vengeance of the kind that exists in fiction, especially dramatic fantasy fiction. This is the same world that birthed Marvel's Hulk, Heracles, and Liam Neeson's acting career. It's the same collective mind that manifested Kill Bill, Inglorious Basterds, and Django Unchained (Tarantino's characters have a lot of unfulfilled needs). It's the simmering cousin of American national pride in today's rhetoric. It goes to the root of our disagreements.

DnD has a history with vengeance. It has the paladin oath, the 9th level spell, the oathbow, and more. It crystallizes vengeance into a magical force.

When we consider human emotions like this, especially ones that motivate like revenge, fear, and greed, we usually end up agreeing that anyone can be driven to the point of embracing one of these primal responses. Anyone, pushed far enough, turns to things which orient us and give us immediate emotional gratification. We love to examine this phenomenon in media. It's why the people in the Walking Dead are the greater evil: they've lost so much more than the dead. Loss and response. Want and response. Need and response.

So to kick off the blog, I obviously chose a weighty topic. Something I can chew for a while, work through the creative muscles, and write about. Something I can come back to later if need be. In this post, I'm setting up the idea and following through with some specifics. One specific: Storm of Vengeance.

This 9th level spell is on the druid and cleric spell lists. Not wizard, warlock, or sorcerer. Not bard. Not available through subclasses. It exists solely in the realm of the full-casting divine casters. That alone tells us that a spell which channels wrath at such a potent tier of emotion and conjuration is necessarily reserved for only the most powerful of individuals. A tenth level paladin might get angry, might demonstrate wrath, might even exact justice -- final and swift -- but only the mortals which draw nearest their spiritual guides can achieve this state of vengeful destruction. And among them, only the most powerful can hope to one day summon such a display.

This seems like a spell of opportunity. It seems like a spell cast in anger. It doesn't seem premeditated or planned. It's a spell of instantaneous response to stimuli. It's a knee-jerk reaction to something personal, powerful, and ultimately grief-inducing. It's the closest DnD gets to a prolonged, show-of-force artillerization of magic by one singular spellcaster. It is exactly the kind of spell a shunned cleric, cast out of her church for heresy, pines after, returning only after she has learned the incantation and received the inspiration. Here in the center of town, she exacts vengeance, and wreaks havoc.

And what does that look like to the person on the ground? The commoner; the noble; the town guard; the budding mage; the high priest; the back-alley ruffian? What do these people have in common in the face of such magic? They must die by it or cower, bent under cover, for fear of their life. A druid can hover 1000 feet in the air with a fly spell cast on them, an item granting flight, or using natural terrain and phenomena, far beyond the reach of any other spellcaster, and pummel the earth beneath them. They fear no counterspell or dispel magic, they have impunity, and they have their anger. Whatever drives them to cast this spell is free to knock around in their head, rattling their cage while they dehumanize their victims with distance and justification. This is the moment for a player to deliver a monologue at the table, or a DM to make judicious use of thaumaturgy and the relative powerlessness of the players to do the same. It is grandeur and awe and horrible magic and it is so much fun to play out.

Ice, wind, lightning, deafness, bitter chill, driving sheets of acid rain, and thunder swirl beneath the storm. The caster is above it all so they suffer no ill effects. They are free to rain devastation.

After the storm clears, what remains? Hailstones embedded in flagstones and yards; ice slicks and puddles of acidic water; corpses of the fallen dotting the streets; small fires and smoldering ruins, charred by lightning; people, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, stumbling half-deafened and drenched through the wreckage; and above it all, a diminutive figure made small by distance but possessed of vengeance made palpable by the scene around them. It's a scene of war and death and apocalypse, and it should strike fear into players.

How to use the spell?

Give it to your big villain and let them rip open the sky in the starting city. It's a good way to immediately put the players in a dramatic situation where they can be drawn into the narrative or simply choose to survive and escape, only to see more ruin take place as long as the villain continues to operate in this way.

Let the players stumble across an abandoned town where this spell was cast and the cost of rebuilding was too high for the survivors. It looks like a town that went through a tornado (it did) and feels like a town charged by loss, rage, grief, and bleak, dreadful serenity (it is). If you've ever lived through a superstorm, tornado, flood, or hurricane, you know what this is; it's the day after, surreal, with buildings uprooted and shifted wholesale over city blocks. It's finding scalpels from the miles-away hospital embedded inches thick in two-by-fours. It's the relief centers with people missing their insulin, their photo albums, their loved ones. It's panic attacks and looters. It's chaos after the chaos.

Have the players receive an opportunity to stop the spell from being cast. Perhaps a villain has a way to cast it remotely, through a macguffin they acquired. The players can fail, and failure means they have to face some measure of responsibility (rightly so or not). Let them see what it looks like once before they meet the villain to really drive home what this is.

Maybe it's not a villain who used the spell. Maybe it's a cleric or druid who destroyed a gnoll camp or orc warband. It's not humans at the receiving end, so the aftermath shouldn't feel the same. But if you describe all of the things they caused in the same way you would a human settlement, it will be even more poignant. What these creatures did and were was vile, maybe, but wanton annihilation of life is reprehensible too. How do the players react when they have to help the gnolls find a lost young one or assist the orcs in saving a cherished elder? If the young one is trapped by floodwaters or the elder is wounded by hail and debris, now the immediate villainy shifts. This is a cheap trick and done improperly it will seem to your players trite and meant to yank you around. But if you approach it with gravitas and sincerity, they'll soon understand that vengeance is no tool of the just and the merciful.

One of the players wants to cast the spell. They receive a dream, vision, or other metaphysical experience that forces them to walk through the aftermath of their own actions. It's not said up front where the character is, but have them walking down a street witnessing people with acid burns and bandaged, concussed heads. There are children. There are young couples. There are brigands and nobles. It affects everyone. It is not a "good" spell. It doesn't just target fiends and undead. It wounds everyone. They must help people to escape the dream-vision. Otherwise, they endlessly sift through the wreckage of their choice. If they still choose to cast the spell afterward, maybe have a conversation about their alignment or morality with them afterwards. Make sure you're on the same page as them, and that they understand that using magic of this magnitude is not just a choice: it's a game-altering event.



I know this post wasn't the intro to Ordain that I promised, but I found time in the middle of my week to blog and this is what I wanted to talk about. This is what I delivered. It feels good. I wrote more today than I have in a long time and I enjoyed it immensely. Here's to writing more often, flexing those muscles, and improving the blog and my (and hopefully your) game one post at a time!


Still no sexy sign-off. Until next time.