What Ho, Frog Demons

Holing up in a converted New Hampshire barn has me fiercly procrasti-tasking around finishing the manuscript for Misty Isles of the Eld (all the while with Luka Rejec working like a machine to produce an inspired round of self-directed illustrations) and skipping ahead to the last and final stretch adventure coming out of the Slumbering Ursine Dunes project, What Ho, Frog Demons, a sandbox that pulls together a number of smaller adventure sites around the Dunes and Marlinko into a tidy little (and slottable in a home campaign) package.

The dreaded Frog Demon Temple (an intensely deadly and traperrific smallish dungeon with an extradimensional backdoor), the manor of the Beet God, and an outline of the backhills dungeon-infested town of Bad Rajetz will all have a turn after having been game to the hilt in my own campaign.

But here's a Wodehousian teaser of the set-up for the first scenario.

Jevo and I

“Nasty business with the Lord-Surveyor, Jevo. What.”

“If you say, Pan Vostvr.”

“I mean look at the face of it, old chum. Man writes an apologia titled A Corelands Defense of The Absolute Necessity of Frog Demons. I mean that is just asking for it, isn't it? One doesn't just casually stroll into salon stating 'you know frog demons, there is a warty race worth putting on the show about' and not expect to get stuck in.”

“Quite right, sir.”

“Still disappearing outright on the first high official visit to the borderlands in 76 years, that's a rum show and in Marlinko of all places with a temple so near. A frog demon temple of all things. Perfectly dreadful. One must do something about that kind of msvavo [Pahr slang roughly meaning “outrage/tragedy/funny bit”]. Now, Jevo, I know you have a bit of a thing when it comes to my embossed half-plate but I must have it for this adventure, what.”

“The one with the leering satyr face and protruding man-breasts, Pan Vostvr?”

“You will come around to it, Jevo.”

“I don't believe I will, sir.”

---

Ropucha Rigygtzenacht, Surveyor-Lord of Canton Departments Both Hilly and Forested, has announced that he will be conducting an official inspection and tour of both Marlinko and Ostrovo cantons. In the Cantons he is, of course,  more famously known as “The Garrulous Grease Toad,” a nickname attributed to him due to both his bulbous oily countenance and the famous, eccentric apologia he penned “Feuerundflammen: A Corelands Defense of The Absolute Necessity of Frog Demons.” Locals are shocked at the news, it has after all been almost 76 years since an Overking-appointed cantonal high official has actually set foot in the borderlands.  Beyond his official duties the grandee is said to be offering “sizable bounties for items of magic” including 5,000 gold suns for a “certain staff” (details available upon inquiry).  

Fever-Dreaming Marlinko Free Map Download

Well Fever-Dreaming Marlinko, finally, finally wormed its way out of my own acid-dreams and hopefully into yours. Backers of the Slumbering Ursine Dunes will find copies sitting in their hot little inboxes and all others can find the 72-page city adventure supplement right here on Drive-Thru RPG.

To celebrate--and give you a taste and a tool at the table--we are making the ever-talented and delightfully-eccentric Luka Rejec's three isometric maps (city map and two dungeons) available as part of a free download map pack on DriveThru (look for it tomorrow when I am off my champagne bender).

Reavers of the Weird Microgame

North Texas RPG Con was naturally a ton of fun, productive even. I won't rub it in. Much.

The ancient and obscure boardgame I brought for our beer and pretzels evening, King of the Mountain, though interesting looking was chocked full of way too many quirky exception rules and I quickly vetoed my own idea after a read through. The half-giant Robert Parker had the bright idea of adapting my old By This Axe campaign idea, the Reavers of the Weird for a quick evening game and I shaved it down on the fly into what is now a microgame.

Jason Sholtis, Trey Causey, Andrea, Mike Davison set down to a crazed anarchic evening of stealing, conniving, villager humiliating and murdering. In other words it was great.

So here's a game for you.

Background and Set-Up

Countless centuries of gavelkind succession laws have cranked up the fractionalizing, autarkic, hair-splitting pettiness—so typical of life in places with a foot in the Weird--to a feverish pitch in the Translittoral Canton of Hoimatbuch. That chilly, windy easternmost bastion of the Overkingdom is further plagued by a strangely-virile nobility creating a maddening over-proliferation of hyphen-crazy micro-fiefdoms as each holding is divided equally among the male children of each line.

You are the holder of one of these tiny sub-divided micro-states, your neighbor is a similar such asshole. You both want to kill and take each other's stuff, but are limited to the rules of low-intensity warfare that the Overking imposes.

Each player as part of his squalid little holding receives a livestock corral, a village filled with tax-paying chumps, a blood-apricot orchard, a swollen (yet strangely beautiful) prize pig and a charming (almost), rustically-decorated, black-timbered manor house. Ridding your opponent of his or her assets being the object of the campaign.

Each player receives eight footmen, four archers and three mounted. The actual figures can be (and should be if you want to bring the full gonzo) just about anything. In fact the game is abstracted enough that just about any playing pieces can be used with each manor locale either having a terrain representation or even just a notecard.

The Campaign Turn

Each turn (roughly a fortnight) the player can elect to mount 0-1 offensive actions (see below) and as many defensive actions as he cares. All actions are considered to occur simultaneously. The campaign ends after six turns and victory points are computed.

The players have five minutes at the beginning of each turn to wheel and deal among themselves. Reserves can be combined for joint defense. Attacks are never jointly conducted but players can gang up to conduct multiple individual attacks in a turn.

Players write down their offensive and defensive actions for the turn and reveal them at the beginning of the turn--or pass them to the umpire if you have one. Raids are resolved clockwise from the lowest initiative rolling player each round.

The dreaded Cantonal Lummox. Special rule coming soon.

Offensive Actions

Each turn can assign a leader or general and accompanying units to conduct a raid (each force must have a leader). He picks one of the options from below.

Steal Livestock

Humiliate Villagers

Burn Blood-Apricot Orchards

Defensive Actions

Each turn the player also assigns his non-raiding units (again each must have two or more to various locales.

Assign Guards to Livestock

Assign Guards to Village

Assign Guards to Orchard

Assign Reserve (assign figures to serve as a reserve for pursuits and defense)

Buy Reinforcements (usable on the fourth term to buy five new Footmen, see Victory Point penalty)

Combat

Combat occurs when a raid is caught (see Raid Resolution). All raids end with either the death of one side or the retreat of the attacker. The attacker may retreat at the beginning of each round but is forced to suffer a free attack from any archers or mounted left among the defenders.

Combat goes in rounds and is simultaneous. Archers get a free attack in the turn before melee starts. Each round the players roll to hit and pass the dice with hits to their opponent for saves. The defender chooses which figures to allot saves to.

To Hit on a d6

Archers 5,6

Footmen 5,6

Mounted 4,5,6

To Save

Archers 6

Footmen 5,6

Mounted 4,5,6

Raid Resolution

Opposition

Raider rolls d6 when on a raid to see what resistance she faces.

-1 Raiding Force has 1-4 figures

-1 Raiding Force all mounted

0-	Get Away Scot Free (Roll on Plunder)
1	Escape with No Plunder (No Effect)
2-3	Fight Locale Guard Only (Victorious Raider Rolls for Plunder)
4	Fight Locale Guard and 30% of Reserve (Victorious Raider Rolls for Plunder)
5	Fight Locale Guard and 60% of Reserve (Victorious Raider Rolls for Plunder)
6+	Fight Locale Guard and 100% of Reserve

Plunder

Victorious raider roll a d6 on the follow charts.

Modifiers:

-1 Raiding Force has 2-4 figures

+1 Raiding Force has 11 and over figures

Livestock Raid

1-	Nothing stolen
2-3	1d6 animals stolen
4	2d6 animals stolen
5	3d6 animals stolen
6+	3d6 animals stolen plus Prize Pig or Fine Horse

Village Humiliation

1-	Local folk laugh and ask “is that all you got?”
2	Village idiot forced to wear Eld helmet
3	Blacksmith tarred and feathered
4	Village headman (notable) cuckolded
5	Local temple Sun Lord priest (notable) beard shaved
6+	Relative of Boyar (notable) speckled with dung

Orchard Burning

1-3	Fire doesn't catch
4-5	Orchard burned
6+	Fire spreads to other orchard. Two orchards burned.

Add up after six turns. The highest score wins.

+1 VP for each pig in possession

+5 VP for each Prize Pig

-2 VP for each village commoner of yours humiliated

-3 VP for each village notable of yours humiliated

-5 VP for taking reinforcements

-5 VP for each orchard burned

Fever Dreaming Marlinko Going to Bed, North Texas

The last stretch of Fever-Dreaming Marlinko has been..well...a stretch. My natural impatience starts showing in this last part of the cycle, but another round of layout and proofing (disrupted by the fact that nearly all of the Hydra Collective is packing up and heading to North Texas for the week) is something readers will appreciate--so it's looking like we will go to press somewhere around June 12-13 (or later, such are things in our hobby).

(If you are going to North Texas RPG Con, track me down and say howdy, I am friendly-ish and likely to be running a pick-up Marlinko session or wargame.)

Inevitably I hate most everything I write with a reflexive hatred as soon as it clears my keyboard. It takes months, some times years for my own stuff to become rehabilitated in my own eyes. 

But I feel pretty good about Marlinko. Ironically I think this stretch adventure, which was supposed to be a relatively disposable 20-page Kickstarter supplement to Slumbering Ursine Dunes, is not only a thing in its own right but is stronger than the thing it supplements (and longer even).

Pulling in Luka Rejec to do maps at the 11^th hour turned out to be better than I imagined. All three of his maps went beyond even what I imagined. I mean just check out this beauty, the backcover map. I'm also way happy with both Jeremy Duncan and Jason Sholtis's art in the final product.

click on me.

But one of the reasons why I am genuinely excited beyond the required “fake it to, make it” enthusiasm small DIY publishers are supposed to project is that you will find several urban adventure mini-systems stuffed into Marlinko that I am pleased as punch about:

• A Chaos Index with escalating events/triggers scattered throughout the city. Meeting an NPC when things are stable might be a wholly different experience than when it's escalated into high weirdness later (and things in the city go from being a bit eccentric to hallucinatory as play progresses)
• And because one cannot have enough whirly bits in a sandbox, I threw in a whole news generator with full news brief like the campaign news I have been writing for years for the eponymous Hill Cantons campaign.
• A tiger-wresting mini-game,
• A weird nickname generator,
• A section on running scams, hoaxes and grifting activity in a city that loves the Mountebank (the player class is in there too).
• A (often very funny) carousing system tied into the quirky city quarter (contrada) by Robert Parker,
• A“fair play/pay” guild system for hirelings (solidarity!) also by Robert/