Slumbering Ursine Dunes: The Extended Dance Version (Series Omnibus)

[Before we get into today's matter at hand, if you find this blog helpful and most of all want to help me get a new Hill Cantons book out please consider backing my Patreon. I am about to drop the first chapter of the new Revoca Hill Cantons book next week so it's really the optimum time.]

Going on two years now 1-2 times a month I seem to field a variant of the question “are there plans for a compiled version of the Slumbering Ursine Dunes books?” With a whole damn reddit thread (that I was blissfully ignorant of for a fortnight) and What Ho off my plate I think I've reached a tipping point.

Yes, I want to do an omnibus of the first four SUD books.

And I want to do it sooner rather than later with an eye for actual value and increased playability for both existing and new readers.

Likely Going In:

• All Four Books. All four SUD-kickstarter books back-to-back in sequence. So expect to see Slumbering Ursine Dunes, Marlinko, Misty Isles and What Ho under one cover with one unified, sharper, more user-friendly layout. Hell I want this for my own table.
• Larger Format. Likely switching from digest size to full 8.5 x 11. While digest is my own personal jam, we need to let some of those cramped tables and illustrations breathe.
• Hardcover. Preferably with stitching (better quality binding, easier to lay flat over time) and likely with a high-quality traditional print run rather than only Print on Demand.
• Index. A traditional back of the book index to assist with play at the table.
• Bookmarks for Digital. The PDF edition will have them for reasons above, a perennial ask for the books from readers and reviewers.
• More Illustrations. Luka's generous and productive mind packed the last two SUD books with illustrations, looking back from the Dunes and Marlinko they could use some more interior illustrations to snaz them up.
• Unified Appendices. All those new monsters, items, new classes, subsystems, and weirdo subsystems will be organized together for ease of use.
• New Cover. Hell, we do judge books by their cover, don't we? Something big, something splashy and hitting the Hill Cantons aesthetic just so.

Maybe:

• Supplementary and Cut Material. In the maybe category is pulling in wider material to give the books more context and usability. Why I say maybe is that I am laser focused right now on not only finishing the Revoca book but getting it out much quicker than the previous books (and at the same quality level) which means realistically my writing time is sparser. But with my recent move and crazy person level of organization I keep finding whole notebooks of campaign notes relevant to all four books (tons of monsters, items, and even some dungeons) and pinko DIY me loves throwing value at readers who support the Hydra.
• Design Notes. How and why the sausage was made.
• Largescale Aesthetic Makeover. Maybe even if we do crowdfunding really kicking it up some design chops (more than than the significant makeover I am imagining above even).
• Strong Unaccounted Stuff that Readers Want. Seriously, here's your time to chime in. What do you want? Nagging questions from the text? New vistas? The sky is the limit.

What Ho Frog Demons is Out, Here's its Origin Story

What Ho, Frog Demons is out (you can buy it here, print is still in the works).

One thing I can guarantee you about the entire four books of the Slumbering Ursine Dunes series is that while published details can and do vary to protect the wicked they all do represent years and years of actual at-the-table play (above and beyond the many hours of more straight playtesting that comes post-manuscript).

Michael aka Migellito (aka the player of Father Jack of Fever-Dreaming Marlinko fame) relayed a ritual that would happen each and every session of the Hill Cantons weekly game for two years regarding the Frog Demon Temple, which lays just a few miles out of town right on the road to the primetime adventure spots of the time in the Marlinko Canton:

“Chris, every week: "So, you want to go to the frog demon temple?" 

Us, every week: "NO!" 

After about two years of playing and probably more than 50 sessions, we finally say "you know what.. ok, lets go to the frog demon temple". 

We walk up the spooky dead tree aisle to the temple. We go inside the main door. We start down the.. HIRELING DIES. 

We immediately leave the frog demon temple.”

It took another 1-2 years and several levels more powerful before the Nefarious Nine, the Google Plus campaign group that never numbered nine, actually came back to loot and pillage the temple.

In emergent play places and things take on quickly a significance, dynamic, and meaning beyond the design origin. I had never intended the FDT to be anything more than a punctuation in the campaign. Much like the Manor of the Beet God (also presented in What Ho) had intentionally been designed as a “Saturday Night Special”, the kind of self-contained 1-3 session micro-site that MAR Barker threw at players to spice things up between longer explorations.

The original intention of What Ho as a stretch goal was to just throw these sites straight and unadorned at you in a 18-24 page adventure. But like the emergent play of the campaign proper the Hydra Cooperative's publishing mission seems to zig zag and explode out of proportion out of the sheer love of imagining the hell out of things. Untethered by worries about the bottom line we just wanted to make something that blossomed like the play it was based on.

So here we are. The book is out and its busting out of its britches at 114 pages. We threw everything we could at it (a whole Marlinko hexcrawl, tons of NPCs, an infection index, tons of Vanican monsters, etc). If you feel so inclined you should check it out, feel free to mangle it beyond repair. And drop me a line if you thoughts about it (good, bad, or critical I want to hear). 

The Frog Demons are Coming Y'all (Eventually)

So the long and short of the update on What Ho, Frog Demons (the fourth of the Slumbering Ursine Dunes series) is that we are right in the middle of the editorial process. The ever-versatile Luka Rejec has jumped over from the illustration side to being the chief editor and just when I thought I was catching a break from the ever-demanding eye of Robert Parker I find myself wading through a 21-point revision list for the manuscript.

Punchline: What Ho is going to take a month or three longer---but it will be tougher and stronger for it.

So in the meantime here's some actual gameable content, one of the lesser tiers of the eponymous critters (the full version comes complete with a random generation system based in freakish real world adaptations to create your nightmare). Also Luka being Luka some sketches of anuran fiends are already percolating through the ether here are some.

Frog Demonettes/Žába'dabel Nymphs

No. Enc.: 1d6 (3d6)

Alignment: Chaotic (Evil)

Movement: 120’ (40’)

Armor Class: 5

Hit Dice: 2

Attacks: 2 (claws or barbed steel darts)

Damage: 1d4 or 1d4+1

Save: D2

Morale: 9

Hoard Class: XI

XP: 60

Like many extra-dimensional xenoforms the Žába'dabel as a demonic race both mirror and defy natural ecology. Frog Demonettes, the lowest of the three basic types—one hesitates to call them life-cycle stages as they seem to lack rhyme or reason alternately evolving or devolving at seemingly random intervals of their millennium-long lives—is a uniformly female-appearing race of man-sized, lithe, pastel-skinned bipeds with short stubby tails.

Though the Frog Demonette is not as intellectually well-rounded as the larger, more mutated Oorhi, they are quite cunning and love tinkering. This dovetails nicely with their typical caste role as trap setters, sanitation maintenance specialists and unionized builders of the grotesque, baroque floats that grace the annual Benighted Parade of Weltschmerz in Peklo, their home dimension.

Frog Demonettes can cast Mend and Push spells once a day. Admittedly a power that will see little use in combat with PCs.  

Peklo the Hot Hell: a Brief Tour on Ten Electrum Pieces or Less, Part 1

One hell is really insufficient for the inimical side of the Hill Cantons' cosmology. The reality of the Cold Hell readers of Misty Isles of the Eld have experienced, What Ho, Frog Demons explores some adventurable connections to that other fell dimension, Peklo or more baldly the Hot Hell.

I have cut the long willow branches from their tree and dragging them thrice around where the red bull stomps the tall rye, I have made loving supplication to God S-d. Erecting the lead barriers and donning the Suit of Containment and issuing the mutterings of the Vulgar Hyperborean words of protection, I can tell finally of Peklo.

The Ludicists maintain that Zem, is just the dream projection of a great and cosmic game. That is of course heresy vile and ill-informed, but like most corruptions of the mind has an element of Truth in its inception. When great Overgod floated across the void, his ship left a wake from Demonspace. How natural, how predictable, how convenient, that it was that the ego-drunk Demons with their great arrow-like vessels penetrating the heavens would also follow shortly in their vessels.

The Sunlord in His Wisdom sternly warns us of the trap of timelines, intoning of expository history and the senseless capitalizations of portentous proper names but suffice it to say there was a time of Conflict between Overgod and the voyaging Captains. Overgod held his own trapping the inimical encroachers to an infinite in-between plane of psychic friction: the fell place we now know as the Hot Hell.

Lower and Upper Hell

The Two Hells each have their own two hells. Much like our world the Hot Hell is divided between a flat bedrock of daily existence and an upper firament. Unlike Zem with its orderly domed heavens and neatly bounded earth, the Lower Hell and the dark inky void Upper Hell are said to run dizzingly, terrifyingly infinite.

Upper Hell is a lifeless zone, a place of transit (astral flyover country if you will), eschewed even by the Captains. The void is punctuated here and there by the running lights of the hulking, ruined Vessels and cold rocky orbs. It is known to run over the Cold Hell, a pocket dimension closer and more imbued with its substance.

Lower Hell in comparison teems with demonic ecologies. While universally unpleasant and over-warm, the Lower Hell is a bewildering patchwork of fiendish bio-climes fecundly blossoming from the psychic projections of the deep anxieties, ugly archetypes and ego excesses of the adjoining dimensions. Here is the Malachite Scarp, a vertigo-inducing narrow-ledged cliffscape of barely perched stork-legged backward facing demons raised by the pure might of petty insecurity. There the polished bronze phallic towers and monstrous hot pink orchids of Vulvak, the Archtownship of Unsubtle Imagery.

Also striking are the teeming, squalid squatter cities thrown up around the wrecked hulks of the Vessels (more about those later). Lording over each vessel-city are the silver-suited Captains with the castes of the Crew eternally jockeying from the flaming-eyeball headed engineers up to the gargantuan, multi-headed Officers.

And those are just the thematically discernible sections, some areas seem to be a confusing stew of jarring elements. Great barb-vined patches of demonic tubers nestle up against tarpits filled with lamprey-faced life coaches, cellophane forests, and dung warrens of cold-calling bivalve psychic marketers.

In the Next Part we get into some of the hot spot (no pun intended) sites of Peklo.  

The Salacious Salon of Sxiploi

An excerpt from the upcoming What Ho, Frog Demons (fourth book in the Slumbering Ursine Dunes series) for your amusement, a little stylish sub-level inside the Temple overlooking the Hot Hell in which you can employ the Top Ten Books of Hell list (along with some other guiding boxes in the text to help with the demonic repartee.

Room 10. Cloakroom. Blixr, a sickly thin frog-demonette with flaccid urine-yellow skin and a loose-fitting (but immaculate) white uniform fronted with golden braid sits on a tall stool here behind a counter. In a terse, heavily-accented croak she ask for cloaks or other outerwear, producing from a slit in her wane neck an obsidian token in exchange for the article of clothing. A delicate cape made from ocular-bat wing membrane (worth 150 gold pieces) and a heavy ermine coat with thick shoulder pads and inexplicable rows of cast iron barbs (worth 500 gold pieces) hang on a rack behind her. The demonette will only attack if the cloak rack is disturbed.

Blixr [AC: 5, HD: 2, Hp: 9, Attk: 2, claws 1d4]

Room 11. Moist Towelette Room. Two large white-steel covered buffet trays sit here on a gleaming, polished marble counter. Two cans of magic sterno (low open flame burns for 24 hours before running out) sit below the trays warming neatly-folded moist towelettes. A small sign scrawled in menstrual blood states “take one and only one and refresh.”

Taking more than one has no consequence.

Room 12. Salon. The salon is decorated in the clean, crisp lines of Late Hell Modernist style: bare, polished rock floor with light thin metal gas burners (mounted on the wall for illumination) and a long airy window on the southern wall emitting red light. Through the glass panel (which overlooks interdimensionally the Hot Hell), a massive pillar of fire can be seen arching up from a plain of volcanic glass littered with styrofoam cups. A low, black wood coffee table has three tiny artfully-arranged delicate bowls containing decorative ebon black, pale green and blood-red pearls (worth 2,000 gold pieces each) and a platter of giant fly thoraxes wrapped in lammasu bacon.

Lounging on three low, sleek hobbit-skin couches are three Type B frog demons, Kanvmp, Hilrtnoc and Vasescltz, debating and discussing the political dimensions of soul-juice derivative markets (they vary in the difference of regulation of said financial instruments) and Hot Hell literary trends with their host, Sxiploi, a severed donkey head resting on a velvet cushion. The demons will react to apparent sharp points by the mute and long deceased head. The debate is punctuated frequently by droll, cutting gossip about local Marlinko human notables.

The demons will not immediately attack but will demand that party member participate in their conversation. Failure to provide more than two real-time minutes of interesting conversation (or attempts to steal the table bowls or otherwise be a boor) will bore the demons enough to fight, otherwise they will let the party come and go with no fuss.

Frog Demons Finishing Up the Dunes Series

Just as we close out the Op U Kickstarter (oh yeah by the by Misty Isles of the Eld and a heap of A-side OSR work is on super sale at the Bundle of Holding), we started down the last phase of the Dunes series. I finally, finally passed over the draft manuscript to the distracted hands of my editors the fourth and last adventure What Ho, Frog Demons. While it's not the 100+ page monster of the Misty Isles, at 30 pages and growing it's still a lot more than the 12-16 page product of micro-dungeons we promised.

After a good deal of insomnia agonizing about whether it all hung together as well as its sequels I think I am getting to the place about feeling good about what's rolling off the line. The master of font and trade-dress mimicry magic of Trey Causey working with a lovely anuran illustration from Luka Rejec (another brother from another mother) have us already good to go with this great little homage/satire cover--very fitting for the terribly misguided mix of Wodehouse, gonzo D&D and cosmic horror satire that's the theme for this one.

Basically beyond my usual quirky meandering sections, you get two quite different, but ballpark theme-linked small-scale adventures that have been specifically designed to be either wholly slottable in most home campaigns or run alongside the hooks and chaos index of Fever-Dreaming Marlinko, Misty Isles and the Dunes.

On one hand you have the low-level trap-hell dungeon of the Frog Demon Temple with its wandering squads of booby-trap laying frog-demonettes, gratuitous deadliness and hell-spawned literary salon on one side and on the other the building tongue-in-cheek horror of the Manor of the Beet God, with a rising Infection Index dynamically changing the nature of the site as the players chose to explore or ignore the mounting menace and mystery.

Let's see if it works.