The What in What Ho, Frog Demons

Writing my final (yay) Slumbering Ursine Dunes-related adventure, What Ho, Frog Demons, is well underway. (I've also had a rather pleasurable turn designing an Orbital Habitat generation chapter for Trey Causey's upcoming Strange Stars OSR).

What Ho is going to be a little different from Fever-Dreaming Marlinko and Misty Isles in that it's going to be closer to the more modest 20-page small-adventure format we had intended the SUD bonus adventures (Marlinko was 72 pages and Misty Isles may end up around 92 whopping pages). That said it's still likely to jam in a lot of content and be something more like a mere 40-odd pages (ha).

Here's a little rundown of what I'm planning on throwing in.

The basic frame is that this is a “further adventures” style product that will either: a. give your players more things to do in the immediate region around the Dunes and/or Marlinko or b. give you small site stuff to drop in digestible chunks (basically what I do with most published adventures).

There are two small easily-portable, small-scale dungeons: the greatly-feared in-campaign deathtrap, Frog Demon Temple (a shout out to Jeff Reints's chaotic frog gods of Cinder and some strange bedfellow Wodehouse elements) and Beet-God Manor, a manorhouse that has been possessed by a massive sentient and quite demonic beet (you read that right, inspired by Clark Ashton Smith's Mandrake short story). As a bonus two other unpublished locales from Hill Cantons players will likely find their way in there: Robert Parker's delightful, hilarious Chaos Monastery and Mike Davison's Fane of Grooze mini-dungeon.

So basically you get four small sites to plunk down and play with.

Expect a number of likely related bits including:

1. a hex or pointcrawl map of Marlinko Canton. Points from SUD, Marlinko and Misty Isles are included as well as some brief rundowns of local adventure sites like the Tomb of the Great Deodand, Lumas (Tower of Bone), Mountain Hall of the Hyperboreans, Bad Rajetz, and Revoca Canton.

2. A Frog Demon random generation system. I got some strong feedback from two backers about wanting something like this and it's a great idea (thanks guys). The system is shaping up to be based on the bio-diverse and delightfully strange range of actual existing and extinct batrachian adaptions (naturally with some weird twists and mutations).

3. Bite-sized Chaos Indexes for the sites that throw in some dynamic shifts.

4. Some supplementary info (mostly NPCs and Things to Buy) for greater Marlinko Canton.

5. A new, revised, yet still sophomoric Chaos Monk player class.

6. A lovely, large array of Chaos Monk equipment, mostly impractical martial arts weapons by Robert Parker.

As always a full plate, but I'm hoping to return to more regular(ish) content updates here on the blog. This year.