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.

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.  

Misty Isles of the Eld Review Round-Up

Confession time. Despite having more than a few years experience getting published in the so-called real world, I was disproportionately nervous about getting my first real elfgame booklet, Slumbering Ursine Dunes, out in a non-shitty form.

I spent a lot of time in that spring of 2014 reading and rereading a lot of the toughest criticism of adventure writing in our circles trying to drill down on what  the most common pitfalls are (like I already had years of strong but untested opinions myself). Pretty high on that list was Bryce Lynch's reviews on Ten Foot Pole blog. Tough, often funny and in my own game design value wheelhouse his reviews were really a good marker for that kind of weeding out.

So anyways punchline, I felt like his recent review of Misty Isles of the Eld was a well-earned one for our crew (and I emphasis crew the publication just wouldn't be the same without the creative love of Luka Rejec, Robert Parker, Humza K and Trey Causey).

And while I have you here are some other rundowns on the labor of love:

A nice comprehensive video rundown on MIE (do check out the rest of his list of Youtube reviews). 

And a great overarching review by John Bell in the context of all three SUD series books.

Needle's fun take on Misty. He gets me.

Misty Isles Behind the Scenes, Cut Art and a Review

Quick post to highlight a couple mole-like appearances of my new mini-sandbox, Misty Isles of the Eld, around the web.

Yesterday I had the chance to write up a behind the scenes piece as a guest poster at Tenkar's Tavern. I threw in several incredible pieces of Luka Rejec's that sadly didn't make it into the final print product due to text flow issues (two posted here, the top one being Eldmen slaves working the stim-jam Plantation House).

Also here's the first Misty Isles review from the always-interesting Eric F. over at Swords & Stitchery. His ten point has my brain popping about deviant variations in how the isles could be run at the table. Good stuff go check it out.

The Misty Isles of the Eld Out Now

After much blood, sweat, and tears, Misty Isles of the Eld is now a real published thing. No really, go check it out (and if you are one of the OG backers of the Slumbering Ursine Dunes project go check your mailbox). Somehow over the last year, it shook itself out of my brain and refused to just be a 20-30 page wee stretch goal affair and instead became a 102-page monster (but a lovable Ozian one).

Here's a couple other related pieces of good news: the manuscripts for Antony Picaro's thoroughly re-skinned/re-imagined Coast of Grizzly Dreams and my What Ho, Frog Demons (the next two and final installments in the SUD series) are in and being worked on.

Also if you are going to North Texas RPG Con this year we will have a limited run of pre-Print-on-Demand hardcopies available--and I'm running this beast Friday morning. 

Click on me.

Anywho brass tacks:

Art, Art, and More Art. Seriously Luka Rejec drew like a fiend in this project, producing ultimately 56 illustrations inside the interior alongside designing that Bowie-rrific cover and gorgeous pointcrawl map. 

Four dungeons. The Vat Complex (with its menacing sealed off-west wing, body-horrific industrial process and pocket dimensions), the flying god-prison Monument Five, the meth-fruit Plantation House and Colonel Zogg's Pagoda Bunker.

Full “extra-planar” pointcrawl. The wilderness crawl spreads over one main isle and two smaller islets subdivided by massive, movable grubs.

An “Anti-Chaos Index.” Through their actions the players shape the very reality of the Isles. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worst, but always for the weird. You know a reverse kind of thing from the Chaos Index mechanic I love so much.

A slew of new otherwordly monsters (the best of which jumping straight from the fever-driven mind of Robert Parker with some Jason Sholtis inspiration).

A large collection of bizarre technological Eldish artifacts and treasure. Includes a random generator for miscellaneous artifacts picked up.

A new psionicist player class, the Psychonaut, with a soft scifi twist. Including its own powers and mutations.

Hexcrawls vs Pointcrawls

Despite the header this is not a cage match between hexcrawls and pointcrawls. Pointcrawl reputation notwithstanding, I both love and use hex maps all the time in my campaign. Having run all kinds of wilderness in my campaign, I've started to become keenly aware of how each format complements certain types of outdoor gameplay.

Let's unpack the distinctions.

In a hexcrawl, the party is presented with a 360-degree, six-direction choice most every time it exits a hex. Terrain will often foster soft positive and negative natural choices, the presence of a road running into a different hex or a bordering “open” or “rough” hex (easy/quicker travel in a grasslands or what) codes incentivizes/deincentivizes choices.

The problem from a design perspective with that approach is this the “paradox of choice”, that lovely study that showed that an over-abundance of variables, tends to surprisingly reduce meaningful choice by causing option paralysis (that “fuck it, let's just do this” exasperation). And I believe that paradox often extends to the designer of the hexcrawl. I find making hex maps an incredibly quick (maybe too quick process) I think about the kinds of sub-regions I want, pop open hexographer and the map just flows out of geographic naturalism (or at least some kind of internal logic).

Unless you densely pack your hexes (I am insane about this) you end up with large amounts of empty hexes. Now you need pacing (and a sense of travel) and a principled sandbox GM just has to live with the fact that players may never see this or that thing you worked so hard to make, but it does mean at least for me that I can make some sub-optimal choices about placement.

A weird serendipity often hangs over the map when you start playing put these kinds of hexcrawls. The party runs this way and that way, sometimes running into a good run of interesting hexes, sometimes just somehow, inexplicably hitting the dullest string of hexes one could imagine.

A pointcrawl on the otherhand is all about the deliberate path choice of say a dungeon. You place a node much like a room with its doors and corridors leading out.

The drawbacks are much like that of dungeon design again. Make the decision choices too limited, too linear and/or too chokepointed and you end up straight-jacketing the players and making for a dull-ass map to explore.

Secondly it's also more challenging presenting an environment where wide-open wilderness exploration for its own sake is the goal. Sometimes you do want that 360-degree exploration/clearing or serendipity. Hexes give an exactness of space and have the advantage of being gridded with a recognizable number pattern. Being able to call a hex number is a convenient short-hand both for the GM during play and for players thinking about how to explore an outdoors area.

The punchline here is this...

I use a hex map when I want a campaign phase that...

1. mapping each hex on a blank map is a reward in itself.

2. clearing wilderness and creating your own hold is the goal.

3. is quick and dirty.

I use a pointcrawl when I want...

1. choice in travel and exploration to feel more deliberate and meaningful.

2. to highlight the major and minor sites in a wilderness as the major goals of exploration. (Revoca being an example of a pointcrawl hidden behind a hexmap).

3. well-thought-out, dense small sub-regions.

Oh and while I am on the subject, Luka (again for the umpteenth time in our collaboration) wowed me with this weekend with this beauty of a pointcrawl map for Misty Isles of the Eld. Maps can and should be beautiful also in themselves, no?

Do so click on me. 

Misty Isles Sample Pages

Super quick update and some show and tell. Misty Isles of the Eld has gone through layout and is just waiting on some maps and proofing.

Slumbering Ursine Dunes Kickstarter backer, old-school blogger and all-around good guy Jeff Russell jumped in the on the last minute to finish layout for the project. Not only was he a life-saver but he did it on our tight deadline, not a mean task given that this product is a good 24 pages longer than the Dunes (you know the actual crowdfunded adventure).

In other last minute happy news old school cartographer Cecil Howe has jumped in to do some of the site maps. I have been digging his work especially some pieces from Ed Greenwood recently.

Just to give you a taste of what is to come, here are some of the first round pages. Naturally many of these pages will get cleaned up and changed around as we work through the last step. Seeing all of Luka Rejec's art in one place made my jaded heart flutter a-new (and the thing is just packed with it).

Click on each to enlarge. 

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. 

Bowie and the Eld of the Cantons

In my first year of high school, I gradually dropped away from the gaming which had pretty much shaped my identity and interests up to that point. I started spending most days escaping the post-war tract-housing boredom with that aimless kind of driving that happens with teens with no outlet (if you've watched King of the Hill, you've seen where I grew up).

Cassette-driven soundtracks hung all around us and was shared in equal portions by my friends. Black Flag and Minor Threat mixed incoherently--but somehow happily--with the 1970s glam of my tall, openly gay, friend Scott (not a small act of courage in mid-80s Texas). Mott the Hoople, T Rex and most of all early Bowie spun tales in my imagination of a place glittering and remote. Scott, tall, pale and a bit cruel, coolly dragging his menthols and trying to be for all the world the Thin White Duke was a mental impression that stuck with me for years afterward.

Hit the tape-drive warbly forward to five years ago and I have gone full circle and back into this hobby as an older man. The Eld, those strange space elves and substitute Melniboneans of James M's Dwimmermount, are carving out space in the Hill Cantons.

But invasive species mutate here in the Weird. Darkness is consuming my old friend back in the real world and find myself spinning Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust more and more. And with each listen more of that mental space and enduring image creep into how I see the big bad Eld in the campaign. They are cruel-lipped, thin almost fragile with a highly refined aesthetic.

So when it starts coming time to write and publish Misty Isles of the Eld and illustrator, Luka Rejec, starts asking his probing questions about what they look like among the long asides about brutalist architecture and fluted armor, my brain suddenly blurted out "think Bowie in his cocaine fascist Thin White Duke/Man Who Fell to Earth period and bulb-headed Melniboneans in Giger-like stormtrooper armor.” That it made sense to Luka was just affirmation that he was the right guy to run with the concept.

And he did. 

Front "Bowified Eld, the bucolic illusion"

Back. "The Cold Hell reality"

In fact when I told him to surprise me with a Misty Isles cover (front and back above) that wasn't like what we have come to think of as rpg cover art, he sent me this and asked outright “too much Bowie?”

I replied “can you ever have too much?” I mean you could in his Let's Dance phase but whatever I am doubly happy we made this choice, a small, modest and off-kilter homage to the man.

RIP Thin White Duke and thanks for the inspiration along the way.

As my other best friend of that time, Mark wrote so well this morning: “He releases an album with death and immortality themes on his 69th birthday. And then dies. Badass right to the end.”

Coming Soon Misty Isles of the Eld

The best of news, after seven tough love editorial iterations The Misty Isles of the Eld is in layout. I am proud as hell again that we decided to take what were supposed to be 16-20 page mini-adventures and hammer them into fully-realized adventures.

Like Fever-Dreaming Marlinko, the Isles is longer and more content heavy than the original Slumbering Ursine Dunes main adventure (clocking in at over 72 pages). It's a pleasure to create in itself (my main motivation in being involved with the Hydra Cooperative) and we wanted to make sure that those who took the risk of backing us feel that the good faith and support is being paid back in spades.

The Eld naval port

What you can expect in the Isles:

Tons of art. The ever-talented and prolific Luka Rejec has packed the thing with his superbly quirky art. Expect to see something like 4-5 times the amount of illustrations than in the Dunes and Marlinko (and what art too). The unfinished front and back cover that mirror the complicated dual nature of the Isles (a section of a horrible cold dimension transposed onto a pastoral mythic wilderness) you can see down below at the very bottom.

Four dungeons. One large one (the body horror-industrial Vat Complex) with its menacing sealed off-west wing, body-horrific industrial process and gates to pocket dimensions. The flying god-prison Monument Five, meth-fruit Plantation House and Colonel Zogg's Pagoda Bunker are all in there.

Full “extra-planar” pointcrawl. The wilderness crawl spreads over one main isle and two smaller islets subdivided by massive, movable grubs. Nearly each one of the sites has a corresponding Luka illustrations.

An “Anti-Chaos Index.” A backwards version of the dynamic sandbox tool I use in the campaign and in both previous adventures. Through their actions the players shape the very reality of the Isles. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worst, but always for the weird.

A slew of new otherwordly monsters (some truly wonderful examples by Robert Parker).

A large collection of bizarre technological Eldish artifacts and treasure. Includes a random generator for miscellaneous artifacts picked up.

A new psionicist player class, the Psychonaut, with a soft scifi twist. Including its own powers and mutations.

God-Torture Artist at Work

Grub-Ridge in motion

Front Cover (Pastoral). Work in Progress.

Back Cover (the Cold Hell). 

Building Dynamic RPG Sandboxes Part 1

[Part Two can be found here.]

Tabletop rpgs lord over other gaming forms in several key areas. One major area is in the ability to provide robustly reactive campaign worlds that can take players and GM alike into totally unexpected places.

I have my shortcomings as a GM (pacing in online sessions for one) but over the years that the Hill Cantons has been active I've worked like hell to make the campaign feel alive and ever changing—to make all the whirly bits whirl. I've tried to extend that dynamic feel to the published mini-sandboxes of the Slumbering Ursine Dunes and Fever-Dreaming Marlinko. (The upcoming Misty Isles of the Eld has several, some that radically transform the region through player's actions.)

Often providing dynamism is just a matter of thinking through after a session ends how the various pieces of your sandbox (the machinations/reactions of NPCs high and low, what an in-game activity like a massive treasure haul did to change a base settlement, etc) are organically pushed and pulled by players (and other actors), but it helps immensely to develop a range of tools and habits to give it depth and consistent motion. Here are a few of my own tricks of the trade (cut into two parts for length).

Campaign News Cycle. I've written about this before in depth, but an important glue in the Hill Cantons campaign is the weekly news.

Regular news updates serve a triple function: 1. they force you as a GM to have think about the moving parts of your world on a regular basis, 2. it provides players frequent active choices in interacting with these moving parts, and 3. they create the illusion (and to some degree the reality) that your campaign world is a real, living place.

Dynamic Encounter Tables. This is a new piece for me. While I am generally pretty good at developing unique encounter tables (it's an easy and eminently practical shortcut in providing an interesting feel to an area) they have been mostly static.

I've started making them more dynamic in two ways:

1. Adding a variable New Developments slot that is basically a place holder for a special encounter tied to either a recent news event or an action that the party takes. A concrete example is that there has been a recent invasion by horse-nomads (kozaks) just to the north. If that slot is hit on the chart the party will hit something that has to do with event, maybe it's a patrol by the local militia, foraging stragglers from the horde, deserters etc.

2. I have been using encounter pools for total numbers of certain creatures (especially important in the colony-building Feral Shore campaign phase). Kill 30 Grotmen total over the next month? Well their local population is exhausted and something else will fill that niche. It's a pain to track so I do limit this to certain factions or types of monsters. It plays out at the table well, often giving me ideas for what's happening when new creatures step in.

Sample chart:

Upper North Mythic Woods Encounters

1-2  Personality

3-4  Creature

5  Mishaps and Magic

6  New Development

Creature

1. 1d6 War Bears pilgrims
2. 1d3 Revocan Honeyback Bears
3. 1d4 Infested Boars
4. 1d10 Reverse Centaurs (20 total)
5. 2d4 Dirt-Gnome Mushroom Hunters (30 total)
6. 1d4 Lost Village Children

In the next part I will chatter on about using a Chaos Index (or other overarching dynamic model), Encounter/Event Notebooks, Faction Dynamics and more. (Quite a bit more is written about sandbox mechanics here.)

Undoubtedly many of you sandbox vet GMs out there have a host of your own, feel free to lay them on in the comments.

The Misty Isles of the Eld Take Shape

With Fever-Dreaming Marlinko mostly done and in the rewrite phase, I have moved over to the next of the big stretch goal adventures, the Misty Isles of the Eld.

Where as the Dunes was mythic wilderness presented with the elements of an outdoors pointcrawl, the Isles are shaping up to be an extra-planar (in this case the alkaline wastes of the Cold Hell/Anti-Cantons) adventure wrapped up in an 18-point pointcrawl spread over three islands. Pinning it all down are two dungeon sites (the body-horror Vat Complex and the stage-facade Pagoda City) that are larger and weirder then the two tent-pole dungeons of the Dunes.

My writing enthusiasm level has gone from “tired but still feeling it” to “amped up, get out of my way motherf*cka.” What's helped is seeing the art develop on both projects: Jeremy Duncan's inspired grottiness (really a perfect fit for Marlinko) and Luka Rejec's irrepressibly charming and darkly funny work. Seriously on the Hydra team page I will no sooner finish praising a piece only to find another piece posted. And I find myself answering Luka's questions about "do the Isles have such and such?" with “they do now.”

Again with the showing and not telling...