Leiber Ghuls, Blood Rains, and Doleful Bandits

With the mysterious (and possibly living sentient) Golden Barge of the Hill Cantons, finally verging on conquered after two years of play, I feel comfortable releasing a few of the details (a few, a ship must maintain it's secrets after all). Below you'll find the write-up for one of the most commonly encountered inhabitants of that vessel.

All similarities between the Ghuls and other creatures of other world, is of course, purely coincidental. Ahem.

Leiber Ghuls

No. Enc.: 1d6 (5d6)

Alignment: Lawful (Evil)

Movement: 90’ (30’)

Armor Class: 5

Hit Dice: 3

Attacks: 1 (weapon)

Damage: Weapon+1

Save: F3

Morale: 11

Leiber Ghuls are practitioners of the Illuminated Doctrine of the Septuagint Anthropophagite (Authentic), a rather extreme mystical sect that maintains that human flesh corrupts the spirit-self.

Unlike other ascetic doctrines, however, the Leiber Ghuls posit a rather straightforward solution: ritual cannibalism. By liberating (ie eating) human and demi-human males of their flesh—women are believed to be inherently too corrupted and hobbits a delicious veal-like delicacy—they believe that they make their little corner of the world a spiritually uplifted place. Resistance is seen as a corrupted mental trick of the meat-demons and is dealt with by an upright and furious force.

Over the aeons, Leiber Ghuls have themselves been transformed by their flesh-eating practices. Their flesh is now wholly composed of a near-invisible translucent goo leaving only a dull pink skeleton to view. Because of this translucence in shadowy environs they will surprise on a 1-3 roll.

The ghuls are highly intelligent and are inordinately fond of debating amongst themselves and others the fine points of their doctrine—even in the midst of a forcible liberation. Once engaged in combat the ghuls will maintain a steady stream of locution about the urgency and inherent rightness of their doctrine until their dying breath.

When found inside their sect quarters, the ghuls will be accompanied by a Sub-Patriarch of the Cleansing Palate (6 HD of their species) and 1-3 lieutenants (4HD). Obsessively-compulsive pyramids of the clothing and bones of those liberated will be found throughout the area, occasionally items of interest will be found within said piles (luxurious clothing, dropped items) totaling up to 50-400 gp. Any weapons of worth picked up in their duties will be employed in use (though they are particularly fond of big nasty barbed weapons).

The ghuls maintain a long-lasting interdimensional friendship with the Gentlemen Ghouls of Stonehell and some distant relations in the world of Nehwon.

And now the news:

The biennial blood rains have been falling all through the Cantons this week. Expect great big buckets of thick sanguine downpours throughout most of the week. Old wives maintain that the rains are due to water miraculously forming into rain clouds over the Scarlet Sea. Men of learning, of course, reject such superstitious claptrap and counter sagely that it's the Lady's beating of the Sun Lord with her silver chains that creates the soil-enriching rain.

Renowned highwayman and scoundrel, Libor the Lugubrious, is working the main road south of Marlankh again. The canton Rada has set a bounty of 1,000 suns for his head and 50 for each of his dolorous band.  

Location, Location, Location

It would be difficult to top Jeff's living arrangement's list for Wessex posted today. I can't and won't, but it did give me the excuse to rework and post the wee subsystem I have for real estate in and around the Marklinko and Ostrovo cantons in the HC.

Like most luxury items in the campaign, PCs get 1 exp per 2 suns spent on buying a place. Players can also choose to custom build (or expand an existing structure) according to these rules. The price for land will vary wildly. Land ownership of arable land is difficult without engaging into the complicated dance of social relations.

Type	Cost (in gp/suns)	#Housed	Availability
Rural hut	100	2	2
Menstruation hut	80	1	5
Rural longhouse	800	10	4
Meadhall, faux-Hyperborean	3000	20	18
Farmstead, semi-fortified	2200	8	15
Slum hovel	180	2	2
Slum flat	320	6	4
Tower, onion-domed	3000	5	15
Townhouse, whitewashed	2600	10	9
Townhouse, stuccoed	4000	15	15
Manse, creepy and decrepit	15000	25	18
Manse, swanky	20000	30	20

The actual cost is variable and the GM will adjust to fit campaign circumstances (a rush of refugees might drive up the price or what) . It is assumed that this price represents the best deal that can be found in a week's search.

Roll d20 (modified by CHA)

1-2	200%
3-7	150%
8-15	list price
16-19	75%
20	50%

The number housed represents relatively comfort conditions. Twice as many can be housed in cramped, unpleasant, bitch-at-your-companions-out-of-annoyance conditions.

Availability is rolled on a d20 (add levels of thief or mountebank as a modifier) to equal or beat the target number. Again this may be adjusted due to campaign circumstances.

What Background Charts Say About Your World

One of my favorite quirks in that lovable mess of a book adorned with a scarlet butt-ugly hollering efreeti on its cover is the sudden, inexplicable lurching into polemic.

Take this section on Social Class in the DMG:

“There is no random table for determination of a character's social status to be found here. That is because the inclusion of such a factor will either tell you little or nothing of useful nature, or it will abridge your freedom with respect to development of your campaign milieu. That is, if such a table tells you only a little so as not to force a social structure upon your campaign, the table can contain nothing of use...There are dozens of possible government forms, each of which will have varying social classes, ranks, or castes. Which sort you choose for your milieu is strictly your own prerogative. While this game is loosely based on Feudal European technology, history and myth, it also contains elements from the Ancient Period, parts of more modern myth, and the mythos of many authors as well. Within its boundaries all sorts of societies and cultures can exist, and there is nothing to dictate that their needs be Feudal European.”

On the surface that's a totally bizarre way to begin a passage in a rulebook, “let me tell you all the things that aren't in here and why in detail.” Gygax was obviously responding to the trend of second-generation fantasy game competitors to tout background charts as providing a deeper social context.

Leaving aside the obvious self-interest, I love this passage as it reveals two things: 1. a profound insight into the imaginative big-tent reach of classic D&D and it's latitude for personalizing worlds (“why do any more imagining for you”); and 2. it's a concession in a way to the fact that such tables are a powerful way to subtly hardwire setting logic into character generation.

A quick paging through a few of the contenders of that era seems to validate this. Chivalry and Sorcery's starting background chart is a laser-focused on a long list of professions and classes--from serfs up to the lesser nobility--that clearly reflect a very narrow implied campaign world based in Northwestern Europe around the end of the 12^th century. It's random distributions while slightly weighted “unrealistically” toward not playing the bottom part of the pyramid. (Harnmaster would go full hog later giving you a 65 percent chance of playing a wide range of dirt-rooting peasants).

On a radically different note, let's take Stormbringer first edition, a game whose more flatly-distributed and divergent class background table typically generates a weird, wonderful, unbalanced grab bag of a party. It's not unusual to have a strange chaotic blend of PC backgrounds. A Melnibonean sorcerer-warrior-assassin tooling around with a pygmy hunter from Oin and a leprous beggar from Nadaskor. It's a set-up for campaigns even weirder than the books really.

Point is that each of these tables alone said as much and more about the setting and how the players fit in as the many pages of text yakking on about medieval society or the twisted words of Michael Moorcock. It's an elegant way to get around info-dump.

Winding up for my second point. What I take away from that DMG rant is not so much that such tables will break your D&D campaign, but that you have a choice as a DM to either run a “background is wholly what happens in the first three levels” approach (banking on bottom-up development) or custom fit a background table or subsystem to fit the contours of your own world.

Either works well I can attest from years running and playing—players in the HC are free to choose either road--but long-time readers will know that I have loved me some campaign-specific background generators over the years.

The background subsystem in the Hill Cantons Compendium says a good deal about the implied HC campaign world. There is both the obvious flavor elements—the landsknechts, dwarven indentured servants, mountebanks—and the somewhat deeper bits in the campaign logic itself.

The Weird touching the borderlands amplifies the chaos of human society. To be in that rootless group of crazies willingly exploring it something must have broken in your head. So the system tends to generate a background that is really tumultuous and zig-zaggy, a childhood and adolescence spent running from a crime to pushing a pike to having a mystic experience and the like.

I'm throwing a wall of text at you—and forgive me if it all sounds like a big stinking pile of pretentious poo—but it's a topic that I come back to a lot in my homebrewing. And I notice more than a few of my friends out there in the ether custom fitting their own tables and it makes me just want to play in their own worlds all the more.

And you? Have you made—or want to make—your own custom fits? Did it work?

Hobgoblins of Foolish Consistency

No. Enc.: 1d8 (4d8)
Alignment: Lawful (Evil

)

Movement: 90’ (30’)

Armor Class: 5

Hit Dice: 1

Attacks: 1 (weapon)

Damage: Weapon

Save: F1

Morale: 9

Foolishly Consistent Hobgoblins appear much like slightly-smaller Hobgoblins except for their unremittingly gray skin color and attire.

Although nominally as intelligent in cognitive functions as the more common sort of hobgoblin, their pathological small-mindedness frequently undermines their stratagems. Thus if a party finds away around pitfalls and a response strategy in one of their lairs, it is 90 percent likely on each return to the lair that these hobgoblins will be falling back on the same plan.

Foolishly Consistent Hobgoblins found in lair will be ruled by an autarch (sometimes styled as a “lifecoach”), a 5 HD member of the species known for mapping cradle-to-grave “career plans” and exacting economic accounts for his followers. There is a 80 percent chance that the autarch will be attended by 1-2 barristers, 3 HD tribal witch doctors that can cast Hypnotism once a day.

Because of their bull-minded predictability they are much loved by city officials, sages, and clergy as bodyguards.  

Hill Cantons “Appendix N”

I put this together ages ago and with the three year anniversary of the campaign having just reared its ugly head, it's a good a time as any to post.

What follows is the reading list that went into the HC mental stew, I was reading or rereading (or just remembering) these books about the time the campaign (2007-2008). This list concentrates on books, but of course there are a myriad other influences such as the West Marches in particular and the general internet effervescence of the so-called OSR around that time. It's also conspicuously missing all the influential gaming materials (like Griffin Mountain).

The list below is organized in rough order of influence both by author and book. In parenthesis are my guesses of exactly what they influenced (though with all the heavy synthesizing it's even a bit of a mystery to me at this point).

Fiction:

Jack Vance: Lyonesse trilogy, Dying Earth, Eyes of the Overworld, Cugel's Saga, Showboat World, The Last Castle (campaign tone, themes, viewpoint of human civilization and religion, talky monsters, picaresque journey and characters etc.)

Fritz Leiber: all Nehwon stories (campaign tone and themes, direct homage in Marlankh, monsters)

John Eric Holmes: Mazes of Peril (kitchen sink, gonzo D&D)

Michael Moorcock: Elric stories (cosmology and visitors from other worlds/planes)

Clark Ashton Smith, Hyperborea cycle (well Hyperborea and some campaign backdrop)

Henryk Sienkiewicz, With Fire and Sword, The Deluge, Fire on the Steppe (eastern borderlands ambiance, both books and movies)

M.A.R. Barker, Flamesong, Man of Gold, Book of Ebon Bindings (some deep background and cosmology)

Michael Shea, Nifft the Lean, Quest for Simbilis (Vance lite)

Umberto Eco: Foucault's Pendulum, Name of the Rose (esoteric ideas, societies)

Poul Anderson: Three Hearts and Three Lions (the war between human civilization and the Fae)

Ivan Bilibin, Russian Fairy Tales (aesthetics)

Eric P. Kelly, Trumpter of Krakow

George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman series (picaros and scumbaggery)

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces (eccentric characters)

Non-Fiction:

C.V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War (the autarkic HRE as a model for the Overkingdom, internal religious conflict)

Stephen Turnbull, The Hussite Wars 1419-36 (backdrop of the Cantons proper)

Fernard Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Centuries (all three volumes), The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (the breakdown of medieval European society and general political, economic, and cultural contours of the early Renaissance)

James George Frazer, The Golden Bough

Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 

Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas (big weird ships and exploration)

More News from the Hills

A fine report on the third anniversary face-to-face session of the can be found here. A hearty thank you to all the players both past and present. May you never face a roll on the Death and Dismemberment chart (unless you have it coming).

And now the news...

Wild rumors are circulating in Marlankh that agents of Frantisek the Striped Mage have found four pieces of the fabled rod of the Wind Dukes of Aqa'a only to sell them back to a mysterious inter-dimensional being called the “Great Rientz”. Incredibly the pieces are to be re-scattered among several different alternate realities. 

The centaurs of the Slumbering Ursine Dunes are in a righteous froth about the murdering of one of their toll-collectors. Raids have been made into human settlements as far as the farm belt south of Marlankh. Reputedly the hirsute Master of the dunes has sent away for skilled carpenters in the borderlands to cross over into the Weird at premium triple-pay, an offer to be extended to any men-at-arms willing to escort the craftsman to his tower. It's unclear if there is a relationship between the two developments.

The Rada (council) of the Marlinko Canton has heeded the Overking's recent call to arms against the Brazonians by raising the Marlankh Reavers back to active duty. A number of tough and seasoned officers have been pulled into service including a renowned, local Colonel. It's unclear if the heavily-armed band of border ruffians is to serve as a unit of badly-armored medium horse or as an armed-to-the-gills unit of light.

Authorities are investigated the foul murder of Drogo, the much beloved half-ogre manservant of Hurloj Kladivo, master of the Guild of Accipitraries, Ankle Beaters, and Drovers. A 150 sun bounty has been posted for return of the culprits to the Guild.

Several of the 43 known children of the old smith Jaromil have brought their families out to settle back around the patriarch's fortified stead near the dunes. The extended family has petitioned the Overking for a charter for the new settlement tentatively called Kugelburg after the old man's dear departed friend (may the Sun Lord illuminate his spirit-self).