Fever-Dreaming Marlinko and Slumbering Ursine Dunes Review Round-Up

I have been remiss in posting blogside reviews of my full-length, broke-in-the-head adventures. Promotion—and most of all self-promotion—being one of those necessary bits for micro-publishers that I have never felt entirely comfortable with. 

I do think the reviews, all of them thoughtful, constructively critical and by people who I respect in their own right, have interesting, broader things to say besides what's in the product. 

(Appearing below are some wonderful unpublished concept sketches of war bears and cave dwarfs that came out of the Kickstarter by David Lewis Johnson.)

Fever-Dreaming Marlinko

Fever Dreaming Marlinko -- A Review

Fever-Dreaming Marlinko: A City Adventure Supplement For Labyrinth Lord

Slumbering Ursine Dunes

Sleepy Bear Piles

On a Useful Review of Slumbering UrsineDunes

On Slumbering Ursine Dunes

A short review of Slumbering Ursine Dunes draft

Hill Cantons Compendium II

The Totally Awesome 'Pay What You Want'Hill Cantons Compendium II For Your Old School Campaigns

Hill Cantons Compendium II -- Review

A Quick Tour of Marlinko Canton

Despite being the geographically largest of the Hill Cantons, Marlinko Canton (affectionately known as “Bloody” or “Sun-Damned, Fucking Marlinko” by its neighbors) is far and away the least densely populated. Much of its cedar-covered, ferrous red-soiled hillscape lies wholly inside the Weird and its not uncommon to feel the sudden, palpable electric shockwall and instant cessation of bird song that marks entering the mythical wilds several times strolling along a country back road.

As such human settlement clusters tightly and nervously together in the Ostrod river basin. A fertile region with its rich soils bi-annually renewed by the super-nutrients of the Blood Rains brought on by Habeka the Celestial Lady's whipping of our dear Sun Lord with her silver chains.

But don't be fooled by the bucolic whitewashed and blackwood-sided villages with their smiling floral-embroidered-tuniced peasants and bluff  red-faced rural boyars, their superficial rural easiness masks a life as strange and dream-cast as their big city capital, Marlinko.

Indeed each village tries to out do the next in having numerically more and vastly more eccentric mini-contradas competitively aping the demigod-centered, ancient traditions of their urban neighbor--some tiny hamlets sporting as many as 6-7 even!

Who cannot marvel at an entire so-called “contrada” being made up of two rundown cottages and a barn dedicated to an entirely-fictitious godling called She Who Mothers a Donkey?

The tidy blood-apricot orchards and wide barley fields...but Hot Hell, I come not to bore you with such mundanities, let's get to the hexcrawl.

Clicking does the enlarging.
Scale is 2 cantonal miles/hex (3.2 of your Earth kilometers)

02.13-03.13 The Misty Isles. Deep never-lifting fog covers these isles said by many to be a pastoral paradise where cheese and apricot pastry-trees grow along gentle banks of plum-brandy rivers and rock-candy boulders. This is, of course, some bullshit, upended by the cold, hard pocket universe reality of the upcoming Misty Isles of the Eld.

03.05 Lumaš.  A tall free-standing bone-tower monument rises here in memory to the sweetest of joys: organized slaughter of co-religionists on the field of battle. A massive granite slab sits on rollers below the tower cutting off the chill tomb-warren haunts below. 

04.11-07.11 Slumbering Ursine Dunes. You've probably heard about this place.

06.08 Kugelberg. Jaromil the Old Smith's thriving little thorpe.

14.08 The Frog Demon Temple. A wide bowl in the surrounding rocky, cedar-sprinkled hills holds a fetid bog. A low causeway runs over the swamp toward a cypress-ringed mound. Beware the Batrachian Prince that Gnaws at the Soul of the World Turtle, bewarrrre. [This death-trap dungeon which my G+ group was (rightly) terrified of and refused to step into for almost three years (after losing a hireling to a stair trap in the first minute) is one of the star attractions in the upcoming What Ho, Frog Demons.]

15.10 Hrad Fraza. A fortified country estate of the villainous banking family (a redundant distinction), the Frazas. Currently displaying the fabulously-expensive, yet poorly-executed and gauche Tapestry of Xvikz (also see Fever-Dreaming Marlinko p.40).

The Inflexible Highway. An old Hyperborean stone highway stretches just over the ridge from Marlinko precisely north and south. Stubbornly its engineers refused to route it around ridges or cut notches to reduce the gradient and can be a grind to walk even with its magnificently un-shitty pavement.

16.00 Ancient Mountain Hall of the Hyperboreans. High on a flattened mountain top lies the campiest of Hyperborean faux-barbarian ruins-camp: an over-wrought meadhall raised in cold grey slate and supported by gleaming cyclopean pillars. Beneath it lies...well, a dungeon (seven whole levels to be precise).

17.07 Marlinko. Marlinko (or Marlank if you using the Nemec exonym) is a bustling, smallish, and deeply odd city of 7,000 and the council seat of the Marlinko Canton. Life there as such takes on a strange dream-logic cast even by the standards of the rest of the borderlands. It's all in Fever-Dreaming Marlinko, why are you even reading this?

17.12 Ctyri Ctvrt. A pleasant market town and port of white-washed and black-trimmed buildings saddled with a tongue-twisted name that opaquely translates to "The Quartered Fourth." A local boyar has unearthed a 500-stone beet from his tenant farmer's field in the hamlet. Most strange of all is the twisted face-like blemish near the giant beet's crown. A local shepherd claims to have heard a booming voice emanate from the storage hut where it is currently housed.

18.02 Here Be Deodands. Not terribly far from the best, most obvious and most comfortable place for unlikely travellers to camp is a series of small caves in the bank of a short creek. Living in tidy, glittering sequin-walled caves is a lair of 20-200 deodands (100% “in liar”). A wise traveler refuses their late night entreaties to “cut a sweet real estate deal with them.”

19.09 Stary Maso. This oddly-named village (“Old Meat” in the local Pahr dialect) has a remarkable tolerance for adventurers, especially given several incidents in which said itinerant ruffians sired illegitimate new local residents—and a rather inglorious and infamous incident in which the local peasantry were collectively tricked into believing into a cargo cult centered around a Golden Barge by an obese, pig-masked mountebank. Indeed the precociously-glib toddler-bastard “Lil Colonel” is a much beloved village center of attention at barnyard line dances.

21.08 Bad Rajetz. Inbred eastern hinterland town renowned for its leather goods (especially its fetishwear). Infested with diabolists, demon-lovers, crowdfunders and Old Pahr heretics. Vast caverns with great, swooping bats and fire-breathing lizards lurking in the shadowy depths are said to feed into a vast, sprawling and most improbable Undervillage. Beware of your sister-cousins.

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/ 

Marlinko Easter Egg Contest

I do love my homages and in-jokes so. Whether it be a small backhills town, murderhole or weirdo nation, the Hill Cantons is sloppy with literary references, nods to current events, woots to favored creators, lampoons of dreadful real world trends, etc. And the published work is no exception, Slumbering Ursine Dunes containing a rather large (and seemingly not-caught) Big Lebowski reference, a wereshark and grotto ship hat-tip to John Eric Holmes, and a host of smaller little eggs.

Fever-Dreaming Marlinko is even worse, positively bursting at the seams with them. The inestimable Gus L even calls me out in a thoughtful review for it with the Catacombs section (and he's most likely correct about their jarring nature.)

So friends, having accidentally over-ordered some print copies of Marlinko, time for another dumb Hill Cantons contest.

Contest Goal

A very simple one this time, there are 12 literary and movie direct homages hidden in the text (there are actually 17, but five of them seem way too veiled to be anything but a chuckle-point for me and maybe the home group players). Whoever finds the most, wins! (Note: I am specifically ruling out campaign in-jokes and broader D&D homages, just sticking to books and movies.)

Contest Prize

The winner gets to choose from the following list:

1. a print copy of both Fever-Dreaming Marlinko and Slumbering Ursine Dunes.

2. a $10 gift certificate to Amazon (don't spend it all in one place, hoss).

3. a copy of a book or movie from the reference list (barring a runaway auto-pricing fiasco).

Contest Deadline

Given that you have to wade through 70-pages of my quirky-ass writing I am putting out a longer deadline than my usual contests, July 21.

To enter your submission, email me at kutalik at the gmail dot the com.

Contest and Video Review of Fever-Dreaming Marlinko

A rather nice and thorough video review of Fever-Dreaming Marlinko by Talking About Games. Here's the fun part, the host is doing a contest based on my dumb Robo-Dwarf class presented in Marlinko  with a chance to win a copy of the book.  Contest deadline is August 12th (later today, so get entries in.)

Here are the contest particulars: "Send me a youtube message or write a comment below saying why it's a good thing and a bad thing to be a Robo-Dwarf."

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).

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. 

Oh Fever-Dreaming Marlinko

The Slumbering Ursine Dunes is lumbering along to its fourth stretch goal, this time putting the ball back into my court to get some more heavy lifting done on the writing front. In this case we turn to the local “home base” of the Dunes region, the eccentric little borderlands city of Marlinko.

In the last KS update I told backers what NOT to expect. Namely that the supplement wouldn't be take "kind of deadly dull keyed map approach that tells you the utterly mundane potter at Building 21 has 3 hp."

In general I plan it less on focusing on that micro-detail of site based descriptions that often bog down fantasy city products (a different tack that makes Vornheim, Weird Adventures and Midkemia's Cities products so refreshingly different and useful). Instead of rehashing that detail you can check it out here on the Kickstarter update.

To get myself back in the mood of this place, the current party continues to disappoint me by stubbornly going everywhere but back to this city, I rustled up old notes from the campaign. Here are some abridged excerpts from the notes (expect cuts and revisions to fit with the focus mentioned above).

The original crappy player's map (to be redrawn professionally, naturally)

Marlinko is a bustling, smallish city of about 6,000 and governing seat of Marlinko Canton. It is the southernmost town-sized settlement in the Overkingdom before it peters off into pure howling wilderness. Though prosperous, Marlinko is deeply infected by it's relative isolation and closeness to the Weird. Life there as such takes on a strange fever-dream cast even by the standards of the rest of the borderlands.

Around Town

The Manse of the Lady Szara. The notoriously-erratic, allegedly -undead lady abruptly moved away three years ago “to visit relatives back in the Corelands” and her town-manse was overtaken by the also-seemingly-undead, thief-hero Kugel the Lucky. Rumors abound about underground excava...cough...cough mini-dungeon.

Catacombs of St. Jack's Church of the Blood Jesus. After three weeks of backbreaking work—under the expert supervision of the Termex the Robodwarf--by devotees of this imported, alien and utterly syncretistic cult, a catacomb space has been excavated by nun-maeneds under the city. The new sparagamos fane and exquiste ossuary-like sculptures are "things of beauty" report cult leader Vatek son of Vatek.

Tomb of the Town Gods. Located in the central plaza is the squat polished basalt bulk of this mausoleum of the sleeping divine founders of the city. The local Sun Lord followers have made a lifetime of quietly ignore the obvious blasphemy of such a thing existing. It is whispered that extradimensional gates lie inside but what fool dares to explore the terrifying silence of that space?

The Guild of Condotierre, Linkboys, Roustabouts and Stevedores's Dome of Supernal Dealings. Marlinko is a “union town” and even the hirelings have lasting organization. The hiring of “scab” henchmen is intolerable.

The Guild of Accipitraries, Drovers, and Ankle-Beaters. Run by the supreme hard-ass, Hurloj Kladivo, a good place for the sale or training of animals. Be wary of kidnapping his daughter.

The Serene Guild of Seers, Augurs, Runescasters and Wainwrights.  For 4000 gold suns answers are given in clear, parseable language. 1000 suns will buy answers in cant with an occasional admit of ambiguity. 500 suns will buy you a parable based on the life and work of our dear Sun Lord to be interpreted as you will and 100 suns will buy you babble in an unknown tongue.

The Drunken Troll. An upmarket inn located just south of the Tomb-Plaza of the City Gods. The inn's silent owner is said to be by local gossips the infamous Yadis, an anonymous, foul-mouthed satirist. The inn is also noted as the home of local second-fiddle mage (and man of letters) Mandamus the Erudite and his companions Uma, Barbarella, and “Martin the Fighter”.

Brothers of the Other Mother chapterhouse. Local chapterhouse of an Orthodox Sun Lord monastic order that promotes the veneration of a less divine “Marian” like mother-figure to the Celestial Lady. These guys are assholes.

Fraza's Brokerhouse. Fraza the freakishly-honest dealer in curios has his showroom here, a good place to experience the novel situation of selling without being robbed.

The News Around Town

The Rada of Marlank (ruling council), in an apparently arbitrary fit of borderlands pique and Pahr identity politics, has decreed that the southern cantonal city will heretofore not be referred to its Nemec exonym and may only be referred to as “Marlinko.”Official reasons remain mirky but one Rada councilmember anonymously stated that it “reminded them too much of Fritz.” Local residents continue to call the city whatever the Cold Hell they please.

Speaking of Marlan...err Marlinko, tiger-wrasslin' has come back in vogue thanks to a self-proclaimed “Master Beastmaster” newly immigrated from points South. Local characters willing to go toe to claw with a lovable furry orange killing machine should inquire with bon vivant Jarek the Nagsmen. A 500 gold sun bounty is offered for anyone who survives the match. 

While Kezmaroki fashion has been bending to the austere and plain of dress since the Turko Fey Anti-Rapture, haute fashion has been taking some risky new steps in the Hill Cantons proper. This week in Marlank, Chovo the Omniaesthete is expected to reveal his new line of fabulously sequined merkins (pubic wigs). Codpieces are definitely on the way out!

In other exotic cult news, the Church of the Blood Jesus has passed its sell-by date as the flavor of the month. Doctrinal arguments over virgin births, a shortage of animals suitable for the Sparagmos rites, and a growing annoyance to the Rada have withered the strange sect's recent growth spate. Despite the setbacks, Vatek son of Vatek, continues to preach the Good Word along with the most devout of the nun-maenads.

Guildsmen of the Illustrious Workers of Wood (commonly referred to as the “Totterers”) are celebrating the fifth century anniversary of their local lodge this week. A giant wickerman has been erected in the Plaza of the Horned Oracle for the festivities.

The scurrilous tribe of were-worms who migrated from the Weird into the Slumbering Ursine Dunes last month have stepped up their depredations in the area. The Rada has hotly debated a plan to introduce giant robins into the dunes to halt the menace. 

The World of the Hill Cantons Revisited

It's probably a testimony to how insanely busy and distracted I was over the last year with campaigns in the so-called real world, but I have been discovering and rediscovering all kinds of sadly neglected Hill Cantons material as I methodically work backwards through Google Plus archiving well over 1,000 related posts. 

One great little gem is the following map drawn by one of my fecund of creative partners, Luka Rejec (go support his Patreon and keep this talented guy fed and clothed.) Drawn from my own crappy players map of six years ago (which you can see in this revised post below). It's a rather nice view of the southwestern quad of Zem, the Hill Cantons campaign world. It provides a nice context to the four books of the Slumbering Ursine Dunes series which all take place in an inch wide area right in the middle. 

click ye here.

What the Hell is This Special Snowflake?

This Slavic acid fantasy snowflake is the world of Zem. The Hill Cantons is a region proper (a loose collection of poorly-run borderlands cantons ostensibly ruled by the Overking), the name of the ten-year campaign--and of course now a four-part published series to be ignored and smiled at indulgently like an eccentric uncle.

Zem is a world divided into four near-symmetrical parts, double bisected by the World Canal, domed by the heavenly firmament, and riding on the shell of the World Turtle that swims in a spiraling loop through the cosmic void. It is believed to have its reflection in an mirroring Anti-Reality.

Old wives also foolishly believe it to be a spherically-shaped, concentric “shellword” , a world inside of an Overworld and containing another Underworld. And that the heavenly firmament is but the illuminated rock underside of that upper layer of the world which itself elliptically orbits an outer sun, one of countless billions.

But that's crazy talk.

You can click on me. 

Where did Zem Come From?

Some believe that a dreaming Overgod in floated from Demonspace to this dimension and created it in his self-loathing/loving image. Others believe that the world is but a psychic projection of another, a shadowy cave of folk-spirits and broken platonic ideals.

What Kind of Cracked God Would Want to Live Here?

For a world dominated by a monotheistic religion (the Sun Lord and Solarity) that denies even the existence of other divine forces, Zem is crawling wall to wall with countless cohorts of failed gods, godlings, local gods, beast gods, hero cults, and atrophied gods.

Read all about it in the Hill Cantons Cosmology if you aren't asleep yet. Or see here for the Cosmological Appendix N. 

Just What Exactly is Up with the Weird?

The Weird is a marble-cake band of mythic wilderness/underworld and magitech other dimensions bleeding over and living in a constantly changing/moving (dialectical) tension with human civilization. It is a shifting zone of Other Reality. It's where the feral things are.

But I said it way better and with more detail here. One of the in-game models of this is the Chaos Index campaign idea. 

Civilization?

Human civilization is smaller, more thinly-rooted and more inwardly-focused than our world. There's a small-scale survey of the campaign spots in Hill Cantons Compendium II , but here's the big picture rundown:

The Overkingdom of Nemec, Nurian, Heimeti, and Pahr Lands, a “bright colors” psychic projection of late 16^th century Western and Southern Slavic (the Pahr) and German (the Nemec) countries. The coreland Overkingdom has three large semi-autonomous borderlands regions: the Hill Cantons, the Translittoral Canton of Hoimatbuch and the Marches of Nur (famous for its War Bears and kuduks).

Marlinko Canton. Well you can read your eyes off about Marlinko city proper here and the greater Marlinko Canton here. The central original hub of the campaign. 

Revoca Canton.  A tiny, remote canton even odder than fever-dreaming Marlinko, the fourth campaign hub--and my next book! Read a tour of it here. 

Kezmarok on the Rock and Over The Water, a former empire now clinging to life in a half-ruined metropolis after 500 years by the Turko-Fae. Run by the Decade King, a monarch that until late was deposed and blinded each decade. Quite a bit written about this glorious dump here, here, and here.

Himyar, the 19^th century Orientalist/pre-Muslim Arabic-ish “Scarlet Sultanate” of the south (with a splash of Clark Ashton Smith necromancy). 

Hy-Brasos, barely-settled Magyar-esque horse nomads cum feudalists with war wagons. Pity the poor dirt-gnomes, glammer-slyphs and talking dogs enslaved by them. 

The Kozak hordes, Old Pahr horse nomads. The western horde being led by Hetboy Pavol.

Oiorpata, that distant and exotic isle near the resting point of the Sun Lord's daily ride, are a fine, strong-boned, if verbally assertive race of Amazons noted for their love of high-crested, baroque helmets, polished armor, and knitting circles.  

The Pantless Barbarians.   

Races and Places Weird

Hyperboreans. A long-fallen, world-spanning super-human civilization that possessed great lost sorcerous techologies (read Kirbyesque space gods/science fantasy). Shit went south a millennia ago and their Necromancer-King successor-states left great undercities and ruins on their way out.

Anticantonal Eld. Lords of one of the Cold Hell (a rigid, hierarchical anti-reality). You know, these assholes.

Turko-Fae. Grey-skinned and inscrutable, these strange turbaned warlords have laid seige lines outside Kezmarok for five centuries. They wipe clean (literally) any bit of civilization they wrestle control over.

Grugach. Crazed homicidal and anarchic they pore forth from the so-called "Summer Country" in elk-riding hordes to lay waste to...well anything.

Vlko. A lost (but found by the players) Old Pahr kingdom.

The Feral Shore. A former Kezmaroki borderlands completely wiped clean 500 years ago by the Turko Fey. Now thick with Old Pahr mythic wilderness and the center stage for the current campaign.

So Wait, Aren't We Still Talking About an Elfgame Here?

Yes, yes we are. While I will admit to slipping semi-embarrassingly into long daydreams during the real world grind, there is no childhood hand-carving figurines, collection of awkward short stories for my made-up world. The HC is a creation that has no independent force driving it other than the anarchic and organic process of layer being laid down on lair from the repeated bruising contact with the play table over seven years of running it.

It's a campaign world that has an arc divided up my discernible “phases”. Starting as a West Marches, radically plotless and exploration style campaign, it morphed into a broad-bases sandbox with layers of accreting layers of mystery. (That devolution plotted here). 

Still the game, D&D and its microexploration focus, drives the setting. And all roads lead to the dungeon.  

The Four Contradas of Fever-Dreaming Marlinko

I've been really feeling the wind in my hoary-cliched sails this week.Not only did it feel good to get the Slumbering Ursine Dunes pdf out early to backers last week (and on sale at DriveThru), it felt even better to put the last touches on the draft of the Marlinko city adventure that was the first stretch goal of the Kickstarter. We had originally imagined it to be a smallish thing 20 pages as opposed to the 66 pages of the Dunes but it's already taken on a life of its own and is hitting around 40 digest-sized pages already.

What's invigorating about the writing I am finding is that in a long sandbox campaign you end up with a lot of dead ends or partially-developed material when the party veers off one way or the other. Having the excuse and motivation to really dig down into half-baked, left-behind ideas and places thus feels like a real treat. I never got a chance to really dig into the city adventures and high weirdness of Marlinko after it slipped from its place of prominence as the party's home-base roughly two and change years ago. And now I do. 

Anywho here's a sample of some of what the new material is looking like...

The Four Contradas of Marlinko

Marlinko was built around the squat, black bulk of the Tomb of the Town Gods, a structure that predates the rest of the city by an interminably long period of time. The ominous edifice sitting in its wide, cobblestoned, circular plaza has retained its position as the dead center of the city. Four wide avenues radiate from it at the cardinal points and divide the city into four contradas or quarters.

The four contradas do not reflect merely a geographic or class division but have deeply embedded cultural and psycho-geographical lives of their own. Each contrada organizes its own festivals, keeps its own histories, and pays fearful homage to the abstract-featured idol of its own unique “town god.”

Each contrada also maintains its own contrada hall (a large, well-maintained, ceremonial gathering place) where it keeps a collection of its own unique banners, ceremonial regalia, historical tapestries, mummies, and most importantly, the various trophies it has won in the single most important bi-annual event: the great chariot race that headlines the Ebon Horse Fair. Throughout the year, contrada trainers keep their chosen condemned convict-jockey revved up and ready for the Black Race. It is well that they do for the losers are hanged and the winner takes a trophy and his freedom!

Včelař (Sullen Apiarian) Contrada

The Northwestern Quarter with its great yellow-and-black beehive and mopey deodand emblazoned banner contains the greatest concentration of affluence and easy living in the city. The great painted-plastered town-manses of the wealthy dominate the coveted plaza and avenue fronts in this part of town.

Despite its wealthy cast, the contrada has a deeply-ingrained inferiority complex--due in large part to its century-long losing streak in the Black Race. The loss has become a self-fulfilling prophesy in recent years with the rash of suicides of convicts who consider being drafted into service as a SA jockey to be a death sentence anyway. Roving gangs of youths from respected families are quick to draw rapiers against any slight as to compensate for the wound to their civic honor.

Anfolf

Sullen Apiarian “worships” or placates Anfolf, the vaguely bee-headed town god said to be a rainmaker and bringer of both wealth and anxiety. When Anfolf in his glowing golden nimbus walked the streets of early Marlinko impressing the bearded Pahr immigrants just getting used to lives not spent on horseback, He was said to literally shower them with the sweetest of honey--and the swiftest of kicks...

Though it shouts “conspicuous consumption,” the yellow-limestone and quartz facade of the Sullen Apiarian contrada hall with its amber and lapis lazuli-encrusted honeycombed frescoes stands handsomely over its small, tight square. The contrada society itself is a broad one with a large burgeoning hierarchy of ceremonial officers arrayed in 27 ranks. Incongruously the higher, more labor-intensive (and not un-powerful) positions are held traditionally by the less affluent members of the contrada (or “temporally-embarrassed grandees” as they like to call themselves).

From here each contrada has a key focusing on the interesting and adventurable sites. Each ward description also has their own unique encounter and random building charts—many of which have triggers and hooks embedded in the escalating random event system of the Chaos Index. Encounter charts that have entries like this...

Maus. A wild-eyed  paranoid dressed in the long-robed, woolen hat finery of a rustic boyar. Maus rants and raves at the characters about the “Axis of Tindrthurn,” a secret postal and matchmaking service that he claims is trying to kill him. If the Chaos Level is 6 and over he is correct on all counts.

Suggested Readings for Running Fantasy Cities

Regrets weigh on my mind. I cut a few sections from the Fever-Dreaming Marlinko manuscript and one of them I am already rueful about is the Suggested Reading section.

Oh hey, make sure to check out Hydra's Saturnalia in Summer Sale for 25% discounts on Marlinko and all other products (end pimp). 

The readings from the gaming product list (I will post the non-fictional and fictional suggestions if there is reader interest) are for the most part geared around the central design challenge that nagged the hell out of me during the writing and playtesting: how can we do a better job presenting gameable fantasy cities by minimizing the traditional layering of boring, not-useful mundanities (the whole “here's a hobbit bootmaker with 3 hp and two daughters” syndrome) and maximizing things that either give it more flavor or make for better adventures at the table?

The products in the list below are all things that helped me think that framing question through (though it's up to y'all to decide if Marlinko succeeds).

In-Print Gaming

Vornheim 

There's been a good deal of digital ink spilled on this one and for good reason—it is a forceful, articulate partisan of the “can the mundane” way of running large, sprawling cities. Of particular utility at the table are the numerous generators for things such as random streets, neighborhoods, taverns, NPCs (and their quirks and motivations), etc.

Weird Adventures

In a recent social media exchange WA author Trey Causey (and for full disclosure, one of my fellow co-partners in the Hydra Collective) said:“ If you want a Lankhmar or New Crubozon, it means the city has to be almost a character. It needs to inhabit mostly a space of content in players' minds, not as much a place of spatial location."

This seems not only broadly true but something I found deeply inspiring about WA's centerpiece City (a 1930s-ish fantasy NYC). I found his general approach of imaging the hell out of the features of a city that make it unique and memorable coupled with a neighborhood focus (with sidebars and boxes for unique social features or gameable charts) to be worth reading for the how to bring out the flavor and life in a fantasy city. You get a strong whiff of it on his blog index.

Pavis/Big Rubble 

Glorantha produced a wonderfully adventurable city in the Chaosium-era boxed sets (republished together with a huge expansion by Moon Design). While I found some of the building entries to be on the bland side in Pavis, the product makes up for it by having evocative and interesting factions, distinct neighborhoods (each with their own street gang), town god cult (Pavis), dwarven undercity and best of all a massive ruinscrawl in the next-door Big Rubble.

Mad Monks of Kwantoom 

The city write-up section is a flavorful exploration of an Asian-inspired city (and thus a nice departure from the standard more Western-based city books). I love the variant equipment lists and neighborhood encounter charts.

Lesserton and Mor 

Lesserton and Mor seems to be directly inspired by the Big Rubble or at least it's very similar (ruinscrawl next to small base town). I found Lessertown, as a good solid example of an interesting adventurer boomtown, to be surprisingly more interesting than the ruined Mor.

Out of Print Gaming

Cities

City adventures run as much or more on navigating humanity and information as they do on site exploration. As such Cities by Midkemia Press (and later Chaosium) with it's massive array of city encounter charts is a huge inspiration for its breadth and depth (covering everything from a table of accidental jostlings of and by NPCs to a sub-table for the rare appearance of gods). The back section of the booklet is an intriguing downtime system that lets players run a minigame for what happens to them between adventures. 

(Btw Jeremy Duncan's cover for Marlinko is a bit of an homage to the second edition cover by Richard Becker).

Lankhmar

First most on any list of suggested readings for fantasy cities just has to be Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar stories. TSR's first and second edition are uneven but have some highly useful urban geomorphs and a beautiful map (that allows space for said geomorphs).

City State of the Invincible Overlord

The granddaddy of all fantasy gameable cities has to make the list even for all its mundane aspects. I dig the weird little sub-systems such as the strange and vicious court system.

City State of the World Emperor

Much as above though I found much of the actual city detail to be weirder, more evocative and more interesting than its brother CSIO.

Jonril

Loaded down with a heap of mundane descriptions and some of the worst and blandest character names, Midkemia's Jonril makes the cut by having a really interesting expedition sub-system for generating missions in the nearby howling wilderness of the Sunken Lands.

Building Dynamic Sandboxes Part II

The Building Dynamic Sandboxes kickoff post felt a bit light without some of the supporting entries so instead of waiting until tomorrow I am going go ahead and post Part II. (There will indeed be a Part III centered on Faction Dynamics, NPC Actors, and Notebooks, likely Monday).

Beyond having a regular campaign news cycle and building less static encounter charts, I've found having generators for large-scale regional or realm-wide events to be extremely helpful in injecting fluid situations into the campaign. My personal druthers is to concentrate on (or at least having on hand) generators that are either escalating (with PC-action and NPC triggers) or random --even better is when I can manage to combine elements of both.

The Chaos Index. If you've read Slumbering Ursine Dunes or Fever-Dreaming Marlinko, you have perhaps an inkling of what the Chaos Index is. The Hill Cantons has a campaign conceit in which human civilization is hemmed and battered with supernatural/mythic/faerie zones known as the Weird. Because the boundaries between the Weird and civilization tend to move back and forth I put together a track similar to what one might find in wargames.

The track moves up and down when actions inside the game either roll back the forces of the Weird or trigger greater chaos. As the track escalates away from the baseline the afflicted campaign areas get more anarchic and stranger. When things get to relatively high levels things get really odd and start to set off various events.

One, of course, doesn't have to buy into that kind of pretentious cosmological shenanigans. Something like the Index can just easily be adapted for any escalating situation in your campaign: the ebbs and flows of a war and its impact on the surrounding countryside; the rise and fall of a sinister looming great evil/dark overlord, etc.

But let's go back to my Chaos Index for a concrete baseline example. Here's are a few index-related excerpts from Fever-Dreaming Marlinko.

Click on me.

Me too. 

Now that's pretty elaborate and takes some heavy lifting in terms of thinking about the variables that might apply to your own campaign world. The idea is to capture movement, no need to overdo it. 

And, hey, truth be told I use a way more stripped-down, loosey-goosy version at my own table most of the time. I tend to take notes at the end of a session and make a fast and loose judgment call about whether I should move the index. “So the players killed the Ernest Borgnine wizard creating badgerman clones in his vats?” That's going to ratchet down the Weird a slot. “Oh they broke open that lead-sealed chamber containing Nezarr the Aborted, well thats four slots upward.”

Similarly what happens as you hit each level of escalation doesn't have to have a fully-developed chart. One can just as easily seat of your pants as I often do. “Oh this week the Index jumped up pretty high. So that must mean that the war against the kozaks is spiraling out of control. Let me say make it twice as likely that players will encounter a kozak warband.”

Event Charts. Event charts and similar mechanics have been with the tabletop hobby for a good long time but are strangely underdeveloped and neglected by designers. Wargamers of the 1960s-70s frequently employed random chance cards in battles and campaigns, a phenomena that got ported into Dave Arneson's Blackmoor with interesting and sometimes hilarious results.

Oriental Adventures fielded one of the few examples of a good overarching and flexible system for generating events in an old school D&D product. OA's system has multiple levels of magnitude. Big ticket events are diced once a year, medium/regional level events monthly and small-scale daily events are nicely cross-indexed to terrain (and produce some immediately actionable type things like discovering a lost ruined temple and the like).

Though it produces some events that are either or culturally-off (and I want my campaign-shaking events coming in more frequently than annually and monthly) it's an easy system to adapt. The general architecture fits in nicely with the routine of campaign news that I think is important to establishing good habits. I will admit to relying on OA's system quite often when I get stumped for ideas.

Surely you have some personal favorite campaign events systems? Designed your own? Jacked it from Birthright or some other product?

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). 

Ten Other Eccentrics, Scamps and Scumbags You Will Meet in Marlinko

The ever-talented Jason Sholtis made my week by drawing a just-perfect character sketch of Glamdalf (that's him above), one of many NPCs of escalating weirdness that appear in Fever-Dreaming Marlinko. It reminded me that I have been sitting on this list of “out-take” NPCs that didn't make it into the final draft.

Given that petty crime (especially small-scale grift) is a widespread, popular pastime in that strange little borderlands city, many of the following are likely to be in the annoying nuisance category of urban NPCs.

[Oh also I done got interviewed about the Hill Cantons by Jack. Check it out here.]

Roll a d10 (if you must)

1. Radko the Ruffler. 0-level Man-at-Arms. Leather Jack, tattered uniform surcoat, sabre. Approaches a Fighting Man and claims to have been a veteran in the Kozak Wars. Claims to be looking for honest work or a donation to get him through a hard time. If hired on, he will split at the first opportunity, stealing an item of value from the party.

2. Havol the Hooker. 0-level combatant. Padded, polearm. Hp 4. Despite the name Havol is not a prostitute but instead has gained his underworld nickname by using his long, hooked polearm to grab hang lines of clothes, spring open second-story shutters and commit other pole-related crimes.

3. Poor Tomas the Ubra-man. A second level mountebank. Hp 5. Feigns anxiety disorder claims that it prevents him from fulfilling seed money for a wilderness expedition and is now financially destitute. Carries an Ubra-stick, a white-painted staff that signifies a former patient/indentured servant of the Ubra work camp for the mentally ill. Will ask for specific amounts of alms money (5 gold and 2 silver), offering rumors and gossip (true and useful at first but increasingly more fanciful and far-fetched as he runs out of info). Will pretend to have a panic-induced heart attack if ever confronted.

4. Bedka the Bawdy Basket. First-level thief. Leather jack, hand axe. Hp 3. A matronly, rosy-cheeked pedlar of kitchen ware. She bribes servants to steal items of value from the townhouses of their patrons.

5. Petr, Prigger of Prancers. Second-level thief (stealth skill 4). Leather jack, lasso, sabre. Hp 10. A wee, bow-legged, skilled horse thief, Petr will approach the party either as means to off-load stolen horses (giving deep discounts of 40-50% off the listed horse price or as marks to be stolen from.

6. Janos the Jarkman. Forgerer of papers. He can knock off 200-400 gp worth of inducement fees (bribes) to Marlinko or contrada authorities by filing mountains of official-looking falsified paperwork. Takes a commission of 30% from any cash saved. He's backed by One Armed Jiri and any attempts to cheat or otherwise metaphorically fuck him will suffer retribution from his semi-criminal society.

7. Zela the Inflicted. 0-level woman-at-arms. Half plate (AC:5), spear, sword, large container of tallow soap. Hp 2. High strung, fidgety with deep black bags under her eyes, she will offer her services as a hireling. While earnest in trying to pull her weight, she will panic when asked to individually take on a task even half-dangerous. Discreetly soaping up her face, she will feign an epileptic seizure in such a case.

8. “Whipjack” Wahlo. 0-level man-at-arms. Studded leather. Trident. Hp 5. Broad-shouldered, black-skinned (literally) and barely speaking the local tongue, Wahlo is a shipwrecked sailor from the Scarlet Sultanate. He is quite anxious about his “papers” (forged by Janos above) and being picked up by the local authorities--and is sadly ignorant of the Overking's law granting free right of passage to distressed mariners. Manipulative PCs could wheedle him into serving at a pittance of the hireling rate. A patron however who informs of his legal rights and undue worry will gain his near-fanatical loyalty and gratitude.

9. “Upright Man” Uli. 3rd level thief. Leather, quarterstaff. Hp 15. Though dressed in a threadbare and patch-covered doublet, grey-haired Uli is almost stately in countenance. Uli has a finger in every small scam or theft below Jiri's interest. All on this list owe him a favor, the women owe their hearts and the petty criminals owe him grudging fealty. He may be persuaded to intercede in trouble with any listed here—for a fee.

10. Frazalina. Daughter of Fraza the curio dealer. Thin, spindly-necked and sharped-nosed, Frazalina is uncannily similar to her old man in both appearance and aspect, she is also freakishly honest—and a racist. She is likely to offer a commission for appropriating rare macguffins in local murderholes. She is in terrible company on this chart.