WHY IS IT THERE? WHY??? CAN'T WE MOVE?

Print PDF SO YOU WANT A ROOM BY ROOM DEATH LAND IN YOUR CAMPAIGN AND NONE OF THAT PESkY WILDERNESS CRAWL

I mean the Sewer Beneath the City or the Ruined Ward is a classic. Though the Ruined Ward needs more love. Big old chunk of the city all wrecked and full of woe and they just put a fence around it and try and stop people from nicking things. Good times.

Here's some other ideas for the dungeon being some fucking dumb :

1: THE ATTICS AND ROOFS : like those medieval towns where they kept building up until the buildings leaned into each other and then insane birds started building nests ontop and flying ships kept crashing into the pile and now up is bad and another civilization might of even been started up there? 

2. BIG FALLEN OVER WARMACHINES like giant monuments and colossal colossi. They are place around the city , fallen on the city, and buried under the city. They are full of treasure because the crews manning them were like every army ever and loved to loot.

3. DREAMLAND : if you are awake when the city sleeps , it's an alternate city with bad shit everywhere. and LEWD PEARLS OF THE NIGHT

4. CRAWLSPACES: Dungeon is condition like Rising Damp or black mold , but one that makes impossible amounts of space underneath your house or skirting board. Technically the treasure you drag out of there is a fruiting body that spreads spores but no-one has wised up to that yet.

5.  METROTUNNELS: Like big ass underground railways that used to connect citys and overland travel is not an option so everyone is really keen on someone making the trip and clearing them out but you know molochs and shit.

6. THE SKY + MOON : really it's just a big ladder away

7.  MANGROVES + SWAMPS: though it's basically a forest right around a city that's awful to log and has shipwrecks in it.

8. SHIPWRECKTOWN: So many shipwrecks they've formed a solid structure around the little island y'all call home. Variants include it's in space and they are spaceships. 

9. LORD MAYOR MUD: The old city gotten entombed in mud and the new one is just a couple of 100 people sweeping out some tower rooms at the top. The deep river below is emptying out the very bottom levels and things are getting in below too. So it looks like a hourglass if the top bit was some small boxes and the bottom was a wide bottomed triangle

10. THE CITY IS ON A BIG DISC AND THERE'S REVERSE CITY ON THE OTHER SIDE: both citys keep having groups sneak into the other and steal and fight shit. Both citys are mostly wrecked from this. Good one.

11. BIG TREE: it's a big tree , everyone lives up high in the upper branches go down and it's bugs and rot and rotten gods. Pretty sure this is where Chewbacca came from?

12. GOD : he dead and rotting in the middle of town. He's got stuff in him though.

Hardcover Version of Fire of the Velvet Horizon

Print PDF Sooo this took awhile , mainly because it took so long to get shit send to new zealand and then problems with the physical postal address and courier post and initially trying to get it done through blurb  .
Blurb, while great interface and quality , don't have an a4 size. They do have some fun square and landscape sizes , and those were tempting , I went with peecho instead.

And while lulu is fine, it doesn't have the paper weight that allows super black and stand-out colours.
Lulu is 60lb while peecho  I think  is 110lb (they list it as 200 which I assume is gsm so that's 110lb because 200lb is crazy) and blurb 80lb to 140lb.
I.. barely understand any of that though?


Lulu also uses ftp file transferring for files over 300meg and this has taken days and days of multiple failed and resetting upload attempts to get it there and it's fucked and was a major reason for going else where.

I mean it's entirely possible I could get the pdf smaller  (the mac Preview default program is worryingly good at resaving pdfs at smaller sizes with no obvious loss of quality) but I don't know what the fuck I'm doing and I don't want to the horror of having to then go through the pdf to make sure nothing has gone wrong, then test print it out and wait for that to show up and then when it doesn't try and track it down and then finally get it and go through it and this has take over a year of doing this , I'm not kidding.

Anyway Blurb and Peecho you can upload crazy big files without using some darkages internet shit to do so. Big ups Blurb and Peecho.


Blurb has store pages , while Peecho sadly lacks them, so I have to awkwardly make one on here , all they give you is BUYNOW link like so くコ:彡

so if you want to do some absurd over illustrated monster check out both peecho and blurb.

Now that this hardcover is live , I intend to NEVER update this book again. It's reached some kind of event horizon where any improvements I make cause an equal amount unintentional mistakes that need fixing. It is done. I have reached the limits of my limited competence. No more.

COOL STORY SO THE BOOK?

It's sexy hardcover version of the book. It has like 4-5 additionally appendix pages , which do not justify buying one if you already have the softcover. The text is bigger and clearer and considerable effort has been made to get the text out of the gutter. So there's that.

there's some (much) better photos here

(also did you know Patrick sleeps in a bed and not a rat-eaten blanket on bare floors , I am surprised)

And let's just make this a super commercial mega-mix,
first up : CONTESSA. Contessa is the best, they do pro-active diversity and representation in gaming,  here is their
site 
you get t-shirts there and/or support them directly, or find out how to register an event with them for gencon, which you should totally do if you are a lady or otherwise a member disproportionately underrepresented group in gaming and want to REPRESENT.


PEOPLE I KNOW THAT AND HAVE PAID ME MONEY TO WORK ON PROJECTS BEFORE AND THEY ARE DOING KICKSTARTERS RIGHT NOW :

Zzarchov Kowolski (who funded the original Deep Carbon Observatory , and paid me to illustrate  this )
is doing a board game,  I know nothing about boardgames I can see literally nothing about it other than here's kickstarter

Jacob Hurst (who paid me to do some small illustrations for this) has been doing this Swordfish Island thing for years and it's basically done , it's just funding the print run. Here's the kickstarter it will explain everything.

ALSO? I'M SORRY FOR PLUGGING STAB-CITY , IT FOLDED LIKE A DAMP CRANE, DUNNO IF ANYONE GOT THEIR MONEY BACK , I HOPE THEY DID

crikey all that commercialness has made exhausted tooo exhausted to put some actual game content on here, hahahah

ALSO
IF YOU ARE GOING TO PUT SOME FAKE BINOMINAL NOMENCLATURE FOR YOUR MONSTERS 1ST EDITION MONSTER MANUAL STYLE YOU FORMAT IT LIKE THIS
 Draco caustiscus sputem NOT IN ALL CAPITALS NOT WITH ANYTHING OTHER THAN THE GENUS CAPITALIZED AND IN ITALICS AND/OR UNDERLINED
So Draco is the genus , caustiscus is the species , and if there's a 3rd word it will be a subspecies (so in this case sputem). In this case (1st edition monster manual dragon names) it makes little sense for their to be a subspecies listed unless there is a shit load of slightly different black dragons. If there was going to be a subspecies it would be likely that Black dragons would be Draco caustiscus caustiscus as it's thought of as the most representivity of that species. There could be an argument  that chromatic should be the the species with each of the colours being a subspecies (So Draco chromaticus sputem for black dragon). 

However, there doesn't really seem to be any hard and fast rules about when to do species and when to do subspecies and it's more about people's careers than an exact measurement of genetic difference.
Also while botany can have cultivars ; kinda like a subsubspecies , zoology doesn't, and doesn't formally recognise "breeds" , which are the zoological equivalent of a cultivar , the closest thing is race , which is used fairly rarely and informally.

In regards to the correct way to have latin suffixes, well yes there are all kinds of rules about which to use depending on the gender of the root word, but it's been barely followed in actually biology for like a century , so fuck it. Like there's serrata and serratus and it should be standardized as one because the suffix is depend on the gender but no.

 Some suffixes , however , modify the word , so -oid or -scens.
-oid means "like a" and -scens means "an immature version of"

To make it even crazier there's a lot of greek used , and  latinized greek. Like -oid for example.

Small Clustered Things

Print PDF more ideas I couldn't expand much further than a couple of paragraphs



Godzilla campaign:

Put some stupid large monster on the map and have it wandering around smashing things from the very start of the game, so the players can have an end game right there in front of them , and it keeps things changing and basically randomly moves around and destroys whatever it wanders on.

Players might just tail it , looting the chaos in its wake.

I had this idea before I read Broodmother Sky Fortress btw, and Broodmother Sky Fortress is a lot about this so that's a plug for it.



Player types:

there's these 2 player types, it's not an either/or thing though, it's just 2 contrasting behaviours I've noticed.

-one will turtle up and do as little as possible as to avoid risk, and you need to give them a clear goal and try and kill the shit out of them. When you do that , they get amazing creative and engaged with the game.

-this other type will immediately find stuff to do or make plans in the campaign (and often are not-directly-linked to character advancement) and be super engaged and creative etc, but interpret any obstacles put in there way by the g.m as the g.m punishing them for something.

I lean more to  that second type btw.


Which kinda leads me to this other thing

Powered By The Apocolypse :
I keep reading these books and feel even more confused about how you are supposed to play them. It's like a play style like a hybrid of those two I just mentioned, the g.m just sets some token stuff up and the player's start thespianing around it and then the g.m tries to make as shitty/interesting as possible for the characters/players.

Like it sounds like my thing , but I can't help feel like I should be doing my best to not trigger moves , it like feels like just bull-shitting ideas with friends but with bear-traps thrown around, but you aren't meant to avoid the bear-traps?


I'm still not over the "pick a name" thing. It's messed up.




So no-one had seen an elve or dwarve that close and just described what they saw using what they knew existed, but actually

The things growing out of the face of dwarves:
From a distance it looks like a beard. But that's not hair , it's
1.Fungal Hyphae
2.Barbel
3.Synapses
4. Filter Feeding Tentacles
5. Worms
6.Eimer's organ
7. Kept Promises that participate to a physical form
8.Tongues, randula
9. Tongues, pseudotrachea
10. Bristles, stinging
11. Old Teeth
12.Ancestors DNA

The things growing from the sides of the elf heads:
not an ear, an error
1.The flesh pinches off into space, like distorted 3d model. This is where the animating force acts on them.
2.Skull knives
3. Antenna
4. Fruiting body
5. Moth
6.Wings (bat, insect, other)
7.Photosynthesizing fern fronds
8.Suckers for remora style attachment
9. Flower Labellum
10. Fractal Whorl of All Previous Bodies
11. Minaret
12. Cooling Fins







Ninja dragon:

this is one of the stupidest things I could think of as a base concept, but say there's this whole country that is fearful of a secret society of assassins who do this whole horrible secret police bit
 , pulling the strings of the government , killing both politically and seemingly arbitrarily.

Expert poison users, only shadowy figures glimpsed etc . All kinds of theorys and stories about who they are, where they came from , what they want etc.

In truth they are literally shadow of a vast crippled dragon lying deep beneath the land.

The dragon who was said to have been killed by the founder-hero of the country.

But it's not dead , and it extends its poisonous shadow into every patch of darkness, hearing everything, seeing everything, and twisting the legacy of the founder hero into a vast tortured mockery.


It's from a thread here which also has some solid gold ideas by other people on using fantasy cliches


One more thing
 I just watching something that had the amazing pun "Salt Rifle"

from here

1. Salt Rifle (naturally) :
Squeeze it tight and a crack starts and propagates like anti-lightning to the end of it , and a shard snaps off and is carried impossibly by the crack as it extends past the rifle .
In addition to the damage a subsonic hatey triangle will do , it will pull salt out of the body to expand into a beautiful, flesh destroying salt crystal formation.