Where Imagination Takes You
When a group of heroes set off in search of wealth and vengeance against a sect of foul Warlocks they are called on to free a warrior’s soul from torment. Things get nasty.
Soul Stone of Kulthai is an adventure and micro-setting for Barbarians of Lemuria. The PDF link is HERE. Take, change, use and abuse it and let me know what you think.
In response to some positive feedback I’ve put together a short document detailing a setting I’ve been using for Barbarians of Lemuria (Mythic Edition, not that it matters). This is one particular city in one particular country and it’s a useful jumping off point for several different types of adventure.
It can become the home base for your heroes, or a final destination on a quest to discover dark horrors, or it can be the setting for adventure itself with plot hooks inherent in the setting for everything from palace intrigue, to cosmic horror, to street level skullduggery.
Use what you can, change, adapt, bend fold spindle etc and I hope it proves of interest.
If it does, I’d love to hear what works.
A friend of mine shared the following humorous graphic on Liber Faciem recently:
And there is more than a modicum of truth to it. I’ve recently taken to jotting down simple ideas as they occur to me using the web tool Trello as a scratchpad (though anything would work of course) because I know full well that if I wait till I actually have some time to myself the ideas will all have run together like coloured plasticine and their bright hues lost in the murky brown average of “Uhhhh what now…”
My list was originally going to be a list of potential story seeds for my Trail of Cthulhu campaign but having taken the time to review them I think that some may be more suited to one-shots of a Fear Itself nature or possibly (in one particular case) an Esoterrorists investigation.
I’ll probably get round to fleshing out one or more of these at some point and figured that if I post them here it will provide a spur in my side to actually get on and do it, and there’s also a chance that some other GM/Keeper/Asylum Attendant may be able to take one or more and run with any kernel of inspiration they can winnow out of them. Given the nature of story it’s likely that there may be recognisable elements from other stories, any such resemblance is coincidental and unintentional on my part. I’ve never been one for buying published adventures so if it turns out that one or more of these is “OMG that’s just 1987’s CULT OF THE RECIPROCATING EEL!” then I apologise in advance.
The Kernels
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| Mysterious Arab fellow |
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| No slouch at disguise… |
How does a university professor, even one at Oxford, afford to hire two deniable mercenaries to recover a stolen manuscript?
Why would a medievalist be so interested in this much later document?
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| “Of course I work for Interpol you jackass” |
In recent posts I’ve discussed the collaborative worldbuilding undertaken by myself and a couple of players new to Tabletop gaming and posted the questions I set them to outline the basics of the world, and the answers they came up with.
I’m attaching a link to the basic setting notes that resulted and hope they’re an enjoyable read- we’re adding more details as they come out in play of course so this was very much the first wide glance at the setting. Every adventure has added more information of course as is inevitable, and now we know, for instance, why the abandoned city of Kalnathan is a haunt of ghouls and why the ageless librarians in the tower of that foul city do not venture into the windowless Westernmost tower of the library despite the wisdom that remains on those unlit shelves, and why books of magical lore disguised as collections of erotic poetry are so keenly sought by certain Orloi ladies.
Download PDF
Yesterday I posted some open-ended questions I gave to my two players for a new Fantasy Fate Core game, the purpose of the questions being to allow them to shape the world we’d be playing in. They discussed things between them and sent back their answers as follows:
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| Image by Asafesh |
How many years is it since the great capital city was abandoned?
120 years
WHat led to the fall of the royal house.
War
What price do magicians have to pay for their magic?
Their eyesight
How many of the noble houses of the realm fell into dark ways? How did the others respond?
About 40%, the others are resisting more or less openly depending on their level of bravery.
Why are priests shunned by wise folk?
Priests are not looked kindly upon by the powers that be, and so people don’t want to associate with them and risk getting entangled.
Which of the gods is still revered by the common folk and why?
A warm deity, often associated with harvest, mercy and peace
Why is it hard to reach the elvish lands?
There is a large mountain range to cross to get there.
What weapon is the weapon of the nobility?
Naginata-type of weapon
What non-combat skill is a true nobleman or woman supposed to master?
They’re supposed to have some kind of musical skill – whether that’s singing or an instrument is not important (Though preferably both).
What do people swear by when they really mean it.
By my mind, heart and hands (ordered by order of operation)
Have the trolls gone for good or might they return some day? Who or what defeated them last time?
They might be back. The royal family and their loyal supporters did.
That gave me a good starting point for defining the world –
Since the fall of the capital city and the royal house was as a result of war just over a century ago, I figured the land would still be pretty fragmented. Having just under half of the noble houses turned to the dark ways suggests that they were the ones who opposed the royal house and the status quo while the other noble houses were the loyalists… and therefore the losers. And since that was only a century or so ago there would still be a lot of bad blood between the big families.
The questions about customs, the nobles wielding a particular type of weapon and being expected to be skilled at music suggests some nice background colour for the setting, and I really liked the idea of magic use costing the practitioners their eyesight. That makes magical ability something with a real cost, and also allows for some nice distinctive NPC magicians who have to find ways to compensate for what they have given up.
The players had a good enough time with coming up with the ideas that I followed up with a second round of questions to dig a little deeper and flesh things out. The questions and their answers are here:
What obligations are placed on members of the nobility that do not apply to the common folk?
Every noble family that has 3 kids or more must send one of them to join the army.
(Player commented: One of us might be escaping that)
What is the Final Oath? That’s the oath the last king swore before the last battle, swearing to protect his people.
Why does the last king’s spirit still haunt the ruined city? He hasn’t fulfilled that oath.
What is/was Duke Raendor’s secret? He’s secretly protecting a descendent of the royal family.
It was lost at sea and the people of the coast rejoiced – what was it? A slave-trader ship + crew that had been raiding the coast.
What was the greatest creation of the dwarves and who stole it? A mechanical contraption with numerous uses, some of which are rather obscure. It was stolen by a small sneaky quiet thief, usually called The Weasel. It’s not entirely certain if it was his own idea however.
What animal do they liken the king of thieves to? How secure is his hold? He’s likened to a snake, and his hold is pretty secure.
They call her the Lady of Sanctuary – who is she and what does the title mean? She is the goddess of harvest, mercy and peace. Her title alludes to the fact that she gives refuge and healing to suffering souls after death.
Which group of people wears the tattoo on the back of their right hand? Slaves do
Plot hooks galore. The players pretty much decided that one of them would be playing the third child of a noble house who was skipping out on their military service, We have the ghost of a king haunting his abandoned city because his spirit cannot rest because of an unfulfilled oath. We have a nobleman hiding an unknown scion of the royal house. We learned that there is a predatory slave trade assailing the country, that there is a master thief called the Weasel who – on the orders of some mysterious other – has stolen a dwarvish artifact, and we’ve fleshed out the only deity still actively worshipped in the area. Given how much conflict and discord there is in the kingdom I can imagine why a goddess of mercy and peace would still have followers.
We all really enjoyed the process and it gave me as GM an awful lot of material to work with when I sat down to flesh out the details – which I may post at some later time. One thing I really appreciated about the process was the knowledge that if I presented the same questions to another group, or even to the same group again at another time, we’d end up with a world with plenty of background and potential plots that wouldn’t need to resemble this one at all.
I followed the worldbuilding questions up with some more character focussed ones once the players had their core concepts for their characters worked out, and in much the same vain they were open ended leading questions designed to bring out key points of their past and a cast of associated characters that could act as friends, rivals or just background colour. It’s the first time I’ve used this process but the results have been very satisfying and I’ll almost certainly use variants of this in the future.
One of the things I loved the most about Fate Core when I first picked it up was the emphasis on collaborative world-building – the creation of Aspects for the setting and attaching Faces and Places that the players come up with in concert with the GM.
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| Image by Jessie Therrien |
I do most of my roleplaying online these days using Roll20, Hangouts and/or Skype and two of my players were interested in starting up a Fantasy campaign using Fate. While they’re both seasoned veterans of PlayByPost and even some magnificent LARPS with casts of hundreds and spanning years in the forests of Europe they’ve never done Tabletop before. I figured that sitting them down and trying to explain Aspects and some of the rulesey stuff about Fate (even the approachable Fate) might not be the best way to start, but I did want to involve them in the creation process so I hit upon a compromise idea that turned out to pay dividends.
I created a questionnaire for them with a few leading questions in there – not leading in the sense that I had particular outcomes in mind, but in the sense that they opened the door to a variety of tropes – and then I left it with them both to discuss between them.
It worked well, and I can recommend it as a great way to get the creativity going in a group even before sitting down together to play, with the beautiful bonus that everyone is invested in the results and knows the setting much better than if they’d simply been presented with a sheaf of pages of background material from the GM.
The questions are reproduced here. In the next post I’ll share some of the answers they came up with which formed the basis of the world we’re now playing in.
How many years is it since the great capital city was abandoned?
What led to the fall of the royal house?
What price do magicians have to pay for their magic?
How many of the noble houses of the realm fell into dark ways? How did the others respond?
Why are priests shunned by wise folk?
Which of the gods is still revered by the common folk and why?
Why is it hard to reach the elvish lands?
What weapon is the weapon of the nobility?
What non-combat skill is a true nobleman or woman supposed to master?
What do people swear by when they really mean it?
Have the trolls gone for good or might they return some day? Who or what defeated them last time?
A creature for Trail of Cthulhu.
The shunned tribal elders called it Giaouchatnhon when they discovered it’s lair deep within the caves in what is now Vietnam. They saw the effects it had on the first unfortunates to be exposed to it, infected by it, and they studied the results.
The victims grew ill, pale and weak. They began to suffer delusions and terrifying visions of worlds and lives utterly beyond their comprehension. The elders recorded the babbling of the victims, restrained them when they tried in their delirium to seek out dark hiding places of their own, and after the inevitable final moment when the doomed man or woman collapsed into greasy grey dust they sifted through the powdery remains and they found the slug-like larva and roasted it over a flame.
The charred thing, ingested, would grant visions to the elder who consumed it and grant them knowledge and magical gifts that helped the elders cement their rule over the tribe. But power is never enough power. The elders sent more and more victims into the caves to expose them to the spores of Giaouchatnhon, to sicken them with alien flesh growing within them, to record their delirious cries and then to consume the thing that had slain them. The elders became priests of a sort, and they consumed the larvae more frequently, becoming themselves other than human. And inevitably their untainted neighbours eventually decided enough was enough. The elders and their followers were executed and the sacred caves became the forbidden caves, and the entrances were blocked with rocks and earth.
Alhazred encountered it in his dream-wanderings beneath a brittle sky, a vast coiled worm or grub with an oil-black membrane and hardened roots at its extremities burrowed into the rocky wasteland beneath it. He wrote of plunging his hands through that crusty skin into the gelid interior and he touched its mind… its minds… its mind conscious at every moment of every place, every world, every age in which it grew and festered. One being, one consciousness, a thousand thousand dark places. He licked his dream-fingers clean and tasted each one of those worlds and he wrote down what he tasted. He tasted of darkness and the desire to spread itself wide across every world that was, of the desire to be carried to every speck of dust that made up the cosmos until it was everywhere and everywhen. He knew from the slime trickling down his throat in that dream that the creature lurked within the deepness of his own world too and he wrote down cryptic warnings about digging too deeply.
The Mi-Go recognise the signs of infestation in their own kind and in the bodies of other species they encounter as they surge from world to world. They burn the worlds that are too badly infested. They vivisect the victims, even among themselves, to study the growing infection and then they destroy the larvae with strong acid. Their symbol for the creature placed upon a boundary place will dissuade them from entering, as a red plague-cross on the doorway of a house deters visitors.
Behind The Scenes –
Giaouchatnhon is the name it was given on Earth by the tribal elders who first discovered it. It exists in only one location on Earth – for now – but it is the same entity that lives in and on countless other worlds across the cosmos. Every instance of it shares the same consciousness and it perceives at once every sensory experience of every one of its manifestations.
Its thoughts, you can be sure, are not human thoughts.
The life cycle of the creature is one of contagion and dispersal. The adult form resembles a vast slug, several metres long, with a hardened carapace and rigid talon-like roots at either end with which it anchors itself into whatever surface it has chosen for its home. While capable of uprooting itself and moving it does so very rarely, and it is clumsy and slow. It prefers to remain stationary since once it has put down its roots it begins to spread trails of filaments through the surfaces it is in contact with, thin lines of mold that can permeate through almost any material, forming a nearly invisible web around it and extending from it over increasing distances.
The filaments spread only slowly in daylight, faster in total darkness. The creature perceives the world around it through this web and the longer it remains in place the wider the net grows. When the creature perceives a potential host moving within the compass of that web it will begin to form tiny nut-like cysts on the filaments. These will detach from the web when they are ripe, and about the size of acorns. Movement triggers them to burst releasing a small cloud of sharp spores which can be breathed in (causing irritation of the throat and lungs) or absorbed through any damp or broken skin.
The victim is now a host and the spores will invade the host’s cells like a virus and replicate themselves. The host will become ill over the next week to ten days. At first a fever, tremors and night-sweats, then delirium. Their dreams will become disturbing with disjointed images and sensations, and inexplicable alien landscapes and appetites. After a few days those dreams will become waking hallucinations and the host will become helpless to resist the touch of the creature’s consciousness.
When the creature within him has multiplied enough the host will be compelled to seek out a dark place to lie down and rest. At this point the host’s body dissolves into greasy ash or dust and within that dessicated mass there will be the larva of the creature. No larger than a long thick finger, resembling a slug or black grub, it will wriggle to a place of safety and there begin to grow, and attach itself to the environment around it.
After a month it will be several feet long and will have developed enough to anchor itself in place and start to extend its filaments of perception around it. It will reach its full size after after six months and then it will be able to create its own cysts and spores.
In Play
Giaouchatnhon is a source of stories rather than a direct actor in them itself. Its earthly form is largely immobile, brooding within a deep sealed cavern beneath the hills of Vietnam, thinking the same thoughts as all its other manifestations across the cosmos, perceiving everything they perceive and waiting for a chance to spread.
Sooner or later those caves will be opened, perhaps to spelunkers, perhaps to tourists. Perhaps some reference in Alhazred’s allusive text will drive someone foolhardy to explore in just the right place. They will become infected with the spores of the creature and carry them outside for the first time in countless centuries and Giaouchatnhon will have an opportunity to propogate itself.
Player characters may be part of that foolhardy expedition and companions of theirs may be the first to fall prey to the mysterious illness from the caves, growing sickly, their minds starting to crumble as they ramble about alien landscapes and secrets undreamed of by sane minds. Or perhaps the victim may be a friend of theirs returning from some foreign trip and falling ill… or perhaps by the time the investigators touch this story things have already advanced, and Giaouchatnhon is also growing in some damp basement in Chicago, or the store room of some night-club in New Orleans or London… growing and spreading its filaments and forming spore-rich cysts ready for the next host.
It may be that some modern savant has realised what they are dealing with and, like the hated priests of ancient times is deliberately cultivating the infection of others in order to use them as oracles in their delirium, or as growing mediums for the vile larvae which, roasted and consumed, grant magical power and inhuman insights to the ingestor. Cults may grow up around such creatures as in older days, offering up the helpless and hapless to deliberate infection simply to obtain the larvae whose foul bodies transform the human monsters who devour them.
If the cult fails to allow some of the larvae to grow though, if the cult prevents Giaouchatnhon from spreading, then it may become aware. It is ancient and it is wise and its patience is not infinite. With effort it can retard the illness of the hosts who carry the spores and reach out with its vast mind to take direct physical control over them as their own grip on sanity weakens. Investigators may not only have the cultists of Giaouchatnhon to deal with but controlled hosts who seek to spread the contagion further even at the expense of the cultists who seek to control the creature and use it for their own ends. And as mentioned above the Mi-Go are well aware of the threat posed by Giaouchatnhon to worlds they have a use for. If the fungi from Yuggoth become aware of an infestation on Earth then the investigators may find themselves in the middle of a massive conflict between inhuman interests… or possibly in a strange alliance with the Mi-Go as the slightly lesser of two evils.
Otherworlds 