Crowdsourced Wizard Tower is 90% complete!

So, last week I put up a call for a crowdsourced wizard tower.  After some contributions, editing, and lots of writing, that wizard tower is now 90% complete.  A lot of the monsters don't have stats, most of the magic items don't have descriptions, and I haven't gone through the tower to make sure that it has (roughly) the right amount of treasure, but I'll do all those things later.

I intend the bottom half of the tower to be burgle-able for a party of six level 3 characters.

I'm posting the room descriptions below, so that authors +Alex Chalk, +Cédric Plante, +Christopher Wood, +Claytonian JP, +Michael Raston, and +Greg Acker can read and review them in the context of the mostly completed tower.  Guys, if you want to edit your room, this is your chance.

I figure that I'll compile all of this into a PDF as soon as it's complete.  People seem to like PDFs.

Items from the Pit and the House

Here's a selection of thingamajigs from the East Pit Marketplace (the ruins of east Pittsburgh) and the House of Hours itself.  Players can read--there's no spoilers here.

The first few of them are replacements for hirelings/retainers.

Hurleypuss

A hurleypuss is a big, cantankerous type of psuedocat.  Generations of breeding have made it suitable for use in combat.  A hurlypuss' tail is replaced with a J-shaped stick, like that of an umbrella.  The hurleypuss has some sturdy tendons in it's tail and hips--yanking it by the tail/stick doesn't hurt it, but it does piss it off.  The tail/stick also gives a longer lever arm, allowing the hurleypuss to be thrown further.

A hurleypuss will spend most of its life in a bag, where it takes catnaps.  When the hurleypuss is thrown from the bag on a target, it will wake up, enter cat flight mode (you've seen it--arms outstretched, waving the tail for orientation and balance), and maul the first thing that it lands on.

What the hell is wrong with this tavern?

1. Sound of a baby's crying coming from the latrine.
2. Sleepwalking epidemic among guests. Psychic domination or just bad food?
3. You are being robbed/spied upon by an animal. (dog/bird/monkey/cat).
4. Strong, odious affiliation. (50% guild-based, 50% religious).
5. Carnivorous beds.
6. Proprietors are lycanthropes. (Were-wolves, -boars, -rats, -pumas, -bears, -centipedes, etc).
7. Food/booze is addictive.
8. Fake looking ghosts! Real or just someone trying to put Old Man Jenkins out of business?
9. Cook is mass murderer. Destroys evidence by feeding it to customers.
10. There are royal cannibals in the basement.
11. There's a tiny person in your soup. (50% dead, 50% begging for help.)
12. Someone has been in your room while you slept. (50% stole something, 50% added something.)
13. Oblivious guest is slowly transforming into demon over course of evening.
14. Rats in the walls! And maybe more than rats.
15. Loose floorboard in room conceals treasure, cryptic note, and intrigue.
16. Everyone starts vomiting at once, then stops. No one seems to think this is unusual.
17. Proprietor seems 10 lbs smaller/fatter whenever the PCs see him (even if 5 min apart).
18. Overbooked. Share a room with a berserker/nun/scribe/cultist. Figure it out.
19. Overnight, you witness an man float down the hall and vanish into the fireplace.
20. Out of booze! Desperation is setting in, and the situation is growing dire.

Running Through Yoblintown While Caked In Feces

This is Wallow, a.k.a. Yoblintown.  It sits in the belly of a caldera, while an open sky peeks in over the 10,000' vertical feet of stone.  All of the city's filth and wealth trickles down the spiral streets, which are build like open gutters, so that the city's wealthiest can hoard the sludge and garbage that they value.

I added the scum farms--plenty of human slaves there.

A Perfect Pleasant Pair of Pigs

Yo, I wrote up some monsters and they're both pigs.  What are the chances?

lookit thiis fool jumpin teh hog all gigglin an shit

Our first beast is not a mammal but a rodent.  Its conical bulk tapers down to a pink, hairless head. Curved yellow incisors lead the face, and lend the animal an untrustworthy look.  It has the proportions of a short-legged dog that has grown fat from stealing milk.  It's paws are heavy and black-nailed.  They have the features of human hands but not the proportions. It's dim eyes are those of a misanthropist, dusty and calloused.  It shuffles through forests, digging up mushrooms, falling asleep in sunny glades, and casually eating baby birds.  Long spines fountain from its backsides, a bristling armory of quills.

Encounters on the Sea of Fish

Because I want to eventually put together a Land of Flowers campaign, I probably need some tables for the Sea of Fish, which you'll probably be sailing back and forth across to reach the Land of Flowers.  It's a big, subtropical sea comparable to the Caribbean, and full of interesting shit.

You'll forgive me if I don't detail the dangerous sea creatures too much.  I don't want to ruin the surprise.  (You think you know what an octopus monkey is?  You have no idea what an octopus monkey is.)

The Goblin Library

In order to promote literacy, I wrote a couple of pdfs.  They're books of monsters.

Both books have been slightly updated to versions 1.1.  It's mostly styling bullshit that no one will ever notice, but I added a few paragraphs to the Book of Tigers and the Book of Mice got three new (minor) pieces of art.  So now you can see what a popkin looks like.  Yay!

Here are the downloads:

Link to files on Google Drive

Taming the Mouse

We're all such fools.

If you take a step back and look at all of human history, we've been mostly wrong about mostly everything most of the time.  At least, a lot of the natural science stuff.  The best authorities used the best available methods and still came up false.  And I firmly believe in atoms and the Bernoulli effect and the tectonic plates, but what if I'm wrong.

It's an infantile train of thought but it is good for cultivating unconventional trains.

Anyway, there once was a time when people thought that mice grew out of riverbanks.  They knew mice had babies like other animals had babies, but mice totally just popped out of the mud ever summer as a secondary way of making mice.  How else can you explain how come there's no mice in April and fucking gazillions of them in May?

And while this sounds stupid nowadays (lol at pharaoh) it was the best explanation available at the time.  And there's certainly no reason why this erroneous delicacy can't be the god-given truth in a fantasy setting.

So here's a book of mice.  Low HD monsters (usually 1 HD) that are formed through mundane magic.  That's not an oxymoron.  The processes that generate mice in a riverside are as mysterious and as logical as plate tectonics.

You can download it here.

Inventing the Tiger

If you just want the pdf, you can download it here.  See also: the Goblin Library.

Ecology

I love ecology.  It's organisms and their environment, acting on each other, everything all at once.  Did you know that things in ponds die and they sink and they rot and they release a bunch of CO2 that gets trapped in sludge on the bottom of a pond?  This CO2 is permanently subtracted from the environment.  Depending on the climate, the pond may "turn over" once or twice a year, releasing all the trapped CO2 back into the pond.  This has major effects for the pond-dwellers.

Yeah, that sounds boring, but then read about limnic eruptions.

The point is that pond turnover is an emergent system that arises from the interactions between critters and ponds.  No critters means nothing to rot.  No water means no CO2 entrapment and lake stratification. This fish-pond system is bigger than fishes and ponds.  The sum is more complicated than the parts, that sort of thing.

Death and Dismemberment Upon the Table

I wrote some a Death and Dismemberment table to roll on when your PCs drop to 0.  I do this because I'm very bad at "fun" and very good at "I wanna type some numbers and roll dice in bed".

You gotta make two rolls before you find out what happens to the PC, but then again, this only happens when your PCs are dying, so hopefully it won't happen too often.

I tried to keep it simple enough that you could sorta memorize after one reading, which is good, but it also means that you miss out on all the ridiculous injuries like, "46 on a d100: your nipple is cut off and the monster chokes on it.  Roll on the Choking Chart to see how this resolves." but, eh.

Here it is ---------------> boom

Stark Staring Mad

I like insanity rules.  I like that there's a psychological element to the game.  I've seen other sanity mechanics, but I wanted to make my own.  Here they are.

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1. Whenever you see something terrible, you gain 1 Insanity Point. 
2. Whenever you gain insanity points, roll d20 + Wisdom mod.  If you roll higher than your current amount of insanity points, nothing happens.  (But the points don't go away.)
3. If you roll equal-to-or-less than your Insanity Points, you have a breakdown.  This lasts until your friends can calm you down (a few rounds away from the stressful) or you cry yourself to sleep.
4. At the end of your breakdown (if you had one), make a save.  If you fail the save, reduce your insanity points to 0 and gain a permanent madness.  If you succeed on your save, reduce your sanity points by 1.

Breakdowns (d4)

1. Fainting.
2. Flee in terror.
3. Hide.
4. Stand there babbling/worshipping.

Permanent Madness (d20)

1. Phobia. (Must make Wis check to endure fear.)
2. Kleptomania. (Urge to steal things from vendors, Wis check to resist.)
3. Minor hallucinations. (Senses become unreliable, e.g. listening at doors)
4. Nightmares. (Con check to sleep unaided.)
5. Voluble Paranoia.  (Cannot talk without talking about conspiracies, penalty to social interaction.)
6. Substance Abuse.  (Wis check to pass up an opportunity, penalty if you go without it.  This includes sex addiction.)
7. Amnesia.  (Lose some XP, but it will return slowly, as memories are recovered.)
8. Alien Hand Syndrome.  (One arm basically becomes an NPC.  Roll a starting reaction roll for it to see how it feels about you, and then roll again during stressful situations.)
9. Nervous twitches.  (Penalty to fine tasks, picking locks, climbing walls, firing bows.)
10. Murderous psychosis.  (Wis check to avoid flying into a rage during combat, this gives no bonuses but it prevent you from retreating.
11. If you roll 11-20, it's the DM's choice of whatever's most appropriate.

You can get rid of insanity points by doing extremely normal stuff.  Getting drunk with your friends, working on a farm and milking cows, drinking wine while staring at the ocean, and taking long, introspective showers.  You can remove 1 insanity point per week if you are relaxing in peaceful, sane surroundings.

Obviously, it's more dangerous to keep adventuring once you've got Insanity Points on your character sheet, so after a PC picks up 1 or 2, they should maybe start thinking about going back to town.

A PC cannot normally get more than one Insanity Point from the same source.

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I like this method because it still links insanity to both Wisdom and saves, so people with low wisdom will suffer more breakdowns, while higher level characters will have a lower chance of permanent madness.  They probably got enough of that at lower levels anyway.  It also gives characters a reason to stay in town and just be normal people for a little while.  Read some books, tell stories in the tavern, bang the innkeeper's daughter, whatever.

If you do the math, the level 1 PC who sees five things that give him +1 insanity point each has got close to a 50% chance of being insane by now.  Math is funny like that.

I think that insanity points should be given out when a player knows and accepts the risk.  Less of "you open the door and see Cthulhu's penis so now you gain 5 insanity points" and more of "Are you sure you want to transcribe the spell out of the squidlord's tome?  The letters are literally crawling across the page."  Or better yet, "Are you sure you want to torture the prisoner to find out where the rebel base is?  That sort of thing can scar you for life."

I'm not saying the first kind is bad either.  Sometimes the party needs to be surprised with the cuttlefish of cthulhu (if you know what I mean).

Asthmatic Berserkers and Skeleton Jellies

A lot of people will tell you that monsters don't need complicated mechanics to be interesting.  And they're right.  A lot of the awesome parts of the fight can come from the fumbles and the crits and the interactions with the environment.

Buuuuut, if you want to add a level of tactics at the monster level, here are five low level guys with gimmicky tricks to them.  They all reward a certain tactic and punish another.  I'm lucky in that my PCs have always enjoyed figuring out how to best defeat a new monster.  If that's your thing, you might like these.

Asthmatic Berserker
Armour Class: 7 [12]
HD: 1+1
Move: 120' (40')
Sword  +2 to hit, 1d6 damage
Save: 14 [+6]
Morale: 12 when raging, 8 when asthmatic
Special: Asthmatic rage

Asthmatic Berserkers can fly into a rage.  While raging, they get +2 to hit and do +2 damage.  However, they can only rage for 1d4+1 turns, after which they stagger around wheezing for five rounds.  While they are staggering around wheezing, they get -2 to hit, -2 to damage, and move at half speed.

These could be reskinned as deeply flawed clockwork warriors who periodically grind gears and shoot out springs, or civilian victims of some rage curse.

Variant - Juicers: The rage lasts up to 10 turns, but can be ended prematurely if someone severs or unplugs the tubes that pump psycho-juice from their backpack into their skulls.

Skeleton Jelly

Armour Class: 6 [13]
HD: 1 (but it doesn't matter)
Move: 90' (30')
Jelly Claw +1 to hit, 1d6 damage
Save: 15 [+5]
Morale: 12 (mindless undead)
Special: Immune to damage

This is a symbiotic organism formed between an undead skeleton and a necromantic slime.  The skeleton's bones are squishy, like lutefisk.  You can't hack it apart, and any injury it takes is automatically healed.  They don't even burn, and acid just makes them smell worse.  They're about as strong as a neurasthenic poet, so give them -2 to grappling or something.

I love these fuckers.  There were a couple of rounds after they where introduced where all the PCs were at a loss.  Then something clicked and they started throwing them down pit traps, pinning them under furniture, and sealing them inside sarcophagi.  Turns out there's a lot of ways to neutralize immortal monsters if the monsters are weak as shit.

You can't reskin these guys as anything else.  They're too perfect the way they are.

Wtf are those goblins doing?

So you've just rolled on your random dungeon chart and the result comes up: 2d6 goblins.  2d6 goblins.  Again?  I hope the party doesn't get bored of goblins. . .

Wrong attitude, Mr. DM!  Humanoids are awesome because they can do anything that the party can do.  They're people!  Little green, incompetent people that you can kill and loot and not feel bad about because they aren't really people!  You are so lucky to roll 2d6 goblins!  Here's why: