The Monstrous Lady Mantlewray

To the rest of the world, the Marilanth Petal is a criminal organization, peddling drugs and poisons in alleyways the world over.  But in Bospero, they are merely another of the noble clans--another miniscule dukedom in a city infested with dukes.

That the Duke of Poppies is the head of a criminal enterprise is no secret, but it is certainly not something that is remarked upon in polite company.  Besides, the city already tolerates greater offenses against decency (the Stewer's Guild, the Black Rabbits, the ever-larger fashions of the nobility, the scandals of the Queen, and the financial predations of dragonkind) and is perhaps stronger for it.

A Sidebar: Bospero

The largest city in the world, Bospero is technically a tight cluster of dukedoms, each separated on a small island, where the duke holds absolute power.  These islands are separated from each other by trash-filled canals, protected from the roughest vagaries of the sea by a maze of breakwaters, built atop Odo Longo, a sunken city just off the coast, thought to be build by giants in past ages.

These dukedoms were originally limited, and only awarded infrequently, but as the breakwaters proved too be too effective, silt built up around the city, and the ocean became shallow enough that islands could be constructed by ambitious nobles.  And while the granting of duchies has ebbed and flowed with the options of the regent, the end result is that Bospero now has nearly a hundred soverign duchies, all locked together in a maze of shallow canals, each with the power to negotiate foreign treaties, tax visitors, and declare war on other duchies.

Bospero is a famously difficult to city to navigate.  Foreigners describe the city as pure madness, a riotous warren of strange laws, toll bridges, mystery cults, incomprehensible dialects, and a heady gradient between street gangs and duchal armies.  The locals are proud of their city and its reputation.  They wouldn't have it any other way.

This is also where Coramont, the Holy City, is located.

End of Sidebar

Where was I?  Oh yes, the Duke of Lornavel is a terrible man.  If you ever wish to make a name for yourself in Bospero, make sure that you are a friend to him.

But there is a reason why the island of Lornavel is given this special dispensation: they are responsible for satisfying the Mantleray.  They are not scrutinized by the queensguard; the Grand Euphorium is never searched.  The crown doesn't even tax them--their only civic responsibilities are the deliveries.

The deliveries are more drugs, of course.

Vast amounts.  Impossible amounts.  Pools of poppy extract.  Casks of delago.  Enough tambrack to smother a child, or ten.  Thrum, mevverwen, jopeth, scrumboola.  Fat-petaled lotuses, big as a crown.

And for this delivery, they have only a single client, the Mantlewray.

More correctly, her name is Elzabeth Jonna Mantlewray, the former duchess of Madrigo.  Her story is lost, another victim of her own predations, but pieces of her history can still be assembled from among the flotsam.

Most of the stories agree that she did it to herself.  Madrigo had a history of strong alchemists, primarily focused on metallurgy, but with enough biomancers in the family to make her transformation very plausible.

The stories disagree on whether her son was her first test subject, a simultaneous effort, or later recruited to her cause once she was leading a rebellion and needed an ally.  Regardless, even though her son is just as much of a Mantlewray as her, he is not called by his familial name, Jubalcain Monastus Mantlewray.  Instead he is called The Lech, or sometimes The Son of the Squid.

Why did Lady Mantlewray become the leviathan?

To fight the merfolk in their own element, perhaps, and safeguard Bospero harbor from their drills,  nets, and horrible dolphins.

Another story claims that she did it to flee an abusive marriage.  (It is agreed that her own estate was among the first that she destroyed.)

And yet another story claims that she simply desired power.  There are no supporting facts required for this explanation--human nature has proved it to be true countless times.

These theories are not mutually exclusive, and her true rationale is probably not limited to a single motivator.

Still, is it difficult to see the brutal remains of her violence and think them to be products of a subtle mind.  Everywhere in the city, you can see places where the stone is lashed to the foundation by rasping tentacles.  Certain spires are still bent and rusted by her terrible exhalations.  And although the birth defects have declined, it is not rare to see an elder whose body has been bent by her cruel poisons.

The only places that do not bear her scars are the Holy City of Coramont (because she did not dare), and the Golden Road (because she could not).

A Sidebar: The Golden Road

The Golden Road is a bridge that traverses the Bosperian Bay, connecting Bospero with its sister city of Marinda.  The bridge is 36 miles long, and is usually crossed in three days.  The bridge is studded with fortifications dating back to the Road War, when both Marinda and Bospero competed for control of the Golden Road.  It was a long, bitter, slow conflict that Bospero ultimately won.

The Golden Road is built from adamantine, and shares other similarities with the Bastion of Medurak (a dam) and the Forbiddance (a wall).  Bospero has mixed feelings about the Golden Road.  It connects them to the lands to the north, but it has also allowed foreign armies to swiftly march into the city.  They are proud of it because they control it, but they are frustrated that they cannot even chip the least piece of its structure.

End of Sidebar

During the rebellion she was the Traitorous Abomination.  When she was crowned, she was Lady Mantlewray again.  And now that she has loosened her grip on the throne and the city, she has regressed into the Mantlewray, well on her way to becoming a beast again.

And as the Mantlewray becomes more and more withdrawn, she concerns herself with less and less of the world.  There are few alive who have heard her speak, and certainly no one living remembers her tearful confessions in Coramont, her supplications at the feet of the Prophetessa (May She Live Again), and the forgiveness that she received.

In fact, the only thing that seems to concern the Mantlewray these days is the potency and punctuality of her drugs, a task that has only become more challenging over the years as both the Mantlewray and her son has grown larger over the decades.

But while the Mantlewray is withdrawing from the city that she once ruled, her son leans into it more with every passing year.  For a while, he was fascinated with brewing, and ran a brewery for years, producing several quality lagers.  Everyone agrees that the accident wasn't his fault.

Then it was cigars.  Then it was horses.  Then it was a distillery.  Then he went to work on his shell, adding new chambers, bolstering his seams with bronze, and spinning his natural spines into monstrous spires and involutions.  Then it was horses again.

For a while, he attended plays--his monstrous face peering over the roof of the theater, the light lessened by the shadows cast by the cyclopean parapets of his shell.  He had no hands to clap with, but he voiced his approval by stamping his dozens of feet in the street outside, the sound of boulders falling.  He brought many gifts for his favorite actresses.

And then it was girls.  Perhaps it was something like a delayed puberty, an artifact of the many contortions his mother inflicted on his biology.  Or perhaps he finally located his genitals within the cavernous carapace of his.  Regardless, he threw himself into this newest mania with an appetite exceeding even his own previous frenzies.

He attempted the more typical methods of courtship, but after the predictable failure, he moved on to more transactional enterprises.  Soon he was showing up to the plays with a nest of strumpets among the crenellations of his shell.  He had gold aplenty, his mother's gold, dug up from whatever secret reef she had buried it during her regency.

The Lech visited the city even more, then.  You could hear the booming gurgle as he laughed from the harbor, as he showed another girl how to use his mother's enormous harbor-bong.  You could see him in the Grocer's Harbor, his gracile oral tentacles loading furniture into his freshly expanded shell, the prostitutes carrying off another chaise lounge to furnish some interior boudoir.

Artisans were brought in.  His shell was caulked and sealed.  He had airtight compartments, now.  He could bring his girls down with him.  He was too heavy to swim, but his crab legs could carry that castle through all the Bosperian depths.

He thought of himself as a clam, and the girls as his pearls.

Down in the bottom of the bay, where the watery sun above was paler than the moon, his girls would massage his aching mantle, and they would ask him about his childhood as a human.  Did he remember his hands?  Did he remember what is was like to kiss?

And in the face of these questions, he could only lie.

How to Use This in Your Game

I hope that you think that Lady Mantlewray and her son are as interesting as I do.  They are certainly powerful, if you were to plop them down in your campaign world.

Lady Mantlewray's brain contains a wealth of potent knowledge.  If you could find some way to leverage it, a piece of that trove could be yours.  You could get a fortune of gold, or turn yourself into a kaiju of your own design.  As an enemy, Lady Mantlewray is about as dangerous as any other 60,000 ton monster, so be careful before you tamper with her drug supply.

What does she want?  An escape from her melancholy perhaps, or a remnant of her earlier days.  Perhaps she wants her humanity back.  Regardless, there are plenty of people in town who can answer this for you.  Her son, perhaps, or even the Prophetessa (May She Live Again).

Her son might yield easier leverage, but perhaps in a riskier way.  He is not dumb, although he may be a bit naive.  And unlike his mother, the players will probably have no trouble thinking of ways to entice him.

There's also a great deal of interested parties.  Many people would like to see the two monsters dead.  The Marilanth Petal would like to be free of this responsibility, even though it would degrade their special status.  (They've tried poisoning her; they don't recommend it.)  The death of the monsters would also create a tremendous glut of drugs, unless the Marilanth Petal can keep a lid on things and enforce a certain level of stockpiling.

The merfolk would like to see the Mantlewray destroyed.  Without her presence, the Bosperian ships are vulnerable again.

And even pieces of the monsters are valuable.  There are many alchemists and biomancers who would pay handily for even a piece of the creatures: the Stewer's Guild, the Transmetallic Alchemists, Grandfather Oshregaal, etc.

Even the pieces are valuable.  The players could be hired to steal a vulnerable cache of drugs (at the risk of incurring the Mantlewray's wrath).  They could be hired to steal a velvet ooze from inside the Lech.  You can even use the Lech as a questgiver (whose identity isn't immediately disclosed), as there are certainly many things that he would want to acquire, and many of which require a bit of legally ambiguous footwork.

The Ruined City of Braxa / Undead Armies

This is the second of my ruined cities.  (Here is the first.)

The Countryside

For the wise traveler, all they'll ever see of  Braxa are the roads, and even then, from a safe distance.  Patrols are not as common as they once were, but they are still deadly.  The average patrol is composed of a quartet of mounted "knights". 

The average work-crew is composed of three dozen undead laborers, who level the flagstones and clear the footpaths of their growth.  It is a futile exercise--the citizens of Braxa all died long ago, victims of a plague of their own devising.

There are no small farms in Braxa, only plantations.  If you are determined to ride into the city itself, you'll pass several of these huge platations.  They are autonomous, all singularly crewed by bleached skeletons.  (Fleshy undead are messy, smelly, and spread the wrong types of disease.)

And you'll see the wagons pulling the giant jars of grain along the manicured road, on their way to the great grinding houses. 

The grinding houses, you can feel them in your feet from half a mile-away.  A thousand chained undead, straining in a spiral, rotating an entire building.  A torrent of clean grain thunders into the basement, where it is then carted off, again in a single gigantic jar.

The Walls

The city is surrounded by high walls of earth and stone, the highest wall in Centerra (except for the Forbiddance, which most consider to be a mountain range rather than a wall.)  As you walk through the long passageway between farm and plaza, you can hear the shuffling of dead, pivoting inside their secret chambers, watching you as you pass, ensuring that the leader of your party is wearing a merchant's medallion.

The walls are where the city stores its dead.  Each is about 50 meters thick, and 50 meters tall.  It is honeycombed with secret tunnels, armories, and sepulchers.  If you believe the tales, there's more bone than stone in the walls.  The whole wall is supposed to be able to exhume itself and march off at a moment's notice.

by Kris Kuksi

The City

It is clean and well-patrolled.  If there were any left of the old bloodline left, it would be a utopia for them to claim.  Supposedly, the undead will respond to the rightful rulers of Braxa, and signify this by kneeling.  Then the whole warmachine will be there for the scion to claim.

There are many granaries and stockhouses in Braxa.  Food is delivered to every house daily, and older food swept away and throw into the canal, which is choked with rot. 

The smell from the canal permeates the whole city.

A Small Building

A gate house.  Two skeletons operate the gate, while a dozen coffins in the bunk room can be summoned as reinforcements, if the proper bell is rung.

Another Small Building

A school.  Every morning, the undead clean the chalk tablets, open the windows, and serve lunch.  And every night, they put the chalk away, close the windows, and clean the tables of their refuse.

The Harbor

Looking down in the water, you will see the encrusted skeletons of Braxa's marines.  There are thousands of them down there, clad in lead boots for marching underwater.

Visitors sometimes arrive in Braxa.  The undead pay a bounty for corpses--three silver for every corpse laid down on the dock.  You may not leave the dock.

The Castle

Behind the blank-faced silos sits the castle.  Your merchant's medallion will not gain you entry.  Skeletons squat above every window, peer up from between the flagstones.  The moat is contains no water, merely more skeletons.

The last known king was Obrichan the Poet, although it is believed that he died in the plague, along with all his subjects.

Many people believe that the plague was caused by the king's acceptance of necromancers into his kingdom, and his acceptance of the undead.  Rather than condemn all forms of undeath as an abomination, he allowed them to serve as laborers.

This is where you will find living humans.  Some of the slaves seem to have escaped the plague, and now still tend to castle, performing the chores that the undead are too indelicate to perform, such as tending to the garden or playing songs during "dinner".  Slave who do not perform their chores are mutilated by the skeletons.  They may not leave the castle.

The slaves have gone through countless generations without any interaction with the outside world.  The speak a degenerate patois, and perform their chores religiously, without understanding the significance of what they do.  They have an invented religion, in which the Prophetessa is an invisible spirit within the castle.  After a lifetime of service, they will be promoted to skeletons themselves (mostly true) and after their skeletal life is complete, they will join the invisible Prophetessa at her invisible court.

One of the three towers is known to be the home of Abin Uldrin, the king's necromancer.  If there are any answers to be found in Braxa, they will be there.

Undead Army Strategy

I swear to god, no one does it right.

The greatest strengths of an undead army is in logistics, and in sieges. 

Not needing food is a tremendous advantage in long campaigns, far from home.  The need for a supply line is minimal.  And so undead armies tend to embrace long campaigns, sometimes wandering far from home for decades.

This resilience is even more useful during sieges.  Undead armies can encircle a town for years.  A common tactic is to build a second wall around a city's walls, and use that to prevent relief armies from approaching.  The undead have all the time in the world.

Skeletons are also resistant to arrows and burning oil, two common methods of repelling a siege.

In fact, skeletal armies are so good at sieges that an opposing commander will often make great sacrifices to force a pitched battle elsewhere.

The greatest weakness of an undead army is the intellect of the soldiers, and their magical prohibitions.

An undead battalion must be led by a living soldier, capable of formulating plans and enacting them.  If this soldier is killed, the battalion becomes headless.  Multiple commanding officers offer redundancy, but also erode the unique advantages of the undead.  And so a common opposing tactic is simply the assassination of officers, either through a suicide squad or subterfuge (such as an opponent's risen skeletons.)

Another flaw of the undead is their limited ability to differentiate between humans (and other skeletons, for that matter).  An enemy will be obeyed if they are wearing the proper armor and giving the proper code words.

Lastly, clerical magic can scatter skeletons with shocking efficiency.  An army backed by the Church's clerics can be devastating.  And so assassinations are also required (something that skeletons are incapable of).

Undead Army Tactics

Skeletons are typically iron-shod, like horses.  Their feet tend to erode during long marches, and then they become incapable of walking. 

Skeletal armies are also capable of startling ambushes, with their combatants buried in sand, shallow swamp, or surf.

Crawling skeletons are usually relegated to battalions of their own, and trail behind the main body of the army, unless there are so few of them that they can be carried on wagons, or by their peers (although this just causes their feet to wear out faster).

Lead-shod skeletons can also invade a city through the harbor, by walking on the bottom.  This is devastating to an unprepared city, and this type of sneak attack is usually how campaigns are kicked off.

The most visible icon of a skeletal army are the gas wagons.  Huge things loaded up with burning arsenic, or possibly a mixture of bitumen and sulfur crystals (capable of producing plumes of sulfur dioxide). 

If you ever fight a skeletal army, you will do so in smoke.  In many battles, the smoke claims more lives than the skeletons do.

Common counters involve maneuvering for optimal wind, obstructing the wagons with rough terrain, and/or fighting a running battle.

Tunneling crews are also common.  Sometimes traditional tunnels are used, while othertimes a "bubble" is used, in which freshly excavated soil is piled behind them.  The skeletons are not concerned by their entombment.

For gaining access over a wall, a certain type of skeleton is sometimes used, called a flatback.  These skeletons wear special armor that makes them stackable.  A battalion of flatbacks is capable of building a ramp up to a wall within just a few minutes.

A common counter for flatback battalions is a type of wrecking ball, which is attached to the battlements and used to clear the wall.  

The Ruins of Tabernach

Centerra is supposed to be post-apocalyptic, although I sometimes forget that fact.

And if you are going to have a post-apocalyptic world, the most defining feature should be the ruins of cities.  Ideally, the ruins should outnumber the living cities.  The clouded brows of dead cities should loom over the tallest spires of the living cities, and the glories of lost civilizations should outstrip anything the present has to offer.

So here's a dead city.

This looks nothing at all like Tabernach, but the mood is right.
by Stefan Celic

Tabernach

A city of cubic buildings, built from black basalt at the bottom of a steep valley.  A river runs through it, filled with fat fish.  There are gates and gardens.  There is a park, where a parade of stone animals still stands in revelry, roaring over the silent boulevards.  Dire otters sun themselves on the stones of sunken docks.

They have tried to make the city habitable, those certain people. You can see where they've stretched poles across the street, and canvas hung between them.  It was done in order to turn the roads into tunnels.  But now the poles are broken and the canvas all slashed.  The tatters blow through the streets like bandages.

The Largest Building

It was clearly an observatory.  The rusted remains of a telescope are still visible, peering out the apex of the tower like a scared bird.  This landmark is well-noted, and people have journeyed to Tabernach in order to loot the great lens (precision optics are always among the greatest treasures of the age that mints them).

But the wooden stairs of the building have all rotted out, and those that have made the perilous climb to the top report that the glass is too heavy to easily lower.  And so the great lens remains there, an unplucked fruit.

A Central Building

There are still a few footpaths in Tabernach.  Many of them convene here, at this small prison.  The few dozen people who live here often choose to sleep in the prison, because they can lock more doors.  They feel safer in there, father from the outside.

The people who live here are criminals, runaways, and exiles.  Smugglers and travelers sometimes pass through.  Tabernach is a good place to disappear into.

Mousehead deals with the smugglers, mostly.  He and his family ensures that their goods remain undisturbed and their exiles remain unnamed.  He is a large man with a soft beard.  He always struggles to maintain eye contact, and so many who meet him do not suspect that he is capable of prodigious violence.

Mousehead is satisfied with the status quo, and anyone attempting to change the city in any significant way (such as excavating the temple) will meet lethal resistance from him.  He will also expect a cut if the lens is ever successfully removed.

Fiddleback deals with the spiritual needs of the exiles, when he is sober.  He knows more of the history of Tabernach than anyone else.  Like everyone else, he has his theories about what is wrong with the sun.  Unlike anyone else, however, he is correct.

Fiddleback would never admit it, except to a trusted friend, but he is writing a book about the shape of the sun in Tabernach.  He has been studying shadows and pinhole camera projections, which he believes to be safe.  (He is mostly correct.)  His has a folio full of drawings which can be used to piece together the shape of the sun, something that he has been hesitant to do (and rightly so).  With total knowledge comes total insanity.

Still, Fiddleback knows enough that the truth of the city's demise could be discovered in a library (one of the mansions holds a sufficient library) and the curse dispelled.

A Small Building

A shack near the docks contains a spread cowhide and a trio of sodden barrels, sprouting mushrooms.  The barrels were once filled with a small fortune (2000s) of pepper.  Now, the rot is so bad that only a small amount (100s) can be salvaged by a patient hand.

Another Small Building

A two-story house, the perimeter secured by strings and trip-wires.  It's filled with shoes, many still containing a foot.  The owner is Chapparung the Shoe-Thief.  He'll be back soon.  HD 3, unarmored, Axe 2d6.

The Temple

The paint has faded and at least one steeple has toppled, but it is still the most highly stylized building in the city.  It's composed of an outer building, a courtyard, and a small inner building.

The outer building holds a dozen small shrines and a central chamber of worship, all of which have been looted and defaced long ago.  The buildings only inhabitant is Gogo, a lonely who man who was unfairly driven from the prison because of his obsession with his own feces.  He's lived here peacefully for years, but has never ventured into the inner building, since he suffers terrible nightmares whenever he does so.

The inner building is a small sanctum.  There is a small pedestal where a larger statue once stood, but aside from that, the room is empty.  The only other thing to note is that the floor is made with pale tiles of rhyolite--an oddity in a city where absolutely every other stone is black basalt.

If the tiles are pried up, the ground beneath them discovered to be made from human bones, broken and mixed together.

If these bones are are removed (a process that takes about 10 hours of labor), a staircase is revealed, leading down into the basement level.  Every cubic centimeter of space is in the staircase and basement is filled with broken bones, from floor to ceiling.  Before even a mouse can explore the lower levels, the bones must be removed.

The process of clearing the bones takes about 1000 hours of labor.  The bones belonged to approximately 160,000 people.  The bones all appear to be of equal age, and all demographics are represented among them.

The Sun

The sun does not shine down on Tabernach.  Although the light is the same shade and intensity as the sun's light, it is something else entirely in the sky.

People who go down into the valley of Tabernach do so at night, and they do so quickly.

Those who see the sun (through a peephole, mirror, or even a pinhole camera) go insane.  Their first actions are usually to open all the windows, destroy any awnings, and encourage their friends to look at the sun as well.

Those who are seen by the sun suffer a worse fate.  They are snatched up, screaming into the sky as if by a giant hand.  Their remains are usually returned to the same area, usually within a few hours, and dismembered usually at the joints.  There is a great deal of variety in this process, though.

And there is one last oddity: all of the shadows in Tabernach are twinned, as if there were two light sources instead of one.  (The eyes of Satan, some say.)

Another common story is that there is an invisible giant prowling the city.

Another story, the one told by Mousehead, is that there is another sun behind the first.  And behind that second sun is another world--another planet, called the Opponent.  (This is known as the Heliocentric Heresy, since it is known that the sun orbits the earth, not the other way around.)

 But if there is such a thing as the Opponent, it would explain where the crawling men come from.

The Crawling Men

They exist only in rumor, and the rumor is this:

the crawling men are knights (or perhaps large beetles) with large, round heads.  They have long arms that allow them to move swiftly on all fours.  Their heads sag, either from the weight of their own skulls or because they are always searching the ground for scents.

The crawling men are accused of killing dogs, stealing weapons, poisoning food, and removing shade.  No crawling man has ever been killed, or any piece of their armor been recovered.

They may not exist.  In fact, they probably don't.  But if they did, they would have the following stats.

HD 2  Def plate  Rusted Sword 1d8
Move dwarf  Int 8  Mor 5

Bloodseeker - Crawling Men always know who has the least HP, and attack that target preferentially.

Skittish - As soon as someone is killed (either a PC or a crawling man), the crawling men will attempt to grab the person and flee.  This is the only time they will ever fly (as a giant beetle).  They will fly about 200' away to a place of relative safety, slit the person's belly open, and lap up their blood with their long tongues (which fit perfectly through the round mouthparts of their armor).  This process takes about 10 minutes, after which they will return to fight again.

A platter of fresh blood is irresistible to them.

The Exile

I'm writing another adventure.  It was a small idea but it's already spiraling out of "manageable" and into "I may never finish this".

Essentially: a sorcerer colonized a flying mountain and enslaved a bunch of people to work for him via mind-wipe collars.  A raiding party has killed (?) the sorcerer, and now his mind-slaves are snapping out of it.  (Because the fastest way to get a game started is to shout "all you have is your filthy clothing and amnesia".)

It's meant to be approached in two ways: either as a starting adventure for a bunch of level 1 characters, or as a continuing adventure for a bunch of established characters.

by Sergey Zabelin

Hook for Established Characters

On a cloudy mountain hex, clouds blow over a lonely precipice.  And out there, just beyond the lip, is a rope ascending into those same clouds.  The top of the rope disappears into unknown heights.  The tail of the rope swings in the wind, lazy circles a hundred feet across.

Hook for New Characters 

You realize that you are picking turnips.  You have been picking turnips for a long time.  You aren't sure how long.  You look around and notice that there are other people like you in the field.  They are sunburnt and wear burlap tunics.  Everyone seems as confused as you are.  Where are you, exactly?

Hex 1 - The Farm

Depressingly mundane.  Fields of grains and root vegetables.  There is a small field of mandrakes, but they are not obvious.  Chickens, cows, sheep.  The billy goat is a failed apprentice--he has human intelligence and is spiteful.

Expect a lot of shabby NPCs milling about.  People will be trying to take off their collars.  People will be examining each other, trying to make sense of the amputations and alchemical scars.  People will be searching faces, looking for a known face, a piece of context.  People will be weeping.

Some people will be angry.  They will want to set out, figure out who put collars on them, and force that person to take the collars off.

Some people will be scared.  They will want to remain on the farm until help comes.  They will build a Godhand in the yard and start walking devotional circles around it.  They will pray.  A nameless woman will begin preaching, and if the PCs don't intervene, the farm will become hostile and isolationist within a couple of days.

If you don't help fortify the farm, it'll be wiped out 5 days by the strongboys.

Hex 2 - The Elephant

You might encounter it as a wandering monster, but you'll definitely encounter it here, collapsed by the side of the well, shuddering as it tries to drink water.  It is damaged beyond easy repair.

It is wrapped in cerement, like a mummy.  Only its pale face pokes through the tarry bandages.  It sputters and gasps like a man, but it does not speak.  Its tusks are gold-banded, wrapped in runes.  Its two eyes are rheumy and vacant.

It will only open its third eye if it is heavily damaged (below half HP).  The third eye is an alien thing, bloodshot, spasmodic, and alert.  It gives the elephant a gaze attack: save vs (torsional) long bone fractures.

It's innards are made from scented wood (worth 500s) and elephant bones (a whole herd's worth).  It's heart is a canister of felfire, sealed with white lead.

Stats as an elephant, movement speed halved.

Hex 3 - The Windmills

A dozen of them, each one sitting atop a small mound.  There is no wind, only fog, and yet the windmills still turn lazily.  Close examination reveals that the windmills sit on turrets--they can rotate. 

Because of course they are not windmills at all, but propellers that move the flying island around.

Each windmill has a small hatch, but there is no obvious way to open them.  A crowbar and a chisel would be sufficient.  Alternatively, a brave PC could climb the vanes and enter through the top, descending along the driveshaft where they can open the hatch from the inside. 

The windmills connect to the Underground.

Hex 4 - A Hole Full of Clouds

It looks like a garbage pit from far away, but from up close you can see no bottom.  All you can see are the tops of clouds.

The hole is, in fact, the garbage pit for the farm.

The Exile

The name refers to Gormagog, and he is a mountain.  He was condemned by his brothers for an unspeakable crime, and the whole planet was in agreement that the most serious sentence should be enacted.

And so Gormagog was exiled--cast off from the planet where he had been born 30 million years ago.  His roots were all broken, his brow was bashed in, and he was banished into the air. 

Gormagog rose higher and higher with each passing day (the blink of an eye in geologic time) and would have plummeted all the way into the sun, had the sorcerer not intervened.  A contract was struck, and Gormagog was allowed to remain at 3000' feet, not exiled but imprisoned.

However, the death (?) of the sorcerer caused the death of the planet's covenant, and now the Exile is rising again.  If nothing is done, the flying island will fall all the way into space.

Wizards disagree with all of this, by the way.  They say that it is something to do with magnets.

(PCs will notice that it is getting colder each day.  They may even notice that the ground is getting farther a way.  There is a time limit on this scenario.)

Hex 5 - The Ranch

The Astromath enjoyed the charade of a simple country life.  His house is modeled after the type of rustic house that he claimed he grew up in.  (A lie he told even in his childhood.)

One story, ten rooms, with a small horse barn out back.  Big tree, swing set, tree house, pond, one-eyed cat. 

The golem is in the process of burying the sorcerer's family, three bloody figures arranged beside three open graves.  Soon it will begin repairing the burnt sections of the house.

The druids--the assassins--were all heaped unceremoniously in the back and burnt incompletely.  The golem is a clay man with fire roaring behind the cracks of his face, but he knows less about fire than a child.  (In fact, the golem knows nothing.)

The golem is not immediately aggressive, but one will be allowed into the house.  It knows if there are uninvited people in the house, and it will not permit them to stay.  In a way, this serves as a checkpoint for unequipped parties.

Golem
Level 6  Def 14  Fists 1d8/1d8
Move 10  Int 2*  Mor *

Immune to slashing and piercing damage.

Becomes inert if it is ever fully submerged in water (as this extinguishes the fire).  Dies if its shem rune is ever broken or damaged.  This golem's shem is located on the crown of its head, hidden beneath a metal servant's cap.

The interior of the house is simple, but elegant.  There are signs of violence.  The only survivor is Delilah, the third wife, a succubus bound to her circular, silver-framed bed.

Hex 6 - Dead Warriors

About half a dozen of them.  They were killed by the golem, their heads bashed, with the bloody pulp of the brain now attracting flies.  (It hasn't been long enough for maggots.)

They ascended the Exile via long ropes, originally anchored by druids who flew them up in bird form.  But the Exile has drifted, and those tropes are no longer a feasible means of escape.

Hex 7 - The Apprentice Tower

Currently under siege by a small woman and an enormous polar bear.  The woman wears tattered wolf-skins and wields a rusted sword.  She is a powerful druid, he is a powerful shapeshifter.  They are mated, and they came here to kill the sorcerer and free his slaves.

They do not know yet that their allies are dead, but they will not care much if/when they discover that fact.

Inside the tower are three apprentices, each armed with a single spell (light, sleep, and illusion) and a crossbow.  The bear has considered turning into a sparrow and flying in through the arrow slits, but is worried about what weapons the apprentices might have at their disposal.

They will all attempt to coerce the PCs to join them.  The apprentices know their histories and have a way to remove the collars.  The druids will argue that these are the same people that enslaved them.  They will tell the PCs that they should feign friendship to gain entrance, and then kill the young sorcerers in their sleep.  (It's not a bad plan.)

The tower is loaded with magical trinkets of dubious value.

None of them have any way of escaping the Exile.

Hex 9 - The Escaped Horses

They're all out here, rolling on the grass and looking for carrots.  They're happy out here, but wouldn't mind being led back.  It's getting late, and they know the value of a good stable.

Hex 8 - The Prism

A crystal the size of a three-story building.  Dusty, cracked, and crudely faceted. 

The Sorcerer uses it to import copies of items from adjacent universes.  Light is reflected off an item and onto a second mirror, where it is then bounced back and forth between the two mirrors.  Since a reflection imitates a form, and the form doesn't necessarily exist while the image persists, a paradox occurs and a new item is created.

Currently it is copying a burly man--the progenitor of the strongboys.  Every once in a while, a new strongboy will wander out of the prism, where he will be greeted with a new enslavement collar.

PCs who wander into the Prism will find that it is a fractal, with the same three rooms repeated endlessly.  Loot: crystal marbles (see 6 seconds into the future if swallowed) a mirror cocoon (essentially just a save-file for one of the PCs), and an infinite number of elemental arrows, each one a different element.

TODO

The wizard known as Nimbrot the Astromath.  I should probably explain what an astromath is, what's in the tunnels beneath the Exile, and how the PCs can escape.

Zak

I believe Mandy.  

If you're reading this blog, you're probably already familiar with the people that have come forward in condemned Zak, but just in case, here's Vikva, Patrick, Scrap, Cavegirl, Skerples, Fiona, Kiel, and Kenneth Hite.  

Add me to the list, I guess.  I'm cutting ties with Zak, and I encourage you to do the same.  

I've dragged my feet because Zak was one of the first people to welcome me to the OSR, and because of all of the good discussions that evolved around him.

Those are good traits, but it's possible to have a few good traits and many shitty ones.

Zak is a manipulator and a narcissist.  He is very good at arguing people down.  I'm not referring to anyone else's allegations--I'm saying this based on my personal experiences, and nothing else.

After Patrick's Fuck All of You post, I wrote a few thousand words condemning Zak's behavior.  I also talked to Zak about it, hearing his side of it, and he eventually talked me out of posting it.

So here's a quick recap of that unpublished post:

Zak likes to divide people into a binary of rational creatives and insane people who don't contribute anything useful.  This is ridiculous and reductive.

It's good to hold people accountable for their words, but Zak has taken that instinct to the extreme by demanding that everyone answers all his questions to his satisfaction, or else admit that you were trolling all along.  Also ridiculous.  

And lastly, he always insisted that rational speakers paid no attention to tone (since definitions of tone were variable), even when it dipped into arrogance and abuse.  Anyone who argued otherwise was doing so in bad faith.

He strives to turn conversations into a strict dialectic, with rules defined by himself.

Zak also wins many debates by sheer attrition.  At a certain point, you realize that it's just not worth sinking another hour into an internet argument.

. . . anyway.

What to do now?

If you believe Mandy (and the other victims): support them.  Say something.

If you want to hear Zak's side of it: here it is.  I don't believe it holds up, but you should still read it as part of the truth-seeking process.

If you want to talk to Zak directly, I don't recommend it.  Debate is his preferred battleground.  I'm not advocating that you don't seek out the full story--just recognize that Zak will distort and spin things.

If you are one of the gleeful trolls looking for an opportunity to shit on Zak: hold your fucking tongue.

If you are Zak: I dunno, man.  You've got a lot of good ideas in your head.  Stop viewing everything as a combat to be won.  There was a time when you were less aggressive, less controlling, and I think a lot of that online harm can be rectified someday.  (I can't speak about the offline actions.)

If you want to know more: click those links up in the second paragraph.

If you want to build a better OSR community: 

• This week's lesson is to never tolerate abusers.  More broadly, don't tolerate shitty people who are making your community worse.  The shittiness very quickly outweighs past actions and contributions.

• Hold people accountable for their statements.  Ask for sources.  Research your own claims.

• Cite sources.  Give people credit.  Especially artists.

• Post something.  Even if you don't think it's that good, I guarantee that it will be of use to *someone*.  Don't denigrate reviews or remixes--those are also extremely useful things.

• Talk to people that are writing stuff you are interesting.  Bang ideas together.  Collaborate on something.

• If you see something that sparks joy, reshare it.

• If an online comrade hasn't posted in a while, check in on them.  It helps keep the community alive, and even if it doesn't, everyone appreciates a friendly voice.  I'm not just a name at the bottom of a blog post--I'm a human.  And so is everyone else on your blogroll, on G+, and on Reddit.

I know G+ is dying soon, but we aren't.

And whatever strange form the OSR takes in the future, I know I want to be a part of it.