The Awakened

"We're nothing new.  We've always been here.  

YOU're the newcomers.  You're the animal that forgot that it was a man.  Stop crying, you animal, you sleepwalker!  If you opened your eyes for only an instant you would see that.  You're a race of amnesiacs, of dreaming children.  I said STOP CRYING!  You disgust me.  That's why I'm not going to explain anything else.  That's why you will die--screaming--without ever having truly woken up.  I will paint every inch of this floor with your blood."

-An Awakened, formerly Ms. Albright, speaking to Albert Frond, immediately before his murder

There are terrible truths in this world.  The unknown things that--perhaps--we are simply better off knowing.  This is especially true if the things that call themselves Awakened are speaking the truth.

The Mighty Plot Machine

They say that imitation is the easiest form of creativity.  I’m okay with that.  I'm copying this idea that I got from a bunch of blogs that I like.  It's a random plot generator.

http://metalvsskin.blogspot.co.nz/2012/11/the-plot.html
http://monstroustelevision.blogspot.co.nz/2012/11/grotesque-horror-plot-generator.html
http://monstermanualsewnfrompants.blogspot.com/2012/12/plot-generator-from-planet-best-ever.html

I think I totally succeeded in making the stupidest one.  My plot is the thickest!  You'll never have to think of a plot again.  This generator also works if you are trying to name an NPC as long as they have a Native American-y name that's just a bunch of nouns and adjectives strung together.

Non-Euclidean Architecture

Introduction

Non-Euclidean Architecture is how you build places using non-Euclidean geometry (Wikipedia's got a great article about it.)  Basically, the fun begins when you begin looking at a system where Euclid’s fifth postulate isn’t true.  When that happens, you are talking about a system where parallel lines don’t remain the same distance from each other.

Two basic ways of describing Non-Euclidean spaces: are elliptic and hyperbolic.

In elliptic geometry, two parallel lines will eventually curve towards each other (think of the outline of a football).  Space iscurved, and the degree of that curvature affects how long it takes the parallel lines to intersect, and what angle they make when they do.

In hyperbolic geometry, the opposite is true.  Space is curved the other way.  Parallel lines move further away and will never intersect, only grow farther apart.

Non-Euclidean geometry is weird because it looks like normal space as we know it on the local level, but on the global level it is much different.

Here's an example of "locally normal, globally weird": The globe can be a non-Euclidean space if we assume that the surface of it is actually flat.  A man standing at the equator travels to the north pole.  He turns 90 degrees to the right and travels back to the equator.  He turns 90 degrees to the right again and travels back to where he began.  If you map it out, he has made a three-sided figure with three 90 degree angles.  He has made a three-sided square!  If the surface of the Earth were actually flat, the man would be in a non-Euclidean geometry, probably running from eldritch abominations that he discovered at the north pole.

Actually, most physicists believe that we already live in a non-Euclidean space.  Like how the surface of the Earth is 2-D locally (and squares are squares) but exists in a 3-D space (and three right angles make a triangle), the universe is probably 3-D locally (where cubes are cubes) but 4-D globally (and cubes are not cubes).

The Pillar Room

How to apply this to a tabletop game?  I like to introduce it with the Pillar Room.

Imagine you go into a normal room with a square pillar in the middle.  You walk 360 degrees around the pillar, noting that it has four sides with 90 degree angles for the corners, and you are back at where you started.  Sound good?  That's a normal room.

But what if it took more than 360 degrees to get back to where you started?  What if you had to go around it twice, and it took 720 degrees to get back to the door?  Picture this: the party enters the pillar room from the only door (on the S wall).  The rogue decides to walk around the pillar and look around, but when the rogue gets back to the S side of the room, the party is gone.  The rogue can still hear the party asking him why he's hiding behind the pillar (the sound is bouncing off of both of the N walls) but he can’t see them.  In fact, the door is gone too, even though he is on the S side of the room.  Of course, he has only to walk 360 degrees in either way around the pillar in order to get back to them.

With non-Euclidean architecture, a 10’x10’ room can hold 200 sq. ft.

You might notice that this looks a lot like hyperspace, having many things occupy the same space.  In fact, the room I just described could be duplicated by putting a discrete, two-way portal from the pillar to the middle of the north wall.  This portal would lead to an identical room (that doesn’t have a door or any party members in it).  By walking around the pillar, the rogue walked through the portal into the identical room and didn’t even notice it.  But another 360 degrees around the pillar and he’ll be home.

But that’s still simple stuff.

What if it was 270 degrees to go around the pillar to get back to the starting point?  The rogue would go ¾ of the way around the pillar before getting back to the party, even though the pillar has square corners.  In fact, the rogue could stand in the NW corner of the room (after leaving the party on the S wall) and see the party in two places.  And the party could see the rogue in two places.  Note that they aren’t seeing copies, they’re actually seeing the rogue from two directions because space is curved and parallel lines meet here.  This is an elliptic geometry, and the apparently square room has three corners.  This 10’x10’ room has an area of 75 sq. ft.

If it was 180 degrees around the pillar, the pillar would be a two-sided square, and the rogue could do weird things like shoot himself in the back as he peers around a corner.  Highly elliptical spaces get weird fast, and I'll cover them in the next sub.

What if space was highly hyperbolic?  What if you had to walk around the pillar 10 times before you got back to where you started?  A 10’x10’ room on your dungeon map suddenly has 1000 sq. ft. in it (and the square pillar has 40 sides).

What if you put two of these pillars in the same room and called it a maze?  Depending on how the party twisted and turned around the two pillars, they could get very lost, and end up very far away from the door that they entered.  A 10’x20’ with two pillars could be . . . hell, as big as you want it, with as many branches as you feel like mapping.  If you put a monster in a smallish 2-pillar maze, the party will probably be less than 20’ away from the monster at any given time.  It'll be roaring like a giant garbage disposal and the party will be screaming like cheerleaders, but neither the party nor the monster will know how to reach each other (since the noise is coming from all the different paths to the other party).  Spooky, huh?

Fun Tip: When trying to map simple hyperdimensional mazes, just think of each center of the room as a single location.  Then just figure out where each of the four directions takes you (each direction around each of the pillars) and which location it leads you to.  Just because it confuses the hell out of your players doesn’t mean it has to confuse you.

Time to think big.

Don’t be afraid to extrapolate the pillar room to the whole dungeon.  Maybe a spin around the pillar takes them to a very similar dungeon—the party might not realize that they’re in a different one for a while, nor will they realize that the pillar can take them back.

Or picture a main room between two pillars, as in the two-pillar maze.  Depending on where you are in the maze, the central room can have different themes or purposes.  With the price of real estate the way it is, you can fit a 20-room dungeon in a 50'x50' area.

The pillar doesn’t have to be a pillar, either.  It can be a square hallway, where the party must travel around it three times to get back to where they started.  (This hallway has 3 north halls, 3 east halls, 3 south halls, and 3 west halls.)  It can be a hole that party jumps down into a pool of water.  It can be an arch or a mousehole.  It can be a building where the windows lead somewhere the front door doesn't.  It can be a gazebo.

Lastly, you finally have some justification for making some truly nonsensical maps.  If five (90 degree) left turns equal a right turn, you are allowed to put two rooms in the same space and confound logical attempts at map-making.

Interfacing Non-Euclidean Spaces with Euclidean Ones

You can’t.  As soon as you start trying to put three-sided squares onto your battlemap, you’re going to run into problems.  Technically, you should be mapping those sorts of spaces with weird tessellations and not graph paper.

But Non-Euclidean spaces can work well in confined starships and dungeons, where there are a limited number of ways into and out of a room.  You can have a lot of fun mapping out a room with Non-Euclidean geometry.  The trick is to remember is that they are Euclidean locally (squares still look like squares), but not on a bigger scale (a big enough squares doesn't have 4 sides anymore).

Start simple.  Maybe one lap around the pillar room leads to a hallway that curves a different way than the hallway you you came from, and leads to a different area.  Maybe clockwise turns lead you into older and older iterations of the ship, until after four turns, it dead-ends, and you are left in a decrepit corpse of a starship (and maybe the turns took you back in time, if you want to get stupid).

And if your party starts hacking at the walls between non-Euclidean space and Euclidean space. . . well, breaking the things that keep an impossible object in our universe can’t be a good thing.  Options for the discriminating DM include (but are not limited to):  Explosions (hyperbolic spaces), Implosions (elliptical spaces), Sucking Vortexes, Sentient Itches, Cthulhu, etc.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Random Weather Table

Mundane Weather (95% of the time)

	SUNNY WEATHER	RAINY WEATHER
1-3	Still	Overcast
4-6	Breezy	Light Rain
7	Gusty	Heavy Rain
8	Windy	Thunderstorm

If the weather was sunny yesterday, it has an 80% chance to be sunny today.
If the weather was rainy yesterday, it has a 50% chance to be sunny today.
If it's cold outside, the rain is snow.
If it's dry outside, there is no rain and treat Heavy Rain and Thunderstorm as Duststorm.

Weird Weather (5% of the time)

1	Acid Rain	16	Stone Rain
2	Painted Rain	17	Reverse Stone Rain
3	Noxious Rain	18	Rain of Horror
4	Reverse Rain	19	Rain of Worms
5	Hallucinatory Sky	20	Rain of Slimes
6	Blackness	21	Rain of Meat
7	Insanity Sun	22	Rain of Knives
8	Sun Invasion	23	Rain of Vermin
9	Distant Space	24	Rain of Gasoline
10	Thick Air	25	Rain of Soot
11	Antigravity	26	Rain of Noise
12	Low Gravity	27	Rain of Rage
13	Empty Wind	28	Blasphemous Clouds
14	Hungry Fog	29	Burning Clouds
15	Drunken Fog	30	Roll 2x

All weird weather is preceded by something indicative.  Strange looking clouds, “squirming” in the sky (or behind it), chaotic droning from the sky, etc.  Weird weather doesn’t come as a surprise, and you usually get 1d4 hours warning.  It lasts for 1d6 hours, unless indicated otherwise.

Acid Rain corrodes metal, wears down stone, ruins cloth, kills fish, and does 1d6 damage per minute if you are caught in it.  More damage afterwards, too, if you don’t get that stuff off your clothing and skin. 

Antigravity pillars roam over the land like searchlights from mars (which they might be).  Things caught in the beams fall upwards for 3d20 seconds before falling back down.  Cars are dropped on buildings.  Schoolchildren pepper their playground like a dozen dropped eggs.  Smart folks hang out in their basement and tie themselves to the floor.

Blackness.  No sun.  No moon.  No stars.  It’s as dark as being in a cave.  Up above, you can hear slow sliding noises, like someone is sandpapering a square mile of elephant skin.  And there are things reaching down, extinguishing the bonfires and the lights, clustered so tightly in the sky that no light gets through.

Blasphemous Clouds!  Deformed, inhuman faces appear in the clouds and rain down booming indictments, blasphemies, and profanities.  20% chance they tell embarassing/horrific secrets from one of the PCs past.  20% chance they tell horrible lies about one of the PCs.  Wasps fly down and sting people who talk back to the clouds.  The clouds say whatever will disturb people the most: dead baby jokes, mockeries of god, homoerotic poetry. . . whatever will make the most children cry.

Burning Clouds!  The clouds turn red, roiling masses of angry cinders.  20% chance it rains fire.  20% chance it rolls along the ground like asshole fog.

Distant Space.  Oh wow.  For 1d6 hours, it looks like the Earth has been teleported to some distant part of the universe.  5% chance bathed in the warmth of another sun, 95% chance the temperature drops 10 degrees F per hour.  Independent 10% chance of deadly meteor shower.

Drunken Fog!  This fog is way more fun than the hungry fog!  Everyone it touches gets wicked drunk!  Chance for alcohol poisoning is low, but don’t drive a car.  The police try to pull people over but they drive into ditches.  Sometimes bad stuff attacks, ‘cuz it knows that everyone sucks at fighting back.

Empty Wind!  If this wind blows on a living creature, it will be transported into the future!  D6: 1-2 is 1d6 rounds / 3-4 is 1d6 hours / 5 is 1d20 days / 6 is 1d6 months.  There is a 10% chance that this wind will be ethereal, and will blow through walls, affecting everyone.  Transported creatures arrive naked, covered in sunburns, and smelling like campfire.

Hallucinatory Skies are completely harmless, but they are freaky.  D6: 1 - fleshy eyes and faces peering down / 2 – warped vision so that you can see over the horizon and appear to be in the bottom of a bowl / 3 – planet appears to be spinning at 1000x the normal rate (nauseating if you watch it) / 4 – flickering sheets like grey membranes shot through with pulsing yellow veins / 5 – bright light and an orchestral roar, temperature raises 10 degrees F / 6 – clouds appears to be animals fighting/fucking/running, etc.

Hungry Fog!  The fog comes in on little cat feet, a hungry stomach, and sucking tendrils like giant hungry elephant trunks.  Hide and seek as the fog breaks down doors and windows, trying to suck you into its central stomach, where you will be held above the ground, paralyzed, slowly whirled around, and digested in layers.  Lasts 1d6 hours, and usually leaves piles of bones, shoeleather, and keychains in the town square.

Insanity Sun.  The sun shrinks down into a tiny pinpoint of bluish-white light, although its still brighter than a full moon.  Everyone who looks at anything illuminated by this watery light, even for a second, goes stark, staring mad and will mumble about “the people behind the sun”.  Unless they make their save.  Town is full of people with blindfolds on, and other people trying to rob them.

Low Gravity!  Like, 1/10 of normal!  It’s like being on the moon!  You can jump really far!  Waves look really cool!  You suck at throwing things because they don’t arc the way they should!  Running is difficult without traction!  Lasts for 1d20 * 10 minutes, and then whops back to normal.

Noxious Rain causes vomiting and mutation if you get more than a few drops on you.  Save negates.  It looks like thin, golden brown fluid that smells like a pile of goats that died of dysentery last week.  Use your favorite mutation table.  Afterwards, brown mushrooms grow out of everything that isn't metal.

Painted Rain comes down in different colors.  D6: red / orange / yellow / green / blue / purple.  Mostly harmless, but the green one causes mercury poisoning and the blue one causes hallucinations.  Surfaces (and people) will stain that color until it is washed off.

Rain of Gasoline! A very bad time to have a cigarette craving.  This is why we don’t have wooden buildings anymore.  Inevitably, a fire starts by the end of it.  Air quality = shit.  Sewers, waterways, rivers, lakes, ocean runoffs will all become infernos.  Afterwards, oil stains and ashy smudges.

Rain of Horror! Roll a d6: skulls / skeletons / heads / headless corpses / garbage / ectoplasmic ghost guys that crawl around moaning piteously before dying.  20% chance that this stuff comes to life and attacks everyone.

Rain of Knives! Actually just pieces of really sharp ice.  D4: 1 – icicles / 2 – ninja star snowflakes / 3 – no physical knives but things just start getting cut / 4 – totally metal knives, I lied about the ice.

Rain of Meat!  Most of these are bitesize, but roll d20 * 100 to see how heavy the biggest chunk of meat is (in pounds).  20% of the meat is recognizable, 20% of the meat is poisonous, 20% of the meat looks pre-chewed.  A lot of carnivores slouch in from the hills.  Slorgs go into gluttony mode.  Afterwards, everyone makes bonfires.  Alternatively, fly swarms next week like Moses hates you.

Rain of Noise! Metal rods fall from the sky and vanish upon hitting the ground.  Each one sounds like a gong, or an off-balance washing machine, or a destruction derby, or a rhino in a china shop, or two skeletons fucking on a tin roof.  Conversation is impossible.  Cover your ears or save vs deafness.

Rain of Rage!  Blood rains from the sky!  Anyone who gets it in their eyes or mouth flips out in a murderous rage!  They kill their loved ones first!  All recorded music is temporarily replaced with Cannibal Corpse!  Even U2!  After the rain stops, affected people make a save to avoid being rageful forever!

Rain of Slime! Globs of carnivorous slime.  Tough to kill, but sunlight, fire, cold, and salt destroy it.  Normally immobile, but if it eats enough (falls on an unlucky herd of cattle), then giant blobs rampage through town eating people.

Rain of Soot!  Hot ashes and soot rain from the sky!  1d6 feet of it!  1 damage per round if you are caught out there.  Afterwards, snowplows and choking hazards.

Rain of Vermin! D6 frogs / locusts / lice / snakes / minnows / rats.  50% chance that the vermin are a new species.  50% chance that they all share a specific deformity (no eyes, no mouth, no head, two heads, no limbs, spider limbs, etc).

Rain of Worms! Most of these are just 3” long carnivorous worms, but roll a d4 * d4 to see how big the largest ones are (in feet).  These are stormworms, with mouths like rotary electric razors and skin in big leathery flaps.  They take minimal damage from falling.  They mostly devote their energy to eating each other, and afterwards people make hunting parties.  Like a lot of these weird weather effects, looting and burglary are rampant.

Reverse Rain pulls water from the surface up into the clouds.  If a creature isn’t indoors or underwater or something, they take 1 damage per minute as they desiccate painfully.  Pink clouds form over crowds of people who are losing a lot of blood.  Green clouds form over forests.  Most clouds formed this way are yellowish brown.

Reverse Stone Rain!  Pieces of rock break off of everything and fly into space.  Buildings look like bites are being taken out of them by invisible rats.  Your exposed skin with also break off in fingernail-sized servings and fly away.  1d6 damage per round after your clothing is gone (shouldn't take more than a couple of rounds).

Stone Rain!  Stay indoors.  Mostly pebbles, but sometimes fist-sized stones and 1d4 boulders!

Sun Invasion.  There isn’t just one sun.  There are hundreds.  Of all colors and sizes.  Swelling, swarming, and eating each other.  Sometimes things outside spontaneously combust for no reason.  Temperature raises 20 degrees F.

Thick Air.  The air has the consistency of water.  Breathing is exhausting.  Old people die.  Guns and engines don't work.  Fish swim out of the ocean and through the air.  When the weather ends, all the fish swimming over dry land drop and die, gasping faces mouthing the word “Why??????”.  The fish all die looking betrayed.

What's That Noise?

What is this blog about?  I'm not too sure about that myself.  I play a lot of DnD, and I think about a lot of DnD.  So, one reason to have this blog is to have a place to put my thoughts in order.  Another reason is to share with the internet-people.

I have three settings.

Centerra is the stereotypical fantasy setting.  All the unicorns are rotting abominations, the richest person on the planet is a dragon merchant, and psychic dragons control the dreamscape from a vast subterranean ocean.  Some of the highest level things around are orcs.  You can climb to the moon by climbing its dangling tail.  Most of the world is monotheistic, and worships Iasu, the blue-winged angel.  The calendar starts in the Time of Fire and Madness, when everything was on fire and everyone was insane.  Pretty standard fare.

Magic is rare, there are no apparent gods, no teleports, resurrection, or even undead in the normal sense.  I'd call it gritty fantasy if there wasn't so much weird shit in it.  Themes are cliche-punting, transformation, subtle post-apocalypse, evil humanity, sex, and decay.  I also try to keep it "hard fantasy", where everything is internally consistent and makes strict sense given the laws of the world.  Which makes it hard to fit all of the gonzo shit in, but that's why I have other settings.

Duscuro is infested with gods and flirting with aliens.  Formerly a "nature reserve" established by vast and ancient (but still mostly human) powers, the planet was guaranteed to remain in a natural, uncivilized state because 1) the humans were engineered to be idiots, 2) dragons were engineered to wreck everyone's shit as soon as people started stacking bricks, and 3) there's a set of immortal fleshbrain death satellites ringing the world that will drop lasery sky-death as soon as there is any deviation from the accepted norm.  All of these failsafes failed spectacularly very quickly, and part of the campaign consists of figuring out why.

Gods are tangible, accessible rulers, who speak through wooden manikins.  They rule city-states like kings, not some distant ethos.  One of them, the god of warfare and agriculture, exists on the material plane like any other schmuck in order to better enjoy the things he loves.  The gods wage wars against each other in order to stamp out the loser's religion and absorb their portfolios.  All of this takes place under a pair of binary suns that cause four-year winters when the colder sun revolves in front of the warm sun.  This is bad, because there are tribes of things in the mountains--half of them are undead, half of them are alive, but you'd need a doctor to tell the difference--who get all Genghis Khan when it gets cold, and start trampling cities under their ultra-mammoths made from normal mammoth corpses.

Noxious America is 1930's America forty years after the fall of humanity due to sudden, cataclysmic immigration of "gods" from tentacled dimensions  It's a mix of Lovecraft and maybe even pokemon and noir. And definitely a lot of Americana.  But it's not post-apocalyptic.  Humanity has fallen, but other things have risen in their place.  It's a time of optimism, dance halls, gangsters, speakeasies, gnashing death, droning abysms of madness, and writhing degeneration in dark corners.  From Satan's gigantic, poisonous corpse in Arizona to Skethriman Scolex's combustible corpulence hovering over Fatland.  It's last call for the human race, before the doors lock behind us and we face the night.

We're pretty sure it's Satan's corpse, anyway.  That's just what everyone calls it.

It's the least developed of all my settings, and also the one I'm most into right now.

Other Things might also appear on this blog, including but not limited to: engineering, architecture, art, fiction, and stupid things that North Korea does.