Running Cult of Undeath, Part II

• A well-loved professor, Alpon Lechfeld has died in what appears to be an accident—although there are some suspicious clues that cannot rule out foul play.  For the sake of getting the game going, I'm going to tell the PCs that they've all been asked to be pallbearers and are named as (minor) heirs in his will.  He'll give them a few things, but most of his fortune is left to his daughter Revecca.
• Ghosts are appearing in town, threatening (or at least frightening) many residents, that can be traced to a haunted and abandoned ruin of a former prison.  Why are they leaving their normal territory? (linked to the murder above.)
• A rampaging Frankenstein-monster is blamed for some more townsfolk murders.  This, and the ghosts, are probably happening at the same time, so nobody knows which is responsible.
• A mob of townsfolk wants to exhume Lechfeld and "put down his corpse"—of course, it turns out that someone has already exhumed him and dismembered his corpse, as well as apparently eaten some other recently dead in the graveyard.  Notably, an amulet that he was buried with is missing.  Revecca suggests that this amulet kept the ghosts in check in some way; if it's gone, that explains their extraordinary aggressiveness.
• The Frankenstein monster was a creation of Lechfeld himself in an extremely foolhardy experiment years ago, and it has come into town looking for him when he stopped visiting.  It really is a monster, though, not some misunderstood something or other—he's killed numerous townsfolk viciously.
• The ghosts have to be put down (salt and burn their remains) in their haunted house.
• The professor's beautiful and friendly and otherwise hopefully quite sympathetic daughter, is missing.  Gigantic wolf-paw prints and other hints of that nature surround the area she was last seen.
• Her kidnappers are, indeed, werewolves from the Bitterwood, and they've taken her to Innsburough.
• To follow up, the werewolves may have to be confronted in the Bitterwood, though.  They're too good at covering their tracks to be followed to Innsborough.
• The Black Path has Revecca in their grasp, and want to sacrifice her on the Devil's Reef by Otto von Szell, the manorial lord of the Innsborough territory.
• Revecca knows enough about her father's amulet to use it as a key to enter the sealed tomb of Grozavest.  This ability is related to its ability to suppress undead activity in some way.  But Otto von Szell had his own ideas, and wanted to call up some undersea daemon (Typhon?) to destroy his rivals in the Black Path.  Namely, Grigore Stefanescu.
• Stefanescu steals Revecca and her father's amulet, either from the PCs if they've rescued her, or from von Szell if for some reason they don't.  Maybe it's a ghoul group that actually carries out the abduction?  Ghouls from Dragomiresti seems like a good way to bring that into play.
• The ghouls take Revecca to Grozavest, where Stefanescu foolishly intends to "rescue" a Primogenitor sealed in with Melek Taus, thinking that by so doing, he will gain a champion capable of dealing with any of the other noble houses.

Ideally, this would be interwoven and run concurrently with the ghost business from Part I.  The Beast of the Ebenbach Road is more apt to attack travelers on the road between Mittermarkt and Ebenbach than to attack people in either location.  It's a ravenous flesh golem, looking for its creator, and obviously not being able to find him, since his creator is Lechfeld himself, and he's dead.  

What are flesh golems like in CULT OF UNDEATH (or DARK•HERITAGE for that matter?)  For the real low-down, read "Herbert West: Reanimator" by Lovecraft; written as a deliberate parody or pastiche of Frankenstein.  That's what we're going for here.  (If you haven't ever read that before, you should, even if you don't care what I think about flesh golems.  It's a pretty cool story.  Funny that Lovecraft himself was never happy with it.  He hated that he was required to write it in a serial format with a cliffhanger at the end of each installment, which was not his normal style.)  In Mary Shelley, the golem was a sad, pitiable philosopher.  In "Herbert West" they're savage monsters who would likely try to eat you if they noticed you.

The golem has attacked a few travelers on the road over the last few days, but now its breaking into homes or barns or something in Mittermarkt.  People are dead, and their bodies gnawed on and partially eaten.  The mob gets kicked up trying to figure out what's going on—or at least to find someone to blame and lynch.

Here's the golem stats, from the monster list:

GOLEM, FLESH: AC: 16 HD: 4d12 (28 hp) AT: slam +8 (2d6+4) STR: +8, DEX: -2 MND: -3 S: Immune to most forms of magical attack.  Regular weapons do only half damage.  Fire (magical or mundane) does 2x damage. 

The stitched together remains of human(oids) given an evil unlife by foul magic.  Flesh golems are notoriously tough and difficult to kill, although luckily they are very rare, and the research into the creation of one is usually punishable by death in most civilized lands.

The Beast, when put down, has fragments of notes on golem creation in its pockets—in Alpon Lechfeld's own hand, and prominently mentioning his name.  And yeah; turns out he had a bit of a reputation as a macabre eccentric, prowling graveyards, and whatnot.  While it had been seen as part of his research, he's now universally decried as a necromancer, and the cause of these attacks—both by the ghosts and by the Beast—and the mob wants to exhume him to (at the very least) make sure that he's really, truly dead.  Maybe treat him like a vampire; behead him and stuff his mouth with garlic, or burn his body, or something.

There's a major clue when he's unearthed; his body has been dismembered, they find that other graves in the cemetery have also been raided (and partially eaten.)  Most importantly, Revecca notes that an amulet that he was insistent in his will be buried with him is missing.  Revecca knows something about this amulet, and suggests that it was the key that was holding back the haunts; now that it's missing, that's why they're all going crazy.

Of course, the PCs may insist that the body not be exhumed.  They may take no interest in what the villagers do, on the other end of the spectrum.  I'm always hesitant to have the next step of the adventure hinge on them finding some clue that they may not find, and may not even be interested in looking for.  So, they don't have to.  The townsfolk will probably eventually get around the PCs and dig up the body, and then rumors will reach their ears.  The next phase is Revecca being kidnapped, and if they don't have any knowledge of the amulet, well they can still move forward without knowing that.  They can find out about the amulet some other way.  Heck; if the PCs don't do anything heroic, maybe someone else can; I think it'd be funny if a bunch of flat on their asses PCs are dinking about around town and another group of bounty hunters or adventurers show up with the amulet that they rescued from a pack of ghouls leaving town, and they're bringing it back as a gesture of good will.

This is the beauty of adventure planning by focusing on "what will the NPCs do, unless interrupted by the PCs?"  It doesn't require the PCs to do anything if they don't really want to.  But the world goes on without them doing it, or goes on while they're chasing after red herrings somewhere else, or while they're distracted by some other whatever.  If they want to do that, they can.  The NPCs just keep putting their plans in motion all the easier.

What are some other potential encounters or avenues that the PCs might chase down?  They might try to track the amulet thieves, which as noted, are a pack of ghouls—probably 8-10 of them.  

GHOUL: AC: 13 HD: 2d6 (8 hp) AT: claws or bite +2 (1d6) STR: +2, DEX: +0, MND: -1, S: touch paralyzes for 1d4 rounds, humans wounded by ghouls are cursed if they fail a MND + level check (DC 12) and will slowly turn into ghouls themselves.  This process involves taking 1 point of MND damage every day (which does not heal overnight) until they reach -5, at which point the conversion is complete.  GM may provide antidote/remedy to counter this curse. 

Formerly humans, who fell prey to daemonic, cannibal rituals, and were transformed via blackest necromancy into feral, subhuman monsters that endure endless hunger for human(oid) flesh.  Their most fearsome ability is their tendency to spread their curse to those who survive their attacks.

Ghouls are nasty opponents for lower level PCs.  You might want to have a notion in your back pocket of how the PCs can find some way to deal with the ghoul curse if they follow up with this.  Either that, or the survivors will have to ruthlessly put down their former comrades when they turn into ghouls themselves.  Harsh.

If they're really harsh, they might end up fighting against the mob of townsfolk, although if they do that, they'll find that they've worn out their welcome very quickly, assuming that they don't get killed. Regular human civilians aren't tough, but when there's thirty of them, maybe a couple of old veterans, and they have big mean dogs too, they can be trouble to a party of low level PCs.  And even if they kill and/or chase off the mob, then they'll have to deal with the sheriff and his deputies.

HUMAN, TOWNSFOLK: AC: 11 HD: 1d6 (4 hp) AT: weapon +0 (1d6), STR: +0, DEX: +0, MND: +0 

HUMAN, VETERAN OR DEPUTY: AC: 12 HD: 1d10 (6 hp) AT: weapon +1 (1d6) STR: +2, DEX: +0, MND: +0 

HUMAN, SHERIFF: AC: 14 HD: 3d6 (12 hp) AT: weapon +3 (1d6), STR: +2, DEX: +2, MND: +2 

DOG: AC: 12 HD: 2d6 (8 hp) AT: bite +2 (1d6) STR: +2, DEX: +1, MND: -3

Anyway, there's also the possibility of some countryside exploration as they're looking around for clues.  Like I said earlier, interweave all of these things with the ghost stuff I mentioned in Part I, and this can be a plenty busy few nights of role-playing.

After Cult of Undeath?

Although I'm not done, of course, I'm nevertheless really quite happy with the CULT OF UNDEATH project and how it's turned out.  Much of that was the fact that CULT OF UNDEATH led to FANTASY HACK, so it is the inspiration that I needed to actually create my own version of "D&D" that perfectly meets my D&D needs.  And with the crazy summer coming to a close, maybe I'll actually find time to run this thing for someone in the fall.  So, the whole thing is rather timely, in spite of the many months in which the project sat without any updates at all.

But CULT OF UNDEATH is coming to a close soon.  Oh, sure—I need to do about 5-6 posts where I put some more detail behind the rest of the bullet points in my revised adventure summary.  And I'll probably do more setting development of Timischburg to make it more "hexcrawlable", as well as just for its own sake because setting development is fun.  But, it's largely done.  And it was successful enough for me that I need to think about what I want to do next.  Is there another adventure path that I might want to condense into something that resembles what I've done with CULT OF UNDEATH?  Yeah, probably.

Strange Aeons is probably the one that's most up my alley (honestly, it would probably have been even more up my alley than Carrion Crown if I'd started CULT OF UNDEATH a year later than I did.  Sure; it's got a lot of issues, as near as I can tell, but so did Carrion Crown.  It would have been interesting if CULT OF UNDEATH had been all along CULT OF THE KING IN YELLOW or something.  But it wasn't.  And this is a poor choice as a follow-up to CULT OF UNDEATH for a couple of reasons.  Not least of which is that I don't have the Strange Aeons books.  Plus, it's got too many thematic similarities to CULT OF UNDEATH, and would presumably take place in Timischburg as well, whereas I'd like to develop something a little different.

I gave some thought to the old Dungeon Magazine adventure paths; Shackled City, Age of Worms, etc.—but if the Paizo adventure paths are too long and involved, these are even worse.  They tend to be nearly twice as long as the Paizo ones (although I haven't ever tried to figure out if the page-count of actual adventure in the Paizo modules compares or not) and they also tend to be uber-D&Dish (fighting D&D demon lords and stuff.)

No, the two that are my most likely targets are Legacy of Fire and Serpent's Skull.  Because both of them start veering into strange directions that are not really what I'd want to do, significant pruning will probably be required.  Heck; maybe either of them can be improved by grafting something else into them as well; either elements of some other AP, or some stand-alone module of some source, or just plain old new ideas.

For instance, although Skull & Shackles isn't really one that I'd be interested in doing anytime soon, I've got to admit that this damsel in distress is a compelling character.  Fantasy adventure games could use more scantily clad hot pirate-themed chicks.

What is "epic fantasy?"

Over on Vox Popoli there's a post with rather vigorous discussion on what exactly "epic fantasy" means.  I've never really given it too much thought, because I thought it was just fantasy with an adjective.  Fantasy is "properly" divided into High Fantasy vs. Sword & Sorcery, and now the new category of urban fantasy; everything else is defined by how close it hews to one or more of those three poles.  And most people who use the term epic fantasy use it interchangeably with High Fantasy.  But maybe that's not fair, and Vox has come up with what he considers epic fantasy, with the following traits:

1. Secondary World, not alternate reality or real world with fantasy elements
2. Assumed adult audience (not YA)
3. Epic scope
4. Length (the trilogy as the kind of "minimum" seems to be the trend—no doubt thanks to Tolkien.)
5. Multiple perspective point of view characters.

This does narrow it down considerably; whereas Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions is High Fantasy, it fails to be epic because it's not that long (less than 200 pages) and only has a single point of view character (Holger Carlson.)  Also; given that Holger is a real world character in a semi-fictional world, it falters a bit on the first point as well.

Curiously, with this highly constrained definition, there aren't really that many works of note that qualify.  This led to, as you'll see if you follow the link, the notion that a lot of authors who are generally considered hacks by fans at large getting surprisingly high rankings.  Of course, his opinion of who is or isn't a hack may differ from mine or yours, but the point is that finding authors who's work qualifies is relatively difficult, actually.

I'm not going to attempt to make a list, because I've not read many of the guys in the field, or I've given up in disgust on several (Brooks, Goodkind, Donaldson, Erikson, Martin, Abercrombie, Jordan, etc.—although often for different reasons.  He also doesn't list Phillip Pullman, but I gave up on his works in disgust too.)

I will say, though—I'm not necessarily surprised that David Eddings was rated fairly highly.  He did kind of become a parody of himself after a while, but the original Belgariad series is still a fun read, and pretty masterfully constructed.  Donaldson I could never get very into, mostly because the most significant point of view character, Thomas Covenant himself, was such an unlikable douche-bag that I hated it.  Even he admits that he ranked it highly more because it was a difficult work to pull off rather than because he necessarily liked it.  I'm a little less inclined to be charitable on the merits of books that I dislike.  I'm glad to see Raymond Feist getting some love; the original first few books, before it dragged out into self-parody again, plus unlikable characters who reflect the non-values of liberals and bohemians start to become all too common after a while (why is it that so many modern writers are so contemptuous of actual heroes, anyway?)

I also think the original Dragonlance Chronicles merit a place.  They're actually not bad, and they were supremely influential.  He actually calls the Legends trilogy even better, but I never read that one.  Maybe I should?  Someone asked why, if he's going to include that one, he doesn't have the Salvatore Driz'zt stuff, which is a valid question, I think.  It is, by that definition, also epic fantasy.

For that matter, in the world of shared world spec fiction, there's a lot more examples.  There are epic fantasy cycles within the Black Library corpus, and elsewhere in the D&D or Pathfinder corpus—although often the scope fails to rise to the occasion, I presume.  Mike Lee's Nagash Trilogy, and the whole End Times project (which is admittedly written by multiple authors) qualify as well. (I really need to finish reading those...)

Anyway, I find that I'm giving some thought to this concept.  Epic Fantasy may be among the most difficult fiction to write, because you have to write a lot of it for it to count, you've got to juggle lots of plot threads and lots of point of view characters, etc.  It's no wonder that not very many people do it well.  Even the successful guys who sell tons of books (Robert Jordan, George "Rape Rape" Martin) tend to drop the ball.  

I've also found myself wondering if Steven Erikson was ever able to sort out his crippling flaws as a writer and make anything of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series.

Anyway, yeah—this is kind of a rambly post, referencing someone else's post.  Not the best of material.  Hey, not every post can be a winner.  This one is what we call a punt.  I've been given something to think about, because I've been avoiding epic fantasy, mostly, for some time.  Maybe I should give more of it a try.

As a totally separate aside; I did fairly recently read A Throne of Bones, the first book in the epic fantasy series by Vox Day himself.  He's right, even if it is just him saying so.  It's quite good.  I picked up the second book while it was free briefly a month or so ago, but I'm not going to attempt to read it until it's actually the complete version of the book.  I think the update to the Kindle file is due late in the year.

Cult of Undeath with Fantasy Hack

This may seem like an unusual topic, if you know the history of both (although, of course, I don't presume that anyone pays that much attention.)  Let me give a very quick and dirty summary of my system development, though.

1. I'd been running around house-ruling d20 Modern and D&D 3.5 to be used with my DARK•HERITAGE setting for years.  I'd also played with other systems, but never really settled on anything.  Until...
2. In early 2013 I belatedly discovered the Microlite system (amazingly, by then it had already been around for almost 7 years!)
3. In May of 2013, I created my own adaptation of m20 for use with DARK•HERITAGE.  I also took the two existing Star Wars iterations of m20, combined them into a single one, and added my own elements.  I think this was a great adaptation of the m20 rules to an existing setting that works well with the premise of an old-fashioned game like m20 anyway.  Even if it's just me saying so.
4. These systems underwent periodic revision and fixing of minor elements for some time.  Most of these changes were minor, but they didn't really completely settle down until 2015, at which point both the Star Wars m20 and DARK•HERITAGE m20 were considered complete.
5. Also in 2015, I was confronted with the possibility of needing to pick up where our group had left off; in a campaign that was faltering.  We ended up doing something else (Call of Cthulhu—a campaign that also ended up faltering, as it happens.)  I decided to start the CULT OF UNDEATH project; a thorough pruning and adaptation of Paizo's Carrion Crown adventure path.  For whatever reason, I decided to adapt m20 to do this.  This was the genesis of the m20 CULT OF UNDEATH game; I basically took the DARK•HERITAGE game and replaced the DARK•HERITAGE races with some that more closely resemble standard D&D.  I could, of course, simply have used an existing m20 D&D version, including the original 2006 m20, or maybe the Purest Essence.  But, for whatever reason, I wanted to do my own thing.  
6. In June of 2016, I decided to expand the CULT OF UNDEATH system into a full-blown "My D&D"—i.e., my own take on what I think the D&D system should look like to best emulate my ideal game of it.  This became, of course, FANTASY HACK.

So, the question is weird and unusual; because CULT OF UNDEATH is the seed from which FANTASY HACK grew; mostly by adding the appendices, examples of play text, and bulking up the monster list, rather than by changing anything fundamentally.  Of course you can run CULT OF UNDEATH with FANTASY HACK when they are the same game.  But what I really mean is, are there elements in FANTASY HACK that maybe shouldn't be used in CULT OF UNDEATH?

I think the expansion of the monster list to include a lot of classical mythological creatures is a moot point to some degree because in running any type of published adventure, you're using the monsters preselected for you.  But at the same time, I've included many of them on the random monster tables, and Timischburg is now absolutely fit to be used in a hexcrawly fashion as the PCs travel from one location to another.  Also; I've specifically included a Typhon daemon (based on the Greek mythological Typhon—loosely, anyway) as part of the CULT OF UNDEATH summary.  Use anything on the monster list as you see fit.  It shouldn't be a problem.

Appendix II adds a lot of material, and here's where we need to really get to brass tacks.  I think using anything out of the class-builder system in Appendix II would be fine.  I think using the black powder firearms would be fine too—maybe even desirable to give the whole thing a kind of Solomon Kane or other vague Witchunter vibe to it.

So the real brass tacks; the real thing where the GM might need to step up and "Just say no", is in the Appendix II races.  The race selection for CULT OF UNDEATH was specifically selected not only to feel like classic D&D, but to also work with the implied setting that CULT OF UNDEATH comes with.  Sure, sure—I actually created a setting for it; a bowdlerized version of Ustalav, really—but still, the question is begged.  Some of the races of FANTASY HACK may not fit all that well.   Let's go through them with a bit of discussion, shall we?

• Goblin.  In a place like Timischburg, goblins would struggle to fit.  They wouldn't be welcome by the citizens or the militias either one.  They'd be constantly mistrusted.  Not really appropriate to be used, in my opinion.  Don't.
• Jann.  The jann could conceivably come from one of the port cities on the coast, but they'd otherwise be so exotic that that'd be a distraction everywhere that they went.  I'd probably say no.
• Kemlings.  No, I don't think so.  As exotic as the jann and yet as mistrusted as the goblins if anyone actually knows their provenance.  Too much trouble to try and make them fit, I think. 
• Nephilim.  These would also be distracting, but they're less obviously weird—I can see them.  No doubt about it, nephilim would be so rare anywhere that they go, in any setting that doesn't specifically account for a number of them, that they'd have problems standing out. This would be true in other areas besides Timischburg, if there were any. But that's part of what the race means, I suppose.
• Woses.  My first thought was to say no, since the earliest version of the Haunted Forest was that it was "haunted" by fiercely territorial and angry woses.  They'd be seen as enemies; like an orc trying to travel peacefully in Third Age Gondor.  It just didn't make any sense.  But then, I thought about it and decided that actually there probably are populations of woses in Timischburg, since the Bitterwood is pretty much a werewolf forest.  The woses could be the descendants of werewolves that lost the potency of their curse after many generations.  They actually fit quite well. This begs the question; what do I really want to do with the Haunted Forest, then?  Maybe it shouldn't be haunted by woses after all, it should be "haunted" by something else altogether.  It's not a major issue, because the CULT OF UNDEATH doesn't send anyone up to the Haunted Forest, unless of course the PCs just decide to go exploring up there.  I'll probably eventually define Timischburg so well that it could be a complete hexcrawl, but for now, let's just assume that the Haunted Forest is more like southern Mirkwood, and the Necromancer of Dol Guldur—serial numbers filed off first, of course—is up there somewhere.
• Other Races.  I used these rules to create a few more races for EBERRON REMIXED, and a few of them would fit.  Half-elves, gnomes, warforged, changelings, kalashtar, and hobgoblins.  The half-elves and gnomes would—I guess—fit as well as any of the regular D&D races in the main rules would.  I wouldn't otherwise allow any race-building, unless it's just mechanical reskinning, with a cosmetic adherence to a more common race.
• All that said; if goblins and hobgoblins don't fit, why exactly do orcs fit?  Just because the core rules allow half-orcs, and I make no mechanical distinction between orcs and half-orcs, really.  If you want to disallow orcs, do so with my blessing.  If, on the other hand, you want to presume that Timischburg does harbor some small populations of "savage humanoids" and orcs are in, then I suppose you can go ahead and add goblins and hobgoblins as an option too.  

Although, of course, I've gotta be full disclosure honest and transparent.  The population of Timischburg as I envision it is about: 85% human (Tarushan ethnicity make up most of these; a kind of Eastern European Romanian, but with a pseudo-Austrian Timischer aristocracy super-imposed over the top.)  Cursed make up about 7%, especially in the Ubyr and Orlock counties, reaching their highest density at Inganok.  Woses make up another 7%, especially in the rural areas between the Bitterwood and the Black River, and south of the Haunted Forest, where they are most common.  Only 1% of the population is anything else.  So, for "maximum verisimilitude" quite honestly the standard D&D races of elfs, dwarfs and halflings are too exotic to do anything except stand out and be a distraction—they're only included to make this whole thing feel more like the D&D source material from which it's adapted.  This is a very humano-centric setting (as are all of the settings I dabble with) and honestly, Cursed and Woses are just humans with a curse on their bloodlines anyway.

Those population numbers don't include monsters, though—including undead.  The dirty secret that's not so secret is that some of the Timischer nobility are actually vampires.  There are other undead floating around, of course.  Plenty of haunted spots and ghost stories that happened to a friend of a friend are more commonly told in Timischburg than anywhere else.  And, sadly, all too many of them turn out to be true.

Ghouls haunt the graveyards at night.  Byakhees flit around the towers of reclusive rural lords with vile reputations.  Dark Young lurk in the depths of the Haunted Forest, and werewolves have famously made the Bitterwood dangerous to pass through.  Succubi siphon the life from urban socialites who fool with powers over their heads that they don't understand or respect.  The Eltdown Fens crawl with shambling, moss-covered skeletons that rest uneasily in their watery graves.  The coastline features mysterious areas that are rumored to be ancient ports destroyed by Ketos.  Liches keep lonely towers in the wilderness, surrounded by their rotting servitors.  Nightgaunts haunt the peaks of the Knifetop Mountains.  Dark rumors of shoggoths lurking in the sewers of Grozavest and Preszov continue to linger.  The Thursewood is crawling with thurses (duh.)  The hilly ridge that gradually rises to the Mountains of Mittermarkt are topped with lonely, old barrows where wights lurk in the night.

Etc. and so forth.  Everyone likes to talk about how during the Middle Ages people rarely traveled more than a few miles from where they were born.  With a place like Timischburg, it is painfully obvious why that's actually a great idea.

The Cloud

One of the things that is more and more apparent in the last few weeks is that Google may well not last forever.  Now, I have a Gmail account, I "back up" a lot of blog content on a Google site, which isn't really "back-up" given that Blogger is also a Google application.  I have stuff on Google Drive, etc.  And heck; I even have an Android phone, which of course uses a Google architecture.

I find it very convenient to use the Cloud.  But then; James Damore has shown us that Google is freakin' crazy.  And in response to being called out as crazy what do they do?  Crackdowns on Youtube.  I think it's time to accept that expecting Google to last forever, even as they run as fast as they can for a cliff that you know is ahead—you just don't know how far ahead it is—is probably foolish.  I've lost my stuff that I was using before.  I used to be big into Geocities.  I had a lot of content there.  Much of it is just gone now, although the stuff that I really wanted the most I managed to save somewhere.  I used to be big into Wikispaces, but then they dumped all of their free users, so all of that content is now gone.

Now, I probably shouldn't expect that my "free" stuff is going to last forever, but that's kinda what we do with Google, isn't it?  No, most likely Google will continue to get crazier until they are non-functional, and then they'll be replaced.  They'll limp along for a while as a shadow of their former self, and the services that we take for granted today will not be available.

No, I think it's time that I re-embraced the concept of portable, local storage.  Fer cryin' out loud, for ten bucks I can get a 32 Gb SanDisk USB drive at Wal-Mart.  For less than $20, I can get 64 Gbs.  I should just buy three or four of them and make sure everything that I really want to keep is safe.  And I'm talking about preserving text, for the most part, and some images, not HD movies.  Either is much more than enough storage to meet all of my real needs.

Of course, you have to be careful here too.  Multiple sources of back-up is best.  I had some stuff that I used regularly and really enjoyed having handy on this zip drive.  I'd carry it around with me so I could put it in any laptop or computer I was using without problems.  Until I had... well, this problem.

You can see where I tried to tape the thing together long enough to make it work one more time to pull my files off of it, but it was all in vain.

Anyway, I've transferred FANTASY HACK back into an actual file again, instead of just having blog posts be the latest and greatest version of it. It's a Word file and also a PDF now as well; slightly edited from the blog posts, so it's now the latest at version 1.5.1.  I'll do the same to AD ASTRA soon, and then start backing up setting posts in some format or other for DARK•HERITAGE, AD ASTRA, and some of the other setting tags that actually have enough development on them that it's worth keeping (CULT OF UNDEATH, EBERRON REMIXED, ODD D&D... maybe MIDDLE-EARTH REMIXED?)

It'll be different developing them in private rather than in public, but then maybe not really.  It's not like this is a joint effort.  I get some views, but not a lot of feedback, so what's the difference really?  I'll just be going back to the way I used to do things before the Cloud became so faddish.  And that doesn't mean that I won't be posting stuff; merely that I'll take a few minutes to make sure that stuff that I really will be sad if I lose someday is archived too.  And then when I archive stuff on my zip drives, I'll probably copy it on at least two PCs or laptops too.  Just to make sure.

Fantasy Hack haunts

Haunts are a novel idea introduced by Paizo that combine elements of a trap and a ghost—haunts should be used liberally to create the classic "haunted house" vibe, or to create any eerie, horror-themed vignette in your FANTASY HACK game.  In adapting the idea of haunts to m20, I'm needless to say going to be forced to interpret the concept very differently and with considerably less complexity, but I do want to maintain the idea of a haunt being somewhat midway between a trap and a ghost.

Haunts are extremely difficult to notice without triggering them.  While a normal trap can presumably be seen (if you know what to look for) haunts cannot.  That said, as a haunt is being triggered, there is a brief moment when wary characters might be able to detect that something is happening (by making a MND + Survival check), and possibly mitigate its effects.  If the PCs do not detect that the haunt is about to start, they are caught unawares and off-guard under the full effect of the haunt.  If they do detect it, they have one round to attempt to do something to alleviate the effects of the haunt; flee the haunted area, cast some spell of their own, etc.  This doesn't mean, of course, that the action that they choose to take will be effective.  As GM, you will have to adjudicate what (if anything) their actions have on minimizing or defeating the effects of the haunt.

The effect of a haunt is usually replicated by using the mechanics for a spell.  You can describe the haunt very differently than the description of the spell, but the mechanics will be the same.  Haunts may have varying "caster levels" depending on how powerful you want the haunt to be, if the spell used is one in which its effects vary by caster level.

Haunts cannot be "fought" like a normal ghost; they must be destroyed by the PCs taking some specific action that causes the haunt to go away.  They probably will not know what this action is, although they may stumble across it, or otherwise figure it out.  (If you want, a MND + Knowledge check can give them a clue—often this needs to be done in a library or with a book or journal of a ghost-hunter, or someone else experienced in the works of the undead.)  Mostly, haunts don't need to be destroyed however; the PCs' suffer the effects of them and then avoid them from then on out.

Haunt trigger areas are usually relatively small; a room, a dell, a small stretch of hallway, etc.

To create a haunt, you need to do the following, then:

• Pick a DC for the PCs to notice the haunt, as well as an effect that they notice.
• Pick a spell that the haunt triggers, or create your own spell-like effect.
• Pick a caster level for the spell (if applicable)
• Pick the way in which the haunt can be destroyed.  In a pinch, the go-to method is to find the body or remains of whoever is doing the haunting, sprinkle them with salt and burn them.

Here are a few samples:

BLEEDING WALLS (Notice DC 20 to hear the sound of disembodied soft sobbing.)  The Bleeding Walls haunt causes thick rivulets and streams of blood to ooze from the walls, accompanied by the piercing sound of a woman's pained screams.  Effect: Blasphemous Piping of Azathoth (4th Level spell.)  If the PCs can leave the area after noticing the sobbing before it triggers, they can avoid the effect.  The haunt can be destroyed if the woman's body hidden in the walls (who's sobbing and screaming you hear) is given a proper Christian burial in the hallowed ground of a proper graveyard.

SLAMMING DOORS (Notice DC 10 to see the door start shutting.) The Slamming Doors haunt causes doors to slam shut and to be held shut.  These door can be broken open (depending on the strength of the door), but will otherwise remain shut.  The doors are supernaturally strengthened by the will of the malicious poltergeist that caused the door to slam.  Usually, this will trap the PCs within an area, such as within a haunted house, etc.  Effect: Door will slam shut and be resistant to opening.  To avoid the effect, PCs must dart through the shutting door before it closes.  The haunt can be destroyed if the door is broken and destroyed.

CHOKING HANDS (Notice DC 20 to see/feel a cold mist starting to coalesce around the neck of the victims.) Ghostly hands made of gray mist will choke the PCs.  Effect: Casts Moloch's Word (3rd level spell) at caster level 5.  This haunt will continue each round that victims are within the target area, although it only effects one victim at a time.  Victims being choked must make a DC 20 STR + Survival check to move, or else fall prone and be unable to move (another character can drag them out of the area, however.)  The haunt will usually target one victim at a time until dead before moving on to the next one.  The haunt can be destroyed if the body of the murderer who it is reflecting is exhumed and their remains burned and salted (as for a ghost.)

GHASTLY WHISPERS (Notice DC 20 to hear crescendoing blasphemous whispering before it is triggered.)  The ghostly sound of at least dozens of whispering, screaming, sobbing, crying and cursing voices fills the heads of its victims, driving them rapidly insane.  Effect: Casts The Seeping of Kadath on the Mind (4th Level Spell).  This can be avoided if PCs run like the dickens out of the area before it targets them.  This haunt can only be destroyed by a trained exorcist performing a night-long prayerful ritual using at least a gallon of holy water and uninterrupted prayer by an anointed priest—although the haunt will attempt to attack the exorcist repeatedly while the exorcism is underway.

HEADLESS HORSEMAN (DC 15 to hear the clip-clop of galloping hooves before it appears.) A ghostly, headless soldier on a ghostly, skeletal horse appears and attacks those attempting to cross its area of road or dell or bridge, etc.  Effect: This ghostly apparition cannot be fought like a normal ghost, as all attacks against it are ineffective, even with silver or magical weapons.  It, however, attacks with its own spectral sword, with a To Hit bonus of +8 (2d6 damage) and it will continue to attack until all targets manage to escape its area of influence (often crossing a bridge or some other road marker) or they are all killed.  The haunt can be destroyed by finding the remains of the ghostly, decapitated victim, and reunited it with the remains of its head.)

BLACK CARRIAGE (DC 15 to hear the creaking of the carriage and clopping of its hooves before it appears.)  A spectral black carriage, driven by a ghostly coachman appears and runs down all in the haunted area.  Effect: Equivalent to the Summoning of Ithaqua (4th level spell). A DC 30 DEX + Athletics check allows the victims to dive out of the way of the wildly careening coach, although if will probably appear again moments later until the PCs are out of the haunted area.  The haunt can be destroyed only by casting The Invocation of Kadashman (Ritual only spell) to summon a ghostly steed of your own which will lure the ghostly stallions deep into the ghostly realm, never to return.

Running Cult of Undeath, Part I

• A well-loved professor, Alpon Lechfeld has died in what appears to be an accident—although there are some suspicious clues that cannot rule out foul play.  For the sake of getting the game going, I'm going to tell the PCs that they've all been asked to be pallbearers and are named as (minor) heirs in his will.  He'll give them a few things, but most of his fortune is left to his daughter Revecca.
• Ghosts are appearing in town, threatening (or at least frightening) many residents, that can be traced to a haunted and abandoned ruin of a former prison.  Why are they leaving their normal territory? (linked to the murder above.)
• A rampaging Frankenstein-monster is blamed for some more townsfolk murders.  This, and the ghosts, are probably happening at the same time, so nobody knows which is responsible.
• A mob of townsfolk wants to exhume Lechfeld and "put down his corpse"—of course, it turns out that someone has already exhumed him and dismembered his corpse, as well as apparently eaten some other recently dead in the graveyard.  Notably, an amulet that he was buried with is missing.  Revecca suggests that this amulet kept the ghosts in check in some way; if it's gone, that explains their extraordinary aggressiveness.
• The Frankenstein monster was a creation of Lechfeld himself in an extremely foolhardy experiment years ago, and it has come into town looking for him when he stopped visiting.  It really is a monster, though, not some misunderstood something or other—he's killed numerous townsfolk viciously.
• The ghosts have to be put down (salt and burn their remains) in their haunted house.
• The professor's beautiful and friendly and otherwise hopefully quite sympathetic daughter, is missing.  Gigantic wolf-paw prints and other hints of that nature surround the area she was last seen.
• Her kidnappers are, indeed, werewolves from the Bitterwood, and they've taken her to Innsburough.
• To follow up, the werewolves may have to be confronted in the Bitterwood, though.  They're too good at covering their tracks to be followed to Innsborough.
• The Black Path has Revecca in their grasp, and want to sacrifice her on the Devil's Reef by Otto von Szell, the manorial lord of the Innsborough territory.
• Revecca knows enough about her father's amulet to use it as a key to enter the sealed tomb of Grozavest.  This ability is related to its ability to suppress undead activity in some way.  But Otto von Szell had his own ideas, and wanted to call up some undersea daemon (Typhon?) to destroy his rivals in the Black Path.  Namely, Grigore Stefanescu.
• Stefanescu steals Revecca and her father's amulet, either from the PCs if they've rescued her, or from von Szell if for some reason they don't.  Maybe it's a ghoul group that actually carries out the abduction?  Ghouls from Dragomiresti seems like a good way to bring that into play.
• The ghouls take Revecca to Grozavest, where Stefanescu foolishly intends to "rescue" a Primogenitor sealed in with Melek Taus, thinking that by so doing, he will gain a champion capable of dealing with any of the other noble houses.

In the spirit of not reproducing stuff that Paizo has already produced, let me give you the high level summary of what to do with the first few bullet points, as highlighted above.  This summary is from my post a day or two ago about how to prune the adventure path and make my notes focus more on what the NPCs are doing, rather than on what I expect the PCs to do.  The PCs are on their own to make their own plans, counter-measures, or what-have-you with regards to the NPCs' plans.

So, I'm actually assuming that you have access to the Carrion Crown adventure path books, although I'll try to see what I can do to make that not strictly necessary in case you don't.  I'm going to use Mittermarkt as a relatively major large town.  It corresponds to Lepidstadt in the Pathfinder sending, and I'm going to use the same map to represent my version of it.  Because; why not.  Professor Alpon Lechfeld doesn't live in Mittermarkt per se; he lives in a smaller village down the road, Ebenbach.  This will be represented by the map for Ravengro, since it's the analog, anyway.  According to my map, they're only one hex apart, and there's a nice smooth road connecting them.  This means that it still takes several hours to travel from one to the other; you don't walk or ride almost ten miles in just a few minutes without a car.  I know that I personally, on foot on a decent dirt road, could cover that in about three to four hours—about half a day—without unduly hurrying (although I admit I'd rather take a whole day and walk more leisurely.)  Needless to say, Professor Lechfeld doesn't commute exactly; he lives a life of semi-retirement and only comes "to town" once a week or so, most of the time.  He's prosperous enough to have a carriage, I'm sure, and a few horses.

What could the professor have left the PCs, and under what conditions?  I think a silver sword that he uncovered during an archaeological expedition, cleaned up and identified as the sword of famous ghost-hunter champion, Azold von Craultou.  Some notes on the archaeology of Eltdown, including an incomplete transcription of the Eltdown Shards would be appropriate.  Maybe a few gems of moderate value.  However, as in the case of the module, to inherit, they need to stay in the house for a couple of weeks and make sure his daughter Revecca is properly attended to, set up, and ready to succeed.  She's young, but not a child.  She may well have some suitors—maybe even the PCs are given the task to sort through their merits and help her choose one, etc.  Or maybe she's legally and financially independent, assuming she is watched over somewhat.  Not sure exactly how this one will work out yet.  It may well depend on who I play this with.

As ghosts of dead prisoners start to attack people in the town, maybe turn a little bit less to the characters named in the module, and focus more on recognizable urban legends and other cultural touchstones.  Bloody Mary, the Hookman and Bloody Bones for instance.  The Headless Horseman, maybe.  Maybe even Slenderman.  The silver (or maybe even +1 magical, if you're feeling really generous) sword that the PCs inherited from Lechfeld could come in awfully handy here.  Recall; here's my stats for ghosts:

GHOST: AC: 16 HD: 4d6 (16 hp) AT: touch +4 (1d6) STR: -4, DEX: +2, MND: +1 S: undead immunities, only hit by magic or silver weapons, arrows do a max 1 HP damage.  Ghosts also have one of the following special attacks.  More powerful versions can be created by giving them two or more:

• drains 1d3 DEX on touch, creatures reduced to -5 DEX are immobile and helpless for coup de grace attack that kills them automatically

• as an action, may cast the spell Withering of the Haunter (level 2 spell)

• forces a Sanity check on all characters that can see the ghost

• under a permanent effect identical to the Blasphemous Piping of Azathoth (level 4 spell)

• can cast all spells up to 3rd level

The spirit of the departed, which for reasons which are unknown, lingers on earth to bring misery and fear to those who remain.  Many, even when defeated, will return after many weeks, months or even years, if their remains are not properly attended to—they usually need to be exhumed, doused in salt, and burned.

These are challenging monsters for 1st level PCs to handle, even in FANTASY HACK or the more constrained (but from a system standpoint, identical) CULT OF UNDEATH system.  If you've only got one weapon that can even affect the ghost (likely) then that makes them even more challenging.  PCs may have to find some silver that they can use an improvised weapons (silver candlesticks as clubs or maces, melt down coins to form crude knives, etc.)  Although the stats above say that ghosts will be defeated for weeks, months or even years, I'd make it much less permanent.  "Defeating" a ghost in combat only makes it disappear for that night; it will come back in just another night or two.  The PCs have to understand that without infiltrating the ruins of the burned and semi-collapsed prison where these killers died, finding their bones or whatever else is left of their remains, setting them on fire and salting them, they have not permanently defeated them and they will continue to be a threat to the town.  Researching how to deal with ghosts, probably from the Professor's literature, should be an element of being successful here; if they PCs think that they can just charge a ghost, shouting "Get her!" they will have a rather bad time.

Eliminate that dungeon-crawl aspect of the prison as presented in the module; but you can certainly (and should) see about adapting the Haunts, or at least a couple of them.  Reminder again; the rules for haunts are here.  They're too complicated to be an m20 rule element, but you can adapt them easily enough.  Keep in mind that there's no "channeling positive energy" in FANTASY HACK, so destroying the haunt is the only way to end it—either that or just suffer its effects and soldier on.

Feel free to also have a rat or bat swarm.  The module has a rat swarm, by the way, as well.

So there you have it.  This little mini-adventure plus some encounters is the "collapsed" version of the entire first module—a necessary pruning if you want to turn an entire Paizo Adventure Path into something like a module; even a longish module.  It will probably take a whole session to resolve; if your players are like mine, it might well take two.  The optional events on pages 54-55 of the module can also be worked in as pretty cool little vignettes that help confirm that this is a horror-themed game.  The rumors in page 59 in town would also be useful.  You can use the key provided in the module with the map I linked to above, but you don't need to.  There's lots of opportunities to wander around town, talk to NPCs and get the lay of the land.  There's lot of opportunities to explore the surrounding countryside as well, and you should feel free to make that exciting if so; some random encounters, bandits, wild animals, etc.  They may need to wander about the countryside exploring reports of hauntings and ghosts, honestly.

Keep in mind that the events of the second module; the next two bullet points (which I'll do in the next post of this series) should actually happen concurrently.  The ghosts and the Frankentstein monster are threatening the village of Ebenbach and the larger town of Mittermarkt at the same time.  This gives the PCs a chance to move around a bit, too.  Explore the area, try and figure out what's going on, etc.  It may not be a bad idea to have the ruins fo the prison actually be a mile or two outside of town.

APPENDIX: Ghosts in the haunted house:

SLENDERMAN:  AC: 16 HD: 4d6 (16) AT: touch +4 (1d6) STR: -4, DEX: +2, MND: +1 S: undead immunities, only hit by silver or magical weapons, arrows do a max of 1 HP damage, forces Sanity check on all who see him, drains 1d3 DEX each round on touch attack. Characters with -5 DEX are helpless and immobile, and will be killed by coup de grace. 

MOURNING MAIDEN: AC: 16 HD: 4d6 (16) AT: touch +4 (1d6) STR: -4, DEX: +2, MND: +1 S: undead immunities, only hit by silver or magical weapons, arrows do a max of 1 HP damage, casts Glance of the Gorgon as a 5th level caster once per round.

Haunts in the haunted house: Slamming Doors (at the entrance), Bleeding Walls, Choking Hands.

New haunt: THE PIED PIPER (Notice DC 15 to hear the soft sound of piping before the haunt triggers in full.) The mournful dirge of the Pied Piper is mesmerizing to its targets.  Effect: Everyone in the area of effect must make a DC 20 MND + Subterfuge check to avoid being sucked into the trap; those who fail have their DEX drop temporarily to 0—until the piping stops, or the target is dragged from the area.  Also, all characters visibly age and wither within the area (lose 1d4 hp per round) while the piping plays.  The DEX effect can be avoided by plugging your ears with something sufficient to cause the character to not hear, although the withering will still happen as the Pied Piper sucks the life from the characters.  The haunt can be destroyed with holy water; the Pied Piper was terrified of drowning.

Timischberg Hexmap

So, many months ago—a couple of years ago even by this point—I hand drew a sketchy map of Tarush Noptii, for use with the CULT OF UNDEATH game.  At the time, I wasn't even calling it Tarush Noptii necessarily, but I clearly borrowed the geography of that prior creation, added a few new details, and later changed the name and decided that they were, in fact, one and the same (although I do also have the alternate name of Timischburg.) I colorized and labeled the map—again, very quick and dirty and sketchy—and threw a hex grid overlay on it.

But what I always knew that I'd eventually have to do, if I was ever to make a hexcrawl capable map, was to make a honest-to-goodness, old skool D&D hexmap of the place.  Which, I have now finally done.  This map isn't supposed to be complete-complete—I've deliberately left lots of blankish spaces with only terrain.  One is to assume that there are many more villages, hamlets, and other small settlements than are noted (because actually very few are) and even up to reasonably sizable towns can be inserted without too much work or effort in places that are otherwise blank.  For instance, most of those cultivated farmlands all along the southeast coast and up near Preszov should be assumed to have small hamlets or even villages in them for the local farmers to gather to market, etc.  Most of the hexes through which the rivers run should have similar hamlet and village sized settlements, but only the small town of Ebenbach and the larger town of Mittermarkt are actually noted.

Also; I have put no ruins anywhere on the map, but naturally one can assume that there are some.  This is a very old country that's been continuously settled for thousands of years.

Of course, by ruins, I don't necessarily mean D&D-style "dungeons" but that's only because I don't really do dungeons myself.  Someone else could certainly assume their presence, if desired.  But you've got to decide for yourself where they are, if so.  Also; I exported the map, but didn't save it.  In this, I made a rather significant mistake; because I forgot to add the coordinates first.  (sad face)  So, you'll have to use this without coordinates.  You'll survive, no doubt.  I'll probably have to eventually re-draw it because of this, so look at this map as a "draft" I suppose.  Sigh.  If I'm going to go to that much trouble, I'll probably double the size of the map and halve the scale, to allow more detail.

So anyway; let me describe the map.  If you're not quite familiar with the Hexographer app, then you might not necessarily recognize every one of the terrain tiles, so I'll describe what's what.

Up along the top edge of the map, we have hilly shrubland.  The Knifetop Mountains should be obvious; they look like mountains, plus they're labeled.  The forests should also be obvious, but you can see that there are three colors, more or less, to them—the darkest is heavy evergreen forest, the medium one is heavy mixed forest, and the lighter one is heavy deciduous forest.  The Haunted Forest is thus the "darkest" of the forests, and the Bitterwood, the "greenest"—although in winter, when the leaves have all fallen, that obviously won't be true.

The Eltdown Fens are marshlands, and should therefore be obvious.  Below them is a long ridge of forested hills, gradually making their way up to honest to goodness snow-capped mountains by Mittermarkt.  South of this ridge is flat shrubland, and south of that is grasslands.  On the other side of the river are forested grasslands, followed by prairie.

The cultivated fields and low hills and mountains in Dracul and Ubyr Counties should, hopefully, be obvious.  There are some rough canyons and cliffs and badlands in Vyrko County and around Preszov.  The other slightly tealish hexes that aren't the marshes of the Eltdown Fens is the marker for moors, and should be seen as "wind-blasted heath"; rolling downs, maybe, often soggy and foggy.  Much like the wilder parts of northern England and Scotland—had The Hound of the Baskervilles described a real, supernatural entity roaming the lonely moors, this is the kind of place in which it would have taken place.

That dotted stuff in Orlock County and near Inganok is the symbol for "poor grasslands"; I actually think of them as perhaps not unlike the Warren Sand Dunes or Sleeping Bear Dunes of western Michigan; covered with salty grasses, but unable to be sufficiently fertile to be arable for very much.

The dots out in the ocean near Innsborough is a reef.

Two large lakes are also noted; the Henefelsee, and Eltdown Lake.  The latter is for reference; the fens are actually difficult enough to traverse that people don't really go out that way.

You'll also note that the Black River is navigable, and where it connects the towns—especially the very large town of Mittermarkt—to places further south, such as Grozavest, there are no trails or roads.  There should be many more smaller (and perhaps unmarked and lacking in signs) trails and roads that connect many more towns, villages and hamlets all throughout the countryside, but since most of those towns, villages and hamlets aren't noted, the roads that lead to or through them aren't either.

And finally, you'll note the dead zone around Grozavest.  I've said before that it is the astronomically implausible fact that it is always night in Grozavest.  The sun does not rise nor set within this circle.

The Grand Duchy of Karameikos hexmap has one hex = 8 miles.  This seems about reasonable for the scale of Tarush Noptii.  Before I looked that up, I was thinking about 10 miles per hex, which seems like a rounder number, and therefore one that I'd be more inclinded to remember; but 8 and 10 are close enough that I don't really care.  Feel free to do either, to taste, but I'm assuming 10.  This means that it is unlikely that travelers will cover more than a couple of hexes a day even in the best scenario.  On horseback and on a road, or perhaps in a boat that travels through the night on the river, you can get three hexes done a day.  In the rougher country, it's more 1 hex per day average while traveling.  And for those who are taking it slow, hunting and gathering their own food as they go, perhaps, or otherwise spending time exploring the hex a little bit there's definitely no way you're getting more than one hex a day of travel done.

UPDATE: I did make a bigger map.  The scale here is different; 1 hex = 5 miles.  Also, I moved a few things a small amount.  This is the "real" hexmap for the setting.  In fact, I've replaced the old hexmap that I drew and overlaid a hexgrid on on the FANTASY HACK sample setting page with this one.

Reworking Cult of Undeath

The final EBERRON REMIXED post can come after I've had some time to review the campaign setting and figure out exactly what I need to include (Dragonmarked Houses, plus tattoos?  Some other power groups?  Not even sure yet.)  In the meantime, I've been looking over my "5x5" for the CULT OF UNDEATH campaign, and am more unhappy with it than ever; so much so that I'm finally motivated to admit that it needs to be tossed out and replaced.

Specifically, two things just don't work for me.  1) Each "adventure" that I'm trying to convert is very chimney-like, and it has been difficult, if not impossible, to interweave them very well—at least not without putting them in a geographically much smaller place.  The whole point was to seriously prune the adventure path into being more of a single "mega-module" rather than six discrete yet linked modules.  The problem, of course, is that Adventure Paths by their very nature are quite railroady and come with a pre-programmed plot.  Somehow I need to divorce myself from this "plot" which means that I'm not going to resemble the AP nearly as much when it's done.  But that's OK, and in fact desirable.  2) The run-around looking for several McGuffins that all combine into a single Voltron-like McGuffin is just stupid, over-used, and I just don't really like anything about it anymore.  This second point marries well to the first one; it's the plot, and the locomotive that continues to drive it along the rails that creates this problem.  Solving both problems becomes the work of a single solution.

But if I'm completely yanking out the plot, and much of the premise of the AP, what in the world am I left with?  Well, that's what I need to figure out.  I have some scenarios, encounters, etc. that I can figure out what to do with, and make much more open world and hexcrawl-like in design... assuming I can find a way to make them pull together in some way at all.  So, let's see how I can rebuild a series of events in such a way that it is just stuff that's happening that the PCs can get involved with, rather than a rather silly "rush all over collecting McGuffins" railroad.

First, let's dispense entirely with Ialomita.  This can happen in Mittermarkt, mostly.

• A well-loved professor, Alpon Lechfeld has died in what appears to be an accident—although there are some suspicious clues that cannot rule out foul play.  For the sake of getting the game going, I'm going to tell the PCs that they've all been asked to be pallbearers and are named as (minor) heirs in his will.  He'll give them a few things, but most of his fortune is left to his daughter Revecca.
• Ghosts are appearing in town, threatening (or at least frightening) many residents, that can be traced to a haunted and abandoned ruin of a former prison.  Why are they leaving their normal territory? (linked to the murder above.)
• A rampaging Frankenstein-monster is blamed for some more townsfolk murders.  This, and the ghosts, are probably happening at the same time, so nobody knows which is responsible.
• A mob of townsfolk wants to exhume Lechfeld and "put down his corpse"—of course, it turns out that someone has already exhumed him and dismembered his corpse, as well as apparently eaten some other recently dead in the graveyard.  Notably, an amulet that he was buried with is missing.  Revecca suggests that this amulet kept the ghosts in check in some way; if it's gone, that explains their extraordinary aggressiveness.
• The Frankenstein monster was a creation of Lechfeld himself in an extremely foolhardy experiment years ago, and it has come into town looking for him when he stopped visiting.  It really is a monster, though, not some misunderstood something or other—he's killed numerous townsfolk viciously.
• The ghosts have to be put down (salt and burn their remains) in their haunted house.
• The professor's beautiful and friendly and otherwise hopefully quite sympathetic daughter, is missing.  Gigantic wolf-paw prints and other hints of that nature surround the area she was last seen.
• Her kidnappers are, indeed, werewolves from the Bitterwood, and they've taken her to Innsburough.
• To follow up, the werewolves may have to be confronted in the Bitterwood, though.  They're too good at covering their tracks to be followed to Innsborough.
• The Black Path has Revecca in their grasp, and want to sacrifice her on the Devil's Reef by Otto von Szell, the manorial lord of the Innsborough territory.
• Revecca knows enough about her father's amulet to use it as a key to enter the sealed tomb of Grozavest.  This ability is related to its ability to suppress undead activity in some way.  But Otto von Szell had his own ideas, and wanted to call up some undersea daemon (Typhon?) to destroy his rivals in the Black Path.  Namely, Grigore Stefanescu.
• Stefanescu steals Revecca and her father's amulet, either from the PCs if they've rescued her, or from von Szell if for some reason they don't.  Maybe it's a ghoul group that actually carries out the abduction?  Ghouls from Dragomiresti seems like a good way to bring that into play.
• The ghouls take Revecca to Grozavest, where Stefanescu foolishly intends to "rescue" a Primogenitor sealed in with Melek Taus, thinking that by so doing, he will gain a champion capable of dealing with any of the other noble houses.

If you note; these bullet points aren't about what the PC's will do; they're about what various NPC's will do, and situations that arise because of their actions.  It's up to the PCs to determine what (if anything) they'll do about any of this.  I presume that most PCs will in fact take an interest in these developments and attempt to intervene, or plan their own counter-measures, or something.  It's entirely possible that they won't.  They may simply take an interest in farming, or hunting werewolves in the Bitterwood, or deciding that they think Lechfeld is a lost cause and his daughter is probably as corrupt as he was, or who knows what.  Maybe they get so caught up in rumors of the Nameless City of the Eltdown Fens that they abandon the rest of the country and go see if they can find it.  I dunno.  

If so, let them do what they like.  But keep track of the list of things that are meant to happen.  If Revecca is not rescued from von Szell, maybe he does manage to lure a Typhon daemon from the sea, who rampages across the countryside.  If they don't put down the ghosts, maybe Mittermarkt becomes so haunted that it is evacuated.  Maybe some other group of NPC adventurers show up and start solving problems.  Maybe the PCs even fall under suspicion as being involved somehow with all this nastiness.  

This isn't meant to be punitive really—although it can seem that way.  This is just what happens if the PCs don't do their job and rise to the occasion to save the kingdom.

And that's how you convert Carrion Crown into something that I could run.  I've got a setting; adapted from some prior development of mine, it serves reasonably well enough as an ersatz Ustalav—and why wouldn't it; it was developed under very similar design constraints.  I've got a system that feels sufficiently D&D-like, while serving my needs as a quick and easy to use swashbuckling system.  I've gotten rid of the worst railroad-like elements, I've pruned the AP of all of the (surprisingly, many) instances in which it betrayed the tone that it was meant to evoke.  It still feels like a module, but it focuses more on what will happen around the PCs (with the assumption that they'll intervene) rather than a plotline that they must follow.  Granted, if the PCs don't bite on the hooks you're dangling, then you've got your work a little bit more cut out for you than if they do, but that's not the purpose of module design to factor into account all of the things that the PCs might do instead.  The setting does include a hex map, so they can just ignore all of this and hexcrawl their way over the setting if they'd rather do that.

So, as the final leg of my CULT OF UNDEATH project, I'm going to flesh out the map a bit more, build a real D&D-style hex map (about 20x30 or so) in a very traditional sense, and key it up a bit.  That way, I've got all kinds of material available for you to potentially use.  Of course, like I said, it's not my intention that the PCs ignore these hooks, and as conditions get worse the more that they do ignore them, they will hopefully be prodded into taking some kind of preventative or mitigating action.  If they just don't, though—well, their negligence may indirectly be responsible for "blowing up" the setting.  Stefanescu is a fool to think he can control a Primogenitor.  I don't have Primogenitor stats, of course, but they'd be really nasty.  Not only that, opening up the seal to free one Primogenitor probably leaves an avenue for all of them to escape.  Twenty Primogenitors is a disaster on the order of getting hit by a Yellowstone supervolcano style eruption combined with being hit by a Biblical scale flood.  It just really sucks for everyone.  And to make matters worse; if the Primogenitors are free, why not Melek Taus himself?  

While there's some amount of ironic entertainment in thinking that the PCs allowed the Apocalypse to happen, I'm going to assume that such a result would be so statistically unlikely as to be a moot point.

EDIT: Well; I've got two more legs to the project, actually.  I want to flesh out that outline above with more of what I need.  Stats for antagonists, and whatnot, specifically.  Some more detailed location material in the cities and villages through which the game would presumably pass, etc.  Random encounter tables.  I dunno what else.  Anyway, it gives me plenty more CULT OF UNDEATH posts yet to make, I suppose...

Remixing Eberron—the setting Post III

So... we've got the high concept of remixing Eberron, based on what I believe the high concept of Eberron is.  This means:

1. Adapting a system that better manages the expectation of that high concept than the highly tactical and static and rulesy and bloated modern versions of D&D (I've selected my own m20 variant, FANTASY HACK, but you can go with something else, if you like), 
2. Establish some guiding principles which, if adopted, means you can fine tune the remix at the detailed level when in game in order to better coincide with the good, old-fashioned, pulpy tone that the setting is trying to reach for but failing for a variety of reasons (but most especially the demands of conforming to details of the social justice delusion about the nature of reality), and 
3. Pruning esoteric D&Disms that are unrecognizable outside of the world of D&D junkies and more in line with what anyone with a familiarity with the foundational myths and fantasy literature of Western Civilization would recognize, and 
4. Adapt setting elements as highlighted in this brief prospectus over the course of a few blog posts into this paradigm.

So far, we've had a few posts (click on all posts with the EBERRON REMIXED tag) that have done some of that.  I'm actually trying to change as little as possible, so as to make all of your material still applicable, but that doesn't mean that there aren't some changes that aren't fairly significant, though.  And I should probably add a number 5. to that list: I also change stuff that I just don't like, on occasion, even if it doesn't cause a conflict with any of the four above.  An example of this would be changing the halflings of the Talenta Plains into jann.  Just because I think the notion of barbarian warrior halflings is kind of ridiculous and hard to take seriously.  Rather than accept the challenge of trying to make it fit, I just picked a race from FANTASY HACK that I think fit the bill better anyway (for fans of D&D races, this race is similar enough in concept and appearance to the fire genasi.)

In spite of this remixing, I suspect that Eberron will still feel more like a D&D campaign than most games that I'd entertain here on this blog.  Just for grins, let's do a quick catalog as a minor aside of my alternate settings and games and whatnot: if nothing else, it might spark in me the desire to explore another of these a little bit more when I finish this (as this latest small series of posts on Eberron.)

• AD ASTRA: The capes and rayguns space opera setting that I've been spending most of my time the last few months playing with.  It is also deliberately an ersatz Star Wars, although as it continues to develop, it continues to diverge in many ways from the original.  But it was originally the combination of the prior AD ASTRA, which was always a Starjammers or Guardians of the Galaxy style "superheroes in space" concept that I never did anything with combined with STAR WARS REMIXED... but read that one below to see how it came to be.
• CULT OF UNDEATH: a horror-fantasy setting that can be dropped into an existing setting, or which has enough material to handle several campaigns on its own right.  This was originally designed as a place in which to run a Carrion Crown Remixed adventure path, but if I ever do a Strange Aeons Remixed, it'd take place here too.  It's also the final and formal evolution of an old setting element of mine, Tarush Noptii, the kingdom of the vampires, as well as the included setting example for FANTASY HACK.  I do actually have plans in place to get back to this and spend some time playing with it a bit in the next few months.
• DARK•HERITAGE: The setting for which this blog was initially devised, although I've often wandered far afield, and haven't done anything with this in a long time.  Which is too bad, because I was in the middle of a rather comprehensive upheaval of the setting.  It's also the very first m20 game of my own that I developed, and the prototype for everything else that's followed since, including my "complete" alt.D&D m20 game, FANTASY HACK.
• DREAMLANDS REMIXED: An attempt to take Lovecraft's Dreamlands setting, which he never really developed as well as could be hoped.  In reality, much of what is sometimes considered the Dream Cycle should really belong to a proto-Sword & Sorcery prehistorical cycle, in my opinion, and rather than being about dreamers in an alternate reality, I'm officially making it a S&S setting.  Blended also with some Clark Ashton Smith stuff; especially Hyperborea.  This needs a lot more work to be usable.
• EBERRON REMIXED: This series of posts.  
• FALLEN SONS: Is just a high concept, of a post-apocalyptic fantasy world.  Kinda like the future as seen in the Terminator movies, except instead of killer robots, it's demons that destroyed the world.  Anyway, I'm still not sure what I want to do with this one, so it's still in the icebox for now until I get inspired.
• FANTASY HACK: This actually isn't a setting.  I took my rules for CULT OF UNDEATH, which was considerably more "D&D-like" than DARK•HERITAGE was, and decided; why not go all the way and turn it into an alt.D&D?  Here it is. 
• MAMMOTH LORDS: Does for North America what they Hyborian Age does for Europe and MENA.  Vikings and Indians, basically.  But this is now defunct.  I've taken this idea and hybridized it with my older DARK•HERITAGE setting, and the new DARK•HERITAGE which is emerging is similar enough to this setting now to effectively replace it.
• MIDDLE-EARTH REMIXED: What if Middle-earth were a sword & sorcery setting instead of a high fantasy one?  That's the concept here.  I've toyed with it a bit, but my last post on it was on the verge of really coming up with an alt.Middle-earth setting with the names and landmarks having their serial numbers more officially filed off.
• MYTHS REVISITED: Inspired by stuff like the Percy Jackson movies and the concept from comic books of Olympian and Asgardian gods as superheroes, essentially, this is meant to be a "mythology as superheroes in the modern age" type setting.  I barely did anything with it except describe the high concept. 
• ODD D&D: A D&D setting, using only D&D elements, but eschewing the most popular and iconic ones.  The evils to be fought are lizardmen and yuan-ti empires; the PC race palette is totally different (except for human.  And half-orc, if I remember) and instead of magic, there's only psionics. I never did make a map for this, though—although I always meant to.
• REALMS TRAVELER: According to the oft-told story, Gene Roddenberry sold the concept of Star Trek to the network by calling it "Wagon Train to the Stars" as a nickname.  This setting, then, would be Wagon Train to the Planes.  It would also be fairly D&Dish, although significantly different than "standard" D&D.  Maybe it would more honestly be called "Quantum Leap to the Planes" since each "episode" would involve traveling to a new plane, until finally they'd get to their real destination at the end of the campaign.  This is more of a campaign really than a campaign setting.  Or, at least it would be if I ever sat down and did anything with it.
• SOLNOR: Taking place in Greyhawk, actually; but entirely underwater.  D&D meets The Little Mermaid.  I never did anything with it other than say, "hey, here's a high concept!"  And I didn't even think of it myself.  Maybe that's why I haven't been motivated to do anything with it ever.
• STAR WARS REMIXED: Originally meant to actually be Star Wars—except set 1,000 years after Return of the Jedi.  I created a whole bunch of stuff for this, including even an entire m20 variation.  For a variety of reasons, I later became somewhat disenchanted with the idea of playing in the Star Wars setting itself, so I ended up taking my Star Wars + 1,000 Years setting, filing the serial numbers off of it, and calling it AD ASTRA.  After all, I never developed my AD ASTRA concept, so it was just sitting there begging to be used for something.  Since this point of divergence, or fork point, if you will, AD ASTRA has continued to evolve away from Star Wars in many details; but it remains very much a product of the same kind of feel and the same kind of thing as Star Wars.  As Star Wars was a pastiche of a whole host of earlier space opera stories: Lensmen, Dune, Leigh Brackett, and Flash Gordon, combined with Lucas' love of the Kurosawa samurai movies and Westerns, AD ASTRA is a pastiche of not only all of those things (because I'm on first name basis with all of them) but even Star Wars itself.  Or rather, perhaps it's a pastiche that focuses those same elements in a similar fashion to Star Wars.  Anyway; as AD ASTRA took over what had been STAR WARS REMIXED, the latter become defunct, needless to say.

Anyway; that exercise took more space and time than I expected; I better get back to my EBERRON REMIXED setting elements.  But it did do its job; I've decided, looking over that summary, what I want to do next as my EBERRON REMIXED series comes to a close.

The Mror Holds.  Another one of the relatively few nations that can be used as is; because it is actually a nation, and not a conglomerate.  Other than making sure it complies at the detailed level with the principles spelled out last post, no changes required.

The Lhazaar Principalities.  Only a few minor changes here; 1) more humans, less gnomes.  2) They are usually portrayed in official books as somewhat tropical—but have you not seen where they are on the map?  They're quite a bit to the north of Karrnath, which is supposed to be really cold.  Now, granted—Karrnath might well be continental in climate, while warm currents keep it from being too cold; but then again, warm currents keep northern Europe from being as cold as Siberia and northern Canada.  That doesn't mean that islands like Great Britain and Ireland are tropical.  Rather than Caribbean style pirates, the Lhazaar pirates have to have a much more northern feel to them.  Like Vikings in Medieval ships, maybe.

Xen'Drik.  There need to be more colonial footholds besides just Stormreach on the northern shore, which in turn leads to a "Scramble for Africa" politically tense environment.  Instead of drow, I'm using kemlings, but that can just be a mechanical rather than setting change.  The giants are largely to be represented by ettins from the FANTASY HACK monster list.

Xen'Drik also isn't just totally "savage"—it's not a continent of dungeons and ruins and monsters.  There are, of course, the ruins of past civilization that are now fallen, but lots of people live there (mostly kemlings, but there could easily be plenty of humans as well), usually in poorly organized polities, with primitive technology and social structure.

Sarlona.  I'm also not really changing anything much here, although I'm considering this a "fringe" part of the setting, where PCs wouldn't actually go (although NPCs may on occasion be from there.)  The only thing that I'm "changing" is that the Inspired are not a "race" per se; I'm considering them just an aesthetically pleasing race of humans.

Aerenal.  I'm not changing this much, other than to note that the Undying vs. the Undead is too esoterically D&D to make any sense to me, honestly.  The whole "no, no—it's positive energy rather than negative energy" was always rather silly; these are just really spooky elves with a civilization that one-ups ancient Aegypt in terms of venerating and preserving the dead.  It's kind of a moot point; the Aerenal elves are rather isolationist and unwelcoming, so it's more a point of reference than a place to visit.

Frostfell.  I think there's little reason to change much here, because there's so little detail about it anyway.  I'd undo some of the hints of exotic, weird humanoids (I really don't need more) and maybe have hidden threats; Clark Ashton Smith style, hiding up in the ice.  A combination of Father Llymic, At the Mountains of Madness, and Hyperborea, if I do anything with it at all.  Which I probably wouldn't.

Argonessen.  Since so little is known about it, there's no reason to change it.  There will actually be very few dragons in Eberron, but those that do exist will largely be powerful and feared, no doubt.  Dragons in FANTASY HACK are a bit more monstrous than those in D&D (particularly Eberron) but still—this continent is too far away from the normal field of play to really matter much. (I should point out that I never got, or even saw, the book Dragons of Eberron so there may well be more material than I'm aware of.)

Everice.  I don't know anything about Everice except that it's there.  You're on your own.