Happy Halloween

Tonight, I'll probably watch Halloween on TV (edited for TV and DVRed... because that's what we usually do), drink wassail, eat junk food, and hand out candy to trick or treaters from the neighborhood.  Lluckily, we don't live in one of those neighborhoods that migrants looking for a big haul come to—we tend to get plenty of trick or treaters, but they're are own kids.  Plus, I live on a cul-de-sac, which lots of kids pass on because only half the lights (at best) will be on tonight, normally.

So Halloween is a low-key affair at my place, sadly.  One of these days, I'll figure out how to throw a real Halloween bash that will be legendary.  Probably when my kids are finally all grown up and moved out (I have two teenagers still at home now.)

Or maybe I'll settle into something low-key but more topical.  Wouldn't it be awesome if I could kick off my CULT OF UNDEATH actual campaign tonight?  Oh, well.  I can't.

A quiet tribute to dinosaurs of yore

I'm not going to pick a single Extinct Animal of the Week this week, and I'm not going to (yet) do the second half of MEET THE MEGALOSAURS either.  Rather, I'm going to do a nostalgic trip through the kinds of dinosaur stuff that I used to read as a kid.  The whole "gigantic lizards, living in the swamps and lakes" business, with names that I saw in practically every dinosaur book that nobody ever uses anymore.  Scientifically, we find that most of these names were assigned to dubious, scrappy, incomplete, or non-diagnostic remains, and then the name was used normally to describe remains that should have been assigned other names.  Today, of course, we 1) use different names to describe the animals that used to have the names listed below, mostly, and 2) know that most of what we thought we knew about them was wrong anyway.  Given 2, then maybe it doesn't mean that 1 didn't get renamed; it means that they simply never existed at all.  The whole aquatic Trachodon, for instance—one could say that they were renamed Anatosaurus, then Anatotitan, then Edmontosaurus.  But although the remains of Edmontosaurus are those that used to have the name Trachodon, the two animals are really quite different.  Edmontosaurus is a terrestrial, pine-needle eating Late Cretaceous buffalo, if you will, while Trachodon was a lake-dwelling, two-legged, tall, buck-billed herbivorous crocodile.  So, without further ado...

Trachodon—well, I was just talking about it, so let's start there.  In every old dinosaur book I ever read as a kid, Trachodon was the "boring" duck-bill, and he'd be sitting there on the lakeshore along with Lambeosaurus, Corythosaurus and Parasaurolophus.  They always hung out together on the beach.  And whenever Tyrannosaurus rex came along, they'd make a scramble for the water, which T. rex was so afraid of that he wouldn't even let his feet get a tiny bit wet in a few inches of water, it seems.

This is of course nonsense, as only Edmontosaurus lived at the same as as T. rex; the other three were all part of Judithian or Edmontonian faunas.  None of them lived at the same time as each other either.  And while it's true that these hadrosaurs all seem to have favored wetlands as habitat, they weren't lake-dwellers, and T. rex hunted those same terrains without worrying too much about it.  There is also a theory that the transition from the Judithian to the Lancian fauna came as sea levels decreased and generalists from the more arid uplands flourished, while wetlands specialists declined.  This is more marked in the south, with the Alamosaurus-Quetzalcoatlus guys.  Migration from Asia and possibly South America as sea levels fell is another theory.  In any case, nothing about the environment or habits of Trachodon turns out to be true, so maybe it's not such a bad idea that the name is closely associated with the debunked paradigm of dinosaurs anyway.

Fabrosaurus—This one, on the other hand, is just unfortunate.  Fabrosaurs were long listed as these really primitive, early Ornithischian from the Early Jurassic of South Africa.  They were presumed to have had wide-spread, probably even global distribution.  (This in spite of the fact that almost all of what we've found for them is in South Africa, and maybe some very recent findings now from China.)  No doubt, there were some interesting, early Ornithischians that were more or less similar to what we long thought Fabrosaurus looked like—Pisanosaurus from South America is even earlier and isn't all that different than what we would expect from Fabrosaurus.  But fabrosaurs themselves are no longer believed to be a group; they're just a bunch of stuff "on it's way" to becoming another, more advanced ornithopod group, or something like that.  And the specific animal on which most restorations of Fabrosaurus were based is now called Lesothosaurus instead.

Monoclonius—While some still say that this might be a valid animal, most think that Monoclonius was actually a fragmentary juvenile Centrosaurus these days.  As with the duckbills, horned dinosaurs in old books were often thrown together regardless of whether they were from Judithian, Edmontonian or Lancian faunas—although at least they were more or less geographically close (much of the fossils of the southern province of Laramidia hadn't been found yet, with names like Bravoceratops, Eotriceratops, Arrhinoceratops, etc.)  In those old books, a hungry T. rex almost always found the duckbills—who ran into the lakes, thus frustrating him, then he stumbled across an Ankylosaurus, which he couldn't do anything with because of its armor, and then he went looking for the horned dinosaurs, which oddly enough were always believed to be out on the plains like scaly buffalo.  Monoclonius and Styracosaurus were usually pictured together, but for whatever reason, T. rex didn't try to eat them, always looking instead for the Triceratops.  Often these other two were pictured forming musk-ox like circles around the young.  Triceratops, on the other hand, were always the big bad loners.

Complete with Triceratops in the distance

Brontosaurus—This is a real crime, in my opinion.  Brontosaurus was the most famous dinosaur ever, and a bunch of nerdy, nebbish paleontologists made a gamma male play to be self-righteous and self-important and tell everyone in the whole world that no, we need to call it Apatosaurus.  At around the same time that the name was disappearing from popular literature, we also found out that it had been given the wrong skull, and the boxy, squared-nose skull associated with Brontosaurus should have been replaced with one more like Diplodocus, making the newly christened (at least in popular literature) Apatosaurus a very different animal than Brontosaurus that was.  At about the same time, the whole snorkeling lake-dwelling sauropods was replaced; we now believe that there's actually a strong correlation between sauropods and drier climates, if anything.  Granted; what we've learned about sauropods is much more interesting than what we used to think.  Most old dinosaur books associated the sauropods very distinctly with the Jurassic, and we were often only shown three of them; Diplodocus (the longest), Brachiosaurus (the biggest) and Brontosaurus (the most famous) while the much more common (yet fairly boring) Camarasaurus and the rare Haplocanthosaurus plus the European (yet poorly known) Cetiosaurus.  Maybe if you were really lucky, you heard of Barosaurus somewhere.  But those three were all we talked about.

Curiously, Brontosaurus has made a return; some specialists now believe that Apatosaurus deserves to be split into two genera, and Brontosaurus was the obvious choice.  There are now two to three species of both Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus specifically (probably separated in time, so that there was only one of each in the Morrison at a time, most of the time.)

Classic square-headed Brontosaurus trying to escape by going to the lake.

http://fistfullofpodcasts.com/?powerpress_pinw=1117-podcast

Very interesting.  Listening to the stuff about halfway through (a few minutes after one hour) they talk about sauropods being really big all of the time; that clearly isn't true, though.  He does talk about island dwarfs briefly, but the fact is, there really are a number of modest sized sauropods, and much of the latest Cretaceous sauropods are modestly sized.

He also talks about the polyphyly of Sauropoda.  This is not something that he really believes (in fact, he specifically says that) but it's still an interesting idea.

Friday Art Attack

This sorcerer is probably best suited to be a Nizrekh villain from the TIMISCHBURG setting, but there's plenty of places he could fit in DARK•HERITAGE too.

These alien-sharks are just nasty.  They actually look like the alien eggs face-hugged some sharks, but they're probably just some really nasty sea creature in one of the many aquatic worlds already detailed for AD ASTRA.

I've got a lot of futuristic soldier art.  More than AD ASTRA really needs, of course, but then again, I'd imagine most worlds have their own uniforms, right?

I have no idea what to do with an alternate Darth Vader except... just show it, I guess.  This one isn't really all that far from the original.  I've got some alt.Vader artwork that's really unusual.

Another AD ASTRA soldier uniform.

Speaking of which, I find concept and in-game art for Dead Space 3 is really cool—they kind of have that rough bounty hunter Boba Fett look to them, except different.  The game itself is weird; zombie outbreaks and religious fanatics in space.  With this is all about the look, not anything else.  Besides, my understanding is that Dead Space 3 was kind of a flop and killed the series off.

I don't have drow in my setting, but that fiendish dire rat with spider-like eyes has always been something I thought was an awesome piece of art.  That monster can make tons of appearances in any FANTASY HACK game, and probably should.

I'm not familiar with this game, but it's a fresh take on the X-wing pilot flight suits, mostly.

Villains at the fantasy Star Wars cantina.  My games aren't this... diverse most of the time, but y'know; maybe they need to have more in the way of weird villains teaming up to cause problems.

Deconstructing The Serpent's Skull 1: Souls For the Smuggler's Shiv

Adventure Summary
The Serpent’s Skull Adventure Path begins with the PCs being shipwrecked on an inhospitable island, the legendary Smuggler’s Shiv. Yet before you begin, you should take a moment to let the PCs introduce themselves to each other in the framework of a long ship voyage. ...

After the PCs wake on the shores of Smuggler’s Shiv, they must contend with carnivorous plants, predatory monsters, vengeful undead, and aggressive cannibals as they scavenge for food and water and hope for rescue. Complicating the situation is the eventual realization that they’ve been placed in this situation through the design of one of the ship’s own passengers—a mysterious Varisian scholar named Ieana who went missing during the ship’s wreck just offshore of Smuggler’s Shiv. 

As the days go by, the strange mysteries and dangers of Smuggler’s Shiv make it abundantly clear that the castaways are not welcome on this hostile island—and if the PCs are to survive long enough to be rescued or to repair their crippled ship, they must take the offensive and stand against the restless spirits and treacherous denizens of the island. The PCs are eventually forced into a final confrontation with the island’s cannibals, only to discover that below the cannibals’ camp lies an ancient serpentfolk temple to Ydersius. This temple contains clues leading to a hidden Azlanti temple to Zura elsewhere on the island. The PCs use these clues to find the hidden temple, only to learn that the traitorous Ieana, in fact a disguised serpentfolk named Yarzoth, has beaten them to the ruins and will stop at nothing to ensure that only she escapes Smuggler’s Shiv alive with the temple’s astonishing secret—the way to legendary Saventh-Yhi, a fabled city said to be hidden somewhere in the depths of the Mwangi Expanse.

So, that's the context around which we'll be deconstructing this adventure.  That, of course, doesn't mean that I'll be reconstructing it with a similar context, but at least it will make the stuff we're about to see make sense.

FEAST ON THE BEACH (Not as fun as Sex on the Beach, sadly.)  The PC's wake up, in order of Fortitude saves made earlier, from having been poisoned and shipwrecked.  They're lying on the beach, and their gear is nearby, but big eurypterid sea scorpions are nipping at them and need to be killed. (Eurypterids are an arthropod order of "sea scorpions" that flourished from the Ordivician until the late Permian.  They're not really scorpions.)  They're sick for the duration of the encounter.  There's also almost half a dozen other survivors.  They can see the wreck of their ship out to sea not far away, stranded on a reef and broken.

SINISTER OMENS  I'm a big fan of using dreams, strange events, and other stuff to create mood and foreshadowing.  I won't repeat the specifics of this one, but there are a lot of fun ideas here.  Use 'em.

EXPLORING THE ISLAND There's a list of locations here that the PCs will presumably find just by wandering around exploring.  Which they probably will do assuming that they don't want to die of starvation or thirst, if nothing else.  They can also go out to the wreck of their ship, on a rocky reef not far away, where they may fight more sea scorpions, but salvage some useful stuff.  Here, they also find the first mate's body and an increasingly disturbed and disjointed captain's log, where he admits to changing course for this island at a passenger's request, who he had obviously become more and more obsessed with over time.

There are also numerous predators scattered all over the island, and the PCs should probably come into contact with them by exploring.  There's a list of what they presume you will find, some of which is not surprising (snakes, giant spiders and crabs, monitor lizards), some of it is very D&Desque (shocker lizards, cave fishers) and then there's a Dimorphodon; a small pterosaur from the Early Jurassic "Jurassic Coast" of England.  I guess this gives it that Lost World or Skull Island kind of vibe.  I'm a big fan of having dangerous wildlife be on the loose whenever the PCs are in the wilderness, and anything that's kind of tropical, jungley or island based should fit, although keep in mind that we're talking beginning, low level characters still here.  There could also be "natural traps"—poisonous nettles or vines, etc, quicksand, and then, of course, actual traps and snares set by the cannibals who live inland.  They have a small island just off shore covered in poisonous fungus and populated by a small group of vegepygmies and their "fungus god", but that's such a weird D&Dism, that I'll almost certainly pass.  And I don't have any equivalent to Zuggtmoy either.  There's also a dryad, who wants to convince the PCs to get rid of the fungus foulness, but since I doubt I'll use the fungus, I doubt I'll use her either.  Although I do like to throw in a classical mythological reference when I can.

There are also older, more rotted and decrepit shipwrecks on the beaches, or just off the beaches, that can be explored, although little is to be found in them except dangerous marine life and undead former crewmen; as skeletons, zombies or even ghosts.  The shipwrecks are also dangerous to explore because of their poor condition; parts will break and fall, etc. regularly. One ghost captain in particular is mentioned, but it's needless backstory; all you need to know is that the island is indeed haunted by the undead.  One area in particular is a buried treasure spot, complete with a few traps and undead sailors that the captain killed after they buried it, so they couldn't give away the secret of where the treasure was buried.

There's an interesting thing; a gigantic, house-sized crab-shell that's been hollowed out and a marooned sailor or something lives there.  He's a kenku in the book, but of course, I don't have any bird-people in my setting, so I'd make him something else.  He's a little crazy, but he can confirm that his original crew were killed and eaten by cannibals, so there's that.  Speaking of which, a cannibal ambush and/or trap would be a nice touch somewhere in here.  If you want to give the PCs something useful (for later; they can't spend 'em here) they could harvest a few pearls in a quiet bay too.

And finally, they find evidence of old camps of other shipwrecked sailors, but one in particular is pretty fresh, and it includes evidence that the captain of the ship and at least one other spent some time there before the PCs find it.

THE CANNIBAL CAMP  There are cannibals on the island.  There's a whole backstory behind them, but who cares?  They're cannibals; they want to eat you, not tell you where their ancestors came from.  Their camp is under a partially ruined (or never completed, more accurately) lighthouse, and they wander the island.  The PCs might find them first, or maybe the other way around, depending on what the PCs do.  There's a fair number of cannibals; nearly two dozen in all, but they may not all be sitting around waiting to be discovered in their huts, obviously.

There's a chief and a witch-doctor statted out as specific NPCs, but whatever.  If the cannibals are supposed to be so crazy and evil, it seems unlikely that you'll really spend time chatting with them.  Ieana has been here, sacrificed the captain, dominated the chief at one point, studied the caverns under the lighthouse, etc.  You won't meet her yet, but there are a bunch of ghouls living in these caverns, as well as a few other undead of various types.  There are also notes from the poor captain, who on recovering from his spell-induced hysteria, feels like writing a note explaining himself, for some reason.  And there are instructions for how to use the Tide Stone, which causes massive lightning strikes and the tide to go down to an unnatural level.  Ieana does this herself right as the PCs are cleaning up the cannibal camp, showing that the adventure isn't quite over yet.

TEMPLE OF BLOOD When the PCs go out to the headland that leads to the submerged Azlant temple to Zura (a demon goddess of vampires and cannibals, and the reason the island is cursed and haunted) they are attacked by a flying chupacabra—unless they've already wandered across and killed it during the course of their exploration of the island.  Then they walk out along an uncovered causeway that normally sits just below the surface.  There's a shark that got stranded in a pool on the causeway that they can fight.  There's also a now uncovered shipwreck with a water mephit who thinks he's the "captain" of it, and a crew of sea urchins and other aquatic animals.  I get the feeling that they're supposed to be kind of comic relief.

After this, they can explore the temple proper.  There are serpentfolk skeletons to defeat right away.  There are human skeletons (former slaves) and a pit trap.  Another nearby room has doors that crash shut and then bladed pendulums that swing down to kill anything in the room.  I admit; I think trapped dungeons are boring beyond all get-out.  I can pass.  But I make note of their presence in the module as written for the record.  There's some weird encounter with soulbound dolls; strange little animated humunculi or sorts, that actually seek out the PCs once they are aware that they're in the temple.  And an old pool of water in a side-room is home to a gibbering mouther (a weak shoggoth, for those more familiar with Lovecraft than with D&D.)  And finally, in the nave of the temple, they encounter Yarzoth/Ileana, now revealed as a serpentman himself, with skeletons.  After this, they discover the clues to the lost city of Saventh-Yhi, which makes up most of the rest of the adventure path.  They're to get this from the carvings on the walls, and then translating/interpreting them later.  After this, allow the PCs to escape the island either by being able to create a signal (perhaps in the lighthouse) or by building a raft or something, and then on you go to the next adventure.

NPC SIDE QUESTS There are a number of fellow castaways that all have side-quests associated with them, just like a computer game.  Maybe you'll find them kinda fun to do or not, but here's a quick n dirty summary of them anyway.

Aerys Mavato is one of those pixie-ninjas; probably weighs all of 100 lbs tops, but is tough and angry and has a chip on her shoulder about men in particular (don't flirt with her.)  She's also an alcoholic and an aspiring novelist.  She sounds like someone that the writer knows, but flattered into believing that she can fight.

Gelik Aberwhinge is a little gnome fop and con-man, who is a bit like Harry Hill from The Music Man. (If anyone is cultured enough anymore to get that reference.) He does have a meaner, snarkier tongue, though.  One of the shipwrecks is his potential target for exploration, as it might get him back in good with the Pathfinder Society.

Ishirou is a lost Japanese guy with a sad and tragic history, who is quiet and taciturn and generally introverted.  He's got a treasure map to the treasure mentioned above, though, if he can be convinced to tell you about it.

Jask Derindi plays the role of the "Magic Negro"—he's literally in chains for a crime he was framed for when you first find him, and the keys are on the ship that you crashed in.  Evidence of his innocence is to be found in another one of the shipwrecks.

Sasha Nevah another completely unrealistic, yet Harveywood common archetype; the manic pixie dream girl (who is also a deadly assassin) with—of course—red hair and green eyes; the physical type of beta nerds everywhere.  In typical manic pixie dream girl fashion, her sidequest is to bring her a baby Dimorphodon which she wants to have as a pet.

BESTIARY
The new monsters associated with this Bestiary section are the Eurypterids, the ningyo (a kind of really ugly monkey mermaid), several types of pterosaurs, a giant sea urchin, and the tuyewera, a kind of undead with legs severed at the knee and a long frog-like tongue.  Off-hand, I don't think I need to write any new monster stats for anything that's shown up either in the adventure text or the bestiary, but I'll analyze that when I'm ready to start hanging these encounters and ideas into a new framework of some kind.

So, what stats would I need for this module, and what do I already have (or can repurpose?)  Not counting NPCs:

• sea scorpions (how about using byakhees, but taking away their ability to fly and replacing it with the ability to swim)
• In general, a fair bit of dangerous wildlife; giant spiders and crabs, snakes, lizards, pterosaurs, etc.  I have a fair bit of wildlife already, and for the most part, what I don't have can be recreated anyway by using existing wildlife stats and just calling them something different in game.
• a dryad (I've got)
• vegepygmies (Eh... I'm not interested, but I'm sure something that I already have can be adapted.  I won't bother myself, because I think the notion of these guys is kinda silly.  If I have plant men, I'd rather have them resemble the weird fey creatures from Leigh Brackett's The Vanishing Venusians.)
• undead that I have stats for already, including skeletons/zombies, ghouls and ghosts
• a shark (hmm... I don't have one of these.  I'd probably use crocodile stats and just present their habitat and hunting tactics differently, though.)
• a water mephit (I think using an imp and replacing the poison sting with something more aquatic-like would work.)
• soulbound dolls—assuming that I use these, I'd probably have to whip up new stats for them.
• gibbering mouther (shoggoths are basically the same thing, but significantly more powerful.    I'd probably use the shoggoth stats, but halve the hit points and lower the To Hit score, although maybe not as drastically as halving it.)
• serpentman sorcerer.  I've been reluctant to stat serpentmen, because I've already got lizardmen, and really; what's the difference?  Making one a "boss sorcerer" though requires a little bit of work.

LOCATIONS Maps and other locations that can be adapted to another setting:

• Smuggler's Shiv island
• Thrunefang (cannibal) village/camp
• Caves of the Mother (small cave system under the lighthouse ruins
• Azlanti temple and semi-flooded causeway that reaches it

Announcing Isles of Terror

Well, although it took me a while to get it to the point where I liked how it was working, I ended up being relatively happy with the CULT OF UNDEATH project.  I got a whole new system out of it, which ended up expanding into FANTASY HACK, so that was worth it for its own sake.  I'm also slowly but surely getting a whole new setting out of it, which I've so far called TIMISCHBURG, but which I'll probably have to rename since Timischburg is only one of several countries in the setting.  What are some lessons learned from the drawn-out CULT OF UNDEATH series, then?  Well, in no particular order:

• I don't really like the Paizo adventures.  They've got two major structural problems at a high level, and then a third problem that isn't necessarily killer, but which doesn't work for me so well.
• They're horribly railroadish in their structure.  They really need to be carefully strip mined of their valuable content, but then run in a fashion that has little if nothing to do with the structure that they're written in.  
• They're horribly politically correct.  Paizo seems to be almost completely inhabited by professional SJWs, which really hurt the usability and entertainment value of the material that they write.
• And third, they're very, very into the "derived D&D" vibe.  I prefer a more wild and woolly gonzo sword & sorcery without all the clutter and baggage.  Paizo brings all their clutter and baggage with them.  
• I don't really like over-planning anyway.  Attempting to adopt a whole 15 level adventure path, even if part of the adaptation is a major pruning of the content to make it shorter, is still coming up with way too much in the way of planning for my taste.  I kinda knew that this was going to be a feature of attempting to do this, but it ended up being worse and less satisfying than I thought.
• To fix some of these problems, I think I'd do what I did near the end of the CULT OF UNDEATH project, but start on the right foot.  Rather than a have a framework that I'm trying to fit the encounters, scenarios, characters, and locations from the game into, I should do the strip-mining first and then see what all that raw material suggests to me.  It'll probably be something considerably different than what Paizo did with it.  And I'll keep that deliberately vague and high-level anyway.

What this sounds like it means that if I do another one of these, I should just go through each module—maybe even in more detail than I did for Carrion Crown, and archive what the encounters are like, the NPCs, the locations, etc. and spread them out (virtually, of course) as a buffet, and then after I've done that, figure out what if anything I can do with it.

So; let's do that, shall we?  Heck, if that's how I'm going to do things, then I can do tons more of them.  Now that I've got a model—finally, and with only a little bit of trial and error, all things considered—I can crank through these relatively quickly, until I run out of the ones in my collection.

I'm also going to use it as an excuse to gradually develop the setting a bit.  So, to start with, let's do The Serpent's Skull adventure path.  Because it all starts with a shipwreck and builds from there into a tropical, King Kongian adventure of sorts, I'm going to call it ISLES OF TERROR.  Now I just have to figure out exactly where I'm going to place these islands...

And yes, I'm aware of the vaguely Isle of Dread-like vibe that the adventure path starts off with.  Which, I have no doubt, is very deliberate.

I should point out that I'm not completely done with CULT OF UNDEATH either.  I still want to pull all of the work I did together; going back and treating the whole thing the way I'm going to do this one, maybe.  Yeah, it'll only be another post or two; or maybe I'll just put it on the wiki and make reference to it here.  Not sure yet how I'm going to finish that one off.

Deconstructing Shadows of Gallowspire

Finally, in the 6th and final chapter of Carrion Crown, Paizo lets us know who the BBEG (a common reference in D&Diana, which I think comes from the old Buffy show; it means the Big Bad Evil Guy.) they've been chasing all this time is (poorly done; I'm currently reading Sax Rohmer's The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, and fer cryin' out loud, the villain's name is in the title!)  The adventure summary is that the PCs have to go rescue some old guy who's the "damsel in distress" (Paizo is way too politically correct to actually put damsel's in distress; unlikable, foolish old men is about right for them.)  And then, at the very end, they go fight the BBEG, who's liched himself out, and they hear of him, go meet him and kill him all in one go.  Sigh.

It's somewhat poorly structured, but my own finale isn't so different from this that I can't borrow some of the same notions.  Let me go through it, as I have the others, and see what I want to use.

The first section of the adventure has the PC's traveling through the Ustalavic version of Mordor, so it's overland travel with horror-themed encounters and hazards.

WITCHGATE GROVES This is presuming that the PCs attempt to teleport to their destination; they are drawn by lodestone like witchgates, so they can't arrive where they want to.  Ancient groves of trees surround these witchgates, but they've been corrupted, so they have 6 hangman trees in them, which are basically the Pathfinder equivalent of Old Man Willow from The Fellowship of the Ring.  I'd treat them as a trap or even a haunt if I were to use them, and why not?  Sinister dark forests are a cool idea for any fantasy game and have been ever since sinister dark forests became a meme in Western Civilization folklore, which dates back to the beginning of written records, pretty much.

HAUNTED GROVE: Subterfuge + Mind (Notice) DC 20 to smell the scent of decay one round before the haunted grove strikes.  Thin, prehensile branches snake down from the trees and wrap around the necks of the targets, pulling them off their feet, where they will die as if they were hanged.  Each round, the PCs can attempt to break or cut free of the branches (STR + Athletics DC 23, or attack with an edged weapon, to hit AC 25, doing 15 total points of damage) but they are still susceptible to additional attack.  Now that they are aware, they can attempt to dodge out of the area which can be reached by the tree (a DEX + Athletics check, DC 15) but if the trees are in a grove, they probably cannot leave the area of one tree's attacks without stumbling into another one.

Note: this is a relatively difficult haunt, with high DCs to escape from.

WYRMWAY SMEAR Although this is just really a bit of color, Hagmouth is a festering dragon with a tail wound that doesn't heal and therefore is rotted and disgusting.  He lives in a cave by one of the witchgates and has an unstable and untrustworthy relationship of sorts with the Whispering Way.  At the end of the day, it's just a dragon, though.

KNIGHTS OF OZEM  The transparently Christian Knights of Ozem have cornered the transparently innocent Wiccan and want to execute her for being a witch or some such.  In fact, she is actually possessed, but she allowed the possession to protect her family from some greater evil.  This whole encounter is as stupid as it is insulting.  This is a demon.  Anyone foolish enough to make a deal with one, even if it is supposedly good-intentioned (but they aren't, because demons don't make deals with the innocent) has been thoroughly corrupted.  This is just an excuse for some preachiness. Not on my watch; not in my campaign.

WITHERLEAF BARROWS  The demon didn't fulfill its end of the bargain after all; the lady's stupid family was captured by an undead dragon, who keeps them for a while, I guess, and then absorbs their life force like some kind of vampire or something.  However, the wagon train where her family was is now the ambush site for some hags, who hoped somebody would stumble back across them.  They've also animated the remains in the barrows, which curiously are just zombies, not barrow-wights.  Oh, well.

RENCHURCH ABBEY The headquarters of the Black Path (or Whispering Way, as they call it here), but it's just a haunted house slash dungeon encounter bucket.  I don't really have much use for it, but let me make some quick notes about what it has in it.  There's way too many of them, making this a major dungeoncrawl episode, but some of the below would at least be welcome.

• A banshee (in FANTASY HACK, a variant ghost)  
  
• a haunt that casts a fireball spell, basically
• bog mummies that climb out of a stagnant pond
• a minor haunt based on shady asylum doctor habits, that cause weakness in the PCs
• skeletal demon horses (nightmares) in a stable
• a graveyard haunt where graves open up and attempt to swallow the PCs
• a whispering haunt with variable minor effects
• a bladed door trap—reminds me of some Indiana Jones business
• a freaky giant with an extra withered arm called an athach
• a ghostly bell
• a barbed devil
• some really fat ghouls (I like the imagery, I suppose)
• some kind of famine demon
• a weird haunt where all kinds of animal heads on the wall suck the air out of the room
• a vampire and some spectres
• failed liches (hungry ghosts) (there is some really cool art for these gals, though.)
• invisible stalkers
• mummies
• an undead werewolf
• mohrgs (a stupid, D&D undead)
• golems
• a lich
• another demon waiting in ambush where the PCs have to cross a slippery, narrow rim around a pond underground.  Not a bad set-up for an encounter, actually.
• a drowning haunt
• a flying sword haunt
• more liches and cultists
• more zombies and variant undead
• stone golems
• shadows
• more demons
• necromancers
• a flaming iron golem shaped like a fly
• a "worm that walks"
• a sub-boss who's an undead cleric of some kind or another called The Gray Friar

Presumably at this point, you've rescued the "damsel" in distress, and the only thing left to do is go kill the BBEG that you've never met and only just recently heard of for the first time.  Now you go to the Ustalavic reflection of Minas Morgul, where you face another dungeoncrawl full of haunts and undead and demonic spiders.  But you fight an undead dragon (a fellghast in FANTASY HACK) and the BBEG, a nasty, advanced and customized lich.

WHAT NEXT?  There's actually some interesting ideas on what do to after the adventure is over as a kind of denouement, or even post-denouement.  These are all about a paragraph long, and the entire section is less than a page, so I'm going to copy and paste the text as a quote.  Some of these are merely side quests with a similar theme and geographical setting.

Blood of Bastardhall: Once every 100 years, the spectral bridge leading to Castle Arudora appears and a coach driven by a headless rider storms across, scouring the countryside and claiming victims with mysterious deliberateness. Yet this century the bridge to the ruin known as Bastardhall has appeared early, not long after a mysterious figure calling himself Caydserris Arudora passed through Cesca headed for the castle. Who is the mysterious new master of Bastardhall? What has changed the balance of power within its haunted halls? And what lies imprisoned within its catacombs that even angels would kill to keep secure? 

The Doom That Came to Thrushmoor: With all the tampering with the forces of reality and sanity occurring on the banks of Avalon Bay—already considered a weak point between worlds—the fundamental barriers that guard reality are beginning to unravel. This becomes most apparent in Thrushmoor, where the town’s Star Stelae become the source of strange piping songs audible throughout the community. But the otherworldly music seems incomplete, as one of the Star Stelae went missing long ago, and gradually the discordant harmonies cause sensitive townsfolk to regress into primitive monsters. Things become stranger when one of the black ships of the denizens of Leng sails into port. Can the PCs recover the missing Star Stelae and repair the borders of reality, or is Thrushmoor doomed to become a realm of madness? 

The Haunted Count: Several weeks after Count Galdana’s return to his home, Willowmourn, he begins experiencing terrifying dreams of unliving creatures and ominous arcane seals. The research he conducts in his family library leads him to believe his dreams are in fact visions of the ancient wards scattered across Golarion that ensure the Whispering Tyrant stays locked away, the knowledge of their locations imparted to him by a combination of his recent trauma and secrets locked away in his tainted blood. Not trusting anyone else in the nation with knowledge of his foul ancestry, he contacts the PCs, seeking their aid and revealing the mysteries of his visions. With their help, the count becomes convinced that his dreams aren’t merely memories, but warnings that one or more of these ancient seals is soon to be breached. 

Heirs to the Tyrant: Gallowspire is not the only profane edifice haunted by the taint of the Whispering Tyrant. Several of the archlich’s minions still survive across Golarion, and the PCs’ conflict atop Gallowspire garners their attention. Several of these former generals of Tar-Baphon and their reactions to his near return are detailed [below]. 

The Impossible Cure: Count Galdana makes no secret of the PCs’ involvement in his rescue, and soon they are heralded as heroes in Ustalav’s capital and beyond. Yet Galdana is not the only one of the nation’s rulers who might have use of these newly recognized heroes. Depending on their actions in Caliphas and based on the report of his agent, Ramoska Arkminos, Conte Ristomaur Tiriac invites the PCs to his home at Corvischior, enlisting them in his search for a cure for vampirism. Can Tiriac be trusted? And will the PCs ally themselves with the vampire count, even if doing so might put an end to the curse of vampirism across Golarion? 

Vampire War: Caliphas’s vampiric lord, Luvick Siervage, likely had a role in aiding the PCs in their struggle against the Whispering Way. Soon after Adivion Adrissant’s defeat, the vampire general Malyas wakes from his slumber and learns of the role of his ancient rival—Siervage—in thwarting the Tyrant’s rebirth. The merciless warlord rouses his armies to strike at the traitorous vampires of Caliphas, careless of the petty human capital that covers their rat’s den. See [below] for more details on the contenders in this immortal rivalry. 

Wrath of Shadows: The umbral dragon Sicnavier has tormented the people of western Ustalav throughout the nation’s history. In truth, numerous dragons have held the name Sicnavier, murdering their predecessors and ruling from an ancient and ever-expanding lair that drills deep into the depths of the Hungry Mountains. After centuries of depravities and murders, the dark pit known as Sicnavier’s Lair has become a haunted abyss where draconic spirits and stranger things lurk in the dark, seeking to drive the pit’s living draconic inhabitant mad. Recently, they succeeded, unleashing a forgotten terror upon the world.

As mentioned in Heirs to the Tyrant and Vampire War, there are some other suggestions for follow-ups.  I thought about posting them too, but it's several pages worth, so you're better off just reading it in the module itself.  But there's some decent ideas there.  Especially if you're going to do something a bit less like Carrion Crown and more like CULT OF UNDEATH, which is abbreviated and faster than the prototype on which it is based.  I do dislike over-long campaigns with ever-more powerful characters, though.  Maybe these sequels would be best served as a kind of informal follow-up with new characters starting all over again from scratch.

Meet the Megalosaurs, Part I

I never did an Extinct Animal of the Week on Monday!  I noticed this on Tuesday, of course, but I was busy on Tuesday and even Wednesday and still didn't get around to it.  So my Extinct Animal of the week is extraordinarily late this week. In fact, it's so late, that I think I'm going to expand it into another "Meet the ...." series, in this case, Meet the Megalosaurs.  This is an odd one, because I'm not as familiar with the megalosaurs as I am with the carnosaurs or tyrannosaurs... so I'll get to learn along with the reader, to some degree!

Megalosauroidia, as defined by Carrano, Benson and Sampson (2012) is the sister-group to Avetherapoda, which includes both carnosaurs and coelurosaurs.  I've already talked a great deal about both the carnosaurs, and one branch of the coelurosaurs (the tyrannosauroids.)  Of course, the coelurosaurs also give us, for instance, the oviraptors, the "raptors" (dromeosaurs), the ostrich-dinosaurs (ornithomimosaurs), the therizonsaurs, the compsognathids, and of course, the birds themselves.  There are several posts worth of exploration within coelurosauria, but I'm not feeling very inclined to do it, because I think many of those animals are weird and less interesting to me personally than some other dinosaur groups.

I'll do the megalosaurs, and maybe the ceratosaurs (someday), including abelisaurs, and I'll be done with meat-eaters.  I may yet explore some of the plant-eating lineages, like the ceratopsians or the sauropods, but we'll see.

The megalosauroids consist, at a high level, of three groups: the piatnitzkysaurs, the spinosaurs, and the megalosaurs proper (which also has the spin-off group of afrovenators.)  The earliest known examples come from the Middle Jurassic, and this seems to be their period of greatest diversity.  Their larger and more famous examples include Late Jurassic forms (like Torvosaurus), but the spinosaur radiation is more of a "mid" Cretaceous phenomena.  (Keep in mind, there is no official Middle Cretaceous; just Early and Late.  "Mid" Cretaceous is therefore a convenient informality.)

The Piatitzkysaur family is united by five synapomorphies, and is usually the "first" encountered on the megalosaur family tree.  It consists of only three animals; two Middle Jurassic therapods from South America and Marshosaurus bicentesimus from the Cleveland-Lloyd quarry of Utah.

If you recall, Cleveland-Lloyd is from the Brushy Basin member, and is therefore the later part of the Morrison.  There were other large megalosaurs in the Morrison; mainly Torvosaurus, but Marshosaurus was a more modestly sized animal, maybe the size of a grizzly.  Known from not a lot of remains, and have some tail fragments from Colorado provisionally referred to it as well, we don't know a lot about Marshosaurus.  It would have been, curiously about the same size as the holotype of Ceratosaurus, but a large individual of the latter was also found in the Cleveland-Lloyd.  Altogether, there seem to be more predators in the Morrison than we'd expect, and exactly how they evaded competing directly with each other is unclear—but the Morrison area was large and spread over many millions of years; maybe they didn't all exist in the same time and place at the same time as much as it seems that they did.

The other two piatnitzkysaurs are Condorraptor currumili and Piatnitzkysaurus floresi itself; both from the Cañadon Asfalto Formation of central Patagonia.  Both are known from pretty scanty material, so I'm not sure exactly how to describe them as different from each other—but both are medium-sized therapods (similar in size to Marshosaurus) from a lacustrine floodplain environment from the Middle Jurassic about 165-160 million years ago.  Not a lot is known about not only these two animals, but also their environment.  Some frogs and turtles, a couple of primitive sauropods, a primitive heterodontosaur, and even a primitive abelisaur have all been found in the formation, as well as many plants and a few few mammal bones, but not necessarily all from the same stratigraphic position within the formation.  Which means to say that we can only infer a relatively small amount of information about its environment at all, really—what it hunted, how it lived, and what it competed with.  As is the case with some other environments, there seem to be two many therapod species that are all about the same size for the area, making one wonder how they avoided competing with each other exactly.

Leaving the piatnitzkysaurs and entering megalosauria proper, before we get to any of the groupings within it, we have to deal with Streptospondylus altdorfensis, a French animal of (again) medium size, known from some vertebrae and limb elements.  Although it was one of the very first dinosaurs identified, it was actually known and misidentified as crocodylian for quite some time prior to that.  The remains are too fragmentary for a really confident placement of its relation to the rest of its family.  It was found in rocks that are about 161 million years old, and like many megalosaurs known from fragmentary remains, has bounced all over the therapod family tree for many years, and has seen a bizarre split into numerous proposed species, almost all of which are dubious.  Although within Megalosauria, it is not within Megalosauridae, which means that it's not really all that closely related to Eustreptospondylus oxoniensis, which is within the Megalosauridae proper.  Eustreptospondylus is sometimes placed within its own subfamily.  Like everyone else in the family we've looked at so far, it was about 20 feet long and maybe half a ton in weight.  Also from the Middle Jurassic around 162 million years ago, it is one of the most complete largish therapods discovered in Europe, and certainly that was true when it was unearthed in 1870.

Europe during this period was an East Indies-style archipelago, with relatively large islands, but nowhere near the landmass of a continent, because high sea levels flooded much of the epicontinental areas with shallow, tropical seas.  It makes an appearance in Walking With Dinosaurs which, although pretty dates, is probably more or less accurate enough.

It's funny that the megalosaurs have been an infamous trashcan taxon for decades when in reality not a ton is known about megalosaurs, because they've been found most frequently in formations that are poorly known, or they've been relatively rare in the formations in which they are found.  There are really on three genuine megalosaurs, by which I mean members of the Megalosaurinae subfamily.  The most primitive and oldest is Duriavenator hesperis from 170 million years ago in England; one of the earliest of all tetanuran therapods, actually.  Of course, it was originally referred as a new species of Megalosaurus itself, but it's fairly closely related, at least.  Known only from some jaw fragments, it was... probably about the same 20-25 foot or so size as everything else we've looked at so far.  Very little is known about it or its environment, except that it had more teeth in its jaws than Megalosaurus itself.

Which, after all that, only has one valid species left after all, Megalosaurus bucklandii.  From the same time period, the Bathonian of about 166 million years ago, in Oxford.  Amusingly, its famous for having the knob end of a leg bone named Scrotum humanum, the first scientifically named dinosaur remains, although they were assumed to have been the fossilized testicles of a giant at the time.  Although among the largest animals known of those we've reviewed so far, it still wasn't all that big; less than 25 feet long—this seems to have been an upper limit for Middle Jurassic finds so far.  A hip and sacrum is known, some leg bones and plenty of vertebrae, and some jaw bones, but nothing like a complete skeleton has ever emerged, and its exact proportions and details remain fairly speculative.  A bit of skull (although no nose elements) suggests that it might have been an unusually large-headed therapod.

Megalosaurus lived alongside primitive cetiosaur-grade sauropods (including Cetiosaurus itself), some other smaller therapods and primitive ornithopods.  By inference, some stegosaurs are believed to have lived in its habitat as well, and it's believed to be the apex predator of its ecosystem.  As described elsewhere, including earlier in this post, it is part of the island Europe environment.

The final megalosaur (before I do afrovenators and spinosaurs tomorrow) is Torvosaurus, which comes in two species, tanneri from the late and northern Morrison and gurneyi from Portugal.  There may be another specimen (or closely related animal) found in Germany as well, and as at least a few already collected but not prepared or properly described bones lurking in museums have been referred to it, there may yet be more to come that's already been unearthed.

Torvosaurus, compared to, say, Allosaurus, which appeared in the same time and place (more or less) seems to have been quite large; from nearly 35 feet long to nearly 40—possibly—with a heavy body, kinda short legs, and a long snout.  It is presumed that Torvosaurus (and Ceratosaurus) may have preferred the more thickly vegetated gallery forests, and the allosaurs may have preferred the drier plains, but this is an inference based on pretty circumstantial evidence.

Tomorrow (or Monday) I'll turn to the spinosaurs and afrovenators.  In general, the megalosaurs have not been among my favorite predators (which are the predictable tyrannosaurs and the less predictable carnosaurs) but the last two; particularly Torvosaurus is a kind of favorite of sorts of mine.  As a contemporary of Allosaurus and the possible king of my favorite dinosaur faunal assemblage from the Morrison, I've got to give Torvosaurus his due.  I'm also a bit fascinated by Megalosaurus himself and his environment.  I've long been interested in the immediate predecessors of my Morrison-aspect faunas (and by Morrison aspect faunas, I mean Lourinha and Tendaguru too); i.e., where did they come from, and what were the more primitive Middle Jurassic faunas that led to them come from and what did they look like?  In general, the early Jurassic is very poorly known and the Middle Jurassic could use a lot more exploration.  It's a bit of a blank spot on our paleontology map that I'd love to see filled.

Deconstructing Ashes At Dawn

My summary for CULT OF UNDEATH has the PCs presumably attempting to rescue Revecca and stop the unsealing of a Primogenitor vampire at Grozavest, because the unleashing of such a monster would be catastrophic.  Plus, presumably they like Revecca enough to not let her get killed.  This is really more like the last chapter of the adventure path as written, and I don't have anything in my summary that follows very well what the fifth chapter, Ashes At Dawn has.  In fact, I really don't like this one even more than I don't like the other chapters of this adventure path.  Much of this can be seen quite clearly in the Introduction to the adventure, written by dysfunctional r-strategist and professional SJW F. Wesley Schneider.  Let me quote parts of it, briefly:

We’d been talking vaguely about Carrion Crown since PaizoCon 2010, when someone on the messageboards eventually hit us with what seemed to me to be a very obvious question: “Why would I help the vampires?” I understand this sort of question when all the details about a campaign’s plot are unreleased, abbreviated, or still forming. But as we weren’t ready or even able to release a lot of details yet, my only answer was essentially, “They have something the PCs want, putting characters into a ‘You scratch our backs and we’ll scratch yours’ situation.” 

For a certain subset of those in the discussion, this was not an acceptable answer.
“But vampires are evil!” “My party won’t work for the undead!” “I’m a paladin!” Wah, wah, wah! 

The world’s a hard place, and even harder when there’re fireballs and zombies! Toughen up! 

I wrote and deleted responses running the gamut of diplomatic shades, but I never posted anything with quite that tone. Most frustratingly, after considering and discussing the concern for a few days, I was forced to admit there was some validity to it. So I told folks we had top men on the job—I was planning to write it myself, after all—and assured them that, come volume #47, they’d be pleased with the outcome. 

Well, you’re holding the outcome in your hands. 

You don’t have to dig deep through Paizo’s backlist to catch the drift of my tastes. In short, I also always rooted for Skeletor over He-Man and the Joker over Batman. So obviously, like many GMs, I like the bad guys, I like overwhelming odds, and I like shades of gray and seeing the heroes forced beyond their comfort zones.

So... if you don't want self-righteous, ham-handed preaching during your gaming about nihilistic values where there's no such thing as a hero, or good and evil, then Schneider doesn't have time for you and only his reluctant professional duty keeps him from openly mocking you—although he'll still throw in some passive-aggressive BS anyway, like pretending that you're crying.  What a douche.  This is the guy who wrote the absurd fantasy Burning Man bohemian city of Kaer Maga, by the way.  Not surprising that the whole "save the monsters, because actually people are the real monsters, especially if they look kinda white and Christian and male, LOL" vibe is one that he's pushed heavily into the adventure path, and which has effectively ruined it.  That said, as I've done in the past with the other modules, I've kind of reworked the framework, i.e. "plot" and then go through each module to strip-mine them of any encounters and details of value that can be rehung on this new framework.  So, let's get to it.  I suspect that I may end up using less of this module than of most of the rest I've reviewed, but we'll see after I go through it in detail at the end of this post if that presumption ends up being true or not.

The gist of the adventure is that someone has started infiltrating the younger generation of vampires at Caliphas, the capital of Ustalav (so my Grozavest, in the TIMISCHBURG setting).  These younger punks are spurred into violent revolution, and begin by starting to murder their elders who stand in the way of their own political ambitions, but of course, these younger vampires are being manipulated by the Whispering Way cult, so they're chumps.  The PCs are expected to help the vampire elders, who at least make the trains run on time in Caliphas... I'm sorry, they at least recognize that parasites can't literally destroy the entirety of their host, so they oppose the Whispering Way which wants to turn the entire world into an undead one.  Given the rules for vampires and their spawn in D&D and Pathfinder, there's an elixir or some-such developed to give spawn free agency, made by hags, and they have their own agenda too.  The PCs are supposed to work with the leader of the vampires to solve the mystery of who's murdering the vampires and stopping them so that he will help them track down the Whispering Way and stop their funny business.   Again; I don't know how much of this I'll use, but the key elements can be used somehow other than they were originally written, if needs be, so let's have a look at them.

THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN  A Whispering Way adherent that the PCs have been following for some time has been turned into a Headless horseman, and is tasked with slowing or stopping the PCs.  They fight him on the road, where he's been tracking them, before they arrive in town.  He's got dire ghoul wolves with him, and rides on a nightmare.

HEADLESS HORSEMAN: 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.  Also: drains 1d3 DEX on touch, creatures reduced to -5 DEX are immobile and helpless for coup de grace attack that kills them automatically, forces a Sanity check on all characters that can see the horseman. 

MOUNT: AC: 15 HD: 5d6 (20 hp) AT: bite +5 (1d6) STR: +3, DEX: -1, MND: -3, S: breathe fire (1d10 HP damage—DEX + Athletics check DC 14 will halve damage.) 

GHOUL-HOUNDS: AC: 13 HD: 2d6 (8 hp) AT:  bite +2 (1d6) STR: +2, DEX: +0, MND: -1, S: touch paralyzes for 1d4 rounds, humans wounded by ghoul-houndss 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.

The ghoul-hounds should arrive as reinforcements after the combat has already started, which for best results, should be an ambush at night on a covered bridge.  (Keep in mind that I'm treating the headless horseman as a ghost story, which is more in keeping with the whole Sleepy Hollow tradition.  Irish folklore has the dullahan, which is a headless horseman of sorts too that carries around its own head.  This is an Unseelie Fae, not a ghost.  I don't know that it really matters, but I like the Sleepy Hollow ghost tradition better.  Plus, I'm not at all Irish, and in fact have a fair bit of Scots-Irish blood, so screw you, Paddy!)

VAMPIRE BODY INVESTIGATION Vampire bodies and gossip in the morning as the PCs wake up in their inn.  If you're not going to do anything with the vampire murder subplot (I am not) then this probably has no place in adventure.  Besides, it's not an "encounter"—it's where the PCs get a clue shoved in their face.

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA How typically Vampire: the Masquerade-ish.  After going to a fancy party, the PCs are supposed to convince someone to let them browse the archives for clues. In a pinch, they can break in later if they have no charisma or charm.  They find clues and probably set off a trap which summons four bone devils.  I wonder; I don't have anything quite like bone devils in the FANTASY HACK monster section, but they can easily be replaced with something else.  On the other hand; what would I have the CULT OF UNDEATH PC's researching exactly?  I don't really need them for anything.

Then a dhampyr NPC shows up and tells the PCs where to go next.  Sigh.  He offers to introduce them into vampire society so they can rub shoulders with the bloodsuckers and find more clues about who's killing them.

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRES  That's actually what they call this section.  Now that they've offered about the fourth side-bar about trying to force PCs to not kill the vampires but work with them, they finally seem to assume now that they just will.  It starts out with the statement that you as GM will have eliminated any other option for them, giving them no choice but to seek out the vampires.  Sigh again.  The entrance to Vamp Undercity is through the Glass House, a bit greenhouse and park, guarded by a strange topiary-loving vampire who wears vines instead of clothes (oooh, sexy! Or something.) There's also stuff like Venus people-traps, enslaved vampire spawn guards, magical traps and loads of vampire nobles to talk to (or kill; they go out of their way to discourage and yet say that we can't stop you in the text) including a Nosferatu-themed guy, who even wears the same clothes as Max Schrenk, of course.  They are meant to discover the murderer and lay an ambush for him, or seek out him out his "lair"; a fancy haberdashery, since the vampire murderer is also a tailor.  Inside, there are demons, vampires, ghouls, and the vampire murderer himself.  At the end of this episode of "we promise, this is still D&D, not one of those White Wolf pussy games" the PCs are meant to know something about the witches, and go chase after them next.

There's not really anything in here that I need.  I don't have a whole bunch of individualized vampire stats.  Unless I need them (and I don't) a vampire in FANTASY HACK is a vampire is a vampire.

THE BELLS OF SAINT PAGAN SOMETHING OR OTHER  I've gotta be honest; the attempt at "cute" subtitles that mimic well-known movies and/or books isn't something that I'm immune to, but it also kinda ticks me off after a while.  The witches are, of course, hanging out in an abandoned abbey.  The story is that they are a coven of three, but one of them is "stuck" in spider swarm form because her body was destroyed and dismembered years ago.  Their motivation is that they're trying to get her skull back so they can finish reassembling the skeleton and revive her as a humanoid witch, rather than as a whole bunch of spiders crawling all over the place.  They've got a summoned demon and some charmed guards, a falling bell trap, invisible stalkers and a few other things kicking around, and then of course, the two witches themselves, plus the third in the form of a bunch of spiders that hold together in humanoid shape.  You find a fallen paladin, a weird "blood knight", a kind of animated armor dripping in blood, possessed by the spirit of a dead warrior.  And, of course, you find the two witches, who are illustrated to look like ratchet Renaissance Fair girls; pretty much exactly what you'd expect a nerdy D&D player to jerk off to, I suppose.  Shudder.  And then at the end, you get confronted by nagas.  The witches supposedly have a "get away from being killed by the PCs for free" card.

Although the adventure itself is... not my cup of tea, mostly because it is more like having a cup of tea with the duchess than it is an adventure, the section which follows the adventure proper and shows us the city of Caliphas is really quite nice as a city brief.  It's too brief to really be a good sourcebook, but it's a nice map, and I could easily use it for a decent-sized city.  I don't know that I want to use it to represent Grozavest itself, as I need a big, sealed prison in it (maybe one of the half a dozen or so castles in the city can double for this, though.)

I also like popping to the back and seeing what they've got going on in the bestiary, in case I want to convert up something using the same concept.  They don't this time, but they do curiously have their own versions of nosoi, a word that I also use as a type of daemon.  In Greek mythology, the Nosoi were spirits of pestilence and disease that escaped from Pandora's box when she opened it.  Because of this, I basically gave the name Nosoi daemon to a big, ugly plague-daemon loosely based on a Warhammer Nurgle miniature of the pox maggoths, so it wouldn't exactly fit in a box, I don't think.  That's OK.  Paizo have decided that they're little bird-like psychopomps, so they're even farther removed from the Greek original.  Mine at least are purported to have grown from tiny fly-like versions of themselves that crept out of the box many millennia ago.  There you have it.

One more of these, and then I'll decide what (if anything) still needs to be labeled CULT OF UNDEATH, or if it's ready to just transition completely into the new TIMISCHBURG tag that explores the setting.

A Raiders rip-off that I missed

Given that Harveywood rarely puts out anything worth watching anymore, I'm quite tempted to just dig up old movies that I never saw the first time around.  Chances are I'll like them at least as much.  Better Kiss a Cobra (or maybe The Kiss of the Cobra; it seems like the translated title was all over the place.  But it did involve a kiss and a cobra.)  Made in Italy.  We have spaghetti westerns and we think they're great; why not spaghetti neo-pulps?

Speaking of which, has anyone ever found Bring 'Em Back Alive anywhere?  The old Bruce Boxleitner show which was also a Raiders rip-off.  I think it only ran a season or two.

Where's my MicroSD

After making a big deal about pulling the plug on reliance on the Cloud and putting a bunch of my RPG stuff on a MicroSD card (32 Gb.  I replaced it with a 64 Gb card in my phone, so I had it sitting around needing to be used) I find that I can't find it this morning.  The adapter in which I tend to keep it was empty when I got it out of my pocket to plug in today.

Sigh.  Well, that sucks.  Maybe I'll find that it's in the pants pocket of the pants I wore on Friday, if I can find them before they hit the laundry (I can; I just need to remember to go check it first thing when I get home.)

Sigh again.  I had a lot of stuff on there that was updated from where I have it anywhere else.

So, not only do you want to be sure and not rely on the Cloud, but you need to also make sure that you include frequent back-ups in more than one place.  Just in case it ever can't be accessed in its primary storage location anymore.

I'm actually fairly certain that it'll turn up.  There's really only one or two places it can be.  But, in the meantime, I'm a bit anxious about the state of my AD ASTRA and FANTASY HACK files!  Not to mention all of the images that I've been pulling my Friday Art Attack posts from!

Friday Art Attack

Belit, Conan's best bet at a one true love, and the best female character created by Howard.  Not because she was a Red Sonja, but because she was feminine.  It's amazing that the Leftists who create our fiction today fail consistently to recognize that women who aren't feminine are simply unattractive and unlikable.  I suppose that's because the only men that they typically know are equally lacking in masculinity.

For whatever reason, I've long been fascinated with the concept of apes or other primates that are equally intelligent as at least some men, and who have lost civilizations somewhere out there in the backwoods of whatever.  I've got them in AD ASTRA and I've had them in most of my fantasy settings too, including the Mk. IV of DARK•HERITAGE.  I haven't yet found a place for them in the evolving Mk. V, or in TIMISCHBURG, but I'm certain that eventually I will.

Scrambling!  I believe this is concept art by none other than Frank Frazetta for the old Battlestar Galactica TV show.  It was later attached (and flipped) to a novel that was part of the franchise.

There's nothing particularly special about this piece; there are loads of orbital space stations in place above countless worlds in the AD ASTRA setting that look more or less like this.  In fact, you'll need them for the really big space-ships which are too massive to actually land on the surface or otherwise get too close to the gravity well of a massive object like a planet without risking structural damage.  They can, of course, dock on an orbital platform like this and then send shuttles to the surface.

Although AD ASTRA is not meant to be a hard sci-fi, or even a "blue sci-fi" setting in the least—it's not part of the Campbellian "engineers with screwdrivers" type of sci-fi, it's more of the E. E. "Doc" Smith, Edmond Hamilton, Alex Raymond and Edgar Rice Burroughs "red sci-fi" type stuff, even Star Wars benefited from turning some exciting real science into exotic locales, if nothing else.  This is an illustration of J1407b, an exoplanet with a ring system that's tens of millions of miles in size.  In fact, each of thirty individual rings are tens of millions of miles across; the scope of this ring system is equivalent to an entire solar system almost.  Sense of wonder indeed!

I've often been back and forth between embracing and avoiding the Classic influence, but I'm wondering right now where superhero-like mythical gods like Ares here can fit into my settings.  Possibly I need to resurrect some of my other ideas to make room for something like this, because if I don't, eventually I'll miss it.

Speaking of superheroes, Magnus Robot Fighter is an interesting and poorly known example; a kind of champion of humanity who lives in a dystopian future not unlike that of The Terminator in some ways, although humanity is more enslaved rather than hunted and hurtling towards extinction, but of course, he's a superhero with superhuman strength and durability allowing him to fight metal robots with his bare hands and destroy them.  Plus, he has this Flash Gordon look to him.  I need to come up with a planet or two that's under the thumb of robot overlords, and it wouldn't hurt me to incorporate a bit more of the kind of toned-down superheroics of some of the Star Wars and Guardians of the Galaxy scale stuff into AD ASTRA.  

I often use images of Abomination and Killer Croc to represent my Oerks; bit reptilian humanoids from heavy gravity worlds.

OK, this has nothing to do with any of my settings.  I just thought it was funny.  Sounds like they were a bit worried about the optics of this at LucasFilm, since the latest rumors coming out of the studio and from the actor himself are all about making him gay for his Latino best friend Poe Dameron instead of pining for Mary Sue Rey.

There's altogether a lack of Egyptian mummy/undead vibed aliens in AD ASTRA so far.  Considering that I specifically want to focus on the more gee whiz space opera and not get caught up pseudo scientific realism for the setting, I need to sometimes remind myself to include stuff like this just to keep my wahoo meter from falling too low.

On the other hand, this game art  from Dead Space 3 reminds me that I need a nice big stable of Boba Fett-like supercommando soldiers.  They can't all be Cilindareans and Janissaries either; sometimes they just need to be incredibly talented free agents.

This concept art reminds of a quick location flashed in the old Disney animation for Ichabod Crane, and it reminds me painfully that the idea of Western civilization religion and horror are now purposefully and integrally worked into the fabric of DARK•HERITAGE and TIMISCHBURG and every other setting I'm working on.  AD ASTRA doesn't have much horror in it, though, so maybe that's a bit of an exception.