It Will Be Here, It Will Cost 0$, And Then It Will Be Gone Forever

The hardcover, full-color, 8.5x11", 400-page Compendium is now available. Until Jan 1. Then it's gone. And it costs 0$.

Fifteen years in the making, it includes:

-All of the illustrated Cube World material--fully re-designed to be easier to read, cross-referenced, with notes, including adventures in Voivodja, The Southern Daimyos, The Peacock Isles, Drownesia, Nephilidia and more.

-Dozens of pages of unpublished new material.

-The entire aborted Violence In the Nympharium scenario--re-laid out, redrawn, and deluxified

-An entire illustrated megadungeon--with dozens of levels--which my players have been in and out of for the last 2 years. Designed to be the be-all-end-all dungeon of its kind, with every kind of cool dungeon monster and environment represented in its dozens of levels.

-New completely crawlable maps of the chivalrous continent of Broceliande. Likewise--my players have been in and out of here for the last 2 years.

-Tools and tables to use all of this stuff.

That is--it basically has all the material for my campaign that isn't in another published book, everything in all the Cube World pdfs, and more.

Email me if you want it: zakzsmith AT hawtmayle dawt calm.

Also: The Cube World pdfs are no longer available (aside from the unillustrated utility ones like Book of Jerks)--all that material is now only available in the illustrated Compendium.

None of this will be on sale after January 1st.

And all you pirates--this will not be available as a pdf. It's available in this hardcover only.

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Why Jews Never Forget Anything

The Genizah

 It is said that among the Jews there were once wizards who, after creeping from the beds of Christians, smeared fluids vital--still fresh from these fornications and interfaith adulteries--across the graven faces of their golems while whispering words from the Zohar, thus imparting movement and intellect to these stone mockeries of the will of the Creator. Speaking as a Jew I can tell you straight up: it’s all true. (Place campaign mcguffin here) has been with the Jews since before the age of the First Temple where it was once held within the sacred Kodesh haKodashim, and the witch’s notebooks found therein illuminated to only the holiest and most learned rabbis the true nature of reality. It is now housed on the lowest and most hidden level of the library beneath the Synagogue of the Levantines (or El-Geniza) in Fustat, Egypt. Few attend this ancient library, as those who would seek the most esoteric knowledge hidden there must contend with golems left by the kabbalists and baal shem of the distant past.

On the outside, the Synagogue of the Levantines appears to be an ordinary, though very large, synagogue, beneath are seven semi-public levels of the mundane library (one for each name of god), beneath this, the secret levels 8-24 (the number of abundance) hold the genizah (it is forbidden to discard any text with the name of god written on it, so this is a disorganized record of nearly every document produced by the temple and surrounding community since its founding) and beneath are the still-more secret levels (of which the current caretakers and rabbis may not even be aware) 25-35 (the number of wisdom)  possess the sorcerous texts. It is here that the (mcguffin)—and the golems protecting it—are found. A magic-user or cleric spending at least a week in this part of the library may gain a level and more new spells may be available at the Referee’s discretion.

Baal Shem Golems 

These golems resemble the gargoyles of medieval architecture, human-sized, save that each has a Hebrew name of god engraved on its forehead. Each can use a different spell associated with that name at will. Inside each golem’s mouth is a yad (a wandlike object with a carved hand at the tip used to turn the pages of the Torah) which, when the golem is destroyed, can be used to turn the pages of the texts that teach the spell associated with the golem (though these texts may be in any of a hundred languages). Without the appropriate yad the text is unreadable. There are dozens of each golem throughout the forgotten halls of the library.

Encounters on levels 25-35, roll d100, or d10 on levels 34 and 35:

1-YHWH golem

2-El golem

3-Eloah golem

4-Elohim golem

5-Elohai golem

6-El Shaddai golem

7-Tzevaot golem

8-Roll d8 twice on this table

9 Degenerated Baal Shem

10-14 Red sunset cobra

15-19 d4 eggshell scorpions

20-21 Jackal eating dead Baal Shem

22-00 No encounter

HD 12  HP 70  Speed 120’ Armor 20 (18 vs blunt weapons, 16 vs pick-axes or similar point-force weapons) Attack +10 choke/claw d12 or by spell as 12th-level caster:

YHWH God's Eye (level 3 cleric)— Range: touch. Duration: d4 rounds+cleric level. The eye of the cleric's god falls upon the target. The target must strictly obey the tenets of the god's faith and holy teachings at all times or suffer d8+(cleric level) damage per round of disobedience. 

El  Warmask (level 3 cleric or m-u)—Caster cuts the face from a slain foe (this takes 1 round and a successful Dex check). The face then will magically adhere to the face of the caster or a target and grant them the physical (str, con, max hp and combat and damage bonuses), mental (int, magic-user spells) or spiritual (wis, cleric spells) of the dead foe for one round per level of the caster. The target or caster must have slain the foe.

Eloah Divine Lacuna (level 2 cleric)—No save. Range: Touch. A single god chosen by the caster cannot see the target. The target cannot be directly helped, harmed, or in any way affected by any cleric spells cast by a devotee of that god's faith or otherwise relying on the power of that god.  Lasts a number of days equal to the cleric’s level.

Elohim Twist of Cain (level 3 cleric)—Range: 100’. No save. Target briefly sees an apparition of every being s/he has slain. The target is stunned until s/he makes a successful save. The save is made at a minus equal to the number of digits in the total tally of the target's kills. 

Elohai Zealous Repetition (level 1 m-u)—Range: 20' On a failed will/save, the target must repeat that action every round (s/he may change targets) until s/he succeeds on a save. 

El Shaddai Obsession Curse (level 2 m-u)—Range: Touch. Failed save means the target becomes obsessed with an object of the caster’s choice. The target must do things like make a will or spell save to get away from the object and otherwise avoid acting all Gollum about it in any other circumstances. The target is at -4 in combat if not touching the object on account of being distracted unless it is actively fighting to secure the object in which case it is at +4.

Tzevaot Total Empathy (level 4 cleric)—Range: 20 feet. No save. Two targets are chosen: a "donor" and a "receiver". The receiver becomes completely aware of the donors struggles in life on the most visceral level. The receiver knows the donor's most powerful desires and fears but will not consciously act to exacerbate the donor's situation. Unless the donor creature is suicidal, the receiver cannot harm the donor in any way. The receiver may, if s/he desires, make a will/spell save to stop the feeling once every 24 hours but the knowledge gained remains.

Degenerated Baal Shem Wizard-scholars who never escaped the library, now hideous: they crawl on bellies and have legs and tails like desert lizards. They are otherwise unarmed, unarmored magic-users or clerics of level 2d6.

Red Sunset Cobra—a species of spitting cobra, likes to hide in the stacks

HD 1 HP 4 Speed 90’ Armor 14 Morale 8 Attack Bite +2 to hit d4 (can spit up to 8’) and save vs Poison each round until a save is made, taking 1hp per failed save. If any saves are failed the affected body part will swell grotesquely and the character will take 4hp every morning until it is treated.

Eggshell scorpions

HD 1 HP 3 Speed 120’ Armor 13 Morale 9 Attack +1 to hit d4 plus Save vs poison or go blind until you save.

Jackal

HD 1 HP 5 Speed 120’ Armor 15 Morale 7 Attack +1 to hit d2hp.

Connections: If the locals get the feeling the party are adventurers, they’ll tell them the legend of Zirzuuza (G12). Local Jews may ask you to take letters to relatives in Prague (D3).

(This is one of 100 adventures from the upcoming module Violence In The Nympharium from Lamentations of the Flame Princess)

101 Nymphs 100 Octopuses 98 Adventures

Why Is There A Nympharium?

To understand what will come next, you should first accept the following premises:

-In Chapter Three of T.H. White’s The Sword In the Stone, Merlin says “But I unfortunately was born at the wrong end of time, and I have to live backwards from in front, while surrounded by a lot of people living forwards from behind.” This is wholly accurate.

An entity that might be the thing called Merlin, Emrys, Vauthes, Merlyn, Merlin Silvestris, Merlinus Caledonensis, Vermauthes, Merlin Emrys, Myrddin, Myrddin Wylit, Myrddin Ambrosius, Myr, Myrd, Magus, Merynum, Lailokem, Laleocen, Taliesin et al will, in at least one potential future, sometime after you read this, be born—to a woman and to a demon. He will age slowly through ever-more-primitive centuries until coming to be known as a wizard.

-An omniscient though otherwise ordinary observer, moving through time in the natural way, would, at some point before the 12th century, see: an increasingly-younger being—after decades as advisor to a king of the Britains—seduced by a naiad (often called Nimue, Nymue, Niviane, Niniane, Nyneue, Nyneve, Viviane, Evienne, or even Elaine) who locks him up in an awful palace made of thick green glass beneath the ocean .

There he watches Nimue’s belly swell as his hybrid children—part-water-creature, part-sorcerer, quarter-demon—gestate. They will be born less than thirty years from when you read this—centuplets, 101 nymphs like their mother in form and like their father in time. It is with these daughters and their machinations that this work is concerned.

-From, again, the point of view of an ordinary observer: sometime in the 17th century it will become clear that a great and subtle conflict is in progress between a large number of long-lived women, in a variety of nations, each strange, each a sorceress. The masked adept Ligea Narthex plots from her Fens Ultraviolet, the long-limbed Cianotica Bast directs armies from the island fortress of Glaucous Murdonon —and 100 other frightening women of demonic lineage and naiad blood vie with them for spoils geographical and metaphysical.

-Through the mesh of intrigue, necromancy and misdirection, Cianotica Bast eventually saw things as they were: her rivals were her sisters. Like Nimue before her, she contrived then a scheme combining hostile architecture and erotic entrapment. It was called the Nympharium and she left it rusting in Negadimensional Space until her sisters had grown too young to resist or remember her magic.

This worked—some years before you read this—in 2005—the ninety-nine nymphs were ensnared in the cruel Nympharium—which exists at once in two times and 99 places at once. Each chamber exists once in the real world, and the whole exists in Negadimensional space.

-Time and possible futures are usually imagined upright like an elm: what is past is the unsplit trunk below, what we have yet to experience expands above as potential events and consequences divide into limbs, branchs, twigs. In considering the situations presented here, we have to imagine instead a willow, or an umbrella, with the tips hanging near the ground. The tree is revealed as a curtain rises, we encounter the leaves and branch-tip spurs early, before the trunk begins to divide, we see the result before its origin, the effect before the cause, the adult before their conception, the endgames of possible futures before the crucial present which chooses between them.

-As of the moment your players encounter the Nympharium, Bast has caught the ninety-nine young nymphs who will become her enemies. She has tampered with them—but not decisively. She feared some miscalculation by which she might edit herself out of existence.

She was a cautious woman, and busy: she had a war to run. 

Violence In The Nympharium, featuring:

demons

romance in portugal

Violet leopard orchid zombies

The PanoptiKhan

Gianlorenzo Bernini and his rival Giuliano Finelli

goblins

a race to kazakhstan

ninjas

hell

royal fist monkeys

a battle on the yangtze river

Giacomo Antonio Marta, Jesuit and spy

a scheming vizier

frost giants

a mapping challenge

Narvik Cross, a victim of the demon-cats

qelong cameo

yoon suin cameo

Harst Insidious—A green-skinned, one-eyed wretch, shambling and narrow

centipede god

zebra priest

negadungeons

posidungeons

Moriyama Utagawa, dashing, long-haired eldest son of Lord Nobuyushi and Lady Kaori, who acquitted himself admirably at the Battle of Broken Lake.

100 girls and 100 octopuses

metalized polypropylene

brassieres

the special part of a jewish temple where they keep things they can’t throw away because the name of god is on them

nymphs

the droll god

the spinneskelle

protolarvae

hyperlarvae

megalarvae

the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse

pirate queens

pterosaurs

a temple of true neutrality

venetian carnival masks

the scots and brits feuding over a bonny lass

the fearsome warlord, annihilus neroxx

SO MANY TRAPS

brain eaters

clouded leopards

the isle of nephilidia

ancient vampire tubeworms

witches

a tar cyclops

meeting your baby self

bloodfriends

the pentamorph

a time-stop heist

Thuggee cultists

homicidal scholars of several nations

the aspidochelone

the chameleon prince

a manor house murder mystery

puzzles

the octophant

the black sphinx

wizard apes

your rich uncle

the war pig

the forest of 500 shadows

The Isle of Massive Crustaceans

the undead army of onibaba

....and much more

Coming Soon from Lamentations of the Flame Princess

Terrorize Them With Quality

ps The Demon City Kickstarter is allllllmost over...

Notes Taken While Starting to Write My Next RPG Book

Room When she is there, Room when she is not there.

Johannes Vermeer

100 Octopuses

Nimue

“A terrible worm in an iron cocoon,” 

Oceanids

Sexual cannibalism is rare in the animal kingdom. Although cannibalism is not uncommon in cephalopods, here we report the first documented case of sexual cannibalism. A large female Octopus cyanea was observed continuously for 2.5 days in Palau, Micronesia, when she was out of her den. On the second day, a small male followed and mated her 13 times during 3.5 h while she continued to forage over 70 m distance. After the 12th mating, she aggressively chased a different small octopus that barely escaped by jetting, inking and swimming upwards. Shortly thereafter, the original small male mated her a 13th time, but subsequently she attacked and suffocated him and spent 2 days cannibalizing him in her den. This sort of intraspecific aggression helps to explain several reports of octopuses mating out in the open, a behaviour that may serve to allow the smaller mate to escape cannibalism.

Kang the Conqueror

Christianity from Judaism from Canaanism 

Niobids

Nimue, Viviane, Vivien, Elaine, Ninianne, Nivian, Nyneve, or Evienne

T.H. White's 1958 Arthurian retelling, The Once and Future King, in which "Merlyn", as White calls him, has the curious affliction of living backwards in time to everyone else. This affliction also appears in Dan Simmons' Hyperion as the "Merlin sickness." A related novel is The Book of Merlyn.

Metacomet

Abbas II of Persia

Kamāl ud-Dīn Behzād

Nympharium

Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba

“

Voltaire:

This unfortunate time for Ibrahim was unfortunate for all monarchs. The

Holy Roman Empire was unsettled by the famous Thirty Years War. Civil war

devastated France and forced the mother of Louis XIV to flee with her children

from her capital. In London, Charles I was condemned to death by his own

subjects. Philip IV, king of Spain, having lost almost all his possessions in Asia, also

lost Portugal.

Voltaire went on to consider the careers of Cromwell in England, Li Zicheng in

China, Aurangzeb in India, and others who had seized power by force, concluding

that the mid-­seventeenth century had been ‘a period of usurpations almost from one

end of the world to the other’.1

“

The Loe

Llyn y Fan Fach

Llyn Ogwen

Ribbon lake

Llyn Llydaw

Dozmary Pool

Witch's ladder

Martin Mere

dolls and doll carriages harnessed to mice

Lady of the Lake

One Thousand and One Nights

the Seclusium of not Orphone

Anaxaorchas

Islamic Golden Age

William Adams (sailor)

http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-goblin-cubes.html

sorceress / witch

clowns

Valmont (film)

Thessaly rebellion (1600)

Giordano Bruno

Haunted Lake

Elizabeth Báthory

wfrp career list

http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2015/09/100-more-lyonesse-things.html

http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2015/09/d100-things-you-find-in-lyonesse.html

Lyonesse?

Vrokk

http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2015/10/vrokk-isle-of-war-wizards.html

History of Spain

Les Liaisons dangereuses

Clathrus archeri

A Coconut Octopus Uses Tools to Snatch a Crab - YouTube

Octopus leaps out of water, grabs crab - YouTube

octopus wraps around the Wildlife Man`s head - YouTube

Tortuosa willow

Ich Dien

Scheherezade

 a piece of John the Baptist’s head. (relics)

Myddfai

Paimpont forest

Brocéliande

Pergusa Lake

Beeswing, Dumfries and Galloway

Buccaneer

The Decameron

The War Hound and the World's Pain

Battle of the Planets

Galactor

G-Force: Guardians of Space

All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku

Hispania

Eustache Deschamps

Eleanor de Montfort

a rainwater fishpond on the roof.

chinese painting

Rime dictionary

Monolatrism

Ancient Canaanite religion

Origins of Judaism

Jews

Judaism

Yahwism

Jean Le Maingre

a mere Wrecca

Grimoires—17th c

microscope

1674  A Hindu conqueror, Shivaji, is crowned king at Rajgarh. Maratha power is established. Shivaji gives assurance to Hindus across India.

1675  The Mugal emperor, Alamgir, has escecuted Tegh Bahadur for refusing to accept Islam. Tegh Bahadur's son and successor, Guru Gobind Rai, vows to combat Alamgir's oppression. He adopts the surname Singh (lion) and gives his closest followers the same surname.

1686  Isaac Newton presents his Principia, Book I, to the Royal Society. 

Merlin

Nymphaeum

Ranulf Higden

Cephalopod Attack

Octopus Wrestling

Clytie

Ocyrhoe

Nymph

Naiad

Salix babylonica

Weeping Willow

La Maupin

“List of Women In the Old Testament”

Joanna of Flanders

Imagine an umbrella. Or a willow. Salix babylonica (Babylon willow or weeping willow; Chinese: 垂柳) is a species of willow. This is the situation. 

Nemesis

Styx

I'm sailing away set an open course for the virgin sea

I've got to be free free to face the life that's ahead of me

On board I'm the captain so climb aboard

We'll search for tomorrow on every shore

And I'll try oh Lord I'll try to carry on

I look to the sea reflections in the waves spark my memory

Some happy some sad

I think of childhood friends and the dreams we had

We live happily forever so the story goes

But somehow we missed out on that pot of gold

But we'll try best that we can to carry on

A gathering of angels appeared above my head

They sang to me this song of hope and this is what they said

They said come sail away come sail away

Come sail away with me

Come sail away come sail away

Come sail away with me

Come sail away come sail away

Come sail away with me

Come sail away come sail away

Come sail away with me

I thought that they were angels but to my surprise

They climbed aboard their starship and headed for the skies

Singing, come sail away come sail away

Come sail away with me

Come sail away come sail away

Come sail away with me

Come sail away come sail away

Come sail away with me

Come sail away come sail away

Come sail away with me

Come sail away come sail away

Come sail away with me

Come sail away come sail away

Come sail away with me

Come sail away come sail away

Come sail away with me

Come sail away come sail away

Come sail away with me

Hourglass Heads

“We risk all, we win everything”

Randall, Time Bandits
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