Steel Leviathan

Sometimes I still mull over ASE and things like will it ever get more levels, and will I ever write anything more for the setting.

Sometimes this musing goes as far as drawing some stuff for the setting.  Like this Steel Leviathan and Unyielding Fist detachment.  I think this is a bigger and meaner steel Leviathan then the ones described in ASE - I imagine that it is a new creation from the Academy designed for the wars against the Dinosaur Khan and Serpent Men of the Certopsian plains who threaten Denethix's expansion and sovereignty.

It's also a chance to play around with some drawing effects.

Let's take this another step ... here are stats for "Red Ruin" and the unit it's part of.  If you are running ASE, they can flesh out the Unyielding Fist that guards all the other entrances of the megadungeon after it opens

ASE CAMPIAGN - SESSION XII - The Irrefutable Offer

Looking through an old folder I found some notes on the last few seven session of the ASE campaign that started this blog back in 2012.  I've decided to maybe write a few up and see where it goes.  This is the first, starting directly after this Play Report.  I think this season was played late 2012 or something, before Huxley's player had a kid.
 

Huxley McTeeth - (m) Fighter (Lvl 2) - Short, strong, grizzled, armored, and wielding a magic white saber from the tomb of a Rocket Man.

Grimgrim "The Seared of Monstcrom"- (m) Cleric (Lvl 3) - Recently extra fervent. pig masked.

Druizzilnax (aka Drusilla) - (f) Elf (Lvl 1), physically frail, spear wielding, hideous armor wearing and from a society of militarized cannibals.

Nell Hassenphafler "The Topstown Gore Bird" - (f) Assassin (Lvl 3), Scarred face, sinewy physique, fancy purple metal dress and poison hatpins.

Lemon Jackson, Evoker - (m) Magic-User (Lvl 2) Gun totting, hell-bolt flinging and heavily tattooed.

Gurgur, Greymol - (m,m) Moktar, Moktar Holy Tom, (Lvl1,Lvl1) Moktar henchmen , serious catbrawn. 

SUNDAY MORNING COMING DOWN

Geof Darrow - A Denethix Street Scene?

Back in their dingy apartment, covered in the tiny scabs of grunkie inflicted wounds, Huxley, Nell, Lemon, Grimgrim and Drusilla wake to another day, stunned and sore and for the first time cannot begin an immediate debauch, the last bottle of hooch purloined from the depths of the Old Brewery having been spilled down Lemon's sweaty torso the night before. 

The booze brought back from their last adventure may be gone, but the desperation lingers. Nell's arm set in a crude cast, but clearly broken to the point where even Grimgrim's divinely aided ministrations won't quickly restore it to functionality.  The band needs a rest, a long rest, preferably somewhere peaceful, but it seems doubtful that their enemies will allow them one.  It's been a week since the raid on the Old Brewery's lower levels and each of the adventurers knows there will be a price to pay.  It's not clear who will come to collect, the Unyielding Fist, drug running gangsters, the death cult of Furter, or even Drusilla's anthropophagic relatives - but a debt has come due and payment is going to be rough.

The Livid Fens - Color Maps

THE LIVID FENS

The Livid Fens, a land of trackless swamp, shifting channels and rotten mangroves filled with uncanny reddish and purple growth. The lands are firmly in the clutching hands of the Fen Witch and her coven of lesser witches who allow neither rival Wizards or worship of the orbital religion within her swamp domain.  The people of the fens are a tribal lot, generally peaceable, living in small villages, and paying a yearly tax of corpses to their necromancer god-queen.

Despite harsh conditions, wretched heat and the unnatural fecundity of the bruise hued alien flora, treasure seekers are drawn to the fens rich stores of unique furs, hides, drugs, spices and gems.  In addition to these prosaic sources of wealth the fens are dotted with ruins: fallen plantations, crumbled towers, shattered temples and strange underground fortifications from an ancient war.  In addition to these ruins, countless wrecks sink slowly into the pools and bogs of the fens – wrecked trade ships, side wheeled steamers and ancient warmachines of rust red and glassy black offer lost cargos and magical artifacts.

The Fens in Hideous Color

KEY LOCATIONS  

The Lichthrone – A twisted tower, also called the Tower of Flints, marks the gateway to the Livid Fens.  A few hours from the water, the tower was once the lair of a decadent wizard who tried to stand aloof from the Fen Witch.  Rivermen claim that his tortured screams can still be heard from atop the tower.

Rendermarche – A city of spice traders, froghemoth hunters, and the factory workers that convert the catch into oil, bone, meat and hide.  A detachment of the Unyielding Fist from Denethix and a larger force of elite tribal warriors loyal to the Witch Queen hold Rendermarche as a joint outpost of Denethix and the Queen.  The city is also protected by a small squadron of river leviathans (crude steam powered skiffs armored in riveted steel plate and armed with cannon or heavy machine guns).  Rendermarche serves as a base of operation for Northern Traders and is the first major port on the trade route between Denethix and Druid Hill deep in the Emerald Jungles further South.

Bone – The capitol of the Witch Queen, set amongst poppy fields and rice paddies in the most solid area of the fens.  Bone is a strange place, the huge corpse drums, each stretched with the skin of a hundred wizards boom out from atop the Queen’s great palace tower to give vigor to the myriad of undead who work the surrounding fields and man the walls. Marble temples to the Fen Witch cluster around her palace, and the rest of the city is only sparsely inhabited, with many of its grand old mansions falling into ruin and home to undead scavengers.

Grave Ancien – A deep crater around a bore that descends into the earth, surrounded by the melted and warped ruins of the Fall.  The bore itself seems to breath a miasma that reeks of death.  Even the warriors Fen Witch, used to the creatures of undeath and disease fear to enter the grave.

Wight Bog – The Wight Bog is an expanse of mudflats around a pair of odd stone spires.  The bog itself is a deep mire teaming with the restless dead below its surface.  While the Fen Witch’s servants can easily control these feral wights, and the locals travel on giant transparent shelled crustaceans whose long spindly legs fail to stir up the dead.  To facilitate travel the locals have also created paths of white tree trunks, sunk into the mud, but to discourage trespassers these routes are often trapped to drop into the mud, or lead into dead ends. Protected by the bog itself the sleepy blue and white town of Teacup winds up the side of one of the stone spires and is home to a community of skilled potters.  

The Fens Brown and Grey

The Livid Fens - Black & White Map

Anomalous Subsurface Environment is still a setting I think about and that I hope to run again some day.  In the last ASE campaign I ran the party ended up getting tired of Morlocks that screamed "Mheeeet!" at them constantly and had started setting traps and left behind the megadungeon in favor of the bruise colored marshes to the South - The Livid Fens.  This is an area directly South of Denethix that is mentioned in ASE 1 and included on the largest regional map within.  I've written a couple of small ASE adventures for the Livid Fens (Red Demon and Wreck of the Anubis) but until now haven't drawn a full map of the place in the style of the map I did for the area around Denethix and containing Mt. Rendon (home of the ASE itself).

The map here is a black and white version, hopefully in the next couple of days I will get it together to ad some contrast and even an acid orange version in the style of the 1st map.

Everyone Hates Halflings

A Most Reviled People

A companion piece to "Demons of the North" and "Dwarves are Horrible" discussing the oddities and inhuman awfulness that I like to give to demihumans when I run Anomolous Subsurface Environment. Vanilla Halflings aren't perhaps as bad as Dwarves in their boring almost featureless description, which universally (except for Darksun's jungle dwelling cannibals) seems a pallid and half-hearted copy of the Shire's Hobbits.  In a lot of games lately halflings seem to be the first demihuman race to get replaced - with anthropomorphic animal people usually, or with goblins - this isn't a bad thing, but it shows a certain exhaustion or disdain within the tabletop hobby for halflings.  ASE keeps halflings fairly close to the vanilla D&D norm, but like dwarves and elves it adds the twist that halflings are the result of ancient goblin genetic muckery (goblins being the debased descendents of 'grey' aliens).  I expand on this idea and have recast ASE's Halflings as an oppressed but internal (they have no culture or homeland to return to) minority within Denethix.

“Are Halflings even a people?  More a plague, like poverty or the weeping cysts  - another blight of these cursed times, roiling across the land and lingering to choke the life out of anywhere it has taken root, much like the clouds of sick rock gas that used to boil from the Lanthanide Wastes” – Ray 4375 Beta, field researcher 3^rd form – Temple of Science

 

A pair of Classic Jeff Dee Halfling

Halflings have it bad, and most, both halfling and others think they deserve it. 

ASE Map - The Denethix Area

Sure ASE 1 by Patrick Wetmore has some nice maps in it, but I went and decided to draw the area map around Denethix (ASE's 'point of light') in my own overland style.  Use it how you will - player map immediately comes to mind.  It's only vaguely to scale, but that's part of the fun.

Use them however you like.

Black and White

A Psychedelic Sepia Sort of Version

Wreck of the Anubis - A short ASE adventure

Last week in my ASE game the party investigated a wrecked paddle wheeler in the depth of the Livid Fens.  The adventure itself is a simple "wizard tower" designed to be thrown in as a random encounter. All the same I typed it up, illustrated it and drew up a silly isometric map for the thing.  The adventure is linked below.

I'm not sure what level this thing is for, the treasure shouts out 2nd - 3rd level, while some of the monsters are rather dangerous for a second level party.  Of course the best solutions for this adventure are to avoid combat where possible.

The party I ran it for was large (7 characters) and of  varying level from 1st to 4th.  They had no trouble with the ticks or zombies and managed to negotiate a peace with the Botanist (lucky reaction roll) while clearing out most of the treasure. Likely I'll edit this for typos in a day or two - also maybe add a normal map.

THE WRECK OF THE ANUBIS - PDF

It is Unsafe to Wander the Gloom Lit Red Channels and Purple Sucking Bogs of the Livid Fens

The Livid Fens are several thousand square miles of bogland South of Denethix along the River Effulent, between the Southern Certopsian Plains and the Sea. They are a strange place, shrouded in mists and lashed by scorching sun, seemingly without season. Teaming with life, the vegetation of the fens is unlike anywhere else, universally shades of red and purple, the Fen’s flora tastes of burning iron and grows in shapes that look profoundly alien even to the jaundiced eyes of the Fallen Age.  Fecundity brings wealth, and the fens have made many fortunes animal products (especially the bones, blubber and meat of the enormous Froghemoth), herbs, drugs, medicines and gems.  The Fens also contain thousands of tiny channels, innumerable islands and countless wrecks and ruins which draw adventurers, fugitives and hermits. ... (Table Follows)

Subsurface Environment Level 1 Treasures Table

In the past I've talked a bit about my efforts to run ASE, basically using the book as published by Patrick Wetmore.  Due to the tendency of my players to wander off and gain levels elsewhere, and ore their tendency to play in groups larger then the 3-4 the module seems written for. With a group of 8 or 9 2nd level PCs I've made the opposition both more numerous and more powerful. Consequently I've had to make the treasures a bit more numerous and valuable.  I've decided to do this by A) Providing groups of wandering monsters with a chance (1 in 6 for humanoid, 1 in 10 for animal/monster) to carry small treasures worth 10 x 1D6 GP.  Likewise I've added more treasure to fixed locations in packets of 100 x 1D6 or 1D8 GP.  Now packets of treasure are normally a bad thing, but to my mind a treasure type is just a packet anyhow, so I figure it's fine.  Simply handing out coins though is really boring on the other hand I don't want to design a treasure on the fly during play so I create the table a while ago of potential treasure that I think no only seem interesting but give some clues in the context of ASE's 1st Level.    

8 Wagons to Chemfoldshire - ASE travelling traders.

My Anomalous Subsurface Environment game continues on G+, and the adventurers have finally figured out some of the basic mysteries of the first level beneath Mt. Rendon.  It's been a few months of game time though and the little mold farming hamlet of Chemfoldshire is growing into a boom town a rowdy boom town from the fortune hunters flocking to Mt. Rendon's various entrances.  Below is a table of traveling merchants, some of whom have flocked to Chemfoldshire (though I've changed the details in my own game).  This isn't perhaps the most useful of tables - but with all the OSR competitions going on right now I'm trying to work on some things for Dyson, Tenkar and the One Page Dungeon contest.

Space, Boredom and the Modern Megadungeon - With ASE Level 1 Examples.

I’ve been running Anomalous Subsurface Environment straight from the book, for what is really the first time. In the first campaign of Land of 1,000 Towers that I ran the party steered clear of the ASE itself and I ended up using scenarios of my own devising. That is happening in this campaign as well, but it seems like for now the adventurers are back in the megadungeon at least for now (the key is offering them revenge for several deaths).

More Morlock means more flavor!

A problem I’m noticing is that ASE has a lot of empty rooms, at least on the first level, and for online play, especially with a large number of players, this can be really slow and a bit boring. I don't think this is limited to ASE, I think this is a central issue with published megadungeon design. It's an issue of not enough flavor, and too little variety in the empty rooms, and ASE has more flavor then a lot of mega-dungeons, Stonehell for example (not to say Stonehell is bad - it's great), but even with ASE the small room descriptions leave a lot up to the GM and there are plenty of rooms that are simple filled with dust leaving a large amount of blank exploration space.

Wreck Hunting in the Vile Fens

So I've been thinking a little about the Livid Fens, and area well South of the Anomalous Subsurface Environment Megadungeon on the Land of 1,000 Tower's 'world' map.  The place is sketched in ASE 1 as a weird red swamp filled with dinosaurs and froghemoths, undoubtedly irradiated.  I've expanded it with hints as the home of human tribes people, a necromancer witch queen and the site of ancient battles. 

Map W-1 of a "Weird Wreck"

Indeed, the Livid Fens are filled with monumental rusted war machines from the wars after the fall of the ancients.  Strange cults, mad dictators and radiation mad battalions in clanking steel tanks of dungeon size all perished in a mutual orgy of nuclear, chemical, thaumaturgical and biological mass destruction.  The remnants (The Red Demon being a medium sized one) still provide interesting adventure locals and offer places for salvage. Below is a small wreckage map and a table of treasures for within.  Note: I have a separate table of perils, but since my ASE game may make it to the fens sooner or later I don't want to give too much away.

The Tower of Flints - Map

Rising from a peculiar stretch of foothills, just North of the Livid Fens and only a mile from the River Effluent, the Tower of Flints takes it's name from the hills around it, where the turf has been cut down to the grey flint of the hills beneath.  The Tower itself is built of the same grey stone, though oddly decorated with crude lumpy statutes of with niches where their faces should be.  These niches at one time held white stones or skulls, but most are empty now.  The tower is universally shunned as the Witch Queen of the Livid fens has made it known that she will take a personal interest in any who attempts to take up residence within. The tower crumbles into ruins, and it's upper stories have fallen to the North of the base as if torn away by great forces.



The Tower of Flints is a deserted tower once home to one of the megalomaniac victims of super-science who call themselves 'Wizards' and haunt the Land of 1,000 Towers.  It marks the unofficial line between the marches of Denethix and the domain of tribes beholden to the Witch Queen of the Livid Fens.  In the South it is known as the Lichethrone rather then the Tower of Flints, though no explanation is given for this difference in convention.

Caw caw.

ASE - Onward to the Obelisk - Play Report

ASE SESSION B 1 – Return to Mt. Rendon

The Party

Mungo Stroot – CL 2

Jane Dill – IIL 2

Raymond ‘Numbers’ Gamma – SCI 2

 ‘Bee Bot’ – ROB 1

Darth Acne – MU 1 (necromancer)

Yana of Cithras – CL 1

After spending a few weeks going about their own business in the newly booming town of   Grain doesn’t grow in the mold patches of Chemfoldshire and the demands of the Certopsian  War to the South East have meant that grain shipments to the new brewery are frequently getting hijacked by troops, including mercenary bands and private militia heading to the front.

In Denethix Mungo can’t even get a meeting before the magistrates and the Boards of Proper Apportionment won’t honor most of the brewery’s scrip for refund as they are on the wrong form or misspelled.  A clerk suggests that Mungo and his business partners retain a lawyer to travel with each grain shipment to make sure that the brutish mercenaries and angry Unyielding Fist Sarjents fill out the right paperwork.  With this setback Mungo wanders into a nice bar near the Street of students and begins to realize that the life of a business priest is perhaps less certain and more cutthroat then wandering into the darkened lairs of eldritch horrors from ‘before time’.   He soon meets up with his old nemesis/adventuring companion Ray ‘Numbers’ and finds the scientist equally glum, as his reports on opening the subsurface environment were received only with threats from Ray’s advisor who wanted to know about the secret entrance and where the gold Ray had found was, far more then he wanted to hear Ray’s theories about subsurface life cycles and robot ghosts.

Dwarves are Horrible

Now I've always hated Dwarves.  They are my least favorite fantasy race, I'm not sure why.  Even reading the hobbit I didn't like the Dwarves much.  I like them less now with the strange hybrid of Warhammer Fantasy, LOTR movie and Warcraft that makes them utterly uninteresting gruff stumpy goons one dimensionally interested in Brew (though rarely actual drunkenness or beer), fighting, mining, axes, prickly senses of honor and beards.  The Scotts' accents only make them worse because they are always played for laughs.

Yet many adore dwarves, stereotype and all.  I don't want to speculate why.  The point is I am reexamining the little creeps and doing my best not to change them into horrible mole people, or robots, earth elementals or living statutes.  Below is my conception of Dwarves for Anomalous Subsurface Environment, attempting to follow the majority of Dwarf tropes in standard fantasy: avarice, booze obsession, beards and clannishness.

It is perhaps worth noting that Elves are also horrible - likely more horrible...

One of Callot's Dwarves 1592–1635

Dwarves of the Home Warrens
North of the plains, beginning in the low hills and winding high into the bitter brown stone peaks beyond are the home warrens of the the Dwarves.  It is commonly known that Dwarves are a clannish lot, obsessed with wealth and fixated on the production of alcohol and high quality metal work.  They are often cruel to outsiders, or at least entirely lacking in charity and obsessed with honor, family and revenge.  The situation only get more confusing as one interacts with the dwarven emigrant communities of human lands.  Below are excerpts from the lectures of Azimuth Red 721 Alpha, Scientist and leader of a recently returned expedition to the regions of the Dwarven Home Warrens.

What are the Home Warrens?
Dwarven society is one of stasis, hopelessness and endless tiny humiliations.  The homeland of these strange subhumans reflect the grim facts of dwarven life.  Like Elves and Halflings, dwarves are a manufactured race, likely a hybrid between humans and something else.  Whatever alien masters created dwarves, they created them for a particular type of obedience, and most likely a particular type of warfare.   The Home Warrens reflect this origin - a seemingly endless labyrinth of utilitarian passages made from whatever is at hand with whatever technology the dwarves can master: ceramicrete, vitirified stone, reinforced concrete, carved rock or brick and mortar.  Unlike underground elven fortresses, dwarven warrens are almost without decoration, and are designed so that the majority of dwarves will not and cannot never leave them.   The warrens are constantly being built, downwards, and outwards, with many sections long abandoned based on the whims and internal conflicts of the dwarven creditor nobility.

To visitors dwarven warrens are confusing and monotonous, gallery after identical gallery, connected by cramped passages.  When in use some distinction between distillery, workshop, storage rooms and living quarters can be observed, but once abandoned all that remains is cold stone without signage or evidence of original purpose.  The only differences from monotonous plan are found in the homes of the creditor class of dwarven nobles, who live in luxury surrounded by wealth and decoration (much of it imported from above ground) and the fortress areas of the warrens, where traps and ingenious defenses break up the sameness of the warrens with pits, bulwarks, mazes and redoubts.

Slezgar the Elf - ASE NPC MVP -

 Slezgar the Elf is a stalwart of the Anomalous Subsurface Environment Thursday Night G+ Game.  He appears as a random henchman in ASE I notable only as "Elf, Male. Enthusiastic about hanging out with those short-lived humans."  In Pat's ongoing and original ASE campaign Slezgar became the party's first henchman in February 2009 and then their nemesis - captain of an anti-human Elven NPC party, ultimately ambushed and slaughtered in late 2012...

Well my players rolled on the same chart and they got Slezgar straight off.  My Slezgar has yet to show propensity for betrayal, and rather ingratiated himself with the party - as the only regular delver that can cast sleep and surprisingly lucky.  He's reilable enough that his being a hedonist and a bit of a creep, hasn't put the party off yet.  It has also been established that he makes frequent bemused quips about the frailty of humans and has a rather licentious way of searching for secret doors - the players don't ask much about it because it seems to work (again Slezgar always seems to pull a roll out when it matters).  So far Slezgar's only act of sinister elven gamesmanship has been to demand a 25GP per delve fee, and to encourage the other henchmen to do the same.  Slezgar is considering demanding a share of treasure instead, but hasn't gotten quite high enough a dried blue lotus grubs to vocalize it.

Slezgar the Elven Flaneur

Slezgar the Elf
Elf 1

STR 14 (+1 Hit/Dam)
INT 12
WIS 7
DEX 15 (+1 AC/Hit Ranged)
CON 10
CHR 13+1

HP: 4
XP: 1099
AC:4
Spell: Sleep - 25% to cast it on everyone in area out of laziness.

Equipment: gaudy and somewhat risque partial splint armor, elven yatagan (1D8), Spell Book (several fragments of slate bundled together in old newspaper - sleep, magic missile, dancing lights), 20' rope, 35 GP

Elves Generally....

Thoughts on "Gonzo" Games

Running the ASE and Gonzo Without it Getting too Stupid.

Gonzo - B. McNally

I run an ongoing game of Anomalous Subsurface Environment on G+ Hangouts using slightly modified Basic D&D.  It's going pretty well some ten sessions in and several people keep returning to delve into the bizarre and confusing depths of Mt. Rendon, or to interact with the cutthroat capitalism, cronyism and debasement that is the city of Denethix.  ASE is notoriously "gonzo" and disliked by some for this reason.  There's definitely a danger in running a silly adventure, but after last night's session I think I figured out a few ways to avoid the worst aspects of silliness.

Last night was an especially good session - a couple of key rooms were discovered on ASE's first level - neat set pieces, and the first "faction" of the dungeon encountered. Secret doors popped open due to extraordinary rolls and traps/trick encounters were intelligently bypassed or smashed.  Yet, the traps were funny, and the faction is roving hunting packs of a pop-culture reference.

Strange Armor Alternatives

I am profoundly bored by the classic D&D armor categories.  Given the importance that games place on armor, and the fact that every PC wishes to have cool armor I've decided that in my games AC value is going to be largely divorced from armor type allowing for strange materials and a much wider variety than leather, chain or plate" or even the additions of studded leather, ring, scale, splint, and banded armors.  Below are some tables or menus of armor based around broad class: light, medium, heavy and plate armors that one can substitute.  They're written with gonzo science fantasy in mind, so they may be a bit odd for a high fantasy orcs vs. elves Tolkien off.  The plate armor gets especially bizarre as it's priced at 400GP in my game, making it feel like a major achievement

 Meat Suit - AC 8 or AC 4?

Treasure Table - Sample - Hobo Treasures

HOBOS' TREASURES

Partially in response to my previous post, below is a random treasure list useful for generating "Hobo Treasures" for a gonzo hobo themed dungeon node.  It's not as detailed as I would like for a large node as it's not split between large and small packets or magical and mundane treasure.  I'd use this one as an adjunct to personal treasure of the hobogoblins, or whatever denizens of the node carried around in their bindles.  The table might also be useful determining rewards or boons granted to PC's for service to the Hobo King of the Great Northern Jungle.  So feel free to use it in your gonzo D&D, Wampus County or Weird Adventures games.  It's stated up for B/X D&D but pretty system agnostic.

"Hobo and Dog" - 1924

Also includes so wondrous "Deck of Several Things" to torment your players.

ASE - Thursday Night Campaign round up

My drop in G+ game of ASE has been going well.

The party (a diverse lot with a few stalwarts) has lost two PCs, several henchman and a pack of pit bulls.  They've also fully entered the Anomalous Subsurface Complex and are beginning to wonder why it exists.

Here's a short recap of what's happened since my last play report.

Elves - they're creepy.