Rift City campaign - session 43

 The party made their... what, let's call it '43rd' visit to the caves in the Rift (it's not really, we missed a couple of sessions due to work issues, and on some sessions, they've made multiple visits, leaving after a good quick haul and going back 'the next day' during the same session... but about 43rd) on 14th Feb. 

Yes I know that's Valentine's Day, but as it turned out, the four players who came to the session are two couples. 

No I didn't do anything particularly Romantic for the session, but in line with some of my recent musings, I made extra-sure to use Reaction Roles and Morale rolls. I know I should do that anyway, but... I made extra-sure.

Anyway... Halvor the Cleric, Berg the Dwarf, Gibbet the Thief and Brigham the Cleric (that was the marching order) made their way towards the towers that they'd found last time. They'd got a treasure map at the last session that looked something like this:

In case you can't read the text, it says "In the Rift there is the Fortress of Skile, two towers with a gatehouse between. Beneath the eastern tower, a stair leads down to a crypt where lies the Fabled Hoard of Riha the Bejewelled. Gems without count and fabulous jewellery are there, adorning the bones of the last of the Sorcerer-Queens. From the tower, take the staircase, and at the landing, turn west. Foul things lurk in the darkness of the eastern stair. In the Deeps, we came to a great room with six corners, but this was a false chamber – we never found the real burial chamber beyond."

Trying to find the place where the jewels might be stashed, they headed down the path, past the spot where they killed the Giant at the last session (his corpse was still there, somewhat chewed by local scavengers, but substantially intact, so the party, deciding they didn't want a Zombie Giant rampaging around and mindful they were supposed to burn corpses, set fire to it using a barrel of oil they had in the Bag of Holding).

Going on a bit further past the smouldering corpse, the party noticed a flock of ... somethings ... flying above them. They weren't sure what they were so the PCs hid in the undergrowth for a bit. Turns out that the flying things were hippogriffs, and there were 15 of them. The party was undecided about what to do - Berg, Gibbet and Brigham kept hiding, Halvor decided to try and attract their attention. Then Berg threw out some beef jerky for one, which took it, but then the flock decided that it would rather go and investigate the burning Giant so flew off.

The party headed on to the ruins of the Fortress of Skile and found their way in. Remembering there was a pit trap, but not exactly where it was, the party unfortunately triggered it again. No-one was seriously hurt however. Now they've outlined it in chalk so perhaps they'll find it easier to avoid next time.

Making their way inside they turned to the left to try and find the entrance to the lower levels. The first room they came across seemed to be deserted, but the second contained a hideous spider-type entity.  Conscientiously rolling for the spider's reactions, the dice came up snake-eyes so straight into a vicious combat. To be fair, there's only so much interaction I'd be able to role-play as a Giant Spider I think. When they searched the room, they found a chest with some money in it, but unfortunately ripped the old tapestry hanging from the ceiling.

Pushing on, the PCs found a room decorated with a frieze of faces. Searching these carefully they found that one was hinged to come away from the wall. Behind it was a kind of safe - trapped, which Gibbet disarmed (they still don't know what the trap was, but Gibbet detected a trigger mechanism and disabled it) - and containing a potion-bottle and a bag of cash.

They'd reached the end of the corridor, but I reminded them that there were other corridors and rooms they hadn't explored in the other direction (this time they'd entered and turned left; last time they turned right). I don't often do that sort of thing but I thought it was justified in this instance. It was a month ago that the players last explored the dungeon, but for the PCs, it was yesterday. I think that the PCs would perhaps remember that there were further unexplored passages to the right even though the players didn't. So, they started to make their way back to the areas they'd explored the game-day before.

On the way they encountered some 'grey worms' - Caecilia from  the Expert rulebook. These were actually fairly straightforward to deal with, in the end. Somewhere, and I'm not certain where now, they also encountered some Giant Weasels, but as I have no real recollection of this fight I'm not sure they really gave the party much trouble either.

Having retraced their steps, they moved off to the right (east), back through some rooms they'd explored previously, and then on to new territory (actually, they may have run into the Weasels here). This led them to a room of Ogres, who the party, probably sensibly, decided would be a serious threat and a fight ensued. Halvor made good use of his Sticks to Snakes ability (the snakes this time were Spitting Cobras, which blinded several of the Ogres) and the Ogres (6 of them) were disposed of without too much damage coming to the party. However, the fight had alerted other Ogre guards and 5 more then barged into the room when the party were searching. The snakes were still around and had been tasked with guarding the door so the Ogre ambushers were themselves ambushed and soon defeated.

By this time it was the end of the session. The PCs had searched about 90% of the tower but not yet located the steps mentioned on the treasure map. I guess, they'll be heading back here next session... but one never can tell, they often end up going off in all sorts of unexpected directions.

Rift City session 17

So, the 17th session of Wandering Monster Table and the Rift City campaign...

A few of the usual players couldn't make this session, so the party consisted of:

Bonjella the 1st Level Elf;
Galan the 1st Level Elf;
Gene the 2nd Level Fighter;
Gibbet the 3rd Level Thief;
Karensa the 1st Level Elf.

Their plan was again to raid the 'Bath-house of Blibdoolpoolp'. I rolled for Ademus the Priest's reaction - he wasn't having any of it, preferring to follow up on the rumour that Ulfang the Black was in another part of the complex, so Ademus has gone adventuring with another group. The PCs might hear what happened about this when they get back to town.

Today, on approaching the entrance cavern, the party saw that the door was smashed and there was excrement around the doorway. There's no reason for any of them to be experts in animal excrement (except Gene who it's previously established was brought up on a farm, but this didn't look like any kind of excrement Gene had encountered) so they were none the wiser. They wondered if it was Giant Bat guano, as they'd run into one of those previously in this area (maybe last session thinking about it, probably could have mentioned that in the last write-up).

It wasn't bats; the PCs leapt into the room and were confronted by some (3) Harpies who had moved in to the cave entrance. The PCs had surprised them for sure but the Harpies were tough; the 3 Elves, after managing to get some wounds in, all failed their saving throws against the Harpies' song and it was left to Gene and Gibbet to dispatch two of them while the third fled, horribly injured. In the meantime however, both humans took injuries. Searching the room produced a big sack of coins that went straight into Galan's Bag of Holding.

Moving on to the next room, they found the door wedged from the other side (presumably to stop the Harpies getting into the rest of the dungeon). Being 4/5 clad in plate, the PCs barged the door down, and slammed into the next room. Finding some Orcs in there, Bonjella used her Sleep spell on them and the PCs then slit their throats. Looting the bodies and the room produced a big red gem and some Orc swords (which were soon discarded).

The section of 'The Bath-house of Blibdoolpoolp' that the PCs have explored

Heading south out of the Orcs' room, the PCs came to an open area with various doors coming off it. Having already explored quite a lot towards the east (the library, tannery, Kobold temple where the PCs smashed a statue of Kurtalmuk, wine cellar and the 'necro-room', which contained Giant Rats and a lot of skulls and candles had all been explored in the previous two visits), the party turned west. The ignored the teleport room (the small room at the far end of the north-west corridor) and instead made for the room marked 'rats' on my map. Listening at the door indeed allowed them to hear that something was within - not Kobolds however. A somewhat complicated plan ensued with the door being quickly opened and a lit torch thrown in. When the (Giant) Rats inside panicked and made for the door, the party quickly shut it.

Exactly what happened next I don't actually remember. There was definitely a fight with the Rats. The party made short work of the R.O.U.S. (3 dead and the other 4 so panicked that they turned and fled down a small hole), leaving time to search the room. Several things caught their attention. First, on a shelf along the north wall, five large jars stood in a row. Amidst the dust and slime and rat-crap, a small metal chest was also visible. Gibbet searched that, found no traps and tried to unlock it. He succeeded and the chest sprang open. Inside was a was a leather purse containing coins (209GP) and four ceramic vials in the shape of dragons emerging from eggs. Meanwhile, Galan discovered that the vases each contained hundreds of silver pieces. Everything went into the Bag of Holding.

There was also a gaggle of wandering Fire Beetles that turned up. Another Sleep spell dealt with them pretty quickly and the party harvested their glow-glands for sale to Gisuintha back in town. This may have been before the fight with the R.O.U.S. but I can't actually recall.

Pushing on through the Rat room, the party opened the western door. This led to a very strange room indeed. As soon as the door opened, a warm light and soothing music was heard. Having previously been victims of the Harpies' Charm, everyone freaked out and decided that they all needed to stuff things in their ears and wrap things round their heads to block out the sound. Only Gene refused to do so. 

I have to admit that I misread the room description when the PCs did go in. There was supposed to be some smashed furniture and disembodied harp music, but I told them there was an actual harp sitting on a somewhat smashed desk. D'oh. Now instead of a groovy room effect, they have an actual enchanted harp, because of course it ended up in the bag. Bonjella poked around in the smashed furniture, and unfortunately set off a surviving trap, being hit by a spring-loaded bolt, which caused her an injury but luckily not death. There was however also some cash lying about, a purse with coins in it that the trap was meant to protect.

That was about it for that room however, so with the harp and the cash, they opened another door - again, the western one. They could see about 10' away a curtain of water falling but could not see if the corridor continued beyond it. Leaving that for another day, they opened the door in the north wall. As that only seemed to lead to another corridor with several more doors, they retreated back the way they'd come and out of the Rat room.

Deciding that with three party-members injured, only one spell between them and a lot of loot, they might be best of heading back, they opted to try one last room and see what was what, so they chose to open the southern-most door in the wide section of corridor, into the room marked 'beetles' - in this case, more Fire Beetles. The room was some sort of mausoleum, with five large sarcophagi standing about, and the beetles running in between them, partly out of sight and definitely difficult to kill.

However, the party was determined to get them and add some more glands to the pile, so they marched through the room butchering the beetles. The attacks were maybe a little fierce however, as I ruled that most of the precious glands were destroyed and they only managed to get three out of a possible nine. Even so better than nothing and it rounded off the haul for the day. Disappointingly for the PCs, the sarcophagi turned out to be empty.

The PCs made it back to the entrance without incident, and high-tailed it to town with their loot. Totting up at the end of the session, Galan announced that he had also gone up a level. This levelling-up thing is catching. And now, the party has a spell-caster with two spells - what will they think of next?

Rift City session 14 report - perils of the free-range party

A few relative regulars couldn't make this session but the 6 players who could constituted a party of:

Bonjella the Elf,
Galan the Elf,
Gene the Fighter,
Gibbet the Thief,
Karensa the Elf,
and, making a welcome return, Marl the Halfling.

The Rift is a megadungeon. Levels 1 and 2 constitute - at the moment - 472 rooms. As I've just worked out that 200 of those are on Level 1, the other 272 are on Level 2. Levels 3-10 exist mostly as ideas, but there are some things that exist in a more concrete form. The party has some evidence that suggests there's an Ogre colony on Level 3 or 4, as well as having  picked up rumours of a 'horned giant' somewhere around Level 3 and a Vampire perhaps around Level 6 or thereabouts. The PCs don't actually know which if any of these things are 'real'; I do, but I'm not about to confirm or deny what's real here.

The Rift also a sandbox. Not a hexcrawl for sure, but a bit like a dungeoncrawl built like a hexcrawl. There are multiple ways into the caves in the Rift. The caves themselves are sort of geographically organised - different areas have rooms of different types  (some are actual dressed-stone rooms, some are either natural caverns or chambers hewn* from the living rock) or may have different monsters (some areas are infested with Kobolds, others with giant spiders, for example) and so on. These different areas are connected together through multiple paths horizontally and vertically, as well as many of them having access to the outside. I've also detailed some areas away from the Rift in case the party goes exploring elsewhere. So there's a whole bunch of 'nodes' to go for.

Sketch-map of the edge of the Rift, about 2 miles west of Rift City

Not sure how easy it is to make out the detail, but the fat line is basically a road that zig-zags down the side of the canyon from Rift City off to the east; the thin line that crosses the eastern portion of the road is the edge of the Rift itself; two thin lines branch off the comparatively well-built (and -travelled) road, representing paths or trails through the rocky scrubland; one is marked 'path down' (I don't think I'm giving anything away here to say that there are more caves down there), and another starts with a question mark and ends with a cave; also marked are the bulge of the rocky outcrop, the 5 caves the PCs explored originally and, past the outcrop, the limit of their exploration at the cave with the question-mark near it. The area that the PCs are exploring is effectively the top of the canyon which is itself cut into a relatively-flat plateau-area... that then stands in huge mountain massif that I know as 'the Mountains of Abomination' but possibly other people call 'Rockhome'. Something like this...

An even more schematic diagram looking vaguely from west to east

Over the period of the campaign, the party has been exploring the caves on the left of the trail. These are on the uphill side of the road, they're conceptually the Level 1 caves. There are 5 entrances near the point where the trail passes into the Rift proper. The PCs spent, I think, around 10 sessions in this area (sessions 2-11, though probably four or five of those sessions were actually taken up with exploring the area under the rocky outcrop, a complex of rooms that connects the caves accessible from entrances 1-5 with those accessible from entrance 6). In that time, they've explored maybe 50 rooms (some they've visited more than once). Then, round a rocky outcrop, there's another cave entrance. The PCs have been there twice (sessions 12 and 13). The question-mark in the first diagram was the limit of the PCs exploration after 13 sessions. From these 6 cave-entrances, 161 Level 1 rooms are directly accessible.

So... what do you do when the party ignores the 161 rooms you have laid out for them, and heads for the 39 rooms you've only just sketched in? For Session 14, the PCs decided to go on past the areas they'd been before. What I don't know is, if they know they have probably only explored about 1/3 of the rooms in that area. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. Pushing on past that cave they came to the fork in the trail where a rough path lead off to the left, up and away from the main road. Essentially, from somewhere round there, the road began tending downwards, and the cave entrances would potentially be on Level 2.

The cave they eventually came to was well away from the main paths and the party's hope I think was that these would have not been cleaned out by other adventurers quite so much. So, anyway, how did they fare?

The first room they came to was apparently shut with a locked wooden door. The PCs listened at the door, and having heard it was definitely occupied they decided to knock on it and see if the inhabitants would open up.

When a Kobold gingerly opened the door a crack, the PCs shot it in the face with arrows. Bonjella and Karensa flung the door open and Marl leapt in brandishing his short-sword. The Kobolds weren't surprised but they were somewhat overwhelmed by the PCs' onslaught, which wounded several more. However, that party failed to capitalise on their position and two of the PCs took injuries as the Kobolds fought back. Another round of combat however reduced the Kobolds from an initial 6 to 1, who turned tail and fled to another door but died with Galen's dagger in its back. The PCs stripped the bodies but only found coppers. They then searched the room that had a shallow pool and a 15' statue of a naked humanoid female with lobster head and claws. This is of course a reference to Blibdoolpoolp the Sea Mother, AD&D goddess of the Kuo-Toans. This room-complex was created using the WotC dungeon generator found here, that includes all sorts of creatures I don't have rules for (like Kua-Toans). She's in my copy of Deities & Demigods from about 1981 and I have always referred to her as 'Biddlyboop' as it's much easier to say than 'blib-dool-poolp'. Why she has a shrine up a mountain in a landlocked country is not necessarily easy to fathom. Fathom. It was a joke. Anyway, moving on...

The PCs searched the room but were unable to find anything significant, and some of the doors were locked. They tried using a Kobold as a battering-ram but were unable to break down one of the doors, so they continued in the direction the Kobold had been fleeing. The door it had been heading towards led to a room with a fountain and some depressions in the floor which may have served as baths. In the corner was a well and some rope, but no bucket. Fearful that something might come up, they quickly moved on.

The party came out into a wide corridor that had several branches. Taking the rightmost, they came upon several doors at the end. The first they tried was locked, so again a dead Kobold was used as a battering-ram. Gibbet was unhappy with the room, fearing a trap, so the Kobold was thrown into the room to test things out. Now, in the description it says 'anyone stepping into the room is teleported...' and it's definitely arguable that a dead Kobold, even if granted 'personhood' while alive (ie the room would have teleported a live Kobold) might not be a person when dead, so the room might not teleport a dead Kobold (or other person). But that's not what I ruled.

"The Kobold flies into the room... and disappears."

"Oh, is it a sphere of annihilation or a gelatinous cube, or something else nasty?"

So after a bit of discussion, the PCs decided to test the floor with a 10-foot pole. Now, I don't really know how this teleporter works. There are other teleporters that I know about (let's say, in other dungeons, the PCs don't know them, they live in Canada and I met them one summer etc etc) that work for example when the PCs are inside the room and the door closes. But with this one, it works while the door is open. Things can be both in and out (which isn't so likely with a closed door). And, having said that a dead Kobold set it off, I couldn't see any reason why a dead tree (ie a wooden pole) would not set it off. So, when Gibbet said that he'd stand outside and poke the floor with a 10-foot pole, the only thing that made sense was that the spell effect took hold of everything inside the room boundaries, which included the door frame, at the point that something touched the floor. So, the end of Gibbet's pole fell off.

Next, he started sliding the pole towards the door. This has the effect of a very small bit of the pole being in the room while the magical effect is working, which I think would produce an effect a bit like grinding away the end of the pole, so again a little bit came off the end.

So, having done all of this and then deciding it must be a teleportation rather than a destruction effect, Gibbet jumped into the room...

... and I asked the rest of the party if it would be OK if they all stepped outside for a moment.

Gibbet found himself in a room very like the one he left (the same size at least) - but the door was locked. In the room with him were a dead Kobold, and some sawdust. Listening at the door he heard voices on the other side. They sounded like the party. It turned out (after the party battered the door down for him, they're better at smashing than he is at picking door-locks) that the teleporter had taken him (and the dead Kobold; and the pile of sawdust shaved from the 10'-pole) a whole 8'5" away. There were a few other things in the room, including a kind of strange drum. Gibbett decided that he may as well take it.

The world's most pointless teleport trap (the diagram has a scale and north-arrow so is a proper map)

I asked the rest of the party to step back in - and Galan then said he stepped into the teleporter room...

... and I asked the rest of the party if it would be OK if they all stepped outside for a moment.

I'm not going to reveal why the teleporter doesn't take everything to the same place. It might be random. It might be a sequence. It might depend on age or race or sex or armour type or be influenced by any number of features. But for whatever reason, Galan was definitely transported quite a long way away.

The room Galan found himself in - he didn't know where it was - was larger than the one he had stepped into. It appeared that it was being used as place to cure animal skins. However there didn't seem to be anything of use or interest to adventurers, and nor were there any ways out except the door he'd come in by, so he exited, at which point he found himself in a corridor he didn't recognise.

Trying some other doors, one was locked but the room behind definitely seemed to have occupants. Another contained what appeared to be a smashed-up wine cellar. No other exit was visible to Galan so he turned round. Heading in the opposite direction, the corridor ended with another door, this time opening into a mouldy old library or study - with two doors this time. This room however was occupied. Some scorpions the size of cats headed towards him, but he made it to the other exit (it was unlocked) and he got out without injury. This door too opened into a corridor. Reasoning that the rest of the party was standing in a corridor, and finding a way through without going into rooms was preferable, Galan kept going.

Sure enough, round a few corners he came back to the wide corridor with several branches. Taking the right-most, he approached that party from the rear. All the while I had been rolling for wandering monsters but nothing showed up. After a quick conflab with the rest of the party it was decided to head for the library and wine-cellar - by the conventional route.

So first off (still no wandering monsters) the party headed for the library. It didn't take long to dispatch the scorpions, whereupon, channelling the spirit of Polly (who was the player's previous character), Bonjella cut off their stingers to take to Gisuintha back in town. Deciding that they'd also have a look for any interesting tomes on the way out, the party headed on to the corridor that Galan had found himself in earlier.

They couldn't open the locked door but they did make it into the wine-cellar. There they found that most of the bottles had been wrecked but there was one amphora and a barrel that were still sealed and had their contents intact. Scooping these up, the party headed back for the exit.

Stopping only at the library to pick up some of the less-mouldy scroll and books, and to make a find of 100gp stashed behind a cache of scrolls, the party made their way out. At last, I rolled for a wandering monster. Consulting the list, it turned out to be a party of three Elves coming into the caves. There was no reason to assume that the Elves were going to be hostile (and the reaction dice said that there was no immediate hostility), so conversation ensued and information was exchanged. Marl, knowing that a silver-haired Elf had been asking questions around town, tried to find out if these Elves were involved; and Gibbet lifted a purse from one which contained a couple of dozen silver pieces, but otherwise both sides went about their business unmolested.

And that was it - home to sell the bits and pieces they'd picked up (a lantern, a mirror, the wine) and divide up the gold and then off to bed for another hard day's adventuring tomorrow...




*My spellcheck doesn't like 'hewn', I wonder why? As far as I'm aware it's the normal past participle. Maybe it's one of those British/American English things.

A map for my players...

Currently, with a mostly-1st Level party (only Gibbet the Thief has reached 2nd Level) the party is exploring some Level 1 caverns. I used the donjon dungeon generator for this area. It's an AD&D generator but fine for my purposes - I just have to change the odd monster details here and there. I use donjon's generators a lot - there are dozens on the site - and heartily recommend them to one and all.

So here is part of the map of the area - I've called this cave-system 'the Caverns of Ulfang the Black'. The players probably can't even remember who 'Ulfang the Black' is, but never mind. Perhaps they'll be reminded at some point.

Heavily redacted are the tunnels the players haven't gone down yet - just marked with arrows.

Getting Freaky

Went back to 'Build a Dungeon From Me'. I do from time to time. It's a great resource, it's a great idea, and it's a pity that it isn't updated any more. It's also a pity I really can't work out how to do something like that with Blogger. I'd love to be able to add random pictures from Pinterest (for example... I don't care, I'd do it with Photobucket if I could) to the blog as a gallery like the 'Build A Dungeon From Me' gallery. Apparently adding a gallery like that to a Wordpress blog is easy, but not Blogger. Ho hum. - and now, in a week, every time I try to go back to it it redirects me to a dating site. If I've inadvertently broken 'Build a Dungeon From Me', I really am sorry.

Anyway, I've been messing around with 'Build A Dungeon From Me'. I generated a bunch of random images. I wrote a short description of each. I fed the descriptions into a randomiser to mix the order again. When I first encountered 'Build A Dungeon From Me', I had the idea that the basic concept was to take three images to make an adventure from them - I don't know why, the number three isn't mentioned on the site, maybe the suggestion came from whichever blog it was where I found out about it: anyway, I've grouped the descriptions in threes and started expanding them to make encounter zones. I'm thinking hexcrawl, like Carcosa.

Many images on 'Build A Dungeon From Me' are quite 'Carcosa-y', at least how I see Carcosa. It is by turns epic, bleak, decadent and barbaric (my version of Carcosa has more than a hint of Barsoom about it). I think it has helped me to see what Carcosa (the setting book by Geoff McKinley) can be in relation to my current campaign. I'm trying to make Carcosa a parallel world, exactly mimicking the campaign world the players are adventuring in - except it's Carcosa, so maybe not 'exactly mimicking'. It may be in the unimaginable future (but there's a problem in the theoretical possibility that our world is in the PC's future) or it may be in the unimaginable past (at the moment, this seems more likely, though it might also cause 'continuity problems'), but it should certainly be in the same 'landscape'. Either the PCs should be able to find faint traces of Carcosa in their world, or they should be able to find faint traces of their world in Carcosa.

Simply put, there is a region of the world (maybe more than one?) where Carcosa is bleeding through, into the world the PCs know. It may be that the PCs can 'bleed back' and end up in Carcosa. If I map them one-to-one, the correspondences should be obvious and will both suggest sites in the PC's world (because for example, 10,000 years after Carcosa, there should still be remnants of that horrific and brutal time, even if one of the suns has vanished), and it  should give me suggestions of places where it might be possible to cross from one reality to the other (by accident or design).

I've found part of the world the PCs are in where I think I can add 'Carcosa' as I envision it - a weird wasteland where decadence and barbarism collide. The campaign-world is a stripped-down version of the 'Mystara' setting, or maybe, a version starting from the same roots as Mystara, the map of 'The Lands and Environs of the D&D Wilderness' from 1983, but not quite the Mystara that was later elaborated. The potential resting-place of Carcosa is somewhat to the west of this area, which is where most of the action has been concentrated so far (The Rift, and with it Rift City, is more or less in the centre of this map, in the south-west part of Rockhome).

This version from Thorfinn Tate Cartography - link here

As a result, I've been working out details of the horned Forest Witches; I've been mapping a city built on spires of rock, with a palace - or maybe a monastery, I haven't quite decided - at the centre; I've been wondering where the Prince is going on his boat on the Black River; I've been trying to determine who was the skeleton sitting on the throne, with a headdress and a giant sword?

Perhaps the PCs glimpse some towers across a lake. Perhaps they even find a scroll that refers to lost Carcosa or the King in Yellow or the Yellow Sign (oh, yeah, my Carcosa probably has more reference to R.W. Chambers' short stories than the Carcosa sourcebook does). However I do it, Carcosa needs to bleed into my players' reality. It's really just too interesting not to.

Happy Birthday to Me...

It was my birthday recently. One never asks an Orc their age, but I saw the Bakshi Lord of the Rings in the cinema (probably in 1979, the year I first read it) and started playing D&D in 1981 with the Moldvay Basic Set. That's a pretty good indicator.

I got some game-related stuff. From my awesome parents, I received the Eldritch Horror game. I have no idea what they would made of it (they're religious, in a very tolerant sort of way), but I think it looks pretty groovy. It's certainly heavy. I have punched out all of the counters but am yet to persuade Mrs Orc to play: we'll get there soon I hope.

My brother, his amazing wife and incredible son gave me the Adventurer, Conqueror, King System hardback book. I have read a lot of it and I'm very impressed at the production values and way it joins stuff up. I still think that the ACKS was the wrong way to go but they made such a brilliant job of it. I think - maybe - it would have achieved more sales if it had not just substantially repackaged B/X with some great additions, but if instead it had been released as some supplements - one for the 'domain game' stuff, one for character creation. Both of those sections are really good and will I think soon be making appearances in my ongoing campaign. Some of the rest is... stuff I already own but slightly reworded. I dunno, maybe I wouldn't have bought a 'campaign system' for 1/3 the price and an 'expanded character creation system' book for 1/3 the price and all the other ways this could be done, so maybe I'm wrong and Autarch are right. I don't have any games company, let alone one that releases such well-made stuff so am I really a good judge? I just have a feeling I'd have invested sooner if the initial price-hump hadn't been so high. But something like a 64-page soft-cover dealing with Chapter 10 would have been good.

From my lovely wife, who really doesn't know what she's done, I got the Carcosa book. It is of course great, I think there will be some memorable adventures that leap from its pages in years to come. I have form here, please see some posts from the middle of last year by following the 'Carcosa' label - but man oh man I hate 10-mile hexes. So, I've hatched a plot. It's a stupid plot, but right up my ally as far as making things harder for myself by not adapting to change is concerned (which I do a lot... I am still playing B/X-BECMI D&D after all).

Geoff McKinley says that the descriptions are only a small part of what is actually happening in the space covered by the map. That's fine. Adding extra encounters is OK. I have a bunch of hexes that I have already mapped. I think there must be a way to smash my map in the map as already exists and see what happens. I imagine it as being a sort of fractal process.

I think the way I am going to attempt it is to turn Geoff's 10-mile hexes into my favoured 6-mile hexes. This will mean that the number of hexes will increase 3-fold (for 10-to-6 hex-theory, please see this post in particular). This will slightly increase the area being mapped but to be honest I don't care. I don't think it ever says 'it's 480 miles from Carcosa to the Bottomless Lochs' or whatever so it's all good as far as I'm concerned.

There are currently 400 hexes and 800 descriptions: this will become 1,200 hexes with 800 descriptions. My hexes (currently 200) will become 400. I will double the numbers of each terrain type and apply them to the map... I'm not entirely sure how but I'll think about it. I suspect I'd kind of interpolate my hexes, by adding my 20 columns and 10 rows (not forgetting to double them) to the existing 25 columns and 16 rows by some kind of proportional process. If my hex doesn't fit the general theme of the map at that point, then so what? There's a tiny little (6-mile hex) mountain in the ice-field or a bit of desert in a lake (erm, an island maybe?). Or even a series of small lakes in the desert. I can live with that.

Some of the hex descriptions I have are already directly lifted from the Carcosa preview, so I need to find these and eradicate them as duplicates. One, though not lifted from the Carcosa preview, in that it already existed as part of John Stater's Kepler-22B project 'Strange New World', was swapped for a Carcosa preview description; the red vitrified ground in Sector G9 (from 2014, before I even remember having heard of the Carcosa book) was very similar to a description of vitrified white ground in a hex in the Carcosa preview. I swapped mine for Geoff's in my mapping is all. I guess the idea of vitrified ground can occur to more than one person.

But anyway, I have something like 136 descriptions, of which maybe 12 were from the preview. That leaves about 124. I need to add 400 hexes. It's fine, 124 more locations (including something like 30 settlements, a couple of them largish for Carcosa) will fit in that space with hardly anyone noticing. Maybe I should fill in all 400 new hexes? That would be a challenge!

But perhaps, in line with the advice for peopling the map from ACKS I could just interpolate the hexes and keep some of the locations back: when the PCs stumble on them, that's when I add them to the map... I need to read that bit again and think how it applies to Carcosa, the world, and Carcosa, the book. And I need to work out the maths of thing. That may take a little while.

In essence it's simple - in the first hex in the top left of the Carcosa map is an area of plains with trees. In the top left of my map is an area of barren plains. Making one hex into three means there are two mostly-forest-hexes and one barren plains hex. But making that work when I have to also increase the 'sides' of my map from 10 to 16 and the 'top-and-bottom' from 20 to 25 is less easy. The proportions aren't the same so my hexes will have to be taller than they are wide (conceptually at least).

The total number of hexes needs to be divided so that north-south and east-west proportions are round about right. My map, of 200 hexes, was 20x10. The Carcosa map, of 400 hexes, was 25x16. The new map, of 1,200 hexes, probably needs to be somewhere between 40x30 and 50x24 to keep something like the right 'aspect ratio'. Maybe 48x25 is right. They seem to be the only ways of dividing 1,200 hexes in a reasonable ratio anyway. My map is at 12:6 EW:NS. The original is about 9:6 EW:NS. Somewhere between those looks to be about right. 50x24 is just over 12:6 so goes too far in having its EW dimension greater than twice its NS dimension. 40x30 is at 8:6 so goes too far the other way and has an EW dimension less than 1.5 times the NS dimension. 48x25 is just about 11:6 and at the moment looks like the best fit.

Meh, I'll get there. Then I can go mad and do a 24-mile hex map based on the map from Carcosa, which is what I really want!

Rift City Session 6

The sixth (wow yeah count them) of our open gaming sessions happened on the 21st, a week late because of huge scheduling conflicts - in the end, the rest of the players decided they'd rather have it at another time so that I could DM, rather than anyone else volunteering to run a game. Next month we're going to have to change things again, as our usual venue will be occupied - the Leicester Comedy Festival is on in February and most of the places we could meet in the city will be hosting gigs. So, we're having a night off from meeting in public (I know that kinda defeats the point of an open gaming session but it's only one month) to meet at one of the players' houses.

Anyway, the session started in the inn frequented by adventurers coming to Rift City. There, Sven the Dwarf, Frost the Fighter, Gwynthor the Cleric, Gibbet the Thief and Poly the Magic User were breakfasting and discussing their assault on the caves when they were approached by Berg, another Dwarf and Cnut, another Fighter, asking if they could join the party for a bit of dungeon-delving. 

While they were still breakfasting, they were also joined by Galen the Elf, who (being a bit richer than the others as the only PC survivor of the successful raid at the last session) had decided to take up more salubrious accommodation and had taken a room at the Scoundrels' House, a more up-market place all together.

I also supplied the players with a map of the main parts of Rift City; apart from their inn, I've marked on four of the main drinking establishments, the main market area at 'The Circus', a couple of temples and a few other locations of note. Some of these turn up in the large rumour-table I have (100 rumours culled from a variety of sources - the inns and rumours are bound together if you get them from the Donjon site, but not from Inkwell Ideas - which is fine, I need more than six rumours per inn). Some of them have adventures attached all of their own. I won't say which.

Rift City map, including several sites from various random rumour sources...

So anyway the party got itself together at last and set off for the caves. They decided that they might as well go after Orcs - rescuing the poor enslaved Gnome had obviously touched the conscience of... well Galen probably, he was the only PC to have gotten out alive, but he must have been dashed persuasive.

So, they ventured in: they passed the body of Bob the Fighter (who died in sight of the exit last time); no Kobolds this time but in one of the rooms that had been emptied last session, a Crab Spider attacked Galen.

Galen is approximately as armoured as the Tin Man from Wizard of Oz. His nose may count as a vulnerable location but I'm not sure. Whatever, even with dropping from the ceiling with surprise, the Crab Spider was unable to bite Galen before the rest of the party made it into Spider jam. Polly was desperately trying to save any interesting parts to take back to the wizard in town who's collecting such things, but couldn't really identify enough bits in the mush to be of use.

A bit further on - Ghouls, two of them. There are a lot of them around, in 6 sessions there have been at least 3 encounters with Ghouls. Gwynthor tried to Turn them but failed, and they moved to attack. Again, 8 party members made short work of them. No-one was bitten. No-one was paralysed. They were lucky.

They were lucky with Wandering Monsters too. I kept rolling high. No monsters.

They pushed on, looking for the Orcish slavers. But they found some Elves, three of them, a party like themselves out for the killing of monsters and the liberation of treasure - for noble purposes of course. Not only was Galen an Elf, but Sven the Dwarf also speaks Elvish, so the Elves weren't immediately hostile. Some information and wishes for a successful quest were exchanged, Sven was declared to be a noble comrade who would be remembered in the stories of their people, and then as the Elves went past, Gibbet pick-pocketed them, gaining a handful of coins for his trouble.

Several empty rooms, recently cleared - by the party, 'yesterday' in fact. There was some discussion about whether to turn left or right at the furthest point - they turned left but just to do one last room before turning right for home again. And the room happened to be one in which there was some actual treasure. A locked chest, with a poison needle trap - and Gibbet managed, the dice-gods alone know how, to get it open without killing himself. The loot was counted and divided - 300SP, 20GP and two huge gems - and the party decided to high-tail it to the exit.

And then, in the distance, more figures. This was it turns out another NPC party. The only wandering monster in the whole session was basically friendly. They propositioned Berg (the leader of the other pary was a male Dwarf, and Berg a female - they arranged a meeting later that evening), wished the PCs luck,  and warned them the Orcs and Skeletons lay between them and the exit before heading off to the south-east, further into the cave system.

Indeed, a few moments later, the PCs found the cave where the eight Skeletons were. Gwynthor again began trying to compel them by the power of Yrt (a god who mostly manifests himself through pine-cones, or this at least is what Gwynthor believes). Gwynthor shouted at them and commanded them by the power of Yrt not to resist; the rest of the party then battered them to death... or, more to death.

One more room and one more room... after the Skeletons, who were disappointingly short of treasure, the two Dwarves entered another room, that smelled bad and had piles of droppings on the floor - from bats, probably. But the party didn't care, they were treasure-hunting. Unfortunately Sven set off a floor-trap and fell 10'. Lowering Gibbet down on a rope to see how Sven was, the PCs realised their Dwarven comrade was going to soon bleed out. Alas, Gibbet was unable to staunch Sven's wounds and the noble Dwarf died of a broken beard (or something).

Then... the party decided to argue for ages about how to divvy up all the loot. Eventually I rolled a few dice and said "your argument is interrupted by an axe smacking into the wall above you". The Orcs they'd been looking for, merely a few tens of yards up the corridor, had come looking for them having heard the commotion. But, the Orcs were attacking superior numbers of better-armoured foes. They threw their hand-axes as they charged, but they never even made it into hand-to-hand. By the time Polly used her 'Sleep' spell on them more than half were already dead. The rest had their throats cut and their possessions looted, and then it was off home to sell the weapons and gems and divide up the gold, another successful day of murder-hoboing accomplished, the only fly in the ointment the death of Sven Olafson, noble Dwarf and friend of Elves, not to mention wolves everywhere.

Fourth part of mapping Carcosa

OK, so I've generated the map at 6-miles per hex, I've put all the encounter numbers on it, I've changed all the numbers to be much more sensibly-organised, re-numbering the 28 encounters I'd already generated in the process, generated around 80 more locations using the Save v Total Party Kill's Random Carcosa generator and sourced the remaining dozen or so from the Carcosa Preview pdf, the Carcosa Grimoire pdf, the odd source like Bernie the Flumph (Vaults of Man) and Joe the Dungeon Brawler (Carcosa Avdenture, sic) and even  some things out of my own brain that will be posted on here at some point as no-one in my occasional meatspace gaming gives a toss about this blog. Villages (whether generated as settlements according to the patterns I already established, or turning up as a 'Weird' result due to some particular eccentricity of their ruler) have been given a cultural quirk from Papers & Pencils - d100 Small Town Quirks. In itself this has caused the necessity for a little re-thinking to sidestep the implicit feudal/pseudo-medieval background of some of the quirks.

200-hex map with sequential numbering

There are a few other things that need to be sorted out: there is occasional reference in the descriptions to things that don't exist in the same format (eg, in one hex there is the description "An abandoned space alien outpost is now home to a group of 23 Dolm bandits. Amongst their possessions is a map of the first level of a space alien research base in hex 1505" - I don't have a hex 1505, but I do have a hex AO 05 which is pretty much the same thing) or at all (eg the map is 20 hexes wide and 10 deep so there isn't anything higher than AT 10, which equals 2010). I need to integrate the Carcosan Rituals in a systematic way too; divorcing them from the 'official' map means that link between components and Rituals is broken, for example. How does a Sorcerer bind the Foul Putrescence with the essence of the fungi of 1302, if a) 1302 is AM 02 and b) doesn't have a fungus-forest? Tracking all of those lose ends and tying them up is I think going to be the tedious bit.

However, the map is I'd say 90%+ complete. If I got a call saying there were people to game this tomorrow I could start running it as a hex-crawl as it is and make up the missing details on the fly. But tying a few more things down first would be useful. Where is the nearest Orange Man settlement to the hex where the escaped Orange Man slave is hiding? The party might not know but the inhabitants of the next village they visit possibly (probably?) would. Where are the Black Men going with their Mummy Brain, and why? Are there carnivorous fungi in hex AM 02 after all, and if not, where are they? It's not so much work to tie up the lose ends once I have determined what they all are.

And I don't think there's much chance I'll be gaming this tomorrow, so that's all right then...

Mapping Carcosa part the Third

Right, to recap (again)...

I'm more than half-way through mapping my 200-hex region, and frankly there's not enough desert. My second lot of terrain determinations (again in a 28-hex area, this time I've been a bit more careful not to go over the edges because I'm effectively starting in my own south-east corner) looked like this:

'County'-sized area in south-east corner of 200-hex map

Don't forget this is approximately the size of an English county - the area of an earldom. In a feudal society we'd expect a population of tens of thousands. The Domesday Book lists 529 population centres in Gloucestershire in 1086. This area is a bit smaller, but the same order of magnitude. I'm expecting that I'll get about 6 settlements.

For the rest of this side of the map, I just filled in the hexes on the big map because I can't tile any more of these small 'county' level grids onto the regional map on this side. I can fit one on the west side - but I think I'll change my style for that, to produce a different distribution of terrain types.

My terrain generation table currently looks like this:

1 - sandy desert
2 - rocky desert
3 - salt flats
4 - swamp
5 - mountains
6 - volcanic badlands
7 - barren plains
8 - open water

but probably needs to look more like this:

01-25 - sandy desert
26-50 - rocky desert
51-60 - salt flats
61-70 - mountains
71-80 - volcanic badlands
81-90 - barren plains
91-95 - swamp
96-00 - open water

That's what I'll use for the next lot of determinations, in the north-west of the regional map.

So, this whole region will be transitional between the slightly damper more volcanic area in the centre (first bloc) and east (second bloc), and the area to the west which is likely to be more characterised by desert.

Next group of hexes in north-west, with single 'odd hex' on west side

This new map looks OK; there's much more desert obviously and no open water (the purpley sections are 'barren plains', even though I'm not really sure what the difference is between 'barren plains' and 'rocky desert'). Smashing through the terrain generation with the new formula, and adding it to the areas I've generated with the old formula, produces a map that looks like this (including not just the odd single desert square on the extreme west of the map but an odd mountain added to the three more-or-less in the centre):

200-hex regional map

So, we have a map which is dominated in the west by rocky desert, but in the centre and east a more mixed landscape prevails, where mountains. lakes, swamp and volcanic badlands all crowd together. I'm perfectly happy with that as a landscape.

Now to do the encounter rolls. I've added in the encounters generated for the first map (though on the regional map, I haven't attempted to place the encounters in specific locations in the hexes, just noted which hexes they take place in).

The first bunch of encounters are keyed to the following hexes on the regional map:

1 -          AH 09

2 -          AH 09

3 -          AI  04

4 -          AI  04

5 -          AI  05

6 -          AI  05

7 -          AJ 06

8 -          AJ 06

9 -          AK 05

10 -      AK 05

11 -      AK 08

12 -      AK 08

13 -      AK 09

14 -      AK 09

15 -      AL 04

16 -      AL 07

17 -      AL 07

18 -      AM 04

19 -      AM 04

20 -      AM 05

21 -      AM 06

22 -      AM 06

23 -      AM 07

24 -      AM 07

25 -      AN 09

26 -      AN 09

So what I need to do now is determine the next lot of encounters. OK, 1 is in an inconvenient and weird place, but I didn't really think about that when I started.

For the next lot of determinations of encounter location, I think I'll tweak the table from the other day. It looked like this:

     1    2    3     4             5          6

1 yes yes no   yes/yes no         no

2 yes no  yes  no         yes/yes no

3 no  yes yes  no         no         yes/yes

where the number along the top is a d6 and the number down the side is the number of the hex in the 3-hex group (generally reading from top-bottom and left-right) where the encounter is to be found. Due to electronically determining lots of numbers 4+ (in fact only one of the 13 numbers wasn't a 4, 5 or 6) there was a lot of clustering of encounters. I don't mind some clustered encounters, but I want a more even (ie, non-random) distribution. Settlements don't form at random, there are some random factors but also non-random factors, and other encounters will also follow both random and non-random tendencies. Some of these I think will act as forces repelling other encounters (eg, it's less likely to get monster encounters near a settlement if the people in the settlement are going to hunt to monsters - though of course, the monsters may be close by because they're hunting the people...).

I think I'll try the following tweak to the above table, replacing a d6 roll with a d12, weighted towards the bottom end of the scale, increasing the chances of separate encounters from 1/2 to 3/4 and decreasing the chance of clustered encounters from 1/2 to 1/4.

    1-3   4-6    7-9    10             11           12

1  yes   yes    no      yes/yes    no          no

2 yes   no     yes     no             yes/yes no

3 no    yes    yes     no             no          yes/yes

That has given me an overall distribution of encounters on the map that looks like this:

200-hex region with encounters keyed to hexes

Unfortunately that's really difficult to deal with due to the encounter numbering effectively spiralling out from the lower centre of the map. I hate maps where the numbers are scattered on the map as I find them more time-consuming to use, so I've already decided that I'm going to renumber everything starting with 1 in the north-west corner, but I have another more procedural choice to make here. I can either determine the encounters first and change the numbers afterwards (which is basically doing the fun part now and the tedious hard work later) or I can change everything over first and then do the fun part afterwards.

I know what I'm like, if I d the fun bit now the tedious bit will never get done. So I'd best start with the boring stuff . Maybe I'll reward myself with breaking it up - when I've done the first group of 34, I'll determine the encounter details for them. That might prevent this from getting too tedious.

A lesson in forward planning methinks... don't start numbering your map in a random location.

Mapping Carcosa part deux

The experiment to map out a Carcosa-style environment continues... with a look back at what has happened so far. So in the spirit of all TV shows at the moment:

"Previously, on 'Mapping Carcosa'... (FX: bell-like theme tune)"

Current map showing settlements with individuals and groups that may belong to them

Well, the area of the Ulfire Men is pretty interesting I think. I didn't put things there on purpose - it just happened that I'd put two encounters in one hex and they both turned up as villages of Ulfire Men, and it happened that one of the encounters in the hex next door was also a village of Ulfire Men. The middle and north-eastern village were - co-incidentally - ruled by Chaotic Sorcerers, and again co-incidentally I generated the same 'cultural quirk' for them - the uniform with the red stripe. All just random determinations.

So, there's definitely something going on there. 800 Ulfire Man is a decent population, about 55% of population the region. If they were united (especially by a gaggle of Chaotic Sorcerers) they'd probably overcome most opposition in the area. Perhaps that's why there are so many settlements on water (1/2 of castles and 2/5 of villages) - because the Ulfire Men rule the land in that eastern portion. Another way to look at this is every non-Ulfire settlement bar one is on water (3/4), no Ulfire settlement is, and of land-based settlements, 3/4 are of Ulfire Men. Ulfire Men avoid water; pretty much everyone else favours it. However (perhaps luckily for the others), the Ulfire Men are not united.

Two things may have happened to a posited 'Unified Ulfire Culture' in that area; either a Neutral Fighter has taken Village 17 from a Chaotic Sorcerer, or the Chaotic Sorcerers in 16 and 23 have recently taken over and are building a power-bloc. Either way, it looks like war between different Ulfire factions. Even the idea that the Neutral-led Ulfire Men have a communal toilet might hint at a militarisation of the village under the threat of the Chaotic Uniformed Sorcerers.

If I was the ruler of the Black Men, or the Orange Men, or maybe especially the Lawful ruler of the Jale Men, I'd be trying to make sure the Chaotic Sorcerers didn't take that last Ulfire village.

If on the other hand I was part of the Sorcerous cult that has supplied the leaders and ideology of Village 16 and Village 23, I'd be trying to not only conquer the last 'free' Ulfire territory, I'd also be trying to destabilise other local settlements. I might be particularly concerned about the Black Men village to the north - perhaps I'd get Black Men to bring me Mummy Brains to increase my power, or maybe, I'd give them Mummy Brains to take back home in a bid to destroy their village from within...

Moving Forward

I have a big bad hex-map with 200 hexes on it (about the size of 7 Gloucestershires or Athens-es). That, of course, is not divisible by 3. But, given that my 3-hex squares are very slightly bigger than the 10-mile hexes they're supposed to be mimicking, I'm not really bothered. I'll have 2 encounters over 2 squares and not worry about it. My version of Carcosa will probably still be slightly-less-densely-populated with encounters than the official version, on a comparison of encounters per square mile covered.

2/3 of 200 is therefore more like 2/3 of 198, plus 2. I think that is 134 encounters (therefore mimicking 134/2 or 67 10-mile hexes), of which I so far have listed 26. I also have a couple of things I've found that I'm going to slot into the space - I'm going to put Bernie the Flumph's Vaults of Man and Joesky the Dungeon Brawler's Carcosa adventure into the map as locations in specific places (the Vaults of Man implies a mountainous location for a start so that will be prioritised for a mountain area), as well as a few locations I've been working on recently. I haven't found much material from other sources - the Carcosan Grimoire aside, which has a set of procedures for settlement generation - but there are some things I think will work in a Carcosa-style setting: I'm going to be going over Chris R's Carcosa blog very carefully, and some of Michael Prescott's material from http://blog.trilemma.com I think might work nicely.

One thing I want to do is try and keep a Carcosa-y feel while re-skinning monsters from other sources. So my 'Space Aliens' are technologically-minded yes, short yes, and grey-skinned; but I suspect that they will be a bit weaker than a standard human fighter (about HD1-1, for example); they will have good vision for seeing in darkness but will likely have a penalty for fighting in full daylight (I expect this will be -1 to hit), and they will scare easily.

Some things will, and some things will not, be like standard Carcosa. I really like the idea of using Treants as huge carnivorous plants. Pretty sure there'll be at least a few dotted around 'my' Carcosa. In fact one of them I think will be part of a locale I'm working on. On the other hand, I don't think getting rid of Thieves as a class as a class makes much sense. Sure, Thieves' Guilds (something I don't really use anyway) don't make much sense in a world without significant urbanism, but I'm happy to divorce 'skill-set' from 'cultural construct'. Essentially, not everyone is 'hard'. Some people are faster or more nimble or more sneaky (because if they can't intimidate other people, they have to be more devious to get what they want). I don't think that will change in Carcosa. I think even in a setting that's less 'feudal' and more 'heroic' (and I use that word advisedly) than the norm for elf-games, one characterised by low-intensity conflict between villages and petty warlords, some people will have sneaking, hiding and sleight-of-hand skills. Think of them as spies, assassins or explorers if you like, and justify their existence as being people who loot ancient and alien sites or got their training from sorcerous or militaristic cults who sometimes need a sneaky skill-set, but I think there's scope for such skills in Carcosa. My version, at least.

One thing I don't understand, but am happy to run with while I work out a justification, is the prevalence of castles and citadels (2/7 in the test area). To me this implies small settlements subsidiary to somewhere else. So, for example:

Encounter 7:
Citadel of 82 Yellow Men led by "the Brilliant Illumination," a Neutral 6th-level Fighter.

This implies to me that  somewhere close by there is a settlement (or group of settlements) of Yellow Men that has sent them as an organised force, rather than a settler community - there are no children or elderly there, it's a military establishment. How do 'young Yellow recruits' come and take up duties in the citadel? Of course, they could just be bandits, taken over a ruin or fortified a site for themselves, but it's difficult to see how they could sustain themselves, especially if Carcosan species of humans are not inter-fertile. If it is to be anything other than a brief occupation of Yellow Men, there needs to be some support network in place to prevent such places being obliterated by more-powerful neighbours before help could arrive from nearby Yellow settlements. Or, perhaps it's more like a 'military order', and there's a known network of Yellow settlements across a much wider area that sends recruits to the 'Citadel of the Order of the Brilliant Illumination'. Or perhaps I need to deconstruct the entries and move the descriptor 'Yellow':

Encounter 7:
Citadel of 82 Men led by "the Brilliant Illumination," a Neutral 6th-level Yellow Fighter.

If the Citadel was open to all Men (possibly except Bone Men, see the Carcosan Grimoire) then it could be self-sustaining easily as recruits could come from any of the villages in the region. I'll have to think about whether I deconstruct the generated results though, it looks a bit like cheating (OK, I'm the sort of person who, when presented with a system immediately goes 'yeah? But what if you do it like this?'... but on the other hand, I set up a system and I'm not going to subvert it just because I can't immediately explain the results. Best to try and find a justification before abandoning the system I think).

Perhaps there's information that could be gleaned from distinguishing between 'village, castle, citadel and monastery (I haven't yet generated a monastery)' in the listings. I've been thinking that 'castle' and 'citadel' are synonyms but there's no reason for them to be so. In English usage 'citadel' is used to mean 'castle-in-a-city' and that's not really appropriate, unless every Citadel generated has an unmentioned settlement outside it. It carries connotations of a central or final fortification, probably on a hill unless it's a metaphorical citadel (of faith or something), where you retreat to when all else has failed - the last impregnable fortress.

But I'm going to use 'Citadel' to mean 'wooden fort on a hill', I think, a stockaded camp of non-settlers (bandits or 'soldiers' whatever that mean in this context). 'Castle' will imply 'stone construction of 1-6 towers (and connecting walls if number of towers >1)' and could be either an ancient ruin or a relatively-recently built construction. 'Monastery' (if I ever get one), which really means something like 'place of those who are separate', will mean 'walled settlement inhabited for educational or devotional purposes' - they will have some defences but not like castles. Their ideology will depend on the generation of their leader - leaders can Lawful, Neutral or Chaotic, and classed as Fighters or Sorcerers. A monastery commanded by a Lawful Fighter implies something very different to a monastery led by a Chaotic Sorcerer, so that's a place to start with determining the character of the place. I might need to determine the monastery's age and/or construction material too. Say, d8 a table something like this:

1 - less than 10 years, wood
2 - 10-50 years, mixed wood and stone
3 - 50-100 years, stone
4 - 100-200 years, stone
5 - 200-300 years, stone
6 - 300-500 years, stone
7 - 500-1000 years, stone
8 - more than 1000 years, crystal or other exotic material

- where 'wood' and 'stone' can be replaced with any suitable local materials (eg the most easily-obtained relatively-tough building material is the carapaces of giant arthropods, that might be a substitute for wood).

That all seems a reasonable workaround I think. 

Now I'll start applying some of that in another area to work up. I have 6 or 7 more areas the same size as the region I've already detailed, but I will experiment with alternative generations in other areas - in a future post...