Fiendish Quartet #4

(Concluding a series of D&D campaign brainstorming based on the 1e Fiend Folio.)

Gamma Weird

One of the charming things about the 1st Edition Fiend Folio is the way that truly fearsome monsters like the iconic githyanki on the cover, or the horrid grell (a hovering, octopoid brain) share pages with misfit critters like the flail snail or the adherer (a mummy wrapped in flypaper, more or less). The 1e monster books are all much closer to the homebrewed roots of the hobby; they are less professional, less 'art-directed' both in the literal sense and in the figurative sense that they resist any overall tone or coherent vision. None more so than the Fiend Folio, much of which was drawn from fan submissions to British gaming magazine White Dwarf. The fiends within often don't make any kind of sense together, but there is a lot of freedom in the juxtaposition of the goofy and the gruesome.

Even the goofiest critters have their place in a Gamma Weird campaign: Flail away, flail snail! Glue mummies, stick around! Poisonous beetles camouflaged as treasure? Check. Mangy cadaverous skunk-weasels? Got 'em, natch. Giant mosquito lobsters? The more, and the more ridiculous, the merrier! Gamma Weird is post-apocalyptic D&D, and from where I sit the only way to play the apocalypse is for laughs.

Now, I don't mean a combination of D&D and Gamma World, a science-meets-fanstasy mix-up. I mean, that is awesome, no question. But what I have in mind is more like D&D rewritten as Gamma World:

A high fantasy realm is thrown utterly into chaos by a world-spanning magical catastrophe. Cities are destroyed by arcane forces, and the knowledge of ten thousand years is buried in the wreckage. The minds and flesh of men and beasts are warped by polymorphic energies. There are no large states, no kingdoms -- at best the land is a feudal patchwork, and most people subsist in scattered unconnected villages. Low-level spells and some simple magic weapons and devices survive, but unpredictable magical effects can make them chancy to use.

Those adventurers who seek more powerful magic will have to quest for it. Lacking a shared history and culture, social structure and mores vary wildly from town to town, so travellers may find the ways of even their neighboring villages strange. In the untracked leagues between settlements the land itself has grown eldritch and strange, rocks, rivers and hills twisted by the magical apocalypse. Creatures both comical and deadly hunt the countryside and haunt the ruined cities of the ancients, but the greatest danger the adventurers face may be the very sorceries they hope to master.

Fiendish Quartet #3

Lost World Above

There's a book I read when I was much younger that told the story of a modern man trapped in an underground world, hunted by the evil fey who live there and unable to cross back to the surface world. My google-fu is not strong enough tonight to track down the title, but the book had a memorable beginning. The story's hero first discovers the underworld after pursuing a strange figure into the basement of a building, and then on through a gap in the wall of the adjoining basement, which is connected to yet another basement and another, following a secret highway connecting the dark corners behind furnaces and broken furniture. Eventually he finds a lost world deep beneath ours.

What if the lost world, though, was the one above? Two of the iconic races of the underdark, the drow and the deep gnomes, are first collected in the Fiend Folio, and there are many other strange deep-dwelling creatures in the book--meazels and meenlocks, dire corbys and doombats, gibberlings and grimlocks. What if their caves and subterranean cities were all of the known world?

Travel in this world is hard--even well established trading routes are treacherous. Bullywug bandits gambol and hop from their sumps to waylay caravans. Yellow musk creeper clings to stalactites and stalagmites, choking entire caverns like kudzu, a vile weed spreading its seedlings on the backs of its zombie victims. Mites and snyads pilfer and loot the unwatchful, and the loathed jermlaines use their nets and clubs and pitfalls to capture travelers for ransom, or worse. Beyond a few miles teleportation magic is risky for most spellcasters, but the enigmatic crypt things form a wealthy cabal of travel brokers, collecting hefty tolls to move folk over long distances. Their depots are encysted in solid rock, sealed off from all other tunnels and warded from scrying.

There are no large nations in the underdark, only small unfederated kingdoms, city-states, and trading centers. The drow and the other elvish races are a fading people. Their great halls of polished stone and marble are still, their galleries empty save for echoing footsteps. Dwarves mine alongside the svirfneblin for gems and precious metals, and the duergar study magic in squat, daemon-guarded towers. Deep halflings, the derro, are xenophobic nomads by and large, tending herds of cave oxen. Humans are more cosmopolitan, mingling even with xvarts, norkers and other humanoids in their cities and bazaars.

Forking off from the known routes are uncountable side caves. The further one follows these corkscrewed tunnels the stranger and more dreamlike the underworld grows: Two revenant princes marshal death knights and fouler undead in a perpetual war, each seeking justice for a betrayal long forgotten. Neither can ever truly triumph or fall, for the victor moulders away even as the vanquished rises again....Forlarren, the King Fallen and Redeemed, broods on his throne, black jealousy heavy about his brow. A network of skulks spies on the King's beloved and his subjects, and it is feared that the King may slay his new bride as he did the old....Elsewhere, myconids and algoids tend sprawling mushroom gardens, ruled by the Protean, an ancient fungal mind driven mad with the magic of the dozen wizards and priests it has enveloped....

Fiendish Quartet #2

Crucible
There are hardly any extraplanar beings in the 1e Fiend Folio: a few ethereal and astral foes, one devil, the demoness Lolth, the slaadi and the Elemental Evils. This suggests a much simpler cosmology than the standard "Wheel of the Planes." Consider a Prime Materium at the center of the four nested Elemental Planes, arranged in a shifting order depending on their current influence on the Prime. Astro-ethereal space interpenetrates all of the planes, and beyond the outermost Elemental Plane lies only the chaos of Limbo. Crucible, the Prime, is the warring ground of the Lords of Elemental Evil.

Imix, the Firelord, is currently ascendant; smoke seems to drift across the night sky, a haze beyond the embral red stars. Hordes of firenewts, led into battle by suicidal berserkers in magically heated armor, have driven the dwarves down from their mountain keeps. Firetoads and drakes harass the elvish woodlands and the halfling and human farmlands. Mephits plague the cities: smokish mephits choke and wheeze the unwary...the magmic delight in vandalism and desecration, melting statuary and gravestones...every woodpile and thatched roof is kindling for the fiery mephits...the steamish poison wells.

The other Elemental Lords have less influence. The icy wastes and cold seas that gird Crucible's equator are still held by the hostile allies Cryonax the Icelord and Olhydra of the Wave. Fog giants, frost men and ice drakes maraud the tundra, and kuo-toa return to the oceans from their caverns and earthen deeps. The Earthlord and the Airlord are weaker still, but they too contest for the Prime. It is thought that the slaadi manipulate all five of the Elemental lords, to unknown ends.

The clerics of Crucible, no matter the ethos, seek vainly for gods to worship. Undead are few, so they channel their nameless faith to turn or control the Elementals.

Fiendish Quartet #1

Inspired by a post at Jeff's Gameblog I've been riffing on several campaign kernels built mainly from the First Edition Fiend Folio, "tome of creatures malevolent and benign." Here's one:

Beastlands
A world where apes evolved from men? Not exactly, but the simian dakon are one of the many humanoid animals in the FF. What if these intelligent apes, and bird-men, and cat-people and other beastfolk were the major political and cultural powers in the world? Humans and demi-humans are mainly found in a few free states held by the dakon, a scholarly and mercantilist people ruled by a silverback wizard. It's rumored that he is not merely advised but also controlled by his phanaton familiar.

Still, the dakon lands are open to peoples of all sorts, and a measure of safety and prosperity can be had even for humans and their ilk. Elsewhere, peril. The deserts are ruled by the aarakocra, who range far from their cities of towering cacti to hunt on hot dry winds. The bird-men make much sport of tribes of nocturnal halflings, using trained achaierai to root them from their burrows, like pigs after truffles. The kenku are less savage, but long-lived and remote, keeping usually to mountain aeries and forest rookeries, mischievous and aloof in their dealings with other peoples.

Elsewhere, great trains of slaves are herded by the Shepherds of Iron, the dog-headed flinds and their truculent gnoll soldiers. Best not to speak of the slaves traded to the jungles where the tabaxi skulk; they are rumored to be as cruel as they are elusive. Likewise few win free of indenture to the crab men, for the building up and tearing down of their shell and coral cities is unceasing. Better by far to end up in the Squamic Fens at the center of the lizard men's empire. Though ruled by the savage caste of Lizard Kings, they are a people of long history and ancient knowledge. It is easy to die on the sands of their arenas, slain by babbler or bonesnapper or worse, but there is much glory for the victorious....

MP3: Robyn Hitchcock, The Shapes Between Us Turn Into Animals