Thursday, April 23, 2020
You Are Here
So I did one about moving through a maze (like a literal maze this time) and trying hard to get a treasure without seeing a basilisk. The size scale is drastically reduced, gaps in the maze are sometimes 1' wide or less, some are just big enough to look through.
The default rules of D&D aren't meant to deal with this--you can move 30-60' in a six-second and I've built this adventure where a player needs to make tactically important left-right decisions every four or five feet.
This is where its nice to be able to draw it all out in the middle of thinking up the adventure rather than write the whole module and then hand it off to some other person to illustrate--the more of the problem I can draw, the less I have to write. By drawing the labyrinth up front I can go "Ok, let's say the basilisk hears you, how long does it take to get to you? Do we need rules for how it moves? Can it climb walls? What if the players climb the walls?" etc.
In another adventure for Nympharium the treasure was in a trap--technically in a trap which was itself in a trap which is itself in a trap, etc.
When you normally draw a dungeon, you put a little square with a "T" and then write "Pit trap" and move on with your life. By drawing the whole trap and the entire mechanism, Grimtooth-style, I managed to make this one into an adventure that'd keep a party busy for forty minutes or more.
Once I'd done a few of these, I realized this kind of stuff is so relaxing when I DM with it--like when you have one of those stress-DMing situations where you've spent weeks trying to set up a day and everyone is finally available and then the day comes and your head is in five different places and you're like oh fuck game in an hour but I haven't done laundry but if I pull out one of these "activity book" -style adventures--oh man everything is right there. No abstraction, no trying to keep track of people, it's has an 8-bit video game clarity that I can just cruise on. It's easy to stretch parts out, go into descriptions, take your time because you have all the problems the players are about to face very clearly laid out.
Obviously this approach doesn't work with everything--Castle Terravante from the first Cube World is a social adventure about a weird love triangle and drawing the castle itself and drawing little weirdoes with rapiers in it with arrows pointing at each other doesn't get you very far, you still are stuck having to invent situations and act NPCs and the majority of the adventure is going to have to be improvised around their personalities. You are less CPU and closer to just being another player (one devoted to making life...challenging..for the other four).
But when you can do it, it's nice. And it's fun to try to figure out new things to draw and what possibilities that opens up. Like I have this one notebook which is printed with a page of angles, they're presented in degrees but also as fractions over pi, so if the halfling economy is based on pi, and halfling houses are always round then...
Anyway, the new one I just put up in the store last night is a pack with three of these: The Labyrinth of the Basilisk, The Deep Trap, and The Old Empire--a like 50-room dungeon all drawn in cutaway view.
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Tuesday, April 21, 2020
What I've been up to for the last year
I made lots of D&Dable pictures, then cut windows into the pages ahead of them....
So you've got a players' map and then each "window page" is a completely different scenario using the same image...
That's a good, small notebook for if you just want to throw something in a bag and run a one-shot across town, the next one is much heftier...
It used to be a cook book--a compilation of La Cuisine Magazine--the contents page isn't quite finished yet..
It's been turned into massive area-by-area atlas of the entire Cube World, kind of like all the old TSR Gazetteers mashed together. The original book was color-coded, so it used to be "vegetables green, seafood blue, meat pink" etc now its Gaxen Kane green and the islands are blue and the area around Vornheim is pink...
I've been altering it page by page...
The actual entries are in different formats--like, the North of Broceliande on the Goblin Empire border is a bunch of short, illustrated hexcrawl-style entries, (that's the Warbox: Broceliande module)
....and then other individual areas are longer, like this one based on populating a xylene-transfer of the port illustrated at the top of the page with a chaos warband for the players to take out (The Siege of Ortheque).
Anyway, thanks! See you soon.
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Saturday, April 18, 2020
The Store
This is an all-purpose generator for gods in fantasy role-playing games. I wanted to avoid making tables to roll on just for the fun of rolling on them, and instead put the emphasis on allowing for as wide a variety of deities as possible while quickly providing details that are actually useful in running a game and which give the gods and religion an interesting and unique role to play in a campaign.
While I’ve seen similar generators before, they tend to have a different focus–either providing so little that they put the GM in a position of making up the memorable details of the deity from whole cloth, or they provide so many details that the generator becomes its own lonely game, bogging the GM down in minutiae that doesn’t really see utility at the table and providing mismatched results that have to be ignored in order for the god or faith to be interesting. In both cases, the same thing occurs–you make one or two gods, then get bored.
I aimed for a generator that worked like the best character generation systems: providing options but also inspiration at each step, making the user not only eager to create new creatures but to see how they will work in the game world.
I also included a tool for making specific spells and abilities that match a god's specific domain.
I put the first 5 gods I invented using the generator at the end.
15$
Cube World #57 Evil City-State Generator
This installment of Cube World features an adventure in the Lands of the Southern Daimyos where the players are put in charge of an entire army. They must simultaneously direct their forces in battle as well as locate and take on the ferocious Onibaba herself--commander of the enemy forces.
10$
This all-text installment of Cube World was boiled up from the charred remains of a project that never saw the light of day: “Bards”--a semi-serious book that Lamentations of the Flame Princess head James Edward Raggi IV commissioned about the worst character class in all fantasy because he has a bad sense of humor and hates me.
Five pages of jokes and 11 pages of actually useful stuff, the Troubadour class was previously published on this blog but the rest is new.
10$
This installment of Cube World features two and a half adventures:
Crawling Lake is a short scenario that leads up to The Test -- one of those massive pain-in-the-ass dungeons designed by insane wizards to test adventurers,
The Ghost Army is a thorny but simple scenario involving trickery and intrigue which puts the party at the center of a (potential?) battle between three armies.
12$
This installment of Cube World features two unusually quiet dungeons:
In The Lost City of Zirzuzza aka The Quiet Place--which takes place deep in the desert that covers The Scorpion Lands--the party will discover a city long abandoned. One of the abandoned palaces contains a great treasure, but the party must navigate a strange mechanism to acquire it.
The Polder lies deep within any larger dungeon of the game-master’s choosing. Although the effects of visiting The Polder are wildly unpredictable, it is perfectly safe--but this in itself might frighten a party away.
10$
The Fox Witch, Eng-Ti is wild beyond imagining, and her hovel houses wonders, yet it is a place of woe.
In You Can’t Say You Weren’t Warned the party is told exactly where to find their way to the heart of a complex full of terrifying creatures. Now the only problem is the terrifying creatures.
In The Vast Gut of Kvertelak the party is again told exactly where their goal is: in the stomach of 240’ frost giant. Piece of cake.
10$
10$
10$
The Spinneskelle is a weird automaton that can fit into pretty much any adventure, the Black Sphinx is the answer to the riddle of why an obsessed scholar won't leave his library, and the demon cat of St Ylvyst's Hospital for Imbeciles and the Mad is just a jerk.
Three short adventures, 12$.
Cube World #38 Three At Sea
Three adventures at sea--turtle island, mantamen, derelict ships, werewolf pirates. You know--like in the ocean.
12$
10$.
I have a bunch of tables and tools I use regularly at the table outside the ones already published in, like Vornheim and similar books. They go into the Cube World Sandbox Kit, 24 pages, with pictures (plus the most updated versions of the bestiary and treasure tables, of course).
A visual guide to the world containing Vornheim, the Red & Pleasant Land, the Devoured Land from Frostbitten & Mutilated, the Maze of the Blue Medusa and every other thing I made up for my campaign.
15 maps, 14 continents, with overviews of what goes on in each one, including major cities and landmarks, notes on encounters, and a few options for sandbox campaigns that can take your players all over the Cube.20$--now available in The Store.
Cesaire is a place of great waterfalls, green-blue jungle, elephants, lions, cheetahs, ancient civilizations and wide, bloodstained savannah.
This installment is an introduction-it includes a description of the subcontinent as a whole, animals and other inhabitants that are found nowhere else, customs, and a handful of short adventures. If you’re new to Cube World, don’t worry, there’s nothing in the previous installments about this area of the world--you have in your hands everything that’s been published so far on Cesaire.
20$
A new cult has arisen, worshipping death by plague and its locus is somewhere in the hinterlands, centered around a bizarre structure. Whether the plague pyramid is the result of a mad necromancer’s experiments with the mcguffin or whether the magic inside simply a response from a traumatized plague-ridden land itself is unclear. Either way, thousands of refugees have abandoned the cities and staggered mesmerized toward the infested pyramid, where a Plague Jester urges them on to the most debased and degrading acts.
The pdf is 5 bucks.
This adventure takes place deep within the deserts of the Scorpion Lands, in the Valley of Nas Akhu Khan, within Syrinx, the former empire of the Necropharoah, now infested with vile jackalmen.
The area explored is the Bastion of the Second Soul of Kheftiu Asar Butchiu, an underground temple which is—wouldn’t you know it?—rumored to contain vast wealth.
It’s a small dungeon suitable for a night or three of play and the main issue is getting out. Leaving requires three keys and finding them all requires thoroughly exploring the dungeon.
5$ via venmo etc. 7$ if you use onlyfans email zakzsmith AT hawtmayle dawt calm if you can't figure out know how to pay.
So, if you're like me, you're sick of rolling random wilderness encounters in a sandbox campaign and then it just says like "57-Ghost" or "34-Venomous snake" and then I'm like "Fuck who wrote this table?" and then having to be like "Oh right, I did".
So I wrote a whooooooole big table of wilderness encounters with
91 Halfling(s) moving to a new home in elven, human, or dwarven lands (d4).
92 Halfling(s) on so many drugs just vibing.
310 Gnoll hunting party taking prey—as Hunting Party above. Taking: 1-7 Herd of deer, 8-11 sheep and goats, 12-17 wild horses, 18-19 giant monster, 20 unicorn.
100 Goblin encounters, like:
522 Goblin scouts “surveying” (pointing to random landscape features, holding a telescope) (d6).
523 Goblins carrying off a random hogtied NPC (roll d100 on Civilians table) (d6).
524 Goblins teasing local children (d6).
Bad monsters are in a room. It’s a pretty good room, as fantasy adventure module rooms go, and presents some interesting problems.
The room’s in a Toad Temple, which has some cultists--before they get to the room with the monsters, your players may have to fight them, too, or maybe just sneak past. If I knew already, your game would be pretty boring.
Around the temple is the idyllic and rambling rural Broceliandaise barony of Gruyère de Comté whose distinctive features include:
-The lovely convent of Tittivila (or Tittivila, or Tittivilla) a goddess of all flesh to whom misspellings are sacred and one of the top two most popular deities in Broceliande. Although most of the nuns are just 0-levels who pray and read books on how to breed weird livestock all day, if you’re running a campaign in Broceliande, genuine fighting clerics of Tittivila will be pretty thick on the ground, so I’ve given some information about them, including a random table at the back.
-The alchemists of Gruyère de Comté, who are some of the few folks from whom your lazy Skyrim-addict player’s PC can just “buy potions” in Broceliande.
-The Festival of Japes, a happy festival, for those who seek amusement or exotic cuisine
-Skopje, a village with a delightful secret
-and a bunch of chaos-worshipping creatures bent on destroying everything in the first three bullet points
So that’s probably enough to be going on with.
5$ / 7$ on OnlyFans
This installment of Cube World is all about The Halfling City which, for the time being, has no other name.
Settled within the Elven territory of Broceliande on the Hogspot river, it is a place of friendly domes, pools of syrup, frighteningly vigorous food-fights, and constant competition.
Being quite comfortable with most forms of commercial relation, and eager to delegate tasks which might require violence or plausible deniability (including but not limited to: foiling rivals, escorting trade goods, eliminating creatures that prey on shipping and locating lost or coveted valuables behind doors which might be variously locked, trapped, guarded, or all three) to freelancers, urban halflings are great patrons of the adventuring classes. It is, therefore a good place for PCs who like to keep busy.
This pdf includes:
-Notes on the city in general, including the Halflings' contest to name it
-An encounter table and guide to the major commercial houses
-An adventure-generator for PCs seeking work in the city
-Notes on the syrup-eating cyclops, a terrifying problem for which the City has yet to find a solution
Includes...
A dungeon for your players to explore: the Temple of the Bastard Elves.
A guide to creating “typical” simple dungeons in Broceliande—that is, dungeons matching the kinds of ruins parties will most often run across, organized by the main architect cultures in the area (dwarves and goblins, plus humans and elves of the three known eras) and by who occupies the structure dungeon now.
Points of interest in the Broceliandaise baronies, including Pont-L’évêque (populated mostly by elves and home to a powerful bishop), Livarot (a once-elven land now contested by the orc knights of Lord Draa) and Eese (a barony on the edge of the human Empire of the Hunger Kings, mostly wild). Plus a d100 table of wardogs.


The area now known as The Seething exists at a nexus of ley lines high in the mountains. The atmosphere is sharp and strange, and an indelible electricity courses through every feature in the landscape. Its properties made of this implausible country an abode of great magi and of those who wish to peer past the panoply of green veils with which the modesty of nature enshrouds itself.
Such individuals notoriously prefer seclusion to liaison and soon fell to quarreling, intrigue, and mass murder. The Seething, while still, yet seethes, profoundly contaminated with the radiation of dweomers past.
But they say there’s treasure so, y’know, prolly worth a look.
This module contains three strange edifices left over from the time of the War Wizards--one now occupied by a mad sylph, one taken by the fearsome Panoptikhan and a still-functional automated outpost of hell known as the Demon Factory.
7$ /9$ on OnlyFans

Three simple scenarios that can be used as stand-alone adventures
or as elements to drop into a sandbox adventure. They are freestanding and require very little prep and don’t need to be embedded in any particular fantasy culture, mythos, or setting.
-The Alien Sorcerer is a tough villain for mid-level parties who can can appear anywhere at sea, a strange foe hidden beneath and artificial island.
- Zy’Lik The Disintegrator dwells in a simple castle surrounded my minions nearly as powerful as he. He’s a good target for a high-level party who’ll scout out a location and devise a plan and he can appear in any isolated place where you might find a castle.
5$ / 7$ on OnlyFans
This module contains descriptions of five borderland areas nestled within the pleasant greeneries and strange wildernesses of Northern Broceliande:
23 Page PDF plus reference and treasure tables
10$, 12$ on Onlyfans
Odd Jobs In Small Baronies
(Cube World 14)
A mini-sandbox setting, a little over a hundred miles across, a fine starting place or headquarters for exploring the Forest Sauvage. Legendary beasts, underwater ruins, elves living on cliffs, unicorns and unicorn-thieves, a land of hedge-mazes, the cult of the Ultravore, and more.
As of May 31, this project is a benefit because this.
10$ / 12$ on OnlyFans
The Philosophers
(Cube World #13)
This module concerns The Philosophers—a handful of related species from another dimension with an eerie power over the minds of terrestrial species. Specifically:
-The Neolarval Genesis Pits, a valley deep within the mountains where the Philosophers perform strange experiments and breed new selves.
-The Hyperlarvae of Triplet Velve, a set-up suitable for an urban social/investigation scenario where the party encounters some of the most bizarre outcomes of these experiments.
-Fortress of the Brain-Eaters, a simple ruin colonized by these creatures, riddled with traps, suitable for a skirmish or infiltration via stealth.
-Negazohedron of the Czarithid, a dungeon adventure in the four-dimensional inner-sanctum of the Czarithid—the most powerful of Philosophers.
10$ / 12$ on OnlyFans
Four Islands
(Cube World #12)
Nephilidia
(Cube World #11)
So decadent are the vampire lords of Nephilidia that they fear equally the sun, the sea, dry land, and, indeed any surface not hewn by an intelligent hand. Distinguishable from ordinary vampires by the gills on their necks and their glassy blue eyes, they prefer to travel via subterranean aqueducts, sewers, or other shallow, watertight, artificial constructions.
Most prefer never to leave their half-drowned empire of Nephilidia. Inside its tarnished palaces and rotting halls they sit--forever knee-deep in black and stagnant water, with strange algaes stretched like cobwebs from the surface to the once-ornate walls and crumbling statuary--endlessly elaborating cruel and languid intrigues, attended by naught but eyeless fish.
Nephilidia once had another name, and another before that, but now it is only Nephilidia—the sun’s weakened gleam silhouetting nothing but immense sea spiders and the scaffolds of illegible, unmoving machines rusting in snow and the enormous moon, in its turn, describing only the charcoaled surfaces of black-armored knights and the pale of their ghost-colored steeds.
This 23-page pdf includes a hexmap, random encounter tables for the sea, snow, and ruins, Nephilidian dungeon generator, map of the last palace, stats, items and lots more. 12$, 15$ if you use Onlyfans.
Red and Pleasant Miscellany
(Cube World #10)
Snarks, bandersnatches, four-dimensional rooms, halfling pie locks, riding teacups through pools of mercury--I've done a lot with the world of Red & Pleasant Land since it was first published in 2014, here's the best of it...
5$ / 6$ if you use OnlyFans.
-Temple of the Mantis takes place in a bizarre, mazelike extradimensional space, where the players must evade or defeat strange mantis priests to secure the McGuffin. Lots of teleporting doors and an isometric map.
-Wargenfels finds the party clinging to life on the back of a giant the size of a mountain
5$. 6 if you use OnlyFans.
The Tracery, Lair of the She-Jackal and Graphic Dungeon Generator
(Cube World #8)
This pdf has three dungeon things...
The Tracery—a unique area of interlinking walkways that can go inside a larger dungeon, and act as a “switching station” between other levels.
Dungeon Generator—A tool for quickly putting together a medium-sized dungeon, ideal for lonely places that have been abandoned and then taken over by monsters.
Lair of the She Jackal—A medium-sized dungeon made using the Dungeon Generator featuring weird magic, lava babies, and lots of scorpions.
It's 5$. 6$ on OnlyFans since there's a service charge.
-In the first part the party discovers that the port town of Ortheque, in the region of Teeming, has been blockaded and taken over by a chaos warband. The party is given the opportunity to plan an assault and liberate the town. Unaltered, it’s suitable for a mid-level party and has a player's handout they can use to scout it out, plus a GM cheat sheet to make it easy to run.
-When and if the party succeeds, the scenario opens up: all kinds of NPCs are excited to ask the heroes for help doing things they were going to do before the blockade both in Ortheque and in the larger town of AuNord on the other side of the region.
-There are a few things to do in and around Teeming, including a small dungeon, and a random dungeon generator. 5$
(Cube World #5)
Broceliande is lovely and green, with tall castles, jousts, quests, wild forests, foxes, frogs and fae, elves in the north, halflings in the south, dwarves in mountains, the stylish and pleasure-loving empire of the Hunger Kings along the east coast and the staid and comfort-fond kingdom of Annwn nearby.
Unfortunately, its closest neighbor is Gaxen Kane, the horrible Goblin Empire, with which the various nations of Broceliande have been at war on-and-off since the earth first formed from the stone that the twelve medusa sisters turned the primordial demons into. This installment is just about the wartorn northern reaches of Broceliande, where the gray elves and goblins contend much as they have for many lifetimes of men.
This is a 10-page sandbox module with about 50 locations, a random town generator, random encounters and D20 illustrated places in which to set them. Lots of pictures. 5$.
(Cube World #4)
This four-pack of one-page (ish) places and situations is all about sailing and exploration. The first is a pirate fortress where PCs can try to blend in or just take over, the others are set in Drownesia (or Southeast Asia)--investigating the body of a god being picked at by pterodactyls, an elephant-headed ogre, and a Drownesian princess bride in need of foreigners rescuing from her dinosaur-riding groom.
Includes a 7 page pdf plus a simple map for players to use and a lots of pictures, including the fully-illustrated way-too-much-effort two-page spread "cheat sheet" I use at home for Isle of the Octophant (previewed above).
Each room of the library consists of one or more hexagonal galleries lined with shelves, with each gallery possessing a second balcony-level held aloft by wooden columns (reached by an immensely tasteful winding staircase in the southeast corner of each room), all executed in the warm and scholarly middle-fae style of southern Broceliande during the Second War. Unless otherwise noted (or flooded past 10’), each is lit by six torches in sconces set along each column. If extinguished the torches will be re-lit the next time the party returns.
It is the Curated Destruction, a semi-legendary library created by the elves to contain all useful knowledge and literary art. The hexagonal shape of the libraries’ galleries derives from the shaft libraries of the ancient serpentmen, the name derives from the method the elves employed to make these collections their own: since the serpentine libraries reportedly contained all possible literary works (all masterpieces, all possible inaccurate plagiarisms of these masterpieces, all accurate predictions, all false ones, texts containing only the letters xvi over and over, utter gibberish, this module, etc) the elves compiled their vast libraries by looting the shaft libraries and destroying every meaningless work.
The party has just found every book they could ever want…in among a practical infinity of ones they don’t.
This is a mammoth installment: 36 pages plus the map. The library-dungeon and all its sections, plus 100 rare books, over a hundred new items and the entire rest of a d1000 all-purpose dungeon treasure table. Plus a table of useless (?) books the PCs pull off the shelves
I put together an adventure in three parts leading down into them: in the first scenario, the party heads through the wilderness to investigate a heresy at the behest of religious authorities, in the second section the party encounters the cult of the White-Lipped Goddess in a once-abandoned fortress, and the third section is this dungeon.
Each section leads into the next but there are other ways to run them—you could place a treasure at the end of the first or second section and have complete scenario, and you can place enemies from the section section in the Echo Chambers and have a diverting one or two-session dungeon crawl.
Either way, this installment of Cube World should give you at least six hours of play, and likely much more. It also includes a d100 random potion table along with a list of the exotic ingredients necessary to make each potion because I had a monster that was carrying random potions...
It's an 11-page pdf plus a map. $5.00.
(Cube World #1)
It ran to ten or eleven pages including old-school D&D-style stats (she requested Lamentations of the Flame Princess, so they're technically that), a full-color illustrated dungeon map in addition to the island sketch above.
Art Stuff...
Posters, prints, pillows, shirts, phone cases...here





































































































