Tower of the Octophant, Drownesia, etc.

Like I posted earlier, I'm making all the game stuff I use at home, including projects LotFP cancelled after Raggnarok available to y'all.

Today, some outside adventures:

Iguana Isle, The Megacorpse, Tower of the Octophant and Drownesia

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 below).

$5.04$ mail me to arrange payment via app zakzsmith AT hawtmayle and I'll send the pdfs or, if you can't use payment apps (like you live outside the US), just tip me here (membership is free, you won't be billed) and then send me your email address and tell me you want Cube World #4.
-
-
-

The Curated Destruction

“…at times I have traveled for many nights through corridors and along polished stairways without finding a single librarian.”

-Jorge Luis Borges, the Library of Babel

While building the random encounter table for this one I considered the usual megadungeon inhabitants--NPC parties, escaped prisoners, maybe a vampire. But then I decided no, no intelligent monsters: I don't want anyone in there with you capable of understanding where they are.

The velociraptor in the library seemed to be exactly the point--its dumb staring chicken eyes just scraping past all that effort and thought and attempt to build and communicate. Dead people, whole dead cultures, trying to tell you--tell anyone really--something. And nobody listening. I liked that.

The Curated Destruction (Cube World Installment #3)

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

$10.03 pdf.

You can just email me if you have Venmo ( zakzsmith at hawtmayle dawt calm ). Otherwise: subscribe here for free and tip me 10.03$.

Your torch throws a dozen shadows across the spiked pit

Every dungeon needs quiet spots, where there are strange things to see and strange choices to make in the dark. A switching-post between the more intense areas--this is what The Echo Chambers are for. They can also just be a fun place to chase an enemy through--like when the spooky music kicks in at Bowser's castle.

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. Tip $5.02 to get it (since these new modules have a kind of informal presentation, I'm only asking 5 bucks now that the roll-out is over).

----------

How to get it:

Email me ( zakzsmith at hawtmayle dawt calm ) if you have Venmo and let me know you want it.

If you don't have Venmo:

I'm processing credit cards through a specially-set-up OnlyFans, which is usually a porn site, because usual online payment methods aren't very adult-industry-people friendly.

1. Subscribe to my profile, it's free and has no porn on it so relax. Tip me $5.02

2. Send a message saying you want Cube World #2 with your email address. You'll get the pdf within 24 hours.

(3. If there's any trouble, email zakzsmith at hawtmayle dawt calm).

-

-

-

I've also been getting more Demon City spreads in from the graphic designer, here's a taste:

 

click to make it bigger

New Fucking Content. Buy it.

Maybe you heard. If you like drama, go here.

Anyway, while waiting for the legal systems of various nations to set straight what the online game scene has got crooked, I have not been idle...

 I've been well...playing D&D with porn stars. As usual. And drawing and writing out the entire world and all the dungeons. This includes all the tools on this blog that haven't otherwise seen publication (updated to reflect all the new stuff I made since then), over a hundred pages of cancelled LotFP content (including adaptations of all of Violence in the Nympharium and Bards), hundreds of pages of new stuff, including hex locations, new monsters, weird religions, everything.

The point was to just do it. Everything. Nothing piecemeal, nothing where I worry about publisher quirks, how to format it for the blog, etc. Just all the D&D: new rules, tools, creatures, classes, every country, every continent, from to Vornheim to the goblin kingdom of Gaxen Kane to Drownesia plus a vast megadungeon beneath. The whole Cube World.

Originally I wasn't planning to publish any of it, but since reaction to the benefit for Adam Koebel's victims was so positive, I figured, ok, maybe there are some people in the online RPG scene who aren't gullible psychopaths. Maybe they can have it, as a treat.

So, here it is-the part the D&D w/Porn Stars crew is playing just this week.

It's a couple of linked scenarios (detachable from each other) a social-interaction clusterfuck involve shenanigans in a castle (a duke, a count, a scheming priest, a dark secret etc) and the rest about the dungeon beneath. It runs to ten pages plus a map and I've run it as part of the beginning of a megadungeon and as a one-shot in its own right--it works either way. So far Kimberly's lost a warpig and all the fingers on one hand.

How to get it:

Email me ( zakzsmith at hawtmayle dawt calm ) if you have Venmo and let me know you want it.

If you don't have Venmo:

I'm processing credit cards through a specially-set-up OnlyFans, which is usually a porn site, because usual online payment methods aren't very adult-industry-people friendly.

1. Subscribe to my profile, it's free and has no porn on it so relax. Tip me $5.01

2. Send a message saying you want Cube World #1.

3. I will get the message, and within 24-hours I'll send you a message and you can say how you want the PDF sent to you.

(4. If there's any trouble, email zakzsmith at hawtmayle dawt calm).

-

-
-

Niksa Belorac is Carole Baskin Backwards (new adventure available)

Exotic animals, competing factions, controlled substances, murder-for-hire, mutilation...the DM who asked me to write her a Tiger King-themed adventure didn't know what she was getting into.

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 and the island sketch above.

How to get it:

Email me ( zakzsmith at hawtmayle dawt calm ) if you have Venmo and let me know you want it.

If you don't have Venmo:

I'm processing credit cards through a specially-set-up OnlyFans, which is usually a porn site, because usual online payment methods aren't very adult-industry-people friendly.

1. Subscribe to my profile, it's free and has no porn on it so relax. You can cancel right after.

2. Send a tip for $5.

3. I will get a message, and within 24-hours I'll send you a message and you can say how you want the PDF sent to you.

EDIT and NOTE: The first week of sales for this were a benefit.
-
-
-

Spikes and Edges

So much depends upon your attitude toward the sky.

In LA--in Sicily and Morocco and all the places Europeans and North Americans call "The South"--half the time you don't even want a roof. The sun is up there, life spills horizontally out, eager to take advantage of it, soak up the sun, providence, goodness.

In The North things are different, God rains semisolid death whiter than bone down on you several months a year and liquid inconvenience half the rest. What's the point? It's on the roof, which is invariably pointed--to keep the snow off.

This is The Gothic: Protection from the sky. Protection from God. A pointed roof implies (in churches and palaces and any other structure required to project a sense of power and the ability to create visual unity that power implies) doorways with pointed arches, windows with pointed arches, multiple floors, dense cities close together (to make dashing from front door to stable, inn, or armory, convenient), skinny buildings with small windows.

Power in the north is the ability to create long, tall, pointed, defensive things.

Spikes? Whole cities of spikes. Months spent in darkness. Much is made of D&D's invention in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin--where it's cold.

This also implies: extensive interiors, underground cities (Montreal has one, kind of), tunnels, networks, coziness in-and-despite darkness, storytelling against that darkness, introspection, interpretation (discovering not just the story but the story behind that story--to kill time), torchlight and candlelight versus moonlight, books, research.

So: Dungeons.

Having moved to Los Angeles as an adult I'd also say the North connotes: precision (please arrive on time because conditions might be different later, please make this properly because otherwise it will leak), efficiency, slowness and patience (we'll do it when the season changes) and therefore: planning.

Contrast the Southern Gothic (which is only a common phrase because it implies something new, a great contrast--"western gothic" and "eastern gothic" don't imply as much because the disconnect is smaller): people always outside or at least always hot, where the sun can always get at them, they're always at God's mercy, torn apart, emotional, and so often horizontal: long roads, flat horizons. Dead mules. Mad Max is as southern gothic as Faulkner. The spikes are almost an afterthought, the key signifiers of the southern gothic are dust and rust. Exhaustion. God has already gotten to you. There was never any protection. If The North has any comforts, its the high quality of man-made protection: armor, thick walls, central heating, furs.

Anyway, we're all Northerners now...

I Pull A Random Book Off The Shelf... (random books, with clues)

(also from the unpublished LotFP "Bards" book )

Roll d20. Since I don't want the clues spoiled for the girls before we roll, you have to highlight the area after where it says Hidden Clue to read the clues.

Twenty Minor Dramas

Tired of having every tome player characters pull off a shelf be a revolving-door-trigger, spellbook or in a language no-one knows? Flesh out those vast subterranean libraries while discouraging further investigation with these lost classics…

…and feed your players a subtle clue in the process.

1. The Scolding of Queen Principia

A garbled farce. Seven ruined men poke a chicken with sticks. None survive.

Sample:

Montague

She’s off her guard! Now is the time sir!

Lord Scropshire

Very well, I shall…ah! I’ve been peck’t!

Cropsford

Really, Lord Scropshire, I do…

Lord Scropshire

Ah! The pecking has not in any way abated! I’m now bleeding from the eyes!

Hidden clue: This (and the presence of other works like it nearby on similar themes) may tip the players off to the fact that the fearful avian creature they will soon encounter near the library (perhaps a gargantuan ibis, a roc, or an eldritch cock) is, like the creature in the book, immune to physical attacks. 

2. The Sallow Bridegroom

Sisters compete for the love of a Duke who turns out to be a piece of cheese carved in the shape of a man. They share him. Suppressed by the church.

Sample: 

Cornucopia

I dare not touch him for to touch him is to touch myself in my most slender places.

Andyne

“Slender”? What?

Cornucopia

I never liked you. But I liked that boy—even though he is made of cheese.

Hidden clue: The drama is based on a true story from the much younger days of the powerful crone Andyne. If the PCs should ever encounter her, they might realize she still still possesses a fondness for cheeses—and a hard time distinguishing the living from the inanimate.

3. The Pinking Draught

A magic elixir causes no end of trouble for a family of assholes. 

Sample:

Ephesius

But I put it in my butt!

Albinioni

Well take it out, I want to suck on it!

Ephesius

I’ll take it out when I’m done absorbing its magical properties through my butt!

Hidden clue: If the PCs ever come upon a potion labelled “Pinking Draught” (not too soon, let it lie) they may realize it’s nothing but trouble. It is: the potion causes anyone who uses it to become sure it does exactly what they most wish it would—though in truth it has no effect. The illusion lasts one hour and there is no Save.

4. The Wolves of West Clopping

A brooding tale of slow revenge wherein a cobbler and a tart bandit contrive a nightmarish demise for a priest caught fondling their daughters on All Hallow’s Eve.

Sample:

Bagatelle

Would you like some tarts?

Father Sloque

Where, good sir, did you acquire so many tarts?

Bagatelle

Oh, I have my ways. Of…acquiring tarts.

Father Sloque

Well they’re very good tarts.

Bagatelle

Thank you!

Father Sloque

So you wanted to talk to me about…mmmf…excuse me. Wow these are really good tarts.

Bagatelle

Yes I...acquired them specially for you. Because I wanted you to….have tarts.

Father Sloque

Well I definitely got them. Boy howdy!

Bagatelle

(tenting fingers)

Yes…

Hidden clue: A former cobbler named Ella Tagab (“Bagatelle” backwards) will eventually come into the lives of the PCs—and he will be wealthy, secure, and possessed of something the PCs want very badly. If the PCs realize he is the same Bagatelle from the play and threaten to expose the murder he committed in his youth, he will fold immediately.

5. The Clutching Cow

A rogue ungulate seizes the scions of a great house. Considered the apex of Baroque literature by many critics at the time, and a precursor to the gothic novel by modern scholars, this jagged psychodrama explores the ever-splintering relationships between the self and the demands of the external world, construed both as a natural and social construct.

Sample:

Silas

Hey, it’s that cow!

Cow

(grabbing Silas)

Moo!

Silas

It hath me!

Cow

Moo!

Silas

This sucks! I am being dragged off by a cow!

Cow

Moo!

Silas

Fuck!

Hidden Clue: This work is beloved of the “Philosophic Prince” Morach Van Heem of Battaviglia, and any who have read it may come into his good graces by discussing with him its symbolism and themes.

6. The Severed Blessing

Considered an early example of socially-engaged theatre, this gripping tragedy depicts a pair of nuns who discover their love for one another just before the Inquisition does.

Sample:

(Inquisitor pulls lever)

Sister Clara

Oh no I’m being executed in an awful way!

Sister Anastasia

I wish social mores were more advanced than they are presently!

Sister Clara

I as well my love! Aghhhh…

(Clara is dropped into Excellent Beadle)

Hidden Clue: One of the torture devices in the book is called “The Excellent Beadle”. If the PCs later encounter a seemingly innocent priest, monk, priestess, etc who says they are taking them to meet The Excellent Beadle they’ll be tipped off their host is not what they seem.

7. The Erotic Beaks

A philandering pair of plague-doctor brothers deceive their respective inamorata by refusing to remove their pointed masks. A lewd travesty, universally despised.

Sample:

Madame Orvieto

Oh Cyril it’s so long and fascinating!

Jeremy

Yes, and filled with aromatic herbs!

Hidden Clue: The brothers are named Cyril and Jeremy. The wicked twins the PCs will one day encounter (also using their semblance to dissemble) are also named Cyril and Jeremy.

8. The Eight Mistakes of Oswald de L’Orme

An unsettling work of experimental theatre by the depraved genius Andromache Parlour—executed in 1620 for witchcraft and heliocentrism. All the lines are spoken by nude and corpulent men standing astride statues of their own children caked in red ice.

Sample:

Ninth Shadow

You have made another mistake Oswald de L’Orme!

Oswald de L’Orme

What is it? Was it the thing I did with the wine bottle?

Angel of Prostitution

Calumny! Striation!

Ninth Shadow

(whispering)

Fun cakes

Hidden Clue: If the PCs should come across statues of children caked in red ice, they might be clever enough to say something like “Ah, I didn’t know you were putting on a production of the Eight Mistakes” and thereby give their host impression of being cultured.

9. These Pale and Rigid Ranks

A savage satire of contemporary morals, this tragicomic tale relates the life of an unscrupulous dentist as told by his own teeth. As his rates skyrocket and his handiwork decays, they begin to take on dark, paranoid personae reflecting the ills of both dentistry and society as a whole.

Sample:

Molar

How can I see a cavity when I have a cavity inside myself?

Bicuspid

Your mother was twenty whores.

Canine

Arf.

Hidden Clue: The PC will one day come upon a statue of a colossal head with the phrase “Hi gradus pallidus tensa atque rigida efficiuntur” carved into its base. Any cleric or anyone making a language roll will realize it’s a reference to the title of this play—and that they should, therefore, examine the teeth carefully.

10. The Tale of Snodgrass

A man loses track of his mother on market day only to find she has been kidnapped by Poseidon.

Sample:

Poseidon

Though she once whelped and raised you, a slave to your whims and mewlings, Irma is now my queen and will reign with me beneath the waves for all eternity .

Snodgrass

Um, ok? She seems happy.

Irma

(whispers)

Look at his abs!

Poseidon

Ok cool.

Snodgrass

Cool.

Hidden Clue: A mountebank will one day attempt to run a long con the PCs by claiming their mother was “kidnapped by a seaman on market day”. Familiarity with this work may put them on their guard.

11. The Egotist

A captain in the king’s guard tortures those around him with his overweening arrogance until a humble but perspicacious lady challenges him and wins his heart. Said to have been a great inspiration to Jane Austen.

Sample:

Nurse

What have they done to my puddings!

Captain Poquelin

I don’t know dumbass but I’m impressive.

Lady Almondine

(enters)

Nurse there’s not nearly enough boning

in this corset!

Captain Poquelin

I’ll say!

Hidden clue: The reserved, uxurious and pious Captain Raphael Poquelin has suffered much on account of this play as he feels it has caused the women of the French court to mistake him for a cad and a bounder. Any who remark upon the coincedence of the names and share his woes will be brought into his confidence.

12. The Impregnable Fortress

From the pen of Rollo Ortega del’Osoria comes this groundbreaking and early attempt at the Theatre of Inertia concerning a fortress that’s really hard to get into.

Sample:

General

Are we in yet?

Calderon

Nope.

General

Did you try the battering ram?

Calderon

Yep.

General

What about the catapult?

Calderon

We threw the rocks right at the door.

General

And?

Calderon

Nada.

General

What about the Iron Rhinoceros?

Calderon

That’s not a thing.

General

Hm.

Hidden Clue: del’Osoria would become a mystic obsessed with the notion of an “impregnable fortress”, filing the book that would be known as the “del’Osoria Codex” with architectural diagrams and protection spells. Anyone reading it will gain two levels in Architecture and access to d6 new protection spells. While the book is occasionally referenced in lists of lost tomes, this play is the only clue as to its contents.

13. The Carrot

This play, written entirely in rhyming couplets, deals with attempts by a humble Austrian peasant to locate a carrot belonging to his cruel lord, a vegetarian as strict as he is voracious.

Sample:

Peasant

Over dale or under hill?

Perhaps upon some window’s sill?

King

If you don’t find my fucking carrot,

I’ll make a hat from your ass and force you to wear it

Hidden clue: The Countess of Crewthe has heard in passing—she cannot remember from who—that this play is of interest—and will ask the PCs if they’ve heard of it and what it is about. If they know, (or better yet, have it with them) she will mark them as quite erudite, and shower the favor of the court upon them.

14. The Knight of Noses

A curse obliges a knight to store thirty noses in his chambers and wear a different one on each day of the month. The courtiers mock his affliction until a savage reversal occurs.

Sample:

Serial Mutilator 

(cuts off everyone’s nose)

Lol

Courtiers

Ub…coulb we borrow…

Knight of Noses

Seriously?

Hidden Clue: There’s also a tavern called the Knight of Noses. Each day of the month it “clones” a different other tavern in the city: the personnel, decor and events within mirror those in some other inn precisely, save for any interference from those who wander in to the Knight itself off the street.

15. The Glossy Chop

A pair of diners differ over the origin of a thin coating of moisture atop a piece of pork loin. Much praised in its day for its striking realism.

Sample:

Obragon

Mayhap a mignonette sauce!

Voynich

I think that it is pee.

Hidden Clue: The PCs may run into an alchemist obsessing over a mysterious goldish potion they fear to open labelled “The Voynich Solution” created by his dead mentor (a great enthusiast of the theatre). The play should tip them off as to its contents.

16. The School for Emperors

A pair of mighty rulers gamble on the outcome of a duel between two beggars, not knowing the beggars are themselves their own parents, once thought dead but in fact driven into destitution by the stresses of their office.

Sample:

Emperor of the East Wind

Ha look at that jerk!

Emperor of the Western Desert

Yep he sucks because unlike us he doesn’t have royal blood in his veins and is instead a normie.

Beggar

Actually I’m your dad, fucking zing.

Hidden Clue: In a few months the PCs may find themselves on a flyblown street watching a pair of beggars circle one another with flensing knives while a pair of high-born fops look on from a high balcony. They may then realize the text was a premonition and all four men are emperors in disguise.

17. The Expedition

The elders of a small town menaced by unknown forces from beneath the earth hire a band of adventurers to harry the terror to its lair and defeat it.

Elders

But who shall assay this perilous task?

Thief

(spinning dagger on fingertip)

I have for decades apprenticed to the crafts of stealth in movement and the opening of locked doors!

Elders

Indeed? Excellent!

Warrior

(hefting an axe the size of a child)

I, veteran of a dozen wars, am skilled with shaft, steel and all arms of combat.

Elders

Outstanding!

Wizard

(as lightning erupts from cupped hands)

I enslave the very forces of the cosmos, conjuring fire and terror from the very air.

Elders

Right on!

Bard

(strikes harp)

My silver tongue sways any man to my cause, and my songs inspire heroic courage!

Elders

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Bard

No seriously I want to go

Hidden Clue: To prevent the unlettered from befouling the stacks, Kharsos The Examiner demands any visitor to the Library of Nachtim-Nightwallowing  answer three of five questions about books before permitting them entry. One is—which adventurer was not hired by the Elders to go on The Expedition in the play of that name?

18. The Masterpiece

A fierce and passionate artist, encouraged by his loyal muse, contrives his finest work yet: a portrait of the goddess of mercy in alabaster and red-veined marble, but the attempt only reveals his flaws and ultimately leads to his undoing.

Lorraine

Is it finished? May I see it?

Lagneau

Almost, almost…Wait, how many arms does a girl have?

Lorraine

Two, my love

Lagneau

Merde!

Hidden Clue: The party will one day come upon a statue of the goddess of mercy in alabaster in red-veined marble. It will have two arms, but—upon careful examination—the right arm and shoulder will be shown to have been added at a later date by a less-talented hand. Cracking off the second arm will reveal a lever which opens a secret door.

19. The Second Expedition

A sequel to The Expedition, the village (saved at the end of the previous work) is once again bedeviled, this time by demons accidentally unleashed by the first party. A new company is formed to face this threat.

Sample:

Bard

(still brandishing harp)

Look, I can do magic!

(Strums aggressively, a fireball flies from the harp)

Elders

Yyyeah. Next.

Hidden Clue: Another of Kharsos the Examiner’s questions (see 17 above) is “What is the name of the sequel to The Expedition?”

20. Glendower The Brephophagist

A maiden’s long search for a husband appears to have reached a happy conclusion until it is revealed that her suitor eats babies. 

Sample:

Elizabeth

Glendower, have you seen Doctor Minniver, he…AGHHH!

Glendower

…ngumb…num…Oh hey Elivabeff

Hidden Clue: Well now the party knows what “brephophagist” means—and this is LotFP so it will likely come up. Don’t let them look it up if they don’t remember.