The Abyss Stares Back

Jeff Jones



Barry Windsor-Smith

Kris Kuksi

Kenji Yanobe

Ivan Bilibin

Ian Miller

Harry Clarke


Eduardo Paolozzi

Nicholas Digenova


Sean McCarthy


Paolo Uccello

Walt Simonson


Stephen Gammell (Thanks, SirLarkins for IDing him)

Another Totally Free Product Brought To You By DIY D&D

This week's episode of "I Hit It With My Axe" is long and serious. (Relatively--it does feature spontaneous titfondling and casual PC mutilation, if you're into that sort of thing.)

I generally like the pointless funny episodes more since funny's funny, whereas any plot revelations in the game are stuff I knew about ages ago and often made up to begin with, so they have less impact on me.

This plot-heavy episode, however, is notable since I had some help from some cyberfriends:

-Jeff of the Gameblog wrote most of the nobles of Vornheim (other than Vosculous Eeben). I figured: if I write some high-level fancies for this city, they may or may not ever get used, depending on what the PCs decide to do. Hell--there's no guaranteeing they'd even return to Vornheim.

However, it's nice to have some stuff there, and it's nice to throw fellow DIYers some cash from the show's budget (even if it means I temporarily become a YDIer) to develop a little depth on the setting in case I ended up needing it while I focused on more pressing things like sifting through 16 hours of tape looking for a 2 second clip of someone zooming in on a blue-wizard-with-pointy-hat miniature.

With Jeff's permission, I might put his full write-ups for the nobles up here--maybe fleshed out into full-on artifacty NPCs.

-The Death Frost Doom module to which Mandy refers to during the very blurry exposition was, of course, produced by consummate professional James Edward Raggi IV a.k.a. Lamentations Of The Flame Princess.

Fans of that grim and unforgiving auteur may be interested to note that sometime around October the 'Axe' crew will be returning to the site of Death Frost Doom* (which I am, rather lazily and metally, calling 'Deathfrost Mountain'). Wherein they will encounter some things that were not in the original module. One of which is very large.

In case you didn't feel like clicking the link or just like your videos small:



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*At which point I will make sure the LOTFP logo appears in the credits, James. I figured this time we were just talking about it rather than "using" it.

Crossing The Streams

In addition to their ordinarily allowed spells, wizards may choose any one extra spell of any level and designate that as a "poorly remembered spell". This spell represents the caster Fucking With That With Which One Ought Not To Fuck.

This is a spell that the wizard kinda mostly is pretty sure he saw someone cast once while he was leaning over somebody's shoulder and pretty much thinks he can kinda guess how it works.

When cast, this spell has an unmodifiable 50% chance of working backwards--striking/affecting the caster and/or her allies (if it's a harmful spell) or the caster's enemies (if it's a beneficial spell). If the spell isn't strictly beneficial or harmful, then the GM is encouraged to interpret "working backwards" in the most disastrous possible light.

Artifacty NPCs

Ok, Telecanter, I'll bite. Artifactlike NPCs are go...

But if I'm gonna do this, I think I should inject some DIY D&D philosophy into it.

Basically the thing is, your NPCs suck and they are all going to die. This is not one of those mostly-not-DIY-D&D blogs you occasionally wander onto where everyone spends half their entries explaining how NPCs have to have motivations and depth and everybody trades character-design tips they got from reading Jane Austen and/or watching Buffy.

This is how NPCs work in games I like to play:

An NPC shows up with one dimension. This dimension is awesome and generally involves tenting his or her beringed fingers and laughing maniacally about cruel deathtraps s/he dropped the players into. The NPC probably gets fed to a pit full of Yeth hounds or is ignored in favor of the players doing some crazy shit they thought up while trying to fish a nacho out from under the couch.*

If, by some miracle, neither of those things happen, the NPC might show up again the next session with two dimensions. He seemed like a kindly barkeep but he was a wereweasel all along? Huh. Wait, you're Luke's father? Whoa. At any rate, he is probably going to get impaled on something before breakfast the next morning, or, again, ignored in favor of some plot thread s/he isn't involved in so whatever.

If the NPC manages to come back again then the NPC will now have acquired a third dimension. Because this keeps the players from being all "Fuck, Gorgraxx The Unliving again?" Like in Jedi, we find out Vader, in the end, was more loyal to Luke than the Emperor. Huh, who knew?
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In other words, just as PCs have to start at first level and earn their badassness by surviving and solving problems, NPCs start out as giggling fiends or cliched schlubs and earn their complexity by surviving and having the players give a fuck about them. This is how TV writers actually do it, kids.

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So, here's how I'd write up an Artifacty NPC:
Vosculous Eeeben is the current Duke Regent of Vornheim. Like most who have donned the Three Beaked Mask of the Regent, he is a vain compromiser, given to fits of solitary drinking. His only joy is gambling on duels between immature carrion crawlers in the grub-breeding pits.

Like most nobles of his line, his mother began exposing him to small doses of poison at as a child so that, by the age of 13, he'd built up an immunity to most common toxins.

If Eeben appears in a second session, he will be revealed to possess the following characteristics:

One item from the DMG "miscellaneous magic" table.

One trait from the "Hidden Traits of NPC You Didn't Realize Was Going To Be Important Until You Started Playing" table.

If Eeben appears in a third session, he will be revealed to possess the following characteristics:

Roll or pick something from the Traumatic Adolescent Background Generator.

If Eeben appears in a fourth session, he will be revealed to possess the following characteristics:

Roll or pick something from the Traumatic Childhood Background Generator.

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Addendum:

The more I think about it, the more I feel this is the way to go if you're going to have "shared" NPCs. What the NPCs appear to be at first is something everyone can start with--what the NPC actually is is a DM's decision. Everybody needs an avuncular innkeeper--what that avuncular innkeeper turns out to be underneath (if anything) is a place where DM's differ. And these differences are interesting.

This is, pretty much, how DMs deal with many things in D&D--monsters, f'rinstance--already.

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*Just because the PCs are ignoring an NPC doesn't mean his or her scheme won't happen, obviously--but the NPC's personality and quirks only matter if the PCs pay close attention to him while he's enacting it.

Another Experimental Adventure Creation Method

You can sew, dance, and blind fight? Just what we needed.

Here's how I made my last TMNT/Mutant Future adventure: I looked at the character attributes in the game (strength,intelligence, etc.) and flipped randomly through the skill list and tried to think of a situation where each attribute and/or skill would be useful. About 15 minutes of thinking got me about a session's worth of material.

You could probably brainstorm a whole megalocale or campaign pretty quick if you just tried to get at least one situation for everything on a game's skill list. Call of Cthulhu seems particularly ripe for this treatment.

Not that the PCs would have to do all that stuff to get through the game--it just seems to spur the imagination to try to think of how a gameworld where both artist: stage magic and pilot: hovercraft could both be useful in short order.

Oorld's Wide Web

(Here's another one for Jeff.) Long ago, a small, brave spider named Oorld crawled all the way around the Earth, spinning and weaving a long, long web as she crept. The web collected all the stray ideas and loose thoughts in the world.

Pieces of the web still exist--some have been made into earrings. Holding a piece of the web near one's ear allows a character to hear billions of voices--a fragmented chorus of opinions and alleged facts about whatever the user happens to be looking at. The main effect is to make the possessor extremely tired (-2 to all saves).

Occasionally the formula for a useful spell or a powerful metaphysical insight is audible above the ill-informed din. Once per year the owner may make a wisdom check to try to find such a voice:

If the check fails, s/he is afflicted by a Class III effect,

if it succeeds, the web allows the possessor to use a Class I power OR may choose instead to make another wisdom roll in order to try to hear a more powerful voice,

if a second roll is made and failed, the user is afflicted by a Class IV effect (and gains no powers),

if the second roll is a success, the web enables the user to employ a Class II power (instead of the Class I power) OR the user may choose to make a third wisdom roll to gain even deeper insight,

if the third roll fails, the user will be permanently afflicted by some form of insanity,

if the third roll succeeds, the user will be permitted to use two Class II powers.

Deck of Hurtful Things

When throwing together random post-apocalyptic villains for our TMNT game, I find that deciding what weapons they're carrying is a subtler task than in the D&D campaign.

In D&D, the weapons tend to be either standard issue (bow, sword, axe) or culturally-specific (the goblins throw vials of slime at people, that's just one of their things), and anything more unusual than that is probably magic, so it's treasure and therefore rare.

In the post-apocalyptic setting, the "everything is scavenged" vibe and the resulting lack of unifying "cultures" plus the wildly varying tech levels plus the whole survivalistic angle plus the fact that novel weapons are not necessarily more powerful than standard-issue ones (i.e. they're not necessarily magic) plus the fact that a big draw of the Ninja Turtle game is the novelty and complexity of the fight scenes all suggest that the precise kind of weapons used plays a much bigger role in defining the mood than it does in good old Vornheim which, after all, is supposed to look and act enough like Medieval Europe often enough that the players are at least a little surprised when things get weird.

Point being: it is helpful to think up a wild and various list of possible weapons the baddies could be carrying in a radioactive future in the event that the PCs run into unexpected trouble or in the event that I get lazy about building specific badguys before I run a session.

Rather than write these on a chart, I decided it'd be fractionally easier to get a sharpie and write the weapons and their vital stats on a set of playing cards. (I know I'm not the only one, lots of game companies produce card products with treasures or traps or whatall on them--and of course there's Sham's W/O Walls dungeon-building technique. It's easier to look at a one thing on a card than find something in the middle of a chart.)

I used the cards themselves to suggest what weapons would go on them: clubs are blunt weapons, diamonds are edged weapons, spades are projectiles and firearms, and hearts were various unarmed strikes and techniques. The value of the card roughly corresponds to the power level of the weapon--with court cards being exceptionally bizarre or powerful. Jokers are wacky weapons.

Now if the party tries to rob d6 mutant bikers for their gasoline, I can shuffle, deal, and in that moment where everyone tries to read my handwriting it's just like that moment where you go "He's reaching for something! What is it? A knife? A gun? A limpet mine made from a real limpet? A speedboat propeller attached to a frisbee?"

I kinda like the idea of using playing-card vandalism to handle anything in any game that:

--comes up a lot,

--doesn't take too long to think up,

--you want to be different every time, and...

--isn't very environment-specific

The Yog-Sothoth.com people have an insanity deck for Cthulhu--seems like the kind of thing that makes sense to be in a deck. NPC personalities could be a good one to do next. Clubs are cliquish, diamonds are powerful, spades are dangerous, hearts are friendly...something like that.