The devil is in the details – Many Dwarrow, Many Rat-People

Inspired recently by the "devil is in the details" concept developed by Kesher in Fight On!, I decided to start creating these tables of random racial features for my Old Aalia campaign. First up are two d30 tables which describe some of the most common traits of Dwarrow and Rat-People. The concept is that each newly created character of these races should roll for three of these traits.

Many Dwarrow

1. Have only three fingers.
2. Stretch their ear lobes by hanging pebbles from them.
3. Smoke a sweet smelling pipe-weed which is intoxicating to humans.
4. Find humans physically repulsive.
5. Believe that Dwarrow are the rightful possessors of all metals and stones.
6. Have no sense of taste.
7. View avarice as the highest emotion.
8. Can subsist by eating gravel alone.
9. Have thick, slow-oozing blood.
10. Worship Ogremoch, lord of the dark, cold earth, whom they view as the creator of the world.
11. Are driven mad by the sound of music.
12. Follow an ancient creed of 111 rules known as Bag-Hran.
13. Dream of conquering and ruthlessly enslaving other races.
14. Hate and fear water.
15. Eat enormous quantities of bland food, apparently without pleasure.
16. Carve likenesses of themselves in stone.
17. Do not sleep but just go still for precisely 8 hours.
18. Like to mock other races openly.
19. Become obsessed with hoarding a certain type of item.
20. Have a black tongue.
21. Practice the art of counting, internally maintaining an increasing count through their whole lives.
22. Will only sleep on bare stone.
23. Participate in ritualistic orgies.
24. Believe that one who eats a diet of gold will live forever.
25. Feel a kinship with a specific type of stone, determined by the auspices of their birth.
26. Keep a small book in which they write in code.
27. Are covered in warts and lumps, which they are secretly ashamed of.
28. Never sweat and have completely odourless bodies.
29. Are of the opinion that the human conception of the soul is a laughably childish attempt to mask the grim truth of reality.
30. Have extremely long names, and up to 17 secret names reserved for specific rituals.

Many Rat-People

1. Happily eat food which is well past its prime.
2. Are trained in a craft of spiteful pranks to be applied to the arrogant and vain (often involving needles and irritating poisons).
3. Superstitiously carve little animal figurines from bone and wood.
4. Delight in clockwork.
5. Are expert swimmers.
6. Can speak with rats.
7. Excel at poetry and riddles.
8. Abhor the concept of slavery or service.
9. Try to remain neutral in all disputes.
10. Love to keep pets, which they groom and adorn with ribbons.
11. Brew a fish-wine in odd stills made from guts.
12. Practice a unique craft, something between sculpture and smell-art.
13. Find humans' religious and philosophical opinions endlessly funny.
14. Do not view theft as a crime, seeing it rather as a joke to be played on the stupid.
15. View writing as a pointless arrogance of the “tall races”.
16. Believe that their folk descended from the moon.
17. Awake instinctively at dawn.
18. Adorn their tails with rings and bells.
19. Have no concept of marriage.
20. Love dancing to music played on pipes and flutes.
21. Protect their possessions obsessively and elaborately.
22. Cannot keep a secret.
23. Have an acute sense of smell, and make no differentiation between pleasant and foul.
24. Find humans incredibly attractive.
25. Bury valuable items.
26. Have no understanding of the concept of nobility.
27. Shave spiral patterns from their fur.
28. Have a detailed and on-going alternate life in their dreams, in which they are usually slaves.
29. Practice a wide array of fortune-telling techniques.
30. Believe that it is an honour to bestow equal favour and disfavour upon others.

Old Aalia - players' map + adventuring locales

Ok so as planned I've finished off the annotations on the campaign map, and added some sites of special interest. These are represented by numbered stars on the map.

Here's what they denote:

1. The sunken palaces of Garm.
2. The dungeons of Thraal.
3. The Eld tree.
4. Fastness of the giant king.
5. Grbla -- City of the swine-folk.
6. Realm of the Ja.
7. The desolation of Orb.
8. The scintillating peak.
9. The sphere of Agk-H'ral.
10. The caverns of Jib.
11. The breachlands.
12. Feremhaal -- City of statues.
13. Shadda's dominion.
14. The pillars of prophecy.
15. The tower of death. (With thanks to Carter Soles ;)
    

More details on these, and the other locations on the map, to come!

Old Aalia - players' map

Here's an almost-finished version of a new campaign map I'm working on. The original was drawn in coloured pens, then scanned in, cleaned up in Gimp, and vectorised and text added in Inkscape.

The next step will be adding some more "sites of interest" to the map. I have a list of about 15 unusual locales (potential sites for adventures), which I'll probably add to the map simply as numbered stars or something like that.

Finally I need to write up snippets of info about each of the cities and adventuring locales to give the players some hints as to what's what.

The map I posted previously, of the Harln-Halladan region, can be seen just to the right of the text "Old Aalia" in the new larger scale map.

Looking for a random table

I just remembered an excellent post I saw somewhere ages ago, but which I now can't for the life of me track down. It was a method of fleshing out a campaign world and simultaneously producing nice bits of interesting background for characters. The idea was that for each race you have a set of tables like "most halflings X, Y, Z", "some halflings A, B, C", "rarely halflings J, K, L", and so on. That's the gist of it, I just can't quite remember the details.

If anyone knows where to find it, please do let me know!

Fun with body parts

A fun little 4th level necromancer spell for your entertainment...

The rest of this post is designated Open Gaming Content according to the Open Gaming License.

Detach / Graft
Level: 4
Duration: See below
Range: Touch

Casting this spell and touching a body part causes it to detach from its owner, who can then control the part as an independent entity. Thus hands may crawl around, legs may hop, and even heads can be detached and rolled. The detached body part can be controlled for up to 1 turn per level of the caster, after which it must be retrieved and reattached to the body (which happens automatically). If the body part is not reattached during the spell's duration it dies.

Using the reverse version, graft, body parts lost in any way may be replaced either by reattaching the missing part or by grafting on replacement parts cut from another living or recently dead creature. The graft is permanent, but the recipient (which may be the caster himself) must make a transformative shock roll. If the roll fails the graft does not take, and will wither and fall off in 1d6 weeks.

Victorian London guidebook

A little recommendation for anyone interested in running games in Victorian London: I've just been doing a bit of research on sourcebooks for the period, and discovered the wonderful looking "Baedeker's London and its Environs 1900". It's a hardback facsimile of a real guidebook from the time, and is readily available from amazon etc. And it's 512 pages, so I imagine it's pretty comprehensive!

Originally I was looking for something specifically RPG related, possibly the out-of-print "Cthulhu by Gaslight", but really I just want a book with detailed maps, and information about notable places, where one can buy things, and so on. It looks like this book will be perfect for the job! I just ordered it, so will post further information as to its RPG-worthiness when I receive it.

Look what I got!

Just received in the post yesterday...

The really great thing is that I've only played CoC twice, and both times the d20 version, so this majestic tome is all new to me!

Horror in Victorian London here I come :)