Silicates

A silicon dioxide-based race of chronomancers with a roughly humanoid body shape. Organic muscles work because they’re made of material that contracts when electricity is applied by the nervous system. The quartz that silicates are composed of reacts to electrical current by vibrating at a constant rate. That’s why humans use quartz crystals to regulate their timepieces.

The regularity of these vibrations has allowed the silicate race to evolve with a sense of temporal awareness in addition to the spatial awareness possessed by humans. Over the course of that evolution, they’ve developed the inborn ability to manipulate time by creating temporal anomalies.

Silicates are asexual, and reproduce by seeding quartz clusters that grow to about a 2 foot height and radius. Once that size is reached, the cluster is again visited by its parent and imbued with a self-sustaining electrical pulse that does for silicates what DNA does for organic life. This pulse rearranges the physical material of the new silicate into a bipedal form, at which point the new silicate gains sentience and mobility. Each cluster produces 1d6 silicates. The electrical pulse is also a coded message containing all of what the parent considers to be the most important knowledge, which is instantly learned by each new silicate.

In appearance, new silicates feature the rough surfaces and hard edges of fresh, raw crystal. Their upper limbs end in big, chunky three-fingered hands. As they live out their lives and grow in power, they’re ground down by time and experience, becoming smooth and soft-edged. This is important for adventurers who might encounter them to keep in mind, since it means that the ones with rounded, organic-looking forms are the most dangerous.

Silicates can grow crystal weapons as sharp and strong as steel. Sometimes, powerful silicates learn to permanently imbue the weapons they grow with time-related powers and curses.

They “eat” gemstones and precious metals. This makes their acquisition a primary motivation for silicate NPCs, and groups of them usually try to keep a fully stocked pantry (but are you really willing to sink low enough to steal food from this ragged band of alien survivors? well probably yeah). Silicate PCs gain the value of the minerals they ingest as XP. This is in place of, not in addition to, the normal XP for loot rules.

These creatures were first encountered 529 years ago by the rokai Hojo Mori while he was on a slave raid in the outside worlds. Recognizing that they were too powerful to be suitable for use as slaves, he instead sought to learn how their powers worked in order to harness them himself. To that end, he pretended to diplomatic aspirations and extended an invitation which several of the creatures graciously accepted. Once they were in his castle, Hojo Mori treated them as guests until he learned how to trap them in a stasis prison, outside of any timeline.

WIS: 4d6  INT: 4d6  DEX: 2d6  STR: 2d6  

HD: d4

Saves progress as a magic-user, but apply a bonus equal to half of the silicate’s level (round up) to breath/reflex/DEX saves.

Add WIS bonus to AC. 

Immune to poison and sneak attack damage.

Acid and sound-based attacks do double damage.

Silicates don’t heal naturally with rest like organic life forms do. Instead, they rely on their Entropy Reversal ability for healing (see below). If the silicate is unable to reverse any damage done, the missing chunk of quartz becomes a permanent “scar” and their max hp is permanently lowered by the amount of damage that wasn’t healed.

Silicates can create one temporal anomaly per day per 3 levels (round up) without straining themselves. After that, creating further anomalies costs 1d6 hp damage (save vs. magic to avoid the damage, with a cumulative -2 penalty each time that resets each day).

Stasis Bubble- Stops time within a diameter of 10’ per level for one turn per level. This effect can be set up as a trap to be triggered by a reasonably simple condition determined by the silicate creating the anomaly. This anomaly will continue to exist in its dormant state for as long as the silicate wishes, but it also continues to count against the silicate’s anomalies per day. That is, a silicate who begins a new day with a stasis trap previously set up, begins that day with the ability to create one less anomaly per level. If such a trap is triggered, the silicate who set it is immediately aware of the fact, but not of the specific circumstances. If the silicate dies before the anomaly is set off, it ceases to have ever existed.

Forward Slip- Slows down time for the silicate long enough to perform one standard or movement action per level in the blink of an observer’s eye. So a level two silicate can make one attack and move at normal speed before anyone else knows what happened. Any victims are considered to be surprised or flat-footed, even if they’re already in combat with the silicate.

Entropic Touch- A successful touch attack causes the victim to physically age several decades or even centuries (depending on the normal lifespan of the species) in matter of seconds (save applies, only affects creatures and objects which can normally die of old age). The shock of this sudden transition causes 1 permanent point of CON damage per 2 levels of the silicate (round up). If the target is an inanimate object, it instantly becomes subject to the ravages of time to the point of uselessness. Wood and leather rot, metal rusts and disintegrates. Magic items are entitled to a saving throw to avoid destruction.

Macrouncertainty Cloud- There are always an infinite number of realities which are so close to this one on the world tree that the only difference is the exact location of a single being. This anomaly causes the silicate’s analogs in three adjacent realities to become visible in this universe for one round per level of the silicate. These images are constantly shuffling around with the silicate in a multidimensional shell game, and are impervious to harm. Every direct attack that would normally hit the silicate has a 3/4 chance of passing harmlessly through one of the images (which flickers for just a moment, but comes right back at the end of the round). If one of the images is already flickering from an attack, and another successful attack is made, that one only has a 2/4 chance of missing the silicate. So if the silicate is the target of five attacks in one round, only the last two attacks will have the normal chance of hitting it.

Reverse Slip- The silicate is able to very, very briefly reverse the temporal velocity of reality itself, essentially taking a step back in time. The silicate can only turn back time by a second, just far enough to re-take one roll or re-think a single, extremely recent, and incredibly bad decision. If the new roll still fails, and the silicate is high enough level to create multiple anomalies per day, more than one anomaly can be used to retry a single die roll multiple times. This can also be used to force an opponent or allow an ally to re-take a roll.

Entropy Reversal- Touch any living (or recently dead) thing to instantly undo all damage taken by that creature within the past ten minutes. This anomaly’s effect doesn’t stack with itself. For example, if you use it once to heal 12 hp taken in a recent battle, you can’t immediately use it again to gain another 12 hp. Extending the effect further back in time costs another daily anomaly use per extra ten minutes— so it would cost a level 6 silicate all their free anomalies for the day to undo damage that was 30 minutes old. This applies to ability score damage and conditions like disease or level drain as well as hit point damage. This anomaly cannot be used to bring a creature back from the dead.

Jump Sharks

got me a conquistador

Freshwater sharks that live in swamps and have evolved fins like flying fish. They can jump across narrow strips of land to bite/tackle victims and drag them under the water. Their fins are as articulate as those of a bat, so they can glide quite a distance before transitioning into a football spiral that takes you head over heels when they grab you in a terrifying surprise judo drowning bite attack that ignores armor (so combined with the penalties to swimming in heavy armor pretty much mean don't wear full plate mail in the fucking swamp but players will probably do it anyway).

They know where the water is because they've learned the labyrinthine geography of their swamp completely. Not in an individual sense, though they've been swimming these waters all their lives, but in an evolutionary sense.

Cab drivers in London have to take an extensive test for which they must learn the entire layout of the city, and the process of learning this intensely complex pattern actually changes the physical structures of their brains. Jump sharks have it the other way around. They're born with the layout of the swamp where they evolved hardwired into the frontmost part of their brain.

This means that if they're somehow removed from that environment, their normal hunting methods are useless. If they can still manage to survive on a purely aquatic diet, their descendants several generations down the line (let's say 80 years -- they have unusually short lifespans for sharks) will have adapted their brains to their new home. They're usually a bit smaller by this time, but the sub-species created by this process tend to return to their normal size pretty quickly once they've reincorporated the land into their hunting grounds.

Of course if boats are commonly used in the area all bets are off.

Characters with high enough intelligence have a chance of learning the layout of the local region, including hard-to-spot bogs and quicksand, by carefully inspecting the brain structure of a dead jump shark. If an intelligence check fails, a read magic spell will still do the trick.

They know where you are because they've also evolved eyes that can detect the infrared radiation produced by humans and other warm blooded animals. This even applies to newly transplanted jump sharks that can't get at landswimmers at all anymore, which pisses them off to no end.

siberian bear hunting armor

Your creepy neighborhood swamp hag may be able to use these sensory organs to craft items that grant their users infravision, in exchange for some favor that should probably take at least a couple sessions to deliver on. Anyone who can practice normal alchemy has a chance of figuring out how to distill them into potions that (temporarily) have the same effect.

The only warning sign of their presence is their well-camouflaged dorsal fins, since they must swim close to the surface to get around the water's ability to absorb all radio waves. You and I can't see as far in water as in air because it absorbs visible light waves, and infrared waves work the same way.

The only type of armor that's actually useful against them is the kind with pointy spikes all over it. Any nearby cultures with at least Bronze Age technology are almost guaranteed to have figured this out, so it should be available if they exist.

Saurian Heresies

You know how humans are about religious beliefs, where some of us seem think that believing in one holy book about being nice to people instead of another book about killing people is good thing to kill people over? Saurians are kind of like that, but for the most part they don’t worship any sort of deities. Instead, they subscribe to philosophies (more in the ancient sense than the modern one).

When their race started it’s eternal journey through the multiverse, they understood for a fact how reality worked and how to bend it to their own will (the wise men of some worlds claim that these were the originators of magic as we know it), but that knowledge was lost over the course of 65.5 million years. Whatever a modern saurian believes, you can bet it isn’t the whole truth, but quite a few of them are willing to kill for those beliefs.

All saurian philosophies also take into account the fact their home continent, Exodus, randomly shifts from one reality to another every 1d4+12 months, and almost all of them make some attempt to explain that fact based on their core beliefs. The phenomenon is generally referred to as the Great Paradox.

The Highland Emperor has a particular philosophy which is generally agreed with by his subjects, at least the ones who haven’t been executed for heresy. His rule has lasted 483 years so far, but his worldview has been the official position of the ruling emperor for at least the 300 emperors. This philosophy is built around a set of specific beliefs that act as pillars of faith:

• The saurian race is superior in every conceivable way to all other forms of life.
• There is only one universe, in which Exodus is stationary while everything else changes yearly. This makes Exodus the only stronghold of Law in an eternal sea of Chaos.
• The memories of ephemerals (living things from outside Exodus) are false, forming at the same time their version of reality does.
• The continued dominance of the saurian empire is the only thing that matters.
• The magics and technologies of the ephemeral world are corrupt and untrustworthy.

These pillars of the emperor’s personal belief system have shaped the laws of the land, which has led to policies of exploitation of and unthinking callousness towards ephemerals.

Nearly every saurian settlement is clustered around the stronghold of some powerful rokai, who functions as a local lord. Most saurians take the philosophy of their local rokai as truth (whether or not they understand it), and most rokai take the philosophy of the emperor as fact. The only exceptions are those rokai who’ve discovered secrets that run counter to the emperor’s beliefs.

To achieve the wealth and reputation implied by this station, a rokai must have survived a long and successful adventuring career, during which they are bound to have learned some nuggets of unorthodox wisdom (some of which are untrue). These secrets, in the context of a general acceptance of the emperor’s beliefs, form each rokai’s individual philosophy. The resulting worldview is the main motivation behind most of the rokai’s actions.

Every time the players enter a saurian settlement under the protection of a rokai whose philosophy is unknown, roll 2d6 and some number of d20s. The 2d6 uses the reaction roll chart to determine how the rokai will treat anyone who vocally disagrees with their philosophy. Hostile or unfriendly means any infidels are executed (or banished if you want to be a wuss about it). “Friendly” (or indifferent) to them means what “evangelical” means to the rest of us— after all, they’re doing you a favor if they can convince you of the error of your ways.

Neutral means they really don’t give a shit what you think. They may be interested in discussing it, but won’t persecute you for what you believe as long as you don’t break their laws. The NPC chart from LotFP gives you a 44% chance of this result.

Each d20 determines one of the rokai’s core beliefs. If a belief comes up more than once, don’t roll it again, just think of that as a particularly strong belief that overrules the others when they come into conflict. Roll as many as you feel like; the more you roll, the more bizarre shit this particular rokai has been through, and the weirder the resulting belief system. It also becomes more likely that this rokai’s belief system will directly conflict with the emperor’s.

Two or more beliefs are likely to contradict each other, and that’s fine. That won’t stop the saurian from believing both things simultaneously. Some rokai simply refuse to acknowledge the contradiction, sometimes violently. Others go out of their way to imagine a scenario in which all their contradictory beliefs can coexist. A rare, reasonable few believe these contradictions to be proof that no one can ever know the whole truth for sure.

Beliefs that directly contradict those of the emperor are italicized.

1. It’s foolish to keep rejecting foreign secrets of technology and magic, rather than turning them to the saurian race’s benefit. 
2. The saurian race is the creation of ancient alien geneticists.
3. Saurians are the destined people, who will one day ascend to a higher state of being.
4. All life-forms are pawns in an elaborate simulation being played out on some higher plane.
5. One may achieve enlightenment through a regimen of mental and physical conditioning.
6. One may achieve enlightenment through a regimen of drug use and depravity.
7. Dinosaurs are actually the reincarnated ancestors of saurians.
8. Ephemerals who die on Exodus with enough good karma built up are reincarnated as saurians, the only race capable of achieving enlightenment. Those who die elsewhere are simply wiped from existence.
9. The changing stars could be read by ancient astrologers to discover much about the occasionally-shifting outside world, but their skills are long forgotten.
10. Exodus is moving and has a final destination, a place of endless madness and torment.
11. The entire universe rotates around Exodus physically. The stars are holes in the dark hemisphere that surrounds a disc-shaped planet.
12. Saurians have existed for longer than the universe, without their physical form changing significantly.
13. Saurians are the atavistic (and therefore inferior) descendants of a more advanced avian race.
14. Any territory colonized by saurians continues to exist along with Exodus the next time the continent shifts, and this has already happened several times.
15. The sun is actually a vast intelligence made up of all saurians that achieve enlightenment, and directs the yearly shifts in reality.
16. The consciousness of most three dimensional beings moves through time in a straight line, while the saurians travel a corkscrew path through time. This essentially means that the outside worlds exist independently of Exodus, which travels between them.
17. The path to enlightenment is the prolonged experience of pain beyond measure.
18. Dreams are memories from the future, or sometimes from past lives.
19. The infinitely shifting realities around the saurians and the ephemerals  are all the creations of their ancient ancestors. The continent is essentially moving forward through a creator god’s equivalent of a mixtape.
20. Ephemerals are equally capable of achieving enlightenment, and respectful cooperation is preferable to exploitation.

When a rokai’s fundamental beliefs run contrary to those of the emperor, it means one of three things, depending on their attitudes towards those who disagree with them. Hostile means they’re at war with the empire, and evangelical means they’re secretly trying to set up a coup, possibly in a conspiracy with other like-minded rokai. Neutral means they don’t mind pretending they’re like him to his face, while doing their own thing and governing their own towns their own way.

So if you give every philosophy like ten d20 rolls, almost all of the rokai end up opposed to the emperor’s beliefs. Assume only 44% of those rokai are going to stay basically loyal (again, the chance of a neutral reaction roll), and you get a big messy war with multiple sides that’s probably been going on for a long fucking time, where even those supposedly loyal to the emperor can’t really be trusted. If you only roll a couple d20s for each settlement, you get a more stable and unified culture with a relatively small number of potentially dangerous radical outliers.

If you want the empire to be truly crumbling with only a few loyal vassals left, you also need to nudge the attitude ranges around on the reaction table. Say that for these purposes only a result of 7 is neutral, and you’re pretty much good to go. That gives the rokai who disagree with the emperor (most of them if you roll up five core beliefs for each) a one in six chance of being loyal anyway. The others are evenly split between those openly at war with the emperor and those who are pretending to serve him while conspiring to replace him.

I’ve made a new toy and now I wanna play with it so here’s some examples.

Rokai #1 (2d6:7, 3 d20s:18 16 1) Isami Takeda

attitude toward disbelievers: neutral

• Dreams are memories from the future, or sometimes from past lives.
• The consciousness of most three dimensional beings moves through time in a straight line, while the saurians travel a corkscrew path through time. This essentially means that the outside worlds exist independently of Exodus, which travels between them.
• Exodus is the only foothold of law in an eternal sea of chaos.

So right off the bat we’ve got someone who’s lost faith in one of the core tenets of the imperial worldview, but prefers to hide his beliefs. He rejects the single universe theory and understands that outsiders are not ephemeral, but still feels that they’re disgusting creatures of chaos, so they’re still morally inferior beings that don’t deserve rights. His faith in the significance of dreams could serve as reasonable motivation for any weird behavior you feel like.

Rokai #2 (2d6:6, 3 d20s:8 4 4) Sumi Naboharu

attitude toward disbelievers: neutral

• Ephemerals who die on Exodus with enough good karma built up are reincarnated as saurians, the only race capable of achieving enlightenment. Those who die elsewhere are simply wiped from existence.
• All life-forms are pawns in an elaborate simulation being played out on some higher plane.

This rokai is 100% sure that she’s in a game, and probably has seen some glimpses of sweaty over-caffeinated mammals playing with miniature dinosaur figures and dice. Since the world is a game, she doesn’t really care what happens in it beyond keeping her own people safe.

Akizuki Kondo

Rokai #3 (2d6:5, 3 d20s:20 5 14) Akizuki Kondo

attitude toward disbelievers: evangelical

• Ephemerals are equally capable of achieving enlightenment, and respectful cooperation is preferable to exploitation.
• Enlightenment may achieve enlightenment through a regimen of mental and physical conditioning.
• Any territory colonized by saurians continues to exist along with Exodus the next time the continent shifts, and this has already happened several times.

Okay, this is interesting. This rokai wants to live in peace with the ephemerals and help them achieve enlightenment. He still believes that they only exist while Exodus is in the same world they are (a bit like a child playing peekaboo really), and wants to bring more ephemerals into the  true land through the establishment of missionary colonies. He believes the missions he’s already set up in previous worlds to still exist despite his explorers’ inability to find them, and has concluded that they must have drifted from their original geographical locations every time the universe shifted.

Dungeons & Dinosaurs

The multiverse contains infinite realities and grows with every decision or random occurrence. Most of those realities include some version of the star Sol, but relatively few of those realities still include some version of the planet Earth. This planet has been destroyed in millions of ways over the millennia, and its continued existence grows more unlikely by the day.

Some of these apocalypses have been the result of an external cataclysm. The astral body that collided with earth in its early history, forming the moon, could have been more massive, or approached at a slightly different angle, which means that in many timelines, it was, and the Earth was demolished long before it would have become suitable for life as we know it.

Many, many of these Earths were destroyed in the crossfire of wars fought among their own inhabitants. In some of the universes where restraint proved too difficult when it came to nuclear warfare, even those weapons failed to satisfy the wrath of the warlords and generals and presidents and kings. The survivors were forced underground but the war would continue. Sometimes the core of the planet would become part of the battlefield, compromising the Earth’s structure. A few realities produced particularly enterprising and ingenious madmen that managed to trigger a supernova event, destroying their entire solar system.

Even on the Earths that physically survived, mass extinction events were fairly common on most. Each of these massive die-offs cleared the way for another form of life to have its shot. The only hope of any particular genetic strain of surviving one of these events was in producing a species intelligent enough to see the event coming and prevent or escape it (bear in mind that most technologically or magically advanced civilization that the Earths produce also bring about their own extinction, so even if evolution somehow gets that far it’s still a crapshoot).

In some of those realities, the great oxygenation event (when early plants poisoned the world with oxygen, and the rest of life had to adapt to the abundance of this new toxin) happened a few hundred million years earlier, giving cambrian life a longer period in which to develop. The cambrian intelligences that ruled some of those worlds were the first to escape to other Earths, where they lie dormant beneath the oceans, while their cultists on land prepare for their awakening.

On one branch of the world tree (which is a much more apt metaphor for the multiverse than the ancients are likely to have realized), the great permian extinction occurred a hundred million years before it did in ours, greatly extending the length of the mesozoic period, giving the dinosaurs plenty of time to produce a species capable of language and tool use. Great saurian empires rose and fell much as our own have (that is to say, through a tragic history of violence, treachery and greed). Meanwhile, the academically inclined continued to work towards understanding the world around them and adapting it to their own needs.

When the saurian astrologers of those worlds recognized impending doom in giant asteroid form, they severed their homeland from their own timeline, expelling the land from its original place in the multiverse. This is how Exodus, the Prodigal Continent, came to be.

This continent, about the size of Australia, would jump to a wildly different shade of reality every year or so, and continues to do so sixty five and a half million years later. It’s been known by many names on uncountable worlds, including Atlantis. Due to the fractal nature of the multiverse, it’s essentially certain that more than one version of Exodus exists, but if more than one has ever appeared in the same world at the same time, the history of their interaction was lost long ago.

Nations and philosophies have risen and fallen on the continent over the course of countless generations. Few saurian philosophers today even remember the traditional world tree model and those who do reject it, perceiving themselves as the one true people, denizens of the one true continent in a constantly shifting universe. 

One of the few constants throughout the multiverse is that any civilization which stops thinking of outsiders as real people no longer sees abuse and exploitation of those outsiders as morally wrong. This universal truth, coupled with what the saurians perceived as an outside world that was almost constantly rewriting itself from scratch, has largely shaped the behavior of this species. Generally speaking, any time the saurians themselves aren’t too busy with some internal crisis, they appear in a new world and make contact with the most intelligent ephemerals they can find (as they refer to any species not from their continent), take advantage of them and enslaving as many as possible to support their own extravagant lifestyle. 

Bringing up the propagation of these slave races on Exodus and using that as a philosophical counterargument is a good way to be labeled a heretic. 

Many of these species revolted and were wiped out, but a few managed to escape, organize, and claim territory. The saurians, who once ruled the entire continent, retreated and unified in the highlands. The lowland regions are littered with the crumbling ruins of their towns and fortresses, and the highlands are home to a federation of saurian city states, having adopted savage humans as their current slave race of choice.

Having been exposed to wildly varying conditions throughout the vast majority of their history, the saurians have become one of the most versatile races in the multiverse. Their adventuring class, the rokai, are responsible for defending what’s left of saurian territory, exploring the various outside worlds looking for opportunities, and maintaining order within the federation’s borders. Rokai are expected to acquaint themselves with the arts of the magician and the swordsman alike, as well as the more practical skills of the scout or thief.

In terms of game mechanics, a level 1 rokai starts with a combination of abilities normally associated with a thief, fighter, or magic user, without excelling in any of those areas. From then on, every time the rokai increases in level, they must decide which of those three classes to advance in.

These stats are for LotFP because that’s more or less what I’m running at the moment, and because I couldn’t give a fuck less about niche protection if I tried. Making it work for another game might require shifting some numbers or adding some abilities depending on the ruleset, but the basic framework is:

SAURIAN ROKAI

XP Progression: as fighter

HP: 1d4 + constitution bonus at first level, as chosen class each time the rokai levels up.

Start with 2 skill points, gain 2 more when leveling up as a specialist.

Start knowing read magic and two random (or one chosen) 1st level spells. Begin with the spell progression of a 1st level magic user and increase when leveling up as a magic user.

Start with an attack bonus of +1 and add one when leveling up as a fighter. Can use all the same combat options as a fighter.

Saving throws: All five saving throws start at 16 until the rokai reaches level 2, then the saves vs paralysis and poison decrease by one when leveling up as a fighter, and saves vs spell and device do the same when leveling up as a magic user. When advancing as a specialist, saves vs poison and device decrease by 1, and the save against breath weapons decreases by 2.

Saurians also have the following natural abilities:

Bite attack, 1d4 damage.

Dinosaur affinity (similar to the affinity humans have for dogs and horses).

Scent up to 1/4 mile.

Scales provide natural protection as leather armor.

Quick DMG to the 30 Years War

The 30 Years War was a big complicated mess, in a way that makes it uniquely gameable. It was part of what historians refer to as Europe’s General Crisis, a century-long period of violent political and religious upheaval combined with famine and plague.

It is in no way necessary for a DM to understand all the details of the 17th century political landscape in central Europe in order to run a good game in that setting (although if you happen to enjoy studying history, it certainly wouldn’t hurt), but there are a few major points that could potentially be useful to know when you're coming up with encounters, or when your players start doing things you don't expect.

So here's a quick list of simplified gameables for DMs who haven't got the time or inclination to look into the history themselves. Anyone else probably knows all this. If anyone else is you, feel free to add good stuff I left out in the comments.

• “Germany” did not yet exist as a coherent nation, and wouldn’t for a couple more centuries. Instead, the region was dominated by what was known as the Holy Roman Empire, a loosely-stitched together group of states each ruled by semi-autonomous electoral princes. By the time of the 30 Years War, many of these princes were Protestants, while the imperial dynasty was fiercely Catholic. The war was initially fought between an alliance of rebel princes and those loyal to the empire and if that doesn't sound familiar why are you even reading this?
• The violence of the General Crisis was, if not caused by, then at least enabled and encouraged by the intra-religious conflict that began a century earlier with the Protestant Reformation. The most basic way of viewing these wars, including the 30 Years War, was as a conflict between Catholics and Protestants (mainly Lutherans but Calvinism was starting to catch on too). This is the underlying conflict that a lot of that time & place’s jingoistic propaganda exploited.
• Religious oppression largely took the form of witch trials and inquisitions. Accused heretics were being executed at a faster rate than any other time in European history. So in a game with magic users, they generally would not have been trying to advertise. Bizarre wizard's towers could still exist, obviously. The setting just gives you a good opportunity to use weird magic to hide them really absurdly well.
• What began as a civil war was kept going by opportunistic and expansionist foreign nations getting involved. In 1631, when Better Than Any Man is set, King Gustavus Adolphus’ Swedish troops were sweeping through Germany. Their standard tactics were more appropriate to the technology of the time than the tactics of their rivals were, and they earned a reputation as an unstoppable horde. Each victory added territory to his relatively tiny empire.
• Aside from the continent-wide religious conflict of the day, the largest rivalry in Europe at the time was between two of its richest, most powerful families: the Bourbons in France and the Hapsburgs in both Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. Both the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons were Catholic, but the kingdom of France was squeezed between the Spanish and the Germans. This led to the Bourbons aligning themselves with the mostly-Protestant enemies of the Hapsburgs, further complicating any answer to the question “just what were these whackos fighting over, anyway?” This gives a DM multiple factions and somewhat tenuous alliances to play with.
• Soldiers were not well paid (or fed) in this time & place. It was common practice for rulers to blow their savings raising armies from a combination of foreign mercenaries and their own peasantry, then leave them to provide for themselves by “living off the land” (raping-pillaging-killing their way across the countryside). This led to a serious enmity between peasants and soldiers, regardless of sides or religious preference. There was always a wide "foraging" area around the actual armies, creating twin crises of famine and internally displaced refugees. Which made conditions ideal for the spread of the bubonic plague.
• The belief that these were the End Times was not at all unusual. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death) were considered by many to be the most powerful forces in Europe. This was sometimes metaphorical but often meant in a quite literal sense, especially among the uneducated peasantry, who really couldn’t be expected to grasp the bigger picture of what was happening to them. My point here is that no urban encounter table in this setting would really be complete without at least one or two doomsayers. A secondary point is that things like the physical incarnations of the Horsemen are always fun to stat up.
• This is one of those wars where the safest place to be, by far, was in the army. At least that way you had a weapon, maybe even some light armor if you’d plundered enough to afford some, and a group of other armed men that (barring extraordinary circumstances or personal grudges) had your back. The second safest place to be was in the cities and larger towns, because the worst of the pillaging happened in out of the way farms and villages. Which meant that many towns near passing armies were overrun with refugees, while others would have turned them away for fear of the plague.
• The fact that being in the army was somewhat safer than any alternative didn’t stop countless soldiers from deserting and becoming outlaws or switching sides. The punishment for desertion was hanging, but only if your own side managed to catch you, and they were usually too busy to try hunting you down. On top of that, mercenary units were often officially disbanded, penniless, armed and thousands of miles from home, putting them in basically the same position as the deserters. The major takeaway for a DM here is there were small groups of outlaws all over the damn place.
• If you don't know anything about the period at all, firearms existed but were just being introduced. They took forever to reload and malfunctions could be disastrous and they really weren't all that much more useful than swords at that point.

Here's Your Lump of Coal

If you asked the Humbug, it would tell you that it doesn’t want to hurt anyone really, but has had to defend itself countless times and just wants to be left alone. It won’t mention (and probably isn’t really even aware) that witnessing joy in others triggers an emotional escalation that, unless appeased successfully, ends with the Humbug entering an uncontrollable rage. Of course that’s assuming you’re able to get a word in at all.

It looks like either a child with the features of a grey-skinned old man, or an old man whose growth has been severely stunted. It has functional insect-like wings, and antennae, dresses in shoddy looking but functional clothing, and (when grounded) leans heavily on a gnarled cane that’s taller than he is. The Humbug is likely to be found living in any sparsely populated and isolated dungeon or wilderness area.

When first met, it demands to know what the PCs are doing, but doesn’t really care once it figures out that they aren’t from around wherever it is they find it. The Humbug then introduces itself and starts complaining about the area in a way that reveals useful and reliable information to the PCs. It keeps complaining about anything and everything that occurs to it without letting anyone else get a word in, and follows anyone who tries to walk away in the middle of a “conversation”. This will continue as long as the PCs tolerate it, with useful intel sprinkled in generously. If the PCs engage in combat (including trying to attack the Humbug itself), it will simply fly out of the way until it’s over, grumbling about how tedious combat is the whole time.

The Humbug will not say much about the occasional groups of 3-5 adventurers’ remains, all of which have had their skulls bashed in. Just that it takes the right outlook to survive and these poor saps didn’t have it.

The Humbug will not try to stop anyone who tries to silence it with a gag, but will still continue to go through the motions of speaking as if it hasn’t noticed. This will muffle the sound well enough to allow for stealth. Otherwise, every enemy within 20’ of the party will be aware of their presence (or at least of the Humbug’s, and that it’s talking to someone). It shouldn’t take long for a clever party to realize that they can just gag and un-gag it as needed and have half of what’s going on explained to them.

If any the players express joy in-character, the Humbug turns visibly red, rips out its gag (if it’s wearing one) and starts angrily pointing out the dark lining to every silver cloud, demanding that the PCs see things its way. If they “admit” that it’s right, they still need to make a charisma check to convince it they’ve genuinely changed their minds (even if they actually have). If they succeed, it turns back to its normal shade of grey and starts complaining about all the infuriatingly naive adventurers it’s met in the past, and how they all turn out to be such huge disappointments in the end.

If the PCs fail to convince the Humbug of their sincerity (or tell it they think it’s wrong), its rage intensifies. It grows a deeper shade of red and flies out of reach while shouting about how disappointing the party is and shaking its cane like a madman. All of a sudden, its shouts turn into an incoherent war cry as it starts zipping around at 6x the speed of the PCs. First, it trips them all with the hook of its cane and tries to disarm them if there’s time, then it spends a whole round smashing in one victim’s face while the rest of the group recovers. The Humbug repeats this process until they’re all dead and keeps screaming the whole time, not even stopping to inhale.

Nice Streets Above

I’m just about done writing and laying out my Kellerlabyrinth project, which I’m calling Nice Streets Above, after a song by Wire. The song is an expression of rage generated by upper class pricks. The title is relevant to the adventure both in that sense, and in a purely literal one, as the tunnels beneath the streets are inhabited by refugees and the human parasites. It’s a dungeon and a slum at the same time, and several conspiracies with unique goals and methods are based there.

I can see no reason why horror, science fiction, superhero fiction and fantasy shouldn’t all be the same thing, and NSA reflects that aesthetic. There’s also a little bit of history, which is basically horror anyway. The supers influence shows in some of the choices that PCs may find themselves faced with; the abilities they might gain, and the prices that must be paid.

I’m designing this to be played with any edition or retroclone of D&D. NSA is set in the tunnels under Oppenheim during the 30 Years War, so that ruleset is the most obvious fit. It would also be really easy to fit this and Better Than Any Man into the same campaign. I’m not including many stats in NSA though, so it shouldn’t be too hard to convert to whatever RPG rules you prefer. One of these days I wanna try running it with FASERIP and probably also one of the Dr. Who RPGs.

I figured out what to print on the back cover as a teaser. It’s super pretentious and I’m not fucking changing it. Imagine it being read to you by that movie announcer guy:

A war over a decade old.

A city under foreign occupation.

A refugee crisis with no end in sight.

A rebellion brewing beneath the streets.

A privileged society abusing mystic abilities.

A cult of the hopeless and their gods of decay.

Welcome to Oppenheim.

Corruption is power.

And here’s a couple of illustrations, from a page of potentially recurring NPCs. One set of three basically normal humans, and one set of weirdos with secret powers.

It would be pretty funny if repeating the acronym NSA over and over got me put on a watch list of some sort.