Notes on a semi-successful skill system

When I finished my Team Tsathogga campaign back in 2019, one of the things that I noted afterwards was the extent to which fighters had struggled to keep up with magic users as the game progressed into the higher levels. At the time, I wrote:

One quick and dirty fix that I'm considering is to let each fighter pick a new area of noncombat competency every time they go up a level, so that by level 8 or so they're less 'meat-shield' than 'Batman', although mastering entire new fields of knowledge every few months does rather strain my disbelief. 

When I started my City of Spires campaign shortly afterwards I put this into practise. In this campaign there are three classes, Fighter, Magic-User, and Cleric. Magic-Users and Clerics get spell slots. Fighters get extra hit points, to-hit bonuses, and a skill slot every level. Spending a skill slot on something means you are really good at that skill, and will always succeed at attempts to use it except under severely adverse conditions. If you have the Climbing skill, for example, you can automatically climb any normal surface you encounter, although doing so quickly or quietly might still require a Dexterity check. New skills have to be something your character could plausibly have learned, although given the vast lengths of game-time the campaign has covered (twelve in-game years and counting) this has seldom been a major obstacle. 

Here's how it worked out in practise.

Low Levels: One Weird Trick

At low levels this system worked great. Three level 1 fighters might have almost identical combat stats, but if one of them is great at Running and one of them is great at Climbing and one of them has Heightened Senses then the roles they play in actual play will be totally different. These skill choices worked powerfully to help distinguish mechanically-similar characters, and helped each character make distinctive contributions to the problems they encountered. By level 3 or so I was feeling pretty good about the system as a whole.

Mid Levels: Convergence

As the PCs carried on advancing, the skill system continued to do a good job of letting PC fighters keep up with magic-users in terms of their contributions to problem-solving. But we increasingly ran into a problem: adventuring life being what it is, certain situations just keep coming up, and so it became logical for everyone to start developing a fairly similar set of skills. 

When you only have one choice you might legitimately take either Climbing or Hiding, but once you have six choices most PCs tended to converge on a broadly similar package of skills dealing with perception, mobility, and stealth. Hiding, Move Silently, Tracking, and Night Vision isn't identical to Climbing, Camouflage, Riding, and Heightened Senses, but it's not that different, either - they're both 'sneaky scout' skill sets. Even characters who were determined to develop in other directions often found they only needed 3-4 skill slots to complete their concept: the party builder, for example, took Scavenging, Tinkering, Tunnelling, and the surprisingly useful High-Speed Barricade Building. After that he just spent his skill slots on stealth, mobility, and perception abilities like everyone else. 

High Levels: Superfluity

The difference between having one skill slot and having two was huge, but the difference between having seven and eight was minimal. Most 'adventurer' concepts really only needed 4-6 skills to cover the main bases, so at high levels players were often unsure what to spend their skill slots on - sometimes they'd just say 'I'll think about it' and then leave them unspent for several sessions. This led, in turn, to the rise of 'reactive skill learning', with players saying things like: 'hang on, I've got a couple of spare skill slots. I can spend one of them on Woodworking and then carve the idol that the ritual needs!' (I tended to permit this as long as the skill was one they might plausibly have learned, given their background, concept, etc.) Also, by this point the magic-users had so much magic that mundane skill mastery was getting progressively less important. Thorny problems tended to be solved by throwing huge amounts of utility magic at them, instead.

Lessons Learned

For a game that probably won't go beyond level 5 or so, I think this is a good system, allowing fighter-types to clearly differentiate themselves from one another in ways that add very little mechanical complexity but have a large impact on actual play. At higher levels, however, it increasingly broke down. If I were to use it again I might let high-level characters (7 or above, perhaps) 'double down' on a skill, spending a second skill slot to elevate it to near-superhuman levels. Alternatively I might let high-level characters to trade unused skill slots for some other benefit (e.g. a bonus to hit points or saves), to avoid the embarrassment of just having them piling up unused on the character sheet. Either of these would still allow someone who wanted a true 'Renaissance man' PC to just keep broadening their skill set, without requiring every high-level fighter to do the same!

Early modern corpse medicine

I recently read a book called Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires, by Richard Sugg. Despite its title, it's not about monsters. Instead, it's a history of what Sugg calls 'corpse medicine' - the early modern practise of using bits of dead people in attempts to cure the living. Sugg can be a bit credulous in places, but he does a good job of establishing that human blood, fat, and bone saw fairly widespread use in both European folk remedies and 'academic' medicine during the period, giving rise to a range of often gruesome medical practises that, in some cases, lingered on as late as the nineteenth century.

Here are the most gameable bits.

Skull Moss: The theory went like this: during life, your brain is constantly sloshing around inside your skull, marinading the bone in brain juice (AKA 'vital spirits'). So after you die, some of the life-giving power of your brain juice should logically still inhere in your skull. You could just grind up a skull and use the resulting powder as medicine, and indeed many people seem to have done exactly that. But the best way to get the power out is to take a human skull and grow moss on it, preferably by moonlight or starlight. The moss sucks the power of the vital spirits out of the skull, and you can then powder and eat the moss as a remedy. 

Plot seeds: 

• 'My loved one is sick! Bring me the powdered skull of something with really powerful brain-juice! Maybe a wizard or a dragon or something.'
• 'Actually, what we really need is their whole skull, so we can grow moss on it in the light of the full moon. That won't be a problem, will it?'
• 'And we need the brain-juice to be super-fresh, so you'll need to either find one that's just died, or kill one for us yourself. Remember - the skull must be intact! No headshots!'
• If your PCs end up building some kind of freakish garden full of moss growing on the skulls of everything they've ever killed, then so much the better!

Strangulation boosts skull quality: If someone dies by hanging or strangling, then at the moment of their death their life force will obviously be trapped inside their head, unable to escape down into their lungs. This means they will die with a head full of super-charged brain juice, making their skull (and any skull moss subsequently grown on it) extra-potent for medical purposes. There was consequently a brisk trade in the skulls of the hanged.

Plot seeds: 

• 'We need the skull of a [wizard/dragon/whatever] that died by strangulation. Any other death makes them useless to us. Here's a noose. Good luck!'
• 'Did you hear? They're hanging Horatius the Hexmaster tomorrow! Everyone's going to want his skull! We need a plan to get in first...'

Subdermal talismans: One particularly hardcore early modern soldier apparently wore a lump of skull moss under the skin of his own head, presumably by cutting a flap of skin off his forehead, pushing the moss under it, and then sewing up the wound and letting it heal. Probably the intention was to fortify his own skull with a double-dose of life-giving brain-juice. Apparently it worked, too, protecting him against being injured by sword-blows to the head. 

Plot seeds:

• PCs should absolutely be encouraged to sew lumps of skull-moss from all the scariest things they've killed under the skin of their own heads. Give them mechanical bonuses for doing it. You should be able to spot a real monster-slayer from all the weird scarred-over lumps bulging out of their foreheads.
• An enemy with a sufficiently impressive skull-moss collection might be almost unkillable, requiring PCs to specifically cut away their subdermal talismans to render them vulnerable to harm - tricky if they're also wearing a helmet!

Wound salve: According to the early modern doctrine of sympathy, a connection existed between a wound and the weapon that caused it. Rubbing a 'wound salve' made of human blood, fat, and skull moss on a bloodstained weapon would make the wounds caused with it heal, no matter how remote the victim might be.

Plot seeds:

• 'I can't treat this injury - the poison is far too powerful! Find me the knife that made it! I'll treat that, instead!'
• Wounds could be used as a means of ensuring loyalty at a distance. 'Oh, that wound looks pretty mortal, doesn't it? But as long as you keep making payments, I'll keep applying wound salve to the knife I just stabbed you with...'
• Sugg doesn't discuss it, but there was also believed to be a 'powder of sympathy' which, if stabbed with a weapon that had been previously used to wound someone and which was still stained with their blood, would cause that person to experience sudden pain, no matter where they were on Earth. The potential value of such powder as a weapon (or, indeed, as a long-distance signalling mechanism) should be obvious!

A cure for bad blood: To reconcile enemies, take blood from both of them and mix it with fertile soil, then grow herbs from the soil and feed the herbs to both enemies. This mixing of their life forces will soften the enmity between them. 

Plot seeds: 

• This scenario basically writes itself. 'Here's a bag of dirt, a bag of seeds, a sharp knife, a bottle, and a cookbook. Now get out there and end that feud!'
• Good luck convincing someone who knows you've been consorting with their mortal enemy that you've got a totally innocent reason for first cutting them open and stealing their blood, and then coming back and feeding them a bowl of herbs with questionable origins!

Blood lamps: Take a lamp, fill it with human blood drawn from one person, and then light it. The light from the lamp will reflect their condition - if it burns clear and bright they're probably OK, but if the flame wavers it means they're troubled, and if it goes out suddenly for no reason it means they've died. Presumably the lamp required periodic blood top-ups to renew its connection.

Plot seeds: 

• A ruler or spymaster might maintain whole rooms full of blood lamps, one for each person they want to keep tabs on. Plenty of opportunities for sabotage by spiking one person's lamp with someone else's blood!
• 'I know he says he's fine, but how's he really doing? Here - take this lamp, steal some of his blood, and pour it into it. I just want to make sure that he's actually OK...'

The Hand of Glory does appear in the book, but is surely too well-known to need writing up here.

Dead man's hand: One seventeenth-century doctor recommended treating piles and swellings with the sweat of a dying man. This was obviously a pretty time-limited resource - if he's genuinely dying, you've only got so long before he tips over into being dead - but luckily, there was an alternative: you could rub them better with a dead man's hand! (Presumably he had a preserved one that he used for this purpose? I imagine it mounted on a stick for easier rubbing...)

Plot seeds: 

• A particularly stubborn disease might need rubbing with a particularly powerful severed hand - perhaps one belonging to a dead cleric, wizard, etc. If you can grab some of his sweat while he's dying, that's a bonus!
• A curse or monster might inflict terrible swellings on those who oppose it, requiring the PCs to rub one another down with severed hands in mid-melee!

The executioner's other trade: Each human body was believed to possess a certain allocation of life force, which leaked away through age and sickness - thus the bodies of young people (especially healthy young men) who died suddenly by violence were held to possess great power, as so much unspent life force remained bottled up within them. Many early modern executioners thus carried on a thriving trade in the blood, bones, skin, and fat of their victims, all of which were believed to possess healing properties and even to be able to ward off black magic due to the life force with which they were charged. The fresher these body parts were, the better - people desperate for cures would sometimes come to beheadings with cups, ready catch and drink the victim's blood right at the foot of the scaffold. 

Plot seeds: 

• A corrupt magistrate might be in league with the local executioner, having specific people executed on trumped-up charges because he believes their body parts are likely to fetch a particularly good price on the open market.
• In a region plagued by witches, different families might compete fiercely for bits of each person executed (and agitate constantly for more executions), seeing such corpse-talismans as their best hope for protecting their families from dark sorcery.
• A PC suffering from a magical curse or disease might learn that their only cure is the freshly-spilled blood of an executed man. When's the next execution happening, again? And they'd better be ready to fight for a spot at the foot of the block - they won't be the only ones there waving empty tankards around and trying to guess the likely trajectories of arterial spray...
• PCs tend to inflict a lot of violence and untimely death - what if they start selling the blood and bones of their victims, too? How will the local executioners react to someone trying to break into 'their' trade?

Blood against age: Drinking the blood of the young and healthy was thought to grant strength to the old and infirm. Normally the 'donor' was paid, though rumours circulated that some rulers had young victims abducted and murdered for the sake of their life-giving blood.

In-game uses:

• 'No, I need someone really healthy. Get me... like... a barbarian champion, or something. Then tie him down so I can drink some of his blood!'
• Campaign start concept: the PCs are a bunch of random travellers kidnapped because their hardy, athletic frames make them ideal targets for the local lord's medical vampirism. Now they need to break out of his horrible castle before he drains them all dry like the ghastly, thirsty, geriatric monster he is. Good thing they're all such vigorous specimins!

A cure for flatulence: Tired of farting at inconvenient times? Try wearing gloves made of human skin! For some reason they're good for the joints, as well! 

(We can only hope that not too many people tried putting this one into practise, although the idea of human leather doesn't seem to have disturbed our ancestors as much as one might expect. Books continued to be intermittently bound in human skin well into the nineteenth century.)

Plot seeds:

• 'So what you need to do, right, is wait until he begins his big speech, and then pull his human-skin gloves off! His uncontrollable flatulence will finish his career on the spot!'

Preserved scalp of the Red Barn Murderer, Richard Corder, and a book of his crimes bound in his skin. From 1828.

Mummy: The crushed flesh of Ancient Egyptian mummies was believed to have many healing properties - so much so that demand for it soon outstripped supply. Egyptian corpse-merchants made up the shortfall first by substituting 'natural' mummies (the dried-out corpses of travellers killed in desert sandstorms) for the ancient kind, and then by just buying up as many bodies as they could, drying them out in giant ovens, and exporting them as 'mummies'. Paracelsian medicine maintained you could make a home-grown version just as good as an ancient one by taking the freshly-killed body of a young man who died by violence, leaving it out overnight, cutting it into strips, and macerating it in wine. So as well as moss-covered skulls, dead men's hands, human-skin gloves, crushed-up mummies, and pastes made from human blood and fat, the workshops of early modern doctors may also have contained shredded corpses in wine. For, y'know, medical reasons.

Plot seeds:

• 'Find me a genuine ancient mummy, with a pyramid and everything! Then crush it up so I can rub it on my injuries. You can keep the inevitable cursed gold for yourselves.'
• PCs may kill a lot of people, but they probably don't carry giant urns of wine around on adventures with them. So for an extra pay-off, why not drag all those corpses back to the local wine-merchant and have them made into medicine? Let's just hope no-one asks any awkward questions about why you're dragging all these hacked-up corpses around...
• With all these mummies being traded back and forth, how long can it be before an undead one gets mixed in with the rest, and wakes up just as it's being unloaded from the ship? Imagine how angry some ancient priest-king will be upon discovering he's narrowly avoided being ground up for medicinal purposes...
• Some early modern doctors also broke into barrow mounds in search of ancient dead people to grind up into medicine. Think of all the furious barrow wights!

The Black Doctors: Suspicion of the medical profession seems to have run deep in rural Scotland. There parents would warn their children of 'the Black Doctors', medical murderers who lurked around looking for potential victims. When they spotted a likely target they'd sneak up behind them and slap a black adhesive patch over their nose and mouth, suffocating them and preventing them from calling out, then drag them off to make healing broth from their bodies and bones. (Very similar stories circulated in early Victorian London, where medical murder-gangs were rumoured to garrote pedestrians and throw their bodies down through hidden hatches into ever-boiling cauldrons in the tunnels below.)

Plot seeds: 

• Hunt down the medical murder-crew preying on the local population! Then struggle with your conscience over what to do with all the cannibalistic healing broth you've just acquired from their hidden lair!
• Actually, those suffocation-patches sound pretty handy for adventurers, too...

City of Spires character art, by Autumnal Bloomer

One of the players in my City of Spires campaign recently commissioned a collection of character art for the party from Autumal Bloomer, of Tabletop Character Art. I thought they were absolutely adorable, and so - with the permission of both the original artist and the commissioner - I'm reposting them here. If you'd like images of your own D&D characters in a similar style then do give Autumnal's Etsy shop a look!

Barnabus, scribe turned sorcerer.

Barry, vagabond swamp magician.

Crabface, levitating crustacean pope.

Cyrus, Harvester of Men, and his knife-throwing murder-monkey Zari.

Darius the Organ Collector, with his offal bag and his pet raven, Giblet.

Ira, bee-swam hive-mind sorceress.

Jyll, crossbow-woman extraordinare. 

Lucius, long-suffering herbalist turned city administrator.

Marcus, evangelist of the Shining Ones.

Nikolai the distractingly sexy trapper.

Rattigan, rat-man energy-stave wielder.

Victor, heir of the Witch-Queens.

The whole damn crew!

Team Tsathogga / City of Spires setting primer, for Severed Fane

Severed Fane asked for a 'small campaign bible' for my current campaign, City of Spires, which shares a setting with my previous Team Tsathogga campaign. This campaign world started as a kitchen-sink-y science fantasy setting, suitable for running short, casual games over beer with players new to D&D. To my utter astonishment, I'm still running games set in the same world six years later, and it has now accumulated a staggering level of background lore. 

What follows is a very zoomed-out version of the setting. Obviously I can't include anything that my PCs haven't discovered yet, but this post provides a snapshot of the discovered regions of the setting as they currently stand, fifteen years of game-time after our first campaign began!

Deep history: City of Spires, like Team Tsathogga before it, takes place on the world originally known as Research Planet Alpha Three. It was colonised thousands of years ago by a spacefaring empire of serpent men, who used it as a research base for something called 'The God-Mind Project': this seems to have involved going to other planets, capturing the various god-like psychic 'hyper-intelligences' they found there, and bringing them to Alpha Three in a limbo state of [sleep / death / non-existence] for research purposes. Presumably this was eventually going to lead to some kind of pay-off for the empire, but their civilisation was destroyed in an interplanetary slave uprising before their work could come to fruition.

Even before their empire fell, the serpent-men on Alpha Three were not much involved in the day-to-day running of the colony. In the part of the planet in which the campaign is set, the various species they imported or created were ruled for them by three client states: the Zaant Imperium (ruled by island-dwelling ape-men), the Omen Kingdom (ruled by one-eyed giants), and the Nameless Empire (ruled by human magicians - its name is genuinely lost, having apparently been burnt out of history by some terrible magic). When the empire fell apart, a rebel space fleet obliterated the main power centres of these loyalist states from orbit. The rebels were then meant to land and liberate their enslaved subjects, but something happened and the liberating army never came. What went wrong with the rebellion, like the purpose of the God-Mind Project, has been one of the major mysteries behind both campaigns.

The game is set 1300-ish years later. 

The Chaos Ages: The destruction of the serpent man power structure, coupled with the non-appearance of the rebel army, ushered in an age of chaos. The magitech infrastructure of the old empires fell apart, and the world was ravaged by the various war machines, monsters, and bioweapons released, intentionally or otherwise, during the war. Power in many regions was seized by local warlords who managed to salvage fragments of functional magitechnology from the general conflagration: these included the Witch Queens, the Cannibal King, the Scavenger Lords of Aram, and the Kings of Ruin. Other regions fell under the sway of cults worshipping the alien hyper-intelligences kidnapped by the God-Mind project, whose containment systems were shattered by the war, leaving them leaking incoherent psychic distress into the surrounding world. This was a pretty grim era, remembered in most places as a dark age of strife now thankfully surpassed. 

The modern era: In the end the various Chaos Age despotisms mostly destroyed each other, or were overthrown by their subjects, or simply disintegrated when their scavenged relic technology finally degraded into uselessness. In their place came more stable polities, unified by pro-social religions such as the worship of the Bright Lady (a deified folk memory of the original rebel commander), the Shining Ones (pure-energy beings imprisoned by the serpent folk to power their magitech infrastructure), and the Golden Lotus (a transcendent embodiment of cosmic Law). The God-Mind cultists, who despite their formidable supernatural powers tended to be a crazy and dysfunctional bunch, were mostly driven into the wilderness.

Today a range of nations have arisen in the more habitable areas of the old empires. However, the areas beyond their borders are still littered with radioactive ruins, magical dead zones, and the lairs of weird creatures who escaped from the prisons and laboratories of the serpent men. 

Regions visited so far

Qelong: Based on the (excellent) supplement of the same name, this Khmer-inspired nation was saved from utter ruin by the PCs during the first campaign and is now staggering back towards something resembling normality, although vast swathes of the hinterland remain effectively post-apocalyptic. The Naga who empowers the river flowing through it was one of the victims of the God-Mind project, and is presumably imprisoned somewhere beneath the nation.

The Cold Marshes: Freezing expanse of marshlands inhabited by mutated marsh giants, and by human tribes who ride upon great swamp beasts and drive squirming masses of bog mummies into battle by beating on enchanted drums. The PCs in the first campaign kidnapped one and forced him to give them drumming lessons.

The Stonemoors: A windswept land of sheep-herding crofters brought to crisis when the perpetual snowfall ceased on its holy mountain, denying meltwater to its rivers and causing a serious drought. (This turned out to be due to the theft of an enchanted maiden from the mountain, who had been slumbering in suspended animation within a magitech casket.) In desperation, the hardest-hit clans turned to a cave-dwelling monster, the Blood Fiend, for power to extort food their neighbours. In the first campaign the PCs found the casket but kept it as a power-source for their flying ship, and 'solved' the problem by sending the Blood Fiend and his followers off to reclaim the Fiend's birthplace in the Grey Uplands.

The Plateau of Yeth: Inspired by Minotaurs of the Black Hills by Raging Swan Press. Plateau inhabited by minotaur clans, who arrived here as invaders, but whose power was broken by the terrible heat-weapons of the bat-folk who lived within the citadels of vitreous stone at the plateau's heart. Since then they have lived humble lives as tributaries of the bat-folk, whose skill in technology remains great, but whose numbers have now waned to the point that their citadels are almost empty. The PCs from the first campaign adopted one who had aspirations of reversing the decline of his people, but then apprenticed him to a mad scientist and forgot about him.

The Great Northern Wilderness: Vast expanse of hills and forests inhabited mostly by savage cave dwarves and mad vulture-men, who once ruled as death-priests of the necromantic Carrion Kingdom until their defeat by the bat-folk of the Plateau of Yeth. Hidden here are the Pools of Life (loosely based on Dwimmermount), an ancient complex where the serpent men originally created their 'demon' shock troopers. An attempt to duplicate this feat by a sorcerer in the Chaos Ages led to the creation of the minotaurs, who were the closest he could manage to the real thing, but who soon turned on their creator. Later still the Pools were looted by a magician in the service of the Church of the Bright Lady, who went rogue and used his stolen technology to create the creatures of the Grey Uplands. In the first campaign the PCs shut down the complex and its malfunctioning monster-engines, and led the creatures trapped within it back into the light.

The Grey Uplands: Remote upland region inhabited by the various monsters created using magitechnology stolen from the Pools of Life - including the Blood Fiend, who later ran off to the Stonemoors. In a castle at its centre lived an isolationist settlement of humans with transparent skin, bred for medical testing purposes. The PCs in the first campaign evacuated the humans to a haunted valley they'd found earlier, and sent the Blood Fiend and his followers back to reclaim their homeland.

The Purple Islands: Inspired by Islands of Purple-Haunted Putrescence. Taken over by the PCs during the first campaign, now the home of a motley assortment of humans, apemen, and undead practising a syncretic religion that the PCs invented. Contains a lot of relatively intact ruins due spending most of the last four hundred years outside the timestream. There was once a hidden Serpent Man science base here, but the PCs invaded it and killed most of them, with the ones that got away vanishing into the jungles of the south.

Reval: This temperate agricultural kingdom is the seat of the Church of the Bright Lady, which is run by mysteriously similar-looking 'Angels' and an all-female council of Elders who appear to be mutants of some kind. Site of Glasstown, home of the setting's leading magical academy, which has some kind of sinister dealings with the Mirror Men. Recently ravaged by a plague of 'demons' falling from the sky - these turned out to be genetically-engineered warriors created by the serpent men, who had been floating in orbit in their cryo-chambers since the empire's fall. In the first campaign the PCs discovered their ancient command codes, and managed to free some of them from servitude.

The Underworld: A vast expanse of caverns beneath Reval inhabited by many strange monsters, including goblins and toad-folk loyal to Tsathogga, who was one of the beings kidnapped for the God-Mind project and is presumably imprisoned somewhere down there. The dominant underworld powers were previously the Science Fungoids and the Navigator Houses of the Nightmare Sea (which I lifted from They Stalk the Underworld and False Machine, respectively), but in the first campaign the PCs inflicted terrible damage upon the Science Fungoids, allowing the Navigator Houses to establish trade relations with the surface and press everyone nearby into debt slavery.

The Grand Duchy: Cold northern nation, remote and agriculturally poor, a centre of the fur trade. Plagued for years by the Devourer cultists hidden in the mountains, who secretly served the serpent men of the Purple Islands, drawing liquid time from a sleeping titan buried in the earth (another God-Mind project victim) and using it to keep the Purple Islands isolated from the timestream. It was the fall of this cult that precipitated the reappearance of the Purple Islands and the rain of 'demons' in Reval. The PCs in the first campaign ransacked the cult temple, and adopted the undead cultists they accidentally awoke while doing so, leading them back to the Purple Islands. 

Ingra: A fertile land of shady, forested hills and valleys, once a stronghold of the Witch Queens until their defeat by the followers of the Bright Lady. Witch-cults and beastmen still lurk in its deeper forests. Its cities are famous as centres of learning, and especially renowned for their schools of medicine. A secret society, the Cult of the Divine Surgeon, commands the loyalty of many senior doctors and academics, revering an obscure golden-armed hero figure from the early Chaos Ages. 

Aram: Once a hub of trade between the eastern and western nations, now in decline since the Howlers cut off the roads to the east. Centre of the faith of the Shining Ones, whose holy city was once the capital of the Nameless Empire. Reliant on alchemically-modified warriors to keep the Howlers at bay. Its nobles telepathically link themselves with psychic golden serpents, and are served by Gearsmen, clockwork automata animated by human souls. The kingdom was wracked by internal discord until the PCs from the second campaign mostly resolved the situation.

The Southern Desert: Wandered by pastoralist tribes who live in fear of a terrible devil of the wastes, the Black Jinn, who dwells in the House of Tarnished Brass somewhere deep in the desert. This desert was once the home of a cult revering a god whose name is both 'Fire' and 'Hunger' - the ruins of its sacred sites still dot the desert, haunted by firenewts and other servitors of this vanished faith. Ancient obsidian warriors roam its southern reaches. This whole region was menaced by the sinister schemes of the Red Architect until the PCs in the second campaign blew her up. 

The Far Towns: Marshy region of isolationist farmers, recently brought back under the control of the City of Spires by the PCs from the second campaign. Threatened with annihilation by the Howlers until the PCs saved them with the aid of a giant robot snake and an order of ninja death cultists they founded by accident. Deep in the marshes live a matriarchy of hags, the remnants of the once-terrible dynasty of the Witch Queens, hiding from the world and served by loyal ogre clans who live in enormous halls woven from reeds. The PCs are currently working with them to find a way to neutralise the Howler threat.

Wastes of the Cannibal King: These once-fertile lands desertified as the weather control satellites of the Nameless Empire ceased to function - getting these back online has been a long-term goal of the PCs from the second campaign. In the Chaos Ages they were ruled by the fearsome Cannibal King, from whose tyranny the ancestors of the Tajarim fled long ago. Today they are dotted with haunted ruins, though the PCs have managed to clear out most of the worst ones.

The Howler Territories: Once a centre of sheep farming, this upland region was overrun by the Howlers - aggressive, territorial humanoids created by the dwindled Witch Queens, who hoped to use them as an army with which to reclaim their empire. The Howlers fled their makers and infested the hills and forests, driving out the human population and cutting off the roads between Aram and the City of Spires. The PCs from the second campaign have been trying to work out how to deal with them for years.

The Old Road and the City of Spires: Trade route that runs through the deserts north of the Pale Mountains, connecting Aram to the lands of the Tajarim and the kingdoms beyond. The major waystations along this road are the oasis-cities of Halwa, Wasat, and the City of Spires - this last is much the greatest of them, though it has fallen into accursed ruin since the closure of the road by the Howlers drove its merchant oligarchs to desperation and despair. In the days of the Nameless Empire the city was bombed flat, but immense underground complexes survived beneath the surface, and the treasures and horrors stashed within them have played a pivotal role in the city's history. The PCs in the second campaign seized power in a coup and now govern the City of Spires with the aid of a variety of freakish allies, including cyborg cultists, reformed diabolists, rat-man mechanics, and the remnants of the local nobility. 

The Pale Mountains: These towering mountains are fought over by hardy human clans and furry abhumans with a fondness for gunpowder, which they manufacture from stinking nitre pools. One peak was hollowed out by the Nameless Empire as the resting place for its honoured dead, and a vault beneath it held the egg of the Great Worm, a larval hyperintelligence which presumably had something to do with the God-Mind project. It has since hatched, giving rise to a worm-cult which the PCs from the second campaign destroyed so that they could turn the whole mountain into a worm farm for their giant rat-breeding side-project. 

The Lands Beyond: South of the Pale Mountains stretch lands that were once part of the Nameless Empire, but which were so devastated by bioweapon releases and orbital bombardments that civilisation here has never really recovered. One blasted city is inhabited by a nation of ghouls; other regions are home to wandering cattle-herding wagon tribes, or clans of hidden people who watch over the ruins of the doomed cities from which their ancestors once fled. Further south these lands are apparently ruled by lords who call themselves the Barons of Rust, but the PCs have never visited their territories. 

More encounters from the City of Spires: the uplands

Second in a series of three 1d10 encounter tables, one for each of the three biomes that my PCs have been most active in recently. This post covers the uplands. Feel free to roll on them next time you need to stock a random hex!

1: Wooded hills dotted with overgrown ruins. There are many springs and streams, here, but not all are safe to drink from: some ancient catastrophe seems to have poisoned many of the aquifers, and the area is shunned by travellers, who fear that drinking from the wrong stream could spell their death. These lands are inhabited by clans of hidden folk, who live in concealed settlements deep in the forests, and keep watch on outsiders from afar. They are the only ones who know where to find the ruined, poisoned cities that their ancestors once fled from, and of which they consider themselves the ancestral guardians. Today these ruins are roamed by ex-human monsters over whom the clans maintain a sorrowful watch, believing them to be all that remains of those who did not flee quickly enough when disaster came.

2: Uplands inhabited by furry, bestial abhumans, who roam the vallies by day and creep back to their lairs by night. They have learned how to make crude gunpowder using the nitrate pools in the foothills: it's vile stuff, coarse and smoky and impure, but the abhumans love their bombs and blunderbusses and use them fearlessly despite their tendency to explode in the faces of their wielders. By these means they carry on an ancestral feud with the human mountain clans (see 3), killing them when they can and nailing their turbans to the walls of their hillforts as trophies. Though brave in battle, they live in fear of the cruel ghosts said to haunt the mountains, who carry their victims off into the heights and leave them to perish in the snows. Their king dwells in a ruined clifftop castle, his armoury stuffed with prodigeous quantities of black powder. 

3: Mountains claimed by rival clans who live by herding and raiding from inaccessible villages hidden amidst the scree slopes, their independence guaranteed by the impassable nature of the terrain, which they navigate with the same agility as the mountain goats they herd. They are easily spotted afar off amidst the rocks and snow by the bright red fabric of their turbans, though these are grey withinside and are worn inside out when the mountain-men do not wish to be seen. They are great travellers, roaming far and wide across peaks that anyone else would regard as uncrossable, and serve an important role as traders and messengers between peoples whom the mountains would otherwise have severed utterly. Outsiders passing through their lands are usually seized and held prisoner for ransom, though the clans do this entirely without malice, regarding it simply as the immemorial custom of their people. 

4: These hills are infested with rebels, who raised their standards a few years back, dreaming of rallying the people and sweeping their king from his throne. That didn't happen, and the king's men drove them into the uplands - but then his armies were called away by troubles on the border, and the rebels have been here ever since, lurking in the forested valleys, unable to return home while they are regarded as enemies of the crown. Initially many of the local communities supported them, but with each year that passes the 'contributions' they level on the nearby villages looks more like simple theft, and they are well on their way to degenerating into a mere bandit gang with a fancy flag. Their leader is a charismatic aristocrat who has discovered, somewhat to her own surprise, that she much prefers her new life as a terrifying bandit queen to her old life as an admired and accomplished young noblewoman. Her spiritual advisor, a saintly healer-priest, is quite besotted with her, and continues to insist on the obvious righteousness of their cause even as their grand rebellion declines into mere brigandage. 

5: High in these hills stand isolated villages, whose inhabitants practise a syncretic faith that combines the local state religion with worship of their ancestors. Each family traces its lineage back to one of a set of founder-heroes, to whom they maintain household shrines - a practise that has repeatedly got them into trouble with the religious authorities, who regard them as borderline-heretical and mistreat them accordingly. Their men are famous for their courage in battle, claiming their bravery comes from the knowledge that their ancestors are watching over them. The most closely-held secret of these villages is that their ancestors really are watching over them, having gained a ghastly immortality from deals struck with a dark spirit of the desert: by day they sleep beneath their ancient burial mounds, but at night they squirm from the cracks of the ground to watch over their descendants from afar. After so many years the ancestors have become bestial and barely-human, with wild eyes, claw-like nails, and tough, fibrous flesh covered only by their black and matted hair. They are a mad and bloodthirsty bunch, but their descendants are fiercely devoted to the 'grandparents' who have protected and watched over them for so long. Only the elders of each community are entrusted with knowledge of the hidden burial grounds where the ancestors 'live', and are charged with keeping them supplied and placated with offerings of blood. 

6: These rocky, forested hills were once inhabited only by solitary trappers and hermits, but the lands upon which they border are now ruled by a cruel lord who overburdens his subjects with conscription and taxation. Driven to desperation, a growing number of people have simply abandoned their old lives and fled into the woods, joining fledgling communities nestled in remote valleys where they hope the lord's men will never find them. They have acquired a protector of sorts in the form of a malfunctioning clockwork warrior with bladed wings, who was unwisely revived from deactivation by another local ruler, and promptly mutinied when it was unable to match its current circumstances with the memories recorded in its fractured mechanical mind. Paranoid and unhinged, this automaton assumes any soldiers it sees have been sent to recapture it, and murders any who trespass into its domain - a fact which has so far stymied the local lord's efforts to reclaim his errant subjects. He is growing increasingly irate about this, and has offered large bounties for anyone capable of destroying this mysterious defender of the woods.

7: Officially these hills are the site of one of the local ruler's hunting lodges, and nothing else. Secretly, however, he also maintains a hidden prison here, in a low, mossy fort concealed by screens of trees. Here he stashes those inconvenient individuals whose disappearance he has deemed desirable, who are dragged to the prison by night and kept in ignorance of its location. They are watched over by snarling semi-human guards, who have been alchemically modified by the king's enchanters to ensure their ferocity and remove their ability to speak. Here many people are held who are generally believed to be dead, including high-status individuals implicated in a recent rebellion (see 4).

8: Half of an ancient castle clings to a mountainside, here - the other half lies smeared and tumbled across the slope below, having been toppled in an earthquake centuries before. Once the seat of some ancient tyrant, it is now the home of an exiled magician, banished from her homeland for dealings with unholy beings who promised her knowledge and power - an opportunity whose loss she still very much regrets. Since taking up residence here she's managed to refurbish the flying stone skull-throne that belonged to the castle's original owner, an airbourne symbol of power and terror that has allowed her to convince the inhabitants of the surrounding villages that she's a terrible witch whose wrath must be placated with offerings of food, herbs, and flowers. Although amoral in the pursuit of knowledge, she's otherwise a decent enough sort, and far from the fearful hag the villagers imagine her to be, even if her years of living in isolation are making her increasingly eccentric...

9: Long ago, this mountain was partially hollowed out by a now-fallen empire as the resting place of its most honoured dead. Whole sections of the complex have collapsed over the centuries: what remains is accessible only by clambering through ancient elevator shafts, and is still defended by zomborg guardians, who stand watch over endless rows of ancient, embalmed corpses in broken glass cases. Few were buried with much treasure, but the halls are an antiquarian's paradise, and the cumulative value of all those rings and earrings and belt buckles is considerable. In the uppermost part of the complex the embalmers themselves still rest in cryosleep, though various freezer malfunctions over the centuries has turned their brains to mush: if revived they will mostly come lurching from their chambers crazed and screaming, some of them brandishing still-dangerous cybernetic limbs. Only one of them, an apprentice embalmer wearing a protective amulet gifted to him by his sorcerer uncle, is really reviveable alive and sane, though he will be utterly distressed to learn that his civilisation has fallen while he slept. 

10: Beneath this mountain lies a great vault, built to contain the egg of the Great Worm. At some point after the fall of the civilisation that built it, the egg hatched, giving birth to a vast, blind worm-god crawling endlessly around its prison. At some point after that a band of luckless refugees chose the wrong cave in which to seek shelter, and ended up being converted into worm cultists by the psychic radiation of the monster-god below. Now they and their worm-man followers labour endlessly to dig their way through the innumerable tons of rubble that lie between them and their buried god: already they have dug close enough that anyone descending into the lower workings will be enveloped in the dreams of the Great Worm, a hallucinatory dream-world of alien jungles that the Worm recalls through ancestral memory, but has never actually seen. The cultists have unearthed many relics of the ancient world in the course of their excavations, and will eagerly trade these for sturdy pickaxes and shovels if the opportunity arises. Vulnerable travellers who are unable or unwilling to hook them up with good shovel suppliers will be abducted and dragged down below instead, where the Great Worm's psychic radiation will progressively transform them into worm cultists as well. 

Gender and 1990s comic books 4: Witchblade

Fourth and possibly last in this series, depending on whether I can muster the energy to do posts on any of Kabuki, Dawn, Aphrodite IX, or Fallen Angel. This one's just on gender, as Witchblade had little interest in race beyond the usual 1990s surfeit of honour-obsessed Yakuza assassins. Previous posts on Shi, Warrior Nun, and Ghost here, here, and here.

She's mostly forgotten now, but there was a time when Witchblade was a pretty big deal. Her comic ran for 185 issues, or 230-ish if you count the spin-offs and crossovers. It appeared monthly from 1995 all the way up to 2015: a run that dwarfs those of most of its competitors. Witchblade quickly became the tentpole of the 'Top Cow' comics universe, relegating older characters like CyberForce to the status of mere supporting cast. It had a manga series (2007-8) and an anime series (2006) and a two-season live action TV show (2001-2). And it provided a launchpad for Croatian artist Stjepan Šejić, who illustrated dozens of issues of Witchblade and its spin-offs between 2007 and 2013 before achieving online fame for his heartwarming lesbian BDSM romance comic, Sunstone (2014).

In later years, the creators of Witchblade were very open about the fact that they came up with her because Shi and Lady Death were the most successful characters in comics at the time, and they wanted a piece of the 'bad girl' action for themselves. However, unlike the other comics I've discussed in these posts, Witchblade was initially written by an actual woman, namely Christina Z, who wrote the first 39 issues. Its gender politics weren't as in-your-face as those of Ghost, but it was still pretty clearly about the difficulties of wielding female power in a world built on male violence and female victimhood. 

As the Witchblade armour shreds Sara's white ballgown, her empowered (and sexualised) 'bad girl' identity rises from the ruins of her 'good girl' femininity.

Witchblade had two opening plot arcs. The first arc - issues 1-8 - tells the story of Kenneth Irons, billionaire, sorcerer, and all-around embodiment of patriarchal power. Irons is obsessed with the Witchblade, an ancient gauntlet which grants great power to its wielder... but all of its previous wielders have been women, and any man who tries to wear it ends up maimed or dead. When it merges with NYPD detective Sara Pezzini, Irons choreographs a series of events to try to compel her to yield it up to him, in a not-very-subtle allegory for the way in which powerful men manipulate women into giving up the power that is rightfully theirs. Sara resists and reclaims the Witchblade, and Irons apparently falls to his death. 

The second arc - issues 9-14 - tells the story of Dannette Boucher, Irons's wife, who is basically a metaphor for the ways in which women become complicit in misogynistic power structures. Abjectly devoted to Irons, Dannette allowed him to experiment with implanting fragments of the Witchblade into her body, wilfully blind to the fact that he sees her sacrifices only as a means to enhance his own power. By the time he's done with her she's a monstrous mutant freak who constantly builds up power within herself, power that she can only get rid of by discharging it into other people, cooking them to death in the process. Realising that she's going to need a steady stream of victims, she demonstrates her internalised misogyny by setting up a modelling agency that keeps her supplied with desperate young women, whom she treats the same way Irons treated her: as disposable fodder. Sara hunts her down and reabsorbs her power into the Witchblade, killing her. 

Both stories set Sara up as a kind of champion of her gender, against the cruel men who seek to steal the power of women and the abject women who help them do it. The Witchblade, as its name implies, is the symbol of her power as a woman. (Pop-feminist Wiccan neopaganism was everywhere in the mid-1990s.) It connects her to a lineage of female resistance stretching back through time, embodied by all the previous women who carried the Witchblade in other times and places - a fairly obvious metaphor for the project of feminist history, which at the time was very invested in excavating histories of 'inspiring' women who could act as heroines and role models for new generations of girls. Interestingly, similar 'lineage' scenes - in which heroines have visions of all the previous women who have wielded the same power they currently hold - appear in both Magdalena and Warrior Nun Areala. Buffy, with its conceit that the power of the Slayer has passed from one woman to another throughout history, represented a minor variation on the same theme. 

So what qualifies Sara to wield the Witchblade, when most women and all men fail to do so? Simple: she's just stronger and braver and tougher than pretty much everyone else. She tells an anecdote at one point about how, when she was young, some boys encouraged her to climb a wall, and halfway up it she realised that they hadn't really done it because they wanted to see her climb: they'd just wanted to look up her skirt. She responds by climbing so far above them that their lustful leering is replaced by awe. But the limitations of this as a methodology of liberation are fairly obvious: it only works because Sara is stronger and braver than the boys who seek to humiliate her. That's great for her - but what about everyone else? What about all the girls who only possess average levels of strength and courage, the ones who will never be chosen by the Witchblade as its wielders? 

Sara frequently expresses contempt for women too weak to walk her path, including her own mother and sister. She scolds Dannette for allowing herself to become a victim, declaring: 'Unlike you, I'm not stupid. I'm not going to blame my plight on some man who screwed me over. I refuse to let anyone, man or woman or object, decide my fate.' (Dannette, as she lies dying, replies brokenly: 'I'm sorry, Sara. I wish I could have been as strong, as independent, as you.') The comic is thus led towards a kind of 'Great Woman Theory of History': advancement comes through the actions of a series of heroines, women badass enough to take on the patriarchal weight of history and kick the shit out of it. Ann Bonney is named as a previous wielder of the Witchblade, and so is Joan of Arc. Everyone else just sort of cowers and waits for the next heroine to come along. 

Sara as phallic woman, from Witchblade #1.

Even more than Ghost, Witchblade thus celebrates a version of femininity which wins power by being more masculine than the actual men. Sara Pezzini's only emotion is anger, her only mood is 'pissed off', and her only problem-solving technique is violence. Her favourite movie is Dirty Harry, she loves guns, she idolises her detective father, and when her partner is murdered she refuses to do anything as girly as talking to a counsellor: instead she works out her grief in true macho style, through boxing practise at the gym. However, whereas Ghost pairs its aggressive heroine with calmer, kinder men - 'beta heroes', as they were called in the romance literature of the time, before the internet poisoned the term beyond usefulness - Witchblade, like most female-authored media, pairs its alpha heroine with a man who is even more alpha than she is. 

Enter Kenneth's personal enforcer, Ian Nottingham, a sexy bad boy so over the top that only a woman would ever have written him. He has knee-length black hair and a British accent and he catches bullets with his bare hands and cuts cars in half with katanas. Ian actually does wield the Witchblade for a while, despite his gender - probably because, like most male love interests written by women and unlike the ultra-macho Kenneth, Ian actually has quite a lot of femme traits, including physical and emotional vulnerability, a history of abuse at the hands of patriarchal authority figures, and a tendency to wear floor-length gowns and pose with pink roses. Ultimately, though, even a gender-fluid man isn't woman enough to handle the Witchblade, and it is to Sara that it always finally returns.

Apparently Ian's pay is 'a high seven-figure salary and access to Irons's vast laser disc collection'. Adorkable.

Witchblade is also notable for being much kinkier than its competitors. The whole 'bad girl' genre owed its existence to the fact that, in those innocent days, internet pornography had not yet become ubiquitous, meaning that there was still a market of horny adolescent boys willing to pay two or three dollars a month for comic books full of pictures of mostly-naked ladies. Witchblade provided fan service in spades: every time Sara activates the Witchblade it rips her clothes up, providing endless excuses for her partial nudity. (Later writers dialled this up to absurd extremes.) But it also repeatedly featured tableaux of men and women in bondage gear or fetish fashion, and depicted Ian and Kenneth's relationship as deeply homoerotic and sadomasochistic: in one scene Kenneth even dresses Ian up in chains and a rubber gimp suit for a spot of water torture. Sadomasochism, of course, also structures Kenneth's relationship with Dannette, Dannette's relationship with her victims, and even Kenneth's relationship with the Witchblade itself, which is explicitly described as an abusive relationship in which the more the Witchblade hurts him, the more he desires it. Even Sara's triumph over Kenneth has a sado-masochistic edge to it, as Kenneth pleads with her to show him the full power of the Witchblade by hurting him as badly as she can. Sara refuses, which reminds me of the old joke: Sacher-Masoch meets De Sade in hell. 'Torture me!' begs Sacher-Masoch. De Sade thinks for a moment and then says: 'No.'

Ian Nottingham: assassin, anti-hero, gimp.

As a result, while they feature relatively little actual sex, Christina Z's Witchblade comics are much more sexually charged than, say, Shi. She's clearly interested in the inseperability of sex, power, and violence, and in the way that Kenneth, Ian, and Sara are all attracted to one another precisely because they keep trying to kill one another. She also has a much more grown-up understanding of what it feels like to be fascinated with someone else's body, as in the scene where Sara borrows Kenneth's coat and finds herself thinking about the warmth and strength of his body inside it. Sadly the art doesn't back her up on this, remaining fixated on busty women in revealing clothing to the virtual exclusion of all other forms of eroticism, although it did feature a surprising number of hot guys in bondage for a comic so clearly marketed at heterosexual boys. 

After the first fourteen issues, Christina Z's run carried on for another couple of years. She started lots of new plot threads - a cult, a conspiracy, Ian's backstory, Sara's childhood traumas - but never resolved any of them, and her run ultimately just trailed off into nothing. After that the comic passed into the hands of other authors and dissolved into stream-of-consciousness fanservice gibberish for a while, before going to David Wohl, who upped the fanservice even further but also tied up most of the dangling plot threads left over from Christina's run. Finally it went to Ron Marz, who wrote Witchblade from 2004 all the way to its final demise in 2015. Marz professionalised the comic: he gave it a consistent tone, cut back on the nudity and nonsense plotting, and tried hard to elevate it above its trashy 'bad girl' roots. But he also masculinised it, ditching Ian in favour of some generic 'nice guy' hunk, and dropping any attempt to engage with gender politics. 

I can't really claim that Witchblade is a good comic. Its art is amateurish compared to that of Shi or Ghost or Kabuki, and the writing is mostly pretty weak. Its 'solutions' to the social problems that it identifies are not exactly sophisticated: when Witchblade had a crossover with Darkminds in 2000, it takes the more emotionally intelligent Nakiko just a few pages to realise that the Witchblade's all-violence-all-the-time methods ultimately mark it out as just another abuser, and that what its wielder really needs is a supportive female friend and a good hug. But for its first 14 issues Witchblade is at least an interesting comic, worthy of note for the way in which both its author and its heroine struggle to find ways of using the 'bad girl' formula to assert themselves within a male-dominated world. That their answers are necessarily imperfect does not lessen the significance of the fact that they asked the questions in the first place!

More encounters from the City of Spires: the desert

 A year ago I posted tables of 72 encounters from the City of Spires, as a convenient means of recycling material from my ongoing campaign into something that other people might find gameable. As the game is still going on (and now approaching the two-and-a-half year mark, or five and a half if it's considered as an extension of the previous Team Tsathogga campaign set in the same world), I thought it was probably time for an update.

Since taking over their city the PCs have been spending more and more time in the outlying wildernesses, so I'm going to be doing three 1d10 encounter tables, one for each of the three biomes they've been most active in. This post covers the desert. Feel free to roll on them next time you need to stock a random hex!

Deserts

1: Desert expanse roamed by nomad pastoralists, who travel between watering holes with their herds of goats, sheep, camels, and horses. Harsh experience has taught them to live in dread of the evil spirits of the desert, to whose wicked deeds they attribute all their misfortunes. A thriving market in protective charms, spells, and talismans exist among them, and the clans compete fiercely over those rare men and women believed holy enough to protect them from the devils of the wastes.

2: A trade road winds alongside the wadi here, watched over by linen-swathed desert giants, ten feet tall, leaning on gigantic spears. They are few in number and serve a human king, acting as his shock troops and honour guards, and demanding a toll from all who pass. The king's palace stands nearby, an ancient building divided awkwardly into human-scale and giant-scale areas. The giants are long-lived and more loyal to the palace than the man who rules it, transferring their loyalties each time it changes hands with little more than a shrug of their colossal shoulders. 

3: City built by the side of a wide, shallow oasis, surrounded by stands of date palms and overgrown with sedges. The people of the city are famous for the manufacture of papyrus: in the heat of the day they sleep, and conduct much of their business by night, in streets lit by innumerable papyrus lanterns. Their ruler is a once-vigorous man, now sinking swiftly into indolence. In the dusty caravanserais the traders mutter that the desert clans no longer fear him, and that their demands grow more outrageous every year. 

4: Here the desert clans have been driven from their watering holes by an aggressive race of diminutive lizard folk, who came surging suddenly out of the desert and have since been conducting excavations of certain long-abandoned buildings of baked brick that lie nearby. Their diggings have revealed walls painted with ancient frescoes, depicting beautiful androgynous figures dancing between pillars of fire. The lizardfolk are mute, and exactly where they came from and what they are looking for remains deeply unclear. The nomads who claim these lands would very much like them to be driven back into the wastes from whence they came.

5: A ruined city deep in the desert, raised up on a rocky plateau. In its central plaza a holy fire burns eternally, huge and hot enough to burn a man to ash. Any who come here are met by a white-robed spirit who asks if they come as pilgrims: any who say no are driven from the city by swarms of mute, dwarfish lizardfolk (see 4) who come pouring from the ruins to aid her. If they affirm that they are pilgrims then she will ask which of them is the celebrant: whomever is chosen will then be invited to step into the flame and be burned to death, so that their fellow pilgrims may ritually partake of their charred remains in the name of her god, whose name is both Fire and Hunger. Anyone who actually goes through with the whole ghastly rite will win the favour of her ancient divinity. A being of pure ritual, the spirit is easily confused by anyone who goes off-script, and quick-thinking PCs may be able to capitalise on this in order to escape. 

6: Desolate dunes roamed by desert zombies, dehydrated animated corpses with flames flickering in their hollow eye sockets. They guard the lair of an undead sorceress, whose body animates only in darkness: in the light she is merely a corpse, clad in tattered crimson rags. During the day she lies buried beneath the sands, her tame bone worm coiled around her, but when night falls she and her mount rise up to resume their unholy work. In life she was a great architect, and knows many secrets of the famous palaces and temples of the world, their hidden tunnels and concealed chambers, having been responsible for designing many of them herself. Now she seeks the resting place of an ancient god once revered in these lands (see 5), confident that she would be able to tap its power for her own purposes if only she could build a temple over it in just the right way...

7: Dusty hilltop ruin encircled by bandit camps. The bandits chased a bunch of wizards in there a while back, and have been keeping watch on the ruins ever since to make sure they don't sneak out again. They haven't gone in after them because the wizards, in desperation, activated the slumbering stone golems with which the ruins are littered: now they cower in the ruins of the very manufactory in which the golems were once mass-produced, relying for protection on the ancient ward-lines that once kept them out of the manager's offices. The wizards have no way of controlling the golems, which now randomly attack anyone entering the ruins, though they're very much hoping to come up with one before they all starve to death...

8: Oasis city ruled by an aristocracy with ash-grey skin, marking them out at a glance from the general populace, who have normal dark-brown skin tones. Each year, the city's emir makes ritual offerings to the spirits of the oasis to ensure the prosperity of his city. He claims to enjoy the favour of the spirits, and those who defy him are dragged off into the night by the Misery Men: anonymous enforcers with jet-black eyes, their presence announced by a cold, damp smell like the bottom of a half-dried well. Among the people, mentioning (or even acknowledging the existence of) the Misery Men is believed to incur extreme misfortune. The remains of an immense rusted tank by the side of the oasis suggest that something was once contained here, although whatever it was must have leaked into the oasis long ago... (No further details - my PCs haven't got to the bottom of this one, yet!)

9: Wasteland haunted by clawed, burrowing humanoid scavengers the colour of charred meat, who sense tremors through the earth and dig their way up to sieze unwary travellers by night.  Though savage and feral, they are smaller than men and do not like to attack except by ambush. The smell of cooking meat will attract them from miles away, and a funeral pyre will bring them in swarms. If killed the bones within them are found to be black and charred, as though burned by some terrible fire, and are filled with cinders where their marrow should be.

10: The desert clans shun this region, roamed as it is by damaged but still-functional obsidian warriors, huge and mighty and almost-indestructible. Beyond them, in the heat-haze, can be glimpsed the bulk of an immense structure half-buried in the desert sands, its walls riven in ages past by some unimaginable violence. Sometimes the wind carries strange sounds from this building - distorted voices, hollow booming, the scrape of metal on stone - but since the fall of the cult of he whose name is both Fire and Hunger (see 5), none have successfully run the gauntlet of the obsidian warriors to discover what lies within... (No further details on this one - my PCs haven't been inside!)