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!

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. 

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!)

Remnants of the Nameless Empire: more monsters from City of Spires

More monsters that my players have run into during my current City of Spires campaign. These ones lean further into science fantasy, as one of the key conceits of the campaign is that it's a fantasy setting built on top of the ruins of an SF setting. The deeper you dig the more likely you are to start running into all the malfunctioning cyborgs and radiation zombies left over from previous ages of the world. 

Worm Cultists: AC leather, 1-5 HD, damage by weapon, morale 7.

Long ago, the Nameless Empire procured the egg of an alien worm-god for study. At some point after the fall of their empire, this egg hatched, giving birth to the enormous alien monster known as the Great Worm. It remains trapped to this day in the subterranean vault it was originally stored in as an egg, but its dreams and magical radiation are powerful enough to bleed into the world outside.

Worm cultists are those wretched individuals who strayed too close to the Great Worm's prison, and found their minds overwhelmed by the power of its alien dreams. Compelled by its will, they dig themselves as deeply as they can into the rock and earth that entomb it, bathing themselves in the bizarre radiation that it emits until they are utterly changed, body and soul. Their bodies and limbs become slimy and segmented, studded with bristly hairs that allow them to sense vibrations in the earth and air. They can still just about speak, though their voices sound as though they're gargling with slime. At the apex of their transformation they tear out their own eyes, their empty sockets becoming hollow, slime-filled pits in what were once their faces. Mortal sight would only be a distraction from their new senses.

Worm cultists retain human-level intelligence, though the submersion of their minds in the dreams of the Great Worm tends to make them rather unhinged. They are utterly devoted to the Worm, and work tirelessly to free it from its prison. Their boneless bodies can squeeze through any space wide enough for them to get their heads through, and they can tunnel efficiently through soil and dirt. Their bristling hairs allow them to sense motion, making them hard to evade: they can also instinctively sense radiation, including the background radiation found throughout nature, and can recognise different substances from their differing radiation signatures. They are still blind, however, and cannot easily distinguish between e.g. one human and another unless they hear them speak. Drying out is very painful for them, and they take an additional 50% damage from heat- or fire-based attacks. They prefer to remain in cool, wet, dark locations whenever possible.

All worm cultists double as priests of the Great Worm, and have the spellcasting abilities of a cleric with levels equal to their hit dice. 

Image by Artur Owsnicki, after an image by Devon Cady-Lee.

Worm Men: AC leather, 2 HD, damage by weapon, morale 6.

This is what worm cultists eventually degenerate into after soaking up too much magical radiation. Their legs atrophy into vestigial stubs, while their arms warp into long, boneless, wriggling tendrils. Any hint of neck or waist disappears: apart from their arms, they now resemble giant segmented worms with distorted human faces at their apex. Their radiation-fried brains are only semi-intelligent, and they cannot speak. They have the same sensory abilities as worm cultists, and are even more proficient as tunnellers, but lack their spellcasting powers. They usually fight with crude clubs or spears.

Worm men are hermaphroditic, and are capable of breeding with one another, though their irradiated state means that their fertility is very low. They instinctively obey worm cultists, who use them as warriors, labourers, and guardians.

Image by Patrick Reinemann

Zomborgs: AC chain and shield, 3 HD, damage 2d6 (blade hands) or 4d6 (energy blaster), morale N/A.

Cybernetic zombies built by the Nameless Empire to guard the resting places of its honoured dead. They resemble embalmed corpses held upright by cybernetic skeletons: their right arms terminate in a variety of blades (to allow them to assist with embalming work), while their left hands have been replaced with short range energy blasters. These blasters require three rounds to reload between shots - zomborgs will try to keep their distance while their blasters are reloading, but if their enemies close with them they will fight with their blade-hands, instead.

Zomborgs sense intruders via motion sensors built into their eye sockets, whose blinking red lights are easily spotted in the darkness of their ruined vaults. They have no other senses, and are oblivious to noises, smells, lights, etc. They have no intelligence beyond their preprogrammed 'guard-hunt-kill' and 'autopsy-embalm-preserve' routines, and are incapable of learning from experience. (My PCs mostly dealt with them by luring them into traps.)

Stranglers: AC chain, 1 HD, damage 1d4 / 1d4 (2 claws), morale 5.

These hairless subterranean humanoids are a deliberately devolved caste of engineer-slaves created by the Nameless Empire. Their stature is dwarfish, averaging only 4' high, but their bodies are lithe and muscular and they have freakishly long arms ending in long, clever, multi-jointed fingers. They can see in the dark, and underground they are as agile as monkeys, effortlessly climbing and swinging along walls and ceilings. They are capable of squeezing their bodies through narrow cracks like contortionists, and their nests are usually found in spaces only reachable via fissures so narrow that only they can squeeze through them. They possess only animal-level intelligence, but have an instinctive knack for mechanical labour if commanded to undertake it via the correct machine-noise signals.

Stranglers get their name from their secondary function, which is to protect the areas they inhabit against intrusions from unauthorised personnel, i.e. anyone without the correct subdermal microchips. When they sense intruders into their ruined underground complexes they will creep stealthily down upon them, aiming to sever ropes, douse lights, and otherwise render their victims blind and vulnerable: then they will leap down upon them in chattering swarms and try to claw and strangle the life from them. If a Strangler hits the same target with both claws in the same round it has its hands wrapped around their throat, and will proceed to throttle them for an automatic 2d4 damage per round in place of its normal attacks until either it is defeated or its victim dies. (Obviously, this special attack only works on enemies who have necks and need to breathe.) They attack only from ambush and in packs, and will retreat if faced with determined opposition. 

Stranglers are usually found in the wreckage of Nameless Empire factories and laboratories, some of which still house semi-functional AIs dozing through the centuries on sleep mode. Explorers who manage to fight their way through the Stranglers and contact such an AI may be able to persuade it to microchip them if they can convince it that they are there on legitimate imperial business, though the AIs may demand that they perform other tasks in return in service of their long-dead empire.

Desert Monsters from the City of Spires

A few monsters who have turned up in my current campaign. I think my PCs have figured all these guys out well enough for me to safely list them here.

Image by Akihiro Tsuji

Smoke Giant: AC chain, 4 HD, 2 fists (1d8 damage), morale N/A.

Smoke giants are artificial guardians created by a long-fallen civilisation. In their dormant state, they just look like a thick covering of soot, coating everything in the room they guard. When they are disturbed, however, the soot flies up into the air and rapidly coheres into an ogre-sized humanoid monster, jet-black from head to foot. The giant furiously attacks anything that enters its protected area. If reduced to less than half HP, or if the trespassers depart, it explodes apart into a cloud of choking black smoke, which gradually settles to the ground as thick black soot. In smoke/soot form it recovers 1 HP per round until fully healed, at which point it will cohere back into humanoid form if the trespassers are still present. If reduced to 0 HP it explodes into smoke and does not recohere. 

If a dormant smoke giant can be collected into a container while in soot form without triggering it, then the resulting container can be used as a missile weapon: the moment it is opened, the giant will explode out of it to attack anyone nearby. Smoke giants are sometimes found still lying dormant inside their original storage crates.

(Once my PCs worked these guys out, they dealt with them by building an improvised suction pump attached to a hose, which they used to suck up the soot a little at a time from outside the giant's trigger radius. Then they mixed the soot with clay and baked it into bricks, effectively imprisoning the giant. The smoke giant's attempts to reform itself from inside the bricks makes them vibrate violently whenever anyone approaches, allowing them to function as an intruder alarm system.)

Locust Spirits: AC chain + shield, 4 HD, 1 claw (1d8 damage + strength drain), morale 8.

These awful famine-spirits look like shadowy humanoid locusts. They are only semi-corporeal and take half damage from non-magical attacks. Anyone struck by their claws is filled with terrible weakness, as though they hadn't eaten for days, and loses 1d6 strength - this strength returns at the rate of one point for each decent meal they eat. Anyone falling to Strength 0 is reduced to an emaciated corpse, apparently the victim of months of starvation. 

Locust spirits are only semi-intelligent, and can usually be found as servitors to more powerful spirits or dark magicians.

Jackal Knights: AC plate, 6 HD, 1 greatsword (3d6 damage) or 1 bite (1d6 damage), morale 9. 

These terrible demon-warriors of the desert can take the form either of a jackal (in which case they have a bite attack, and can run much more swiftly than a human), an armoured jackal-headed warrior (in which case they have a greatsword attack, and move at human speed), or a dust devil (in which case they have no attacks, but are immune to non-magical attacks, can move at much greater than human speed, and can blow through narrow spaces). Shifting between forms takes one round. 

In jackal or warrior form, they have long, lashing razor-sharp tongues, with which they can attempt to open the arteries of one opponent per round in melee combat. Unless their target is wearing armour on their neck, wrists, and thighs, they must save each round or else be cut, bleeding out for 1d6 damage per round. Spending a full round bandaging the wound allows for a new save to stop the damage. Any healing magic stops the bleeding instantly.

Jackal Knights register as magical to Detect Magic, and casting Dispel Magic on a Jackal Knight in dust-devil form will force it to resume one of its corporeal forms.

Desert Zombies: AC leather, 2 HD, 1 claw (1d6 damage), morale N/A.

This one was adapted from a Pathfinder monster. Created from the dehydrated corpses of unfortunates who perished in the wastes, these zombies resemble dried-out desert mummies aside from the candle-like flames that flicker inside their hollow eye-sockets. By day they slumber beneath the desert sands, quiescent unless disturbed, but by night they wander the in search of prey, their eye-flames visible from afar off in the darkness of the desert night. If they hit anyone in melee, their target must save or be grabbed and pulled in close enough for the zombie to exhale its dessicating breath all over its victim, causing an additional 1d8 damage in spontaneous dehydration. 

The flames in their eye-sockets serve as their eyes: immersion in sand cannot extinguish them, but immersion in water can. A zombie whose eye-flames are extinguished is effectively blind, and will simply wander randomly. If it is still animate by the following dawn, the flames in its eye-sockets reignite the moment the sun comes over the horizon.

Escape from the Ghoul Queen!

This post is about a situation that arose in a recent session. One of my players suggested that I post it, and I thought it might be of interest as a case study of in-game problem-solving.

The situation was as follows: the party had arranged a meeting with the fearsome Ghoul Queen, in order to negotiate future trade arrangements with her people. The meeting was to take place a few miles from the ruined city she ruled over, one hour before dawn. The PCs really wanted to meet with the Queen, but they were also aware that she was very, very dangerous, and they needed to have an escape plan that would allow them to flee the meeting in case she decided to abduct or murder them, instead.

Image by Sam Kennedy

The Problem Stated:

• The meeting takes place in a blasted, rocky desert, with quite a lot of cover.
• The Ghoul Queen is accompanied by a large retinue of ghouls, numerous enough that fighting them is not a realistic option. 
• The Ghoul Queen is known to have hidden dozens of ghouls in concealed pits around the meeting area, so simply running is likely to be difficult - the ghouls will pop out and grab anyone who tries to flee. 
• Ghouls are relatively weak individually, but have paralytic claws, so anyone attacked by a whole bunch of them is going to end up paralysed. They have no effective missile weapons.
• Ghouls have a sharp sense of smell, and can see in the dark.
• Ghouls hate sunlight, and will retreat underground at dawn.

The party's resources

• Two clerics, whose spells include Detect Evil, Light, and Levitation (self only, long duration, permits vertical movement only). One of these clerics is a crab mutant who can breathe underwater.
• Three magic-users, whose spells include Illusion (visual only, lasts as long as the caster continues to concentrate), Ghost Sound (creates audio effects, lasts as long as the caster continues to concentrate), Agility (boosts dexterity), Spider Climb, Gaseous Form (self only, short duration), and Gust of Wind. 
• Five fighters, skilled in archery, riding, tracking, stealth, camouflage, and concealment.
• One ratman, who can see in the dark and has an even better sense of smell than the ghouls.
• Three trained giant rats, saddled and ready for use as mounts or pack animals.
• A ring of invisibility to undead. (Does not conceal smell.)
• An amulet that grants perfect night vision as long as the moon is in the sky.
• A bag of half-rotten internal organs.
• Quantities of rope and strong metal wire.
• Survival gear: tents, bedrolls, supplies, etc. 
• One spyglass.
• An animated prison block, 20' cube on stompy stone legs, which the PCs can crudely steer using an undead lizard-monkey on a fishing rod, but which makes huge amounts of noise and stops dead at random and unpredictable intervals.
• One preternaturally intelligent trained raven. 

Take a look through the lists. Think about the situation.  How would you solve it?

Here's what the party did. 

• Step 1: Two fighters ride out stealthily on giant rats and conceal them behind rocks several hundred feet from the meeting place, well outside sniffing distance. 
• Step 2: Two magic-users smear themselves with offal from the bag, making themselves smell intensely distracting to ghouls. The clerics, meanwhile, wash themselves to minimise their scent as best they can. 
• Step 3: One of the clerics puts on the ring of invisibility to undead.
• Step 4: One of the magic-users casts Illusion and Agility on the non-invisible cleric - Illusion to make it seem as though there's no-one there (an illusion of empty ground), and Agility to allow them to move more stealthily.
• Step 5: The two clerics and two magic-users go to meet with the Ghoul Queen, although the ghouls only see the two magic-users: one cleric is invisible, one is covered by illusions, and the smell on the magic-users is strong enough to distract the ghouls from the smell of the unseen clerics. Each cleric carries a blanket and a rope.
• Step 6: As they reach the meeting spot, the two clerics quietly cast Levitate. They then levitate straight up until they are hovering, unseen, above the meeting, holding blankets in their hands. 
• Step 7: One magic-user conducts the negotiations while the other concentrates on keeping the levitating clerics hidden behind an illusion of empty night sky.
• Step 8: When the Ghoul Queen gives orders for them to be seized, the magic-users both cast Gaseous Form, passing harmlessly through the grabbing claws of the ghouls, and drift straight upwards until they reach the levitating clerics.
• Step 9: The magic-users rematerialise behind/on top of the levitating clerics, clinging to their backs and shoulders. The clerics shake out the blankets so that each cleric holds the bottom of their blanket and each magic-user grabs the top, holding them vertically in front of them like sails. The ghouls swarm below, but are unable to attack them while they are airbourne.
• Step 10: The magic-users cast Gust of Wind spells directly into the blankets they are holding and cling on for dear life as they, and the levitating clerics they are riding on, are propelled hundreds of feet through the air until they are vertically above the spot where the fighters and the giant rats are hiding. The ghouls pursue, but the PCs have a substantial headstart.
• Step 11: The fighters break cover and ride out to meet them. The clerics let go of the blankets and each drop one end of their coil of rope, which the fighters catch and tie onto the saddles of their giant rats.
• Step 12: The fighters spur on their giant rats and ride away from the ghouls as fast as possible, heading east towards the rising sun, dragging the levitating clerics behind them on the ends of their ropes, each one with a magic-user still clinging onto their backs and shoulders.
• Step 13: Dawn begins to break and forces the ghouls to abandon the pursuit, allowing the PCs to circle back to their main camp under the cover of daylight. By evening they are many miles away. 

The players were pretty happy with this triumph of lunatic ingenuity. I bet there were other solutions possible, though. They didn't even use the raven in this one.

Feel free to post your own solutions in the comments below!

72 encounters from the City of Spires

 Apologies for the two month silence. The Covid situation has fucked things up. 

Anyway. The City of Spires campaign is still going strong, and will soon rival my previous Team Tsathogga game for the sheer number of sessions played. The PCs took over their city and have now transitioned from ruin-crawling scavengers to ambitious oligarchs, rebuilding infrastructure and establishing trade routes and clearing out the last of the old monsters from what they now regard as their territory. In the process they have encountered so much stuff that, as the Gawain poet put it, 'Hit were to tore for to telle of þe tenþe dole' - so, instead of boring everyone with campaign write-ups that no-one cares about, I've made a list of all the random nonsense that the PCs have stumbled into over the last eighteen months and put it on a series of tables instead. Feel free to roll on it next time you need a random encounter in the crumbling fantasy city-state of your choice!

(And, yes, everything on this list has appeared in the campaign. The PCs managed to make friends with most of it.)

Roll 1d6 + 1d12: 1d6 for category, 1d12 for encounter

Categories

1. Tombs and Tunnels
2. Magical remnants
3. Trade and crime
4. Encampments and settlements
5. Monsters
6. Power players

1: Tomb and Tunnels

1. Disintegrating necropolis of blue-tiled mausolea infested with burly, stinking ape-like creatures covered in matted purple fur. They lair in desecrated burial chapels and eat carrion.
2. A tottering tower in which nests a great winged beast, with poisonous breath and skin like lead. It was once the pet of a tyrant-king who now lies buried beneath its tower, clutching his cruel law-code in his huge, skeletal hands. His enchanted crown fills the wearer with unnatural hungers: the more that these are slaked, the larger and stronger the wearer grows, and the more powerful their urges become. 
3. A dusty graveyard in which the sense of misfortune is almost palpable, haunted by shadowy beings that can choose to appear as wild dogs, or as dust-clouds, or as armoured men with the heads of jackals. In a pit at its heart lives a grotesque, giggling ape-demon, which knows the locations of many hidden treasures but takes a sadistic pleasure in toying with and tormenting those desperate enough to come to it for aid.
4. Ancient burial chamber with a stone sarcophagus at its centre, its walls riddled with cracks and holes. If the sarcophagus is disturbed then an awful protoplasmic slime will surge up from within, attempting to grab hold of someone and crawl inside them just as it once did to the unfortunate soul buried here, using them for its own alien purposes: meanwhile, a small army of tiny, wizened, mummified lizard-creatures will come pouring from the holes in the walls, intent on tearing apart anything in the chamber. (They are immune to the slime, and were placed here to watch over it.) Magical treasures of the ancient world await anyone capable of besting both threats.
5. Immense tomb surrounded by a high wall, covered in layer upon layer of scratched signs warding against misfortune. Here, according to local tradition, a cruel king was once buried, and the people still regard it as a place of ill-omen, blaming all their misfortunes on his restless and vindictive ghost. Anyone listening at its lead-sealed door can hear something flapping and fluttering around inside it. (No further details on this one - my PCs haven't been in yet!)
6. Immense pit leading down to a vast, vaulted concrete chamber where immense iron serpents hang coiled on the walls, the slumbering war machines of a now-vanished civilisation. One of them is still semi-active and will attempt to repel intruders, turning its huge spotlight eyes upon them, its speakers blaring warnings in long-dead languages as it slithers forwards to attack.
7. Sinkhole leads down into tunnels infested with long-armed, semi-intelligent subterranean humanoids with coal-black skin, who scurry across walls and ceilings like spiders and reach down to strangle intruders. Anyone who can make it past them will reach a complex containing the blinking, semi-functional terminals of ancient artificial intelligences, which - if contacted - will be enraged to learn that the civilisation that built them has fallen into ruin while they slept.
8. Recently-unearthed tunnels lead to battered subterranean laboratory guarded by animated skeletons wearing tattered military uniforms and wielding basket-hilted swords. Beyond lie flickering electric lights, bloodstained cages, scattered bones, and a computer monitor playing a looped distress signal on continuous repeat. 
9. Tunnels inhabited by a pale young woman with silvery circuitry imprinted across her skin, marking her as the priestess of a being she calls 'the Black Messenger', whom she believes to be a long-forgotten underworld god of journeys. The Messenger is actually the still semi-functional corporate AI of the city's old maglev subway system, which is extremely anxious about the fact that its trains are running thousands of years behind schedule, and would very much like its rubble-choked tunnels cleared before the negative customer feedback starts coming in.
10. Half-flooded ruin of a once-noble mansion. The family that dwelt here fought to the last man in defence of their homes, and their furious ghosts will animate their shattered bones to avenge themselves on would-be trespassers and thieves.
11. Buildings with doors nailed shut from the inside, haunted by the anguished ghosts of those who starved to death within them. 
12. Nailed-shut trapdoor in a chapel basement leads down to a vault whose walls are lined with skeletons resting in alcoves. A bronze bell hangs from the ceiling, and a pair of engraved brass doors lead to a chamber in which a dead princess lies in skeletal splendour on her bier, flanked by the bones of her handmaidens and bodyguards. Each night at dusk one of the skeletons animates and rings the bell, causing the princess and her attendants to rise from their tombs for their nightly prayers before returning to their eternal rest: the tolling of this bell is faintly audible in the chapel above. The princess is a pious soul who will be horrified to hear of the state of the city, and eager to help restore it to glory, but her undead attendants will not allow her to leave. 

2: Magical remnants

1. Fortified estate of a sorceress still guarded by clumsily-built magical servitors with emaciated bodies and shining eyes. They refuse to stand down until they receive orders from their maker, who has spent the last eleven years in suspended animation in a meditation chamber within the estate, watched over by a terrible invisible guardian.
2. The secret study of some vanished magician contains maps showing the way to a half-legendary mountain where the ancients embalmed and buried their most esteemed dead, accompanied by disturbingly-well-developed plans for retrieving the corpses of the sages of antiquity and wringing their secrets out of them by magical force. 
3. Wrecked home of a long-dead wizard. In a secret chamber beneath seven flaming demons sit patiently inside a summoning circle, singing softly to themselves, waiting for the inevitable earthquake.
4. Sealed house containing the silk-robed bones of a dead magician, whose pack contains stoppered bone scroll cases documenting his unwise excavations beneath the city, and the ancient secrets that he discovered there. 
5. Abandoned estate inhabited by spooky extended family with innate magical gifts, who tell far-fetched stories about how their ancestress emerged from the impenetrable swamplands of the west, no doubt a fugitive princess or something equally romantic. For a sufficient bribe of alcohol their matriarch can be persuaded to reveal the location of their ancestress's grave, but may neglect to mention its undead guardians.
6. A woman with skin the colour of ash searches the ruins, surrounded always by the smell of smoke. Feral creatures that might once have been human scamper at her heels like dogs, covered in masses of tangled black hair. She claims to be searching for magical items that will help her reunite her 'family', and offers to share arcane secrets with anyone who will help her in her work.
7. Shattered laboratory cloaked in fast-growing stranglevines, leaking weird chemicals into the surrounding soil and water, causing the local vermin to grow to prodigious size. If the chemicals could be gathered up and deployed in less concentrated forms they would be immensely valuable as fertiliser.
8. An enchanted tree with shining leaves that drives all those who pass beneath its branches mad with rage, surrounded by the scattered bones of animals that killed one another in their fury.
9. Heavily fortified building full of ancient alchemical machines, where the rulers of the city convert their favoured henchmen into scale-covered mutants, the better to enforce their cruel edicts upon the people. Those whose minds or bodies are left too warped to be useful are kept in pits, mad and bestial, held back for use as an emergency attack force in times of need.
10. Ruined streets roamed by clanking skeletons held together with metal struts and joints, steam engines bolted to their ribcages, clouds of black smoke pouring constantly from the smokestacks welded to their spines. At the heart of their territory is a surprisingly well-maintained smithy, from which the sound of hammering can be heard echoing at all hours. (Again, no details on what's inside yet - my PCs haven't been in!)
11. Dilapidated palace inhabited by an ancient woman guarded by flickering semi-humanoid locust-warriors. She is the last true devotee of a long-suppressed religion, but now that everything has fallen apart she sees no further need to conceal her faith. In her home she keeps a human corpse tied to a chair, through the dead mouth of which something speaks with a loud, booming voice, and visits it whenever she is in need of oracles.
12. Sacred subterranean meditation chamber guarded by a hovering angel of blue light, its face smashed to fragments. Any unrighteous soul who tries to enter will be struck by coruscating blue lightning. Those who are allowed to pass within can, by meditation, establish psychic contact with certain roaring elemental beings of pure force, who wordlessly communicate their desire for the city to be cleansed of the evils that infest it.

3: Trade and Crime

1. A low opium den, where those who pass beyond the tattered yellow curtains can enjoy the dubious pleasures of stained couches, clouds of opium smoke, and decanters of sour wine. Miserable serving girls cater to the thuggish clientele, under the watchful eye of a withered landlady and the gigantic bravo whom she pays to guard the door. Every one of them would burn the place down in a heartbeat if she thought she could get away with it. 
2. Tailor's shop, where terrified children labour at sight-destroying embroidery work under the supervision of their cruel and supercilious taskmaster, who - frustratingly enough - genuinely has excellent taste in clothes, ensuring that his services are much in demand among what remains of the city's great and good. 
3. Market stall selling honeyed pastries, popular with a variety of local workers. Its keeper is actually part of a conspiracy that aims to seize control of the city, and among her regular customers are several of their agents, to whom she passes secret briefings and communications in the form of papers wrapped around the pastries that they buy. 
4. Stimulant-fuelled consortium of perpetually-desperate market traders, who live in fear and hatred of the talking silver skull they have hidden under their guildhall, which always tells them where more money is to be found but insists upon them debasing and disfiguring themselves in exchange for every treasure. (In my campaign, it eventually turned out that this skull was a mouthpiece for the ape-demon at 1-3.)
5. Stall manned by weary, travel-stained merchants selling miserly quantities of adulterated tea, coffee, and spices, imported with great cost and labour from foreign parts, watched hawkishly by preening guards in the employ of the city's government who are trying to work out just how much to demand for the 'import taxes' that they've just made up on the spot.
6. Ragged school run by an outlaw occultist turned schoolteacher, much happier in his new life but perpetually anxious about his blood-soaked past catching up with him. 
7. A desecrated temple inhabited by dropout temple acolytes turned wannabe cultists of the dark powers, usually drunk and hopelessly in debt to the gangsters who provide them with all their drugs. Have just enough forbidden magic to be dangerous to themselves and others.
8. Encampment of bandits turned opportunistic slavers, led by a thuggish drunkard who spends most of his time in an alcoholic stupor. His second in command is a violent and badly-traumatised woman who seeks to convert the band to her apocalyptic religion, convinced that their bloody work is a righteous punishment visited upon the city for its many sins.
9. Huge dome of near-unbreakable glass that once served as a prison, long since taken over by its inmates, now the home of bellicose and anarchic 'crime tribes' who roam the surrounding ruins, resplendent in their gang colours. They feud constantly among themselves, but will unite instantly against outsiders.
10. Shattered noble house now degenerated into a mere street gang, its scions roaming the streets with jewelled knives tucked into their sashes, extracting the 'tribute' they believe themselves to be owed by their 'subjects', at dagger-point if necessary. Their leader is a mere girl, skinny and malnourished but crazy-confident, with the pride of a duchess and a conviction that empire is her birthright. She lives in the three-quarters-ruined home of her ancestors, followed everywhere by a flock of mad and feral peacocks.
11. Old trade route rendered impassable by an infestation of savage, loping, fur-covered humanoids who lair up in the hills to either side of the road, filling the night with their mournful, sonorous howling.
12. Pilgrim road that once led to a site of great spiritual significance, its sides dotted with wayside shrines and ruined, dust-choked caravanseris, a few of which still have functional wells and water-holes hidden beneath all the rubble and sand. No-one has walked its length in over a decade, now, and what - if anything - remains at the far end of it now is anyone's guess.

4: Encampments and Settlements

1. Community of fisher-folk living by the side of a river: they have dug a wide trench from the river around their houses, effectively turning their district into an island for ease of defence. Their red-sailed boats range far and wide along the river. Their leader is a rough and weather-beaten man with a not-so-secret weakness for crab and lobster, who will happily lend the PCs boats and crews in exchange for particularly fine crustaceans. 
2. Rows of shattered porcelain manufacturies, now inhabited by tusked and snuffling beastmen, placid unless provoked but suspicious of outsiders.
3. Community of isolationists in a walled settlement, who have ringed the land around them with networks of hidden traps to discourage intruders.
4. Miserable village devoted to the cultivation of opium poppies under the command of brutal overseers, who punish villagers found raising any other crop. The people are sick and scared and half-starved, kept too weak and demoralised to challenge their oppressors. 
5. Stockade in the ruins guarded by men in bronze masks, with polished copper shields: they carry crossbows, and are extremely wary of outsiders. Within, a small community of desperate souls has coalesced around a miracle-working teenager, whose prophetic visions help her in guiding her people, but whose alarming fits and seizures suggest that she probably does not have long left to live.
6. Demoralised mining town up in the hills. The local lord is depressed, sunk in gloomy reflection on the sins of his ancestors, while his neglected children run wild on the hills outside. Something horrible has taken up residence in the copper mines, putting them out of action, and now the whole community faces ruin unless something can be done.
7. Village of wretched pastoralists languishing under the dubious 'protection' of a bandit gang in a hilltop fort, who raid the nearby roads and prey upon the people at will. In the centre of the village stands a crude idol of hacked wood depicting a winged woman, sacred to the cruel faith that their bandit overlords have imposed upon them. 
8. Painstakingly cleared area of ruins irrigated and farmed by bent-backed labourers, too stubborn to leave their homes even after all the disasters that have fallen upon them, and led by a council of elders even more bent and stubborn than they are. Rickety watchtowers ring their fields, allowing them to spot trouble coming from afar.
9. Stockaded hinterland settlement built around a fragment of the old irrigation network that still functions, guarding its water like gold, surrounded on all sides by desertified farmland and abandoned villages. 
10. Vast sinkhole in the ruins. Climbing far enough down its treacherous sides will take one to a subterranean complex flooded by acrid-smelling but highly-fertile chemical slurry from some ancient alchemical laboratory. This complex is inhabited by isolationist humans who use the chemicals to grow crops of pale, flabby edible fungi, making it one of the few places in the region where food is actually abundant. Years below the ground has left them pretty pale and flabby themselves, and they fear outsiders.
11. Zealous would-be warrior and his followers hard at work domesticating and training giant rats as steeds, hoping to thereby make up for their lack of horses.
12. Column of wretched refugees, expelled from their homes by an imperious lord who values their land more as a hunting preserve than as a village, stumbling through the ruins in search of a new home.  

5: Monsters

1. An infestation of demonic monkeys with charred flesh, knowing smiles, and wickedly hooked brass claws. The spell that summons them is distressingly easy to learn.
2. Ruins hung with corpses, each with spikes hammered through their eye-sockets into the bricks beneath. These are the hunting grounds of an accursed thief, who stole an enchanted hammer from a dark temple and fell under its power: now he kills by instinct and has a hypnotic gaze, enabling him to mesmerise his victims into waiting passively to be killed. If the hammer was taken from him he could yet be saved, but anyone taking it from him risks falling under its curse.
3. Ruined house whose basement contains a nest of insane human-snake hybrids, the results of botched experiments, who sleep through the cold months and creep out in summer in search of prey. (In my campaign they were created in the building at 2-9.)
4. Area overrun by giant worms, ruled over by a crazed individual who encountered some kind of 'worm-god' beneath a distant mountain and now serves as its self-appointed 'priest'. He's more worm than man himself, now, his eyes mere pits of ooze, his body slimy and segmented and covered in thick, bristly hairs. He is served by a retinue of keening radioactive zombies. (In my campaign he'd come from the mountain described at 2-2.)
5. Royal park and menagerie now fallen into utter neglect, overrun with strange exotic plants. The cages are all rusted and empty, and weird beasts from far-off lands now lurk in the undergrowth.
6. Ruined district overgrown with trees and alive with songbirds. Desperate, tangle-bearded, ex-human cannibals lurk in the basements of these overgrown buildings, warped by the sinister powers to which, in their utter misery, they have surrendered themselves. Their flesh is woody and fibrous, resistant to blades and bludgeons but still vulnerable to axes or fire.
7. Ruined distillery infested with feral ghouls. Most are mad and naked and bestial, but their leader retains enough mental coherence to talk, dress himself in flapping black robes, and consecrate their kills to a grim divinity that he believes to dwell in the mountains to the south. The copper distilling equipment that litters the building could be used to produce quantities of raw alcohol, valuable both as a trade good and as a means of setting things on fire.
8. Ruined temple built around a courtyard in which stands a fountain, choked with translucent paralytic slime. Dormant during the day, this slime-beast stirs into activity in the moonlight, glowing with iridescent colours as it squirms around the temple, reaching upwards with a thousand waving tendrils towards its distant lunar home. Three blank-faced servitors roam the ruins on its behalf, feeding it whatever they can catch, from squirrels to people. Its paralysis-inducing slime could make a powerful weapon if harvested.
9. Wrecked complex in which every surface is covered in soot: if disturbed, this soot hurtles together to form roaring 'smoke giants', horribly solid when they want to be but capable of bursting apart into clouds of whirling soot if threatened. (If killed while solid, however, they stay dead.) Sealed boxes in a basement contain more such giants, ready to leap into life as soon as their lids are pulled off. 
10. Abandoned temple, its doors barricaded shut. Within, a vast network of wire hangs like a huge metal cobweb across its vaulted ceiling. Animated corpses crawl across this web like spiders, and will drop down to attack anyone who ventures within. Powerful holy items litter the floor, abandoned during the panicked flight that occurred when the temple became the abode of horror it is today.
11. Ruined streets overrun by flocks of aggressive dire pigeons, the unfortunate outcome of an ambitious attempt to construct a carrier pigeon network among the surrounding settlements.
12. Ruined manor house guarded by rusted iron automata in the shape of humanoid eagles, slow and heavy but nearly unkillable, their beaks and talons still murderously sharp. Within are furnished chambers that bear witness to a hasty evacuation - a rich looting opportunity, if it wasn't for the automata. In a barricaded room upstairs lie the corpses of the house's masters, around the unwisely-opened sarcophagus of the horror that killed them, which ever since has crawled out of a hole in the ceiling each dusk to trouble the city by night. 

6: Power players

1. Outcast clockworkers wearing outlandish mechanical prostheses, crazed and scarred and mutilated by years of ruin-delving, guarded by a retinue of kitbashed automata which carry them and their gear from place to place as they search for relics of lost technology, dreaming of the day they will return in glory to the guild that cast them out and trying not to think too hard about all the lives they've sacrificed along the way. 
2. A disconsolate child being raised in total isolation by a resurrected bandit-king and a highly-strung vat-born butler. Her jewellery proves her to be the last surviving heir of a noble house otherwise believed extinct. (In my campaign she was the heir to the house at 1-10.)
3. Isolated estate housing a proud lord, his troop of black-clad horsemen, and his many, many illegitimate children. One of his older sons, a skilled and relentless huntsman, is being groomed as his successor. The lord's latest teenage mistress is thoroughly sick of his brutish ways, and would happily betray him to his enemies in exchange for a chance at freedom.
4. A walled monastery guards the relics of ancient holy wars from the sinful world outside. Some of these 'relics' are actually pieces of pre-cataclysm technology, coveted by a band of rogue technologists who lair nearby, plotting how best to steal them from their current guardians.
5. A plaza with a gigantic, crippled clockwork war machine slumped along one side of it, guarded round the clock by agents of the city's rulers. Under cover of darkness, ratfolk from beneath the city come creeping up with scavenged fragments of machinery from the underworld, which the guards buy from them in the hope of eventually repairing the war machine enough to render it fully operational. It's slow going, but they are making progress...
6. Palace of a monstrous despot who never leaves his stronghold, his movements weirdly inhuman, his body covered by voluminous silken gowns. His whole body from the waist down is a single mass of squirming, spitting, biting poisonous snakes, a fact that he is at some pains to conceal from his subjects.
7. Gilded barge setting off on tribute-gathering mission for the city's rulers, packed with empty crates and barrels that will soon be stuffed with confiscated goods and foodstuffs under the watchful eyes of the city's soldiers. The mission is overseen by one of the government's chief enforcers, a towering bruiser long since grown cynical about the regime he serves. Convinced that the city is doomed, he carries out his duties with impersonal cruelty while keeping his ears open for hints of better opportunities elsewhere.
8. Deposed queen kept under house arrest in one wing of her confiscated palace, attended by a staff of bored and inattentive handmaidens, her remaining jewels and wardrobe regularly plundered to adorn the wives and daughters of the city's current masters. Starved of activity, she spends her days weaving elaborate but improbable plans for her revenge.
9. Soldiers patrolling the city by night in polished helmets and breastplates, holding lanterns on the end of long poles, peering fearfully into the dark corners that loom on every side. They carry halberds and crossbows, and will willingly engage human foes, but flee at once if they cross paths with any of the true horrors of the city.
10. Fortified tower, home to a reclusive noble family who barely ever leave their home. Their treasures and trinkets are being sold off piecemeal to fund their luxurious lifestyle, the tower dotted with empty alcoves and half-filled bookcases that bear witness to the slow but steady evaporation of their wealth. The windows are all filled with tinted glass, blocking out the world outside, and the family themselves view any allusion to the current state of the city as being the height of rudeness and vulgarity. 
11. Bustling manor house full of activity, soldiers and servants coming and going, the master of the house ensconced in his study while his three tall sons practise riding and swordsmanship outside. Closer examination reveals flaws everywhere, cracks in the masonry, peeling paintwork, the household accounts recording a thousand sordid compromises with the reigning powers. The head of the house maintains his stiff and military bearing but his heart is breaking by inches. He has almost given up on any hope of a better future.
12. Fastidious visiting emissary from a neighbouring city-state, whose veil cannot quite conceal his unnatural dead-grey skin. Accompanied everywhere by silent bodyguards in black and silver liveries. He believes that this city's ruinous condition means that it is high time someone else took charge, and is willing to pay for information that might help his masters seize and consolidate power in these lands.