200th post spectacular: the big book of B/X classes!

B/X D&D is a beautifully simple, elegantly minimalist masterpiece of RPG design. So what better way to show your appreciation of its grace and clarity than by throwing twenty-two new and totally unplaytested classes into the mix?

A while back, Chris Tamm (of Elfmaids and Octopi) said he'd like to see a book of my classes: so here, in celebration of ATWC's 200th post, I present a free downloadable pdf document containing ALL TWELVE of the B/X classes I've written for the blog over the last year-and-a-half, along with TEN of the classes I've written for ATWC itself, translated out of the weird B/X variant I actually use in my games and back into standard B/X D&D terminology. None of them have been playtested, but I've tried to keep them balanced with the default core classes. if anyone out there does use them in a game, I'd love to hear how it goes!

Aside from The Extras, who really do need a bit of explanation to make any sense at all, I've only included the actual rules information for these classes. If anyone downloads this and then finds themselves wondering what, say, the Sirtya actually are (and why they ride around on clouds by singing to them), then feel free to look up the original posts in the blog archive, all of which present these classes with at least a little bit more context...

I'll get around to that Rise of the Runelords thing later.

So, with no further ado, I present:

The ATWC Book of B/X Classes!

Containing: 

• Angels!
• Blue Folk!
• Brass Men!
• Children of the Pines!
• Clocktopi!
• Deep Ones!
• Disciples of the Word!
• Extras!
• Ghouls!
• Goblins!
• Half-Trolls!
• Inquisitors!
• Mesmerists!
• Noncombatants!
• Orcs!
• Patchwork Girls!
• Renunciates!
• Sandshapers!
• Sirtya!
• Snake people!
• Skaven!
• The Unkindness!

This book truly has something for everyone! Download it! Ruin your B/X campaign today!

Conceptual density (or 'What are RPG books *for*, anyway?')

I recently picked up Shadows Over Vathak for free in an online sale (summary: a perfectly good two-page setting document mercilessly stretched out into an interminably lengthy setting sourcebook), and it got me thinking about, well, ideas...

Imagine this situation: you're running a game of D&D, and your players arrive in a new place - a tavern, a market, whatever - and you happen to mention that one of the people hanging around the place is a dwarf. This dwarf has no special significance: you just came up with him on the spur of the moment, as the kind of person who might be in a place like this in D&D-land. But one of the PCs latches onto him. She asks questions about him. She goes over and talks to him. She wants to know what a dwarf like him is doing in a place like this.

At this point, you might have any number of brilliant ideas about how to work this dwarf into your campaign. But even if you don't, there are three options which are always available to you.

Option one is the path of least resistance. 'His name is, um, Dain Steelbeard. He's a blacksmith. He's short and muscular and he has a massive beard. He's in town to buy, um, mining equipment for his clan, who operate an iron mine up in the hills.' Anyone with even the most basic knowledge of traditional fantasy can come up with this stuff ad nauseam. It's boring and cliched, but it'll do until something more interesting comes along.

If he isn't called Dain Steelbeard, I bet someone else in his clan is...

Option two is the path of free-association. 'His name is, um, Ronald Cakeman. He's a cat trainer who travels the land in search of designer shoes. His beard is dyed bright green and he's wearing a bowler hat. He's embroiled in a sordid bisexual love triangle with a centaur and a harpy and his sorrows have driven him to drink. And he rides around town on a yak.' Coming up with stuff like this is easy because it is meaningless random bullshit. It's more fun and colourful than yet another beer-loving, axe-swinging dwarf with a bad Scottish accent, but it's also more disruptive and less likely to cohere with the rest of the setting. Too much reliance on this sort of free association will quickly turn your game into surrealist nonsense.

Option three is the path of filler. 'His name is Dain the, um, Corpulent. He's really fat. He has bright green eyes and he works as a carpenter, repairing the local mill. And he hates mice.' This is the kind of stuff you can get off any one of a thousand 'random NPC traits' tables. Random detail about occupation. Random detail about appearance. Random detail about personality. Just enough to distinguish him from the next dwarf, but nothing that's actually particularly meaningful or interesting. After all, why should your players care that he has bright green eyes?

Now, there are all kinds of other, better things you might do with him as well, but these three options are always available as a kind of baseline minimum. You can always fall back on cliches or invent random nonsense or string together plausible but irrelevant details until they accumulate into something resembling a (rather boring) person. They are the most basic implements in the GM's toolbox.

I think it thus follows that, if an RPG supplement is worth reading (let alone buying), it has to give you more than that. The contents need to be something better than you could come up with, unaided, simply by following cliches and/or random madlibbing and/or coming up with irrelevant filler. Otherwise, how have they improved your game?

I say this because quite a lot of them don't. Like, they'll detail an orc tribe, in enormous detail... and it will all be exactly what you would expect from the words 'orc tribe'. They'll be fierce and warlike and brutal and love violence and live in a cave and have a thuggish chief who likes throwing his weight around and a creepy shaman who's always demanding more sacrifices and you could have thought of all that yourself. It boils down to 'this orc tribe is a tribe of orcs who look like orcs and think like orcs and act like orcs and fight like orcs'. Sometimes entire campaign settings will be like this, spending hundreds and hundreds of pages telling you that, yes, the not-Vikings sail around in longships and raid coastal settlements and the not-Egyptians build giant monuments to their dead Pharaohs and all the other stuff that you could have guessed just from being given the most basic overview of the world. There's no added value.

Orcs who are angry violent savages? And fight with axes? My mind! It is blown!

Or else they'll take the filler route, and just fill their word-count with irrelevant detail. The headman of this village is tall and old and cheerful. The headman of that village has a long black beard and drinks too much. Maybe this isn't exactly what you would have come up with if you were inventing these NPCs out of whole cloth on the spur of the moment... but the chances are that if you had just made something up on the spot, then whatever you did come up with, possibly with the help of a random table or two, would have been just as good. What's the point of writing things down in full detail when a single 'random NPC quirks' table could have done the same job a hundred times over?

So this is where RPG books come in. They give you better material to work with. They are full of examples where the author added one more idea, and that idea was really good. Slumbering Ursine Dunes, for example, gave me neanderthal Cave Dwarves with flint hammers and stone-and-metal Robo-Dwarves with robotronic eyes and evil space elves who talk and dress like Ming the Merciless, and since reading it I have had that many more options available to me when thinking about what the random elves or dwarves hanging around my games might be like - options which aren't just the same old cliches, and which are likely to be much more powerfully imagined and conceptually coherent than whatever randomness I might ad-lib on the spur of the moment. Most RPG supplements, even pretty dull ones, will have at least one or two such ideas buried somewhere within them. But the really good ones will have stuff like this on almost every page.

This is what I think of as 'conceptual density', and it is, bar nothing, the single thing that I look for most in RPG materials. A weak book will take one moderately interesting idea - 'What if a bunch of kobolds started worshipping Cthulhu?' - and eke it out over ten, or twenty, or thirty pages, filling in all the gaps with either cliche material (kobolds doing either generic kobold stuff, generic Cthulhu cultist stuff, or a mixture of the two) or with the kind of random details which are no better or worse than the stuff you could have come up with on the spot. A good book will use that one idea as a kind of basket into which it proceeds to stuff as many other new ideas as possible. Think of the sheer number of ideas packed into, say, Qelong: war-torn fantasy Cambodia and animated stupas and a river which is a Naga and it's stirring in its sleep and its dreams are warping people into monsters and a magical device is leaking arcane radiation into the water and it collects in people's hands and the villagers cut people's hands off to be safe and those hands then animate and crawl around the countryside strangling people and and and and... 

and and and it's all going to fucking kill you, but at least getting eaten by a miles-long snake-river-goddess with four heads will be original...

I guess what I'm getting at is that, quite a lot of the time, I feel that a lot of the content in RPG supplements - especially adventure modules - is superfluous. 'Trolls raid nearby settlements, capturing villagers to sacrifice in an ancient stone circle in the hope of awakening their ancient monster-god' is a decent enough basis for an adventure. But if everything that follows is just pretty much exactly what your reader would have expected based on that description - trolls acting exactly like trolls normally do, villagers being cliched fantasy villagers, the monster-god being a gribbly tentacle beast straight out of Cthulhu Central Casting, and so on - then you might as well have left it as a one-line adventure prompt rather than writing a whole module about it. The extra page-count should be justified by its content: it should be full of stuff that is, on average, better than most people are going to be able to come up with on the spot. 

My favourite RPG supplements are the ones in which the page count corresponds to the number of actual ideas, and thus maintain a very high level of conceptual density. One or two ideas in one or two pages is fine. Dozens of ideas in dozens of pages is fine. But a handful of ideas stretched out over dozens or hundreds of pages, Shadows Over Vathak style, is just wasting everyone's time.

Probably coming next: behemoth Pathfinder mega-campaign Rise of the Runelords distilled down into a single blog post!

[Actual Play] The Further Adventures of Team Tsathogga

Team Tsathogga rides again! (For the previous installment of their adventures, see here.)

Having struck a bargain with a holographic head in a box, the PCs promptly started plotting to betray it. They gathered up their new followers in the village they'd taken over, plus a group of soldiers from the church expedition, and marched this assembled force over to Hologram Head's workshop, where it was busy repairing the robot-men they'd crippled in their previous encounter. Claiming that this warband was going to descend into the control tunnels on its behalf and kill all the people who had once tried to delete it, they soon persuaded the megalomaniacal head to show them the location of the hidden hatch that went down into the tunnels below. The surviving robot-men then smashed the hatch open, revealing a narrow shaft with metal ladder rungs set into the walls, descending deep into the darkness.

Volunteering to go first, Jack climbed down the ladder into the unknown. Finally dropping to the bottom, he found himself surrounded by nervous-looking men in white robes, holding glowing globes and pointing strange metal implements at him. A tense dialogue followed, in which the robed men explained that the holographic head - which they called 'the mad one' - was the result of their failed attempt, decades earlier, to re-establish contact with 'the Great Machine' which their ancestors had once been able to speak to. Unfortunately, instead of awakening the Great Machine, their meddling had merely caused it to bud off an insane secondary personality; they had believed it deleted, however, and were very alarmed to hear of its survival. They pleaded with Jack to destroy the head, insisting that if it was allowed to plug itself back into the Great Machine, as it desired, the results would be catastrophic for everyone.

Yes, it's basically these guys from Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Minus the psychic powers.

Jack climbed back up, reassured the head that there didn't seem to be anyone down there, and set about 'briefing the troops' (i.e. telling everyone to betray the head on his signal). Meanwhile, the robot-man carrying the head moved closer to the hatch so that it could peer down into the darkness - so Circe, unable to resist, cast a Command spell ('Run') on it. Failing its save, the robot-man promptly ran straight into the open pit, dropped a hundred feet, and was shot to pieces by the men waiting below. The rest of the robot-men attempted to avenge this betrayal, but were set upon by the PCs and their solders and pin-cushioned with spears and arrows before they had a chance to strike back. Thus ended Hologram Head's brief bid for world domination.

Keen to learn more about these weird tunnels, the PCs climbed down for an extended discussion with the tunnel-dwellers, who were still very unhappy about having had their entrance hatch exposed. They explained that they were the descendants of human slaves who, in the last days of the serpent-man empire, had fled underground into the control tunnels and simply never came up again. The ancient machines provided them with the necessities of life, although many of these (including the Great Machine itself) had failed or fallen silent over the centuries. They also told the PCs that the tunnels connected all three islands. The PCs, realising that this provided a potential way of travelling between islands without risk of being eaten by the Putrescence, asked if the tunnel-dwellers would escort them to the other islands; reluctantly, the tunnel-dwellers agreed, but only on the condition that the PCs agreed to be blindfolded during the journey.

Several hours of blindfold tunnel-walking later, the PCs emerged through another hidden hatch onto another island, hiked a short way, and made camp. In the night, Hash's keen eyes spotted a group of creepy robed figures crawling out of the nearby woods: he quickly woke everyone as the figures surged to their 'feet', revealing only slug-like masses of oozing slime beneath their hoods! Brandishing torches from their campfire, the PCs held the slug-men at bay; and after making a variety of horrible slimy noises (which might have been an attempt at communication) the creatures slunk back into the woods.

Ewwwww.

The next morning, the PCs explored some nearby ruins, at the centre of which was a crude stone altar stained with blood and marked with crude inscriptions: a Comprehend Languages spell soon revealed that these were merely rantings about how something called The Devourer was coming to consume the world. A horrible slimy noise alerted them to the fact that the slug-creatures they had met in the night were now emerging from the ruined houses all around them, quivering in obvious expectation of a sacrifice. Thinking quickly, Circe pulled on the ritual vestments she stole from a dead priest of The Devourer several sessions ago, grabbed Jack by the throat, and told them - gesturing at the sun - that she would sacrifice him in the evening, when the time was right. The slug-creatures reluctantly oozed back into their hovels, and the PCs fled for the hills.

Avoiding the island's central peak after seeing large flying creatures circling it, the PCs made their way around the coast until they came to a small walled village, where they were warily welcomed by the inhabitants. The people explained that, a few decades ago, something had caused the dead to rise on the island, and the area around the central peak was now infested with zombies - thus the village walls. The PCs explained that they had come from the mainland, and claimed that they would try to evacuate the villagers from their now-cursed island if only they would adopt the party's (made-up) dualistic religion, and accept the worship of the Bright Lady and the Frog God. The chief explained that his people revered the spirits of their ancestors, but Circe and Erin agreed that they could continue practising their quaint traditions alongside their new religion provided the real gods were given their due. Enthused by the idea of being able to go and live somewhere that wasn't full of ravenous walking corpses, the villagers lent the PCs a boat, with which they rowed around the edge of the island and returned to the hidden hatch.

Switching religions doesn't seem so bad now, does it?

Another day of blindfold tunnel-walking brought the PCs to the third island, where the tunnel-dwellers were especially afraid to go, one of their own having recently gone missing there. Scouting the island, the PCs soon located the village which the church expedition had so disastrously attempted to contact, where the people wore clothes dyed with purple slime and worshipped the purple cloud-monster which roamed the islands. Some of the purple-clad villagers were busy excavating nearby ruins, so the PCs abducted two of them and interrogated them, learning that their current chief - who apparently had the ability to control the cloud-monster, at least to some extent, using something hidden inside his house - was obsessed with searching for 'relics of the ancient world'. Bullshitting wildly, Circe claimed that she too had worshipped this monster, until she received a revelation that it was only the emissary of even higher powers: she demonstrated her miraculous abilities, and told the captives to go and spread the word of the Frog God among their community. Then they released the villagers and ran away.

Heading to the far end of the island, the PCs came across a weirdly well-maintained arena, defended by a hulking half-robot ape-man which talked wildly of how the arena spoke to him, inspiring him to defend his title as champion of the ring against all comers. Further conversation soon revealed that he had been another victim of Hologram Head, but that he and one other robot-man had retained some measure of free will after their transformation: the two of them had escaped together on a crude raft, but after that his story became vague and confused. Concluding that the creature was somehow being mind-controlled by the arena itself, the PCs persuaded it that they were here as spectators rather than challengers, and went back into the ruins - only to come across a hunting party of armed men in purple, sent to capture them by force! Fleeing back to the arena, they told the ape-robot-man that a bunch of 'challengers' were coming to fight him, and then hid themselves. When the hunters arrived, the beast promptly butchered the first one he laid eyes upon, and the rest fled in panic. Concluding that anyone who was that good at killing people was clearly a useful person to have around, the PCs began speculating how they might free the creature from the arena's spell...

Communities allied with: 2.

Communities antagonised: 2.

Chance of this whole archipelago ultimately becoming the birthplace of a weird new syncretic religion with Circe as a deified prophet-figure: A whole lot higher than they were a few weeks ago.

Summon Evil Hedgehog: A spell from 1854

My trawl-through of mid-nineteenth-century literature is getting weird, yo.

Nicodemus: The Black Art? Here is your very good health! - I wish you could see my master's room, after he has been trying to call up the devil! Lord, sir! there's no end of skulls, and chalk marks on the floor, and stench of sulphur, and what not - but I don't believe that, with all his pains, he ever brought the devil up.

Second Familiar of the Inquisition: Take another cup. - But he tries it sometimes!

Nicodemus: Punctually upon Wednesdays - about midnight, when the whole household have gone to sleep. But he's not up to the trick: he never could raise anything larger than a hedge-hog.

Second Familiar: But he has done that, has he?

Nicodemus: Of course! Anyone can raise a hedge-hog. But I'm not going to sit here all night seeing you drinking. I must go home to translate Plotinus, who was a respectable father of the Latin Church. Take my advice and go home too - you are both drunk. Where's my beaver? Don't attempt to offer me two, in case I put the phantom one on my head. I say - if there is a drop remaining in the bottle, you might offer it by way of courtesy. Thanks, and take care of yourselves. [Exit]

First Familiar: What say you to this story? A clearer proof
Of arrant sorcery was never given
Unto the holy office.

Second Familiar: It is complete.
He raises hedge-hogs! That's enough for me.

- William Aytoun, Firmillian (1854), scene 5

New level 1 Magic-User spell: Raise Evil Hedgehog.

Summoning an evil hedgehog requires chalk, sulphur, and the skulls of at least six humans or large animals, and can only be attempted at midnight on a Wednesday. The spell is most commonly cast by novice magic-users, usually while drunk. Casting the spell requires a 30 minute ritual and the burning of lots of sulphur, at the end of which one of the skulls tips over and an evil hedgehog crawls out from underneath it. If cast by a magic-user of level 5 or higher, there is a 1% chance per level that something really dangerous shows up instead, so the spell is usually avoided by more competent magicians.

The evil hedgehog looks like a regular hedgehog, but more sinister. It can roll itself into a ball and bounce along the ground at a brisk walking pace, and will use this mode of transportation to follow its summoner around until the following Wednesday at midnight, at which point it returns to wherever evil hedgehogs go. During this time it will obey any non-suicidal instructions given to it, and can be used as a messenger, watch-hedgehog, carrier of very small objects, and so on. It cannot speak, but will communicate via biting - one bite for yes, two bites for no. Its teeth are very sharp.

The evil hedgehog can be ordered to attack someone, which it will do by running up their legs (inside their trousers or under their skirts if possible) and proceeding to maul their most tender regions with its spikes, teeth, and claws.This doesn't do any damage, but it's very painful and distracting, and its victim must make a save vs. paralysis each round to be able to do anything except shriek and try to knock it off them. Once the save is passed, the hedgehog is dislodged, causing it to bounce away and lie stunned and useless for the next 1d6 rounds: during this time, it can be killed by anyone willing to spend an action stomping on it. At any other time, killing the evil hedgehog requires a successful attack against AC 0 (AC 20 if you use ascending AC) due to its extreme bounciness. If killed, its explodes into a ball of sulpherous soot and its soul is banished back to Hedgehog Hell, there to await its next summoner. Targets who have very thick skin or proper armour are normally immune to the evil hedgehog's attacks.

Normal hedgehogs hate evil hedgehogs, and will shun them whenever possible.

Old-School Space vs. New-School Time

I have got to stop reading Pathfinder adventures.

The clue's in the name, I guess: the job of the adventures (and the adventurers) is to find the path. The path goes from point A to point B to point C, in order. It follows a plot, in the original sense of the word: a line plotted on a chart to show the route that something will follow. First this happens. Then this happens. Then this.

The characters move through space, but that's basically incidental. The whole adventure is plotted out in terms of time, and travel through time is (almost) always one-way. Even when they are plotted out spatially instead, they are often arranged in such a way as to heavily encourage a linear approach: long, narrow dungeons, encounter areas arranged along a road that runs from A to B to C, and so on. Freedom of movement is usually kept to a bare minimum.

A 'plot'. You will start at Paris and end up at Limoges. You will go through Barcelona, Seville, and Porto. You will not visit Madrid along the way.

In most OSR adventures, by contrast, what's presented is space. A bunch of things are happening in a bunch of places: which ones you go to, and in what order, and what you do when you get there, is up to you. Instead of saying 'first this happens, then this happens', they say 'in this place this is happening, and in this place this is happening'. The primary movement of the characters is through space, which they are permitted to navigate freely, in three dimensions, rather than simply being marched down the one-way hallway of linear time.

What keeps striking me about the better-written Pathfinder adventures is how easy it would be to blow them open. Arrange them across space instead of time: turn scenes 1-10 into locations 1-10, and let the PCs wander between them at will. (I did a version of this for the Kingmaker adventure path here.) Pathfinder usually can't do this because its system is so restrictive that any encounter more than a couple of levels lower or higher than the PCs is going to be a cakewalk or a TPK, meaning that everyone always has to meet everything in exactly the right order. But OSR-style games don't usually have that problem, and in any case, most OSR players will understand that not everything is there to be stabbed in the face.

Take the first two chapters of Rise of the Runelords. As written, they're completely linear - first the PCs fight the goblins in the town, then they fight the goblins in the glassworks, then they explore the dungeon under the town, then they go to the goblin lair, then they investigate some murders, then they fight the ghouls in the farmlands, then they explore the haunted house, then they take on the cultists, then they assault the clocktower. But given a less restrictive system, all that content could be made available simultaneously. The PCs ask around in town, and they hear about weird murders and goblin attacks and old smuggler's tunnels and the big haunted house outside of town - and then what they do next is genuinely up to them. This also means that the clues to what's really going on can be uncovered in any order, leaving it up to the PCs to join the dots and work out what it all means, rather than having it all artificially spoon-fed to them in the 'right' order by the GM. And it means that the intra-NPC interactions really open out into a genuine web of relationships, because rather than only encountering each villain after the last one is safely dead, the PCs are free to ally with them, manipulate them, turn them against each other, and generally behave like the scheming little monsters they inevitably seem to be.

So if you've ever read a module which you quite liked in some ways, but were put off by its railroaded linearity, take a moment to think: can you un-railroad it? Sometimes the answer will be 'no': sometimes scene C requires scene B to have already happened, which requires scene A to have already happened, in which case nothing but a complete rewrite will save the adventure from being a total railroad. But sometimes modules pretend to be a lot more linear than they really have to be, and with only a small number of changes - essentially just a rearrangement of the same material across three-dimensional space rather than linear time - they can be turned into something much more in tune with an OSR sensibility...

[Actual Play] Team Tsathogga tour the Islands of Purple-Haunted Putrescence

(Dramatis Personae: Circe and Jill, clerics of Tsathogga; Erin and Skadi, fighters; Kroak, a pious mutant toad-man; Hogarth, a magic-user; and Hash, an elf.)

Well, I finally got them out of the underworld! A series of tragi-comic misadventures involving wizards and mirror men ended up with Team Tsathogga back on the surface, bound into indentured servitude with the Church of the Bright Lady, and sent off to visit some weird islands which had recently appeared off the coast - my own cut-down, heavily-modified version of Venger Satanis' Islands of Purple-Haunted Putrescence. For centuries, sailors had occasionally glimpsed these weird islands, their beaches streaked with purple slime; but when ships next sailed to the same location, days or weeks later, the islands would be gone. However, since the start of the Starfall (a rain of what appeared at first to be shooting stars, but which actually turned out to be demons in stasis chambers dropping out of orbit), the islands appeared to have become a permanent part of the landscape, and the church wanted the PCs to find out why. And also to find out why their first expedition still hadn't reported back...

Landing on the nearest island, the PCs soon found that its forests were full of highly-territorial ape-men, who threatened to attack if they came any closer. With the aid of a Comprehend Languages spell, the PCs learned that these ape-men were being hunted by humans from the rocky lands to the south, and decided to go and find out who their hunters were. A bit of careful scouting revealed the presence of a small, primitive village to the south, its edges marked by hacked-up apeman corpses hanging from trees. The PCs decided to leave it alone for now.

Humans hunting apemen? That's barbaric! It should be the other way around!

Crossing to the far side of the island as night fell, the PCs saw watch-fires burning and headed down the beach, where they discovered the camp of what was left of the church's first expedition. The survivors told a wild tale of how the people of the southern island had sent a gigantic purple cloud-monster to attack them, snapping the masts off their ship and eating many of their comrades; they had rowed to this island to repair their vessel, but after several foraging crews simply disappeared without trace they had retreated to their camp, building a stockade around it and only leaving when absolutely necessary. The PCs spent the night within the stockade, and the following day they went back to their ship, which sailed around the island to bring much-needed supplies to the soldiers there. Their ship's captain, however, refused to evacuate the first expedition until he could return to the mainland with some kind of concrete results to show the church.

Having learned that this purple cloud-monster apparently roamed the islands at will, the PCs hit upon a cunning plan. Approaching the village in the rocks, they used illusion magic to conjure what appeared to be a small version of the monster which had been described to them, and sent it up the hill towards the village's guards; the guards, as expected, retreated into cover, and the PCs seized the opportunity to charge into the village. They found skulls and corpses scattered everywhere, some from ape-men, and some from humans; some of the villagers ran out to attack them, but in the face of some eagle-eyed shooting from the party they quickly turned and fled. The village's chief charged out of his hut waving his scavenged laser sword, but never got to use it: he failed his saves against two successive Command spells ('kneel' and 'prostrate'), and thus just knelt there grovelling while Circe, in full ritual regalia, opened his throat with her dagger and sacrificed him in the name of the Frog God. Seeing the man who had terrorised them for so many years butchered like a calf took all the remaining fight from the villagers, and they surrendered to the party.

All glory to the Frog God!

With Circe obviously about to convert yet another hapless community to the worship of Tsathogga, Erin had Hogarth cast Light on him and grabbed up the laser sword, presenting himself as a holy emissary of the Bright Lady come to bring light to their spiritual darkness. A hastily-patched-up compromise between him and Circe led to them inventing a dualistic religion on the spot, with the Bright Lady as queen of the daylit world and the Frog God as the bloodthirsty king of the underworld. Even a half-benevolent religion represented a massive improvement on the psychotic personality cult the villagers had been living with up until now, and they eagerly accepted this new gospel, especially after Jill demonstrated her miraculous powers by healing one of the villagers that Hash had shot down only minutes before. When interrogated, the villagers shamefacedly admitted to having abducted and eaten some of the soldiers from the church's first expedition, but Circe cheerfully reassured them that the gods wouldn't hold this against them.

After using Purify Food and Drink spells to convert some of the stinking ape-man offal around the village into edible supplies, the PCs headed into the forest with the corpse of the dead chief, which they offered to the ape-men as proof of friendship. Happy that the laser-wielding lunatic who had murdered so many of their kinsmen was now dead, they permitted the party to travel through their forests, as long as the area around the ape-man village itself was left alone. Travelling north through the woods, the PCs found a region of hills dotted with weird ruins, but while exploring one they were suddenly set upon by three weird half-man, half-robot creatures, who killed Jill. Her death sent Kroak, the toad-man, into a berserk frenzy: always a bit unbalanced due to all the weird Science Fungoid chemicals he soaked up while still a tadpole, the sight of a priestess of the Tsathogga being killed right in front of him filled him with overwhelming rage, and he led the remaining PCs in butchering the robot-men in revenge. The discovery of a forearm on one of them, still wearing the remains of the church's livery, told them that these creatures had been the source of yet more of the disappearances which had plagued the first expedition.

Kroak attack! Run!

Returning to the stockade to bury Jill in what Circe decreed should be a frog-shaped grave, the PCs soon recruited a replacement for her: Tod, the villager whom she had healed earlier, who was shocked by the sudden destruction of the only benevolent spiritual force he'd ever encountered and was keen to avenge her death. He told them that the people of his village regarded the robot-men as demons, but that the bravest of them had gone far enough into their territory to see an ancient building that they went in and out of, full of the sounds of metal and screams. The next day, he, Skadi, and Erin went north to scout it out, and found it hidden in a steep valley, guarded by two more robot-men; they then brought in the rest of the PCs, who concealed themselves halfway up a steep slope before launching a volley of spells and arrows at the guards. One was killed at its post, but the other clawed its way up the slope and was almost upon them when it was brought down by a still extremely angry Kroak. (Circe, not wanting to share the fate of her under-priestess, had run off the moment she saw it coming.)

By this point the alarm had been raised, and two more robot-men burst out of the building, one of them carrying a metal box which projected a holographic green head. In between fits of crazed laughter, the head demanded that they stop killing its minions, and an extremely strange dialogue ensued. The head claimed to be a machine intelligence, which had somehow evolved from (or budded off from) an older machine intelligence in the control tunnels beneath the island: it had fled to the surface to avoid being deleted by its human custodians, upon whom it now sought revenge. They also learned from it that the ruins were left over from an ancient serpent-man empire, which had bred the starfall 'demons' as soldiers, and was destroyed in a great slave revolt a long, long time ago. The islands had come unstuck in time between the first and second starfalls, experiencing only a few years of time passing while centuries went by in the rest of the world; as a result, some of the descendants of the original human slaves were still alive down in the control tunnels, where they had sought shelter during the great war which had brought the serpent-man empire to an end. They now acted as custodians of the secret mechanisms beneath the surface of the islands, and it was they who had attempted to delete the head when it first attained separate consciousness. The head offered to show the party how to get into the control tunnels if they came back with a force of allies capable of routing these custodians. The PCs agreed, and headed back to the stockade to 'recruit' the church's soldiers, all the while secretly planning to betray the head in order to avenge Jill's death. 

Oh, Hologram Head. What have you gotten yourself into?

Dead PCs so far: Five.

Communities converted to the worship of Tsathogga: Two and a half.

Limits of Circe's ambition: None so far discernable.

Chances of her ever taking off her ritual death-mask: Slim to nil.

Just a wandering gill-man, in search of love and adventure...

The other day, I saw some toys for sale in a local shop at a knock-down price; I thought my son might like them, so I bought him some. They turn out to be part of some complicated multi-platform media franchise called 'Skylanders', which I've never heard of until now. My son (who is two years old) eagerly grabbed the first two toys, which he promptly christened 'Cake Belly' and 'Robot Guy'.

This is Cake Belly.

This is Robot Guy.

I, however, was much more interested in the third of them, a buff, bicep-flexing fish-man dude with a big, happy smile. I told my son that the thing he was holding was an anchor, so he was swiftly named 'Anka', which isn't nearly as good a name as Cake Belly or Robot Guy. But he's still my favourite of the three.

This is Anka.

According to the packaging, his real name is 'Gill Grunt'. I looked him up online, and discovered that he actually has a surprisingly tragic backstory:

Gill Grunt was a brave soul who joined the Gillmen military in search of adventure. While journeying through a misty lagoon in the clouds, he met an enchanting mermaid. He vowed to return to her after his tour. Keeping his promise, he came back to the lagoon years later, only to learn a nasty band of pirates had kidnapped the mermaid. Heartbroken, Gill Grunt began searching all over Skylands. Though he had yet to find her, he joined the Skylanders to help protect others from such evil, while still keeping an ever-watchful eye for the beautiful mermaid and the pirates who took her.

So at this point I was pretty much in love. A happy fish-man who wanders the world looking for his kidnapped mermaid girlfriend (whom he met in a cloud OMG WTF) and whacking people with an anchor. And his battle-cry is 'Fear the Fish!'

But wait. It gets better!

Gill Grunt grew up in a typical Gillmen city on the ocean bottom. From his glass bedroom bubble window, he would gaze out at circling cyber squid and menacing mega sharks. He couldn't have been more bored. 

Cyber-squid? Mega-sharks? Boring! I'm gonna join the army and work out and date mermaids and maybe shoot some guy with a fucking anchor. Fear the Fish! FEAR THE FISH!

I feel a very real connection to Gill Grunt. I identify with him on a very deep level. I can think of very few better ways to live than as a happy, romantic, easily-bored fishman with an anchor gun.

In fact, if and when I get a chance to actually play in a game instead of running one, this might just be my next character...