Solium Infernum After Action Report and Review

 

Solium Infernum (2024, League of Geeks) is a digital board game where you play as one of four to six Archfiends of Hell, vying with each other to succeed to the empty throne of Hell that Satan left when he vanished. 

It has solo and multiplayer mode, but it is currently best played in multiplayer, as no AI can compete with another human for sheer deviousness.  

A full house of Archfiends

There are four ways to take the throne of Hell: two main ones and two methods that are more complicated, called Manipulation Victories, that I will explain later. The first method is to become ruler of Hell by Election. To do this, you simply must accumulate more victory points (called Prestige) than any other Archfiend and survive without being excommunicated until the end of the game.  The second method is to take the central city of Hell, Pandemonium, by force with a legion and then survive five turns while you are excommunicated and every other Archfiend is given sanction to enter your territory and try to topple your capital city (Stronghold).  This method of victory is called the Tyranny of the Usurper.  Excommunication means that you can no longer win by Election, you can no longer make purchases from the great Bazaar of Hell and you can no longer engage in diplomacy.  

True to its nature of simulating Hell, most actions lead you into conflict with one player or another.  For example, in order to enter another Archfiend’s territory and attack their legions or take over their territory, you must first have a casus belli.  These are generated by the diplomacy actions, the most basic of which are the Demand and the Insult.  A Demand allows you to aggressively request resource tokens from your opponent for a wager of your Prestige. If they refuse, you lose the wagered Prestige…but you may declare a Vendetta, which among other things allows you invade their territory, take over their Places of Power and slaughter their legions.  Albeit with a time limit in turns that you determine before the Vendetta takes place.  

Erzsebet responds to an Insult

An Insult is sort of like the opposite of a Demand. By hurling an Insult, you wager an amount of Prestige. If your opponent accepts your Insult, they lose Prestige and you gain twice the Prestige you wagered. Alternatively, if they reject the insult, you have manipulated your opponent into declaring a mandatory Vendetta against you.  This can be useful to draw a weaker opponent into a conflict they cannot win. 

Tactical nature of Hell's landscape

So overall Solium Infernum plays like a tactical wargame at one level, with a layer of diplomacy above the wargame table that is integrated within it.  In addition, there is the great Bazaar of Hell, where instead of buying outright legions, artifacts, manuscript pages and Praetors (infernal heroes), you have to bid on every item. If another player bids for the same item with more Hellish currency, then you simply lose everything you have bid and have to slink back to your domain empty handed.  Hell is not certain; Hell is not kind. Unpredictability lies around every corner and decision. Every action in Solium Infernum is uncertain, takes time, or leads to deceit.   These are also the very basics of play.  With higher rank and greater infernal attributes, one can steal legions outright from another player, throttle the number of actions an opponent takes, wreck their ability to cast spells outright, send a strike of infernal hellfire against an opponent’s legion and frame another player, and many more dastardly actions.

It is quite fun.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun documented a rather devilish multiplayer playthrough of the original Solium Infernum, created in 2009 by Vic Davis of Cryptic Comment. Although that version is no longer available, the story is still worth reading.

Now I’ll relate my first Solium Infernum experience. I joined a realtime game for four players, lasting at least 60 turns, in which each player had 3 minutes to complete each round.  Predictably I got crushed. However, I did learn a couple of devious moves by observation. 

Astaroth

I played as Astaroth (a war and conquest archfiend). My opponents were Belial (deceptive manipulator), Lilith (sorceress) and Mammon (lord of money). I started off with two Places of Power immediately next to me so I seized both (to benefit from their Prestige income per turn) and built up my only legion with a Praetor (infernal hero) and a piece of equipment.

An Angel in Hell

Fast forward a couple of turns and one of the Archfiends anonymously had executed an event card that eliminated my only legion and the resources I put into it. Then Belial and Mammon basically crushed me by taking away my Places of Power. But was I done? Oh no. Stunted and doomed though I was, as the least of the four Archfiends, I caused chaos in Hell by inviting an Angel unit from Heaven to go around Hell and eliminate one of each of the Archfiends’ units. Also, there were other shenanigans as I was boxed in to my little piece of territory.

Fast forward to the end. Belial's player had been hounding me incessantly and Mammon was winning the game at like turn 30 with 335 Prestige. The Lilith player wanted to secure some semblance of victory so she blood vassalized herself to Mammon, giving half her personal Prestige to her new master. Belial's player had been rather aggressive so I began weaving spells to hinder his colossal units like The Beast of Hell and a Walking Fortress, both units with over 20 hitpoints (average is 4-8 hp). Between the three of us Belial's player got his Titan units torched and he ragequit in response. Mammon was going to win. I was fine with that. When Mammon ascended the Infernal Throne, there was a shadow that parted from behind the throne. Lilith had a secret relic that she chose at the beginning of the game that gave her the ability to win if she correctly vassalized herself to an Archfiend who was going to win via her manipulation. Mammon with his 300+ prestige was just a pawn. Such is Hell.

This is called a Manipulation Victory of the Power Behind the Throne type in Solium Infernum, and that is one of two Manipulation Victory variants.  The other is a Crown of the Kingmaker victory, which requires a player to select the appropriate relic before the game commences, then requires you to choose another Archfiend as a “puppet” within the first 10 turns.  If the “puppet” Archfiend is Elected to the throne, you win instead. 

As I have said, nothing is certain in Hell. 

Entity After Action Report and Review

 

 I was jonesing for a solo game a couple of weeks ago and I came across a rather evocative image of an astronaut in DriveThruRPG under the “Most Popular Under $5” section. The title was Entity, and it advertised itself as a “Solo Storytelling Nasa Punk Game” which was immediately intriguing, in particular the Nasa Punk description.  Predictably, I bought it, and after one adventure which I have turned into a little story, I have some thoughts. In summary: It’s good! I like it. I find the game loop to be a little simple but the engine serves very well as a planet exploring experience, and it was significantly better than other solo “journaling” games I have tested. 

How does the game Entity play?

 In Entity you play a far future synthetic astronaut, piloted by an AI, that explores an alien world. Mechanically, your character is defined by three Traits (Technology, Analytics and Adaptivity) and each Trait has three distinct Edges (for example Physics, Biology and Chemistry are Analytics Edges).  The three Traits can vary in value from 3 to 5 and each Edge can have a value from 1 to 3.  These values come into play when your character travels to a location or discovers encounters on a location.  

 To pass through a travel or location encounter, you will be prompted by the encounter to add the value of your Trait to one of its corresponding Edges and then roll two d10 and compare each die roll to see if both, one or no die rolls under the resulting target number of your Trait plus Edge value.  A full success results in both dice rolling under or the equivalent of the target number. A partial success is defined as one of the two dice rolling under or the equivalent of the target number, and a failure is both dice rolling over the target number. 

 With a full or partial success, you may proceed to the next encounter and/or obtain the items the encounter delivers. However, with a partial success you also accrue a Strain. With a failure you suffer an Impairment. These matter because you start with 20 slots in your Spacesuit. Each slot can hold either a Strain, Impairment or an Upgrade.  Essentially this means you have 20 hit points per mission, except that some of these slots can hold Upgrades that augment your Edges. Strains are different from Impairments in that once you complete a Mission, Strains are removed from your Spacesuit’s 20 slots. However, Impairments are permanent from Mission to Mission. 

Speaking of Missions, Mission are completed by obtaining a certain number of Aspects (from 2 to 4) and Mission fulfillment results in the building of a Structure.  Structures give you and your successor characters bonuses from Mission to Mission and do not take up any Spacesuit slots. Aspects are rarely acquired (a roll of 10 or higher on 1d10 when you are determining encounters at a location) unless you spend Data to positively modify the location encounter roll. For example, if you have 4 Data, you can spend up to all 4 Data to add +4 to your location encounter roll, ensuring that you have the possibility of recovering an Aspect if you roll a 6 or higher on a 1d10 when determining encounters at a location. Data is most reliably found by carrying out the Side Activity: Collect Data which you can only do once per exploration to a location.  There are other Side Activities that can bolster your astronaut positively as well. 

In addition to the core book for Entity ($5 on DriveThruRPG), I purchased Advanced Storytelling for Entity, which is a 30-page pdf with a plethora of additional tables (also $5).  However, after adventuring with the core book, I find it alone produces enough information and prompts for journaling that additional detail is unnecessary. Understand, that this is not a failure of Advanced Storytelling for Entity.  The tables provided there are descriptive and very useful if you wanted to go into more specifics with your Entity story, or just rip-off the tables wholesale for some other scifi rpg. 

An Entity Story: Game One

Without further ado, here is the story of my first Entity game. 

 

The rhythmic rise and fall of the violin’s notes roused me from my reverie. By the time the drum beat played my focus was awake and analytics flooded my sensorium. Alien constellations wheeled above me in the vast expanse of void as I listened to the last strains of a forgotten song from an ancient place named Scotland.  Funny that. The song was immortalized in digital film but the unknown questions as to its origin mirrored the unknowns of this planet’s alien landscape that stretched out in leagues beside me, dwarfing me. 

 Heh. Enough maudlin ruminations. Although this land was defined only by a meaningless string of numbers and letters, unknown shores are nothing new to the human race, or even the memories of one. Time to get to work. 

 The long dead newsman’s audio came in clear as I surveyed the wreckage of my creche, the technological marvel that had once streamed from star to star, carrying me and my explorer’s soul. 

 “…remember. We are not descended from fearful men.” Defiance surged through me. So much was damaged, broken or a wreck. Right. Start from the beginning then.  I waved my hands to activate the translucent orange overlay that defined input to my electronics.  Daunting. My touch feedback haptics for robot controls were fried. That’s it then. My first mission would be to fix that.  I strained against the planet’s gravity and heaved a chunk of metal and technology to the side, staring at what I had uncovered. Then I looked up. I would need to find resources and other assorted things on this barren planet.  Correction, I thought, musing over the gigantic pyramid that orbited in the sky.  Suspected barren planet. 

***

 My local sensors and what was left of my creche’s scanners filled my sensorium with reams of spooling data. A particular image of a desolate craggy outcropping was zoomed in on and overlayed with pinks and greens, telltale markings of rare minerals, essential for the robotic repairs I so badly needed to function on this planet.   As my telescopic sensors keyed in on the outcropping objective I began to march across the alien plain, leaving a line of footsteps in the dust. My vision resolved a more high-resolution image of the spar of the outcropping as my effort brought me ever closer.  Telescopic sensors swept up and down the glimmering metallic material of the spar as the stars winked overhead. 

 CONFIRMED. TITANIUM DEPOSITS in bold yellow letters flashed in the lower left of my vision. Then the announcement scrambled into letters, numbers and static. What the Hell? I gasped as my sensorium glitched, stuttered and nearly cut offline. I held my helmet in a humanlike-coping manner, shaking my head as if to clear my vision.  

 Then I felt it. The static and the pulling. I started running. Flickers of bright blue and white-yellow sparks started emanating up from the ground as I accelerated away from the rocks and dusty trail I had started carving through the alien landscape.  Visuals were immediately fixed on my local area, the titanium spar forgotten in the panic of flight. I did not stop until I had broken far away from the sudden electromagnetic storm.  My hands were on my knees in relief, a remnant reaction of the human brainwave patterns my silicon mind was based on.  Instincts die hard deaths it seems. Fortunately, survival is one of them. 

 Thankfully the sprint hadn’t cost me any oxygen. It did, however drain some of my batteries. One of the main cells was flatlining. I switched to draw more energy from my auxiliary stores and put unnecessary functions on standby, just in case.  I looked forward. The spar twinkled in the starlight.  I surged forward, this time a little more warily. 

 After traversing a sparkling white ridgeline and reaching the shadowed side, I stopped cold. Then as I stood, I slowly smiled. At the base of the titanium spar was, for lack of a better word, a construction worksite, clearly alien.  

 

 As I approached the location I felt a sense of peace in the dormant machines, curled cast-offs of titanium metal on the ground here and there, and Platonic solids of unknown manufacture simply hovering silently in the air off the ground at about at eye-level.  Metal twinkled in the starlight, and everything just looked … well, abandoned. Like several someone’s had just walked off the scene and were waiting in the wings, grabbing coffee and whiling away the minutes, ready to retake up their tools at a signal from an invisible director. 

 A compressed sine wave appeared before my sensorium, and moments later moved to the very bottom of my vision, repeating over and over.  I turned my hearing on; it was an audio waveform. Did that sound like…hissing? 

 I did an about-face, spinning about quickly. Then I looked down. The ground rumbled and cracked open in various places. Hissing bio-luminescent vivid green fog began to swirl around my knees and rose to my chest, pouring out of the earthen rents in the ground. Was the very surface of this planet trying to kill me?  NON-TOXIC ORGANIC my sensorium responded to my unasked query as my vision filled with the green fog. I looked up and it was swirling ever higher, blotting out the dome of constellations above me.  

 

 I took an exploratory step. The ground held. I took another and nearly wedged my foot into one of those vents in the surface. Then, I held out my hands to stabilize myself and walked out of the fog, step by careful step, navigating purely by dead reckoning until the fog wall began to become thinner and thinner.  

 I arrived unmolested in the center of the alien workshop when another rumble occurred. The hissing stopped abruptly and I looked back. A plume of beautiful vivid green organic fog danced in the starlight. Was this some sort of pollination on this alien planet? I stared in wonder, knowing that likely I would never find out. I turned back to the dormant construction droids fallen in a nearby heap and what looked like broken tools of alien make and manufacture strewn across the workspace.  I salvaged what resources I could, stowing away strips of electronics to repurpose and carefully mining the titanium from the deposits in the craggy glacier I had finally reached. 

 

 After hours of diligence, I was satisfied with my harvest and scanned my surroundings for a more lucrative site.  

***

 I spotted it through my telescopic sensors. I saw the mirage above it before I understood what I was gazing at.  A mirror of the cosmic wheel above, the river was embedded in the ground and curving in a sinusoidal pattern beyond a plain of an ash grey spotted with a pungent orange color. That degree of reflective sheen on the surface could only mean one thing; I was looking at a river of pure quicksilver.  The liquid mercury would be very useful to my repair project, so I nodded to steel myself and began the long hike to the desolate valley where the river lay. 

 I began to traverse the ash grey plain, careful and slow to pick my way around the bright orange spots here and there.  The sound snuck up on me. There was a faint crackling behind me so I turned my head.  My eyes grew wide and I fell onto my hands and knees, suddenly struggling with the ground crumbling beneath my feet and turning what was once a flat plain into a 70-degree incline in front of me. Every footprint in the grey ash plain behind me was emanating with long trails of choking grey dust.  The bright orange spots began moving; crawling over the plain with little tendrils and merging into each other in their haste to converge on me. 

 This, this was some sort of cryptobiotic soil, it wasn’t a lifeless plain.  And I had disturbed it. Swiftly I righted myself and ran up the incline in front of me and I didn’t stop pushing forwards even as my boots sunk themselves into the earth up to mid-shin.  As I moved frantically forward, my sensorium was filled with image after image of cryptobacteria until a molecular model was pushed to the foreground.  The cryptobacteria commonly interacted with chemical signals. If I could exude some chemical signals that mimicked the cryptobacteria signaling pathways it might, just might, consider me “friend” rather than “foe” and stop trying to engulph me in this fragile earth.  

 I engaged my multitool to the chemical emitter on my suit’s side and began modulating different input valves as mentally I guided the emitter through the complicated heating, cooling and chemical washes necessary to mass produce the cryptobacteria signaling molecule in question. 

 Then I heard a ping and the emitter began spraying yellow water, stinking of sulfur. Shit. I frantically tried to get the multitool to seal the venting emitter, which was exuding chemicals far too early in the reaction to produce a viable cryptobacterial signaling molecule. 

 I was slowly drowning in porous grey earthen matter. And that did not even count the bright orange clumps of bacteria saturated crusts that collectively jumped down into my deepening hole, serving to make my flailing forcing me to sink deeper still. 

 I had one chance; I needed to go back. I had no idea how much further this cryptobiotic soil extended, but I did know I had enough energy and suit integrity to return to my point of origin. Where I could gaze at the subtle shifting of the liquid mercury river, but not reach it. 

 I began my retreat. 

***

 It was very clear to me now, if it wasn’t apparent before, that I could take nothing for granted in this truly alien environment.  Marching away from the cryptobiotic infested plain, I set my sensorium to complete a full analysis of a deep environmental scan. A couple hours later I had cogitated and correlated my next plan of action. To the south, the fissures extended into a network of subterranean cave structures, weaving and crossing their ways into the deep underground. Far-ranging chemical sensors suggested there were useful microorganisms hidden in these structures. Clearly, understanding of the local microflora and fauna was essential for survival on this planet. I checked my batteries and clicked on my suit’s headlamp. It was time to go caving. 

Bioluminescence. Available here

 I entered the first underground aperture and squinted. Then I turned my suit’s lights off. The darkness was still illuminated. Not by the warm yellow of my headlamp and LEDs, but by a cool aquamarine luminescence that coruscated against the rock walls. The humidity external to the suit began to peak and I flicked on my lights with a thought. Pools of water, captured in pockets in the rock, lay before me, coated in floating algae of some sort, glittering with the bioluminescent aquamarine glow. I picked my way carefully among the pools, weaving over a delicate land bridge that creeped further in to the stygian depths, the bioluminescence guiding my way. 

 There were egg-like protrusions of rock on the ceiling of the cavern in irregular clusters, usually of about five or seven. As I continued down the now widening land bridge, the egg-like rocks became more clustered on the upper walls, adjacent to the ceiling.  Wary and not willing to take a chance in this unusual environment, I set my sensors to scan one of these rock clusters in detail.  

 There was a response to the sensor ping. One rock egg crackled and unfurled like the petals of a flower, revealing a grey interior shot through with crimson-orange veins.  I stared, mesmerized, as my suit began to register a steady stream of packets of data from the open rock egg…rock flower?  Then there was another sound of crackling. One more egg unfurled. Then another and another. 

 Red warning symbols decorated my HUD as the packets of data became more numerous, then completely chaotic as my suit began being bombarded with the data explosions from these alien plants? Rocks?  Reeling from the data impact, I made the drastic decision to cut all local communications except for a very long-range ping from my creche’s remaining scanners. Silence engulfed me. I navigated by the cheery yellow glow of my headlamps in the deepening dark cavern and that distant pulse of my creche by which I could approximate my position.  

 Running through my navigational memories I noticed several discrepancies between my current location and the tunnels I had been. At least I think I had been there. The tunnel crossovers were all wrong and I couldn’t draw a straight-line path from where I entered the caverns and where I was now. Were the paths shifting?  

 Unsettled by that thought, I relied on dead reckoning again and that very faint ping from my creche to navigate to a deeper cavern that was not covered with those data-spewing rock eggs or the bioluminescence of the algae-like life in the pools.  

 After hours of hiking in the barely illuminated stygian blackness, I had found my quarry. I risked rebooting my sensorium to active and fortunately, though there were a few glitches, the HUD and my electronic monitors were not the worse for wear.  What appeared before me was a cloud of hazy white in the light of my headlamps.  The long-range chemical sensors were dead on the money. I began taking copious samples and running every test I was equipped to run on the biological spores.  The life in this area was data-sensitive? Or at least somewhat capable of interfacing with my electronics and nanotech? Strange. I collected extra milky-white samples and headed back towards my creche for more analysis and hopefully greater answers. 

***

 I stood around the ruins of my creche, watching patiently as the functioning (thankfully) genetic sequencer took the alien genome of the hazy white spores and rendered them into familiar and understandable data: the A, G, C, and T nucleotides of DNA.  I took the white spore’s sequence and entered it into my GLADIATOR simulator, a software tool for simulating microorganisms and their interactions, and compared it to the sequence of that cryptobacteria that had colonized the soil and nearly eaten me alive.  Extensive biochemical charts filled my sensorium, marked in black.  Then I began to dig deeper, looking for conserved biochemical pathways between the two organisms.  Looking for what common biochemistry the two alien species had for identifying food.  

 The swirling haze of data in my sensorium began to thin out and red marks of chemicals in common began to be displayed here and there. I consolidated these red colored chemicals, and set GLADIATOR to find the most likely chemical that received the “food” signal and develop a synthetic ligand that would bind to the “food” signal receptor and shut down the pathway. “I have you now,” I whispered under my breath. With luck, a little bit of this synthetic ligand spread about the cryptobiotic zone would prevent the cryptobacteria from seeing me as eatable and allow me to navigate the path to the quicksilver river unmolested. Think of it as crop-dusting an alien field to bend the biology to my will. 

 Long range telescopic sensors locked onto the serene waters of the quicksilver river. I stared at the ash grey plain with bright orange spots in my immediate focus. Hell yeah. Time to try this out. With a thought, my suit started releasing a faintly white-tinged cloud of gas.  The synthetic ligand had been deployed. I took an exploratory step. The ground held solid. No boots sinking into the ash grey plain. So far, so good.  

 From there it was a welcome stroll down to the embankment of the liquid mercury river.  A field of strange plants with elongated tear-drop shaped purple fruits hugged the shore.  I scanned them, wary for a data burst that would scramble my sensors, but happily the readout just indicated a collection of heavy metals in the fruits. Useful. I collected as many of them as I could carry and gathered up multiple liters of the quicksilver in the river.   

 I sighed in relief and sat upon a nearby rock, just marveling in the silvery mirror sheen of the mercury waters.  The orbiting pyramid was rising on the horizon, alien and enigmatic. I couldn’t help but smile as I looked up at the stars. I finally had enough base elements and materials to repair the haptic controls for my robotic interface. I’d be able to assemble the necessary mechanisms back at the crash site of my creche.  But for now, I indulged in the absence of a goal, simply enjoying the vistas of this strange and uncanny planet.

from Entity

Behind the Scenes: The rolls and decisions made in Entity

When I wrote up the above story, I took the salient details from the Entity game and tried to weave them in a narrative. 

Part of an Entity round looks like this: 

Identify Location, Roll:19

Result: Titanium Glacier - A unique glacier formation made from ultra-dense ice mixed with titanium deposits, gleaming metallically under the stars.

Travel, Roll: 2

Result: There is a Travel Challenge.

Travel Challenge, Roll:38

Result: You are caught in a sudden electromagnetic storm. It’s scrambling your suit’s systems and draining your power. Use Physics or Survival (used Survival)

Target Number 8 or less, Roll: Partial Success

Result: +1 Strain = 1 total strain

And so on.

Incidentally I rolled Location “Quicksilver River” and Encounter Challenge “You cross a patch of cryptobiotic soil that becomes hostile when disturbed” twice. So, I felt I had to make it front and center in the story plot. 

The rock eggs, and looking for conserved biochemical pathways between the milky white spores and the “cryptobacteria”, and a few other things were my ideas. 

Thoughts on a Delta Green/Mythos Racing Game

On the Night at the Opera discord server, the album cover for the Dukes of Al-Hazred from the band the Darkest of the Hillside Thickets was posted.  

The title of the album “Dukes of Alhazred” is a reference to both the Dukes of Hazzard (the 70-80’s tv show that was essentially a retelling of Robin Hood with a 1969 Dodge Charger named the General Lee) and of course the lovely author Abdul Alhazred, of the famed Necronomicon. 

As a result of this discussion, I had two thoughts. 

I was imagining a heist/racing game, where tricking out your Eldrich car is a thing and you have to decide how much Space Mead you mix in with your ethanol, gasoline, rocket fuel and blood so you can go on a Mythos road trip.

Then I thought of the wargame Gaslands Refuelled by Mike Hutchinson in a Mythos crossover, using the Gaslands rules but with every servitor race of the Mythos specialized with a different vehicle in a racing/demolition derby. 

The following faction splats are a result of that unspeakable rumination: 

Mi-go – In slick black Lexus RX Hybrids, LX SUVs and police cruisers the Mi-go let their Grey drones pilot the wheel while they hang out in the back seat trying to frost their competitors with Mist Projectors that spew freezing air into their opposing racer’s way.  Throwing Mi-go brain cases at an opponent is considered a rude, but acceptable last resort!

Dark Young – Cultists of the Black Goat and Her progeny hit the tract with stripped down moonshine racers with NASCAR symbols.  Tommy guns and banjos are considered a must. 

Shan – Thanks to their PICESE contacts, well dressed Shan piloted humans drive equally immaculate Aston Martins and blast Goldfinger and other vintage 007 tracks as they swerve and cut across the raceway.  Just don’t ask whom those bloodstains belong to in the back seat!

Ghouls – They rock PT Cruisers because they sort of look like hearses. They get the choice to stock extra bodies in the back for roadtrip snacks or to feed into the corpse-eating engine to fuel it.  Opening the windows so they can put their head out the window and let their tongue loll in the wind is mandatory. 

Nightgaunts – Since they are servitors of Nodens, they pilot amphibious cars such as the Gibbs Aquada, clearly a vehicle that only came about through vivid and deep dreaming. These are always convertibles so the Nightgaunts can stretch their wings and catch the breeze with their black, rubbery, faceless heads.

Innsmouthers; Deep One Hybrids/Deep Ones – Built Ford tough, March’s Fisheries has an exclusively American motorpool of delivery trucks. Powered by the F-150, March’s trucks can carry a whole family of Esoteric Order of Dagon worshipers, plus granddad in the aquarium.  Armed with shotguns, clubs and Molotov cocktails made from Zadok Allen’s Best (locally brewed), Innsmouthers provide a formidable opponent on the road to victory.

Elder Things- Competing in Teslas powered by the Shoggoth Engine (TM), Elder Things have to manage their electricity as their electric-Shoggoth prods are their only way to speed up…or slow down!  Running out of power may make the Shoggoth keep accelerating to ludicrous speed or rebel and envelop the racer for a quick snack.  Elder Things can recharge their prods at EV stations all over the USA. 

Yithians – Modified Jalopies. Similar in style to Yithian lightning guns and temporal communicators, this vehicle looks like junk combined with strange lenses, bits of metal and wire and a central crystal that protrudes through the shaker hood of the car, that glows like a disco ball.  Since the racers are possessed by the Great Race, they take more risks than the human (or quasi-human) competition! 

Apart from factions I was thinking there could be a “build your own Mythos car” minigame where you trick out your car with occult and squamous artifacts. Just imagine the possibilities. 

Examples include: Shining Trapezohedrons hanging like dice in the mirror.  A gilt Haunter of the Dark as a hood ornament giving extra speed if you are in pitch darkness. Elder Sign spinners.  Whistles that say Ia Ia or attract Flying Polyps.  

Maybe it’s drag racing down the Plateau of Leng. Or drifting down the streets of Carcosa. It’s always exciting at Top Mythos!

N@tO's Need to Know, Part 1

 

Fall of the House of Usher, by Mario Jodra 

There have been many discussions on the Night at the Opera discord about Delta Green campaigns. I want to record some of the details of those discussions so that the recommendations and knowledge are not lost to time.  Thanks to Inixis, who came up with the phrase, I will name these details “N@tO’s Need to Know”. 

Without further ado, here are some thoughts on developing Delta Green campaigns.

How do you create a mood?

One way I’ve created a mood is to envision your game like connected movie stills or scenes and come up with vivid descriptions that convey a particular emotion.  For example, if your mood is “decay”, I don’t think you could do better than to steal imagery from Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher.  Let’s take the introductory passage from the short story:

"It was a dark and soundless day near the end of the year, and clouds were hanging low in the heavens. All day I had been riding on horseback through country with little life or beauty; and in the early evening I came within view of the House of Usher.  I do not know how it was — but, with my first sight of the building, a sense of heavy sadness filled my spirit. I looked at the scene before me — at the house itself — at the ground around it — at the cold stone walls of the building — at its empty eye-like windows — and at a few dead trees — I looked at this scene, I say, with a complete sadness of soul which was no healthy, earthly feeling.  There was a coldness, a sickening of the heart, in which I could discover nothing to lighten the weight I felt. What was it, I asked myself, what was it that was so fearful, so frightening in my view of the House of Usher?”

You could describe your intro scene where Delta Green agents meet in a rundown motel as having “cold flimsy walls, empty and grimy eye-like windows and surrounded by a few dead trees.”  Such a description sets the tone for the adventure and story you want to tell. 

Another way is to choose a mood that you want to convey and find words and synonyms that point to that mood. Sprinkle these words in your narrations, descriptions and dialogue. Let’s assume your mood is “decay” again. Synonyms are “decompose, putrefy, rot, and spoil.”  You could talk about the smell of trash decomposing in dumpster outside a greasy spoon. Maybe inside the greasy spoon the cook yells at the manager, saying that the meat in the refrigerator has spoiled.  Perhaps the waitress smiles and has a noticeable decaying tooth. You get the picture.  

A third way to set a mood is to use the idea of synesthesia. Synesthesia, as we will be using it, is defined as when your brain routes sensory information through multiple unrelated senses.  For example, “tasting” a sound or “feeling” a smell.  In the example mood of “decay”, instead of the air smelling like fruiting bodies, perhaps the air tastes like overwarm tobacco chew, gelatinous and unwelcome.  Presenting the senses as “mixed up” can make a stronger impression on the reader or receiver. 

How do you make scenarios mysterious?

Generally, in Delta Green games I think the focus of the adventure is on an event (usually a murder, or more than one) with unusual coincidences (a decaying body is found above an identical decaying body buried three months before) or with details that do not make sense (there was a murder victim found in a room locked from the inside).   Further digging by the players is required to uncover the entire twisted tale you the Handler (Delta Green Game Master) are telling and have the event make sense. 

But how does a Handler carry out the mystery?   To answer this question, I will recommend two blog posts by The Alexandrian. The first blog post deals with the (rather well known now) Three Clue Rule, that explains how to present clues so players will not miss them. The second post is about how to run mysteries and why the failure to find a clue is so important. Both of these posts discuss actions a Handler can use to build a mystery that can be successfully unraveled in their campaign.   

What is the theme/premise of your DG campaign? Have you made deliberate choices? Should you?

While one could make a campaign out of Delta Green adventures casually strung together, some Handlers want more connective tissue or a theme throughout the campaign for a richer experience for themselves and the players.  If you are creating a campaign with a theme, pitch it to your players. One way to do it is to present it as a summary (we are focusing on X, Y and Z).  

Another format is to do what Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition did with its campaign settings. They had defined characteristics about the campaign setting world in the introduction.  Mechanically, each of the characteristics had a sentence with a paragraph explaining it.   For example, in the Dark Sun Campaign Setting for 4th edition D&D, the first three characteristics of Athas (world of Dark Sun) are “The World Is a Desert”, “The World is Savage”, and “Metal is Scarce.” There are eight characteristics in total, but you can get an idea just from the first three statements where this world is going.  Use this technique to craft a very clear campaign theme for your players. 

What do your players want to do in the campaign?

Ask them! No seriously, asking players what they would like to accomplish during the game gives them and the Handler (you) goals and ready-made plot ideas for your campaign.  You can also reflect at milestones during the campaign or after missions and ask your players if they feel like they are achieving their goals or what else needs to be done in order to do so. Player feedback provides instant scenario ideas. 

Should you have a home base in a Delta Green campaign? What is your local area?

Some DG Handlers have stated that they feel the 5th edition D&D community has scooped them. 5th edition D&D Game Masters often start their campaign in a single village or town (or even just a tavern) and expand the adventuring area surrounding the village as the campaign progresses. After each adventure the player characters regroup back at the central village, meet established NPCs and engage in inventory management and/or shopping of some kind.  

The D&D players have a home base, and that seems to be missing from the majority of Delta Green campaigns, but there is no rule saying you can’t steal from D&D!  First, establish what your home base will be. Is it a town, a city, a Holiday Inn, or a Delta Green safehouse with really good Thai food down the street?  Having a home base allows the players a sense of familiarity and relaxation once they complete a mission. Maybe they would be wrong to relax because you want paranoia to reign supreme, but that is a discussion for another post.  Also, players can interact with NPCs and see how they change over time; possibly for the better if the DG agents are successful in their missions, and maybe for the worse depending on what you the Handler wants to do. 

Home scenes are more than just reciting that bonds were damaged for Delta Green agents to protect their sanity or acquire new skills or whatever.  Setting a home scene (say an important phone call to a loved one) at a home base may increase the poignancy and could give an excuse for important PCs and NPCs to give commentary on a player’s home scene.  Is everything falling apart at a PC’s home, but the Delta Green team is hale and hearty?  Does the PC spend their time meeting commitments at home but get dirty looks from the team whey they are down important gear that no one can afford (without burning bond points)?  Having home scenes at a home base, or interspersed with scenes at a home base can add additional emotional weight to a scene.  And that may be just what you want for your campaign. 

On the flipside, maybe you want a globetrotting campaign. Hey, 007 gets along fine.  Masks of Nyarlathotep (the classic Call of Cthulhu campaign) does this as well.   In an international campaign you may want to focus on the local area on each “hub world” stop for the players.  As a Handler, ask some questions of the area before you introduce it to give it flavor.  What are the gun laws of the location? Can firearms be trafficked into a location by land, sea or air?  How do the locals and the local government respond to criminal activity that the players will surely get up to? How friendly are the citizens to foreigners or shady types like the investigators? Do the PCs have access to all resources in each “hub world” they land in?  Or does this require additional skill checks or expenditure of resources to get what they are looking for?  

What is the quantum language skill and should you use it? 

The Delta Green “quantum language skill”, comes from the concept of a “quantum ogre” which is a Game Master technique. A quantum ogre is the idea that the Game Master has designed an ogre encounter, and no matter what choice in the dungeon the players take (i.e. right or left passageway) the players will always run into the ogre. 

In Delta Green, deciding your character can read Latin, Ancient Greek, or whatever; and never having that particular language show up in the campaign can be very frustrating.  Thus, some Delta Green Handlers allow for the choice of a language to be a “quantum language skill”.  The language skill the player has is undefined until a foreign language is encountered in the campaign. Then the player with the quantum language skill may spend that slot to know that given language at a skill level that they bought upon character creation. This is a bit metagame-y but it prevents language skills from being useless in the campaign. 

Alternatively, if you the Handler know all the languages that will be used in the campaign, because you just did that much preparation, you can give a list of languages used to the players at the beginning of the campaign and have them decide what they want.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the following people from the Night at the Opera discord for ideas and review of this post: anonymous, zomner, Splizwarf, and Inixis. 

Things on my Radar

 It’s been a while.  Here are a list of games and authors that I am either actively reading or actively pursuing.  I do not have enough information to review any of these products yet, but they have all piqued my interest. 

Games

Holdout- a solitaire, roll-and-write resource management game in which you must grow your wasteland settlement, deal with mishaps that drain your resources and daily bandit raids and achieve certain objectives to win.  

I am interested in this game, because I wanted to examine simple and fun resource management games, what makes them tick, and how they can be iterated off of.

Holdout is by Humble Bard Games. $5. This is a print and play game. A video overview is here.

Dangerous Space- A sci-fi solo game that is published by PNP Arcade and designed by Jason Greeno and Jason Tagmire.

The description for Dangerous Space says: 

"Dangerous Space is a dungeon crawl experience in futuristic starships.

This solo, roll & write game has a tactical emphasis on dice management and careful placement. 

With puzzle-optimizing challenges combined with a hero tech tree, you’ll find yourself racing the clock, dodging enemy laser blasts and confronting some deep space terrors.”

The Dangerous Space Core Set is $4.

Stoneburner- I’ve been reading through this game. Stoneburner is about being a Space Dwarf and inheriting a space mine in an asteroid that is infested by demons and worse.  It takes its inspiration from Deep Rock Galactic, Doom, Dwarf Fortress, The Expanse and Firefly. In addition, it claims it is “solo friendly.”

Mechanically, to perform a check you roll a skill die, or a die from an item.  The roll result of 1-2 indicates you outright fail, or you may succeed with a major complication. A roll of 3-4 means you succeed in your endeavor, however there is a minor complication.  A roll of 5+ means you greatly succeed, and the higher the roll result the better. 

Now after you use a skill or item, your die for that skill or item decreases by one step, (ie 1d6 turns into a 1d4).  Skills cannot go lower than a 1d4.  Dwarven classes have three skills: Strength, Dexterity and Willpower.  These skills may vary from 1d4 to 1d8, depending on starting class. 

Stoneburner is created by Fari RPG’s, specifically by René-Pier Deshaies. It is $15. 

Bandit Republic- The Bandit Republic OSR hexcrawl from itch.io is set in an alternate history 1925 where the Republic of Jelenia broke off from Poland and the characters are all deserters from the Army of Jelenia. There are artillery, radios, soldiers and spies from East Prussia, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia; guns galore, witchers, leshy and other supernatural oddities along with revolutionaries and communists.

The system is based on the Wolves Upon the Coast hexcrawl's system. Bandit Republic was created by Tom Mecredy who some of you may remember as the author of the Napoleonic naval OSR hexcrawl Shot and Splinters that I liked so much I designed two additional random tables for.  

 

Bandit Republic is currently 50% off through 1/30/24. Normally it is $20 as of January 2024. As the hexcrawl is further developed, the price will increase.  

Over War: Monarch Edition-  

UPDATE **Kickstarter is LIVE Through Feb 15th** 

Patreon post link about Over War: Monarch Edition here. 

Over War: Monarch Edition is a tactical tabletop rpg (inspired by Fire Emblem, Yggdra Union, Langrisser, and the works of Yasumi Matsuno) soon to be a Kickstarter (possibly in February) by author Richard Kelly and expanded by Blackoath Entertainment.  Blackoath was responsible for Across a Thousand Dead Worlds which I enjoyed reading and wrote a review of.  So, expect the Blackoath touch of a solo mode and tons of interesting random tables with Over War: Monarch Edition. 

Here is the blurb that got me excited about Over War: Monarch Edition from the Patreon post.

“But how does it play, I hear you ask? Well, players maintain a warcamp, unlock new units and supplies between missions, then take to the field, relying on the types of characters they've recruited and the formation they've put them in to carry them through battles.

Missions take place on hex maps covered in unique terrain types. Cities can be conquered, swamps can be slogged through, units can take to the air to avoid the effects of terrain or stand on mountains and fire downward into foes for extra damage. Throughout all this, the emphasis is on keeping things simple and keeping choices meaningful. Dice are rarely rolled. Attacks typically hit. And good formations, tactical choices, and resource spending carry the day.”

Want to see how the original Over War plays? There are FREE Community Copies of Over War: The Night Comes Down on the itch.io page. Make sure you scroll down to the bottom to get it. 

Books

Mark Samuels; The Age of Decayed Futurity- I’m sorry to say I first heard of Mark Samuels and his weird and Lovecraftian fiction upon an announcement of his passing on r/WeirdLit. The blog Wormwoodiana had a very nice tribute for Mark Samuels, specifically saying that he was a passionate advocate for Machen, Lovecraft and Ligotti. I am looking forwards to reading some of Mark Samuels’ “best” short stories as collected in The Age of Decayed Futurity once I get my hands on a physical copy.   

Premee Mohamed; No One Will Come Back For Us - From her bio on Amazon, Premee Mohamed is “a Nebula, World Fantasy, and Aurora award-winning Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta.” Her science degrees are in molecular genetics and environmental science. 

I recently downloaded the Kindle sample of Premee’s book No One Will Come Back For Us. It contained two and a half short stories: Below the Kirk, Below the Hill; Instructions; and The Evaluator.  In Below the Kirk, Below the Hill; and the section of The Evaluator that was present in the Kindle sample, Premee Mohamed creates a mood of a normal world but with pinpricks of oddity that she pulls on to lead the reader through mystery and horror indicating that what these people live in, is not our world, or if it was; something very alien has happened to their surroundings and they are trying to cope.  I’m very eager to continue reading The Evaluator to see how the story develops.  I’ll report back if she is one of the authors who also treads the path of cosmic horror in her tales.  

Adapting the Laird Barron Mythos to Delta Green, Part 1

 Laird Barron, the weird fiction and supernatural horror author has crafted a Carnivorous Cosmos with several entities that may be similar to each other, but they all view humanity with various unholy lusts, including love.  In this post I describe some of my thoughts on Barron’s Children of the Old Leech and how the mechanics and mythos of Delta Green could handle them. 

WARNING: Heavy spoilers for Laird Barron’s work, in particular The Croning and on the subject of the Children of the Old Leech. 

I am convinced Barron’s creativity and views on Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror are rich places to mine for horror that would be fresh and new to players of Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green.  In fact, mellonbread submitted two shotgun scenarios to the 2002 Delta Green shotgun scenario contest, inspired by Laird Barron’s works: Saturnalia and BUGS BUGS BUGS.  Saturnalia won the People’s Choice and Second Place awards in the 2002 Delta Green shotgun scenario contest.  I had the opportunity to speak with mellonbread and he told me Saturnalia was based on two of Barron’s stories: Termination Dust from Swift To Chase and Jaws of Saturn, featured in The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. BUGS BUGS BUGS was inspired by the story Proboscis in The Imago Sequence, and the X-Files episode Folie a Deux.

Recently I saw a blog post from fellow Delta Green enthusiast, magnificentophat, and part of it inspired me to consider how Barron’s dreadful supernatural aliens the Children of the Old Leech could be generated in a Delta Green context. Barron mentions the Children of the Old Leech in several stories (which I may delineate in a future post) but for today I will focus on Barron’s novella The Croning where the Children are most explicitly described in the climax in the following passages:   

p. 221 "“…behold the portal. To be taken through it is to be carried to the home of the Children of the Old Leech, chief among the Dark Ones who serve vast blind things in the lightless wastes where mortal physics collapse into nonsense.”"

p. 220 "“The Dark Ones don’t procreate as we do.” Rourke said. “Their system of reproduction is via assimilation, absorption, transmogrification.”"

p.131-132 "“Hey,” Mr Dart said, “I’m curious-you ever ask yourself what the connection is between the Wolvertons, Rourkes and Mocks? Other than big fortunes?”

“You gotta include the Redfields too,” Mr. Claxton said. “Although, I don’t know how deep that goes.”"

How deep indeed Mr. Claxton, how deep indeed. 

These passages suggest that there are mortal families that will be “adopted” and transmuted into Children of the Old Leech in a terrifying ritual or procedure. The Children of the Old Leech are the top Servitor race of a group called the Dark Ones, all of whom serve the Old Leech or apparently comparable beings, i.e. “vast blind things in the lightless wastes where mortal physics collapse into nonsense.” And the Children of the Old Leech, they love us, yes they do. 

In The Croning, it is implied the mortals chosen for conversion into the Children are flayed of their skin, changed in some terrible fundamental way, then rewrapped into their own skin and can carry out their human roles, looking none the worse for wear except a long scar somewhere on their body which they explain away as one accident or another.  It may also be possible for the newly inducted/changed Children to slip their mortal skin and reinhabit it later as needed.  

See page 152 "A muddy inscription near the bottom of one canvas read, Fathers and Mothers come as slaves and depart as kin." 

So, is there a current Delta Green mechanism that could explain or describe the horrible transmutation that mortals are forced to undergo to rise as Children of the Old Leech? Yes. Magnificentophat created a variant of the ritual Changeling Feast, that is most often associated with Lovecraftian ghouls, that was inspiring to me.  I’ve quoted the full text from the magnificentophat blog, below:

Changeling Feast

The operator may pay part of the WP cost when they consume the body and the rest when they assume the disguise. The latter cost is reduced, as it must be paid repeatedly. Eg: 6 WP and 1D4 SAN during cannibalism and 1D4 WP (or 1 SAN if they have any) every time they ‘change shape.’ Maybe it takes anywhere from a round to a minute to assume someone else’s form and taking damage disrupts the illusion. A successful Ritual Activation roll could enact a speedy change. Unnatural entities always transform quickly. Some versions ‘only’ involve skinning and tanning the victim’s corpse (1/1D4 SAN from violence) to make a cloak or belt that disguises its wearer. It can’t be disrupted but isn’t as easily put on and taken off as the traditional glamour.

Alternate Names: Consume Semblance, Deathly Glamour, Yig’s Deception

For full comparison and reference, below is the original ritual Changeling Feast from the Delta Green Handler’s Guide page 175.

Changeling Feast

Complex ritual. Study time: days; 1D10 SAN. Activation: days; 12 WP, 1D6 SAN.

This ritual allows the operator to consume a human corpse and later assume the victim’s likeness. The likeness is not deep. It does not change the weight of the operator; bright light casts the operator’s true shadow, not that of the likeness; and it does not emulate the victim’s behavior, personality, or mannerisms.

Consuming a human body costs 1/1D6 SAN for violence. Devouring a human corpse takes days for a human operator. Some inhuman entities can do it in far less time and gain access to a victim’s thoughts and memories. How much of the body must be devoured, and whether a human operator can use this ritual to devour and change into an animal or unnatural entity, are up to the Handler.

Now the ritual for conversion of an appropriate human into a Child of the Old Leech is described, either literally or metaphorically, in the following passage from The Croning, page 163:

“The passage in question was accompanied by an elaborate woodblock illustration inscribed, The Croning (fig. i); a depiction of thirteen naked, apparently middle-aged women encircling a massive boulder.  A buxom figure lay supine, draped across the face of the stone, shackled or bound in some manner.  Don instantly recognized this piece as the subject of Michelle’s sketches.

The drawing was exceedingly baroque, freighted with peripheral figures: winged gargoyles; demonic beasts that resembled kangaroos with tusks (these latter feasted upon the carcasses of men in Conquistadors’ distinctive armor); cherubs; flautists, and peeking from the roots of a mighty oak tree, shadowy woodland sprites, imp faces twisted in dark merriment.  Its overall effect was singularly disturbing, like a Bosche simplified and shrunk to minuscule dimensions. Michelle had scratched in a list of initials and alchemical symbols; she’d even gone so far as to make a charcoal sketch of the original on a piece of textured art paper.“

I will be referring to this ritual as The Croning (ritual). The Croning (ritual) may require up to 13 cultist participants, require the presence of an elder or non-human Child of the Old Leech, a human victim (the converted-to-be), an occult location of power devoted to the Old Leech and an auspicious calendar time at night.  In the process of The Croning (ritual), the victim is transformed into a Child of the Old Leech by an unspeakable process that involves flaying the victim’s skin, modifying the victim with biological and physiological processes that are so advanced they appear supernatural, forcing the victim to consume their human parts that are no longer necessary according to the Children, and literally re-wrapping the victim now Child of the Old Leech in their original human skin.  

The idea of “forcing the victim to consume their human parts that are no longer necessary according to the Children” is inspired by the Children of the Old Leech’s predation upon human beings, and I think it is fitting because The Croning (ritual) process can then be linked, in part, to the Delta Green established ritual Changeling Feast.   

I don’t have a full idea of how to mechanically define The Croning (ritual), but inspired by magnificentophat’s version of Changeling Feast, Children of the Old Leech should be able to impersonate themselves when wearing their own human skin.  It is also suggested in Barron’s The Siphon from The Beautiful Thing that Awaits Us All, that the Children of the Old Leech can take on the forms of those humans they have consumed, assuming they have flayed the human victims first.  I am assuming that the supernatural beings described in The Siphon are Children of the Old Leech. 

I suggest the following new magical ritual that Children of the Old Leech would know upon conversion by The Croning (ritual):

Changeling Feast (Child of the Old Leech):

This ritual allows the operator to consume parts of their own body or a complete human corpse and later assume the victim’s likeness, assuming the operator has access to the near complete flayed skin of the victim (themselves or another). The likeness of a Child of the Old Leech’s personal human form is complete and fully convincing, with the exception that there is a long scar somewhere on the Child’s human body. This scar is the location where the Child can “unzip” their skin and regain their true monstrous form.

In the case where the Child wishes to impersonate the likeness of a complete human corpse that they have consumed, the Child may pay part of the WP cost when they consume the body and the rest when they assume the disguise. To be clear, the Child inhabiting the flayed skin of a victim is wearing a disguise and not an illusion. The Child can shed their skinsuit and emerge as their true form in a round. It takes a minute and requires a dark location for a Child to wear a flayed skin and disguise themselves in it. 

I’m not sure whether, like the original Changeling Feast ritual, the inhuman operator does gain access to a victim’s thoughts and memories. I will have to do additional rereads of Barron’s corpus to come up with a ruling that is accurate based on the source material. 

I will note however, that the operator of Changeling Feast (Child of the Old Leech) does not automatically emulate the victim’s behavior, personality, or mannerisms.  That is up to the Child to do through their stats and skills, not the ritual. 

The operator of Changeling Feast (Child of the Old Leech) may be detected by the abhorrent taste or scent of their skinsuit. For example, The Siphon describes the following:

“The group dispersed, shuffling off to their respective rooms, and Landcaster shook the hands of the men and kissed the hands of the ladies – Kara’s skin tasted of liquor, and Mrs. Cook’s was clammy and scaly and bitter. He glanced at her face, and her eyes were heavy-lidded, her thick mouth upturned with matronly satisfaction at his discomfort.” 

“He remembered kissing Mrs. Cook’s hand the previous evening, its repellent flavor of sweet, rotting fruit and underlying acridness.”

In addition, the operator of Changeling Feast (Child of the Old Leech) may force a San check from observers by allowing their monstrous nature to bleed through their disguise for a round. This may generate a 0/1 or 1/1d4 San loss once and only once per observer as determined by the operator.  Note I have yet to define what the San loss would be upon seeing a Child in their full monstrous form. At the moment, I suggest at least 1d6 San loss from a failure or perhaps 1d8. 

Anyway, more to come on this subject and others as I continue to mine the Barron Mythos for nuggets of pure undiluted horror with advice from friends. 

Shot and Splinters, Useful Tables 2

 

Image from chess set here

I’ve mentioned Shot and Splinters, Tom Mecredy’s naval Napoleonic hexcrawl before and I still find myself hearing the siren’s call of the Age of Sail.  In short, I have designed two additional tables for use in naval adventures around the time of 1800, inspired by history and my own flights of fancy. The trinkets and treasures d30 table describes things of value of the era or that are adorned with things of obvious value. For some of the entries I researched for museum pieces of the time and used those as inspiration. An example is the “traveling calendar timepiece from a Swiss watchmaker,” that I discovered in one of the references down below. 

Sailors have always had superstitions, so I mined those ideas and an article on ship leisure to generate the d20 table for incidents aboard ship.  Without much trouble, one could adapt the entries to apply to the crew of a spaceship as well.   

More sources for naval and Napoleonic history:

• Society in Napoleonic France

• Exploration and Discovery in the Napoleonic Era

• Breguet timepieces Napoleon owned

• One of the entries in the trinkets and treasure table is a direct reference to HP Lovecraft’s The Temple. 

• Some sailing superstitions 

• Leisure during the Age of Sail