From the upcoming Ocean Game sourcebook… Steerage There are bugs underneath the skin of the world. Scratch, and they come out. Scurrying around in darkness. Fly the light. They start out small. You’d mistake ‘em for silverfish, those little crawly things, like little white termites. But they grow. It’s when they’re as big as fat cockroaches that you […]
There’s always a dragon. Maybe it’s down there in the darkness of the dungeon, last and greatest of the monsters. Its long sinuous body coiled around a bed of stolen treasure, it slumbers, waiting for some doomed fools to make their way down past the upper levels, waiting for the final battle to come. Maybe […]
Sometimes, a monster’s just a bag of hit points attached to some fun attacks – the heroes roll in, spend a few perfectly enjoyable combat rounds fighting the creature, and then head on to the next encounter. Sometimes, a monster’s a major recurring foe, a devilish nemesis whose schemes and counterschemes reverberate through the campaign, […]
Talk is again turning in Pelgrane Towers to my infrequently-written 13th Age campaign, Prophet of the Pyre, and when I’ll actually get around to delivering it. The first third of the campaign is set in a self-contained valley in the mountains, and that concept of the local sandbox can be useful tool for a 13th […]
(Author’s Note: Sometimes you have stupid ideas. Sometimes, an idea is so stupid that it develops its own gravity well, dragging you down into it even though you are quite aware that it is monumentally stupid. Enjoy the fruits of said stupidity. That said, putting stupid constraints on yourself can be a useful way to […]
One of the major factions in the Eyes of the Stone Thief campaign is the Cult of the Devourer, a cabal of fanatics, wizards and fanatical wizards (wizardly fanatics) who worship the Living Dungeon as a god of vengeance. As outlined in the campaign (p. 302), the cult was originally founded, many ages ago, by […]
There are places where the Membrane between our reality and the Outer Dark frays, where things slip between worlds too easily. Some call these liminal spaces the Outskirts; the Ordo Veritatis, in its clinical way, refers to them as LMSLs (Low Membrane Strength Locations). Such places are often found on the edge of towns, in […]
(Esteemed KARTAS patreon-backer Loius Sylvester asked some questions about The Dracula Dossier, and they were marginally more my wheelhouse than Ken’s, so…) I have been reading Dracula Unredacted alongside Klinger’s New Annotated Dracula and I am about halfway through both books. I have a few questions. 1) The dates in Unredacted do not match the Annotated. In […]
The Dracula Dossier Director’s Handbook (DH) covers the present-day Legacies of the main members of the Crew of Light – Billie Harker, Tabitha Holmwood, Thad Morris and the rest, the descendants of the original group who battled Dracula. However, Dracula Unredacted reveals the existence of several other members of this fellowship who, for reasons sinister […]
Following on from this article – the advice to use Investigative Abilities as a checklist for an adventure applies doubly to Yellow King games. Unlike, say, Night’s Black Agents or Esoterrorists, where the player characters are highly competent and well-rounded investigators, Yellow King characters tend to be unusually narrow in their range of backgrounds, especially […]
