Cannibal Cave of the Suicide Cult!

Cannibal Cave of the Suicide Cult!

            This ruin is a short but potentially deadly dungeon crawl.  It is full of traps, secrets, cannibal dogs and fungus.  What a lovely day!

                I generated the basic idea using the ruin generator in Other Dust.  The Other Dust ruin generator has fewer variables than the generator in Sandbox #1 (example here), but it uses Kevin Crawford’s signature tag system to create depth and possibility.  It’s more geared to the Stars Without Number setting where Other Dust takes place, but it’s easy enough to reskin for other settings, including Pugmire.

                The results for the rolls were: Location: sinister caverns; Cause for ruination: madness; Current occupants: cannibals; Tags: Secret Base, Abandoned Traps.  The tags are quick notations that include short lists of possible Enemies, Friends, Things, Complications and Places.  For example, the Abandoned Traps Enemies entry includes Mad trapsmith survivalist, Creatures that float or fly above the snares, and Dormant security bots.  These lists can be used to inspire, or you can select items and plug them into adventure seeds included in Other Dust.  Adventure seeds look like this: A Friend has left a Thing in a Place.  An Enemy is trying to claim it for her own.  You can plug the tags into the seeds for various locations and get a huge variety of adventure hooks that tie directly into locations.  It’s a handy system for creating a rich, living sandbox.  Most of the mechanical ideas presented here are from the Index Card Role Playing game, which I cannot recommend enough.  It’s a fast, simple system for building compelling action stories that leaves plenty of room left over for heroism, drama or whatever kind of role playing your group prefers.

The original Cult

A Nordic supremacy fire cult tried to initiate Ragnarok through ritual self-immolation. The walls of the cavern are inscribed with runes and other cult symbols. In their meeting hall is a small library of books and journals about the Norse occult and other Nordic supremacy concerns.  The cult kept supplies both ritual and material in these caverns and guarded their secrets with traps.

The Current Occupants

                A strange fungus has overtaken the ruin.  It covers the walls, obscuring the runes and symbols and making the rocky floors treacherous and slippery. (If you’re feeling really nasty, any attempt to climb, run or otherwise move using the slippery surfaces of the ruin for traction is at disadvantage.) A musty smell hangs in the air.  The fungus uses sentient creatures as agents to fetch nutrition; these are the zombie cannibals that inhabit the ruin.  They raid the surrounding area periodically to abduct travelers, loners, and derelicts to feed the fungus.  The victims serve as agents until they are totally consumed by the fungus.

                The fungus can change how the characters are able to rest.  If the players take a short rest in the ruin, they must make Con saves.  If they fail, they are infected with the fungus.  Magical healing, a successful Heal or Medicine check, or fire kills the infection immediately, but the characters are always susceptible to the fungus.  Anyone who takes a long rest in the ruin is automatically infected.  Anyone who is infected has 1d4 days before they are completely zombified by the fungus.  Tell the players when you use this timer what will happen; it’s terrible but fair, and it will create an urgent problem for them to solve. The fungus isn’t hard to cure, but it’s quick and the effects are irreversible.  It will eat up resources quickly.

                This would also be a great location for a yellow musk creeper, if the fungus thing doesn’t float your boat.

Map and Key

All checks, saves and other rolls are dC 15. Hard rolls are dc 18 and easy rolls are dc 12, per ICRPG (check it out.  Srsly.)

1.Entrance:  This is a metal door set into a rock face.  It was better concealed at one time; now it’s rusting and barely hanging on its hinges. Make a Dex check when opening; failure means it falls and clangs.  Crit failure alerts the zombies in area 4 so they cannot be surprised.

2.Bunker:  Bunker is barely visible, requiring a Notice roll to find.  Crit failure means zombies are alerted and present in Workshop.  The door to the bunker is an easy lock. Crit failure breaks the lock; crit success earns the picker advantage on their next lock pick attempt because they learned something. Inside is the intake for a broken air filtration system.  The fungus is growing around the intake ports. On the floor inside is a trap door, opening onto a metal spiral stair.  The stair is electrified, doing 1d10 damage to anyone who touches it.  Dex save for half damage, but climbing the down stairs assures two shocks. The stairs can be shorted; doing so ruins the power cells in the workshop.

3.Tunnel: The long, dark, winding tunnel eats up light and time.  1 in six chance of being surprised by a zombie

4.Workshop: This workshop contains two metal benches, an extensive collection of post-tech tools, and a broken plasma chisel (Hard repair roll). One type B power cell is wired to the metal staircase leading up to the bunker.

5. False Supply room:  This room opens into a sizable chamber, with supply crates and barrels scattered about the perimeter.  These are rusted, covered in fungus, and trapped.  If the PC’s check them for traps, they find 1d4 concussion grenades.  If they are not successful in making the checks or don’t bother, they set off the grenades which do 1d10 damage (Dex save for half) and push them ten feet towards the pit in the middle of the room, into the pit. There are two zombies hiding in the natural alcove in the south end of the chamber who will rush the PC’s and attempt to shove them into the pit as well.  Ten feet down in the pit, near the water line, is a field emitter which creates a plane of energy parallel to the water.  This is a portal to the cage in the spring cave, which contains the sister emitter.  (Together these portal emitters comprise a relic.) Anything that falls into the pit disappears and reappears in the cage.  If the PC’s manage to detect and disable the emitter before they fall into the pit, they find that the walls of the pit are Hard to climb, being covered in slippery fungus. Along the side of the pit near the water line is a cave tunnel that leads to the spring room.On the opposite side from the zombie alcove is a carved alcove (easy to spot; DC 12) which contains four black robes with a white rune embroidered on the left breast.  Wearing these robes allows wearers to bypass the traps in the ruin, including the portal in the pit.  One the robes has a prosthetic link hanging with it. (This basically works like a Google glass, but the augmented reality it accessed is mostly disrupted or destroyed.  It can be used as a two-way radio with another link holder, and it can be a great device for giving extra information on critical successes.)  On the floor is a dusty hygiene kit.

6. Escape cache: In the tunnel between the workshop and the store room one of the cultists hid a rotting bugout bag containing one Type A power cell, two Old Terran rations, a TL 4 bedroll, and a Navcomp. Use the ruin target (15) to spot.

7. Supply room: This room can be approached two ways.  The way from the main tunnel is protected with a force field emitter; it can be bypassed by characters wearing the runic robes, by interacting with its interface with a prosthetic link or by making a successful Hard Know Arcana and Steal checks.  The same character does not have to make both checks. The other entrance to the store room is through the tunnel from the workshop. Anyone who comes through either way is targeted by a small laser turret located on the top tier of natural dais (+3, d10 damage).  Once activated the turret continues to attack once per round until it is destroyed or the room is empty of living creatures.  The turret will target zombies in this are as well as PC’s. If the turret is destroyed on a critical, 1d2 TL 3 spare parts can be retrieved in its wreckage.On the dais tier just below the turret is a locker containing 11 Old Terran rations and a smaller box containing 1 unit of TL 3 spare parts and three Type A power cells.

8. Meeting hall: This room is located behind a secret door concealed by a small shrine to Odin (a rotting flag hung above a candle-flanked silver bowl containing two crow feathers).  The characters can discern the concealed door with a Notice or Stealing check, or by examining the inexpertly installed ductwork and power cables.The cult used the plasma chisel to shape the hall into an elongated octagon.  Solid benches and an altar on a dais have been carved into the living stone.  Moldy, flickering holo-tapestries and ragged flags hang from the walls.  Plasma-carved into the wall is a book shelf.  On the shelf are several books about Nordic occult concerns, political ideology, and a journal full of screed and venom.  These are not in a language that the PC’s know, but they could provide advantage on Know: History rolls or attempts to decode the runes. Any critical success on these rolls proves distressing to dogs; they discover some truth about the fallibility and pettiness of Man.  Dogs exposed to this knowledge must make a Cha save or be at a disadvantage for all Charisma and Wisdom based saves and checks until they take a long rest.  However, dogs who use this knowledge in any way to connect to their community, engage with others constructively or grow personally will gain a permanent +1 increase to Charisma or Wisdom.The runes and diagrams are all dedicated to Nordic ideals, mythology and magic.  They have little relevance to the world outside the ruin, unless the GM decides otherwise.  (In fact, the nature of the cult is up to the GM as well.  There’s nothing about the location that makes a cultural supremacy cult necessary.)

9. Sinkhole: This slippery-sided sinkhole drops into the spring chamber.  Climbing down is a hard check.  The fall does 1d6 damage.

10. Spring: The water in this chamber is calf-deep and very cold.  It feeds the pools below the false storeroom and the sinkhole and the stream that cuts through the immolation chamber.  In the one end of the chamber sits a large cage, big enough to hold the PC’s.  A field emitter sits on top of the cage, completing the portal in the false store room. Anyone who falls into the pit there is dumped into the cage, taking 1d10 from the fall and the portal itself, which is not meant to transport living things without regular, meticulous calibration.  The cage is rusty and corroded, especially at the water line.When the PC’s appear in the cage, the cave contains as many zombies as there are PC’s plus one. Roll a d4. The PC’s have that many rounds to prepare, escape, or make ranged attacks before the zombies break through the bars and attack them. (It is also the number of round it takes the PC’s to break out of the cage, should they choose to do so.  Let them figure that out.) Each round that the fight continues, roll a d4; that many zombies appear.  Once a turn ends with no zombies standing, the fight is over and no more random zombies appear in the room.

11. Immolation chamber.  This high-ceilinged natural cave can be accessed either through the tunnel that opens onto the sloping path leading down to the floor or through the tunnel that leads from the spring room to the rock face below the path.  A stream flows from the spring through the center of the room via the tunnel opening.  Several large stalagmites jut from the floor and stalactites cover the ceiling.  The walls are carved heavily with cult symbols: Runes, black suns, and runic wheels.  At the far end of the chamber is a stone altar, blackened and partially melted by some horrible conflagration.  Evidence of fiery destruction radiates some three meters around the altar, and strange shadows seem burnt into the cavern walls. Characters who search find burnt a few small blackened bone fragments teeth; these are relics of the Old Ones. At the base of the natural ramps that surround the rock face, two empty robes are lying on the ground: two black and one a shimmering white.  The black robes are identical to the robes in the false supply room.  The white robe belonged to the cult leader; it reveals the skeleton of the wearer, yellowed with age. The negative space surrounding the skeleton is filled with dark soil, with worms and beetles burrowing about.  The robe contains a highly sophisticated medical diagnosis algorithm that has been modified to match the cult’s aesthetic.  The diagnosis routines can be accessed via a prosthetic link.  This robe counts as a Relic.

A cannibal demon (CR 5) is living in this area. If you need to lower the challenge, the demon has been infected by the fungus which has weakened it (lower hit points, lower AC from fugal damage to hide, etc.)  If you decide the demon knows about the cult’s origins and activities, you can use that knowledge to torment the dogs.  The demon can harangue the dogs as an attack.  This acts just like the Confusion spell, in addition to having the same short- and long-term effects as reading the books in the meeting hall.  A harangue also attracts 1d4 zombies to the immolation room.  The cannibal demon is carrying a plastic figurine.

Hooks:

The PC’s have several reasons to investigate this ruin.

1.           It’s a ruin.  Everybody loves a good ruin.
2.          There are rumors of an artifact in the ruin.  It is a matter transporter which the cult used as trap component.  The GM can mete out as much information about the transporter as will entice the players.
3.          There is a cannibal infestation that needs to be cleared out. This can include a rescue.

Only pre-tech items (TL 5) are considered “relics”.  All other salvage is common enough to be of no real status value in Pugmire.

Death Garage!

          In the next few entries, I’m presenting several ruins for your PA game or campaign.  My own setting is Pugmire meets Other Dust; change the setting details to suit your needs.

          I designed the ruin using the “What Is That Ruined Structure?” table in The Sandbox #1 with a flourish from Monte Cook’s Injecting the Weird. The tube-as-dungeon idea came from Runehammer’s video “Dungeon Building 101: Part 2”.

          The table uses all the standard dice to answer several questions.  Here are my results:

1.       Entrance: Wall or window has given way; Visible damage: outer sheathing is decaying and falling away; Original function: Entertainment (club or theater), What’s valuable inside: a functioning vehicle of some kind; What’s the threat: something waits for those who emerge; What’s unusual about this place: a vicious combat was here. Once a tower; now laying on its side(From Injecting the Weird). All checks are DC 15 (an idea from Runehammer.) The Runehammer channel also recommends each location has a Threat, a Timer, and a Treat, which I have included in this location.

The Death Garage

Surrounding Area

Steel splinters of a broken city loom around the ruin. A wooded sward trails behind it in a verdant wake.  Its entrance yawns like the broken-toothed maw of an idiot god, an amphitheater of destruction choked with rubble. The implacable agents of decay-rust, vines, lichen-penetrate every crack and fissure.

A one-mile halo of mayhem encompasses the ruin. The fragments of war machines and fused automatons testify of a long-forgotten battle. There is little to salvage.

Getting In

The way to the entrance is difficult and close; only one character at a time can make their way into the ruin. Characters must make few Strength or Dex saves to see if anyone takes 1 hp of scrapes and bruises. Once inside, they are in near-total darkness, standing on the edge of a fifty-foot drop.  This is the parking level of an entertainment complex. The complex, a high tower filled with clubs and restaurants, toppled over in the battle. The parabolic entrance is the tower’s bottom edge, ripped from its foundation. In the intervening years, time has buried the bulk of the tower and plants have taken hold on the land above it.  This is the green sward that cuts through the rubble of the city. This bastion of nature presents its own set of adventuring opportunities.

Standing inside the ruin, the PC’s can see a few blinking lights at different levels below them in the darkness. These are running lights of the few grav cars whose batteries are still good.  Some of them float in pairs forming platforms. Others hang from one corner as if pinched by a giant's fingers. They pirouette like demented party lights.  The "floor" is a thick layer of wrecked and rusting vehicles that slid to the ceiling when the garage toppled. The treat hovers above the wreckage: a pristine black grav car, its stereo thumping.

Descending the Tower

Once all the PC's have all reached the first floating car, roll a d4. Describe a terrible grinding sound. An ancient robot from the battlefield had powered up and is trying to chase them into the garage!  In up to four rounds it will tear an opening in the ruin large enough to get itself in (and to get the grav car out). It will then enter the ruin and attack the characters, trying to destroy them as they leap from car to car.

If the players leave a guard at the entrance, the robot ignores the guard. It focuses on getting into the tower to attack the group. If you must, give the robot a dying shield that lasts as long as the timer.

Characters make 3-5 checks to get to the lower level and reach the Treat.  The floating cars are between eight and fifteen feet apart, but most of this distance is vertical.  Failing the check for moving from car to car results in a character hanging from the target car for dear life. Critical failure means the car’s battery dies it plunges to the floor!  Anyone of a falling car takes 2d6 damage as the vehicle drops. Crashing into other grav cars on the way down slows the vehicle's fall.  This can send cars spinning off in other directions, re-configuring the battlefield!

The Robot

The robot can be expressed in several ways, depending on the group’s level and makeup.  It leaps and climbs like a gorilla, charging the PC’s to knock them off the cars.  Add a climb speed and construct qualities to the following creatures and ignore irrelevant abilities:

Minotaur Skeleton (CR 2)

Minotaur (CR 3)

Gorgon(CR 5)

Clay golem (CR 9)

Girrilon (Volo’s Guide to Monsters) (CR 4)

Ogre, add the pounce ability from a tiger (CR 3)

Iron golem (CR 16)

Other Monsters

On every round that someone stands on the wreckage at the bottom of the garage, 1d4 rust monsters appear. They live in the strata of rusty cars and are hungry for fresh metal.  If the PC’s are clever, they can kite the robot onto the floor and let the rust monsters swarm it. The rust monsters ignore the black car because they hate the taste of its nano-enhanced body. (or because of the vibrations of the stereo.  If the players turn it off, the rust monsters swarm the car!)

Besides to the rust monsters, there are three darkmantles living on the ceiling of the ruin.  They drop on prey and use darkness to make leaping or climbing between grav cars much more hazardous.

The Car and the AI

Hooks to retrieve the treat car could include an assignment, a map, or a happy accident. It may have led the PC's to itself via a key card with GPS.  Emphasize that the car looks badass: black, aerodynamic, expensive.  Make it drool-worthy. Emphasize that the hole the robot tore in the entrance is big enough for the car. The car may contain a personal possession of the former owner or a key card to an executive suite higher/deeper in the tower. In a post-recording world, the sound system is a priceless treasure.

Nigel, the car's friendly AI, is unclear about what’s happened in the last several centuries. It can tell PC's a little about life before the fall, but it has no news of the years it spent hovering in the dark. Nigel is politely curious about who is driving the car and why they smell like dog. The GM can decide how keyed into the internet of things Nigel is, and whether it can access the net at any given time. Nigel can maneuver the car out of the garage if asked. The PC’s can make Nigel an ally if they treat it with a modicum of respect.  It will do its job regardless of treatment, but no more if the PC’s abuse it.

The car can’t fly, but it can levitate up to one hundred feet with limited mobility and speed.  Consider its Speed score to be 0 when levitating, with a fly speed of 20 feet. (Speed is a Sine Nomine quality of vehicles seen in Stars Without Number and Other Dust.)

The Rest of the Tower

The rest of the buried tower awaits exploration.  It is an entertainment complex full of holo-suites, dance clubs, bars, restaurants and private rooms. Populate it with vermin, mutants, and fungal threats, as well as demented companion, service, and security bots.

       

The Death Garage!

          

The garage and the rest of the tower.  The small maps are extras.

          Any questions or comments that could improve this encounter and location are welcome.  I'm always trying to improve as a GM and designer, and I sure as shootin' don't have all the answers.

Monster AI, Challenge Adjustments and Learning to Love the Monster Manual

Runehammer is one of my favorite You Tube channels.  Hankrin Feranale (hankerin’ fer an ale. Get it?) presents D&D as an old-school-meets-board-games tactical story-telling experience, and it works for me.  Ken Hite once said the whole point of narrative in D&D is to string the fights together, and Hankrin seems to subscribe to that philosophy.

That said, he knows how to squeeze a lot of narrative juice out of combat encounters.  His videos on monster AI and adjusting challenges are must-watch for any GM who wants to get more out of combat than a hit-point countdown.  (Note that Runehammer started out as Drunkens and Dragons, and Hank gets hammered in quite a few of his vids, but the core content is worth the obnoxious You-Tubery.)

I applied the wisdom in these videos to my Dr. Levinson the-Fly-Meets-Immortan-Joe cul-de-sac encounter, and here’s what I came up with:

AI for Dr. Levinson:

Hankrin suggests pre-determining monster behavior via logic gates and writing the routines on index cards.  Here are my three cards, for preparation (his passive state, in which he prepares his evil master plan for world insectoid domination), aggressive and retreating behavior.

LOS is line of sight, which means he tries to get out of sight for ranged attacks, or find a LOS for ranged attacks.  Place of Safety means he’s in his lair, rather than out and about getting ready for world domination.  Timer means he sets off the timer (see below) that sends a wave of buggy death into the surrounding area.

Next, I applied Hankrin’s three challenge factors of damage, disruption and duration.

Damage: Since I’m going to be using Pugmire which is based on the  5e SRD, I decided to look at the 5^th Monster Manual to check out the Ankheg, a bug-monster that DR. Levinson was going to summon on a natural 20.  I found that the Ankheg was essentially what I wanted Dr. Levinson to be, so now he’s mechanically a super-intelligent Ankheg with Spider Climb and the ability to summon Stirges on any even roll above 16.

I decided to double the damage for Dr. Levinson, because I want him to be deadly and scary, as well as a potential recurring villain.  I’m using fixed monster damage, an option listed in the 5e MM, so we’ll see how that goes.

There are enough new factors in this encounter that I didn’t also want to add the complexity of monsters from multiple sources. I took out most of the 13^th Age and Other Dust mechanics for Levinson and added an animated carpet to the encounter.  The “carpet” is really a swarm of insects controlled by Levinson that overwhelms a character and tries to force its way into their body.  Gross and scary, I hope.

Disruption: Disruption dictates how much freedom to act the PC’s have in the encounter.  Hank’s illustration of a low disruption encounter is fighting a balrog in an empty parking lot.  A high-disruption encounter might have broken terrain, traps, changes in elevation, and so on.  The disruption effects in Levinson’s lair are all DC 12 (another of Hank’s ideas: one disruption DC per encounter), and they all have the same effect: they disrupt the characters’ ability to act freely. The lair is full of termite-damaged floors and walls, line-of-sight disruptions in the form of debris and termite mounds, and an ongoing effect called “swarm skeeve” (name suggestions welcome, btw) that’s a DC 12 Charisma save.  Characters who fail the save must spend a round swatting, stomping and generally being occupied with the layer of insects that undulate all over and fly through the encounter.  Certain areas of the floor are badly damaged; avoiding them requires a Wisdom or Dex save. Characters who fail must spend a round extracting a foot or other appendage from the broken floor. Between the skeevy swarm, the weakened structure, and the termite mounds blocking line of sight, this should be a fairly disruptive encounter.

Duration: If Dr. Levinson successfully retreats, the PC’s have 1d4 rounds to prepare before he unleashes a wave of heritor bugs, which will overwhelm the PC’s and disperse into the world in a twenty mile radius from the cul de sac.  All settlements within that radius will have their resources reduced by one level.  All level one settlements will be destroyed. (Rules for enclave rankings and resources can be found in Other Dust.)

So there you have it!  AI and challenge tuning for Pugmire and other PA games!  I hope you enjoy the ideas from Runehammer.  Give him a look, a like, and subscribe if you dig his stuff!

(Here are links to Hank’s video on timers and one of his brilliant room design vids.  I used these ideas in the encounter design, but I didn’t write them in to keep it reasonably brief.)

Timers video

Dungeon Building

It all comes together in Pugmire. (Seriously.)

Pugmire is where it all comes together. Less Fury Road and More Gamma World, Pugmire is a game set in a post-human future where uplifted dogs, cats, lizards and rats live in rough equivalent of a D&D-style medieval society. The first thing that comes to a lot of minds when they hear of this setting are either furry jokes or jokes about dogs’ less noble behaviors like humping legs and sniffing butts. Go ahead and have your giggle, but then get ready for some deep role playing.

The sense of loss in Pugmire is profound. Dogs all have some response to the Code of Man, a set of edicts meant to provide moral structure for dog society. Some dogs respond to the call of Man with serious devotion, even dedicating their lives to Man’s service: doing good works in Man’s name, seeking artifacts of His reign, and generally trying to shepherd others towards the ideal of being “Good dogs.” Others are skeptical pragmatists, wondering if Man was ever really worth obeying or if He was in fact just another animal: nor more or less noble than the dogs themselves. Still others revel in their freedom and run (and run and run and run) with it. Each dog’s attitude towards Man provides a large part of her role-playing impetus. The Pugmire book suggests that man has perhaps evolved and shed his mortal shell to ascend to a higher plane.

Enter Other Dust. In this setting, the Earth has been abandoned by star-faring humans because it has become an inaccessible death trap. The setting details why, but the parties responsible for isolating Earth so totally are a cadre of seven human super-psychics called The Crazed. These men and women are the lich-kings of the setting: horrifically powerful, immortal, and completely insane. If Arkham Asylum were a prison for mad gods, the Crazed would be right at home there. Add this bit of back story to the world of Pugmire, don’t tell your players, and suddenly you’ve got a role-playing time bomb worthy of John Wick. What will your devoted shepherd do when she discovers that the wasted earth she and her puppies have inherited came to her compliments of the best Man had to offer?  Will your cynical ratter still aspire to be a Good Dog when he has had to journey through a forest of formerly-human cancer trees, the handiwork of one of the Crazed?  If Mankind was so simultaneously fragile and cruel, what is the use of following the code? What will the dogs do when their gods are dead?

Pugmire bills itself as lighthearted and family friendly, but with the backstory of Other Dust, darker themes become an option.

Beyond its potential for thematic depth and role-playing drama (meaning stories in which characters must change in some way as they progress), Pugmire is very versatile mechanically. Based on the D&D 5^th edition SRD, Pugmire invites monsters and locations from pretty much all editions of D&D and other d20 material (d20 Gamma World gathering dust? How about d20 Call of C’thulhu? Bust them out and populate some ruins). While written for Savage Worlds, Andy Hopp’s Low Life is a great source of weird cults, locations and misinterpretations of the age of Man.  Even The Day after Ragnarok can provide cool adventure hooks and campaign frameworks for a game of Pugmire.  The Mutant: Year Zero free starter booklet provides some cool ideas and locations that would sing in a Pugmire campaign. And I would be remiss if I left out Numenera, a game which while fun in its own right, is full of ideas applicable to Pugmire.

Of all o these options, Other Dust provides the most Pugmire bang for your buck. OD has tools for generating gear, artifacts, locations, and adventures that are just what the Shepherd ordered for Pugmire. While capable of great thematic depth, Pugmire also shines as a game about exploring ruins and fighting monster, which Other Dust robustly supports with many maps and tables. The free material for Other Dust, including the excellent adventure Grandfather’s Rain, is bursting with adventure hooks, creatures and gear to challenge and entice Pugmire players. The free zine,The Sandbox, also has a great ruin generator. Finally, Hard Light, an adventure for Stars Without Number, has a tool set for generating tombs that would allow a sci-fi spin on a Barrowmaze-style campaign.

Pugmire won’t give you Mutant Crawl Classics-style gonzo craziness (though the patron AI's could make an appearance) or grim survival rules (though you could import them) or cool car battles (ditto), but it will provide a unique post-apocalyptic take on the terrible consequences of getting what you want.  It  will also give you full use out of your 5e books and it invites use of other material of multiple genres. I highly recommend Pugmire, and I am looking forward to seeing what my game group does with it.

Using Silent Legions and 13th Age mechanics to make an OSR post apocalyptic monster boss

In the last entry, I used Kevin Crawford’s Other Dust to flesh out a ruined cul de sac complete with a insectoid mutated military scientist bent on unleashing a massive colony of radioactive bugs onto an unsuspecting wasteland.  The mad scientist, who I’ve decided to call Dr. Levinson, needs some stats.  I’ll be using ideas from Silent Legions and 13^th Age to create the good doctor.

Silent Legions builds on the monster/mutant/alien toolboxes in Stars Without Number and Other Dust by presenting a menu of base creatures and adding a few add-ons to make the creatures unique.  I chose the Humanoid Thing, Average as the base for Dr. Levinson.  (Silent legion presents creatures as a generic type like Hulking Brute and Verminous Beast and gives three variants of each--weak, average and strong—with appropriate stats for each.) Average Humanoid Things have the following stats:

AC: 8. HD:2. Attacks: bite+wpn. +Hit:+2. Damage: 1d6+wpn. Speed: 30'. Morale:8. Skill:2

I’ll give him the Acidic template, which modifies his stats by upping damage and +Hit, but lowers morale.  Additionally, Dr. Levinson will be in body armor and carrying a laser pistol. 13th Age has some compelling reasons for giving monsters static damage rather than dice, so his final stat block is this:

AC: 4 (14 if using ascending AC). HD: 2. Attacks: Caustic claw and laser pistol. +Hit: +3. Damage: Caustic claw 3 +1 acid, 1 acid for 1d4 rounds/ laser pistol 3. Speed: 30', wall crawler (can move on any surface like walking). Morale: 6. Science: 2.

One of the things I love about the Sine Nomine sandbox tools is how they allow the GM to discover the game setting right along with the players.  Monsters with lots of GM activated powers turn the play experience into a tactical battle, while monsters with only claw/claw/bite can be tiresome.

13^th Age monster design has monster abilities activating based on the to-hit roll or the number on the escalation die (a die that counts rounds and has other mechanical effects in that game.)  Applying that principle to OSR monsters allows the gm to watch and enjoy the experience of the combat without switching roles from tour guide to tactical opponent.  (Of course, if you want to match wits with your players as a combatant, feel free.  However, I would rather facilitate their experience than be responsible for remembering how many times a breath weapon has been used or whether the spell-likes have been activated.)  I want Dr. Levinson to have some acid-puke ability as well as a swarm summoning that comes after a certain number of rounds.  I will also throw in a random mook bug showing up with certain die results. To add this kind of AI to the monster, I’ll tie certain effects to d20 rolls.

Even Hit 16+: Acid vomit.  Does 5 damage and 2 ongoing acid damage for 2 rounds.  Fortitude save for half and negates ongoing damage.

Even Miss: One heritor bug appears to fight with Dr. Levinson. (Heritor bugs are giant roaches; any low-level vermin will do.)

Natural 20: An Ankheg appears to fight with Dr. Levinson

Should he fail a morale save, Dr. Levinson will retreat easily by scooting up the wall and out a window or into a hole in the floor. His insect minions will not follow him, but will continue to fight the PC’s to block any attempts at pursuit. Dr. Levinson will disappear and become impossible to catch if he is not caught in three rounds.

Now I have a boss monster for my cul de sac, a summoner with a ranged and a melee attack who will run away to fight another day.  Dr. Levinson could be a short fight or a recurring villain, always seeking to cleanse the earth of the plague of primates that prevent the ascendency of the insect horde. The final form of Dr. Levinson is this:

AC: 4 (14 if using ascending AC). HD:2. Attacks: Caustic claw +laser pistol. +Hit:+3. Damage: Caustic claw 3 +1 acid, 1 acid for 1d4 rounds/ laser pistol 3. Speed: 30’, wall crawler (can move on any surface like walking). Morale:6. Science:2.

Even Hit 16+: Acid vomit.  Does 5 damage and 2 ongoing acid damage for 2 rounds.  Fortitude save negates ongoing damage.

Even Miss: One heritor bug appears to fight with Dr. Levinson. (Heritor bugs are giant roaches; any low-level vermin will do.)

Natural 20: An Ankheg appears to fight with Dr. Levinson

Making a Cul de sac Ruin With Google Earth and Other Dust

I've been enjoying the RPG mapping community lately.  There are a lot of helpful, generous, creative people making all kinds of fun, free maps for RPG's that I got a little excited and decided to try my hand at mapping, something I haven't done for years.

To create the ruin I wanted to map, I used the ruin generator from Other Dust.  This is about as good a generator as you can find, and it gives just enough detail to spur the mind to new and interesting avenues.  I rolled on the Ruin Origins table and got Suburban Wreckage.  I thought immediately of Sanctuary Hills in Fallout 4, the first settlement the vault dweller encounters in the game.  Sanctuary Hills is a ruined cul de sac, full of interesting back story and useful items and work stations.

I then rolled on the Ruin Destruction table and got Decay.  Ruin destruction tells what put the ruin in its current state. Basically, the place was quickly abandoned and then went to seed.  So I've got an abandoned cul de sac with buildings that are in various states of dilapidation.  Hm.

Next came the Ruin Inhabitants table, on which I rolled Beasts. The first thing that came to mind was an insect infestation: heritor bugs (the Other Dust version of PostApoc cockroaches), maybe an ankheg or rhemoraz (because D&D monsters are great for Post Apoc monsters as well in OSR games).  Things are coming together.  I have an abandoned residential area in a state of deep decay populated by monstrous bugs.  Nice.

Last came the Ruin Tags. Tags are one of Kevin Crawford's genius inventions, and basically are an evocative word or phrase combined with a number of variables like Friend, Enemy, Secret and Complication.  The tags I rolled up were Mad Scientist and Doomsday Countdown.  Things are about to get funky in the cul de sac.

I decided that the Mad Scientist is a recently thawed-out military officer who has been mutated into an insectile creature with the ability to control and summon bugs. Think Immortan Joe meets The Fly.  His mutation has driven him mad and he wants to overrun the world with insects.  He has to finish brewing a pheromone bomb which he intends to detonate under the cul de sac, sending the massive colony of bugs that live there into a killing frenzy, cleansing the world once and for all of the evil influence of man. The Mad Science tag led me to decide that he has been experimenting with human subjects, in order to make the pheromones trigger only a certain type of murderous behavior on the part of the insects.

The story elements were in place.  Now I needed stats for the Mad Scientist (that's next week's post) and a map.

I googled Post Apoc RPG maps, and found a few neat things (random ruins,random wasteland) but nothing really fit the bill for a pre-fab housing developmet. Then, it hit me: Google Earth was loaded with top down views of all kinds of places from residential areas to industrial and military complexes.  I started looking around my location and sure enough I found a cul de sac with several large homes perfect for the lair of the mad military scientist and his insect horde.

I took a marker, graph paper, and copied the layout.  Then I added details, including some random elements for exploration because you should be able to use and reuse a cul de sac map; they're all over the place and they're all similar. Here it is:

Not quite Sanctuary Hills

It's not the prettiest, but it's done and I can re-use it.  Random rolls can tell me which buildings are explorable and I can populate them with critters and loot via the Other Dust random tables as well.

How do you find make or find maps for your post-apoc games? Leave a comment below!

Art post!

This is an illustration I did for a Savage Worlds post-apoc idea a while back.  The character is named Charlie Crow, and he's a Nuid, a protector of life in Nu Earth. His companion is a four-eyed pig with a high Smarts and the Alertness feat.  Charlie could fit into any Post Apoc campaign, including the new Mutant Crawl Classics game by Goodman Games.  Here's a link to a larger image of Charlie and the rest of my Deviant Art gallery:

http://manifold2.deviantart.com/art/Charlie-Crow-144727845