Breakdown at Geyser Station

 

For this months post I am making a dungeon based on a photo I took at the Dali Museum in Paris on a recent trip to Europe. It was a great trip, I thought the cities were beautiful and spending so much time in ancient pedestrian based cities really made me realize how I always imagine my big fantasy cities as having wide roads, presumably for wagon traffic or something. 

The Dali Museum contained many of his sculptures in addition to art pieces like this one. The piece this dungeon is taken from is called Space Elephant. It contains interior room drawings inside of one of his iconic elephants with long spindly legs carrying an obelisk on its back. Dali loved elephants, often making them chimerical, for example by giving them pig tails or bats wings for ears, so I will add a chimera. He also loved Alice in Wonderland, and did an illustrated series of scenes from the book, sort of in the ink style of Space Elephant, so I will lean into that too. I also think it would be cool to try and go for a Quantum Alice angle, and do something in the style of Derelict Transdimensional Anomaly by Kirt A. Dankmyre/Xiombarg, from the recent 2024 One Page Derelict game jam.

This mechanical rambling pachyderm is captained by a salty old man and is the only way to reach your destination. However, the creature is broken down and unable to leave Geyser Station. If you want to get on the road, they might need a bit of help. 

1. Station Crewed by a Baboon who operates the pulleys and levers to dock with travelling pachyderms. He hates his job, but receives a reward of nuts, berries and cigarettes which keep him from running away.
2. Stairwell A retractable tower with a stairway that allows entry and exit from the traveling pachyderm. Electric eels in an aquarium sculpture in the ceiling provide illumination in the tower. The stairwell has exits to rooms 3 and 4 on the first landing and to 5 and 7 on the second landing. 
3. Foyer Changes every time you visit.
• 1 A bundled traveler in a waiting room at a long distance train station which connects to a cold and distant country.
• 2 Two angry opossums nested away with some rotten food in an upended cabinet in a Victorian waiting room.
• 3 Three ghosts floating in alcoves of a small crypt. They visited their living families and are now heading back to the gates of the underworld.
• 4 Four acrobats in a changing room, waiting to be called out to begin a performance for a powerful lord. The performance is themed around a fable of forbidden love.
• 5 Five golems with bodies full of drawers sit in a room with walls also full of drawers. They say that every drawer contains a secret.
• 6 Six witches and fey creatures sitting in a waiting room with bronze trim and large potted plants. They are travelling to a great effigy burning.
4. Gallery Steam elementals are forbidden from entry. Artwork of elephants with long spindly legs carrying obelisks on their backs taking part in a great war. In the center of the room are two mirror orbs that show the true intentions of anyone reflected in them. 
5. Captains Bedchamber Captain Kudzu was once a pachyderm cavalry general for a great and powerful wizard named Aleph. When Aleph was killed by adventurers, Kudzu was reduced to making a living in commercial transportation. 
6. Cockpit Here are the main control panels, observation deck, trunk docking controls and many gauges showing temperature and pressure.    
7. Engine Room Boilers powered by steam elementals. This area also serves as a kitchen for Aleph and any guests on the traveling pachyderm. The steam elementals were subdued by the wizard Aleph. When Aleph was killed long ago, Kudzu did not tell them. Steam imps from a nearby geyser have revealed Kudzu's lie to the steam elementals and they are now in open rebellion. 
8. Obelisk A chimera lives here. It is Kudzu's loyal familiar and will act in his best interest. They have been together since the war and it will do his bidding, running errands and communicating messages. A maintenance hatch in the Obelisk leads to the aquarium full of electric eels which illuminates the stairwell below. Roll d66 for animal type and body part until a complete creature emerges.
• Animal
• 1 Bat
• 2 Ox
• 3 Dragon
• 4 Lobster
• 5 Ant
• 6 Human
• Body Part
• 1 Torso
• 2 Legs
• 3 Head
• 4 Tail
• 5 Arm
• 6 Eyes/Ears/Nose/Mouth

Aggregate Arcs

Author Kurt Vonnegut talked about what he called the shapes of stories. One of the basic plots he described, Man in Hole, starts at a high point with the protagonist doing well, then they are brought low by falling into some trouble, and finally they get to another high point after resolving their troubles. Novels and TV shows that capture popular attention often follow such structures. Many shapes are studied and reproduced meticulously in today's blockbusters, like Joseph Campbells Hero's Journey, where the hero embarks on an adventure, encounters adversity, and then returns home changed. 

Many game masters will write stories ahead of time, and guide their adventuring party through a predetermined set of events. In this case, a campaign may have a well defined shape, where clear recognizable plot points occur to give a story different progressions of highs and lows. 

There is a way that stories develop in games if the GM refrains from writing a story before hand that I think of as an aggregate story arc. In a game that values player agency, the highs and lows come much more randomly and unpredictably. So you have little chapters and vignettes that tie together probably leading towards one or a handful of overarching quests or themes. They are more or less a series of collisions between players and the game world. Ultimately there is a story shape or arc, but it is an aggregation of many different things that happen over the course of months and years of playing to find out what happens next.

I had a moment in a recent game I run, where following a players curiosity and improvisation based on random tables felt very much like one little chunk of a larger aggregate campaign arc. The group was traveling by boat through a jungle when their boats were damaged by rocks. They spent the evening and night on a river bank doing repairs, and in the meantime one of the characters (the thief of course) decides to wander into the jungle looking for anything valuable. After a few rolls of the dice and some random generators, we found out that they do in fact find something. It was a giant ameoba with a glowing flower in it, strangely undigested inside the amoeba's body beside bits of decomposing debris. The players use a bag of salt that they happen to be carrying to easily overcome the amoeba and recover the flower, which they will be able to use to create a regeneration potion. They discussed some plans, which included trying to cultivate and grow more of this flower. The regeneration flower could be a footnote, or it could be the start of a new agricultural dynasty. 

This was one short chapter among many in our campaign, made up on the spot, but memorable and potentially game changing. It seems to me that these little chapters aggregate, being created through randomness and letting things happen spontaneously and organically. Events layer one after another to create a richly varied, moving story line that is much more satisfying than any prewritten plot arc. 

Kitchen Sink Fantasy

When I first moved to the Denver area I was searching for local TTRPG book stores and discovered Black & Read, a used music, books and games store. It has an impressive section of used (and new) TTRPGs and board games tucked behind the fantasy and sci-fi novels. My first visit there I picked up two games I remembered seeing in middle school, Shadowrun 2nd edition and Werewolf: The Apocalypse, both first published in 1992. Reading them back to back I came away with an impression of how different ingredients combine to create new fantasy worlds. Shadowrun's world has a magical aura that waxes and wanes causing apocalypses, tying the game world to our real world and to the publishers medieval fantasy game line, Earthdawn. All this is of course a pretext to doing cyberpunk with orcs and dragons. Werewolf's ingredients in their broadest strokes are that you have secret werewolf tribes fighting a cosmic Wyrm who is destroying the earths life force, acting through modern industrial society. These two games both use simple combinations to create their worlds, Shadowrun adds fantasy to cyberpunk and the werewolves protect mother Earth.

I want to continue in the vein of some discourse that followed the death of Dragon Ball author Akira Toriyama. Toybox Creativity: The Genius of Dragon Ball talks about rejecting genre conventions by being open to combining disparate fantasy/sci-fi/other elements without worrying about explaining everything. Toy Box Naturalism builds on this idea by sprinkling in a little bit of Gygaxian Naturalism, which is the idea that a limited amount of backstory and ecology behind monsters makes them come alive and become more interesting in game. I really agree that explaining elements of your fantasy with more fantasy lore rather than technicalities can be a lot of fun. 

I think my two 1992 "classics," Werewolf and Shadowrun, both demonstrate this ethic to create new fantasy worlds. They go about it very differently from each other but also have a lot in common. Both games frame campaigns that are politically charged, Shadowrun as corporate espionage lowlifes and Werewolf as... furry ecoterrorists. Both feel very '90s to me, both books are similar in size and pretty proportional in their levels of lore and rules crunch. Maybe Shadowrun has more crunch because of all the hacking rules and cyberware, but overall they feel close to me. 

The lore that creates Shadowrun's fantasy universe feels a little like it is an ends to a means, like the goal was to figure out a way to combine the two genres. I do think the ebbing and waning of the Earths magical field is a very cool bit of world building, but the amount of effect it has is minimal aside from weaving fantasy into cyberpunk. The emergence of horrors with the growing magical field gives the setting a Lovecraftian, post-apocalyptic element, but our attention is drawn to the dense city centers for corporate intrigue.

Werewolf's lore leads in almost the opposite direction. It creates an acute genre, centered around secret werewolf societies that all work towards a mission aligned with their spiritual position in the universe. Part of this difference between the two games is because genre is such a broad term. Genre can describe the world your story takes place in, but it can also describe the characters in the story. The genre of detective stories, for example, its not about whole worlds full of detectives, its just features detectives. Werewolf makes use of this, where being a werewolf is not just something that you are, but an identity and worldview. 

I have a world building game I play with some friends that started out as a way to choose which movie to watch from a shelf of VHS cassettes. Everyone pulls out one or a few cassettes a little bit out from the shelf, and then everyone takes turns pushing cassettes back into the shelf one at a time, until just one remains. The final remaining movie is the movie for the night. My friends and I use a similar approach for a world building exercise. Everyone writes a genre element on a notecard and puts them on the table, making and adding as many notecards as they want. Next, we all take turns removing cards until we are left with a handful of elements that we think we can work into a cool campaign framework.

Halfway through this game, you end up in a place that is sort of Toybox Creativity taken to its extreme. With every genre your group can think of thrown in the mix, it becomes a Kitchen Sink Fantasy, a fantasy where all possible fantasy elements exist, the collective product of your imaginations all together in one universe. The first half of the game up to here is freewheeling brainstorming. In the second half, you break the Kitchen Sink Fantasy down into increasingly specific combinations, things that you never thought of putting together become world-defining realities. This part is about being critical. We are making those tough decisions. What can we cut? What do we want to keep? This half is more serious in contrast to the light-heartedness of the first half.

So my point in all this, is that to me Shadowrun exists on the first half of this journey, optimistically brainstorming and adding to the pile. Werewolf exists on the second half of the journey, on the way back down toward an intentional aesthetic, brooding and paring away from Kitchen Sink Fantasy. 

Sandboxing Volturnus 1: The Pirate Ambush

The idea of a shipwreck leaving passengers stranded and having to survive a harsh environment has been an interesting starting point for many a story. The "starship crash on an isolated alien planet" particularly has been used a few times in media that I love, for example in Scavengers Reign and Rimworld, so it makes sense for me to use it to frame a TTRPG campaign. (There is also its sci-fi counterpart, the "Otherworld Arrivant," mentioned by Old Gus on the NSR Discord.) 

This is the first worldbuilding post of my "Sandboxing Volturnus" adventure, discussed in this previous post. In it I will cover the starship crash that kicks off the campaign. Although this is a sandbox adventure intended to give players open ended control, railroading the crash is necessary for the concept to work. So we'll kick off the campaign in medias res, with the players on a starship that is severely disabled by a pirate attack. There is no safe way home from here, and the players will have to survive the planet and find a way off on its own alien terms. 

The players are members of a survey crew, sent on a mission to explore a little known remote alien planet. The previous survey crew sent here has gone missing, so their mission is to find out what happened to them. Unfortunately, soon after arriving at the planet, while the players were still sleeping, there was a surprise pirate attack which destroys the survey ships engines and defensive capabilities. Their pirate scrap ships have attached a boarding tube and are overwhelming the survey ship's meagre defenses. And to make matters worse, the ship is slowly plummeting into the atmosphere and will burn up in a few hours!

The players wake up in their own private quarters or perhaps are awoken from cryosleep. In the case of cryosleep, their belongings will be stowed away in a luggage compartment. The ship is mid-siege and the damage to the ships systems is done. Pirates have boarded through two boarding tube breach points near the front of the ship each guarded by two pirates. Twelve pirates boarded from each of their ships, and a pilot remains on each one. If anyone other than a pirate attempts to cross the boarding tube, the pilot will immediately eject the tube. With superior numbers and firepower, the pirates quickly took over the bridge and are looting the stores looking for valuables. 

The crew quarters are the furthest point away from the bridge, with separate rooms for engineering, telemetry, cargo, mess hall and a gym between. Aside from the players there are a few specialists on the crew, who can be saved and possibly help out later. There are probably no more than 15 crew on the survey in total.

The safest way off of the ship is to sneak to the escape capsules near the bridge and escape in the chaos of the attack. If the pirates complete their raid, or if all pirates on the ship are neutralized, the scrap ships will detach to allow the survey ship to crash on the planet. If the escape pods are not used, the ship can possibly be navigated to land "safely". 

Pirate Ambush Encounter Table

1. Terrible noises coming from the engine

2. Gunfire and screaming from down the hall

3. Running injured survey crew member

4. Pirate chemheads, out of their minds on chem

5. Pirate goon squad, looking to hurt people

6. Pirate leader, sadistic, melodramatic and loves the arts

Possible crash sites

1. Desert

Home of the Ur-Octopod land-dwelling octopii people. They possess an extra neuro tentacle similar to those in the Avatar movies, and are friends to many animals. To win entry into their tribe and gain their trust, you must make a pilgrimage to their holy city through the Rocky Badlands and prove yourself in battle with a terrible beast. 

The desert also holds occasional ruins of an ancient advanced dinosaur civilization which might be used as shelter and water sources. 

2. Glass Grasslands

The grass itself is incredibly sharp and prohibits free travel. Certain native fauna have evolved ways to clear paths in the glass grass, and following their trails is the best approach to travel.

3. Megaflora Forest

Home to the Kohnots, a species of furry and diminutive tree dwellers who build tree villages with hanging walkways and swing by vines. They have also developed hang gliders which allow them to foray safely into the adjacent Glass Grasslands. The Kohnots have a complex social life characterized by ritual and paying respect through gifts and favors. 

4. The Northern Hills

Cold hilly lands occupied by the Plodin, a species of land bound crustaceans whose bodies have a three-fold axis of symmetry. They have an animistic religion and have a different spirit to worship for just about everything and every situation. They have carved a great temple out of a naturally occurring crystal occupied by the highest ranking members of their religion. 

5. Rocky Badlands 

The holy city of the Ur-Octopod octopii people is here, only accessible through dangerous networks of caves that contain many terrifying creatures. In the holy city, outsiders can do battle with a terrifying beast in their ancestral tradition to enter their tribe.

6. Volcanic Wastes

The wastes are largely uninhabited and present many natural hazards.

A group of pirates led by The Star Kraken also make the planet their home, and have established a few bases of operations on the surface, as well as an hidden mothership in orbit. The attack that downs the players' ship is made by a few smaller vessels that come from this mothership. The Star Kraken has connections to corrupt officials in the government in the more civilized regions of space, and make a fortune by trading resources mined here. Their operation depends on labor of the Plodin, who they have deceived into working with them by pretending to be gods that speak to their religious leaders. 

The pirates have two main planetary bases, one to the north near the Plodin, and another near the forest, where they often clash with the Kohnot. The southern forest base is their main scientific facility, where they bring unconscious Plodin religious leaders for surgery that renders them pliable to Star Kraken control. Each facility has considerable defenses: electrified fences, artillery guns, atmofliers and a host of robots in addition to the hardened pirates themselves. 

Sandboxing Volturnus: Outline

The Volturnus hexmap

Recently I have been trying to get into the classic 70s and 80s science fiction adventure modules. This means reading modules from games like Traveller, Star Frontiers, Gamma World, etc... I was lucky enough to find a good reading list on the NSR discord with a lot of depth, as well as plenty of classic sci-fi recommendations on the blog Grognardia. After reading a couple of Traveller modules, I moved on to the Volturnus series, an adventure split into three booklets. The first of these booklets comes as the intro adventure in the Star Frontiers: Alpha Dawn box set published in 1980. The complete series makes up a grand adventure set on an alien world populated by inimical sentient races who need to be united to defend the planet from an impending alien threat. The downside is that the series is also written with a very linear narrative with unavoidable plot events that must happen along the way. These are events like an initial spaceship crash, storms that prevent the party from leaving a certain part of the desert, and a kidnapper who takes a prisoner during an assault on a pirate base who is seen disappearing into the desert. I thought that this story railroad detracted from on otherwise awesome mini-campaign, and that Volturnus could be rewritten as a more open ended adventure in the form of a sandbox. I'll try to set up and outline this sandboxing project here, and then flesh out the different factions and dungeons in later posts. 

I don't think all of the plot events that happen over the three booklets need to be thrown out. The spaceship crash at the beginning of the adventure is sort of unavoidable to set the stage for the campaign. The starting mission of tracking down the crew of the previous survey mission who disappeared should stay, but doesn't have to be pursued by the party for the world to be interesting. The battle between the Kurabanda and the pirates that is ongoing the first time the party enters a certain forest is pretty cool. The final battle between the united alien races of Volturnus and the invading space worms should stay too, its pre-planned decisive battles can be worked a bit into more of a toolbox for large scale warfare. 

The Kurabanda will become Ewoks with the serial numbers filed off, since that's sort of what they are, and because of some recent missteps made by WotC in using another monkey alien race related to Star Frontiers. 

I will try to rewrite the setting from memory, so in practice this will be a Volturnus inspired sandbox for me or anyone to use. I guess one day it might be fun to put together into a book and stat out for a system like Stars Without Number or Mothership, so I also plan to come up with alternate names along the way to avoid any future headaches. 

Since it is January, I will try and make this my 2024 writing project, and try to shoot for one blog post a month, hopefully.

My current ideas for posts are: 

• desert octopii and their pilgrimmage
• traversing the glass grasslands and other dangerous terrain
• the tree dwelling furballs and the megaflora forest
• the pirate base and their operations on the planet
• the ritualistic and religious crustacean/insect people in the north
• the underground city of dying ancient dinosaur gengineers
• the race of sentient robots occupying the city of the ancients
• the evil alien worms and a large scale warfare procedure for the final battle

Anquadus Symbiote

 

The anquadus is a symbiotic pairing of a telepathic Anqua snake and an Adus eagle. The alliance is made because the Anqua snake has extraordinarily strong scales, which allow the eagle to wield it as a weapon, even during the high speeds involved in diving strikes. The venom and flexibility of the snake also allow the duo complex manipulation of objects. As a symbiote the Anqua snake is also capable of speech and will know the local humanoid languages of the area. It is not uncommon for them to possess magical capabilities and know a handful of spells.

While both are equals in this relationship, the snake is craftier and more sly than the eagle, and it speaks for and makes most of the important decisions for the two.

An anquadus will typically settle in mountainous regions, where it will terrorize small towns, stealing their livestock and taking them back to their lairs in the most inaccessible regions of the mountains. They also have a fondness for magical items and will steal or trade for them when possible, offering their services in exchange.

Shrine of the Desert Dragons one page dungeon

 I realized that my last post would work well as a one page dungeon so I threw it together, enjoy!

Download a pdf version here