Cocaine Owlbear

Cocaine Owlbear

Alignment: Chaotic
Movement: 180’ (60’)
Armor: As chain mail
HD: 6 (25hp)
Attacks: 2 claws/beak, or 2/claws/owlbear hug
Damage: 1d8/1d8/1d10, or 1d8/1d8/2d8+2
Save: As fighter lvl-3
Morale: 12

It is said that owlbears are the failed byproducts of the experiments of mad natural philosophers, but in truth they are the result of successful experiments. The failed ones are the creatures known as cocaine owlbears, hyperviolent and mindless creatures who stop at nothing in their quest to devour the entire world and all its inhabitants. Cocaine owlbears have an initiative bonus of +1, and PC’s surprise rolls are modified by -1.

If both claws connect, the cocaine owlbear embraces its victim, dealing 2d8+2 damage. On each subsequent turn, the victim continues to take the same amount of damage unless he or she is able to escape the embrace (saving throw, STR roll, oppossed STR roll). If only one of the claws hits, the beast continues with a peck.

Cocaine owlbears are immune to sleep and mind-controlling effect. In fact, these monsters do not sleep, ever.

Monsters should break the rules

What makes a monster a monster and not just a particularly ugly or strange animal? It doesn’t seem like a difficult question, but entire books have been written to try to answer it*. Leafing through some of these texts, we find several interesting things.

1. A monster is menacing

The monster in a work of fiction can be friendly (Monsters Inc.), heroic (Swamp Thing), genial (The Munster Family), ridiculous (Scooby-Doo). But in horror, which is generally intended to frighten, or cause discomfort or discomfort to the reader, the most notable characteristic of this creature is to be menacing, i.e. dangerous.

A) Dangerous in a concrete way

The most direct way to make a monster dangerous is to make it lethal. A creature that can kill or maim is a good example of a menacing monster. Literature is full of them: The cenobites in The Hell-bound Heart (Clive Barker), the human/fish hybrids in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” (H.P. Lovecraft), the monster in Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), the vampire in Dracula (Bram Stoker), the daddy in The Shining (Stephen King), the mansion in The Haunting of Hill House (Shirley Jackson), even the cat in “The Black Cat” (Edgar Allan Poe).

The monster in literature can be an ordinary human (King), a supernatural being (Barker, Stoker), an animal (Poe), an object or thing (Jackson) or what we would call an aberration (Lovecraft, Shelley).

B) Dangerous in an abstract way

Sometimes, the monster is not physically menacing, but psychologically, morally or socially. They’re beings that don’t destroy the body (or not only the body), but the identity (“The Horla” by Guy de Maupassant), that disrupt the established moral order (Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite), or that seek to impose a new social order (“The Shadow Over Innsmouth”).

Also menacing are monsters that reactivate in the protagonist and the reader some childhood fears, such as the fear of being devoured or castration (Stephen King’s It; Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes), or that threaten to make sexual fears and traumas conscious (Joseph Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla; Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper”).

2. A monsters is impure

A common characteristic among monsters in horror literature is the repulsion they cause on a physical level; in other words, the protagonists of these stories react with disgust or rejection to these creatures, and do their best not to come into contact with them. This is due to the interstitial or contradictory nature of monsters, which present a conflict between two or more cultural categories. It is like being in the presence of dirt or human waste in a space that should be clean, such as a kitchen or living room.

The impurity of literary monsters, is achieved in 5 different ways, to wit:

A) Fusion

Fusion activates conflict through the combination of two or more opposing cultural categories, which may be visually perceptible or of an ontological order, for example: life/death (vampires, mummies, zombies); animal/human (“The Fly” by G. Langelaan; the pig men in William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland); animate/inanimate (haunted houses, the puzzle in The Hell-bound Heart); intelligence/instinct (“The Black Cat”); tangible/intangible (“The Horla”); innocence/evil (“The Decapitated Chicken” by Horacio Quiroga).

Fusion is constructed by condensing two or more opposites in the same character (or object), which in horror literature can be none other than the monster.

B) Fission

In the case of fission, the contradictory elements are distributed in different but metaphysically related entities, as occurs with the double or the changeling.

Temporal fission. Fission divides a being in time. For example, the figure of the werewolf, where beast and human occupy the same space/body, but at different times; this monster embodies a categorical contradiction (animal/human) that is distributed in time. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is the most famous example of a monster created through temporal fission.

Spatial fission. This is two separate but related bodies, a fission that divides a being in space, multiplying it. For example, the double in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey, or any work about the doppelgänger. This fission takes place in two modalities:

• The double. It represents the dark, the hidden or repressed that comes to light, and causes horror by contradicting accepted cultural, moral or social categories. The double performs the evil acts that the original would not commit. Poe’s “William Wilson” and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixirs are examples of this form of fission.
• The imposter. The monster is either a replacement for the original (usually human), or an impostor trying to impersonate it. If the impostor really is, it is an emotionless being. If there’s been no such replacement, and it’s only imagined by someone, it’s a psychotic disorder, known as Capgras Syndrome. Horror comes into play when the boundaries between the two are unclear. The Case of Lovecraft’s Charles Dexter Ward is paradigmatic on the subject of the impostor.

These divisions turn the characters into symbols representing categorically distinct or opposing elements, while in the fusions, contradictory elements are amalgamated into a single symbol that contains them. Condensation and division allow for the projection of themes of interstitiality, cultural contradictions and impurity.

C) Magnification

To cause horror, we can take a real creature, associated with a feeling of revulsion, or that has unpleasant characteristics from a cultural point of view, and increase its size considerably. Giant spiders would be the most obvious choice. Spiders are creatures that cause repulsion to most people even at their original size. Increasing their dimensions, even to the size of a dog, let alone a building, has the power to increase the horror experienced. An example of a larger than normal, though not colossal, spider is found in M.R. James’ “The Ash-tree,” and in Brian Lumley’s “Cement Surroundings,” there are some huge worms.

*Reduction. One variation is reduction, as evidenced by stories about goblins and evil elves, or Horacio Quiroga’s “The Feather Pillow”, where the typical vampire figure is taken and reduced to the size of an insect.

D) Multiplication

Instead of taking these beings and making them giants, it’s a matter of multiplying them in number. The mass of these creatures becomes the monster. Attacks by spiders, ants, locusts and rats are among the most popular. These hordes not only cause distress because of their repulsive nature, but are driven by an evil intelligence that seems to seek the annihilation of human beings. Lovecraft’s story “The Rats in the Walls” comes to mind, as does Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night,” where evil fungi sprout everywhere and threaten to cover the entire world.

E) Horrific metonymy

The monster doesn’t need to be repulsive in itself, it’s enough that it relates to repulsive beings and objects to cause horror. Count Dracula is a figure who, physically, does not appear abnormal, and in some readings may even appear seductive, but he surrounds himself with rats and other nauseating creatures, which’s enough to make him repulsive by association.

In Clive Barker’s The Damnation Game, the monster has a normal appearance, but his assistant is a zombie who throughout the novel goes through a process of putrefaction that consumes him more and more. In “The Abominations of Yondo” by Clark Ashton Smith, the monster is the desert of Yondo which, although not a living being, becomes a cause of horror because of its association with all kinds of abominations, such as corpse-colored insects that chase the protagonist, to the eyeless creature similar to a dog and at the same time to a spider, which tries to hunt him using its sense of smell.

3. So… break the rules

A monster must be, by default, threatening, this is achieved by making it dangerous. A monster can also be impure. Impurity is what turns a monster into a monster of horror. This is achieved through: Fusion and fission, which allow the creation of horror biologies; magnification and multiplication, which are ways of increasing the power of creatures already associated with repulsive feelings and rejection; and horrific metonymy, which is a way of emphasizing the impure nature of a creature by associating it with reviled beings and objects. Monsters in horror literature are a compound of danger and disgust.

Some of the most interesting creatures are those that use more than one of these categories. In the aforementioned “Las abominaciones de Yondo” we not only have the metonymy of horror by associating the desert with repulsive beings, we also have the multiplication by multiplying the horrors that the protagonist encounters. In the same way, Dracula is not only a repulsive being by association with rats and spiders, he also incurs in fusion by being an undead, and in temporal fission, by becoming a wolf.

Monsters break the reality rules of fiction. In the same way, monsters in a role-playing game, if we want them really scary and horrifying, must break the rules of the reality of this other fiction. A monster is not created in the same way as a player character and should not follow the same rules.

If you wish, a monster can attack several times, or regenerate its life points, or be immune to certain kinds of attacks, or whatever madness comes to mind. Of course, in the hands of a fair and impartial referee, a monster, even if it breaks the rules of reality, will not break its own rules.

*Suggested reading: Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror Or, Paradoxes of the Heart; Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo; W. Scott Poole, Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting; y Phillip Athans, Writing Monsters.

Now go make some nasty monsters!

Suggested soundtrack

The Dark, the Weird and the Sublime

The Dark

The dark hates the players; you play the dark. You will probably forget that a candle has a ten foot radius but you will never stop waiting for the candle to go out.
–Patrick Stuart

From time to time something unexpected happens in our life or our environment. It’s not something extraordinary but mundane, but very easy to miss. And because it’s so easy to overlook, the first time you experience it, it’s amazing.

I once visited a cave.

Huasca de Ocampo, in the state of Hidalgo, Mexico, is a tourist town (or Pueblo Mágico, as they call them around here). Its main attraction is its huge ecological park. There are recreational activities, a large lake in the middle of the forest, virgin springs and a trout farm where you can catch your own food. Ah, yes! And also a cave that you can visit.

The Cueva del Duende (Leprechaun’s Cave) is only a minor attraction. For a very modest fee, the attendant lends you a battery-powered lamp and lets you enter the cave all alone (it’s a small cave, more like a tunnel; it’s really not a dangerous place). The rules are very simple and straightforward: “Do not turn off the lamp at any time”.

I, of course, could not pass up the opportunity presented to me. When the entrance to the cave had disappeared behind me, that is, when daylight no longer reached the cave’s interior, I turned off the lamp and… Holy shit!

Reality Testing

But, you know, I wasn’t in any real danger. The worst that could happen was that the lamp would not light again and I would have to wait five or ten minutes until the next visitor passed by. What happened was that, after thirty seconds, the reverential terror I felt at experiencing the utter darkness gave way to another, more mundane, and more familiar feeling: boredom. I lit the lamp, which worked perfectly, and continued on until I reached the exit. Then I went to catch a trout, failed and had to buy a previously dead one.

Although ephemeral, the experience of complete darkness has served me well for two things, mainly: writing fiction and running dungeon adventures. Having known darkness, it’s easier to describe the oppressive atmosphere of a dungeon.

Two years later, reading Veins of the Earth, I relived that moment. Reading this book was an artificial (which is to say: artistic: aesthetic) way of reliving the reverential terror of that experience without having to return to the embarrassing reality of boredom and disinterest, the goofiness of existing and having a body, the awareness that I had to hurry so as not to make a fool of myself, so as not to be “the idiot who turned off the lamp”.

The Sublime

The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature is astonishment.
–Edmund Burke

In aesthetic theory, and in contrast to the merely beautiful, the Sublime is the quality of physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical greatness, beyond all calculation. It’s the capacity of a work or phenomenon to provoke both a feeling of awe and terror, an irrational ecstasy.

The ideas of the Sublime originate in the Greek Pseudo-Longinus, approximately during the first century of the common era, and were rediscovered in the Middle Ages and then again during Romanticism, and it’s from here that they reach us, we of the future.

For Romanticism, the Sublime is the combination of awe and terror provoked by an encounter with the natural world. In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke describes the Sublime as astonishment: “Astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other.”

The Sublime is an encounter with the vastness of the world, and that this encounter strips us of all our thoughts, leaving us in pure emotion. It is the feeling that comes from contemplating a violent storm or the landscape from a high mountain. It is not the simple fear, which is caused by the threat of death, but an existential and reverential terror that occurs when we become aware of our insignificance and the immeasurable vastness of the world.

To experience the Sublime, you must eliminate all the pleasures and comforts of the world and make yourself as vulnerable as possible. Or as Burke said, “Vacuity, darkness, solitude, and silence.” For example, the most absolute darkness inside a cave.

Summoning of the Muse

Not only nature is capable of evoking the feeling of the Sublime, art can do it too.
Dead Can Dance’s Within The Realm Of A Dying Sun (which I am listening to as I write this) is, for me, the perfect example of the Sublime.

I don’t know the concept behind the album, and I don’t want to know it so as not to ruin my own interpretation and experience.

Within The Realm Of A Dying Sun is the equivalent, abbreviated and sonorous, of the Mysteries of Eleusis. It’s an initiation rite practiced by the followers of the religion of Demeter and Persephone.

The initiatory rite was a representation of Demeter’s journey recounted in the Homeric hymn dedicated to the goddess. It included a pilgrimage, a fast, the consumption of an intoxicating drink and the entrance to an enclosure, where the mysteries were revealed. One of the modern theories points out that the mystery was the communion with Demeter herself, a theory of which I am a supporter (I am an atheist, so it’s logical that the appearance of the goddess is merely symbolic).

Dead Can Dance’s album, of short duration (less than forty minutes) reminds me of this rite. The first tracks are sung in English, by Brendan Perry. They serve as an initial guide, they lead us little by little from the normal world to a more mysterious one, out of this world.

The second half, sung by Lisa Gerrard, in her own invented language (glossolalia, apparently), places us squarely in the world of the mythical/symbolic. Even the music has changed, becoming reverential and mysterious, akin to blood-curdling ritual chants.

The penultimate theme is an invocation. We are calling the goddesses.

The last theme is the proper manifestation of the goddesses, or Persephone specifically. The theme, “Persephone (The Gathering Of Flowers)” refers, undoubtedly, to the return of spring and the blooming of flowers.

But it is not a happy or luminous song. It’s dark, mysterious. Even sad and apocalyptic, with instrumentation unlike anything else, on the album or anywhere else (except, perhaps, Final Fantasy VII). In order for Persephone to come back to life, Demeter has agreed to sacrifice her own life and go to the world of the dead, if only for a season.

Those last moments of the track provoke in me that awe and terror that can only be described as the feeling of the sublime. Listening so many times to this album allowed me to understand, at least on an emotional, if not entirely rational level, the Mysteries theory.

Usefulness of the Sublime

According to Burke, the Sublime has the positive effect of making the everyday problems that overwhelm us become trivial. Compared to the black skies of a storm, the raging clouds, the violent winds capable of making the mightiest tree bend and the very ocean itself churn, compared to this, I repeat, what is a traffic jam on the way home from the office?

In an ideal society we would have encounters with the sublime on a regular basis, not just in museums or during the holiday season when traveling. The old religions had it right. The Greeks of Mycenaean times came face to face with Demeter; the sorginak celebrated feasts in the Goat’s Meadow in the company of their goddess, Mari.

After a week’s work, everyone had the opportunity to be confronted with ideas of greatness. Even the Sunday Christian mass would have the same function.

And isn’t this similar to meeting (weekly, biweekly, monthly) to play OSR?

The Weird

The weird is constituted by a presence — the presence of that which does not belong. In some cases of the weird (…) the weird is marked by an exorbitant presence, a teeming which exceeds our capacity to represent it.
–Mark Fisher

Into the Weird

In the introduction to The Weird: A compendium of strange and dark stories, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer define the Weird as “the pursuit of some indefinable and perhaps maddeningly unreachable understanding of the world beyond the mundane”. And they complement their definition with Lovecraft’s words: a “certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread”, a “malign and particular suspension or defeat of… fixed laws of Nature”.

Doesn’t this remind us of what was said about the Sublime? But there is a difference. The reverential terror we experience during a storm or in the total darkness of a cave doesn’t seem to us to be malign, nor to be against the laws of nature.

The Weird is the sombre counterpart of the Sublime. This abolition of the natural laws of the universe is astonishing and terrifying, but also incomprehensible. “Reverie or epiphany, yes, but dark reverie or epiphany” (Ann and Jeff VanderMeer). After seeing an exhibition of Max Klinger’s etchings in Munich, Kubin wrote:

“I was suddenly inundated with visions of pictures in black and white – it is impossible to describe what a thousand-fold treasure my imagination poured out before me. Quickly I left the theater, for the music and the mass of lights now disturbed me, and I wandered aimlessly in the dark streets, overcome and literally ravished by a dark power that conjured up before my mind strange creatures, houses, landscapes, grotesque and frightful situations.” (Emphasis is mine)

It’d be easy to suppose that Kubin expresses the same epiphany that occurs when we are confronted with the Sublime, and in a certain way it is, with the exception that instead of elevating the spirit (in its materialistic sense, as a state of mind; the spirit in the metaphysical sense does not exist), instead of a lesson of humble insignificance, this encounter with the Sublime caused in our author a feeling of disturbance, and this feeling was caused, precisely, by the impossibility of understanding it.

Modern philosophy is born with Descartes, when he asks himself, in reference to knowledge and reason, if it would be possible that he is being deceived by a demon of perversity. Modern philosophy is born from the encounter of philosophy as it had been known until then with the horror of incomprehension.

The Sublime makes us remember or become aware of our finitude. If this awareness is tinged with the horror of the incomprehensible, the Sublime is overshadowed. This somber Sublime is precisely the feeling or the quality of the Weird.

Weirdos

So far this century, the Weird has become quite popular, not only in literature, but also in movies, role-playing games and even philosophy. Authors such as Mark Fisher, Eugene Thacker, Ben Woodard and Graham Harman have systematized the Lovecraftian “philosophy”. Although it’s far from becoming the quintessential new philosophy, its presence and influence on modern culture cannot be denied.

Eugene Thacker is known as the philosopher of horror. When he speaks of horror, he’s not referring to the narrative itself, but to a mood or an atmosphere. This echoes Lovecraft’s definition. The goal of this philosophy of horror is to think about the limits of our ability to know things in the world and our place in it; that is, about the incomprehensible.

Like the Sublime, this kind of horror, which we must call the Weird, places us face to face with the incommensurability of the universe, reminding us of our insignificance; unlike the Sublime, it forces us to think about our place within the universe, but it also makes us aware of our inability to comprehend the non-human world.

What happens when you leave a negadungeon

Negadungeons are cursed places. You don’t enter a negadungeon chasing promises of wealth and fame (at least not usually). You enter a negadungeon chasing obsessions.

Smart adventurers (or players) avoid negadungeons like the plague. Sometimes they enter a dungeon and as soon as they notice something’s off, they leave.

Leaving the Negadungeon Unfinished

“Unfinished” is an ambiguous, arbitrary term, and must be interpreted by the referee according to her own campaign and style. An “unfinished negadungeon” is generally one that is left:

• before at least half of it has been explored,
• without finding/destroying/solving the main item/monster/mystery

Save vs Curse

When adventurers escape from a negadungeon, each must make a saving throw vs. magic. Those who fail are cursed.

Effects

Roll a d6 to find out the effect of the curse on your character (and any accompanying NPCs). The curse will activate during sleep (the next time the victim sleeps).

1. Every morning you wake up with blood on your hands. You did something during the night but you don’t remember it. But maybe someone saw you do it.
2. Every night you dream of the negadungeon, your sleep is restless and there is a 1-in-6 chance that the next morning you will not be able to prepare spells. If your class doesn’t allow you to cast spells, lucky you!
3. You have seen it in your dreams. Something important to you (a child, a spouse, a family heirloom, your lucky pants) is deep in the negadungeon. You don’t know if it’s really there, but what is certain is that it’s not where it should be (at home, among your possessions, etc.)
4. You find them everywhere. Instinctively you recognise them. They are the original inhabitants of negadungeon. They are spectral apparitions, a pair of disembodied eyes watching you from a distance, a voice calling for “help”. Every morning you must make a saving throw vs. magic or you will automatically lose initiative in all your encounters for the day (in group initiative, you are considered a separate group).
5. You have been marked by the dark sign. This sign, visible as a scar or tattoo on your face, is like a lantern that attracts moths, but in your case it attracts chaos. Each night you must sleep in an area bright enough to prevent you from resting (the next day, all your rolls are made at a -1d4 penalty); otherwise, 1d4 undead will appear at any time during the night, automatically winning the surprise roll.
6. Animals hate you. You can’t ride horses, stray cats and dogs might attack you, crows want to steal your eyes, animal-based food makes you sick.
7. Animals talk to you, you can understand them. They have nothing important to tell you but they’re annoying. You may need to make a saving throw vs. magic to avoid responding to them with irritation, especially in front of others, who probably think: “Hang the witch!”
8. In stressful situations (combat and many actions requiring dice rolls), you must make a saving throw vs. magic or you’ll begin to bleed from your genitals for 1d4 turns, suffering one point of damage each turn.

Identical results are rolled again. Each time a result has been rolled, the referee must create new options.

Get Rid of the Curse

The only way to remove the curse is to fulfill the obligation that the curse has placed on you. This obligation can be something as “simple” as returning to the negadungeon and completing it (explore more than 50%, solve the mystery, eliminate the monster, obtain the treasure, perform a purification ritual at the dungeon’s heart, retrieving the relic, rescuing the spouse, sacrificing an animal… the options are endless!), or something as elaborate as completing a multi-step ritual over several days or weeks, which would lead to one or several more adventures.

Mood Can’t Be Concrete (horror RPGs)

(This article was published originally in Hidden Shrines of Setebos).

Atmosphere, mood, it is essential in any horror story, and horror adventures are no exception. I added a small ​mood​ section in each room.

Mood descriptions are made of abstractions, ideas and symbols. Mood can’t be concrete. Is the mood sad? ​Sad mood​ sounds concrete enough. But what does sad​ mean?

Each of your players will have a specific idea of what ​sad​ is. Of course I could’ve made all the mood entries similar to ​sad​ or ​lonely​ or ​bleak​. These look concrete concepts; they aren’t. They’re just familiar and can only convey ordinary feelings, not the real sense of the weird (weird sadness, weird bleakness), which is what I’m trying to do here.

But the way I made these descriptions is just as abstract and subjective as the ordinary, but much more evocative (I think) and odder, and the Referee can do one of three things here:

1. ignore my mood entries,
2. read aloud my mood entries,
3. describe it with her own words; express her feelings after reading mine.

Either way, her players will have their own interpretations of what a ‘misery curdled, but also ancient and intriguing’ mood means. Personal interpretations are more horrific than whatever I can think of. At least, that’s what all the horror writers I read say, and I like their stuff, so I follow.

Mention to the players what is included in the ​stuff​ section (below mood in every room) as well, and the room should start getting a better shape in your player’s mind. The name of each room is also a tool for evocation, especially the deeper they explore.

Once they imagine the meaning of it, they will have to update its meaning when confronted with ​a Charlotte Perkins Gilman nightmare​. When they realise things are not as they thought they were, that’s where horror lies.

A room description from this module

Tricks & Traps | The Horror of the Fourth Wall

We are in a cube shaped room of 1,000 m³ (10 x 10 x 10), there are no doors or windows, virtually no exit.

How did we get here?

As the referee sees fit: falling through a trap door, using a teleport, the door disappears as it closes, the four walls rise up from the ground around the unfortunates as they step on a slab, or they simply wake up there after dreaming of the idiotic chaos at the center of the universe.

Three of the walls have something written in red letters

South wall: “Our Mother, who art in earth… etc.”

West wall: “The thoughtless chaos at the heart of the world”.

North wall: “Azathoth, the amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity, who made the gods and thereafter rested, sleeps eternally, lulled by the music of your heartbeat.”

The fourth wall is different

East wall: There is an eye-shaped stain of dirt and moisture on the wall. When your and its eyes meet, you can feel the look in that eye judging you, you can see your darkest or most shameful secrets, those things that you deny even to yourself, those things that if you contemplate for more than five minutes would lead you to suicide or insanity.

If someone pays attention, they hear a scuttling sound behind the wall.

It is not obvious to the naked eye, you have to throw something at it or hit it, but the wall is easy to knock down using a little brute force or a sledgehammer.

What’s behind the fourth wall?

A bulbous, shapeless, bubbling mass. It is composed of thousands of cockroaches constantly moving. Normal weapons are useless but fire will kill them quickly, revealing a hole behind the wall, and the hole leads to the exit.

Exit

Again, as the referee sees fit: it can be a staircase leading up, a teleport, or a simple hole that takes you out of the room.

What is a dungeon? | Another take

The nature of dungeons is a theme that fascinates me!

I have written about this subject before. Perhaps it all comes down to a search for meaning. I mean, whenever I make a dungeon, I try to give it a reason, an original purpose, but at the same time I like randomness (also I am not an artist or designer), and I use a random dungeon map generator (although I make changes to the final map to fix some inconsistencies; with Paint is actually easy).

This results in things as strange as a Victorian mansion with a layout that doesn’t correspond to a mansion, but more like a maze.

However, a realistic layout of a Victorian mansion, although attractive to the eye, is boring as a dungeon.

So I make again a weird maze and impose a sense, mainly, to choose the taste, color, aroma and general or specific characteristics of each room.

But I have been thinking a lot these days and I came up with another possibility. This is a dungeon, more or less typical:

Who built it and for what purpose? The answers may be many: a magician, an ancient civilization, aliens!

But what if it was built by a race of antimatter beings? What if solid spaces are the voids for them, and vice versa? From this antipoint of view, the antidungeon would look like this:

I don’t know about you, but it gives me the impression that it makes at least a little more sense as an architectural layout, as if it were a small village with roads and buildings.

If this was not the plan of an underground dungeon but of an open-air village, it seems a somewhat more reasonable map. The white areas are pathways and gardens, the black squares are buildings, and the black lines, only the antigod knows. Perhaps the foundations of crumbled buildings?

Take into account that the subterranean of these antibeings is their “open air”, while our open air for them is a “compact solid”. Perhaps our villages and cities are dungeons they crawl. That would partially explain the presence of ghosts and apparently immaterial beings in our streets, especially during the night, because following our unscientific logic, our night is their day, our darkness is their light.

These meditations were accompanied by the beauteous music of the gods.

Over the Edge | Situation Rolls

How difficult is it to deactivate a magical lock? Many games will ask for a roll versus some difficulty assigned by the gamemaster, but how do you assign a difficulty for some task that doesn’t exist in real life?

In real life, we cannot know how difficult or easy it is to pick a witch-lock, or for a Tiger-Man to do a triple somersault, or for a Space Ninja to blend in with the atmosphere of an urban environment. Maybe it’s hard, maybe it’s easy. But we really cannot tell.

Over the Edge provides a pre-designed list of difficulties (called Levels) for the GM to use, and is fully functional, but sometimes a GM may want to deviate and improvise a little, or players decide to go and investigate that other building that the GM has nothing prepared for.

What is the difficulty of the task? To find out, just roll a d6 and compare the result to the table below:

[1] Two levels below the party’s highest level
[2] One leve below the party’s highest level
[3, 4] Same level as the party’s highest level
[5] One level above the party’s highest level
[6] Two levels above the party’s highest level

Most characters begin the game at level 3, which is the standard. But if for some strange reason the highest level in the party is 1, remember that the lowest difficulty-level is 0.

If you want a more exact result for level-1 characters, simply roll 1d4-1, and the result is the difficulty. This roll gives a range of results from 0 to 3.

If you’re the kind of GM who breaks the rules and allows players higher levels (like 6 or 7), remember that 7 is the highest possible difficulty. To interpret the result of the roll, extrapolate what I said about the lowest level.

A Tome of Weird Artifacts

A couple of months ago I shared some black metal bands for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and promised that I would have a wider list. Well here it is. It’s free (you can give me a tip, but I would prefer your soul.)

In addition to a good collection of these bands, you will also find masks, magic weapons and some monsters, among other things.

Get this wicked tome here.

The dungeon: dumping ground and portal to otherworldly realms

The last time I went down to the dungeon I wondered where so many undead came from. Someone said that Magick-Users had put them there.

At first, that doesn’t seem to make sense. But, as Robert Macfarlane describes it, the underworld is the “repository of nuclear waste sites and burial chambers, both a dumping ground and the portal into otherworldly realms.” In the fantasy (or weird fantasy) worlds of OSR games, there is no nuclear waste, but what we might call “magic waste.”

When a Magick-User cast a spell, hazardous waste remains. Perhaps the ingredients (or components) of its magick, even if they become unusable ashes, retain part of the magical properties that have disturbed the stability of nature by producing their effect*.

A Magick-User does not want that waste to represent a danger to him or, probably, to others (although almost all of them are misanthropes, not all of them actively pursue the destruction of humanity), so the best option is to bury them; this sepulchre is not perfect, but when the harmful effects begin to take place, he will no longer be alive or, if he is, he will take care of the matter.

Many years later, or centuries, when a group of adventurers descend in search of treasures, artefacts and relics, in addition to undead, the place will be plagued by anomalous entities from the deep past and outer regions, which will have been awakened or attracted by the residual energies of magick.

Among the most common anomalies is spatial distortion, which explains why a simple and mundane drainage system or an old underground vault have become the labyrinths of often unconnected or inconsequential corridors and rooms we commonly know as dungeons.

Of course, some very sick people, invaded by the disease of logic (in a game of magic and goblins!), will not find this explanation satisfactory. For them I have no better answer than to suggest that they make an appointment with the Psychoanalyst to keep that OCD at bay.

*This means that magick and its effects cause the sensation of something that should not be, but is. Magick, then, is not an anomaly; it is our conceptions of the nature of reality that are inadequate.