
(To be clear: I did not make this jack o'lantern -- the actual creator is linked through the copyright statement of the photo above)
Secret passages will be located on the roll of a 1 or a 2 (on a six-sided die) by men, dwarves or halflings. Elves will be able to locate them on a roll of 1-4. At the referee's option, Elves may be allowed the chance to sense any secret door they pass, a 1 or 2 indicating that they become aware that something is there.As the player of Dordagdonar in my Dwimmermount campaign will happily tell you, I keep forgetting that, in OD&D, an elf's simply passing by a secret door merits a roll by the referee to determine if they sense its presence. But I'm even more forgetful of the fact that an elf, if actively looking for such a door, can find one on a roll of 1-4 on 1d6. Indeed, I'm so "forgetful" of this fact that i don't think I've ever used the rule.
Literary inspiration for the worlds of fantasy role playing games comes from many sources. The fantasy worlds of Dungeons & Dragons and Chivalry & Sorcery are based on myth and fairy tale. The field of literature is dominated by the work of one man in this century: J.R.R. Tolkien. Without the popularity of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, fantasy role playing would not have found the wide public it now enjoys. Despite this, most fantasy games are closer to the wild, bloodthirsty worlds of Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard, and L. Sprague de Camp. The magic system of Dungeons & Dragons is partly derived from the books of Jack Vance. De Camp's The Compleat Enchanter discusses magic as a separate kind of reality with its own rules of logic. As a Dungeon Master, I have drawn extensively from the works of A. Merritt, Andre Norton, Clark Ashton Smith, Lord Dunsany, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and H. Rider Haggard.As he so often does, I think Holmes strikes the right balance here, pointing out that, while D&D really has more in common with swords-and-sorcery literature in the vein of Howard and Leiber, it was the wide popularity of Tolkien's works that laid the groundwork for the fantasy roleplaying fad in the late 70s and early 80s. I think this squares well with Gygax's contention from 1974 on that the direct influence of Tolkien on D&D was superficial, while its influence on many gamers was significant.
It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind. It was the Yuletide, and I had come at last to the ancient sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival was forbidden; where also they had commanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten.In that section, Lovecraft nicely outlines the entire theme of "The Festival," namely, the unnamed narrator has returned home to Kingsport (based on Marblehead, Massachusetts, a visit to which HPL called "the high tide of my life") to participate on an ancient festival his family has kept for untold centuries. Of course, the narrator, being an outsider who's never been to the home of his ancestors, has no idea just what this festival is or why it is so important. He knows only that it is important enough that he has been summoned to this dilapidated seaside town from far away and that he must hold true to the ways of his forefathers.
Lovecraft felt himself united with his entire cultural and racial past. The past is real -- it is all there is; and for a few moments on a winter afternoon in Marblehead the past really was all there was.That's an experience I understand myself, given my own antiquarian tendencies, which probably explains why, as I get older, despite the vast gulfs between HPL and myself when it comes to our world views, I nevertheless have ever greater sympathy for him. In "The Festival," HPL does an astounding job of conveying the way that the past can weigh upon the present. Of course, this being a Lovecraft story, that past has a decidedly sinister cast to it, or at least an inhuman one, as he makes plain near the very beginning of the story.
Judges Guild: Do you do much playing of characters as opposed to Judging?Common sense would, of course, dictate that what Barker meant was that he'd never had what we typically call a player character in his Tékumel campaign. Certainly, he's played characters -- non-player characters -- over the course of his campaign, many of them in fact! However, he's never created a character who was his rather than part of the world in which other people's characters adventured.
Barker: I've never played a character.
The Vornheim City Kit will be a guide to the city that my campaign is based around, but way more than that, it'll be a tool for running open-ended city adventures anywhere. I'm not going to be Mr. PR here and claim I'm sure it'll have 'Everything You Need To Run A Campaign In A Fake Medieval Urban Setting' but I am sure it'll have everything I need, because this is actually the stuff I use when we play.I don't know about anyone else, but I think this sounds like a really intriguing product, one I'm looking forward to seeing, if only because urban adventuring is a staple of swords-and-sorcery stories and it's not been well supported in the hobby in many years.
The Vornheim City Kit will feature: oddities of the city; maps of major locations; a souped-up version of the "urbancrawl" rules for creating fully-stocked labyrinthine streets while players are actually being chased through them; and loads of tables for creating taverns, merchants, libraries, decadent aristocrats, and other accoutrements of urban living in a split-column format allowing the DM to generate functional details on the fly or mix-and-match results during adventure prep in order to create more individualized environments.
The emphasis will be on creating instruments you can actually use, rather than burying the DM under masses of pre-imagined information. This won't be a big, fat, where-the-fuck-did-I-put-that-bookmark encyclopedia of every loose toothpick and manhole cover in the city. This will be a little book that you can put on your table and say to your players "Ok, it's Friday night in 1200 AD, what are we doing?" and be confident that you have an environment ready to roll with any punch the party throws. The pictures will be helpful, the maps will be clear, the tables will be fun to roll on, and it will all be easy to find."
The kit will also include notes and commentary on how the tools in the kit can or have worked out in actual play from James Raggi, Zak Sabbath, and the 'Axe' girls.
Look for it Winter 2011.
"Look about you, Clarke. You see the mountain, and hill following after hill, as wave on wave, you see the woods and orchard, the fields of ripe corn, and the meadows reaching to the reed-beds by the river. You see me standing here beside you, and hear my voice; but I tell you that all these things—yes, from that star that has just shone out in the sky to the solid ground beneath our feet—I say that all these are but dreams and shadows; the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes. There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision, beyond these 'chases in Arras, dreams in a career,' beyond them all as beyond a veil. I do not know whether any human being has ever lifted that veil; but I do know, Clarke, that you and I shall see it lifted this very night from before another's eyes. You may think this all strange nonsense; it may be strange, but it is true, and the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan."The surgery goes off as Raymond intends and the consequences, though tragic for Mary, are exactly as he expected:
"She will awake in five minutes." Raymond was still perfectly cool. "There is nothing more to be done; we can only wait."The story then picks up years later, as several young men are dying under mysterious circumstances. The only connection between these deaths is that all of the men is a young woman named Helen Vaugh, who is described as "at once the most beautiful woman and the most repulsive they had ever set eyes on." One need not read the story to know that the prelude to The Great God Pan, involving the surgery done to poor Mary, and the later events involving Helen Vaughn are also connected, but I won't say here the nature of that connection, for fear of lessening the impact of the tale.The minutes passed slowly; they could hear a slow, heavy, ticking. There was an old clock in the passage. Clarke felt sick and faint; his knees shook beneath him, he could hardly stand.
Suddenly, as they watched, they heard a long-drawn sigh, and suddenly did the colour that had vanished return to the girl's cheeks, and suddenly her eyes opened. Clarke quailed before them. They shone with an awful light, looking far away, and a great wonder fell upon her face, and her hands stretched out as if to touch what was invisible; but in an instant the wonder faded, and gave place to the most awful terror. The muscles of her face were hideously convulsed, she shook from head to foot; the soul seemed struggling and shuddering within the house of flesh. It was a horrible sight, and Clarke rushed forward, as she fell shrieking to the floor.
Three days later Raymond took Clarke to Mary's bedside. She was lying wide-awake, rolling her head from side to side, and grinning vacantly.
Vampire
No Enc.: 1d6 (1d6)
Lair Probability: 20%
Alignment: Chaotic
Movement: 120' (40'), Fly: 180' (60')
Armor Class: 2
Hit Dice: 7 to 9
Attacks: 1 (see below)
Damage: 1d10, drain life energy (see below)
Save: F7 to F9
Morale: 11
Hoard Class: XVII
XP: 3,590/5,560/8,000
The vampire is a hateful undead creature created by means of an abhorrent necromantic ritual that requires the free and active consent of a human (and only a human) being to effect. The vampire survives only by drinking the blood of the living. It is immune to sleep and charm spells and can only be struck by magical weapons. If damaged, a vampire regenerates 3 hit points per round. If reduced to zero or fewer hit points, it is not destroyed but rather reduced to a gaseous form (which it can also assume at will).
A vampire is immensely strong, dealing 1d10 points of damage with each strike of its claw-like hands. Though this creature looks like a hideous, emaciated corpse, it nevertheless can exert a powerful attraction over mortal beings with its gaze, which acts as a charm person spell (save at -2 to resist). A vampire will drink the blood from a charmed victim, draining two levels with each feeding. Drinking blood cannot be done in combat and the victim will have no recollection of the event afterward. Victims entirely drained of all their levels simply die, but they may not be restored to life by any means, including resurrection. A vampire must drain a number of levels per week equal to its hit dice or it will permanently weaken, losing one hit die per week of insufficient sustenance.
Though powerful, a vampire will quickly disintegrate if exposed to sunlight. It cannot cross running water (which they cannot cross except by means of a bridge, boat, or similar construction) and impalement with a wooden stake immobilizes (but does not kill) it. A vampire is repelled by the scent of garlic or its reflection and can be turned by a cleric of sufficient level. During the day, this creature must return to a grave, tomb, or casket that contains soil from its native land or else it will lose hit die per night until it reaches 0 hit dice and fades away. Lost hit dice are restored at a rate of 1 per night of slumber in its proper hideaway.
A vampire can summon 1d10x10 rats or 3d6 wolves once per day, which arrive in 2d6 rounds to aid it. The presence of an active vampire creates a miasma that slowly spreads at a rate of 1 square mile per day up to a maximum number of square miles equal to the hit dice of the most powerful vampire in the area. Anyone within the miasma suffers a -2 to saving throws against diseases, curses, and similar effects.