July 18, 2024 hex culture Uncategorized

runs in the family

Thinking about dragonborn for an upcoming 5e game I’ll be running/playing in. This is designed to be laid atop dragonborn as they are in the book, so there aren’t any additional or different mechanics at the moment.

Dragonborn are not a distinct people; they are lucky or unfortunate inheritors of dragon nature, and can be found among humans, elves, or anyone who consorts with dragons.

Some families are familiar with their inheritance, each generation instructing the next in the pursuit of dragonhood. There are even communities of dragonborn, or polities led by a dragon-natured line. Other families learn of their ancestry when their newborn’s first screaming breath is accompanied with a plume of smoke.

Dragon nature is fierce but fitful, and what marks a dragonborn depends on both random chance and how wholeheartedly their embrace dragonhood; those who embrace it metamorphose slowly to become more dragonlike. Pick some or all of the following signs at character creation. You may choose additional signs each time you gain a level.

Signs of the Dragon

Horns
Sharp eye teeth
Fingers terminating in claws
A scaled tail
A thick mane growing from the scalp and neck, sometimes extending a distance down the spine
Dragon facial features (somewhere between a crocodile and a cat), sometimes sparing the mandible
Scales, usually densest on the back, back of the neck, and back of the arms
Digitigrade, clawed feet
Reptilian eyes

Dragonborn in the world

Dragonborn families and communities are complicated.

Those who wholeheartedly embrace their nature may shed their human senescence and mortality before dying, allowing them to pursue metamorphosis without end.
Rarely, a member of a dragonborn family will give birth to a wriggling wyrmling–a miraculous portent, for such wyrm-get will grow up to be wise and immense, dragons in truth.
Conversely, an elder dragonborn may occasionally find a human infant working themselves free from their clutch.

The path to dragonhood is long and uncertain, and dragonborn may find themselves wandering from it. Ancient dragonborn can undergo exploratory metamorphoses or make a mistake in their embrace of dragon nature, splitting or duplicating appendages, growing human limbs at dragon scale, exposing muscle or organs through gaps in integument, losing some or all of their scales to reveal glabrous flesh, sprouting gills or filmy insect wings, fungal hyphae, fleshy cerata, mineral growths, roots, and so on. Most ancient dragonborn bear signs of this error or experimentation, but a few are lost to it. They shed aspects of their human nature without attaining the dragon equivalent (morality, memory, ability to dream or sleep), causing them to become erratic or even mindless.

Dragonborn Communities and Factions

Dragon Lepers. Those who nurse the memorial plague of the Green Dragon. It brings longevity along with mutation, slowly bending the afflicted towards the dead dragon’s shape across centuries. Limbs stretch and bones twist, the disease knitting torn skin back together with keratinized integument and shredded muscle with pulpy hyphae. Dragon Lepers share their dreams, always on the edge of a bottomless mire into which the Green Dragon’s vast corpse sinks.

Golden Dragon Alchemists. Students of the Golden Dragon who accentuate their inheritance with ritual medicine. They pierce themselves with needles forged from the gold of its body and drink elixirs distilled from its crumbling bones, gaining extended life, but also something of the old dragon’s greed. They are marked by their golden eyes and golden canines, and sometimes the horns that push through their temples. Most are hermits or pursue their craft in isolated schools, but every few generations a royal line or noble house turn to dragon alchemy to improve their family’s grasp on power.

Derelict Dwellers. The bearers of the blessing of the Blue Dragon. Its body is the foundation of a vast atoll and flourishing coral reef; every generation, some number of the atoll’s dwellers are born with coral horns or faints sparks on their breath. Derelict dwellers who embrace their fate live forever, but become slower and more brittle with age, eventually becoming as sessile as the coral that made them. Some choose to settle in the shallows around the atoll as immortal additions to the crackling reef that forms their home; others travel to distant seas to form the basis of a wholly new storm reef.

High House of Sigurd. Descended from a storied dragonhunter who drank up the lifeblood of the Red Dragon in an inspired violation of the great taboo. Inheriting his cursed and stolen strength, they have established themselves as a member of the aristocracy, a privilege they defend with weapons forged in their elders’ dragonfire. Their cannoneers and brass-clad dragoons are especially hated.

Others: The Crystal Dragon Rite – dragonborn collective that conducts dialogues with celestial bodies from icy mountaintops; Gravetenders – inheritors of the Black Dragon who cultivate the worms that feast on its body and brew artificial souls to do their bidding.

May 14, 2024 hex culture amateur hour, new project, Uncategorized

half-baked

In the interest of not spending three years on a project without ever mentioning it a single time until several months after it’s out, I am going to talk about one of my current projects

A turn-of-the-century urban fantasy game about a post-revolution anarchobureacracy pulled tight between a violent return to reactionary form and something better (?). Involves evil industrialists, dueling postal services, a society of rogue chefs who worship the absent God of Liberation, and ghost-eating ravens.
It’s a bit messy and somewhat incomplete, but playable by the determined
Players are supernatural outcasts / troubleshooters who pingpong among the many eccentric factions of the city
The book includes several character types (foxes, ravens, ogres, witches, and sages), a rundown of the city’s main locations, and a bunch of factions with example NPCs and the ventures they send you on, plus some worldbuilding details and a couple encounters I’m trying to build up into a larger table.
Rules are 24XX
Heavily inspired by Eccentric Family, The Night is Short Walk On Girl, and indirectly by Mage the Awakening, the Crying of Lot 49 and Malcom Harris’ Palo Alto (especially the bits about 19th century financiers and industrialists).

You can check it out here

May 11, 2024 hex culture adventures, amateur hour, new project

Announcing Sinjin

A New Project

Big new book by me and my buddy Jackson about a big horrible haunted swamp available here. It actually since November but I realized I never talked about it on here.

The sendup is as follows…

A century ago, the Black Heron College performed an experiment into the nature of Death and caused a great disaster. The site of this catastrophe came to be known as The Saint John Forbidden Territory.

A hundred by hundred yawning miles of sawgrass, palmetto hammock, winding river, and overrun industry—all reclaimed by the Dead. In the territory, the land forgets itself, geography flexing and twisting like a straining muscle, the progression of days stuttering and jumping like a broken zoetrope.

You are a freelance exorcist, compelled or driven to enter the Territory. You wield the remnants of Death’s instruments: arts and tools left over from Her now-unfinished work. It is your duty to carry on against the growing disaster. The depths spread, and the Dead stand against you.

Put them back in their graves.

It has art by The Scrap Princess and a bunch of scary photographs Jackson and his wife took out in some wetlands and some cool public domain art. It’s pay what you want, also.

We have a print edition in the works. Print production is not my favorite thing in the world so it’s going slow but here’s pictures of the proofs.

Old Work

Ram said some people were looking for some of my old pdfs. I’m going to relink them here and fix their original posts, because there’s some kind of funky permissions problem with them. These were all quite early efforts, and I would do them quite differently now, but here they are.

World of Endings, dark fantasy World of Dungeons hack
Flowerland, a weird Florida proto-Sinjin

January 7, 2024 hex culture adventures, afternoon espresso, amateur hour, encounters, monks, monsters, Uncategorized

food web

I have been thinking about two wildly different shows: Mrs. Davis (a stage magician hunting nun / mystic from Reno, Nevada) and Scavengers Reign (space colonists get marooned on a planet with a mysterious and infinitely complex ecology).

What they have in common is a strong sense that something strange is going on deep behind the scenes. This often manifests as a snowballing series of semirelated or ambiguously related encounters. Sister Simone in Mrs. Davis keeps on running to a number of feuding secret societies and their agents who have an intense but unknown interest in her and each other. When you have a run in with the superintelligent AI app, the weird German treasure hunters take notice, which leads to an encounter with yet another faction when they intervene in ways I don’t want to spoil.

Similarly, the survivors in Scavengers Reign stumble across a creature that’s hunting or being hunting, which then kicks off a long series of encounters as predators and prey get involved and entangle/endanger the survivors further.

I’ve modeled how this could work in games in a short encounter table. Basically, you have encounters as normal, but certain reaction roll results either guarantee a certain encounter the next turn or guarantee that the next rolled encounter will be with a certain creature. If you run into a stressed out and Unfriendly prey animal, it means there’s a predator nearby. This means you can have normal encounters, but some make you fall forward into another encounter that demonstrates the relationships between creatures. There’s a little extra bookkeeping, but you just have to make note of what happens next turn and what replaces the next encounter, which isn’t too complex.

1d4 Indigo Steppe Encounter Table

2d100 Carrot Snails
3d6 Humpbacked Oryxes
1 Langouste Leopard
2d4 Big Scarlet Crawler

Carrot Snail

Roll	Result
2	Highly stressed by a nearby predator; will vent harmless but foul-smelling oil out of their eyespots on anyone who enters melee range. Next turn is a guaranteed encounter of humpbacked oryxes in addition to rolled results. Next rolled encounter is replaced with langouste leopards, attracted by the scent of snail oil that humpbacked oryxes are often drenched in.
3-5	Being hunted. Next rolled encounter result is replaced with humpbacked oryxes that are on the snails’ trail
6-9	Photosynthesizing, unbothered.
10-11	Senescent. These snails are at the end of their lifespan and full of seed-larva. They offer themselves up to likely predators in hope they will be eaten, thus spreading their larva (which gestate as they pass harmlessly through the eater’s digestive tract).
12	Will warble and approach with adorable little hops. They are infected with megaplasmodia; their eyespots will erupt into plumes of bacteria-bearing aerosol upon entering melee range of any uninfected creature. Save vs Poison get infected with megaplasmodia.

3d6 Humpbacked Oryx

Roll	Result
2	Moving quickly because a langouste leopard is in the area. Next encounter is replaced with a langouste leopard.
3-5	Protecting their young. 2d6 oryx calves are hidden nearby; the adult oryxes will go berserk if they are approached.
6-9	Grazing. Next rolled encounter is replaced with big scarlet crawlers that want to scavenge their shit.
10-11	Hungry, scavenging. Will nose through pockets and bags looking for food and positively remember anyone who gives them something.
12	Will amble up amicably. They are infected with megaplasmodia; their eyes will explode into plumes of bacteria-bearing aerosol upon entering melee range of any uninfected creature. Save vs Poison get infected with megaplasmodia.

1 Langouste Leopard

Roll	Result
2	Starved, sick. Can’t fail morale checks.
3-5	Hunting. Will attack but retreat if faced with any real violence. Until killed or fully chased off, it will secretly accompany every subsequent encounter, waiting for a chance to ambush.
6-9	Hunting something else.
10-11	Just ate; curious. Will accept bribes and is less likely to hunt anyone who bribes it with snacks.
12	Will act like a big cute cat. It is infected with megaplasmodia; after frolicking for a little while, it will turn to leave just as its tail explodes into a giant plume of bacteria-bearing aerosol. Save vs Poison get infected with megaplasmodia.

2d4 Big Scarlet Crawlers

Roll	Result
2	Confused. They are infected with megaplasmodia and will detonate into a sticky spume of bacteria-bearing purple ichor as soon as they ram into an uninfected creature. Take 3d6 damage, Save vs Breath for half; Save vs Poison or get infected with megaplasmodia.
3-5	Performing a mating ritual. Will attack only if approached.
6-9	Busily sifting through piles of oryx dung.
10-11	By chance unthreatened by the PCs; if offered food, they will trail behind by them until the next time the party rests, effacing all trace of their passage; negates all impending encounters. If there are no impending encounters, players can choose to reroll the encounter die the next time an encounter is rolled.
12	Will trail the PCs, effacing all trace of their passage; negates all impending encounters. If there are no impending encounters, players can choose to reroll the encounter die the next time an encounter is rolled.

Uses

This is probably best for relatively small encounter tables in places that PCs will be spending a lot of time in; if they’re just passing through or there are a lot of different kinds of encounters, I think it could end up as just a bunch of weird stuff happening. PCs have to linger long enough to understand how different behaviors are associated with different outcomes for the interesting part of this mechanic to really kick in.

This example uses animals to model an ecology, but you could model some fun Mrs. Davis / Crying of Lot 49 shenanigans where Neorosicrucians are always encountered on teal Vespas and when they’re Neutral it’s because they’re too busy fleeing from Retrotheosophists to try to throw fake blood on you, and everyone is getting chased around by the local SETI chapter, which is trying to whisk people away in their ice cream truck without getting nabbed by the IRS.

You could also do fun stuff like having certain creatures that aren’t on the encounter table at all and only show up as consequence to a prior encounter. This could be good for rare, especially dangerous predators or especially mysterious NPCs.