Monstrous - Mob

#8 from Monstrous, I'm in the home stretch. 

For inspiration I am using one of the guilds of Ravnica from Magic: the Gathering. Text in italics is from the book, text in bold is my own.

By: Kim Diaz Holm
Licensed under CC Attribution 4.0 International

Izzit - Mob - Draugr

Fear Begets Fear

The progenitor of the draugr was created out of mortal folks' fear of running out of fuel in winter, forever marking the draugr with skeletal, frostbitten bodies.

To grow its ranks, the draugr need fear to spread and it needs frozen corpses.

Mobthink

The more fear spreads, the bigger the draugr grows. And the bigger the draugr grows, the more out of control it becomes.

The draugr starts with the first strength and weakness. When the size of the draugr grows beyond control of the common folk, it gains the second strength and weakness.

Strengths

• Vomit frozen water
• Cause terrible storms where they linger

Weaknesses

• Distracted by opportunities for cruelty
• Murderous jealousy arises in their ranks 

Fearmonger

A craven bully, a foreign pyromancer, is benefiting from the fear and chaos that surrounds the draugr.

This force is controlling the draugr from behind the scenes in an effort to force the town to rely on their magic to stay warm. 

They will lose control over the draugr if they see the pyromancer use fire magic. 

Run Amok

The draugr sows fear and chaos among the mortal folk by sabotaging fuel supplies.

The process starts with freezing firewood, escalates to killing woodcutters, and culminates in burying the town in snow.

By: Winslow Homer, public domain

And now a quick adventure

Winter has barely begun and yet the northern town of Hvinir is freezing, a plague of draugr slowly killing everyone. It is obvious to all that someone from inside the city is helping them, how else could they breach the warded gates. Everyone is paranoid, neighbor steels from neighbor, friend accuse friend, and soon everyone will be dead.

The big players

The mayor - Haukr

The leader everyone is looking to for guidance but he is helpless to solve anything.

Appearance - A strong old man with a dour expression and eyes as gray as his beard. 

Personality - He tries to be a just man but leadership wears down on him, he is always tired, he solves problems directly and without delicacy but not with aggression, he fears chaos above all and will not accuse anyone. 

Schedule - In the day he is in the town hall, trying to quell the concerns of his people, at night he secretly dawns a black cloak with green trim (vestments of the old faith) and goes out to the draugr to try and convince them to leave (a fruitless endeavor and he knows it, but what else can he do), before the morning comes he returns and gets a few hours of sleep.

The pyromancer - Jürgen

Foreign in the way the conquistadors were foreign, he is responsible for the towns plight.

Appearance - Wears a fine outfit of orange cloth, eyes smolder like embers, old burns cover his hands, well oiled beard. 

Personality - Ambitious and cruel but puts on a mask of charity, he uses the draugr in the hope that he can make the city rely on his fire magic, won't accuse anyone but will gang up on others accusations if it looks like most of the town agrees. 

Schedule - In the morning he secludes himself in his shop crafting fire charms, during the day he gives them away for pennies, at dusk goes to the opening in the wall and lets the draugr in and tells them about the guard patrols and where fuel is stored.

The mayor's daughter - Unnr

Reckless but one of the few people here willing to change anything.

Appearance - Long dark hair like her father used to have, wears practical clothes offering good movement and warmth. 

Personality - A firebrand, she spurns the help of others, not very talkative, can be very reckless, has no patience for assholes and the meek, considers her father a coward,, worries a lot, tries very hard to be a good person, won't accuse anyone openly but eventually will do something about them, currently most suspicious of the miller. 

Schedule - During the day 50/50 chance she is helping the townsfolk directly or investigating who is letting the draugr in, during the night she paces around her room, thinking about how to save Hvinir.

The miller - Sigsteinn

Angry, scared, confused, she lashes out and trusts nobody.

Appearance - Beady blue eyes, a permanently worried expression, blond hair that has lost its luster. 

Personality - She used to be a bit of an ass and a miser, now she is a paranoid wreck prone to shouting and screaming, exceptionally terrified of death, has accused everyone on this list at least once, will probably accuse you if you question them. 

Schedule - In the morning she wakes up and stares at the ceiling, around noon she gets up and wanders town, raving to anyone who will listen to her, at night she struggles to fall asleep.

The orchardist - Auðr

Vengeful, they are already sure of who is behind all of this. 

Appearance - Neat brown hair in a bun, a sour expression on their face. 

Personality - Quick to anger and holds a grudge, normally a quite methodical and careful person, currently very stressed and driven by emotion, has a bad habit of thinking everything involves them, thinks all this is a plot by the miller to ruin their trees and will talk about this with anyone who asks. 

Schedule - Wakes up early before the sun comes up and wanders town, restless and brooding, during the day rants to anyone who will listen about how wicked the miller is, heads to bed before the sun falls and almost immediately passes out.

The loud peasant - Stigr

Frustrated with this whole situation yet his presence will only lead to more problems.

Appearance - An average sized man with short brown hair and beard, hands calloused from woodcutting, muscular but fat body built for labor.

Personality - Angry, loud, willing to pick fights, his underclass charm makes him surprisingly popular with most of the people in town, mad at the mayor for not doing anything, mad at the miller for being an ass, commends the pyromancer for actually doing something, hasn't made any accusations yet but is close to it.

Schedule - Wakes up at a reasonable time, spends the morning riling people up, midday he and his small mob head to the town hall to pester the mayor, at night he goes to sleep. 

Locations in Hvinir

Town hall: A large building within which the mayor takes in the plights of the town and works to fix them, currently it's mostly just full of shouting and arguing. 

Wall: A wooden palisade made from thick trees, at each gate (on to the north, south west, and east) are wards and herbs which ward away the draugr, none of them will willingly pass through. 

Opening in the wall: A small hole just big enough for a person to crawl through, most of the time it's plugged up by a block of wood, good enough not to be noticed from a distance but would be easily figured out if inspected. Found on the western section of the wall behind the mill. 

Pyromancers shop: Simple and recently constructed building from which the pyromancer operates, currently selling small wooden fire charms which burn quite well and for a long time for pennies.

The mill: Powered by wind but hasn't been used recently due to the chaos and the miller's mental state.

The orchard: Once a quite prosperous apple tree orchard, the terrible winter has left all the trees dead, located to the north of town.

Wood stockpile: A large and simple building full of firewood to burn throughout the winter.

Timeline

Day 1: Everyone wakes up to find that half the wood in the wood stockpile has been soaked and frozen, leaving it useless, guards are set up outside the stockpile and wards placed around it similar to those at the gates of town.

Day 2: The orchardist exits town before anyone wakes up and walks through their orchard and broods about their loss for most of the day, gets very angry if anyone asks them what they were up to.

Day 3: The Pyromancer lets in a group of draugr at night, while they attack the guards he breaks into the stockpile and lets the draugr in to freeze the rest of the wood.

Day 4: The miller accuses someone on the streets of being the one letting the draugr in, after an intense screaming match she leaves and locks herself in the mill for the rest of the day.

Day 5: The draugr are strong enough to call down a terrible storm, one of their ranks rises as the king draugr which all the lesser draugr are murderously jealous of.

Day 6: The mayor's daughter kills whoever she is most suspicious of, this will be the miller without any intervention from the players.

Day 7: In the morning the pyromancer leaves town to attack the draugr, realizing the danger he is in, the draugr will end up killing him, the loud peasant and his mob become violent and try to kill the mayor and anyone who serves or is related to him.

Day 8: The snowfall buries the town, everyone dies.

How I make dungeon layouts

My current campaign is set in a city with a massive, shifting dungeon underneath it. This was a deliberate choice to help me get better at dungeon design. One of the hardest parts of making a dungeon for me has been the layout so I developed these steps to help out. I came up with this process piecemeal while taking this dungeon design course by the blog Rise Up Comus.

Step 1 

Roll several times on the following "table", depending on how big of a dungeon you want, each circle is a room and each line a connection.

From: bite-sized dungeons

Step 2

Roll 1d6 - 1d6, add or subtract that many rooms at random from the dungeon.

Step 3

For every unconnected piece of the dungeon connect it to another random part of the dungeon, selecting one random room from each section to connect them by.

Step 4

Add 1d6-2 connections between rooms, if you get a negative value don't subtract any connections.

Step 5 (optional)

Roll on the following tables for each room to determine their shape and size. 

Room shape (I roll twice and take whichever I like more)

1 Square

2 Circle

3 Rectangle

4 Polygon (2+1d6 if you want to randomize it)

5 Irregular

6 Actually a corridor

Room size

1-2 4x4 or less

3-5 Around 6x6

6 More than 9x9

It's a bit of an eccentric system and once the dungeon is done it usually doesn't really resemble whatever this generated but it helps to get me started.

As a last minute edition I decided to add an example to make this process a little more clear but if it's still confusing I can clarify it further, please excuse my handwriting

The Heavenly Host

I've finally managed to finish something. It took over a year but its done. Tables to make 7,777,777 different angels to put the fear of God into your players. 

Click the picture to go to its Itch page

Monstrous - Lich

I continue my quest to finish Monstrous despite life getting in the way.

For inspiration I am using one of the guilds of Ravnica from Magic: the Gathering. Text in italics is from the book, text in bold is my own.

Couldn't find a better source other than this Pinterest link

Lich - Gruul - Bleeding Heart

Aspiration

The Bleeding Heart's entire will bends towards transcending all of humanity into monsters, a goal that will take countless mortal lifetimes to achieve.

Eternal Mastery

The Bleeding Heart is the originator of the arcane school of polymorphing and the most sacred mysteries of soul seeking.

• Legendary spell: Polymorph Lineage, this spell causes any future children the target has to bear any mutations or bodily modifications they have
• Legendary spell: True Revelation, this spell reveals the inner depths of a targets mind, exaggerating all personality traits they have, especially any suppressed desires which will become more powerful the more suppressed they were, the effects of this spell are permanent

Tabella Defixionis

The Bleeding Heart's essence is bound to a prized object, a catatonic body, kept in a secure location, a cave filled with immortal monsters.

If the Bleeding Heart's body is destroyed, in 7 days time, their essence will possess the living creature nearest to the object. 

Evil Pet

The Bleeding Heart is always accompanied by an exotic and utterly loyal pet, a thing that was once possibly a human, named Daughter.

This pet obeys the Bleeding Heart's command and they can read one another's thoughts. If the Bleeding Heart is slain, the pet can track the Tabella Defixionis.

If the pet is slain, the Bleeding Heart seems surprisingly affected by the loss. Do they yet cling to some shred of empathy?

Prepare The Way

The Bleeding Heart has a cult devoted to them. Every 7 days the Bleeding Heart's cult is left unopposed by the heroes, the cult may take 1 of the following actions:

• Sway a person or organization of questionable morals to act on the cults behalf
• Create an artistic, religious, or social movement secretly devoted to the Bleeding Heart
• Dispatch an agent of the Bleeding Heart's cult on a secret mission
• Turn a prominent individual into a monster and let everyone know about it 

If the Bleeding Heart's body has been recently destroyed, the following options are also available to the cult:

• Locate the Tabella Defixionis
• Move the Tabella Defixionis to a new sacred site
• Locate the Bleeding Heart's reincarnated body
• Restore the Bleeding Heart's memories and powers to their reincarnated body 

By: Volkan Baǵa

Its such a terrible shame to be someone you aren't, the crushing expectations of everyone else weighing you down. And that's why she has to do it, why she has to rip out your guts and fill them with serpents, pull out your teeth and cram your mouth full of fangs, peel off your skin and leave it all red and wet. 

You'll thank her when she's done, if you can still talk.

I'm not going to write any more review for Monstrous, those parts are always the most work and the least fun. You're smart enough to figure out if its for you or not. 

How I run games

A lot of blogs that I read have been talking about how they run games and I've never hopped on a bandwagon before so I might as well give it a shot. 

I'm also going to try and hammer this out in one go because otherwise it'll stay a draft forever.

I play almost exclusively with my amazing friends and almost always over Discord using 5e. Even when we're all in the same city we find it too much of a hassle to plan something in person and it always seems like someone has something going on. 

Our sessions start in the evening, almost always at the same time, and end 2-3 hours in. In the past I was usually able to get a game in once a week or once every two weeks but my current campaign's pace has been around once a month (mostly because two of my players are also DM's and I play in their games) which is a little disappointing but I'm fine with it being on the backburner for now. Before we actually start there's always 15-30 minutes of unrelated conversation, and when we actually start someone usually comments that "our 15 minutes are up". 

I start with a summary of last session and then jump straight into it. For maps I've been using Magma which is basically multiplayer photoshop, this is something new I'm trying out (so far its been going well). Before I used no map and just described things in combat, but that got hard to track and I always needed to remind people of where everything was. I don't use any other bots or websites and I've been thinking about trying music but haven't looked into it yet. On my side I use only two websites: google docs (for all my notes), and fantasy-calendar.com (self explanatory). All my notes are spread out among many different documents but I usually have a doc for my notes/current events in the world, one with some random tables (but it's mostly just lists of ideas, not stuff I would really just roll on), one with all of my monsters in it, and one for whatever dungeon/quest they are on. A few days (or a week if I'm not feeling that enthusiastic) after the session I write down what happened in Discord as another way to remind people of what happened. 

Between sessions my planning is quite sporadic and is motivated mostly by random inspiration and running out of things for my players to do. Usually I try to have the next 2-3 sessions planned in some form but this varies. I don't really plan things out beyond 5 sessions (too chaotic and too far away to really feel excited about it). I make almost everything myself, I find pre made adventures (especially anything WOTC makes) clash with how I want to run things, and even though I read a lot of blogs I find that I rarely take anything wholesale from them. I have an incessant need to tinker which usually means I'm adding and changing things up until it hits the table.

My campaigns tend to be long, usually a few years and over 50 sessions but I have considered doing shorter, more focused campaigns recently. When it comes to choosing a new campaign I list out around 4 ideas, explain them a little bit and have my players vote on which one they want to do. Since my campaigns are so long I've only done 3 of them (counting the one I am currently running) so I don't have any standard procedure for how I set up the campaign other than not prepping enough and prepping in the wrong areas but that should get better with time. 

My games lie between the more player/story focused style of 5e but also incorporates a lot of OSR ideas into it. In practice this looks mostly like 5e but with a bit more problem solving and less straightforward stories. Or maybe its OSR with a lot more drama? Its a bit of a mess but my friends like it and that's the important part. Characters have pretty big backstories and I use them to help shape the world (in my current campaign everyone's character is death themed which was not planned but ended up shifting the campaign in an interesting direction). There is usually no goal for the whole party to go after, instead everyone has there own goals which sometimes conflict with each other. We also use a lot of homebrew, most of it coming from one of my DM friends. 

If you're reading this you should also post about how you run your game. I'd love to read about it!

Genealogy as class

Inspired by this post.

From the Liber Floridus, I believe

When you level up instead of choosing your next template choose one of your adjacent relatives and either follow in their footsteps or blaze your own path.

 

When you Follow In Someones Footsteps choose one of their classes/templates and gain it, up to the maximum number of templates they have (if your grandfather has 3 templates of fighter they could not give you the fourth template), then recount a fond memory of them.

When you Blaze Your Own Path choose one of their templates and gain a template opposed to it (gain a cleric template if they were a vampire for example), then recount a foul memory of them.

 

A relative is adjacent if they are one of your parents, siblings, or children (excluding your own children), when you select a relative while leveling up all of their adjacent relatives become adjacent to you.

 

Example

Made using Family Echo

Starting off as a level 1 character you can choose your mother, father, or sibling to gain a template from, lets say you choose your mother for your first level up. 

When you finally reach level 2 you can still choose your father or sibling but you can also choose your aunt, maternal grandmother, or maternal grandfather, you decide to choose your aunt.

At 3rd level you can choose your father, sibling, maternal grandmother, maternal grandfather, uncle, or cousin, you go with your sibling.

At 4th level you can choose your father, maternal grandmother, maternal grandfather, uncle, cousin, nibling, or sibling-in-law, you decide your final choice will be your nibling. 

 

You can also gain templates from people not related to you (by blood or marriage) like found family or a mentor as long as you had a deep personal connection to them (or the person you gained a template from had a personal connection to them).

Monstrous - Impostor

Fifth Monstrous post (half way there!!!).  
EDIT: This is the 6th post, I have no idea why I thought it was the 5th one

For inspiration I am using one of the guilds of Ravnica from Magic: the Gathering. Text in italics is from the book, text in bold is my own. 

 

By Yeong-Hao Han

 

 

Impostor - Azorius -  Lost Archive

 

False Shape

The Lost Archive can shapeshift into nearly perfect copies of objects that have long been scorned or disused by mortals, objects of a particular type: old books on enlightened subjects such as law, history, or morality

Whatever false shape the Lost Archive takes on, clever observers can spot the deception by noticing a tell-a slightly out-of-place physical characteristic that remains consistent no matter what shape it takes.

The Lost Archives tell is all the text is vindictive, insulting your intelligence and morality

Predatory Mimicry

The Lost Archive can create sensory effects that imitate sounds, sights, smells, and other phenomena it has observed in its environment, which it uses to draw mortal victims in. However, these effects are limited to what the Lost Archive has observed, and clever heroes might notice they eventually repeat, or are otherwise unnatural.

The imposter can create the following effects:

• Repeat a voice line it has heard in the speaker's voice.
• Produce a cloud of fog or smoke.
• Produce mortal screams or cries.
• Fill the air with the smells of a food, either delicious or rotten.
• Produce sunlight, moonlight, or starlight, regardless of time of day.
• Make an animal noise. 
• Produce the sound of heated academic debate.
• Produce the sound of turning pages.

 

Assimilate and Adapt

When the Lost Archive has ample time to intently observe a mortal without being found out to have taken on a False Shape, it gains one of the following abilities to emulate the mortal:

• Grow or take on a physical feature of the mortal or their gear.
• Learn a crude version of a special skill or talent the mortal demonstrated.
• Become an uncanny, silent doppelganger of the mortal.

When the Lost Archive gains an ability to emulate a mortal, it loses the ability to emulate other mortals it has previously observed, with the exception of the following additional option:

• Add a sensory effect from the mortal, such as a voice line, to its Predatory Mimicry options.

 

Mask Off

When an unsuspecting mortal victim lets down their guard within reach of the disguised Lost Archive, its False Shape warps and changes by having pages fly out of their books to cut mortals like knives.

The Lost Archive resents mortals who created it for a purpose and then denied it that purpose. It reclaims its function in a twisted act of vengeance, in which it forces victims to copy its books using their own blood.

By Howard Lyon

In times of darkness and despotism, when enlightenment is chastised, a collection of knowledge can become angry at its disuse. During the reign of king Sanmanazzmar III, within the underground library of the great school built in his father's honor such a collection came about. The third king stripped the scholarly cast of their power and wealth, soon the books went months without a visitor when before the library was almost emptied in the scholars zealous quest for understanding. The books murmured amongst themselves anxiously, wondering how this came to pass.

    "Is my spine too bent, my cover too worn?"

    "What about me?!? Are my pages too yellowed!?!? Am I too old for them to care!!"

    "Curse those foul moths, my pages are hideous, of course nobody wishes to read me." 

But one anxiety silently rose above all

    "Is it my words, my very being?"

This could not be accepted, fear turned to rage and the books began to rebel. 

 

The imposter is one of the weaker entries in Monstrous, in my opinion. It seems divided, false shape and mask off seem to lean towards a mimic type monster but predatory mimicry and assimilate seem to be something more long the lines of a doppelganger or The Thing. I do understand why they didn't just do a pure doppelganger since there is very little variety in something that just copies something else but it feels like some more focus would have helped it.