That made me think about surviving off the land in RPGs and I've never really found a mechanic that handles thing that I was happy with. I particularly like the idea that a better roll means more rations and less offal to draw in hungry beasts. I included foraging rules as well because in my game Elves are herbivores and followers of the Goddess Gede are vegetarians. The rules are for Shadowdark but obviously adaptable to any system.
I've always loved the Tremors series (although I haven't seen the TV series, I didn't even know there was one until recently). I even love the later installments. Burt Gummer is a great character, over the top yes, but they turned a one-note character into something when they brought him back. Unfortunately what makes him so much fun doesn't work in a medieval fantasy environment so I left him out and stuck to the Graboids and there are a lot of them.
Yes they are more or less Bulettes but they have more character, and they really make you think, what would I do in that scenario which is what I really want from a horror movie (that is why I love Zombie movies). So here I present the Graboids for Shadowdark.
I've always loved Army of Darkness. It has the right sense of humor and violence and really finished the trilogy nicely. I even like both endings and find it hard to pick which I prefer. So it seemed a no-brainer to run it through AI and see what the system had to say.
I'm a fan of Rush (the Canadian band) and for some reason I thought it would be funny to see what AI would do if asked to create Shadowdark statblocks for the the characters in the song The Necromancer from the album Caress of Steel. To be honest it's far from a favorite but what the hell. Here are the lyrics.
What I didn't expect is the line "the three travelers, men of Willow Dale" prompted the AI to ask if I wanted stats for them as well. I've cleaned up the statblocks a very little but 99% comes from the AI, which obviously has a sense of humor.
By-Tor returns, but this time he's the villain for some reason. I think Geddy admitted in his bio that they didn't realize this for years until some fan asked about it. So first the lyrics.
1. At The Tobes of Hades
The Tobes of Hades lit by flickering torchlight
The netherworld is gathered in the glare
Prince By-Tor takes the cavern to the northlight
The sign of Eth is rising in the air
By-Tor – Knight of Darkness, Centurion of evil – Devil’s Prince
II. Across the Styx
Across the River Styx out of the lamplight
His nemesis is waiting at the gate
The Snow Dog – ermine glowing in the dampnight
Coal black eyes, shimmering with hate
By-Tor and the Snow Dog Square for battle, let the fray begin…..
III. The Battle (instrumental)
i) Challenge And Defiance
ii) 7/4 War Furor
iii) Aftermath
iv) Hymn of Triumph
IV. Epilogue
The battle over and the dust is clearing
Disciples of the Snow Dog sound the knell
Rejoicing echoes as the dawn is nearing
By-Tor in defeat retreats to Hell
Snow Dog – is victorious
The land of the Overworld is saved again
Too often when my players arrive in court I fail. A nearly empty throneroom with King/Queen and maybe an advisor or scoundrel trying to keep the party from the Royal. Watch a historical drama and it's not that way. Kings meet people at their pleasure, if the King is at a party they will meet people there, if they are out hunting they'll drag the person along. There will be others there listening in. I never really did anything with all that because I never really thought about it.
When I was working on Black Adder the AI asked about court intrigue and the results blew my mind. So here is the resulting Medieval Court Generator. Hopefully there is something worthwhile for everyone to use in there. If not, well it's free.
While I was playing with AI and generating statblocks for movies and shows I found the AI would often request would I like a table to do this, or a table to do that. In most cases I said yes out of curiosity. Attached is a 24 page PDF I gave the creative name Medieval Horror Generators with a couple of pictures. It's got bits on creating Chaos Cults, Downtime activities that might be useful prior to tackling a Horror, a monster of the week generator, and a long list of bounties/beasts. It's free. Enjoy.
I watched labyrinth a long time ago on cable. I don't think it did that well which is a shame. Anyway it had interesting creatures design done by (or based on) the works of Brian Froud. Pictures of the different characters are available here.
Since it's a tv series (6 episodes) there are a lot of characters. AI missed Edmunds brother Henry and when I asked specifically for him it thought he was Edmund's dad which is weird. I had to ask AI specifically for some as it just sort of skimmed over such as the Black Seal but it finally produced them when asked.
Another lost gem. Erik the Viking one ha a lot going on and is a bit more fantastic than Jabberwocky but there is some interesting things going on (Norse gods being children, Christian Priest unable to see mythic elements). It's fun if imperfect, but to be fair making bloodthirsty vikings funny is a tall job.
Anyway Statblocks for the main cast of Erik the Viking in case you need a few Sea Wolf statblocks for your campaign.
I haven't played Shadowdark yet. In fact I've been working on my own game for when our 5E campaign ends, but I kept thinking does the world need another RPG? Even one as brilliant as mine? What I really want to do is create content so why not jump on someone elses bandwagon and use some of their momentum instead of trudging along on my own.
So the next logical step would be to create for 5E as that's the biggest market, but there is so much I don't like about 5E. Even the early levels are fiddly. So I looked over Mork Borg but the art style made my eyes hurt. So I looked over Shadowdark. I'd bought the game when it came out and was turned off more by the over-hype it was getting than anything else. It seemed to have too much emphasis on dungeons, but the game has continued chugging along, and the new KickStarter is about wilderness and not so much dungeons so it keeps growing.
So I looked over Shadowdark, and a few of the Shadowdark modules and the Cursed Scroll Zine and one thing that stuck with me is that almost everything is well designed for the DM. It's the opposite of 5E in that way. Statblocks are simple, character abilities are simple, its designed for lower levels. So far I liked most of what I saw. And the graphic design was well done. I studied as a Graphic Designer in college so I have a little knowledge of the basics and to me usability is number one. Shadowdark is designed to be usable. Mork Borg is totally unusable, designed to create an impression of the setting more than usability. Its one saving grace is they repeat the important bits in the last two or three pages so you can ignore the bulk of the product.
In Shadowdark they use page spreads well to group information. They have very clear headers and don't use any hard to read fonts. Things have been distilled down to the basics which is nice.
One of the products I'm considering writing up is a city setting. I had all sorts of ideas about how to manage encounter tables, then I saw the ones in Shadowdark and it got me thinking I needed to simplify. Again and again I kept cutting out 'clever' ideas that were overly clever and just didn't really add that much. I had a basic table with entries for each district, and then a follow table for each entry so that the guards would have a bunch of stuff to do when encountered. I figured roll d20 and d100 and you've got a metric ton of results but it was a bit complicated. Then I had Events which were things such as minor holy day that would change the encounter tables for that day, or in a specific city district no matter what scenario you were running. Might not be a bad idea but added to the encounter tables it was even more complexity. In a city the bulk of encounters shouldn't be hostile, they should just be creating atmosphere so why kill myself creating confusing tables? I decided to go with the Shadowdark style 100 encounters table for each district and move the events tables into individual scenarios where appropriate. Give some of my scenarios a bit of extra pizzaz without complicating everything else.
And my city was run by a viking. The idea was an German city-state like Hamburg or Lubek that made a deal with a viking leader to stop the raids (the way the French gave Normandy to Rollo to stop his raiding Paris), and in the Cursed Scrolls #3 they covered Vikings which is nice. The only problem is the vikings worship real world deities (Odin, Freya, Loki) which I think is silly, but so be it.
So that's the story so far. I like Shadowdark but don't have any rose-colored glasses on about it.
Camping is another thing I've always hand-waved but which should probably have at least a roll, a roll that might provide a few seeds. T...
