Robin D. Laws's Blog, page 115

The Birds

The updated archive is here!

Korad: Polling the Something Awful

What is the Something Awful that lurks under the mines of Oldtown, and can be blamed for the province's collapse to a shadow of its former self?

Decide from the following possibilities:

The miners cracked an evil godlike creature's prison. They did not awaken the creature, but Barle must now commit incredible resources to dealing with cults, keeping the prison from unraveling, and with the monsters and zombies that erupt from underground all over the continent from time to time.

a complete and utter fabrication. The Koradi, seeking to keep the Barleans in line, put their many alchemists to the task of creating a compound, part of which could be introduced into Barlean food while the other is let loose as a gas through the Barlean cities' sewage systems. A field trial twenty years ago produced results beyond expectation.

Hellborn crawling terror. It was late summer when it happened. The mine was deeper than any mine had ever gone and looked to be opening up a fine vein of silver. Then a section of wall collapsed...normally not that terrible an event...and millions of tiny creatures were set free. Within hours, they had overtaken and suffocated 12 miners before spilling out onto the surface.
It was then that the Barleans found out exactly how terrible this crawling plague was, because the creatures began eating every bit of metal they could find. Iron, tin, gold...if it was metallic, they ate it. If a human oe animal got in the way, they were crushed under the weight of the horrible crawlers and suffocated.
The tiny creatures increased their numbers at a startling rate. In just over a week, they covered an area nearly a half a mile square to a depth of 18 inches. Entire villages were crushed, the rubble revealing not a trace of any metal or, it was later discovered, any glass.
For two months the creeping terror was an unstoppable force, causing widespread destruction and panic. Tens of thousands of people fled the country. Those who remained were convinced that all was lost.
And then, the first cold weather of fall came and the creatures (creature?) retreated back into the mine and the warm depths of the earth. The mine was then sealed and a one mile wide area around it was cleared of everything but bare earth and stone. Setting foot inside the area was decreed to be punishable by slow death from torture.
With most crops and livestock destroyed, villages & cities in ruins, nearly half the population gone and almost no metals of any kind left, Barle was never fully able to recover.

High Pressure Magma Floods Lower City Killing Thousands.
All the mines in Oldtown have long been connected, but the deepest was by far the richest. When the mine was dug to a pocket of high pressue magma it quickly filled all mines, including those old ones that had been converted to cheap housing for the cities workers. While many entrances to the mines were sealed before the magma spewed forth into the city proper, all mining in Oldtown has now ceased for fear of reopening the volcano and a good third of the city has been destroyed. The simultaneous blow to the cities economy and the regions major population centre have had long lasting effects on all the people of Barle.
(To my mind, there are realy three questions that any entry needs to answer:
1) How did shutting down the mine seal the threat 'in'
2) Why could the mining not continue around the threat, or use specialists to do the mining
3) Once the threat was dealt with (sealing it in) why has the process still had such a devastating effect (beyond just loosing the main mine).

Kudzu Kraken. Were there many, or just one? Impossible to tell due to the rate of growth. Desperate to stave off the choking tendrils that reached absurdly from the mine to draw water (even salt water) from where-ever it could reach; a daring band of pirates gathered up every stonemason within reach and took them down into the depths before all ships and cities within reach of the radiating tentacles were destroyed.
They were never seen again, but the tendrils found themselves unable to draw water back to their main source. Choked off, they withered and died. Exploratory missions found several manufactured rockfalls sealing all passages below.

Slaughter Worms. Small worm-like parasites that crawl under the skin of living beings, infecting thier minds with an irresistable urge to kill. As the infection progresses, the brain is devoured, the victim becoming less and less capable of reason, and more and more violent. Worm-eggs are laid in the mouth of the victim, and spread by bites.

Smell
The Most Blasphemous Smell.

They punctured a deeper labyrinth, causing widespread subsidence. Nobody survived who saw the original detonations, but they collapsed the top layers of an alien underearth city, that stretches across much of the breadbasket. Spontaneous, catastrophic subsidence still threatens the fields between Oldtown and the lake.
Some folks say that strange bodies washed up into the river for a couple of weeks after that day, but none were ever brought to the palace.

View Poll: The Something Awful

The Worldwound Gambit Goes Wallpaper

Want a lake of magma, a sword-swinging con artist, shadowy demons and a dread tower on your desktop? (Who doesn't, am I right?) Paizo harks to your demands, by reconfiguring the cover of my upcoming Pathfinder Tales novel, The Worldwound Gambit, as a wallpaper image.

Because when you're heisting from demons, the getaway can get a trifle messy...

Artist Daren Bader has done a multi-horned, lava-riffic job with the cover. Thanks to Crystal Frasier for the wallpaper version.

Finding Me at OddCon

I'll be at Madison WI's Odyssey Con this weekend. You can catch me at the following events:

Friday 5:30 PM Indie Press panel
Sat 10:00 AM GM Troubleshooting panel
Sat 11:30 AM State of Hobby Gaming panel
Sat 1:00 PM Signing
Sat 8:00 PM Guest of Honor Speeches
Sun 10:00 AM Reading
Sun 1:00 Cthulhu! Ia! Ia! Games, books and more! panel

Various little birds (not the gun-toting kind) have alerted me to the likely presence of unadvertised gaming luminaries. So if you're in the area, pop on by.

The Birds

The updated archive is here!

Korad: Pirates of Barle and the Something Awful

The results are in from last week's poll establishing the basics of culture and history in the breadbasket province of Barle. The pirate theme that proved such a voter-getter when describing its coastal cities once again rises to the top. The top eight entries in this checkbox poll wind up in our collective Barlean canon.

The Barleans descend from ocean-crossing seafarers. Their first wave founded Oldtown, the empire's oldest city. For this reason they evince a nautical infatuation; the romantic ideal is the suave pirate. Barleans created the the banking, accountancy, and currency systems used throughout the Empire. When the Koradi conquered Barle, the aristocracy fled to Blackflag, where they founded and still maintain its pirate fleet. Barlean citizens hope the day will come when the pirates will reverse this epic defeat and end Koradi domination. Twenty years ago, however, they suffered a catastrophic setback, due to the "something awful" in the Oldtown mine.

That leaves us with a question to resolve before we move on to our next region. Now that we've tied it into a province wide-collapse, we ought to fill in more detail on the thing in the mine.

Here's the original entry from the setting bible:

Oldtown reels from a blow to its mining industry, suffered when the biggest mine dug down to something awful twenty years ago and had to shut down to seal it in.

Commenters are asked to provide an account of the catastrophe, and exactly how it had a region-wide devastating effect. They may detail the Awful Something to whatever degree they wish. Take as much space as you like, but lead off with an 8 word or less phrase we can use for the poll.

One narrative per participant, please. Riffs on a narrative by other participants will be considered part of the canon only if the original contributor approves them. Do so with a later comment in the same thread.

The contribution window closes Monday evening, eastern time. Have it at, my hearties!

Kicking the Boundary Stones

In response to last week's post on jumps and causal transitions, random Firedrake comments:

Rather than imitate linear narrative, though, I'd prefer a system which flows from the things that role-playing does well, rather than turning it into a copy of television or film.

Here's my reply to this is an oft-expressed opinion.

(Although, the Internet being what it is, I guess we must allow for the possibility that this is oft-expressed by random Firedrake...)

We don't yet know what roleplaying does well, because the form is young and we have yet to fully explore its boundaries. It is still less than forty years old. The aesthetic limits of film had not been completely established in 1935, forty years after the Lumiere brothers. Jazz, which came along a few years after the first film screenings, was far from completely plumbed by the early forties.

A century later, it's tougher, because so much has been done by so many, to do new things in film or jazz, but hardly impossible.

As roleplayers, we are much luckier than today's filmmakers and jazz players. We live in a time of fertile continuing development. The full extent of the form has yet to be established. Some experiments will fail; others will spawn sub-movements. Others will be drawn into the main corpus of RPG thought.

When we take techniques from older narrative forms and import them into roleplaying, they transform. They become roleplaying expressions of outside ideas, adjusted to fit. Just like all of the previous concepts from other forms we once borrowed and now take for granted. And thus, they become part of what roleplaying does well.

The Birds

The updated archive is here!

See P. XX

The latest installment of Pelgrane Press' irrepressible webzine has bubbled up for your delight and delectation. In addition to a whirlwind of product news, it features a contest of apocalyptic proportions from Graham Walmsley, a Night's Black Agents teaser from Kenneth Hite, a Razed teaser from Will Hindmarch and a complete Fiasco playset from Nathan Russell.

My eponymous column tackles the issue of "That Guy": what to do if you've got him in your group, and what to do if you've begun to suspect that you yourself are that guy. Thanks to Chatty DM Philippe-Antoine Ménard for the topic suggestion.

Flames Rising Interview

I am interviewed at Flames Rising, regarding GUMSHOE, Hamlet's Hit Points, Stone Skin Press, the police procedural as contemporary gothic, the impact of ubiquitous tablets on RPGs, and more. Check it out.