Tag: rpgs

The Blood Fiend of Toledo [The Day After Ragnarok]

The Blood Fiend of Toledo – Google Docs

The Blood Fiend of Toledo [The Day After Ragnarok]

Toledo, Ohio is a haunted ruin.  Just ask anybody.  There was a plague, and then there was a huge fire, and then the usual Things moved in – and now the city’s abandoned.  Except for the Things. Thankfully the Things keep to themselves, whatever they are, but smart people don’t go into the ruins.  Especially once the drained corpses of various animals and lesser monsters started showing up on the outskirts of the city.  The legend of the Blood Fiend of Toledo is already making the rounds of all the dives and pirate havens on the Great Lakes, and the tales get steadily taller. Continue reading The Blood Fiend of Toledo [The Day After Ragnarok]

Adventure Seed: Wild Salamander Chase.

Blame this. Kinda.

Wild Salamander Chase – Google Docs

Wild Salamander Chase

The most powerful mages in the animal kingdom are the ones that thrive in two environments. When you say that, most people think ‘birds:’ and it’s true, many birds are powerful magi.  But consider the humble turtle.  It is [amphibious], so it lives in the water and the land; in fact, the turtle’s shell gives it a special symbolic connection with Earth.  The turtle merges Earth and Water; the albatross, Earth and Air.  The flying fish is likewise the guardian of the interface of Air and Water.

But what of Fire? What are the animals that speak for THAT element?

…And there is the adventuring party’s assignment, in a nutshell: work out what animals partake of the elements of Fire and each of the other three Elements, confirm that those species have natural mages, and report back to the suitably cryptic Wise One that gave out this assignment in the first place.  Or come back and admit failure.  There’s no shame in not being able to handle such a difficult task, after all.

Continue reading Adventure Seed: Wild Salamander Chase.

Spell seed: Anser Reformabit.

Blame this.

Anser Reformabit

Despite its name, this spell works on any sort of poultry. When cast, it transforms the victim into a variety of carnivorous dinosaur, depending on the rough size of the poultry in question:

  • Duck-sized: Microraptor (How it kills you: swoops down from the sky and goes for the eyes)
  • Chicken-sized: Hesperonychus (How it kills you: swarms with about a dozen other Hesperonychus and worries its prey to death)
  • Goose-sized:Compsognathus (How it kills you: stalks from the trees and leaps from behind)
  • Swan-sized: Velociraptor (How it kills you: standard disembowelment with its sickle-claw)
  • Emu-sized: Troodon (How it kills you: inventively. Usually with sticks and sometimes a handy vine or two)
  • Ostrich-sized: Deinonychus (How it kills you: RAWR [chomp])

Continue reading Spell seed: Anser Reformabit.

Now available: John Wick’s ‘Curse of the Yellow Sign’ RPG adventures.

The Curse of the Yellow Sign book seems to be an interesting mix of King In Yellow-style adventures: they’re in the past, present, and future, and may be interconnected (while still being examples of different sorts of horror stories).  Also, it’ll be interesting to see if John Wick is working in what is now more or less the ‘classic’ Hastur Mythos – which is apparently going to be our generation’s default contribution to Lovecraftian cosmic horror – or whether he’s taking a more idiosyncratic path. Knowing Wick, I could really see it going either way, honestly.

My PJ Lifestyle piece on innovating zombies in RPGs.

Found here. Short version: there’s actually a bit that you can do with zombies in your campaign, and I didn’t even get to zombie pets or metaphors for the environment.  Although… a zombie campaign done in the style of the 1970s disaster movie genre could be hysterical.  Polyester leisure suits, and all.