Using the Numenera Ruin Mapping Engine with the Sun Below
In Jade Colossus: Ruins of the Prior Worlds, Monte Cook Games has come up with a ruin mapping system that allows you to flesh out parts of the Ninth World that you don’t have details for. Most of the book is about the Jade Colossus, but like many Numenera ruins, it’s enormous and there is no point in detailing hundreds of rooms and corridors that players will never see. The ruin mapping engine lets you roll a few dice and create weird Numenera environs on the fly.
Let’s roll some dice!
Example One: A 5m x 10m rectangular chamber with a machine that grinds small objects into drit. It has one exit sealed with a force field, and two additional exits.
Example Two: A sealed vault (seals are level 7 with level 7 defenses that do 7 points of energy damage). The interior is made of self-repairing level 8 synth. The vault is 15m x 30m and contains a vortex of energy that swirls above a raised circular platform surrounded by complex (level 8) machinery. The vortex is painfully bright and hot, and induces a sense of awe in observers. The vortex is a wormhole that leads directly to the sun.
The Sun Below
Using the ruin mapping engine to flesh out when players go “off the path” in any Sun Below adventure is perfect. You can roll dice, or use the tables for inspiration.
Then use the background of the adventures as window dressing for your on-the-fly creations. In example two above, that vortex obviously leads not to some lame sun at the center of the solar system but directly to the Sun Below!
The Sun Below: City on the Edge
Like the Jade Colossus, Urbamorr, the city on the edge, is enormous. Unlike the Jade Colossus, it’s mostly inhabited. Use the ruin mapping engine, and 50% of the time decorate the places with praithian statues, burial chambers, and enormous artwork. Above ground sections will have dh’lann features (like dream-vapor bowls), while below ground areas will feature slithik items (like floating tubes of blood).
Since the city is inhabited, 50% of the time use a creature as the main feature, the rest of the time roll as normal. If you do have a creature, 50% of the time use dh’lanns, floaters, praithians, praithian war snakes, pyronic sentries, or slithiks.
The Sun Below: Sleeping Lady
Liluna is also massive, and, like the Jade Colossus, mostly uninhabited. 50% of the time you should decorate the areas you roll up with displays that show lido automatons, Liluna in flight, gibbering murken, Lebby with her red bouncy ball, or an aspect of Storm. Depending on what's going on in the stricken moon, you could show the forces of Liluna or of Golthnor doing well or doing poorly.
If you roll up a creature, 50% of the time use a child of Golthnor, cultists of Golthnor, data demons, gibbering murken, lido automatons, Lebby, skratts, Storm, or synites. Look at the Orb Encounters section of the adventure for ideas.
Get those Holiday Orders in!
Numenera Celebration Sale!
Did someone say 24 Hour Sale on Numenera Print Books?
OK then!
$12.49 for The Sun Below: Sleeping Lady
$9.20 for The Sun Below: City on the Edge
Buy both and save on shipping!
Both include the PDF for free!!!
Gods and Icons Comes Together
We've got some great playtesting feedback, which really helps. The art is rolling in, the writing is almost done, and editing is underway. Next up: layout!
I wanted to share this lovely picture of Lady Akuma by Jeshields. People say terrible things about the Lady, but they don't know the half of it. Maybe she's just misunderstood. ;)
We were so lucky to find some great artists for Gods and Icons. Since I both love art and fail at the basics, I'm in awe of what people can turn my art specs into.
And let's not forget Supreme Commander Tyrvek! I'm pretty sure he's not misunderstood. ;)
James did a great job on Tyrvek standing alone, but I wanted to show him as leading an army. So James added the background and I love it!
Now that's it's August, our Christmas in July sale is over, but the savings don't stop! We lowered the price for both The Sun Below: City on the Edge to $2.49 and The Sun Below: Sleeping Lady to $6.49.
Keep on gaming!
John
Sale Ends Leap Day and Kiss of Death for Numenera
A little Numenera love before the Gods and Icons Kickstarter eats my soul.
40% Off, Sale Ends Leapday
The post-valentine's day sale is ending soon. The PDF versions of The Sun Below: City on the Edge and The Sun Below: Sleeping Lady are still 40% off for the rest of February.
Kiss of Death
Numenera in Space! Into the Night from Monte Cook Games is an inspiring setting book that teleports the game into space. I wrote an instant adventure set in one of those space worlds, Kiss of Death.
Liskal the AI needs a mind-gem from Zalkezia of Branu’s Kiss. Liskal tells the PCs that Zalkezia will spit the gem out after leaving the Kiss. They must grasp the gem to be teleported home.
Look for the upcoming release of CypherCaster Issue 5, which will include Kiss of Death. This adventure is set in in the watery worldlet of Branu's Kiss from Into the Night.
CypherCaster magazine can be found at DriveThruRPG.com. CypherCaster 5 should be out in mid March.
Speaking of CypherCaster magazine, check out the bundle for issues 1 - 4. www.drivethrurpg.com/product/171996/CypherCaster-Issues-001004-BUNDLE
Art for Art's Sake
A little preview of the icon Baron Von Vorlatch for Gods and Icons. The baron rules the barony of Borgostnya for Emperor Roland. He likes the night.
And here's the new art for The Sun Below Bundle: City on the Edge and Sleeping Lady. Eventually That's How the Light Gets In will be there as well.
Happy New Year from Dread Unicorn Games!!!
Dread Unicorn Games in 2016
Are you going to OrcaCon? I am, please say hi! I'll be running a few 13th Age games for Fire Opal and attending as much gaming goodness as I can.
Our first products are sister titles: Gods and Icons for 13th Age and The Gods Have Spoken: Deities and Domains for 5E. Why two? It turns out most of the writing and art will work in both products, so why not?
Here's where we are now with Gods and Icons and The Gods Have Spoken:
- The writing is 75.09% done (+ or -). Vanessa has done a great job with three pantheons, and I'm excited to plug in their relationship to the icons for Gods and Icons. There will be holy swords for paladins and religious items for all the divine classes.
- I've been playtesting Gods and Icons for a few months now. Soon I'll give it to the real playtesters to try out.
- We're going to Kickstart the gods! You'll be able to pick either or both titles as your rewards.
- Since this is our first kickstarter, we're going to be cautious. We don't want to promise what we can't deliver! For example, we're not going to do our own printing and shipping. For physical copies, we'll use Drive Thru's Print on Demand and let them do the shipping.
- But we will have lots of great stretch goals: more content and more art!
- Speaking of art, we have a great cover artist! Justin Wyatt has agreed to do our cover art, which will include three gods and three icons. Yay! Gaming art fans will recognize Justin from The Sun Below: City on the Edge where he did interior art and The Sun Below: Sleeping Lady, where he did the amazing cover and interior art.
- Some of Justin's work:
After the Kickstarter, our next title will be a return to Numenera with another adventure: The Sun Below: That's How the Light Gets In. There the players will confront what happens to the underground world when The Sun Below starts to fail!
After that? We're not telling! There is so much going on in roleplaying right now. We've got a lot of great ideas, but first, let's get these three products out the door.
Happy New Year!
John
Major Hobnobbing on Game Master's Journey
Lex Starwalker and I chew the fat on his most excellent podcast: Game Master's Journey. Give it a listen!
We talk about Numenera, The Sun Below: Sleeping Lady, The Sun Below: City on the Edge, (electronic versions of both are on sale now for 40% off!!!) 13th Age Organized Play, how the run an RPG Montage, using Fronts in your own adventures (and fronts in The Sun Below: Sleeping Lady), and more.
And this is just part one of a two part podcast!
We're Number Two! :)
I just love this screencap. The Sun Below: Sleeping Lady is the 2nd hottest Cypher System seller right now on DriveThru. And the Sun Below bundle with City on the Edge is the featured product.
OK, enough reveling in my 15 nanoseconds of 2nd place fame, back to work.
Sneak Preview: The Sun Below: Sleeping Lady
Like The Sun Below: City on the Edge, The Sun Below: Sleeping Lady is another adventure for Numenera. They are both set far below the surface of the Ninth World in the world of The Sun Below. Like City on the Edge, Sleeping Lady is an adventure for all tiers of characters, contains plenty of new creatures and numenera, and devilish plot twists to keep your players guessing.
Sleeping Lady is a great sequel to City on the Edge, but can be run standalone or even prior to City on the Edge. It begins with machines going mad in a town of blood-sucking green slime creatures. These creatures, slithiks, will pay handsomely if the madness of the machines can be stopped. From there the players are thrust into the mysteries of the numenera mines, underground ruins stuffed with weird echos of past ages.
Two disasters in the making confront your players. Can they save the town of the slithiks from being torn apart? Can they stop an ancient evil from entering their world? Can your players handle both crises? Or even one?
Includes two new descriptors: Slithik and Gibbering, and a new focus: Burns Blood.
Get ready for minds to shatter when your players enter the numenera mines of Orb Mountain and find the secrets of the Sleeping Lady.
Stealing the Weird: Putting Numenera Creatures into your 13th Age Game
Sometimes it's nice to shake the players up a bit. They know the game a little too well and are becoming hard to surprise. One trick is to look at your bookshelf and steal something from a very different game and stick it in the one you are running now.
As an example, I'll steal a Numenera creature, and 13th Ageify it. I'll take one of mine, the Pyronic Sentry, which first appeared in The Sun Below: City on the Edge, but you can see it here. You can do this with any two game systems.
This is a challenging creature for beginning Numenera parties, so let's make it a challenge for a 2nd level 13th Age party. We'll make it a large 4th level monster. It looks large and it's doing double damage, which is what large monsters do.
It's obviously a construct, perhaps one of the Dwarf King's artificers went over the deep end and sold these to the highest bidder. Or was forced to make them against her will...
Reading the modifications, we'll make it invulnerable to heat, and vulnerable to cold.
Now, let's look at it's GM Intrusion: it can teleport a PC to directly in front of it. Which is nice, because it's always standing in a fire or lava, and then it hits it for extra damage. A GM Intrusion typically only happens once a battle, so we'll go with limited use, once a battle.
Check out DIY Monsters section in the 13th Age Core book.
Pyronic Sentry
A pyronic sentry is an armored construct whose color changes to match the flames it finds itself in. It looks like an eight foot tall armored man with long blades for hands. It is always found standing in fire, lava, or some other superheated environment. To engage a pyronic sentry, one must enter its fiery environ. As a construct it follows orders to guard a place or a thing.
Large 4th level wrecker [construct]
Initiative: +7
Invulnerable: magical and mundane heat and fire; Vulnerable: cold
Sizzling Sword Hands +9 vs. AC -- 20 damage
Natural even hit: +16 heat damage
R: Come Play: +9 vs. MD -- 24 damage
Hit or Miss: Nearby target is teleported directly in front of the pyronic sentry, taking 16 heat damage from the environment the sentry is standing in.
Limited Use: 1/battle.
Fiery environs: At the start of the pyronic sentry's turn, each enemy engaged with it or otherwise standing in the fire/lava takes 14 fire damage.
Nastier Specials
Some Like it Hot: A character must make a hard save (16+) to leave the fiery environs.
AC 20
PD 18 HP 108
MD 14
Print Version Now on Sale: 25% off for rest of February
The Print Version of The Sun Below: City on the Edge, is on sale through the end of February. The PDF version's sale continues to the end of the month.
The Sun Below: City on the Edge Print Version Now Available
The print version of the Numenera adventure The Sun Below: City on the Edge is now available on DriveThruRPG!
If you already purchased the pdf version of The Sun Below: City on the Edge, AND you are allowing me to send you emails on DriveThruRPG.com, I sent you a special offer on the print version. Check your email!
Valentine's Day Sale
What could be more romantic than The Sun Below: City on the Edge?
Yes, it's 25% off for Valentine's Day, and for the rest of Valentine's Month!
Mor-Klish wants a kiss!
Blogger's Roundtable of Doom: The Montage
It's time again for the Blogger's Roundtable of Doom! Last time we talked about how to encourage roleplaying. This time our question is: What is a favorite mechanic or idea you've encountered in an RPG that you think would work well in other games? Please explain the mechanic/idea, tell us a bit about the game it comes from, and give some ideas of how it could be used in other games.
THE MONTAGE
I'm going with the montage. I first encountered the montage in 13th Age's Organized Play adventures. At the start of every session, the GM tells the players where they are going, and then has the players go around the table, each player describing a challenge the group encountered, and the next player describing how their character overcame the challenge. No dice, just pure roleplaying.
So the players tell the story of how they get to an important scene, and then the normal 13th Age rules take over and everyone plays out that scene. I love this, as it gets everyone's creative juices flowing and creates an exciting shared story that is part of the adventure.
Here is an excerpt from my Numenera adventure The Sun Below: City on the Edge. The goal of the montage is to narrate a prison break by the PCs. Since they have lost all their equipment, I let them pick up cyphers as they go around the table. After the montage, they may encounter a hostile patrol, so I want them to gear up appropriately.
Prison Break
For the escape, the goal is not to go into details with maps and die rolling, but to give a sense of time passing as the characters make their getaway.
The characters are fleeing in an underground labyrinth of tunnels full of ancient machinery. In this scene, the players will help decide what obstacles they face, and what they must do to overcome them.
If the characters search for weapons at any point, they find pipes and bits of metal they can use as clubs.
Pick a player to start with, then go around the table. Each player will describe an exciting problem the group encounters. The next player will describe how their character solves the problem in a cinematic fashion. The GM narrates the solution back to the group, with the character as the hero, and has the hero find a cypher in the process. The player then comes up with a new problem and the next player in turn comes up with the solution. Keep going until every player has created and solved a problem.
For example, the first player says, “We run around a corner and find a bottomless chasm blocking our way.”
The next player describes how their character got the group past the difficulty. (No die rolls needed.)
For example, the player could say, “We find a storeroom full of long transparent tubes, wide enough to crawl through. We lay one over the chasm and go on.”
You then narrate that back to the group, making the character the hero and add a cypher.
Amazing. What looked like just part of the wall turned out to be the door to a storeroom, and you found it. You single-handedly lift a long clear tube up and place it across the chasm. You even find some machinery on both sides to brace it with, so it won’t roll. All the other characters get across.
You go last. As you crawl across the chasm in the clear tube, and notice something glittering on a shelf three feet below the far ledge. It’s a cypher.
Then give them a cypher. Consider cyphers that might help the characters escape from a patrol, such as a force screen projector.
Now the player who described the solution and found the cypher describes a new obstacle to the party’s escape. You keep going around the table. Once every player has had a chance to make up a challenge to overcome and a solution, the montage is over.
What are the other Blogger's of DOOM stealing from other roleplaying games? Let's see!
James Walls takes on the Player Turn from Mouseguard. I love Mouseguard, and this is an excellent post!
Marc Plourde is such a showoff, he blogs about 5 things to steal, and then adds 2 more. Great stuff.
Scott Robinson steals location aspects from FATE. Hmmm, I'm going to have to try this myself...
Lex Starwalker is behind all this madness: Now, he's taken the Cypher System's GM Intrusion, and intruded it into D&D 5th edition. Is nothing sacred?
John Clayton finds backstories that have fallen off the back of a lorry. Prince of Shadows aproved!
GM Intrustions Podcast Reviews The Sun Below: City on the Edge
"Just as good as an official product -- in some ways I think actually better." "Lots and lots of GM Intrusions..."
Lex Starwalker reviews The Sun Below: City on the Edge in episode 73 of his awesome podcast GM Intrusions. The review starts at 31:39, but if you like the Cypher System, you'll want to listen to the whole podcast, which starts with an interview with Matt Forbeck about the Shotguns and Sorcery kickstarter, a new licensed Cypher System rpg.
25% Off on The Sun Below: City on the Edge!
Starting NOW, The Sun Below: City on the Edge is on SALE! 25% Off! Journey far below the surface of the Ninth World, and save shins while you do it!
Creature Preview: Pyronic Sentry
Here's a preview from The Sun Below: City on the Edge, available now on DriveThruRPG.com. While the creature hails from a Numenera adventure, it'd be right at home in The Strange as well.
PYRONIC SENTRY 5 (15)
A pyronic sentry is a synthsteel- and glassteel-cladded automaton whose color changes to match the flames it finds itself in. It looks like a massive armored man with long blades for hands. Motive: Follow orders to guard a place or a thing. Environment: Pyronic sentries are usually found near fires, lava pits, or other hellishly hot environments. Damage Inflicted: 5 slashing and 5 heat. Armor: 3 (100 vs. heat) Modifications: While being almost invulnerable to heat, cold attacks gain an asset and ignore armor. In fact, if a pyronic sentry is removed from a fiery environment and placed in a temperature comfortable for a human, the automaton will become sluggish and have a one-level penalty on all its actions. Should one end up in a frigid environment, it would take a two-level penalty on all actions and take one point of damage a turn until it shattered into pieces. Combat: A pryonic sentry will follow its orders first, and worry about self-preservation second. Usually the orders do not require it to move to cooler locations. Interaction: Pryonic sentries do not speak, but are telepaths. Use: An arch-nano’s synthsteel tower rises out of a lava field. People say the arch-nano hasn’t been seen in years, but the pryonic sentry still stands guard, stopping good folk from taking valuable items from a woman who surely doesn’t need them anymore. Loot: Once cool, the remains of a pryonic sentry can be salvaged for 1d6 cyphers and possibly an oddity.
The Pyronic Sentry's GM Intrusion is designed to challenge any tier party, from tier one to tier six. Stats are presented in three groups, separated by /s. The first stat is for tiers 1 and 2. The second for tiers 3 and 4. The last for tiers 5 and 6.
GM Intrusion: The pyronic sentry teleports an enemy who is at short range or closer to just in front of the automaton. The sentry then attacks as level 7/8/9 with both bladed hands, doing double damage and dazing the foe for one round if it hits. The foe will also take heat damage from the environment if the pyronic sentry is in its usual searing environs.
You teleport into the flames and feel the searing-hot bladed hands of the automaton spike deep into your body. Your flesh sizzles like meat on a spit.
Notice how the GM Intrusion flows from the creature's description? Bring on the searing heat! You can do the same with your own creatures, see Numenera GM Intrusions: Creatures.
Have fun, and there plenty more creatures to be found in The Sun Below: City on the Edge's bestiary!