IN THEIR FROZEN BODIES

Q: what are we doing this afternoon?

A: finding a stilled but living god, climbing into its mouth or eyes and taking everything we can find.

ROT is maybe a setting/hack/adventure I will release this year (this year? 12 months? WHEN IT'S DONE, I GUESS).

__________________________________________________________

Q: what will it look like?

A: digest size. short and concise. pixelated art.

Q: rules?

A: hacked Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

Q: hacked how?

A: mostly wanking with the classes. Playsheets. About 3x as many classes. Taking the simplicity of something like B/X and bringing it into line with the power curve of 4e. I think.

I stole some questions from Jeff R.

Q: What is the deal with my cleric's religion?

A: you go make friends with a god and they give you spells. sometimes they come with you and help out, like a mildly malevolent Totoro or something from Where the Wild Things Are.

Q: Where can we go to buy standard equipment?

A: Anywhere. It's like, highly populated and everyone has a ton of junk. Hermits in caves or holes have junk like door spikes to sell you. Wandering Porter Johns or Janes have been reworked to carry tons of stuff and make a great deal of profit selling you whatever their last (now dead?) client had them port around.

Q: Where can we go to get platemail custom fitted for this monster I just befriended?

A: can you not just do that yourself? since most of the people here might count as monsters, custom jobs rarely make economic sense, but there's sure to be someone in town.

Q: Who is the mightiest wizard in the land? The greatest warrior?

A: Highly disputed. These questions start wars. You're in the land of 777,777 heroes, after all.

Q: Who is the richest person in the land?

A: Whichever of the mightiest of heroes has spent the least of their war chest.

Q: Where can we go to get some magical healing?

A: Oh man (or woman), anywhere. Throw some coins into a river and there's sure to be a talking fish that'll set you right for a favor.

Q: Where can we go to get cures for the following conditions: poison, disease, curse, level drain, lycanthropy, polymorph, alignment change, death, undeath?

A: It is offensive to suggest lycanthropy or undeath are to be cured, bigot. Everything else, see above, though the favors get more costly.

Q: Is there a magic guild my MU belongs to or that I can join in order to get more spells?

A: there is the Lodge for wizardy types, the Eye for warlocky types.

Q: Where can I find an alchemist, sage or other expert NPC?

A: In any town.

Q: Where can I hire mercenaries?

A: Assume everyone is or was a mercenary.

Q: Is there any place on the map where swords are illegal, magic is outlawed or any other notable hassles from Johnny Law?

A: No. In fact, the idea is anathema.

Q: Which way to the nearest tavern?

A: Anywhere. All the towns move around. Most of towns are really just an enormous drinking party with a bunch of hangers on.

Q: What monsters are terrorizing the countryside sufficiently that if I kill them I will become famous?

A: You’re looking for other heroes, probably.

Q: Are there any wars brewing I could go fight?

A: Constantly. Assume that one will break out by the second or third session.

Q: How about gladiatorial arenas complete with hard-won glory and fabulous cash prizes?

A: Go to a tavern/town/drinking party. Start a fight. Win. Impress whoever is buying drinks.

Q: Are there any secret societies with sinister agendas I could join and/or fight?

A: Not really. The Tychginian Massive wants to destroy the universe, but everyone knows about them and no one seems worried. The Horde (mind-synced, psychic halflings) are probably up to something.

Q: What is there to eat around here?

A: Hope you like meat. Probably from something sentient.

Q: Any legendary lost treasures I could be looking for?

A: Go to the Quiet Spires and loot the near-motionless body of a god sinking into the Rot. They’re full of them, or at least, that’s what everyone says. There’s also the ruined Castle in the Lake, fortress of the Brass Emperor (now long ascended to godhood) if you want big shiny weapons and armor. Or the Hospital of Christ Repulsive, Prince Rot if you want magic or weird, probably cursed but terrifying armor and weapons. And then the Grey Temple and Ordru Vem if you don’t mind the psychic probing of the Grey Elves. And also the black catwalks of the forge city/machine planet of the dwarves, Ghaz’sham.

Q: Where is the nearest dragon or other monster with Type H treasure?

A: probably out drinking. Eyeball everyone at the party for scales. Look for whoever is getting their ass kissed the most.

attribution: i did the art. and yes, I know there are numerous technical problems

Monsters, new ruleset sort of

Working on new rules. Endurance is like HP, HD (hazard die) is what's rolled for damage. Here are some monsters.

scrambling eaters

Dextrous Monstrous Halfling HD6, 4 Endurance

-small, like a cross between a child’s corpse and a big cat

-night vision: eyes reflect light like a dog

-heal injuries in a few minutes in the dark or when eating

-hunts in threes, nests in 6s; nest has d2 Treasures

-1XP

ghoul, ascended

Charismatic Monstrous Human HD8, 9 Endurance

-tall, humanoid form, translucent skin, bones and organs glowing as bright as daylight, speaks with two voices

-4 SP: Restore, Calm, Silence, Phase

-takes an extra pip of harm in star light

-attended by d3+1 pupal ghouls, in chapel: d3 Treasure, 1 Art

-3XP

ghoul, pupal

Strong, Charismatic Monstrous Human HD6+1, 8 Endurance

-Light Armor

-tall, translucent humanoid, a whisper echoes whatever it says, but awkwardly, like it’s not used to a mouth or tongue

-2XP

lonely hungerer

Strong Monstrous Human HD10, 12 Endurance

-Thick skin and bloodlust; as Heavy armor with helmet

-Tall, muscular, hulking, always male-looking, with wide mouth and baleful eyes (red in the half-light)

-lairs solitary, among the bones of humans, has d2 Treasure

-2XP

specter

Undead HD6+1, 6 Endurance

-luminous, ectoplasmic human shape, slit mouth, black eyes

-becomes something worse if it opens its mouth

-Cannot be injured or killed by normal means

-corpse may be treated as Fetish

-1XP

failed chimera

Hardy, Monster, Once Human HD8+1 10 Endurance

-random Trait (determined by components)

-claws, teeth or beak in a jagged mouth and long black tongue and long stringy hair, 3+d4 limbs

-somewhere between a child and a predator, hunts, sings

-3XP

infernal juror

Wise Enormous Masked Demon HD10+1, 16 Endurance

-increase damage die size for human or smaller creatures

-can only be injured by weapons of its own making

-can change sizes, and its mouth is a door and its throat a tunnel to hell

-d4+2 Treasure

-4XP

star mite

Fast, Intelligent, Dextrous Monster HD6+1, 8 Endurance

-glowing, burrowing tick-like and dog-sized, attacks from loose earth and retreats, hates being seen

-sleeps when immersed in water, immune to heat, cold and pressure (including blunt trauma)

-consumes darkness, dreams, fantasies, nightmares; falls apart when it dies

-d4-3 Artefacts

-2XP

cultist

Human HD6, 5 Endurance

-marked with a sign visible only in peripheral vision or mirrors

-knows a Secret about something dark and deep or far, inky and cold

-1 in 6 have a random Trait, HD6+1, 7 Endurance, +1XP, d2-1 Treasure

-1XP

villagers

Human HD4, 3 Endurance

-important villagers have a random Trait, HD4+1, 5 Endurance, 1XP

the horde

Wise, Intelligent Monstrous Human HD6, 5 Endurance

-once abandoned children in rags, emaciated, a sign in their forehead

-appear in d3 or d8+2 numbers

-linked consciousness, telepathy

-live in sewers, alleys, dark places, hate the Empire, the wealthy

-1 XP

attributions: Rec, Blame!, Berserk, Sankai Jutsu, the Grudge, Dorehedoro, Wikipedia, the Village of the Damned

Childhood Staring for Too Long

Part of my front tooth flaked off and its all raw and sensitive.

Here are things I like:

PCs who are children or teenagers who rescue other children or teenagers or fail horribly trying to rescue them. For tactical reasons and emotional and spiritual ones. (Monsterhearts. Over the Garden Wall. Adventure Time. John Bellairs. Gorey. Shintaro Kago. Takato Yamamoto. Maruo)

Wizards are from some wizard academy and they are all hot, condescending rich kids that don't really give you the time of day. like this one.

Dopplegangers not so much in the D&D monster sense, but in the literal sense. Jealous alternates. And places that are dopplegangers. (If a PC dies when no one is around, ask the player in secret if they want to come back as the malignant, weird version of themselves. They weep after killing a monster. When they think no one is looking, their character stares into the distance and they detect as neither evil nor good, but they are terrified of _sanctuary_. And they gain a fetish for masks of any kind, always wear them.).

Animals that wear clothes and act like people but also eat one another and don't really understand language and just pretend at civilization and stare too long at the humans that talk to them. (there is a 1 in 3 chance that any village or town is animals instead of people. The shops take nuts (squirrels sell books and clothing and rations and tools) or worms (birds sell spells and secrets) or fresh meat (weapons, armor) instead of money, the courts determine things with fights to the death using only claws and teeth (you can probably convince the judge that a sword or something is like "your claws" if you do a good job of miming. otherwise charisma check or something))

People riding deer that seem to understand them like a person would.

Fairytales and Ovid and things where people are punished because the world is unfair and because they weren't clever and hadn't figured out the secrets. (dryads trapped in trees by thug  boyfriends. nice people turned into monsters because the mayor didn't like them. children raised as killers because their parents are awful. the emperor is the worst of all, like a monster pope.)

Gods that are monster.

gods

Orcs that are just racist regular people in white robes and pointed caps with lots of muscles that worship something horrible and all fuck eachother.

Goblins that are just the lost boys and their king is a scaly peter pan. They are at war for esoteric reasons with other goblins led by the serious and kind Wendy (who is an Alice). They have magical scarves made by mothers they've forgotten (cantrip 1/game and then the scarf is ruined, the scales fall off and the boy or girl starts growing into an adult).

Magical longjongs (always warm or jump high or better AC).

Landscapes that are  the maps of people's minds. Like Ghostland. Or the limbic crust in Limbo.

Things with eyes like flashlights. Like that frog in the fiend folio.

Ghouls that glow like ghosts in the night.

Slaadland (D&D/Planescape, places more suitable for lower-levels)

each square is roughly 18 square miles

Slaad are hunkered into biomes pulled from other worlds. Also, they have mind palaces.

This is about the those land masses and the people living on them.

LAND

By an internal logic similar to Aristotle's striation of the sublunary sphere into concentric elemental slices, the biomes sinking around the Slaad are oriented to one another by temperature, climate and native life such that the temperate biomes often agglomerate into a band on which either side is a more tropic and more arctic band. This isn't universally true and fingers of ocean - impossibly deep cracks teeming with ocean life - span biomes and offer routes for trade, transport and communication (both via sail and submersible, especially the latter, as many share subsurface tributaries). Similarly, deserts and arctic cankers may sit in the middle of a jungle and while, over long centuries, each biome wanders along its borders and the oceans spread and swallow deserts and jungles flood or dry out, natural processes are much too slow and the inevitable inclination toward ultimate dissolution and end in the primal soup of Limbo prevents more serious transition.

Tectonic action occurs here too as the Slaad shifts or the Limbic body, both like an ocean and a plate, rubs against the Slaad's crust of biomes, but at the level of biome (one biome interposed over another in quick tectonic action - what life can survive in that new place doing so, most of it dying off, most such under-places being complexly dead in a generation or two).

More jumbled: the agglomeration of biomes can be both vertical and horizontal, meaning that there may be forests under forests (one the mirror of the other, their roots tangled or else actual layers where the roof of one is dotted with the root-tips of the other) or a forest swallowed by a swamp. The inhabitants of the Slaad's districts refer to upper- (lit by the weird light of the Slaad's mind palace) and under- (usually lightless). Oceans may fill such undertructures, but many are dry.

The gentry of the Witchocracies that populate Slaad-touched swamps talk of going to under-forest and upper-swamp, and weave into their long black hair the little bones of the birdlike and lamp-eyed goblins that roam those lightless woods. Some such places are lodged like a bezoar and have petrified, bushes like sharp grey teeth to the touch, or are otherwise well preserved, treasure troves of older technologies.

The city-states of the Slaad lands (Ariesne-Orlay, the Atlantis-Ys Protectorate, Kievs) all have on lease from Gaz'sham traitor-pirates drill-tanks, boring rigs, assaying instruments the size of a house, are seeking caches of lost technology sufficient to kill or incapacitate their Slaad or one another or rocket themselves either out Limbo or at least keep them from sinking further.

The closer a biome is to the Slaad or the Limbic body, the greater the variation, the greater the deformation due to radiation. 

CIVILIZATION

Each biome pulled from the material plane tends to be in a state of natural decline even before its capture. Accordingly, any civilizations and peoples brought with their homelands are usually living in ruins, People living among technologies they no longer understand in a land that has turned against them:

"Had satellite imaging existed, those distinguishing features of civilized life - towns, roads, cultivated expanses - would have been mostly invisible to the camera eye under their canopy of primeval growth. Beneath the green scrim, millions of wolves roamed the twilit forests, packs prowled the rutted streets..." (God's Crucible pg 152-3)

What remains: roads left to the depredations of forests, roots and erosion, and the casual habitation of highwaymen and independent tollbooths, aqueducts full of stagnant life and weeds, their vast cisterns home to salinae burbling water songs in brackish or water-goblins making earth-bombs at the behest of beings vast, ancient and aqueous, factories (into which teams journey to salvage metal) in which lurk old guards in rusting armor and books of inscrutable power, museums and laboratories to be ransacked for arcanum and histories, castles being squatted in by revolutionaries or sorcerers looking for help or people to use or someone to do some nasty work, cities teeming with people from a multitude of biomes and planets, refugees from a collapsing or long lost biome.

Memories of one's home being taken by the Slaad are consonant with myths of cataclysm and apocalypse; Slaad capture mechanisms are as different as possible from the subtle engagement of Ravenloft.

Xaositect cells pamphlet civilized areas, establish dischoirs, overthrow tyrants and recruit the more democratically inclined. 

MAJOR THREATS
Over all this looms the Slaad, and over the Slaad, its mind palace, radiating psychic abreality and chaos and entropy, a forever mouth and gut swallowing whatever is around it, pullulating monstrosities, Slaad-intention spreading over the sky like a foul borealis moving in waves of mutation. This is a place from which the eye is averted, to which no maps lead, but to which every compass points.

Slaad mind palaces are like machines, massive circuits of chaos and maleficence, its hooks and conduits like flumes into other planes, chutes down into a gnawing and total chaos, its few pools and more still chambers huge networks like dungeons, teeming with nastiness, mutation and horror, hordes of psychic weapons and engines.

And into which come Xaositect Legions on their continent-ships, nothing offends them more than the vestigial order and civilization that clings to Slaad land masses and they often attach great weights or engines to drive these masses into the primal soup at a much accelerated pace.

Some Slaad share biomes at their extremes, most, however, do not and at the far end of any biome is what appears to be a vast sea of alien, inhospitable landmasses floating according to obscure tectonic action, swallowing and shitting out one another like amoeba, blind and idiot flagella, geometries that sicken the mind, over which or through which crawls the black ships of Gaz'sham or the cumbersome 'zerai missile boats.

Slaadland peninsula into the Limbic body

attributions: me and Avalon Hill

Blanchehammer (5e D&D's proficiency system, the game)

RESOLUTION DICE
I have played D&D so long that the die scale feels second nature.

OD&D treats some broad checks (listening, opening doors) as a 1 or 2 in 6 chance. I believe Talysman uses it for general resolution of non-combat procedures as well (but can't find it on the blog). It's simple, elegant and respects both the GM to adjudicate well and the player to make clever, calculated risks.

This is maybe D&D sans the wargaming roots.

THEME
You're adventurers, out to make money, out to colonize, discover, map, get famous, get lucky and do the sort of thing that excess and heretofore unlucky people might do in a world with too many unlucky people and not enough food, housing and compassion.

Jeff's Middenheim hack is probably the only city on the map.

DOING STUFF
If you are good at something  you get a +1 to rolls related to doing that thing, increased by 1 every 4 levels (so 5e's proficiency bonus, but starting at 1 less). The bonus doesn't change relative to the die rolled.

x is the highest value of the die. Success is any roll resulting in an x-1. So, success on a d6 is 5+ (33% chance) and on a d4 is 3+ (50% chance), etc.

You roll when it's important to roll.
d4 Simple
d6 Average
d8 Little Tricky
d10 Complex
d12 Difficult
d20 Very Difficult
d100 Chaos

If your proficiency bonus+1 equals success (ie equals "x"), you automatically succeed. (But may still need to roll if the GM is using margins of success).

No critical success or failure.

IN PLAY
Armor is either armored or heavily armored. Particularly agile characters are treated as armored for defense. Heavy armor makes doing anything that isn't moving around as normal, riding or attacking more difficulty (increase die size of difficulty). Armor increases the die rolled to land a die by one or two (heavy armor) sizes.

players do pretty much all the rolling and so roll to both attack and defend

attacking someone defending themselves is difficult (d12) but wounding someone with a sword is simple (d4) killing someone already wounded is likewise simple, but killing someone in a single blow is at least a little tricky (d8).

convincing someone to help you against their perceived best interests is very difficult (d20), but convincing someone that their best interests align with yours is only a little tricky (d8).

Healing a wound in an hour of game time is Very Difficult, decreasing in difficulty each subsequent hour.

Not dying or going insane in the face of terrible wounds or cosmic horrors is usually at least complex (d10) but may become harder to do given the scale of the opposition.

CLASSES
Classes reduce the difficulty of Class-related die rolls by 1 die size:

Fighters do a better job of landing blows and not dying, are always at least armored and can wear heavy armor without difficulty
Assassins kill and wound with great ease
Sorcerers find understanding the magical and the insane only very difficult and casting spells only complex
Rogues are quite adept at locks, mechanisms, slight of hand and lying
Clerics find basking in the radiance of the many great and powerful beings without losing one's mind or composure only very difficult
Explorers are adept at navigation, survival and ancient architecture
Bards are good at debauching, lying, music and heraldry
Sages are knowledgeable about languages, ancient history and lore
Protagonists are quite skilled at intimidation, shakedowns and general brutality
Dukes are quite skilled at throwing money around and wearing heavy armor and persuasion

COMPLICATIONS
caveat
a player can only roll a die ONCE during any given turn

interpretation 1
can roll a die of a given size once during any given turn (ie, each player has a d4-100 and may roll each of those die once during a turn) and "turn" means one go-round the table

interpretation 2
can only do one thing requiring a die roll during a given turn and each player takes a "turn" during a single go-round the table (with only the speaking player's character acting in that turn, other characters reacting)

BACKUP
Troupe play is the norm and there are a number of henchmen types:

Fighters, Dukes and Explorers get Footmen (proficient in landing blows, gaming, following orders and are always at least armored)

Assassins, Rogues, Bards and Protagonists get Lackeys (proficient in drinking, hiding, stealing and following orders)

Sorcerers, Clerics and Sages get Pupils (proficient in languages, research and whose obsessiveness and cowardice makes them relatively resistant to insanity and dying)

CHARACTER CREATION
This is the first turn and interpretation 2 controls (where a range is given you can either roll the corresponding die or pick the lowest number. If you roll, you cannot roll for anything else and should just pick the lowest ranges. If you roll a one, re-roll the die and add 1 for each time you've re-rolled until you don't roll a 1 anymore). Everyone has a bag of basic adventuring gear, any given proficiency and a class and:

you begin with 1-4 characters

and 1-6 pupils, footmen or lackeys

and 1-8 acquaintances on whom you may call for succor once (name at least 1)

and 1-10 weeks of food and drink

and 1-12 ducats

BUYING THINGS
The most valuable things a peasant and the very poor might have cost a pence (about 250/ducat)
The most valuable things  the lower class but not penurious might have cost a quarter
The most valuable things  the middle class might have cost half a ducat
The merchant class walks around with at least a ducat, usually much more in good
The aristocracy usually has about the same, but their ransom is enormous

This goes for things "fit" for each social class. Food for a peasant costs a penny and is pretty terrible (turnip-flavored water), etc.

Obscure things are eyeballed to fit the social class and are expensive for each syllable (a la Vornheim, I think) (so: human fat candle is 5 syllables, but is probably something anyone in the lower class might have (being of some religious significance) so it costs (5 syllables * quarter ducats means it costs 1 and a quarter ducats).

(a "syllable" is also the ducat-equivalent used by thieves and disreputable types as bank notes and are purportedly written in a mix of demon blood and the blood of some local strong man [and is issued by the local strong man] but are probably often fakes)

IMPROVEMENT
Levels are gained at a rate of 1/hour of play for any character exposed to real mortal peril for the majority of the hour in the pursuit of money, fame, power and the exploration of lost places and other of the gentler colonial pursuits (this is eyeballed, but characters wounded while adventuring are pretty much guaranteed a level).

Proficiency may be had in half as many things as your level +1. You must find a trainer to teach proficiency and they'll likely ask quiet a bit of money (current # proficiencies x level x 5 ducats, half that if you've 2 or more related proficiencies already). Learning a new proficiency takes a month of game time, give or take. Play another character in the meantime.

Attribution: John Blanche

Morale, Reaction Rolls in any kind of D&D

I've talked before about how I don't handle reaction rolls well. Basic has two regular 2d6 rolls the GM makes: reaction rolls and Morale.

MAPS, BOSSES, INTELLIGENCE
Where I'm coming down on this has to do with map and proximity.

Sufficiently intelligent NPCs (say, anything above animal intelligence) have their behavior largely determined by their position on the map and their relative proximity to "dangerous areas" and "bosses."

Bosses, in this case being named/senior NPCs who are likely interested in and in the position to boss around other NPCs ("named" being obvious, "senior" being the designated leader based on the edition's distributions (for every x of y there is a +1HD +1 Damage version of y) or maybe just even a superior hp roll (the one orc with max hp in a level of middling hp orc). You act right and proper when the boss is around.

Dangerous areas being points of ingress/egress from what the NPC considers "my place" and the "not my place" parts of the dungeon and pretty much everywhere in the Wilderness. You act tough and alert when your life depends on it.

Outside of this context, reasonably intelligent NPC are doing the things reasonably intelligent NPCs do: they're eating, lounging, arguing, gaming, painting, torturing something, masturbating, reading, playing with their kids, having sex, etc. You can make a list of these depending on the type of enemy or their culture, etc. You then tick off each entry on the list as you encounter more enemies (the first ones are eating, second ones are lounging, etc); if you do it this way, repeat actions that feel more common or likely.

WHAT YOU CAN DO WITH THEM
The party encounters some goblins pulling the wings off moths and playing a dice game.

The PCs are inside goblin territory. They don't necessarily appear as threats to the goblins and, the goblins not being on guard duty or being near an authority figure, don't really have any obligations to fulfill. They leap for weapons and watch the characters (neither groups were surprised) warily.

The players can then choose to attack, but they can also choose to talk. Interpret what the players ask as the goblins: they are saying things. what do those things ask of "us"?

If the players are bluffing, pretending to be allies and that's a reasonable thing for them to do in this context, then you roll a 2d6. If you beat the goblin's morale (7), the goblins buy it. If you don't, they don't.

Moldvay even accommodates situations in which parley still feels appropriate, even around a "boss" type (say, negotiating with surprised or overwhelmed opponents). Just add 2 to their Morale.

AESTHETIC
Morale is employed as a metric in the older Basics of how likely a character is to break and run or crumple and plead for mercy when the swords came out and allies died.

Fundamentally, the idea here is that the mechanics and fictional positioning conspire to make the game inherently opposed to the characters where it ought to be and more plastic where that makes more sense too. It asks more of GMs (who will need to determine if creatures attack immediately or not), but also much less (how easy it is to push NPCs around). As with any tweak like this, it smooths edges that are often satisfyingly uneven, but so far it's worked pleasingly (it also creates some rough edges of its own.

5e with DCs or NOT
Personally, I'd go with not. I've got a lot of experience with Moldvay and remembering or extrapolating morale scores is pretty easy. Goblins in Moldvay have a morale of 7 (58% chance of success or roughly, a DC10) unless there is a boss around, in which case it's 9 (30% chance or DC15).
An 8 morale means PCs doing a good job have a 45% chance of success (DC12).
A 10 Morale means PCs doing a good job have a 17% chance (DC17).

attribution: Leonora Carrington

you are in a field of tall green grass - more 5e setting stuff (lots of monsters)

more on that 5e starting area hexcrawl thing.

let me know if the links don't work.

there are probably some typos/math errors in the monsters. Nothing major. Building 5e monsters seemed pretty easy, which probably means I've screwed them up.

In the text, the italicized text is meant to call out mechanics, die rolls or GM-significant stuff.

“in a field of green grass that reaches to the shoulders”

"grass varies from 3-6’ tall. d4+2

the grass is untouched and sways in the wind, and is just really, really long grass that somehow is able to stand upright like corn without being wider, etc.

grass moving in a pattern or against the wind or bird flight is the likeliest sign of something incoming. Surprise is rolled with an advantage by all parties that are using the grass to their advantage (locals always do).

The grass is slow to burn without an accelerant. mass burn-offs using accelerant are likely to disturb large, hunting myriapodia, confusing the sudden flash of heat for a nearby food source."

"The ground is uneven, rich, black, lumpy but soft, full of holes and strange rises. It writhes with an overabundance of life, especially with annelids and myriapoda.

when all-out running, the ground should be treated as a falling hazard,  requiring a DC 20 DEX Save to avoid being knocked prone. horses and similar destriers may break a leg when they fail this Save.

when rolling a 5 or less on this Save, the character falls 10’ below into a roiling horror of enormous biting myriapoda and venom and blind hunger and madness. Climbing out without help takes a round and a DC 15 check. First round of exposure is 9 (d20) damage, second is 19 (2d20), etc."

daytime encounters (wandering encounters are rolled twice, once for day and once for night)

d20	encounter	second roll	notes
1	2-5 red birds	d4+1
2	3-30 gazelle	3d10
3	2-8 young lithobius	2d4
4	1-2 lithobius	any die/2
5	an archispirostreptus	any die/2 (see note)	50% chance it's startled, being chased by 1-2 lithobius
6 - 8	3-30 bin warblers	3d10
9 - 12	spider	see entry(4d10)
13 - 15	30-300 oracle swallow	"a lot" or 30d10
16	5-8 swamp people	d4+4
17	30-300 swamp people	30d10
18	an evangelist of torment	one	see the names of the evangelists
19	1-2 giant hunting spiders	any die/2 (see note)	50% chance for each that it is accompanied by d10 host
20	1-2 Oji Scarab	any die/2

attribution: John Hallmen