The prolific virtual pen of Bearded-Devil has written about me. How exciting! Elsewhere on the interwebz, Matt Jackson’s CollaboDungeon 02 has gone live. CollaboDungeon 02 is bigger and perhaps niftier than its predecessor. Check it out, and be a collaborator. (It’s okay in this instance; normally, collaborators get shot.)
My previous post perhaps included one too many puns, assuming such a thing is possible. It’s okay. I forgive me. Since only a fool laughs at his own jokes, I’m still kind of giggling about the Sybil ants. Therefore, today’s monster, written for the wonderful Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game. (Nota Bene: The link for the Basic Fantasy RPG is an affiliate link.)
Swarm of Sybil Ants Armor Class: 12 Hit Dice: 4** No. of Attacks: 1 bite plus paralysis Damage: 2d4 Movement: 60′ (10′) No. Appearing: 1d6, Wild 2d6 , Lair 4d6 Save As: Fighter: 4 Morale: 7 on first sighting, 12 after engaged Treasure Type: U XP: 320
The hissing Sybil ants build vast networks of tunnels and chambers in the Saar Chasm. These stealthy, precognitive insects have swarmed more than one careless traveler, their venom quickly inducing paralysis but not unconsciousness, making it easier to drag their hapless prey underground to be drained of blood over a period of several days.
A swarm of Sybil ants covers up to a 10-foot square, but it may move in column, et cetera. It makes only one melee attack against a creature adjacent to or within its mass. If more than one target exists, randomly determine which one is affected. A creature bitten by the swarm must make a save versus Poison or become paralyzed for 1d4 days. A creature that starts its turn within a swarm must make a saving throw versus Poison or be unable to take any actions other than moving at half speed due to the large number of insects crawling and biting the creature.
A swarm of Sybil ants takes half damage from weapons. It is immune to magical effects that target a single creature. Since Sybil ants have low-level precognitive abilities, they are surprised only a 1 (in 6). If a swarm of Sybil ants has lost at least 50% of its hit points, its bite inflicts 1d4 points of damage and saving throws against the swarm’s effects are made with a +2 bonus.
Travelers travailing across the Saar Desert face many hazards and obstacles. Sandmen prowl moonless nights. Windstorms whip up scouring clouds that can strip flesh to the bone. Brutal heat and numbing cold alternate each day and night. Wicked water elementals pose as life-giving oases, and all manner of venomous creatures lurk and hunt. Centuries of flash floods during the all-too-brief but fearsome rainy season gouged miles of twisting canyons, the deepest and most treacherous of which is the dreaded Saar Chasm.
The hissing Sybil ants build vast networks of tunnels and chambers in the chasm. Those stealthy, precognitive insects have swarmed more than one careless traveler, their venom quickly inducing paralysis but not unconsciousness, making it easier to drag their hapless prey underground to be drained of blood over a period of several days. Other ambush predators, most of them solitary and reptilian, wait in the chasm, often lairing in the crumbling cliff crypts built long ago by a now dead yet territorial race of deaf necromancers. Would-be tomb robbers venturing into the chasm must do so with the utmost care and quiet. Vicious enchantments etched into the very walls of the chasm transform echoes into stinging words of rebuke and ridicule, made all the more hurtful because they often carry the weight of truth.
Sounds louder than normal speech echo in the Saar Chasm. When such echoes occur, roll 1d4, but rolling no more than once per round. Add +1 for very loud noises, such as multiple combatants smiting about. Consult the list of effects below. In all cases, such effects only apply to those who can hear them and have a language. Creatures hear the echoes of Saar Chasm in their native tongue.
1 – Succeed on a DC 13 Wisdom saving throw or take 1d4 psychic damage and have disadvantage on your next attack roll made before the end of your next turn.
2 – Succeed on a DC 13 Wisdom saving throw or fall prone, becoming incapacitated with laughter at another’s expense. You are unable to stand up 1 minute. At the end of each of your turns, and each time you takes damage, make another DC 13 Wisdom saving throw. You have advantage on the saving throw if it’s triggered by damage. On a success, the effect ends.
3 – Succeed on a DC 15 Wisdom saving throw or take 2d4 psychic damage and have disadvantage on your next attack roll made before the end of your next turn.
4 – Succeed on a DC 15 Wisdom saving throw or fall prone, becoming incapacitated with laughter at another’s expense. You are unable to stand up 1 minute. At the end of each of your turns, and each time you takes damage, make another DC 15 Wisdom saving throw. You have advantage on the saving throw if it’s triggered by damage. On a success, the effect ends.
5 – The echoes reveal your darkest, most embarrassing secrets. Make a DC 15 Wisdom saving throw or drop whatever you are holding and become frightened for 1 minute. While frightened by this effect, you must take the Dash action and move away from others by the safest available route on each of your turns, unless there is nowhere to move. If you end your turn in a location where no creature has line of sight to you, the creature can attempt a DC 15 Wisdom saving throw. On a successful save, the effect ends.
Matt Jackson, gamer/mapper icon, recently posted CollaboDungeon 01 on his site. As Matt explains, “An idea that came to me while walking my pooches just now. A dungeon and collaboration between all of us to to make something, just for fun. The CollaboDungeon! I post a new map, you blokes and I turn it into an adventure.” Since I’ve turned one of Matt’s maps into an adventure before, I figured why not? Also, I needed something to run for my middle-school gamers at this week’s Ludi Fabularum meeting, so Matt’s map became a stone, and I killed two birds with it.
The result? The Barnacle Barrow of Blunderbuss Crain, a Dungeon World adventure set on Jonathan Newell’s wonder-full Genial Jack from Lost Pages . (Nota Bene: That second link in this paragraph is an affiliate link. If you use it to purchase the PDF, then I got a few coppers. The third link is for the store that sells copies from the first print run. The first link lets you glom the adventure via Google drive.)
When I cobbled together my brief review of Genial Jack, I noted that none of the new races introduced in the book have subraces. To quote me, “Oddly, none of the races have subraces. …. [This] seems a blank space that begs the application of creativity by the players and DM.” Permit me to muse about how subraces might be presented for one of the groups residing in Jackburg.
My choice? The Fomorians. Another quote, this time from Genial Jack: “The giants know as the Fomorians were banished from Faerie by Queen Mab after their leader, King Balor, sought to depose her.” These outcasts went off and conquered an island, which later got earthquaked and deluged, vanishing beneath the waves. Genial Jack literally took in the survivors, and they’ve been part of Jackburg ever since.
Since the book itself establishes that there are two types of Fomorians, it seems most sensible that those become subraces. If I make up a Fomorian PC, I choose between Fair Fomorian or Foul Fomorian. Reading the Fomorian traits presented in the book, I start to see a way they can be retooled gently between “core” traits and subrace traits. Ergo:
Fomorian Traits
Ability Score Increase. Your Strength score increases by 2.
Age. Fomorians age slowly, reaching adulthood around 25 years of age. They can live indefinitely, with some being thousands of years old.
Alignment. Fomorians retain a tendency toward Chaos from their former ruler, the mischievous Queen Mab.
Size. Fomorians vary in height widely, but all adults are over 10 feet high. You are Large in size.
Speed. Your walking speed is 40 feet.
Tool Proficiency. You gain proficiency with your choice of smith’s, brewer’s, or mason’s tools.
Languages. You can read, speak, and write Common and Jetsam, as well as a dialect of Giant.
Fair Fomorian
You appear very much like a human, but of prodigious size. As a Fair Fomorian, you may be considered comely to human eyes.
Ability Score Increase. Your Charisma score increases by 1.
Persuasive. You gain proficiency with the Persuasion skill.
Benevolent Gaze. You can cast Bless once, and it recharges after a long rest.
Foul Fomorian
About nine of out ten Fomorians have warped bodies, perhaps missing a limb, or having mis-sized limbs or misshapen bones.
Ability Score Increase. Your Constitution score increases by 1.
Intimidating. You gain proficiency with the Intimidation skill.
Evil Eye. You can cast Bane once, and it recharges after a long rest. Charisma is your spellcasting ability for this spell.
Nota Bene: The first link below is an affiliate link. If you use it to purchase the PDF, then I got a few coppers. The second link is for the store that sells copies from the first print run (not print-on-demand as I mistakenly had thought). That’s the route I went. All direct quotes come from the book itself.
Jonathan Newell’s Genial Jack from Lost Pages astonishes from cover to cover. Within its 50ish 8.5-inch-by-11.5-inch pages, one finds a fascinating introduction to Genial Jack, “a whale the size of a mountain” that has been for hundreds of years “the host to the teeming town of Jackburg”. Oodles of creatures representing more than a dozen different races/species call the buildings both within and without Jack their home. Ships anchor in Jack’s cavernous mouth. Elevators climb Jack’s inner mouth to reach Mawtown. One can ride the Esophogeal Tram to reach the villages in Jack’s guts. If that’s not one’s cup of tea, then wander across Jack’s immense back, marveling at the Coral Fortress or sampling the wares of the Dorsal District. Able to breathe water? Then dive in and swim down to the Grooves or visit the Barnaclebank Fish Market. All along the way, rub elbows with Draugar, Finfolk, Fomorians, Jellyfolk, and nine other races ready for use as PCs.
After a short introduction that includes a bit of Jack’s history and suggestions about how to use Jack in your campaign, the book details the People. Each of the 13 races are presented on a single page along with a portrait of a representative member. The races include 5E D&D stats, and each is sufficiently detailed and different to avoid Finfolk seeming too much like Jellyfolk. Unsurprisingly, many of the races are aquatic. Each race has a niche carved out in or on Jack. For example, Octopoids “have become merchant princes and princesses par excellence, with tendrils in every business in the city.” The shark-like Selachians tend to live on the fringes of Jackburg society as they hail from “nomadic warrior-bands who roam the seas, taking contracts as they come from islanders and other merfolk, living off what they kill, and in some cases turning to piracy.” I like this approach to handling races. Each has its distinctive appearance, racial abilities, and a societal role within the context of the setting.
Oddly, none of the races have subraces. Perhaps these will be detailed in the next issue of the Genial Jack? If so, it seems an odd way to present the information. If not, it seems a blank space that begs the application of creativity by the players and DM.
Jackburg itself is divided into two sections: Outer Jackburg and Inner Jackburg. Multiple districts comprise each section, and Genial Jack doesn’t so much as detail the districts as it presents them in a few paragraphs of evocative text that introduce the general flavor of the district and then briefly describes possible encounters and noteworthy locations. The encounters and locations sections are like oysters. Pry them open, and one can find pearls, if by “pearls” one means hooks for adventures both short and long. Along the way, the reader gets to meet some of the power groups and movers-and-shakers of Jackburg, from the Whaleguards to spectral pirates to Selachian clerics serving the Sharkfather. Jackburg’s government, laws, and criminal organizations (of which there are five mentioned) also get some description as well.
Smack in the middle of the book is a wonderful double-page poster of Genial Jack, showing the locations of the different districts. It’s not really a map per se. There’s no scale, for example. A nice touch is that back of the right half of the poster includes examples of Jackburg slang. When a ratfolk ruffian says you’re “eelish”, you’ll know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. (Hint: It’s not a good thing.) Then, if you’ve got the “cannonballs” for it, you can pummel him until he’s half “crab-eaten”.
One oddity is the back of the left half of the poster, which is blank. Page 26 talks about the Melonward district. Page 27 is nothing but white. Paolo Greco on DriveThruRPG explains that the page “is blank on purpose, when printed is the back of the removable centrefold.” I’m a bit meh about this. There should be something there. Perhaps more Jackburg slang? A typical tavern menu? Just about anything rather than a blank page. If you’re the type of person who would unbend staples to remove the center map, don’t fret. The two-page illustration of Genial Jack appears near the end of the book as well, right after Appendix A, which is a d20 list of interesting Jackburghers, each one of which could become an adventure hook.
In addition to the lack of subraces and that blank page, there is one other oddity: The table of contents appears at the end of the book, right before the Open Gaming License. It wasn’t until my third or fourth flip through the book that I noticed what I thought was the missing table of contents. The Draugr race is also missing from the table of contents, but they’re a bit aloof, being undead and misunderstood, so they probably don’t mind.
So, Genial Jack isn’t perfect, but what is? Rather than perfection, Genial Jack achieves others effects, all on me the reader. It enchants, amuses, and inspires. Most of the money I spend on RPG products buys something that either sits in a computer folder or gathers dust on a book shelf. Not so with Genial Jack. I want to use it. I want to share it with others via the medium of a game. Indeed, I am doing so, adapting it piecemeal for Dungeon World with my group of middle school students with whom I game about once a week.
I’m most pleased with Genial Jack, and I eagerly await the next issue.
By the way, each picture below embiggens when you click on it.
I’ve not gotten much writing done in the past several weeks. No good reasons why. I did start outlining Commandos & Cultists, a mash-up of The Cthulhu Hack and WWII: Operation WhiteBox. As I’ve written once before, the heroes in ComCul fight against the Thule Society, an occult society that directs much of Nazi Germany’s occult activities, operating through the Heereswaffenamt (HWA) (with its Wissenschaft (HWW) and Okkulte (HWO) divisions) as well as the Ahnenerbe, a Nazi-backed archaeological and occult organization. (Nota Bene: These groups come from the “Mini-Setting: Nazi Occult” section of WWII: Operation WhiteBox.)
The real Thule Society was founded in the early 20th century. It was a bizarre mixture of neopaganism, anti-Semitism, eugenics, pan-nationalism, and occultism. Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel, strove mightily to make his devotion to the racialist occultism of the Thule Society into a sort of state religion for the Reich, envisioning Thule Society beliefs replacing other religions, especially Christianity, which Himmler loathed. An important part of Thule-inspired doctrines involved discovering the undiluted blood of Aryan descendants. Those with pure Aryan blood were destined to rule. Others were fit to serve, except for the lowest of the Untermensch, which had to be exterminated.
To assist with the racial classification and establishment of the race-based caste system, Munich-based Lehmann Publishers, a publisher of eugenics materials, manufactured the Augenfarben-Tafel shown in the picture. The glass eyes show 20 different eye colors used by proponents of Nazi racial ideology to help better classify individuals based on their suitability for various state-granted privileges, such as those related to marriage and children.
A small number of Augenfarben-Tafel possess magical properties. Various high-ranking Nazi officials, especially those assigned to the HWA, own magical Augenfarben-Tafel. A person carrying a magical Augenfarben-Tafel is surprised 1 in 6 times and suffers only a -2 penalty to hit invisible foes. The carrier also enjoys a +1 bonus on saving throws against being blinded. Fully 75% of magical Augenfarben-Tafel enable the user to cast Darkvision (50%), Wizard Eye (25%), or both (25%). Spells cast via a magical Augenfarben-Tafel can be used once per day.
