Letters, welcoming adventurers from other worlds to Dis. Choose a world and go to town.
Dark Sun, Rock of Bral, Empire of the Petal Throne…where else?
https://githyankidiaspora.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/welcome-to-dis-letters-to-get-started/
Letters, welcoming adventurers from other worlds to Dis. Choose a world and go to town.
Letters, welcoming adventurers from other worlds to Dis. Choose a world and go to town.
This is super smart, dude.
Thanks, I want to write MOAR but real life and shit.
After reading that Jim DelRosso has a job in his game regarding stealing History-eater from the Witch-King of Stygia, I am tempted to write one for Marr’d.
Also, playing Dis Wardens as Dungeon World meets the Wire makes me no end of happy.
The Wardens have a rough time of it. Preserve freedom of movement at all cost? Uh… okay…
Whoah this is totally the hotness. Brilliant.
Dear Noble Knights, Stoic Ladies and Peasants,
Welcome to Dis, the city that devoured your precious Camelot and made Mordred one of the Sultana’s Wardens.
If you are a Knight of the Round Table or a noble lady of the court, the Sultana extends the offer to be a Warden to you too. If not, you are beneath her notice.
When you try to settle down in Dis, roll +Int.
On a 10+, your manor or hovel was eaten by Dis and now is in Mordred’s Parish. Your keys still work and you either have ownership papers or you have the same landlord, though rental agreements will be quite different.
On a 7-9, your manor or hovel was eaten by Dis but is not in Mordred’s Parish; it is in a neighboring Parish, stuck between a church of an alien deity and a pub whose drinks are poisonous to you. You can claim residency but there is a price to be paid and the only jobs hiring are freebooter gigs whose dedication to chivalry is dubious.
On a miss, your home is gone. Welcome to Dis. The freebooter scum are always looking for bodies in need of work.
Hugs & Kisses,
The GM
Lovecraft’s Dreamlands would be fun too.
Put Nyarlathotep in his place!
[this one isn’t a specific setting, but it angles for a particular tone]
You Who Have Lost Everything,
You already know how you woke up this morning to the wrack and ruin of all your loves and dreams. The future you wrote for yourself – as lord of a shining castle in the free mountains, lady of a noble mage’s college in the bustling city, rogue captain of your merry band wandering the scented wilderness – is gone, and replaced with the smoking pits and oily fetid pools that stretch to the horizon beyond the mechanical creaking of a waking god. Dis, unwelcome Lord of claustrophobia and scarcity and smoke has wrapped and choked your free lands in pipes, sewers, and creaking tenements as first light cracked the egg of night.
You must make a new future for yourselves, fitting into the orgiastic misery of the swelling billions that call Dis their home. Everyone here is a refugee making themselves anew and forgetting the heavy past.
For each of you, roll+WIS:
On a 10+, you are relatively easy of heart and quickly leave behind your old stories, accepted into the fold of some new guild or society. Only on rare occasions do you fall into the abyss of a drunken or drugged binge.
On a 7-9, you can mimic the empty grin of the urban masses, fitting in, but you acquire one of these:
-Nightmares of your pillaged home and lost loves
-A nervous habit – twitching eye, alcohol, drugs, compulsive behavior of one kind or another.
On a miss, you are consumed with sorrow. Everyone around you knows you for a refugee, fresh meat, and you are the constant target of predation.
Willem Larsen That’s the stuff!
Dear Elves,
You are the last of your kind, driven from the stars and celestial spheres by the twin forces of the ever-expanding city of Dis and the encrouching Outer Darkness that unmakes all. You have chosen the lesser of two evils: urbanization over annihilation. Many of your kin made a different choice and you carry songs about them on your lips and in your heart, but yet are slowly beginning to forget their faces.
Have the most street-savvy of your party roll+CHA to see how your entry goes:
On a 10+, you make your way into a squalid refugee camp at the base of the Apocalypse Tower and are quickly lost amidst the throngs of other lonely souls. Beneath your cloaks and buried amidst the rubble you have stashed the glories of your homeland, hidden from view.
On a 7-9, someone with ulterior motives takes a special interest in your case and offers you some extra rooms in their dingy basement or dead relative’s decaying property in an unfortunate part of town. Whether you take them up on it or not, there will be consequences.
On a 6-, word spreads throughout the underworld that there are elves (no really, ELVES!!!) in Dis, though the details about your situation are vague or distorted. People are looking for you; good luck.
Hugs & Kisses,
Your GM
Dear Ring-Bearer,
Once the Ring of Power was destroyed, magic fled from your world and the powers that held off Dis’ hunger could deny the Sultana no longer.
Your ship to paradise washed up in pieces in one of Dis’ harbors.
You can feel the pull of arcane powers that awaken longings you had hoped had died in the fires under Mordor.
Roll + Con, on a 10+, you feel the pull but manage to avoid becoming an addict to some something precious to you.
On a 7-9, you pawn everything you own for a ring whose power will soon run out. Will you go somewhere for help or get a job and try to afford another hit of the precious.
On a miss, you wake up in a gutter, in debt to a dark power who can craft rings. It demands you get a job to pay for your habit.
Hugs and Kisses,
Your GM
Jonathan Walton Judd Karlman You guys, haha. You’re terrible. The worst. I LOVE IT.
I was just thinking the other day that District 9 is such an obvious influence on Dis that I wish I’d mentioned it in Dark Heart. There’s something so great about taking high concepts and rubbing them in the reality of the world in all its complexity, ugliness, and day-to-day labors.
Dear Sucka MCs,
Hip-hop is introduced to Dis 1,500 years in the future when it consumes Wyrd is Bond. You, however, have decided you can’t wait that long. As members of the gifted-but-inexperienced crew, An Immortal Ruckus [or insert your crew’s name here], you got tired of being straight-up destroyed by ever mediocre MC in the year 4268 of the Sultana’s reign, so you’ve magically time-traveled 3,000 years in the past to “invent” hip-hop and become the undisputed Lordz of Dis.
Have your best MC roll+CHA to see how this has gone so far:
On a 10+, you have successfully cultivated a small but vibrant scene. Sure, the music isn’t quite what you had in mind, since it’s often a couple of fiddle players doing ragtime in the background while one of you beats out a rhythm on a cast-iron kettle, and your crowds are mostly ratmen and spiderfolk so far, but it’s a start, right? And this one spider, who calls herself The Most Loquacious Widow, would honestly be quite sick on the mic, if there were actual mics, and if you could prevent her from stopping to feed on audience members in the middle of her set.
On a 7-9, there’s not a scene exactly, but it hasn’t been a complete catastrophe. You’ve gotten a regular gig at a small, slime-covered bar near the old river and there’s a crowd of folks who you suspect are necromancers and diabolists who show up every Sultanasday to hear you spit. Afterwards, they come up and converse with you about “where the rhymes come from” and their connection with the dark arts, which is cool but also a bit creepy. Let me know if you’ve hooked up with any of the more attractive sorcerers yet.
On a 6-, come on, you think you were the only crew who’d thought of this idea? There’s a well-established cross-temporal guild known as the Elemental Guardians who make it their business to protect the “proper” (that is to say, temporally linear) development of hip-hop in the known planes. History and context, they claim, matter a lot in preserving the authenticity of the medium and its natural spread. While you appreciate their theoretical position, it’s hard to have a conversation when they’re hunting your asses down. Can you escape, or defeat them in an epic, magical rap battle across time, space, and the 63 boroughs of Dis?
Hugs and kisses,
Your GM
Dear Spelljamming Scum,
You’ve crash-landed into the Maw Bay and you are a short swim away from Dis. Welcome to the Hungry City.
Roll 10+ Int and choose 3.
Roll 7-9, choose 1.
_ Your ship is damaged but can be repaired.
_ Your ship needs fuel (life, arcane energy or something more obscure) or a wizard to sit on the helm but you can get it to the docks without it sinking into Maw Bay’s murky waters.
_ Your crew isn’t about to mutiny.
_ Your cargo is not damaged.
_ The Neogi slave-ship you were exchanging ballista bolts with isn’t right behind you in hot pursuit. You seem to have lost it for now.
Hugs and Kisses,
Your GM