Author: J. Walton

I know folks are probably still wading through old D&D material, but something else finally got posted on DriveThru this week. Now available to the general public, not just DW Kickstarter grognards.

http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/110283/Dark-Heart-of-the-Dreamer

Cover draft. The splotches on the top right of the logo are supposed to represent a disconcerting congregation of bale stars. Comments welcome.

Thinking about my submission to the DW zine project. I’m thinking it’ll be another plane-hopping adventure, just because I’m in that mode right now. Here’s what I’m currently thinking, though the final version will also have maps and dangers, I think:

Icy Fiscal Cliffs (working title)

The frozen star Ephedra has plummeted into the elemental plane of water, freezing it completely solid in the course of a fortnight. At some future time, unknowable except by diviners and soothsayers (and who can trust those scoundrels?), the ice will crack, the thaw will come, and the living seas will writhe once again. For now, however, the plane hangs suspended, an immense crystalline fortress of towering spires and icy caverns.

That would be enough, in an of itself, to temp fortune-seekers out onto the ice to hunt for wealth and lost artifacts previously thought to be sunk forever beneath the endless roaring waves. But then the renowned archaeologist Alexa Van Der Vaart (Associate Professor of Anthropoid Civilizations at the Academia Arcadia, raider of the tomb of Abaddon) spotted dark blotches that “are unquestionably the hulks of the Arcadian Treasure Fleet,” frozen a few leagues below the surface, their holds near to bursting with valuables (and people) fleeing the expansion of the city of Dis several hundred years ago.

The rush is on. Despite Alexa’s attempts to claim the site as a historical find of great significance to the Arcadian diaspora, multiple mining operations currently are competing to be the first to drill down to the ships and adventuring parties are searching through the icy caverns for an unimpaired route. Of course, with all this activity and ice-breaking in the area surrounding the dark blotches, the thaw may come sooner (at least to this portion of the ice) than anyone currently suspects. Even worse, Alexa has voiced her worries privately to you that the dark spots she assumed to the fleet appear to be moving in recent days. That can’t be right, can it?

Your Mission: Ensure that Alexa and her husband Patrice Garçon get to the treasure fleet before anyone else despoils the site. Alexa is, of course, a capable adventurer in her own right, but she has no illusions about the friendliness of the mining companies and spelunking parties who are also after the treasure and what might need to be done in order to “secure her rights” to the wrecks. She wouldn’t normally have hired you, but the members of her usual crew were either killed or maimed in the expedition to Abaddon’s tomb. Most other local miscreants of any skill are already out on the ice. Patrice knows at least one of you from a previous job you did for the Academia Arcadia, where he is a Visiting Lecturer in Trap Construction (roll or choose what this job was). Your cut is 1/3 of whatever the find is worth and the clock is ticking. Better get going then, eh?

Time to poll the audience! I’m finishing the last few changes to The Planarch Codex and have one major change I want to run by the folks who will actually be playing it…

So, when I run the Planarch Codex, one of the parts I find the most difficult to remember is that the City of Dis is an omnipresent monster that the GM can nearly always choose to make monster moves for when players roll a 6- or when it’s fictionally appropriate. That’s really cool, theoretically, but it requires a lot of mental effort on the part of the GM. If I can’t remember to do it, I probably shouldn’t expect other GMs to do a better job!

Luckily, there are several other possible ways to structure the moves for the City of Dis, so that you trigger them in other ways. Here are some possibilities:

1. Session Move: “At the beginning of a session, roll+X to see what new regions the city has consumed, what planes it has opened gateways to, etc. or how it has rearranged itself.”

2. Fictional Trigger: “When XYZ conditions happen (when you travel to another district or plane, for example), roll+X, etc.”

3. Time-Based Trigger: “After every hour of play or every fictional day/week, roll+X, etc.”

4. Some combination of the above.

Of these, the session move or fictional time passing are probably the easiest to remember to do, but if it’s a session move then it happens more quietly between sessions rather than in the middle of play. Fictional time is interesting, especially if you consider the city to be a living thing with a normal cycle of activity and slumber. Then I just need to decide when the city is most active and code that into the moves.

It might also be cool to include one or more fictional triggers as well, such as “when the stars align,” assuming I have room.

What do you think? What would be the most useful to you in play? What would be the easiest to remember to actually do? What would be the coolest or the most fun?

Over on Twitter, someone managed to unlock the first stage of the mini-ARG for The Planarch Codex, which leads to the freebooter “job board” of Dis. Other folks are welcome to participate or not. Just something fun that I wanted to try, after seeing a presentation about ARGs at PAX Dev a couple years back. I’m naming it in honor of the Hobbit movie coming out at roughly the same time. Also, pretty cool that it starts on 12/12/12.

Finished! Just final proofread to go. Sage says he’ll send it out Monday so other folks can help spot any remaining typos. Pretty excited to see what folks think, since it’s a pretty different approach to a setting book…