Hill Cantons

Many a virtual page has been sacrificed on this here blog in elaborating various pointcrawling schemes. One could leave with the impression that I was completely down on hex maps in general.

This is really not at all the case. I still find that hexes still have a great deal of utility. Their numbering system and wide-open organization are ideal for any campaign I run where thorough 360-degree exploration and domain game-like clearing are central activities (such as the new colonizing Feral Shore phase of the campaign). It makes it hella easy in that context to organize the session when the players just say “ok so let's explore some of the hexes around the fort, we will take 21.20 and hop on to 21.19 and 21.18”

But I just can't leave it alone.

When it comes to the nitty-gritty of the actual site organization of a single hex, I tend to fall back on using a pointcrawl nestled right up in the hex. My brain continues to rebel against the yawning emptiness of even the five-mile hex in traditional D&D wilderness hex thinking (that point being made so well here) and it needs to fill in that space with a number of small little “rooms.”

So when it comes down to that kind of micro-exploration, I like having the more focused choices of the dungeon and the point-connector schema mirrors that nicely.

How does mixing the two systems work?

A good starting point for showing what I am on about is to boogie back to my original inspiration for the idea, that wonderful old Avalon Hill warhorse (that I could never figure out how the hell to play with all my preciousness as a tween): Magic Realm. One of the most fascinating and visually-interesting components of the game were the hex geomorphs that allowed you to build a totally new gameboard everytime you played (they also could be flipped to reveal a nifty new purple-hued configuration when the hex was transformed by sorcery, but no need to go into that).

The hexes provide an interesting way to break down the hex into smaller areas and provide a number of constrained exploration choices and dilemmas for a party wanting to scout out the whole area.

A single Magic Realm hex.

Unpunched for the full effect

My own system is a bit less “geomorphy,” the external connections into the hex are a bit more abstracted and free-form to push back on the “gaminess” and allow for multiple approaches into the hex. I use the same color and connector in my wilderness pointcrawl (rather than restate the whole thing just look here at the text right after the pointcrawl illustration). Here is a semi-hypothetical example.

Contents of a mashed-up Feral Shore five-mile hex

The only significant difference is the scaling amount of time between points and the dots on connectors that represent extra travel time. On occasion my pure wilderness pointcrawls may include contours, I make greater use of these in the intra-hex pointcrawl.

That's really all there is. As always the system continues to evolve, some concepts getting dropped as too fiddly, others getting more elaboration over time.

Questions? Suggestions for improvement?

All unbearable fantasy worlds demand a ponderous and senseless creation myth. Why should Zem, the world of the Hill Cantons differ?

Tell us, oh savant of savants, oh chanter of lullabies, oh chiseler of gratuities, now that we are deep into our cups, the origin of this turtle-bound world?

First there was the Void.

Void? Surely nullity could not exist before World-Matter?

It matters little, of it's Nature we can not say but that All Void is divided into Three Parts. In the beginning, tiring of the Space of Demons the Overgod floated into the Insufferable Void on his great galley.

“What is the measure of my being?” he asked no one in particular. The Overgod was a restless god, troubled by his past of toil and tribulation and overeager for evolution. After listening to the ungrateful pattering and never-ending sideways stories of the Void only for answer he became impatient. “I must begin my work again,” he said to the poor-listening Void.

The Overgod began to toil. Great balls of burning vapor he hurled into the reaches of the Void, who bothered not to pause in story even. Around these balls he spun smaller balls of rock, metal, ice and gas. Great rings he placed here and there and span them all.

Enough with the old wives tales, man.

And in all that creation the Overgod grew frustrated and weary. “This is but the same as before. My work is thankless and jejune.” In his weariness he invented Drink in order to care not.

And the Overgod drank and drank and drank.

And soon he was joyous, dancing upon his creations in defiance. “I can take all you motherfuckers,” he roared before slipping off the shoulders of a gas giant. And then he slept for a great aeon and Drink split and covered many of the rocks.

And he slept and slept and in those wet, yeasty places grew Ocean.

When Overgod woke, his head felt smitten. “What have I done with my Drink?” he muttered piteously and his weariness came again.

“I crave sensation,” he mused to the newly-cowed Void. So he divided himself into Man and Woman and Both and he/she/them loved themselves in countless couplings. And the Overgod(s) begat other gods, the Little Gods.

Tiring of this and marveling at the wonder of his many offspring, he reformed and watched them in their dance for a great while.

But even this became stale, the staging too familiar and circular, the tales too predictable and then he created the Weird and the Dialectic that things would always change and not-change and then change again anew throughout the ages. Now pleased with his great work, a complicated, terrible and beautiful thing, he invented Drink again.

And again he drank and drank and slept and slept. And the Little Gods begat even littler gods and demons even and all fought and drank and stole and loved and lived again and again. And such is where our world in our time began.

There is something missing old man. Why do you shrug so?

Ale co se delas? (Old Pahr: “But what can you do?”)

Detective Cohle had the right of it. Time is indeed a flat circle.

And lest you think I am (again) ragging on the forum-warriors who Vahalla-style arise to fight the same butthurt-battles, I am aiming closer to home.

Mulling over last night's Hill Cantons game, one of those strangely enjoyable “town” sessions that just meanders around, my brain went back to one of the big-ticket PC and high-ranking NPC goals in the campaign: apotheosis.

The punchline here is that I sat down this morning to write a post about that drive to divine ascension in the campaign, ripped the Robert Plant/Almost Famous classic phrase—and realized I had not only written a post on that subject a few years back but gave it the very same header.

Hmph.

Let's break with the quantum skein of the Norns and take it a different direction. Let's talk about the specifics on how one becomes a god.

Let's take that little tucked-away and sadly dry as sand section on the subject in the AD&D's Deities and Demigods book (page 11) as a baseline. In that version to become a god you must meet four criteria:

1. the character has to have surpassed the average level ofallNPCs in the campaign (being something like 25-30^th level in one that 15^th is the average).

2. His ability scores have to be magically raised to beyond human levels on par with the vaguely-defined “lesser demigods.”

3. He must have sincere followers.

4. He must have been a faithful true follower of his patron deity and alignment.

I can live with one as an objective marker of personal power (though the rather low power range of NPCs in the Hill Cantons sets the bar around 11-13^th level). Point two to me seems both a bit dull and munchkin like. Four is just a terrible fit for the tone of my campaign. In fact, I am not even sure who many of the PCs worship as a patron god (if any) and alignment is more about the vague cosmic team you identify with than the codified belief system of AD&D.

Three I like the best as it points to something I believe is more important than just accumulating enough personal mojo, it's more about an open-ended goal that can be played out in the course of the game. It's about the doing. It also sets out the rather interesting gameable and well rooted literary idea that deities power fluctuates with the size and deeds of their following.

Coming to the point here's my rough idea of what you need to do to become a godling in the Hill Cantons:

1. The character has to be personally powerful (at least 12^th level or whatever the class level max is) and known by repute to be powerful.

2. The player has to be able to push their way into the cosmology of the setting. Whether that's stealing/usurping the portfolio of an existing (and perhaps downwardly mobile) god, destroying or consuming their life force, recreating a lost mythic pattern, starting a state cult, being absorbed by a godhead, creating a whole new religious framework, or whatever. There just has to be someway of fitting into it all. In the Hill Cantons where my cosmology is funkier and more hidden than the D&D multiverse, it also means that the player has figured out by the hard work of play at least some of what the hell is going on behind the cosmological mysteries.

3. You must pull around you a real sincere group of followers by hook or crook (the latter seems popular to the party right now). Hoodwink them, dazzle them, whatever but you have to a sizeable group of NPCs believing in your dance. Quantifiable? Dunno.

4. Those followers must have some infrastructure and organization. You have to have temples, shrines, groves, clergy and accountants all the outward trappings of a cult.

5. Finally you have to accomplished several Herculean “great acts” in this world and the others. I like the idea that it the PC has to have successfully undertaken a truly epic mythopoeic “heroquest” (or two, I do so love Glorantha). Fortunately Barry Blatt has already laid out a lovely scheme for in-game heroquesting (in a pointcrawl format no less) that may be portable to a D&D framework.

6. Importantly it means the player is ready to hang it up at least for that character. It means retiring in the ultimate End Game.

Still want to be a golden god?

Wayne of Wayne's Books fame posted a rather nice found object the other day, a hand-drawn and inked city mapfolded up in a second-hand rpg product.

There is something bittersweet in stumbling over these finds. The sad fact that someone took their imagination seriously enough to have poured creative effort into them at one time—and then later in life that it mattered so little that they tossed them away.

One of the silver lining sides of having lost track of many of my own gaming books coupled with a “fishing trip” lunch-hour obsession with Half Price Books is that I too have ended up with a burgeoning collection of these found objects.

To be sure most of them fall into the category of the junk Wayne mentions, a small mountain of filled-out character sheets. Even then there is some fleeting interest in a glance at these snapshots from the early 80s, the graceless awkward tween boy handwriting, the goofy character names, the dramatic scribbling over of an obviously dead character and the like.

But a good fifth of the time I find something more interesting: a dream stronghold illustration, a castle map, a letter-code key (from my own brother's Players Handbook and likely to be for one of my dickish ciphers), an AD&D combat slide ruler (totally useful), a page of a dungeon key (my own Tree Maze), etc.

I love the fragmented, divorced-from-context nature of them, it spurs my imagination. Was that stronghold the culmination and reward for a long-arc of play by a particular character? How large was that dungeon? Was that drawn by another kid like me?

Yesterday in the mail came a boxed Runequest Vikings set, I had what I consider a huge find: five solid dense handwritten pages of an adventure. Though written for Runequest likely somewhere in the mid-1980s it has all the classic features of a D&D dungeon homebrewed by an early teen of that period. The room descriptions are wonderfully goofy and unbalanced.

Take the hilarious entry door description: “2 levers, 1 says pull, 1 says don't pull. If you pull the the one that says don't pull, the passage behind you collapses...”

Or this room description: “30 small humanoid creatures. They cower and offer no resistance. There is a stockpile of food and water. If the food is taken the creatures will get all riled up and 300 more will pour of the caves and attack.”

Take that encounter level!

I know the rest of you are uncovering your own flotsam and jetsam of gaming past. Land any big ones?

For years all my dungeon and wilderness keys have been nothing but the most ephemeral of affairs: a small, semi-organized mountain of stained and terse random bits of paper. My games for the most part seem to run fine with the occasional, jarring bit of discontinuity as the price.

At any rate, something has moved in me (all vain and seductive) to try and write all the various adventure sites I have run here in the last 5-6 years as something more publicly presentable. The Golden Barge adventure locale came easy and with that momentum I started fleshing out the surrounding mini-sandbox area of the Slumbering Ursine Dunes and related sites as a pointcrawl.

Punchline is that in a month's time I will most likely have the whole package out as some kind of cheap for-charity pdf (or bundle it up with the never-ending Live Weird or Die blog compilation booklet project).

So at any rate, this all has me feeling especially fine so to celebrate I wrote another eminently silly Hill Cantons myth.

Medved

It so came to pass that Marzana tired of her second life among the Foreign Gods. “My lover is feckless and my poses grow affected and languid,” the Queen of Winter exclaimed with a great sigh. “I shall cover Zem in the bitterness of my cold and start anew.”

And so the great mountains of ice drove Pahr and his family from the fields of paradise. With horse and wagon Pahr's clan divided amongst the three elder sons and wandered Zem. Stanko, the youngest and most broke in the head of the three, reasoned that the cold of the Northlands must be like the darkness before dawn and must surely give out to warm lands of milk and honey. Thus his followers made great coracles from udders shorn from Velesh's cattle herd and crossed the World Canal.

But neither warmth nor milk nor honey was to be found. For one hundred years they fought the blueskins of the North and the fell creatures of the boreal forest until at one great battle Stanko and all his kin but one were slain.

Sad and strong the boy Mirko was left alone and he said to himself, “I make peace with having no milk but warmth and honey perhaps are found with our kin to the south.”

And Mirko wandered and wandered the hills of the south enacting great acts along the way. Finally he came to the shores of the sweet-smelling sea and made content he rested.

Sleeping upon the sand he was visited by Old Bear. Old Bear had a great hunger and seized upon Mirko's leg swallowing it in a mighty bite. Mirko awakened and crying in pain “Sweet Svat” did battle with Old Bear kicking up great mounds of sand in the struggle.

With his spear he pierced Old Bear and laid him down. Hungered Mirko began to eat Old Bear. His belly full but saddened by having consumed such a noble foe he was approached by Younger Bear. “Why have you eaten the flesh of Old Bear?” Younger Bear asked. “He is not unlike you in that he yearns for honey.”

“Sometimes you eat the bear,” Mirko replied. “And sometimes the bear eats you.”

“Is that some kind of Northern thing?” Younger Bear asked, but Mirko only shrugged in answer.

Mirko was made sad again and though he had eaten and beaten Old Bear decided he would share what remained of his life with him as one.

So Mirko and Old Bear became Medved, the seeker of honey, ruling all bears and bearlings from the dunes thrown up in their battle until the world-dialectic turns again.

This morning in a fit of procrasti-tasking—really nothing spurs my hobby writing more than having to complete a large real-world writing project--I started compiling a big old master list of the free DIY rpg products (PDF and printed) that I love to post blogside here.

There is a bewildering amount of free, quality stuff out there and the minds of the crowd I hear outweigh the mind of this individual, so this here's an all-call for adventures, settings, compilations, games, monster collections or whatever you love of freebies. Drop me a link and maybe a little motivation regarding that little piece of the gift economy near and dear.

Klallam potlatch

Why do you enjoy it? Do you use it at the table? Enquiring minds want to know.

At the end of last week I dumped a major project monkey off my back, by finishing the draft version of my mini-sandbox, the Slumbering Ursine Dunes. It's clocking in around 26 dense letter-sized pages that feature a wilderness pointcrawl, two dungeons, a Chaos Event generator, and a metric crap ton of new monsters, spells and items.

Expect to see a modest little Kickstarter next month to pay for fancy pants art, maps, editing and other costs (only going to do this when I have a near-publishable draft in my sweaty little hands.)

Punchline is I am feeling great, so here's something free for y'all, the infamous Tree Maze of the Twisted Druid. The two sessions playing through it were hella fun (at least on my end) even if the finished product felt more bad-bad and good-good then the intended good-bad, so this is the sound of my shoulders shrugging. You get what you paid for it.

Download the module here.

If you do run it (what's wrong with you?), drop me a line, feedback is the best reward. And if you really want to be a mensch and make your mother proud, you can make a $2 suggested donation over here at Autism Speaks.

But if you don't...well...I guess that's cool. It's not like it's chump change compared to what you spend on Steam or that pricey crappacino or whatever. (And why don't you call? We never see you anymore.)

Great peacemaker that I am, I have drawn some alternative DIY aesthetic covers for the new D&D Next. Feel free to photocopy them and duct tape them over the hardcover originals if they offend thee. Sadly I ran out of paper and lunch break time before I could finish the new DMG.(Kickstarter?)

“Vast treeless plains swept away to merge with hazy horizons. In the distance, to the south, a great black cyclopean city reared its spires against an evening sky, and beyond it shone the blue waters of a placid sea. And in the near distance a line of figures moved through the still expanse. They were big men, with yellow hair and cold blue eyes, clad in scale-mail corselets and horned helmets, and they bore shields and swords.”

- Robert E. Howard, Marchers of Valhalla

Marchers of Valhalla (1977) cover by Ken Kelly

I will forgive the reader for thinking the prose above is a scene from a lesser known Howard tale set in a Hyboria or Atlantis or other time-forgotten exotic place, strangely its setting is something much closer to home, Texas. Obviously it is neither the Depression-era Texas of his time nor the cartoonish trainwreck Texas that I live in, but an antediluvian mythically-projected Texas.

The deeply odd short story, which was rejected by Weird Tales and first published as late as 1972, is a strange melange of Swords & Sorcery adventure tale and creation myth. Reading it is an uncomfortable experience, the idea of blue-eyed Aryans swooping down to destroy a brown-skinned city of decadents seems too close to the well of bizarre race-based occultist ideas that the Nazis would also be drawing on in this period.

But there is a deep level of mythic resonance to the tale and some compelling fantasy touches, as there is to much of Howard's writing, something that has been explored here before. The semi-famous old school Texan historian (you know the kind that used to write histories as great sweeping narratives) T.R. Feherenbach once wrote that there was a “vast residue of violence leftover from the making of Texas” a theme that heavily inspired Cormac MacCarthy's masterpiece Blood Meridian.

Weirdly reading Marchers this weekend it made me want to game it. Well not “it”, not the actual story itself, but a early medieval fantasy version of this state.

It's an idea I have flirted with before. You can see some throwaway, jokey references in the Tree Maze of the Twisted Druid to the Duke of High Brazos, the Big Thicket and the Free City of Houston. That all reflects a weird transition time circa 1981 for me when my dungeon-focused Holmes campaign was busy morphing into AD&D. I hadn't bought the World of Greyhawk yet (or the Players Handbook for that matter) where the campaign would eventually find its home and was too intimidated about creating my own world whole cloth. What I had instead was a thinly-veiled and vague place set in the cedar-covered hills and plains around my birthplace Austin Texas.

Coming back to this is a deeply broken idea from the get go, but hey bear with me as I try to exorcise this idea-demon to stay focused on the current campaign.

Barbaric Texas

The campaign would open a 1,000 or so years after a less horrific version of the Marchers of Vahalla. Somehow it is a place stuck out of time tens of thousands of years ago but with reflections of today.

The vast big plateau sundered and flooded by Poseidon and Ishtar's wrath at the end of the story has been broken and reborn as the tiered tablelands and hills of Texas's current biomes. I would use an actual bioregion map of the state to fill out a large-scale hex map.

The dark-spired city of Khemu exists as taboo set of ruins mired on flats of one of the long Texas barrier islands (read ruined city pointcrawl). Private in-jokes make me want to put it right where Port Aransas sits today.

The current majority population of the region—those afraid of miscegenation can piss off back to their Stormfront forums--are now mostly the mixed descendants of the blue-eyed raiders from Nordheim and the presumable Native Americans of Khemu. “Purer” descendants of both people exist but are in the minority.

These “Old Texans” live in a patchwork of early medieval-like (read Dark Ages) petty kingdoms with nothing more than rough palisaded towns as seats of power. Longhorn cattle raids, bloody feuds and other border violence are weekly occurrences. It is a violent rough place.

Religion is a bizarre syncretisic mix of Norse, Mesoamerican, DDG Native American and Hyborian deities (so you'd have Snake Man rubbing shoulders with Ymir). I am tempted to throw in a Pecos Bill equivalent and other dumb Texas tall tales but that line perhaps should not be crossed.

The residue of violence has some actual existing supernatural manifestation. Driven mad by it beserker bands roam around and the undead are fueled by sheer hate.

Megafauna from Pleistocene Texas abound. You've got Columbian mastodons, gylptodons (giant proto-armadillos), giant sloths, giant bison, dire wolves, sabre-toothed cats and the like. Hell maybe there is a lost valley of dinosaur critters in Palo Duro canyon out there.

A Comanche equivalent rules the high plains and raids the hell out of the Old Texan settlements. These horse nomads aren't the brutal savages of Texas Anglo myth nor noble savages, just some highly dangerous folks with their own thing going on. Part of me wants to go goofy and say they are the wolf-riding Elves of Elfquest (this whole tone being way, way grimmer than what I enjoy in the Hill Cantons).

Rules? Hmm...Stormbringer first edition or full circle back to an uneasy and ungodly mix of Holmes Basic and AD&D.

Idea-demon exorcized, back to writing about Slumbering Ursine Dunes.

One of the most fun parts of writing up the Slumbering Ursine Dunes mini-sandbox has been putting together the now lengthy(ish) bestiary in the back. The booklet will have 15 unique monsters stuffed into it (that is if I have the willpower to stop cramming more in with each editing iteration).

One of the things I have tried to do throughout the campaign with mixed results is introduce a menagerie of new critters to challenge and amuse players with. Some have a foot in a fantasy reflected Slavic mythology, others have more than a bit of the gonzo (or just plain dumb) in them.

The War-Ocelot is one of the few that mixes a bit of all of them.

War-Ocelots

No. Enc.: 1d10

Alignment: Neutral

Movement: 150’ (50’)

Armor Class: 5

Hit Dice: 2

Attacks: 2

Damage: 1d6 bite, 1d8 helmet spike

Save: D2

Morale: 9

When the Boreans threw down their spears

And sprinkled Zem with their tears

Did Svat smile his work to see?

Did He who made the flumph make thee?

- The Ocelyt by Vilem of the Lake

The twin brother-heroes of the Old Pahr, Vlko and Romuilak the Lupine were the first to bring the dreaded cats of the steppes to this part of the world. With their horde of druzhinas, reverse centaurs and yes war-ocelots they carved a kingdom out of the black peaks and bottomlands of the South a thousand years ago. With such an entrance the war-ocelot demurely snarled into the pages of collected history—before vanishing anew along with that time-misted kingdom.

Centuries of selective breeding by Pahr nomads of their most beloved semi-feral ocelots had raised the adorable spotted critters into a bellicose, semi-intelligent companion. Bigger boned and wiry their feline frames were increasingly capable of sporting first elaborate harnesses and later full armored arrays complete with long piercing horn (not pictured in the transitional period array above).

War-ocelots are rarely encountered without their humans who they look upon as gullible marks who will dish out food and provide the empty boxes that make for prime napping in exchange for so little.

Totally happened.

Got back yesterday after a rather grinding trip home from this year's North Texas RPG Con. So amazingly bone tired that despite the deeply scandalous time that was had by me and the other degenerates that I call my friends there, I am going to pass on writing the full gossip column of North Texas Confidentials of years past and instead trot out this not terribly deep and utterly subjective list of high and low lights.

The Hill Cantons session pregens.

Highlights

Hanging out in general with people from the blogging and G+ nexus. "Doc" Trey Causey, Robert “Half-Giant” Parker, Brad "Skullcrusher", James "the Mad Beekeeper" Aulds, Justin "The Sixth Blackrazor" Davis, "Shirtless" Jason Braun and others. Like real world conferences the event is made as much or more (no more) in the hallway conversations and bar table banging story swapping than in the official events.

Running my first full Hill Cantons Con game. This being a run through of the Golden Barge adventure site in the Slumbering Ursine Dunes mini-sandbox (which is in its last and final draft before editing). The party (Brad playing the talking bear, James Auld playing a feral dwarf and two Louisiana gentleman the Black Ratter and Ool the Dandy) managed to whip competently through the biomechanical barge in 3.5 hours and grab the long-lost macguffin of many a G+ Hill Cantons game, the Jewelled Codpiece of Radegast. Yay them.

Having Jim Ward buy us a round of drinks, sit down at our bar table and proceed to spin out a deep dark round of tall tales about TSR. I promised not to tell. Give me another week.

Great conversation with Chris Holmes, son of the dude who launched my long strange trip through this game (J. Eric Holmes naturally). Incredibly wonderful stories about he and his father's writing and gaming side careers (lots of fascinating unpublished and/or out of print stuff out there). Look for an official interview in weeks to come.

Running for a half an hour of Tree Maze of the Twisted Druid after an extended whiskey bingeand before having one of the players (cough cough begins with a B) pass out SITTING UP. Then realizing that I was too far down into my cups myself to continue running the adventure.

Barely surviving the worst hangoverof the past four years (related to that above) and playing a cutting torch wielding pleasure robot in James Aulds's Anomalous Subsurface Environment game (I being apparently one of the 8 people in old schoolish circles who haven't read the game). Props to Gus L for the nifty hand-drawn character sheet and James for putting up with my seasick self.

Also happened.

Lowlights

Skipping too many sessions. Seriously this happens every single time I am at a con of any subcultural stripe. While I don't regret missing some of the carousing, I missed a welter of hot gaming. No one to blame but myself.

Not as many pickup games. The last time I went to the Con there was a lot of impromptu side action that really was more fun than the official sessions. Either I wasn't paying good enough attention (a distinct possibility with the slow poisoning of alcohol) or it was that the larger number and wider range of official sessions were enough in themselves, but I saw very little of that action this year.

Too many dudes. I mean really.

That D&D has its roots in wargaming is an old story. Thirty years down the road support for running battles larger than party-sized remains surprisingly and woefully uneven. A small not terribly spectacular range of compatible miniature and abstract large battle rules exist.

But holes stubbornly persist. The biggest gap I have encountered time and time again in the campaign is the lack of simple and fun ways to run battles that are larger than the standard kind involving the party and also too small scale or tactical to run with a wholly abstract system say like the Warmachine rules from the D&D Companion set.

What follows is the first part of what I tongue in cheek am calling By this Poleaxe, an adaption and extension of pen and paper small battle rules Deep Evan and I have been using in the Feudal Anarchyplaytests into a more oldish D&D format. I plan on testing them in the heat of battle in the nasty brutish border war currently brewing in the Hill Cantons.

It's intended to allow a GM to run small-scale battles or skirmishes involving 15-120 combatants on each side in a hour or so without miniatures. (If you want or need battle rules for miniatures you might want to check out By this Axe rules).

If you would like to see the rest of the draft (this first part to give readers a sense of where this is going) give me a holler at my email address or on good ole Google Plus.

By this Poleaxe: Pen and Paper Oldish D&D Small Battle Rules

Each “squad” is made up of up to 5 combatants. A squad is represented by a single figure in a miniatures game and will generally be part of a battle or conroy (a larger unit) in battles involving more than 100 combatants. A squad must be at full strength (five combatants) if possible.

Squads have five attributes: Attack Value, Defense Value, Morale Value, Hits to Kill and Movement.

Squad Attributes

Attack Value (AV)

The measure of the squad's ability to hit on a d10. Total Hit Dice and divide by 5.

Base AV

1	0-level Human, monster under 1 HD
2	Man at Arms-1^st level, up to 1+1 HD
3	2-3 HD
4	4-7 HD
5	8-10 HD
6	11+ HD

Mounted +1

Crappy weapon (dagger, club, hoe) -1

Two-handed weapon +1

Fighter or Trained Leader over 6^thlevel/HD “stacked” in unit +1

Attacking from the flank, rear or from surprise +1

Minor Special Offensive Ability +1

Medium Special +2

Major Special +3

Defense Value (DV)

The measure of the squad's ability to shrug off hits, used as a savings throw. Average the AC of the party.

Base DV

1	Unarmored (AC 9 or 10)
2	Light AC (AC 7-8)
3	Medium AC (AC 4-6)
4	High AC (AC 1-3)
5	Very High AC (AC 0 and lower)

hard cover +2

soft cover +1

Minor Special Defensive Ability +1

Medium Special +2

Major Special +3

Morale (MV)

The measure of a squads ability to not break and run.

Typical Base MV

Peasant levy, kobold, rabble	4
Average soldiery, orc	6
Veteran, hobgoblin, white ape	7
Knight or other elite	8
Fanatic, berserker	9
Undead	10

Modifiers:

+1 in a “secure position” (behind cover, in a pike phalanx, bless spell etc)

+1 leader CHA 15-17 (non-stackable)

+2 leader CHA 18 (non-stackable)

Hits to Kill (HTK)

The number of hits the squad can take before being Out of the Fight.

HTK

Human levy or half hit dice	1
1 HD or Man-at-Arms	2
2-3 HD	3
4-5 HD	4
6-7 HD	5
7-8 HD	6
9-10 HD`	7

-1 if squad has 4 members.

-2 if squad has 3 members.

Movement (M)

The number of abstract “move spaces” that a squad can move per combat turn. Movement is with the by-the-book standard rates if a map grid is is in use.

60 feet or less	1
90 feet	2
120 feet	3
150 feet or more	4

I am up to 18 unique monsters in the Slumbering Ursine Dunes mini-sandbox (now in its fourth editing iteration and about to roll onto to take off), the monster bestiary now starting rival the actual pointcrawl and adventure site write-ups in size. A big fan of new critters to torment and befuddle players this, naturally, makes me supremely happy.

To give readers a sense of the flavor of these write-ups I am posting one of the new additions blog-side, my weirdo twist on the Vodník, a watery “bogey-man” still sometimes used to scare the living poo out of kids today back in the mother land.

Vodník

No. Enc.: 1-2

Alignment: Chaotic (Evil)

Movement: 120’ (40’)

Armor Class: 4

Hit Dice: 4

Attacks: 1

Damage: 1d6 special (see below)

Save: F4

Morale: 10

Hoard Class: XX

XP: 300

It is said that among the Old Pahr people that a pessimist is someone who thinks that things couldn't be an worse--and that an optimist believes that it can! Pushing aside the old wives tale that a surfeit of strong drink drives men to melancholy, learned men attribute this pervading culture gloom to the surfeit of malovelent spirits and faeries in that people's mythology.

A particularly nasty example of the inimical Pahr spirit is the vodník, a male water nymph of a particularly sour and murderous nature. Vodník often lurk at the edges of lakes and rivers waiting for lone or small groups of village folk

Vodník are invisible in the the water before they strike, but rise as a translucent seeming serpent when they do. Each strike does 1d6 damage but worse is that the spirit serpent will attempt to drag the victim down to a watery doom. Failure to save vs. paralysis will mean that the victim is dragged into the water.

Once the Vodník has a victim under water it will shift into its true form, a pot-bellied old man covered in fine scales, and concentrate on drowning the hapless victim. It will drown a person in 1d6+1 rounds a process that can only be stopped with the creature's death.

The Vodník will only take one hit point of damage from piercing or slashing weapons, but takes full damage as normal. Fire magic will have no effect on the monster. Electrical magic will double in intensity. Casting Purify Food and Water on the creature will kill it outright.

The Vodník will become strangely mellow (read non-murderous) for 1d6 turns after the witching hour, often appearing on rocks or floating on the water smoking a carved pipe. Fishermen as such will often leave offerings of pipe weed to placate local Vodníki.

It's summer and I have been predictably getting a little restless and low in the batteries. Time for another mini-campaign to break up routine.

This time about I am going to swing back to the murderous rapine of that Boot Hill (second edition) one-shot I ran a while back. I'm unsure exactly how many sessions this thing will go before it ends, but I think I am going to just expand off of the last dust-up.

Keeping the same town (with a hex map of the surrounding area) and keeping a scoring system in place. Points are going to be scored either individually but with the option to share for collective activities if the players want to. For example if they rustle a herd of cattle they can take individual shares of the point take (or one player takes all if he decides to cross his fellow's and kill them off).

At any rate one player is going to win--or at least several tie. That should punch up the mayhem factor a few notches. It will be interesting to see what happens with a variant of the Prisoner's Dilemma game in place. Hell I will probably even throw in a prize for the winner.

So without any further adieu the revised Marauding Point System, local NPCs and the starting hooks. (Hex map of Cantones County coming later.)

Marauding Points

Each “combatant” killed: 50

Each scalp of a combatant taken: 10

Each non-combatant killed: -50

Each $1 of loot or bounty earned or taken: 1

Total destruction of an inhabited building: 20

Poor horse, mule, or donkey stolen: 20

Fair horse stolen: 30

Good horse stolen: 50

Excellent horse stolen: 100

Cattle per head rustled: 10

Sheep per head stolen: 5

Horse or Cattle Thief hung: 25

Getting killed: lose half your points

NPCs

Captain Ferral. Former Confederate bushwacker, discharged from the Texas Rangers for being too psycho tunes for that outfit. Meanest son of a bitch you ever met, though he never killed a woman who didn't have it comin'. Heads up the Moderators.

Jay Augustus Jissom. Semi-famous cattleman and trail-breaker of the Jissom Trail. Has set up a dry goods store in Cantones de Los Montanos to rival the monopoly of the Evo's-- and consequently touched off the Cantones County War (the Evo-backed Moderators vs. the Jissom Boys).

Claude Evo Jr. Cattle baron son of the gunned down Claude Evo. A spitting image of his father right on down to that damned bolo tie.

Frank Stripes. former doctor run out of his Mississippi practice for unwholesome phrenological studies with the craniums of dead convicts and vagabonds. Every once in a while--deep into his jug of corn liquor--he will slip up and introduce himself as “Phillip”.

Vilem “Bohemian Bill” Psanec. Fastest Moravian in the West. Laying low in the area after the Bad Rye Massacre. Has a fondness for slivovce. Officially neutral.

“Wild Bill” Hickock. Still in the area after the big shoot out drowning his sorrows in whisky and gambling. Fixin' to run on up to a little town called Deadwood.

Bat Masterson. What authorities there are over in the county seat in Broken Oath City have employed this dead-shot lawman to bring a little law and order to this side of the county. He's rumored to have a six-month contract in place before he moseys up to Dodge City.

Boss Peckerwood. Chubby, petulant former opera singer. Chief foreman at the Big Moran Mine and colder than a whore's heart on Sunday.

Paco and Tuco Ramirez. Twin brothers and “comancheros” (traders who illicitly trade with the Comanche).

Local News courtesy of Breezy Pete

Reckon that the Moderators and The Jissom Boys are hiring gunslingers seeing as they are evenly matched with five pistoleros a piece. See each of their bosses for hiring on.

It's said that the Ramirez brothers want no one less than Bohemian Bill dead but of course are too low down and yellow to do the deed themselves. They are offering 150 silver dollars to any one who cuts him down.

Speaking of the Ramirez brothers it is said one can buy just about anything contraband in their back roomup to and including Comanche captives that they trade off for

Well and come to think of it speaking of killing for profit, I reckon those locked out silver miners up there want that old sow Boss Peckerwood dead too. Bet they'd be willing to hand over a few boxes of dynamite and some proceeds from the Western Federation of Miner's mutual aid fund to anyone who does him in.

Claude Evo Jr. has been outdoing his pa, no mean feat, in accumulatin' the biggest herd of longhornsthis side of the Little Pecos. Everybody knows it's through rustling but who's going to stop the Big Man?

I am a little behind in prepping for the Boot Hill Cantons mini-campaign I was going on about a few days back, but here's something of potentially wider use for folks running Boot Hill and other western campaigns. Texas-sized thanks to those beautiful broken minds on this Google Plus thread that helped me crowdsource the baroquely over-done table at the bottom.

Starting Gear

All starting characters come with cheap but functional range clothes, bed roll, canteen, poor-quality horse and $5 to their name. Roll on the following charts for the rest of your gear.

Distinctive Piece of Finery

Pick or Roll d20 Once

1	Buckskin Jacket
2	No Name Poncho
3	Ten-Gallon Hat
4	Civil War kepi
5	Threadbare Butternut Confederate Artillery Jacket
6	Union Cavalry Uniform pants and suspenders
7	Furry Bear Coat
8	Top Hat
9	Sombrero, Campesino
10	Sombrero, Mariachi band-style
11	Bolo Tie
12	White Mexican Federale uniform, patched
13	Derby, arrow-stuck
14	Cowboy Hat, bullet ridden
15	Duster, bloody cuffed
16	Beaver Coat, full length
17	Spanish Boots, Spanish Leather
18	Fancy Mexican Riding Boots, silver spurred
19	Chaps, sequined
20	Calico Dress

Hogpieces and Other Primary Killin' Implements

Roll d10 Once

1	Repeating Rifle, 9-shot
2	Double-Barrel Shotgun
3	Fast Draw Revolver, 5-shot
4	Fast Draw Revolver, 6-shot
5	Single Action Revolver, 5-shot
6	Single Action Revolver, 6-shot
7	Buffalo Rifle
8	Civil-War Repeating Rifle
9	Repeating Carbine, 6-shot
10	Three Sticks of Dynamite, short fuse

More Killin' Dee-vices

Roll d10 or Pick Twice

1	Comanche Lance
2	Big Ass Bowie Knife
3	Throwing Knife (x2)
4	Tomahawk
5	Single-Shot Derringer (x2)
6	Two-Shot Derringer
7	Old, but Well-Oiled Cap & Ball Revolver
8	Long-Barrel Revolver
9	Calvary Sabre
10	Rusted Scatter Gun, 10% chance of it exploding when fired.

Random Crap

Roll d100 Twice

01	Dead US Marshal's Badge
02	Silver-Plated Single Action Revolver
03	Tombstone
04	Three coils of 60-foot rope
05	Small herd of goats (five)
06	Stubborn Old Mule named after an Old Sweetheart
07	Braying donkey named King's Kent
08	Silent mute “trail wife” but loyal
09	Hillbilly Musket (treat as Army Rifle)
10	A velvet-lined coffin
11	Silver whiskey flask with monogram
12	30 Silver Dollars
13	Keg of Gunpowder marked XXX
14	Ten pounds of Deer Jerky
15	Three jugs of corn liquor
16	Holy Bible with cut out derringer space
17	Gold snuff case
18	Two pounds of chewing tobacco and spitoon
19	Bottle of Scotch, peaty
20	Amputation hacksaw
21	Prison manacles and chain
22	A set of spurs pitted and rusted
23	Rattlesnake, live
24	Guitar or banjo
25	Lonesome-sounding harmonica
26	Grave-diggin' shovel
27	Pocket watch on chain, Dad's
28	The prospector's will
29	Bearer bonds (50% confederate)
30	William Blake poetry, slim volume
31	tobacco, wacky, 2 "twists"
32	Small pouch of gold dust
33	6 silver bullets
34	Assorted ladies hosiery
35	Deck of cards, marked
36	Deck of cards, unmarked
37	Piano tuning equipment (fork, hammer, mutes)
38	Old cracker tin containing several peyote buttons
39	Wooden leg, pilfered
40	Dime store novels, random assortment
41	music box
42	String of Chinese coins
43	One-horned ox
44	Dentistry kit
45	Undertaker's tools
46	Bible, natty
47	Miniature Vest Bible, steel-backed
48	Three sasquatch teeth
49	Scalps, notable figures
50	Scalps, comrades
51	Diploma, college
52	Dead or Alive Wanted poster, you
53	Dead or Alive poster, twin brother
54	Bullwhip, lovingly maintained
55	Clark Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment, Made From Genuine Rattlesnakes
56	Pabst's Okay Special (22% alcohol, take 2 teaspoons 3x daily)
57	Dr. Wengert's Hepatica Pills
58	Dromgooles Bitters
59	The Mormon Elders' Damiana Wafers, for Strengthening the Brain, Nerves, and Sexual Organs
60	Crane's Laxative Mint Chewing Gum
61	Kickapoo Indian Sagwa Renovator
62	Jayne's Vermifuge
63	Saddlebags with secret compartments
64	Ridiculously ornate shotgun, small bore, once used by a Portuguese Duke to shoot partridges.
65	Worn but still razor-sharp skinning knife.
66	2 pound bag of coffee beans
67	Coffee hand mill
68	Autograph book
69	Ten Confederate gold pieces
70	Gold pocket watch
71	Vial of nitroglycerine with dropper
72	French's ladies' underwear, made in Chicago. Red satin & black lace
73	Cargo manifest and letters taken off a Civil War smuggler/blockade runner
74	Domino mask or red handkerchief, conceals identity perfectly
75	Crystal skull, stolen
76	Head in a box wrapped in brown paper and string
77	Last letter from a famous gunslinger
78	Hound dog, scrawny but tenacious
79	Child named William
80	Branding irons in small shapes that can be used to 'correct' brands on cattle
81	20" cast iron skillet with lid
82	Harness and tack for plough-mule
83	Three iron blades for ploughs
84	Rusty sickle
85	Five axe-heads in various sizes, just add handles
86	Sixty-two pounds of nails in an oily sack
87	Apache medicine bag
88	Three sacks of oats
89	20-pound Bag of flour
90	Plunger Detonator, 26 notches cut in box
91	Belt buckle big enough to hide a derringer behind it
92	Basket of paper roses.
93	Letter promising a job in Machine, Montana. It's a month old.
94	Knife with an elk horn handle.
95	String of Five Wild Horses, Unbroken
96-00	Upgrade Your Horse (stackable)

For going on six months now I have been doing an on-again/off-again read/reread of favorite or suggested sandbox products. Unbidden the same driving question keeps popping into my broken brain: what particular set of things makes this product so damn good? (What makes it shitty or mediocre being an interesting and useful question for another time.)

I have something like 30 unfinished blog posts beating, beating in tell-tale-heart urgency from my draft box and some of them are various attempts to move those margin notes into a blog series. Reckon it's time to whip those recalcitrant posts into publishable shape.

Before I kick off the series though let me set the frame. Imagine the standard disclaimer here these elements are what make a particular sandbox pop me for me, your own mileage may vary blah blah blah. You will note that how I frame the criteria precludes a number of much beloved sandboxes and hex-crawls.

Lines had to be drawn.

That said I am curious to hear if you the reader were making this list what would you include? What particular thing inspires you or helps you run it? And what products would you through on your High Fidelity Top Five list?

What constitutes an exemplary sandbox adventure:

Main frame is a large, but bounded wilderness or outdoors environment.
Open ended and allows (may even explicitly plan) for different outcomes and play (though most often having loose overall goals or player motivations wired in).
Combines the adventure-site exploration with another deep axis (political maneuvering, interesting NPC goals, timelines or whatever) to make it multi-dimensional.
Site description is in my utterly subjective “sweet spot” (between terse hex crawl and baroque setting books).
Has distinctive color and texture.
Often has something that enhances or bends the system it is designed for (say mechanics for running particular natural obstacles or mythical wildernesses that bend standard rules).
Has a map that is either aesthetically inspiring or has interesting play choices built in.

Sandbox adventures to be examined (ranked loosely by personal inspiration):

Griffin Mountain (Runequest)
Twilight 2000 adventures
Heart of the Sunken Lands (Midkemia)
Vault of the Drow (AD&D)
John Stater's Land of Nod/Hex Crawl Chronicles
Pitzburke (Gamma World 2e)

Almost rans (ballpark goodish, that may or may not be thrown in):

Leviathan, Prison Planet, Tarsus and Beltstrike (Classic Traveller)
Isle of Dread (B/X)
Night's Dark Terror (BECMI)
Qelong (LoTFP)

“Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish...It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.”

Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness

One of the enduring themes of neo-oldish D&D in the past five years has been the notion of dungeon as a “mythic underworld.” Philotomy the originator of the phrase stated it quite succinctly: “a mega dungeon should have a certain amount of verisimilitude and internal consistency, but it is an underworld: a place where the normal laws of reality may not apply, and may be bent, warped, or broken.”

Inexplicably the theme hasn't extended itself as thoroughly to the ancient realm of the mythic: wilderness. Projecting our dreams and ideas into the wilds is a timeless thing that changes with our own times. It is nature as giver, supernatural evil, challenge, peaceful refuge, antidote to civilized decadence or whatever. The theme endures and deserves some gaming love as a motif for adventure sites.

Of course in fantasy gaming almost all wilderness is mythical in the sense that human civilization has a weak hold and things monstrous or magical often live in their bounds. But I'm talking here about the cranked up high version. The kind of wilderness that is truly otherworldly, the enchanted wood, divine mountain, sacred grove or magic garden gone feral.

Mythical Wilderness is a major running theme in the eponymous campaign. Where going into the wilds—crossing into the Weird--is going into a different physical reality. Characters can feel an electric undercurrent as they pass out of the human realm and can expect just about anything.

Not surprisingly as it comes straight out of that broken line of reasoning and play, Mythical Wilderness plays a huge role in the soon-to-be published mini-sandbox Slumbering Ursine Dunes (now in its fifth editing iteration and being run again on Google Plus if you'd like to come out and play).

The Dunes incorporates most of the following laundry list: an internal ecology and weather climate distinct from the surrounding “real world”, impossibly large dunes; magical fields; mythical demi-god guardians, and a random "weird" events system, a chaos index, that dynamically changes the sandbox with player actions.

Common Features

Internal Dynamics Trump Ecology. It may have beasts going through the motions of such things as predation or a climate cycle or the like or it may have nothing at all like that (no mundane animals, nothing consumed/shat etc). The internal logic and dynamics of the place trumps all and it is not beholden to the regular rules of either the mundane natural world or human civilization.

Unhooked from Time and Space.Time is completely relative inside it and may have any number of effects. It may work like the Faerie mounds or realms of Northwestern European folklore with years passing in the outside world for a matter of days inside. Or it may preserve residents of an ancient past or border/open into another plane of existence altogether.

Inimical or Supernatural Terrain. Trees may grow to fantasic heights or widths. Whole forests of giant gnome red cap mushrooms may bloom. Miniature mountain ranges rise, amnesia-producing rivers spring or seas of lava spread. The terrain itself may even be actively hostile to outsiders, twisted trees and vines may trip or attack.

Bends Outside Magic. Spell effects will often be different. Certain spells may be amplified, dulled or neglected in effect. Certain areas may be magically fertile or completely barren. Endless fun for the GM.

Layers of Mystery. Part of the great fun of having this kind of funhouse wilderness is that what

makes it all tick—the why and how of the whole thing-- is often something wholly inexplicable at first. Like a great dungeon or adventure site those layers get peeled away in exploration. Think of the Island in Lost here.

Powerful, Semi-Divine Boss/Force. Invariably the strange, weird, mysterious and fantastical nature of the Mythic Wilderness is due to a force or master. A terribly powerful being-- the Horned Master of the Wild Hunt, Green Man, Faerie Queen, Demonic Tree-Spirit, Batshit Archmage or what have you—that the PCs run from/parlay/barter/fight.

Anything else you think should make this list? War stories of your own creations?

I've jibber jabbered here and there about the Slumbering Ursine Dunes, the Mythical Wilderness sub-region of the campaign that I have been slowly, slowly, slowly turning into a mini-sandbox for public consumption.

Longtime readers will have probably noticed that I have also spent a good chunk of time here on the blog and on Google Plus raising criticisms of the excesses of the rpg crowd-funding way and the commercialization of our hobby. As I gear up for horror of horrors a modest Kickstarter in early September I also gear up for not being a complete ass of a hypocrite.

So here's what you can expect as counter-measures against douchery in the Kickstarter:

1. That when it goes live the manuscript will be in a “pre-print” done state. It is currently in its fifth round of aggressive editing and the two tireless editors, Robert Parker and Anthony Picaro, have done the Lord's work in whipping my lazy, indulgent 50-plus digest-sized pages of text into some coherence. There will be no getting stuck in the hard-to-maintain cycle of motivating, writing, playtesting--and avoiding your collective wrath as a result.

2. A bottom $1 or 2 “test drive” tier where you can get the artless PDF immediately (all tiers will get this but I wanted to give folks something my cheap and picky self would want.)

3. A lot of thought has gone into the project not getting bogged down in the usual morass of crowdsourcing delays (and excuses). Higher backer-tiers and stretch goals have been kept modest with an eye on being able to be put together at a reasonably quick pace. Importantly the print publication will be done through RPG Now/RPG Drive-Thru's print-on-demand with an at-cost coupon being sent to backers thus reducing the major delaying woes of printing and fulfillment. (It also means that UK backers can get domestic shipping rates.)

4. That a sizable chunk of the budget is going to pay first the talented David Lewis Johnson (who has also played in the campaign) for gorgeous art and cartography. Another quarter-percentage chunk is going to pay for the editing and layout (yay Mike Davison). While KS's skimpy restrictions don't allow you to directly fund-raise most if not all of what I take all the end of that pie will be going to pay for the filing and legal costs of reviving Hydra, my hippy-ideal game design cooperative, as a worker-owned company (more about that later in the week).

The Golden Barge cover (adventurers likely to disappear)

But enough about the hand-wringing, here are the fun things you can expect from the Dune:

A pointcrawl of the otherwordly Dunes region. Beyond the big ticket adventure sites you will find along the way include a Polevik-haunted rye field, a Zardoz head-living hermit (that scraggly fellar above), bearling pilgrimage site and other assorted madness.

Two separate “dungeon” sites, the biomechanical, lost-in-time Golden Barge and the warring demi-gods Glittering Tower, with enough detail and portability to be slotted into an existing campaign (as can many of the adventure nodes).

A subsystem for modeling the mythic weirdness of the Dunes in the Chaos Index, a dynamic events systems. Actions of the players in the sandbox will escalate or deescalate the levels of events from blood-rain thunderstorms to an aerial invasion of magictech bubble cars.

Four competing factionsoperating inside the Dunes, plus guidelines for their mutual interactions.

Unique, “unlockable” player classes, spells and magic items compatible with Labyrinth Lord or really any other oldish D&D game.

15 new and unique monsters, many drawn from Slavic mythology (with a twist or three, naturally).

Some flipping great cover and interior art by David. Check out some of the early sketches.

Labor Day always heralds the traditional end of Summer, even if someone always forgets to tell the sadistic weather gods that rule Texas. As the season winds down so does work on the Slumbering Ursine Dunes project.

With five editing iterations under its belt--and a last final one for good measure--Slumbering Ursine Dunes is pretty much done. Now unto the part where I work through my knee-jerk anti-commericalism and go into crowdfunding mode. Most all bits of the Kickstarter are in place and we just need a few more “t's” to cross, expect to see it officially launch early next week.

An update on what interested folks can expect:

1. More art and cartography from David Lewis Johnson. The drop-dead gorgeous cover is now in its final stage (that's it above) and all the black and white interior art is looking to be quite good. Our very first stretch goal at $2000 will cover packing in more of his great work.

2. Immediate gratification with the draft PDF. The artless, draft 50-page PDF will be sent to all backers, including a $2 “test drive” pledge level, shortly after the drive starts. Feedback naturally is always welcome.

3. A modest-priced top pledge tier with lots of goodies. For 25 bucks a backer will get the finalized PDF, print 50(ish) page adventure and a package of past and backer-exclusive Hill Cantons PDFs including By This Axe (medieval-fantasy minis rules), By This Poleaxe (pen-and-paper rules for running battles in Old School D&D), The Dunes Run Red (a mini-supplement with battle scenarios for the Dunes), and Hill Cantons Cosmology (a backer-exclusive run-down of gods, godlings, special clerical powers and myths).

4. Non-junky/schlocky stretch goals.Forget the belt buckles, the project stretch goals will focus on getting more content into your hot little hands. The second stretch goal will help us produce a two-page “cheat sheet”, an organized digest version of relevant room, site and monster descriptions to help cut down on having to hunt through the full version during play.

All other stretch goals will add a heap of new dungeons and adventure material--including a total re-imagine of the Dunes that puts the players into the roles of trappers in 1830s Northern California where they’ll encounter the weird inhabitants of a “mythic America.”

5. Hydra Cooperative (re)launch. The Dunes Kickstarter rings in the first product of what we expect to be many by the newly-reborn Hydra Cooperative, a revival of my idea to run a worker-owned/DIY-oriented rpg publishing outfit. (Hydra is as of last month an officially recognized “member LLC” in Texas, more about it and upcoming projects later this month.)

But now the news from the real world...

The Rada of Marlank, in an apparently arbitrary fit of borderlands pique and Pahr identity politics, has decreed that the southern cantonal city will heretofore not be referred to its Nemec exonym and may only be referred to as “Marlinko.”Official reasons remain mirky but one Rada councilmember anonymously stated that it “reminded them too much of Fritz.” Local residents continue to call the city whatever the Cold Hell they please.

Speaking of Marlan...err Marlinko, tiger-wrasslin' has come back in vogue thanks to a self-proclaimed “Master Beastmaster” newly immigrated from points south. Local characters willing to go toe to claw with a lovable furry orange killing machine should inquire with bon vivant Jarek the Nagsmen. A 500 gold sun bounty is offered for anyone who survives the match.

Travellers on the Muth trade road claim that the always mysterious Slumbering Ursine Dunes has “doubled itself.” The salt merchants bizarrely maintain that the region seems to be twice as big as the last time they passed and exactly identical in its features. The western dunes appears however to be "somewhat blurry."

That melancholy metropolis of Kezmarok has been strangely quiet the last three months. The Monarch Formerly Known as the Decade King has stated that “in one months time our year's worth of plans will come to fruition and our Great City will be restored.” With a dramatic and heroic flourish he pointed to the northeastern horizon.

The Dunes Kickstarter is highly likely to go live before Thursday. As a mental palate cleanser I've treated myself to thinking about something other than D&D which means a return back to Classic Traveller.

Some readers might have followed the Traveller Coupbox mini-campaign that I ran around last year's holidaze. It was centered around the players being members of a mercenary cooperative (a bolo) who have been contracted launch a coup against an autocratic micro-state on a civil war-wracked moon.

The scenario was intended to be an open-ended experiment in presenting a grand-tactical situation and basically going for it. I developed some big battle rules, the players created some beautiful chaos that I could never have planned for and we worked up to a nice climax—and then promptly never finished the endgame session (thanks a lot Christmas).

The new mini-campaign, Coupbox II, will basically let me (and the players that have been bugging me about it) get some closure on that.

The Set-Up

Major “Polo” Hurloj Tousant, former leader of the internal military opposition in the Kral has consolidated control of the moon micro-state. His six-month regime has been only a shade less authoritarian than that of the deposed Autokrator and in recent months he has even begun to himself “The Demokrator.” Indeed the former Major's lack of his predecessor's batshit insanity and token efforts for the dogoid minority such as his Friday Kong Treats program have only increased the efficiency of Kral's state apparatus. There is even talk of a purchase of a Ettin IX mega-tank from an off-world tank-bolo.

On the far side of Freedonia, once again the belabored old joke “In Autocratic Kral, state reforms you” rings sadly true.

Now return ye to this desolate shithole once again as there are good credits being put up on the table for a group of desperate Travellers willing to arm, train and lead a ragtag column of dogoid and other oppositionists barely holding on in the cactus wilds of the north.

Pointcrawling Inside Hexes

A Creation Myth for the Cantons

I Am A Golden God. Again.

Found Objects

Slumbering Ursine Dunes and The Myth of Arctolatry

Free Quality RPG Products?

Tree Maze of the Twisted Druid For Free, Yo

Alternative D&D Next Covers Released

Barbaric Texas

Hill Cantons Bestiary: The War-Ocelot

North Texas RPG Con After Action Report

Running Small Battles in Oldish D&D

Hill Cantons Bestiary: The Vodník

The Hill Cantons Run Red Mini-Campaign

"Fast Packs" for Boot Hill

What Makes a Great Sandbox Adventure Great?

Mythical Wilderness

Slumbering Ursine Dunes Is A-Comin'

The Dunes are Nigh and Other News

Back to Classic Traveller and the Coupbox