UVG DW - Session 4

Dramatis Personae

Mac 'Driver - DWARF artificer with inherited golem armor

River Thornheart - Steppelander witch/warchief's daughter

Uba Bigtooth - Half-orc gunslinger cowgirl

Axil Scheele, Cogflower Inquisitor

Cordolan s'Abner - Chief medical aristocrat of biomagical corruption (i.e., cleric)

R5F1 - Ancient golem archaeologist

Amaric diVridi - Greenlander hostler. Hired to care for the pack animals.

Taelin Nyxara - Violetlander Heretical biomancer agronomist and undergraduate wizard

Sonia - Artificial dryad re-awoken from the Great Mechanical Baobab Tree.

Imke 'Shippingexpert - DWARF Hexad RLD smuggler, professor of Oldtech Engineering at Magenta Magical University, and caravan financier

Axil Scheele - A stern, no-nonsense greenlander and Cogflower Inquisitor

Caps and Nico - Two post-mortal thugs of the Nighshade Syndicate who work for Old Tom

Tomas "Old Tom" duc Lyco - A minor wine vampire nobleman turned capo of the Nightshade Syndicate.

Session 4 Notes

• The heroes returned to the Violet City to sell the loot from their first successful venture. They met with Imke ‘Shippingexpert, who chided them for cutting the vile heart out of the statue. Still, they were able to sell their acquisitions for an ample profit.

• With their new funds, they purchased four hover-wagons and the magnificent velblod camels needed to pull them, as well as several replacement bodies to sell at the Porcelain Citadel.

• At the stockyard, they were approached by Axil Scheele, a Cogflower Inquisitor. He informed them that the reason that the RLD Hexad had cut funding from MMU was because Imke ‘Shippingexpert had accidentally activated a vile communications array and sent and received a ping from beyond the Mountains of the Moon, where the last viles live. He warned them of the danger of a resurgent vile invasion, and urged them to tell him if Imke asked them to do anything else dangerous or illegal.

• Later, they were approached by two men in purple suits and gasmasks, who asked them to come to the Lagoon Lounge, a local dive bar, to discuss a business venture. There they met Tomas “Old Tom” duc Lyco, a minor vampire nobleman and capo of the Nightshade Syndicate. He asked them to deliver a shipment of illegal narcotics to a post-mortal named “Two-Lives” Traz in Flare Town, a settlement northeast of the Last Serai. They were promised a $5000 reward and they agreed.

• They passed through the Violet Lands and saw a congregation of azure cultists performing funerary rites for a deceased avatar of the Blue God. They decided not to bother them.

• In the Low Road and the High, their camp was attacked in the night by six hulking wolf-like creatures, who turned out to be skinchangers of the war-like Pomelo tribe. They tried carrying off their camels, but the heroes reacted and the skinchangers were slain.

• They sold the replacement bodies in the Porcelain Citadel for a high profit and proceeded to the Last Serai. 

• Somewhere along the way, the copy of the spell taken from the Iron Obelisk went missing. Cordolan investigated the wagon thoroughly, and it showed evidence of a tiny humanoid sneaking into the caravan and making off with it. River consulted her new familiar, and it told them it was a fairy. How a fairy had known to steal this from them was a mystery.

• They arrived in the Last Serai, and encountered an apparition of a woman in a flowing gown, apparently made of static, who beseeched them for aid in freeing an imprisoned goddess. River’s divinatory magic revealed that this was a trap, and approaching the tower with the imprisoned goddess would result in their souls being devoured.

Concluding Thoughts

    This campaign is turning out to have a lot of book keeping associated with it. I think I should probably try and conduct this over Discord so as not to cut into adventuring time.

    Also, I'm beginning to worry if the players are getting too much money and XP too fast. I should come up with something for them to spend it on.

    In general, I just need to get more organized, and smarter about my prep time. I feel like I spent a lot of time prepping things that didn't come up this session and not enough on the things that are actually important.

Six-Point Interesting Locations in the UVG

     I've been trying to get myself to do more writing and worldbuilding, just for its own sake. You can't improve if you don't practice, after all. And I hope that some of the things that I write will be of interest to anyone who happens upon this blog.

    Part of the challenge of writing bite-sized chunks of worldbuilding content is that there needs to be a larger coherent setting to hang them on. I could make my own, but that's a lot of work that may never be useful or interesting to anyone. I am, however, running a campaign in Ultraviolet Grasslands, a setting with an extremely open-ended and inspirational science fantasy setting. You are encouraged, even compelled, to add to the locations detailed on the map. It even names some topographical features not directly detailed in the various points of interest.

    I figured that describing some of these named locations might be a good starting point for some interesting writing.

    Furthermore, Tsojcanth of the Lost Pages blog recently made a post detailing a template for writing about interesting locations. I find it to be a simple and elegant template that I wanted to try out. In brief, the template is as follows:

1. The Core; the defining aspect of the location
2. Not an adventuring locale, but colorful
3. Not an adventuring locale, but colorful and potentially dangerous
4. Possible Danger
5. Danger
6. Resource; something precious but not easy to access

    For my first attempt, I looked at the UVG Grand Long Map and chose the "Best-Forgotten Massif."

Doghead Necromancer Olek

The Best-Forgotten Massif

1. The Memory Hole. A huge hole in the peak of one of these mountains. The closer you get, the more of your memories vanish. No one can remember where it is.
2. Sobaka Village. A peaceful anarchistic village of dogheaded dissidents from the Violet Lands. Practice strict mental exercises and mainline dog’s tail to avoid memory loss.
3. The Necromancer’s Garden. The home of the doghead necromancer Olek, a burly, tough, black-furred doghead man with a prominent gold fang, clad in dirty and ill-maintained black robes. Has an orchard full of trees whose fruits contain fragments of the souls of dead people, whose bones and blood fertilize the garden. A very proud man, he hints darkly at revenge against someone in the Redlands who once wronged him.
4. Crystal Nymph. Enigmatic forest-women whose biology melds crystal, metal, plant, and animal matter. Capricious and vain, with an insatiable hunger for gossip, stories, and news.

5. 

   The Celestial Wolf

   Celestial Wolf. Big badass wolf-taur monster. Extra eyes, purple spines, blue-gray fur. Appears only when the stars are in the right alignment. The dogheads of Sobaka fear him, and believe he is a demon of some kind. 
6. Memory Crystals. Can be found embedded in the soil, or growing from plants like fruit. Come
   in a variety of different colors. When ground into a powder and combined in a precisely measured proportion, can create a potion that erases memories. Different mixtures of different colors can erase memories from a specific time period. It can erase memories of the past night, or the past week, or from a specific time years ago, or someone’s whole childhood, etc.

UVG DW - Session 3

Dramatis Personae

Mac 'Driver - DWARF artificer with inherited golem armor

River Thornheart - Steppelander witch/warchief's daughter

Uba Bigtooth - Half-orc gunslinger cowgirl

Cordolan s'Abner - Chief medical aristocrat of biomagical corruption (i.e., cleric)

R5F1 - Ancient golem archaeologist

Amaric diVridi - Greenlander hostler. Hired to care for the pack animals.

Taelin Nyxara - Violetlander Heretical biomancer agronomist and undergraduate wizard

Sonia - Artificial dryad re-awoken from the Great Mechanical Baobab Tree.

Sonia, the Artificial Dryad

Session 3 Notes

• After escaping the barbarian sorcerer’s hideout on the Trail of Vomish dreams, the adventurers went back inside so that Mac could carefully dismantle the shrinking device.
• They traveled back to the Iron Obelisk, dug a hole under it, reassembled the shrinking device, activated it, and shrank the obelisk to a more manageable size. They flipped it over and got the rubbings of all four sides.
• With that accomplished, they traveled back to the Porcelain Citadel, where they sold the shrinking device to a somewhat disinterested Porcelain Prince for $4000.
• They were wondering about the value of the octopus pheromones they looted in the last session and asked around. They heard an interesting rumor about some kind of “slumbering octopus deity at the bottom of a spring” in the Steppe of the Lime Nomads.
• Taelin Nyxara mentioned that he wanted to go to the Steppe as well, since he heard about a “great mechanical baobab tree, whose sap has healing properties.” That suits his research interest of melding plants, animals, and machines.
• They traveled to the Steppe of the Lime Nomads and quickly dispatched a flock of vome-infested birds with cameras for eyes, then discovered the Great Mechanical Baobab Tree.
• Taelin used his phytomancer skill to commune with the tree and discovered a sentient mind inside. Thus, he awoke the slumbering artificial dryad, an ecological maintenance golem named “Sonia.” Sonia was distraught at the apparent failure of her ancient builders to “regenerate the biosphere,” and, with nothing better to do, agreed to accompany them.
• They traveled to the High Road and the Low, where they stopped to revisit a discovery they witnessed earlier: the Motor Agate Outcrop. There was a conflict with a gang of vomish pseudo-archaologists, which they dispatched.
• One of the vomes had a treasure map tattooed on its back, for some reason, pointing to the Serpent Stone.
• Mining the Motor Agate Outcrop yielded a metallic humanoid skeleton, which they took as treasure.
• They returned to the Violetlands, and on the way witnessed an errant Avatar of the Dead God, apparently summoned by inept cultists. Cordolan s’Abner tried to listen carefully to its incoherent bellowing, and witnessed a disturbing vision that rattled his psyche.
• Deciding it would be better to avoid the Avatar, they circled around it, and thus arrived in the Violet City.

Monsters

Porcelain Hunter Golem 14HP 3 Armor

Group, Construct, Large, Organized

Damage: Slam (1d8+2, close, reach, forceful), Laser-Eyes (1d8, near, ignores armor)

Special Qualities: Robotic

Hulking humanoid golems deployed by the Porcelain Princes to keep out raiders and vomes. Unfortunately, their friend-or-foe recognition system is notoriously unreliable.

Instinct: To protect the Porcelain Citadel

Moves:

• Radio for help
• Mistake a friend for a foe
• Chase a target tirelessly until it’s dead

Avatar of the Dead God 25HP 1 Armor

Solitary, Huge, Divine, Terrifying, Amorphous

Damage: Tentacles (1d10+3, reach)

Special Qualities: Divine hideousness, rapidly dissolving

Giant, many-tentacled blue monstrosity born of the flesh of the dead god of the Bluelanders. Summoned by an inexperienced cult. Rapidly dissolving into yellow slime.

Instinct: To make the world rot

Moves:

• Inflict a rotting curse of the Blue God
• Ensnare an enemy in its many tentacles
• Bellow out a maddening cosmic truth

Artificial Dryad 12HP 2 Armor

Solitary, Magical, Intelligent, Devious, Construct

Damage: Crushing vines (w[2d8], close)

Special Qualities: Golem

A biosphere monitoring eco-golem merged into the Great Biomechanical Baobab in the Steppe of the Lime Nomads. Beautiful, plastic, and manipulative. Dreams of healing the biosphere.

Instinct: To reactivate the damaged biosphere

Moves:

• Entice a mortal
• Merge into a tree
• Turn nature against them

Back-Jointed Archaeologists 6HP 1 Armor

Group, Construct, Devious

Damage: Serrated Claw (1d8, close, reach), Slagger (1d8, near)

Special Qualities: Cyborg, Disguised as humans

Vome-insect hybrids masquerading as human archaeologists. Found in the Low Road and the High.

Instinct: To seek resources for the hive

Moves:

• Glitch out
• Infect a helpless victim
• Find/excavate a valuable ancient site
• Mimic human behavior