Looking for some spice for your roleplaying game? Perhaps a new monster? But of course, without flavour, any new creature is just a bunch of statistics. So let’s turn to the stranger sort of news that we can find in the real world, and look at what cryptozoologists call Alien Big Cats. After all, every GM should know his ABCs.

Cryptozoology is the study of unknown or undiscovered creatures, and is a rich vein for game masters looking to challenge their players with a new and exciting encounter. Not only has this pseudo-science given us yetis, sasquatches and Loch ness monsters to play with, it can also provide us with plenty of inspiration for plot hooks and whole adventures.

So what are Alien Big Cats? This real world phenomena  describes not, as you may suspect, kitties from the beyond the stars, but large predatory cats reported in places where they couldn’t possibly be able to survive, typically because the area the creature has been spotted in does not have the right sort of prey animals to support the beast’s diet.  A typical ABC story involves someone being stalked and injured by an enormous animal which appears suddenly and then vanishes.

Reports of enormous cats coming out of nowhere have come from all over the world. In India, they are called Pogeyan, which means “the cat that comes and goes like the mist”. In the United Kingdom, the Royal Marines were sent out in moorlands around Devon and Somerset to hunt down the Beast of Exmoor, following a spate of livestock deaths.  At the time, soldiers reported a few sightings, and claimed that the creature behaved with human-like intelligence. It was never found (and was later dismissed as a hoax).

Do you know your ABCs?

For a GM, this sort of thing is a great place to start a story. 

RPGs such as Dungeons & Dragons like to describe the natural habitats of creatures, and taking a monster out of its habitat and setting it on the PCs is an old trick. However, the reasons behind such an encounter can provide a great deal of fun. Perhaps the reason there’s a huge panther successfully stalking the streets of some classic medieval city is because someone has let a gift intended for royalty escape, or an overly elaborate murder plan has gone awry and now the beast is loose. Perhaps a cult has captured and perhaps enhanced the beast and is using it as an assassin. (This also happens to be the plots of the excellent 2001 French film The Brotherhood of The Wolf, which is also loosely based on fact.) If you want a high level threat, maybe the creature has wandered in via a magical portal; a straight-forward monster hunt may then swiftly become a desperate struggle to prevent an invasion.

RPGs set in the modern day are just as suitable; one does not expect to encounter a huge albino lion when going for a coffee, after all. Subway systems and abandoned apartment blocks make for fantastically creepy lairs, and for those looking for a mundane explanation for why there’s an ABC in a major city don’t have to look very far for a reason; they are private collectors of exotic animals in the real world, and they have been reports of tigers kept in New York apartment blocks as recently as 2003.)

One of the theories surrounding the ABC phenomena suggests that the animal has adapted its diet somehow, so it’s possible that an entire pride of the beasts lurk somewhere in the city. The adapted diet may include human flesh, or maybe just coffee.  Or perhaps they only eat coffee shop regulars. ABC’s also make an excellent red-herring for games featuring Vampires or Werewolves; Monster hunters who rely too heavily on supernatural solutions may have their hands full when they realise panthers aren’t repulsed by crucifixes, and though silver bullets will kill ordinary creatures, it’s an expensive solution.

Introducing ABCs into your game doesn’t come with its own problems though. Consider, for example, your favorite game’s rules for tracking: though this skill can often be a handy way to move an adventure forward, in scenarios where a small band of heroes are being stalked by a hidden and incredibly powerful beast a good (or bad, depending on your POV) roll of the dice can bring the adventure to a disappointing stop. Of course, the legend of the ABC is that they are very hard to spot.  We can circumvent tracking rules in a few ways; the simplest is to cheat and to give the beast the power to turn into mist, turn invisible or perhaps teleport if discovered.  For those who want a mundane explanation, then we can use an environmental reason (such as hard, icey ground making anything hard to track), give the creature very high intelligence (allowing it to cover its tracks as it moves around), or simply give the beast better local area knowledge; if it’s using underground caves, sewer systems or air vents then the tracker will have to discover that these things exist before he can successfully hunt down the beast.

Another problem is, of course, the beast itself.  Some systems make it easy for the party to overwhelm a single monster and this can be a bit anticlimatic if the PCS have been tracking the creature for an extended period of time. If you’ve spent the last couple of hours building tension, the last thing you want is a short messy fight at the end.  However, the stories we tell about the single solitary, ghost like threat fit perfectly for a game involving an ABC. If you’re running a one-shot game or some sort of horror, you can steal an idea from movies like Predator or Alien; have the creature pick of the party one by one.  This is often not practical for entire parties, but can be a marvellous way to dispose of that annoying NPC the players insist on keeping around. Another technique from the same book is to grind the PC’s down through a series of environmental threats.  An intelligent creature which knows the area well enough can easily draw a party of people into natural traps, dangerous rivers and unsafe ground.  After all, why risk a confrontation when you can make soften up your prey by making it fall down a ravine? Ultimately, the struggle should make the creature’s demise all the more satisfying.

So, whatever your preference, ABCs—as a general category of adversaries—can provide some intrigue, tension and exciting combat to your game. They are have much in common with Reoccurring Villains, but where the villain usually has intellect and parting-words-that-reveal-their-plans, a hard to find Alien Big Cat has beastly brawn and a hidden agenda (eating humans; Surprise!)

Have you used ABCs in your game? If so, what has worked well?

Visit the original post, Are Alien Big Cats stalking your players?, at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

Illustration © 2011, Rob Torno

The Unofficial Official RPG Blog Carnival Logo.

February belongs to Cupid – it’s a month of love and lust, want and wonder. On the flip side, it’s also a month of scorn, disappointment, and frustration for some (and we  pity them all too). So, being that we’re all gamers and we all love our RPGs to death – the topic for this month’s RPG Blog Carnival is “Things to Love, Things to Hate!“ 

The possible things we could explore that we love and hate about our hobby could go on forever. So, let’s keep things focused on Game Systems and/or Adventures we love or hate, and why. Some quick suggestions might include

• What are the best adventures made of? What about the worst of them?
• What kills an adventure before it even gets off the ground?
• Some say it’s all a matter of opinion, but I say some game systems are clearly just better than others (read:more fun to play). What’s your favorite system? What are the things you love about it most? WHY?
• With [insert new edition of some cool game] on the horizon, I’m sure you have an opinion  regarding what the next edition should or shouldn’t be once it’s out. Share your thoughts. Let your readers know where you stand and who you love!

So, go forth and blog it out. Just make sure to link back here or to leave a comment so that I can include you in the end-of-the-month round up too! If you don’t have a blog of your own, but have a burning desire to get something off your chest, why not guest blog on Nevermet Press? A carnival is a great way to start – heck, the topic is already picked out for you! =D

And… while you’re waiting for the RPG blogging community to response – why not check out last month’s carnival: “Fantastic Locations” hosted by Keith Davies. Over 40 (!) posts on new made-of-awesome places to set your adventures. What an amazing response! Nice work Keith!

Want to host a future month of the carnival? Check out the archive and sign up there.

Visit the original post, Things to Love, Things to Hate: February RPG Blog Carnival, at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

When a person leaves anything that he or she loves doing, deep-seeded reasons have to be involved. What follows is an attempt, after a 15-year hiatus from TTRPG, to delve into the reasons for my abrupt departure. It’s the first time I revisit this period: who knows what I’ll find deep inside of myself. I approach this post as an adventurer would approach a cavern entrance that has barely legible inscriptions warning of dangers within. Therefore, I jump right in: on my guard…but excited!

The year was 1995. I was barely out of my teens and the world beckoned to me like a siren to sample its delicacies. I had come to the big city of Ottawa from my small town of Kapuskasing in northern Ontario, ready to indulge in the pleasures that such a change brings; an overflow of cultural possibilities, a vast mosaic of unknown beautiful women, new friends of varying types (much more varied than the small-town template could offer), and perhaps most importantly: freedom.

Naturally, my AD&D 2nd Edition books had made the journey to the big city as well. Part of the wonderment and anticipation of moving to a metropolis was, quite honestly, the prospect of gaming shops! Ottawa had a few of them in those days, including one that still survives right in the downtown core, Fandom II. Money that should have been used for—oh I don’t know— textbooks, was instead diverted to rounding out my Dark Sun collection (note: if you’re reading this, Mom, it’s not true – the previous sentence was artistic licence). Luckily, many of my gaming friends had also chosen Ottawa as the city for their post-secondary education. Hence, a resumption of my DM’ing of the Dark Sun campaign was expected.

Once we got together for the first time in Ottawa to play, something was off. I don’t know and can’t recall if anyone else expressed that sentiment, but I remember feeling it very keenly. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. There seemed to be a general blandness to our adventuring, a lack of focus. It was as if we were all going through the motions, trying to keep at least a part of our hometown with us. Perhaps that’s just 15 years of wisdom being thrown at that particular cold case mystery. Nevertheless, the important thing here is that after a few sessions, we quit.

I quit.

Image Credit: Kevin Pelletier

I no longer had the thirst to read the game manuals, nor the hunger to prepare gaming sessions. A lot of stuff goes on when you’re 19 years old and released from the shackles of a small town. There were now a plethora of entertainment options to take up my free time. I suppose a part of me was embarrassed about my gaming hobby. I didn’t want my “cool” new friends to find out that I really liked to be a fantasy storyteller, guiding a bunch of D&D “geeks” to loot and lore. Presenting myself as a music nerd, a political junkie, a sports aficionado; all of these seemed better suited to my newly-found “hipster” status. Let’s face it: trying to impress a girl you like with “Why don’t you come back to my place, I’ve got this great collection of U2 bootlegs for us to listen to” sounds so much more suave than  “Hey, I know how to calculate THAC0 – wanna be my gnomish bard?”.  (For the record, the U2 thing never worked…)

Visit the original post, Hunting the Beast: The Real Reason I Left D&D (Only To Return), at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

Adventures are often linear, “rail roaded” scenarios designed around getting maximum play-time out of a single product, reducing GM prep time, and maintaining story arcs across “adventure paths”. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this approach, I still think there needs to be room for free-form roleplaying, chance encounters and so-called “sandbox campaigns.” One way to mix things up a bit is to introduce side-track mini-adventures into your campaign, and that’s the goal of this series of posts. Homebrew games can be created the same way, so try this for yourself you’ll see how fun it can be.

“A Fork in the Road” aims to set up a dynamic mini-adventure where the outcome hinges on player choices, not scripted design choices. The PC are invited to a local noble’s estate and hired to help him quell a local rebellion. Once the PCs meet the rebels, however, their choices are suddenly not so clear.

Editor’s Note: It should go without saying, but if the monster stats and encounter set ups aren’t appropriate for the PCs, simply retool the storyline of the encounter a little bit.  Again, this article is designed for 4E D&D.  There is no reason why the encounters can’t be used in any system or setting though!

A Fork in the Road – A 4E D&D Mini-Adventure

Read the following background to the players to set up this side-trek adventure and get them started. The proper names for this scenario are generally generic, so please feel free to change them to adapt to your own campaign.

The state of the Duchy is in flux. Several recent violent disputes between the county’s royal family and the commoners have occured, so Duke Regibald Darimus is calling for the aid of “independent individuals” (Adventurers!) to come to the aid of the ailing duchy.  Nothing the royalty or their direct agents can say will calm the populace at this point, and they are worried that things may get out of hand before you have come to their aid.  As court convenes, the time has arrived for you to discover what is happening in Duke Darimus’s territory and what you will do about it.

The PCs could hear about this general call for help through a town cryer, or perhaps be invited personally by the Duke depending on their notoriety and how it suites your campaign. As the PCs travel to the Court, they might hear rumors of unrest, fight a small battle with brigands who are capitalizing on the country’s growing unrest, or perhaps receive a warning letter from the leader of the Rebels. The exact nature of the perceived injustices by the people at the hands of the Duke’s rule should be tailored to your specific campaign setting: excessive taxation, land grabbing, religious persecution, or widespread corruption are all common themes that could be played upon. This initial phase in the adventure sandbox could last for one or more sessions, or none at all if the PCs want to get straight into the meat of the adventure.

The Duke’s Court

Eventually, the PCs will arrive to the Duke’s estate. Have them be welcomed by the servants and their horses and other belonging cared after by the Duke’s staff. They will escort them promptly to meet with the Duke in his audience chambers. The PCs should get the sense that they are not the only ones who answered his call for help.

After a brief journey, you arrive at the Duke’s court chambers, a grand room of marble adorned with golden chandeliers and red velvet tapestries. The floor is checkered, and covered with dozens of overstuffed cushions on which a few other Adventurers are already lounging about, idly talking amongst themselves. The mood in the air is solemn.  The Duke stands at the far end of the room speaking to several advisors. Two downtrodden guards standing nearby.  Duke Darimus then turns and makes an announcement:

“Thank you to all that have come to my calling.  The Duchy is in dire need of your help.  After some recent altercations, the commoners have taken it upon themselves to rise up in rebellion.  I seek your aid in restoring order to my lands.  If you will help me with this cause, stay here in court.  I will approach you and task each of you myself.   There will—of course—be rewards for your loyalty and actions to support my rule.”

Sounds of yelling, an argument perhaps, are suddenly heard from outside the court chamber. The two guards spring to action—blades drawn—and stand to protect the Duke. The double doors to the court chamber swing open and slam into the walls. A moment later, two men and a woman walk in. Two of them are dressed in cheap, but effective looking battle garb.  The third carries a white flag.  He steps forward and addresses the court without being introduced:

“I come on behalf of the good people of the Duchy.  We will not see the injustices against us go unpunished. Surely the Duke has claimed our cause is selfish, but it is not.  Any of you who wish to help us to rebel against the royals that have abused us, come to me before I leave.  I will tell you where you might meet one of our leaders, Citizen Strauss. 

It is custom that, even in the worst of times, the white flag bears total neutrality and peace for immediate time. Several of the members of court mutter and grumble to themselves that these rebels should be detained and executed, but the Duke, though fuming, but he does not signal his guards to detain them and permits them to leave.

The PCs now have a decision to make: should they stay and defend the Duke and become agents of the state or exit his Court and seek the Rebels at their hiding place. There are, of course, numerous other choices. Perhaps the PCs might opt to leave the kingdom entirely (effectively ending the adventure), or become a peace keeping force of their own focused on having the two sides find common ground.

What do you think? What other options do you see for the PCs? In our next post, we’ll set up the adventure to explore these options to pursue helping the cause of the Duke.

Visit the original post, A Fork in the Road: Starting the Adventure, at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

1.

They stood on the ancient ramparts together, watching the refugees stream into the city. The sunset behind them, the long shadows of the delicate spires of the great Aldohthiir City looked like dark teeth, raking the very land itself.

She wore her battle regalia, finely wrought, delicate-looking breastplate of bronze covered in runes and script, and leather pants with matching bronze greaves and bracers. Her arms, tanned and sculpted from her days campaigning in the Queens service, were bare save campaign tattoos and a collection of scars.

He stood next to her, his rightful place as lord-commander of her majesty’s armies. His armor, no less finely wrought, was mangled and dented. Deep gouges and scratches marred its surface. He wore pauldrons and a chain-scale skirt of bronze as well, his helmet lost on some distant field.

She turned to face him and he saw there were tears in her eyes.

“It’s all going to burn, won’t it, Marcus?”

“Just things, Zarana. Just things. Buildings can be rebuilt.”

“But it’s our home.”

“Not anymore. Now it’s a piece of history.”

She turned back to watch the refugees.

“I-I have to go.”

“What? Where? The armies are defeated. Even the Handmaidens are passing through the Gate.”

“You should be with them. You’re their leader.”

“I know.” she turned to him again, “I just wanted to look one last time.”

He nodded his understanding. This was the view they’d both enjoyed more than thirty years past, as young adventurers, tramping across the countryside, cutting a swath of daring-do, fighting the Great Orcs, almost single-handedly winning the first war. It was Marcus Tenibrass himself who struck the killing blow against the demi-god bastard of their beloved queen, sending the Great Orc hordes fleeing into the dark north.

“So where are you going? Won’t you be escorting the Queen with your Shayleen?”

“Zarana, the Shayleen are all dead. I’m going to hold the walls as long as I can, while you all pass through the Great Gate.”

“By yourself?” She was shaking her head, her typically unemotional demeanor lost. As the First Handmaiden, she was Master of the Queen’s Assassins and Protector, a position that required a level head at nearly all times.

“No, there are about two hundred of us that will stay.”

“I’ll stay to then.”

“No, I think you won’t. The Queen will need you, and the Handmaidens will need you.”

“Orc-son! You’re trying to keep the glory for yourself,” she tried to joke with him.

“We’ll be the last through, I promise.”

She moved forward suddenly and embraced him. He held her in turn, gently, though his armor made it awkward and then drew back. He looked into her eyes, slate and storms swirled there. He acted as if he were going to say something, but closed his mouth and left her, Zarana, First Handmaiden and Protector alone on the ramparts with her memories of their wild youth.

2.

The Gate was ancient, and few knew exactly how its magic worked. The elder sorcerers and magi had consulted the most ancient scriptures and realized that the Gate was built into the city itself, and would consume settlement wholly. None of the magi or wizards or sorcerers could offer an explanation of what would happen to the city as the magical energies that fueled the Gate surged through it.

Many were optimistic, suggesting that the ancients knew this day would come to pass, and that the entire city would be transported through the gate.

Zarana, part of the Queen’s inner circle, had heard the archmages talking in hushed tones to their ruler. Many elder magic-users believed the energies required to open the gate, to rend open reality itself, would eat up the city, burn it to ashes from the inside out, leaving the refugees and their monarch alone, on a strange world.

A world without orcs, at least.

Zarana and her seven Handmaidens rode in a protective circle around the Queen’s carriage, Zarana at the rear, her tear-brimmed eyes ever watchful for that last threat, that final encounter that would render her decades of service inert. She’d told the courtiers that not even the Great Orcs of Northwild knew of the Gate, that their fears were unnecessary. It was a lie of course. In her years at court she’d learned to be diplomatic and outright treacherous when it was called for. She’d been warned by Marcus one day to never become the viper she guarded against so vigilantly.

She looked back, thinking of him, hoping she’d not become that viper.

The Gate loomed before the Queen’s entourage. A massive arc of stone, some hundred feet high, engraved with runes so old, so alien as to not even be recognized as ancient Aldothiir. They where strange and angular, jagged and altogether alien. Their meanings could only be surmised by even the most learned.

Zarana could hear the chanting of the mages grow louder, their strange words at once guttural and poetic. No stranger to wizards and their scuttling ilk, she reigned in her horse, a white mare with a golden bridle decorated with rubies, a gift from queen herself. She patted the beast’s flank and whispered nonsense words to it.

3.

From the foremost gatehouse, using a spyglass, Lord Marshall Marcus Tenibrass could see his castle in the distance burning. He’d named it The Watcher’s Fortress when he ordered its construction. It was the last bastion of defense before the city, a wondrously advanced castle, complete with engineering marvels of his own design, a griffon aerie, and more. He’d personally collapsed the two-mile tunnel that led to the city, a tunnel that had taken three years and three thousand dwarves to cut through the very earth. It’s didn’t matter now he told himself, the griffons are all dead.

Much closer than his flaming home, Marcus saw the Great Orc horde, led by a vengeful albino orc, known as Ashkevar. The origins of Ashkevar were a mystery, but with him came thousands of white and grey orcs, covered in thick, short hair. They were the masters of the Northwilds, come to claim the southern lands as their own.

Comparatively few in number, the Aldothiir, with their war colleges and sorcery couldn’t stem the flow of orcish filth. It was the way of the Orcs, to breed in great numbers and overwhelm their foes, masses of them dying in the process. Marcus was shaken from his musings as a stone tipped arrow struck him square in the chest, shattering against his once-magnificent armor.

“That’s range, Balthasar.” He commented absently to his adjutant.

“Aye, Lord.” Balthasar, a young man of excellent stock, raised his arm and bellowed out the order for the last few archers to open fire with their flaming and poisoned arrows. The Great Orc drums could be heard over the din of onrushing war, and Marcus felt that rare and dangerous excitement grip his soul. He drew his sword, also a gift from the Queen, so long ago. The blade was called Marethuresa and was said to contain the spirit of a woman cavalier, a knight-errant of such virtue that she drove herself to madness pursuing the very source of evil upon the world. When she found it, Marethuresa knew there was only one way to combat it properly. She sought out an artisan and bade him craft a long sword of adamantine-silver with angelic wings and a red eye so baleful that evil would cringe and shrink from its gaze. This he did. Then Marethuresa took the blade to a powerful wizard whose name was lost in antiquity, the first of the war-casters, and offered her own soul to keep the blade alight with wrath. This he did.

Marcus breathed slowly as he held the powerful war-tool in his hand, feeling it tremble. The artillerists fired their siege engines, catapults, trebuchet and arbalests and still the orcs would not scatter. Still they came on. Marcus took Balthasar’s hand and nodded to him.

“It was a good life, Sir.”

“It was.” And Marcus leapt over the wall.

4.

Zarana felt the air charge with energy, unnamable but palpable energy. The setting sun, normally an orange rose in the sky became green and the sky a deep purple, as the ritual encompassed the Aldothiir city. She watched the stone arch light up and radiate a keening sound. Colors took on shapes and sounds became raw sensations. Her horse stamped the ground, nearby one of her handmaidens was thrown from her mount. Great peals of thunder, consecutive and angry shook the ground, in the refugee column women and children cried out, men shook in silent terror. Zarana’s long, black hair began to stand up, to rise as energy coursed through the city, through her. She felt her heart begin to race as only it had in her youth when she foolish ran into battle alongside Marcus and her other companions, hacking her way through impossible odds. She grinned wickedly through her delicate gold-chain veil. The Magic was working.

5.

For Balthasar, who’d grown up on stories of the exploits of his Lord Marshall Marcus Tenibrass and First Handmaiden Zarana, a chance to see his commander in battle, though he had no delusions it would be the last, was thrilling. The martial culture of the Aldothiir would not allow Balthasar to not enjoy this moment, the finality of it. His orders were clear however, and he stood with a few other apprentice swordsmen and watched the phenomenon occur.

Marcus had trained from the age of ten to fight with a long sword, his natural ability was stunning, and he soon mastered the various styles of the Aldothiir. He was given a dagger for his off hand and he became twice as deadly. Balthasar’s favorite story was during the First Orc Horde, before the final confrontation, when Marcus, clinging to the back of a mighty water serpent gouged out both its eyes with that dagger before returning to the surface. Then there was the Lord Marshall’s duel with the Queen’s own son-in-law, an uppity princling looking to usurp the throne.

None of the tales however, compared to what Balthasar and the others witnessed that dusk at what became known as the battle of Aldothiir Gate.

6.

Marcus hit the ground in front of the main gate seconds before the orcs first reached it. Coming along was a battering ram, pushed by the seven foot Great Orcs, smaller orcs in elaborate and heavy plate armor followed along. In the distance, their leader, an albino orc in white furs rode a mighty snow drake. It was in that direction Marcus was heading.

He raised Marethuresa in his hand and set to his grim task. The first and nearest orc was beheaded in a single blow, the next had his throat opened, the next howled as his entrails were spilled tripping other orcs in bile and feces and flesh. The next died as a thrust speared his eye, and drove into his brain. The next found his weapon hand cleaved entirely from his arm, blood like a fountain, spraying Marcus’ and the nearby orcs. The next was also decapitated; another fell clutching his abdomen, another his throat, one screaming crawled off without his leg below the knee.

Marcus for his part was only warming up. The orcs were no match for him, even in greater numbers; they dared not get too close. He found himself chasing them back into their own oncoming allies. He leapt upon the approaching battering ram and swatted the heads from three of its haulers, then dropping behind it, to clove the rear axle with two quick, powerful blows.

From the ramparts and gatehouse, Aldothiir archers fired their arrows madly, supporting their frenzied commander. Orcs attempting to sneak up on Marcus from behind were holed through, the Aldothiir marksmen taking careful aim to put their arrows into the soft spot in the base of the great orcs’ skulls.

Marcus continued his ferocious assault, coolly dispatching orc after orc. Sparks flew in great arcs as his blade Marethuresa chewed through the enemies armor and then on into bone. In great droves the orcs fell, this one too slow, that one not strong enough, the next in the wrong place with his parry. The sight was magnificent and horrific. In decades and centuries to come, any bard who told the tale would begin by saying the traditional lines “Though story teller I be, I have but a few of the words that do justice to the heroism of those who stayed behind. And for your sake, I dare not speak the words that accurately explain the violence unleashed by the Lord Marshall.”

Balthasar saw the battering ram collapse and drew his own blade. “Time to die with a hero!” He called, leaping from the gatehouse ramparts. A cheer went up amongst the Aldothiir elite, who leapt after him into the fray, great peals of thunders followed upon their heels.

7.

Zarana, her handmaidens and the queen’s entourage were among the first Aldothiir to actually pass through the gate. The sensation was sickening, painful even. As the world resolved itself once again and time took up its normal march, Zarana found herself dismounted, one of her Handmaidens was gathering the horses, another trying to awaken those who had fallen unconscious. The sky was a brilliant azure stippled with daisy-seed clouds. Beneath her was a soft earth with grasses and foliage growing up between her fingers. A dense forest spread out around them, its canopy thick and the wind smelled sweet and stick, like fresh sap. As Zarana took in her new world, more and more Aldothiir began to materialize. It looked as if their spirits were materializing first, then their bodies.

“We’ve made it,” she whispered aloud.

8.

Balthasar was killed when an orc crushed his knee with a heavy iron mace, and then on the return swing, stove in the young warriors face. Taken over completely by his bloodlust, the orc swung twice more, pulping the young Aldothiir’s skull.

Next to Balthasar was Tutra A’lis, another of the Lord Marshal’s students. He died when a heavy black blade landed on his shoulder and sunk deep into his body. The orc swinging the blade put his foot on Tutra’s chest and pushed off in order to free his broadsword from his victim’s corpse.

Pareth of House Narh, one of the few nobles to stay behind, was bleeding from a hundred minor cuts, nicks, and wounds when finally a combination of blows knocked his helmet free and sunk a blade into his face, across the ridge of his nose and bursting his eyes. He died a moment later as he was decapitated.

And so it went, as the elite of the Great Aldothiir nation fought desperately to buy time for their beloved queen and their friends and families. The enemy paid sorely for every foot of ground they advanced, the butcher’s bill counting well into the thousands of limbs, hundreds of heads, hundreds of thousands of buckets of blood.

Two hundred heroes fell that day, as the sky turned vile and the earth melted away around the Great Aldothiir city.

As for Lord Marshall Marcus Tenibrass, it was the last time he was seen on that world, chasing after the Orc Chieftain Askevar himself…

9.

It took two years to build a settlement with a high enough wall to consider it safe. The Queen of the Aldothiir, who had known Zarana from a very young age, bade asked her to marry her last remaining son, Reenoran. Tired, and heartsick for the home she knew she’d never see again, for the friends she’d lost on that tragic day, Zarana quietly agreed, and retired from her life as Handmaiden and Protector of the Queen. She was became a princess, and simply existed.

It was difficult for her, watching the younger Reenoran try to rebuild the Aldothiir nation. The Queen seemed to have aged greatly since that day, since the Battle of the Gate, and she quietly withdrew from public life. The Aldothiir people, barely twenty thousand of them, could get on without her, she said.

Often she called Zarana to her to share honeyed drinks or wine. The Queen would ask stories of Zarana’s adventures in her service, and sit quietly listening to the tales. This always made Zarana sad, though she tried to hide it from the Queen. Each story included Marcus, the lost Lord Marshall. The Queen noticed this and one day spoke of it.

“I know, Zarana, that you do not love my son as you might have loved others.”

Shocked, Zarana shook her head in denial, and stammered an explanation. Had she been unsubtle? Had she been cold or callous towards the prince in some way? During some official function?

“Shh. Child. Mightiest of the Handmaidens you may be, but I am three hundred years older than you. I see, still. I know.”

“Your Highness-“

“Shush. Bear him a strong son, and get you a headache. We’ve lost so much. You and I, Zarana, our lives were never our own. Yours was mine, and mine was theirs.” The Queen gestured to the growing city their balcony overlooked. Zarana turned her head and saw the chimneys of forges, signs of industry, the market was bustling and hawkers could be heard over the laughter of children in the streets. A town had grown up around their refugee camp, and commerce had begun and the young were once again being trained in the disciplines of the arts, craftsmanship, war and even magic. The Aldothiir people would live.

“My queen.” Zarana bowed her head.

The Queen stood and left, her skirts rustling as she did so. As she moved past Zarana, she touched her shoulder and squeezed it.

Visit the original post, Exodus, by Eric Staggs, at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

Silver Surfer © 2012 DEZE via http://deze.deviantart.com/

An RPG Blog Carnival Post

Once again – Happy New Year to all you readers out there! This month’s RPG Blog Carnival post is taking us to Fantastic Places.

After role-playing for so many years in so many different genres, systems, and settings, I have grown bored with the 10 foot hallways, random villages and wooded areas just as this month’s host, Keith J Davies, has. What this boredom has led me to in recent months is to blur the lines between the different genres. Often times people will see a laser gun in a fantasy game and say “Eeww, you got sci-fi on my fantasy!” I, however,  like to think this is what veteran gamers need to keep gaming enjoyable. There are only so many times I can play a moody, brooding vampire in the modern day without having a want to travel into VR space or live in ancient days and control cavemen.

So, my fantastic place is meant for a fantasy game, but it can be used in other genres if you blur the lines one way or another.

The Ghost Outpost & The Great Beyond

The basic setting is a city of your choice, only this city has two things that make it quite unique. First, a small moon known as The Ghost Outpost is locked in a geosynchronous orbit with the world, directly overhead the city. This small moon blocks out the stars directly above and the light of the sun as it approaches noon each day. Within the city, the second unique feature is a wizard’s tower in the shape of a massive leaning “L” that towers over it’s surrounding neighborhood. Atop this tower is the only means to travel to and from The Ghost Outpost.

The details of the city are relatively unimportant – that’s up for the GM to design and should be tailored to fit the existing campaign. What’s important here is the small moon orbiting above this urban expanse and the teleportation device located at the top of the wizard’s tower. When activated (again, how this is done is entirely up to the GM), characters are instantaneously transported to the Ghost Outpost in the sky via a bright, but brief, beam of light. They then find themselves in a small frontier town of the same name.

Some believe the strange realm the hangs overhead in the night’s sky to be another plane of existence, but those who are knowledgeable of the planes understand that the Great Beyond simply sits upon the outer edge of the material plane; or the World at it’s center.

The Ghost Outpost
The Ghost Outpost itself is a small frontier town. This town is only settlement on the moon that dominates the sky over the city on the planet below. The residents of The Ghost Outpost largely live below the surface, inside craters and canyons that dot the surface on the asteroid.

The city with the teleportation hub is quite literally invisible to the naked eye, a spec on the surface of the World lost in it’s epic beauty. Characters who have seen maps of the world can look up from the shadow barren rocks of the Ghost Outpost and recognize the World above’s continents, oceans, and rivers that stretch for thousands of miles. Along the horizon line, the World and the Ghost Outpost share the same Moon – which orbits into view twice each day.

The World is visible in all its beauty to everyone who looks up, looming overhead like a great blue and white pearl in the sky. What little light that reaches the surface of the Outpost comes early or late in the day, or is reflected back up off the surface of the world from the passing Sun.

There is a fortified primary structure on the surface that is a transportation and commercial hub of the moon and the Great Beyond. It is run by a powerful merchant cartel that is fair, but expects everyone to on the moon to respect one another no matter what the dispute is over. This fortification is where anyone teleporting to the moon from the surface first finds themselves (such as the PCs). It’s a tough place, since most of the Outpost’s residents represent powerful noble houses and wealthy wizards from the World below. Nonetheless, the purpose of the outpost is to serve as a foundation on which expeditions can be staged for heading deep into the voids of the Great Beyond.

The Great Beyond
The Great Beyond is a deep, dark blackness that is filled with very few solid objects. There is no ground to walk upon. It is essentially space as we know it. To travel at a reasonable pace, characters have to rely upon Utineech, creatures that were first found after the discovery and establishment of the Ghost Outpost. The merchant cartels and noble houses use the Utineech as a means to explore the furtherest reaches of the Great Beyond. From fields of distant lights that punctuate the blackness, to floating bodies of rock drifting the depths of the Beyond; it is these places and more that hold the secret treasures of the universe that the nobles and wizards seek.

Utineech
As was mentioned above, The Great Beyond is navigated by making use of Utineech. These creatures are flat, board-like creature of super-animal intelligence. They are naturally docile when left to their own whims, but what makes the Utineech special is their psionic link they can form when first “boarded” by a World-walker. When a character steps upon a Utineech’s back, a link instantly forms with the character that allows the Utineech to take them anywhere in the Great Beyond they desire. The Utineech travel at exceptionally fast speeds, and confer near total protection to their passengers, often called Pilots, while traveling.

The tight knit bond between human and Utineech strengthens over time, and some Pilots have become almost acrobatic in their abilities to control the Utineech while in flight. Many of these “Dogfighters” have taken residence at the outer reach of the Great Beyond and often fly in groups to raid and pillage expiditions heading to explore new areas. Combined with spell casting and other forms of traditional weaponry, these space pirates make the outer reaches of the Great Beyond a terribly dangerous place to visit.

Couple this with space debris, sub-lightspeed comets, shifting asteroid fields, and blackholes and you’ve got a great place to run some crazy space fantasy adventures in the Great Beyond. Together all these locations are a compelling attempt bring a feeling like a 1980′s style sci-fi fantasy surf board riding action flick. Enjoy the idea and make it your own!

Anyone played Spelljammer lately?

Visit the original post, The Great Beyond – Surf’s Up!, at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

In April of 2011, I came home to Dungeons & Dragons after a 15 year absence. It was a decision made outside the vacuum of the TTRPG community, hence totally oblivious of the “Edition Wars” I’ve come to know about since that time. It was a decision made purely out of a desire to revisit an aspect of my life that had been integral to my development as a human being in my teenage years. It was a return I have not regretted for one second.

The first thing I did was I checked if D&D still existed. No, seriously: that’s how far removed I was from the TTRPG community. A quick Google search confirmed that yes, indeed, D&D had dropped the “Advanced” from its name and was currently in its 4th edition. Being an impulsive person, I promptly spent $200 through Amazon.ca on core rule books and other stuff. It never even occurred to me that people would still be playing previous editions of D&D – this was the new and shiny edition, so it’s the one I acquired.

You might be saying to yourself “Wait a second here…you bought all that stuff on a whim, without checking to see if anyone would play with you?”. That would be correct. I wanted to make sure I was committed to this before roping in friends and family.

That commitment did not take long to establish itself once I started reading the 4e Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide. I was instantly transported back to the wonderful world of D&D with its Armor Class, Initiative and Kobolds (with the happy realization that  THAC0 was history). I felt like I had come home to be enveloped with a warm blanket and a cup of hot chocolate. Without really thinking about it too much for 15 years, I realized just how much I had missed it.

Trips to my friendly neighbourhood Amazon.ca were now being made almost daily, as my hunger for D&D knowledge became insatiable. Xbox 360 controllers were left collecting dust as I suddenly preferred spending hours on end in my study writing a campaign for an as yet undetermined group of adventurers.

From then on, I mentally started working through a list of people who I would invite to play. Since this new edition called on a party of 5 adventurers as its basis for all stats, I decided to go with that amount. I settled on one returning player from our old group, with four 30-something newbies rounding it out (including my lovely fiancée – getting her on board was going to be key to spending so much time on this. Pure genius, that.). This endeavour was now getting real.

Let’s rewind a bit. Why did I seek out D&D again? First, there was the now-famous Community episode where everything revolved around a D&D session, which filled me with all kinds of nostalgic feelings. Beyond that, however, it’s obvious my motivations were completely selfish. I had been reading (for the 2nd time) Jack Whyte’s “Dream of Eagles” series, and started wondering if it would be possible to re-create the conditions that led to his re-imagining of the Camulodian Legend (namely, that the Roman Empire in Britain is collapsing and a group of breakaway legionnaires form a Utopian city called Camulod out of self-preservation). I had a fleeting thought that if I were still a DM I could recreate this scenario in the Forgotten Realms and use my adventurers as a case study in post-apocalyptic sociology. Yeah, I know – pretty Machiavellian of me. Despite this sinister strain, I forged ahead.

Little did I know that the Wizards RPG team had handed me a ready-made post-apocalyptic campaign setting with the Forgotten Realms’ Spellplague! I spent the summer months researching and building my own corner of Faerûn, encouraging my newly-recruited players to acquire their own copies of the Player’s Handbook and creating their characters. I also decided that, for the purposes of learning this new system and shaking off the 15-year accumulation of rust, we would play through Keep on the Shadowfell (with a few of my own plot hooks from which to build once Kalarel was defeated).

This unholy stew was brought to a boil, and what was served up was a cleric, a paladin, a rogue, a ranger and a wizard; a motley crew of traditional classes. I play-tested some solo sessions with a few of them to establish the overarching story before having the entire group meet in Winterhaven to begin to unravel the mystery of this death cult of Orcus.

I’ll spare you the details, but one thing I noticed right away was that combat was taking much longer than I had anticipated. I was enjoying the addition of a battlemat, which brought the visualization of combat out of our imaginations and into the physical plane. Consequently, however, our imaginations were no longer the limit of what we could propose in combat – everything now seemed accounted for and quantified by the rules. It was an advantage for me as DM but also a constraint for the players. I shrugged this off at the time, accepting it as the new way to do things.

Have you ever been on a strict diet for a few months and then been able to delight in a favourite food of which you had been depriving yourself? That’s the best analogy I can think of when describing how that first session went. We all felt it—even the newbies (only for them it was more like tasting delicious Indian food for the first time).

There is something distinctly unique that happens at a D&D table when things click that cannot be reproduced in real life. I suppose sitcom writers must feel that way when they’ve written a particularly funny episode, or when a music group experiences acute chemistry on a given night. It’s the feeling of having put your creative juices to work, collectively, and coming out on the other end with something tangible to point at and say “Wow, we did that!” That’s how our weekly D&D sessions have gone since September, and not one of my adventurers wants to miss an appointment, despite our busy lives.

For myself, I’ve gotten a particular thrill from seeing my creation come to life. I’ve finally found an outlet for my creativity that had been boiling under the surface, aching to be released. It’s left me pondering “Why was I away from it so long? Why did I even leave it in the first place?” Would you look at that: I just found the premise for my 2nd post!

Visit the original post, Back From The (Un)Dead: How a 15-Year D&D Hiatus Ended, at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

The heroes are trapped in our dreams...

Every gamer faces the same dilemma at some point: What game should I run next?

Well, this article proposes that you take two genres and slam them together to create something new. I took a light and frothy super hero adventure story, stirred in some gritty detective drama and created Slumbering Heroes, a campaign that lets you have your cake and eat it too. The Savage Worlds system is ideal for this sort of thing: it’s so flexible that you can use it to run practically anything. Not only is this handy for gaming groups that like to change the setting without changing the rules, it also means that you can easily create a mashup of two settings together to create something new.

Slumbering Heroes is a campaign setting that fuses the genres by using the weirdness of one to enhance the grittiness of the other. Though investigation and detective work are a typical part of most superhero games, and heroic action does feature in detective games, the idea here is to start the game with the two elements at odds with each other. Then, slowly, introduce them into the campaign. In Slumbering Heroes we do this by splitting the game into two sections: The Waking World and The Dream Zone.

For this campaign, the players are invited to create two characters, one for each section. The Waking World character should be a normal human adult, with a normal job, life and motivation. The only rule is that each of the characters need to be childhood friends, and ideally roughly the same age as each other.

The other character is a superhero. Ideally, the hero should be one that the first character dreams of being. Idealised versions of themselves are fine, but feel free to let the players go nuts. If someone wants to play a very small woman who sometimes wishes they were a big green giant monster, all the better.

The campaign begins in The Waking World. It is a world much like ours, but less interesting. Crime is rife and bravery is rare. Most people keep their heads down. They don’t so much live in fear as have lowered expectations. Another oddity is that they are no super-hero movies. The major comic book producers went bust sometime during the characters childhood. It really is a world without heroes.

The campaign begins at a school reunion, wedding or similar gathering perhaps. We want to give the players time to introduce their characters to each other, and this also gives the storyteller a chance to introduce other NPC’s, perhaps one of the character’s bosses is also at the party, maybe friends and family of the characters happen to be at the gathering as well.  It’s possible that the characters haven’t seen each other in years; childhood friends grow apart after all. As the celebration ends, the characters  head to their hotel rooms; by coincidence, all the characters are sleeping in the same building that night.

As the characters fall asleep, they find themselves in The Dream Zone. This is the magical land of the character’s childhood, a world that they have all completely forgotten about. A world where they are all superheroes. In this land, a strange magical creature welcomes them back (it can be a frog, a gnome, a wise wizard, anything really). The creature tells them that it has missed them, and that the strange magical land is under attack by terrible monsters (the more pulpy the better), and are asked to deal with one of the horrors on behalf of their strange guide. Once they’ve beaten up their first monster, they wake up.

As the characters start to get their bearings and get on with their daily routine, one of them becomes the victim of crime. They are rescued, however, by a heavily armed vilgilante who swoops off into the night.

This should be the basic structure for the game; every time the player’s succeed in a mission in The Dream Zone, more and more heroes appear in The Waking World.  The day time adventures focus on uncovering the mysterious appearance of these heroes, whilst the heroes fight evil forces in their dreams.

The reason for this can be as complex as you like. For example: Sometime during the character’s childhood, all the villains teamed up and made the supernatural magic in the world vanish- including all the Heroes. Somehow, though, they missed the player characters, who where only ever heroes on another dimension whilst they slept. Each act of heroism undoes the spell, bit by bit. The reason the world is so dull and tawdry is because villains rule the world, and only they heroic actions of the player characters in both lands can save reality itself.

What do you think?

Visit the original post, Slumbering Heroes – A Super-Powered Campaign Setting, at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

Seating at the Ouroboros University Amphitheater

The Amphitheater at Ouroboros University features a horseshoe shaped seating area open to the weather, though the stage and the seating closest to the stage are have a roof but no walls. Behind the stage is a five-story building, built in a Brick Gothic style, home to dressing rooms, costume and prop shops, a small performance hall, classrooms and professors offices.

What People Know

A character visiting Ouroboros University knows the following information about this chapel and cemetery with a successful History, Streetwise or Thievery skill check.

DC 12: The Mentzer Theater is the proper name for the place, though most people just call it ” The Amphitheater.” It is the site of musical performances, displays of magic, plays, operas, shadow plays, ballets (dwarf ones are surprisingly popular), kabuki dance drama and the like – all open to anyone willing to purchase a ticket (1). Technically speaking, the Amphitheater is part of the Department of Department of Histrionics, in the Music College.

DC 14: More than a thousand years old, the Amphitheater has been a part of the city for ages. The roof and theater building are recent additions, more or less, replacing the originals lost centuries ago.

DC 16: Bards and others may learn their craft and practice their skills at the Amphitheater. It is also home to amateur productions, giving students a chance to prove themselves. Jennifer Zamzanoble, noted actress and keen observer, serves as theater director and likes solving mysteries. (2) Musical lessons are available to any proffesion. (3)

DC 18: Zamzanoble hosts “salons,” or gatherings of intellectual, social, political and cultural elites, in part to amuse one another and partly to refine their taste and increase their knowledge through conversation. The nature of these gatherings has drawn severe criticism from the local nobility, who dislike the university in any event.

DC 22: Rogues and others may learn their craft and practice their skills at the Amphitheater and has managed to avoid entanglements with the local thieves’ guild. (4).

The Salon – A Murder Mystery

When the PCs attend a salon at the Amphitheater read this text:

“You are invited to attend a salon at the Amphitheater. It is an enjoyable event, a kind of low-key party featuring good drink, good food and good conversation. The topic of the evening is music and how different races handle music. Eldarin, from the feywild embassy in the city, stare at people when not assuring everyone their music is best as visiting lizard folk talk about their drumming techniques. This is cut short when a brief magical darkness descends on the room. When it lifts, a man lies dead in the middle of the floor, a knife in his back.” (4)

Setup

• Balatro, Human Knife Fighter
• Professor Zamzanoble, 12^th level Fighter
• Crudus, Greenscale Marsh Mystic
• The audience, made up of a few dozen eldarin, dwarves, humans, halfings, gnomes and dragon born NPCs.

Twisted in his soul by forces of evil (5), OU student Balatro serves as an agent of pointless chaos and violence. To this end, Balatro murdered Aduro, a songwriter, attempts to blame Crudus, a Greenscale Marsh Mystic and further plots to murder an Iron Dragon, who will give a lecture in a few days. Taking the initiative and successfully investigating the situation will earn the PCs Professor Zamzanoble’s respect and help for a future adventure.

This scenario provides a map of the over-all layout for the Amphitheater. The room in which Zamzanoble conducts the salon is on the second floor and doors lead from it to the balcony. This encounter requires no combat until the identity of the murderer is uncovered – until then it is an investigation, where the PCs accomplish their goals through skill challenges and well used magic.

Features of the Amphitheater

1. General Seating: The proverbial cheap seats in the Amphitheater. Attendance at an event in one of these seats costs 1 cp. This area is open to the elements.
2. Good Seating: Decent seating in the Amphitheater. Attendance at an event in one of these seats costs 1 sp. This seating section is covered, shielding it from rain and snow, though not winds.
3. Stage: The stage is huge, running 32-squares (160-feet) long and by 7-squares (35-feet) deep, except for a curved section in the middle, which runs 14-squares (70-feet) deep. Most performances use only the center.
4. Balcony: A balcony over-looks the stage. The balcony permits access to catwalks running just under the roof over the stage and Amphitheater and to the deus ex machinae, a 2-square (10-foot) by 3-square (15-foot) platform which can be lowered to the center of the rounded section of the stage by a series of pulleys and cranks.
5. Theater Building: A relatively recent addition to the Amphitheater (6), this large and impressive brick-Gothic building is home to home to dressing rooms, costume and prop shops, classrooms and professors’ offices.

Investigating the Murder

To investigate the murder, the PCs need to speak with people attending the salon, which includes members of all the player races and classes, with a preponderance of bards. There are four groups at the salon; a delegation of eldarin, a group of dwarves, students and faculty from OU and a party of adventurers accompanying Crudus the Marsh Mystic. Salon attendees were in different places across the room when the lights went out and each has their own perspective on the salon and Aduro.

• Eldarin: This includes staff of the Eldarin ambassador – he is not present and they do not have diplomatic immunity. They are attending the salon to explain to people about feywild music and to watch people the way people watch fish in tank.
• Dwarves: A group of professional mime accordion players (7) attending the salon out of friendship with Professor Zamzanoble and to prevent the eldarin from over impressing people with their bell ringing.
• Students and Faculty: While they come from OU, they are not a single group and do not share a purpose, aside from a desire to attend the salon. Balatro is in this group, as was the murdered Aduro.
• Adventures and Marsh Mystic: Among the adventurers are some OU graduates and Crudus the Marsh Mystic, who is a member of the party and seeking a patron, to gain admission to OU. She is an excellent drummer.

Skill Challenge

Level: 7 (XP 1,500)
Complexity: 4 (requires 10 success before 3 failures)
Primary Skills: Diplomacy, Insight, Perception

Diplomacy (DC 14): The PCs use the Diplomacy skill to convince the NPCs of their good intentions. A salon is about people talking to each other in a witty and well-mannered way and the murder has not changed this fact, though the murder has disrupted the evening.

Insight (DC 14): The friction between the dwarves and the eldarin is professional and not personal; several people liked Aduro’s songs but disliked the man personally, though they would not willingly admit this fact. Balatro is a disruptive presence.

Perception (DC 8, 14 & 19): DC 8 to determine the knife in Aduro’s back in one made by lizard folk, DC 14 to learn that Crudus, the Marsh Mystic possesses a dry, musky scent common to large reptiles and DC 19 to detect a scent of cologne on the knife in Aduro.

Secondary Skills: Bluff, Intimidate

Bluff (DC 14): The PCs can convince members of the audience they can be trusted, even if they shouldn’t be, to gain a +1 bonus on Diplomacy checks.

Intimidate (DC 20): Those attending the salon include a number of experienced adventures, whom are difficult to Intimidate, though it is possible.

Conclusion

The PCs receive information based on the total number of success achieved. If they fail, the city guard solves the case but not until after Balatro assassinates the dragon. If they succeed, the PCs determine the murderer before the second murder and make a favorable impression on a number of important people at OU.

Success: If they PCs accumulate 10-success, they are able to determine the identity of the murderer before the city guards can but not before Balatro temporary escapes.

Failure: If they PCs accumulate 3 failures, they do not pick up on clues and alienate people attending the salon to the point they are unable to conclude the investigation.

Additional Points

The PCs learn the following information based on how many successes they manage to obtain during the investigation.

• 0-2: Aduro and Crudus the Marsh Mystic had been arguing sharply earlier in the evening, until Professor Zamzanoble intervened.
• 3: A lizard folk dagger is hilt deep in the back of Aduro. When the lights went out, Crudus the Marsh Mystic was standing to the left of a dwarf mime, and when they came back on she was on the dwarf mime’s right side.
• 4-6: There is a lingering scent on the corpse of peppermint-scented cologne hanging about the corpse. Lizard folk made daggers are available for purchase across the city.
• 7-8: An argument between Aduro and Crudus the Marsh Mystic were not actually that severe, nor does the Mystic possess the ability to create a magical darkness. Balatro goes out of his way to create chaos and trouble for others, centering his life on conflict.
• 9-10: The dwarf mime says the scent of Crudus the Marsh Mystic always stayed near him while Balatro is one of three people in the entire city who likes peppermint-scented cologne (and the other two did not attend the salon).
• 11+: Aduro was killed by Balatro, who then attempted to frame Crudus the Marsh Mystic. Balatro bragged on owning a wand of dragon slaying.

Resolution

As he realizes the PCs are accurately piecing events together, Balatro moves towards a window. He jumps through the window in an excessively theatrical manner and flees into the night once the party accumulates 10 successes. Balatro could be chased down or, at the DM’s discretion, a trap could be laid for him when he returns a few nights later for an attempt to kill the dragon who will be visiting OU to give a lecture. And, sure enough, several nights later Balatro positions himself on the deus ex machinae amid the catwalks, to assassinate the iron dragon (with his wand of dragon slaying) who is giving a lecture on dragon mating rituals (8). Ideally, the PCs could confront him on the platform, which should lower to the stage making for a dramatic combat encounter. (9) Should they prevent the assassination and stop Balatro, Zamzanoble may act as a patron for those in the party wishing to attend OU.

Other Game Systems

Savage Worlds: Appropriate skills include Investigation, Knowledge, Persuasion and Streetwise. At a standard difficulty, a successful skill check reveals the paragraphs above, one paragraph per successful check.

Pathfinder: Appropriate skills include Diplomacy, Knowledge (arcana), Knowledge (engineering), Knowledge (history), Knowledge (local) and Knowledge (religion). Knowledge (arcane) reveals information only about the wizards’ school. Knowledge (religion) reveals information only about the seminary. Starting at standard difficulty, a successful skill check reveals the paragraphs above, though subsequent paragraphs increases the DC by +1.

—

1. This is an ideal location for social conflicts of some kind – the encounter above is an example – and to provide plot points, meetings with contacts and just oddness to color and fantasy world.

2. The theater provides a context for learning bard related skills, even for those who are not bards.

3. Zamzanoble’s courses are among the few places where the feat “Bardic Dilettante” are available.

4. On the sly, the theater provides a context for learning rogue related skills, for those who do not want to deal with those leg-breaking bastards in the local mafia. How long the PCs can go without the leg-breaking bastards in the local mafia catching them is a different issue.

5. There is nothing like good dinner theater.

6. Until recently, Balatro enjoyed a reputation as a respected student, though in recent months he has become a troublemaker and gossip monger. Who know what happened to the man?

7. The Amphitheater is almost 1,000-years old and the “new” theater building is about 100-years old.

8. They are good and in high demand at taverns across the city.

9. The iron dragon manages to make this terribly dull – most of the attendees are there for the following show, a performance by the dwarf mime accordionists.

10. The audience will think its part of the show, and the critics will decry the employment of deus ex machinae as an unnecessary device.

Visit the original post, Ouroboros University: The Amphitheater [D&D], at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

Angel Leigh McCoy

Angel Leigh McCoy loves writing.

Her fiction has appeared in numerous print and digital media, and in 2011 alone she published stories in the anthologies Beast Within 2, Fear of the Dark, Growing Dread: Biopunk Visions, Clockwork Chaos, and our very own Stories in the Ether with Charlie Darwin, or the Trine of 1809. Her contribution became our first stand alone work of fiction, an “illustrated novella” with commission art from Steven Austin. Not only is the story compelling and full of wit—but the artwork is gorgeous. It’s truly something special.

During the day, Angel gets paid not to be a fiction writer – but to be a gamer. She is a writer and game designer at ArenaNet, and part of the development team for Guild Wars 2. (Yeah – we think that’s pretty bad ass too). At night, she’s the Editor in Chief at WilyWriters.com. How Angel found time to write Charlie Darwin and do this interview is beyond me – so I’ll say she must be a magician too.

She began her career writing for White Wolf, Wizards of the Coast, FASA, and other RPG companies in the early 1990′s. At Xbox.com, she was the correspondent Wireless Angel.

We caught up with Angel just after the holidays and wanted to find out more about her work, her writing, and the inspiration behind Charlie Darwin.

[NMP] You’ve been a life long gamer and fan of horror and fantasy fiction, but when did your love of these things turn from “hobby” to “profession”? Was is something you set out to do early on, or something that just sort of happened along the way?

My love affair with gaming had a gradual beginning that turned, almost overnight, into a career. In 1991, some friends and I opened a games and comic store in Blacksburg, Virginia, the home of Virginia Tech. We called it Fun-n-Games, and it fed my addiction to games. It was a magical time, with many creative people all coming together. Several of us went on to careers in the games industry, including Shane Hensley who created Deadlands and Savage Worlds, and game designers John Hopler (writer), Zeke Sparks (lead content designer of Champions Online), Paris Crenshaw (freelance writer for Paizo), and Hal Mangold of Atomic Overmind Press. The creative cocktail in Blacksburg at that time was intoxicating. There were plenty of actual cocktails involved too, but that’s a story for another time.

A now-defunct gaming company called Chameleon Eclectic Entertainment also birthed in Blacksburg. CEE was making its mark with a TRPG (tabletop roleplaying game) called Millennium’s End. I was a close friend with the owner and game creator, Charles Ryan (better known as Chaz). I cut my teeth writing material for the Overlay Kit for his game. Later, I wrote a sourcebook called The Medellin Agent for him. In a bit of serendipity, he and I later went on to both work at Wizards of the Coast. He has had a long and successful career in the games industry as well.

How could anyone surrounded by so many creative, entrepreneurial, and gamelicous people not get swept along? It wasn’t entirely like being dragged by a current though. I had to actively swim toward my dreams, and it was hard but rewarding work. The games industry gave me the entrance I needed into making a career as a writer—something I’d wanted since grade school.

Angel at SteamCon 2010

[NMP] Writing for the gaming industry in the 1990′s was likely a very different experience than what it is today. Now that you have worked extensively on both on table-top and video games; what are the biggest differences and challenges of each?

The differences between writing for TRPGs and video games could fill a vast chasm. It’s somewhat like the differences between writing a novel (TRPG) and writing a screenplay (VG).

TRPG writers tend to be part of a very small team. They may have co-authors and prior world canon or an editor to guide them, but they are mostly on their own. Often, you can feel like you’re working in a vacuum, and the pressure of production schedules means you rarely get a chance to do more than a first draft.

In video games, you work with a very large team that includes artists, developers, programmers, marketing, testers, alpha & beta feedback, voice actors, and of course, your fellow writers. All these people contribute and affect what you write with their feedback and creative input. It’s chaos like you cannot imagine turning magically into a finished product that astonishes with how well-put-together it is. It can be challenging to sift through all the feedback and contributions, but with an iterative process like the one we use at ArenaNet, you revise and revise and revise until the material is just what you want it to be.

You have to leave the majority of your ego at the door, replacing it with discriminating taste. The ability to gauge whether feedback is useful or not is a skill that can be learned. More often than most of us like, you will have this amazing idea that’s going to be the best thing in the game, but when your co-creators see it, they cringe. Ahem. You have to learn to let go. And, you also have to be willing to champion someone else’s idea if it’s truly amazing or better than your own. Passion and creativity are everything in game design. Being unafraid to take risks is important, but you also need flexibility and a good emotional shield for when your idea doesn’t work.

Angel at Stokers Weekend 2011

[NMP] So, how about work today? You are a full-time designer for ArenaNet, how did you find yourself working on Guild Wars 2? (And… when is the game going to be released? [wink wink]

I do work full time, and I’ve been here for four wondrous years as of today. Before ArenaNet, I was working at Microsoft Game Studios (MGS) as a project manager. I’d interviewed at ArenaNet a couple times, been wined and dined by their previous writing lead, and had met the owners, but it wasn’t the right time. I had several friends at ArenaNet already, and I was a huge Guild Wars fan, but I just wasn’t ready to leave MGS. Finally, at the end of 2007, Bobby Stein, the new writing lead, approached me about applying again. So, I did.

Bobby likes to remind me often about how I blew off the first interview, and he had to call me and ask if I was coming. I’d had a total brain fart and lost track of time. Despite that, and despite the fact that I admitted to disliking Tolkien in the group interview with James Phinney, Jeff Grubb, and Ree Soesbee, I was hired. And I was ready. To my delight, the timing was perfect. I moved right into working on Guild Wars 2, and I’ve been crazy happy ever since.

That last question is the big one, eh? And, I cannot answer it because I don’t know the answer. What I can tell you is that we’re currently in Closed Beta and planning has begun for an Open Beta. It’s all extremely exciting, and the game is coming along smashingly. It really is like magic when it all starts coming together and you see what an enormous accomplishment you’ve contributed to.

[NMP] Any advice would you give for someone looking to break into the creative side of the video game industry?

Follow your bliss. That, of course, applies to everything, but with the video game industry, it’s especially true. There is so much competition out there that only those people who are truly passionate about games and about their own craft will make it in the industry. You have to constantly seek out ways to improve your craft and to make your mark in your field. If you’re a writer, then it’s simple: play games, write about games, make games. If you’re an artist, it’s also simple. Draw, imagine and re-imagine game worlds and characters. This goes for any job in the games industry. If you’re passionate about your career, then skill and opportunity will follow. Also, the not-so-secret back door into any game company is through testing positions. Many people start there and move up through the ranks.

[NMP] I want to ask you about the work you did at WotC. You worked with Sean Reynolds on the 3E Magic of Faerun supplement for Forgotten Realms. Frankly, it’s one of my most treasured supplements for FRCS (~no joke~). Can you tell us a bit about its developement? I’m always curious about the balance between “crunch” and “fluff” when it comes to RPG products and I find that the best products have specialists on board to develop each side of that equation. How did you and Sean balance those roles in developing Magic of Faerun?

Mmm—Sean. Love that guy. And you’re so sweet to say that! Thank you. So, I’m definitely more of a fluffer than a cruncher. Sean, on the other hand, can do both. Sean taught me a great deal on that project about game balance and statistical analysis of game elements. I knew, even then, that stats weren’t my forte, so I went into it thinking that my contribution would be in the stories and histories of the characters and groups. Sean and I worked well together and our styles blended delightfully. It remains one of the projects I’m most proud of.

[NMP] So, it seems your more into the creative writing side of game development. A “storyiest” as I call designers with that focus. What are your favorite sources of inspiration for your work? To date, you’ve published only short stories, why? Have you ventured anything longer?

Over the course of my career, I’ve taken inspiration from numerous sources, depending on and informing what I was working on. For example, back when I was putting out some really dark horror, I had just read Clive Barker’s BOOKS OF BLOOD. I also went through a period where I was removing everything extraneous from my writing, and I read a bunch of Ernest Hemingway at that time. There are two authors whose work I study: Neil Gaiman and Margaret Atwood. These authors have had big influences on my writing. Mostly, though, I take inspiration from life. I’m a terrible voyeur. I can’t go into a public place without getting sucked into just watching people, eavesdropping, and making up stories in my head for interesting strangers. Life is, after all, truly stranger than fiction.

I’ve always been drawn to the short form. I’m not a rambler. I prefer to be economic and efficient with my language. I like to construct a story, not just tell it. The short form gives me important boundaries that allow me to play with beginnings and endings, with tight character development, and zinging dialogue. Novels give you much more room to play and don’t require nearly as much conservation of words. With a short story, I can revise and re-revise until it’s perfect. If I did that with a novel, it would take me five years to finish it.

Having said that, it took me five years to finish my (unpublished) novel. I’m shopping it around to agents and beginning to outline the next one. Ultimately, I think it would make my mom most proud if I published a novel or ten, and that’s the real reason I do this.

[NMP] I absolutely loved Charlie Darwin when I first read it. The observation that Lincoln, Poe, and Darwin were all born within 2 months of each other is really cool. What made you think of this? Can you tell us a bit about the story’s genesis?

That fact was one of those obscure ones found on the interwebs. Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin share the exact same birth date (2/12/1809), although they were born on different continents. Poe was a bit older, born on 1/18/1809. I got to thinking about how these three men had been so influential during their lifetimes and afterward. Both Lincoln and Darwin had enormous social impact. Poe affected people on a literary and personal level. Quickly, I got to the “What if?” part of my thought process. What if there were some supernatural event that caused these three men to be so great? What if it happened when they were all nine years old? What if it had been done to them—on purpose? And I was off to the races.

In order to show that this event had changed them, I had to establish up front that they might have turned out very differently, so I did a lot of research into what their lives were like when they were young, what their parents did, etc. I wanted to see if I could find the alternate path for them, the one they might have taken if they hadn’t become extraordinary. Abraham Lincoln would have become a farmer, like his father. Charles Darwin was lined up to become a doctor, like his father. And Edgar Allan Poe could very easily have become a businessman like John Allan, the man who raised Poe after he was orphaned. Instead, they all had a great adventure that gave them different world-views and taught them that anything was possible.

I researched all three extensively, and you may find, while reading, that you see bits and pieces of their futures foreshadowed in the story.

Rytlock watches over Angel's desk at ArenaNet

[NMP] Well, obviously we loved it. Steven Austin apparently really loved illustrating for it as well. Now, can you tell us about your creative space and environment? I’m really interested in the connection between the creative process and where it actually takes place. For artists, it’s often in a studio or in front of their drawing tablet. For writers and game designers though – it can be a bit harder to nail it down. 

I have little choice about my workspace at ArenaNet. We’re all at desks in a big open room. Ree Soesbee’s desk faces mine, so I’m one of the lucky ones. My desk has a growing array of toys and stuffed animals on it, thanks to my awesome co-workers. And I have a plushy Rytlock (a character from Guild Wars 2) who straddles my monitor.

At home, it’s a different story. I have my writing chair. This is an overstuffed, extremely cozy armchair placed in the corner of my living room. Its upholstery is a burgundy/gray paisley. It has a floor lamp beside it and a book shelf for my coffee/Coke/tea/snackums. I can sit in that chair all day, writing with my laptop on my lap, and that’s often how I spend my weekends. Comfort is key. If you’re uncomfortable, it breaks your concentration and you fall out of the zone. Invariably, one of my kitties will join me in the chair, and that always helps.

I never listen to music or have the TV on while I’m writing. Even at work, I often have headphones on with no sound playing. It helps keep out the ambient noise and lets me focus better.

[NMP] What writing or game design plans do you have for the future (aside from working on Guild Wars 2, obviously)? Do you have enough time to pursue your interests outside working for ArenaNet? What can we expect to see from you in 2012?

Right at this moment, I am living and breathing Guild Wars 2, but that isn’t always the case. I have plans for WilyWriters.com, the fiction podcast I produce, in 2012. About mid-year, we will become a pro-rate market (you’re getting a scoop on that). In addition, FUTURE IMPERFECT: BEST OF WILY WRITERS, Volume 2, is about to be released. I expect to be tackling the third volume by the end of the year.

I’m always writing short fiction and sending it out for publication. This is my staple, like tater tots or Fritos. I have to have a bit of short fiction writing going on, or I go into withdrawal.

In addition, I plan to start writing my new novel, the one I’m outlining now. It’s a historical fantasy series, set in the late 1800s in Boston. If I do it right, it will be much darker than “Charlie Darwin, or the Trine of 1809.” I’m looking forward to that.

On the game design side, I can’t look far beyond Guild Wars 2. Once the game launches, I plan to play, play, play it! I’ll have earned it.

[NMP] Thanks Angel! We wish you the best of success and we’ll be sure to keep an eye out on Guild Wars 2 release—whenever that might be… [wink wink]

Visit the original post, Interview with Angel Leigh McCoy, Stories in the Ether Author & Guild Wars 2 Designer, at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

The Unofficial Official RPG Blog Carnival

This month’s RPG Blog Carnival is being hosted by K.J. Davies blog and the topic is “Fantastic Locations”. There have already been a good number of solid contributions from all over the blogosphere too, so make sure to stop by his early round up and check them out. I wanted to contribute as well, but I was having trouble finding inspiration – until I ran across the entry on Agharta in Jess Nevin’s Encylopedia of Fantastic Victoriana (EFC). According to Nevin, Agharta was created by Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre in his 1885 Mission de l’Inde en Europe. Although others claim that Agharta was created earlier by Louis Jacolliot, a French Official living in India, and is a variation of the Norse Asgard. There’s a fantastic bit of information on Agharta in Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth too (Google Books Link). Nevertheless, in the EFC, Agharta is presented as an underground kingdom that exists under Tibet where travelers who manage to reach it either don’t realize they are inside the earth or forget they traveled there if they leave.

If you are not familiar with Agharta, it’s a version of the Hollow Earth Theory and there have been many variations on Agharta since d’Alveydre’s death in 1909. It was apparently a reoccurring story destination in the 1940′s Amazing Stories series as well. What amazes me, dumbfounds actually, is that there is still a belief today by some conspiracy theorists that Agharta is a real place. Nevertheless, it’s a great source of pulpy, “Journey to the Center of the Earth” steampunk fun. Check out the crazy conspiracy theory map below. How could I resist?

So, how could we begin to frame Agharta up as a fantastic location for an RPG? I’ll give it a shot and perhaps you could add in your own additions to the comments?

A Map Agharta and the Hollow World

The Environment of Agharta

Between Nevin’s description and information I found elsewhere on the web,  it seems as though Agharta could be much like our own world, with a few major exceptions.

First, since there’s a small radiant sun at the Earth’s core that shines brightly to illuminate Agharta at all times. It sits fixed in the heavens above, unmoving. There is no night. Shadows remain fixed for all time. There is only one season, which could be summer or spring. The trees of Agharta grow immensely tall and perfectly straight. The forests of Agharta are vast expanses of jungle with high canopies of tropical evergreens. The deserts of Agharta are lifeless and hard-baked under a sun that never sets.

Since there is no day or night in Agharta, or days at all for that matter, the passage of time is difficult for outsiders to measure. In fact, the native people of Aghata—humans with forked tongues according to Nevins—live for centuries and seem ageless to visitors from the surface.

Paradesa & The University of Knowledge

Within the Kingdom of Agharta is the capital city, Paradesa (also known as Shamballah). Within this vast city of millions is the University of Knowledge where “all the treasures of mankind” are kept safe from the prying hands of later generations. The Arc of the Convenant, the Breastplate of Beowulf, the Thunderbolts of Zeus, and the Sword of Atilla are but some of the relics kept safe at the University. The monarch in Paradesa, known as the Sovereign Pontiff, commands the absolute loyalty of an army of a ten thousands soldiers. His most elite guard, The Templars of Agharta, are used to protect the University and to periodically venture forth to the surface world to retrieve artifacts deemed too powerful for common men. They make the trip using airships equip to handle the arctic chills and strong winds found near the polar ice holes of Earth’s crust.

Cover of "Amazing Stories", June 1947 - Agharta was central to "The Shaver Mysteries"

The Secret Masters

Unknown to the people of Agharta is a hidden race living within Paradesa who are not human. Aliens, perhaps, from Mars—or worse! These “Secret Masters”, as the Sovereign Pontiff calls them, telepathically control the world’s leaders and brightest scientists of the surface Earth. They are plotting for the annihilation of mankind everywhere and for the destruction of the entire Earth.

Perhaps the Sovereign Pontiff might find a few brave adventurers capable of rooting out these alien interlopers. The rewards could be… significant.

Or silly…

Visit the original post, Fantastic Locations: Agharta & The Hollow Earth, at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

Like a few other small press publishers (see links below), I like to make public our annual subscriber numbers, sales figures and site traffic so that our fans and other (peer) small/micro press publishers can get a sense for how we are doing. I already wrote about 2011 in a more subjective way last week, but this post is more about the real numbers. I’m obviously not making a self-sustaining income operating Nevermet Press, but I still like it when things go well and there’s some give back to both our readers (you) and our contributors (the authors and artists who create what we publish). After all, whether your new here or a long time reader, I feel like you deserve to know how we’re doing.

Subscribers

We’re pretty well hooked in to all the usual social media outlets. In 2011 I became somewhat addicted to Twitter too, so it’s no surprise that we’ve seen a big uptick there. What I don’t understand is why RSS has lagged behind everything else. All the stats below are have 2011 year-end numbers compared to 2010 year-end numbers.

1. RSS Feed Subscribers : 252 (190)
2. Facebook Fans : 1325 (894)
3. Facebook Post Views : 192,986 (55,585)
4. Twitter Followers : 1,641 (655)
5. Nevermet Press Insider subscribers : 1,088 (1,021)
6. Total Website Visits, based on three analytics packages
1. Webalizer 452,364 (297,367)
2. AWStats 238,587 (110,484)
3. Google Analytics 66,240 (n/a)

It’s awesome how our website traffic has grown, but odd that our RSS feed has stayed relatively modest. I guess RSS is dead? I’m not really sure. When I got started blogging about games in 2008 at The Core Mechanic RSS Feed Readers were all the rage on the interwebs—it’s funny how things have changed. In any case, I think in terms of fans who are reading our blog, and enjoying our site, I’m pretty happy. It seems like things are moving up at a good pace, and for this I have you (our readers) to thank! Hopefully in 2012 we’ll keep delivering!

Sales & Revenue

So, without further ado – here’s a breakdown of our 2011 sales figures (number of units sold or given away for free). All dollar values are presented as net revenue (as in after distributor and retail channel discounts):

• Total Sales 1,714 sales
• 445 : Stock Art
• 177 : Brother Ptolemy & The Hidden Kingdom
• 64 : Portrait of Villain
• 33 : Open Game Table, Volume 1
• 130: Open Game Table, Volume 2
• 68 : Stories in the Ether, Issue #1
• 30: Stories in the Ether, Issue #2
• 379 : Charlie Darwin, or the Trine of 1809 (note: these were all free giveaways on Kindle
• Total Revenue $1508
• $1294 net revenue from sales from Studio 2 Publishing, DriveThruRPG, Lulu, and Amazon
• $214 affiliate revenue from Amazon and DriveThruRPG
• Total Expenses $1549
• $598 author / artist payments
• $510 advertising (Google Adwords, Facebook Ads)
• $441 printing costs, hosting and service charges
• Net Profit / Loss -$41

So – we fell just shy of breaking even. From a strictly financial point-of-view we didn’t do as well in 2011 as we did in 2010. However, this is largely due to a gap in new releases early in the year and several late (Q4) releases piled on top of one another.

Is this enough revenue for me to pay authors and artists using a traditional work-for-hire, or “up-front fee”, approach? Unfortunately No. For 2012 I’ll stick to our existing model of shared royalties. It’s not for everyone, but it’s the best I can do. One of my top goals for Nevermet Press is building enough revenue up to the point where I can afford to pay all the bloggers who contribute to the blog and pay up front for the writers and artists contributions to published projects. Hopefully in 2013 we’ll turn the corner.

Conclusions?

As “small press” publishers go – 2011 had pretty paltry sales numbers, but I still feel like we’re very early in our development. I suppose as a micropress though, I’m not really too worried about raw sales numbers anyway. I stand behind what we are producing and I believe in it. That’s what counts.

We have a great blog, a fantastic community of fans, and we produce excellent products. We’ve also been blessed with the contribution from some amazing writers and killer artists. Things are moving up, and word will spread. It just takes time. Nonetheless, I’m hopeful that in 2012 we will see a at least a 25% growth in sales and a doubling of our subscriber or fanbase. My fingers are crossed.

So tell me – how are we doing? What are we doing right? What do you think we could be doing better? Leave a comment below and give me your 2¢

Keep reading and sharing.

All the best,

– Jonathan.

Here are some links to a few other RPG publishers who write about their sales numbers:

1. Third Eye Games
2. Sword’s Edge Publishing
3. How Not To Run A Game Business
4. Avalon Games muses on 2011 in review
5. Rite Publishing also reviews 2011 publishing success 
6. There’s a commentary on the “Death of the industry” for table top RPGs over at NOISMs blog. The comment stream is a great discussion.

Visit the original post, 2011 – Fans, Visitors, and Sales, at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

The Gorgon, Illustration © Paul Hagwood

She sat curled and despondent, looking into the still waters of the reflecting pool. It was not much company, but over her long years of solitude she had grown accustomed to talking to her reflection there and, after a time, she realized the watery image spoke back.

Outside her thoughts the day was brilliant, the sun a bright blazing orb whose rays spilled over the ancient castle walls and into the courtyard to warm her skin. Her glistening hair curled about her face. She touched the water with the tip of one fingernail, watching the image shimmer and coalesce. Her companion was quiet today. Perhaps the image knew the assurances it once gave were no longer so assuring. Once she had dreamt of the joys of companionship, of a suitor, but it seemed none would ever be found worthy of her hand. She was destined to live alone within these centuries old rocks. In grander days, this place played host to kings and queens, and in that day there had been many worthy men to try and take her hand. But no longer.

Her gaze drifted about the edge of the water and stopped upon the form of a large predatory cat preparing to drink. The cat’s eyes peered upward, forever transfixed in startled feline apprehension, muscles tense to spring away with a leap that never happened. She reached out, wistful, and touched the stone cat, cupping its jaw in her hand. Not far from the cat was a sparrow laying on its side, unbalanced from the transformation of downy feathers to solid rock. Similar creatures were scattered all over the courtyard—a fox, rabbits and squirrels, a deer. Many showed signs of age, their stone forms weathered and cracked liked the crumbling facade of the castle surrounding them. Some of the stone shapes had disintegrated to such a degree one could only guess what they once might have been.

The animals were not what saddened her most. No, it was the rock-ribbed forms of her many suitors that struck deepest. And there had been many. They had come hot-blooded and fierce, weapons ready and minds sharp as daggers. And they had failed. Not one had been able to spirit her away. Not one had been worthy.

Over the years fewer and fewer had sought her out, and the people of the land vanished. Her heart had grown heavy and for a time she bemused herself wandering through the courtyard, giving each lithoidal man a name, history, and imagined future for them together. Many she had to prop back into standing positions. But the gritty men that spotted the courtyard never spoke back, and at last the game lost its charm. That was when she discovered the image in the pool spoke to her, whispering promises whenever she woke from her slumbers. And now, just as her companion had promised, her suitors were starting to come once more. She had awoken, and the people had returned. Still none had been found worthy, and so each night she let loose her melodious voice in a song of lament for one of her many fallen.

Her eyes fell to the pool. “When shall my True One come?”

“Soon,” the watery image replied.

“You’ve said that so many times,” she said, shaking her head.

The image shook its head back. “Time is different for you. Soon.”

“But why are so many found unworthy?”

“You know why.”

The reflection smiled. Yes, she knew why. For she was a Gorgon, the most beautiful creature in the gods’ creation. Her snake strand hair curled and twisted. Who could stand before her resplendence and yet live?

#

“Tis the foulest, ugliest creature under the heavens or above the abyss. Nothing can look into its face and yet live,” said Gunther, dropping his empty mug to the table with a thump that caused the young man sitting beside him to jump.

The five men sat silent in Ardy’s smoke-filled tavern, with only the crackle of wood burning in the fireplace stirring the air. The other patrons scattered about sat starring into their drinks, or looking outside at the approaching darkness that would swaddle their journeys home. Most had already left before the darkness could settle in. Ardy’s, once known for its rowdy clientele and nightly fisticuffs, a place where one was as likely to leave with a broken nose as besotted, had been doused. Because, in the end, Ardy’s patrons were but men, and what wandered the streets of Catharist at night was not. Anyone who was a regular could see how that was hurting Ardy’s patronage.

“You know what it is, then?” Sleschal asked, his eyes looking up from his own empty mug he had been rolling between his hands.

“Ardy!” Gunther’s voice, deep and resonating, seemed all the louder in the quiet. “More ale!”

The tavern owner nodded his bald head and tossed his dishrag over one shoulder. His neck was thick and bulging. You had to be a big man to keep a place like this in line, and Ardy was that man. What Ardy thought of this quiet change his establishment had undergone since the creature’s advent was hard to gauge. Perhaps he enjoyed the quiet, but Gunther would have bet a bag of gold he’d rather have the lost business back.

“Aye, I do,” Gunther said, returning his attention to Sleschal. “A creature from Legend, one lost to the God Sleep but that has now awakened once more to the world of man.” Bruchark, all red curly tight hair cascading down about his head and leaving his eyes in shadow, grunted. He pushed a knife across the table top, gouging out small splinters in the hard wood. “And who is this stranger with you, Gunther? Why have you called us here tonight? You risk much, gathering us all together like this.”

Gunther smiled, holding his mug up for Ardy to fill as he approached the table. He looked over the men gathered before him. Together, they were three of Catharist’s most dangerous men, notorious for their brutality, feared for their power. Bruchark, called the Red Shark, controlled the wharves and illegal shipping coming in and out of the city. Sleschal was a wiry man who oversaw all games of chance, parlors of indulgence, and helped people find ways to feed other, less savory, desires. And then there was Grtang, the Silent Blade, who as usual was keeping his own silent counsel. These men, feared and loathed, each with an Emperor’s Writ of Death on his head, fell under Gunther’s staunch authority. Yes, Catharist may have its Emperor. And then it had Gunther. Gunther knew who held the real power.

“All will be explained in good time,” Gunther answered, waiting for Ardy to leave the table. He trusted Ardy, not because he had so much faith in the man, but because Ardy also knew who held the real power, and big men could be made to disappear too. But there was no sense in just letting information slip. “Besides, I think the city guard has enough on its mind these nights without worrying about us.”

“I heard twelve men were killed last night alone,” Sleschal said.

“More than that,” Gunther said, “Eighteen of them, turned to solid stone where they stood. I saw them myself.”

“Then it’s true what the people say, about the families,” Bruchark said, taking a swig of ale.

“Yes,” Gunther said.

“Abominable.” Bruchark took another swig.

Gunther almost smiled. This coming from a man who earned his nickname for his practice of disemboweling those who opposed him and letting them watch as sharks ate their innards before casting them forth into those gnashing teeth.

“And it takes the infants?” Sleschal asked.

Gunther leaned forward.

“All that you have heard is true. Each night the creature descends upon the city on its infernal mission. All those unfortunate enough to run into it are turned to stone.” Gunther leaned back again and his lips twisted. “A little fact our Emperor forgets to mention in all his grand offers of reward to anyone brave enough to hunt down and slay the beast.”

Gunther had listened to the Emperor’s last offer, and had been close enough to look into the man’s eyes. The city’s beloved leader would have been apoplectic if he had known how close Gunther had been. What Gunther had seen in his eyes was fear. Fear of the creature, fear that the city would slip out of control. Gunther knew you could not let fear rule you.

“But why the infants?” Sleschal asked.

Gunther’s face darkened. He had committed a great number of crimes in his time, many bloody and callous, but he did not consider himself an evil man. But this creature, it was evil. “The Lore Masters say that only by eating the flesh of the newborn can the creature feed its power and prevent itself from falling back into the God Sleep.”

The men fell quiet, joining the silence that dominated Ardy’s tavern. After several moments, Grtang, his greenish-grey eyes piercing and hawkish, his ale untouched, said, “All this talk is well and good, but you still have not answered Bruchark’s questions. Why are we here, and who is this stranger that cowers at your side?”

Gunther nodded. “I have drawn you all together that we might discuss what our obligation is to the problem that now confronts our beloved city.”

“Obligation? Are you suggesting we should aid the guard with our own people to defeat this monster?” Bruchark asked, one eyebrow raised.

“More than that,” Gunther smiled. “I propose we destroy this monster ourselves.”

The men sat silent.

“And why ever should we risk that?” Grtang asked, at last lifting his ale to his lips.

Gunther’s mood darkened once more. “This creature, this beast, it hurts our city. It hurts our business. The guard is of no concern to me, but business is. And our business suffers, gentlemen. The creature is a plague upon all that is this great city. And,” Gunther’s lip curled, “the Emperor has now issued a decree that anyone able to slay the beast will be granted twenty thousand gold pieces and full amnesty for any and all past transgressions. They are even releasing some condemned in order to ‘earn’ their freedom. Our proud government’s way of thinning the city prisons.” Bruchark snorted. “Surely you do not think the Emperor would honor such a decree to us? His hatred for us burns like the coals at the bottom of the Fiery Sea.”

“The Emperor has never backed out of a decree. It is his devotion to principle,” Gunther let the last word flow out in a sneer.

“Then we send our best men. Our best men, and then we go before the Emperor with the beast’s head,” Sleschal said.

Gunther gazed quiet into his ale, and for the first time he did not quite meet the gaze of his compatriots. “I already sent our best men. None of them has returned.”

Silence settled over the table again.

“So you suggest we go ourselves?” Grtang asked, voice calm, but with undercurrents of dark doubt. “Sounds as if the Emperor has found a way to your greedy heart, Gunther. And a way to rid himself of you. Let this go.”

Gunther looked at his men with restored determination. “Is that fear I see in your faces? This? From the most powerful, accomplished men of Catharist? What opposition have we not been able to squash under the heel of our boots? We have made this city ours. Ours! Ours as much as the damn Emperor himself!” Gunther looked around, but no one dared look at their table. He lowered his voice. “We will face this terror. We will defeat it, like we have defeated all that has stood in our way. And we will do so with the Emperor’s gold and forgiveness weighting our pockets.”

The men looked at each other with unease. Sleschal ran a hand through his thinning hair, and Bruchark settled back with a grim expression.

“And him?” Grtang pointed to the silent form on Gunther’s left, a slight young man with brown hair whose head hung down, his body leaning away from Gunther’s large frame.

“This?” Gunther looked surprised, as if everyone should have known who it was, and thumped the young man’s back, making him spill his ale. “This is my brother, Tomas.”

“Didn’t know you had a brother,” Bruchark said, peering at Tomas with distrust.

“What’s wrong with his eyes? They look funny,” Sleschal bent forward to look at Tomas closer, but Tomas turned his head to the floor.

“He’s blind, you idiot,” Gunther snapped his fingers, drawing Sleschal’s attention back to him. “And never say he looks funny again, you cod.”

“Sorry, Gunther.”

“And what use is a blind boy to us?” Grtang asked.

Gunther reached his massive arm around his brother and pulled him close, shaking him with what could have been mistaken for affection if you didn’t know him. Tomas shivered beneath him.

“This,” Gunther said, “is the rabbit to our fox.”

A dry, flat tune filled the air, a grating cry running up and down the spines of each man in the tavern. The sound wavered, screeching like rats rolled in gravel, before lowering to a mournful moan and then bursting forth in a wraith-like howl. Ardy’s patrons began gathering themselves, quiet and heading for the door with quick gaits.

“And now it cries in pain and despair. The hunger will soon drive it into the city to feed, and we must be in place before our fox returns home.”

“Tonight?” Sleschal asked.

“Yes, tonight,” Gunther met him with a steady gaze. He was not about to let any of these men, loyal as they may be, slip off and change their minds to skip town. “There are four bows behind the counter. Gather them.”

“Gunther,” Grtang started, but Gunther cut him off, grabbing a satchel that lay between his feet and tossing it over one shoulder.

“I will explain the plan when we reach the castle ruins.”

#

Her serpentine lower musculature propelled her through Catharist’s dark streets, her viperous hair darting and tasting the air. She had to delve deeper and deeper into the city each night to find her quarry. The city had grown large and bulbous like some over-ripe fruit on a hot summer day. All about her were the sour scents of decay, rot, feces and filth. But above that, like oil on water, floated the pure scent of new life. It called to her, and she followed the trail unerringly to the window from which the scent billowed out in sweet waves. The window, like most now, was boarded shut with hastily hammered nails that reeked fear. She ran her tongue over her sharp teeth, then pried her fingernails beneath the wooden edges and wrenched a board off with a sharp snap. A soft sigh escaped her hair as the fullness of new life scent washed around her face.

Her eyes snapped up when she heard a creaking sound to see a man rising from a chair on the far side of the room. He had not risen to his full height when he looked into her eyes, and his stony form collapsed back into the chair, then tottered before tipping over onto the floor. One arm snapped off and skittered away with the impact.

The gorgon’s eyes went back to the sleeping innocence wrapped in cloth, and she ripped another board off. Her forked tongue flicked over her teeth once more as she leaned in to wrap her fingers around the soft folds of cloth.

#

“So Gunther is really your brother?” Sleschal had been ordered to help guide Tomas through the night. Tomas’s hand lightly grasped his elbow as the two picked their way along the pebbled path.

Tomas turned his head, almost as if he might be looking at Sleschal. Sleschal looked away under the intensity that ebbed from those bright, sightless eyes. He couldn’t help feeling that this boy saw more than what was gained by simple sight. Those blind eyes assessed, gauged, and judged. It made him uneasy.

“Yes.”

They walked in silence, only the scrape of their boots betraying them as they followed the dark silhouettes of Gunther, Bruchark and Grtang. The old castle ruins loomed before and above them, black obelisks stumbling up into the night sky only to fall apart. Below and behind lay Catharist, marked by flickering candles and encompassed in cold fear. Sleschal shivered at the thought of the loathsome beast winding its way through the dark streets, and pinned the true source of his feelings of uneasiness on that instead of the sightless youth. And why shouldn’t they be uneasy?

Sleschal found silence oppressive. His business, his success, depended upon knowing people, their weaknesses, their desires, hopes and dreams. Freeing their pockets with his slick tongue was his weapon of choice. It was hard for him to keep it still.

“You’re very lucky to have such a powerful brother.”

“Am I?”

“You don’t think so?”

“Why should I?”

“Look at…ah, forgive me. Consider his success. He owns one of the finest homes in Catharist. Most people with your, um, condition–”

“You mean blindness?”

“Yes. Um, most people who are, as you say, blind, are forced to live life as beggars on the street. You should count yourself lucky.” Sleschal cleared his throat. This conversation was almost as uncomfortable as the silence. He couldn’t remember his tongue ever failing him so.

“You think you know how I live,” Tomas stated, eyes fixed forward as he placed one foot before the other.

Sleschal shrugged, then remembered Tomas wouldn’t see the gesture. He opened his mouth, but Tomas was already continuing.

“Tell me, did you know our mother still lives as well?”

Mother? Sleschal had never even considered that Gunther had a mother. Of course he knew Gunther was born of a woman, as all men, but his concept of Gunther was much like the ruins they approached. They existed as a matter of fact, but what had brought them to their current state did not much matter.

“No.”

“And do you know where we live?”

“”No.” But by now Sleschal was sure it was not in Gunther’s fine home.

“We live in the Barrens. To be honest, I thought my brother had forgotten he had a family. He is ashamed of us. The only reason he brings me now is because he believes I will serve his purpose for slaying the beast. I am nothing but bait. That’s worse than being forgotten, don’t you think?” Tomas shook his head. “Never mind, I don’t expect you to answer.”

Sleschal was not surprised. How many times had Gunther warned them of the dangers of letting someone in too close? And how many more had he seen him callously use people for his own ends? Living in the Barrens was a hard life and it had hardened many a heart. He almost felt a twinge of pity for this youth.

“You sound as if you don’t believe your brother’s plan will work.”

Tomas shrugged.

“What do you believe it is?”

At this Tomas took a moment to consider, though he didn’t stop walking. Sleschal could almost see the cogs turning in his mind. He may be blind, but he’s a smart one.

“Some believe as my brother. Others say it was a beautiful young woman cursed by the Lesser Spirits, for her beauty rivaled their own. They punished her with a hideous form so that men would continue to worship them and not her. Others say such creatures are the offspring of the snake goddess Lilaeth and a human male. There are other, lesser known legends, but they all share this in common. To look into the eyes of this creature is death.”

They continued in silence for a moment, then Sleschal noticed the shape of what appeared to be a statue tilted against the earth. The area was dotted with them, most laying against the ground. Victims of the creature.

Sleschal swallowed and glanced back down at the town, wondering how far off the monster might be. Was it making its way back even now?

“Hold,” Gunther announced. His deep voice, even whispered, carried through the air. “Prepare to make ready.”

Gunther pulled the satchel from his shoulder and opened it, revealing several dozen arrows. Bruchark reached to grab one but Gunther warned him off with one hand. “Be careful, these are laced with the sap of the Black Mary plant.”

Bruchark’s hand stopped, then cautiously pulled one of the arrows out, holding it up to the starlight.

“There are six arrows apiece. Even one shot should be enough to slay this thing. Nothing living can survive once the Black Mary is in its veins.”

“If we get that one shot off before turned to stone,” Grtang mussed, also gingerly taking an arrow to examine.

“We will,” Gunther said, grabbing Tomas by the arm and pulling him before the others. “The beast makes its home in the courtyard. Tomas will stand by the water pool within its center, and we will fill the creature with arrows as it tries to turn a blind man into stone.”

“And if it gets to him?” Sleschal asked, looking at Tomas. Yes, it would have been better for you if he had forgotten he had a brother at all.

“Tomas is very quick. He can stay away from the creature until we have dropped it into a lifeless, bleeding bed of arrows,” Gunther said.

A clatter of rocks came from the darkened path, followed by a low humming noise.

“Shh. It comes. Quick, take positions in the courtyard,” Gunther said, keeping one hand on Tomas and indicating to his men where they should go with the other as they hastened inside. Then both of his hands fell on Tomas’s shoulders. “The pool is four steps behind you. Take this.”

Tomas felt something heavy but well-balanced pressed into his hand. He touched it with one finger and felt the cool, hard blade of metal. A dagger. He flinched as the blade bit into the flesh he had been running along its edge.

“This will protect you.”

“Yes, brother, I already feel much safer.”

Gunther hesitated, patted his brother on the shoulder, and then he was gone. Tomas could hear the creature approaching just outside the courtyard. He began to tremble.

#

She held the infant close, the warmth of its body radiating against her bosom. One hand propped its head up. The baby boy, still slumbering, tried in vain to nurse at one of her barren breasts. She made her way across the shadows of the courtyard, caressing and watching the child. When at last the infant realized no nourishment was coming, he let out a wail; then, as he sucked in air to let out another cry, his eyes opened and looked into her face. The small body stiffened, and the warmth evaporated from the boy’s body as quickly as innocence is lost. She continued to coddle him as she headed for a low wall overhung with ivy. The ground here was padded with tender grass, and there she lay the infant beside the lumps of other muted, hardened children.

“There, my Little One. Sleep now with your brothers and sisters. Soon Father shall come and I will wake you,” the Gorgon said, her eyes going over each child with solemn promise, her hands clasped beneath her chin, “and we will be so happy together.”

It wasn’t until she turned to go back to her pool that she realized she was not alone. Her tongue darted out, tasting the air. More suitors, come to win her hand? Yes! The tendrils of her hair coiled and waved, each snake strand twisting and turning. Like those that had come before, these suitors wanted to tease her. They thought they could hide behind bushes, old cracked columns and in dark corners. Except for one. He stood beside her pool in the open. But she could sense all of them, could see their heat radiating out in soft red glows, and could feel the pulse of their beating hearts echoing through the ground along with the anxious shuffling of their feet.

Perhaps one of these would be found worthy? The one beside the pool turned from side to side, looking for her. The bravest of them all. She would save him for last.

#

Tomas took little side steps with his feet, turning slowly, listening. He could smell the reptilian scent of the creature heavy in the air. Why hadn’t they shot it yet? What could they be waiting for? He heard rustling off to his left, a gasp, something heavy falling to the ground. His foot slipped, and he almost slid after. He drew it back, wet and dripping. There was more rustling, something moving fast.

“No! Gunth-!”

Sleschal’s voice, fear wracked, and another weighty thump. There was a rocky crack and shatter. Tomas heard the familiar twang of a bow letting loose, two quick shots, and felt the wind from one as it whizzed past his face. One shot skittered against the ground. He did not hear where the other went. Tomas held the dagger before him, disoriented. The urge to flee was strong, and his brother be damned. Gunther may have strong-armed him into this, but his fear of his brother did not exceed the fear he felt now. But he had no idea which way to go. He found it hard to catch his breath. He heard footfalls running towards him, and he gasped as a hand fell heavy on his shoulder.

“We have to get out of here,” Gunther said, his voice a heavy, thick whisper. For the first time Tomas heard the edge of panic in his brother. “Quickly now!”

“The others?”

“They can’t be helped. Move!”

“Which way?”

And then his brother was pulled away from him, his grip pulling Tomas along and causing him to stumble before losing its hold. His brother grunted and groaned as he struggled. Then came a wretched, inhuman voice, and his brother screamed. Something heavy fell against Tomas’s leg and knocked him to the ground with a cry.

She grabbed the big man first. He was a strong one. He would make a good father if he was found worthy. But he didn’t want to face the test. After seeking her out, he now clinched his eyes closed as she pulled him close. He was full of power, yes, but not as strong as she. There had been so many like this, those who thought they could change their minds after coming to her. She knew how to discover their worthiness. She held his body in her serpentine coils and wrapped her hands about either side of his head, and she began to squeeze his skull.

“Open your eyes,” she cooed.

The man grunted and heaved, a defiant scream issued in her face, but at last his eyes opened, the orbs popping out of their sockets as his skull bones cracked. And she saw, with some disappointment, the eyes hardening even as they tumbled to dangle against his cheeks. She let loose the man’s body, and it toppled backwards into her last remaining suitor, knocking him down. He lay there holding his leg with one hand, looking at her.

Her twin hearts surged. Could it be true? Her True One had come at last? It must be! This man looked into her eyes and remained whole! This man was worthy. She watched as his fingers touched the stony man who had fallen beside him, but his eyes remained on her. Tears flowed from his eyes, tears of joy that they had found each other at last. She slid around him, reached down to take his hand and pulled him up close against her. He was warm, warm like the children. But larger and more vibrant, like a man should be. She could feel his pulse beating fast and heavy, an indication he was as excited as she. She smiled.

“My love. My True One. I knew we would one day be together,” she said, rubbing her face against his. “I’ll go wake the children.”

#

He ran his hands over his brother’s cold hard body, and he knew from the misshapen feel of the skull that it had been crushed before his brother died. He struggled to pull himself up, using Gunther as leverage. Fear, pain and loss filled him, and he felt the warm streaks of tears roll down his face. He heard the monster moving, the dry rasp of its skin against the ground, and sensed it all about him. He knew it was his turn to die. He shuddered, and his breath came in small rapid intakes as the creature drew him in and pulled his hand across one breast. It w as soft, but slick and cold like no human woman, and then his fingers touched the hard reptilian scales that began at the creature’s waist.

Its face came in close and nuzzled him. Its breath was like air from the depths of the earth, stale and rancid. Its cold flesh rubbed his face, its hair slithered through his and licked his skin, sending an involuntary shiver down his spine. It made a sound, something that may have been language, but guttural and grinding, marbles rubbed together. That was when Tomas remembered the dagger. It rested in his other hand, there but forgotten. His grip tightened, and with a violent heave driven by fear he thrust it as deep as he could into what he hoped was the creature’s chest.

It let out a hideous cry, all anguish and pain and betrayal. Blood spilled over his hand. Not hot like a human’s, but a lukewarm sludge. He pulled the dagger out and thrust again. The creature’s hair hissed and bit at him, sinking their tiny fangs into his face, spitting poison into his eyes and mouth. He felt his face going numb even as he pulled the dagger out to stab at the thing once more. This attempt was weaker. His head spun, and he had lost all feeling. If it was possible, it seemed his world grew even darker.

#

Why? Why? Why? Her mind gasped when her True One turned on her. As the dagger plunged into her a second time, sliding into her left heart again, it was the realization that her dream would not come true that pained her most. At last she managed to pull away from him and hurled his traitorous body across the ground. Not worthy! But she sensed he had undone her. She gasped and squirmed over to the reflecting pool, to the image that now billowed out thick, rustic blood.

“Why?” she asked. But the image only gaped back at her. She looked over where the ivy hung. “The children…”

Her body collapsed into the pool. It was several hours before her tail stopped twitching.

#

Tomas woke to something cool, slick and soft covering him. He beat at it, thrust his arms against it, stretching it over him, until at last he realized it was only a bed sheet. Nausea filled him, and he fell back into a soft, goose feather pillow. His face felt swollen and heavy, and his leg ached. He turned his head. He sensed he was not alone, and he lay still.

“Who’s there?” Tomas asked, his voice hoarse and trembling.

“Is he lucid now?” a voice asked.

“I believe so, majesty. You may try speaking with him.”

“Young man, I am Emperor Cortann. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” Tomas said, relief flooding through him. “How did I get here?”

“A group of soldiers went up to slay the beast that plagues our city. Imagine their surprise when they found the beast already dead! And you, lying there half-dead yourself. You’re either a very brave, or very foolish, young man.”

“It’s dead then?”

“Yes. When you are feeling up to it, you must tell me how you accomplished such a feat. In the meantime, I believe you are entitled to a reward. Twenty thousand gold pieces, I believe. Congratulations, you’re a rich man.”

Tomas swallowed. “I’m not interested in the gold.”

“You’ve earned it, young man. You took a great risk, and have freed our city from a terrible danger. We are all indebted to you. Someone who has done such a duty for this city will not go unrewarded.” The Emperor paused. “The healers say you should recover from your wounds soon enough, given time. The only thing, I’m afraid, is your eyes. The poisonous effects could not be reversed. They say you won’t get your sight back. I’m sorry.”

And despite how ill he felt, Tomas laughed.

END

Visit the original post, The Gorgon’s Love, by Martin Shelby, at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

Picture a dimly lit basement in which a game master is reading a description.

“The hallway ends in a rotting door. Gaps in the wood allow you to catch a glimpse of a hyena shaped head. You can clearly hear the voice of the gnoll leader that you have been tracking addressing some of his minions.”

One of the players at the table jumps at the opportunity: “Sarnash isn’t even going to bother breaking the door down. I’m going to charge and swing my sword right through the door and into the gnoll!”

Although there may be no rule that addresses making such an attack specifically, the GM decides to let it happen anyway. He decides to add a few points onto the armor class of the gnoll to represent the resistance of the door and tells the player to go ahead and roll.

The player rolls a one.

And so ends a moment that could have been Awesome. Under a strict interpretation of the game rules, Sarnash may have failed to even break down the door. Or perhaps he tripped and is now laying sprawled out in the hallway. The gnolls have been alerted and combat follows. The PCs will probably win the fight, but the player playing Sarnash won’t come away from the victory feeling good about it. Not only will he likely be left thinking that his character is a clumsy oaf, but an opportunity for Awesome will have been missed.

Is this really the way things had to turn out? Sarnash isn’t a clumsy oaf. He’s Sarnash the Barbarian from the savage West Lands! He’s strong enough to bend iron bars! He’s been in combat countless times. He swings a mighty magic claymore that has cleaved the heads off a hundred orcs! This guy… tripped?

How about instead of having Sarnash trip, he instead cleaves the door in two? He still misses the gnoll, but he scares the hell out of everyone in the room and forces a surprise check.

I’m not saying that players should never fail. I’m suggesting that failure does not have to be humiliating. If the price of failure is too great, then players play conservatively and every game seems the same. Instead, let your players be as Awesome as the ideas they come up with. If a player comes up with an exciting move, find a way to make it work. If it doesn’t succeed, don’t punish the player for coming up with a good idea followed by a bad die roll. Make something awesome happen. If the roll succeeds, make something really Awesome happen.

The role of the GM should not be an adversarial one. He or she offers challenges to players, not to torment them, but to give them a chance to do incredible things. A GM can create the best adventure ever written, but if the players are unenthusiastic, the game will still be dull. A role playing game can be thought of as collaborative movie script writing. The game master brings the plot and the settings, and the players bring the action heroes. The goal of everyone, both players and the GM, is to create something Awesome.

The chance of failure still has to be part of any game, but failure need not be boring or demoralizing. Player characters should not die by some insignificant act of fate. If a player character must die, let it be a glorious act of self sacrifice. Let it be the kind of death that inspires monuments to be built. A role playing session’s highest success is when the players, even ones whose characters died, remember the game with a smile.

When folks make the time to game, they are there to get away from the mundane, so leave the mundane world behind. If a player comes up with a crazy idea, reward them. The fantasy world is where we can take risks without fear of consequences. Let all the outcomes be incredible.

Allow your players to be Awesome.

Visit the original post, Allow your Players to be Awesome, at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

On Friday I wrote about the ups and downs of Nevermet Press in 2011 – now it’s time to look ahead into the new year that is upon us. What can we expect from Nevermet Press this year? Well, for one I’m going to be more conservative (read:less ambitious) so that everyone’s expectations can be in check. As for specific projects – it’s very reasonable that you will see the following coming your way.

Stories in the Ether in Print

After a full year of Stories in the Ether, my plan has always been to wrap up the first four issues of the ePUB and publish a collected anthology of the entire year. It will be a big-book with over 50 stories and dozens of full-color illustrations. If everything goes as planned – it should be a gorgeous book chock full of amazing fiction. Some people have asked if I’ll be using Kickstarter at all to launch this step in the Stories in the Ether project, and I’m not sure yet if that’s the right approach to take. So, the jury is out so to speak.

Our First Full-Length Novel

I’ve been editing a novel by author Michael Manogue for the last few months and I plan on publishing his novel in 2012. I can’t say much more about this other than it involves werewolves and a German squad lost behind Russian enemy lines during WWII. It’s a great story – and I’m sure everyone here who reads our site will enjoy it.

"Alchemical Vampire", Illustration by Rob Torno

Pathfinder Steampunk PDFs

As a lead up to active development of Loaerth & Feywyrd, we’ll be releasing a few stand-alone Pathfinder RPG supplements as a prelude. The series, tentatively titled “The Steampunk Folio”, aims to provide steampunk elements, monsters, and NPCs for anyone to drop into their existing campaign. Artist Rob Torno has already produced a collection of undead creatures for our first release “The Steampunk Folio : Undead”. His art is shown above—it’s awesomesauce. The game development aspects are being done my yours truly and Jerall Toi. The first supplement will be available sometime in February.

That’s about it. Of course, I’ll be contributing to the blog on a regular basis and trying to get contributions from the community as well. Keeping a mix of stories and games is our niche, so that will continue to be the focus moving forward.

So, with that – HAPPY NEW YEAR! 

Visit the original post, Looking Ahead Into 2012, at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

Looking Back at 2011

Well, 2012 is just around the corner folks. Today, I’d like to take the opportunity to review where we’ve been and what we’ve learned in 2011. It’s been an interesting year for Nevermet Press, to say the least. If you’d like to see the real numbers (in terms of sales), jump over to this other post.

Promises, Promises

First, more of an apology. Long time fans of Nevermet Press have seen the ups and downs first hand, and Nevermet Press Insider subscribers got even a closer look at our developments as we’ve plodded along here. In 2010 I had these crazy ambitious goals that we would publish three books in 2011 – all of them RPG gaming books. Looking back on a post from January, 2011 it reads like the insane ramblings of an editor trying to bite off way more than he can chew. Yeah, that’s me.

Among my plans was much touted Dead Queens of Morvena campaign setting was scheduled to be released last Spring using the Savage Worlds Roleplaying Game as the base system. I even had T-shirts made and pimped the “soon to be released” campaign setting quite a bit at SynDCon in April. In short, for a variety of reasons and much to my embarrassment, it never materialized. I no doubt pissed off a whole crew of artists who supported the project, and one very capable writer who worked hard on the project for several months as well: Charles Dickey. Our differences over the direction of the project eventually led to Charles leaving Nevermet Press, and eventually the laying to rest of the project.

So, to Charles, Matt, MrLich, J, and Rob – you have my most sincere apologies for totally fucking up that project and failing to deliver your hard work to our fans. To the fans of Nevermet Press, I want to thank you for sticking with us despite the troubles we ran into earlier in the year. I hope you’ll continue to stick around and share our creative works with your friends in 2012.

What 2011 Brought

Now, on the bright side, I think I did have at least one good idea: Stories in the Ether. In March it hit me like a ton of bricks. There I was reading and loving FANTASY and Lightspeed (now one journal) and thinking, “This rocks! I should totally do something like this for Nevermet Press!” You know what they say too — Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Now, Stories in the Ether is of course its own thing and we have a long way to go to get it where I want it. But, it is something that I’m cultivating with care, and so far I’ve been quite happy with the results. We’ve published over 40 (!) fantastic stories along with some incredible artwork. It’s a project I’m quite proud so far, and I’m really looking forward to it expanding in 2012.

As for gaming and RPGs, while we didn’t publish any gaming books per se, we have seen a steady flow of excellent gaming articles on our blog from nearly a dozen authors. I like to think that just as many of our fans today come here for RPG content as they do for the fiction and the editorials. One shout out I want to specifically make is to The Grumpy Celt who continues to write and produce innovative, serial content for 4E D&D. His series on Grave Sites was excellent, and we plan on developing it into a full-fledged RPG product in 2012, so stay tuned for that.

2011 also brought us a huge expansion to our Stock Art Catalog. That’s right. I know to many of our fans this may not be all that exciting, but for some small press publishers it’s been a great resource. We offer high quality, royalty free stock art at an affordable price through our partner DriveThruRPG.com. If you’re a publisher, or a game master looking for some cool illustrations, take a peek. We’re currently offering over 70 individual illustrations and in 2012 I expect that number to go up quite a bit.

Twitter, Site Traffic & Twitter

One thing I’ve worked very hard on is promoting (aka marketing) our website and blog. Trying to reach potential fans who have a shared interest in speculative fiction and roleplaying games is not as easy as it sounds. There are literally hundreds of RPG blogs out there in the interwebs, and as many small press publishers like us. So it’s an uphill battle. They say “Content is King” which is true, but without an audience the content can be awesomely alone too. So over the last year I’ve made a commitment to connect with many of you on Twitter and Facebook. Our Twitter following has exploded (tripled) as a result to ~1,600 followers. We’ve also seen a huge increase on Facebook as well. As for the website – some say RSS is dead, which I tend to agree with as our RSS subscriber base has only seen a 20-30% rise is number. People just don’t use feed readers like they used to in 2008/09; back in the “heyday of blogging” so to speak. Nonetheless, our website traffic has been very strong and is currently pulling in an audience of over 25,000 people per month—double what it was in 2010. For that, I’m grateful because I know it means our artists and authors are getting the exposure they deserve. It’s been hard work, but it’s been something I’ve thoroughly enjoyed.

Before I go off the deepend and start rambling, I’ll end with this…

Nevermet Press is a labor of love for me and for many of the people who contribute to this site. We have a fantastic group of creative and energetic people contributing to this blog each week, and fortunately I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

To the authors and artists who have contributed to Nevermet Press; to the fans and readers of our blogs and new books; to our followers and fans on Twitter and Facebook: Thank you and may you have a blessed and truly Happy New Year!

Visit the original post, 2011 Year in Review, at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

We’re very happy to present our first novella: “Charlie Darwin, or the Trine of 1809″, by Angel Leigh McCoy. This fantasy steampunk fairytale explores the “What if” behind three historical icons: Charles Darwin, Edgar Allan Poe, and Abraham Lincoln. Three paragons of history, all born less than three months appart. What if something had driven them to become much more than they were? What if destiny – fate – had intervened while they were only children? Join them and find out what how their fates crossed on an airship to Avalon!

To celebrate this new release we’re offering the book for exclusively through Kindle Select for only 99¢. What’s even better is Amazon Prime members can borrow Charlie Darwin absolutely FREE for up to one month. In the next few weeks we’ll also be releasing a full-color print edition, and in April the book will become available in PDF and ePUB for all eReaders.

Download Now on Kindle for 99¢

Visit the original post, “Charlie Darwin, or the Trine of 1809″ Now on Kindle, at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

I am not all that much of a fan of steampunk—but, I wanted to get educated on the topic.  I thought, “Maybe the reason I do not like steampunk all that much is because I do not understand people’s fascination with it.”

I started my explorations to try to understand this phenomenon with the woefully useless source of Wikipedia.  With a little refinement of the searching, here was the result:

Steampunk is a subgenre of speculative fiction or science fiction that emphasizes anachronistic technology, usually from the Victorian age. It is also used to refer to a trend in fashion and music.

I wanted to dig further into what “anachronistic technology” truly meant.  Interestingly, there was not a single good reference from that search that did not loop back on steampunk or a similar topic.  At this point, I turned my search to anachronism instead.

An anachronism—from the Greek ανά (ana: up, against, back, re-) and χρόνος (chronos: time)— (ism act state and condition) is an inconsistency in some chronological arrangement, especially a chronological misplacing of persons, events, objects, or customs in regard to each other. The item is often an object, but may be a verbal expression, a technology, a philosophical idea, a musical style, a material, a custom, or anything else so closely associated with a particular period in time that it would be incorrect to place it outside its proper domain.

After reading this and applying the general knowledge of what defines “technology”, I started to realize that steampunk is much broader than I first thought.  I wonder if people have contemplated this aspect.  I think, if someone sat and thought hard enough, medieval fantasy, space opera’s and other stories could be lumped into steampunk.  The term anachronistic should apply to more than just technology for steampunk right?  It seems that much of the fiction I have reviewed plays with the realities of the Victorian age politically as well.

Now I have seen plenty of the fashion described as steampunk.  I’m a bit of a goth myself, and I had a hard time resisting a shirt I saw at DragonCon: “Steampunk, when Goths discovered brown“.  It was a pretty accurate statement, I would have to say.   Althought, I personally feel that dressing like this is sort of a gimmick.  But I will give an example of when I truly admire the fashion style: costumes of some typical archetype converted it into a steampunk variant.  At DragonCon, I saw a couple of guys dressed like British Colonial soldiers… done steampunk style.  Amazing!

When I saw music as a reference for steampunk, I could not think of what bands would be steampunk.  Someone help me out with this one! (EDITOR’S NOTE: Abney Park!)

One major problem that I have found with steampunk is that I feel it is often used as a gimmick.  Someone claims something to be steampunk just because there are lots of gears or boilers.  They might simply use steampunk to describe the style of dress of all the characters.  Finally, steampunk seems too often be put into the Victorian era for some reason.

Recently, I reviewed a “steampunk story” for Stories in the Ether*, that stood apart from the others.  What sold me was that, in this story, steampunk did not seem like a gimmick.  It made me feel like all the things that make steampunk a genre were needed to wrap the story up and make it enjoyable.

“Steampunk – a subgenre of science fiction and fantasy featuring advanced machines and other technology based on steampower of the 19th century and taking place in a recognizable historical period or a fantasy world.” – Dictionary.com

This definition is probably more accurate, but less interesting than the one on Wikipedia.  It really narrows the field, and unless someone can show me differently, the steampower of the 19th century could not do all the crazy and fantastical things that are done with it in steampunk stories.

Finally, the last bit of investigating was a simple Google Image search.  This revealed to me not just fashion, but also a number of modern objects that people have tinkered with to make them unique.  Keyboards, USB drives, cell phones, and other gadgets were there in droves.  This is the last part of steampunk I want to explore.  I am not a huge gadget guy, but I do love every bit of technology I have just as much as the next guy. If I succumb to the steampunks of the world, my gear will definitely look out of this world.

So – to the steampunks out there: here’s an opportunity to convert someone who is on the fence. Tell me why you love it so much! What makes it tick for you? I want to be convinced! And to those of you that are not fans of the genre, chime in and say Why!

Visit the original post, Steampunk: I Want To Be Convinced…, at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

Sign at the gate, with the new motto.

The fey city Ydalir is home to the oldest known university and the madrasah of the City of Brass educates creatures from across the planes who can survive voyage to the city, while for most students the University in Kadath is an unattainable dream. More accessible – though no less reputable – is Ouroboros University, located in the player character’s home city.

What People Know

A character knows the following information about Ouroboros University with a successful Arcana, History, Streetwise and Religion skill check.

DC 12: Ouroboros University (OU) is a point of pride for the city, a 500-year old institution of higher learning. An alliance of a wizards’ college, a fighters’ academy, a seminary for clerics and paladins, a school for bards and a general trade school forms OU. Here students learn many useful skills that might otherwise be unavailable to them. However, gaining entry to OU as a student requires a person have a patron, such as city hero, noble, influential merchants, faculty member (1). There are a number of similar universities across the world and on other planes.

DC 14: OU engages in expeditions to lost cities, ruins, foreign nation and other dimensions, as well as testing new tools, weapons and magic – and OU hires adventures to for protection and assistance in all of these activities. Notices for such employment are on the campus and at a local coffee shop.

DC 16: There is an exchange program, where students from OU attend an allied school for a semester while that school sends a student to OU. Also notable are immersive studies, where a student lives with goblins or something like that. OU has also produced a number of living constructs over the years, some of which are currently students.

DC 18: An endowment by a gold dragon created OU 500-years ago, funding the work of the wizards’ college, fighters’ academy and seminary provided the three schools pool their resources and worked together. The musical school and trade school joined later. A stylized image of the dragon appears on the OU crest (2).

DC 20: There is a tradition for professors who have just received tenure to deliver their next lecture without trousers. A walled campus, the gates are only guarded during a war and closed if the city is undergoing an invasion or a decent soccer riot. The campus pays for the raising of any students killed by professors, except during final exams. Some people assert the university is on a downward spiral after 200 some of years of high standards. The damage may be irreparable.

For the Players and the Game Master

Colleges and universities, in one form or another, have been a part of Western Europe since the middle ages. For example, the University of Constantinople dates to 425 CE, the University of Salerno to the 9th century, the University of Bologna to 1088 and the University of Oxford to 1167. As such, they were a part of life in some cities during the so-called “Dark Ages.”

Further, universities play in a roll in mainstream science fiction and fantasy fiction. Examples include Miskatonic University from Lovecraft’s fiction and the Unseen University from Pratchett’s Discworld books.

Given the history of universities, and their presence in fiction, it is possible to have such an institution in a fantasy game without it being an anachronism and to use it as a source of adventures.

Forthcoming installments in this series will detail important sites associated with OU, both on and off campus, important people involved with OU and the kind of trouble only a fantastic university attracts and creates. This includes the campus library, martial training grounds, theater and salons, haunted tunnels under the campus, a shifting hedge maze (3), two new races, weird campus traditions (4), dangerous people.

While this series presents OU as a single institution, a GM should cherry pick locations and adventures in a way that best fits their campaign world. Likewise, the series will map only important locations, to make the facility more flexible for home campaigns.

All of this will give the player characters will test the phrase, “You can’t beat a good education.”

Game System

The series will nominally be in 4E D&D, though much of the material is system neutral and articles present mechanical alternatives.

Savage Worlds: Appropriate skills include Investigation, Knowledge, Persuasion and Streetwise. At a standard difficulty, a successful skill check reveals the paragraphs above, one paragraph per successful check.

Pathfinder: Appropriate skills include Diplomacy, Knowledge (arcana), Knowledge (engineering), Knowledge (history), Knowledge (local) and Knowledge (religion). Knowledge (arcane) reveals information only about the wizards’ school. Knowledge (religion) reveals information only about the seminary. Starting at standard difficulty, a successful skill check reveals the paragraphs above, though subsequent paragraphs increases the DC by +1.

—

1. Or someone capable of getting away with giving a thorough thrashing to a city hero, noble, influential merchant or faculty member.

2. Missing for ages, the whereabouts of the founding the golden dragons – and its reasons for establishing the university – are a popular subject of speculation on the campus.

3. There is a stable gate to another dimension at the center of the maze, among other things.

4. Such as polo from the backs of giant chickens.

Visit the original post, Ouroboros University: An Introduction, at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

First off — MERRY CHRISTMAS!

The Krampus Christmas Carnival is finally over – so let’s have another look at Steven Austin’s kick ass artwork, shall we?

Merry Krampas, by Steven Austin

It’s been a crazy week – and we can all bet that evertyone had fun! Now it’s time to round up all the great contributions from around the net.

Looking for a story?

Colin Barnes writes about Krampus in his short story A Christmas Krampus Conundrum.

Fitz writes Twas the Night Before Krampus, a poetic retelling of a classic christmas story – now with Krampus!

David D’Alessio writes another steampunk inspired Scottish story in We Dinna Practice Christmas Here.

Michael K. Eidson wrote “The Old Country”, a short story where Krampus gives what is due to a sadistic boy who preys on others.

Looking for something for your RPG?

Troll in the Corner cast Krampus as a system-neutral NPC in a (free) PDF that can be downloaded from DriveThruRPG.com.

Two adventure ideas for a fantasy-based RPG are considered in our post on Krampus as the Perfect Anti-Hero.

Stargazer’s World gave us a view on Krampusnacht, an annual parade in some part of Germany and Austria that happens each year in December. But why? Call of Cthulu fans could take something away from Michael’s post for their own adventures.

The Other Side put together a Krampus NPC for Ghosts of Albion games.

Grab ten different types of “Krampus Koal”, OSR gear from Heretic Works

Tales of the Savage Troll put together three Krampus inspired NPCs for Savage Words: WereSanta, Tinkler Girl, and Black Santa (Krampus). Plus some great backstory too!

Hank Hawell put together a One-Page Adventure for Krampus for players of Risus.

Over at Wampus Country, you can find some great Krampus inspired races including the Krampus-Kinder. Awesome!

Beware! The Krampus Curse for Pathfinder RPG showed up at the Sea of Stars RPG blog.

Speaking of Pathfinder RPG, Krampus himself was stated up by Berin Kinsman and Kobold Quarterly – so now you have two different variations on Krampus for your PFRPG!

Looking for a 4E D&D styled Krampus? You can find one at Kobold Quarterly (their 2nd contribution!) and in The Hope Day Massacre, a short 4E D&D adventure here at Nevermet Press.

Dragon Age players can find Krampus at Kobold Quarterly (contribution #3! They rock!).

Players of Warhammer 40K will be happy to see this Krampus inspired adventure from Reality Refracted.

Michael Tresca from the RPG Examiner created a d20 Modern styled Krampus.

ICON players should check out a super-hero styled Krampus from Fame & Fortune.

World of Darkness players should stop by Mad Brew Labs to see his horrifying rendition of Krampus!

Elsewhere on the tubes…

Here at Nevermet Press we posted our Top 5 Favorite Krampus Posts from across the Net.

GeekNative had some fun with Steve Austin’s fantastic artwork by making a great collection of color washes and other filters. Want an 19th century styled antiqued version of Krampus? Follow the link.

JayDot writes about running an annual Kobold Kristmas one-shot adventure that includes Krampus.

Overbury Ink muses about Krampus not being the best icon for American marketing – despite he resurgence in popularity this year.

Stop by Skyland Games who jumped in and posted the Krampus artwork.

Author OM Grey writes about how the feeling of Krampus has crept into her life this season.

ENWORLD featured Krampus in this week’s RPG round up!

Pinnacle Entertainment Group featured the Krampus art on their homepage.

DriveThruRPG also ran the artwork in their weekly newsletter!

My Ethereality posted about Krampus and muses about symbolism of this creature found elsewhere beyond just Christmas.

Visit the original post, The Krampus Christmas Carnival Round-Up, at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

In November I reached out to the RPG blogging community (here and here), as well as a some excellent publishers and steampunk bloggers, about contributing to this week’s Krampus Christmas Carnival. I was super stoked when so many excellent sites joined the party. I was suprised when not two days later I heard a story about Krampus on NPR, and then saw that Krampus was a key figure for PVPOnline’s web comic this month. Something clicked I guess – everyone was thinking about Krampus! And that’s awesome.

So, while the carnival round up is scheduled for tomorrow – today I’d like to share some Krampus links from around the interwebs to sites that didn’t participate in the carnival, but all the same had some AWESOME Krampus content this month.

5. Who is Krampus?

If you’re reading this – you probably already know, but if you don’t then skip over the Wikipedia article on Krampus and head straight to Krampus.com for his own explanation. This site has all sorts of details on Krampus, his history, and some great vintage artwork. It’s definitely worth a stop for anyone curious about the story behind Krampus. Did you know he predates Christmas?

A vintage Krampus, via Krampus.com

4. Eighteen Krampus Images To Ruin Your Holidays

If it’s artwork you’re looking for, BuzzFeed.com ran a story that had some simply incredible, new (non-vintage) artwork featuring Krampus. Personally – from the 18 there #5, “Krampus” by MissMonster on DeviantArt.com, is my favorite (shown at right).

"Krampus" by MissMonster @ DeviantArt.com

3. Horror For The Holidays: Meet The Anti-Santa

Don’t have time to read a whole bunch on Krampus? On December 10th, National Public Radio aired a great story on Krampus by Peter Crimmons. The images from “Krampuslauf”, an annual Krampus Parade in the Alpine regions of Germany and Italy, are awesome! The costumes are friggen scary as hell!

A Krampus roams the streets during a "Krampuslauf" near Merano, Italy. (Source: Johannes Simon/Getty Images via NPR.com)

2. Krampus Time is Here Again!

Croshame.com has created a beautiful crotched Krampus complete with sticks and crying, terrified children. It rocks! Croshame.com has tons of other evil crotched creepies over at their Etsy Store, but sadly the Krampus is not for sale.

"Krampus" from Croshame.com

1. A Krampus Carol by Anthony Bourdain

The #1 best Krampus article on the net – and probably for a long time – is hands down the animated “A Krampus Carol” by Anthony Bourdain. Horribly, horribly funny. Enjoy! A Krampus Carol by Anthony Bourdain.

Hope you enjoyed the links. What sites have you stumbled across this month on Krampus? Share the links in the comments below! In the meantime: Merry Christmas!

Visit the original post, Top 5 Krampus Sites on the Internet, at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

Join the Krampus Christmas Carnival!

Often times in RPGs an opportunity is missed to spice up the game with celebrations and holidays for the PCs that coincide in time with real-world holidays.  I am guilty of this myself.  I often think: of all the days in the year, why would my game fall on this in holiday?

One holiday that has always sparked excitement in gaming is Halloween, but why do things have to stop there?  Halloween means undead, almost 100% of the time (Editor’s Note: or Magical Candy!).  For RPGs – that’s an easy one to incorporate into your game. But, what do Christmas and this holiday season represent?  Gift giving, family, caring for others, and festive decorating are strong themes of this holiday season.

While the mini-adventure below is intended for 4^th edition Dungeons & Dragons games, the story of the encounter can’t be used for any fantasy game system.  If you do use it – for any game system – drop us a comment and let us know!

The Hope Day Massacre

This mini-adventure for four or five low-Heroic Tier characters that have recently finished an important adventure that made them local heroes. Winter has come and the PCs receive an invitation to celebrate the Hope Day Holiday (or some other winter festival chosen by the GM) with a friendly local lord named Sir Boon. He has offered up that there will be gifts, great food cooked by his lovely wife, ale and wine and a warm bed at his estate for a weekend stay. In the invitation, he also makes clear that all his children idolize the PCs and their recent exploits.

Assuming the PCs accept the invitation, the PCs should have a week to make prepare and to travel to Lord Boon’s estate, a full-day’s journey from town.

Lord Boon’s Manor

Read the following read-aloud text as the PCs arrive at Lord Boon’s Manor.

“As you approach Lord Boon’s manor, you are overwhelmed by the smells of many delicious prepared dishes on the air. The pine trees that line the sides of the manor are covered in light snow. There are decorations of various gods on display in the long yard. The gravel path is lined with magical lights that follow the path as it bends around to the front of the manor. Smoke comes belching out of the chimney, carrying the smells of the foods and the thought of comfort next to a nice warm fire. Festive wreaths and tassles adorned on the outer walls of the house and from the second-story windows. Three stand out on the front doors of the house that are clearly amateur in design, but with great creativity. These must have been made by the lords three children. After a few minutes of waiting, you realize that no one is coming to greet you.”

If the PCs search the manor grounds, they will find it deserted. The house itself, however, seems to be inhabited as a bright fire can be seen burning in the hearth inside. When the PCs move into the house, read the following.

“You open the door in the hopes of finding a peaceful night of good food and gifts. The door is not locked, and based on the way the foyer of the house looks it appears that someone recently departed in a hurry using the front door as their way out. Fire from a massive hearth casts light that flickers off the walls of a den to your right. Suddenly, an evening of festivities has taken a turn and a great sense of forboding falls upon you.”

Make the following skill rolls for each PC. On each success, depending on the skill rolled, read the following text.

Perception (DC15): “You hear the distant sound of someone weeping, just over the sounds of the crackling fire.”

Perception (DC20): “Hoof prints show on the wood floor from ashes. The hoof prints come from the den. You cannot see where they may have entered the house.”

Nature (DC15): “You notice tufts of wirey black fur shed on the floors of the house leading towards the den, but nowhere else. It looks like the fur of goat.”

As the PCs enter the den, read the following text aloud.

“You are confronted by the sight of a once beautiful woman, now middle-aged. She is holding an equally aged figure in her arms. She weeps just loud enough to audible over the fire as you approach. One other figure is sprawled about the floor. It is a boy; the look on his face is one of terror. No visible wounds are on his body, but appears to be dead.”

The woman is Lady Charlotte Boon. She is a mess after the attack which happened just an hour prior to the PCs arriving. She quickly describes what happened, but she will not tolerate too many questions. She pushes for the visiting group of heroes to head out immediately after the creature, to find her missing girls. To help encourage their resolve, she offers a reward of 1,000 gold (or other appropriate reward) to each PC who helps return her daughters safely.

She explains to the PCs that about 1 hour before, a strange monster—part demon, part goat, part man—dropped down through the smoking chimney and attacked her family. Her son tried to defend her family, but stone-fell dead from fear at the stare of the Krampus. Her husband, Lord Boon, tried to fight the beast off as well but was gored to death by the horns of the creature. The creature then grabbed both of the family’s daughters and made for the front door. She’s been sitting in shock ever since.

Tracking the Krampus

Listen to creative player options for tracking the creature. Below are some good examples:

History (DC15): “You know the creature is the Krampus, a demon that stalks the mountains in the region. You know where to look for the creature.” All tracking checks by the party gain a +2 bonus.

Perception (DC20): “You find some evidence of several pieces of a ripped girls dress. They start to form a trail and lead you to the beast’s lair.” Tracking the Krampus can take hours into the night, or days depending on how the DM wants to run it. If the PCs fail this tracking attempt, give them an automatic success to find the trail after 30 minutes of searching. In this case, the Krampus will gain an advantage and be better prepared when when arrive.

Arcana or Nature (DC15): “You know the creature is the Krampus, a fearsome beast that exacts punishment on people who it believes have done evil deeds. You know its habits and that its gaze alone can kill people out of fear.”

“Using your knowledge and skills, your group follows the trail to an odd house with many chimneys and made of brick. There does not appear to be a door. The air outside is still. None of the nearby trees rustle and the snowy crunches loudly with every step you take in it.”

The Krampus Encounter

Once the PCs locate Krampus’s lair (a lodge in the mountains), they have three options to get inside.

Perception (DC25): “Hidden among the wood piles at the rear of the lodge, you find a concealed door that leads inside.” A failure means they did not find the secret door.

Athletics (D15): Each player must make this check to climb up and hop down one of the chimneys. Each person who fails loses 1 healing surge and takes 10 fire damage from the fire that is raging at the bottom of the chimney.

Once inside Krampus’s lodge, read the following.

“The lodge’s interior is a large rectangular room filled with a mish-mash of stolen furniture, tables, a straw and branches bedding area, and a small cage. The walls are lined with brick from floor to ceiling. Six chimneys, all with burning fires line the two longer walls three to a side. They seem to be fed by coal rather than wood. The room is scorching hot, those of you that wear heavier armor and clothes start to sweat. There are two fancy, high backed chairs facing a fire in the corner of the room. One of you catches the slightest glance of a human child’s arm.”

If the PCs failed their initial attempt to track the Krampus, read the following.

“There seem to be no threats visible, other than the sweltering heat. “The girls stare into the fire blankly gazing. Nothing you do seems to remove them from their trance. A look of pain has washed over their faces and stays there. You hear a hidden door open as you see the kidnapper step into his lair from the fire and several large chunks of burning coal come flying at you. The Krampus howls and charges forward.”

The two burning coal chunks should each be considered a Ranged Touch Attack (+10) that does 2d6+6 damage each. On a critical hit, the PC catches fire.

Otherwise read:

Standing in the fire of the fireplace furthest from you is a 7-foot tall satyr. His horns are polished white, and his wiry black fur seems to covered in coal dust and shoot. As you enter the lodge, he turns to face you and a shockingly long, whip-like tongue descends from his mouth.

The Krampus attacks immediately. Lord Boon’s children have 10 hp each, but they have been protected by a magical charm that confers Resistance Fire 10. Once the battle begins, the PCs must take care not to kill the children who are bound to the chairs where they sit. The Krampus will use its own abilities, as well as try to bull rush the PCs into the burning fires, or using thrown chunks of burning coal as needed.

You can either use Krampus as a template (see below) or use the Level 5 Solo Skirmisher below (depending on the level of the PCs or how it suits your campaign).

After the Battle:

“As the Krampus falls into a crumpled pile on the floor, the girls finally return to normal.”

Once the PCs return the daughters to their mother, the rewards are paid and the mother asks for the PCs to stay at her estate for at least one week for “added protection”. The Lord’s wife is now the sole ruler of the region, and she may ask the PCs to help her establish her authority in the wake of her husbands death. This could in turn provide for a series of additional adventures where the PCs are pitted against other forces aligned against her.

The Krampus

The Krampus Level 5 Solo Skirmisher

Medium Outsider

Initiative +9 Senses Perception +8, darkvision

HP 160 Bloodied 80

AC 20 Fortitude 17 Reflex 19 Will 17

Speed 8

Action Points 2

Standard Actions

(M) Kneel and Paddle (Standard; at-will)

The target must drop prone or take 10 psychic damage. If the target drops prone make a melee attack +10 Vs. AC; 2d8+10 damage.

(M) Gore and Grab (Standard; at-will) Used as a charge action

+10 Vs. AC; 1d10+5damage and push the target back 2 squares.

Secondary attack: Level +3 Vs. Reflex; 1d6+5level damage. Shift 6 squares and slide the target to an adjacent square.

(CB) Penetrating Gaze (Standard; Recharge 5,6) Close Blast 3 * Fear, Psychic

+8 Vs. Will; 3d6+5 level psychic damage and the target gains Pushed 2 Squares away from the Avatar (save ends).

Move Actions

Goats Leap (Move; Recharge 4,5,6)

Deal 10 physical damage to every adjacent target and teleport 5 squares.

Minor Actions

(CB) Karmic Whiplash (Minor; at-will) Targets 1 in Close Burst 10 *Radiant, Psychic

+5 Vs. Fortitude; 1d6+5 radiant and psychic damage. The target may choose to deal 5 Radiant damage to The Krampus. If they do, they take 5 Ongoing Radiant and psychic damage (save ends)

Free Actions

Punish the Children (Free; Encounter)

The children move to be adjacent to the Krampus. Any attack that hits the Krampus this turn will hit one of the children instead. A player may choose to miss after discovering that the attack will hit one of the children.

Alignment Evil Languages Abyssal, Common

Skills Religion +7 Athletics +11 Perception +8

Str 18 (+6) Dex 16 (+5) Wis 12 (+3)

Con 12 (+3) Int 15 (+4) Cha 8 (+1)

The Krampus Template

Description: This avatar looks like the original creature that it is based off of with a couple of additions in appearance. There are horns curling up out of the top of the creatures head and goat like ears mutated out of the creatures original ears. The creature’s feet have turned into hooves. Its eyes have also become small and have a piercing gaze.

Krampus, Solo Skirmisher

Initiative +4 Senses –

Hit points: +6 per level + Constitution score

Defenses: +2 AC, +2 Reflex; Resist Fire 10; Vulnerability Necrotic 5

Saving throws +4

Speed +4

Action Points 2

(M) Gore and Grab (Standard; at-will) Used as a charge action

Level +5 Vs. AC; 1d10+level damage and push the target back 2 squares.

Secondary attack: Level +3 Vs. Reflex; 1d6+1/2level damage. Shift 6 squares and slide the target to an adjacent square.

(CB) Penetrating Gaze (Standard; Recharge 5,6) Close Blast 3 * Fear, Psychic

Levl +3 Vs. Will; 3d6+1/2 level psychic damage and the target gains Pushed 2 Squares away from the Krampus (save ends).

Enjoy!

Visit the original post, The Hope Day Massacre [4E D&D], at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

"Merry Krampas, a Steampunk Santa with Krampus", by Steven Austin. Click the image to download the high resolution image files.

ALTERNATIVE DOWNLOAD LINK

You’re Invited to the Krampus Christmas Carnival!

Greetings fellow gamers, writers, fiction enthusiasts, bloggers and publishers!

Each year during the holidays Nevermet Press features artwork focused on Krampus, a troll-like demon who serves as Santa’s “bad cop” to punish naughty children. You can learn more about Krampus at Wikipedia, but the short of it is that Krampus is a myth with a rich history that carries on in parts of Eastern Europe to this day. Unfortunately, he’s been trumped by Lumps of Coal and Naughty Kids Lists in the United States. Where’s the fun in that?

This year we’re doing something a little different to bring Krampus back into the hearts and minds of holiday revellers: we’re hosting the Krampus Christmas Carnival! This is a blog carnival where we invite everyone in the gaming, fiction and publishing blogsphere to write about Krampus in one way or another during the week of December 19th – 24th. On Christmas Day we’ll post a Krampus Round-Up and highlight everyone who has contributed to the carnival and link back to their sites. All we ask you to do is link to our announcement (or let us know some other way), and we’ll include you in the carnival round up.

Steven Austin’s Artwork is Free to Share and Remix

To make things even more interesting, we’ve partnered with British illustrator Steven Austin to develop the above artwork. I asked Steven to develop a “baddass steampunk Santa with Krampus riding along in his sleigh”. WOW! Did he ever deliver. The artwork is friggen amazing! (click to zoom). Notice the d20′s, rulebooks, and other gamer swag spilling out of the bag? Yeah.. nice touch! We absofuckinglutely love this.

Now – the artwork is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. This basically means that you are free to use his artwork too, however you like, so long as you a) give him credit, b) share the artwork under the same license, and c) don’t use it for commercial purposes (i.e. you can’t resell it). Otherwise - have your way with it! If you do decide to participate in some way, please feel free to use the art! We’re really hoping a bunch people surprise us with what they come up with! Grab the high-resolution artwork over at RPGNow.com for Free! (Secondary Alternative Link)

Who Cares!?

Hush now – that’s what Krampus would say… stop being so serious! Lot’s of people are participating in this Blog Carnival – so it’s a great way to show your solidarity and join in on some fun. Just check out a sampling of the current participants: DriveThruRPG.com, Pinnacle Entertainment Group, Open Design and Kobold Quarterly, ENWorld, Airship Ambassador, Overbury Ink, OM Grey, Dr. Fantastique’s Show of Wonders, GeekNative.com, Troll in the Corner, Game Knight Reviews, Skyland Games, RoleplayingTips.com, Campaign Mastery, Reality Refracted, Tenkar’s Tavern, Mad Brew Labs, Enderra, Sea of Stars RPG, and The Grumpy Celt. For more details – click through to our announcement on our blog here: Merry Krampus! Let the Carnival Begin!

Join us and join the fun!

Visit the original post, Merry Krampus! Let the Carnival Begin!, at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

The Tavern, Illustration by Matt Meyer

Something is wrong at the Hodgeson Street Inn.

The Hodgeson Street Inn is owned and operated by Oroborus University, with David Hilbert serving as manager, and provides fair accommodations – the university uses the facility to teach people the trade of inn keeping. The tavern and dining hall provide decent food and a standard selection of drinks. Stables stand next door but are separate facility operated under different management.

Shaped like the letter “U”, the exterior walls are smooth, wattle-daub and punctuated by few windows. Inside the “U”, wide balconies provide access to the rooms and overlook a narrow brick-paved courtyard. Access to the the balcony is made possible by a wide staircase located at the bottom of the “U”. A rarely opened two story gate permits wagons into this courtyard and a smaller door, set into the gate, lets patrons in and out. During winter, the inn’s management hangs canvas over the balcony openings to keep out the worst of the frost and snow, while in summer people enjoy a comfortable breeze on the shaded balcony.

Occupying the ground floor are the common rooms, dining hall, kitchens, privies, storerooms and staff rooms. The best rooms are on the second floor, those with actual beds, including several full suites. Standard rooms occupy the third floor, where low counters with cushions double as beds. Dormatory rooms, where people sleep on the floor, occupy the fourth floor. Most rooms feature a small fireplace and typically, at least one window. The Hodgeson Street Inn has no cellar or attic, least none that anyone knows about.

Something is often seems “wrong” with the northern end of the third and fourth floors and sometimes the second floor as well.

A GM should roll on the tables below for each character in the party for every six hours they stay in the inn. The appropriate table depends on the characters location. Ideally, the character should be alone when they encounter something odd the first time. Roll a d20 – each floor has its own encounter table.

Second Floor Encounter Table (d20)

01 – 18 No Event – Nothing unusual happens.
19 Slugs – The PC encounters a few dozen slugs where no one would expect to find them. The slugs continue to arrive in the area for 1d10 minutes from random directions and eventually crawl away in random directions.
20 Singing – The PC finds 13 garden spiders singing softly, rather like songbirds. This continues for 1d10 minutes. The songs are often melancholy and familiar to the PC.

Third Floor Encounter Table (d20)

01 – 16 No Event – Nothing unusual happens.
17 Not True – When the party members are not looking, the furniture, walls, doors, window frames, and the distance of the ceiling from the floor shift and twist askew by several inches. This continues for 3d10 minutes, then returns to normal. Should any combat in this area occur during that time, treat the area as Difficult Terrain.
18 Old – One member of the party will begin seeing their surrounding room, including everyone who they encounter afterwards, as terribly old, decrepit, and poorly kept. This continues for 1 hour.
19 Slugs – The PC encounters a few dozen slugs where no one would expect to find them. The slugs continue to arrive in the area for 1d10 minutes from random directions and eventually crawl away in random directions.
20 Singing – The PC finds 13 garden spiders singing softly, rather like songbirds. This continues for 1d10 minutes. The songs are often melancholy and familiar to the PC.

Fourth Floor Encounter Table (d20)

01 – 12 No Event. Nothing unusual happens.
13 Maze – The layout of the inn, which should be a simple “U” arrangement of a balcony and rooms twists into an Escheresque maze, making it impossible to use the stairs to exit this floor (any attempt returns the PCs to the same floor). This continues for 1 hour.
14 Distance – The distances between all the doors, halls, and rooms seem to extend out for hundreds of feet. All movement is reduced to 1 and the range of all spells and ranged weapons is reduced to 1. The character also has to resort to yelling to communicate since, to them, it seems like everyone is hundreds of feet away. This effect lasts for 1 hour.
15 Water Above – Dark water rolls across the ceilings, but does not drop. It eventually fills the ceilings of the entire floor. Judging by the ripples that are passing through the water, it’s clear there is something on the other side of the surface that remains unseen. Should a PC investigate closer and disturb the water’s surface – a random Elemental (water) manifests and attacks everyone within sight. The ceilings remain flooded for 1 hour, and then the water recedes.
16 Not True – When the party members are not looking, the furniture, walls, doors, window frames, and the distance of the ceiling from the floor shift and twist askew by several inches. This continues for 3d10 minutes, then returns to normal. Should any combat in this area occur during that time, treat the area as Difficult Terrain.
17 Old – One member of the party will begin seeing their surrounding room, including everyone who they encounter afterwards, as terribly old, decrepit, and poorly kept. This continues for 1 hour.
18 Slugs – The PC encounters a few dozen slugs where no one would expect to find them. The slugs continue to arrive in the area for 1d10 minutes from random directions and eventually crawl away in random directions.
19 Singing – The PC finds 13 garden spiders singing softly, rather like songbirds. This continues for 1d10 minutes. The songs are often melancholy and familiar to the PC.
20 Roll Again – Roll on the Fourth Floor Special Encounter Table below.

Fourth Floor Special Encounter Table (d8)

1 – 2 Ring of Fire – while working their way back from a great and unexpected Distance (Result #14) if the character looks out a window, or looking out from the upper balcony, they perceive the world as a terrible, bleak and blasted landscape, the sky the color of a bruise and the sun a ring of blood colored fire.
3 – 4 Corpse – A character is navigating the Maze (Result #13) and while doing so encounters their own corpse in an advance state of decay. If they loot their own pockets, they may be surprised by what they find (roll a random, level appropriate magic item).
5 – 6 Mind Eaters – While they party encounters the singing spiders (#19) and slugs (#18) they also encounter 1d4 mind flayers navigating their way through the temporal fissure. Each is surprised to encounter the other. The ensuing battle should be appropriate for the level of the party members involved.
7 – 8 Alternate Takes – While out getting a bucket of water or on a similar errand, a member of the party encounters an alternate version of themselves on a similar errand. Such as the human rogue in the party runs into an anthropomorphic fox version of themselves, from a world were such creatures are the norm.

The events listed on these tables are essentially plot seeds and situations designed to provoke a reaction and not full encounters in and of themselves.

Why is this happening?

In some distant future, an empire of mind flayers fight a losing war against their former slaves and those they attempt to enslave. As a mad gambit, they strike a blow against space and time itself, damaging the fabric of reality. Cracks spread through creation like fissures through a pane of glass. They then fled backwards through time and across worlds along these fissures. (2)

One such fissure – invisible unless physically encountered – snakes through portions of the large inn and tavern on Hodgeson Street. As damage to the structure of space and time, it is at once; not yet appeared, always been present and is only just appearing. This is why no one has attempted correct the situation, and why the inn was built at this location in the first place. This fissure connects the inn to other places and times, including a potentially endless assortment of other inns.

This is why it is easy to become hopelessly lost, discover one’s own corpse and be attacked by brain eating slugs in the short and brightly lit room of a respectable midtown inn. The party – by dent of being adventurers – will remember their experiences at the inn and tavern standing on Hodgeson Street, even as the memories of others are consistently inconsistent. There is also no permanent solution to the problem – it is just something to deal with and survive. However, a GM seeking a climactic battle may lead the PCs to discover that they are the only thing that can prevent mind flayers from entering the party’s world…

1. Some of the imagery here and mood come from “House on the Boarderlands” by William Hope Hodgeson.
2. This is a reference to Lords of Madness: the Book of Aberrations by Richard Baker, James Jacobs and Steve Winter, which described the illithids as having arrived in the past from the future. This is one of the best “monster” books produced by WotC during the run of 3.5

Visit the original post, Oroborus University: Inn without End [4E D&D], at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

The Krampus Christmas Carnival Has Begun!
Click Here For Details + Artwork!

Krampus Yuletide, by Rob Torno

Krampus Kicking Ass, by Matthew Meyer

For the last few years two artists (Matthew Meyer and Rob Torno) who work with Nevermet Press have produced illustrations that featured Krampus, Santa’s punisher, in one form or another. You can check out previous year’s art on the right.

This year you might be… nay, should be… wondering if we’re going to have another Krampus? Well, as you can tell from this post’s title, the answer is a resolute “YES!” and “It’s a Carnival!“. This year I’ve partnered with artist Steven Austin to do a badass steampunk Santa Claus and Krampus Christmas mashup.

It is downright kickass.

What’s even better is that Steven will be releasing the artwork under a Creative Commons License. Now there’s some legalize! What this basically means is once we release the artwork here at Nevermet Press you will be free to download and reuse the art for your own non-commercial purposes so long as you give Steven Austin credit for his hard work and share the artwork as well. You’ll also be free to remix the art, make derivatives of it, and basically post to your blog, website, or Facebook page with no copyright issues. To encourage people to reuse the art, we will be releasing the art along with the complete Photoshop files too, with all the layers intact, so that you can really “have your way with it”.

Steampunk Santa, by Steven Austin

It’s a Krampus Christmas Carnival!

Here’s the best part: Starting the week of December 19th – we’re starting a Krampus Christmas Carnival!

After we publish Steven Austin’s Krampus Christmas here at Nevermet Press – over 20 other blogs and websites from all over the gaming and publishing interwebs will be joining us to help promote some Seasonal Cheer and give people something that says “Wow – that’s bad ass!”. We also want to bring some fresh light back on the age-old tradition of Krampus. Why? Because he rocks – and lumps of coal just don’t cut it!

Over 20 blogs? Who’s participating?

Doomed Children, by Steven Austin

So far I have confirmed the participation of the following gaming and steampunk blogs and websites: DriveThruRPG.com, Pinnacle Entertainment Group, Open Design and Kobold Quarterly, ENWorld, Airship Ambassador, Overbury Ink, OM Grey, Dr. Fantastique’s Show of Wonders, GeekNative.com, Troll in the Corner, Game Knight Reviews, Skyland Games, RoleplayingTips.com, Campaign Mastery, Reality Refracted, Tenkar’s Tavern, Mad Brew Labs, Enderra, Sea of Stars RPG, and The Grumpy Celt.

We’re hoping that you will join us too.

If you want to join in – just leave a comment on this post and watch our blog in the next week. Post something – anything related to Krampus – and we’ll link back to your blog in the round up! Snap, simple, done.

Spilling Toys, by Steven Austin

How should you participate? That’s up to you. I can tell you that here at Nevermet Press, beyond Steven Austin’s awesome artwork, we are having a short story on Krampus, a 4E D&D encounter with Krampus, and an essay on why Krampus matters published.

Plus, anyone who publishes Steven Austin’s artwork or participates in the Krampus Christmas week will be included and linked to as part of our Carnival Round up on Christmas Day. It’s going to be a fun week!

So – you’re probably wondering now: where’s the artwork? Well – it will be released on December 19th to the general public. Also, if you sign up for Nevermet Press Insider by December 16th, you’ll get early access to the artwork (and the photoshop files). For now – here are some teasers along the right – all cropped from the larger image. Krampus? He’s below…

Krampus, Cropped from "Krampus Christmas" by Steven Austin

The full image puts all these together in one huge full-page illustration. It’s gorgeous – so stay tuned!

Visit the original post, Krampus is Coming Back… in a Carnival!, at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

Sky Admiral Verne vs. Twainbot - A Match of Titans!

SteampunkKindle.com is running a contest: Mark Twain vs. Jules Verne Boxing Match. Vote for who would win, and why – and get a free copy of Stories in the Ether for your Kindle along the way! Here’s the highlight from their blog:

It’s ON! Like Grey Poupon! There’s a battle about to commence- a Battle of The Books! And you will take home the spoils! Our own mascots, Sky Admiral Jules Verne and Mark Twainbot are going head-to-head in a fierce competition for supremacy, and they’re both looking for your support. Cast your vote and add some smack-talk (gentlemanly, of course), and we’ll send you a fabulous Steampunk eBook just for participating: “Stories in the Ether, Issue 1″ from Nevermet Press. Ten lucky winners will also receive“Stories in the Ether, Issue 2″ as well!

Also, a savage beating in the boxing-ring will unfold. You won’t want to miss the hilarious exchange in the running comments stream as our combatants spar verbally; and you are encouraged to add your own contribution!

Visit the original post to ENTER the Sweepstakes and Vote on which on of these Titans will be champion!

Cheers all!

Visit the original post, Sky Admiral Jules Verne vs. Mark Twainbot – A Match of Titans!, at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

“No. All I’m saying is, you don’t gotta hover over me like a baby,” Justin said to his sister, Olivia. Sitting in the cab of her hand-me-down pickup at the newly renovated drive-in, Justin was attempting to go ignored and failing. It was just like Olivia to say more than she should. “I’m not planning to kill myself tonight, so relax.”

Olivia huffed, pivoted in the bench seat to face Justin, and tapped her chin with her index finger. As soon as the finger started tapping, his mind sealed shut. Whatever she had to say, Justin didn’t want to hear.

Her finger stopped, but remained on her chin.

Here it comes.

“We’re not trying to treat you like a baby,” Olivia said. Her hand dropped, and her head tilted to one side. “And we understand you can take care of yourself, we’re just… concerned. You know? We wanna make sure you’re alright, because we care.”

Olivia stared, letting a long pause hang in the cramped cabin.

“Yeah, I know,” Justin responded.

Olivia pulled her frizzy red hair back into a ponytail, smiled as if the matter were settled, and turned back to the movie. Justin watched her profile for a moment before doing the same. Ever since his botched suicide, life had become a chain of false bravado, plastic smiles, concerned, yet patronizing expressions, and watchful eyes. But worst of all, in the two weeks since the incident, he hadn’t been alone for more than five minutes each day to shower. His parents even made his brother, Steven—who was nine years younger— a sort of night watchman.

Life before a failed suicide, by definition, was dismal. But life after a failed suicide was a whole new level of hell. Ironically, all the well-meant condescension only managed to instill perpetual misery, constantly reminding, constantly teasing him with eyes that asked ‘why, why-oh-why would you try to end this rippin rollercoaster we call life?’ But they never said the words their eyes were so feverishly asking. They went on with Teflon-coated smiles and sickening head-tilts, proceeding through life with the confidence of someone living a fairy tale.

He searched the parking lot for a distraction. Half the town shared the dusty parking area, mostly family vehicles packed with rowdy tweens. Some families, like the Parkers who occupied the space cattycorner to Justin, walked to the theater and sat on big blankets with buckets of popcorn for a picnic under the stars.

Justin stopped breathing when he noticed Sara Pruitt and Bobby Welsh lying on the hood of a silver Camaro. Sara was a lifelong neighbor that hadn’t spoken to Justin in almost five years. They played together growing up, but somewhere along the line, she severed communications and become one of the multitudes of females who refused to acknowledge his existence.

And as Pembrook Pines’ thick-jawed, good-for-nothing, golden child, Bobby Welsh made it his personal responsibility to punish the dregs of the lower class—such as Justin Burke.

Seeing the two together brought out complex emotions. He yearned for their acceptance, but hated himself for it. Why should their opinions matter?

Sara kicked her leg into the air and laughed at something Bobby whispered into her ear. Justin averted his gaze when her skirt slid down her raised leg.

The sound of the movie grew distant as Olivia hung the speaker on its pole and rolled the window up. The muffled voices of actors arguing on screen penetrated the truck, reminding him of his parents’ arguments over his ‘condition’.

Olivia didn’t move or speak, but Justin could feel her studying him. She reached up and flicked the dome light on, casting a weak orange glow across her face.

“Why’d you do it?”

Justin was dumbstruck. No one had approached the subject so bluntly until now.

“I don’t know,” he mumbled.

“Is it because everyone at school calls you ginger and gingervitis?”

He could sense her eyes waiting, probing, judging. For some reason this intrusion pissed him off more than the shuffling around everyone else did. He didn’t know how to explain that he wanted space from life; he needed to escape and forget the past, the taunts, the rejections, the failings, the flaws, the laughing eyes, all of it.

“Come on, you can tell me,” Olivia urged. “Is it because Mom treats Steven like a ‘miracle child’, but treats us like old socks?”

“Stop! It’s none of those things!”

But it’s all of those things.

“I get down, too, sometimes. Like when I overhear Mom telling her friends about how sweet and lovely and special Steven is and then she tells them I’m ‘the same as ever’. I just want to curl up in a ball and never move. I tell myself it would be so-ooo much easier to give up and say screw the world. But you can’t give into those urges, little brother. You gotta keep going, you know? Life goes on.”

Justin turned from the window to find his sister looking back with a half-grin. “I … I can’t tell you why I tried, but I can tell you why I might try again. Because everyone thinks they can relate, like they understand the river of sewage flowing through my life.” Flecks of spit launched from his lips as he spoke. “And everybody has some great pearl of wisdom to share. They act like I’m having trouble sleeping at night, and I just haven’t tried the right trick yet. Buck up, boy-o, a warm glass of milk and some soft jazz outta turn that frown upside-down. So you know what? You can save your ‘keep on truckin’ and higher purpose B.S. for someone as dumb as you, because you got no idea. Nobody does!”

“Oh. And since you want to be the expert,” Justin pressed, “let me educate you on depression. It’s like a tick that sneaks up and anesthetizes before digging in to drain your life. But with depression, by the time you discover this … thing that’s burrowed in, you’re too weak to do anything about it because you’ve already been sucked dry.”

Her grin reversed direction as a wave of red spread from her chest to her face, and Justin instantly regretted his words. For all the self-righteous a-holes in Pembrook Pines, Olivia wasn’t one of them.

She turned away as tears filled her eyes. She gripped the steering wheel with both hands and started wringing the rubber in frustration like a damp cloth.

Justin turned back to the window, letting his eyes and thoughts fall back on Sara and Bobby.

Sara pointed at something in the sky with her long, slender arm, while Bobby tried to kiss her neck. Justin almost applauded when she pushed him away. She extended her arm farther while keeping her finger fixed on a certain spot in the sky. Justin tried to follow her gesture, but couldn’t make out much with the dome light glaring on the glass. Cowed, Bobby bent his neck back and looked. For a moment, nothing happened. But then, as if lightning struck him, Bobby’s entire body twitched.

While Bobby stared at the sky, Sara motioned for the Parkers to do the same. She pointed with one arm and spun her other in a hurrying signal.

A low sob filled the tight space of the truck, and Justin remembered Olivia. He turned to her, and placed a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Liv. Really. I’m just… messed up right now, and I snapped.”

She released her grip on the steering wheel, and her shoulders crumpled inward as tears overwhelmed her. Movement outside the truck caught Justin’s attention. He turned the overhead light off, clearing the windows. All over the theater, people were getting out of their cars and standing with necks craned back and fingers pointed skyward. Any who weren’t moved around, alerting others to do so. Within seconds, the parking lot was full of confused chatter. Even Olivia noticed the commotion and stopped crying.

“What’s happening?” she asked as she wiped tears from her freckled cheek.

“Something big.”

Olivia opened her door and stepped down with a far-off look on her face. Someone next to her was on his cell phone, jabbering erratically. Justin opened his own door, and got out. The arc of light from the projector still streamed overhead, clouding the sky from his angle. Most people wore expressions of wonder, but a few appeared fearful, almost disgusted. Sara was still on the hood of the Camaro, but Bobby was gone. The idea of approaching her for answers crossed his mind, but was squelched when a solid arm wrapped around his neck and rested on his shoulders.

“She sure looks fine, don’t she?” Bobby asked as he pulled Justin closer. Justin tried to wiggle free, but Bobby tightened his grip, clenching Justin’s head in the crook of his elbow. “Hey now. I just wanted to rub the school leprechaun’s head for some luck.”

Bobby’s grip compressed. Justin’s temples throbbed, and for a second, his vision dimmed.

“Hey,” Sara shouted from the Camaro. Bobby released his hold, and Justin dropped to his knees, gasping. “Leave him alone, Welsh!”

“No worries, I was just asking Ginger here how the Skipper was doing.” Bobby’s voice remained calm and cool, but he retreated to her side all the same.

Justin glanced at Sara. She looked back with something like genuine embarrassment in her eyes, and hesitated to raise her hand and wave.

Olivia ran around the truck, and bent down to face Justin. He craned his neck around his sister to watch Sara and Bobby climb into the Camaro. “I’m fine.”

“Good. Worry about Bobby later. You gotta take a look at this.” From her crouch, she pointed at an angle into the sky, away from the projector light. “Watch.”

He watched, but didn’t see anything until the projector turned off, revealing the dark expanse above. It was a cool April night, the wind had swept every cloud from the sky, and in Pembrook Pines, layers upon layers of stars were visible, glittering in the sky like the inside of a black geode.

With all the commotion, he expected to find a spacecraft hovering overhead. He squinted, trying to see what everyone else did, but only a sea of stars looked back.

“Is there something in partic—”

“Watch,” Olivia hissed.

Following her gaze, he fixated on a dark spot and waited for the hidden image to reveal itself. And then it happened. A cluster of stars thinned. Where there were seven small dots of light in a group, there were now only five. And again, a group next to that seemed to thin. But it wasn’t the weakest, most distant stars vanishing. Brighter ones were gone too. His eyes jumped to the Orion constellation, and to his amazement, the center star in the goliath’s belt disappeared as if someone drew over it with a black marker.

Justin’s mouth went dry, and when he spoke, he found the words nearly impossible to form. “What the hell’s going on, Liv?”

#

The first night, after the drive-in emptied, his family did the same as every other family in the world: they huddled around the television as if it were the final speck of warmth on a very cold planet.

From the reports coming in, stars were vanishing from all sectors of the sky. Nobody knew what to make of it. Experts of all kinds debated the possibilities, but by five a.m., no definitive answer was settled upon.

As the sun rose, reports of disappearing stars came in from across the globe as dusk descended on other regions. The next day, people began referring to that first night as ‘the night the world didn’t sleep’. Most stayed up watching TV, and when the sun set the second night, the town stood on their front lawns and roofs to watch. Although disheartening information came in an hour earlier from California, people collectively held their breath, hoped, and waited.

Nobody went back inside satisfied.

By midnight, estimates stated that eighteen to twenty-two percent of the stars visible to the naked eye were gone. Scientists and experts still had no explanation as to why, where, or how.

Sick of the news station’s redundant information masked in sensationalized wording, Justin retreated to his bedroom. The silence of his empty room seemed loud somehow, and he recognized the void as thundering loneliness. Just the other day, Justin had been the center of attention. And he hated it. The coddling had sickened him. But now that he was de-prioritized, he found himself missing the illusion of importance.

He straddled the cot his parents had brought in for Steven, and stared at the wall. Band posters covered the area, but the colors blurred together as his mind wandered.

Mom broke his daze by walking by the open doorway. She was rambling to someone on the phone, and Justin looked over in time to see the end of her mauve, lace-trimmed dress flutter by. Her shrill voice waned as she rounded the hall banister and descended the stairs.

So much for not being alone, he thought, lying back on his brother’s cot. He pulled his knees to his chest, closed his eyes, and drifted to sleep.

#

A cluster of excited voices woke him the next morning. Rubbing sleep from his eyes, he shuffled downstairs to the living room and found his family standing around the TV with Mr. and Mrs. Pruitt from next door. Mom, still wearing her mauve dress, held a can of peas in one hand and clutched Steven to her side with the other. Her voice rose over the others with ease.

“—been saying something like this was coming. It’s nothing we don’t deserve, you know, with the world the way it is. Everyone goes about like the bill won’t come due one day, but—”

“What’s going on,” Justin yelled over the commotion. Steven glanced up and grinned, but otherwise, only Olivia acknowledged him.

“Hey, where’ve you been all morning?” she asked.

They stepped away from the conversation and their mother’s overwhelming presence.

“Sleeping. Nobody woke me up. What’d I miss?”

“A lot. A few hours ago, astronomers from Japan claimed that over fifty percent of the stars are gone. Then, the news debated all the possibilities and what this all meant for us, bringing in all kinds of experts to explain crap that even they don’t understand.” She gave a dismissive huff. “Anyways, after all that, the religious nuts went supernova, saying this was a sign of the coming apocalypse.”

“No big surprise.”

“No. But get this. The Pope—I’ll say it again—The Pope, then made an official announcement from the Vatican. In front of the entire world, he verified that the dying stars are a sign of the end of days.”

“So?”

“So, ever since the Pope dropped that little bomb, Mom’s been going wild. She wants us to go to the church to await the second coming. You know, gotta protect her baby and all.” She shrugged and nodded at Steven. “So we’re trying to talk her out of it, but Dad doesn’t think she’ll liste—”

“We’re not even Catholic.”

“Doesn’t matter. She’s convinced and insisting that Dad get Steven t—”

“Hey, hey! Shush-up,” Mom said as she fumbled with the television remote. “Something’s happening on the TV.”

She clutched Steven—her miracle—closer as the room fell silent and everyone turned to the TV. The newscaster had bags under his eyes, and every few seconds wrinkles would crease his forehead when he received updates through his earpiece. An older man with a buzz cut and no emotion in his face sat next to him.

“We have Dr. Price from NASA with us today,” the reporter said in a worn voice as he faced the other man. “He’s here to explain NASA’s findings, or, I guess in this case, lack of findings. Doctor.”

“Well, after an extensive search, using all the tools at our disposal, including the Hubble, I regret to inform the American people that we were unable to locate any of the missing stars. Not even the speculated white dwarfs. They’re simply gone. One-hundred percent. What this means for our own star…”

Justin turned from the thunderstruck room, and headed upstairs. The news was bad and getting worse, so returning to bed seemed like the most comforting option at the moment.

Alarmed voices exploded from the living room, followed by Olivia calling his name. He stopped at the top of the stairs and turned.

“Hey,” she said from the bottom. “Dad says he needs your help. There’s a fire at the Pruitt’s house.”

He hesitated for a second, considering the bed less than twenty feet away. The Sandman beckoned. And besides, he might run into Sara if he w—

“Justin!”

Olivia’s voice decided his inner-debate. “Fine. I’m coming.”

#

The entire west wing of the Pruitt’s redbrick colonial burned with a crackling intensity. Flames arched out of a first floor window, and fused into flames from the second story to create a column of fire. Black smoke billowed across the front lawn as Justin approached the house. Mrs. Pruitt sat on the grass crying, while his mother hugged Steven.

“Where’s Dad?” Justin yelled to his mom over the sound of flames devouring the Pruitt’s home.

“He went with Paul to the back of the house,” she replied, shaking her head. “Said something about Sara being home, but nobody’s seen her yet. And Shelly tried calling nine-one-one, but it’s busy.”

Justin moved to follow Dad, but Mom restrained him with a strong grip. “Where you running off to?”

“To help,” Justin almost screamed.

“No you are not. I want you to take your brother inside, then do what you can to make sure the fire doesn’t spread our direction.”

“But—”

Justin didn’t bother finishing. She wouldn’t care what he had to say.

He ripped his arm free, ran around the side of the house, found a door standing open, and sprinted through into a dense cloud of smoke. He blinked against the irritation, and his lungs convulsed on the first breath he drew, forcing a rasping cough. Pulling his shirt over his mouth, he surveyed the kitchen, looking for signs of Dad.

Three doors led to other parts of the house. Orange light flickered through the cracks of one, and he recalled another leading to a basement, so he opened door number three and found a high ceilinged living room. Still no Dad.

Most of the smoke in this room had risen to the vaulted ceiling, so Justin used the opportunity to gulp tainted oxygen. He yelled for Dad. No response. He yelled for Mr. Pruitt. No response. Signs of smoke and fire showed at most of the exits around the room. Faint shouts from outside were barely audible over the cracks of burning wood. A black-stained film of sweat covered his body, and he realized how intense the heat was. Suddenly, the air felt tangible and thick. He strained his voice screaming for his father.

“Oh, thank God,” someone yelled from above. Sara Pruitt stood on the second floor balcony overlooking the room, wheezing for air, her face covered in soot. Without thinking, Justin grabbed the couch, yanked with every disused muscle in his body, and pulled until it lined up with the balcony.

“Jump!”

#

The Pruitts’ house burned to the ground that day; Mr. Pruitt with it. Sara claimed someone had thrown something through the downstairs window and ran. She saw him fleeing after hearing glass break, but didn’t recognize him. A minute later, she smelled smoke and found the stairs ablaze.

In spite of Mr. Pruitt’s death, the reports on TV made it sound like things could be much worse. Violence claimed the bigger cities. Pandemonium had broken out all over the country. The President called a state of martial law, but with soldiers deserting in droves, little could be done. Every level of order became overwhelmed by people facing a foreseen end.

Justin’s dad invited the remaining Pruitts to stay with them. Mom still insisted on going to the church, but Dad settled the argument by gathering all the food and supplies he could find, barricading the doors, boarding up the windows, and sealing both families in the house. After the fire, nobody other than Mom thought to complain.

Three miserable days of unease and silence passed. The lack of sunlight penetrating the boarded windows and the permanent stream of disheartening news on TV mutated the two families into inverted shells of themselves.

Mom spent large chunks of time stroking Steven’s hair and whispering assurances in his ear. Dad vigilantly patrolled the house, peering through peep holes he had drilled in the boarded windows.

Stricken with misery, Sara and her mother stayed in the basement. Mrs. Pruitt would come up for food and water, but Sara wasn’t seen for three days after the fire. When she finally surfaced, she looked a lot different without makeup, younger, and her hair laid flat in a mahogany frame around her face. Justin sat alone on the couch in the living room, watching TV. She sat next to him with a sullen tenderness, and Justin’s body stiffened at her lithe presence.

“What’s the latest?” she asked in a distant voice, staring at the screen.

“Um, well, society has pretty much ingested itself, and they’ve been debating whether the Pope’s declaration caused the recent riots or if people would have responded the same anyway.”

“Uh-huh. Where is this?” Her hand limply drifted to a point, indicating the crowd of praying people on TV.

“Sweden. The North Star just went.”

“Uh-huh.”

“They’re saying that by the time the sun sets here, there won’t be a single star left. The sky will be pitch-black except for the moon and Mars.”

“Bummer.” She sounded like a pre-programmed recording. He considered offering his apologies for her father, but decided that she probably didn’t need the reminder. He understood the feeling. Things like grief and depression can’t be apologized away or fixed with a confidence boosting mantra.

She needs a distraction.

“I tried to kill myself.” The words surprised him. She broke her gaze from the TV, and the fog in her eyes dissipated.

“What?”

“Yep. Three weeks ago. I took a handful of my mom’s Xanax one night while the house was empty.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I wish,” Justin said, glancing at her with a halfhearted smile. “Obviously, I failed. Mom and Dad came home and found me with the pills. They rushed me to the hospital, I had my stomach pumped, and they’ve treated me like Humpty Dumpty on a tightrope ever since.”

Sara’s lips tucked, holding in laughter. They failed. Giggles, then braying laughter erupted. Her face turned red, her hands left her lap, tears brimmed on her eyelids and, for a little while, she let hysteria take control. Justin didn’t know if he should feel embarrassed or laugh along, so he did both.

Her laughter faded into chuckles, then nothing. She wiped her face dry. As she did, an inner-glow stirred in her skin. “Sorry. I couldn’t help picturing a giant egg wearing a spandex suit, walking a tightrope with one of those long balance poles.”

“No worries. It’s kinda nice to see you smile.” Her grin doubled in length, and a wave of confidence cascaded through his spirit. “And thanks.”

Her forehead crinkled, but the smile remained. “For what?”

“For not acting weird or asking why. Olivia asked why, like I’m supposed to open up and pour my soul out to her. Everyone else gets stiff, and I can tell they want to ask, but they’re too polite to. So … thanks.”

“Hey. You and me go way back.”

Justin shifted on the couch so his back pushed against the cushioned armrest, and she followed suit, pressing her knee against his. “I didn’t think you remembered.”

“How could I forget? Besides, you’re the one who’s ignored me since middle school.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. We used to play together all the time, until you stopped coming around. I’d see you out in front of the house, and as soon as you noticed me, you’d pack up and go inside.”

“That’s only because you started giving me the cold shoulder at school,” Justin said in defense. “I thought you were ashamed of being my friend or something.”

“Believe it or not, I felt the same way. I hit that age where boys became cute. I gave you the cold shoulder because I liked you. When I realized that, I got nervous around you. I didn’t know what to say or how to act, so I hid.”

“So all this time, the only thing keeping us from talking to each other was the fact that neither of us was brave enough to break the tension?”

She smiled and shrugged, and for the first time in five years, embarrassment didn’t prevent him from meeting her green eyes.

His spirit turned to ice and the uplifting feeling shriveled when his mom entered the room, her eyes accusing all they fell upon. “What are you two doing on my couch like that for?”

Justin started to speak, unsure of how she was going to react. “We—”

She took small, quick steps forward, facing him in a way that tactfully excluded Sara. “With the world facing fire and brimstone, you’re gonna use your mother’s couch for sinning? Is that it, Justin? We let this hussy in,” she reached back, pointing at Sara without looking, “and you’re gonna let her corrupt our home? Don’t you see what’s going on? Haven’t you heard the news? This is the end of times, and you two are going to bring God’s wrath on this house.” Her eyes narrowed. “Think about your brother. He’s only eight. Are you so willing to risk the damnation of Steven’s soul for—”

“Stop!” Justin yelled with an assertion he’d never heard in his own voice. “We’re just talking, and I don’t think God deducts points for talking and he certainly won’t take it out on Steven. If Sara and I want to spend our last days, hours, minutes talking to each other, then we will.”

Mom’s face scrunched in dismay. She opened her mouth, but stopped short of words. Turning to Sara, he said, “The sun is setting soon. Would you like to watch the first-ever starless night in Pembrook Pines with me?”

Sara’s ears perked with her smile. “Yes. I would.”

#

Sitting on the curb of Justin’s house, he and Sara gazed at the expansive night above. A final holdout, the moon glowed with a lonely luminescence, highlighted against the dreary backdrop of an empty sky, shinning brighter than ever, reflecting the world’s hope for another day.

They were in the hushed period when birds had stopped chirping, but the crickets hadn’t yet begun. There was no wind; no rustling trees; no honking cars; no mad men setting fires. They sat in silence for a long while, reveling in each other’s presence. A lazy firefly buzzed around Justin’s head, circling upward. Together, they watched the bug move higher until it resembled a drunken star drifting aimlessly in the sky.

“I didn’t really want to die,” Justin whispered, tracing the bug as it swooped from one spot to another. “I think I just realized that.” He glanced at Sara’s profile. Moonlight outlined her elegant face, and she smiled in a way that made him comfortable. “I knew my parents would be home soon when I took the pills. They were gone for five hours. I could have taken them as soon as the house was empty, but I didn’t. I waited until I knew they were almost home.”

Sara slid an arm around his neck, and Justin felt as if she had brushed a terrible burden from his shoulders. “I told myself that I wanted to die. I repeated it over and over and over again in my head until I believed it, too. I made myself believe. But deep down, I didn’t want to go. Just like the stars. Until today, I had convinced myself that I didn’t care if the sun stopped shining or not. But I do. I really do.”

Sara’s arm dropped to his waist as she leaned her head on his shoulder.

“And you know what else I just realized?” he asked, looking up to the lonesome moon. For an instant, the sharp light of the moon’s face waned, fading to near emptiness. Justin’s heart faltered, and in that moment he shut his eyes and hoped. When they reopened, the light was normal, and he wondered if it had waned at all.

“What’s that?” Sara’s relaxed voice almost purred.

“Olivia was right. Life goes on.”

END

Visit the original post, The Stars at Night, by JC Hemphill, at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

The Scottish Royal Lion Rampart

The stench hung over the glen like soiled swaddling on a wee bairn. I didn’t need Burd Mary to tell me, “Ach, old FitzWilliam’s been singeing sheep agin, Constable,” but tell me just that she did.

“In there is he, the daft auld fool?” I asked, nodding my head toward the old peat hut FitzWilliam called a home. Steam was pouring out his chimney, so I hoped he was. She said as much and I went to have a look.

Sure and enough, he was in there, a magnifying glass in one hand and steam torch in the other, doing his best to burn the wool coat off a bleating ewe. “Hold still, ye bugger,” he was grunting. “If ye dinna i twon’t be my fault if yer burnt.”

Sheep singeing had been outlawed in ’06, and FitzWilliam knew it as well as I did. “Ah, Jamey, nabbed in the act ye are,” I told him, shielding my eyes from the limelight of the torch.

Malice was clearly aforethought. He had his rig set up again, a system of mirrors and pulleys meant to get a single ray of sunlight into the dark of the hut anytime during the day. He didn’t even try to drop his tools. “‘Tis a bluidy Sassenach law, Stewart,” he said, twisting the knife in my heart a bit. Clan Stewart and Clan FitzWilliam had stood side-by-side since Culloden.

“Aye,” I told him. “But I hae told you a dozen times or more not tae do it, and I hae sworn to the law, Sassenach or nae.” He came along peaceably, which I attribute to the drink, or in truth the lack thereof. We blew the relief valve on the Newcomen engine powering his torch, then two days in the local lockup for Jamey.

So it was off to Glasgow for Jamey FitzWilliam for his hearing. On Wednesday the pair of us boarded the broad BOAC airship, her silver skin almost invisible against our grey Scottish skies and her twin propellors silently driven by Lord Sterling’s heat engines.

This month the magistrate in Glasgow was another Sassenach, a minor lordling putting in his term of service in the occupied lands before taking up the commission he’d bought in the Unhorsed Dragoons armored division. He sat at the bench at the front of the courtroom, a powdered white wig on his head and a scowl on his face.

Over his left shoulder the statue of Blind Justice held her scales in one hand and her sword in the other. It was there to remind us that after 300 years the Scots were still getting the sword and not the scales, and would so long as the British ruled.

“James FitzWilliam,” the magistrate intoned, “You are here on a charge of…” He shuffled the papers in front of him, found the one he wanted and read, “Sheep singeing…Sheep singeing?” he asked, looking right at me.

“Banned since ’06, yer honor,” I told him. “Was the doing of Lady Barrett-Wimpole. She dinna like the wee lambkins being treated rough, you see.”

The magistrate saw. He probably knew Lady Barrett-Wimpole. He put the paper down and turned his displeasure on FitzWilliam. “How say you, defendant?” he asked.

“Oh, aye, I done it,” FitzWilliam said.

His scowl deepening, the magistrate turned to his Engineers. “Has the defendant any prior convictions?”

The Engineers stood in front of the brass exoskeleton of the Babbage engine they took their name from. “Date of birth?” one of the Babbage monkeys asked.

“1864—” FitzWilliam said, and I interrupted to say, “—1863, your honors.” The Babbage engine had been explained to me: they’d be seeking old Jamey’s file with what was called a tree search: Born in a certain year, each criminal would be male or female, then greater or less than 5’ 6”, then greater or less than 10 stone, and so on, branch after branch, until they found the leaf that was James FitzWilliam. But they had to have the right tree to start with.

The Babbage monkeys cranked the engine, asking the FitzWilliam questions at each of its branchings, and him answering more or less truthfully so long as I was standing right there. The engine’s irregular chittering clashed with the ticking of the giant clock at the front of the courtroom and the impatient drumming of His Honor’s fingers on the bench. I could have told them the answer, but it had been willed that His Majesty’s Courts would use the infernal machines and so used they would be.

The engine clattered to a halt. Three beads slid from one side of the output abacus to the other. “He has three prior convictions,” the Engineer told the judge, as though the Lord was unable to count three beads without the help of an Engineer.

“Three prior convictions,” the magistrate intoned through his nose in the plummiest of accents. “What do you have to say for yourself, James FitzWilliam?”

“‘Tis the fish,” said old Jamey. “They fly me doon herenow and then, and I can hae guid a piece o’ haddock and some chips as we dinna hae up north.”

The judge was not stunned speechless, so much the worse for old Jamey. “Thirty days in gaol, on Soylent Green and water,” he ordered. “No fish, no chips. And you,” he said, pointing at me. “If you bring this man before me again, I’ll have your badge and truncheon. We’ll have no more of this nonsense about sheep singeing!” It was clear he did know Lady Barrett-Wimpole. He rapped his gavel and that was that.

Outside the Hall, as we climbed into the cab to get to the flight back, I told him, “Ye auld fool. Now we’re both in it up to our necks, and no two ways about it! What possessed ye to tell such a cock and bull story?”

The old FitzWilliam reached over to pat me on the shoulder. “‘Tis all for the best, me boyo,” he said. “The Sassenach hae handed us a thousand and one daft laws, agin sheep singeing and candle waxing and cow tipping and bugger all, and hae made us take them with his armored carriages and pneumatic cannon. It took us only four trips doon here to rid oursel’s o’ one o’ them laws. Another four thousand trips, Stewart, and we Scots’ll be free men agin.”

Visit the original post, The Patience of Virtue, by Dave D’Alessio, at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.

"Cyberturkey" courtesy of Rob Lang of the Free RPG Blog

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Last week I found myself suddenly on the receiving end of a surprising rebuttal and backlash from INDEPENDENT PUBLISHER (@IPPYMag) and a few of their other fans on Twitter. For some reason the whole thing has unsettled me. I’m not quite sure what to make of it – other than I obviously stepped on some kind of invisible trip wire, rolled a critical fumble, and ran out of bennies all at once.

I’ve attached the whole transcript to the end of this post – for transparency – but I’m writing this post more specifically to communicate directly to the magazine publicly, as I have no other means to do so.

Dear INDEPENDENT PUBLISHER (aka @IPPYMag),

On 11/17 Matt Delman shared an article from your website which he authored, “The Idiocy of Digital Rights Management“, on Twitter. It was a great read which, I felt, was seriously lacking in that it was impossible to leave any comments on the article or to engage with the author in the context of the article itself.

This was extremely frustrating.

Permitting commentary at the site of the original content is always preferable, in my opinion, to posting commentary elsewhere. And while I admit this is often a debatable topic, I assert that all modern websites—whether they are blogs, eZines, or product sites—should support the option of fans and followers to spontaneously engage in dialogue prompted by content itself at the point of consumption, i.e. directly on the content provider’s site. This makes it easy for communities to coalesce around common themes and subject areas, and for content providers to have better control over their public dialogue. It is, frankly, rare to find a website that does not support community participation in the content. So, along these lines I expressed my frustration via Twitter at not being able to respond to some points of Delman’s article by leaving a comment on your site. I was surprised that INDEPENDENT PUBLISHER doesn’t support community feedback on it’s content, especially given your business focus. It’s seems exceptionally counterintuitive to me.

Nonetheless, I want to apologize for what clearly was perceived as a offensive, “unprofessional“, “trash talk” “attack” on your business. As a fan and reader of your magazine, I believe I was supremely misunderstood and I never intended to debase your reputation or claim you did not support independent publishers. I do admit that I made a claim about your apparent lack of support for ePUBs, which I quickly admitted was a mistake and apologized for after I re-read a section of your website. Furthermore please accept my apology for being #snarky and quipping that you were “so 1999” for not allowing people to comment on your content. I had no intention of suggesting you create a “battleground that needed 24 hours monitoring 2 remove offensive material“. I also want to apologize for Tweets that only “proved your point” and were of “little worth“. Perhaps I should have taken a different – less personal approach and Tweeted with a greater degree of constructive criticism. Perhaps then, we could have avoided this entire discussion, something you have pointed out you wish to end. On this last point, please accept my apology for continuing this discussion here at Nevermet Press, instead of at your own site, which is obviously not possible. Unfortunately, this website is the only public venue in which I have any hopes to communicate an effective apology to you using more than 144 characters.

IPPYMag, please—I urge you—accept my apology and unblock your Twitter feed from my tweet stream. I understand you are mad at me, but I love your eZine and I feel that you should give me a second chance. I was, quite honestly, unaware of your aversion to public conversation about your content. Finally, as a devoted fan, I should point out that you may want to also close the comments section on your Facebook Fan Page for all your fans too. It’s currently open for anyone to comment on, so this may have been an oversight. I would hate to see your Facebook page become the same “battleground of little worth” that your website would become with public comments.

All the best,

Jonathan Jacobs

Below is the transcript of the Tweets that led up the above letter. Make of it whatever you like. In the spirit of this letter to IPPYMag, I’ve left the comments section open below for your thoughts – ill or otherwise.

mattdelman Digital Rights Management is one of the dumbest moves a company can make, and in my @ippymag column I give my reasons: http://t.co/lQVBhVtX 11/17/11 11:36 AM

NevermetPress @mattdelman @ippymag ARG! I can’t leave comments on your article… =( So 1999 of you. =P =D 11/17/11 11:42 AM

mattdelman @NevermetPress Sorry! Hey, @ippymag, how about enabling comments on there? 11/17/11 11:42 AM

IPPYmag @mattdelman @NevermetPress The magazine doesn’t have a comments section and currently has no plans to create one. Sorry. 11/17/11 11:04 PM

NevermetPress @IPPYmag @mattdelman Awww… that’s so 1999 of you. Then again, you don’t support ePubs either =D #snarky Ohwell – still a great site though 11/17/11 11:10 PM

IPPYmag @NevermetPress We’re a magazine not a site. We cover e-pubs all the time. Comments sections too often become battlegrounds of little worth. 11/18/11 11:53 AM

NevermetPress @IPPYmag “battlegrounds of little worth.” ??? Sorry, but saying that the opinions of your readers is worthless is a bit harsh,don’t u think? 11/18/11 12:48 PM

NevermetPress @IPPYmag “battlegrounds of little worth.” ??? Sorry, but saying that the opinions of your readers is worthless is a bit harsh,don’t u think? 11/18/11 12:48 PM

IPPYmag .@NevermetPress We’d love 2 hear opinions but comments sections are often battlegrounds needing 24-hr monitoring 2 remove offensive material 11/18/11 3:18 PM

IPPYmag @NevermetPress And we were equally stunned by your admittedly snarky tweet to us & your accusation that we don’t cover e-pubs, which we do. 11/18/11 3:18 PM

IPPYmag @NevermetPress Your tweets to us prove our point about why we don’t have comment section. Constructive criticism isn’t t/ same as trash talk 11/18/11 3:20 PM

NevermetPress @IPPYmag Seriously? All @mattdelman and I asked for was a comments section. Now – I completely agree. You shouldn’t have a comments section. 11/18/11 5:07 PM

NevermetPress @IPPYmag My apologies for the ePUB comment – I went back to the page on your site and reread it. I stand corrected. 11/18/11 5:16 PM

NevermetPress It always blows me away when a company overreacts on Twitter/FB to fan comments. Fans – even when they are mad – are their greatest resource 11/18/11 5:19 PM

ninatypewriter @NevermetPress You’re behaving in a thoroughly unprofessional manner. We’ve been professional in our tweets to you. You’re now blocked. 11/18/11 6:12 PM

IPPYmag @NevermetPress We’ve tweeted you in a professional manner. You have not done the same. We don’t wish to continue this discussion. 11/18/11 6:15 PM

NevermetPress .@IPPYmag Actually I don’t think you have, but I’m not surprised. This was, after all, started because of your dislike for discussions 11/19/11 4:05 PM