#Dungeon23 Tomb of the Vampire Queen, Level 5, Room 16

Taking the far hallway on the right leads to another corridor with four doors. Each door opens to similar rooms.

Each room is dark with a large vat full of green liquid as the centerpiece.  In two of these, the vats are empty of liquid and there are skeletons at the bottom.  The glass is broken.

In room 16a there is a vat with a Saurian floating inside. If the glass is broken and the liquid drained the saurian will revive in 1d4+1 turns. The saurian (a Warrior) will be enraged and quite insane. It will attack the party right away.

In room 16c the vat has a human male. If this vat is drained the human will revive in 1d6+1 turns, scream incoherently at the party and then promptly die.

--

These are abductees of the Ophidians. They have been here for centuries kept alive and awake for all this time. The Necromancers kept these two to come back to later but never did.  The controls for the life support are damaged, so there is no way to put the victims back.

Monstrous Monday: Saurians and Other Reptile Humanoids

Another sci-fi staple today and one that also fits in well with Doctor Who, Star Trek, and yes D&D.  Today I want to discuss the Saurians. 

Now these guys go by a variety of names, saurians, saurials, reptoids, reptilians, and more. But for the sake of argument I am making a distinction between these guys and the Ophidians of last week. While I typically cast the ophidians as typically all evil and descended from human snake cultists, the saurians (just to use one name) are mostly neutral, cold and calculating, and largely descended from the same era that gave us dinosaurs.

I do admit that I took a lot of notes from Professor Dale A. Russell's idea of a "Dinosauriod" creature.  IT hit me at a very fertile time in my imagination; my growing love of all things science, my curiosity about UFOs and alien abduction theories, and of course, my love for D&D which was at an all-time high then. Throw in healthy amounts of Doctor Who (Silurians, Sea Devils, Draconians), Land of the Lost (Sleestaks), and Star Trek (Gorn, Saurians), and it makes a heady brew.  I also discuss them, or their near-kin, in my various posts last year on Conspiracy Theories (Ancient Aliens, Cryptoterrestrial Hypothesis, Extraterrestrials on Earth).

D&D already had Lizard Men and, to a degree, other reptilians. They would later move Kobolds over to be more reptile-like (something I have worked around) and introduce more reptilian races that are even closer to this idea (Saurian, Saurial).  We also get one of the "Big Bads" of the BECMI D&D line, the Carnifex, who works with this idea.

I used these guys for years but mostly just used Lizard Man stats. Over time I adapted them and changed them to what I mostly use today.

Saurian

Saurians are a reptilian race that came about around the time dinosaurs walked the world. They appear to be humanoid, but this is a case of convergent evolution; they have no biological relationship to the other humanoid species found in the world. 

Saurians are divided into castes based on their roles in society. These castes are purely functional in nature, and while each caste feels they contribute more to their society than the others, all are required to make their society function.

• Workers - These are the vast bulk of the Saurian society. They perform the labor and all the tasks needed. They average 5' to 5½' in height and weigh 80lbs to 100lbs.
• Warrior - These Saurians are dedicated to battle and defending the Saurian tribes. They are prone to battle frenzy and blood lust. They average 7' to 8' in height and 250lbs to 325lbs.
• Noble - The ruling class of Saurians. Stand around 6' high and weigh 150lbs.
• Scientist - nearly indistinguishable from the Noble caste. Noted for the high intelligence.
• Psionicists - on the surface, they look like a Worker or Noble but are characterized by advanced psionic powers.

All saurians are reptilian with large forward-facing eyes. They have three fingers and a thumb on each hand. They also have broad, three-toed feet. Their skin tones can vary from green to pale to even near-pink. There is no color combination between castes; any color saurian can be born to any caste. 

Females are slightly larger than males. There are no mammalian sexual characteristics, Saurians do not nurse their young, and males do tend to be more brightly colored. In the vision range of the Saurian eye these color differences are far more pronounced. Creatures with infravision can see these differences.

While many perceive the Saurians as evil, they are, in truth just very amoral when it comes to other life. They see all mammals as potential enemies and/or food.

Saurians are ancient enemies of the Ophidians and the Dragonborn. 

Saurian Minds

Saurian reptilian brains work differently from that of mammals. This has a few effects when in regards to other creatures. 

This makes giving them an alignment trickier. Slaughtering a group of humanoids, including the very young and very old, would be seen as an evil act by most creatures, but for the Saurians, it would be a necessary part of remaining alive and providing for their own tribe; an act they would view as good, even lawful.  Many humanoids would chafe under their rigid caste system, but to a Saurian, it ensures that individuals are living up to their greatest potential. No Saurian would want a Scientist as a Warrior or a Noble as a Worker since they would all be very ill-suited for the jobs. 

The other effect is one of magic.  All saurians, regardless of caste, have a +2 bonus to saving throws on all mind-affecting magics. This includes Charm, Hold, Illusions, and Sleep spells. It also means they have a +1 on all saves on other magic except for those that deal direct damage. Even a healing spell cast on a Saurian must first be subject to a saving throw. If they make the save they are not healed.

Consequently, Saurians are not able to take levels in any magic using classes like Cleric, Magic-user, or Witch.

Saurian (Worker, Scientist, Noble)

Armor Class: 7
Hit Dice: 2+2 (11 hp), 3+3 (17 hp), 4+4 (22 hp)
Move: 120 (40)
Attacks: 1 by weapon
Damage: 1d6
No. Appearing: 2d10, 1d8, 1d6
Morale: 8, 10, 10
Treasure Type: None
Alignment: Neutral (True Neutral/Unaligned) 

Saurians are a reptilian race of humanoids. They are born into a rigid caste system based on their biology. Each caste feels they contribute the most to their society, so inter-caste conflict is much rarer than intra-caste conflict. 

The Worker, Scientist, and Noble castes are largely indistinguishable from each other to outsiders. The worker caste is the most numerous, and the nobles are a little taller. 

Workers: These laborers handle all the labor in a Saurian tribe. This includes everyone from the ones that build homes to healers to those that care for eggs and hatchlings.

Scientists: Generalized by their higher intelligence and pursuit of ways to improve the Saurian people.

Nobles: The ruling caste of Saurians.

Since all saurian eggs are kept in hatcheries, there are no parent-child bonds but hatchmate bonds. So in this manner, a worker can claim kinship to a noble and visa-versa. These bonds are just as strong as any mammalian parent or sibling bond.

Saurian, Warrior

Armor Class: 7
Hit Dice: 8+2 (56 hp)
Move: 120 (40)
Attacks: 2 by weapon
Damage: 1d8+3 x2
No. Appearing: 1d8 (3d6)
Morale: 12
Treasure Type: None
Alignment: Neutral (True Neutral/Unaligned) 

Saurian warriors are a caste unto themselves. The largest and healthiest hatchlings are trained from birth to be warriors whose only purpose in life is to defend the Saurian tribes. Warriors will fight among themselves to establish dominance and access to resources, but they will never attack anyone of the other castes. They find such ideas repugnant.  

However, a Saurian warrior will have no qualms attacking a group of humanoids; young or old, as they only see mammals as potential food. 

Hatchmate bonding is the strongest among the Warrior caste, with warrior Saurians dedicating their lives to protect their hatchmates.

Saurian, Psionist

Armor Class: 7
Hit Dice: 4 (18 hp)
Move: 120 (40)
Attacks: 1 by psychic attack
Damage: see below
Special: Psychic powers
No. Appearing: 1 (1d4)
Morale: 12
Treasure Type: None
Alignment: Neutral (True Neutral/Unaligned) 

Psionic Saurians are the rarest and sit somewhat outside the Saurian caste system. They look like Noble or Scientist Saurians, if somewhat smaller. They are identified early, taken from their hatcheries, and raised only with other Psionic Saurians. Thus they have the weakest hatchmate bonds of all Saurians, and intra-caste violence between psionics is the highest of all castes. 

Saurian Psionists have the following powers. These are not magic powers but instead are psychic in nature.  

• At will: Detect thoughts & emotions
• 3 times/day: Detect Invisible, Detect Magic
• 1 time/day: Charm Person, Clairvoyance, ESP, Telekinesis (up to 100 cn weight)

There are stronger psionists with more powers.

Note: The powers are not magical and cannot be detected or countered by magical means.

#Dungeon23 Tomb of the Vampire Queen, Level 5, Room 15

 Going back to Room #10 and going straight. This hallway opens into a large open chamber with hallways leading away from the corridor. There are also several doors (8) in this room. 

There are skeletons of same snake-like creatures here.

The rooms are all nearly identical. These rooms appear to be living quarters of some sort.  Each one is about 20' by 20. In each one is a bed, a closest and table. Some still have their inhabitants, though long since dead.  Scouring the rooms will reveal about 1d8 x 10 gp worth of various bits of good metal.

--

These are the crew quarters for the junior officers. Not all of them made it out. 

#Dungeon23 Tomb of the Vampire Queen, Level 5, Room 14

 Going back to Room #10, going left takes them down a long, poorly lit hallway (lights are flickering) it turns to the left and continues into a long room.

This room looks like Room #13, but it is not damaged. The far wall glows and gives off a slight hum.

Touching anything in this room will give off a strange trilling sound. A light will come on, and then go right out.  

There is no treasure here.

--

This the Port (left) side engine and it is intact. The engine itself is in standby mode and will not reactivate. Thankfully. Reactivating the engine will likely blow up the entire island.

Larina Nichols for FASA Doctor Who RPG

You didn't think I would go through all this effort and not at least see how my own Drosophila melanogaster would work. I least wanted to try out a witch. 

In truth, my little witch Larina has a lot to do with Doctor Who, especially the Doctor Who I was watching in the 80s.  My original version of her had bits of Sarah Jane Smith and Jo Grant, but not as "screamy" as they were. And more than a little of Romana II. And many of my favorite episodes had a more horror feel, especially "The Brain of Morbius" and The Sisterhood of Karn.

SO...how does a witch fit into Doctor Who? We have the Sisterhood of Karn in the classic episodes and even the Carrionites in the later "The Shakespeare Code" (2007).  The episode "The Daemons" gave us a White Witch, and "The Stones of Blood" gave us druids. So there is at least some fertile ground here. Humans in rare cases have been shown to develop mental powers like telepathy and tk ("Planet of the Spiders") 

Given my love for the occult 70s revival and British folk horror, I am tempted to set her as a companion to the Doctor (or one of the other PC Time Lords) in 1974 (Tom Baker era). Have her a "white witch" from Wales (because why not) who is trying to figure out what to do with her parents' old spice shop. That is when a Time Lord comes into her life.

Larina Nichols
aka, "Nix"

Human Female
Profession: Spice shop owner, neo-pagan
Approximate Space/Time Coordinates: TNP Earth, 1974

Apparent Age: 20s
Actual Age: 25
Regog. Handle: Bright red hair, blue eyes, thick Welsh accent
Height: 5'4"
Build: Slim/Average
Looks: Striking 

STR: III
END: IV
DEX: IV
CHA: V
MNT: VI
INT: V

Max Op END: 20    Wound Heal: 4
Curr Op END: 10    Fatigue Heal: 4
Inact Save Lvl III: 12
Unc Thresh Lvl II: 6

Special Abilities:  Telekinesis (11), Telepathy (11)

AP: 7

Skills:
Artistic Expression II
Gaming II
Life Sciences II
General Medicine II
General Medicine, Herbal Cures III
Physical Sciences II
Public Performance I
Social Sciences II
Streetwise I
Trivia, Occultism III
Unarmed Combat, Brawling II
Verbal Interaction III

I can see her traveling with her Time Lord roughly parallel to Sarah Jane Smith and the Fourth Doctor's adventures. Maybe in this alternate reality, she got her mental powers from one of the blue crystals from Metebelis 3, turning her eyes from brown to blue, somewhat like they did with Leela.

Travel with her Time Lord until she decides to stay on Karn and join the Sisterhood? No idea, really yet.

As it turns out, I did, in fact, have a character sheet for her. It wasn't complete, but enough to get me going. 

#Dungeon23 Tomb of the Vampire Queen, Level 5, Room 13

 The doorway from Room #10 opens to a hallway. PCs can go right, left or straight ahead.

Going right takes them down a long, poorly lit hallway (lights are flickering) it turns to the right and continues into a long room.

This room looks like it had been in an intense fire with melted metal bits everywhere.

Spending longer than 1 hour here will cause the PCs to feel sick unless a Saving Throw vs. Death is passed.  Affected PCs will then begin to die of a wasting disease. The healing tools from earlier will revive them as will a Cure Disease spell.

There are several decayed corpses here. They look like the humanoid from the previous rooms. All that remain are bones.

There is no treasure or creatures here.

--

This is the remains of the Starboard (right) Engine. The sickness is radiation sickness.

FASA Doctor Who RPG: Part 5 Jenny Everywhere

Jenny Everywhere by Diana Nock

To wrap up my exploration of the FASA Doctor Who RPG I wanted to create a character for it. I wanted a Time Lord or something like that. So I could really test the system out. But in truth, nothing was coming to mind. I wanted a fun character, not a Doctor clone, and someone that fit with the spirit of not just this game but my blog.

After a lot of going back and forth on various ideas and going back to an old idea. I felt it was time to revisit my old friend Jenny Everywhere!

We last saw Jenny on these pages back in Victorian England for the Ghosts of Albion RPG, where, among other things, she was lamenting that there would be no decent cell phone reception here for another 170 years.  But honestly, Jenny is a great character, and according to many of the articles I have read on her she owes at least a little bit of her existence to Doctor Who.  She is perfect for this since I can stat her up for all versions of the Doctor Who RPGs out there and compare them.  

A bit of background from my original post 13 years ago! (ACK!)

Jenny Everywhere is a shifter; that is she can shift between the realities and interact with who knows who.  Whether there is one Jenny Everywhere that is very mobile or multiple Jenny's that have a vague awareness of each other is left to the individual authors.  I personally am fond of the Multiple Jennys idea.

Jenny Everywhere is also a public domain character.  Meaning anyone can use her in whatever project they have. You just need to include her license as below:

"The character of Jenny Everywhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Everywhere, in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed."

It is such a cool concept, not just the open-source of it (that is cool also) but a character that exists in every single reality and can shift between them.

Regular readers should by now know of my love for the multi-verse.  It is a very cool concept I enjoy on principle and how it has been employed in various sci-fi and fantasy publications.  My favorite might be the great Micheal Moorcock stories of Elric, Corum, and the other Incarnations of the Eternal Champion.  Jenny would be different.  While the Eternal Champion feels the combined weight of all his incarnations as it were, Jenny is freed by hers.  Reality is hers to roam because that is what it is there for.  In one of the comics I saw, she fights against a force known as Chaos, but that doesn't make her an agent of Law as we would have seen in the Corum books. 

Of course, the openness of Jenny is very appealing.  Something everyone can use and share and just a promise not to break her.

In the various Doctor RPGs I am going to say she is Galifreyian, or half-Galifreyian, human on her mother's side.  This gives her some temporal sense and makes her long-lived. She also has the ability to shift in Time and Space. 

Jenny Everywhere
aka, The Shifter

STR: IV
END: V
DEX: V
CHA: VI
MNT: V
INT: IV

Max Op END: 30    Wound Heal: 5
Curr Op END: 15    Fatigue Heal: 5
Inact Save Lvl III: 12
Unc Thresh Lvl II: 6

Special Abilities: Luck, Shifting

AP: 7

Skills:
Armed Combat, Contact Weapons II
Armed Combat, Ranged Weapons II
Artistic Expression III
Carousing III
Engineering III
Engineering, Temporal IV
Gaming II
Leadership III
Life Sciences II
General Medicine III
Physical Sciences VI
Public Performance I
Social Sciences II
Space Sciences II
Streetwise IV
TARDIS Systems III
Trivia, Time Shifting V
Unarmed Combat, Brawling III
Unarmed Combat, Grappling III
Temporal Vehicle III
Verbal Interaction III
Verbal Interaction, Fast Talking IV

In my mind, Jenny Shifts about time and space more or less at will. She can also move between universes. A bit like Jobu Tupaki (Everything Everywhere All at Once) and America Chavez (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness). Likely she has met both of those 'verse jumpers as well.

She has run into the Doctor and even hung out with Clara and Ashildr on The American Roadside Diner in Space. 

I have to admit I also want to stat up her companion. Her older, but very normal if a lot sexier, half-sister Donna Everywhere. 

Links

• The Shifter Archive
• Jenny Everywhere Day
• Wikipedia
• Jenny's entry on her Fandom Wiki
• The Doctor on her Fandom Wiki