The passageway opens into a huge open cavern extending for thousands of feet.
There are plenty of what appear to be empty dwellings. There is a globe floating near top of this cavern that glows with an eerie, eldritch light. It appears to be a large moon.
Small animals and large insects run here and there, but they avoid the party.
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This is the former city of the Shadow Elves.
This one has not launched yet, but the sign-up page is ready.
Wasted Lands: The Dreaming Age Role Playing Game
A tabletop RPG of cosmic horror, swords, and sorcery in a savage lost epoch, 1000 years after the Old Ones fell to their eternal sleep.
I am very, very excited about this one. Although I am not really part of the development, I get the joy of seeing it in development and enjoy it as a fan. Plus this has been Jason's baby for years, my typical nonsense can be added at my table.
From the Kickstarter:
The Old Ones are gone...
Stories tell of the day when the skies fell in showers of fiery rock, when the world groaned and shifted, the great beasts of the Old Ones died in an instant, and the stars themselves changed, sending the Old Ones into a deep, eternal slumber. Humankind, now free from the cruel grasp of our former masters, now rules the world from the shining kingdoms the Other Gods left behind.
We now strive against the remaining minions of the Other Gods, their remaining cults, and a world ravaged by the energies of the Deeper Dark. Some with names like Isis, Odin, Quetzalcouatl, Bel, Hecate, Minerva, Marduk, and others will forge legends that remain through the ages.
This is the birth of gods.
Wasted Lands: The Dreaming Age is a game of swords and sorcery in a savage lost epoch, set millions of years ago. You play the all-too-human origins of the gods of classic mythology, whose stories will form our own ancestral memories and civilizations. As you engage with mythology, you gain special powers that will lead you on the path of apotheosis.
The game is offered as a two-volume set: the Wasted Lands: The Dreaming Age Role Playing Game, which contains all the rules of play, and The Gazetteer of the Dreaming Age and Campaign Guide, which contains the setting, bestiary, and game master information. Grab one or both!
How can you not be excited about this?
I hope to post more about this game all month long. I still have some characters I want to make and some adventures to talk about.
This game uses the same RPG system as does NIGHT SHIFT (The O.G.R.E.S.) but it will include conversion guides for Spellcraft & Swordplay (O.R.C.S.) AND Castles & Crusades (SIEGE Engine).
This could also be the non-OGL D&D replacement you have been looking for.
More to come!
Continuing down the passageway down from Rooms 3 and 8, there is a turn to the right.
This room has water pooling in the center. Stopping on it will trigger a sinkhole causing the entire floor to collapse.
Everyone standing 15 ft from the center will fall 10ft and take 1d6+2 hp of damage. Climbing out is not difficult due to the uneven nature of the hole.
This is not a trap, just a natural sinkhole.
Doing the playtesting for WASTED LANDS has made me think a lot about gods again and how many there are out there.
To recap here are mythos covered in the AD&D 1st Edition Deities and Demigod/Legends and Lore.
There are also other categories of myths and legends.
Good coverage, but not everything, to be sure. More Norse gods are listed in the GD&H book and later get a huge feature in Dragon magazine. There are more Finnish Gods too. The Howard/Hyborea gods of Conan also get a listing in GD&H. Though if you grab the PDF or POD versions of GD&H now there are no Melniboné or Hybora sections.
But what is missing?
Despite their coverage in Dragon, we don't get any of the gods of the World of Greyhawk. Same with the WoG Suel Gods. The Roman gods are not covered really. There are all the demi-human gods in the Unearthed Arcana. Then we have more in Dragon and that is not counting what we can get from Castles & Crusades.
We have enough for another volume really. A Deities & Demigods II.
Deities & Demigods II
Collecting all the above material and trying not to do too much duplication here is a proposed Deities & Demigods II for AD&D 1st Ed.
That is a lot.
And that is not counting the ones I also made myself, my Greco-Egyptian Gods, and my Roman-Norse ones.
This could get quickly out of hand.
I have been looking for something to replace my "One Man's God" Feature. Maybe this is it.
I'll need to think this one over.
What would you like to see? D&DG format? Later formats? Gods as monsters with HP or Gods as...well Gods? I think Gods as Monsters really runs counter to the idea the original designers wanted but despite that they gave us stat blocks for them and that is what people know.
Lots of different ways to depict the gods. I suppose I'll just have to figure out what works.
Though I suppose most readers here would want something akin to the AD&D 1st Ed presentation.
Have to mull this one over.
I suppose I could just play-test these gods in WASTED LANDS and see how they all come out.
Returning to Room 3 and taking the left-hand path leads to another long tunnel.
On their way through the passageway, the party encounters 2 large cave bears.
They are a mated pair returning from an unsuccessful hunt. They are agitated and hungry.
There is a nearby cave on the left with its stash of treasure (Vx2).
Growing up the shows I really loved (in addition to Doctor Who and Star Trek) were the various horror anthologies that came and went during the 80s, 90s, and before. "The Twilight Zone (all versions)" was chief among these, but so were shows like "Night Gallery," "Monsters," "The Outer Limits (both versions)," "Amazing Stories," and two of my favorites, "Tales from the Crypt" and "Tales from the Darkside." It was "Tales from the Darkside" that influenced me the most. I wanted my games (at the time largely AD&D) to be more horror-like. Even in sci-fi, I could not help but notice how many of the elements in The Outer Limits would also appear in Star Trek, or more to the point the other way around since I watched Star Trek first.
In the end, I got my wish. NIGHT SHIFT is the perfect distillation of both Horror and old-school adventure rules. A rule system I have been doing in one form or another along with a horror-filled background that is perfect to model the horror and dark sci-fi I grew up loving.
The only thing missing is the anthologies.
I spent my weekend (like every weekend in late spring early summer) out in the garden helping my wife. I was doing some weeding and thought I needed to do a set of themed adventures I could publish. They are unrelated to each other, but all have a common thread of horror.
Then I realized something. I had already started this.
I have written a lot of adventures for many different games. All of them (for the most part) have a horror feel to them.
So to get the ideas rolling for Tales from the Other Side, I figure I will talk about the adventures I have already done and how they can be used with NIGHT SHIFT. I am just going to focus on ones that are readily available. I am looking back at some of my old docs and seeing which ones I own outright and can re-do and which ones never saw the light of day.
This adventure was a prequel adventure to what was called "The Djinn Arc" that never got going. It's purpose was to introduce new players to the game, and it featured the original cast of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." It focused on Willow and Tara as the reincarnations of Bohdmal and Liath (respectively) as the foster mothers of the great Irish hero Fionn MacCumhail (Finn McCool). It features the return of an ancient evil and two new kinds of vampires. The biggest issue with it is that it is an introductory adventure for what should be a "season" of related adventures, not an anthology.
So much of my writing from that time is baked into the DNA of NIGHT SHIFT that converting the game's tone is minimal at worst.
Mechanics changes:
This adventure gives some argument of while the stories are anthologies, the characters remain the same throughout.
This adventure has been successfully converted to NIGHT SHIFT many times. Since it uses Labyrinth Lord rules, conversion is trivial. I ran this both at Gary Con 2021 and Gen Con 2021 as a NIGHT SHIFT adventure where I changed the name to Willow Crest Manor. Both manors are based on a real-life place from my old hometown known as Maplecrest.
The biggest change here is to update when and where you put it. Personally, any small town will do. It just needs to have about 100 years worth of history. Dark woods are good too, so somewhere above the 40º North Latitude line is good in my mind. When I did it for Gary Con I set it near Rockford, IL.
I do adore Blue Rose, I love the optimism and the feel of the game. So of course I bring horror to it. I must be damaged. This adventure requires that you find and rescue five psychic children. Trouble is there is a monster that wants to eat them (thinking they will make it more powerful) and a demon lord of storms that thinks they are his children. In Blue Rose this is all set in the town of Garnet, but in my running of this using NIGHT SHIFT, I set it in Alton, IL. It features another member of the unpleasant Meacham family and my homage to the Piasa Bird.
For changes, there is the tone and location. Use the demon stats from NIGHT SHIFT and one of the many versions of the Piasa Bird I have posted here.
My most recent adventure is horror through and through. A night hag, or in this case a dab tsog, has been attacking members of the local Hmong community. There is also a Will-o-the-Wisp feeding off of the dying energies. Tone wise this is perfect for NIGHT SHIFT.
Chill's skill checks are little different than that of NIGHT SHIFT, but as a rule of thumb, and roll pf +1 above what a character makes in NIGHT SHIFT is 5%. The Nightmare, in addition to being written for Chill, is fairly self-explanatory and can be used as is with a variety of systems.
For the Will-o-the-Wisp you can use my stats for them here. For the Night Hag you can use the hags in the core rules of NIGHT SHIFT.
The next two are total cheats since I did not write them but I did do the D&D 5e conversions for them.
This adventure is a conversion of the Labyrinth Lord adventure created by Peter C. Spahn. The horror elements here are light, but as St. Aleena is the patron Saint of adventurers she is still a good choice. The characters come here and then the horror ensues. There is still an evil cult and still unnamable evil spawn here.
The Shrine of St. Aleena has thematic connections with my own Dark Druid, or at least, it did when I ran it for my group here.
To update this adventure change it over to some modern location, I would say on the outskirts of some town, but it has to be old. So East of the Mississippi River. Otherwise you are good to go.
This is even a bigger cheat than the Shrine of St. Aleena above. But it is solid horror. Death's Ride is an old-school TSR adventure for Basic (Companion) D&D for characters 15th level and above. It has all sort of nasty things going on and really tough monsters.
My D&D 5e conversion scales them down a bit (but not much). It fits with the whole "weird shit going on in far off places" horror. I mean in this respect it is not much different than "The Children of the Corn."
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Almost enough for a mini-campaign.
I'll have to work on some more and see what I have that I can resurrect.
Hopefully there will be more Tales from the Other Side.
A hidden alcove on the far right of this room has another visitor looking for food, though the food only just walked in.
A large Ochre Jelly moves towards the party. This one has been feeding a lot lately and has 7 HD.
The jelly has no treasure.
