It be September 19th...

...and we all knows what that means, m'hearties. Yes, splice the mainbrace, swash your buckles (or the other way round) and hoist the Jolly Roger. Last one to Port Royal buys the grog!

Good Guy Cthulhu 2

An Adventure for Every Monster - Devil, Bone

Bone Devil

Frequency   Uncommon
No. appearing  1-2 or 2-8
Armour class  -1
Move  15” 
Hit Dice   9
Percentage in lair  55%   
Treasure type Nil
No. of attacks 1
Damage per attack  3-12   
Special attack  See below  
Special defences  See below
Magic Resistance 40%
Intelligence Very
Alignment Lawful Evil
Size  L (9’ tall)
THAC0  12
XP value 2800 + 12/hp

This adventure begins in what appears to be a perfectly unremarkable section of dungeon passageway. However, there is a nasty surprise waiting for the party; a pit trap of sufficient size that most, if not all of the characters are going to be caught in it.

They will be plunged down a shaft sufficiently steep that climbing back up would be difficult but not so deep that they would be incapacitated by the drop. At the bottom, they will find themselves in pitch blackness, not because the door to the pit trap has closed again (it has) but because the pit into which they have been dropped is under the influence of a Continual Darkness spell that has been made permanent.

The pit is merely one section of the Black Maze, a labyrinth of twisting, turning and sometimes dead-end passages, with a number of nasty features like doorways that open onto very deep shafts. Somewhere in the Black Maze there is the switch which will deactivate the Continual Darkness; all the party has to do is find either it or the exit (there is one) by fumbling along in the darkness, going by touch alone. Infravision or ultravision will work in the darkness, which is just as well because in the Black Maze are two Bone Devils, whose job it is to hunt down and despatch anyone who enters. They have infravision, ultravision, and they can also detect invisible.

They also have the powers of
Charm person
Suggestion
Illusion
Teleportation
Know alignment
Cause fear
Animate dead
Fly
Become invisible
Summon another bone devil (40%) – the DM could conceivably use this ability to restock the devils if the party gets lucky against one too quickly – not that a good DM would do such a dishonest thing!

Once a day, each devil can create a wall of ice, so they may well use that to block off sections of the maze to channel the party into a killing zone.

The DM can have a lot of fun with this one; remember that the remains of previous parties who didn’t find the exit in time will litter the labyrinth (which the DM can make as large as they wish). There are lots of opportunities for trips, bumps and nasty accidents – plenty of saves v DEX to be made here.  A good trick which the devils might try is to suspend the skeletons of their victims by wires from the ceiling of the maze so that the rattle of their bones might make the party think that a devil is in the area. Another nasty trick might be a patch of fungus or slime which is harmless in itself but marks the party member who blunders into it with a stain that is visible on the ultraviolet spectrum, meaning they’re even more visible to the Bone Devils.

It should also be remembered that infravision in particular may work well to see sources of heat but it’s much harder to spot things which are the same temperature as their surroundings. Like uneven slabs of stone on the dungeon floor.

Malice by John Gwynne

Another week, another big book (628 pages). Unlike Hawk Quest, this one takes a while to get going and I suppose that there are  readers who would have given up by the time the slow-burning plot really fires up. It’d be their loss because once it does get underway, the iron shackles of the quality writing grip and won’t let go. In tone, it’s similar to both Paul Kearney and Brian Ruckley; it’s also been compared favourably to David Gemmell but (and I know this is going to come as a shock) I’ve never read any Gemmell, so I can’t comment.

Gwynne has taken what appears to be the Dark Ages (always a plus in my book) and set his story there. The map seems to be based, in the North at least, on Europe – with the British Isles expanded slightly and attached to the mainland, similar to the way things were before the end of the last Ice Age. I’ve done something similar when designing a campaign map many moon ago, so I recognised it pretty quickly.

Into this familiar arena are pitched the protagonists; chief amongst these are Corban, a blacksmith’s son and Nathair, a prince with big ideas. Starting at almost opposite ends of the continent, they’re clearly on a collision course as kings, warriors and mysterious wise men are swept up in a frenzy of expectation at the imminent rising of champions of good and evil known as the Bright Star and Black Sun respectively. Add to that tribes of giants who haunt the huge forest at the heart of the continent and we’re set for hundreds of pages of good old-fashioned action – and there’s plenty of it to go round. One of Gwynne’s publicity shots has him sitting with two huge dogs (both of whom appear in the book) and a massive axe, so he clearly knows his stuff when describing the combat scenes. There’s blood in bucketloads and when he says, on the cover of the book ‘even the brave will fall’ he means it. There is, however – as far I could see – no foul language in the book so in this respect, it differs from other ‘gritty’ fantasy novels out there.

The book uses a single point of view per chapter, each headed with that character’s name. There are actually six individual point of view characters and that, to me at least, was perhaps too many. Gwynne could have pruned it down by two without losing any of the story’s strengths and a good case could be made for further pruning. Still, spending time with the characters means that what happens to them during the book does affect the reader more than if they had merely been referred to in the narrative of another. The structure does mean that on occasion, the reader has to wait a considerable number of pages before finding out what happened to a particular character, left dangling on a cliff-hanger.

If you’re prepared to put the effort in, Malice is a good read; I found myself making time to read on once the pace picked up and having been drawn in by Gwynne, I’m looking forward to the second book, Valour, due out in the UK early 2014. 

Good guy Cthulhu

What Lies Beneath

Airborne radar surveys of the ice sheets in Greenland have revealed a hidden canyon beneath the ice that is over 460 miles long, 6 miles wide and 2600 feet deep. That's way longer than the Grand Canyon and now officially the longest canyon on Earth. It could be even longer since they haven't been able to survey further south yet.

My first thoughts were of the Rift Canyon in Greyhawk but that's a tiddler compared to the newly-discovered Greenland Canyon.

I love discoveries like this; finding the Gamburtsevs under the Antarctic Ice Sheet was another cool moment. I mean, what's not to like about a range known as the Ghost Mountains?

It's just occurred to me that an ice-free Greenland would work really well as a campaign world. Anyone else find inspiration for their worlds from sources like this?

RIP Seamus Heaney

Whether you're interested in poetry or not, there's no doubt that Heaney was a giant of the arts. On my Creative Writing degree course, the poetry sections invariably had something by him. A sad day for everybody who loves words and what they can do.