My D&D Ideas

The homeland of the dwarves also happens to be the homeland of the hop plant.  That means dwarven beer is the only beer to routinely contain hops which improve both flavour and shelf life.

Beers without hops - basically everybody else’s - spoils too quickly to stored or shipped so it needs to be brewed in relatively small batches and drunk locally.  Most beer served in taverns is made by the tavern keepers or the local community and is of varying quality and taste.

Due to their longer shelf life dwarven beers are the only ones produced in full-time breweries and routinely imported and sold in taverns across the world.  While the travel cost makes them more expensive their superior taste as well as familiarity and consistency makes them a popular choice and most taverns will try to stock at least a little.

Random concept: victorian or early 1900s. Scientists develop a procedure to remove people’s brains and insert them into machines.  This is intended for people who have suffered grievous bodily injuries, particularly soldiers.

Think a brain in a jar on spindly spider legs, some the size of people, some big heavily armed war machines. Brain jars on balloons like tiny zeppelins with dangling insect legs to grab things.  Retro mad science meets Matrix robots aesthetic. Little bit War of the Worlds.

The problem is everybody who undergoes this procedure turns against humanity.  Nobody knows why. They seem to retain their memories and everything but universally side together to try to forcibly extract everybody else’s brains and put them into more robots. Some people think it’s the sinister effect of the new-fangled “radio” or wireless telegraph wired to their brains.

Now there’s a full-on war of humans vs brainbots as the bots slowly spread, extracting the brains of whole cities of people and putting them into all manner of creepy robot for no obvious reason.

The villagers know them as misshapen little monsters half-glanced in the darkness.  As beady yellow eyes watching from the tree line after dark.

They are cattle mutilated and skinned in the night, body parts found in the town well.

Alice claims she shot one with her bow the one night but by morning there was no sign of body, blood or arrow.

They say on a still evening, when even the wind holds it’s breath, if you listen you can hear the inhuman cackling drifting across the dark forest.

The two teenagers who snuck into the woods at night and were found hung from twelve different trees, devoid of eyes, tongues and skin.  The trappers who went out and never came back.

Something needs to be done. It’s getting worse.  They may be coming for our children.  Peter swore he saw smoke from the direction of the old mine but that’s two days’ trip.  Joan thinks we should ask the crazy dwarf that lived in that houseboat.  She always seems to know things.  If she’s still alive.

All the villagers know about the appearance of goblins is they’re small, grotesque, misshapen creatures with bright beady eyes.  Few have seen one up close.

What they don’t know but may discover is that in truth goblins are tribes of halflings cursed by an angy god to live a horrible sort of half life.  They are shrivelled and skinless, their eyes the only thing about them that truely looks alive.  And their eyes are full of anger and hate for the life that’s been stolen from them.

Their misshapen form comes from the ill-fitting, poorly made skin suits they fashion from the people they kill.  They wear these suits to try pretend they’re still fully alive, a kind of grotesque cosplay of their old lives.  Wearing these suits they cook food they no longer need to eat, sit around fires though they no longer feel the cold.  Their entire society is a manic roleplay around the half remembered rituals of their pasts.

Any goblin whose skin suit is lost or damaged is banished from sight until they can get a replacement.  Seeing each other’s true selves breaks the illusion the goblins cling to so desperately and flings them into rages of anger and despair.

Images for a 1930s based fantasy setting:

Gnomes in oily overalls tending to a sleek steam train.

An orcish professor with bushy sideburns and a tweed jacket is asked for his papers by elvish soldiers with rifles and jackboots.

Elven “art nouveau fascist” as an aesthetic.  Curly stylised trees in bold red-white-and-black.

A dwarven zeppelin pulling in to a giant art deco zeppelin dock carved into the side a of snow-capped mountain.  Dwarves queue up in their finest furs for the trip while a team of conjuration engineers do routine safety inspections on the warded balloons that keep the air elementals contained.

An industrial revolution powered not by steam engines but by the free energy from undead workers. Animated skeletons as automation.

Factories with assembly lines of undead workers running day and night.

Trains, tractors and cars with skeletal horses built inside them, only their legs visible emerging underneath.  Paddle boats ply the seas powered by skeletons on giant hamster wheels.

Undead work tirelessly and endlessly turning cranks to power forges, mills, running water.

The essentially free labour creating massive unemployment. Luddites throw holy water at factories to protest the loss of human jobs.

The health of city dwellers slowly drops as ambient necromantic power builds up, making people and animals sick and water foul.  Wealthy necromancer industrialists publicly deny any connection.

Corpses are in high demand as a raw material.  An entire inner city block dies from a poisoned water supply in a “tragic accident” just weeks before a new factory opens.  High supply lets them buy their workers cheap.

A principality struggling with economic problems manufactures a war;  thousands die in the ensuing battles.  Their bodies are brought back to continue working the farms, the surplus food they no longer eat is exported.

Their shortcut through the forest hadn’t been as short as they’d hoped.  Night’s falling and the tree trunks are becoming dark silhouettes against the ever present fog.

They spot a light ahead, a diffuse yellow glow in the fog.  Adventurers trust nothing and assume the worst.  The rogue sneaks ahead as well as he can in the twig-strewn half light.  It’s a cottage, like any peasant cottage, with plastered walls and a steep thatched roof, maybe two storeys at it’s peak.  The light comes from a lantern hung by the low front door and illuminates disorderly gardens all around the house.  A worn path leads north through the trees.  No sign of people or movement but light is leaking out around the cracks in the window shutters. The forest continues to be eerily quiet.

You’ve probably heard of the Overlight, sometimes called the World Above the World by the more romantic types.  While many talk about it as though it were another world entirely most educated people will tell you it’s just another layer to our world.

So what is the Overlight?  Put basically it’s a giant cavern - or, more likely, a series of giant caverns - that can be reached by following any tunnel that goes up high enough.  People from even the farthest corners of civilisation report reaching the Overlight by tunnelling upwards which leads many to think it covers the entire world.

How big is this cavern, you ask?  Nobody has every found it’s walls, although explorers have found places where the floor curves upwards beyond sight, forming the pillars that hold up the ceiling.  Drunken adventurers will tell you the cave is so big hit has no ceiling at all but this is obviously nonsensical exaggeration. Soberer heads have reported seeing many lights on the ceiling, assumed to be some kind of giant glow worm or firefly to be seen from so far away.

Yes, the reason we call it the Overlight.  Many of you have probably heard of it already.  A giant light source - we don’t know what it is exactly - travels at regular intervals through the cavern, coming in one side and leaving from the other.  It’s light is intensely bright, it blinds the eyes and burns the skin. If you’re ever visiting the Overlight I suggest you do it while the light is outside the cavern.  Overlighters have called this light “the son”, we think it’s possibly some kind of demigod child of their strange deity.  All the more reason to avoid it, I say.

That’s what you really want to know about isn’t it?  The dwellers of the Overlight.  It’s home to all manner of bizarre creatures and plants as well as many races who bare an eerie but twisted resemblance to the peoples of the known world.  You’ve probably heard stories of them from the raiding parties they send down into the world but many of the rumours are wild exaggerations. 

Of course you all know the dwarves, degenerate cousins of the dueregar who live with one foot in the Overlight.  You might not know about the light drow, named for their paler skin and tolerance of the light from “the son”.  They turned their backs on Lloth and instead worship the grotesque plantlife of the Overlight.  Perhaps most common are the creatures we call “humans”.  They’re believed to be a kind of mutant grimlock, but more dangerous and cunning and with a very weak sense of sight that lets them see but only in the brightest light.

So you want advice for travellers to the Overlight?  Well I already told you to avoid the blinding light.  When the roof begins to turn blue it’s time to get back into the tunnels.  Many people aren’t prepared for the sheer size of the cavern.  You can stand on a large rock there and see lights from miles away.  Yes, miles.  Many people experience panic or vertigo on their first trip so take it easy and plan for some adjustment time.  Sometimes water falls from the ceiling and it can happen anywhere at any time, there doesn’t seem to be a pattern to it.  Just know that this is normal and not, as you would expect, a sign that the cave is collapsing.

The floor of the Overlight is choked with plant growth, most of it large and an unhealthy green.  Despite it’s abundance you’ll have a hard time finding edible food like mushrooms or molerat there so be sure to pack your own.

The goddess of storms, wind, rain and safe journeys.  Known as the Mother of Storms, Queen of the Four Winds, the Blue Eyed Traveller.

Her priests will be the first to tell you she’s a cold hearted bitch.  After all she controls the wind, the rain, hurricanes and blizzards.  Calling her anything less would be a disservice.  Their primary duties include prayers and offerings to ask that the Mother not bring storms to their village, or at least not kill anybody or blow away too much of the livestock when she does. They’ll sacrifice a sheep to her so she won’t show up for someone’s wedding day. They also tend to be strong on warnings about disrespecting the gods and they aren’t above using drama and theatrics to get the message across.  The priesthood of storms are in many ways a preventative measure.

They will happily tell cautionary tales such as the village reeve who made one too many public fart jokes about the “Queen of the Four Winds”.  It rained torrentially on his village for thirty days and nights, flooding homes and sweeping livestock away in the swollen river.  It didn’t even until a disciple of the Mother drove the reeve from the village.

The Mother of Storms is seen as a god to be respected, even feared, but not hated.  Farmers will pray to her for rain in a drought.  Sailors will pray both for a lack of storms and for a fair wind to bring them home.  That’s how she also became the goddess of safe journeys.  Her storms can sink ships, her blizzards block mountain passes and her rains make rivers uncrossable so it’s not unusual for travellers to give prayers and carry charms to earn them good weather for their journey.

Whenever there is a major storm somewhere rumours start to pop up of people who claim to have seen a grey haired woman with striking blue eyes pass through town in the days before the storm hit.  This is believed to be the Mother herself, leading her storm across the land like a farmer leads an ox through the fields.

The four winds are often personified as lesser deities or spirits who serve their Queen and will sometimes be invoked directly by priests and sailors who need a particular wind.

The Mother is usually depicted with grey hair and blue eyes, wielding a long glaive.  The glaive is big, powerful and dramatic weapon which is symbolic of both the storms she controls and the conduct and style of her priesthood.  The colours of her priesthood are deep blue and silver.

Acolytes of the priesthood are something of storm chasers.  They believe you must experience the full power of the storm so you can learn to truly respect it.

As holy symbols the priests wear small silver-capped vials around their necks containing things like rain that fell over a holy site or a piece of a cloud gathered from a mountaintop monastery.  It’s said some priests wear a piece of lightning around their neck.  Travellers be wary of salesmen peddling bottles of river water and empty vials containing “the north wind” and claiming they’re holy.  These knock-offs are cheap to make but don’t impress the Mother of Storms or her priests.

The PC is a farmer who, suddenly and inexplicably, was granted magical powers by the minor god of goat herders.  The Goat Eyed God came in a vision saying the farmer was chosen to perform a great service in their name.  

Unfortunately that was all the information that was forthcoming.  The PC would have dismissed it as a dream if they didn’t suddenly have the ability to heal with a touch, call fire from the heavens and command the loyalty of goats.

So the group insists they need a cleric but nobody wanted to be one and you got the short straw.

The PC is a cleric of Raanlo, god of Necessity and Passive Aggressiveness.  They wanted to learn wizarding but Raanlo insisted that they “had to be a cleric” and so one day bestowed upon them healing powers and a mace.  Then, as is his way as the god of Necessity, instructed the cleric that they need to join this group of travellers who he claims need their healing powers.

Raanlo is a minor neutral god whose priesthood preach the virtue of Doing What Must Be Done.  Sometimes this is putting the needs of others above your own desires, leading his followers to many acts of selflessness.  Other times it means sacrificing a hundred to save a thousand, making his followers seem cold and heartless.

Perhaps the fact that Raanlo is the patron of people doing what they have to do instead of what they want to do is the reason he is also the god of passive-aggressiveness.

The trick to playing a concept like this is to give it enough depth that you can play your joke character totally straight and make something interesting out of it.  

I was reading the InSpectres game I’m really liking the idea they have of starting the game with an interview. Not a “what do you want out of this game” session 0 type interview but an in-character one.  Literally the first scene of the game is the characters sitting around introducing themselves and talking about  who they are as individuals and as a group, about what they do or have done.

I like this idea.  It assumes your characters are already working together (although they haven’t necessarily worked together before) while still giving you an opportunity to properly introduce your character and have them slip in some information about themselves that might not come up in normal conversation.  For people who like the improv the DM/interviewer could ask leading questions to fill in some group history, like how they met or if it was really them who finally caught the Bandit Prince of Daleford, or why all their clothes are burnt and singed.

I’d probably want to warn the players before the first session that this is the kind of intro they’ll get so they can have some idea going in what their character might say about themselves if asked.

InSpectres is a game about running a small business in the modern world so it’s recommended interview setups are things like a media interview, job interviews for the new employees and pitching to potential investors or reality TV producers.

I’m not sure how to translate that into something like D&D if you’re trying to go for a remotely serious tone.  What kind of interview type scenarios wouldn’t feel too distracting out of place for the pseudo-medieval setting?

Could it make sense for the local lord who is hiring people to kill the goblins and find the lost heirloom to bring the ruffians in and ask them about themselves?  Adventurers are usually payed on delivery so it doesn’t matter much to the quest giver if they’re underqualified and die trying.  Maybe the lord is just enamoured by the whole “adventuring hero” lifestyle and wants to know as much as they can.

Maybe the PCs are talking to the lord after the fact, they made quite a splash resolving the Owlbear Incident and the Baroness called them to a dinner to learn ALL about these people either for her own enjoyment or to assess if they’re likely to use their popularity to lead a peasant revolt or something.

If you don’t mind a bit of silly you can always have the game open with the PCs on a stage in front of a theatre or village festival or crowded tavern being interviewed talk-show-style by a local bard.  That atmosphere would change the nature of the interview to more performance and crowd pleasing than real introductions though.

Having said all that I’m kind of enamoured with the idea of an adventuring-party-as-small-business game where the PCs are putting on their nice clothes and pitching their “kill goblins and take their stuff” business plan to potential investors.  

“With just the investment money we’re seeking here we can afford a +1 shortsword which, combined with the industry standard tracking and fighting skills our company already possesses, will allow us to finally kill the Nameless Thing that’s been stalking the woods.  Figure 4b shows the value of collectable  bounties on the Thing as well as projected income from sales of it’s many, many teeth and tentacles.”

“We will of course offer you a competitive return on your investment and a guaranteed mention of your family or business name in all bard songs sung about us for the next two years.”

A group/campaign concept and plot hook.

One of the PCs is the third child of a duke and the rest of the part are their entourage.

The duke has sent their layabout of a child to figure out why iron shipments (or whatever) haven’t come in from some remote holding.  Maybe they’ve heard there’s trouble with monsters in the woods or dark magics or something and it needs sorting out.

The child might see this as a chance to prove they’re valuable to the family despite not being in line for the title and volunteered/insisted they do it, even pressuring their skeptical parents.

Or maybe the child sees this as a kind of holiday/hunting trip.  After all, they’ll be away from family supervision in a far off place where they’re the highest ranking person around.  They set out with more wine than common sense.  Probably to discover that it’s a rainy, dull backwater.  Eventually their ability to help the locals (or the horrors they witness) brings them around to a more heroic attitude.

The rest of the party are friends of the noble PC or employees of their family.

A fighter might be the older man-at-arms assigned to bodyguard the noble child by their parents.  Or they might be the family’s heavy-drinking judicial duelist because they start so many fights they need to keep one on the payroll.

The wizard might be the apprentice of the transmuter alchemist the family funds, or the child of a nearby earl or duke.

The cleric might on retainer with the family because they fund the local church or monestary.  Maybe the cleric had a vision that they needed to go to the far off holding coincidentally right as the trip was being planned.

The bard could be a favoured minstrel brought along for entertainment or even the family chronicler recording the events.

The ranger could be one of the duke’s houndmasters (or a falconer because of course they wanted to take their favourite falcon on the trip) or could be a warden of their forests who was told to send back their own assessments of the land and what kinds of “beasts” are supposedly attacking people.

The druid could be the wild-haired stranger the group meets once they arrive who insists the trees tell them the answers to all the duke’s questions.

The idea is that they’re all (or mostly) there because they’re working for either the noble PC or their parents, or because they’re a friend of the noble PC.  Hopefully that linchpin character doesn’t die too early.

The party arrives at the remote village and people keep expecting them to investigate things and solve problems, which is after all why they’re there.  To ensure everything is stable and running smoothly.  There could end up being all kinds of problems that end up escalating slowly into a big problem/campaign, or even just a single growing goblin migration.  This is basically the game.  There’s not a lot of cash payment for jobs done but the noble PC’s status gets them a lot of free stuff and the best accommodation available.