The Trash Crash site

Patreon Wizard Reward: July

Thank you to Darragh, who submitted the winning idea for July!

Selkies love seals and seals love selkies.  

Thank you for all your support!  More rewards are on their way!

Patreon Wizard Reward: Overdue

This is a reward that was long overdue. Unfortunately due to several issues at the time, it got lost in the shuffle. It took a while but we finally got to it. Sorry about the long delay.

Thank you to Echo, who submitted the winning idea!

Within the fae the highest position is that of a fairy queen. Titania, Queen of the Summer Court, is one of those queens. Her name was first put down by William Shakespeare, a man well known to the fae at the time.

Thank you for all your support! Again, I apologize for the extensive delay for this piece, it was not intentional. I hope you all enjoy it.

Patreon Wizard Reward: May

Thank you to Dash4rd, who submitted the winning idea for May!

Kitsune are fox werebeasts who can easily blend into human society, yet their curious and mischievous nature often gets the better of them.  Much like other werebeasts, kitsune struggle with their urges and instincts to contain the animal spirit within them.  If they can’t, they may lose control and become a terrible, mindless monster.

Once again, thank you for all your support!  It’s been one month since the first goal has been hit and I hope to continue putting out content for all of you!  Hitting the next milestone will allow me to put out more!

Thank You!

On April 28th the Beyond the Pale RPG Patreon crossed $1600 and 100 Patrons!  This threshold marks the point where I can work on the project full time, fulfilling a dream I’ve had now for years.

Thank you to everyone who has put their support behind me and the project, through the good times and the bad.  Without all of you, there’d be no project, not like there is today.  I can’t properly express how grateful and honored I am to have this help in reaching my dream.

I will be continuing to put hard work into the game, produce more updates and release more artwork.  Work on mechanics is still being done and the lore is the most cohesive and unified as it’s ever been.

This world has been in my head for more than a decade.  And with your support and encouragement, I’ve been able to bring what is in my head into reality.

Again, thank you so much.  From the bottom of my heart.

Please, accept this full color spread as a token of my gratitude.  Elena Nott has gotten herself in a spot of trouble it seems.

There are multiple compositions on Patreon for those interested.

Patreon Wizard Reward: February

Thank you to tsundereanubis, who submitted the winning idea for February.  The idea was “Magical Familiars of Varying Shapes and Sizes” and I decided to take it a step further and add in a witch hanging out with her familiars.

Witches store their arcane magic inside living animals, which they draw out when needed.  This taints the magic with the natural connection animals have to Fairy, giving the witch access to abilities unique to this style of magic at the cost of arcane magic’s raw power and potential.

I’ve taken into consideration answers from the previous post, and even thought tumblr hasn’t really been the same, I wouldn’t mind giving it another go.  To celebrate, here’s a piece I’m very proud of- and I thought I wouldn’t make the deadline- oh how my faith had been tested! Only thanks to the Machine God, I have prevailed :D

More details about the competition here.

Patreon Wizard Reward: May

Steven’s idea for a wild west warden gearing up won the poll!  We decided to spice it up a bit and made him gearing because of an unfortunate surprise!  Even in the wild west there were people willing to put their lives on the line to protect the people from the things that lurk in the dark.

There’s often some confusion about mermaids in the modern era.  Many incorrectly think that the greek sirens were mermaids, yet in reality they were closer to harpies, the fusion of birds and women.

However, the distinct conflation of the two opened up a possible explanation. With the Filipino “Sirena” even having a similar name, it was possible to craft a kind of mermaid that matches both the misconception while also remaining true to the original myths.

Unlike Selkies, Sirena can be a lot more hostile, which allows them greater freedom to be used as villains or antagonists within the game. The limitation, of course, is that Sirena are strictly limited to the water, which means players must be coaxed into an underwater situation for the threat to be fully realized. However, if players can be convinced to take that risk, they’ll be able to deal with a host of new problems to solve, as merfolk possess a lot of potential for campaign opportunities.

Make sure you follow the project blog, Twitter or Patreon for updates!

Project Patreon Project Twitter

In folklore, selkies are wereseals who use a sealskin cloak to transform. This was changed to keep with Beyond the Pale’s magical restrictions, but aided in the design and goal of the creature.  Like a lot of folklore, things get distorted by time and retellings and so the selkie, a being who is often seen amidst seals and who disappears at an instant, was thought to be a wereseal.

Selkies serve a particular niche, able to bridge the gap between aquatic creatures and land based parties, allowing players an in into aquatic scenarios. They were created with the intent of being personable, fun and interesting for the players into interact with, yet not completely innocent, allowing a GM to create selkie villains or antagonists with relative ease.

Even late in the game, a hostile selkie may prove difficult in the correct scenario, as their expertise in moving underwater can severely impact a group’s effectiveness.  Remember, fighting anything in their preferred habitat is probably not a good idea!

The selkie was also chosen specifically for this month for MerMay!

Tomis is back (but currently busy with things like moving) and he provided this excellent piece for everyone!  Pictured is a wendigo stalking a group of unsuspecting game hunters!

Be careful when out in the forest, you don’t know what is out there! 

Frightlings are mostly a unique creation for Beyond the Pale.  While there are several instances of ‘monstrous children’ across numerous pieces of folklore, none directly inspired the frightling.

Instead, they were created to exemplify the worst of aberrations, to highlight that despite their monstrous nature, they were once people. Frightlings, being children, highlight the innocence of those who may become aberrations, often by circumstances out of their control.

And yet, no matter how sad an aberration’s creation is, it is a dangerous monster and that goes for frightlings too. Frightlings lack the ability to hibernate and become a more powerful creature, as such they generally placed as a mid game threat to occupy the space greater aberrations may hold.

However, frightlings can also serve as both emotional and psychological threats, even in late game play. Because they torment others, rather than go on direct attacks, the act of uncovering and locating the frightling can be just as important as fighting it.

The concept of alien colors evolved relatively slowly, but originated from two major sources. The first was finding out the mantis shrimp could see several colors other animals couldn’t, which was interesting.  The second was the theory that ‘color’ as we know it is malleable, where concepts such as “blue” may not have existed in places like Ancient Greece.

These led down the path of creating a series mind breaking, alien colors that highlighted how The Deeps weren’t like our own reality, that something as fundamental as color from the realm didn’t belong in the mortal world.

The colors themselves are not creatures to be slain, but obstacles to be overcome.  Some creatures from The Deeps can utilize them for their own purposes, but the real threat is stumbling across some long buried and forgotten shard of coral or stone containing the color. The color itself can be central to forming mysteries for players to unravel, from cults worshiping it to the color’s insidious manipulations of a community to polluting a nearby local and bending it in strange and terrible ways.

If desperate enough, players may even find uses for such dangerous, eldritch things as the deep colors.

Across folklore and modern pop culture, the idea of a “hag” inspires several different kinds of images; the witch over a bubbling cauldron, a child eater in a gingerbread house, the old crone of the forest, fairy creatures who thrive on misery.  I call this the “Baba Yaga Problem”, where a given creature has so many interpretations through both historical and pop culture lenses that it becomes difficult to choose a specific route to go with.  This isn’t limited to old crones, but it sums this instance up nice (vampires are a good, non-hag example).

As a result, I decided to make the hag the more monstrous of the depictions of Baba Yaga.  The more benevolent and capricious aspects to the figure could be handled by other creatures, explaining the mythological figure as a combination of different encounters with different entities.  After all, people like to generalize, so obviously one old hag you encounter on the road MUST be the same one you’ve heard stories about.

The hag serves as a early-to-mid game threat that can easily be inserted into any game. They can spark an investigation easily under the pretense of missing children or kidnappings, but they can also serve as direct threats to a player character’s family or self. A woman could go missing and the players come across her in the midst of the transformation, offering a chance to bring her back from the brink.  There are numerous ways to insert the creature into the story.

Best of all, a hag who disappears or escapes can return years later, much later in the game, as a much larger threat in the form of an arch-hag.  More information on arch-hags will be revealed later, but the idea of an enemy slinking off the lick their wounds, only to come back stronger a decade later has many narrative applications a GM could use.

Wizard Commission Winner: Hiatus Catchup

Catching up on delayed rewards from the Patreon!

Darragh’s idea was for a human obsessive Dokkalfar and that was the starting point of the picture, a dark elf that is interested in human technology.  Here you can see him repairing an old record player, as well as several other bits and several other things he’s been working on. 

Thank you to Darragh and all the other Wizard tier patrons for your generosity!  And thank you to all the other patrons and followers of the project for your continued interest and support.

I’ve been thinking long and hard about how magic works in Beyond the Pale.  In any setting where magic is involved, you have to think about what you want magic to do, the limitations of it, the rules of it.  Without establishing firm boundaries and definitions, magic in any setting has the potential to become random, inconsistent and confusion for the reader.

This is the first step toward codifying magic in the Beyond the Pale setting, detailing the basics of magic’s properties, history and effects.