Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Sheel'gredival of the Deep Keep


Sheel'Gredival is the third Wizard in the Clatterdelve series. She resides in a watery redoubt well away from the hustle and racket of the less civilized regions where she tends her carefully cultivated grottoes and artfully arranged dome-lagoons. she has an intense, personal interest in Clatterdelve and has sent forth a pair of representatives to locate and employ a small group of professionals for a very special, entirely discrete, extremely well-paying task...



Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Color Test for Clatterdelve


Testing out an alternative color scheme for Zollendreth the Vague, for Clatterdelve Part Two. One of his personally-developed spells is 'Fade Into Purple.' He mostly uses it around his tower to avoid overly needy retainers and hangers-on...

Monday, August 28, 2017

Yellowbelly (Wermspittle)


Blind, snuffling, flabby beasts--they reek of rancid cheese. Disturbingly agile and equipped with suckers at the tips of their boneless fingers, these creatures have captured many who foolishly thought that they might have run far enough, fast enough, and then turned around only to find themselves face-to-face with a Yellowbelly.
Curwen and Kirowan's Yellow Book (Annual, 1172.)

Yellowbelly
No. Enc.: 4d6
Alignment: Neutral
Movement: 120' (40') [Also can Climb at normal Move rate due to suckers]
Armor Class: 7 (as Studded Leather)
Hit Dice: 2 (advance as Thieves or Spell-casters, but never Clerics)
Attacks: 1 (weapon or bite)
Damage: 1d4+1 (gutting-knife), or 1d4 with a 30% chance to Gore with tusks for additional 1d6.
Save: T2 (or by Level)
Morale: 8 (Suffer -2 penalty when exposed to rich perfumes or other strong scents)

Special: Blind. Navigate entirely by Smell, Taste, Touch and Hearing.

Vicious whuffling and wheezing creatures with an insatiable hunger for fresh meat, Yellowbellies hop and jostle about in darksome places, clamber and cavort wildly in broken spaces and it only takes the merest whiff of blood to set them off on another of their fearsome chases.

Warty, swarthy humanoids with three nostrils, two modestly curving tusks and three overly-flexible tubular fingers or toes on each limb ending in suckers...the Yellowbelly is a strange beast indeed. Though many older texts confidently assert that these creatures were manufactured as some sort of homunculi, we now know that this is incorrect. The Yellowbellies have been traced back to the ancient ruins of no fewer than three dead cities behind the Yellow Veil, and while they probably are not native to those places, these are the first points of contact with their kind that have been reliably reported or recorded.



Feed them little cakes made with a pinch of lint and some black-peel mixed with a good amount of arsenic and the Yellowbellies will be too busy suffering from sour stomachs to chase you for long enough to get far, far away...if you don't dawdle or linger to watch...

Every Good Child's Guide to Bad Things

Friday, August 25, 2017

M is for Mucoids: Work-in-Progress (August, 2017)

More Work-in-Progress, this time a sample from a Wermspittle project that has been coming together nicely. The Palegator wasn't a fluke, there's a whole series of ABCs coming along. The old entry on the Mucoid (Fighter) is getting revised along with everything else going into this project since there are some peculiarities and special qualities worth mentioning and detailing for their use in Wermspittle such as their spells, lift-crystals, vicious gold-straws, and so on and so forth. The three main degenerate tribes and the remaining few Keepers of the Old Ways who hold vigil atop their yellow thrones within the ruins of the Cylinder-Keeps will be revealed in their dubious glory...

There will also be versions of the Mucoids in the new and improved, revised Space Age Sorcery (v.2). But those Mucoids will be of the starfaring, planet-invading and civilization-toppling tyrant variety noted for their cool, inhuman intellects and penchant for colonizing and changing entire worlds to suit them whims.

Thursday, August 24, 2017

Experiment 9


Took a break form colorizing and all that to do some other stuff for a little bit.

Raaaarrrr


Another sample for Volume 2. Again, the color-scheme may shift a bit as things get finalized...

Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Work-in-Progress (August 2017)

At the left is another of the Clatterdelve Wizards. It's a work-in-progress, so the color-scheme may shift a little bit as I get the other ones colorized and start comparing them against one another.

This is the Patron/Instigator/Employer who gathers together a band of ne'erdowells fools desperate adventurers heroes to explore a second passage that might lead to Clatterdelve...

We'll have more details on Clatterdelve in the weeks ahead. A local group recently play-tested the first installment and the feed-back was quite favorable.

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Cool New Ymid Shirt by Denis McCarthy

Just received a brand new T-shirt designed by Denis McCarthy from over at Northport. It's an Ymid like the one from Clatterdelve--and it has a Yr-Go familiar! Great Stuff! Check out his other cool T-Shirt designs over at Tee Public. There's a really nice Cthulhu design...

Denis also has his stock art on sale now over at RPGNow and he was just interviewed for the new OSR Podcast with Troy T. Busy guy.

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

Nejaun


"Hold still so I can bash ya dammit!"
Rutigar the Droll, Lord Protector of the Blue Trees of Trondelle

Nejaun
No. Enc.: 1d4
Alignment: Neutral
Movement: 60' (shuffle), 180' (Leap)
Armor Class: 7 (as Leather + Shield)
Hit Dice: 2 (can advance as Fighters or Spell-casters)
Attacks: 1 or 2 (Can Wield Weapons and/or Magic Items)
Damage: 1d4+1 (Slashing Kick)
Save: F2
Morale: 8

Special: Nejaun can perform a double-kick once every 4 rounds for double damage. They can also forego their next attack in order to attempt to dodge an incoming attack by rolling as for a normal attack and if their 'To Hit' roll beats their opponent's, the Nejaun successfully dodges the attack and incurs no penalty to initiative. If they fail to dodge they take half damage and suffer a -2 penalty to initiative on the next round.

When sorely pressed (having lost more than 3/4 hit points in one combat) the Nejaun can rear back on their muscular tails and lash out with all three legs at +3, +2, and +1 to hit respectively, each doing double damage, but then the Nejaun collapses and is unable to continue attacking until it rests for 2d4 hours. This is only ever used in extreme circumstances and only as a form of last-ditch self-defense.

Smooth-skinned pseudo-saurials with three legs tipped with wickedly sharp curved blade-like claws and muscular tails, the Nejaun rarely wear armor or clothes. Nejaun prefer ranged weapons or wands when wielding anything in addition to their natural claws. Only spell-casting Nejaun wield staves.

Nejaun are fairly commonly encountered as summoned servitors or retainers in service to a spell-caster who has made the journey to the cliff-keeps of Jalamere.


The Nejaun are creatures that have languished in my portfolio for a long, long time and as I recently had the opportunity to go through things over the weekend and re-discover them, I've decided to let them see the light of day once and for all. They seem like a good fit for Jalamere and Wermspittle both...

Saturday, August 12, 2017

Friday, August 11, 2017

duality


Work-in-Progress: Little Tomb



...A Star


...


Update: Our Award-Winning Vintage One-Page Adventure


Long-time readers and followers of our blog know that back in 2011 Chris K. held an impromptu contest on his Hill Cantons blog and our weird little one-page adventure won. Ever since then it has been available from our Free Stuff folder at Box, but no longer. We've added a cover, as shown above, and uploaded it to DriveThruRPG / RPGNow where it can be found at either site for Free.

Nothing has been changed. It remains the same vintage adventure into Unspeakable Old School Randomness intended for use with Swords & Wizardry (White Box). It's just available from a different source now. Enjoy!

Actual Play Report from the Fringes of Wermspittle

The map is a work-in-progress...

We recently had the opportunity to run a session of Labyrinth Lord for our friends and their offspring, one of whom is about to head off to college later this month. Our first session went very well, considering that they all began in an isolated village being bombed during the night by unidentified airships...

The following Actual Play Report was written by Jody. We both hope you enjoy it. We're looking forward to the next session!

The party consisted of Q (Potentially a thief), N (Probably a Spell-caster), R (An archer-type Fighter), A (Fighter), and J (Another Spell-caster). Everyone drew a random index card for the gear they were able to grab on their way out of the village during the bombing and everyone had the opportunity to choose a Class for their character based upon how things went as we played through the morning after the bombing...


Session 1
The bombing stopped around daybreak. It had been a long night but the group I fell in with (five of us in all) managed to stay out of sight and uninjured, which is pretty good considering we met in our mutual runs for cover. Everyone was hungry and thirsty, though. We left the relative safety of the woods and walked a bit on the road toward the nearest village. We could hear a few other groups of folks rummaging around in the debris, looking for fallen comrades or fallen goods, but they were all on the other side of town.

The first house we came to still had its walls, more or less. We figured the stench from the flaming outhouse would keep the others away for a while so we decided to some scavenging. Q went first, entering through a broken window as the door was locked or blocked. We heard a bit of a scuffle and some squeaking from inside but no screaming so N and I decided to check it out. A quick peek in the window showed three short, black-furred critters doing their best to hang on to all the goods they’d gathered. Hobyahs. Q had one in hand, thus the squeaking. N decided to go through next to try to talk to the Hobyahs. After a few words and a lot of gesturing N was able to convince the Hobyahs that we weren’t going to kill them out of hand and that we could work together to find more goods, and maybe some food, if they could be quiet.

We met R and A outside. They had checked out the rest of the little farmstead and found an ax, a bucket, and a nice jug of hooch. The bucket would come in handy if we could get to the town well. Unfortunately the well was close to a bomb crater that showed all the signs of being contaminated with Black Smoke. Yuck.

The next closest building to the farmstead had been a blacksmith or arms storage of some kind. Now it was mostly rubble. No food, but we were able to dig out various bits of armor and weaponry, enough for everyone to have something they could use. Some of it had Franzikaner markings, others were Pruztian. The Hobyahs were more interested in the boxes the stuff was packed in than in the goods themselves. I took a nice Vinkin coat and hat and some Pruztian gauntlets. I gave the chausses to A as they fit him. I figure the better armored my companions are, the more protected I am.

N managed to get a pretty nasty cut in their hand digging through debris. I was going to clean it and bandage it up but as soon as I pulled out one of the bottles of wine I had reserved for medicinal purposes one of the Hobyahs became very interested. At first I thought it just wanted to drink it but, with more gesturing, I was pretty sure it was trying to say it could take care of N’s hand. Knowing I had more bottles I decided to see what the Hobyah could do and gave the bottle in hand to it. It took a drink and slapped N’s hand right over the cut. N held up their hand to show the cut was gone. Hobyah can be helpful creatures, apparently.

Things were getting noisier off to our right. At least two of the other groups were fighting over something in another pile of rubble. R and N decided this was a good time to head for the well and fill up all of our containers with water. Q wanted to keep an eye on the fray and snuck around to see what he could see. He’s pretty good at being quiet. A and I chose to stay in the mid-ground so we could go in any direction we needed to.

Pretty soon R and N returned with full water containers. The Hobyahs were playing around with the boxes we had found, trying to get in them. One finally managed to get the lid closed on itself. When its companion opened the lid, the Hobyah inside was gone! We had checked the boxes out pretty thoroughly and they didn’t seem to be designed for helping things disappear, so we decided it must be a Hobyah thing.

Q came back with a report that the fighting seemed to be done and the losing party was heading our way. He also said he had shared the observer role with a winged monkey who was on the other side of the rubble. You never know who you’ll run into out here.

We moved back into the trees to observe and avoid interaction with the wounded group, if possible. They followed the road where it spiraled just past one of the craters and, poof, they were gone. Most likely a Weak Point. Hopefully they ended up in a better place for them.

Once the coast was clear we decided to check out the crater to see if there was anything worthwhile left from the bombing. We got lucky and found a couple of storage caverns. N was able to grab a couple of nice books, with some help from the rest of us holding the anchoring rope. We also found a meat larder and grabbed some sustenance.

While things were still fairly quiet we investigated a few more buildings. One had been set up as a temporary camp for the “winning” group from the skirmish Q observed. Since they didn’t bother to leave a guard we relieved them of an electric lamp and a couple of other goodies. The winged monkey showed up again, watching us through a hole in the roof. We attempted to communicate but didn’t get very far. I guess we’re better at Hobyah.

The rest of the day is a little blurry. I don’t know if I inhaled some Black Smoke by that last house or if I was just too tired to make clear memories. I do remember hearing a tiger in the woods, which we were able to avoid, and that there were five or so Yeren involved in the rubble skirmish that also headed our way. The winged monkey made a beeline for the mountains so we followed. Good thing we did, too. Yeren are nasty critters and none of us were up for a fight.

Turns out the monkey was with a traveler who introduced himself as Gnosiomandus. Nice old fellow. He offered us the sanctuary of his camp for the night, which we gladly accepted. We could all use a good rest before we figure out where we go from here.



The group did very well for themselves and managed to gather a decent amount of usable equipment and avoid some pretty dangerous encounters. It was remarkable to see a group cooperate and communicate as well as these players did--and for most of them this was their first time at the table rolling dice and all that. I'm looking forward to seeing how N deals with the Hobyah Bond-mark and where the group decides to go from here.


Thursday, August 10, 2017

Rough Map-Tiles from recent game session

I drew-up a few map-tiles on little card-stock squares I had lying around for use in our most recent Wermspittle game. We didn't use the Leaking, Fractured Sphere (Upper Left), nor the Scout Airship (Lower Right), but they might come in handy some other time. The Morlock Well (Mid-Left) and the Downed Tripod (Mid-right) both made it into the game, as did the Nasty Cloud of Black Smoke (Lower-Left).

We began with a roll of kid's sketch-paper from IKEA as the base map and just randomly drew-out the curly-swirly Yellow Brick Roads, the Craters and debris from the bombing, and then the various buildings that were left more or less standing at the beginning of the game. The tiles then were dropped willy-nilly onto the map and we got playing.

This worked very well for our group and I'm going to put together a set for the next time we go run something at a convention or elsewhere.

Tuesday, August 8, 2017

Squirmers




"It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be left alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests."

H. P. Lovecraft

Squirmers [Original name unpronounceable by humans]
No. Enc.: 1
Alignment: Neutral
Movement: 120' (limited flight/levitation)
Armor Class: -4 [4] (as Chain)
Hit Dice: 6+1
Attacks: 2 (Slash, Ray)
Damage: 1d4x2, Petrify*
Save: F8
Morale: 10

Special: Squirmers perceive invisible, ethereal, astral, and other immaterial things within a 60' radius as though using True Seeing. They are immune to Charm or Sleep and unaffected by illusions. The Slashing Tail attack is treated as a +3 weapon to determine whether it can strike a given target, but does not add the bonus. Their Petrification Ray can be re-tuned after a delay of 1d4 rounds to either Dispel Magic (3-times per day, 120' range), or Annihilation (up to 3-times per day, does 3d12, range 60'). It is rumored that upon being destroyed a Squirmer will unleash a Lesser Sphere of Annihilation, but this has never been verified.

Ancient relics of some long-dead and forgotten empire, these things were originally astral parasites that were captured, bound, and armored so as to serve as monitors and watchers patrolling the ley-line keeps and fringe-world outposts of their masters. The version presented above is the more common variety, but there are others out there including at least one instance of a very tiny (3hp) version whose swarms infest the Dome of Urlantru and another smallish version that served as a Familiar to the wizard Damthuss.

According to various records and fragments of lore, prior to their being taken-over by the Yithians, the Pnakotians fielded a prototype-version in their doomed war with the Polypous Things.

A number of specimens have been recovered from deep within the polar ruins of what is believed to have been a Hyperborean citadel that was modified and rebuilt by a succession of colonists and settlers over the course of uncounted millennia. Some of these specimens appear to have been modified to make them better suited to hunting and killing Mi-Go.

Though they are indeed Constructs, each Squirmer houses portions of the brain and body of the original parasite from which it was created. They are neither living, nor dead, nor undead, but rather are best classified as some weird in-between category unto themselves. This may be a major contributing factor in there being no known spells for banishing, dismissing, or releasing (nor protection from) one of these things in any of the more accessible sources.



Squirmers were inspired by the notion of what a weaponized bejewelled Mi-Go brain-case might be like and sort of evolved from there to become a peculiar sort of Watcher prowling about the ruined cities of dead worlds out along the rim of known space. It might be possible for a spell-caster to reprogram one to serve as a type of hireling or retainer or to serve as a body-guard or servitor...and wherever they might be left to patrol or to protect very probably still has some measure of loot or eldritch secrets just waiting for the taking...

Friday, August 4, 2017

Good Shirt: Expanding onto Tee Public


So yeah, we've set-up an online shop over at Tee Public. You can find my designs by looking-up Garrisonjames and I'll tag everything with Hereticwerks, Wermspittle, or whatever else might be pertinent to make searching easier. There are four designs up there now. I'll add a new design or two every few days or every other week, or something--still not sure what sort of schedule will work best. All the designs are on sale for the first three days, then receive a slight mark-up, but this seems to be a bit less expensive than Zazzle and I prefer it to some of the other options we've looked into of late.

Right now the first few designs at Teepublic are things we've already uploaded to Zazzle, but soon there will be unique designs only available at Teepublic. We're ordering a couple of sample shirts over the weekend and will report back about the overall quality of the products and how the experience goes.

You can still find us on Zazzle...at least if you use our link. Trying to find anything on that site using it's in-built search function is a bit tedious. That's one major downside to using Zazzle--people can't really find your stuff unless a whole lot of people have already found you. But hey, we're working on that. One major advantage with Zazzle is that you (the customer) can really, really customize your shirts (or other stuff) with any text you want, re-position the image(s), and do quite a bit of personalization. You get to make things just the way you want them. There are a lot of new designs headed to Zazzle fairly soon and there will be an update on that once things start to appear there.