The Flying F*ckers of Morrowind

The best things about Elder Scrolls games, especially the early ones in the series, is wandering the countryside and finding ancient tombs and similar bullshit, or shipwrecks with diamonds in the hold, or vampire castles, or the flying f*ckers of Vvardenfell.

Oh no wait

Not the flying f*ckers again

Please stahp

the flying f*ckers, image courtesy of Actionyurt

Flying F*cker of Vvardenfell

They only want to eat your face.

S&W: HD 1, AC 2 [19], damage 1d6, special: infravision, surprise with a 1-5 on a d6, damage x2 on a backstab, treasure: hell no.

AFG: Level 1 animal, light armour, Sneaky, Flying, Nightvision

Chthonic Codex: a couple of illustrations

Chthonic Codex is the temporary project name for an AFG monster handbook. It’s going to be tied to the Western League campaign but due to the nature of the tie it can be easily used elsewhere and for other games.

Here at AFG Central we’re debating whether to double-stat the content for both AFG and generic-OSR (like LotFP material) or make it compatible with S&W.

The art side of it will be daring. Christopher Stanley is a young and talented local artist and will illustrate the great majority of the book, if not all of it. And as all “monster” entries will have an accompanying illustration, we are talking about a lot of art. Enjoy some preliminary studies. 🙂

MOSTROTRON and incidentally 100th post

One hundred posts: it took me a bit more than two years but to be honest I din’t really expect to be extremely prolific as a blogger. The past years has been especially tiresome (due to working full time wile getting a degree, then embarking in postgraduate studies, plus moving 1000 miles and other madness-inducing shenanigans) and only last October I started to get some rest.

In the meantime the development of Adventure Fantasy Game continued up to the completion of the fifth revision of the text: once more it’s going through proofreading and editing.

I’m getting some pretty pictures done by  artists I admire which I hope to show you in the next weeks, while I ponder about businessy problems such as if it’s best to include an adventure in the handbook or to add an extra booklet, if said adventure should be an hexcrawl, dungeeoncrawl or both and things like this (I’m testing both just to be sure). While I’m getting a colour cover painted, the handbook will be offered with two covers: both  what’s been called the boat cover (some people really love the boat which, according to my seafaring dad, is not a boat but a galleon) and the other cover. which I can’t show you because it doesn’t fully exist yet.

What I can offer you now is MOSTROTRON, the AFG monster generator: download it here clicky clicky.

If you want to know more about it click here (part 1) and here (part 2).

Regarding the AFG manual, I’ll be accepting pre-orders for AFG soon, for both PDF-only and Print-PDF bundles.

New Monster: Bumble Dragon

Alice and I were bumbling about Speirs Wharf and were discussing the benefits of having a garden. She mentioned clover flowers attracting bumblebees, and then mentioned pondweed. I quipped that, from the perspective of a foreigner, English plant and insect names seem made up by three-years-old with not much fantasy:

• foxglove
• hogweed
• pondweed
• bumblebee: I love bumblebees. And I didn’t know that bumble was a real verb, by the way.
• shieldbug
• firefly

All of them are amazing D&D names for monsters and plants, of course.

So we started discussing/brainstorming the Bumbledragon. She never roleplayed, except when last week she played Horse in KNIGHT HORSE SQUIRE SWORD, a RPG we came up with at the last Glasgow Indie Gamers night I’ll tell you about real soon now. Bumble Dragons turned out to be some kind of fat, blue, absent minded dragons, not really good at anything, except thinking about magic and eating cheese. Now and then they set stuff on fire without realizing it, and spend all time thinking about magic, pie, cheese, tea and treasure to buy teh noms. A wizard in need of advice in spell research could bring tea and noms to a Bumbledragon and ask for council.

Bumble Dragon

 

LEVEL: 9

DEFENCE: as plate

SQ: firebreathing (3d6), improv spellcasting (MU 5), random firebreath (1d6, 10% every turn), 3d6 bite damage

Bumble Dragons are flightless peripathetic fat blue dragons with small wings that go bumbling around thinking about magic: they don’t really interact with anybody offered food (automatic good reaction) or attacked, which will turn them into a nasty brutal fighting machine. They can attack with a nasty bite or breathing fire once a round or cast spells like MU5 without need to memorize spell beforehand or resort to a spellbook (usually leaving a spellslot free for a fly spell). They have lairs full of cheese and treasure to buy more cheese. They love cheese, tea and pie (especially cherry pie): if a magic user offers such food to the dragon and ask for aid in spell research, the dragon will contribute and in 3d6 turns will give advice sufficient for reducing research time by (2d6-4)*10%, with a small possibility of a setback. Every turn there’s a 10% chance that the dragon will belch a whisp of firebreath (1d6 damage), unless a teapot of tea (rooibosh, peppermint, rosehip and lotus are good substitutes) has been consumed in the previous turn. A big pie or wheel of cheese per hit per day will keep a bumbledragon satisfied enough to be considered some kind of specialist/henchmen/follower.

One Page Monster Manual

Apparently my effort toward participating in the Fight ON! Fantasy Table Competition paid off big time and I managed to get the third place (which oddly got published under my real name and not my nom-de-plume). Which is WAAAY better than I expected. One Page Monster Manual is the result of compiling previous work on what monster entries are really about in a more organic form, adding some tidbits to it to make it more self-standing and less sucky. And, most importantly, not using on the viral SRD licence.

I’m really, really inspired by the other entries: it looks like a lot of people did a very very nice job. Al got the second place with a very nifty entry that I’m going to use for sure in my games, for example.

I’d like to keep the “FO! version” under cover until the mighty fine Fight On! peeps put it out, but if you’re wanting to use a previous version it you can find it (together with many other crunchy bits) almost at the end of the free download Transcription of the Lost Pages: Volume 1 (in a multipage A5 version with a lot of whitespace).

And yes, I have more improvements. But without feedback (which is obviously very welcome and always appreciated) I’d rather concentrate on working on other things.

new monster: Space-Cephalopod

Yes Master, I’ve met those things already. When we were space-traveling from the Space-Planet to here we had problems with a space-cephalopods assault. They rammed us, breached the space-hull and came in with 8 laser guns each, one in every tentacle…

– Ugub’s Dialogues with Master, volume XVII

Space-Cephalopod

HD 3-16, AC 7 [13], Mov 6m, Dm 1d6 or by weapons SA: 8 attacks, grappling SQ: severing tentacles

Space Octopi are a race of star-faring octopi from a planet far far away. Over the ages they adapted well to lack of water, gravity and oxygen and manage to act normally without air for a couple of hours and without bathing for a week.

They can wield a one-handed weapon in each tentacle (two tentacles for a two handed weapon, three for a polearm), but can’t charge or run.

Tentacles can attack to grapple, dealing no damage but holding the victim in place, giving an AC negative modifier of 1 for every tentacle to the victim.

It’s possible to aim at tentacles, which can suffer up to 1 damage per HD before being unusable until the damage heals. Damage dealt to tentacles is not applied to the octopus HPs. The speed is capped to the number of usable tentacles.

Image credit: www.woot.com