Precious Gem Tree

Full map

Precious Gem Tree
Plump Remains 7/10/5
Spell: Earthquake

Plump Remains is excitable, prone to oaths, and boneless. The grocery is open to the street, colourful, and fragrant. He imports seasonal fruits from all over the spheres, but has a particular love of artichokes and will expound upon their virtues. 5p/lb of fruit. Minor glamour on the display stands, visitors must test their luck or buy one provision's worth of fruit. Always busy, all variety of customer, high and low, though popular with tourists.

RUMOUR: The Tsar of River Stately is about to arrive in town, his legions of fans will undoubtedly erupt.

RUMOUR: A shipment of poorly made dwarves has gone missing on the way to the incinerators. The dwarves do not care.

I'm slow, alright. There are two books, both of which were originally going to be in Troika itself, but I would be a mad man to publish a 300 page monster that is 90% tables and 100% niche/not D&D.

But you've seen them before, so you know what's coming. You think that god thing is complete? HAH.

Anyway, how the hell do you run Troika!?

Strangers Meet At A Crossroads

My favourite campaign structure is to front load everything, make an area or sprawling situation to explore with no thought of who will be doing it. Then drop whatever party you roll right in the middle with no guide.

My last campaign, the Empires of Foliage, started with everyone being passengers on a golden barge that ripped its hull open and crashed into an unexpected crystal sphere. The party emerge from emergency life blobs and find each other. It was a big boat, so no one knows each other but they know enough to know that they were the closest thing they had to allies. Job done.

From here they start to explore their surroundings, ask questions, touch things and find out how stuff works. The first session should have some immediate questions the party can investigate (all games are investigations).

• Why did we crash?
• Where is the ship?
• Are there any other survivors?
• Why is there four feet of blossoms everywhere?
• We have no food. Can you eat the pink fruit?
• What are these fleshy pipes running under the blossoms and where do they go?

And then off they go.

This structure has the benefit of allowing any variety of backgrounds you care to use. Their time together investigating their situation will give plenty of time for them to rub together and make some sparks. Use these sparks to plan for when they escape their situation and you need to widen the world.

The mutual bullshit that backgrounds encourage as players explain themselves to each other also helps you work backwards. Don't offer too much about their pasts, let them go with it. But also remember that you're a player too and can also BS.

It's perfectly ok for them to never get home. Have them be strangers in a strange land forever, play quantum leap, star trek, ulysses 31. The million spheres are huge, and once you go off the beaten paths you're screwed.

CYO Pre-gen

Good for one shots, but equally viable as campaign starters, is to build a closed list of backgrounds and let the players at them. An excellent way to seed the background of the adventure, giving each player a different background with a different bit of information. Player introductions are easy since no one is expected to play amateur theatre class exercise and can just read out "my thing says I used to be a farm-boy, but I picked the spectacles from a wise man's vision matt and learned I was the reincarnation of the Near-Sighted-God-Killer, so that's why I'm here" 

Crypts of Indormancy

I'm opening Crypts of Indormancy to pre-orders. Having half the job done by the time the books arrive would be a huge help, so that's what I'm doing. You can get it from the Melsonian Arts Council shop in print & PDF or just PDF on its own, or you can go to that other place and buy it, if you insist.

The description from all the various places it's being flogged:

The tomb of Thuuz, Lord Nanifer, Elven General of the Western Isle, has been found. The Islanders he once exploited and terrorised would gladly hurl his bitter carcass back into the ocean. Others, hearing of an untouched crypt in the mountains, no doubt filled with all the pomp and pride of an aristocratic burial, arrive with less ideological motives for defilement. 

Crypts of Indormancy is a location-based adventure possessing ecumenical compatibility with Dungeons & Dragons and its descendants. Appropriate for any number and level of players, all who enter the tomb of Thuuz without their wits ready will likely come undone. For Thuuz’s heirs did not leave his bones helpless and unguarded. 

Crypts of Indormancy is written with the relentless wit of Ezra Claverie and illustrated by Andrew Walter’s unbidden alien hands. Never before has such a conjunction occurred and for all our sakes pray it never does again lest our feeble minds slough away like wet cake in a rainstorm.

 Let's see, what else can we say?

• Andrew and Ezra really are as good as it sounds
• It's an actual book, printed in a print run, entirely not on demand
• It's published in the UK. This should fill you with 80s nostalgia for when that wasn't an unusual thing to say. Gimme all your money and I'll try to fix that.
• The Kickstarter did well enough that it won't bankrupt the Melsonian Arts Council if it fails miserably. Which is nice. Though please don't let that stop you.

DONE

Inform your friends, buy some for your neighbours, post it on all those internet places the cool kids go to, take pictures of yourself playing it and having the most wonderful time imaginable with a look that says "oh aren't you envious, you too could be having as much fun as I, but you can't because they all sold out in, like, a day and Dan retired to the peak of Mt Snowdon, Ezra died in a debauched tour of the riviera and Andrew became a caricaturist at South End who never makes any money 'cos all he can draw is unfailingly accurate and cheerful scenes of  his customer's death." Yea. Do that.

Crypts of Indormancy - Kickstarter

Oh my, what's this? Why it's an adventure by the inimitable Ezra Claverie, Undercroft regular and bottomless font of curious concepts, illustrated by one Andrew Walter, whose art speaks for itself.

“Crypts of Indormancy” is a an evocative location-based adventure compatible with Lamentations of the Flame Princess and most other Dungeons & Dragons clones. Set in a quasi-Polynesian island chain with a backdrop of postcolonial elves digging through their imperial past

This scenario is informed as much by sword-and-sorcery as by anticolonial politics, so you might say that it draws on a non-traditional "Appendix N," one that includes Aimé Césaire, Chinua Achebe, Frantz Fanon, Gyatri Spivak, and Edward Said.

This is the Melsonian Arts Council's first* stand alone, big-boy book and is being funded with big-boy money. How exciting! Let's hope it all goes well and gets funded so we can pay everyone and not end up living in the cardboard box the books get delivered in.

(*Oli Palmer's Something Stinks in Stilton counts sometimes, and will count even more if we hit the funding goal to have it reprinted all nice a pretty-like)

Something Stinks in Stilton is in stock

It's here! It's here!

In the 13th century, Stilton produced amazing cheese. Then the Church came and suddenly the cheese trade died out. Now it’s 1730 and the village of Stilton has started producing great cheese again.

You intend to find out why.

An adventure into darkest Cambridgeshire, for levels 1-3. Compatible with Lamentations of the Flame Princess and most other old fashioned Dungeons & Dragons clones.

Issue #8 of The Undercroft, written and illustrated by +Oli Palmer , with a cover by the inimitable +Anxious P. . 

On sale now at the store amd RPGNow