A Fistful of Ideas: A Ship Frozen in Time during a Kraken Attack but its a Dungeon and more!

Here is another fistful of ideas, including somethings I have been working on.

A Ship Frozen in Time During a Kraken Attack Except its Bigger on the Inside and Its a Dungeon

So the backstory of this idea is a post I made a while back about pirates. One of the Weird Stuff tables I made for pirates was the idea that a ship could be bigger on the inside, containing an entire world within its bulkheads. I was recently thinking about making a megadungeon but a super weird one and I thought that it would be a perfect set up, but I wanted to throw in more twists.

So a monster is attacking the ship and a few others and the captain knows things are going very badly but the captain has an ace up their sleeve. They have a magical artifact that can slow time for everyone but them for as long as they like but only once. The captain uses the artifact with the intention of climbing down through the ship to the monster and stabbing it in its brain before returning to their ship and setting time back in motion.

The problem is that the ship's inner world is not affected by the time stop and it is full of the people the captain and previous owners of this bizarre vessel have trapped down there. Plenty of monsters have been condemned to be down here and some people have been down here so long that their descendants have formed tribal societies.

The Kraken itself is also ancient magical and full of hate. Its own interior biological world lives on and poses dangers for any that try to find its brain for stabby purposes.

The PCs enter because the Time Keepers, Modron Style Angels, are trying to put right this time distortion. They appear on the deck of the ship to see the storming seas all about them and the gigantic black tentacles looming overhead, but all is completely still. The Time Keepers have trouble manifesting in an area of such distorted time so they will throw adventurers a the situation until its fixed.

Giant Octopus by Pierre Denys de Montfort

Wage Slavery aboard a Star Cruiship

I have often wanted to play a game where everyone plays crew members during a week long voyage. In a gonzo corporate dystopian future, every player character is doing a prison sentence to pay off their debt to society by working for a luxury cruise corporation. There are petty complaints from customers and a strict limitation of actions at each section of the day. Each player character would be the head of their department and have underlings to assign to the tasks they can't and each underling would have a few traits to determine whether they complete their tasks properly.

Failing to complete tasks properly can cause complaints which can cause pay reductions which causes stress. Plus, the Ship's Computer is authorized to punish inmates employees in more creative ways. Each player character could be paid enough on this voyage to escape their imprisonment if they don't get their pay cut too much so the main goal would be to survive and the secondary goal would be to make enough money to earn your freedom.

Of course, it isn't just the usual horrifying things that happen in space. On top of maintaining the ship and keeping the customers happy, one of the most important passengers is under threat of assassination. This powerful mob boss is more than capable of repaying the crew for their failure even from beyond the grave. An alien monarch sworn to strict abstinence is onboard as is the casanova Space Force Hero: Captain Ray Blazter. The princess' handlers have requested the crew's help in protecting the monarch who is on her way to an important peace conference.

I don't exactly know how I would run this. In some ways, it seems almost more like something that would be better for a text game, but I have a personal preference for voice games. It might be a hybrid situation honestly. I don't know what game I would use for this. Whatever game it would be, I would need to be able to track stress. The main requirements would be some game that can has mechanics or at least attributes for social interactions, manual labor, engineering, and combat. There are definitely bugs in space and opportunities for shoot outs.

Convent of the Night Sisters

I've been working on this dungeon/adventure location for a little while now. It is heavily inspired by Swords and Sorcery and King Fu movies and Sekiro. It is made to be played with my Character Creation During Play system. The PCs plan to steal the Idol of the Black Cat Animal Saint on the night of an ascension rite for some of the initiates which means the complex will be far less protected that most nights.

Unfortunately, the Night Mother and her followers are more than just another mystery cult, and their foul arts may mean the doom of unsuspecting adventurers. There is a lot I could say about this adventure but that would be giving it away and I would like to make it available to people at some point.

Character Creation During Play, Full System?!?!

Speaking of which. Yeah, I have been putting together a complete rules document, hoping to style it after the length of Knave, because the game itself is really quite simple. There would be advice on how to negotiate creating spells with your players, full rules for advancement with the basic four classes, and possibly also other sets of classes. I kind of love the idea of Samurai, Shinobi, and Monk as a set of classes not meant to be played with the original but set aside in case you want to play a game inspired by Eastern Culture.

If anyone wants in on publishing this thing, hit me up! I have no idea about graphic design and would love to produce this properly.

(Spoilers for Weird Marches Players) Autumnia, the Red Land

I am prepping a region for the Weird Marches that I have been thinking about for a while. In this setting, faeries are creatures from hell and as Mephistopheles says in Doctor Faustus: 

“Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place, for where we are is hell, And where hell is must we ever be.” So some faeries from if the Fall Court have set up their own little corner of hell in the Red Land beyond the Shrouded Forest, west of Whispershire.

In this place, Grand Duke Billy Hemlock, King of Wonder Lost, torments mortals for the amusement of his court. They particularly enjoy sending mortals through perilous games like their puzzle boxes or death mazes but the greatest pleasure they get from the toys they really like to watch is to send them on impossible quests, unable to leave the Red Land or die until they complete their nonsensical missions.

Hermits pop out from behind every rock to offer quests, and if any newcomers ever agree, they are magically bonded to an impossible quest. Armies engage in battle all are dead only to rise again. A winner can never be decided. The Wyld Hunt purses the poor souls trapped here as prey. Tent cities of knights in bric a brac armor with donkey head curses offer some reprieve. A gold-toothed preacher wails from the pulpit of the salvation of giving up.

The majority of the population of this region is the Quixotic Errant Hobo Knights. They have been riddled with curses and madness, often becoming fearsome foes through simply entering combat over and over again. They also cannot permanently die, reviving wherever they last slept.

The aesthetics of this region are heavily inspired or straight up taken from Chromatic Soup 2 with a little bit of an arthurian plus folk tale thing going on with a little Guillermo Del Toro for taste.

Tune in next time for whatever I feel like blogging about!