Guns in fantasy

 

I've decided to make a long article about matchlocks and cannons because it can be fun. I've invested a lot of thought on this already, why not share it altogether? 

Why early firearms are normally not a thing on a medieval fantasy world and what happens when they do? What are the implications on a given setting? 

1.  Though arquebuses redefined warfare in the great scale, combats at street level or "adventurer mode" are not very affected. Matches cannot be lit and cannons cannot be loaded in a hurry in the middle of a tavern fight: unless you do the whole dance hidden somewhere, it will be very obvious to everybody that you intend to cause violence. They are bad weapons outside open war, because they cannot be kept "readied": the match consumes, and the gunpowder is either dispersed or susceptible to explode. Keeping watch on a routine night with a loaded gun is not just inviable, but also will give your position by light and smell; only for having you exposed after the first shot. You might keep humans at bay with the threat of a single shot, but it won't work on wolves or other animals. Bandits may still use them on an ambush, though. 

 

2. More firearms means more room for swords, specially more scimitars. The logic on this is because plate armor is suddently not as worthy, and less plate armor means cutting weapons are not facing their great nerfer. On warfare mode this means lighter cavalry and cuirassiers; on adventurer mode this means a golden age for sword duels (see that the golden age of romantic swordsmen appears in both japan and europe after the guns have popularized: in tercios, musketeers and samurai)

3. The appeal of certain monsters is to engage them in melee. This is true specially for fantasy staples like dragons, ogres and other big things, but also mass mooks like orcs or goblins. It is inevitable that once guns exist, they lose part of their appeal. Monsters whose attacks are magical or spiritual are comparativelly not affected, such as vampires, witches, ghosts, etc. Monsters that attack deviously such as snakes, beasts or clever human are also equally interesting. On war mode, makes war be a more historical thing of human vs human instead of law vs chaos or human vs orc, unless you give orcs guns too, at which point they are not mooks anymore. On adventurer mode, this means less combat overall: is harder to pull out filler battles. When it happens, the combat is probably a named NPC or plot-driven henchmen. Knowing myself, monsters that give little aesthetic value in this new situation are not just out of the campaign, but out of the setting altogether. No Smaug type dragons has an upside: allows me to use the oriental ones; if not as physical creatures, as divine ones.

4. Just as arquebuses changed the value of plate armor, the existance of cannons changed the way castles and fortresses were built. Anachronisms can still be had, but they probably require a bit of the fantasy side of the fantasy setting. I am using plate armor made from a spiderweb alloy that is good against bullets, though very expensive and only used by nobles. This keeps cavalry charges somewhat viable in the setting´s near future. On the fortress side, bastion forts were the standard response through the renaissance so my plans to include fortress-based feudalism are still cool without using magic at all. The more aesthetic castles if needed can be placed inside said fortresses, in all their spectre of colorful clichés. There are many other points but atm I feel that I've layed out the main ones.

 

 

  

Planets 3: Duel Culture

Note: this is part of a series, worldbuilding some shit apart from the usual D&Dlike stuff.

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Forgotten from each other, separated in distance and time, every planet naturally develops dialects and customs, and uphelds their own traditions. But if there was one thing that could be considered a constant throughout all the disk, enough to form the backbone of a common culture, that would be the practice of the martial arts. And with it you will find universal respect for a fight in which men have challenged each other 1v1

Everybody knows a version of the tale in which the Sun challenged Gravity to a duel and won, scattering the Gravity Shards all across the universe, around which the planets were eventually formed: the bigger planets around the big shards, and the smaller planets around the small ones. The myth has some weight (no pun intended) as digging deep into any planet one can experience the gravity pull increasing gradually the more you approach the core. And this happens more violently in small planets: it´s easy to imagine the merciless shard down there, pulling everything around as if it was ashamed of being naked and wanted to dress itself. At some point, the very pull dismantles all digging attempts, which are extremelly dangerous to people and have costed lives and fortunes to men. 

Dungeons of increased atmospheres are very useful for some: Dojos use them for physical training. It can help processes when the decantation of any mixture is involved; or the pressure can be used to improve certain metal castings. I've heard of subterranean prisons under castles, where the prisoners can barely move; and of terrible monsters that have adapted to their ancestral caves or the depths of oceans.

 

 

The inverse phenomenon happens outwards: the point in which the pull diminishes enough to be negligible is further from the ground at the bigger planets, and at jumping distance in small ones. This leads to interesting cases like the one at the capitol city of Missina: a big blue planet with little landmass and on which their inhabitants have recourred to building skyscrapers. It is a custom there to travel through the city jumping from one tower to another, all across the streets. The whole city is accessible by "flying" in this method; and it's main Dojo is specialized on mid-air combat: their trainings often take place between the towers that flank the city's bay, with the loser invariably falling down into the waters. This art has a special key relevance because, due to it's size and location on the Disk, Missina attracts an astounding number of asteroids; and the local fighters can kick approaching asteroids before they crash, driving them out of contrived collision zones.

There are some who worship Sun and Gravity as deities, amongst all the others. But real or myth, you can find fighters and fighting schools in almost every round rock of the system. Their styles and attacks are often inspired on the planet's inner or nearby fauna, landscapes, occupations, etc. Some of them use weapons and others refuse them entirelly. Some practice friendly sport amongst peers, while other schools do not contemplate duels that are not to death. Whenever two fighters clash, it's not only their skills who met, but two different worldviews, and there are not universal guidelines or rules for a combat. Those, alongside what do victory and defeat mean on it are to be discovered in a case by case basis. 

 

 

RETRO-POST: Dungeon Crawlers as an urban tribe

 I am closing an old blog I used to have, as I finally found the password. I just felt that all entries on it were obsolete and is like a pruning: cut the old branches to strengthen the green ones. But this one entry, I liked it a lot and wanted to preserve it here. I copied and pasted it as it was published on october 28th, 2017. Images were there in the original, too.

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Something I had on my mind for a while; I'll try to put it into words in case I can make something with it later.

The game/story centers around school kids on a modern town; and how they come in contact with the guild of dungeon crawlers: a mysterious gang of kids that speak about spooky, awesome underworld. Their stories are actually true. They've heard about a dungeon hiding somewhere. Just take any One Page Dungeon and put it on one of this:

(1. right under your school - 2. On a nearby forest, where the whole school is going next week on a trip - 3. Beyond your weird grandma's cellar - 4. On one of your uncles car junk lot. - 5. On the town's supposedly abandoned mansion - 6. Under a lost bridge, behind the industrial part of town)

Not all dungeons have to be under earth; every spooky or abandoned place is likely to have dungeon-like propierties: that's why they're abandoned or unconsciously avoided by normals. Also, some portals to dungeons might open in common places if one finds out how

You get your class at the start; just like that: fighter (though you depend on a specific kind of weapon depending on your background, because kids aren't usually trained on swordmanship), specialist (that kid that knows a lot about a certain thing, you can produce things from your bag that are related to your specialty) or mage (if you're a wizard, you'll probably discover it the first time you get in a dungeon). Use the rules of any dungeon game you normally use, but for the sake of tone, getting to 0 hp means that kids are unconscious and might need to be rescued.

Magic exists, but it only works in dungeons. When attempted on the surface, it acts dulled at best; and is easily dismissed by non-dungeoneers as tricks or sleight of hand. This happens to magic objects and, to a lesser degree, to any kind of treasure you recover from there. When a monster manages to escape from a dungeon, it's powers get subtler and must rely more on invisibility/stealth/cunning.

Normal people treats dungeon crawlers like they did with Goth Kids, Bronies, Emos, etc IRL: they mock them and despise their stories; attributing them to imagination. They're outcasts among kids, while the fashion trends awkwardly tries to appeal to them making artists and clothes about dungeons that miss entirely the point of what dungeons are about.

PC party getting back to the underworld after recovering HP

The underworld raw power of dungeons prevents cellphones and cameras from working, and jams most electronical devices. This prevents you from taking a selfie with a wight to prove your adventures to your friends. The most complex devices might even get hostile towards their wielders (your spotify list is suddently filled with hate messages from your loved ones; a GPS will lead you to the nearest chasm. Lanterns are usually OK, but you can never be sure if they're going to treacherously shut down right as you get into the troll's lair)

Dungeon subculture spreads mainly through drawings (mistaken by kid's edgy art), logs (mistaken as fanfic), grimoires (mistaken as new age books) and chansons de geste about their expeditions (mistaken for incredibly deep metaphors for teenage angst). Due to the inevitable impossibility of talking about dungeon experiences with normal people, there is a strong sense of comraderie between dungeoneers; though of course there are dicks who try to prevent new people from getting into it ("this kids only delve because they want to be cool, we old school delvers have been delving all the summer break and we know what dungeoning it's about"), tricksters ("treasure inspector, may I see your treasure?") and phonies ("Have you been to dungeon X?" yeah. "Dungeon Y?" yeah. "Dungeon Z?" yeah. "I've actually made up the last two" y- y- yeahhhhh of course I knew that)

* Beware: Deep speech ahead! *

Dungeons may appear anywhere; and they do not have any kind of supernatural cover up or anything (In fact, most of them might want to be noticed in order to grow). The only thing that prevents common people from knowing the magical reality is their very own drive to deny everything that clashes with their confort zone. The very zealotry of modern science (understood as denying weird options rather than acknowledging the unknown in order to investigate it) and the importance given to what society thinks we must instead of embracing the mystery of life is what keeps normal surfacers from the twisted horrors and treasures of the underworld. The importance of seeing the truth for oneself is a good theme to be enforced here.

Should a mountaineer discover the tomb of an atlantean king; the headlights on the news would be "Mountaineer goes crazy, pics from the madhouse on page 49" and handwave the whole tomb location automatically, is not like anyone is going to double check it; except dungeon delving kids who know where to read between the lines. No matter how many half-assed proofs you'll present or how good you are convincing people: No one will ever ever believe that dungeons exist unless they either see something strange with their own eyes (and cannot succesfully deny it using a weak pseudoscientific explanation) or really, really want to see a dungeon for some reason.

(If you're using a system that tracks sanity, maybe you need to be under a certain threshold to be operative on a dungeon)

there are those who have trouble adapting to a normal world after they've found the hobby

unexpected twists:

1 - you find out your mother never left you; she was in fact a fairy unable to escape the dungeon, but left you on the surface world to be raised as a human by your father.
2 - you're arranged in matrimony with a merfolk king of the underground sea. He'll whisper love letters to you through any kind of sink you visit.
3 - That mysterious fire that burnt the sawmill that year? a giant fire salamander. That earthquake? a troll
4 - proofs that one or many from this shirt are false.
5 - Goblins kidnap you or somebody you love in order to force you to become their king.
6 - An evil force wants to destroy the whole town in order to expand the dungeon into the surface.

example adventure hook

Nibelungs

I am an RPG ultra-naturalist, for good or ill. The good part is that I do enjoy a lot thinking on how a determinate civilization or animal has adapted to its circumstances, and that usually sends me on a spiral with each decision revealing me more about their circumstances and about them. It also has a payoff in the sporadic cases in which players do decide to investigate more and get involved with something I have actually paid attention to (last week they spend the whole session up and down a tribe of Pink Slimes, it was incidentally one of the best sessions in a lot of time)

On the bad side, I'm completelly blocked when I roll a random encounter of 4 goblins, because I do not understand any version of goblin culture and views, and I end up making them Saturday Morning Mooks with little to offer after their death. Then I start to think: Why were this goblins attacking PCs? Are they hungry? are they greedy? what do they need gold for? Where they live? Do they have a home? Where are the goblin girls? Why do they chose to live in a humid rock passage waiting for the year an adventurer passes by?

My setting might be a little atypical for your classic D&D game. It features mostly Trow (which are humans by another name, not related to Drow at any degree) and Kobolds (Just halflings); Orcs as the everpresent foreign raiders, and very occasional Dryads and Nixes. The tone I usually keep is knights and castles more than anything, 20% dungeons, 80% wilderness and city play. I describe the armors and weapons as eastern-european, but in my mind, the framework is japanese, and the characters under the plate armor disguise are taken from Usagi Yojimbo and Kurosawa movies (which is what I am more in touch with, and seems to flow better from me)

I don't have subterranean humanoid civilizations in my setting, because I find flaws in all of them. Not in their essence (sometimes a goblin is OK! I don't say that they are not workable in another game) but in the relationship with the tone and idiosincrasy of the current campaign.

Lets break it case by case with pros and cons:

 

 

John Goblin from Nekrogoblikon

GOBLINS

+ They make good cannon fodder: You can drop them by lots, and make up for classic skirmish battles.
+ They range from murky to evil, is easy for me to put them as enemies without much questioning.
- They are very shallow. I cannot imagine a goblin settlement without it being an humoristic take. Their motives to live are trifling: you can either make them psychopaths who kill for pleasure, or greedy fuckers crave for gold, but neither of them sustains goblins as full fleshed out civilization. In the first case, I prefer to potray it through demonic beings, be it immaterial, material or through possesion. The second can work, but still makes one wonder what do goblins do with the other 99% of the time.

DWARVES
+ They craft nice things and explain a lot of magic items found underground.
+ They dig and store jewels and I love jewels in my games. Jewels everywhere make the game feel lush and pretty.
+ Their gold/jewels obsession is very gameable, specially in OSR games, with actually having a behavior that plays into it (mining and adventuring)
+ They dig dungeon passages, thus building interesting passages beyond crypts, grottos and mud tunnels
+ They are good fighters and wear actual armor and weapons, which makes them more challenging as enemies.
+ They normally have good vision in the dark, but not infravision. which breaks the game.
+ They can be easily reasoned with. Their motifs can be strange but comprehensible and any normal human player can understand their morality.
- Their concept is ridiculous, they are just scottish men but smaller. There is exactly one (1) dwarf PC that is repeated through decades of gaming, which is basically Gimli but maybe changing the weapon. 
- Dwarven civilization consists in drinking beer, which they somehow make underground? no sense
- No restrictions nor penalty to sunlight, yet they prefer to live in their dark holes because reasons.
- LOTR failed to describe dwarven daily city life, and I cannot imagine one properly that suits the shown character of its dwarves. And nobody has ever attempted to make an interesting take on dwarves after that. It's always beards, axes, beer and end up being humoristic relief. You can fill the gaps making them more "human" but at that point they are just a warrior race's caricature.

 

 

DROW

+ They have hot women (or at least as I imagine them) and both genders are somehow aesthetically attractive in all senses, which for me is +++
+ I love that they worship a spider goddess, which makes a lot of sense in the depths; and all the symbiosis they have with spiders (silk garments, cobweb tools, poisoned weapons, spiders as guardians, pets, familiars, magical inspiration, etc)
+ In general, they are described to be more adapted to the underdark (TM) than the also subterranean dwarves, who are more associated to technology and less associated to fungi, luminiscent scarabs and eating scholopendras.
+ Easy to use as enemies, be it for Lolth fundamentalism or because they are just stupid assholes.
+ They are mythologically accurate to the norse myths if we take svartalfar and dokkalfar to be the earliest recorded description of dwarves.
+ Getting penalties on sunlight is something I expect from a subterranean race. There must be a reason they are subterranean after all, or else the whole thing falls apart.
+ They are slavers. This is very interesting to me in many aspects: the gamist (PCs are not always killed on a defeat, but kept as slaves), and opens a lot of opportunities in the building of world stuff and.in "random things and people you find in dungeons".
- Their crazy society is so much over the top that is hard to take seriously. I love when the goth barista at Starbucks spits in my coffee just as much as anybody, but this is just another level. The whole of the society being run by force of dominatrix and survival of the fittest... lol.
- Infravision is just too potent for my taste, in PCs and any other civilized race that can take advantage of it.

And now, what could happen if I took all the things I liked from those three, and put it on a single race instead? As a name, I've chosen something that has no clear ties to any of the three, as so the players have no broken expectations: Nibelungs, as the earth dwellers in the old germanic myth; which, if wikipedia is to be trusted, means "those who live in the mist/clouds"... well. Let's see if we can use that too.

Wagner's Nibelung art; source

So, nibelungs must be...

...good cannon fodder. An encounter with nibelungs should be at least on par with any other fighter, and they use proper armor and weapons. Those might be crafted with strange underworld means but they are refined and not crude. Their elite troops will possibly use envenomed blades or whips. Their morale is also on par with human bandits: not cowardish, but not temerary either and enjoy combat.
...prone to conflict. Be it for treasure, territory, slave hunt, joy, the demands of their underworld gods, or any other motif we devise through this lines, they have plenty of reasons to attack when the reaction roll goes badly. On the other hand, their morality is not as devious as drow or goblins in general, and at least some of them should be more sensible to provide the opportunity of meaningful interactions (as they will be the only humanoids down in the depths)
... crafters. They are responsible of any architecture found beyond the line where humans do not dare to dig. They can be behind specially rare magical or precious items. Their constructions involve metals, but also all kinds of weird stuff such as spidersilk, insect parts, poisons, fungi, luminiscent stuff, fangs, reptile skin or others.
... hoarder and greedy: at least some of them. Fond of gold and jewels. Maybe miners to some extent at least, but halflings already cover that role. If I get too crazy, I could keep gnomes as a non-playable race just to do this shit and inject cash into the world.
...very good sighted in the dark, but cannot see in total darkness. Correspondingly, they suffer penalties or ills when exposed to sunlight.
...lithe and graceful. Women are invariabily hot and some of them become sorcerer-priestesses, which is a high social position. Their skin being black and hair white can be a trend but not a limitation.
...roguish fighters. Heavy armors are banned to them, and also two handed weapons: I don't want them to be as strong as humans at all. Heavy axes are forbidden. Probably short swords and daggers are their best choice, but will leave this for latter and pay attention to my feelings.
...bound to mist and clouds. As they are weakened by the sun, they prefer to make incursions on the surface on misty or overcast days. This is why the other races have put that name on them. :/

Now, can this make for something that can be explored in a game? This is something for a latter entry, hopefully after I have actually used them.

Inverting colors turns many people into Drow

The monographic entry about ELVES and how I run them (system neutral?)

 You found elves! number appearing? roll in this table:

1. Average elf (1HD, no armor, short bows, with the bow expertise feat granting an extra 1d6 on attacks) They can climb trees very fast.

2. two elves

3. three elves

4. druid (level=1d6, 1d3 spells, with heal and speak with plants being the most common. Speak with plants is the key to gather Sleep Powder from a specific flower: they carry 1d6-3 uses of it. Blowing onto the powder works as a sleep spell. Possible treasure to be found in elven lairs)

5. veteran hunter (no armor, level 1+1d6)

6. Roll twice. On a repeated result or another 6, raise the level of everyone by one

Elves make their lairs in deep forests, and whenever they are on that terrain, they always have advantage to surprise rolls. When on real combat, they will always try to shoot from the treetops: anyone trying to shoot them from below does it at -4 due to the height difference and concealment. Looking for a hidden elf in a tree works as looking for secret doors (5+ on a d6) with advantage if they make any noise, so is a good idea to trick them into talk even if just to locate their silhouettes.

This means that elves are pretty though encounters for their size. I've actually made them more OP each time I use them, because as a GM I enjoy monsters that are hard to kill but offer plenty space for retreat, negotiation, roleplay and using spells and other dirty tricks. As a side note, I am trying to reserve fair combat for "enraged" or "dumb" monsters like golems, but I hate when the PCs resolve and encounter with civilised humanoids and I find out a posteriori that I made them not use tactics at all.

An elven lair consists in sparse cozy shelters carefully hidden into the treetops, and the rest of the hex and the adjacent six (if suitable) are hunting grounds. Elven life revolves indefectivelly around hunting by means of their short bows, though they also carry daggers carved from horns and bones, which they call "fangs". They can prey on many things appearing on your random monster table for the area; including shit like tiger beetles or giant scolopendras. I don't imagine owlbears being edible but they are probably prized for their skins. But of course, it is a great idea to make space for the antelope and the boar, always present on b/x bestiary. Elves cook their food and make campfires to do so if they believe they won't attract too much attention (this is a good example of a good surprise roll against elves).

As opposed to Trow, whom are more proclive to hunt big game par force (that is, succintly, using dogs and coordinate tactics to pursue a catch until its tired and presents battle) elves use stealth. Trow use hunting parties as a social event, and a way to introduce young boys to the customs of riding and battle (I'd love to write an entry about that specific topic soon, cross fingers), while their elven counterparts often hunt alone, and rarely in groups bigger than three. They never use dogs (and rarely have pets that cannot fly or at least climb).

It's not just that they are hard to detect: Elves hardly ever talk, not even amongst them. When PCs arrive into elven territory, they might receive a silent warning in the shape of arrows shot in the ground before them, with the shooters well hidden in the foliage above. If that doesn't work (as always happens with PCs) they might shot a sack that can be pierced, or try to wound someone, to make the whole party turn their back (that's like their neutral reaction roll on their territory). They don't want their sacred groves profaned with bonfires and their buck deers flushed by the noisy trow. Or they are just appalled by the idea of two marching kobolds breaking the peace with constant jokes and laughters.

They do not understand why other races talk so much, like there was so many things to be said. Though they might seem serious and stupid, they do have sense of humor and keep normal relationships, but they somehow manage to do it talking much less and using a lot of implied acts, which are amplified by their surrounding lack of speech.

If required to, they will try to use a single word; two in case of need. Four consecutive words or more are considered a poem for them (and they do write four word poems. This is not an exageration); but they never use verbs in any form. For some metagamist reason, they are unable to use them or appreciate them and so, their speech sounds always precarious to trow and kobolds.



Elves are plant-like in apparence, and dress in pelts; as heavy and hooded as the climate requires. Their color is a greyish green and their hair looks like leafs. This has no more biological effects beyond that, though poison seems to affect them less virulently (bonus in saving throws vs poison) And, of course, there is the fact that a tree will grow from their corpse once they die. This trees are sacred and elves will protect them violently, with at most an awkward explanation. This tree is believed to hold the soul of the deceased for an indefinite time after his death, and the tribe's druids can partially communicate with them. Many times, elves who are about to die decide to wait for death right outside the limits of their forest; knowing that this will cause a subtle inertia for new groves to expand towards their gravetree.

Though elves are individualistic in nature, when a decision involves the whole tribe they tend to value the words of the elders: A veteran hunter that is now a potter by the river, or a venerable druid (clasically a woman). In addition, the opinion or the blessing of the departed elders, now in tree form, is also sought through the druid's abilities.

A silent elf sitting on a branch could be doing anything from sleeping, contemplating nature, listening for prey, thinking or practising meditation, all in the same unassuming position. By doing the latter, they believe that they weaken their illusory miconceptions and are innately guided to their place in the nature cycle, like the other animals do.

Elves are to be a playable race (though not used them as such yet). I've used ambiguous mechanical terms in this entry, but applied to my Trow Fortress rules, their dexterity must be high, so I will make it so they must allocate their best score onto it, and instead of getting regular HD increases as fighter, they can at certain levels increase their dexterity or magic by +1, no roll required. This will help them get into their presumed roles as veterans. As a side effect, some elves can max out dexterity and become elven monks (expertise: combat without weapons) and even have some magic buffs, related or unrelated to combat. But that is something to be written another day. I hope you liked my take on indian-dryads.

Dogs and other animals as monsters

Anybody else has felt that disphoria, when you roll up an encounter and it's just bears? I was expecting a beast; and the weird thing that a bear is actually a dreadful beast! But it falls flat. Why a bear when we got an owlbear? And, doesnt an eagle stop being an eagle (symbol of power, king of the birds) when it shares world with rocs and phoenixes?

There is no distinction in many bestiaries between real life animals and monsters: they are all listed the same, alphabetically, each with their HD and stats. But I think that in many cases they are redundant. It might only be my view on this, but let me tell you something I have slowly injected in my games:

There are no two versions of animals: wolves and direwolves. Eagles and dire eagles. Bees and Killer bees. Only one of the versions is allowed, the one that is more interesting (usually the big or magical one). I am a D&D naturalistic and I spend more time than you would guess imagining the ecology and habits of imaginary beings. On the flipside, I realized that I should not only take monsters "down to earth", but also I should make normal animals become more hyped, more "monster" if you like, in order to have a place in a D&D hexmap. Here are some examples:

Honey is distilled from killer bees. This makes it very valuable and dangerous to produce, much more when you remember that BX RAW the honey at the core of a hive works as a healing potion.
If the hive is set on a city, an accident or an attack can provoke chaos amongst the populace; though releasing the bees during an attack can also be an interesting tactic.
Hives can be wisely situated outside the cities, but this comes with it's own set of problems: being exposed to bandits, raiding parties and monsters is the first. Farmers must adapt by finding hidden havens or finding another defence strategy. The poison of killer bees is also usable through bladed or piercing weapons.

The standard size of wolves is larger than the normal one (see pic above, compared to a Trow and a Kobold), because they are more terrific that way; and I can fit 5 HP on them (on my monster conversions, normal wolves had 4 and direwolves had 6). The same problem happens with lions and tigers, when you have sabertooth tigers living a few hexes apart: There is no place for both: the existance of one makes the other lose its meaning. The concept of a lion falls apart in the moment in which an adventure finds one and says "at least is not a sabertooth tiger!!"

But what about blink dogs? RAW they have as much life and better armor than a dire wolf, just a little less average damage. Thats before we count their blinking ability in. Very tough for something that looks just like a greyhound!
Though I love blink dogs (and greyhounds) too much, I must confess that I have never achieved an interesting encounter with them. They hardly provide combat, roleplaying opportunities, not any help, despite their "lawful" nature. I have thought many times on the domestication of the blink dog. Could it be helpful? well, if a kobold could ride it and blink out of existance with it, sure. The rules are not very clear about it. But how hard would be living in a castle with the dogs blinking constantly in and out of the kitchen?
Thought its a very interesting idea to explore, I have settled giving them the traditional role of coyotes, jackals and foxes: the wild canines that, to put it in terms we all understand, chose to be rogues instead of fighters. They are highly intelligent and show great empathy, but they are not available as pets for the populace. They can be used, however, as animal companion, which in my rules is available for people with high charisma, though the animal must be feasibly befriended. This introduces more ways in which blink dogs can interact with the party: evil wizards can send them to steal your magic items and blink away; or you can get a very dope ally. As a note, I'd like to point that the pokemon Abra is a blinking fox. Coincidence? I don't think so. 

Now that we are talking about dogs; what about domestic dogs? There are few greater contrasts in D&D as between the lack of rules on their use, and the obsession of the average gaming group on using dogs (in my experience, obv). On one side, giving dogs very good bonuses on their scent and tracking abilities could be a little OP. On the other, making them meat shields at best has little flavor and doesn't paint the essence of a dog. Following the precept of "naturalizing" monsters and "monsterifying" common animals, I think that leaning on the buff-dog is the correct answer, with different power ups depending on breeds (More on this on the upcoming entry: BESTIARY) while implying that the dog breeds in the game world are also limited and not corresponding to real life current age.

In my campaign, the only crocodiles are giant crocodiles. All bears are owlbears. Monkey's intelligence is accentuated, so it can be exploited.
Ravens are a widespread communication method, and is easy to teach them words. Falcons are used to hunt, but also can be trained to kill messenger ravens. Stirges are my world's mosquitoes. Eagles don't exist, only rocs of different size. As an exception, I use spiders and snakes of all sizes, because I find uses for both.

Planets 2: Time and weather in the Disk

Not every planet has a night: very small planets have not enough mass to block much sunlight. However, as they grow big in scale, the dusk zone also grows. This is truer in orbits closer to the sun, where desertic climates are common. At the temperate middle orbits it's easy to have bright nights due to the clouds acting as lush reflecting screens. But even if the confortable darkness of night is a luxury for some, it becomes the norm far from the sun: behind all the cloud layers piled up, the planets are gradually subsumed in penumbra.

The very concept of a day is certainly diffuse in the Disk as whole. Every planet has its own rotation cycles, and there is not an unified unit of time. A traveler in planet A can build a house from the foundations to the roof during a single night. Then go to planet B and have seven dusks and dawns pass over him during a nap. But most people don't travel too much, and adapt their lives to their local idiosincrasy as part of their planet culture; just as all civilizations adapt to summer and winter. But how much exactly does a winter last?

Translation cycles are equally diverse across the known world. And while using years as an unit can work when talking with a fellow planeteer or organizing local stuff, the proper way to deal with strangers or speaking of the past is in terms of generations: "In times of my father, my grandfather, or my grand-grandfather". However, seasons do exist, and every planet gets their summer, fall, winter and spring. They just have a different impact and time on each. I cannot imagine how hard (an long) can winter be on one of the outernmost planets, and how does their people endure, if there is actually somebody there.

Sometimes, a sage tries with more effort than success to research notes, contrast planetary records and make sense of the world history, and eventually surrenders; cursing the disinterested nature of men; because it's very hard to find records of the past of any kind in the planets beyond personal or familiar diaries. "Maybe people would act different if we all lived in a planet with the same years and days for everyone" he says. "We could measure our ages in years; or know which planet holds the oldest city" But only sages care about that kind of impossible things: nobody else cares about when something happened or what is their exact age. A kid becomes a youth at some point, and then an adult, then an old man. Those ages are most times obvious to oneself and to others, and they don't need more. While for the sages the world is old and carries the weight of the past, for those with fire in their bellies the world is as fresh as the everchanging sand in a beach, waiting for them to build their castles on; and its easy to hear the breath of the gods behind you, just as if they had created the world not long ago, and are still taking a rest.

Weather, on the other hand, is much more important. 

The Disk itself looks like a disk, because the known orbits all spin in the same plane. Just like planets, clouds and winds have their own cycles around the father sun. And just as birds migrate from planet to planet, alongside floating flower seeds, stray projectiles or the harmless paper hearts that young girls like to send into the sky so they find their future lovers, also winds and storms are put to dance by thermal and centrifugal forces and attracted eventually by a planet's pull. However, weather's dance is as vital to farmers and navigators as planet's dance is to the sages. A weather yearly almanac, be it copied from another guildsmen or inherited through many generations is an invaluable treasure to have for men and woman of many trades. When there is no other choice, settlers and pioneers write them by their own hand, many times in the improvised symbols and crude drawings proper of illiterate men.

Planets 1: Floating around

 

"Why doesn't everybody fly around from planet to planet all the time? It's so easy, right?" 

Thats what most kids ask when they learn about the open space of the Disk. 

 "Yes, it is, kids." Parents say. "But have something in mind: once you set your feet off the land, our gravity will pull you less and less, and at a certain point, you'll be drafted by further gravities of distant planets, so you'll probably get to go somewhere. But the orbits are capricious, our whole universe an unfathomable clock of a myriad spheres. If you lose track of your home planet, you might never be able to find it again. I wish you would stay with us forever, and there is no shame on it. Many others do not ever abandon their home planets. But someday you'll be a man and might like to prove your worth far beyond those clouds..."

Nobody knows for certain how many planets there are on the solar system. It is known that the biggest one (and the most populated for sure) is probably Hytral: its enormous circumference spanning almost 250 km along its equator. The planet codices at the observatory in Emben register the names of five hundred spheres of different sizes, though the actual number is for sure much larger: its impossible to count all the smaller nameless rocks which can barely hold a handful of baobabs. The added problem of them all having different rotation cycles makes travel and observation very difficult during long spans, making most of that information incomplete and outdated,

Travelling from planet to planet is not difficult for a healthy and fit person. Although at surface level all the planets have similar gravity pull, its easy to break free of it by propelling yourself high enough: this distance is usually proportional to the size of the planet. In a very small one, an energic jump can do the trick, or you may help yourself by using a jumping pole or climbing up a tree (As a kid growing up in a small planet, I did it all the time with my friends instead of going into school). Bigger planets normally have towers dedicated to the purpose of helping departers reach the heights for low gravity. Of course, the landing is also rougher on those, and having a parachuting device is advised to those travelling into one. 

Its always wise to check your local sage for the upcoming planetary conjuntions, as you can lift off and wade through clean sky and clouds for more time than you intended, or find another place instead. In case of doubt, following a flock of birds will always lead you somewhere. On the other hand, following a flock of cloud whales will surely lead you to deep cloud formations with little or no land, in which is terribly easy to become disorientated and lost.

Most people has no real reason to travel to other planets. Some do it in their youths, as an adventure, or maybe searching for a different place in which to settle. Constant travel is much rarer, and people who does it is often treated with as much curiosity than suspicion. Though interplanar invasion and wars are very strange in the disk, probably for logistical reasons, criminals and scoundrels are not. But who doesn't like the visit of a journeyman of any strange foreign trade, looking for knowledge and sharing his own? Who isn't enthralled by the visit of a singer, bringing information that is part her own lies and part the ones that were told to her? Who hasn't followed a foreign monk into the local dojo, searching for an honorable duel in which to test his skills?

 

[illustration] World of Guweiz

Official Soundtrack of the post:

This post is dedicated to the artist called Guweiz who did all of this drawings. One of his recurring themes is this samurai girls, under a seemingly endless rain. Doing who knows what, at what seems to be the outskirts of a flooded modern city. Some part inside me remembers waking up early in autumn mornings, to walk the way up to high school on days like that. And that specific kind of magic. Lots of grunge.

This one above summarizes the essence of the ¿setting? perfectly for me. It's title is Countryside. Notice how there is a constant presence of that warm lights around the girls. Sometimes its pendants, sometimes butterflies. Sometimes lamps. As if that light hold a great importance to their survival or the missions ahead. Maybe that is why our girl came to the countryside now; to gather a little light for the road ahead.

There is something that speaks to me in this world. What kind of plot or setting would it had if it was an RPG? would this girls be the PCs or the Monsters? what do you do in a world like that? Is it a normal autumn in our world, or is it another one, smaller, where the autumn never leaves? Where you put a lamp on your door to keep your home safe from whatever is lurking there? 

Notice the giant oni armor at the background. Did she just beat him? is he pledging service? or just a dead cask that happens to be there? Whats going on in this city?

Is it all in the end a metaphor for teenage life? Why so many girls? And how do they get their XP? If you have any ideas of what this setting could be about, please tell me.