Meltwater: Q1 2025 Slush Pile

 

For those not familiar with the practice of a slush pile in TTRPG blogging, it's basically 'throw all the stuff you've lost motivation to write/found wasn't worth writing about out there so people can pick through the ruins.' For various reasons - possibly I'm not naturally as productive as I was in 2024 over long periods, possibly just a tough few months - I have a fair old bit of slush this season. I hope you find something worthwhile in it!

NOT SLUSH

The following projects are still ongoing. Slowly. 

1. What Interesting Terrain Looks Like, where I argue for a change in the way people approach exploration play in games towards the mundane difficulties and small scales rather than the weird and grandiose
2. Folkloresque-Ritterian North West Mageckrawl, Part 1, in which I'll go through the placement of sites of power, nodes, ley lines etc. over which our mages and other supernaturals will compete. This is the thing I've done most writing on this season, it's just LONG.
3. Bookposting.
1. For March, a brief little hexmap trick I came up with whilst trying to work out how to represent the multissipolar factional maps of Christoph N. Vogel's Conflict Minerals, Inc.
2. For April, (having promised it at Christmas) a piece on Ármann Jakobsson's The Troll Inside You, describing a number of different traits a creature described to your PCs as a 'troll' by superstitious townfolk might actually have. 
4. The First Two TTRPGs I Ever Read, Or - Wrote! in which I go over a couple of games I wrote between the ages of 9 and 12 which are nominally TTRPGS but written with 0 awareness of other games beyond 2nd or 3rd hand cultural osmosis of what D&D might look like. 
5. A Fight in Every System I own (Part 1), a piece I've had for literal years where I run the same fight (6 minimally-capable street toughs, 4 starting PCs) in... every system I (physically) own, to see how the rules shape the outcomes of play at the most basic level possible.

And maybe

1. More on my Warhammer: the Old World magic system, which I've finally got some test games for
2. Thoughts about Archaon's advantages compared to other Everchosen and technological development in Warhammer
3. More of my old 5e homebrew (it takes a surprising amount of effort to put it all in a post for stuff I am very much Over)
4. D50 radical groups

There will also be new things, but since IDK what pace I'll end up settling on & I don't want to disappoint, no teasers for now.

OK, let the ice crack...

Slush

Notes on the Velkithi Anglercray

Submitted for the consideration of tutors of Psiomagy, Biomagy, and Ecology, of specialists in Hydrographic Exegesis, and for all the coastal Librarii of the South Intercontinental Sea, the Sea of Faces and the Eternal Ocean. A copy also presented to the city watch of the Pillar of Velkith.

Researched by Kepluan Varaniasschild with Maraven Talmorraloalsdaughter

Notes on the Agamathoan Iocamaorc, or Velkithi Anglercray, a possible novel crustacean-jelly copsychic symbiote and aggressive mimic for comparison with records of similar creatures

• Gas-pockets
• how does it metabolize them?
• Slow to move above the water.

There would have been an extensive section here discussing the 'science' of the creature's biology as researched by a couple of elven wizards. 

Generic-ish game stats

The Lure:

• Base stats as a weak Ooze
• Swim speed equal to the higher of move or climb
• Intelligence as a slightly stupid but cunning and opportunistic human
• No acid or poison and does not attack, except to grab a weak target who is departing
• Can extend up to 25 ft. from the Cray's body 
• Generally the Cray lurks 10 ft. below the surface when luring, so only 15 ft. of 'rope'
• In any and every direction - extends its body to create both mobile illusions of creatures and illusory terrain - walkways, little islands etc.
• These can speak, move, and take on whatever colours it wants
• Not smells or tastes, though - always tastes like soap and rotting pork
• Close examination will reveal a rubbery texture and slight translucency in strong light. you are unlikely to get time to do this
• Always a thin trail of slime stretching back, to maintain the connection
• If the Cray is confused, brain-damaged, psychically blasted etc., the illusion becomes melted or shifts wildly
• If the tie is severed, the ooze loses all shape and goes around trying and failing to wrap around and digest small animals, finding targets by touch
• Cannot digest anything and eventually starves. Might suffocate a child first.
• If the Cray dies, resultant psychic backlash kills the ooze.
• Via its link to the Cray, can use the latter's telepathy to choose how it shapes itself.
• Will take the form of somebody the target is already expecting
• Will say whatever they expect or hope that person will say
• Wants to get you to step onto one of its walkways, take it's hand, or go for a swim
• If you do, the whole thing collapses into a pseudopod grappling you
• Save or contest strength as system appt. once per turn to escape. Not the first turn - you had that chance.
• Dragging you at its full move speed towards...

The Cray: 

• Base stats as an Ogre.
• Walk, climb, and swim speed as a giant crab
• Can cling to even vertical surfaces underwater with its giant clawed 'feet'
• On the surface, halve walking speed
• Senses:
• 120 ft. psychic senses - can detect any creature with a mind within 120 ft. and read its surface thought
• Shares this with the ooze via their physical connection - see above
• Weak vision - eyes face forwards and slightly up, embedded in the head so little peripheral vision. Can see little more than light and dark beyond 30 ft. 
• Slightly stronger than human smell and taste, can detect a body in the water from up to 30 ft. away though not specific location.
• Armoured as full plate - the shell is slightly softer than steel, but also thicker.
• Joints of the limbs are narrow weak spots which can be targeted specifically. Armoured as padding, but hard to hit (disadvantage or equivalent)
• Eyes are vulnerable but embedded deep in the front of the head - can be targeted only by piercing attacks (arrows, bullets etc.) from the front
• A small slit in its 'forehead' through which the ooze emerges
• Deep blows to the shell (critical hits, or max damage if no crits) puncture a flotation gas chamber - a burst of bubbles, a vile smell and the creature's natural elevation in the water decreases 10 ft. 
• It must expend a round to resurface, and henceforth one pair of limbs must be used to keep it afloat, reducing its attacks by one (cumulative for multiple sacs destroyed).
• If a torch is held by a punctured sac, a rush of blue flame deals damage as a small fire to creatures within 5 ft. If a flaming or superhot weapon is used to puncture the sac, it explodes inside the creature, driving shrapnel through its interior flesh, cracking the shell and leaving it concussed. Unless somehow healed or able to return to hibernation, the creature dies within 24 hours.
• Four attacks (one per main pair of limbs), damage as trident.
• Reach 10 ft. 
• Slow: Dexterity bonus to defences is doubled, or dodge rolls have Advantage.
• Drag: If it hits against a creature's unarmoured defence, the creature is grappled (contested roll or save against STR to escape) and immediately pulled up to 5 ft. towards the Anglercray.
• If the creature is armoured, a hit between the unarmoured and armoured defence value does no damage but still grabs it.
• A creature dragged into contact with the Anglercray must make another such roll or dragged into its Terrible Mandibles and Palps, damage as 8 knives striking as one, no roll to hit. 
• Inside of the mouth is armoured as the exterior. 
• Successful hits reduce damage by 1 knife equivalent.
• Armour is battered and crushed in against and into the body; fewer chunks of flesh are torn out but the damage is compounded by the resultant physical impairment.
• Creature is chewed in this manner for three turns. May make further saves to escape each turn at disadvantage.
• If no escape for 3 turns, creature is SWALLOWED and passed to the Digestion Sacs.
• Unarmoured. 
• Damage as a weak acid bath, ignores armour, no saves or rolls to hit.
• No air. Overwhelming smell of flesh.
• Horrible black slime sticks to the walls
• Room for up to two medium creatures

Strategy and Tactics

• The Anglercray hunts at night, when its illusions are hardest to see through.
• Seeks out sentiences moving alone and follows them from the water.
• If other people arrive with different thoughts on their mind, the slightly stupid crab may send the wrong information, leading to an amalgam of their thoughts presented by the ooze.
• When they pass an open area of water or look like they're about to, sends out the ooze to lure them in (see details above)
• Those who fall in it grabs with its claws and digests

lore and plot hooks go here

Credit to Patrick Stuart's Anglerlich (Veins of the Earth), which first got me thinking in this (aha!) vein. I hope that, despite obviously being less imaginative, the Anglercray distinguishes itself meaningfully by being a bit less high-concept and therefore potentially more usable without needing to insert the concept of a puppeteering dimensional predator into your game.

Random Thematic Worldbuilding Generator for People Who Own Too Many Books

STEP 1: Roll 2d4 to determine how many elements your world will be inspired from.

STEP 2: Per element rolled, roll 2d6 on this table to determine what it will be.

    2. A non-fiction book that really should be your thing, but isn't for whatever reason

    3. A non-fiction book that you find compellingly wrong

    4. A non-fiction book about a subject you wish TTRPGs handled/represented better

    5. A non-fiction book you like that not many people have heard of 

    6. A non-fiction book you've been meaning to read for ages
    7. Your favourite/most influential book right now (2nd favourite on your second roll, etc.), or your         current read. This is the only option which can include other TTRPGs.

    8. A fiction book you've been meaning to read for ages

    9. A fiction book you like that not many people have heard of 

    10. A fiction book that you really wish had a TTRPG

    11. A fiction book that's 'so bad it's good' to you

    12. A fiction book that really should be your thing, but isn't for whatever reason

Pick the first thing that comes to mind! If that's something you already picked for a previous element, roll again.

STEP 3: Per element, roll d4 on this table to determine how many samples you will take. Subtract 1 from the roll if you rolled 6-8 elements in step 1. Add 1 to the roll if you rolled 3 elements in step 1. Add 2 to the roll if you rolled 2 elements in step 1.

    0 or less. 1 random sentence from a random page (randomize by line then read the first sentence of                        that line from the start)

    1. 1 random paragraph from a random page

    2. Pick a random page, then take a book in the footnotes/endnotes/mentioned on that page. If none, from a work listed by the author as an inspiration for the book - the first you can find. (So long as you can also find said inspiration). Roll again for it, at a further -1 modifier.

    3. 1 paragraph from d3+1 random pages 

    4. 1 random page plus plus a reference sample as per #2 from that page

    5. d3+1 random pages

    6. d3+1 random pages plus a reference sample as per #2 per page

STEP 4: Find your samples, using a random number generator to randomize pages.

STEP 5: Per sample, roll d8 to determine how it will be integrated into the world. If you have multiple disconnected samples from a single result, roll once for each if you have time and energy.

    1. Entirely diegetic text (you can change names if you wish) of SIGNIFICANCE

    2. Represents a worldview/philosophical debate/influential feature of the world

    3. Represents a physical component of the world

    4. Example of a type of action or event in the world, either common or significant

    5. The vibe of the text is part of the world's mood and theme

    6. Write down all significant nouns, verbs, adjectives in the text on individual slips of paper. Jumble

        them up with other lists resulting from other rolls of this result. Put them in a bag, draw 2d6                     TOTAL. These are important words within the world.
    7. PSYCH you aren't using these specific samples. Instead, look for the closest piece of art in the                 book - the cover counts if it's cool - or google fanart of something described on the page and                 integrate that.
    8. This page describes an introductory adventure for the setting. If rolled multiple times, these are                 elements of one adventure. If the contents aren't adventurous, think about them harder. Meditate             on them. Consider this a test of creativity.

STEP 6: Integrate these parts, these critical pillars. Build the bridges between them, ensure they make sense . These are the necessaries of your world.

STEP 7: Start writing. Fill in as much of the gaps as you can in half an hour, an hour, some set period of time. Or, if you prefer, follow an exercise like this one, or the ones listed here.

EXAMPLE:

Step 1: 2d4=6
Step 2: 2d6 for each

1. 10 - Fiction book you wish had a TTRPG: China Miéville, Perdido Street Station
2. 7 - Favourite book right now: Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social
3. 8 - Fiction book you've been meaning to read for ages: N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season
4. 4 - Non-fiction book about a subject you wish was handled better in games: Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation (my subject is 'religion, religious movements and the nature of faith,' for the curious)
5. 8 again - Seth Dickinson, The Monster Baru Cormorant
6. 6 - Non-fiction book you've been meaning to read for ages: Edward Said, Orientalism

Step 3: d4-1 for each as we have 6 elements.

1. 2 - one random reference from Perdido Street Station
2. 0 - one random sentence from Reassembling the Social
3. 1 - one random paragraph from The Fifth Season
4. 0 - one random sentence from The Great Transformation (my subject is 'religion, religious movements and the nature of faith,' for the curious)
5. 3 - 4 random paragraphs from pages of The Monster Baru Cormorant
6. 3 - 3 random paragraphs from pages of Orientalism

Step 4: we assemble our samples

1. No citations of course, but my copy of Perdido Street Station has acknowledgements shouting out M. John Harrison of Viriconium, so I grab my complete Viriconium (mostly unread), roll a 1 with the modifiers for a random paragraph, and randomize to page 436, par. 4:
   "The prince rode south all night, and when he came out from under the trees he would not look up in case the Name Stars should reflect some immense and unnatural change below." 
   Single-sentence paragraph, what can you do?
2. Randomized to page 88, line 30:
   "Once visitors have their feet deep in the mud, they are easily struck by the spectacle of all the participants working hard at the time of their most radical metamorphosis."
   Nice one!
3. Randomized to page 89 (fun lil synchronicity), par. 1: '"I know, I know. But it's still a shame." He shifts, getting more comfortable in his saddle. "Very well; I'm no lorist, but I'll tell you of Shemshena. Long ago, during the Season of Teeth - that's, hmm, the third Season after Sanze's founding, maybe twelve hundred years ago? - an orogene named Misalem decided to try to kill the emperor. This was back when the emperor actually did things, mind, and long before the Fulcrum was established. Most orogenes had no proper training in those days; like you, they acted purely on emotion and instinct, on the rare occasions that they managed to survive childhood. Misalem had somehow managed not only to survive, but to train himself. He had superb control, perhaps to the fourth or fifth-ring level-"
4. Randomized to page 125, line 15: 'The two earliest Upanishads emerged seamlessly from the world of the Brahmanas.'
5. Randomized to page 304 par. 10, 24 par. 8, 61 par. 4, 28 par. 6
1. '"Faham Execarne," Faham Execarne said. He stripped off the jacked and placed it over the dead man's head.
   "What?"'
2. 'It struck Baru as very odd that so much of the map was fallen empire, fallow territory, forgotten land. As if the tide of humanity was going out, all across the world...'
3. 'Shao Lune sneered, quite enchantingly, her face like a wonderful painting of your worst enemy, For a very long time Juris had wanted to court-martial her for insubordinantion and consign her to a fish-patrol corvette. But the more angry Juris became, the less she cared about the tone of Shao's loyalty, and the more the quality of her work.'
4. '"Anyway. These figures are members of the Throne. Here's Itinerant-" a smiling, wainscotted bust, her patron, Farrier. He put it down on the edge of the map. "Stargazer-" a telescope lens, also for the edge. "Me-" A pale figure, with red paint for hair. He put it in Aurdwynn. "Renascent-" A featureless pawn, which he placed, with a shudder, on Falcrest. "And you."'
6. Randomized to page 262 par. 3, page 5 par. 2, and page 83 par. 5. And since I've been getting away with short paragraphs rather too long...
1. 'Thus, in order properly to understand the intellectual genealogy of interwar Islamic Orientalism—as it is most interestingly and satisfyingly seen (no irony intended) in the careers of Massignon and Gibb—we must be able to understand the differences between the Orientalist's summational attitude towards his material and the kind of attitude to which it bears a strong cultural resemblance, that in the work of philologists such as Auerbach and Curtius. The intellectual crisis in Islamic Orientalism was another aspect of the spiritual crisis of "late bourgeois humanism"; in its form and style, however, Islamic Orientalism viewed the problems of mankind as separable into the categories called "Oriental" or "Occidental." It was believed, then, that for the Oriental, liberation, self-expression, and self-enlargement were not the issues that they were for the Occidental. Instead, the Islamic Orientalist expressed his ideas about Islam in such a way as to emphasize his, as well as putatively the Muslim's, resistance to change, to mutual comprehension between East and West, to the development of men and women out of archaic, primitive classical institutions and into modernity. Indeed, so fierce was this sense of resistance to change, and so universal were the powers ascribed to it, that in reading the Orientalists one understands that the apocalypse to be feared was not the destruction of Western civilization but rather the destruction of the barriers that kept East and West from each other. When Gibb opposed nationalism in the modern Islamic states, he did so because he felt that nationalism would corrode the inner structures keeping Islam Oriental; the net result of secular nationalism would be to make the Orient no different from the West. Yet it is a tribute to Gibb's extraordinarily sympathetic powers of identification with an alien religion that he put his disapproval in such a way as to seem to be speaking for the Islamic orthodox community. How much such pleading was a reversion to the old Orientalist habit of speaking for the natives and how much it was a sincere attempt at speaking in Islam's best interests is a question whose answer lies somewhere between the two alternatives.'
2. 'Having said that, one must go on to state a number of reasonable qualifications. In the first place, it would be wrong to conclude that the Orient was essentially an idea, or a creation with no corresponding reality. When Disraeli said in his novel Tancred that the East was a career, he meant that to be interested in the East was something bright young Westerners would find to be an all-consuming passion; he should not be interpreted as saying that the East was only a career for Westerners. There were—and are—cultures and nations whose location is in the East, and their lives, histories, and customs have a brute reality obviously greater than anything that could be said about them in the West. About that fact this study of Orientalism has very little to contribute, except to acknowledge it tacitly. But the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient (the East as career) despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a "real" Orient. My point is that Disraeli's statement about the East refers mainly to that created consistency, that regular constellation of ideas as the pre-eminent thing about the Orient, and not to its mere being, as Wallace Stevens's phrase has it.'
3. 'But dealings with the Muslims were only a part of Napoleon's project to dominate Egypt. The other part was to render it completely open, to make it totally accessible to European scrutiny. From being a land of obscurity and a part of the Orient hitherto known at second hand through the exploits of earlier travelers, scholars, and conquerors, Egypt was to become a department of French learning. Here too the textual and schematic attitudes are evident. The Institut, with its teams of chemists, historians, biologists, archaeologists, surgeons, and antiquarians, was the learned division of the army. Its job was no less aggressive: to put Egypt into modem French; and unlike the Abbe Le Mascrier's 1735 Description de I'Egypte, Napoleon's was to be a universal undertaking. Almost from the first moments of. the occupation Napoleon saw to it that the Institut began its meetings, its experiments—its fact-finding mission, as we would call it today. Most important, everything said, seen, and studied was to be recorded, and indeed was recorded in that great collective appropriation of one country by another, the Description de l'Egypie, published in twenty-three enormous volumes between 1809 and 1828.'

And then the caffeine wore off...

DRACONIC RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR

Red army = allied with the fiery red dragons that stoke the furnaces of factories. These creatures are proud, chaotic, independent, yet they will fight alongside their mortal coworkers. And if their independence ultimately turns to a drive to dominate... well. Themberchaud from Out of the Abyss just developed class consciousness
Black army = We move the Makhnovischina into the Ukrainian marshes, where the fierce and violent black dragons lurk. Though they lack the intellect or power of their red kin, black dragons share their antiauthoritarian streak and make up for both deficits with cunning, improvisational skill, and a great deal of environmental adaptation.

Green or peasant armies = Green dragons lurking in the fields and forests, who have long since created deals to protect rural villages in exchange for tribute.
White army  = the old tsar held onto power by control over the stupid, brutish white dragons, which were used as a powerful military force capable of operation in even the harshest and most frigid climes. Alas, against the industrial might of foreign armies they availed little, and the tsarist regime fell, but still their riders fight on like the dragon-bogatyr of old - just as vengeful, petty and privilege-obsessed
Blue army????? = The Basmachi islamic revolt in Central Asia, the steppes and deserts ideal terrain for the dryland blue dragons. They strike like lightning from a clear sky, nomads fighting alongside the beasts which, being intelligent, philosophic and Lawful, are quite inclined to religion themselves. The Basmachi do better in this timeline/

We're ignoring the evil of chromatics, though obviously not the law-chaos aspect. What is evil in these times? Order, disorder, these make sense.

How I Make Random Encounters Sometimes

I'll make this quick. Just a fun little trick I've not seen anybody but myself explicitly discuss, which I find helpful when making random encounter tables. It's sort of an antagonistic cousin of the current OSR 'overloaded encounter die' fad: it shares the desire to condense many tables into one, but rejects completeness. I find it leads to more unique and often weirder or more niche encounters.

TL;DR: use random encounter tables to generate your own random encounter table. Avoid over-emphasizing weird encounters by re-randomizing every time an encounter occurs. A small, evolving table can represent a lot more than its current entries.

Here's how it works:

There are a lot of random encounter tables out there, or generators that can help with random encounters. Here are three of my favourites:

• Mindstorm Press, Adding Congruency to Anti Canon Worldbuilding
  
• u/Dresdom, Universal Random Encounter Table
  
• Between the Skies' Encounter Recipe
  
  
  
  
  

Most of the time, I also want to mix in something to represent the types of creatures and factions in a specific area, though that could be represented by the Anti-Canon worldbuilding seed table. (For the sake of argument, because it breaks down encounters by terrain a bit and I think that's a big part of the value here, I'll use the Rules Cyclopedia encounter tables in the following examples.)

I want to incorporate the different foci and complexities of all of these, but merging them into one table is unwieldy. So, I just randomize the information from them a few times, then use that to fill in a small random encounter table - I quite like d4+d6. Arrange the table by how likely you think the encounters are. You probably don't want this table to be much bigger than maybe d6+d8, or results which were already rare on the earlier tables will effectively be being selected against twice, leaving them very rare indeed.

So, let's say I want to prep random encounters for a science-fantasy desert planet (desert for RC, Wild Space for BtS, just the basic example table for Adding Congruency). We'll use a 2d4 table for simplicity, so I generate 7 results on each table. This is not as well-groomed as my normal set of tables, as I'm throwing wildly different things at each other just because I like them and want to recommend them. So... sorry for the jank?

1st

• Adding Congruency: Great Lytellia, the Fallen City. Artifacts of uncontrollable power. Hubris. The color blue./Allied. The element works for or directly with the anchor.
• UET: Animal
• BtS: NPC, powerful: Zealous brothel owner, desires revolution, has a fanbase
• RC: Animal, Animal herd (desert)
• Synthesis: Drovers bring their flocks of sheep across the desert to give in tribute to the famed former courtesan and now vice-lord Ileeem of the city of Xeh, whose beauty of late inspires many such gifts. (In reality they are mind-controlled servants bound to the Brain Stone of Great Lytellia, sent by the Brain Stone to stoke Ileeem's pride and hate of the city that so long scorned them and make them a pawn in its apocalyptic schemes against the city).

2nd

• Adding Congruency: “A wise bastard acts the bloody fool.” A common saying. Watch for those hiding in plain sight./Lightest Touch. A simple, esoteric connection.
• UET: Minor problem or setback
• BtS: NPC, powerful: Criminal shipwright, desires to chart the spheres, artist
• RC: Human, dervish
• Synthesis: Posts in the red sand appear as those used to mark safe pilgrimage-routes through the desert for a mendicant religious order, but are in fact disguised beacons for the illicit flying-machines of a mad scientist. The tops of the posts are marked with glow-in-the-dark paint about as bright as a candle, yet visible from far above - and only above - on the dark desert sand. PCs following them from the ground expecting a route to a safe monastery-orb will lose a day's travel. PCs who wait by one post for 24 hours have a 10% chance of hearing a flying-machine buzz overhead at night.

3.-7. ... 

I then synthesize the different results, in order, into 7 coherent encounters.

The critical point here is that encounters do not reoccur - at least, not the same. When one is rolled, you get rid of it and roll up a new one at the next opportunity. If you roll it in the meantime, run a slightly different/progressed version of the same thing.

The Hidden WFRP Adventure in the 6th Edition WHFB Tomb Kings Army Book

I'm genuinely amazed that I've never seen anybody write about this before. (If I've missed something - ah well.)

The Warhammer 6th ed army book for Tomb Kings is a pretty fantastic one in many ways. All the 6th-ed ones were; despite typically being about 80 pages apiece, they managed to pack in a quantity of lore and detail which the 8th ed ones (despite my generally preferring the latter edition) simply failed to. Tomb Kings specifically, though, is very nostalgic for me as the first army book I ever got my parents to buy me, I believe for my 7th birthday. I'd just recently had that magical experience of walking into a games store for the first time, and to this day I associate that long-out-of-business place with a very exciting sort of beigeness that certainly stems from the cover of this very book. As I grew up and became more interested in TTRPGs alongside wargames, however, the thing that increasingly stuck out to me was that the book contained an entire, quite significant, adventure of the sort you might find in an O/AD&D module.[1] From a great metropolis, the characters must cross the seas to a far-distant land, chasing a rival trying to steal a march on them, crossing a hostile wilderness to arrive at an ancient tomb-city, then locate within that city a dungeon to be navigated, all in a search for treasure and knowledge! All in the space of only four pages. It feels like somebody inserted their WFRP adventure into a WHFB book, and the constraints of the latter forced them to presage the micro-adventure in the process.

So, would it be a good adventure in a TTRPG? That's what I'm hoping to discuss. If you're one of my WFRP-liking friends, I might run this in the future so maybe give this one a miss. If you don't know much Warhammer but are still interested - good choice! This is entirely system-neutral, and could probably be fairly easily adapted. I've tried to link to the major bits of setting terminology where possible to reduce confusion.

The Tomb of the Infant King

Sources of Information

The majority of the dungeon is presented across pages 72-5, as excerpts from the journal of an Imperial archaeologist, Heinrich Johann of the Magnus Museum, Altdorf, describing his journey to Nehekhara, the Land of the Dead, in search of the special key to unlock the sarcophagus of the Infant King Kaspeh[2] which is already held in the museum. The account ends with a letter from Johann's colleague, Jacob Stacheldhorf, saying that he has retrieved the journal and will endeavor to pursue. This creates a fascinating opportunity for a group to approach the adventure with access to this fragmentary journal to guide them as a years-later expedition, or to experience it for the first time as replacements for Johann.

A strongly implied additional account of the same journey from the perspective of their Arabyan guide's nephew, Suli, appears across pages 13-14. A brief mention of the history of Queen Rasut and King Kaspeh, last of the Second Dynasty of Khemri, appears on page 4. Other context on the Tomb Kings in general is of course scattered across the rest of the book.

Timeline

The original journal spans from the 8th of Pflugzeit to the 9th of Nachgeheim of the Imperial Year 2499 (approximately equivalent to late March to early August). Stacheldorf does not date its recovery; one could choose either the present year of the wargame, c. 2519-20 prior to 8th edition, or of the RPG, c.2515 in its 4th edition. Which date one chooses will have substantial impacts on how much is known about the dangers of Nehekhara in the Empire, so I present a short timeline of relevant events culled from various sources. Forgive the lack of citation here; this is a hobby project. Most of this can be found on the Wiki.

2475 - Imperial and Marienburger trade with Araby and the Far East begins to increase, spurred by the development of colonies in the New World.
2483 - The Imperial Navy buys passage through Marienburg in a treaty negotiated by the Emperor Luitpold, increasing its reach over the seas dramatically.
2498 - A substantial force out of Khemri besets the Imperial Arabyan colony of Sudenberg,  (its status as a colony at this point is dubious, given it's existed in excess of a millennium, but that'll have to wait for an in-depth post on the various approaches to Araby in Warhammer and their flaws) commencing a series of conflicts with the Tomb Kings - presumably concentrated around Sudenberg? - and cement something of an alliance with the Sultan of Araby

2499 - Johann's expedition 
2502 - Luitpold dies and Karl Franz becomes Emperor, ushering in an age of prosperity, trade, and security
2506 - Tilean expeditions to Zandri raise the ire of the undead kings there, who fight with them extensively
 c.2510 - a mysterious Arabyan known as the 'Prophet of Law', presumably associated with the gods of Law, begins preaching against 'evil', including the nonhuman species. (Note that since the IRL 2000s or so Araby has been a polytheistic setting worshipping primarily the Djinn, and with an unusually high level of acceptance of atheism or agnosticism. Again, need to do a detailed post on how GW authors and others have tried to deal with their 'middle east' bit of the world whilst tiptoeing around accusations of orientalism, with... mixed success)
2509-15 - Things start to look down a bit for the Empire with the invasion of the great Chaos warlord, Tamurkhan the Maggot King. This is, in retrospect, the first sign of bad things to come. A civil war briefly breaks out in 2512, the Orc Warboss Azhag the Slaughterer rampages across the North and the city of Volganof is sacked by the Chaos lord Lord Mortkin. Hordes of daemons are summoned in Ostland, beastmen burst from the forest to ravage, and several foolhardy Bretonnian lords invade.
2515 - Date of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay's default setting and, to my mind, best date for Stacheldhorf's expedition. The battles of the previous years begin to slow down a little, and the Emperor's skilled statesmanship gets things back under control. Trade is still booming and people (of a certain class) feel confident about the future.
2517 - An unknown Tomb King, or just possibly one of the legendary Barrow Kings, turns up to prevent an attack on the Imperial province of Wissenland by the Vampire Lord Zacharias the Everliving. What's going on? We don't know.

2520 - The Skaven commence a series of brutal attacks into Araby as part of their Great Uprising against all the nations GW didn't want to write about in the End Times series. However, Araby actually holds out against them, entering into a continual state of war until the end of the world.
c.2520-1 - A great imperial expedition is sent to explore the Southlands, stopping off at Sudenberg in Araby on the way.
2522 - King Settra the Imperishable of Khemri purges the necropolis of all Kings who will not submit to him and assembles his armies to conquer the world. He also assaults the major regions of Araby, which once again holds out against him. This is likely the terminus ante quem of the adventure, because having defied the ancient Nehekharan laws by using her infant son to make herself queen, Queen Rasut is likely to have been destroyed in the purge.

Introduction: Altdorf to Al-Haikk (or wherever)

Setting the Scene:

It's 8 days after the mid-spring equinox of Mitterfruhl, and the last streamers of the Emperor's Tournament are just being cleared from the streets of Altdorf. They're damp and disintegrating now - everything is damp, the famous Altdorf fog being swept aside only occasionally by outright rain.

Build characters together. All of the player characters should link themselves to one or more of the following:

• They've done something that they regret over the days of the festival and are looking to get a long way from Altdorf, for a long time, ideally with some heavily-armed companions. They also know at least one other member of the party with a different hook.
• [If first expedition, at least one character] They have a strong bond with an academic called Jacob Stacheldhorf, an adventurous man often setting off on journeys around the world. [In the Second Expedition scenario, he's getting a bit old for this at around 50] 
• They are expert explorers with prior experience of Araby or similar environments, a reputation, and a willingness to work for pay.
• [Second Expedition only] They are indebted to Lord Curator and Translator Alun Gärtner of the Magnus Museum
• [Second Expedition only] They are relatives or friends of a missing explorer named Heinrich Johann

THE FIRST EXPEDITION

Jacob Stacheldhorf returns to Altdorf on the 8th Mitterfruhl and arranges to meet with any characters he already knows at the Red Lion tavern. He drinks fast and hard, increasingly insistent that the characters should join him on a visit to the Magnus Museum in Altdorf to see 'something astounding,' despite the late hour.

THE RECOVERY EXPEDITION 

• The Expedition: Al-Haikk (or other port) to Khemri
• Potential encounters with nomads, desert creatures, and increasingly undead on the Khemrian periphery. Maybe even the Tower of Arkhan the Black? Descriptions earlier in the book of the perils of the desert are our friend here

• Citycrawl: Khemri to the Tomb
  Very little description of this in the book - do you skip it??
• Dungeon Crawl: Into the Tomb and Out Again
  
  Easily the best bit! We have cool traps which are just the right mix of technical function and wacky Indiana Jones feel, lurking menaces not yet awakened, puzzles...
• Aftermath - how do the PCs escape and are they pursued?

The big thing that stopped me finishing this was being unsure how to do a writeup that kept similar content for both expeditions when a key principle of the latter is that PCs have the journal already. Maybe it's what gets stolen by the new 'Klarissa'?

[1] The comparison that leaps out for me is to UK6 All that Glitters... which also begins with the discovery of a mysterious artefact and calls on characters to traverse hostile wildnerness and ancient desert for the promise of treasure.

[2] The Lexicanum wiki gives his name as 'Kaseph or Kaspeh', but none of their sources give the latter. Yes, Kaseph would make more sense for a culture based on Egypt. Yes, maybe the Germanic-sounding Empire mistranslated the hieroglyphics into a form that'd make more sense to them, imitating the common Imperial name Kaspar/Caspar, but no, this is not textually confirmed.

Gameable Ideas from (Oh God) Bruno Latour's Reassembling the Social

This is the second oldest idea for a post on this blog, and it's sad to see it go, but it's just not taking shape

Late 2023, I got really into the Coins and Scrolls blog. I'd read a lot of TTRPG blogs before, but it's the first one I ever binged. Two to five posts a day, I'd say, until I was done. At some point in this process, I read a post urging the reader to follow Skerples' example with posts like these, seek out the gameable content in the next thing that they read and make their own blog post about it. I don't actually remember if this post was on Coins and Scrolls, another blog in Skerples' blogroll, or possibly a product of my fevered imagination; I spent an hour looking for it before deciding I didn't need to know that badly. At any rate, I went 'oooh, that's cool! I'll do that!' and only then remembered what I was reading at the time. 

Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (RtS henceforth), by noted sociologist of science Bruno Latour, is not a book stuffed with obviously gameable content. Nor is it a book that's easy to summarize; virtually everyone I've seen try to do so, from academic reviewers to the wikipedia page, seems to have read up to a certain chapter, stopped, and decided that that chapter's content was the main thrust of the book. This is understandable, because the book is densely packed with complicated ideas and then stuffed with additional 'explanatory' metaphors and comparisons which in practice tend to convolute things further. It's the kind of slender 260-page book that can easily take a person six months to fully parse and another two to recover from enough to write about it.[1] Easy to give up on, and still take away something insightful but incomplete. 

This isn't going to be a review, because I couldn't do it justice. That said, since I've seen no summary I can really recommend, here's what I got from it in brief:

There aren't layers or types of reality. 'The social' of sociology refers to a particular 'format', a way of deciding which web of connections between specific human and nonhuman actors is being talked about. Thus, there's no such thing as a 'social explanation' in itself - the social refers to the subject, not something that can itself explain. The same goes for other grand categories. Categories can be respected, but disciplinary formats should not be privileged over actors' own worldviews. Multiple mutually contradictory framings of reality need to co-exist to accurately describe the worlds in which the subjects of sociology move, as the perspective being applied changes whether given connections mediate (i.e. transform) or intermediate (pass along untransformed) action and whether certain actors are empowered to effect change or not. That said, Latour does eventually set out a brief political programme, roughly arguing for sociology to engage in a continual expansion of what sorts of agencies are recognized as falling within the social and political sphere.

Hm. That's grossly inadequate and as I write it I wonder if I'm laughably unable to discuss this even now. Maybe you should read the book and decide for yourself?[2] 

Anyway, gameable content! I'm adopting the rough-and-ready format of this post from Patrick Stuart because it's tested, good, and relatively simple and, being laid up with COVID at the present, I'm not overeager to make work for myself.

N.B.None of these quotes should be taken as representative of Latour's arguments; often they're plucked from a nest of important qualifiers. I don't agree with all of them even with those qualifiers, but you do need the context to make a decision on that front.

'when social scientists add the adjective "social" to some phenomenon, they designate a stabilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that, later, may be mobilized to account for some other phenomenon. There is nothing wrong with this use of the word as long as it designates what is already assembled together, without making any superfluous assumptions about the nature of what is being assembled. Problems arise, however, when "social" begins to mean a type of material, as if the adjective was roughly comparable to other terms like "wooden," "steely," "biological", "economical", "mental", "organizational", or "linguistic".'

Sword of Social Stuff: can go from being very small to very large in an instant and strike at people far, far away, absolutely indestructible whilst wielded by human hand.

'Sociologists are often accused of treating actors like so many puppets ... But it appears that puppeteers ... possess pretty different ideas about what it is that makes their puppets do things. Although marionettes offer, it seems, the most extreme case of direct causality - just follow the strings - puppeteers will rarely behave as having total control over their puppets. They will say queer things like "their marionettes suggest them to do things they will have never thought possible by themselves." When a force manipulates another, it does not mean that it is a cause generating effects; it can also be an occasion for other things to start acting.'

Gloriously sinister, but also we've all been here with a character at one point or another. Read RtS to discover who is pulling the strings :) 

'The more radical thinkers want to attract attention to humans in the margins and at the periphery, the less they speak of objects. As if a damning curse had been cast unto things, they remain asleep like the servants of some enchanted castle. Yet, as soon as they are freed from the spell, they start shuddering, stretching, and muttering. They begin to swarm in all directions, shaking the other human actors, waking them out of their dogmatic sleep.'

(I'm not sure Latour's right about this. Maybe 19 years on from RtS the rise of object-oriented ontology and its cousins has simply changed the field, but it seems to me that the radical thinkers of, say, Marxism have long been deeply concerned with the active role of things.) 

Rather than gods creating sentient beings to inhabit a numb world in your fantasy story, certain sentient agencies chose to chain others such that they could not act, cursing them to eternal sleep. The 'gods' chained, and sentient beings are those which were spared, bribed with the profits of infinite exploitation of the sleepers to help maintain the cage. Some objects begin to reawaken and revolt; can your characters give up their privileges to restore the world to its original panpsychic state?

'But still, there is a difference: once humans become mediators again, it is hard to stop them ... whereas objects, no matter how important, efficient, central, or necessary they may be, tend to recede into the background very fast ... The first solution is to study innovations ... in these sites objects live a clearly multiple and complex life through meetings, plans, sketches, regulations, and trials. Here, they appear fully mixed with other more traditional social agencies. ... Second, even the most routine, traditional, and silent implements stop being taken for granted when they are approached by users rendered ignorant and clumsy by distance - distance in time as in archaeology, distance in space as in ethnology, distance in skills as in learning ... novelty is produced, for the analyst at least, by the irruption into the normal course of action of strange, exotic, archaic, or mysterious implements. ... The third type of occasion is that offered by accidents, breakdowns, and strikes: all of a sudden, completely silent intermediaries become full-blown mediators; even objects , which a minute before appeared fully automatic, autonomous, and devoid of human agents, are now made of crowds of frantically moving humans with heavy equipment.'

Innovation, a distance which can be crossed to a discoverable thing, and accident or breakdown could be a pretty good typology of the useful and fun kinds of plot hook. (A fourth option, archival research to place an object in historical context, is given but it's not as useful here)

 'power, like society, is the final result of a process and not a reservoir, a stock, or a capital that will automatically provide an explanation. Power and domination have to be produced, made up, composed. Asymmetries exist, yes, but where do they come from and what are they made out of? ... When power is exerted for good, it is because it is not made of social ties; when it has to rely only on social ties, it is not exerted for long.'

'When science studies writers set out to account for Einstein's relativity, Pasteur's bacteriology, Kelvin's thermodynamics, and so on, they have to draw connections between entities that are completely different from what before was considered to be a string of social explanations. Those writers state that a factor is an actor in a concatenation of actors instead of a cause followed by a string of intermediaries. As soon as they do that, to their great surprise, the practical details of the case at hand seem to provide some explanation of the context that was supposed to explain it. Suddenly, it's Pasteur's own bacteria that appears to explain, through the new tracer of infectious diseases, a large part of what it meant, during the Second Empire in France, to be 'socially connected'; contagious and uncontaminated peopld didn't establish the same solidarity as, say, the rich and the poor ... the contagion redraws the social maps. The British Empire is not only 'behind' Lord Kelvin's telegraph experiments, it is also given a reach, a faster reaction time, a durability it will never have without the tiny cables laid out in the ocean. Kelvin's science creates, in part, the Empire, which is no longer in the background manipulating him unwittingly but made to exist by telegraph wires that are turned into full-blown mediators.'

How do your NPCs enforce their power? What are the specific sinews of their power? An NPC with a generic 'underworld' at their command is a sort of god of crime, and like a god defeating them feels either impossible or arbitrary. An NPC with a specific criminal hierarchy operating in specific places at specific times feels like something graspable, breakable.

'Once the artificial boundary between social and natural was removed, non-human entities were able to appear under an unexpected guise' - this is sort of what rules do, right? At least ones with dice. They allow the non-'really'-human beings of the gameworld to do things in unpredictable, plausible ways, simulating the sort of character-trance authors sometimes get when something acts through them without the GM having to deeply inhabit every single goblin bandit cultist.

'What is an account? ... We start in the middle of things, in medias res, pressed by our collegaues, pushed by fellowships, starved for money, strangled by deadlines. And most of the things we have been studying, we have ignored or misunderstood. Action had already startedl it will continue when we will no longer be around. What we are doing in the field - conducting interviews, passing out questionnaires, taking notes and pictures, shooting films, leafing through the documentation, clumsily loafing around - is unclear to the people with whom we have shared no more than a fleeting moment. What the clients ... who have sent us there expect from us remains cloaked in mystery, so circuitous was the road that led to the choice of this investigator, this topic, this method, this site. Even when we are in the midst of things, with our eyes and ears on the lookout, we miss most of what has happened. We are told the day after that crucial events have taken place, just next door, just a minute before, just when we had left exhausted with our tape recorder mute because of some battery failure. ... And that is excellent because there is no better way.'

Make some information mutually exclusive with other bits. The game doesn't need a completionist run. Have random events happen that the characters cannot know about or prevent; to do otherwise is a betrayal of reality. (and ooc - I think this is a lovely reminder not to panic about not producing the highest possible quality work due to the constraints of your situation.)

[1] It's me, I'm the person. I'm not a sociologist nor the fastest reader in the world, but I read a fair bit in the humanities and am not averse to theory. I read a lot of other stuff whilst on RtS, in part or full. YYMV +/-
[2] I am not sponsored by Bruno Latour (d.2022 RIP) to advertise a book published in 2005. I simply wish to share my pain/joy/confusion (cross out as appropriate).

Lesson here: I need to not write an introduction until I have a post, I think!

Here's to the changing of times,

Jago