The Six Cloven Princes: Overview

Just a few brief notes on each for now; as promised, they'll all get their own posts eventually. As per the name, they all have cloven hooves for feet, but unless this is specifically mentioned in their entry then it's going to be quite subtle; not full-on goat legs, literally just hooves where you'd maybe expect feet.

Embelloch
Into: suffering, pain, torture, convincing lesser beings to carry its babies
Manifests as: gargantuan gray blob with thousands of mouths and hooves; each of the mouths speaks when it talks, all saying something subtly different

Zosu
Into: the fundamental fragility of matter, entropy, elaborate ritual sacrifices
Manifests as: 20 foot tall ape-like creature covered in weeping sores and a head every orifice of which oozes black sludge 

Old Thorn
Into: the alien unknowable terror of nature, Byzantine plots that take centuries to unfold, kidnapping kids and replacing them with doppelgangers
Manifests as: naked old Venusian man from whom sprout innumerable grotesque thorns

Archiom
Into: secret knowledge, frenzied sex rites, doing drugs
Manifests as: Goat-headed goat-legged Earthling man, jacked like a bodybuilder

Barat
Into: bugs, plague, overseeing the Slime Hive
Manifests as: beautiful Venusian woman whose body is covered in holes in and out of which buzz millions of flies, wasps, bees, etc.

Stillwater Jack
Into: mutation, the ultimate randomness of the cosmos, drowning people
Manifests as: giant half-goat half-squid that lives in a slimy black lake

Lost Sepulchers of Venus: Witchery 101

Alright, laying out the basics of the Witch class and how magic works on Venus. Nothing too specific or detailed yet, just a rough sketch.

"Witch" is the most common term, but "wizard," "sorcerer," "necromancer," etc. all denote the same thing: someone who strikes a bargain with one of the Six Cloven Princes and thereby gains access to Powers Man Wasn't Meant to Have. Who are the Six Cloven Princes? Extradimensional horrors who live (sometimes, in some form) on Venus. Each is uniquely monstrous, in both appearance and personality; the only commonality is they all have cloven hooves of some sort. Basically, they're a cross between Lovecraft's Great Old Ones and Medieval depictions of Satan. Don't worry, each of them (and their unique servitor races) are going to get their own post.

In mechanical terms, the Witch replaces the Magic-user and the Cleric. Like the Cleric, they're not quite as capable in combat as the Fighting-man but aren't too shabby. They can use most weapons and some armour. Witch spells take the form of elaborate rituals for binding and controlling weird entities, sending their minds backwards and forwards in time, cursing items, shit like that. Nothing of immediate utility in combat, but which presents a lot of possibilities for clever players. Obviously, I'm filching liberally from Carcosa here, but another reference point is Call of Cthulhu, where most spells are for contacting/calling weird beings and doing other stuff that generally won't help you when you're right in the middle of the shit. Also like Carcosa, certain spells will require certain items, being in certain places at certain times, etc. As I've said before, I really like Carcosa's idea of rituals as adventure hooks: if you have a spell that requires you to be on the Frozen Plains of Amin-Zul on a full moon, you know there's a place called the Frozen Plains of Amin-Zul somewhere.

Witches will start with a couple spells, and to get more they have to perform tasks for their patron, which gives the DM more adventure hooks. They'll also probably get some sort of familiar that functions as the main way they communicate with their Prince, though most of the Princes expect their Witches to visit them in person at least once.

Obviously, Witches are never getting the better deal: the shit they have to do is not pleasant, and obviously your soul is effectively property of a hideous hellbeast the second you say "You've got a deal." Which, I guess leads us to the question of how Witches get to the position of making bargains with hideous hellbeasts in the first place. It's your usual culprits here: reading too much, spending too much time alone listening to weird music, falling in with other Witches because you want to get laid, etc.

Lost Sepulchers of Venus: Races

So I've decided on there being no mechanical difference between the three races, though I like the idea of certain spells or items only working on certain races, or having different effects depending on races.

I've also decided that the non-native races are the descendants of immigrants from many centuries ago. The secret of space travel was lost with the collapse of the still as-yet-unnamed Old Empire; everyone knows it was/is possible, and that the lack of any new interplanetary visitors has something to do with the Empire being gone. Unbeknownst to the general populace, visitors from other planets do still show up every once in awhile, but it's all a bit more surreptitious and these fellows aren't available as player races.

Martians and Earthlings have various traditions, myths, etc. that tell them about their old planets, but it's obviously a centuries-long game of telephone so shit's gonna be way off, and who knows what those places are really like?

Alright, anyway. These write-ups are brief, but it's all you need:

Venusians have green skin and white hair, but otherwise look very similar to Martians and Earthlings. Venus is a land of crumbling kingdoms, whose peoples are prone to prejudice and superstition - especially when it comes to sorcery.

Martians are red-skinned and completely hairless. They tend to be taciturn and humorless. They are almost as common in the Venusian kingdoms as Venusians themselves, having lived amongst them for seemingly forever. They form the bulk of the "working class" (craftsmen and such) and a good deal of the peasantry.

Earthlings come in a variety of skin colours. They are much rarer compared to Martians, and tend to live in slums or their own villages. They are generally more curious and interested in knowledge than either Venusians or Martians; a consequence of this is that more Earthlings wind up being Witches. The other two races know this, and treat Earthlings with suspicion (borderline hostility in the case of Venusians) more or less by default.

Lost Sepulchers of Venus: The Basics

As I said last post, I've been cooking up yet another new setting for use with my own "hack" of White Box OD&D. Tentatively titled Lost Sepulchers of Venus, it takes place, as you may have guessed, on Venus. Prior to the first probe encounter with the planet, science fiction writers had a lot of leeway with depicting the topography of Venus, since the only thing we can tell about it from Earth is that its surface is covered in clouds. According to Wikipedia, most tried to account for what a planet covered in thick layers of cloud would be like, and thus depicted it as either one big ocean, an arid desert, or a humid ball of swamp and jungle something like prehistoric Earth. I'm going with that last one.

It's a science-fantasy setting, obviously. At this point in time, the Venusian populace is sparse, spread amongst a few meagre kingdoms, all around the technological and societal level of 14th century Europe. At the edges of these kingdoms lie a great frontier, once the territory of an enormous Empire, technologically advanced and sorcerously powerful. These very sorceries brought about its downfall, some centuries ago, and now the ruins of its cities, outposts and machines lie scattered all throughout the vast wilderness. Only recently have some shaken off the powerful superstition about the place, and begun to venture into these ruins, to see what marvels might lie waiting to be unearthed.

At this point, I'm thinking three races: green-skinned native Venusians, red-skinned Martians, and pink-and-black-and-whatever-else-skinned Earthlings. How the Martians and Earthlings got there, I have no idea yet. Subject for another post.

Class-wise, I'm thinking: Fighting-man, Thief, maybe some variation on the Cleric but I'll have to think about this, and then the Witch I mentioned last post in place of the Magic-user. I've already got some ideas about who (or make that what) Witches make their dark bargains with. More on that another time.

Speaking of magic, I may also incorporate something like Carcosa's rituals (minus the ickier stuff) that any class can perform if they really want to Fuck With Things That Shouldn't Be Fucked With. The one thing I really like about the rituals is many of them require specific items and/or need to be cast in specific locations. It really adds an extra layer of meaning and impetus to exploration.

Play-wise, I'm conceiving of this as something of a hex crawl with small to mid-sized dungeons scattered throughout the ruins, and probably one legendary megadungeon, the location of which wouldn't be known at the outset.

Thoughts on Hacking OD&D

I picked up PDFs of the original (well, 2013 reprint) of the White Box "little brown books" and Supplement I: Greyhawk off of Drivethru RPG the other day; this is the first I've heard of their existence, but it turns out WotC released them over a year ago now.

Just from my first flip-through it became clear I was never going to be able to run anything with these unless I spent some time reorganizing them for myself and house-ruling away the many ambiguities and a few things I just don't like, but my understanding is this is in keeping with the received wisdom about OD&D: no two OD&D campaigns are going to be the same, because every DM is essentially forced to house-rule and interpret them. So I've been essentially writing my own personal "clone" of the rules, for my own use and for distribution to whatever players I could rope into playing this thing with me. That accomplished, I also plan to make a version that incorporates the various changes and additions from Supplment I, for an "AD&D Light." I may or may not incorporate the rest of the supplements, because it seems like the more you add the more you might as well just be playing 1st Edition AD&D.

But working through the rules in this fashion has made me realize in a tangible way what I've always read in regard to OD&D: that it's the most "hackable" version of the game, i.e. the easiest one to turn into whatever sort of broadly D&D-descended game you want. It's the most barest-bones version with the most room for moving into various different directions thanks to the aforementioned ambiguities.

So now I've been thinking about what my ideal version of D&D would look like. Here are some scattered thoughts on what I'd retain/add/change if I was building my own version of D&D out of the OD&D core:

• XP for gold would absolutely have to stay. More and more, I've been thinking that this and this alone is the most essential thing for the "old-school" D&D feel.
• No elves, dwarves, or halflings, i.e. no Tolkienisms. Whether or not these might be replaced by other races, and whether that would be in the form of race-as-class, would probably depend on the setting/feel/flavour I wanted to capture. Which leads me to my next point:
• Setting baked into the rules. If I'm hacking the rules for myself anyway, there's no point in keeping them generic. It's not like I'm trying to be the umpteenth person to market their own version of D&D that anyone can use for whatever settings, I'd want something perfectly tailored to whatever I was trying to do. So monsters, races, spells, items and all that jazz would probably all be cooked up from scratches, or at least heavily tailored.
• Speaking of spells, I really want to make magic seem fucked-up, dangerous and otherworldly, and I think one of the easiest way to do that is to ditch Vancian magic. Not that it isn't weird and otherworldly, because as I've written elsewhere, I think it is, but as I also wrote there I think a lot of effort is required on the DM's part to really shake off the veneer of banal acceptance that's glommed onto that system after decades of ubiquity. To that end, I think something like Palladium's Witch (or, for that matter, 3rd edition D&D's Witch) would be the main spellcasting class, i.e. magic is a matter of making bargains with one or more dark powers. As such, it's inherently Chaotic, and doing it in public will probably get you burned at the stake.
• Not sure whether I'd want to keep Clerics/Divine magic; if "regular" magic is the result of making bargains with otherworldly entities, then Divine magic would seem to be the same thing. I guess I really depends if I want there to be any "good" gods or not.
• I'd make the combat rules a little more codified, which is mostly a concession to some of the people I regularly play with who found OD&D combat unsatisfying. Something like what Lamentations of the Flame Princess does for explicitly formalizing the kinds of actions you can take in combat, or maybe even something as complex as AD&D.

That's all my thoughts so far. If it sounds like this is probably leading me into thinking up yet another setting to work on, you are correct.

The Church of the Holy Scale

In Keep on the Borderlands, at least as I read it, it's strongly implied that the official religion of the land is more or less an analogue for Medieval Christianity. When I ran my own take on B2, I made them snake handlers, pretty much on a whim. Here's a (slightly) more sketched-out version of that idea.

The Church of the Holy Scale, like its real-life inspiration, is devoted to the worship of a god with neither a definite name (they too just go with "God") nor definite characteristics. He/she/it is most often depicted as a great serpent encircling the world, though this is to be interpreted more or less literally depending on whom you ask. Metaphorically or not, God is associated with snakes over and over in the sacred texts. Like a snake, God is understood to be coldly indifferent to anything but its own affairs, despite having created the world and man for its own inscrutable reasons - though it appears to have a general affinity for order and stability (i.e. the Lawful side of the alignment spectrum).

On the other hand, God also has the hunger of the snake, in this case the hunger for worship and adulation. Thus it offers those who pledge themselves to it a chance at eternal life and (for some) a share of its power in the form of clerical magic. Worship services take the form of handling venomous snakes, specially blessed and maintained by the priesthood, who will never bite those with the true allegiance to God in their hearts. Priests are forbidden to use any but blunt weapons because sharp points and edges, like the snake's fangs, are instruments of God's punishment not to be taken up by mere men.

Structure and organization of the Church is a matter of specific campaign needs. For my B2 game, I assumed it was more or less the only (Lawful) religion in town, and that there was some central Vatican-like seat somewhere, but that such things were generally irrelevant to the sort of hinterland places that B2 is supposed to take place in (the Pope isn't stopping by to inspect some random parish on the edge of the Blasted Wastes or wherever, and most folks just take the lead of their local priests and clerics). But it could just as easily be only one religion among many, maybe an offshoot of some Cult of Yig, or something.

It's Me Snitches

Alright, let's try this again.

My tentative strategy for not completely shitting the bed this time in terms of keeping this thing updated regularly is: (1) to significantly lower my standards for what counts as a complete post; and (2) just accept that I'm never going to be satisfied working on or talking about just one project and just let this thing be a jumble of shit.

To that end, let's briefly recap all the projects I've got on the go, from oldest (which, broadly speaking, also means most developed) to most recent:

• Ionian Nights. I never posted about it on here, but it was my first attempt at an OSR-style megadungeon, set in Asia Minor under Persian occupation in the 6th century BC or so. The dungeon was supposed to be the entrance/descent into Hades, because for the Greeks hell was literally just a place underground that you could get to if a cave went deep enough, which is how living people always used to get there. It turned out, later, that this had literally already been done, so while I do occasionally jot down new ideas and things, I'd have to figure out a way to put my own spin on it if I wanted to post about it on here. Or not, who cares.
• The Crater of Termination / Xish. Weird pulp fantasy megadungeon in a dying earth setting reminiscent of Vance's Dying Earth stories (obviously) and Clark Ashton Smith's Xothique stories, with a bunch of Lovecraft-flavoured gods and cults thrown in. It's more or less my own version of the standard OSR Appendix N worship. 
•  Mictlan. Hex/wave-crawl where players set off from a fantasy version of the Aztec empire to sail a sea of blood and explore islands of terrifying whatevers. The idea here is to push more toward dark fantasy/horror, low-magic, etc.
•  Silfurfall / Dregypth. A Norse-flavoured city-on-top-of-a-megadungeon. This is supposed to be a way of running standard elves and dwarves Tolkienesque fantasy in a way that doesn't make me want to just flip the table mid-session and scream "Oh, who gives a fuck about another one of these?!!" It's also kind of an experiment with figuring out a city using Vornheim.
• Maze of the Mad Magus. Some shit I threw together at the last minute to actually run, which was basically Keep on the Borderlands with my own Castle Greyhawk-inspired megadungeon nearby instead of the Caves of Chaos. The idea was to try and take a lot of cues from what seems to be the implied setting of B2 (and just B2, considered in isolation from other modules).
• Something for the next One Page Dungeon contest, which obviously I'm going to keep under wraps for now.

Okay, that's it for now. Talk to you soon (maybe).