Here, have 750 new monsters: Pokemon/DnD conversions

+Ian Johnson got me thinking about doing a conversion of Pokemon to DnD – after all, we know the stats for the entire Pokemon bestiary (that’s Pokedex to afficionados), and it’s a leveled game, so it shouldn’t be hard.

…and it turns out a couple of conversions already exist, but they’re (a) for later editions of DnD (I’m thinking LL here) and (b) IMHO overpowered (15HD for Venusaur? My games usually don’t go above about 6th level). So I may yet make an OSR rendition (if there’s interest). Here are the complex versions, to help you put some Zapdos in your Wilderlands:

1. a complete D20 (3.5) sourcebook, allowing for Pokemon and non-Pokemon “summoners,” by the Trollmans – their site provides the skinny without downloads.

2. a far from complete site doing critter-by-critter conversions and pokeballs as magic items.

3. a few stat blocks, looks closer to my desired power level (Pikachu gets basically 3 HD)

And my simple conversion? As a very rough first approximation, I’d say:

All Pokemon can level up. 5 Pokemon levels = 1 LL level, and Bulbapedia gives the data on when certain Pokemon become available (evolve) – so for instance my favourite crabman, Kabutops, starts at 8HD.

The basic attributes of pokemon – attack/special attack, defense/special defense, and HP are convertible to attack dice, AC  and the die used for hit dice. I would approximate the stats given to 5 gradations for attack and hit dice, ranging from d4 for each, for the bottom 20% up to d12 for the top 20% of Pokemon stats, with d8 being average both for attack and HD. AC would also be graded on a line, with 5 being average, the highest 10% defense scores being AC1 and the lowest 10% being AC 9. Speed is a straight bonus/penalty on d6, from -2 to +2.

Then there’s stuff to be done with types and the type effectiveness chart, but right now supper’s burning. More later…

20 questions for Tartary, my Carcosesque Bollymecha, Wacky Racing and Ancient-tech-tomb-raiding setting

Following some inspiring posts about weird post-apocalyptic and sciency-fantasy settings, I figured I should try to explain my Tartary setting (again!), this time using Jeff’s famous 20 questions.

…I would do it with pictures, like Robert Parker’s brilliant post (first link) but my poor google-fu on coming up with illustrations for the setting has almost convinced me that I need to start making pictures myself again. >grimace<

Here’s the thing: there’s plenty of gonzo to go around in the setting, but I like the overall feel to be fairly down-to-earth and down-at-heel. So while you may journey to the ghostlands and be chased through fields of porcelain masks by this:

much of the time you’re going to be dealing with places like this:

In fact if I had to sum up the landscape of the setting in one photo it would probably be:

…the fortress on the hill protects the vizierate of Ulm, but not most of the people of the city, who cling to its shell. Out beyond the irrigation zone, where the hungry desert waits, there are hundreds of little experimental shrines – attempts at the gods alone know what, and now the abode of bandits, ghouls and worse.

So. Tartary has some places which are more prosaic and some that are deep in the Weird, kinda like Chris Kutalik’s Hill Cantons and Weirdlands but less formal – the weirder places are where the background psychic radiation is higher. The more mundane or “stable” lands are an amalgam of all the historical periods of Central Asia pancaked flat into one present time. This Tartary is a place of isolated, warring city-states separated by wide deserts and steppes. In the weirder places, lost technologies of the distant future-past might still be working. Incursions from Outside are easier (that’s how the Carcosans and Tharks got in), stuff is more like a Cthulhuvian Moebius bad trip.

[This map is awesome and scaleable and has historical flavour, but the Google Maps of Tartary is altogether more usable, I find]

Empires flare and sputter across this landscape as one city gains a fleeting advantage over the others. When the cities aren’t fighting with armies, they engage in contests for prestige, the most famous of which are the gladiatorial fights between gigantic metal and wood constructs, powered by parts pulled out of the weirdlands and held together by the strange alchemy of grease-monkeying. The pilots of these enormous juggernauts enjoy the status of Bollywood film stars – and must be capable performers for the ever-present, invisible Tartary TV cameras.

The physics between the two realities is not exactly compatible – the weirdlands could almost be considered regio within Tartary, but they’re (more or less) reliably reachable from the stable lands, and there’s imperfect translation of artifacts between the weird and the stable. Weirds can appear and disappear in the middle of the stable regions, they can follow powerful artifacts, or be called into existence by mighty acts of juju. There are many explanations for what the weird might be – a thinning of some veil between worlds, or cancerous tumors in reality, or knots tied up in space-time  by irresponsible jerks mucking around with powers they don’t understand. The important thing is, sometimes stuff you find in the weird can be brought back into the stable. Sometimes weird powerful artifacts can be reproduced in the stable zones, leading to sparks of industrial magical revolution. And fortunes can be made and gunpowder empires can spread… and then one day it stops working, or the batteries run out, or you can’t get the necessary molybdenum any more. So the whole of Toxic Tartary is in a technological, magical, political and treasure-hunting ferment. The constructs are all one-off trial-and-error inventions, only partly understood by their architects and mostly resistant to mass-reproduction. And the whole society is flailsnails-ready: no matter how strange your PC is, the locals will treat them with wary respect or fear – but they’ll be willing to treat with them, because who knows, you might represent the new normal for the next 5 years.

These answers to +Jeff Rients “Twenty Campaign Questions” apply principally to the “stable” lands: the weirds are too diverse to be addressed this way. They’re also influenced by +kirin robinson‘s recent 20 answers for his incredible ukiyo-e by way of Larry Niven setting, which are extremely awesome and can be found right here (thanks kirin!).

What is the deal with my cleric’s religion? You can worship any old thing, and it might give you powers or not, but the closest TT has to a cleric class is the Carcosesque sorcerer/cult leader, and that leader will probably have to explain their whole deal to any followers because religion is totally balkanized. Islam, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Judaism, Manichaeism and Christianity, and a host of other religions, all exist in the setting, but in so many heterodox forms that it’s up to you, the player, to own your own version and tell people your own restrictions. Any PC can invest 1hp in a faith, and if they do there’s a small chance each day of them getting a spell power, for some time period.

Where can we go to buy standard equipment? There are money economies in the major cities – eg Bokhara, Samarkand, Tashkent, Kashgar, Herat. Between those, smaller towns and settlements that cluster around the weirdzones might have caravanserais with traders that take cash. Elsewhere, it’s a barter, gift and social obligation economy. So make friends, be generous, distribute your treasure locally, and build up social networks, and you’ll be able to get equipment as needed. Or join the Muslims or Magians and cultivate a reputation for upright behavior and wisdom, and then co-religionists will probably help you out.

Where can we go to get platemail custom fitted for this monster I just befriended? one of the cities that has trade with the weird – Otrar, Khiva, Ashgabat – or one of the grease monkey settlements deep in the weird, say around Dashoguz or Ulaanbator, but then it’s likely to come with extras you may or may not want.

Who is the mightiest wizard in the land? there’s half a dozen wizard wars running right now to resolve that. The Mad Archmage of Ashgabat gets a wide berth from the others. Of course the wizards of old must’ve been unbelievable, judging by the damage they caused, and there might be remnants of them still kicking around. But you know, the Mongols have been too quiet for too long, and when they get moving…

Who is the greatest warrior in the land? That easy! Prince Khairun, Sword of the Prophet, Lord of Amritsar. He’s also the most handsome, and has the most dashing moustache. His Golden Dome has crushed all competitors in the arenas – even the Titanium Elephant of the Sultan of Aceh, terror of the Sea Kingdoms. His exploits are told far and wide by the traveling theaters.

Who is the richest person in the land? They say the Armenians of New Julfa can buy and sell kingdoms, and the Hongs of Amoy could buy the Armenians. But none of them can buy loyalty, like the Mongols have for their Khans, or the Mamluks for their Black Banner leaders.

Where can we go to get some magical healing? Magic doesn’t heal, it exchanges one misfortune for another. Still, if you’re under a curse there are wise women and fakirs and cunning men all over the place. In Bokhara they have a market full of them.

Where can we get cures for the following: poison, disease, curse, level drain, lycanthropy, polymorph, alignment change, death, undeath? Most of this sounds like magical healing. Look, if you’re really desperate, ask around at the Magian fire temple, the seers guild, or the Armenian trade-house, but if you get told to try the burned lands to the north, you should ask elsewhere: I’m afraid you’re more likely to come back with those things than to get them healed there.

Is there a magic guild my MU belongs to or that I can join in order to get more spells? Every city has them, but they tend to be close-knit and cultish, and they’ll certainly want you to work for your knowledge. The surest path to magic power is through the guilds that work for the city sultans and princes (and quite a few cities are ruled by great wizards), but there are always rumors of deeper magics out in the wilderness and if folk wisdom is true and magic really comes from demons and djinn, then no doubt there are bunches of magicians hanging around the gas craters and ice caves where the demons gather. If you’re an MU without a guild or a demon then you probably got your powers through some alarming encounter in the weirdlands, in which case I can understand your previous two questions.

Where can I find an alchemist, sage or other expert NPC? The cities are dripping with them. The trick is to separate the witch-doctors and charlatans from the real men-of-wisdom. All the famous ones are in the employ of the sultans and big merchants, of course. But there are plenty of not-so-famous ones, keen to make an impression or ready to trade knowledge for ingredients/tools. And then there are the guys out in the high towers in the desert, but they’re usually way out there because they’re up to something the sultans wouldn’t tolerate in town…

Where can I hire mercenaries? How much trouble do you want? Gangs of ruffians can be found outside most cities’ walls. For warbands, people go to the Mongols in the plains or the Pashto in the mountains around Herat and Kashgar, or if they’re desperate, the Green Men of the burned lands. If you can negotiate terms with a whole army, there are the Mamluk states, the Karpans of Amritsar and the Janissaries of he Great Turk – they all keep large bodies of professional warriors who need regular exercise to stop them getting ideas against their crowns.

Is there any place on the map where swords are illegal, magic is outlawed or any other notable hassles from Johnny Law? Every city has its own laws, but they don’t extend very far beyond the walls.

Which way to the nearest tavern? One in every caravanserai and several in each town, or at least every town near something dangerous. Or if the town is dry, then there will be Qat chewing galleries or bath-houses or pleasure palaces. Or if the town is dry and run by a mad archmage who hates dancing and sensual pleasures, then you’ll either have to pick up rumors about underground speakeasies at the market, or hang out at the mosque and conduct your business in the arcades there.

What monsters are terrorizing the countryside sufficiently that if I kill them I’ll become famous? There’s all sorts of stuff in the weirdlands, but if you bring it back to town you might not get the kind of fame you’re looking for. There have been outbreaks of snake-kings in the temple quarter of Bokhara, and the Great Caravanserai outside Tashkent has been unusable for years because of an infestation, so if you could clear that up you’d get lionized, for sure. If you’re after a quick raid, Green man and Turcoman heads are always worth a good bounty in the cities.

Are there any wars brewing I could go fight? Always. The Turcomans wage seasonal war on the cities in the west, the Mongols in the east. The Qaghan of Kashgar has delivered a mortal insult to the Prince of Amritsar, so there will be trouble there, probably in the neighborhood of Herat, where they’re fighting the goblinmen of Mustagh. Every city is constantly developing its own doomsday weapon against its neighbors, and the countryside is littered with princeling heirs to the thrones of Amir Timur and the Great Mongol, who have no more than a horse and a sword today, but dream of world conquest tomorrow. Even the leaders of peace cults rely on high walls and sharp spears to keep the murderers out. War is the dominant mode of life.

How about gladiatorial arenas complete with hard-won glory and fabulous cash prizes? Now you’re asking! They’re everywhere, at every level of society, from the insect- and cock-fights of the street kids, to the riding fights of the Turcoman horseclans, to the armored untouchables’ pit-fights that the town shopkeepers gamble on, to the colosseum races organized by the guilds and bandit princes, hoping to break into the big time. And at the top of the heap, fighting for kings’ ransoms, the great, glittering, walking temples and titanium elephants and stone-shelled razorwyrms of the Fighting Princes.

Prince Khairal of Jaisalmer’s Thronecrusher Stonethrower, in dormant state prior to battle.

Are there any secret societies with sinister agendas I could join and/or fight? Well YEAH, name something & it’s in. Mafias, cults and deposed princes’ cabals or royal pretenders are par for the course, and every vizier plots against his prince or spies on his rivals, so there are shadowy organizations and men in black aplenty. But there are also rumors of sects devoted to expanding or eliminating the weirds, One Church hashishim, agents from Cathay gathering intelligence for a general invasion, icewitches of the north and Secret Masters, who run the history of Tartary and manipulate its brushfire wars for their own mysterious ends.

What is there to eat around here? Delicate banquets of spiced quail and golden bags of fragrant tender lamb with iced sherbets, or foul-smelling foull in raw clay bowls, depending on what end of the social spectrum you’re on, or how far you are into the Kukeldash mountains. There’s also glass fungus and lotus powders from the weirdlands, if you’re feeling like living dangerously or bored with your current number of limbs.

Any legendary lost treasures I could be looking for? supposedly the world used to be a garden filled with nature spirits, but they all got trapped in stones or ivory spheres or something. The city of Irem sank below the sands – allegedly they had an unrivaled menagerie of constructs, which might yet work if you dug them out. Or there’s whatever flattened Merv – the stories about that are pretty wild, nobody can agree on exactly what it was, but if you could find it and it worked then you could do some serious damage to the political status quo. Or if you like to dream big, there’s the farishtas of the overworld. They must have some really cool stuff. But that would be like taking on the gods.

Where is the nearest dragon or other monster with Type H treasure? You want giant monsters, it’s the weirdlands for you. Whether they’ll have treasure is another matter. You want a sure path to treasure, knock over a guild or a merchant caravan – but be warned, the enmity of the guild will likely be worse even than the giant monsters they probably have for protection.

A spell list I will actually use

Maliszewski’s always on about how shorter is better, and Jason of Dungeon Dozen writes masterpieces of concision –

well, I just found my ideal spell list. Example entry: Sunburst: Blinds all within 10 ft., deals 3d6 damage. 

That is all I want, ever. Unless you have something SO COOL I WILL DIE to tell me (like, eg, LotFP’s Summoning spell), that text up there is unimprovable as a tool I can use during a game. It’s enough for me to be able to make rulings from it and I want to be able to make those rulings rather than be held to some dumb interminable legal document, dammit.

Cleric

Druid

Paladin/Ranger (Ranger? Ew.)

Magic User/Sorcerer

Bard

If/when I get DCCRPG I may do the same thing with those spells.
(Does this count as a house rule?)

So Chris Kutalik asked for an underworld layer

here. And I REALLY REALLY need to be working on something else, but then I figures “better to get it out of my brain and down on paper instead,” so here it is.

Disclaimer: Where I say “Ark” and “Noah” please substitute your own fun – Baldur would be fine, or Dave Bowman or Turkmenbashi or whatever you like. Even Noah, I guess. I kinda like the conceit of the Other Ark, with all the creatures that we don’t see around us.

Background:
The ark project – a multi-level “open menagerie” – was either a miserable failure or too successful. Point is, there was never a good moment or method for letting the animals out – things got pretty hairy in there after the second generation of forced evolution. So it was sealed up tight behind a combination lock, the key to which was buried with Noah, and a complicated system was made for controlled release of the animals or for drowning the project altogether… one day.

Millenia passed, the complex fell into ruins, and a few critters have escaped – they roost in the ruined machine halls (blue on the map) around the Ark itself. Now those escaped beasties make the whole place dangerous – especially around the Great Lock in the old entrance hall, which links multiple floors in a big open court. The smarter beasts know what will happen if that door is opened, so they keep a watchful eye on the Lock and try to stop anyone meddling with it.

The machine halls can be flooded individually or the whole complex can be flooded, using the still-working pump houses (green on the map) – to neutralize the threats of beasties in one set of halls or another. Some halls get soak occasionally by malfunctions, though: they contain sea life (giant anemones, nautili and such) that’s dormant unless you flood them back to life. If the whole complex is flooded, folks up on the surface will first notice the level of the river sinking abruptly, then once it’s all flooded, the central Ark piece will break loose and rise up to become a new island in the river.

Treasure can include ancient tech tools and gewgaws (eg “jewels” that are really light-up plastic buttons), knowledge (especially about ancient species/maps of long long ago) and the critters, if they can be captured.

Each of the machine halls is an extensive dungeon complex, as is the Ark itself. Pump houses consist of only a few rooms and are uniformly some stories above the galleries: A is particularly inaccessible: reaching it from any direction involves an arduous climb.

Click for print-size version

Natural hazards and magical mishaps on the Plain of Glass

Aside from certain glass-wielding sorcerers and gigantic, white-hot glass worms (the molten cousins of sandworms), the Plain of Glass hosts a number of smaller but no less dangerous creatures:

watch out for the glazing lilies and pitcher plants, which have a disastrously captivating beauty

and especially the Trapper Tchotchke, which can instantly render anyone that touches it into its own brittle filigree.

And beware the omnipresent eyes, that seem to be in cahoots with all those scavengers that have somehow adapted to a silicate diet:

More at Dark Roasted Blend, which also has a fascinating little photo essay on glass art in natural history museums (a topic about which I should know more than I do), which pours petrol on my suspicion that it might’ve been ocean dioramas at AMNH that made HPL first think “you know, I bet I could do something with tentacles.” Or it might have been that he attended the First Church of Nyarlathotep as a child, I’m not sure.

ROLL FOR INITIATIVE!

More generally, Dioramas! Who does not love them is wicked lame.

Finally, in my own private Flash Gordon reality, Grace Jones is the Eternal Barbarian Queen and hula hoops are the Sacred Circlets of Authority, so this bit of reality bleed might be kinda my fault. Sorry about that, fans of normality.

I bet her maj is a big Grace fan.

That is all.

Upcoming DnD tourism

I’m as fond of a post-apocalyptic Ministry of Love 10′ corridor as the next man, but sometimes you gotta spelunk it up a bit. So (maybe for Carcosa Delves 2.0) I’ll be indulging in a little preparation/inspiration in August:

The “crystal cathedral” of Proumeyssac, accessed by cage-on-a-rope.

Punting the underworld at Padirac.

Clearing out your ledge-cave in the “Goldilocks Zone” at Saint Christophe: high enough to keep you safe from the long-necked carno-grazer-saurs, but not so high that you get into the pelgrane roosts.

I will not be visiting those Carcosans-on-ice, the Adele Penguins. Those guys are jerks.

Would you guys be interested in photos afterwards?

Answering Zak’s call for a typical fighter

Over on G+ Zak asked people to post a pic of a typical fighter. And then that metastasized into the basic 4 character classes and…

These are the basic classes for COUNTER-COLONIAL HEISTCRAWL – my Molucca Pirates against the East India Companies setting. Like everyone else I’m all about the light armour and muskets:

Pirates(fighter/thieves)

Bone-callers (magic users)

Mediums (clerics)

Bushmen (druids)

Birdmen (demi-humans)

…and finally, some things that can go wrong if you dabble in magic:

Imagine if DnD were medieval rather than early modern

This is a lazy post, in that I already wrote it as a comment over at Dreams at the Lich House. And it’s an old chestnut to many. In particular folks who’ve read ACKS (not me yet alas) probably know all this backwards. But it was kinda revelatory to me (since I’m a bit slow) so…

Beedo’s been doing some noodling of late about adapting DnD to the early modern period*, and the more he’s been writing, the more I think DnD as commonly understood** already is early modern. For instance, Beedo finds the world of Game of Thrones rather limited in scope and, let’s say, labour freedom compared with his view of DnD:

there’s certainly no freeman profession of “professional adventurer” the way we see it in more typical D&D

And I’m embarrassed by how long it’s taken my brain to engage on this, but I think that right there is the canonical, secondary-school-history-class, Toynbee thing that separates the medieval from the early modern:
The rise of a middle class of professionals and merchants able and willing to speculate with capital.

Why does 1500 mark the usual beginning of the Early Modern Period?
Because that’s when overseas exploration and colonization pours accelerant on capitalist ventures and changes the world. That is, the Americas and other Indies*** provide a means for exchanging capital + risk for MUCH MORE capital.

Kinda like a dungeon. So there’s novel access to risky treasure, and a class of explorer/adventurers grows to exploit it (and is largely industrialized, BTW, by about 1650-70), and the model of seed capital + risk = PROFIT becomes dominant (simplifying here: see***).

And that’s an exciting prospect, because it points up how unstable the implicit world of DnD must be. What happens when you pour dungeon gold on a small town in the borderlands? Well, the Yukon and Saudi Arabia provide useful examples, but more widely, you must get a technology race devoted to extracting that gold, changing trade priorities, growing luxuries markets etc etc etc. And most games never explore that wave. Instead their fantasy worlds remain stolidly immune to the acts of their heroes who usually**** (for literary reasons) put things back the way they were rather than changing them for better and worse (note,it’s Sauron and Saruman who threaten to bring the industrial revolution to Middle Earth, and Good King Aragorn who restores the world to its safe medieval axis). Just a few of the support structures leak into Greyhawk and similar settings – principally the class of professional dungeoneers, supported by guilds, services-for-hire temples, Western-style general stores of dungeoneering staples, sages for treasure evaluation – the bric-a-brac of Ultima/Elder Scrolls/WoW towns.

But. I’ve always been uncomfortable with the implicit existence of a broad class of adventurers in DnD, and I guess this is why.

I propose that if dungeons and dungeoneers are anything other than very rare, the result must be at least “early modernity”****, and therefore stereotypical DnD is early modern, it’s just in denial about this, insisting it’s “medieval” based on tech level alone.

I propose that if you want actually medieval DnD then it’s best to turn the volume right down. Adventurers and adventure locations have to be extremely rare – the PCs are probably the only group of adventurers they know about, and they have to research long and hard, chase down unreliable rumours, go far out past the borderlands of civilisation, to get to the dungeons and find the treasure – just like John Mandeville or Gulliver or Marco Polo. Or like ancient Egyptian tomb robbers, relying on (maybe) networks of fences and local informants, old ambiguous maps, arduous speculative digging. Or like Cthulhu adventurers. That last one evokes an obvious touchstone for this setting (and god I know it’s been done to death but bear with me): Beowulf DnD (or, maybe better, ancient Berber DnD or Iliad DnD), where your murderhobos have to get introduced into the longhouse before they get to hear the rumours about Grendel. But it could just as easily be St Brendan’s Isle or Iona or Irem DnD, or little Champagne Fair towns punctuating a forest that covers the world.

Nothing has to change mechanically for this dungeoneers-light setting: men at arms – loyal retainers to feudal lords – still have the same skills and might still be cast out of their usual jobs. Ditto thieves, mages and holy men. Only the world has to change – the PCs have to be, not just unusually unattached and suspicion-worthy as befits strangers and explorers everywhere, but downright puzzling to average folks in the setting, like carnies who are also spelunkers and spies and conspiracy theorists, like Mulder or Tim Leary or William Lyttle – people who are doing something dangerous and deeply eccentric. The equipment list has to get less encompassing and directly useful – because who’s going to have mail for sale, in a world where soldiering is actually feudally organized? And if you bring a mysterious wand back to town you’re not going to find someone to identify it for you, so magic items would retain their mystery. And if you build a reputation as a treasure finder then you can expect to draw attention from far afield.

I also contend that such a setting would do well to ditch all those humanoids that operate at more or less the same threat level as humans. Let such threats actually be humans – bandits or pirates or toll-collectors or slavers or cultists or revenue men – and let the very rare monsters be truly monstrous and also whole adventures. Again, Cthulhu style.

The more I think about this low simmer DnD the more I like it, in fact. Low magic, low fantasy not just because mud is gritty but because treasure really is the stuff of legends.

* by early modern I think he means ca 1600-1850, rather than the usual 1500-1800, but whatever: the basic points still hold.
** yeah yeah. For the sake of argument I’m going to say that the clear, unequivocal expressions of Vanilla DnD – the examples we can hold up to the light and examine without doubt that we are looking at the same thing – are supplied by the computer game series Ultima, Elder Scrolls and Warcraft (and Diablo, I guess). No doubt these are not YOUR DnD. They aren’t mine either. In fact I always found them utterly depressing in the narrow scope of their imagination, their mechanisation of the tactical infinity and potential meaning of roleplaying etc etc, but they sure are vanilla.
*** before you historians lynch me, yes I know: actual profit from protocolonial trade was nugatory for ages – Columbus doesn’t explain the Renaissance, and there’s a whole population/productivity/enclosure/rationalisation of labour thing I’m ignoring here which is much more important. But I’m talking here specifically about the rise of an adventurer class and the way that such a rise and continuous capital/treasure injection would affect your tidy pre-capitalist settled-social-ties medieval world.
**** no I’m not going to define modernity, beyond what’s already here in this post.

Carcosa Wacky Races actual play report

Just in case you haven’t been following this nonsense, Carcosa Wacky Races is a not-very-purist turn-based play by post game on G+, in which Mad Max dunebuggies tear across electroradiant hellscapes pursued by mutant dinosaurs.

It’s the first thing I’ve run in maybe 15 years and I’m having a blast. To begin with the orders that came in were mostly fairly tame and sensible, but in the last 2 turns the mayhem level has ramped way up – the players are seriously bringing it. So my neat little 3-paragraph turns have ballooned with all the different kinds of trouble they’ve set in motion. Here are the results of turn 4…

Crunching down the travertines shots are fired left and right. Sweph lobs a mess of rotting meat and metal cans high into the air with his roof-trebuchet, while bits of masonry scatter in his wake.
Rahu, intent on shooting Thora with a peculiar black blunderbuss, is distracted when acid from Poison and Keek hits his scorpion – he misses, his scorpion shrieks in pain, snags a leg on an outcrop and… topples… into the valley of cairns below. Meanwhile Poison, distracted by sacrificing his sky man guide, and Keek, distracted by spraying Rahu, fail to spot Uggs careening crazily down the path behind them. The skullking rams the baby altar from behind, and axe-wielding Uggs leaps across to start murderin’ time. The two vehicles are locked together as they slide past the bridge and disappear among the cairns…
…and Chaz, the skullking’s new driver, blacks out, so they ricochet out of control back and forth among the tombs.

Ahead of them all at the rope bridge, Moon boy leaps from Devil Dino with – is that severed human legs glued to his feet? – and lands on the rearing glassworm, stabbing two electrodes into its back. The glassworm writhes and shrieks, and Moon Boy screams too as his left foot touches the worm’s body and is burned to a crisp – but he holds on. Then the worm’s enormous form swings ponderously over the bridge, while Devil Dino scrabbles madly to catch up.
Just as he hits his stride, however, Devil Dino is toppled by Sweph’s can of spam to the back of the neck. The titanic lizard crashes head-first into the bridge and moves no more –but a smaller, blood-coloured Hemodino springs loose from his long belly wound and disappears into the cairns…

Grampy has had no luck scraping his frogman passenger off on the way down the cliff – the squishy invader straddles the bonnet and works its spatulate fingers into the frame around the windscreen, leering at Grampy, who has to steer looking through its gelid, transparent body. So Haakon takes advantage of Grampy’s distraction to bounce right past him: his ride’s skittering legs leap and tumble past racer after racer, and he hits the bridge neck and neck with Thora.
Grampy accelerates onto the rope span just as the Glassworm drags its furnace mouthparts across the support ropes, setting them instantly afire. The bridge sags: stays snap left and right as Grampy and Oogah tear across. Together they get within 20 feet of the black oil lakes, but the bridge gives out and drops them on top of a flat-roofed mausoleum, just shy of the barricade.

At the same moment, El Diablaser skids onto the bridge, his ride, dragula, covered in tentacled brain. Ayatollah the Grell grabbed hold of him on the way down the travertines; as they lurch onto the bridge the grell is still trying to seize control of dragula but El D is hanging on like grim death against the tentacles’ iron grip. The bridge collapses and together they tumble into the cairns. Crashing through a roof, the whole back of Dragula snaps clean off behind the steering wheel, so now El D is hanging onto the steering column, his feet braced against the gas pedal and dashboard, with a grell hopelessly tangled all over him, and the 2-wheeler roars on for a few seconds with the fuel that’s left in the engine and lines.

Across the bridge at the oil pits, Haakon swerves toward the scree slope, with Thora shooting wildly behind him. Thora is able to grab up 3 barrels and roar away before anyone notices she’s there, but she can’t stop Car-charodon grabbing a barrel behind her as Eribotes fires bravely up at an attacking glassworm, making blue-white bolts of heat rain down from it, eliciting a ragged cheer from the defending men. But then Thora’s cigarillo hits the oil pit beside them and prompts a deafening screech as the oil within rears up in agony, trying to douse the flames spreading across its surface. Cheers turn to panic, and the defenders turn on Eribotes and his infernal machine. Eribotes picks off an orange man with his weird little wand before the defenders close to attack and the racers haul away to escape.

Down among the cairns another kind of hell is breaking loose. Sweph has managed to swipe some weird huge fish and water-weed offerings off a tomb, breaking into its domed roof in the process. But that’s some pretty minor desecration compared with what Rahu’s falling scorpion, Ayatollah the Grell and El D have done. The valley floor is littered with broken tombs like eggshells, their contents exposed to the sky… and with long reaching fingers and a scurrying like monkeys and like shadows, those contents are suddenly swarming all over the valley, tangling up a spiderweb of wrappings and grave-cloths in the narrow alleys of the necropolis…

At the end of the turn, it’s:
1.      Haakon in the lead, followed by
2.      Thora, with a good haul of fuel. Then
3.      Car-charodon, pursued by fuel-defenders. These three are all on the far side of the valley ready to make their ascent, but they face a tough decision: they’ll either have to duck between the glassworms blocking the way to the smooth channel leading up the wall, or deal with a mob of oil defenders running down the scree slope.
Down in the valley,
4.      Sweph has just a couple of blocks of cairns and tombs between him and the shield wall, while Poison and Uggs careen down a parallel path, grappled together in a battle royale. Scraggy black figures swarm out of the crypts around all of them.
5.      Grampy and Oogah, stuck on their mausoleum roof, will either have to jump the final yards to the fuel pits (dicey) or head down the stairs into the mausoleum and find a way out of the necropolis up the side of the pits (unexplored). So far they can’t see any crypt-creepers nearby…
Behind them, right in the middle of the necropolis, surrounded by a ring of wary crypt-dwellers,
6.      Rahu’s scorpion has struggled upright, clearly nursing several injuries. And behind and above Rahu,
7.      Moon Boy struggles to stay upright on his giant glassworm. Skeletal, iridescent glass spider things come scampering toward him from both ends of the worm as his human leg heat buffers burst into flame.
And finally:
8.      Ayatollah and El Diablaser, in a snarl of tentacles and brake cables, are interrupted by Hemodino chasing a cryptcreeper between two tombs in front of them.

…two, maybe three turns to go. Start placing your bets…