Encounter: The Blue Ogre

Art: Caza!

Frequency: Unique
No. Appearing: 1
Armour Class: 8
Move: 12"
Hit Dice: 8+16 (51hp)
% In-lair: 5%
Treasure Type: See below
No. Attacks: 1
Damage/Attack: 1d2+5 or by weapon +5
Special Attacks: Stun
Special Defences: Mirror Image
Magic Resistance: Standard
Intelligence: 17
Alignment: N
Size: L (7')
Psionic Ability: none
Lv/xp: VII/1812

The Blue Ogre is a traveller from a distant world, stranded on the gameworld by some malfunctioning part for his transworld ship.

Physically tough, he is generally able to get by without resorting to the high-tech items in his ship and will normally be encountered somewhere where he thinks there might be some useful material or element that he needs to get his ship working again. His language, spoken and written, is totally foreign to the point that it may take characters a while to realise that either are actually words and not threatening rumbles or random indentations respectively.

With a strength of 18/93, his combat level is 11 and he has been stranded long enough to be come proficient with the bastard sword and footman's mace. His thick skin and musculature give him armour equivalent to "padded" and allow him to roam most tropical, sub-tropical, or temperate climates without need of clothing.

When not equipped with a weapon (which is most of the time) his massive fists deal 6-7 points of stunning damage - the target is stunned for 1 round per point of damage done unless they save versus death magic (CON hp bonus allowed as modifier). Damage is 25% real, 75% temporary. If using weapon versus armour, use the open hand modifiers.

Additionally, the Blue Ogre has an implant which allows him to create 2 mirror images, much as the spell of the same name. These last for up to a turn but can not be dispelled, although they do disappear if struck. As they are mental projections, they do not work against undead and elves have a 90% chance of recognizing the images as fake. It has no effect on anyone beyond 12". He can use this ability once per day.

The Blue Ogre's Cave
The ogre's cave is in fact his stranded ship, which has been wedged into the back of a natural cave. If the ogre is in lair, the door will be open and he will be working on some piece of inexplicable electronic equipment (if he had fixed the ship, he would no longer be there).

In these cases, he will be wearing his toolbelt. This contains:

1. A plasma gun. 2 attacks/rnd, 1d10 damage, use the heavy lance for armour adjustments. Ranges: 2",4",6". 24 charges/shots remaining. Can not be recharged even by the ogre, so he's cautious with it.
2. A laser welder. Used hand-to-hand does 1d12 damage. At range: 3 attack/rnd. Short range: up to 2", 1d6 per hit. Medium range: up to 3", 1d4 per hit. Long range: up to 20", 1d3 per hit. 1-40 charges (40 max) and each attack uses a charge whether it hits or not and whether it is in melee combat or ranged. Use bo-stick modifiers for armour. Can be recharged by Ogre when at his ship.
3. A motorized screwdriver. "Intelligent Morph-Steel™" tip allows it to fit any screw head (down to microscopic scales) and operates as STR 20. 1d20 charges; Ogre can recharge it at his ship.
4. 3,000,000 candle-power torch. 1d3 turns of charge; ogre can recharge. A magic user might be able to recharge this item at the DM's discretion.
5. A Morph-Steel Wrench. Treat as footman's mace in combat. Fits any bolt head, down to microscopic size but is operated manually.
6. Scan-scope™ lenses. As per Eyes of Minute Seeing but require charging. Currently has 1d20 rounds of charge (20 max), can be charged at ship.
7. Various other odds and ends, basically small items of no value to a party other than curiosity.

He has also accumulated 11,461gp in coins, mostly from people who attacked him, as well as a bastard sword and a footman's mace which he normally keeps in the ship and which are perfectly normal examples.

The door of the ship can be shut by the ogre's voice command or by inputting a code on a panel beside it. The internal lights and so on are working and will continue to do so for decades, as will the force shield that protects it from almost any outside event (treat hull as cube of force with 10 charges, regaining 1 per round if depleted by attacks; hull itself has 100hp and regenerates 1hp per turn).

The ogre's goal is to go home. If a party can not converse with him he will normally ignore them, or simply barge past them if they are in his way. If they can talk to him (via magic) he will not be hostile but will only be interested in co-operating if he can get what he needs, and what he needs is gemstones. They don't have to be large, but they have to be good quality.

Basically, the ogre will pay for, or offer his aid in return for gems which are either precious or gem-quality (roll of 71+ on base value table, DMG p25) and which have been promoted at least once on the "increase or decrease of worth" table on DMG p26. He will pay 20% more than the listed price if the gems are already in a party's possession.

The one thing that he has almost given up hope for is a ruby of 10,000gp value. This is the only gem he will consider attacking a non-hostile party for.

Encounter Type 1168(B)

Initial Situation: The party pass through a village where they notice an unusual level of affluence in some or all of the inhabitants.

Significant Characters: The local village headman, who is very weathy due to a deal struck with a being inhabiting a tree in the ground of his house/farm.

The Deal: The tree spirit is paying the villager two gold pieces per day, and has been for some years. Each day the headman comes out to the tree early in the morning and finds the coins at the base. The coins are very old, probably an unknown type unless someone in the party knows about coins or is themselves more than 300 years old.

Specifics

Art by: Benita Winckler

The tree spirit is chaotic and the headman is lawful. roll 1d6:

1. The tree spirit is Good and the headman Evil. The spirit is a young dryad who is trying to prevent the headman from cutting her tree down. He hates all women and her normal power of beauty is unable to affect him while she has not grown into her other powers yet. The villagers are afraid to help her, and she is afraid to keep asking them in case the headman goes back on the deal.
2. The tree spirit is Evil and the headman is Evil too. The tree spirit is a minor devil bound to the tree until it can perform some great act of evil. The villagers are being manipulated by its supply of cash and are now mostly converted to devil-worship under the leadership of their "high priest" (the headman). They've proved reluctant to engage in human sacrifice from amongst their own, but a bunch of strangers might be a different story...
3. The spirit is Evil and the headman is Good. The spirit is a simple tempting daemon from the lower planes sent here by an evil cleric. If it manages to make the headman evil then it, the tree, the treasure, and the headman will all be whisked off to Tartarus.
4. The spirit is in fact a succubus and the headman is Evil. The succubus is the headman's "reward" for a rape and murder he committed. Its goal is to get the headman to confess (in fact, to boast) about what he did and for the villagers (or some passing group) to lynch him from the tree. The plan is coming close to fruition and the headman is more and more convinced that he is above the law each day as his gold buys him immunity to various petty acts. Once he is dead, the succubus returns to the Abyss with his soul. The succubus can not directly intervene or the man's soul will not be harvested for her master (although it will still go to the Abyss). She will, however, attempt to prevent a trial as such a lawful intervention would also cause her mission to fail. So long as she does not reveal her role in events, she is able to act.
5. The spirit is a nymph who has fallen in love with the headman, who is young and handsome but married. She simply wants to steal him away. He is good, but is becoming corrupted by the money and the fact that he is hiding its source from his wife, not to mention the nymph's attractions. The nymph does not want to use magic; she wants him honestly, at least by her elastic definition of "honest". She is CN.
6. The (CN) tree spirit is attempting to become a god and in return for the gold simply asks to be worshipped. Currently, the villagers are going along with the headman's suggestions that they worship nature and the tree spirit is able to grant him first level spells. If the tree can gather worship from higher level characters then it may be able to progress in its plans. The spirit has limited super-sentience and can offer a party aid as if it were a divination spell (cleric, 4th level ) cast by a 7th level cleric. It can/will do this no more than once per day and only if there is sacrifice or a solid promise of some high level worshippers on a long-term basis.

If the tree is cut down and the roots dug up, 2d4x1000gp wil be found underneath it.

Magic Item: Medallion of Thaumaturgic Alacrity

This medallion looks like a small (3") astrolabe but without any moving parts. The surface is scribed with concentric circles and spirals with small gems of various kinds, each small but perfect, at the intersection points. There are nine such gems on one side and seven on the other.

When found, the item will have between 0 and 15 charges (2d8-1), and can be recharged up to a maximum of 45.

When worn during spellcasting, the casting time of any spell is halved, costing one charge per spell level.

Limitations and Other Features
The medallion has no effect on spells which have no somatic component.

If there are not enough charges for the spell being cast, then the medallion has no effect.

The power of the medallion is not voluntary, so long as it is worn it will take effect and use charges if possible.

Recharging
The device becomes inert once all charges are gone, although it will detect for alteration magic. It may be recharged by placing the inert medallion into "recharge mode" - for magic users this involves touching the nine gems in a particular order; for others (including illusionists) the seven gems are used instead. What the order is may be determined using divination, finding the notes of a previous owner, or perhaps by consultation with a sage specializing in magic items.

Once in recharge mode, any spells cast while wearing the medallion add one charge per level [edit: instead of having their normal effect]. However, only one spell per level may be used for charging purposes (i.e., to fully charge the item to 45 levels requires one spell of each level from 1 to 9 to be cast while wearing it). Once the user has finished charging the item, a simple touching of the gems in order again will change it back to its functional mode, where it will remain so long as it has charges, regardless of any attempt to use the gems.

GP: 12000
XP: 2000

Monster: Sharkmaid

Frequency: rare
No appearing: 90%: 1, 10%: 2-3
Armour Class: 7 (AT 10+3)
Move: 24"
HD: 2
% In Lair: 5% (alone)/100% (with children)
Treasure Type: K; P in lair.
# Attacks: 1
Damage/attack: 2-12
Special attacks: charm
Special defenses: none
Magic Resistance: normal
Intelligence: Average
Alignment Chaotic Evil
Size: M
Psionic Ability: nil
Level/xp: II / 28 +2/hp

Sharkmaids appear to be normal mermaids but are highly predatory carnivores with several rows of razor-sharp teeth.

When encountered, there is a 10% chance that the sharkmaid has one or more daughters with her. In this case, there will certainly be be a lair nearby. A single child will have 1d4 hit points. movement of 9" and will fight in self-defence only, doing 1d6 damage with its razor-like teeth. A second child will have a full hit die, move at 12", and do 1d8 damage.

Normal morale is 55% but with children this goes up to 65%. Should morale fail, however, the mother will leave the children to their own devices.

Most of the time (60%) sharkmaids will be accompanied by a school of normal sharks hanging around for scraps. If there are no sharks with the maiden, there is likewise a 60% that a school will show up within 2d6 rounds of her making a kill. Numbers and size of sharks as per MM.

Although on good terms with non-intelligent sharks of all sizes, sharkmaids are other wise on openly antagonistic terms with basically all other forms of life and in particular dolphins and mermen.

A sharkmaid will attempt to kill any and all intelligent lifeforms she meets, whether for food or not. Against males she will use her charm ability, which is good to a range of 12" but only against a single target, which she must be able to pick out either by line of sight or, somehow, by name or distinctive call (e.g., "Are you lonely, helmsman?"). The charm allows a save but, once under the sharkmaiden's thrall the victim will desire nothing more than to kiss those luscious, perhaps suspiciously large lips. The first bite from the suddenly too-wide-to-be-real mouth breaks the charm, but for most victims that is far too late.

Females are immune to their attentions but it is not unknown for a sharkmaid with a child to use it as bait, either instructing it to thrash about (if older) or simply leaving it alone to panic (if younger) in the hope that a woman's maternal instincts will kick in and tempt her to "rescue" the child.

Once a ship or boat is alerted to the presence of a sharkmaid it should be possible to stop her from picking the crew off one-by-one, but those shipwrecked on rafts or even walking along a tropical beach may find themselves in grave peril.

Individual treasure takes the form of tarnished silver trinkets rather than actual silver pieces, and any lair will simply be a small underwater cave suitable for shelter from storms. Although their eyesight is good by human standards, sharkmaids will not venture to depths where the sun never reaches.

They breed by ingesting the genitals of male human/demi-human victims as part of their normal feeding and give birth to live young which they suckle. The whole thing is very Freudian, but the sharkmaids do not care about that and would probably just eat the old faker if he tried anything.

Things Cybermen Hate #2: Initiative

"I wasn't ready"

AD&D: Apocalypse When?

♫It's the end of the world as we know it♫

AD&D is a post-apocalyptic game by default (as has been noted before) and much of the fiction listed in Appendix N and fantasy fiction elsewhere has some post-apocalyptic aspect. REH's Conan stories are set in a Europe which is recovering from the sinking of Atlantis, a setting repeated to drastically different effect by Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. But many of the other entries in Appendix N are set sometime after a "golden age" of some kind has come crashing down in flames or, as in flavour-of-the-year Game of Thrones, ice.

For the game as originally envisioned, this is an ideal set-up as it gives in-built reasons for various things that Gygax and Arneson wanted in play. Firstly, it implies that current technology is limited, so mediaeval weapons and armour are the norm despite the recorded history of the world being quite deep and the Golden Age presented as being very advanced in one way or another.

Secondly, it means that the "civilized" parts of the world have at some point shrunk drastically. They may be recovering but there is a feeling of a candle in the dark. This can give characters a motivation both to go out and explore and also to push back the boundaries of the "wilderness" and re-establish civilization, both goals that were explicitly stated in D&D from the very start. It also means that there's lots to explore.

Bow before the Green Witch

And where the characters go out into the wilderness they will find the ruins of the pre-apocalyptic world - things that they call castles, dungeons, and ancient cities but which could, to their builders, have been research centres, bomb shelters, and fields of generation ships which were never launched to the stars (this one is from Tekumel, surely the greatest apocalypse of them all with hundreds of entire solar systems sucked out of our universe and into somewhere else, each completely isolated in a sky with no stars other than their own).

Inhabiting these ruins are of course the monsters - the things which are no longer "normal". Were they normal Before? Were gnolls simply pets to the Ancients? Perhaps the monsters are a result of the apocalypse; perhaps they caused it. Similar questions may be asked of the gods; in my CSIO campaign the god Mycr was based on the computer "Universal AC" in Asimov's short story "The Last Question" and was the reason that the Apocalypse (the group, not the event) had failed to destroy the world and instead created Gamma World.

High Level Ranger

And what are these monsters guarding if its not the Lost Knowledge of the Ancients? Well, apart from the Lost Gold of the Ancients, of course. The Ancients could do things that can not be duplicated now - they made the artefacts and even some of the non-unique magic items are still beyond the ability of the greatest magic users of the "modern" age. This is embodied in the difficulty of making magic items in the DMG - if making one's own items was too easy, then a chunk of the motivation to go out and try to dig up ones already made would be gone.

The dead past thus represents the origin of threats (monsters) while holding out a possibly false promise of a quick-fix for that threat in the form of read-made magic items.

This dead age can also be used more directly to produce adventure hooks - certain beings may have survived, perhaps in suspended animation or perhaps simply immortal. Or magic can open a rift, allowing characters to travel back to the lost Golden Age where they might find that all that glistens is not, in fact, gold - potentially a complete reversal of the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon show where D&D characters try to escape from a much more advanced world than the one they're used to, and return to a world of simple magic and flying horses.

Old School End of the World Checklist (other old-school checklists are available; time invested may not pay off; offers not valid in some dimensions)

"We're not kobolds, okay,
Mr Monkeyboy?"

• When did the old world end? Is it within human memory? What about elven memory? Will almost any exploration turn up evidence or is it only the deepest levels of the deepest dungeons that carry a risk of encountering Horrors from the Past™?
• What sort of world was it? What sort of ancient artefacts might show up? It's true that the things listed on the magical tables are, duh, magical but maybe there's other options even there. Keoghtom's ointment may in fact be a product of nano-technology; bracers of defence some sort of force-field. But beyond such terminology changes, the DM can sprinkle one-off items around which evoke both the promise and the dangers of the past, whether canisters of viruses or demons enslaved to power flying machines.
• What destroyed it? Perhaps it's something cyclical, like the thread of Anne McCaffrey's Pern stories - if it is, when can it be expected to happen again? Perhaps it was some other natural event like the sinking of Atlantis. Maybe it is something that poses some indefinite future threat like Ksarul/Tharizdun or Cthulhu, waiting for something to free them from slumber to finish the job. Maybe it was the arrival of magic itself, or the gods. Perhaps a war of some sort between wizards and clerics or between dragons and humans, elves and dwarves (leaving the stage clear for humanity), or Law and Chaos.
• Do people know what happened? If not, does anyone care and should they? Is there a stigma or taboo connected with things recovered from "the wastes" or are such items required by law to be handed in to the authorities under pain of, well, pain? Are there sages which know, or are willing to pay for expeditions to find out?
• Is the Apocalypse actually over? The game assumes that the players will, even incidentally, cause the wilderness to retreat. But perhaps it pushes back; perhaps there are intelligent forces out there still trying to harness whatever created that wilderness - organized and intelligently led parties who are themselves exploring dungeons for weapons in a war that civilized people don't even know is being fought.
• Are there survivors, and if so where and what are they? Are they individuals or perhaps an entire race, Silurian-like, expecting to return to a position of rulership once their agents feel that it's safe to come back to the surface?
• Why did anything survive? What did the people at the time try to do about it, and what weapons, artefacts, spells, monuments etc. might remain of this effort? Was the final end only delayed? To what extent are the monsters of the wild simply the descendants of things which were commonplace Before?
• The ultimate question: could someone that knew enough about what happened deliberately cause it to happen again?

"When my horoscope said 'The stars are right',
I assumed that was a good thing!"
"Shut up and row."

Some of these questions can be answered in ways that tend to lead to over-arching themes but mostly they have answers which will only influence the tone of what is found underground and in the wilderness and I've not tried to give examples of the really off-the-wall possibilities such as might be found by a close look at Alice in Wonderland or Bagpuss. Writers, and myth-makers, have found the idea that we are living in the tumbled-down remains of some Cyclopean past (literally, in the case of Greek mythology) a rich inspiration and from Plato to Tolkien to, of course, Jack Vance it has provided a backdrop to some of the world's best fantasy stories and D&D is largely designed to allow interaction with exactly that sort of backdrop. Simply running down the list above should spark ideas for races, magic items, spells, patrons, dungeons and towers, and special encounters.

Spell: Spare Room

Material component
from
Bodices and Bustles
(strangely)

Spare Room (Alteration)
Level: MU 5
Components: V, M
Casting Time: 5seg
Saving Throw: none
Range: touch
Duration: 1 year/lv
Area of effect: 36sq feet+1sq foot/level and see below

Explanation/Description: This spell is cast upon a doorway (ie, a portal with an attached movable door) and creates an extra-dimensional space which is anchored to the door frame.  The surface area of the doorway can not exceed the given area of effect, and must be shaped to allow the caster to pass. If the door is opened then whatever was behind it before is still there and can be entered and used as normal.

However, if the door is opened while uttering a command phrase (chosen by the caster) then it will instead lead to the extra-dimensional space. The room has a floorspace equal to the caster's level in feet squared (ie, a 9th level caster can have a 9'x9' room or a 4½' by 18' room). As with the doorway, the space created must allow the caster to enter fully. The ceiling height is that of the top of the door frame.

It is possible to cast two or more instances of this spell such that they overlap in the extra-dimensional space, in which case a single room is created with multiple doors and perhaps, if carefully placed, an increased floor space.

Note that the spell is anchored to the doorframe and if the doorframe is moved without damaging it, then the rooms will too. If the door is damaged then entry to the spare room is blocked until the door is replaced, although those already inside may leave. If the doorframe is broken then the contents of the room are deposited back in the "real world" as a safety precaution.

If the magic of the spell is cancelled (e.g., by dispel magic) the room is cut off and the contents will be trapped there until the spell runs out, at which point the safety mechanism will kick in.

The spell may be made permanent, but may still be dispelled, in which case the normal duration will re-assert itself in respect of the extra-dimensional space.

The material component is a embroidered cloth representation of a house which is turned inside out at completion of the spell and which re-appears when the spell expires.