Megadungeon School of Magic!

I am playing the excellent and wonderful Inkenfell, it is a RPG adventure that happen entirely in a school of magic, a uncontrollable magic force have been unleashed and the spirits of mundane items awaken and turn them into whimsical monsters. So you fight flowers, floor tiles, chairs, lanterns, books and other mundane items as you explore the school and uncover it secrets. This made me think that you could could play a magical school like a megadungeon or turn a megadungeon into a magical school. 

You can craft your own megadungeon school or, in the spirit of my post about playing the orcs moms in the classic B2 Keep of the Borderlands module, you could hack a megadungeon to turn it into a gigantic school and play characters who study there. 

If you craft your own megadungeon school of magic it could be fun to use the Ikenfell formula: you craft a gigantic school and you add a ton of secret areas, then you unleash a magical force in it. At the beginning of the campaign the school is your "ordinary" whimsical school of magic, the players can explore it freely, only expecting danger in specific mysterious areas. But once they gain a level or two you escalate things by unleashing a wild magical force that turn all the school areas into dangerous ones. That magical force could be enchanting people, animals and items, awakening spirits or opening portals to import monsters. The end goal of the campaign would probably be to seal that magical force and to make the school relatively safe again. The main advantage of this formula is that the player can familiarize themselves with the school before it become dangerous.  

But if you feel like hacking, to create your school, you could take your favorite megadungeon and turn some of it rooms into school's facilities like classrooms, cafeteria, dormitory, lecture hall, library, courtyard, headmistress office, etc... And turn some of it monsters or occupants into teachers, librarians and the ground keeper. The big difference is that instead of starting with a safe school you start with a dangerous one. Maybe the megadungeon school was once safe and have only recently become unsafe. The campaign goal could still be to make the school safe again or it could be to prevent a dangerous force from awakening and making things even worse. Or you can simply play in sandbox mode and see what kind of goals will emerge. Even if the school is dangerous from the beginning I would assign some areas of the mega dungeon as no or low encounters zones. These warded zones could grow or shrink depending of the characters actions.

As for the characters themselves? They could all play young magic users but it would be more interesting to have a variety of classes or archetypes. Maybe a class less system like Macchiato Monsters could be a better fit to run that kind of campaign. But then again it could be somekind of school for adventurers that teach fighting, thievery, thaumaturgy and wizardry. 

Let try to turn a dungeon room into a class room, I present you Barrowmaze High, School of Necromancy. 

Room 103 (original text)

A Runic Golem (1) appears as a large pile of runic tablets in the northwest corner of the room. It will flicker to life with magical energy when the PCs proceed into the crypt.

A large elaborate mirror on a pedestal is positioned near the southern wall of this room surrounded by burial alcoves. Five feet in from the mirror is a bottomless pit. Anyone vain enough stand in front of the mirror will fall in. 

Burial Alcoves: hexagonal, disturbed remains. Content: 87ep, Sapphire (75gp) and a Tome of Clear Thought. 

Classroom 103 

The Runic Golem is clearly a teacher and is teaching magical runes and writing. The mirror work like a black board and is sometimes used as a test. Falling into the bottomless pit take you back to the study or detention room. The burial alcoves contain the remain of past students, you can cast "speak with dead" to get help for your assignment or to gossip. The one with the Sapphire probably have a sidequest. The Tome of Clear Thought can be borrowed by asking the teacher. 

Humpday RPG Show and it blogs review is back!

A RPG podcast I love that talk about posts from the RPG blogsphere. I like it because I don't follow old school blogs anymore and listening to it often inspire me to blog. So hopefully the RPG blogs posts review will reignite my desire to blog. Check out the Humpday RPG Show! 

More actual play of the Kobolds' Art Exhibition

There is a new actual play of my zine The Kobolds' Art Exhibition on Seed of Worlds.

This time the group ventured in the paintings! I am so glad they did, I was hoping to see how people would handle that part of the zine. Making the paint dry and using it as a timer is clever, I like it. It is so nice to see people play with my zines. 

...

I wish my zines were still availlable in print but honestly I don't know how to handle them since LuLu updated. I feel like I should do a re-edition but it would take a lot of work and I prefer to spend the few creative energy I have these days to work on my current projects. I guess that I could work with a editor but I don't know how I feel about that since all my zines include contributions from other people. 

(photo from Seed of Worlds)

Interview

 Regardez ici: https://www.cestpasdujdr.fr/une-interview-de-evlyn-moreau-une-illustratrice-et-roliste-quebecoise/ 

EDIT: Alex C translated the interview and I added his translation in my zines folder.

Keyed Version of the Cozy Land map

I added keying numbers to the Cozy Land map.

I would like to try to write descriptions for all of them to do a mostly non-violent problems solving campaign.

Keyed version: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1mP2WDJzhEp1tMIoWyPFAoAN5kD9QJVXo?usp=sharing

Get the giant plushy print: https://gumroad.com/l/kvhJW

My collection of maps

I assembled all my maps into a collection on Artstation, I was surprised by how many I drew.

I have to admit that I did that because sometime I feel like my map work is a bit under appreciated/celebrated. Probably simply because I am a bit shy and that my anxiety make it difficult for me to participate to big projects and events (like cons).

(Note that you can open most of these projects to reveal additional maps.)

Anyway, enjoy. 😊

https://www.artstation.com/evlynmoreau/albums/2782193

Four Pregens / followers

I used my prompts generator for NPCs backgrounds to generate these four pregens or followers

(I decided their gender identities and sexual orientation on my own) 

(That generator is fun but it need more work) 

Folklore and characters classes

The Good Friends of Jackson Elias podcast discussed how folklore can be used to present varied and often contradictory interpretations of creatures. We often apply this to monsters and mythos entities but I thought that it could be interesting to apply this to the player characters' professions, like how The Witcher and The Mandalorian depict common folks as having all kinds of stories and rumors about their professions, some trues and some false, sometime these rumors profit the characters but sometime they also complicate their live.

You could ask each player to roll and answer up to three rumors about their character class. Their answer are not necessarily trues, but some parts could be. With a small group of players, going around the table and letting each player roll and answer a question to establish a rumor about the other players profession can also be fun. An other option is to roll and answer one question by level. 

If you don't want these rumors to apply to all fighters, cleric and magic-users, make them about a specific character guild.

When the characters explore a new location or region, modify one of their answers to create a local variant.

Folks tell stories about their... (d10)

1. Origins (How their profession was funded? When? Where? By whom?)
2. Purpose (What is the official or secret purpose of their profession?)
3. Recruitment (Who do they recruit and how? What is their initiation?)
4. Interdictions (What does their coda prevent them to do?)
5. Obligations (What does their coda force them to do?)
6. Abilities (What special abilities they are rumored to have)
7. Gear (What special gear they are rumored to use?)
8. Affiliation (What secret alliances or grudges they are rumored to have?)
9. Payments (What they accept as payment? For which task?)
10. Exploits (What kind of exploits they are rumored to have done? Or which historical events they participated in?) 

Exemples

People tell stories about the Fighters Guild's...

• Gear: they only use weapons of defeated foes.
• Recruitment: they must recruit kids who survive raids or wars if they are holding a weapon when they find them.
• Payment: you must include a copper piece that tasted blood with their payment

People tell stories about the Thieves Guild's...

• Origins: the guild was funded by serpent men 600 years ago
• Abilities: they drink so much poison that their blood is poisonous
• Obligations: hang a snake skin on your belt or window and they will never rob you.

People tell stories about the Clerics Cult's...

• Affiliation: the cult has a secret alliance with dwarfs and they will always help them if they give them a piece of hematite as it represents their alliance.
• Origins: their prophet was petrified, each member of the cult bear a tiny piece of her petrified body.
• Exploits: during the Iron War, the cult's prayers animated a statue that saved the city.

Now if a cleric of the cult visit a distant village, you can imagine the villagers asking the character to animate their village statue to save them from the ogre that harasses them. Or a soldier asking the character to show them the petrified fragment of their prophet to prove who they are. Or someone giving them an hematite and expecting a service in return.

Spookyfication

I spookyfied the OSE (Old School Essentials) Level 1 random table using some Halloween keywords. 

I rolled an Halloween flavor for each entries and I mixed the results to create Halloween themed variants of these level 1 encounters.  

Halloween flavors table (d12) 

1. bat|vampire
2. crow|scarecrow
3. witch|cat
4. ghost
5. skeleton|zombie
6. pumpkin|turnip|lantern
7. owl|alien
8. demon
9. monstrosity
10. candy|masked
11. twisted tree|dead leafs 
12. patchwork bodyparts 

LEVEL 1

1. Acolytes of the Black Cat (cultists who use a living black cat as a holy symbol)  
2. Scracrow Bandits (remain still until the ambush) 
3. Balefire Beetles (greenish flames) 
4. Bat Dwarfs (molerat like dwarfs who eat metal and use echolocation) 
5. Vampire's Gnomes (thralls of a subterrean vampire)
6. Skeleton headed Goblins (cackle a lot) 
7. Shambling pile of rotting leaves (Green Slime but as a mass of decomposing leaves)
8. Halfling's monstrosity (an hairy giant foot with eyes, who smell tobacco) 
9. Murdered hornets (Ghosts of giant hornets ) 
10. Twisted Roots Gecko (unded gecko with roots that grow inside them) 
11. Dead leaves orcs (orcs who use dead leaves as camouflage cloaks)  
12. Pumpkin Shrews (glowing shreews who live in giant pumpkins) 
13. Kobolds disguised as (roll a d12 on this table) 
14. Bone caged demon (tiny demon caged in a skeleton's ribcage)  
15. Witch Snake (human headed snake, witch's familiar)  
16. Cotton Candy Spider (colorful "tim burtonesque" spider who weave suggary webs) 
17. Crows Sprites (sprites riding crows) 
18. Alien Stirges (stirge faced grey humanoids who drink blood)    
19. Bodyparts Traders (buy, sell and stiches used body parts) 
20. Masked Wolves (wolves being controlled by weird masks)