lampliterguild

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UZUMAKI 

by David Romero

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✨New item!✨ Crystal Skull of the Hot Spring King Wondrous item, very rare

This crimson monkey skull is carved entirely from blood garnet and weighs 4 pounds. An aura of feral sentience draws your gaze.

Curse. If you stare into the eye sockets of the crystal skull for 1 minute it will transform itself to match the appearance of your own skull. Your race and appearance will change to that of a humanoid snow monkey. You have the bright red face of a macaque, and a body covered with shaggy brownish-gray fur. All of your racial traits, except for your size, alignment and languages, are replaced by those of a snow monkey. These include:

Ability Score Increase. Your Dexterity and your Constitution score each increase by 2, and your Intelligence score increases by 1. Age. You age at twice the rate of your previous form. Speed. Your base walking speed is 30 feet, and you have a climbing speed of 30 feet. Humanoid. Your creature type is humanoid. Bite. Your fanged maw is a natural weapon, which you can use to make unarmed strikes. If you hit with it, you deal piercing damage equal to 1d6 + your Strength modifier, instead of the bludgeoning damage normal for an unarmed strike. Deep Sleeper. It takes you 10 hours to finish a long rest and you regain all spent hit dice when you complete one. Kleptomaniacal. You have proficiency in the Sleight of Hand skill. Once per long rest, when you see an item of value make a DC 12 Wisdom saving throw or you must attempt to steal the object regardless of the consequences. The DM determines which objects attract your attention. Mistrustful. You are quick to assume ill-intent and have disadvantage on Wisdom (Insight) checks. Thermal Tolerance. You have resistance to cold and fire damage.

The remove curse spell is unable to reverse this effect. The only way is to stare into the eye sockets of the skull for 1 minute, after which you may attempt a DC 18 Wisdom check. If you succeed, both yourself and the skull revert back to their usual forms. If you fail the check, nothing happens and this check can’t be attempted again until the next dawn. The effect can also be ended by a wish spell.

When the lord of bathing was laid to rest, all the monks sang out and beat their chests. In the steaming pools where he held his court, the noblemen bickered over his hot spring resort. The wealth he’d amassed was splendid and vast. A sarcophagus of gold for his crystal bones cast. Beneath the snow-blown hills of his kingly domain, they carved a tomb and chiseled his name. Deep down he waits for an inquisitive pawn, his flesh has gone rotten, but his greed lingers on. If you stare too deep into his crimson eye holes, a new shape you’ll take to fit in his mold. Best beware and take care not to lose your head, lest you spend your life living his life instead! - 🖌🎨 Like our work? Consider supporting us on Patreon and gain access to the hi-resolution art for over 125 magic items, item cards and card packs, beautiful monster art and stat blocks, monthly setting pdfs, and vote for the content you want to see!🧙‍♂️ December’s Patrons get the entire month of January 2022’s content - free! 💰

📜 Credit. Art and design by us: the Dungeon Strugglers. Please credit us if you repost elsewhere.

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This is an OSR game that I have been playing for the last year or so, a game that has been shaping my vision of the OSR and how to approach GM’ing.

Here is a compendium of some adventures I wrote, Volume 1 is also getting a reprint.

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The Elven Crater - D66 Table

I have been going through the text of Mork Borg recently and the idea of the d66 table has been rattling around in my head. Other games that I have played, NeoClassical Geek Revival, has presentation given for random tables of d468 or other variations, all of these have been rattling around. From my experience the d66 table feels to be more approachable. While it doesn’t yield as many results it will create a total of 36 possible encounters.  I am running a game that is called “The Times are Changing�� Where the party has delved into an ancient elven city in Not Antartica that has strange super-tech, magic, and spirits circling the ruined city. The players have learned that the city was destroyed by a light from the sky, they presume that it is from the strange star, flashing high above the city. They currently are following a pulsing beacon that they found on a mummy of an alien creature known as an Eld, the progenitor of the elves. Now deep in the city they are finding that not only were the building damaged by this light, but time and space were also.  I have an upcoming game and I am going to share the table that I have roughed out to make the random encounters as they delve into the heart of the city.  D66 Table 1 1 - Shattered Build, Street, or Statue 2 - A place where time has been warped. 1=slowed 2=sped up 3=frozen 4=looping

3 - A shattred pile of Rubble, it is clearing dragging itself back together. It takes days to weeks to rebuild itself, only to see that itself be destroyed again.

4 - Intermixed with the rubble is a mix of Elven and Eld skeletons. The eld skeletons are a mix of metal and bone, as the beacon is brought close to them they start to twitch and look like they are trying to move. 

5 - Swirling winds and the lingering spirits of this place has pushed a massive snowdrift into a cone here. Reaching to the sky

6 - A building, untouched by the destruction and time. 1=Retail 2=Residential 3=Industrial 4=religious/arcane 5=recreational 6=medical

Table 2

1- The signs of forbidden love. Of an Eld and something else. As offspring are grown in artificial wombs, it would of had to have been facilitated by a gene splicer

2 - spirits dancing in the blowing snow 1-6 1 = aggressive 6 = friendly

3 - Items that shouldn’t float, float a few feet off of the ground here, while items that should float are pulled to the earth as if they were stones.

4 - Space and time suddenly warp. Moving space from far away, or different times, to this area. These distortions only last a few moments before violently snapping back into place. The sound of reality crashing back onto itself sound akin to thunder and screams. 

5 - a column of darkness fills and area under the ever-present sun here. 

6 - A group of elven scavengers looking to find historical artifacts, and weapons to help sway the tide of the long war that the 5 domes are fighting. 1=They have such an artifact 2=are haunted by spirits 3=willing to share directions 4=Violent 5=Friendly 6=Spirits of the Elves and Eld, made flesh.

This is the first and rough draft of these tables. While some of these have additional tables nested inside of them I don’t think that they have a reason to be called a d666 table or something like that.  I am just starting to take the foray into Random tables for my DND 5e games and hope that they expand on the experience for my players and cut down on the prep work that I am doing for my sessions. 

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Ritual Spell - Becoming the Wolf

One of the systems that has had impact on my adventure design recently has been LotFP - specifically the ideas presented in the two free titles VAM (Vaginas are Magic), and EC (Eldritch Cock). In these books spells have had level requirements stripped away and replaced with a system that allows casters to cast these spells with the chance of humorous/mundane/catastrophic results. Sometimes one of the options, sometimes all of them at once. These spells are inspired by the titles and music of metal bands. Drawing inspiration from both. In this case I wanted something different for Werewolves in my game, and I had the idea, then found the song title that fit it. Not a perfect system but a system. In my Fifth edition game this exists as a one off scroll, a spell that an individual could find, cast, and scribe into their spell book. With the limitation that it has to be cast as a ritual. The only way that I could figure out a way around the spell level, as I haven’t put any thought into levels since I was basing it around the VaM, and EC model.

The Music that I am using for inspiration I found on YouTube as was Heart Engine - Becoming the Wolf or Mark Pool - Becoming the Wolf. Becoming the Wolf Ritual - Spell To enact the power of this spell one must first hunt a game animal with nothing more than hand/crude weapons. Accepting that the hunt is part of the nature of animal and man. From this game animal the heart must be taken. A mixture of herbs, quicksilver and blood from the caster is placed inside of the heart. The final act of accepting the form of the animal is to offer this heart to a predator of the land. Most often a wolf, but could be any large predator native to the area that you are in. As you offer the heart to the animal you must also take a bit of the heart, the ritual is complete once the animal consumes the offering. This spell takes a portion of your human form and gives it to the wolf, and you take a portion of the form of the wolf. You can assume the form of the wolf, taking on the animal mind and instincts native in the creature. In this form you gain all of the statistics of the wolf applicable in your world. You also gain a supernatural ability to heal. The Referee should apply the best healing rate that would fit their world. This healing is suppressed by silver weapons, only healing through natural or magical means. This healing is given to both participants in wolf form.  When you assume the form of the wolf, the wolf that you offered the heart to, takes on the intelligence and form of a human, yet retains the animal nature of the wolf. These confused individuals sometimes learn enough to survive in the wild as isolated hermits, or they meet disastrous fates inside of the city.  In the event that either the wolf or the human should meet their demise, the surviving participant is trapped in their current form. These persons remember their time as the other. Longing for the life that they lost.

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The Adaption of Wizard of Oz

As a child I remember watching, The Wizard of Oz, with my parents. At the time I wouldn’t have been much older than 6 or 7 and the flying monkeys were terrifying at the time. It also was a formative moment for an imaginary creature that lived in a large mirror in the basement of my childhood home, and for my love of wizards.  This all influences the reason that I want to build an adventure/setting for the Wizard of Oz in the weird imagery that I remember as a kid. As well as mix it with the clockwork, bodyhorror, science fantasy elements that I have been seeing in my Dungeons and Dragons game of late. The first step is to revisit the source documents, luckily these documents are all part of the Public Domain excluding the movie. Which from initial and limited research is still owned by Warner Bros. and as such won’t be able to include that directly into the imagery or material. This shouldn’t be to bad as this is being used as inspiration and not a complete adaptation.  I will be using the Gygax75 challenge as the building for this. Building a dungeon and expanding the location to more and more locations as the game or in this case the write up continues. I hope to share some of the work that I have going.  

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Jaranga, Just Beneath the Streets

Welcome back, you wanted to know about the sounds under the streets? I told you that the city that you aren’t the only persons living here. They live beneath the streets, they are the ones that keep our way of life possible. Working tirelessly. Do the LampLiters do anything for them. Well I don’t, I keep to the high places of the dome, working on the lamps that they provide the power for. 

They aren’t plunged into darkness, far from it, they live in a world of amazing technology. in the middle of their section of the city is a column of glass tubes, plunging into the depths of the world. The great machines are said to be in those depths. They call the lightning that travels in these glass tubes, electricity, which is what powers the lamps up here. Those tubes line the top of their level. a great web of lightning, always travelling across a metal and stone sky. It is a breathtaking site. If you ever get a chance to see it.  The Blind council wants to keep people from knowing about the lower levels of the city. How do you think they would handle knowing that they aren’t the only ones who live here? So few people even wonder where all of the food that they are growing on the roofs of the building is going. While it feeds the people up here, much goes into the depths to supplement their diet. There is much I don’t understand of those deeper depths. The first people built this city and from what we can tell lived here for some time. It was eventually abandoned for some reason.  So when you discard your refuse, you use the luxuries that we live with up here, know that there is someone down below who is making sure that all of those things stay working. With no knowledge of who they are helping above them. Just knowing that they are helping someone up above.  I should return to my labors, I heard report that the lamp in section C42L8 is starting to burn low, I will need to replace those rods. Good bye till next time.

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The Great Dome of Jaranga

Welcome Back, last week we spoke of the great lamps of Jaranga, giving people light and life. What you want to hear about the most prominent feature? Well that is the lights, oh... you mean the dome. Sure it is one great item, a majority of the citizens never leave the protection of the dome. That said there are some trade offs for that protection.  On the inside the dome is stained black from the burned rods of the lights, you see as they create light the rods inside do get smaller, nothing to worry about there, we have plenty of these rods below the city, you see there are piles and piles of this stuff. The dome itself is made of glass, leaks if we ever get rain, and blessedly hides the world outside from the city residents. You see I have been outside and I seen it.  What is it like outside? In here we get non-stop light, keeping at bay the forces of shadow and darkness. Out there, it is a sea of white. The only light comes from the dancing lights in the sky, casting everything in a most inhospitable green glow. I was talking to the residents of the shanty town that has cropped up around the city. Wait you haven’t heard about that? Well that my friend is a story for another time. While we live in a comfortable area, they are exposed to the harsh cold winds of the outside world. I have been told that they travel great distances to collect fuel sources for modest fires to keep themselves going. They have some kind of grey green sludge that they call food. A priceless commodity are spices. But, enough about them. The Dome. The dome was built over what we can best figure is a mine some 2 miles in radius, then the buildings started in the lowest depths and built upward. The residents of the city really only know of the surface, or lit sections of the city. There is another city below, inhabited as well. Those are the sounds that parents tell their children to be afraid of. They are the people constantly toiling beneath. Yes they still wear masks, but it is to protect themselves from the dust, rotting remains of the first people, and chemicals that keep the city above running. They aren’t slaves, rarely do they ever come to the surface. Yet if they do, would we ever know? Do we care to know? What’s it made of? Glass, a thick, tough glass. We could clean the glass and let the people see what is happening outside. Doing that will give away the location of the city though. You see outside, there are things that would be attracted to the light. It would endanger us all. Your elders know that. They just don’t tell you about it. Them damn old blind fools, you know how many times I’ve had to patch up the soot layer because some water washed it away. It is a never ending job. Luckily it is dark so much out there that it usually doesn’t matter. Now off with you, these cat walks are dangerous. Hopefully you return one day for another lesson on our fair city and how the Dome and Lights are helping keep you safe.

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Welcome back, I am focusing today on the lighting of for the Great Domed City of Jaranga. After all I am a representative of the Lampliter Guild. The lighting of the great city is a technology called Arc Lamps, this is the primary light source of the city. These lamps channel the lightning that is created deep in the mines below the city into them. There the black rods inside of the light causes it to arc and create the light that fuels the city, once in a while light from the outside world comes through the dome, where the filth of the city has washed away from the many leaks of the dome. In modern terms: the light that is emitted from an arc light is from electricity arcing between two carbon rods. This electricity ionizes the gas and creates an incredibly hot and intense light. This technology evolved into modern fluorescent lighting, as well as being used in industrial applications for arc welding. Arc lights would produce varying degrees and types of radiation. The types of Radiation that is produced from arc welding is: Ultraviolet Radiation, Infrared Radiation, and EMF Radiation (Electromagnetic Field Radiation). All three of these have serious medical side effects for long term exposure. This article has additional information on the side effects: https://emfadvice.com/emf-radiation-welding/. I will be pulling from this for later reference as well. For the Game: When I was forming the initial idea of the City of Jaranga I started with how the domed city was lit, all hours of the day. Knowing that these lamps produced an intense light as well as UV Radiation. This would result in extreme light sensitivity to the citizens of the city. Homes in the city have small windows, that allow this light into the homes, diffusing it through the use of water filled bottles, many of these serving as both a light source and water for the home and building. Citizens of the city of Jaranga wear long robes, shirts, and clothing when outside. They as well wear intricately made masks, layers of cloth over the eyes to protect their eyesight. Yet in old age many of the citizens suffer from blindness. Yet their culture demands that they continue to wear masks. This is why the City of Jaranga is also known as the City of Masks. The only time one would not be wearing a mask is in the comfort and privacy of their homes.

The Lamps, dome, lightning creating machine, and the other large machines that lay below the city streets are remnants from a people that were lost to time. At some point magic returned to the world, and their technology either failed, fell into disuse, or was abandonned for something new. What we do know is that they still sit rotting underneath our feet. For us in the Lampliter Guild, we make sure that these lamps continue to burn. Cleaning, and maintaining the rods that channel the lightning. This light helps keep the plants alive, it makes sure that we are not consumed by the dark, that is always at the edge of the city walls, and we work with those loathsome creatures who manage the last of the great machines. They toil in the depths of the city, knowing only the light that comes from their glass lightning tubes. They are another story for another time. Thank You, and now back to tending my lamps. 

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On Fantasy, Sci-Fi, and Science Fantasy

I am of an age where the split between Science Fiction and Fantasy had occurred. Yes Star Wars was out and in the early 80′s movies were still being made where Science Fantasy was briefly explored. I have been reading old pulp magazines, from the early to mid 1920-30 where the Science Fantasy genre was occurring. The split had not occurred.  Checking Wikipedia, Science Fantasy is defined as:  Science fantasy is a mixed genre within the umbrella of speculative fiction which simultaneously draws upon or combines tropes and elements from both science fiction and fantasy. In a science-fiction story, the world is scientifically possible, while a science-fantasy world contains elements which violate the scientific laws of the real world. Nevertheless, the world of science fantasy is logical and often is supplied with science-like explanations of these violations.

Why is the definition important, in Science Fiction, everything has to be scientifically possible. That is pushing the envelope outside of what we know to be the laws of the natural world. Such as a colony ship floating in the relative void of space, on a years long journey to another planet. All of this is feasibly possible. I am of the mindset that by limiting our thoughts, in life, and in gaming to what is scientifically possible. Is hindering what we can come up with. I was having a discussion with my son about a Marvel movie that we just watched, Thor: The Dark World. He said, “Dad that movie was fiction, cars can’t float like that.” It got me thinking, and I asked, “Why Not?” Yes my son is only 6 and you will get some of the best answers asking that. His response was firmly rooted in the real, and the mundane. I am glad to hear the concepts and science that he is learning from his mother and myself, as well as from the teachers. What saddened me is that there was no “what if,” the element that helped us develop so much. The Science Fantasy genre to me, is the “What If,” story. For gaming, what if a civilization built up around a nuclear warhead that didn’t detonate, they found that controlling the radiation from the core of that device would mutate the victims into super humans, what would happen. What if instead of a nuclear reaction, it was instead a Pheonix trapped in stasis and they only momentarily let it start it’s rebirth and that is what is mutating those exposed to it. Star Wars explores the what if Magic was real, but was a balancing act between the forces of good and evil. Passion and Control. Which ever other millions of way it can be defined as.  I will be introducing an adventure/location that I am calling Jaranga: The City of Masks. This is a game that I intend to run with the Dungeons and Dragons 5e system. Cause that is what my players like. The city resides in a Dome that doesn’t allow the light from the outside world in, instead it is lit by the incredibly bright lights of Arc Lamps, bulbs filled with plasma, a technology that existed in our history and was abandonned. The Masks protecting the eyes of the persons who live there, much like ancient welding masks.  I am encouraging everyone to take a moment and look at your game worlds, would Science Fantasy fit, benefit, or hinder the game. What elements can be extracted from the blending of these genres to flesh out otherwise unexplained elements past “magic.”

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What am I doing here?

I have been sitting on the Tumblr name Lampliter Guild for some time and little to no information about it. I feel that I should put something out into the world to let persons know what I am hoping to do. I want to explore the world of gaming here. Such as insights that I have gained from Movies, Books, other games that I have played in, or read about.  The reason that I went with the Lampliter Guild as the name, Lamplighters in history have been employed by a number of cities, they sometimes served as the city watch, quietly doing their jobs or lighting the lamps and driving back the darkness of the night. Some of the history has been recorded here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamplighter

In my Dungeons and Dragons 5e game I created an organization named the Lampliters, they are a silent group of individuals. Dressed in Blue Robes, who are only seen between Sunset and Sunrise. Diligently doing their task, or driving back the darkness of the night for the safety of the people. During the day they would retreat back to their guild house, it was rumored to exist in the land of 7 suns, and contain a spark of creation. Able to consume death and restore life to those that lost it. None have found this secret location, yet all cities seem to believe that they are home to this location.  What I am hoping to do is simple, light my lamp. On the road that we have been exploring. Hoping that maybe I can help you uncover an insight into our hobby. While learning what is out there along side of you.