The Hawk's Moor Adventuring Collective

From 2020 through 2022, I ran an online West-Marches-esque D&D 5e game with a slightly oldschool bent. It ran for 91 sessions before my time got eaten up by . . . actually, I'm not sure. I was probably just really busy with Iron Circus stuff. Anyway, having recently read Idle Cartulary's Reflections on a West Marches Campaign, I feel like doing a quick retrospective.

Initial plan

As I've mentioned before, I'm into (what we now call) oldschool styles of D&D gameplay, but I generally prefer modern systems. And the whole West Marches thing seemed like a really interesting campaign structure. I loved the idea of an amorphous cast of PCs of varying levels.

I didn't want to get into the whole ad hoc schedule thing, though. So that's a pretty major deviation from the canonical West Marches format that I made right from the beginning.

I love tinkering with rules, but I hadn't run D&D since the 5e playtest days (Remember "D&D Next"?), so I restrained myself and stuck to what I called "vanilla+" rules. I ditched alignment, implemented the full encumbrance rules, and allowed players to bring in all kinds of third-party PC options. I think the most houseruley I got at the start was having NPCs make Charisma saves as morale checks. (I will die on the hill of using Charisma to represent courage, not Wisdom.)

I started with a really loose idea of the setting—I called it "maximalist kitchen sink fantasy in a vaguely-defined world". I had the players contribute setting elements during session 0, and gave them free rein to define the world by defining their character. You know, like "You're playing the first dwarf that's shown up in this game so far, so you get to tell me what dwarves are like in this world."

In order to skip over all the "You meet in a tavern…" stuff, I came up with "the Hawk's Moor Adventuring Collective". This was to be a non-hierarchical guild of adventurers which gave the PCs a reason to work together, a base of operations, and a way to share their maps and pooled resources. It was, of course, named after Greyhawk and Blackmoor. I didn't throw in any NPCs to run the group; that was all up to the players.

I put the HMAC's clubhouse in a giant, Lankhmar/Ankh-Morpork-style city-state called Sarken. All I knew about it was that it was huge, ancient, and diverse, containing every playable species available for the game, and basically any urban feature we might require.

For our starting dungeon, I picked Dyson's Delve, a "mini megadungeon" by the excellent Dyson Logos. I had a huge amount of fun reinterpreting the contents, coming up with 5e replacements for B/X elements, and reflavoring stuff to fit the kind of world I wanted. I never gave the players a name for it, so they ended up calling it "Dungeon Hill".

I put together some slightly elaborate character generation instructions, and tried to make them new-player-friendly. They look kind of daunting, but they actually seemed to work out okay! I also went kinda nuts trying to make it possible for folks to randomly roll up their characters while keeping ability scores fair and equal, but I kinda think nobody ever used the random option.

Finally, to kick this whole thing off, I wrote up a pitch document and put the word out. I don't think I actually posted anything publicly, but my gaming friends were all free to invite more folks at their own discretion.

Tools

We played via Discord with the DiceParser bot and Google Sheets for character sheets. We normally didn't use any kind of virtual tabletop, except when we resorted to some kind of free whiteboard platform for one or two big fights. I really wanted to avoid getting locked into anything that would handle rules stuff for us—even something as basic as automating attack rolls—because I hate the thought of having to stick to the rules as written (or, worse, a VTT dev's attempt to implement their interpretation of the RAW).

Some of my players would have preferred more automation, but I believe my hack-job solutions turned out to be not only more flexible than real purpose-built tools, but also more reliable.

I probably went overboard on creating lots of separate Discord channels. I feel like that is a common (if trivial) mistake.

We used some pretty extensive spreadsheet tools for this campaign. Each PC had a character sheet based on this one built by Tintagel, editable by the relevant player and myself. These included easy and precise encumbrance tracking, and one of the players—a professional spreadsheet genius—built a system of formulas that auto-generated each PC's attack rolls, skill checks, etc. as DiceParser commands. The character sheets got their XP totals from a separate sheet where I did all my post-session experience accounting.

I also had a "dashboard" spreadsheet that tied into all of the character sheets. I could tell it which PCs were present just by clicking some checkboxes, and then use it to roll stuff like Perception checks and luck rolls for the whole party at once. It also included an initiative tracker where I could paste in monster stats from a different spreadsheet, and it would then roll initiative and hit points for those monsters, roll initiative for the PCs as well, and automatically arrange everybody in initiative order, displaying their ACs, current hit points, etc.

The aforementioned monster spreadsheet contained stats for all the monsters that I expected to need, each one as a separate worksheet. Each monster had auto-generated DiceParser commands that I could just paste into Discord to roll their attacks. For a few monsters, I built random appearance generators right into their sheets.

Perhaps most crucially, I made a huge calendar document that tracked what happened during our sessions and when that actually was in terms of in-setting time. This spreadsheet also included the weather, the phases of the moon, the dates when various downtime actions would be completed, ongoing NPCs activities, etc. I actually had both a DM-only and player-facing version of this document. It was kind of a chore to type up all these session notes, but it really helped me remember what was going on from week to week. Like, without even referencing the spreadsheet, the act of typing that stuff fixed the facts in my memory.

Anyway, all of these tools made for a whole lot of browser-tab-juggling during the game, and I frequently wished I had more than two monitors. But, overall, it worked well, and I would definitely use this system (or something derived from it) again.

Setting

So, like I said, the setting started out pretty vague and flexible. I prefer weirder settings than the familiar spectrum of dungeon fantasy mishmashes that we see in both old and new D&D, but I wanted to be really inviting and allow an extremely wide range of character concepts and mechanical options.

We had a session 0 where some of my earliest players got the chance to set down a lot of basic elements. At this point, I couldn't even say what ideas came from who, but somehow we ended up with two moons, one of which was an immense skull. Elves were a transhuman variant created by a merciless ancient empire called the Hierarchy. Goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears were a single species, and a lot of them were obsessed with a mutagenic substance called "black milk".

The players also had the freedom to come up with the details of their characters' species and stuff, and wow did they ever run with that. One player described their lizardfolk character as a crocodile person, so crocodilans replaced all the lizardmen on my dungeon map. Another player reinvented wood elves completely, and wrote up a whole document about what their deal was. (This was actually a player who was pretty new to TTRPGs, so I was really impressed and excited by how much they understood and embraced that creative opportunity.)

Sarken gradually accumulated more details, and I eventually put together a brief almanac about it. (Much thanks to Watabou's city generator, by the way!)

Later in the campaign, I bought a published megadungeon to supplement our starting dungeon, added its surrounding environs to the world, and gave the party some hexes to journey through (and other towns and adventures to encounter along the way), linking this area with Sarken's region.

Through all this, I accrued loads of setting notes about characters, places, factions, subplots, etc. Some of those ideas came up again later, others kinda got forgotten, but mostly they became part of the overall color of the setting.

Players

I'm extremely lucky in this regard. I've been very online for a long time, and I've got lots of friends in the general comics/webcomics/comics-adjacent scene. Naturally, a lot of these folks are TTRPG people. I both ran and played in some games online before, so I started the HMAC campaign with lots of potential players, and they're all great folks. They're fun and creative, and brought the right kind of energy to the game, as well as a good mix of skills and perspectives. They're all competent with the game system and fully engaged with roleplay. There are some artists in the group, too, which is of course always great!

Anyway, over the course of the campaign, I believe we had 14 different players, although maybe five or more of those folks only played for a session or two. Things definitely got way less open-tabley over time, with the players settling down to a core group. Attendance was still very flexible, though. For the vast majority of sessions, we had four to six players, with one instance where nine folks showed up! We also had a few sessions with only two players, and I actually remember those as being pretty cool. Things moved fast, and those two managed to get a lot done.

After the HMAC campaign, the core group stuck together, and we're still playing D&D on the same Discord server. I love these folks.

Characters

Wow, we sure had some! One really important rule in this campaign was that anybody could make a new character whenever they wanted one (although they only played one at a time). This helped players stay interested, let people experiment with different concepts and builds, introduced a lot of variance to party dynamics, and kept character levels low. I think we had about 40 different PCs, some players created and ran as many as six or seven characters.

And, since the setting was built to allow a wide range of character concepts, we had a lot of very memorable weirdos in spite of the large cast. There was the teenage thief who was raised in a creepy cult, the kobold artificer from a hidden world of advanced kobolds, the potoo guy who was a mindlessly innocent murder savant, the buff goblin with the amazing hair and jorts, the ancient cleric who actively disliked her god, the guy from the fairy mafia, the elf who followed the party so that she could give them a proper burial when they died, the crystalline automaton that had been severed from some kind of collective overmind, the gunslinging frog who used to be an actual gun, the masked skeleton wizard, the mysterious moth-person who came from the moon . . . I'm such a fan of all of these characters!

One player came up with a species of fluffy, mostly quadrupedal weasel-monkey "dragon" people, complete with art and lore, and made multiple such PCs. They're adorable and I love them.

Of course, there were also lots of characters who didn't end up getting much screen time, so they never managed to become very memorable. So it goes!

How it all went

Running the HMAC campaign, I embraced both the "lonely fun" of extensive prep work and lots of randomizer-assisted mid-game improvisation, and I remain a huge fan of both modes. In fact, one of my favorite things to do was spend lots of time between sessions building random generator things to use during the game. Naturally, these took the form of spreadsheets rather than dice tables. And even though I'm not running any games currently, I still cannibalize any lists of interesting loot or NPC personality traits or potion flavors or curse effects or whatever that I happen to come across, incorporating them into existing generators or building new ones around them.

Anyway, the generators were really useful, both in helping me to be ready when the players veered away from my prepared material, and in keeping things interesting for me. As a player or a GM, I love when one random roll changes everything, sending the session or the whole campaign in an unexpected direction. (I'll never forget the incident in another campaign where my character's actions got the whole party dumped into another plane for several sessions. The DM hadn't planned that at all; he just impartially determined the results of my foolishness and rolled with it. And that ruled.)

So, as you can imagine, I didn't do anything remotely like building out grand plots for my players to follow. Instead, I gave them loads of different things to interact with, if they were interested. I threw a stargate-like multi-destination portal into the main dungeon, along with a big list of named but undescribed destinations they could check out. I added a second, much larger dungeon and introduced wilderness travel rules to reach it (and to explore the setting in general). I made a random crypt generator and used it to produce micro-dungeons any time the less scrupulous PCs wanted to just rob a quick grave. I gave one PC a familiar (based very strongly on Arnold K's ideas about familiars) that would teach them new spells as long as they kept working towards a bizarre construction project involving exotic materials. Another PC got hold of an artifact that let him absorb curses and enchantments from others, unlocking a whole elaborate subsystem of magical pollution points.

I feel like I should be saying something like "...and that's why I couldn't keep running that campaign" here, but honestly all that high-effort stuff was a big part of what kept me interested.

Anyway, speaking of high effort: One thing about our play style that seems odd in retrospect was our near lack of downtime. Each week, I'd ask the players when they wanted play to resume after the previous session's events, and they almost always went for the morning of the following day. The poor PCs never got a weekend! They did actually have some downtime activities going on—things like learning new languages and renovating their guild house—but of course they proceeded very slowly. I probably should have encouraged a more leisurely adventuring lifestyle. In the future, I'll probably try keeping the time between game sessions the same in-game as in real life.

There were some interesting interactions between that breakneck pace, the stables of multiple PCs, asynchronous leveling, the addition of a second major dungeon site, and our strict use of an in-game calendar: We ended up with "B teams" and even "C teams" of PCs, although not necessarily in a permanent sense. If one session ended with the PCs still off on an expedition and the next session started with some of those PCs' players absent, people could just use different characters and say that this party went off on a different adventure while that last one was in progress. When the new megadungeon was introduced, the HMAC bought a house in the nearby village and started a local branch that mostly stayed local (until a dead PC had to be shipped back to Sarken for resurrection). When a new player showed up, people would break out their lowest-level characters to adventure with the level 1 newbie. It all took some bookkeeping, of course, but it worked out pretty well!

Anyway, I won't speak for my players, but I definitely had loads of fun with that campaign. We stuck with it for two years and only missed maybe a dozen sessions (mostly due to my own assorted responsibilities, I'm sure). Folks still talk about getting back to it some time. That player who started out pretty new to RPGs is running her own games now, and one of the other players became the group's primary GM for the past three years. Next time I run a game, I'm pretty likely to use a similar format. So, all around, I'd call it a success.

The Longton Cult Compound (Crossword Dungeon)

So Molomoot posted a cool idea over on Bluesky about using solved crossword puzzles as inspiration for both the layout and contents of dungeons. It's pretty brilliant, and sounded like a lot of fun, so I tried it out. Here's how it went.

The puzzle

I've never really been interested in crossword puzzles, so I'm not sure if I had ever—in my 48 years of life—actually completed one before Mol posted their method. However, it turned out to be easier and a lot more engrossing that I expected!

I only had to cheat on the last letter—the M that's highlighted pink in the image—and that's because both crossing words were celebrity names. Just not my area of expertise, man. Anyway, I took that as a cue to make that square the dungeon's entrance.

Turning it into a map

After that, I added walls until things looked like a workable dungeon map, making one room circular because my excessively square layout was honestly looking kinda boring. I messed around a tiny bit with diagonal walls, but found I was ending up with an implausible interior space that would be difficult to describe to players. (I definitely need to get better at dungeon maps, so I'm really glad I did this!)

Adding details

Then—departing from Mol's method and wandering thoughtlessly back to my comfort zone—I started getting dice involved. I selected potential locations for doors, made some quick tables, and rolled for what kind of door situation was going on at each such spot.

d6	Doorway
1	Trapped door*
2	Locked door*
3	Secret door*
4	Obstructed door*
5	Unlocked door
6	No door

d6	Trapped door
1–3	Physical trap
4–5	Accidental hazard
6	Magical trap

d6	Locked door
1–3	Unlocked by key
4–5	Barred on one side
6	Unlocked by combination (or password or something)

d6	Secret door
1	Hidden by conspicuous or predictable covering (tapestry, waterfall)
2	Hidden effectively, but opening trigger is noticeable (torch sconce with scuff marks, obvious button)
3	Covered up by obvious, easily-removed obstruction (paint, wooden paneling, crumbling plaster)
4	Hidden on one side, but obvious from the other (which is accessible by other means)
5	Fully visible, but opening trigger is hidden or elsewhere
6	Hidden, but something gives it away (scrape marks, draft, light, seeping fluid)

d6	Obstructed door
1–3	Stuck due to damage or poor maintenance (rusty, warped, swollen)
4–5	Accidentally obstructed (by debris, corpse, rubble)
6	Deliberately barricaded

(That "secret door" table, by the way, was very strongly influenced by the Conspicuous Secret Doors article over at A Blasted, Cratered Land. Lots of good ideas there!)

I also leaned on some random dungeon-stocking table stuff—you know, the kind with results like "monsters and treasure", "trap", and "special feature". And at this point, I was also influenced by Chris McDowall's Non-empty Rooms article for when the stocking table handed me an "empty" result. On top of this stuff, I also used a room generator thing I made that gave me keywords, colors, materials, and other inspirational stuff.

And, reader, I wrote up a bunch of notes and ideas for every room in the dungeon before realizing I had completely forgotten to do anything with the crossword puzzle words. Which was, like, 50% of the point of this exercise.

So, I did my best to work in puzzle-derived ideas as I wrote the whole thing up. I don't think I did a great job of it, but see if you can spot them!

The actual dungeon

So, what I ended up with was the abomination-infested basement of a cult compound under the ruins of a dead town. (Because, honestly, even when I'm running a fantasy game, my first instinct is always to turn it into horror.)

Hook

About a month ago, the isolated town of Longton was massacred and burned by the regional authorities. The official explanation was that a plague had taken hold there, and the slaughter was necessary to prevent illness and death on a vast scale. People from nearby villages partially corroborate this rationale with stories of Longtonites glimpsed with hideous afflictions . . . but partially contradict it with their own health. If Longton harbored some infection, it was apparently caught before it could escape.

The authorities were certainly as careful as they were swift. Soldiers were stationed in camps outside the ruins for weeks, tasked with keeping any survivors from leaving the ruins, or any looters from entering them.

But the watchers left just a few days ago, and some curious souls have already reported a potentially interesting discovery: a staircase leading into the ground beneath the ashes of what must have been a mansion. It ends at an impressive door protected by a deadly trap. One would-be looter was killed by it, and their partner decided to sell the information to professional adventurers rather than taking more risks.

Background

The actual deal here is that Longton harbored a planar contact cult that managed to invoke a dangerous, flesh-warping force they named the Hand of Change—something more like an invasive ecosystem than a discrete entity—and the authorities got massively freaked out when they caught wind of it. The cult—more of an academic group than a charismatic one—had some wealthy members and owned a few local businesses, but certainly didn't control the entire town. And the Hand of Change isn't communicable in the plague sense (mostly). So Longton's annihilation was probably an extreme overreaction.

The group behind all of this never really had a name, and mostly didn't think of themselves as a religious organization, but the term "cult" applies due to their secrecy, insularity, and controlling internal dynamics. They were a dangerous bunch, fully ready to kill in the pursuit of knowledge and power.

Longton had its own dark history predating all this shit by generations, having been home to an aristocratic family that got into some seriously dark magic. Its was that extinct clan's ill-storied mansion that brought the cult there in the first place, having been prepared as a ritual space around a planar veil weakened by years of large-scale human sacrifice.

Now the mansion's basement—all that remains of the cult's compound—is partially overrun with "unruly flesh", the basic undifferentiated matrix of the Hand of Change. It slowly consumes dead or immobile tissue, and occasionally births remote organs that feed and maintain the expanding alien biome. The cosmic source of the Hand of Change was severed from this plane when the cult was slaughtered, so its extrusion into this world is slowly dying, but it could keep growing for months yet.

Random encounters

Every 10 minutes—or when the party does something noisy—roll 1d12. On a 1, roll on the encounter table. If the pit in the Pit Alcove (5) is uncapped, then a roll of 2 produces an encounter of 1d12 skeletons.

d6	Encounter
1	2d4 stinging organs. Aggressive, spidery, gelatinous things. Stats as giant centipedes.
2	2d4 flying organs. Flapping, leaping things like asymmetrical bats, each with a single black eye. Follow and watch intruders. Only attack to defend themselves. Summon a random encounter if someone harms the unruly flesh. Stats as hawks.
3	2d4 infectious organs. Aggressive, squirming things like velvet worms with wobbling, fluid-filled heads. Stats as giant rats. Anyone who dies while infected turns into unruly flesh.
4	1d4 ripping organs. Aggressive horrors like huge sea cucumbers with thrashing limbs and spiny mandibles. Stats as crocodiles.
5	1 grabbing organ. Fleshy, lumbering, many-limbed thing. Transports corpses or other biomass to unruly flesh. Defends itself if attacked. Stats as giant crab.
6	1 assimilation organ. Aggressive, amorphous flesh mat. Stats as gray ooze. Only camouflages with unruly flesh. Anyone it reduces to 0 HP turns into a new encounter.

Dungeon entrances

The basement actually has two entrances, but the only one that's been discovered is the staircase to the Preparation Room (1). If the PCs decide to spend some time searching the ruins of Longton above ground, they'll also discover (underneath a pile of scorched timber) a bulkhead door leading to the Large Storage Room (8).

The party has been informed that the Preparation Room (1) stairs are trapped, and if they make any effort to examine the area, they'll notice six 1-inch holes at neck height along the walls just outside the basement's door. (These used to be better disguised by some fancy paneling, but that burned away, so now they're very visible shafts in bare stone.) These are basic dart traps targeting three steps near the door, and two darts will be launched at anybody stepping on one of those stairs (1d4 damage each). The first two darts have already been expended, so it's only the lower two steps that are actually trapped.

The bulkhead leading to the Large Storage Room (8) is unlocked, but can be locked with a key from the Mosaic Room (3) or Barracks (11). Anyone listening at it will hear something like a single voice chanting below. From the surface, the bulkhead can be cleared of debris with just a little work.

1: Preparation Room

The south door to the surface is wooden and fire-blackened. There's a ragged gap at the bottom (big enough to reach through, but not to crawl through) where animals have scratched and chewed a way under. It has a peep slot, with a sliding cover on the inner side. There's a keyhole, but it's unlocked.

This room is a waiting lounge and robing chamber that was used before and after the cult's ritual experiments. It is unlit, but the sun will light it dimly if the party enters during the day. It has pale pink wallpaper and dark wooden wainscoting, only slightly heat-damaged and ash-stained. A relentless scratching noise comes from the east. There are two dark blue couches (both in poor repair), and a few small, mismatched tables with iron candelabras, all crusted with white wax. Pegs along the east and west walls hold 11 dark blue robes.

In the north-east corner of the room, a fallen robe covers three pairs of old boots and a family of rats. The rats' movements cause the robe to twitch suspiciously. They'll dart out the south door and up the stairs if disturbed.

Exits

The north door to the Ritual Chamber (3) is locked (key in Mosaic Room (3)), but flimsy. A strong shoulder or a blunt instrument will crack it open loudly.

The east door to the Armory (12) is larger and more ornate, with no knob or handle. It's iron paneled with wood, and is opened by a lever in the Armory (12). It would take significant work with tools or a powerful destructive force to open it from this side. This is the source of the scratching noise.

2: Ritual Chamber

This is a cutting edge magical focus chamber created by the cult to conduct planar contact and summoning rituals with around eight participants. It's a dome-shaped room with walls of green-gray stone, heavily decorated in gothic style, set with dozens of waxy niches holding unlit candles. The floor is a disk of bluish metal with intricate circular inlays. The feeling of active magic is obvious to anyone who enters as a kind of dizzy pressure. The whole place smells like assorted mind-altering chemicals.

If a spell is cast in this room, the unfinished arcane working hanging in the air will consume it, canceling the spell's effects and producing a different effect. Roll a random spell of the same level as the one consumed, or just pick some entertaining fuckery like confusion, polymorph, etc. The unfinished working then has an X-in-6 chance of clearing, where X is the spell effect's level.

Anyone who sleeps in this room while the working is still active (which is difficult to do!) can reestablish contact with the Hand of Change, potentially becoming its cleric or mutating horribly or being granted a single wish of bodily metamorphosis.

Exits

The west door to the Mosaic Room (3) is unlocked, but stuck, obstructed by something tight and rubbery on the other side. This is a layer of unruly flesh, and will tear free with an audible pop and a gust of troubling organic odors if forced.

3: Mosaic Room

This room is overrun with unruly flesh. It's something like mold or coral: a rubbery, lumpy, corrugated layer of lurid magenta and green tissue that covers the floor and most of the gothic stone walls.

The ceiling is covered with the remains of an elaborate mosaic. It portrays an expanse of sea or sky spangled with pale, lacey stars or sea creatures. A dark, crab-like shape dominates the center of the image. The mosaic was created before the cult contacted the Hand of Change, and represents an earlier obsession.

In the southwest corner of the room, the remains of a table have collapsed underneath the unruly flesh. Lying in this heap and partially covered by alien tissue are various ambiguous objects the table held. If the party searches the pile and is willing to tear things out of the flesh, they'll find assorted broken alchemical equipment, vials of drugs and drug precursors worth 150 coins, and a key to all the key-locked (or lockable) doors in the compound—such as the doors between the surface and the Preparation Room (1), between the Preparation Room (1) and the Ritual Chamber (2), between the South Corridor (6) and the Small Storage Room (7), between the South Corridor (6) and the Barracks (11), and between the Large Storage Room (8) and the surface—as well as the pit in the Pit Alcove (5).

Exits

The east door to the Ritual Chamber (2) is stuck by a layer of unruly flesh (if the party hasn't already torn it open recently). It will tear free if forced.

The south door to the North Corridor (4) is mostly free of the flesh, but is barred on this side by a heavy wooden plank.

The west door to the Large Storage Room (8) is severely stuck by a layer of unruly flesh (if the party hasn't already torn it open recently). It requires either significant force or the use of a cutting implement to open. A sound like a single voice chanting comes from this door.

4: North Corridor

This corridor stinks of rot and is overrun with unruly flesh, a rubbery layer of lurid tissue that covers the floor and most of the gothic stone walls. There's a male human corpse in the middle of the corridor, half-overgrown with the flesh.

A spike trap in the north wall drives four rusty spears into the south wall when a weight trigger in the floor is pressed. Both the spike apertures and trigger are covered in flesh, so they're very difficult to spot, and only have a 2-in-6 chance of triggering when someone walks through (maybe 1 in 6 for small people, 3 in 6 for heavily armored or encumbered folks, if you want to get complicated). When triggered, they'll do 2d8 damage to regular-size folks or 1d8 damage to small folks (saving throw to avoid completely).

The corpse lies just east of the trap, face down, head pointing east. It is raggedly punctured in its left thigh and throat, and the wounds seem mechanically inflicted, rather than the result of combat. It hasn't rotted much in the month since death. It wears casual, not particularly fashionable clothing. The unruly flesh has begun covering and consuming the body, but anyone willing to cut it free can find 10 coins, a scroll of shield, and a scroll of sleep on it, and see that its face has been wholly converted.

Exits

The northeast door to the Mosaic Room (3) is barred on the other side (unless the party has already opened it).

The south door to the Pit Alcove (5) is obstructed by something. It feels soft, but not elastic like the unruly flesh. It's another corpse—this one not adhered to the ground—and it takes only a little pushing to get this door open.

The west door to the Library (9) is trapped. The door is thick and iron, and its handle is in a recessed pocket just big enough for a hand. If the handle is turned without being pulled slightly outward first, a metal cuff in the opening will snap shut around the character's wrist, and the door will lock shut. 10 minutes' work with thieves' tools will free the hand (with a check to avoid causing the trapped character 1 point of damage in the process). Alternatively, the mechanism can be released from the other side of the door.

The northwest door to the Large Storage Room (8) is locked with a combination lock, but opens normally from this side. There's also a reminder to the combination written on this side: the numbers 2-7-5-3 written top-to-bottom on the doorframe, near the lock mechanism. A single voice can be heard chanting unintelligibly on the other side.

5: Pit Alcove

This area is free of unruly flesh, and the green-gray gothic stonework is fully visible. There's a ten-foot-diameter pit in the middle of the alcove, covered with a lid of wrought iron, emitting rattling sounds. There's a corpse leaning against the north door (unless the party has moved it). The area stinks of rot.

The pit is where the old mansion's original owners disposed of sacrificial victims. The cult, more recently, threw inconvenient living people in there—sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. Now, the ongoing arcane catastrophe has set off the accumulated death energy below, and the pit contains a virtually endless supply of feral undead skeletons. It's 50 feet deep, so they're not easily visible from the surface (Is it safe to turn an oil lantern sideways?), but their frenzied clacking and scratching is obvious.

The pit's lid is very old and ornate, like a net of iron vines. It's fastened at two points with much newer locks. A key from the Mosaic Room (3) or Barracks (11) will open them, but it will take at least 30 points of combined Strength (or somewhat fewer points and a good plan) to move the lid. As soon as the lid is open, 7 skeletons will emerge (half climbing, half pushed up from below) and attack. 1d4 more skeletons emerge every round that the pit is uncovered and a living person remains in this room.

The corpse near the north door to the North Corridor (4) is that of a human woman in unremarkable, academic clothing. It appears to have been mauled horribly by some kind of animal, but hasn't rotted nearly as much as you'd expect. If searched, it will yield a dagger and a potion of invisibility.

Exits

The south doorway leads to the South Corridor (6).

6: South Corridor

This area is free of unruly flesh, and the green-gray gothic stonework is fully visible. The walls are lined with candle alcoves crusted with white wax.

There's a pit trap in front of the door to the Small Storage Room (7). It's not obvious, but anyone examining the hallways will notice that particular square of floor isn't polished by years of foot traffic like the rest of the hallway. It pops open when about 50+ pounds of pressure are applied to it, potentially dumping a character into a 30-foot-deep, five-foot-diameter pit. It's supposed to reset itself afterwards, but only has a 4-in-6 chance of doing so. At the bottom of the pit are six inches of filthy water and a silver-plated religious icon (depicting the widely popular monkey trickster deity Woho, worth 360 coins) that the cult lost a year ago.

Exits

The northwest door to the Library (9) is barricaded on the other side by crates full of papers, if the party hasn't already moved them. It would take 30 points of combined Strength to slowly push it open. Otherwise, the door could just be destroyed or removed from its hinges.

The north door to the Small Storage Room (7) is unlocked, but could be locked with a key from the Mosaic Room (3) or Barracks (11).

The northeast doorway leads to the Pit Alcove (5).

The southeast door to the Barracks (11) is locked, but could be unlocked with a key from the Mosaic Room (3) or Barracks (11).

The southwest door to the Bathing Chamber (10) has no lock.

7: Small Storage Room

This room used to be storage for daily sundries, but was emptied when the cult fled the compound. Now it only contains a lot of empty wooden shelves and cabinets. They could be used to block the door very effectively. The door could also be locked with a key from the Mosaic Room (3) or Barracks (11).

8: Large Storage Room

This is a large, warehouse-like space full of shelves and crates. It is overrun with unruly flesh, and whatever goods were stored here are largely ruined. Alas Enti waits behind the shelves, chanting endlessly and meaninglessly.

Alas Enti

Once the head of the contact cult, Alas Enti has been massively transformed by the Hand of Change in a desperate attempt to adapt into something that would survive the attack on Longton. She was also mentally devastated by that change, and by the disruption of the Hand's contact with this plane. She's now a swollen horror of lurid magenta flesh with fractally branching antler-like growths and virtually no humanoid features. Her psionic antennae cause constant psychic damage to those around her as they attempt to contact the Hand of Change.

Alas' mind is all but gone. She no longer understands speech, and the combination lock that trapped her in here is completely beyond her. She hates being alone. She is comforted by her nonsense chanting and the presence of the unruly flesh. If she is aware of another person, she will move towards them and chant at them. She won't leave the fleshy area of rooms 3, 4, 8, and 9, and she'll try to stop anyone else from leaving, as well.

She's still weaning the remnants of a black robe and 1,440 coins' worth of expensive, tasteless jewelry. She doesn't care about any of it, and will let anyone take it as long as she's calm and isn't harmed in the process. Much of the jewelry has been partially absorbed by her expanding flesh, but half can be removed without having to be cut free.

Alas has the stats of a troll, and does 1 point of damage to anything with a mind for each round that she has line of effect with them.

Exits

The east door to the Mosaic Room (3) is severely stuck by a layer of unruly flesh (if the party hasn't already torn it open recently), and requires either significant force or the use of a cutting implement to open.

The south door to the North Corridor (4) isn't covered in flesh, but is locked with a novel combination lock: Four cylindrical dials are stacked vertically next to the door's latch mechanism. Each one can be turned to display one of nine different arcane or a blank space. They're basically nonsense, corresponding to no actual language, but can easily be interpreted as a numbering system. Dialing in the glyphs for 2-7-5-3 unlocks the door. While the door can be opened from the North Corridor (4) without being unlocked, it will close and relock itself if the right combination isn't set.

If the west bulkhead to the surface hasn't already been cleared of debris, it's hard to do from underneath, requiring a total Strength of 20. Up to two adult-human-sized people can work together on this, more if they're smaller. It's unlocked, but can be locked with a key from the Mosaic Room (3) or Barracks (11).

9: Library

The cult's library of rare esoterica and original research has been all but completely consumed by unruly flesh.

Anybody who spends 10 minutes searching has an X-in-6 chance of finding intact old books worth 1d10 × 10 coins to a wizard or antiquarian (X = 3 - previous finds). They will also notice two mostly converted corpses underneath the unruly flesh.

If the party spends some time examining the cult's writing, go ahead and tell them about what happened here. You can be as vague as you want, since they're really only interpreting fragments.

There are two large (4' × 2') paintings on the walls, each only slightly marred by unruly flesh. They're merely decorative, not esoteric, depicting a lion and a dove in a competent if unimaginative style. They're worth 30 coins each, and would be a pain in the ass to carry.

The crates that barricade the south door are mostly full of old papers, but one contains a diamond lens worth 300 coins to a jeweler or 600 coins to an optician.

Exits

The north door to the North Corridor (4) is trapped from the outside, but opens normally from this side. The trap can also be unlocked from this side.

The south door to the South Corridor (6) is barricaded by crates full of papers on this side, if the party hasn't already pushed it open. From this side, they can be moved with just a little work.

10: Bathing Chamber

In the bathing chamber, the basement's green-gray stonework smooths out of its rugose gothic style of ornamentation, and switches abruptly to whimsical mosaics of sea creatures. The southern end of the room dips down at an angle below filthy black water, five feet at its deepest.

If someone decides to wade into the suspicious pool in a dungeon cursed by a flesh-warping planar power, feel free to pull out your favorite mutation table.

A toilet alcove in the northwest corner was a later and cheaper addition, and offers no privacy beyond a curtain that separates bathers from shitters.

Exits

The north door to the South Corridor (6) has no lock.

11: Barracks

This room served as excess sleeping space for low-ranking cultists when the mansion's bedrooms were fully occupied. It contains several beds and chests of drawers, four braziers, and two buckets. Three of the beds contain corpses. The walls are green-gray stone in the basement's usual style, with candle alcoves and two big iron chandeliers. The room stinks of rot and shit. There are a few crates full of supplies here.

The corpses are two women and one man, all cultists who locked themselves in here during the siege of Longton and the madness of their leaders, then overdosed on alchemical entheogens after their food ran out. They wear plain, vaguely scholarly clothing, and are very decomposed. If searched, each will yield 2d20 coins and an empty drug vial. One of the women has a key identical to the one from the Mosaic Room (3). It fits all the key-locked (or lockable) doors in the compound—such as the doors between the surface and the Preparation Room (1), between the Preparation Room (1) and the Ritual Chamber (2), between the South Corridor (6) and the Small Storage Room (7), between the South Corridor (6) and the Barracks (11), and between the Large Storage Room (8) and the surface—as well as the pit in the Pit Alcove (5).

The chests of drawers are almost empty, containing only spare bedding, no personal items.

The supply crates mostly contain various mundane sundries. The food is long gone, but there's plenty of lamp oil, paper, ink, charcoal, soap, and even a few weapons (four daggers, two shortswords, and a crossbow).

The buckets are full of shit and piss.

Exits

The north door to the South Corridor (6) is locked, but could be unlocked with a key from the Mosaic Room (3) or the corpses.

The east door to the Armory (12) is barricaded on this side by two chests of drawers and a bed, if the party hasn't already pushed it open. From this side, they can be moved with a bunch of work and some time.

12: Armory

This room is an utter wreck. There are broken weapons and smashed furniture strewn about, and scratches all over everything. There are scant remnants of three human bodies: some oddly diminished bones and a few twists of desiccated flesh. If the party makes any noise when opening or entering this room, Etsetto will immediately be upon them.

There's very little of value in this room. Six daggers, three suits of leather armor, one suit of chainmail, and four crossbow bolts have survived Etsetto's rage.

Etsetto

This creature used to be the cult's head of security and principle enforcer. He was rapidly given extensive and reckless biological enhancements when the group realized it was under attack, and his mind was destroyed when their connection to the Hand of Change was disrupted. He's now a gaunt, towering, distressingly flexible pink-and-russet humanoid with very little in the way of a face. He sports a third arm (notably smaller than his other two) and his feet have worn away to bony spikes—a fact which hasn't slowed him down as much as it should have.

Etsetto cannot rest, and prefers not to stop moving. Being trapped in this room has not improved his mental state, and all he wants to do right now is kill people and break things, in that order. If there's no one immediately available to kill and nothing interesting to smash, he'll absorb any corpses in sight. Failing that, he'll relentlessly lurch around on his spike-feet in search of mayhem.

Etsetto has the stats of an unarmed ogre with a 1d8 punch attack for each arm. If he assimilates a person-sized corpse (which takes 10 minutes), he heals fully and gains an HD. He might also gain a new limb or other faculty. He can squeeze through surprisingly small openings for such a big flesh mutant.

Exits

The east door to the Preparation Room (1) is locked, but is opened by a lever on the north wall nearby.

The west door to the Barracks (11) is barricaded on the other side by two chests of drawers and a bed, if the party hasn't already moved them. From this side, it would take 35 points of combined Strength to slowly push it open. Otherwise, the door could just be destroyed or removed from its hinges.

Postmortem

Wow, this one got out of control. I honestly thought it was going to take just a day or two, but instead I worked on it for almost a week. I really do need to be more concise. I do like what I came up with here, though. I actually want to run it!

Anyway, much thanks to Molomoot for inspiring this whole thing. I did a really poor job of following the instructions, but I had a great time.

Zoteris

So, back in 2024, I participated in this #Lore24 thing. That was one of those year-long creative challenges that the RPG scene likes to do every now and then, this particular one being about fleshing out a homebrew game setting by coming up with a new piece of lore every day throughout 2024. I made it to May 22 before the old slings and arrows of outrageous fortune managed to knock me off track. That was 143 entries, though, so I was pretty happy with how it went! I mean, I got 63,000 words out of it, plus a bunch of spreadsheet stuff, a couple maps . . . and it was fun!

Anyway, the setting in question is my science-fantasy project, Zoteris.

I still hope to do something with it someday. It's an unrestrained kitchen sink mashup of pretty much any idea that caught my interest, with a framework to more or less make it all fit together in what I think is a playable form. It's got magic, insanely advanced technology, mutants, a bunch of different posthuman variants, animal people, robot people, cybernetics, extraplanar intelligences, crazy pseudoscience ideas, kaiju, wildly varied post-post-apocalyptic societies, a stupidly vast scale of history, a calendar with 16 color-coded months . . . just loads of stuff.

Anyway, please check out my giant Zoteris Google doc. It's a massive wall of text, so, uh, I invite you to imagine it all illustrated by Mœbius and Roger Dean, I guess.

Alignment as cosmic affiliation

I never use alignment in my games. It's a poor representation of human behavior, and I think it produces more trouble than benefits as a game mechanic.

But, back in the '00s or '10s or so, there was a lot of TTRPG discourse around the idea that alignment could actually be cool if you treated it as an objectively real phenomenon, a manifestation of some kind of cosmic conflict. That could make a bit more sense out of things like spells that detect alignment, magic items that work differently depending on the alignment of their wielder or target, and maybe even the much-derided concept of alignment languages.

I think this idea was much more closely associated with the older Law-vs.-Chaos alignment paradigm than the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons nine-box system (which would later become such a meme with "alignment charts" of things like sitcom characters and bread storage techniques). This makes loads of sense, given that D&D's Law/Chaos axis was famously inspired by Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions (and probably influenced by Michael Moorcock's Elric / Eternal Champion saga), which absolutely casts those concepts as players in a metaphysical struggle. Also, there's something to be said for leaving the Good/Evil axis out of this conflict, separating cosmic ideals from mortal ones, and avoiding the declaration of any absolute, objective definitions of right and wrong.

Unfortunately, I never really saw any worked examples of this paradigm. Maybe they just stayed in people's home campaigns, or maybe they never really materialized beyond forum discussions. So I'll try developing the idea a bit myself.

A brief sidebar on terminology

So, I actually think that "Law" is a dumb word for a fundamental cosmic force. All respect to Anderson and Moorcock, but for me that word evokes very distinctly human concepts. Maybe it's my familiarity with superhero comics before fantasy novels, but I strongly prefer "Order" as the opposite of Chaos. (See Marvel's Lord Chaos and Master Order, and DC's Lords of Chaos and Order.)

That said, I also think it would be appropriate to discard those very loaded terms anyway.

Chthonos and Ouranos

Let's say that there are two opposing metaphysical forces that interfere with sapient beings in the mortal world. These aren't conscious entities like gods, but fundamental forces like gravity or electromagnetism. They've each got a lot of names (being named anew by each culture who encounters them), but I'll mostly call them Chthonos and Ouranos here. As you might guess, these names are derived from the chthonic and ouranic categories of Greek deities. I'd never use them as in-fiction terms (unless I'm setting my game in a Hellenic context), but I'll use them here to distance us from the D&D alignment system.

Chthonos drives people towards change and freedom. It's connected to innovation, creativity, whim, travel, revolution, individualism, transformation, and egalitarianism. It's associated with deep places (both caves and oceans) and the dark, but also with fire. Many of its symbols are variations on spiralling, squirming, or branching shapes, with snakes, trees, and torches also being used.

Ouranos encourages order and cooperation. Tradition, safety, community, permanence, hierarchy, control, and stability are important Ouranos concepts. It's associated with the sky and celestial bodies, with light, with stone and metal, with day and night and the seasons (but not with weather, usually). Its symbols tend towards wheel and circle themes, as well as the sun or moon (or both), stars, eyes (particularly singular, disembodied ones), and also trees (in places where that's not a Chthonos symbol).

Chthonos and Ouranos aren't self-aware, but they create something like a will or drive when in contact with mortal beings, like light shining through a prism to create a rainbow. The mortal involved will get the impression that the force has goals and might even feel that it gives them wordless commands, but those goals and commands are largely the product of the mortal's mind.

Ultimately, it's probably best to look at Chthonos and Ouranos as ideals, but ideals with an objective, external reality.

Alignment

By willingly aligning one's self with Chthonos or Ouranos, a being can become supernaturally connected to their chosen force. This usually involves induction by someone else who's already aligned to that ideal, but there are places, artifacts, and rituals that one might use to embrace a particular force without help. 

Alignment has a number of effects, largely beneficial but circumstantially harmful.

Identification

Anyone aligned to a given force can recognize that same alignment in others. They can't sense any alignment in people connected to the opposite force, though—not without using a spell or something.

Communication

Beings who share the same alignment can pretty much understand each other. This isn't telepathy as we normally understand it, nor is it a shared language. It's just that, when an aligned being speaks, the general meaning of their words is conveyed (loosely) to any nearby beings with the same alignment. This also makes it a lot easier to quickly learn the language involved for real, even without the help of a bilingual teacher.

Hierarchy

Alignment carries with it a quantitative rank, an abstract degree of alignment. Everyone starts out at the same base level upon joining up, and their ranking is increased or decreased according to how they serve and aid (or betray) the ideals and individuals associated with their chosen force.

This isn't a social reputation, but an objectively real degree of alignment. The ranking phenomenon is mostly experienced subconsciously, but it has a lot of effect on social interaction: Aligned people tend to go along with higher-ranked people of their alignment, even if they've never met them before.

Note that the whole phenomenon works the same under egalitarian Chthonos as it does under hierarchical Ouranos; it's just expressed differently by the people involved.

Subjection

Alignment can increase the effectiveness of magical or supernatural phenomena applied to an aligned creature by another being of the same alignment. That is, your alignment buddies can heal and buff you more effectively, but they can also hurt you badly if they turn on you.

This effect is strongly dependent on alignment rank, though: Your spells don't get any bonuses when used on your alignment superiors, just your peers and underlings.

Induction

Aligned individuals can grant that same alignment to willing, cognizant, unaligned individuals. There's usually some ceremony involved with this (sometimes a lot of ceremony), but it's not technically necessary: Physical contact and informed consent will do the job. And it needs to really be consent: You can't force anybody to align through duress. It just won't work.

Alignment is generally permanent. That is, there's no built-in capability of alignment to be discarded by the individual or revoked by their superiors. However, very powerful mortal magic can de-align an aligned subject. This is soul manipulation stuff, so we're talking 5th- or 6th-level spells. Also, this is a lot easier if the caster is the target's alignment superior.

Persistence

For some folks, this is the big one. Alignment ties people into their chosen force at the soul level, and the more aligned a person is—the higher their alignment rank—the more of an impression their soul leaves on that interface between the primal force and the world. The ideal itself isn't changed, but the metaphysical shadow or footprint left behind by a person who maintained a high degree of alignment over a long time can even persist after that person's death. And that can be enough to shelter their soul, preserving them from the wheel of rebirth, from roving spiritual predators, and even from whatever divine power might otherwise have a claim on them.

Such souls become a kind of ghost, but without the usual psychological degradation and binding to a location or object. They become saints, ascended masters, even candidates for godhood, and they almost always continue to serve leadership roles within their alignment groups.

Neutrality

There's no such thing as "neutral alignment". There's just Chthonos-aligned,  Ouranos-aligned, and unaligned. The vast majority of beings are unaligned.

Society

As I mentioned, "Chthonos" and "Ouranos" are just terms of convenience here. In-fiction, nobody is using those terms. The dual forces they represent don't truly have names, and any culture who becomes aware of them generally comes up with their own terminology. One culture might frame all of reality as a struggle between the Skies and the Depths, while another might talk about the conflict between Fire and the Tree.

Additionally, societies can have wildly varying relationships with these powers. In some places, one force might be accepted—even to the point of making alignment to it a near-universal rite of passage—while the other is considered anathema. Other groups might consider both forces to be dangerous alien influences, and shun all initiation ceremonies as potential vectors for socially destabilizing influences. Some cultures could even regard both ideals as legitimate and morally neutral choices.

Many societies—especially geographically and culturally isolated ones—remain unaware of one or even both forces, at least for now. While Chthonos and Ouranos have presumably existed since the beginning of reality itself, the phenomenon of alignment has a distinct historical starting point—probably a few thousand years ago.

Every few generations or so, reports will emerge of a "third primal force". If any of these really were distinct phenomena on the same order of magnitude as Chthonos and Ouranos, though, their influence in the world must have somehow been curtailed (possibly by agents of the other two), because they never really stuck around. More likely, these other forces were just foreign names and traditions for one or another of the usual two, managing to go unrecognized for a while due to mortal cultural barriers. It's also possible that some alleged thirds really were distinct forces of a totally different type: gods, curses, plagues, cultural movements, etc.

The gods

Gods can be aligned with Chthonos or Ouranos just like any other conscious thing. It's extremely rare for an actual deity to be inducted into an alignment, but it's much less unusual for alignment to be part of a mortal's path to divinity. Souls who manage to persist after death through alignment are often revered within an organization or community of similarly aligned individuals, and that reverence can accrue as divine power across the generations.

Gods born this way inevitably become even more strongly linked to Chthonos or Ouranos than they were in their mortal lives, and they come to represent their chosen force in the eyes of their followers, putting a name and face over a blind and mindless ideal (and possibly joining an existing host of similarly aligned deities). Alignment becomes a sacrament of the new religion, and the god gains the additional power of alignment rank over their subjects.

As a result of this, Chthonic and Ouranic gods (again, not something anyone would call them in-fiction) exist as distinct groups apart from each other, and from the more numerous unaligned deities. Co-aligned gods will often cooperate, even far outside of their own domains and originating cultures.

Elves, dwarves, and others

Somewhere in my giant scratch document, I've got this half-facetious and unexpounded fragment:

Elves are what happen when a human civilization succumbs to Chaos. Dwarves are what happen when a human civilization succumbs to Law.

I'm not actually interested enough in demihumans to develop the idea—for real, I generally want either a setting that's all humans or one that gets a little more interesting than pointy ears—but there might be something in it. Maybe elves, fairies, and goblins are all creatures of Chthonos, the end result of that primal force being allowed to influence human biology for generation after generation. And Ouranos, meanwhile, might have done the same thing to dwarves and, say, gnomes and giants, maybe. (Of course, in this paradigm, the elves would probably live underground while the dwarves live on mountaintops.)

You could also connect the traditionally Law/Chaos-designated devils and demons to the two primal forces as well: Maybe those flavors of fiend are just the fates of aligned souls who don't manage to hold onto the mortal world after death.

Back in the v.3.5 days, demons had a vulnerability to iron, while devils had a vulnerability to silver. (The latter quality remains in 5e, I think, but I think iron is no longer a mechanically distinct weapon material.) And, of course, fae creatures are frequently vulnerable to "cold iron". I tend to think of fairies as chaotic creatures, even if the Monster Manual doesn't back me up, so I always thought that maybe demons were vulnerable to iron because they were chaotic. And, really, doesn't iron feel like kind of a Law-aligned substance? You know, being associated with bars and chains and such? Whereas silver might be considered chaotic through its connection to the ever-changing moon? Of course, this paradigm really wants me to find a way to say that lycanthropes are especially lawful, which I can't honestly do. Oh well. But I definitely think you could extend the Chthonos and Ouranos correspondence chart to include materials, and iron and silver are thematically solid choices.

(I'm beginning to fear I overuse the word "paradigm" the way Gygax overused "millieu".)

Mechanics

Dang, maybe another time. This post is long enough. I might start working this alignment concept into the BX hack I'm developing, and nail down some mechanics in that process.