d20 Traps

1. A crown floating on a jet of water. Taking the crown allows the jet of water to hit the ceiling, where it brings to life a dehydrated and carnivorous fungus.
2. A bar of silver held between the mouths of two copper dragons. A powerful electric current flows through the silver. Taking it will force the current to instead flow through the copper chains that hang like a curtain over the room's door.
3. A room with a ruby on a pedestal in the centre. Every second wall is mirrored. The ruby acts as a lens for a blinding white light emitted by a fleck of rare metal in the pedestal, making it redder and darker. Removing the ruby will blind everyone. Replacing the ruby with an emerald will reveal secret messages written on the walls.
4. An urn in a stone alcove. The top of the alcove is flush with the top of the urn, acting as a stopper and sealing inside a powerful djinn. The djinn is the bored djinn from this story, and has decided just to kill you.
5. An ankle-deep pool of clear water. From one side, you can see the floor through it. From the other side, it reflects the sky from the window above the opposite door, which is too bright to see through. Once you've crossed from the first side, the floor slides away and the water becomes ten feet deep with piranhas in it.
6. An ogre chained to the wall. A sword stuck in a plinth, out of reach of the ogre. The blade of the sword passes through the links of the chains, holding them in place. If it's removed the ogre will be freed.
7. A wall-sized painting depicting an impressionistic parlour scene of a distraught, howling figure. The painting is actually a framed sheet of glass that makes anything behind it look like a painting. Behind it is a drawing-room and a ghoul standing very still with its mouth open.
8. A pleasant grassy clearing with small trees, blackberry bushes and a couple of birds. Actually a pool of cow shit abandoned by a negligent farmer. Anything heavier than a child walking across it will break the crust and drown. There's no air within a foot of the pool's surface, as cow shit swallows oxygen.
9. A river of quicksilver with a thin layer of flammable oil floating on top. Lighting the braziers in the walls also lights a fuse that conducts flame to the oil, which burns away and allows lethal quicksilver fumes to flood the room.
10. Razortoothed rats in the walls that emerge in their thousands if even a drop of blood is spilt. A very fat woman sitting on a treasure chest who demands an extravagant sum before she'll move and let you open it. She will make sure you know about the rats. She has a crossbow. Its bolts are blunted, stunning but not wounding.
11. A vampire nailed to the wall with ruby-tipped silver spikes. Its palms continually bleed. It pretends to be a normal person who has only been there a few hours, but its clothes are dusty and it won't let you see its teeth.
12. A bone whistle on a glass pedestal. The walls of the room are strangely curved, echoing and amplifying any sound made within. The resonant frequency of the pedestal is such that, if anyone blows the whistle in the room, it will shatter and explode into a thousand flying shards of glass.
13. An old dusty book, expensively bound and illuminated with gold leaf. Contains several hundred years of parish records. Infested with tiny black worms that are experts at mimicking letters and live to sow strife and discord. If undetected they will crawl into the wizard's spellbook and riddle it with tiny punctuation errors, meaning the next spell she memorises will go horribly wrong when she tries to cast it.
14. A rack of venison roasting on a metal spit. A big carving knife with a metal handle standing in a block of wood. An electric current runs through the spit, which bulges inside the meat so that if you try to carve it you will probably make contact with the metal and be electrocuted.
15. On the floor, a trompe-l'oeil painting of a spiked pit. Perception save to realise it's only a painting. It is made of canvas, which will tear if you walk over it and drop you into a spiked pit.
16. Spring of fresh water with a faint reddish tinge and metallic tang. Testing for poison reveals a high but harmless concentration of iron. In the next room there is a giant magnet that will pin anyone who drank it to the wall by their stomach.
17. Spiral staircase that is actually a spring. When you turn the doorhandle at the top it releases a latch at the bottom and the staircase collapses upward, crushing you between its coils.
18. Mushrooms emit a curious light that makes it impossible to distinguish between humans and statues. The room they illuminate contains ninety-nine statues and one blind assassin.
19. Swarm of mummified macaques. Big flaming torch on the wall beside you. If you set them on fire you'll swiftly discover they're stuffed with gunpowder and shrapnel.
20. Floor is covered with pyramids, from the base of the door you walk in through to the far wall. On top of each pyramid is balanced a small green egg. Ten thousand starlings stare at you politely from the walls. If you manage to get to the other side without disturbing any eggs you'll find out that the door to the next room opens inwards.

BONUS: An abandoned drawing-room with rats scurrying across the floor and a spiral staircase in the centre. The stairs get bigger as you go down, as do the tapestries and torches. At the bottom is an exact duplicate of the first drawing-room only much larger and with giant rats in it. We wanted to put this in the list but it turns out it's just funny, not a trap.

BONUS TWO: Worm in a bottle of alcohol. If the worm is ever not submerged in alcohol it will rapidly grow to problematic size. Nico insists that this is an item and not a trap.

surely you know what oglaf is
(it has naked pictures! beware!!)

The Unfortunate Occurrence at Thumbroke Manor

I have decided I want to run Gothic horror games using Into the Odd. I think that's a good and normal thing to do.

So here's a game we did several days ago. I ran it and Nico was the only player. It took maybe an hour to write and a bunch more hours to play, which is a good return on investment, especially if any of you guys use it also. I'm good at being characters though so that means I don't need a lot more to a run a game than a couple of strong personalities in a tense relationship. Your skills may lie in other areas! See how it goes.

New Meat Dungeon: Happy Funtimes Bloodpit

BLOODPITBLOODPITBLOODBLOODBLOOD

Mmmmmm CAD programs

Okay so I made this thing in SolidWorks. I'm calling it the Blood Pit, because I read a bunch of choose-your-own-adventure books lately and it ruined vastly improved my ability to name things.

The pit is broken into four wedges, which each contain a maze/gauntlet with the same layout. The wedges all funnel down to the centre of the pit, where they join up into a small gladiatorial arena. Looks like this:

The idea, from a metagame perspective, was to come up with a good way to do competitive rpgery. Start each player with a character or two in their own private wedge, then they have to fight through a micro-dungeon in order to get to the middle and kill each other. Obvious warning: this is not a good game type for the wrong kind of nerd. Friendships may should be broken.

ring = crosshairs
riddle = questionmark
labyrinth = spiral
trial = skull and crossbones

The zones in these wedges are, in the order encountered, Ring, Riddle, Labyrinth and Trial. Each wedge has a theme, and each zone has a mechanically consistent but thematically different encounter. Every dead end is a Dead End. Save vs death, you rat.

Every round of combat, guess at a riddle and stumble through the labyrinth should be counted. Give it a wanky name like 'Heartbeats' or something if you're really desperate. Use these to keep track of where people are so that they enter the central ring at the right time.

For my mechanically consistent encounters, I have picked these things what are below:

• RING - Simple, pretty easy encounter to get everyone warmed up. Takes place in a circular chamber that should be decorated appropriately to your theme.
• 2 HD, armour as leather, 1d6 attack.
• RIDDLE - Mid-sized room with some kind of barrier between rimwards entrances and hubwards exit: river of acid, wall of roots, bloated fleshbeast, etc. Answering riddle correctly removes barrier. Every time players guess wrong they take 1d3. Trying to cut through the barrier also earns you 1d3. Either of those last two things cost you time.
• Answer for all riddles is the same thing. For me it's always death.
• LABYRINTH - Contents of labyrinth make travel between any intersection take 1 time period thingy. Shape of labyrinth makes any sensible path take 5 units, but anyone not paying attention should lose some valuable time here.
• TRIAL - One serious fight with an interesting monster. Central part stuck in middle of room with about 6 limbs/extra fighty bits flying through the air around it. Monster should surprise PCs probably. Do some suspenseful trudging though the bigger arena here before you spring it.
• Body of critter/main critter is 2 HD, armour as chain, 1d6 attack
• Limbs of critter/extra critters are 1 HD, armour as paper, 1d3-2 attack. 

Here are some example wedges:

THEME	RING	RIDDLE	LABYRINTH	TRIAL
Classical	Gladiator Automaton	Sphinx – wall of sand: “What is the surest path to freedom?”	Choking Mist	Microhydra
Fae (Alice in Wonderland duh)	Warty Toad w/ Axe	Big Blue Caterpillar – wall of mushrooms: “What is life’s greatest reward?”	Clinging Roots	Faeries + Faerie Queen (like giant beeeees)
Grimdark	Death Knight	Wall of Maws: “What medicine will ease my pain?”	Grasping Arms	Chain Demon
Racism	Haunted Samurai Armour	Sage-Looking Fucker in Peace Garden – wall of him/her doing kungfu: “What marks the start and end of empire?”	Spinning Mu Ren Zhuang	River Kami w/ Angry Lantern Spirits
Comedy	Hugely Fat Clown w/ Ladder	Ringmaster – wall of clown antics: “Who gets the last laugh?”	Bouncy Castle	Ghost Pies + Ghost Baker

The central arena can be anything you fucking want it to be

• a caltrop-carpeted pit feat. on rickety podium ballista
• a boiling lake, water slowly rising, one 10 foot pole on the island in the middle
• extra dimensional portal that grants control of devilwasps to anyone standing in it
• giant set of scales - every person on them releases more mustard gas on the ground below, increases die size of damage dealt in getting to the centre

Just make it something that rewards people getting through the maze quicker!

Whole map from top wow

And if you know anyone with a 3D printer then I can totally give you the file and you can go and print this thing and stick it in the middle of the table that's like half the whole point I mean c'mooon.

The Many Hobbies of the Peacock King

Did you guys know you can just take maps from the internet and add numbers to them and the maps are yours forever?

This is not a sketch of the interior of the Gur-Emir mausoleum in Samarkand, home to the jade sarcophagus of Tamerlane, from a six-volume photographic survey commissioned by Konstantin von Kaufman, Russian governor-general of Turkestan, in the early 1870s. Although that would be a cool thing for it to be! But it is not that and is, in fact, another thing.

1. Entrance hall. An skeleton in a tailcoat and pinstripe trousers, his bones coated in ash, will offer to take your jackets. If you allow him to do this he will scurry off with them and hurl them into the small incinerator in 4. Then he will come back and ask for the rest of your clothes. If you clean the ash from his bones the ritual animating him will break and he will die. He is very persistent and knows a lot about the palace, including the secret of the incinerator, but can only be made to spill the beans if you threaten the peacocks, his charges. He understands you perfectly but has no tongue and can only read and write in cuneiform, which he will scratch onto the ground with a single bony finger. He has a library chip (see 5.) rattling around in his skull.

2. Gardens. Blood-drinking sacred peacocks patrol the grounds. Anyone who sees their fanned tails must save or be compelled to worship the peacocks, slicing open their veins and allowing the peacocks to drink until they are sated (which usually takes about 1d8 hp worth of blood). One of these is worth a small fortune if you can extricate it from the palace, though you might accidentally start a new religion in the process. The first false princeling, a doppelganger created from the substance of Tawus-Shah, the Peacock King, can also be found here, petting the peacocks. Pale, androgynous and clad in the finest and sparsest silks, the fact that he is immune to the peacocks' effect is the only obvious difference between him and the real princeling.

3. Buzkashi grounds. Several dozen horse-mounted players clad in only whips, spiked turbans and boots are busily engaged in dragging a headless, sandpacked goat carcass from one end of the field to the other. The blue team (as indicated by turban colour) is currently winning. Fist-size turquoise carvings of lions adorn the goalposts. The princeling's bodyguard, an enormous albino, is hanging half-starved in a cage in the centre of the field - the players are competing to see who gets to eat her, albino flesh being a prized delicacy among their people. She knows that the Peacock King has created three false princelings and that none of them will burn or suffer if exposed to flame, but she does not know where the real one is. She is consumed with shame over letting him get kidnapped. She doesn't know he went with the Peacock King voluntarily.

4. Incinerator. Discrete cubicle about the size of a bathroom stall, smooth-walled clay shaft dropping down into pit of roaring green flame, eerie and soundless. Anything consumed by this flame will appear unblemished, whole and perfectly hairless, in room 11.

5. Library. The second false princeling is here, browsing the scrolls, which are written in an assortment of dead languages (requiring translation by an expert) and have all been salvaged from libraries long thought burnt. The princeling is wearing leather gloves, which he will claim is to protect the scrolls from finger-oil but is in fact because his touch will char and shrivel the paper. If you are looking for a specific scroll he will happily guide you to it, though he has only a limited grasp of the languages and will often get stuff wrong. He will make no attempt to prevent you from touching the pages with your own bare hands. Any attempt to remove anything from the room, whether it be a scroll, an urn, a fleck of dust, a dropped coin or a princeling, will awaken the obsidian gargoyle who perches above the door and who vomits blue bloodfreezing antimagma, which will preserve you in stasis until the Peacock King comes to get you. Random scroll contents include:

• agricultural treatise
• spurious travellers' tales
• epic poem documenting forgotten war
• compilation of lewd gossip about important figures of dead society
• erotic odyssey
• natural history
• openly partisan political chronicle
• bad military advice
• dry diplomatic missives from one extinct culture to another
• strategy guide to Hundred Worries, the game everyone is playing in 8. 
• complete explanation of how to be happy
• periplus - list of ports and coastal landmarks, in order, along a distant shore
• golem creation instructions, will result in sad, confused monster who doesn't understand modern world
• cookbook w/ recipe for peacock stuffing
• catalogue of ancient curses

All are valuable to the right research wizard or historian.

6. Anti-art gallery. The Peacock King despises perspective and has, in the four rooms of this corridor, abolished it. Anything in any one of the rooms appears the same size to anyone in any of the other rooms. Anyone can step instantly to any of the rooms from any other. Anyone in any one of the rooms can make a melee attack against anyone in any other room and can pass things back and forth, etc. It's all very confusing. Within the rooms you move around as normal, you can't step from one corner to another but only in between them. The walls are inscribed with complex geometrical patterns that seem to come alive if you look at them for long enough, though they don't. Two nomad-philosophers in spiked turbans and boots are taking a break from buzkashi to study the walls at length, happy to chat about what the hell's going on. They know there is a secret room and that to get there you have to "destroy yourself and be reborn". They also know a lot about sacred mathematics. Any objects of pure art brought into the gallery will, after a round has passed, come alive and try to attack anyone who commits the sin of looking at it. This will break the curse on the culture hero in 9., but only for as long as he stays in the gallery.

7. Smoking room. To the north is a kitchen and pantry, to the east is a long dining-hall with a table running down the middle. Low comfortable couches everywhere. Miniatures on shaded walls of attractive nude youths, gold leaf around edge of paper probably worth something. In the centre of the smoking-room stands an ornate glass hookah twice the size of a man being puffed away at merrily by a couple of sleepy nomads (does not count as an art object for purposes of 6., since it has another function). One of the nomads is holding a scroll from the library and has in her left boot a chip of obsidian with the cuneiform for "debtor" on it. This is a library chip. It will allow you to borrow up to three scrolls out of the library without angering the gargoyle, but you will first have to pay off the nomad's late fees, which are calculable at a single human tooth/day. The scroll is currently three days overdue and is a guide to hydraulic engineering. The skeleton butler comes by every couple of hours to add coal to the hookah and hand around glasses of orange sherbet. Anyone smoking the hookah for more than a couple of minutes will go into a light trance, possibly falling over and hurting themselves, and awaken 2d6 hours later with vague memories of wandering the bowels of a vast ziggurat and being spoken to earnestly by a lammasu. For 4d6 minutes after they wake up they will find themselves able to comprehend all dead languages and no living ones. Every subsequent time they smoke the hookah, the effect lasts twice as long and they become more compelled to do the bidding of ancient gods. The dining table is set for a great feast and a skeleton chef labours in the kitchen, putting the finishing touches on the stuffed sacred peacock that will be its centrepiece. Other dishes include olive, hummus, halvah and albino-flesh kebabs.

8. Gaming courtyard. Open to the sunlight. Hexagonal stand in the middle manned by skeleton barista dispenses thimble-sized cups of insanely strong honey-scented coffee to extremely old people who lounge on cushions playing a kind of tile-based three-player strategy game called Hundred Worries. The board is five-sided, the rules are simple but hard to master, the game is designed to create situations where two people gang up against a third. There can only be one victor. It gets political. The Peacock King will grant a wish to anyone who wins a game that he plays in (which is to say, doesn't come second) but if you play a game with him and you don't win he will not allow you to leave the courtyard until you do. Reigning champion has paid off skeleton barista to serve his opponents decaf, crippling their game, could plausibly be blackmailed about this. Knows that the Peacock King has a treasure chamber somewhere in the palace that "only the foolish can enter, only the wise can leave".

9. Baths. Hook by door for hanging turbans on, racks for keeping boots. If searched one boot will yield three gold coins!! The boots themselves are probably more valuable than that. Another has a library chip in it. Western room filled w/ pools of extremely cold water, tiny arctic shrimp that nibble dirt from skin and leave you rejuvenated. Marble fountain in room's centre of strongman wrestling serpents is actually ancient culture hero locked in time by divine curse, serpents are later addition, water run through pipes in their bodies is cooled by excess stasis energy from curse and fed into pools. Eastern room pressure-locked (doors open inwards), currently filled with flesh-meltingly hot steam. Third false princeling can be seen through glass panels from outside, apparently enjoying himself. Nomads lounge in cold pools, bickering and reciting poetry, irritated that the princeling is taking up the sauna but too afraid of steam (and the wrath of the Peacock King) to do anything about it. The tunnel that usually vents steam outside the palace is currently blocked off, magnifying the heat in the room tenfold. Very thin woman in central bath is trusted advisor of the Peacock King, knows that he despises most of the nomads and would never allow the real princeling to be exposed to their covetous gazes, will provide useful advice if you can get the fake out of the sauna. It's her library chip in the boot. She knows that it will allow you to leave the treasure chamber but has no idea how to get in.

10. Bedroom and harem. Pillows, giant mirrors, beautiful pale boys with scars on their inner arms from feeding the bloodstained albino sacred peacock that wanders the room and that they treat as a beloved pet. Skeleton playing the zither unobtrusively in the corner. Floor descends in steps like inverted ziggurat, air gets hotter and hotter as you descend. Curtains of white silk, illuminated from with, part to reveal huge clay-walled firepit set into floor, dangerously bright, flames leaping into air. The Peacock King is grappling in his vast blue hands the ash-coated bones of his most recent lover, mourning his own insatiability and trying to put the boy back together. Every so often the skeleton butler will bring in a cartload of coal and refuel the fire, which will kill the Peacock King if it ever goes out. The Peacock King usually appears as a huge blue jolly naked fat man in a fez. He can be any size, take any shape and appear anywhere in the palace at any time. He can create servants from his own substance but is limited to three or four at a time. He will burn anything he touches. The skeletons of people he kills in this way are bound to serve him. They feel the same way towards him that they did in life - all the ones you will meet in the palace are former lovers of his who still feel tremendous affection for him. An iron grate in the firepit opens onto a tunnel that leads to 11. If the Peacock King dies everything in the palace except for the nomads and the real princeling will crumble to ash over the space of twenty minutes.

11. Treasure chamber. The real princeling is being kept here among huge piles of gold and jewels. The Peacock King promised that it would be a matter of days at most before he figured out a way for them to consummate their love without anyone getting turned into a skeleton. This was weeks ago. He's since been denied the liberty of the grounds and meals are becoming increasingly erratic. He's not aware that the Peacock King is consoling himself with flame-duplicates of his beauty, a practice basically akin to masturbation. He holds no real grudge against the Peacock King and mostly feels sorry for him, but also he would very much welcome rescue. A trapdoor in the floor leads to the firepit in 10. An obsidian sarcophagus against the north wall will transport a single person to the library if the door is closed on them while they are holding a library chip. The centrepiece of the Peacock King's hoard is an enormous golden statue of a lammasu that whispers in dead languages, creeping the princeling the fuck out and causing him to doubt his sanity (he's been alone and hungry for a while now). It is actually the ancient god who cursed the culture hero in 9. It will ask you (in a dead language) to sacrifice an albino to it. If you do it will break down the wall to 10. and try to kill the Peacock King for imprisoning it millennia ago.

HARPYSHAFT!: The Dungeon Adventure

1. I wanted to write a dungeon but I'm not sure how to draw a map that isn't fuck-ugly
2. Nobody can decide if they want to fuck harpies or not and I think that's hilarious

would you fuck this harpy? why or why not?

You start at the bottom of a vertical shaft. Every room in this dungeon is a ledge or flat place somewhere along the walls of the shaft. If you can fly this isn't even a dungeon, you just go up and out. It is assumed that you cannot fly. If you can fly your DM is under instructions to take that away from you. Why would they even try to use it if... ugh whatever.

It is possible to start at the top of the vertical shaft and go down. It is maybe even possible to come into the vertical shaft via a cave in the side and have the choice of going up or down. It would be cool if there were three multiple, adjacent shafts that you could get back and forth between via caves. There aren't though.

The shaft used to be a tower. Now it is underground. This is because it is thousands of years old. The shaft is high in barren hills that used to be a city and now aren't. The city used to stand on a flat plain. The city used to not be colonized by harpies. The harpies used to not know how to grab human beings by their upper arms and fly off with them and drop them down a hole and break their legs and leave them there until the harpies get bored or hungry. Now they do.

(Sidebar: harpies cannot actually fly very far or high. This is because harpies are basically vultures and vultures are heavy as fuck. They would prefer to glide than flap and can't really effectively take off unless they have access to a thermal updraft. Thermal updrafts only form during the day so if a harpy is on the ground at night it's not going very far. The presence of thermals is often indicated by cumulus clouds, so the desert scavengers know that if they see a clump of cumulus clouds they should keep an eye out for harpies. All of this is the reason that the harpies need a shaft to drop people down and can't just use, you know, the sky. I'd like to thank a comment by Scrap Princess on Patrick Stuart's blog and also Animorphs for the knowing of this.)

You have been dropped down the shaft by a harpy. Or you have to rescue somebody who has been dropped down the shaft by a harpy. I am going to be describing this dungeon from the bottom up because that's better in all ways.

like this only square. square as a high school principal

The tower is square in cross-section, maybe twenty metres along each edge, maybe a hundred metres high. The walls are crumbling ancient stone. In places they are etched with ancient designs that mean nothing to anybody now and were probably just dumb scatological graffiti in the first place. They are also etched with dumb scatological graffiti that is in your language and perfectly comprehensible. Thanks, harpies.

If it's morning or evening a harpy will come down to see if you are worth eating yet about once every half hour. If it's close to noon half of the harpies will be out hunting, taking advantage of the thermals on the plains. If it's close to midnight half of the harpies will be asleep. In either case a harpy has a 50% chance of coming down every half hour. See how neatly the maths works out there? If you make too much noise during the morning or evening there is a 50% chance of this happening. If you make too much noise during the night or day there is a 25% chance, obviously. If a harpy sees that you are actively trying to escape it will go and get its flock and they will all come back and drop shit on you until you are not actively trying to escape any more. Individual harpies are all extremely greedy, weak-willed and easily amused and if you need a harpy not to alert its flock you could do worse than to play on these factors. After the second time they catch you trying to escape they'll probably start posting guards, which probably wouldn't even be that bad for you, since the guards are all extremely greedy, weak-willed and easily amused. There are maybe thirty harpies up there.

All the decomposition and harpy shit going on at the bottom of the shaft creates significant amounts of methane gas. The warmer it gets the more of there is. Between morning and evening there is enough of an updraft (a horrible, acrid updraft) in the shaft to enable a harpy to take off and fly from the bottom to the top without landing. Around noon a harpy could actually pick a human up and carry them to the top with reasonable ease. If a harpy comes down late at night they have to flutter-hop from platform to platform; they don't have enough lift to soar. This is a big part of the reason (besides cruelty) that the harpies even keep the shaft around - all the gas billowing out the top allows them to get into the air basically whenever.

It's possible to climb the sides of the shaft, but methane-related wooziness makes it impossible to do all in one go. Unless your character doesn't need to breathe for some reason. Then the DM has to think of some other reason. For every ten metres you climb vertically, unaided, you get -2 to all climb checks until you've rested on a flat surface for five minutes. If you fall there's a 25% chance you land in a pile of harpy shit for half damage. If you do there's a 50% chance you get harpy shit disease.

Rooms

A. This is the floor. The floor is covered with bones, rotting flesh and harpy guano. The harpy guano lies in uneven mounds and is in places so thick that it will cushion a faller and leave them dazed but unbroken. This is what has happened to you. Or to the princeling you're rescuing. The princeling is extremely glad that you have come to rescue her (princeling is a gender-neutral term designating "one who is to be rescued"). Searching the bones will net you:

1. Nothing
2. Harpy shit disease
3. Couple of fingernail-sized white tiles
4. Couple of copper coins!
5. Dented-to-shit knight's helmet, might fit a guy with a really fucked-up head
6. Potion of feather fall, cork still in
7. Crust of bread smeared w/ harpy shit as if it were blue cheese
8. Tusk of baby elephant, scrimshawed w/ somebody's last words

Searching the shitpiles will get you the same thing but also a 50% chance of contracting harpy shit disease regardless of what else you get. If you are particularly greedy, weak-willed, or easily amused, this will eventually turn you into a harpy. If you have harpy shit disease twice you will turn into two harpies.

There is also a person here w/ two broken legs. She did not land on the harpy shit. She is a level one thief named Moggs from the second-nearest town who has been the victim of a cruel prank by a level two thief. She cannot climb or walk. She has harpy shit disease. If you do not rescue her from the pit she will emerge on her own at a later date as a harpy and try to fuck w/ you. She has a thirty-metre length of black silk rope concealed in the lining of her doublet (she is totally wearing a doublet) and four discs of tarnished silver in the sole of each boot. She knows someone in town who you would also like to know. She will not tell you about the rope until she is completely convinced that you are going to help her. It is special soundless thieves' rope and highly illegal in all civilized societies. It's worth more than the silver. She has already eaten all her food.

If you try to kill Moggs she will tell you that she is protected by an ancient revenant that seeks vengeance on all who would harm her. Then she will die. If you try to escape without Moggs she will do her best to alert the harpies. She is a dick but she is also doing exactly what you would do in her situation and she will remind the players of this constantly.

Every day you spend here you have a 10% of catching harpy shit disease. There's also a 7/16 of some new prey falling from the sky onto your head (see E. Also, hahahaha good luck figuring out how to roll for that). You probably don't have that much food. You could eat Moggs I suppose. If you do that you definitely get harpy shit disease.

what about... this harpy

B.

This is the remnants of the second floor of the tower. It's about twenty metres off the ground (ancient civilizations like high ceilings). It's a jagged metre-wide clay ledge taking up the whole of the west side of the tower. It used to be a floor. A couple of wooden beams jut out from the clay and cross to the opposite side of the shaft. If you have a rope you can throw one over the beams and use the beams to get to the ledge. If you're a really good climber you could go up the west wall and get stuck under the ledge and then go around to the north wall and get up that way. Or just straight up the north wall I guess.

If you make a harpy come down here to get you the harpy will perch on this ledge. It won't come down any further alone because it is a loathsome coward. It will stay up there and yell insults at you and probably try to shit on you because this is the only thing harpies know how to do. Then it will leave and go back and get its friends.

There is a small hole behind the ledge. In the hole is the skeleton of an ancient tomb robber who has not understood that this is not a tomb. He is holding a bronze pick. He was apparently trying to dig diagonally to the surface. This is not possible. It's dark in the hole, especially at night, and it would be possible to hide in there and ambush a harpy who was sitting on the ledge. The bronze pick would be worth some money to a collector of antiquities.

There is a snake in the ribcage of the skeleton. It is a docile, non-poisonous snake. If surprised it will bite you and deal no damage whatsoever. It has adopted the distinctive colouration of a well-known variety of poisonous snake. If the harpy finds it there is a 50% chance it will freak the fuck out and a 50% chance it will grab the snake and throw it at you. There is a network of rodent holes in the dirt that you will only find if you are looking for them. This is how the snake got there. Inside the rodent holes are a couple of fingernail-sized white tiles.

If Moggs doesn't think you're going to rescue her she will totally tell the harpy that you're planning on ambushing it.

C.

This is the remnants of the third floor. It's twenty metres up from the second floor. It's a flat square chunk of clay suspended in the middle of the shaft by a couple of wooden beams that cross the shaft, just like the second-floor ones. The underside of the clay is decorated with a mosaic of frolicking dolphins from which most of the fingernail-sized white tiles have fallen out. If you put three of these white tiles back in the mosaic the Sea God of the tower people, long since reduced to the most pathetic of shadows, will recognize it as the last act of devotion it will ever receive and expend its dying breath to grant you the Blessing of Lost Thalassa. The smallest dolphin's mother-of-pearl eye will fall out into your hand. Anyone who holds it under their tongue for a full day gains an extra saving throw against disease, which they can keep for themselves or give to somebody else with a touch. The more times you use it the more deeply you understand the seas and the more tempted you become to declare yourself Thalassa Nova, the Oceanic Messiah. If you're looking to sell it there's a duke in the closest large city who has sunpox and would pay handsomely for anything like a cure.

There is a dead guy on top of the clay. He is wearing nothing but a leather codpiece. He came here to fuck a harpy. His mostly-skeletal hand is dangling over the side of the clay. It could easily be lassooed and used to pull the guy's whole corpse down. If you get too close to the corpse it will animate and attack. It is possessed by a furious spirit, angry that it never got to achieve its one wish in life - to fuck a harpy. Around its neck there is half a broken copper coin with a hole drilled in it on a bit of string. If you remove this coin the spirit's connection to the body will be broken. If you hurt the body badly enough, or if you simply wait long enough, the spirit's rage will be dispelled and it will temporarily calm down.

One of the harpies in the flock is wearing half a broken copper coin with a hole drilled in it on a bit of string around its (long, slender) neck. This coin is its priceless treasure and fits codpiece guy's half perfectly. It traded a smashed child's rattle to another harpy for it three weeks ago.

The other harpy is called Felch. It was the lover of undead codpiece guy. They met in the hills, hunting, both alone as the sun went down. They spoke for hours. They were afraid at first but as the days went by and the long summer drew to a close they knew they were ready. They arranged a secret rendezvous in a quiet dell that only codpiece guy knew. Or so he thought. Actually when he got there a couple of other harpies were stalking antelope in the rocks above and they spotted him and by the time Felch got there it was too late and it had to help kill him to save face because if it had shown even a second of hesitance the other harpies would have torn it apart. It couldn't bear to look at the coin so it traded it away for some worthless garbage. It is indistinguishable, except by smell, from all the other harpies.

If you can give Felch the opportunity to apologize to codpiece guy's spirit and explain that it was all a terrible mistake his spirit will finally be free. Felch will do anything to help you from that moment on. Also Moggs will find the story so adorable that she will stop being a dick for the rest of the adventure.

if you want to fuck this harpy it's not my place to judge

D.

This is the remnants of a staircase connecting the third floor of the tower to the fourth and fifth floors. It starts halfway across the south wall, ten metres up from the third floor. It goes up at a 45-degree angle until it gets to the point on the east wall where the fourth floor would be. Then it keeps going up along the east wall until it gets to the point where the fifth floor would be. Then it stops. It's maybe half a metre wide, less in places. In places it is slippery with harpy shit.

If you walked out along the wooden beams that keep C. suspended in the air until you got to the east wall you'd be ten metres below the beginning of this staircase. From there it would be an easy climb up to it, assuming the revenant didn't get you and you didn't fall off the beams. You could then edge along the staircase until you got to its end, in the corner of the east and the north wall, eighty metres off the ground. Then you would be only twenty metres from the top of the shaft and you might be able to just climb out.

There is a cave in the west wall, across from the staircase and above it. The cave is lined with twigs, straw, feathers, bones and harpy shit. There is a morbidly obese harpy living in the cave. It is wearing a crown woven from brambles. It can only fly out of the cave in the hours around noon, when the sun is at its highest. Otherwise it will tumble out and fall to its death.

The other harpies have told this harpy that it is the Queen of the Harpies. They have told it that it is the ultimate authority over a grand continent-spanning harpy empire. They bring it food and pretend to relay its wishes to its millions of obedient slaves. The food is not that good. The Queen of the Harpies does not suspect a thing.

If the Queen of the Harpies sees you trying to climb out of the shaft, it will shout "Halt! Who goes there!". It has a one-track mind and is deathly afraid of conspirators. If you do not identify yourself to its satisfaction, it will scream. Its scream is painfully high-pitched and brings all the harpies scurrying, no matter what time it is. It also makes your ears bleed for 2d6 damage. If you are within a metre of the Queen it stuns you. If you are not expecting it you must make a Will save not to clap your hands to your ears and, if you fail the Will save, a Reflex save not to fall off the side of the shaft. From the Queen's cave it can only see the upper half of the staircase.

Two wooden beams jut out from the wall below her cave. Each ends in splinters and is about a metre long. Either would take the weight of a rope. If you walked out along the wooden beams that support C. until you got to the west wall you would be directly beneath them. If you climb over the lip of the Queen's cave it will scream. If you introduce a harmless but poisonous-looking snake into the Queen's cave it will scream. If the Queen screams once and there's nothing there, only half of the harpies will come scurrying the next time. If she screams twice and there's nothing there, only one harpy will come scurrying. It will be the harpy with the broken copper coin around its neck. The Queen is friends with the coin harpy and knows where the coin harpy got the coin from. The coin harpy kind of feels bad about the elaborate prank they're playing on the Queen, but not bad enough to stop doing it.

The Queen's cave is actually a tunnel that leads out the side of the hill, past the harpy nest at the top of the shaft. Moggs knows about this. It's how she got in. She was told by a level two thief that the tunnel led to a secret treasure complex of the ancient wizard people kings. She came on the Queen from behind and then the Queen screamed and stunned her and hop-dragged her to the edge of the shaft and threw her in. This is why the Queen is now deathly afraid of conspirators. You are unlikely to be able to identify yourself to the Queen's satisfaction but one good way to do it would be to proclaim yourself her loyal servants and toss her the head of an assassin, which she will eat.

The cave also has a couple of fingernail-sized white tiles mixed in with all the straw.

E.

This is the area around the top of the shaft. It's a clearing in the scrub atop an barren hill in between a couple of larger, more barren hills. There are bones scattered all around the clearing. There are big conical piles of mysteriously sticky straw that the harpies have gathered together for obscure harpy reasons. These are spectacularly flammable, almost like gunpowder, and will explode at the slightest spark, sending bone-shrapnel in all directions and scaring the shit out of the harpies. Do not stand too close to them.

If it's morning or evening there are thirty-odd harpies scattered about the clearing, scratching at the ground, perching on the branches of a huge acacia tree, gossiping, picking fights and getting the last little bits of brain out of children's skulls. If it's around noon there are ten to fifteen harpies doing the same thing. If it's around midnight there are fifteen to twenty harpies sleeping in rows along the branches of a huge acacia tree and the remainder doing the same thing on the ground. Harpies only sleep four or five hours a day, but when they do it's extremely hard to wake them up.

If the harpies spot you trying to get out of the shaft they will make every effort to throw you back in. Or just kill you.

Around sunset each day a harpy hunting party will return with one of the following:

1. Nothing
2. Stray dog, still w/ collar
3. Scale-armoured caravan guard
4. Skinny, overly-confident wizard
5. Plump, terrified merchant
6. Horse
7. Couple of small antelope
8. Elephant calf

They will toy with their prey for an hour or two before getting bored. Then 50% chance of tearing it apart in a feeding frenzy, 50% chance of throwing it into the pit for later. So each sunset the PCs remain in the shaft there's a, I guess 7/16 chance of something from this list plopping from the sky onto their heads. If you poke your head up over the side of the shaft you can probably observe their behaviour without being seen, they're not all that observant themselves. They will definitely notice if you just straight up make a break for it though.

If the huge acacia tree catches fire the harpies will abandon this site and never come back ever again. The Queen of the Harpies will starve to death.

i'm just saying they range widely in fuckability

Vonnet's Telescope

Vonnet began his occupancy of the telescope some eight years ago, and the locals are really quite grateful, as it's stopped all the deaths. So far, Vonnet has publicly described the telescope as being 'about as useful as a big dumb mirror seems', though he has not also come up with a good explanation for how it kills people. If you ask Vonnet why he bothers living miles out of town on the top of a cliff he'll tell you that it's great inspiration for writing. He's not wrong, but he is lying. If you ask the locals why he bothers living miles out of town on the top of a cliff they'll tell you that he's a wizard, obviously, but not the bad sort. Sometimes he'll suggest looking for yuzlat mushrooms over a particular ridge, and the people will go there, find them, and get very drunk on yuzlat tea. Thus is he accepted by all.

The telescope itself is of peculiar design, though as no-one in this part of the world with the exception of Vonnet has ever seen a telescope before, this will probably go unremarked. The most obviously peculiar thing about the telescope is the fact that it points down. Sitting on an outcropping of rock on the edge of a small, deep crater, the telescope juts precariously from the side of a cliff and points down at an enormous concave mirror, tiled to the floor of the crater. In the observation room within the observatory there is a single reclined chair under the telescope, as well quite a lot of imposing runes which are all completely decorative. Anyone sitting in the chair can shift themselves with a system of hand levers to be positioned right under the large, square-cut lens of the device, and looking into the lens will, once they get all the internal mirrors lined up right, instantly kill them. The mirror's workings are understood only by Vonnet, and if forced (and it would require quite a lot of force) he would describe it thusly.

"The telescope is a very old, very complicated device, that is very little more than a large mirror. When you look through the lens, you are looking through an absolute artwork of glass and copper, which does many complicated things to sight of which you do not need to know or understand [for all his flaws, Vonnet understands normal attention spans quite well]. Suffice to say that the lens shows you the great mirror below us. That great mirror reflects up into the sky, and for some odd reasons involving how thick air is it - no, don't ask questions. Really. Just don't. For odd reasons, this lets us see ourselves from the point of view of a bird, far, far, far above us. The danger in the telescope is nothing more than the danger of looking in a mirror. You see that big hole in the roof? That lets you look into your own eyes, from the perspective of a god. Not a very good idea."

If you're still imagining this you need to start reading again from the top

Vonnet is a wizard of mirrors, mentally styling himself as a mirrormage. He is possibly the only wizard of mirrors currently alive, though the telescope suggests that he is not the first. Vonnet's work in repairing and utilising the observatory is a very well kept secret, known only to himself and his miserable research assistant, an Ouahsdbaa named Uohassbt. The Ouahsdbaa has been recruited just recently. It was 'hired' because it does not have a reflection, allowing it to look through the telescope without immediately dying. Though it may have taken 6 years for Vonnet to figure out what the telescope does without looking through it himself, and another year to figure out how to get the Ouahsdbaa here, the last year has meant a tremendous leap forward for the mirrormage, and his experimental magics involving the observatory look to have him ruling the countryside in only a few short decades.

The secrecy of Vonnet's work is obvious once said work is understood. If one can properly utilise the telescope they are capable of spying on anything within several thousand miles through completely non-magical means. Once anyone of any political power finds out what the observatory can do, Vonnet is well and truly fucked. As such, Vonnet's primary motivation is to pretend to be a wizard pretending to be a historian.



Uohassbt the Ouahsdbaa is sad because Vonnet stole him from his home country. Vonnet insists he didn't mean to, saying that he had another much more willing Ouahsdbaa lined up for the job, and frankly cannot figure out why his spell grabbed the wrong one. He is not as apologetic as he should be, and insists that once he has solved the mysteries of the observatory he will be able to send Uohassbt home. This is all total bullshit of course, and the harpies have seen Vonnet dump the bodies of the first two Ouahsdbaa, who didn't buy the story. Killing them wasn't murder of course - to a mirrormage, people without reflections aren't really people, how could they be?

The last thing you need to know about the observatory is the harpies. They are obnoxious little shits, and will spend their time doing obnoxious little shits on anyone that climbs up to the telescope. When you do the voices it's important that you make them sound like those little worm guys from Men in Black. They know Vonnet's secret, but hate the Ouahsdbaa enough to never tell him. They hate everyone, actually, including Vonnet, but he gives them shitty moonshine regularly enough that they hate him the same way they hate each other, and will only betray him if it seems funny at the time.

Picture this guy saying a naughty word and
then laughing so hard he pisses on you

Monkeyboat!: The Dungeon Adventure

Monkeys are a tool-using species. Magic is a tool. Ergo, monkeys can use magic.

One hundred and thirty years ago the tax galleon Petticoat was returning from distant colonies with its share of the emperor's revenue when a gargantuan volcanic eruption hurled it leagues inland. Nobody thought to look for the lost ship, as there had just been a gargantuan volcanic eruption and everyone had other problems. It was assumed lost at sea with all hands, which was basically correct, except for the "at sea" part. The ship fetched up on its side, straddling a small jungle creek, most of the crew dead but otherwise miraculously unharmed. Only two people survived: the ship's cook, and a runaway wizard's apprentice named Dwoderick who'd thought the sea sounded better than mincing up toad guts all day long. (Not for spells. The wizard just liked them.)

They were on a tropical island a thousand miles from home. The region was uncharted and largely on fire. They had nothing to eat but gold and corpses, and no way of preserving the corpses. Dwoderick had never bothered to learn Create Food. He hadn't thought he'd need it.

He didn't know Speak with Animals, either. But monkeys are pretty smart. They figured something out.

Now the Petticoat is home to a colony of wizard monkeys. They are no smarter than normal monkeys. They just happen to be able to cast spells. Dwoderick stayed in the jungle for about five months, teaching the monkeys what he knew in exchange for raw fruit, birds and smaller, less able monkeys. Eventually he died of malnutrition and the monkeys ate his body. The cook struck off into the jungle, was picked up by passing headhunters, made it safely home, sold the rights to his story to an itinerant novelist and lived a long, pleasant life as a barkeep and collector of royalties. The ghost of Dwoderick knows this and is pretty salty about it. Get it? Salty? Because he's a sailor?

The ship lies in two halves, splintered down the middle, open like a book with the upper deck facing upstream. Monkeys keep watch from the starboard gunports, which now all face up. There are four decks altogether. The topmost one is now a wall, with a horizontal steering wheel that the monkeys use as a rack for drying meat and a captain's cabin which once contained finery and is now a monkey toilet. (Why don't they just shit in the woods? Because monkey excrement in large qualities is a vital reagent in more spells than you realize, and because they are horrible.) The second deck is a gun-deck. All the guns are now barrel-down in the mud of the creek that runs through the whole ship, except for some that are barrel-up. Monkeys will hide in these barrels and leap out and cast Ray of Frost on you. They will also swing from the ropes that cross the deck, which is now much higher than it is wide, like a chapel, and drop cannonballs on your head. The third deck is storage and hammock-space. The galley's in here. It's now a swamp full of cutlery that the monkeys have animated into a horrible mud-and-cutlery golem which will give you a big suffocating rusty-fork hug. There is also a barrel of dry gunpowder hanging from the rafters, miraculously preserved. The monkeys never cast fire spells because they are on a boat and because they are not stupid. If you try to cast a fire spell they will counter it with Produce Water. Anyway the gunpowder barrel is covered with a fireproof tarpaulin so you're going to need to use your brains here. The third and lowest deck is full of treasure, and also home to the Monkey King, who is morbidly obese and rarely leaves his dragon-like lair. He has enormous scarlet buttocks, which is why he's King. He has bound to him an intelligent, vaguely Mephistophelian devil (think bright red skin, a snide voice and shitty little goatee) who has been the victim of one of the countless intrigues/practical jokes of Hell and is more or less resigned to the fact that the monarch he was promised the opportunity to corrupt is not everything he was expecting.

The ghost of Dwoderick lives in the shit-covered cabin. He is intelligent, informative and desperate for someone to talk to, but he will attack on sight anyone who can cook, talks about cooking or demonstrates any ability or interest in anything remotely reminiscent of cooking. The monkeys know a bunch of different spells, none of which work quite the way normal human spells do, on account of they were passed down by oral tradition among a band of monkeys.

Monkey Spell Table

1. Ray of Frost
This is the exception to the rule, in that it works exactly how you'd expect it to.

2. Charm Human
You now find monkeys adorable and struggle to believe that they could ever bite off your finger and shit it out and throw your own shit-caked finger at you. You get -2 to hit against monkeys or something like that.

3. Acid Splash
I'm not going to beat around the bush here. This is shit. The monkey is shitting acid at you. If you are under the effects of Charm Human you have to make a Will save to believe that this is shit and not, like, banana juice or something. More effective from above.

4. Entangle
All plants in the area now hate you and love monkeys. Monkeys get a bonus to swinging through the trees. You get a malus to doing any fucking thing at all.

5. Animate Object
Normally used on ropes, sometimes to make guns try and eat you, sometimes to make the figurehead (a mermaid) come alive and scream obscenities. Or just non sequiturs. Monkeys have no real concept of obscenity and don't understand why it's funny.

6. Prismatic Spray
Gives you a migraine. You see after-effects all day, weird rainbows around the edges of things, nauseating ripples and blurs to what should be sharply defined borders.

7. Bull's Strength
This makes the muscles under a monkey's fur vibrate weirdly and gives it the power to tear you in half without blinking. They were pretty strong already. Can only be used by one monkey on another monkey, not by the monkey on itself.

8. Dimension Door
Often used by monkeys to teleport directly on top of your head. Cast imperfectly, it will leave significant chunks of the monkey behind, floating in space, moving in sync with the rest of the monkey.

9. Magic Missile
Loops and ricochet erratically. Bounces around the bush, scaring birds. Always hits its target, but not in any hurry.

10. Minor Illusion
Used to conceal doors and pits and to create false images of same, but also just to generate uncanny-valley simalucra of the PCs with the textures wrong and the features all running together and have them imitate the PCs' actions from afar.

11. Summon Monster
The monsters are often wildly unsuited for the jungle, like an ice elemental or a narwhal or a grizzly bear whose skin got lost in transition.

12. Speak with Humans
Dwoderick taught the monkeys this as a last-ditch resort. He soon regretted it. You don't want to know what monkeys are saying.