Showing posts with label Red and Pleasant Land. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Red and Pleasant Land. Show all posts

Monday, January 5, 2015

1d10 Random Finds From Across Space And The Planes Table Inspired By A Red and Pleasant Land




Grab It
HERE
Adventurers and reprobate heroes are likely to run across random and somewhat dangerous items that seem to be attracted by the floats om and jetsam  of Voivodja. The place is a whirl pool of hoary and dangerously imaginative evocative weirdness that picks up on the collective unconsciousness of the fairy tale like madness of the place and its vampire faction inhabitants. Here then are a chart of 1d10 bits and pieces of strange, unusual, sometimes destructive items that are found along the fairy pathways, roads, and worse as you make your way to the lands of the high weird.


1d10 Random Finds From Across Space And The Planes Table

  1. A gossamer shroud of shadow stuff belonging to some noble vampire whose family is worried sick about the missing shadow. The semi living stuff is looking for some male or female vampire's soul to attach to. This treasured stuff can slip into the sbackground of a PC, it allows them to hide in shadows and see the invisible. 
  2. An ornate knife that allows its user to cut and stab beings that are seemingly immune to the effects of physical objects and magical weapons. This knife has a secret compartment that holds a dram of demon's blood. The knife can also slice half truths well and was forged in the heart blood of a thousand lawyers. 
  3. A short sword made of the remains of  several pairs of glass slippers. The sword is a +2 weapon and will glow in the presence of demons or demon blooded. The thing is named Mystic Willow. 
  4. A small ornate box containing several miniature marbles which each contain a scene from a near by farm. The marbles will explode of 2d6 points of damage. The mtarbles were drawn from the fairylands and odd dreamscapes. 
  5. A spinning wheel that will spin the owner a new skein from old dreams and nightmares. The owner will be a monster every new moon. The wheel will prick whomever is using it and activate with a drop of blood.  
  6. An ancient deck of Tarot cards each deck is unique and has been created by an artist with hand painted cards each one able to bestow a vision of a possible future. The dreams and visions will animate by fairies bound within the cards. 
  7. A dagger fashioned from a piece of wrought iron from Hell. The dagger is cold and icy able to cut the heart from a vampire. 
  8. A collar for a griffon made from dwarven gold able to resist any escape attempt but able to be removed with a whispered song of old. The collar could be used for a human and it will add +1 to charisma. 
  9. A silver pocket watch able to stop time for one minute. The powers itself from the blood of its owner with  giant silver needle that will do two points of damage every new moon.  The needle is a small +1 dagger in its own right. 
  10. A small set of silver and gold fangs carefully artistically created to magically fit into a person's mouth. The fangs will add one point of damage each time they are used to draw blood. The fangs will telepathically and magically relate the latest gossip from fairy land and magically make its owner feel awake and alive. The fangs add +2 points during seduction and feeding attempts. 
This is merely a small selection of the objects and treasure floating around planes and byways near Voivodja





These types of treasure will most likely have weird and strange guardians nearby to destroy any interlopers into the realm of Voivodja. The undead hordes will try to stay one step ahead of  adventurers who come into possession of these items. 

Thursday, January 1, 2015

A Red And Pleasant Land By Zak S. As Old School Plane & Time War Campaign




Grab It Right Over
HERE

Fairytales are massive parts of the human unconsciousness that we take on as children and realize just how nightmarish and dangerous they are as adults. We look back and we're thankful that we survive the experience.
Which brings us to A Red and Pleasant Land and its use as fodder for expansion into a whole cloth campaign and adventure campaign setting.

I came across 

Here's the bit of the review that got me right between the eyes: 
"The front endpapers of the print book (or two printable pages in the PDF) show the map of Voivodja, bounded north and east by the Carpathian Mountains, west and south by the Terrible Goblin Woods. These, of course, mean that you can tuck the Place of Unreason pretty much anywhere on your campaign map. The map here is about 300 miles by 400 miles, though the area between the boundary terrain is more like 200 by 300. I think that in practice this could probably be scaled down (e.g., I'm thinking of placing it in the Valley of Mists on the Hyperborea map for Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea). Also, because of the nature of the place, Voivodja does not have to take up as much space on your "real world" campaign map as it does on its own. Voivodja is strange. Time and space and manners and emotions and laws and gravity and loyalty can all be subjective here, sometimes all at once. Don't worry. There are tables for this."
And just like that I hadn't even thought about using A Red and Pleasant Land with Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers. My mind was awash with possibilities of  Voivodja  and its twisted vampire factions. The whole setting is rotten with Vampires. If they could be connected with AS&SH where else might they be connected into? Carcosa perhaps? But how does Lost Carcosa connect with Voivodja ? 

I began to think about the twisted fairy tale setting and its vampires? How were they connected with Old Earth? Are they the remains of some Old Earth colony that became twisted by  Voivodja's essence in the distant past or some dim future? I thought about Clark Aston Smith's Hyperborean Cycle (found HERE) and his other creation of Zothique.



Zothique really holds the answer to my perplexing and vexing question. How to connect Carcosa and Voivodja? According to Clark Aston Smith: 
Zothique, vaguely suggested by Theosophic theories about past and future continents, is the last inhabited continent of earth. The continents of our present cycle have sunken, perhaps several times. Some have remained submerged; others have re-risen, partially, and re-arranged themselves. Zothique, as I conceive it, comprises Asia Minor, Arabia, Persia, India, parts of northern and eastern Africa, and much of the Indonesian archipelago. A new Australia exists somewhere to the south. To the west, there are only a few known islands, such as Naat, in which the black cannibals survive. To the north, are immense unexplored deserts; to the east, an immense unvoyaged sea. The peoples are mainly of Aryan or Semitic descent; but there is a negro kingdom (Ilcar) in the north- west; and scattered blacks are found throughout the other countries, mainly in palace-harems. In the southern islands survive vestiges of Indonesian or Malayan races. The science and machinery of our present civilization have long been forgotten, together with our present religions. But many gods are worshipped; and sorcery and demonism prevail again as in ancient days. Oars and sails alone are used by mariners. There are no fire-arms—only the bows, arrows, swords, javelins, etc. of antiquity. The chief language spoken (of which I have provided examples in an unpublished drama) is based on Indo-European roots and is highly inflected, like Sanskrit, Greek and Latin.
Clark Ashton Smith himself described the Zothique cycle in a letter to L. Sprague de Camp, dated November 3, 1953.
Darrell Schweitzer suggests the idea of writing about a far future land may have come from William Hope Hodgson's novel The Night Land, noting that Smith was an admirer of Hodgson's work.
More right over HERE
This campaign revolves around very old and very strange planes, worlds, timelines, all part of a Plane & Time War fought across alternative worlds and dimensions where time and space intersect. 



Sometime in the future the powers of Quas, Misrule, and Unreason fight a protracted war against the forces of  Law, Order, Reason and the very gods themselves against the backdrop of the ultimate saga of a perishing cosmos.

The very fabric of time its rife with holes and man's kingdoms are strange, old, weird,and the PC's are drawn into the middle of it all. 
Hyperborea, Voivodja, Carcosa, The Unknown Island, The Night Lands, etc are all worlds connected across branches of pseudo European timelines. Time is not an arrow but a river full of eddies and branches fought over by monsters, gods, demons, and more.
More to come folks.