Wonder Workers Wednesday 07/23/14

Pentagarchy Sorcerer Creates a Wind Node
by Me.

Welcome back to Dungeon Mastering by Candlelight.  Today is Wonder Worker Wednesday, the day of the week that I share ideas about spell casters, spells and magic from my home campaign.

Most recently I have been running a group every other Monday night using 2nd Edition AD&D and so this colors to some degree my perspective on how spell mechanics jive with the rules.

I will say that in my home campaign we do not use the spell point system from the 2nd Edition optional rules but I do like a number of the ideas that are shared about Channeling and Summoning and different expansions on magical effects.

Magic in my campaign as I suspect it is written in many fantasy campaigns is on the decline.  Rare artifacts are almost non-existent.  Powerful magical items with sustained magic which do not operate off of a charge system are also rare.  Enchanting items no longer "holds" the power in the way that it once did and sorcerers for the past three to four hundred years have worked around this by tagging a charge system onto magical items which otherwise might be of a fairly minor nature (+1 to +2 magical weapons or armor for example).

The Falcon Blade
by Me

Take the Falcon Blade pictures to the left.  This blue steel dagger with the silver head of a falcon is generally a +1 magical dagger.  The ruby eyes of the falcon head have been enchanted to function as a horcrux.  In this instance a horcrux is not an object where an evil wizard hides a piece of his soul.  In this instance a horcrux is a magical battery tuned to a specific type of magical energy.  The energy is always elemental in nature although negative energy or positive energy in this instance also count as a sort of elemental power.

When the Falcon Blade holds the power of a wind node the blade will throw and return and will also strike a target with a +1d6 of cold energy.  For all practical purposes the weapon is still a +1 dagger when determining if it hits a target and base damage bonus.  The cold energy attack stacks with the daggers usual 1d4+1 damage.  The target of the dagger is granted a saving throw versus spell and if successful only takes half of the bonus cold damage from the blade.  The Falcon Blade can sail and return blasting foes for additional cold damage so long as it contains the power (charge) from an elemental wind node.  Each ruby eye of the Falcon Blade is of such quality that it can contain up to a maximum of five charges each.

So what are elemental nodes and how does a character get them to recharge or charge a horcrux weapon, armor or item.  When sorcerers are active in a particular location for a period of weeks or months there is a chance that small bubbles of elemental power or nodes will begin to appear.  My own players encountered a tomb where the frequent casting of necromantic spells to keep the undead in the area slumbering so the bad guys could pass without triggering them is an example from my own game.  This floating bubbles of dark amber count as one node of negative (necromantic) energy.  Physical contact with a node can be dangerous.  A negative energy node can inflict a point of damage to a character or it can heal a zombie, skeleton or other animated undead for 1d4 hit points should the zombie wander into the node during a fight.

A horcrux weapon tuned to negative energy will absorb a node when it comes in contact with it and if it has open charge spots available will replenish one charge.

Creating an elemental node, a floating bubble of raw elemental energy to use to charge a horcrux weapon or item is a 1st level spell.  Once created different types of nodes have different shelf lives and must be handled in different ways if they are not to be lost or to create minor destruction.  The sorcerer who creates an elemental node maintains a form of telekinetic control over the small orb (about the size of a baseball when complete) and may direct it slowly in one direction or another.  The ability to create a node of elemental fire, for example, can be used to light torches or a fire or flare against a target as a minor magical attack.  The direct damage inflicted by a node is always small.  Never more than 1d4 damage and the caster must make a to hit roll when manipulating the sphere.  Failure means the caster not only misses but impacts something nearby like the wall or floor, causing them to lose the node in the process as if they had missed with a thrown weapon.  Nodes do have the advantage of strike for magical damage.

When a horcrux weapon runs out of charges it continues to function as its base type.  The Falcon Blade in the example above would continue to strike as a +1 magical dagger but it would no longer return when thrown and would not strike a target for any cold damage until it was recharged.

Well that is it for tonight's posting.  Hope your week is going well.  Thanks for reading and hope to see you next time!  Happy Gaming!!!

-Ed

Titan Tuesday 07/22/14

Today is Titan Tuesday, the day I offer up a greater power, deity or major villain from my campaign for you to grab for yours.

I managed to include a few classic AD&D tropes into my campaign mythos and one of these is portraying the god of Death as...well, Death.  I remembered the deck of many things had a card where a "minor death" appeared and attacked the characters.  I remember other instances where a classic grim reaper character was referenced in this or that AD&D article so I thought why not write up the Death god in my own AD&D campaign as the Grim Reaper.

Death (The Reaper)

Greater God

Armor Class: -3
Movement: Infinite
Hit Points: 100
No. of Attacks: 1
Damage of Attacks: All of your current HP.
Special Attacks: Shadow
Special Defenses: Immediately heals to full health when attacked by any form of attack either mundane or magical.  Immune to Cold, Fire, Acid, Negative Energy and Lightning.
Magic Resistance: 90%
Alignment: Lawful Neutral
Worshiper's Alignment: Any
Symbol: The Skull
Spells:  Casts Divine Spells as a 14th level Cleric.  Casts Arcane Spells as a 14th level Magic-User.  Attacks as a 14th level Fighter.  Saves as a 14th Level Magic-User.

Death wears vestments, robes or armor which appear to be fashioned of iron but which move with the suppleness of cloth.  His skin is pale like bone.  The grand lord of the Darkling realm holds audience in a massive chamber filled with candles and lamps so that he casts no shadow.  Death must be cautious of where his shadow falls for any mortal being touched by his shadow is immediately slain.

Should Death be called to release the soul of someone held within his realm he offers a bargain.  The nature of this bargain is the result of the roll of a strange pair of dice fashioned from the bones of a beast long extinct in the mortal plane.  Should this be played out in the campaign the DM rolls 1d12 and consults the table below:

1.  The soul is released without any further trade or negotiation necessary.
2.  The party must surrender their most powerful magic item in return for the soul of their companion.
3.  The party must trade 10,000 gold pieces in treasure for the soul of their companion.
4.  A party member must abandon and utterly forget one major goal of their character, the death of a dream for the life of a friend.
5.  Death will trade the soul of the friend in exchange for the destruction of a vampire.
6.  Death will trade the soul of a friend in exchange for 10 years from every character in the party bargaining for him.
7.  The soul is granted in exchange for 1d4+1 points of Charisma deducted from the highest Charisma character in the party.
8.  A character must sacrifice one of their senses.  Roll 1d6.  1. Vision.  2.  Hearing.  3.  Taste.  4. Touch   5. Smell. 6.  Ability to perceive colors.
9.  The soul is returned by the characters must find an empty vessel to place it into.  This vessel cannot be the soul's previous body.
10.  Death refuses to return the soul because it would create to great a disruption in the future order of things.
11.  Death agrees to release the soul but one of the party members has to take the dead character's place within Death's domain.
12.  Death agrees to a game of chance.  Roll 1d6.  If the party member rolls higher the soul is released.  If Death rolls higher the party member is slain.

Death can grant the full range of clerical spells to his priests.  He provides clerics who devote themselves to his service a miracle at 3rd level and a miracle at 5th level.

3rd Level Miracle - Cheat Death

At third level the cleric of Death can be reduced to negative ten hit points and appear for all purposes dead.  1d6x10 minutes later the cleric's wounds knit themselves closed and the cleric will drag themselves back to their feet with one hit point.  This miracle occurs automatically but it can only happen once per week in game time.

5th Level Miracle - Dice with Death

Once per day the cleric of Death can re-roll any single dice roll but the second roll must be accepted no matter the result.

Well there you have it.  Another installment for Dungeon Mastering by Candlelight.  The OSR blog that provides you with a little bit of content for your homebrew campaign just about every day of the week.

Happy Adventuring!!
 -Ed

Monster Monday 07/21/14

Sorry for the slight delay on this post.  I work outside and its been 110 degrees out so kinda sapping my ability to do much when I get home besides recover.  Hopefully I can post this now and the real Tuesday post tonight.  We shall see.

Monster Monday's post is the Brendor Bolg (Bren-Der-Bowl-g).  I am writing this up in a sudo 2nd Edition style since that is the rules we've been using for the Monday night game.

Brendor Bolg (Brute Rending Giant)

Climate/Terrain:  Hills, Light Forest and Remote Villages
Frequency:  Uncommon
Organization:  Mated Pairs or Solitary
Activity Cycle: Nocturnal
Diet: Vegetarian, Craves Thatch
Intelligence: Low / Animal
Treasure: Nil
Alignment: Neutral

No. Appearing: 1-2
Armor Class: 4
Movement: 9
Hit Dice: 3 to 5
Thaco: 17
No. Attacks: 1
Damage Attacks: 2d4+2
Special Attacks: Scream, save or deaf for 1d6 combat rounds.
Special Defenses: None.
Magic Resistance: None
Size: Huge 13' Tall
Morale: 10
XP Value: Varies

The Brendor Bolg may be a distant relation to the Fomorian Giants or even some sort of evolutionary throw back.  Certainly this is an ancient cousin of giant kind and not a true giant.  As far as is known the Brendor Bolg are barely more than animal in intelligence, speak no clear language beyond odd whistles, grunts, contented slurping, sucking on the edges of rooftops and crunching roof thatch in their powerful jaws.

Brendor Bolg are huge standing thirteen feet tall, with elongated skulls and always wet, snuffling, bat like snouts.  They have two sets of arms, one set reaches to the ground and is used for movement while the other set is slender with long hands and fingers.  The eyes of a Brendor Bolg are overly large like the eyes of certain other nocturnal beasts.

Brendor Bolg are night dwelling, sneaking and usually peaceful herbivores with a tremendous appetite for both hay and roof thatch.  They are also very fond of potatoes and other roots and tubers.  The ears of a Brendor Bolg are sensitive and they enjoy a one point bonus to avoid surprise.  Loud noises can sometimes drive them off for they are cowardly unless backed into a corner or wounded.

Brendor Bolg attack with powerful bludgeoning blows from its fists.  It never bites an enemy unless it is rabid.  If the Brendor Bolg is rabid it gains a second bite attack that hits for 2d6 damage, target must save or contract rabies.

Brendor Bolg do not use tools and cannot be trained to do so.  Rarely one can be captured as a youth and be trained to pull a plow or to carry stones or timber from one place to another.

Brendor Bolg are deformed creatures with protruding, enormous round flat teeth and bodies which come in a variety of shapes from grossly fat and waddling to disturbingly thin.  One thing is certain, left to themselves these creatures will utterly strip a building of its roof and anything constructed of or containing hay or thatch in a few hours.

Well that's it for today's entry.  I hope you keep coming back for more and hope to see you soon.

Happy Gaming!!!

-Ed

Sunday Sandbox 07/20/2014

     Welcome back and we are going to dive right in.  As you can see I've changed Sunday from general thoughts about RPG's to a focus on the sandbox project. Sundays are a good day for me to crank out work on my campaign. Between chores and everything, getting a good five or six pages of material knocked out is a productive writing day by my standards.

The page to the right starts to explain the next step for me in sandbox campaign creation.  Once I have the first adventure scale map knocked out I move on to define each terrain area as a sort of wandering monster difficulty level.  This is exactly like creating wandering monster charts for levels in a dungeon.  The final goal here is to create a grid that players can explore where different types of terrain present a different type of challenge.  I don't simply create a generic level one, two, three and four wandering monster chart although this is one way you could go.  I define the general range of hit dice I want for monsters in that terrain and then I create individual wandering monster charts for each terrain type, so for example light woods and river terrain have two different wandering monster charts.

Creating these wandering monster charts are good mental exercise to get my mind working on what kinds of monsters and what sorts of things are happening in each type of surrounding terrain.  I like to scribble down notes on a notepad I keep handy as I create these tables.   As I finish these tables I will launch into creating set encounter locations scattered all over each adventure scale map.  The end result will be a three by three grid of 20 x 20 square maps like the first one we created for an adventuring sandbox sixty miles by sixty miles in size.

 On the far right of each wandering monster table you will see an empty column labeled "uses".  As I run the campaign I will make a pencil tick in this column each time I roll that result.  I don't like repeating the same encounter from adventure to adventure and so this is a reminder to me of what we've already done.  Generally if I roll a same result I will just re-roll.  After playing in an area I might freshen things up by removing commonly rolled lines completely and making a fresh table with replacements or new things written into those lines.

Also mentioned under the entry for Men and some humanoid encounters is a percentage chance for taint.  Zombie taint is one of the themes of this particular adventure area.  A character can be infected with zombie taint and not turn into a zombie.  In this setting the character who is tainted does not return as a zombie until shortly after they are slain.  So a group of bandits where three of the bandits have zombie taint will see three of the bandits rise up as fast moving, infected ravenous brain eaters shortly after they drop during the combat.  Part of the fun is that you can be bitten, the DM quietly makes a saving throw for you behind the DM screen and you never know for sure if you are infected or not unless the party Cleric has the right spells to figure this out.  It can be cured with cure disease so its not a huge big deal for the party however they never know which humanoid be it bandit, orc, goblin or whatever might -also- be carrying the taint from a previous wound and is a ticking time bomb of crazy flesh eating zombie just waiting to pop back up and return to the fight.

I have included wandering encounter tables for dirt road areas (level one), for light woods (level two) and deep woods (level four) in this blog entry.  This will give you an idea of how quickly certain areas on the map become dangerous.

I include a description of these areas as equally creepy and dangerous looking to the players so when they push deep into that wild, dark, incredibly creepy forest they won't be totally surprised when very bad things are lurking inside.

While the characters are low level they will begin to understand that certain types of terrain are more dangerous than others and they will begin to respond accordingly either giving those areas a wide birth or when they finally feel ready to tackle them going in with planning and some extra thought, maybe some extra help to tackle those locations.  Having difficult and challenging areas on the map will slow down the players and get them more interested in careful exploration rather than just waltzing overland in the direction of the next town they plan to visit or ruins they decide to explore.  Part of the challenge becomes getting from home base to that interesting dungeon site in one piece.

You will also notice that the chance for an encounter increases in more dangerous locations.

I like to use a d12 for my encounter tables.  The poor d12 gets so little use in the rest of the rules that I like to incorporate it whenever possible into any random tables or chances for encounter rolls that I decide to create.

A few of the monsters listed here like the Brendor Bolg and the Honeydipper Swarm are my own creations.  I will be posting these up along with other homebrew monsters from my campaign on Monster Mondays so be sure to come back and visit to pick up the write ups for those as they get posted.

Well that about wraps it up for this Sunday episode of Dungeon Mastering by Candlelight.  Entering our second month and still going strong with about a post every single day.  Feel free to leave a comment or suggestion.

Please add me on google+ or follow this blog however you will.  For now, Happy Gaming!!!  -Ed

Sandbox Project: Adventure Scale Map 1: 07/19/2014

Ed Kann's Adventure Scale = 1 Square is 1 Square Mile
Each Map is 20 x 20 miles because the hexes on my grand campaign map
are done at 1 hex = 20 miles across.

Welcome back!  Its Setting Saturday and with so much work ahead on this sandbox expansion I thought it might be smart to work on it both on Terra Firma Thursdays and Setting Saturdays.

To the right you have what I call an Adventure Scale map.  This is a piece of simple graph paper and the drawing bits done with your basic office black pen.  I am doing this on the low tech side on purpose so that anyone, anywhere can create their own material exactly like mine without a lot of time, expensive materials or fancy shmancy art talent.

The graph paper here is a page out of a spiral notebook called a QUAD PAD which you can pick up at Office Depot.  I like these because I can make all my Adventure Scale maps in one easy to flip open and lay flat Quad Pad while giving the map maker in the party a blank Quad Pad and the layout of their maps will more likely fit what I have in hand.  It seems fair that the players at least have the same size sheet of graph paper to work off of as I have behind the screen.  Plus they are dirty cheap.

This example map is not quite complete.  As I key set encounter locations in the overland portions of the map I will note the locations of these with a red dot.  Example.  If I have a set encounter with an Ogre cave at location T-18 on the grid (see the letters across the top and numbers down the side - cross reference these for the correct grid location like playing a game of battleship) I will put a little red dot on that square on my DM map as a reminder that, "Hey DM, don't forget you already have a set encounter waiting in this square for the players to enjoy.  Take a moment to look it up under the entry T-18 in your adventure notebook."

You can fit a whole lot of adventure into a 20 by 20 mile area.  The players will get dropped into this location in the ruins of the old capital of the Kingdom of Kyrene, the city of Kyros at the center of this starting map.  They will be first level with no specific knowledge about the surrounding area outside of the fact that its in ruins, they start secure in an old wizard's tower with the bare minimum of food and water to survive inside the tower for a few nights.  Exploring the tower will gift them with a very few starting items.  Sufficient so that they have some chance of survival when they decide to leave the tower looking for food and water.

Kyros is smack in the middle of the Taint Lands and there are only two very small groups of "normal" survivors holed up in the city.  Otherwise the entire city is one big ruin full of monsters of all sorts of types and of course the undead created by the Pattern Storms.  Kyros is not an enormous starting city.  At its height it boasted a population of perhaps two thousand people so it will be plenty to keep the characters occupied for several adventures but they will fairly quickly explore the place.

Outside of Kyros the villages of Fork, Blackshore near the edges of the Bogwater Swamp, Pelfore and Grone are completely in the hands of the undead.  These are Haunts.  Very dangerous places but likely holding some of the best rewards as far as nifty gear and that sort of thing.

Northeast of the Haunt of Grone is the ruins of Ironspire Castle, the original estate of the King of Kyrene and his court.  This was abandoned when it became clear that the entire Taint Lands were a lost cause and much of it was emptied of wealth.  A tribe of Orcs has been pushed into the forest in this area by the pressures of the undead rising around them and most of the Orcs have moved into the abandoned castle to turn it into a stronghold and base of operations.

The villages surrounding Kyros are quite small.  A black dot village is more of a two street location with an Inn and a dozen buildings, perhaps three or four of these are shops.  Many of these remain in the hands of the original citizens although one has been taken over by bandits.  Locations identified as a "collection of buildings" is just that, perhaps two large farms located next to one another or an isolated Inn with two or three houses built nearby.

Note: Tonight I will come back and write at least a general description of several areas on this starting sandbox map.  Next week I plan to key in about a third of the set encounter locations and just keep working, working, working on this.  As I mentioned earlier this will probably take a few months to set up completely how I like to have my areas written before I start dropping players into them.  Good times making them though.  Good Times.

Saturday Afternoon Notes:

I'm thinking the central area of this map surrounding the city of Kyros should be called the Kyree'an Veld, a region of fertile farmland, gently rolling hills with scattered trees.  The Southwest area is marsh and swamp theme so just going with the simple Bogwater Swamps name for now.  The South East corner of the map is mostly forest and has the biggest concentration of deep woods.  Light woods squares have a slightly more difficult wandering monster value than plains, roads or cultivated fields which all share a basic wilderness encounter difficulty of 1.  Light Woods being 2.  I'm thinking both hills and deep woods have an encounter difficulty of 3 but with two different wandering monster lists, one for hills and one for deep woods.  I think that concentration of heavy forest I'll call The Willow Dirge Woodlands.  Immediately to the West of Kyros is some hills with an area defined as rocky highlands.  There is a fort up in the highlands and a couple of caves which may or may not be linked via an underground cavern system.  I'm thinking I'll call that area the Dragon's Heart.  You have to have some reference to a dragon or dragons in a dungeons and dragons game, after all.  There are two infestations of a sort of massive tangled web of brush which are impassible for a rider on a horse, one has to hack and climb and crawl through these areas.  I think I'll call the Western area the Spider's Nest and the Eastern tangle will be merely a part of The Hive.

I can lighten up my scan of the adventure map and drop it into the background to create this reference map.  I like having broad regions to reference when I work on a map and encounters because it helps me focus on whatever theme I want to build into each area.

As a note I intend this first adventure map to be an entry level area with encounters ranging loosely from level zero to level three.  Likely there will be no actual dragons on this map but perhaps there will be clues to where one can be found on another map nearby up in the Dragon's Heart highlands.

So look to the right and do the "follow" this blog thing.  There are five of us now and we need YOU to join us.  Remember.  Its wrong to be different.  Mwhahaha.  Join in the fun.  Comment often.  You are welcome to chime in on anything.

Happy Gaming!!

-Ed

Freaky Friday 07-18-14

Welcome back to another daily post for Dungeon Mastering by Candlelight. If you haven't already become a follower of this blog, why not? Worried we might follow you home?  Its to late you know.  You hear that heavy breathing outside your door?  That's me.  Quick become a follower and maybe I'll be appeased and go away.

Today I reached into the random pile of AD&D campaign stuff piled near my desk and pulled out a folder containing calendar information.  I thought to myself...wow, how utterly boring is that, but what a fantastic and completely appropriate random thing to post on Freaky Friday.  So here we are anyway, me writing and you reading about creating a fantasy calendar for your home campaign.

First, why create a calendar in the first place?  I am so glad you asked.  Eventually players are going to want to know how many days have passed since the last time they were in dungeon x or town y.  They may even be so crude as to ask you what day it is.  Responding with Wednesday is both inaccurate and not especially inspirational for the sense of immersion into the story for your game.  We already experience far to many Wednesdays at our day to day jobs but how many Starly days have we had?  Just about zero Starly days I would guess, until you happen to play in my campaign and survive to the fifth day of the week.  

This begs the question of course as to how long are the days in your world?  How many days are in a week?  How many days are in a month or in a year?  Are there any fun things you can use a fantasy calendar for in your Dungeon Master notes?

Kingdoms Chimerical

In my home campaign I decided to make it simple and go with a seven day week.  There are seven days in a week, four weeks in a month, thirteen months in a year and twenty four hours in a day, so not exactly the same as here on planet Earth but close enough for the players to relate and carry in their heads without much trouble.

The calendar is divided into four seasons with winter having four months while the other three seasons only have three months.

Winter Months    1.  First Snow, 2.  Ice Grip,  3.  Storm Hearth,  4.  Last Frost.

Spring Months    5.  Greenwood,  6.  Planting Song,  7.  Blossom Gale

Summer Months  8.  Far Road,  9.  Festival,  10.  Dragon Wind

Fall Months    11.  Harvest Song,  12.  Weaver Tale,  13.  Romp

The seven days of a week are called (in order) Westerly, Easterly, Northerly, Southerly, Starly, Farwing and Hearth.  It is thought to be good luck for the direction of the prevailing winds to match the named direction of the current day while it is sometimes believed to be an ill tiding if the direction of the wind blows against the wind name for the current day.

Rumor Sheet

One easy application of your fantasy calendar is to draw out the calendar for the current month or perhaps several months in a row and write down 2d12 worth of rumors.  I like to make sure that about thirty percent of the rumors that the players encounter while they explore a city or town are completely and utterly false.

Let me add to this bit that every month or every few weeks your rumor list might change based upon what you have in store for the campaign.  The changing rumor list from month to month can come straight out of what the characters are doing or it can be a mix of unfolding mini and major plot threads you have going on in your campaign along with what sort of trouble the characters have been getting into.  I like the second option.  It doesn't take long to bash together a 2d12 list of rumors for the next month in the campaign and you will be surprised at how often you can make use of it from game to game.

Terra Firma Thursday 07/17/14

The Kingdom of Kyrene
by Me

Welcome to another daily installment of Dungeon Mastering by Candlelight, the blog where I plunk down at my desk, dig around in existing maps or make new maps, artwork and write ups based in my home OSR campaign.  Everything here is fan material and is freely shared for you to import in whole or in part into your home campaign.

Today is Terra Firma Thursday and I am going to go ahead and focus a spotlight into an existing region in my world pulled from my grand campaign scale map but which I have not yet worked up as a fully developed adventure area.  In my home game the players have explored the Kingdom of Daria to the West to some degree and that is where my current group of 2nd Edition AD&D players is currently based.  I thought it would be fun to break out the paper, pencils and pens and work on Kyrene which is situated to the immediate East of my current play area and go through the entire process of building it into a ready to play sandbox from start to finish.

Building a more or less finished sandbox ready for play can take me several months of on and off writing and so this process is going to be broken down into a great many small steps.  My hope is that by some time in November this area will be finished sufficiently so that anyone reading this could DM it and have a fairly complete region ready for a good many games.

In the spirit of this being an OSR blog I am going to follow, at least in part, the broad instructions for building a campaign area as outlined in the Dungeon Masters Guide.

Ancient Lore

For time out of mind the lands now known jointly as the Kingdom of Kyrene and The Taint Lands has remained a wilderness where the grasp of Lawful aligned civilization never really managed to gain a firm purchase.  The earliest records of this area belong to the Elves who knew it then as the Darkling Lands of the Hag.  This unkind description has its roots in the presence of the greatly feared and powerful Goddess Aglaeca who dwelt bodily within the enormous Boglands of Ghagnasdiak right up to her defeat and imprisonment by the original Hundred Lords of Mankind roughly a thousand years ago.

Prior to her defeat Aglaeca was the betrayed lover of Silviarius the Goddess of the Moon and Twilight.  Ages ago Silviarius and Aglaeca had been birthed out of the Primordea at the beginning of time and had met at the edge of the silver pool.  There, after many meetings and discussions they fell in love and worked tireless and hand in hand to breathe life into the wilderness surrounding them.  Silviarius for her part was drawn to refinement and things of breathless beauty while Aglaeca was deeply in love with simple beauty, the chirping of crickets, the light of fireflies, the splash of little frogs in ponds.  Ultimately Silviarius tired of Aglaeca and decided to rid herself of her lover by pushing her into a bog, body bound and unable to swim to the surface by a silver bracelet fashioned in the form of the crescent moon but also as a two headed snake.

After gifting Aglaeca with the cursed object and pushing her headlong into the swamp, Silviarius walked away, turning her back on Aglaeca's strangled cries for mercy and help.  Aglaeca was stronger than Silviarius suspected and she managed to defeat the cursed object by biting it at first and then by chewing it up in her strong teeth, swallowing it along with her own left hand and wrist and absorbing the cursed silver jewelry into her own flesh.  Aglaeca emerged from the waters of the swamp long weeks later covered in silvery scales with snakes for hair and a cold angry gaze that could turn warm living creatures to stone.

Aglaeca Unholy Symbol
by Me

Aglaeca remains the only Medusa creature in my Kingdoms Chimerical campaign setting.  Following her betrayal by her one and only love, Aglaeca remained in the swamp and poured what remained of her affection for the creation of things that crawled, things birthed from slime, things that were hulking brutes or terrifically poisonous.  From her swamp home deep in the Bogland of Ghagnasdiak, Aglaeca created and loved much of the things now known as monsters in our current world.  To this day they venerate her as their mother and queen and most of the intelligent sorts of creatures she created, orcs, gnolls, ogres, trolls and the like, retain a special hatred for the elves for that refined and beautiful race was ultimately the handiwork and most beloved artful creation of Silviarius the Goddess of the Moon and Twilight.

I picture Aglaeca as a once wonderfully kind Goddess, the sort of underdog you would root for in any movie.  Simplistic, trusting and wonderfully inventive part of the betrayal of Aglaeca by her lover Silviarius rests in a growing and bitter jealousy.  The things wrought by Silviarius while full of grace and refinement simply pale in comparison to the raw, wild untamed natural and eternal beauty of the things created by Aglaeca.

In the end Aglaeca becomes a Baba Yaga + Medusa figure, an incredibly strong one handed titan turned bitter and brooding.  She is at the dark heart of very nearly every nightmare thing that was ever birthed in the world and yet she should not be confused with true evil.  Aglaeca is a loyal and loving queen over her menagerie of nightmares to a fault.  The Mother of All Monsters retains a certain thread of purity and mercy, she loves and protects the slimy edges of the world that nobody else wants.  Its her ongoing feud against the elves and against Silviarius that gets her into trouble ultimately.  It results in her imprisonment far from her swampy home.

The Orsip Dynasty and the Kingdom of Orsia

The Orsips moved into the void created by the defeat of Aglaeca and they ruled over this entire region for six to seven hundred years.  The Orsips were some of the last of the Chaosborn Kings over man.  When mankind poured through the elven gates as the shock troops of the Great Elder beings of Chaos, the Goddess Shub and other such Mythos inspired creatures, the Chaosborn Kings were their rulers and commanders.  When the armies of Chaos were finally defeated the six dynasties of the Chaosborn Kings were smashed and scattered to the four winds.  The Orsips found themselves in the lands now occupied by the Kingdom of Daria but there they remained during the earliest years of their rule, little more than a line of tyrant warlords over blue painted tribes of Chaos worshiping Picts.  With Aglaeca out of the way the Kingdom of Orsia greatly expanded and managed to build something more lasting.

The Kingdom of Orsia lingered as the last of the great Chaosborn dynasties until the ancestors of the Hundred Lords of Man finally managed to wrestle control of these lands from them, creating the three Lawful aligned kingdoms of Daria, Kyrene and Etruria.