As noted in yesterday’s session writeup, I took a swing at homebrewing a Shadowdark creature to give my orcs a little magical support. This was loosely based on the core book’s kobold sorcerer, with some orcish flavor:
These were nasty opponents, made all the more so by the PCs’ focus on their screening mooks. This let them keep casting Wolf Call for several unimpeded rounds, and the wolf spam threatened a TPK at one point.
I only got one Skunk Curse off, and I giggled far more than I should have when describing its effects.
This whole scene was a result of rolling into the topmost hex of my weather hex flower table (to be detailed in another upcoming post). That result for weather indicates some sort of hazardous weather. Because the previous day had been extremely hot, I decided to throw in a day that would have been a red flag warning in modern National Weather Service terms: hot, low humidity, and high winds, perfect for starting and spreading wildfires. I struggled a little bit on how to make a wildfire interesting and “winnable” before settling on a field fire that would start small enough to be manageable… if not for some complicating factors.
The action sequencing for this “fight” ran according to my normal initiative house rules, with the farm NPCs assisting the PCs and the fire acting in the NPC phase. Attempting to extinguish an adjacent burning hex was a slow action requiring a successful Stamina roll. This received the usual +1 bonus for each helper, and an additional +1 if the PC was foolish enough to stand in a burning hex and try to extinguish it.
Good enough so far, but how about the fire “fighting back” and spreading? Well, I decided that while the initial UXO blast that sparked the fire was “natural,” the weather and – ahem – other conditions were right to attract entities that would drive its spread. What the PCs couldn’t see (until Minka and Pettimore uttered their respective prayers) were the two hexes that I had designated as holding the initial entities:
On each NPC/fire turn, I rolled 1d10 for each active entity. For each success (6+), the fire spread one hex. For each maxed die, a new entity would join the fight – which would drive faster spread on subsequent turns.
For each hex of spread, I chose a burning hex and rolled an appropriate die to randomly determine where the fire would go. For example, this would just be a d5 (or d10 / 2) roll:
After all spread had been resolved, each burning hex rolled a normal intensity C (2d8) fire attack against each character within its flames.
So far, this would work perfectly well for fighting a normal fire, perhaps with some mechanism for randomizing the spread rather than picking the source hex with deliberate ill intent (and for pushing the spread downwind).
As far as the entities went – Minka dubbed them “fire sprites” in the team’s after-action review and the name stuck – I decided that they’d be invisible to the PCs, but anyone who spent a turn studying the fire’s spread would get a Command or Survival check to realize the fire was acting unnaturally. With success, they’d be able to perceive the fire sprites. Minka was designated as getting automatic success because of all the PCs, she’s been leaning the hardest into the local folklore. If we’re putting it in D&D terms, she’s the party’s druid to Pettimore’s paladin – but as it turned out, both players independently did things that made me say, “screw it, you can see” without a roll – as did Arkadi’s player a couple of turns later.
Banishing a fire sprite required total melee damage (or Thoughts and Prayers damage) of 5 points. I also was open to creative solutions, but Minka, Pettimore, and Arkadi solved the problem rather efficiently once they could actually see it.
This was prompted by a summer birding walk a couple of years ago, in which my wife and I spotted and identified our first grasshopper sparrow:
The sparrow grasshopper‘s name derives from its mottled brown-tan coloration and prodigious size – typically 14-18cm long at full growth. Genetic analysis reveals it to be an Awakened subspecies of the differential grasshopper (Melanoplus differentialis). It is believed to reach this size through consumption of Awakened plant life, which is its preferred (but not exclusive) diet. Its size makes it a target for predators that do not normally eat grasshoppers, including domestic cats and dogs, several species of raptor, and hoop snakes.
The sparrow grasshopper is generally harmless to humans. However, when startled, it takes flight briefly, and swarms along highways have been responsible for several major traffic accidents as they have obscured drivers’ vision and confused vehicular sensors. As a dual-natured creature, the sparrow grasshopper has an astral presence, and swarms are vivid on the astral plane.
Occasionally, my brain does strange things with syntax. Such was the case when I recently became aware of the peacock spider. If we have peacock spiders, I asked, why can’t we have spider peacocks?
So in my headcanon, the spider peacock is now a thing in the 7th Sea game setting.
It started out as a Montaigne attempt to breed a mute peafowl that would be decorative without disrupting garden parties with its shrieks. The result wasn’t a mute bird, but rather one with raspy, rattling vocalizations – sounding, quite frankly, like a woman being strangled rather than one being knifed. As if that weren’t enough, the breed’s plumage lost much of its coloration, becoming silvery grey and the dark red-brown of dried blood. This might have been the end of the experiment if not for the elaborate patterns on the fowl’s tailfeathers, which resembled unique, intricate spiderwebs when raised in full display.
While a few eccentric Montaigne do still keep flocks of these “spider peacocks,” the primary market for the breed is, unsurprisingly, Vodacce. There, they are cherished pets, allowed to freely roam their owners’ estates. Some Vodacce believe that spider peacocks also can sense when a sorte strega tugs the strands of Fate in their vicinity, and that their ubiquity in certain nobles’ presence is more than simple ornamentation or ostentation.
