Wednesday, April 5, 2017

Thinking about Harpies

Source: http://guthrieartwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Harpy-BRGuthrie.jpg
I'm thinking about harpies right now.

The thought process starts here with this +Dunkey Halton blog post/adventure site:


It's an old post but it's fantastic. From there I asked on Google+ what sort of other monsters pair well with harpies, and +Gus L wrote this little passage:

I think that harpies are a monospeices biome destroyer. Like it's when an island has harpies - that's it, a screaming guano producing throng of harpies and maybe beneath the water at the fringes there are the sad revenants of drowned sailors. Clambering up onto anything that floats, sinking it if its small and terrifying if it's not. They aren't aggressive, just terrible and destructive. 50 waterlogged corpses making the deck creak, while trying to get at your rigging to turn the ship around, messing up as the ensorcelled sailors fight them to get to harpy land. This is how shipwrecks happen!

Curse his brilliance. So between the two ideas of a harpy shaft site-based adventure and a shipwreck-pending island hunting adventure, I'm thinking about an adventure. I'm also thinking about +Jacob Hurst's Hot Springs Island, which is currently on Kickstarter (I'm in at the $100 level and you should be too).

And I'm thinking a lot about Troika! by +Daniel Sell and +Jeremy Duncan.

How do these things all converge?

I'm still trying to figure all that out. I'm open to suggestions. I don't want to overwhelm players with harpies, because that can get boring, hence why I'm thinking of other monsters to feature with the harpies. But Gus makes a good point of harpies being monospecies biome destroyers.

Really I'm just itching to run something, and I think harpies are a good place to start.

So I'll commission some harpy art, and probably a map, and toss something together. I'll have a better idea of what I'm going for in the morning.

Further Thoughts on Harpies

Harpies are ugly and feral. They eat and shit, and probably fuck. Their squawk sounds guttural in a fashion like their throat is full of fish. They smell worse than that. Their skin is dingy, their feathers molted. They are terrible things that hate the world around them. They are territorial. They breed incessantly, destroying ecosystems. They are a blight upon the world.

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