More Drained City

I did a cover mock up for Oursinoir:

Not officially supported or endorsed for Into the Odd

And drew a creature, one of the Purple Columns:

To summarize briefly:

The supplement I'm writing is called Oursinoir: Strange Oceans, and it's about a city of wayward street urchins who work in service to vampiric mega-sized sea urchins (Seriously it started as a gimmick but I really like what came out of it now, so I'm sticking to it). They are divided up into gangs and they fight one another, arming themselves with whatever they can find throughout their city of Gavroche, as well as artifacts they pull out of the deep piles of fossilized fish bones that Gavroche is built on top of.

The city is also perched precariously over a toxic ocean, and seems ready to collapse into the sick green water at any moment. Far beneath the jagged edge of black stone debris crashes into the rocky shore line...broken buildings, foreign ships, bits of other worlds and dimensions formed into corridors inside pieces of living crystal.

So, I was going to write today about constellations and such, but +Michael Gentile asked the question (or really suggested I answer the question) "What's in it for me?", because the first post didn't offer much up in the way of player engagement. I'm really glad Michael asked about this. I had written the original post at about 3am (this one also, it's the witching hour), and while I thought the post mentioned enough adventure bits, it clearly didn't address them clear enough.

So here's a very rough map I started making:

It's a side view to give a bit of a look at how the city is situated over the water, how the piles of fossilized fish bones go deep down into the earth (and they're everywhere) and it even shows some angry crab creatures waiting out of sight in the watery depths.

But I'd rather have something professional, so I commissioned +Thomas Novosel to make a map instead. I'm very thankful that Thomas is taking some time away from his own Runaway Hirelings: Ultimate Peasant Edition game product to work on this for me; his artwork is top notch and his maps are, too.

But seriously, what's in it for adventurers?

I see Oursinoir as three kinds of games: Survival, Exploration, and Street Fighting. I still have to playtest the hell out of this setting, I only just started writing it yesterday, but I think that, for a successful "adventure", all three elements should come into play.

The player characters are poor, parentless children who survive in a city where they aren't in charge a la Lord of the Flies, but they are still oppressed and suffering. The vampiric mega-urchins they serve act as guardians to a degree, promising them safety, but they send the boys and girls on "errands", out beyond the city limits to dig through soft soil and climb deep down into chasms carved out of fish bones, searching dark passages of calcified bone for weird artifacts to make them more powerful.

And everyone hates each other so they're always fighting. And the fighting is fueled by fear because there's never a break from the grueling life, for anyone. There are no adults because adults all work in the faraway factories that fill the wilderness of smokestacks far to the east, across the dug up stretches of the fish bone lands. And the children are afraid of growing up. And they are afraid of the vampire mega-urchins. And the purple columns that float like sentries through the city streets, making monsters out of children. And they fear monsters. And they fear each other.

Children sleep in dark cold places, there's never any sun here, just the warmth of one, and nights are long and terrible.

So what's the point?

Well if you do good on a run, if you find something useful, your patron sea urchin will reward you. More food maybe. Or a warm bed. Or make you a gang leader. Give you a piece of territory to defend.

Sometimes the patron is just hungry. It's hard work capturing other kids, but it's gotta be done. The megaurchins aren't picky; the more sensitive children find other things to feed them; rats and worms and snakes, if they can grab them. The problem is a lot of the creatures that live here used to be kids, before they got caught and converted by a purple column. Besides, most kids no longer care. Especially the desperate ones.

And in the city of Gavroche, everyone's desperate.

But there is rank and status.

Your rank is your level.

Your status is your place in the gang, basically name level. These things affect how gangs will interact. I'm still writing up this part.

You go out on errands for your patron, or sometimes you go it alone. Going on an errand means doing whatever the patron asks for, regardless of how dangerous. Going it alone is something you do on downtime, with or without the patron's blessing. It's more risky, but if you pull of a stunt (some kind of dangerous action), you'll gain renown, which is basically XP with bonuses to status.

So doing either way you gain levels, and if your patron picks you for an errand you have to do what they ask or face consequences, but you can also choose to go it alone and gain extra XP for whatever stunt you pull.

As I write this out, the details will fall into place and make a lot more sense. I also have to do a lot of playtesting to make sure all the bits function properly.

Here are my thoughts on character creation:

Characters are rolled up basically the same way as in Into the Odd (Don't own it yet? Buy it! It's absolutely worth it!), with the following changes: 

Stats: Roll 2d8-1.

Hitpoints: Roll 1d4.

Starting Equpment: You start with nothing; your patron (the DM) will give you starting equipment depending on the errand it needs you to perform. Expect anything like the following (you may roll 1d12 and pick one to start with regardless of the patron's supplies, if the DM allows it):

Brass Knuckles

Candles

Crowbar

Hatchet

Knife

Lantern

Oil

Pipe

Pistol

Rations

Rope

Tinder

Is there magic?

In "Into the Odd", your characters go on expeditions and find "arcanum", which are powerful (and weird) artifacts. Oursinoir functions similarly; there is no "magic" per se, but artifacts can bestow magic-like psionic abilities. Some artifacts are onetime use, some are consumed, and some are activated. The rarest artifacts function constantly...they are both powerful and greatly feared.

Okay, I'll write more soon. I'm enjoying working on this, and other people seem to be responding to it as well. I also have to update When the Seas Hunger and expand Black Stone Starship, and of course there's Across the Stars and Waste; work proceeds on both of those as well.

And I have to get back to Bag of Astronauts, but that I had to put on hold briefly.

There's also the pending company launch, which I'm almost ready to start talking about incessently.

Okay, more to follow.

The Drained City

 

Oursinour: Strange Oceans is a city supplement/setting I've started writing for use with Chris McDowall's excellent Into the Odd ruleset. I love ItO's own city of Bastion, but my mind started to play with the idea of children, of urchins, and what if street urchins served sea urchins. So I made the above picture using various google images and apps (among them Prisma), and once I had that, my city of Gavroche was ready to be written.

So here is Gavroche. Let me know what you think of it so far.

Gavroche, the drained city. An old, and broken place of weathered cobblestone, crumbling bricks, and junked machines, built atop a pile of fish bones, the discarded refuse of an ancient mega beast that once trawled here, when all of this area was deep under water.

When alien queens held court in the vast, deep, black, perpetually at war in an unseen world.

But that beast is long dead and the waters of the ocean receded a long time ago. Now there is Gavroche, sitting perched like a dying bird, hanging on a precipice of jagged black rocks over an ocean of churning waters, green as bile that crest in yellow foam against sharp rock embankments,occasionally spewing up small bits of industry,depositing on beach fronts old temples dedicated to forgotten gods of a once industrious ancient empire, or bringing weird abandoned husks of ships from far off kindoms of the western world, where the mountains slither like worms, or bits of worlds and other dimensions, bound up in strange structures of living crystal that hunger for inhabitants to stumble through their interiors.

Gavroche, the city of lost children...of urchins divided into gangs fighting for scraps to live off of. They fear only the Columns, purple obelisks that float silently along the streets and whose gaze from their single crimson 'eye' turns boys and girls into monsters: lizards and winged horrors and other mindless, hungry beasts.

So the urchins fight. They evade. And they dig. They dig through layers of old fish bones that go on forever under their city, in search of food and supplies and powerful artifacts they wield to help turn the street wars in their favor.

And there are no adults, or there are but they are all far away and imprisoned in the factories that dot the bleak landscape that falls away from the edge of the world, east of where Gavroche rests overlooking a sickly ocean; the dire wilderness from which massive machines rise up as towers, spewing fire and ash into the sky, obscuring the sun, if such a thing still even exists. The street urchins aren't so sure. If it does it moves north to south directly over Gavroche, and it explains the strange warmth that flows in and out of the city, marking midday.

The children have no time to worry about where the sun is in the sky or what it looks like; all they know is that at night the grey haze that fills the sky becomes thinner, and a few scattered stars glisten through the veil of ash-tinted clouds.

The boys and girls instead listen to their patrons, one for every gang, the mighty and undying vampiric once-sea gigaurchins, who long ago abandoned their ocean home and came to Gavroche in search of food. What they found were scared and lost children, so they took them under their spindles.

And they made war of them.

These gigaurchins hide in old buildings, filling basements and bedrooms with chattering noise from their massive maws, circular mouths that still sing astrological murmurings, as they did for the wizards that summoned them, before they all died, when the columns arrived and ate all the magic.

The kids work hard to protect their patrons and keep them fed, lest they stop chattering. But their chattering keeps worse things then columns from invading the city. Deep things, lingering out of sight in the awful ocean, waiting to stalk the surface.  Occasionally there are crablike creatures visible on rocks that get exposed off the coast in seasons of low tide; golden shelled and full of hatred for the surface they witness.

They will come one day, chatter the gigaurchin patrons, when Mercury falls from retrograde and the triangle constellation reforms, three points of light shining from the center of the sky, their stark glow piercing the haze of smog and ash and fire that fills the sky in the daytime.

Still some stars can be seen in the distance west of Gavroche, across the ocean of bile, where black mountainous shapes slither and shift along the horizon. Here at night stars twinkle and a few constellations can be seen, their exposure helping the gigaurchins to read the entirety of the sky they can no longer see.

That's all for now. Next:

1. The Constellations
2. What children find on a dig
3. Stats for creatures
4. Additional setting details

Let me know if there is anything in particular you want me to discuss or address.

An Across the Stars Scene

 

"Do not defy me, you tattooed witch!"

Aurelia Three Moons was not amused with the viceroy, or his delegation. She could barely stand the stench of their technology, whirring motors grinding deep inside their skulls and limbs, no doubt leaking radiation and poisoning their organs.

She sighed, closing her eyes and exhaling before saying,"This is a sacred place, Emrukai, and you are forbidden to be—"

"—I come on the authority of the Central Bank itself!" Emrukai shouted, thrusting the old, yellowed contract of the League's central financial system forward. Aurelia made no attempt to touch the sick paper, once a tree on some lush world, now fashioned into a terrible thing: a weapon, of a variety. One of her attendants grabbed the paper and scurried away down a side passage. There may still be hope to extract some genetic material...

"The League holds no authority here, Emrukai—"

"—it is a known fact that you are in possession of something that belongs to us!"

"The people you refer to ar—"

"—the people are known terrorists and saboteurs and have embarrassed the Ministry for the last time!"

Aurelia chose her next words carefully as she glared at the rotund man and his entourage that somehow managed to remain obsequious to him. She knew the League would come here one day, when their need was strong enough. Right now she had time on her side, but one day, they would come. As they had come for her peoples' land thousands of years before. As they had always come.

Takers, she cursed in her thoughts.

Then, with resignation scripted on her face, she muttered, "They are not in this temple. They landed near the river, 100 miles north of here. Now leave us."

She could no longer look Emrukai in the eyes. Triumphant, he and his entourage left, hurrying down the clay steps and through the temple's naturally grown archway.

Aurelia felt sick. Pain wracked in her stomach.

Then, the three refugees emerged from the shadows of a side passage.

"You...lied," one of them said.

"I know," Aurelia replied, her voice empty and cold.

"I must retire. And you, I'm afraid, must leave now."

(Artwork by Claudia Cangini.)