Dealer of Poisons

Artwork by Sean Andrew Murray. Source: http://seanandrewmurray.com

Nobody trusts the poison dealer, but his is a necessary evil in the city of Murder.

The streets of Murder are all narrow alleyways that intersect at odd angles; there are no main roads here, although there are names for them. Meetings occur in the alley behind the west wall complex past Dagger's shop and in between the Halls of Minotaur and Blade, all of which line Murder Row, which is a street that no one knows how to find but every shop owner claims to know how to get to.

The poison dealer is no different, as he offers what he calls his "canticles", the liquid verses of death.

I'd offer a random table of poisons, but there are so many of them out there. My personal favorite is +David McGrogan's:

...which you can get more details on here:

http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2014/04/random-poisons.html

What poison tables do you use?

Swordfish Islands Kickstarter

Last post I briefly mentioned +Jacob Hurst's Swordfish Islands Kickstarter campaign.

The campaign offers a lot of really great content, but you can find out about it by going to the kickstarter page itself.

I'm going to talk about something completely different.

I've started reading A Field Guide to Hot Springs Island, which is intended to be an in-game resource for players. It includes a fascinating story from one group of explorers as they traversed Hot Springs Island, and what they found there (or rather what found them). It also has sections describing native flora and fauna that are found on the island, including the muttering serpent:

        No one knows what the head of this large serpent, covered in mirror like scales, actually looks like as it always appears as the observer's head, even in death.

Muttering Serpent

I don't want to give away too much information, but I can describe A Field Guide... as over 200 pages of inspiring content. I can see how it could be useful in player's hands, but as a DM, it's particularly useful to me. Reading the introductory story segments help paint a picture for this strange island, and the suggestions presented of the creatures that are found there get the gears turning for new things to throw at my players.

This book is getting an upgraded reprint as part of the new kickstarter, but the second book is the really interesting one: The Dark of Hot Springs Island. This book is the DM's guide to everything crawling on and around Hot Springs Island, arming the DM with a plethora of new content that makes running a hex crawl on Hot Springs possible. It's the book I'm most looking forward to getting. In fact I almost passed on getting the Field Guide reprint, but it's only $25 more to have both books beautifully rendered so...why not?

If you enjoy hex crawls and campaigns of exploration, I highly recommend making the decision to back this project. There is a ton of beautiful artwork inside, and Jacob is a person who is very interested in producing high quality content. The decision to print these books the way he's pursuing is a great example of that.

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:

http://rememberdismove.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/harpyshaft-dungeon-adventure.html

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.