Necrozius' projects

[Necrozius]

The goal of this journal thread is to put my projects out there so that I can share my ideas and hopefully gather feedback/criticism.

...also to kick myself in the ass so that I'll actually finish them! Some have been in progress for up to six years. Having kids, I admit, slowed things down a bit.

For now this is a placeholder and I'll have more meaty content.

You'll notice that they are all inspired by certain styles and bands from the Metal genre. Very corny, I know, but hey, I'll take inspiration from wherever these days!

Curse of the Warlock
An adventure module inspired by a folk tale I once read. Basically the titular warlock is manipulating three noble houses into helping him free a vampire countess from her holy prison. It's a pretty straightforward adventure that is more about creating an eerie mood and setting. If the heroes just go along with it they'll be responsible for unleashing a terrible villain upon the world... if they're clever and perceptive, they'll prevent this OR become her favoured agents. Who knows? Vampire countesses are cool and badass. Inspired by cheesy extreme metal bands like Cradle of Filth.

Bonus: tools to generate creepy farmhouse encounters and nightmarish monsters inspired by Slavic and Eastern European myths.


King of the Grey Isles
More of a setting than a module (although various example hooks will be provided). This one is a heavy homage to a Epic Doom Metal band called Candlemass (the name is almost 1-for-1 the same as my favourite album of theirs). Basically a doomed King, his three fiendish Maidens and a menagerie of eerie servants, haunt the castles and towers scattered about a few column-like islands in a meromictic crater lake. It follows the trope of luring adventurers into that terrible place with rumoured promises of treasure. Of course, it's not quite that nice of a visit, they'll quite discover, as the place marks them permanently with the stink of death and doom. This ain't a lethal place, just a twisted one.

Bonus: tools to tweak the setting and its characters to suit different campaign styles. The King might be a lich, a ghost or a Gothic antihero. His maidens might be daughters, vampires or the ghosts of his former wives. Perhaps the King is actually a Queen, etc...


A Thousand Fathoms Deep
A dungeon setting based on my submission to the 2014 (or was it 2015?) One Page Dungeon Contest (a 2nd place winner called Sepulchre of the Abyss). Basically it's a freaky monastery dedicated to the Bodhisattva of the Dark Light. The concept in this dungeon of an Anti-Buddha is supposed to be as goofy and flawed as the Anti-Christ, by the way (it isn't the complete opposite of Buddhism, rather a twisted, nihilistic version obsessed with entropy and cosmic destruction). Lots of adventure hooks to draw PCs into this building on the abyssal plain. Inspired by black/death metal bands like Watain, Schammasch and Behemoth.

Bonus: tools to randomly generate the layout, NPCs and contents of each room (so that DMs could make this their own or create multiple Sepulchres in their campaign world).

Anyhow, I hope that exposing this stuff here will encourage me to perfect and finalise these works. I desperately want to produce something gaming-related in my life.

 

[Shipyard Locked]

You'll notice that they are all inspired by certain styles and bands from the Metal genre. Very corny, I know, but hey, I'll take inspiration from wherever these days!

Lots of professional RPG product designers clearly draw heavily from favorite wells, so there's no shame in it. I'm reminded of an old Hollywood director trick: Don't try to explain to your cinematographer what you want the movie's colors and mood to look like, just get a postcard, painting, or magazine photo that feels right and tell them to use it as their reference for everything.

That's what I'm doing with the current D&D setting I'm preparing: Whenever I get stuck I go, "How would they proceed in Fire Emblem 4?"

Anyhow, I hope that exposing this stuff here will encourage me to perfect and finalise these works. I desperately want to produce something gaming-related in my life.

Heh, unfortunately it can have the opposite effect, as your brain may interpret the act of talking about a project as satisfying as actually accomplishing something, thereby losing steam.

Anyway, I like the Thousand Fathoms one because I could actually use it in my current campaign, so I vote for that.

I feel on some level the Warlock one and the King one could be combined into one adventure with multiple competing factions.

 

[Necrozius]

Anyway, I like the Thousand Fathoms one because I could actually use it in my current campaign, so I vote for that.

That's always great to hear: gamers saying "hey I could use that!". That's motivation for me (I dread my works being selfish vanity projects).

I feel on some level the Warlock one and the King one could be combined into one adventure with multiple competing factions.

It's funny that you say that because the current draft is a merge of these two. I was worried that it was too much and was planning to split them up. I might rethink that...

 

[Moracai]

My opinions:

Curse of the warlock: You won't be surprising your players with this. Perhaps if they are 13 years old, but not in these days even then.

King of the Grey Islands: Fucking like this one!

A Thousand Fathoms Deep: You'll drown your playerbase with too deep thought. Best keep it simple, I think.

 

[Necrozius]

Curse of the warlock: You won't be surprising your players with this. Perhaps if they are 13 years old, but not in these days even then.

Well my goal wasn't to surprise them. Just to give them an ounce more depth than: "go into spooky dungeon, kill stuff, profit". 1-dimensional dungeon modules are a dime a dozen these days. It will be easy for them to figure out what is going on: what I hope will make it interesting is what they do with this knowledge (hopefully other than "nope, fuck it, let's go do something else").

King of the Grey Islands: Fucking like this one!

Cool.

A Thousand Fathoms Deep: You'll drown your playerbase with too deep thought. Best keep it simple, I think.

It is simple. There's a creepy monastery under the ocean. The monks and nuns are evil buddhists (a preposterous concept, but then again, most fantasy villains are). Again, just trying to add a bit more than just: "spelunking, murdering, looting". Players CAN do that, of course, in this dungeon. If they want to do more with the concept, they can.

I hate meandering fluff as much as the next guy. In all of these, a DM can ignore it all and just run it as a set piece. They'd be missing out on some (hopefully) cool flavor though.

 

[Necrozius]

I do really love Kevin Crawford's "One Roll" NPC generators (as seen in the current draft of Stars Without Number). I'm totally gonna use this in my projects.

The idea is that you get a single page with tables for a full array of "normal" gaming dice (d4, d6 etc up to d20) which you roll all at once and it gives you an interesting NPC.

So concise and simple. Will be useful for creating the monks and nuns of the Sepulcher of the Abyss (A Thousand Fathoms Deep).

 

[Necrozius]

I'm getting closer to wrapping up A Thousand Fathoms Deep. Just ironing out a few wrinkles with the random dungeon generator. There are already so many out there that I really want this one to be simple and easy to use before, during prep, or right there at the table.

After that it's doing some sinister-looking art pieces. The ending is in sight and this could be an epic achievement for me. I've never finished anything ever before. Excited but terrified.

It will be a cheap PDF on DriveThruRPG, most likely.

 

[Necrozius]

Stat blocks

Okay so I'd like to include some stat blocks that are concise. Like the ones seen in Lamentations of the Flame Princess or DCC.

Is there a guide out there on creating or choosing stats for OSR games that consider:

1. Dungeon level (eg, I want my module to be for mid-level characters)
2. Experience point rewards (those mentioned games don't list them, but I assume that DMs know how much they're worth; is it based on HD???)
3. lethality (is there a baseline or logic to making up monsters so that they're lethal/easy ?)

Any advice is greatly appreciated...

 

[Necrozius]

Further development on A Thousand Fathoms Deep

The main "villain" is Baron Laszlo, a decadent noble who visited Asia in search of new occult-inspired pleasures of the flesh (think homage to Hellraiser). During his travels, he found a gang of imprisoned criminals (the self-titled Lords of the Black Flame) who interested him greatly. Using his wealth he bought their freedom, as well as their service, and brought them back with him to start a new cult based on grotesque misinterpretations of several religions, including (and especially) Hinduism and Buddhism.

The Lords of the Black Flame are seven murderers who each follow heretical twisted versions of different faiths (think Satanism but not for Christianity).

Here are two of them so far:

Yurei
A woman from the Japanese archipelago whose vanity was primarily expressed through her voluminous black hair. She has never cut it. She was a successful serial killer of many young women.

Unhappy with how her body aged, she has found a form of immortality in undeath as a Nukekubi. She prefers floating about as just her head, hiding her body in a large vase, and is appeased by the groveling songs of dedication from nuns whom Yurei has hand-picked for their beauty.

She controls her long hair and can use it as a entangling weapon with surprising strength and sharpness.

Akephalos
Hailing from a Greek island, Akephalos dabbled in strange rituals that corrupted his body as much as his mind. His crime was theft and destruction of religious artefacts. The bones of saints were especially useful in his Stygian magic, but a set of false teeth (which were supposed to have once belonged to Saint Paul) had significant impact on a ritual that disfigured him. His head is wholly invisible.

Despite this disfigurement, he proudly exposes his lean, muscled body and paints a large face on his torso (hearkening to the mythical creature of his namesake). In dim light, the outline of his skull becomes faintly visible and haloed in blue flames.

Bukavac
The Warsaw Strangler (more to come)

 

[The Butcher]

Further development on A Thousand Fathoms Deep

The main "villain" is Baron Laszlo, a decadent noble who visited Asia in search of new occult-inspired pleasures of the flesh (think homage to Hellraiser). During his travels, he found a gang of imprisoned criminals (the self-titled Lords of the Black Flame) who interested him greatly. Using his wealth he bought their freedom, as well as their service, and brought them back with him to start a new cult based on grotesque misinterpretations of several religions, including (and especially) Hinduism and Buddhism.

The Lords of the Black Flame are seven murderers who each follow heretical twisted versions of different faiths (think Satanism but not for Christianity).

Here are two of them so far:

Yurei
A woman from the Japanese archipelago whose vanity was primarily expressed through her voluminous black hair. She has never cut it. She was a successful serial killer of many young women.

Unhappy with how her body aged, she has found a form of immortality in undeath as a Nukekubi. She prefers floating about as just her head, hiding her body in a large vase, and is appeased by the groveling songs of dedication from nuns whom Yurei has hand-picked for their beauty.

She controls her long hair and can use it as a entangling weapon with surprising strength and sharpness.

Akephalos
Hailing from a Greek island, Akephalos dabbled in strange rituals that corrupted his body as much as his mind. His crime was theft and destruction of religious artefacts. The bones of saints were especially useful in his Stygian magic, but a set of false teeth (which were supposed to have once belonged to Saint Paul) had significant impact on a ritual that disfigured him. His head is wholly invisible.

Despite this disfigurement, he proudly exposes his lean, muscled body and paints a large face on his torso (hearkening to the mythical creature of his namesake). In dim light, the outline of his skull becomes faintly visible and haloed in blue flames.

Bukavac
The Warsaw Strangler (more to come)

Damn, I like this. I played with "dark/evil/perverted/anti-Buddhism" back in my Day After Ragnarok game. The second arc, that never happened, would involve a radical Serpent cult within the Black Dragon Society (yes, this was a thing that actually existed) ressurecting the Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg as an all-conquering lich king, along with an army of undead White Russians, to crush the nascent People's Republic of China and all the other Chinese and Manchu warlords, and drag the Middle Kingdom kicking and screaming into the Greater Asia Co-Propserity Sphere under the watchful eye of the Chrysanthemum Throne.

What are you statting this up for?

 

[Necrozius]

Damn, I like this. I played with "dark/evil/perverted/anti-Buddhism" back in my Day After Ragnarok game. The second arc, that never happened, would involve a radical Serpent cult within the Black Dragon Society (yes, this was a thing that actually existed) ressurecting the Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg as an all-conquering lich king, along with an army of undead White Russians, to crush the nascent People's Republic of China and all the other Chinese and Manchu warlords, and drag the Middle Kingdom kicking and screaming into the Greater Asia Co-Propserity Sphere under the watchful eye of the Chrysanthemum Throne.

That sounds amazing. I had no idea that this sort of thing really happened.

What are you statting this up for?

I'm not sure yet. I'm torn between OSR basics (like Lamentations of the Flame Princess or Labyrinth Lord) or something more easily marketable like D&D 5e.

Whichever will be easiest for me. Creativity and motivation are rare for me these days. It's immensely difficult to work on this, even though I'm passionate about it...

 

[Necrozius]

Another note about Lamentations of the Flame Princess: I truly admire their adventure modules and design aesthetic. I've had good interactions with many of Raggi's contributors, but never had any luck with any of the "big league" folks of that clique. I might publish the module FOR that system, but not through Raggi. I doubt he'd accept my work anyway: he's never been receptive of any of my messages or ideas (Zak either). In fact, I always feel apprehensive interacting with them (I don't feel "cool" enough).

SO we'll see what happens. When I'm done Fathoms, I'll dish out free copies to people for suggestions/feedback. Not to any of those who charge money for that kind of advice though. I may admire their talent and energy, but I hate sucking up.

 

[Johnny Blade]

Damn, I like this. I played with "dark/evil/perverted/anti-Buddhism" back in my Day After Ragnarok game. The second arc, that never happened, would involve a radical Serpent cult within the Black Dragon Society (yes, this was a thing that actually existed) ressurecting the Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg as an all-conquering lich king, along with an army of undead White Russians, to crush the nascent People's Republic of China and all the other Chinese and Manchu warlords, and drag the Middle Kingdom kicking and screaming into the Greater Asia Co-Propserity Sphere under the watchful eye of the Chrysanthemum Throne.

What are you statting this up for?

Good Old Roman Von Ungern-Sternberg is one of my default BBEGs in secret history/occult conspiracy like games (I have played several). Kudos to you for using him!

 

[Johnny Blade]

In fact, I alwaysfeel apprehensive interacting withthem (I don't feel "cool" enough).

They're just primadonnas, they have Good ideas and can write them down compellingly but It's nothing to be in awe of and doesn't excuse them when they behave like asshats (and that's pretty often).
Just write; If you do It hard enought You'll eventually reach "your" readers, the ones who were waiting to read exactly what you have to offer. The internet assures It.

 

[Necrozius]

Here is some preview artwork for A Thousand Fathoms Deep.

Get a glimpse of two of the Augurs of the Dark Light (the Baron prefers female followers for some reason).

LINK TO BLOG POST; ALSO A SHAMELESS PLUG FOR MY BLOG