Continuing with the prompts from d4 Caltrops’s d100 Table of Topics to Blog About, I’m going to knock out some short ones this time around.

05 – Are there any Recurring Jokes or Humorous Call-Backs that occur in your Games? I want to say yes, but it’s hard to think of them off the top of my head. The gnome got swallowed by monsters so often that she learned a spell that lets her burst out when it happens. The party as a whole skirts the law during their cult-busting but has borderline cult status themselves. They keep a bunch of talking severed heads in a portable hole, and one of them insists on having a “Strapping, young” body made to carry him around. Hot Springs Island was full of silliness which was a good contrast for some of the grim themes.

One of my favorites was in our Frostmaiden campaign, my character was given the secret, “You’re actually from outer space and were brought here by mind flayers,” or something to that effect. I rolled up a goblin and would frequently say, “I’m just a simple country goblin, but…” At a late stage in the game, I revealed, “I’m not actually a simple country goblin! I came here from space!” And everyone rolled their eyes because it had been so obvious all along. It was great.

06 – Are there Constellations in your Setting? Can you describe four of them? Mm… Maybe there are in Midgard and Ptolus, but no, I can’t. There’s a legend about a missing moon in Ptolus and how its return will signal the Night of Dissolution, and that’s pretty important. It’s a fun one because it’s a legend, so its veracity is uncertain and you get different opinions on it from NPCs.

Will there be constellations in the Iron Fist of the Hobgoblin King? I’m not sure. I’d like the months to be significant, like they tweak magic or reactions or something slightly, so maybe there should be. But I want it to be easy to use. I like Dolmenwood and the moon signs characters can be born under for different effects, so perhaps something inspired by that but taken in a different direction. When the time comes, I should pull out my old Dragonlance Adventures book and look at how it handled the effects of the three moons on magic. I love those sorts of campaign-specific mechanics.

07- Are you working on your own System? What makes it stand out from others? This is a big question that merits its own post. In short, I’ve come to feel that new systems are best justified by being tightly tied to a setting, like Dolmenwood. I think I’m going to hack Shadowdark for the Iron Fist of the Hobgoblin King to bring a few rules in line with my preferences (a stealth mechanic, movement in feet, and less abstracted XP rewards, to begin with) and create bespoke classes tied to the setting, while keeping mechanics directly compatible so that you can use the Shadowdark standards seamlessly. It’s going to have domain and mass combat rules, as well as some other stuff that ties into the themes of the setting. And I plan to have an OSE conversion guide, with all the stat work already done.

08 – Can one buy Magic Items in your Setting? Where would one go about doing this? You certainly can in Ptolus. Magic items get regularly brought up from the dungeons beneath the city and there are a number of stores that they get sold at, the primary one being Myraeth’s Oddities in Delver’s Square. I have a system where I started with three items, and then each time the party visits the store, I roll to see if each one is still there, if it’s been sold, and if it’s been replaced. For magic items, I pull from Kobold Press’s Vault of Magic to avoid the same old standards.

You can also request items. A character who does so has to bump into a representative of the Dreaming Apothecary who then gives them a token to place under their pillow. While sleeping, they’ll be visited by a representative who negotiates the sale. That’s straight out of the Ptolus big book and I like it a lot.

The one thing I should have done in my Ptolus campaign would have been to make it so items don’t recharge. The characters have a mountain of gold, use it on something! And then they would have new items and effects rotating in.

Ha, I almost forgot, they also have a fey goblin under contract who’s crafting things for them. He can often be found taking smoke breaks outside their temple headquarters, but he gets his work done.

In the Iron Fist of the Hobgoblin King, magic item sales will be much more uncommon as items are often unique. The wealthy might trade in these items, but it would be a special event, something a general or sorcerers seeks for a specific purpose. Otherwise, the local pellar or hedge witch might have potions or charms for sale. The characters can’t just go into a shop and pick up a +1 sword, but they might be able to convince the dwarves to craft one if they can trade a significant favor.