Grasping Dead, Skull Bomb, and Gaze of the Dead: Three New Necromancy Spells

Just in time for Halloween, here are three new necromancy spells.  The first, grasping dead, is the necromantic equivalent of entangle.  It causes corpses in an area to become uncomfortably handsy, grappling any nearby creatures.  The second spell, skull bomb, charges a skull with volatile amounts of negative energy, turning it into a dangerous bomb, trap, or thrown weapon.  The third, gaze of the dead, turns the eyes of basilisks, medusas, and other gaze-happy creatures into floating, necromantic weapons.

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The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL.  Open Game Content is ©2015 Jonah Bomgaars and d20 Despot.

Improved Armor Tables Part 4 - Medium Armor

This is part 4 of my ongoing series on improving the armor tables.  Unlike my Fixing the Weapons Table posts, these changes should be considered entirely optional and a GM should carefully consider whether they want to use them in their game, because it might mean a lot of tweaking stat blocks behind the scenes.  These changes are designed for GMs who love history and want their fantasy worlds to be a little more grounded in it.

This week's subject is medium armor, more protective than light armor but less restrictive than heavy armor.  We've got leather plate, wooden slat, scale, light mail, jazerant, brigandine, and lamellar.  These include some of the most widely used armors from history.  Lamellar, for instance, was used from ancient times through to the 19th century, in places like Central Asia, Byzantium, and Tibet.  Some armors are more obscure, or more limited in geographic or temporal range; jazerant was largely a Middle Eastern variation on mail, though the Japanese later got in on it as well.

Brigandine is one of my favorite armors, but it is one that often goes overlooked.  Because the actual metal of the armor is concealed (except for the rivets attaching the plates to the cloth backing), it doesn't show up well in historical illustrations and it lacks visual appeal for Hollywood and for fantasy illustrators.  Medieval drawings of soldiers in brigandine armor were probably the inspiration for 'studded leather armor', the fictional type of armor so popular among Victorian medievalists, RPG designers, and Hollywood costume departments.  Nonetheless, brigandine was an incredibly effective and popular style of armor, and I hope it will become so in your games as well.

Read on to see the stats for all these armor types and learn more about them.  As before, I have provided some historical information with each armor entry in order to aid the GM in determining which armors would fit best in a particular campaign setting.

The following items and rules in gold and their accompanying tables are available as Open Game Content under the OGL.  Open Game Content is ©2015 Jonah Bomgaars and d20 Despot.

Sandbox Campaign Part 16: Assault on Castle Drenn, Part 2

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Monster Monday: Fomorians - Horrific Giants of Irish Mythology

Today's Monster Monday is the dreaded fomorian, a race of deformed and hideous man-eating giants that were the inhabitants of Ireland before the Irish.  Well, they were the first inhabitants of Ireland, then the Firbolgs came, then they were both conquered by the Tuatha Dé Danann, and so on, but you get the picture.

The Fomorians by John Duncan, 1912 - via Wikimedia

Fomorians are generally depicted as having all manner of crazy mutations; some of them have one arm, some of them have one leg, some of them even have a goat head!  The king of the Fomorians back in the day was the dreaded Balor (modern Irish spelling: Balar, which I use to avoid confusion with D&D's Balrog knock-off), who had a single eye that destroyed all that he gazed upon, wilting crops, blasting through rocks, and laying waste to armies.  He was finally killed when his grandson, the half-tuatha-dé-danann-half-fomorian Lug, struck him in the eye with a slingstone so hard that it exploded out the back of his skull and killed twenty-seven warriors who were standing behind him.

Fomorians have been statted up for Pathfinder in Bestiary 4, as a type of titan.  I'm presenting my own take on them here, partly because I will never run a campaign in which a CR 22 monster shows up, and partly because my interpretation is a bit more in line with Irish mythology and D&D legacy.

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2015 Jonah Bomgaars.

Improved Armor Tables Part 3 - Light Armor

This is part 3 of my ongoing series on improving the armor tables.  Unlike my Fixing the Weapons Table posts, these changes should be considered entirely optional and a GM should carefully consider whether they want to use them in their game, because it might mean a lot of tweaking stat blocks behind the scenes.  These changes are designed for GMs who love history and want their fantasy worlds to be a little more grounded in it.

This improved armor tables project has been a real labor of love for me.  I have poured countless hours into research, design, and revision that I honestly probably should have spent formulating my PhD proposal or writing thank you notes to my wedding guests.  But hey, I wouldn't be me if I weren't doing this.  What is the point of free time, I ask you, if not to spend it doing something which engages you, even if what engages you is reconciling a body of historical research with an RPG rules system and compiling the results on a table for the readers of your blog?

Now that my table is (mostly) complete, I've had a bit of a debate with myself as to how I should break it up to present to you.  Should I cram it all into one long post?  No, my posts tend to be overly long as it is.  Should I divide it in two, perhaps one post presenting prehistoric and Bronze Age armors and another presenting Roman and medieval armors?  Or perhaps divide it between primarily European and primarily non-European armors?  Finally, I settled on what is perhaps the most obvious solution: one post for light armors, one for medium, and one for heavy.  The deal was sealed when I realized that I had inadvertently made seven armors of each type.  The sixth and (possibly) final part of this series will go over a new set of rules for mixing together two armors to make a composite suit of armor.

The armors presented below and in subsequent parts probably shouldn't all be available in the same time and place in your game world.  After all, one would hardly expect a medieval German warrior to be able to purchase ancient Thracian bronze scale armor or 17th century Iroquois wooden slat armor.  For this reason, and for my own edification, I have provided some historical information with each armor entry below, in order to aid the GM in determining which armors would fit best in his or her campaign setting.

The following items and rules in gold and their accompanying tables are available as Open Game Content under the OGL.  Open Game Content is ©2015 Jonah Bomgaars and d20 Despot.

Monster Monday: Gobbits - A Swarm of Tiny Goblinoids

For today's Monster Monday, I'm adding a new member to the goblinoid family tree.  Gobbits are tiny, knee-high goblinoids that can form up into swarms and wreak havoc.

Warhammer gnoblar box art, via bibliotheque imperiale

My initial inspiration for these little guys came from the Warhammer universe.  Warhammer has a plethora of little goblinoid creatures, like gretchins, gnoblars (pictured above), grots, and snotlings.  Snotlings in particular captured my attention, because they are tiny little guys that attack in swarms.  I wanted something similar in my campaign setting, so years and years ago I statted them up under 3.5 rules as 'Glabouters'.  Glabouter comes from Klabautermann, a type of goblin or kobold from German mythology.  Upon reassessment, Klabautermänner should be nautical goblins or kobolds, which is pretty awesome, so I had to come up with a new name.  Gobbit fit because it sounds like a diminutive form of goblin, plus it is close to 'gobbet', meaning "a lump or chunk of something, especially of raw meat."

As an added bonus, the third definition of gobbet ("an extract of text, or image (especially a quotation), provided as a context for analysis, translation or discussion in an examination.") is a commonly used teaching and testing tool in history education, so naming a monster after it makes me happy.

Presented below are the stats for a solitary gobbit warrior and a mighty gobbit swarm.  I think a swarm of humanoids should feel different from a swarm of rats or vermin, so you may notice that the gobbit swarm is more versatile in combat, able to bristle with longspears and launch volleys of arrows.

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2015 Jonah Bomgaars.

GotWK Campaign Part 7: Cold Iron and Hot Lead

This is an account of part 7 of my ongoing campaign set in my homebrewed wild west setting, Guns of the Western Kings.  Get caught up with the previous parts here.

Previously, in Guns of the Western Kings, our heroes were trying to make their way back to Fort Crawdon and the Sunbeam Silver Mine after an unusual subterranean steamboat ride took them far off course.  They fought off a bandit gang of coyote-folk who were trying to rob their train, only to arrive in Fort Crawdon and find they were wanted by the Deuclair Mining Company for failing to carry out their end of a bargain they had made earlier.  They fled into the woods and encountered a group of elves that they had also tried and failed to help, but were interrupted by a patrol of Deuclair Co. soldiers.  They fled deeper into the woods and were surprised to meet Heather's mom, a dryad, who told them that Heather's daughter was in grave danger.

And now:

Before Heather can absorb the fact that her mother is a dryad and her daughter is in the fey realm, the dryad has everyone link arms and pulls Heather, Theodore, Gudguníis, Face, and Rusty (and their horses) through her oak tree into the land of the fey.  They emerge, slightly dizzy from the experience, in a majestic wood.  The dryad introduces herself as Dervenn and explains that Heather's child, Annabelle (whose disappearance was Heather's reason for adventuring) has been living with her in the fey realm.  Because time passes differently in the land of the fey than it does in the mortal realm, Annabelle is no longer a child of eight, but a girl of seventeen, and quite the favorite at the Seelie court.  Unfortunately, her popularity has also made her a target; the goblin king Hizendis kidnapped her and took her to his lair - an ancient tower in the Forest of Twilight.  The tower, built by the ancient Dark Elves long ago, is reputed to have a corrupting influence on the fey, so none from the Seelie court have dared try to rescue her.  Hence why Dervenn had to reach out to the mortal realm.

Still reeling from the news that she is a changeling and her daughter has aged nine years since she last saw her, Heather heads off with the others across the fey realm.  After trekking for some time, they come to a patch of woods where the sky is dim and a foul yellow mist hangs in the air.  Above the treetops they can make out two towers.  They advance, but are distracted by a commotion to the right - two unicorns have wandered into a nearby swamp and become trapped in the sucking mire.  Suspicious of the trapped beasts, Face the pigtailed paladin detects their evil intent and the party simply walks away.  The evil unicorns, loathe to let their prey slip from them so easily, teleport out of the swamp and gore Face and Rusty.  They manage to fend them off, Face smiting them with her twin sawed-off shotguns and Rusty blasting them with fiery bombs, until the nefarious beasts are nothing but crispy, perforated corpses.  Rusty seems to recall that shadhavar horns can be very valuable evil spell components, and Theodore is all for taking them, but Face and Heather overrule Theodore's business plans and have the black unicorns burnt, horns and all.  Face makes camp there, unable to go further before she fully recovers from the shadhavars' poison.