A Giant is an Accumulation of Ambitions

Campaign: The Excruciata (Umberwell, 5e D&D)

Characters: Raymondo Cortiz (human assassin rogue); Grumli Fellhammer (dwarf path of the ancestors barbarian); Nina Kessler (genasi way of the frozen fist monk); Hiroshi (human samurai fighter); Wexel (goliath college of valor bard).

Events: The Excruciata tracked Doctor Nymenholt down into the basement of the clinic, where they discovered a hellish industrial laboratory. Unfathomable machines spit galvanic arclight across a field of corpses on metal tables--a horrific charnel factory. Nymenholt was ready for the group; behind him stood a giant whose body was stitched together, obscene.

Nymenholt cackled madly, and spoke: "Do you know what a giant really is? A giant is nothing less than an accumulation of smaller men's ambitions." Nymenholt waved his hands, gesticulating wildly to the giant that lumbered and glowered behind him. Then, the Excruciata saw it as it really was, and Nymenholt was right: the giant was not just a monstrosity of flesh, bone, and hate; it was revealed to be comprised of men and women, harnessed together with sutures and hellish surgery to form something larger than each minuscule individual, their bodies thrashing together with the syrupy sick sound of sweat-coated skin striving against other sweat-coated skin.

The amalgamate giant charged the party. Grumli, Hiroshi, and Wexel met the charge and engaged the giant in melee, while Raymondo and Nina attempted to cross the laboratory to get to Nymenholt. The giant hit like an avalanche, its fists pummeling the crew. Nina and Raymondo's sprint toward Nymenholt was halted by the rise of the corpses laid out on the metal tables. 

Nina became a whirling engine of destruction, taking down zombie after zombie. Raymondo tried to break away from the horde to reach Nymenholt, but was felled by the monsters he was trying to evade. By the time Nina fought her way to him, Raymondo had been torn apart by the zombies. Nina began to climb the room's uncanny machinery to get out of the reach of the things, all the while throwing bolts of radiance at Nymenholt as he struggled to find cover.

Meanwhile, Hiroshi, Wexel, and Grumli were slugging it out with the giant. Grumli was knocked prone by the giant's meaty fist, and then he was trampled underneath its feet--crushing him utterly despite his barbaric dwarven resilience. Moments later, Wexel cut the thing asunder, spilling the bloodied bodies that made up its bulk like ropes of offal falling to the floor.

Hiroshi's bow put an end to the cowering Nymenholt, and his remaining animated dead were duly put to the sword. Down two long-standing members, the Excruciata ransacked the clinic quickly, locating Nymenholt's collection of spellbooks and occult tomes for their cultist allies. 

Crime pays dividends in violence, and the Excruciata had held up their end of the bargain with the Church of the Outlander. They would have the magical backing they needed to go into the production of magical gunpowder for sale in the criminal underground.

* * *

Deaths over the course of the campaign: Ramondo Cortiz, Grumli Fellhammer, Zanna Cobblestop, and Erron Halethorpe.

* * *

Other installments in season one of this campaign:
Enter the Excruciata
Aboard a Blood-Hunting Ship
Rumble in the Urban Jungle
We Kidnapped Your Son, Sell Us Dragon Blood
The Dark of a Tavern in the Cemetery

Misery and Death Have Their Own Staccato Rhythm

Stay tuned for Season Two!

Mel Gordon Tribute

Mini-episode 9: Mel Gordon Tribute
Jack and Kate take a different approach in this mini episode by paying tribute to author, scholar, theater expert, and collector Mel Gordon. Mel's books had a huge impact on both of your hosts and they discuss his importance and the legacy he leaves us with. Kate talks about her personal encounters with Mel and Jack dives into where he fits within an academic context.

How does one get cast in a Mel Gordon theatrical production? What kind of gift would one receive from him at one's wedding? Why is there no Weimar Berlin simulation for the Oculus Rift and how do we fix that? Where does Werner Herzog fit into all of this? Find out all this and more in this month's mini episode of Bad Books for Bad People.

Books discussed include:

Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin

Theater of Fear and Horror: The Grisly Spectacle of the Grand Guignol of Paris, 1897 - 1962

The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar's Priestess of Depravity

Horizontal Collaboration: The Erotic World of Paris, 1920 - 1946

BBfBP theme song by True Creature

Find us at BadBooksBadPeople.com, on Twitter @badbooksbadppl, Instagram @badbooksbadpeople and on Facebook. You can discover where to get all the books featured on Bad Books for Bad People on our About Page.

Dragon #243: Street Avenger, PC Report Card, Magical Crossbreeds

I get the best gaming value-for-the-money out of old issues of Dragon magazine. No matter what edition the magazine was currently supporting, there's always at least three ideas worth the price of admission--and in almost every issue the density of ideas-to-dross skews in the right direction. In this series of posts I'm going to pick back issues at random, give them a read-through, and point out the things that (hopefully) illustrate why I think picking up old issues of Dragon for a couple bucks when you see them in the wilds is damned worthwhile.

"In a Class By Themselves," written by Tom Doolan and illustrated by Rags Morales, is not the sort of article that usually appeals to me. Essentially, the article takes up the system for creating a new character class in the 2e AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, and gives a few examples of how to use it to create hybrid classes that act as a kind of multi-classing for human characters. However, the second example--the street avenger--did catch my eye: "Here is the peasant’s paladin, the back-alley hero. The street avenger has made it his personal quest to rid his city of violent crime. He uses the criminals’ own methods to root them out and destroy them, yet he remains the hero and savior of the helpless victim." Although the concept of the street avenger isn't the most original character concept ever, it occurs me that I've never played a character fitting that profile, and that the core idea of a street avenger would fit very well into the Umberwell. In the spirit of making something new from something old, I've borrowing Doolan's character class idea and made a 5e D&D character in that mold: Elzabeth o' the Gutter.

Peter Adkison's "The PC Report Card" is halfway toward something I can use. The notion of grading the players' performance to assign XP seems weirdly one-sided in a game that is essentially a collaborative effort to have fun, and since I grade people's work in real life this isn't something I want to do when I'm off the clock. However, the idea of having players write down the things they feel they accomplished or were significant on a 3x5 card after a game session and using that information to award XP or other rewards is interesting and worth tinkering with.

"Magical Crossbreeds," written by Johnathan M. Richards and illustrated by George Vrbanic, takes a tried-and-true D&Dism out for a walk: wizards are always using magic to glue two different creatures together into a monstrous amalgamation, ala the owlbear. The article gives a full Monstrous Manual treatment to six new monsters, including the amadillephant, dragonfly turtle, duckbunny, moat cat, spider-horse, and venom dog. Although these beasties might be a little out there for most D&D campaigns, I can certainly see them getting some use in a Gamma World game or perhaps a homebrew D&D setting based on Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation.

Igorrr, Dour Festival

Igorrr, Full Concert (Dour Festival, 2017)

If you dig that, check out these videos about the making of Igorrr's album Savage Sinusoid:

Beowulf But with the Xenomorphs from Aliens

A campaign idea: Beowulf, but with xenomorphs from Aliens.

The player characters are all Geatish heroes lately arrived at the kingdom of the Danes to help the beleaguered Hrothgar, whose mead hall has been overrun by...aliens from beyond the stars. 

Of course, once Grendel--a xenomorph/human hybrid--has been slain and Heorot cleared of the alien menace, the heroes must venture beneath the lake to the crashed ship the xenomorphs arrived on and face Grendel's mother--the xenomorph Queen.

This statblock from Geek & Sundry may come in handy:

Misery and Gain Have Their Own Staccato Rhythm

Campaign: The Excruciata (Umberwell, 5e D&D)

Characters: Raymondo Cortiz (human assassin rogue); Grumli Fellhammer (dwarf path of the ancestors barbarian); Nina Kessler (genasi way of the frozen fist monk); Hiroshi (human samurai fighter); Zanna Cobblepot (gnome wild magic sorcerer); Wexel (goliath college of valor bard).

Events: The gang tracked Doctor Nymenholt to the medical clinic he runs in the Chandler's District. Zanna posed as a patient needing an examination; Nina came with her playing the part of a concerned friend. The rest of the group sidled around to the back of the clinic to enter surreptitiously through a window. Unfortunately, the break in went wrong from the start--Raymondo, Hitoshi, and Grumli made too much noise breaking and entering and were promptly attacked by nurses who turned out to be more than medical personnel--nurses generally don't cast spells that make the walls bleed and cause slashing claws to form out of the ether.

Meanwhile, alerted to the intrusion, the nurse who was attending Zanna in an examination room turned on her, slicing at her with a scalpel. Nina, reading a broadsheet in the waiting room, failed to hear the melee until it was too late...Zanna stumbled out of the examination room only to crash to the floor in front of Nina, dead. 

And that's where we took a break so Zanna's player could make a new character.

The game resumed with the gang's sorcerer falling dead at Nina's feet. Now alone and besieged by a murderous, magically proficient "nurse," Nina fought for her life--and won. Upon examining the corpse of the nurse, Nina discovered that the woman bore the Adversary's mark. It was now apparent that the Church of the Outlander had enlisted the Excuciata in a war between two cults as the condition of their alliance--the Church of the Outlander were hoping that the gang could take out their occult rivals.

Nina fled deeper into the Nymenholt Clinic to find the rest of the Excruciata. She discovered them in a pitched battle with other members of the clinic-cult. After dispatching the "nurses" the gang debated whether to press on with their mission to assassinate Doctor Nymenholt or bail in light of Zanna's untimely death. Misery and gain have their own staccato rhythm; the remaining members of the Excruciata decided to press on and take blood for blood.

As they explored the now shockingly silent clinic, they discovered a patient--a goliath musician name Wexel--hiding in a janitor's closet. Wexel explained that he had come to the clinic hoping to beat his addiction to snowleaf, but had discovered that Doctor Nymenholt and his nurses were implanting the patients with unholy parasitic lifeforms. He had tried to make his escape during the chaos of the Excruciata's entrance into the clinic, but he hid in the closet when he saw the doctor appear suddenly and take the elevator down into the basement.

Wexel decided that there was safety in numbers. Grumli armed Wexel with a spare sword and he was duly deputized as an auxiliary member of the Excruciata. The gang quickly located the elevator that Nymenholt had been spotted entering, and took it down into the basement of the clinic.

Facial Justice

Episode 20: Facial Justice.
L.P. Hartley's Facial Justice depicts a post-nuclear dystopia in which absolute equality is enforced by rule of... well, not law, but supposedly benevolent edicts designed to protect citizens--or in the book's language, "patients and delinquents"--from themselves. In this world, anything that might inspire envy is corrected by the state, even if that means surgically altering a person's physical appearance. Jack and Kate take a deep dive into this novel that is by turns cheeky, macabre, and thought-provoking.

Is it possible to be a good person in an inherently flawed society? How can language shape a culture? Is it worse to be banished to the underworld or forced to play rounds of golf? Why is 1984 standard reading but young people are deprived of the chance to discuss Facial Justice in the classroom? All these questions and more are explored in this month's episode of Bad Books for Bad People.

BBfBP theme song by True Creature

Find us at BadBooksBadPeople.com, on Twitter @badbooksbadppl, Instagram @badbooksbadpeople and on Facebook. You can discover where to get all the books featured on Bad Books for Bad People on our About Page.