The end of the world we know shall come like to the tolling of a bell.

In the beginning there was a darkness at the heart of the world, and it cloaked itself in the shape of Shadow King – He Who Was Banished and wrapped in the threads of the Demonweb.

But like a shadow banished by a candle, the Shadow King lurked in the flickering darkness. And he reached out and reared up his Demon Court. And like their King, the Princes did furnish forth their Dukes.

And they are known in the Dark Tongue as the Galchutt – the Lesser Lords. And in the tongue of elves they are known as the Natharl’nacna. And in the tongues of men they are the Dukes of Chaos.

War was fought. And lost. And the shape of the world was changed. And the Princes were banished to serve their King in the webs that lie beyond the edge of time and space.

The Galchutt were not drawn into the temptations of that web. But their power was bound to their masters, and so they retreated to their Caverns of Slumber. And there they sleep.

And they wait.

Those who would serve them must sow the seeds of chaos. For the night shall come when the ties between the Dukes and the Princes shall be forever broken. And then their sleep will end. And the Galchutt shall walk the earth and in their footsteps the seeds of chaos shall blossom into the end of days.

And that night shall be the Night of Dissolution.

THE MANIFESTO OF THE TOLLING BELL

The rest of this book reads as a manifesto. The author – who calls himself Wuntad – describes the need for all the forces of chaos to join together in order to bring about the Night of Dissolution and the end of days. They would be led by a single cult known as Brotherhood of the Tolling Bell.

Mark of Chaos
Transmutation [Chaotic]
Level: Clr 2, Sor/Wiz 2
Components: V, S, M, DF
Casting Time: Standard action
Range: Touch
Target: One creature
Duration: One hour/level
Saving Throw: Fortitude negates
Spell Resistance: Yes

The target gains a physical mark prominently on her body—one of the many symbols of chaos or a chaos cult. Each time the target performs a non-chaotic act, she suffers a –2 penalty on any check or die roll (including attack rolls) involved with the act, if any. Each time the target performs a chaotic act, she gains a +2 bonus on any check involved with the act, if any.

The DM is the final arbiter of what constitutes a chaotic or non-chaotic act. Some are easy—attacking a lawful creature is a chaotic act. Casting a chaotic spell is a chaotic act. Using a chaotic (or anarchic) weapon is a chaotic act. Some acts are a bit harder to judge: Destruction, in general, is chaotic, while building and repairing is not. Murder, defying authority, lying, and cheating all can be chaotic acts, but the decision is ultimately up to the DM.

Arcane Material Component: A burning smokestick

DESIGN NOTES

Some material on this page is covered by the Open Gaming License.

Wuntad’s cult of the Tolling Bell is the central antagonist of The Night of Dissolution adventure. As with The Touch of the Ebon Hand, you can see how I’m taking chunks out of the Chaositech sourcebook and parceling it out via the lorebooks, creating an additional layer of lore for the PCs to slowly peel back. (In practice, this sort of material would also appear in cultist spellbooks and the like.)

Back to Chaos Lorebooks

Here’s a piece of bespoke terminology that I often teach my  players: low stakes test.

It’s not at all unusual for a roleplaying game or storytelling game to gives PCs a resource that they can use to improve their action checks. This might be a meta-currency, charges from a magical item, or some kind of exertion mechanic. Some games will even make this a central element of the resolution mechanic. (In GUMSHOE, for example, spending points from your skill pools is the only way that your character’s skill will have an impact on the check. This is less true in the Cypher System, but most checks will still see the PCs spending points through Extra Effort.)

The trick is that, when I’m GMing, sometimes I like to interrogate the system for stuff that would be kind of a rip-off if the players decided to spend limited resources on the check. If it’s a situation where I can clearly describe the stakes of the roll before the roll is made, no problem. (The players can decide for themselves whether it’s worth spending resources on.) But sometimes this would be awkward, inappropriate, or anticlimactic.

For example, the PCs might all be searching a room together and I want to figure out which of them finds the hidden tiara. I could make an arbitrary decision, roll a flat random check, or even elide past the question of who actually finds the tiara, but in this case

If I call for Find Hidden checks, however, one or more of the players might decide this is worth spending Perception Points on, which I know would be silly because they’re guaranteed to find the tiara – the check is just providing focus, a little bit of color, and a potential roleplaying prompt for one of the players (“Look what I found!”).

This is where the low stakes test enters the picture. Instead of saying, “Give me Search checks,” I say, “Give me low stakes Search checks.” This just literally means, “This check isn’t a big deal and I don’t think it’s worth spending points one.”

Players can, of course, still spend points on a low stakes test, but now I’ve done my due diligence and nobody will ripped off when the true stakes of the check are revealed.

It’s a small difference, but I’ve found – once I’ve taught the players what it means – that it greatly streamlines these interactions. (Some of my players probably think this is actually a published term of art in the games we play: It’s not at all unusual for me to include it when I’m explaining the rules of the game.)

MEANWHILE IN MOTHERSHIP…

In Mothership, every failed check causes a PC to suffer one point of Stress. This is a fantastic mechanic which constantly ratchets up the tensions and helps provided perfect pacing for every session, but it also largely removes small, incidental checks from GM’s toolkit.

I know some will cry out that this is, in fact, the point. I get it. But after a dozen or so sessions, I was still feeling handicapped by the loss of these checks.

So, once again, I’ve introduced the concept of a low stakes test, this time indicating to the player that they shouldn’t mark Stress if they fail the check. And, once again, I’ve found it incredibly useful for streamlining these table interactions, even when I’m running an open table and have to frequently introduce new players to the terminology.

This is very much a finesse technique (like the ones I use when collecting initiative), but it’s another example of how small improvements in your GMing can really add up.

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The pages of this volume are filled with disturbing and highly detailed diagrams of the most horrible physical deformities and mutations. A closer reading quickly reveals that these deformities – referred to as “the touch of the ebon hand” – are venerated by the writers as the living personification of chaos incarnate. Particularly prized are those functional mutations – an extra eye or oversized arms, for example.

The rest of the book describes horrid rites which make it clear that the Brotherhood of the Ebon Hand not only idolizes deformity and mutation, but seek to inflict it and spread it as well: Ritual scarring. Magical alteration. Alchemical experimentation. Chaositech-induced mutation.

Members of the cult have no distinctive garb, but they usually bear the symbol of a black hand in some form: A tattoo. A charm. A small embroidery on their clothes. Or so forth. Of course, most of them are also marked by their mutations.

BLESSINGS OF MUTATION

Blessing of Mutation
Transmutation [Chaotic]
Level: Clr 5
Components: V, S, M, DF
Casting Time: Standard action
Range: Touch
Target: One living creature
Duration: Instantaneous
Saving Throw: Fortitude negates
Spell Resistance: Yes

The target gains the minor mutation template (see Chaositech, Chapter 4). These mutations manifest over a period of 1d2+1 weeks. If this spell is cast every other day during thatperiod, the mutation template becomes moderate. If the spell is cast every day during the period, use the major mutation template.

A target gaining the minor mutation template reduces his experience point total to halfway between his current level and the previous level. He does not gain a new level again until he actually reaches a total that would qualify him for the next level. Thus, if the target is 6th level, his experience point total becomes 12,500 (but his level remains unchanged). He does not gain another level (7th) until he reaches 21,000 XP. A target gaining the moderate mutation template reduces his experience point total to midway between his previous level and the level before that. A target gaining the major mutation template reduces his total to the midpoint between the levels two and three levels below his current one. Characters whose experience point totals fall to zero in this fashion drop into a coma for 1d2 weeks. They awaken with no template but a permanent mutation drawback (see Chapter Four).

This spell does not work on targets that are already mutants.

Material Component: 1,000 gp worth of various chemicals and mixtures, requiring an Alchemy check (DC 20) to concoct. Failure indicates that the chemicals are wasted and ruined.

DESIGN NOTES

Some material on this page is covered by the Open Gaming License.

In the version of this lorebook that I gave to my players, I also attached the entirety of Chapter 4: Blessed Mutation from the Chaositech sourcebook. I won’t reproduce that here for obvi0ous legal reasons, but this is an example of how you can use lorebooks to introduce new mechanical elements to the game. I love pulling material from sourcebooks and packaging it as a lorebook reward for the players. Sometimes this will result in the players engaging deeply with the new material, but even when they don’t, I’ve found that they nevertheless get excited by the material.

Back to Chaos Lorebooks

Where’s the dwarven beef?

Review Originally Published October 9th, 2001

Azadmere is a HârnWorld supplement, containing four Encyclopedia Hârnica articles: Azadmere (10 pages), Khuzdul (4 pages), Habe (6 pages), and Zerhun (10 pages). It also includes full-page Player Maps (black and white, unlabelled) and Common Maps (full-color, labelled) for Azadmere (the kingdom), Habe, Zerhun, and Azadmere (the town).

AZADMERE

The titular subject of the supplement, the article on Azadmere devotes one page to discussing the history, government, economics, and religion of the Kingdom of Azadmere. In short: Azadmere is ancient, predating human civilization on Hârn by several millennia. When the first humans (the Jarin) reached Hârn, a symbiotic relationship grew up between the two cultures – with the dwarves increasingly focusing on their mining and craft, while the humans farmed the surrounding land for food. Eventually some human families were adopted into the dwarven clan structure. This caused some problems, however, because the original city of Azadmere was forbidden to humans. To solve this, the Outer City was constructed outside of the mountain (while the original city, within the mountain, became known as the Inner City).

Following this extremely brief summary (figure it out – if less than a page is spent in the book itself on this material, there can’t be that much information left out of my summary of the summary) we are given a full page map of the Outer City. The next two pages give a key for every single building in the outer city (naturally, almost all of these descriptions are extremely brief).

From there we get an even briefer look at the Inner City: Four pages of maps reveal the three primary levels of the Inner City (in relation to the Outer City and with detailed maps of Levels 1 and 2). The description of these maps is summarily squeezed into a single page, leaving room for a one page chart showing the clans of Azadmere and their primary assets.

And that’s it.

All right, I’ll be totally up front with you: My primary reason for buying the book was for the dwarven city. I’ve got a major dwarven city adventure looming on the horizon in my campaign, and so I went looking for extant dwarven city resources to draw upon.

But I’ve got to believe that I would be underwhelmed by this even if it hadn’t been my primary interest in the book.

I mean, the maps are fantastic. No doubt about it. Not only are they gorgeous in the execution, the Outer and Inner Cities are just plain well-designed from the look of it: They make sense, as so many fantasy cities do not.

But I have to admit that I want more description: I want to know what these rooms on the map look like. I want to know more about the people who live here. I want to know more about the politics. I want to know—

You know what? I just want to know more, period. And it’s not that “wow, you’ve told me so much and I’m still hungry for more” feeling (which is a great feeling) – it’s that “uh, did you forget to print something?” feeling (which is a bad feeling).

KHUZDUL

The four page Khuzdul article which follows the Azadmere article didn’t do much to alleviate my trepidations. Again, we are given the lightest coverage seemingly possible for dwarven history, culture, religion, and economics (and at least some of this is repeated from the Azadmere article).

To put this in perspective: The article on the Khuzdul in the Harndex (one of the books which comes as part of the second edition of HârnWorld) is nearly a page long. I would guess that the amount of information has only been expanded by approximately a factor of 5. Maybe.

Actually, the Khuzdul article as it stands in this book would make more sense as the Harndex entry. Or, at best, the outline for a Khuzdul supplement.

HABE & ZERHUN

The last two articles in the book are slightly better. Zerhun, in particular, seems to give a fairly complete picture of its subject matter (a dwarven fort guarding the southern reaches of the kingdom). But this actually serves as a major tip-off to the larger problems this supplement faces: If you need 10 pages to adequately describe a fort and the small town which supports it, what on earth makes you believe that 10 pages will be adequate to describe an entire dwarven city (which is 30 times larger in population alone)?

Habe is a small town, the oldest Jarin settlement in Azadmere. This article is still a little lighter than it probably should be, but doesn’t fare too badly. The maps of the keep in Habe, in particular, are a valuable resource. The maps of the Inn, in my opinion, less so.

CONCLUSION

The problem Azadmere has as a supplement can be summed up simply:

Where’s the dwarven beef?

If this book did nothing except describe the dwarven city of Azadmere, it could most likely do justice to its subject of choice. Similarly, if this book did nothing except describe dwarven culture and history, it could almost certainly do justice to its subject of choice.

Instead, Azadmere chooses to spread its focus too wide – and ends up failing to do justice to any of the material it chooses to present.

What’s in the book is of high quality. But the book remains deeply flawed because of what isn’t to be found here.

I, for one, am disappointed.

Style: 3
Substance: 3

Author: N.R. Crossby, Tom Dalgliesh, and Edwin King
Publisher: Columbia Games, Inc.
Line: Hârn
Price: $15.98
ISBN: 0-920711-09-X
Product Code: 5004
Pages: 40

Does, “Where’s the beef?” still have any cultural cachet?

I was, in fact, hunting for a great dwarven city supplement that I could plug into my ongoing D&D 3rd Edition campaign. Azadmere was not, as I recall, my only disappointment. (I believe there was also a Moria supplement I sampled and rejected, among others.) If I could go back in time and offer a guiding light to my younger self, I’d point him in the direction of DL4: Dragons of Desolation by Tracy Hickman and Michael Dobson, which includes an incredible set of dwarven city geomorphs.

Looking back, I’m realizing that my younger self had, in fact, read that module, but only in a used copy of the DLC1 reprint collection which, vitally, was missing all the geomorphs.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.