Aw man, Redgre. You beat me at simplicity. Wylowex can fit into almost any type of campaign, from urban technomages to Arthurian legend (if you sand the corners). Well done. Go to Comment
(1) I feel like this should be focused on the Spousey elements of an NPC. There are already other NPC generators out there. Most DMs already have a favorite. I would focus on what a spouse generator can do that other random tables haven't already done. Looks and (especially) Fertility are off to a good start, but it'd be cool to see Love, Faithfulness, Cultural Similarity, Age Difference, mabye Family Cohesion, etc. Maybe you could wrangle stuff in there like Trust or Loyalty, but I'd rather just base on Love and Faithfulness.
(2) If a 6 in Fertility = a sure thing, that means that there are a lot of couples that don't have any kids. If this is pseudo-medieval setting, that's probably too low.
Cultural Similarity (d12): 1 = married a person from a far away place that doesn't even speak your language, 12 = married your cousin from across the street. Maybe 5/6 could be husband/wife marrying below their status.
I'd say Fertility (d10-2) = number of children a middle aged couple has had. A roll of 1 = one of them is barren, 2 = childless by choice. Modify by age category so that teenagers don't have 8 kids (although they could have, like, four? Maybe?) Adjust for childhood mortality if you want to be cynical.
I'd say Love (d8): 1 = outright hatred, 2 = dislike, 4/5 = Love is one-sided (Husband/wife), 7 = honeymoon phase, 8 marital bliss. Adjust for age, if you want to be cynical.
I like it. I've got a good image in my head, and its sticking. A bone-lion the size of an elephant is an appropriately epic mount for a evil giant antipaladin, or whatever.
However, I want to quote my Grandma in saying, "If all you've got is a big scary monster without any any weird powers, you've got to put a dress on it before you bring it to the ball," i.e. I feel like the Leonamuth would benefit from some weird lore or tactics.
Maybe you can make a fantastically deadly poison from its eyeballs. Maybe it wakes up sleeping animals by tapping them awake. Or it carries you off into the desert, gives you five minutes to run and hide before tracking you down (as long as it isn't too hungry) like a big, horrible cat playing with its food. Or they howl at the moon at night, except instead of howling it's like whalesong played backwards through Anton LaVey's skull without a pause for breath, and instead of a moon they howl towards the direction of the next corpsefall. Or else they use their mane-spines to build beautiful, deadly dens (I assume the spines are poisonous) for themselves and their mates, like bowerbirds. (Rival leonamuth are always trying to smash each other's dens.) Or how they'll stalk you with their bellies in the dust, so you can't see them sneak up on you, but their tails bob around 15' in the air like a golf flag is stalking you (My cat does that because he's an idiot.) Or how they roll around in their kills, spiking the remains on the their manes for a later snack. Go to Comment
The spines are poisonous, and banded in the same permutations of brown that mottle it's body. The spines are deadly poisonous, and if some ever finds its way to your bloodstream it will blacken your eyeballs and shatter your bones. However, the Leonamuth has no way to apply this poison intentionally: the poisonous mane mainly serves to discourage other leonamuth from jumping on its neck. (They are mostly resistant to their own poison.)
The poison also loses its efficacy after 1-3 days, and so it is impractical to store it. The only people who will bother poisoning their weapons are people who own a leonamuth. And when you own a leonamuth, you have a better ways to kill people than with a poisoned lance.
Leonamuths build elaborate dens. Their spines constantly grow and fall out. Discarded spines are carried back to its den and stuck into the ground, pointy end up. Larger, more practiced lions might even weave them together, to make something like palisade walls. Given enough time, this can resemble a (very small) labyrinth. There are rumors of a family of leonamuths that live together, and that have spent the last few centuries building a tremendous structure of woven spines. It is a honeycombed maze, and a familial den for the beasts. If anyone has ever found it, they have probably not survived to tell the story, so most disbelieve this "myth".
Leonamuth also use their spines to store leftovers, on the rare occasions when they are unable to finish a meal. Meat is gathered by rolling around in it. It is retrieved by shaking, like a wet dog.
Leonamuth spines are rarely made into permanent weapons, simply because they become brittle once they dry out. However, they have a famous and permanent usage in the Bone City, where they are used as dueling instruments. They have exactly the proper strength and flexibility to be used as dueling foils. The duels are always fatal and usually brief--one good poke with a fresh spine and you have only a few seconds left to poke your opponent before your brain turns to vinegar and your bones to sand.
Male leonamuth are very territorial. Although they will "adopt" a previous male's den if they take over the territory, they will also sabotage and destroy another male's den when given the chance. For smaller males, this is the only weapon they have against larger males.
Leonamuth will sometimes howl together, as regular as clockwork. They do not howl in response to any visible stimuli, but most sages will tell you that they howl in the direction of the next big corpsefall.
I think it would be a good idea to introduce PCs to leonamuth spine duels before they hear about leonamths. And then to hear about them long before they encounter one. And maybe they get back to camp after an excursion and the camp has leonamuth tracks all over it and all of their porters and friends are dead. Apex predators need to be built up before their introduction.
Sorry, animals preying on humans is something we haven't had to take seriously in a few hundred years (partly because the lions weren't 20' tall). Here's another something to shake the ancestral fear by the shoulder.
Not only do leonamuth's use their spine-dens to impress females, but they also use them acoustically. In the wastelands of Corpsefall, hearing a far-off corpse hit the ground is often a matter of life and death.
Built according to instinctual blueprints, spine-dens always work to funnel and amplify sounds towards the center. A listener in the center of the den can hear noises coming from ten times farther away than they would otherwise. Bigger dens are more powerful amplifiers, and the most successful dens are built on hills (although in flat areas without any tree cover, elevation doesn't matter).
For this reason, it is nearly impossible to sneak up on a leonamuth in its den. If you stumble upon a leonamuth's den, you can be assured that it is not home, or else it would have heard you coming and killed you by now. Go to Comment
MORE LIKE THE RING OF THE EPIC BADASS! I can think of like, 28374 uses for this thing. So can everyone, I'm sure.
The bit about it being loose is sort of awkward though. If it's meant to balance the potentially game-breaking power of the ring, my players would just tie it to their fingers or something. If I used this, I'd make it an activation power, so the PC wouldn't be immune to all traps forever. Or a pair of rings. NO! A giant helmet that looks like a loaf of bread with rocketman fins on the top or a giant eagle face or something.
Damn, that's cool!
P.S. I feel like this is the perfect use of the 100-word submission concept. Just a great little idea, stripped down and presented in its most usable form. Go to Comment
I love all of the Scrastech. It's cool, it's realistic, it's detailed, and it's internally consistent. I would pay American dollars for a hardback or a pdf of it.
But it's also completely unusable to me. It's so specific that I would have to run a campaign around it in order to give this stuff the treatment that it deserves. It's basic future-tech equipment with a rich and textured history--a PRESENCE--but it's still just basic equipment.
A lot of the Scrastech posts have real cool ideas buried in them that I can scavenge, but not this one. This one is just lore. Notes for a campaign setting. Which I love to read.
I can't vote it low because it's so well done, and I can't vote high because it's unapproachable. It's the Scrastech Paradox.
I'll leave the voting to less excitable people. People who can leave comments shorter than five paragraphs. Go to Comment
I found I liked him better as soon as I started thinking of him as just a colossal jerk who happen to be a magic bird. As opposed to, say, Bald Eagle Satan.
Otherwise, very good stuff. This devil, though minor, would make for a memorable campaign. Eagles see everything, man! There's a million ways they could mess with you. Go to Comment
Is it called "The Conqueror Worm" by Richard Corben? I'd never heard of it, but it looks pretty awesome. Dark Horse makes good stuff. I think I might buy it. Thank you for waving that morsel under my nose. Go to Comment
Ahaha! Wow. I mean. . . Hmm. I want to say, but then, like, um. Huh. This is an awesome picture. I love the little arm the worm has got. I want to read the story that goes along with it. Go to Comment
This is good stuff. It's well written and the part where he chases his horse for two days is pretty cool. My favorite part, actually.
It looks like you want Wilhelm to be a pretty basic character. He's the good knight, falsely accused, and now an outlaw fighting against his old buddies. You don't need a lot of layers there. Your players aren't going to know or care about how he got his horse, or that his an orphan. Just a basic guy with the most straightforward story possible. In that capacity, I think Wilhelm is just the guy.
However, I think everything should be a little bit weird, and cliches should be avoided like plague rat kisses (does he have to be an orphan?), I vote that you play up some of the more interesting parts of this story.
Does he run the bandits like they were knights? Do they catch horses the same way he did? Because that would be a cool way to get horses and take all the horses, if they catch ALL of the wild mustangs. Is he best friends with the cook? I bet he doesn't practice sword all day long. Does he read? Is he hitting on a woman in the village? Does she know who he is? Has he been trying to figure out who is behind the plot? Has he been stalking Leanard, hiding in his house and going through his stuff? Messing with his sock drawer?
I read the other article, too. I don't feel like a "highly honorable" man would go around bribing priests and trying to start a war through sneaky methods. It should be something more drastic. Maybe he feels like the conspiracy in Thrul goes all the way to the top, and even the king needs to be overthrown. Maybe he is going insane. Maybe there is no plot. Or maybe someone is deceiving him.
Overall, I'd just say (1) throw something unexpected in there, and (2) tighten up Wilhelm's motivations. He'll be a solid sub. Go to Comment
NPCs (Minor) (Religious)