1970s Meets D&D [Archive] - Wizards Community

1970s Meets D&D [Archive] - Wizards Community

Post/Author/DateTime Post
GoriceXII
07-21-07, 03:59 PM Part of my campaign will invovle an adventure thread set in 1970s England in Gloucestershire. (I am planning to use the Goatswood supplement for Call of Cthulhu though I'm changing the monsters and adventures to suit my campaign) Any help or advice would be appreciated. In particular I'd like some help with unexpected encounters or npcs.

Mechanics

Magic is low in this place. Wizards for instance will have to rest 8 hours per spell per level to regain magical energies; Psionics will be at original cost every time used; clerics must use contact other plane or a similar spell to maintain contact with their deity to get spells over 1st level.

Magical items and creatures that are inherently magical (for instance one pc's pseudo dragon companion) will have to spend at least 1 hour a day in some inherently magical location (which might not look like one at a glance) or begin to lose power/life. In the former case this will mean an increasing 10% chance per hour of failure to work. Keeping the item for a day in a magical place will make whatever accumulated chance go down 10% per hour. In the latter case a point of con is lost per hour. However in this case if the creature in question goes down to -5 they die or revert to the main element they are made from. (for instance a dragon might revert to fire or gas while a goliath would revert to stone)

Keeping the Meta Out

I'm planning on requiring magic/psionics/abilities to understand language. However things that are totally outside the context the pcs come from will come across as gibberish, and I intend to make up a list of made up words for common items or slang. Help with this would be appreciated by the way!
GoriceXII
07-22-07, 04:17 PM The basis for the adventure thread is essentially this: there is a magical tower in my homebrew world that is going to become a sort of time bomb unless the players manage to gain control of it. The problem is that it has another aspect on another world that is 'incomplete'. The missing pieces must be found and brought to the other tower's aspect.

There are several steps to this adventure path. The first is the use of a special book called "The Book of the Dragon"

The Book of the Dragon

This is the key to the Tower. It is a mechanical type book which has a number of metal picture plates in a movable frame. They flip over if moved to the very edge and depressed--sometimes the metal plates are totally blank. All pictures are etched onto a strange metal coloured like bronze but feeling hard as steel. There are three essential pieces to the book--the cover which enables the rest to be transported and which actually locks the rest into place, the frame is actually a series of wheels and discs contained in a hollow foldable rectangle, and two layers of picture plates that are delicately hinged and must be fitted into the frame.

The main pictures in it are:
1. A series of geometric shapes, starting with a line, a square, a cube, and a cube within a cube. related to: a person kneeling down.
2. Another Series: A person kneeling down; a person walking; a person running, a person moving all limbs at once.
3. Another Series: squiggly lines going up; squiggly lines going horizontal; staggered lines horizontal (related to a person running)
4. Another Series: a circle; two circles overlapping; three circles overlapping; four circles overlapping.(related to a person walking)
5. A candle gradually dwindling. The candle has a single dash like mark placed on it at regular intervals.
6. The Tower: this has a series of pictures:

- A single door open, related to a picture of a naked man with empty hands raised. (basically symbolically signifying that a person who comes without hostility and in need can enter the tower--they don't have to be naked or totally unarmed) However there is only one room shown. This is the healing room in the Tower. Once entering it people fall into a deep sleep, waking refreshed. If they entered during a time of danger the Tower will only release them once an immediate danger outside it has passed. They have no sense of the passage of time and in fact enter a period of suspended animation.

- A single door open with a room beyond the first one that seems to have a series of lines leading up to where it stands in the middle of the wall. (representing rungs on a fixed ladder) This is the second room and is detailed below. It will be noticed that whenever the book is configured to feature pictures from the series 1-5 and their related pictures that the picture with the single door and the room beyond the first is also in it.

- A door beyond the second door. Note that this is an entirely separate picture. If the book is moved to configure to this as the centerpiece the candle is down to the end and the rest of the pictures are blank.

What Does it All Mean?

The Tower really only has three main rooms. One is a rest haven and entry hall. One is a guard room. One is the prize--the room containing the secrets of the tower.

Essentially the plates 1-5 are clues about how to survive a series of traps and strange events taking place in the second room. Basically a person who is well balanced--both thoughtful and capable of action--can survive.

There is a false impression that the second room is hundreds--perhaps thousands--of identical glass rooms, each with four doors in it. In fact however they are all the same room.

In some rooms time is distorted--in others gravity--in others space. This creates confusion but is also at times dangerous--too much lingering and the Tower begins to attack. It will do the following attacks:
1. The squiggly lines going up and down: these represent a time attack--wavering light approaches. If the pcs do not flee the room they are swallowed up and withered by age, dying swiftly.
2. The squiggly lines going horizontally represent time confusion--events that have already happened might be repeated--people who were thought dead might reappear with no knowledge of how they died.
3. The line leading to square and cube and so on is a particularly violent atttack--the more people move the more permutations of the line's dimensions appear, as gradually whirling sharp edged glass that attacks with the strength of a golem. It cannot really be harmed, the only way to deal with it when it appears is to be perfectly still until it vanishes again.
4. Staggered lines horizontally. The room appears to change so that it starts to close in on itself like a collapsing Escher print. Remaining in the room means being crushed by the collapse of matter.
5. The circles overlapping: it will seem when this happens that every door opened leads to a room where something awful has happened--this shows possibilities of failure. The trick is not to give up but keep moving. Once each door has been tried then there will be a new possibility. Giving up means that there is an increasing possibility of an awful end.
(note: examples of these might include: seeing one's own body having died of dehydration/old age; seeing one's death due to one of the Tower attacks mentioned above, etc)

The candle represents time spent--it shows roughly six hours and 18 minutes. Once this happens then the room appears to be collapsing in on itself--all other rooms that can be seen are falling apart into what looks like swirling chaos. Whatever room a character is in however at this time will remain still though it begins to shudder. A single door is unlike the other possibilities--it shows a black void. If this is entered then the Third Room is achieved.

The Third Room

This is a much larger space, also made of glass, which has a glassy-steel like wavery perfectly circular pool in the middle. By the pool rests a great crystal dragon, a rather serpentine creature whose scales jingle softly, which has a head resembling that of a birdlike reptile with wise dark eyes. This is the guardian of the Tower.

The guardian if attacked is a very dangerous opponent--both psionic and great wyrm. Furthermore it has some measure of control over the abilities of the Tower and can invoke at will the defenses mentioned above.

(I have to admit I'm a little unclear as to what to do at this point--I'd like some kind of fulfillment of the book's purpose though upon meeting up with the wyrm, who will guard or open the way to the other realm)
GoriceXII
07-23-07, 02:56 PM Origins of the Tower:
In ancient days the elvish people fought armies of demons. The Tower was a powerful arsenal used against them. It enabled victory. However when humanity began to spread across the world initially the elves and other elder races were at war with them. The temptation to use their powerful weapons proved great, but the elves were horrified by the results. Whereas with the demons the effect was to destroy their earthly bodies and banish them back to the Abyss with humans and other mortals it had two effects:
1. It drained the lives of younger races (humans, humanoids) automatically to feed the Tower.
2. The weapons simply killed outright without discrimination--the weapons were made to be aimed at battlefields, not at tactical points.

The elves determined that the weapons must not be used again, but were loathe to utterly destroy all of them. They kept ONE Tower but created two powerful magics. The first was to eliminate the memory from all living elves the existence of the powerful arsenal. The second was to divide the remaining one into two realties so that it could not be used without a special key and assembly process. A group of elves with their servants created a portal to another reality by this means and took key items from the other aspect of the Tower which they scattered. A great wyrm that had done a terrible crime against the elves was made guardian as its penance. Powerful time magics were also used to protect the Tower.

Ultimately because the elves had forgotten why they built it in the first place and because it was built in a remote wilderness they forgot about it entirely.

In the other reality the elves who had helped complete the spell began to die. The other world was chosen as one harsh and unyielding to magical folk, but this began to sap their very lives. Unless they remained at the Tower always they would perish. However they could not bear to remain shut up forever and desperately sought out a source of magic outside, among the wind and the trees. Ultimately the elves went mad at the world they found, one in which magic existed only like the occasional oasis in the desert. They found that the only way not to be drained of life was to drain life. In sorrow some chose to perish instead. Others chose to drain life--they became a race of vampire like beings, living in the shadows, gradually forgetting who and what they had really been. Some wandered out into the legends of the new world, while others were drawn for reasons they could not explain to the Tower.

Their servants--Spriggans and other fae creatures, meanwhile were lost, abandoned. They grew cruel, dark and unseelie and found strange places to haunt, becoming part of the world's legends in their own way. They have not lost their memories but had no idea really what was going on.
GoriceXII
07-23-07, 03:15 PM In the Other Reality:

The Tower was built in roughly the 16th century. It has a room that is required to have a certain number of apparently banal items placed in a particular order in it in order to be completed which the elves scattered in various places. The Tower was added to an abbey property built during the time of Mary Tudor. This was then purchased by a nobleman of the court of James I. Meanwhile a town had grown around it and the noble family's lands changed hands, bought by a wealthy industrialist during the 19th century, finally being lost to public sale during the 1930s. It became a church again briefly but was bought out again in the 1950s, becoming a theatre. Now it is a sort of club/bar/theatre, with a number of disused rooms, some of which seem inaccessible. There have always been dark rumors about the place, of strange murders and weird events.

In fact the items have held a strange fascination for the inhabitants of the area--which is Gloucestershire in England. A cult arose in the 17th Century that had discovered not just the objects but the room itself.

The room, you see, has a mirror in it, and the mirror shows the room as it should be. All items in place. The objects have peculiar powers--for instance a lamp that creates calm and grants visions during sleep. A key that enables the will of the holder to be exerted on whoever the key points at. A mysterious stone egg that enables such lucid dreaming that the dreams of those holding it can briefly become real. A glove that somehow stores the energies of people it touches which can then be harnessed and used.

The cult knows there are more items but has been unable to find more. They believe that control of all of them will enable a sort of master control--that the room/building's power will be unlocked and enable them to become godlike. However they found early on that they had to proceed cautiously--now and then the 'vampires' are drawn to the area and will be violent and dangerous if bothered. There are other strange creatures that seem drawn to the area and the items. Over time the cult has become decadent and inward looking. Learning that were definitely more objects around would galvanize them.

One item, a dagger (which seems blunt and is called 'the letter opener' by its owner) is in the hands of another group who call themselves The Watchers. The Watchers believe that the supernatural is deadly and bad, and are fanatical about it. Whether they are a father who knows vampires killed his daughter or a scholar whose inheritance of a 'letter opener' caused weird fanatics to start hunting him down, they are sure that the supernatural is evil and must be fought. The dagger is blunt as a butter knife when used against ordinary people but takes on a deadly sharp edge when dealing with supernatural elements.

Another pair, the pen and the glass, are held by Spriggans. They have no idea what the pen is for save that it automatically draws a number of other seemingly ordinary objects. They remember this from their elvish servitude and are puzzled by it but kind of like it. The glass is used as a gate to see and contact other worlds. In this way they have created a special grotto which retains a lot of magical influence. Now and then they contact some nasty creature to gain spells in exchange for human sacrifice. Over time a strange druidic cult has built up in the village near their cave.

Finally there are the spectacles. A young man named Peter Joyce, an accountant at a firm in London, inherited a country house. It had a lot of eccentric books and objects in it. Among them were a pair of spectacles, but he dismissed these as ordinary until the night he broke his own when he was trying to switch the power back on after a blackout. He found that they not only worked but enabled him to stop time if he raised them from his eyes to his forehead. He's a little disturbed by this and not sure of what to make of the ability. And how DOES it work? Just line of sight? What?
Thus far Peter, a rather timid and law abiding man, has just used them as an experiment, to do little pranks and acts of voyeurism, but in fact he finds them very disturbing. He is not aware that his two inherited seemingly kindly and conservative old servants are spies for the Collector Cult and and will at some point figure out what he is doing.

The Region

Gloucestershire in the 1970s is dealing with recent Indian immigration, largely people who settled in the late sixties fleeing Uganda, and the recent scares involving the IRA, from the shock of Bloody Sunday to the bombing of a barracks at Aldershot. It is feeling a little of the social revolution of the time, with hippies turning up at larger towns and cities and protests against the further development of a nuclear power station in the area.

Post/Author/DateTime	Post
GoriceXII 07-21-07, 03:59 PM	Part of my campaign will invovle an adventure thread set in 1970s England in Gloucestershire. (I am planning to use the Goatswood supplement for Call of Cthulhu though I'm changing the monsters and adventures to suit my campaign) Any help or advice would be appreciated. In particular I'd like some help with unexpected encounters or npcs. Mechanics Magic is low in this place. Wizards for instance will have to rest 8 hours per spell per level to regain magical energies; Psionics will be at original cost every time used; clerics must use contact other plane or a similar spell to maintain contact with their deity to get spells over 1st level. Magical items and creatures that are inherently magical (for instance one pc's pseudo dragon companion) will have to spend at least 1 hour a day in some inherently magical location (which might not look like one at a glance) or begin to lose power/life. In the former case this will mean an increasing 10% chance per hour of failure to work. Keeping the item for a day in a magical place will make whatever accumulated chance go down 10% per hour. In the latter case a point of con is lost per hour. However in this case if the creature in question goes down to -5 they die or revert to the main element they are made from. (for instance a dragon might revert to fire or gas while a goliath would revert to stone) Keeping the Meta Out I'm planning on requiring magic/psionics/abilities to understand language. However things that are totally outside the context the pcs come from will come across as gibberish, and I intend to make up a list of made up words for common items or slang. Help with this would be appreciated by the way!
GoriceXII 07-22-07, 04:17 PM	The basis for the adventure thread is essentially this: there is a magical tower in my homebrew world that is going to become a sort of time bomb unless the players manage to gain control of it. The problem is that it has another aspect on another world that is 'incomplete'. The missing pieces must be found and brought to the other tower's aspect. There are several steps to this adventure path. The first is the use of a special book called "The Book of the Dragon" The Book of the Dragon This is the key to the Tower. It is a mechanical type book which has a number of metal picture plates in a movable frame. They flip over if moved to the very edge and depressed--sometimes the metal plates are totally blank. All pictures are etched onto a strange metal coloured like bronze but feeling hard as steel. There are three essential pieces to the book--the cover which enables the rest to be transported and which actually locks the rest into place, the frame is actually a series of wheels and discs contained in a hollow foldable rectangle, and two layers of picture plates that are delicately hinged and must be fitted into the frame. The main pictures in it are: 1. A series of geometric shapes, starting with a line, a square, a cube, and a cube within a cube. related to: a person kneeling down. 2. Another Series: A person kneeling down; a person walking; a person running, a person moving all limbs at once. 3. Another Series: squiggly lines going up; squiggly lines going horizontal; staggered lines horizontal (related to a person running) 4. Another Series: a circle; two circles overlapping; three circles overlapping; four circles overlapping.(related to a person walking) 5. A candle gradually dwindling. The candle has a single dash like mark placed on it at regular intervals. 6. The Tower: this has a series of pictures: - A single door open, related to a picture of a naked man with empty hands raised. (basically symbolically signifying that a person who comes without hostility and in need can enter the tower--they don't have to be naked or totally unarmed) However there is only one room shown. This is the healing room in the Tower. Once entering it people fall into a deep sleep, waking refreshed. If they entered during a time of danger the Tower will only release them once an immediate danger outside it has passed. They have no sense of the passage of time and in fact enter a period of suspended animation. - A single door open with a room beyond the first one that seems to have a series of lines leading up to where it stands in the middle of the wall. (representing rungs on a fixed ladder) This is the second room and is detailed below. It will be noticed that whenever the book is configured to feature pictures from the series 1-5 and their related pictures that the picture with the single door and the room beyond the first is also in it. - A door beyond the second door. Note that this is an entirely separate picture. If the book is moved to configure to this as the centerpiece the candle is down to the end and the rest of the pictures are blank. What Does it All Mean? The Tower really only has three main rooms. One is a rest haven and entry hall. One is a guard room. One is the prize--the room containing the secrets of the tower. Essentially the plates 1-5 are clues about how to survive a series of traps and strange events taking place in the second room. Basically a person who is well balanced--both thoughtful and capable of action--can survive. There is a false impression that the second room is hundreds--perhaps thousands--of identical glass rooms, each with four doors in it. In fact however they are all the same room. In some rooms time is distorted--in others gravity--in others space. This creates confusion but is also at times dangerous--too much lingering and the Tower begins to attack. It will do the following attacks: 1. The squiggly lines going up and down: these represent a time attack--wavering light approaches. If the pcs do not flee the room they are swallowed up and withered by age, dying swiftly. 2. The squiggly lines going horizontally represent time confusion--events that have already happened might be repeated--people who were thought dead might reappear with no knowledge of how they died. 3. The line leading to square and cube and so on is a particularly violent atttack--the more people move the more permutations of the line's dimensions appear, as gradually whirling sharp edged glass that attacks with the strength of a golem. It cannot really be harmed, the only way to deal with it when it appears is to be perfectly still until it vanishes again. 4. Staggered lines horizontally. The room appears to change so that it starts to close in on itself like a collapsing Escher print. Remaining in the room means being crushed by the collapse of matter. 5. The circles overlapping: it will seem when this happens that every door opened leads to a room where something awful has happened--this shows possibilities of failure. The trick is not to give up but keep moving. Once each door has been tried then there will be a new possibility. Giving up means that there is an increasing possibility of an awful end. (note: examples of these might include: seeing one's own body having died of dehydration/old age; seeing one's death due to one of the Tower attacks mentioned above, etc) The candle represents time spent--it shows roughly six hours and 18 minutes. Once this happens then the room appears to be collapsing in on itself--all other rooms that can be seen are falling apart into what looks like swirling chaos. Whatever room a character is in however at this time will remain still though it begins to shudder. A single door is unlike the other possibilities--it shows a black void. If this is entered then the Third Room is achieved. The Third Room This is a much larger space, also made of glass, which has a glassy-steel like wavery perfectly circular pool in the middle. By the pool rests a great crystal dragon, a rather serpentine creature whose scales jingle softly, which has a head resembling that of a birdlike reptile with wise dark eyes. This is the guardian of the Tower. The guardian if attacked is a very dangerous opponent--both psionic and great wyrm. Furthermore it has some measure of control over the abilities of the Tower and can invoke at will the defenses mentioned above. (I have to admit I'm a little unclear as to what to do at this point--I'd like some kind of fulfillment of the book's purpose though upon meeting up with the wyrm, who will guard or open the way to the other realm)
GoriceXII 07-23-07, 02:56 PM	Origins of the Tower: In ancient days the elvish people fought armies of demons. The Tower was a powerful arsenal used against them. It enabled victory. However when humanity began to spread across the world initially the elves and other elder races were at war with them. The temptation to use their powerful weapons proved great, but the elves were horrified by the results. Whereas with the demons the effect was to destroy their earthly bodies and banish them back to the Abyss with humans and other mortals it had two effects: 1. It drained the lives of younger races (humans, humanoids) automatically to feed the Tower. 2. The weapons simply killed outright without discrimination--the weapons were made to be aimed at battlefields, not at tactical points. The elves determined that the weapons must not be used again, but were loathe to utterly destroy all of them. They kept ONE Tower but created two powerful magics. The first was to eliminate the memory from all living elves the existence of the powerful arsenal. The second was to divide the remaining one into two realties so that it could not be used without a special key and assembly process. A group of elves with their servants created a portal to another reality by this means and took key items from the other aspect of the Tower which they scattered. A great wyrm that had done a terrible crime against the elves was made guardian as its penance. Powerful time magics were also used to protect the Tower. Ultimately because the elves had forgotten why they built it in the first place and because it was built in a remote wilderness they forgot about it entirely. In the other reality the elves who had helped complete the spell began to die. The other world was chosen as one harsh and unyielding to magical folk, but this began to sap their very lives. Unless they remained at the Tower always they would perish. However they could not bear to remain shut up forever and desperately sought out a source of magic outside, among the wind and the trees. Ultimately the elves went mad at the world they found, one in which magic existed only like the occasional oasis in the desert. They found that the only way not to be drained of life was to drain life. In sorrow some chose to perish instead. Others chose to drain life--they became a race of vampire like beings, living in the shadows, gradually forgetting who and what they had really been. Some wandered out into the legends of the new world, while others were drawn for reasons they could not explain to the Tower. Their servants--Spriggans and other fae creatures, meanwhile were lost, abandoned. They grew cruel, dark and unseelie and found strange places to haunt, becoming part of the world's legends in their own way. They have not lost their memories but had no idea really what was going on.
GoriceXII 07-23-07, 03:15 PM	In the Other Reality: The Tower was built in roughly the 16th century. It has a room that is required to have a certain number of apparently banal items placed in a particular order in it in order to be completed which the elves scattered in various places. The Tower was added to an abbey property built during the time of Mary Tudor. This was then purchased by a nobleman of the court of James I. Meanwhile a town had grown around it and the noble family's lands changed hands, bought by a wealthy industrialist during the 19th century, finally being lost to public sale during the 1930s. It became a church again briefly but was bought out again in the 1950s, becoming a theatre. Now it is a sort of club/bar/theatre, with a number of disused rooms, some of which seem inaccessible. There have always been dark rumors about the place, of strange murders and weird events. In fact the items have held a strange fascination for the inhabitants of the area--which is Gloucestershire in England. A cult arose in the 17th Century that had discovered not just the objects but the room itself. The room, you see, has a mirror in it, and the mirror shows the room as it should be. All items in place. The objects have peculiar powers--for instance a lamp that creates calm and grants visions during sleep. A key that enables the will of the holder to be exerted on whoever the key points at. A mysterious stone egg that enables such lucid dreaming that the dreams of those holding it can briefly become real. A glove that somehow stores the energies of people it touches which can then be harnessed and used. The cult knows there are more items but has been unable to find more. They believe that control of all of them will enable a sort of master control--that the room/building's power will be unlocked and enable them to become godlike. However they found early on that they had to proceed cautiously--now and then the 'vampires' are drawn to the area and will be violent and dangerous if bothered. There are other strange creatures that seem drawn to the area and the items. Over time the cult has become decadent and inward looking. Learning that were definitely more objects around would galvanize them. One item, a dagger (which seems blunt and is called 'the letter opener' by its owner) is in the hands of another group who call themselves The Watchers. The Watchers believe that the supernatural is deadly and bad, and are fanatical about it. Whether they are a father who knows vampires killed his daughter or a scholar whose inheritance of a 'letter opener' caused weird fanatics to start hunting him down, they are sure that the supernatural is evil and must be fought. The dagger is blunt as a butter knife when used against ordinary people but takes on a deadly sharp edge when dealing with supernatural elements. Another pair, the pen and the glass, are held by Spriggans. They have no idea what the pen is for save that it automatically draws a number of other seemingly ordinary objects. They remember this from their elvish servitude and are puzzled by it but kind of like it. The glass is used as a gate to see and contact other worlds. In this way they have created a special grotto which retains a lot of magical influence. Now and then they contact some nasty creature to gain spells in exchange for human sacrifice. Over time a strange druidic cult has built up in the village near their cave. Finally there are the spectacles. A young man named Peter Joyce, an accountant at a firm in London, inherited a country house. It had a lot of eccentric books and objects in it. Among them were a pair of spectacles, but he dismissed these as ordinary until the night he broke his own when he was trying to switch the power back on after a blackout. He found that they not only worked but enabled him to stop time if he raised them from his eyes to his forehead. He's a little disturbed by this and not sure of what to make of the ability. And how DOES it work? Just line of sight? What? Thus far Peter, a rather timid and law abiding man, has just used them as an experiment, to do little pranks and acts of voyeurism, but in fact he finds them very disturbing. He is not aware that his two inherited seemingly kindly and conservative old servants are spies for the Collector Cult and and will at some point figure out what he is doing. The Region Gloucestershire in the 1970s is dealing with recent Indian immigration, largely people who settled in the late sixties fleeing Uganda, and the recent scares involving the IRA, from the shock of Bloody Sunday to the bombing of a barracks at Aldershot. It is feeling a little of the social revolution of the time, with hippies turning up at larger towns and cities and protests against the further development of a nuclear power station in the area.