Blogwagon: The Valley of Eternal Cheer

Merry hexmas! Here's another weird adventure location I made for the community holiday blogwagon courtesy of Prismatic Wasteland. Use it however you like! Creative commons license at the end. If you link one of your hex edges to mine, drop a comment or message me on Bluesky and I'll update the post!

Download link

If you'd like a copy of these Christmas hexes in PDF form, get it for free here: https://periapt-games.itch.io/hexmas-locations

Summary

A sect of treetop angels makes this isolated mountain valley their home. Dwelling in the porous rock caverns, the object of their worship: the Blissful Homogenate. It is an immense festive slush composed of thousands of former intelligent entities, now an immense mushy rainbow sea, a hivemind experiencing True Holiday Joy. It dissolves anyone who touches it.

Hex terrain description

This is an area of lofty wind-wracked mountains, most of them bare other than the omnipresent snow. In the more protected valleys, pine trees huddle together for warmth.

One particularly deep valley, more of a huge crevasse than anything, is curiously warm. Wisps of steam drift about, and a rivulet of snowmelt runs its length. Bubbling up from clefts in the rock, a lumpy rainbow mishmash that looks like a tendrilly mess of soft modelling clay.

Above, there's a stand of huge trees, where glittering candlelight suggests the presence of people.

Connecting hexes

• Southeast: The Transient Snowfields (https://periaptgames.blogspot.com/2025/12/blogwagon-transient-snowfields.html)

Locale: The citadel of the treetop angels

A huge ice-encrusted treehouse with numerous parapets, slit windows, and clear sightlines. It is supported on the trunks of six massive pine trees. The only way up, if you can't fly, is a winding path that flips back and forth between ladder, tunnel, and staircase. Concentric walls of stakes at the base help keep out interlopers, but the gate – and the charitable donation box next to it – are both kept unlocked.

Inside, the citadel is freezing cold, lit only by candles. What care angels for warmth?

Principles of hospitality are a little fraught at the moment: the order is nearly torn apart by religious quarrel.

The treetop angels consider the whole valley a holy site. The caves and tunnels honeycombing it are filled with a miraculous vast-lake-sized gelatinous entity of perpetual cheer and enormous power, the Blissful Homogenate. The treetop angels revere this entity as their guardian, guide, and future, but they are at odds over the nature of their worship.

The order of angels is split into several factions, or 'choirs'.

• The loudest voice is that of the status quo, who sing: those who should be drawn into the Blissful Homogenate are already fated to do so. No intervention is needed.
• Another choir believes the angels should be united with their deity at once. These angels are only holding back long enough to convince their sistren to take the plunge together.
• A more radical faction sings carols of escalation: the heathen must be converted, whether by the sword, by persuasion and pilgrimage, or by cracking the stone of the valley asunder and letting the Blissful Homogenate descend like a multicoloured avalanche into the plains below.
• A small number of voices call for study and for optimisation. The rate of dissolution should be maximised. The Blissful Homogenate should be increased in volume if possible. The order should investigate methods for budding off new homogenates to carry elsewhere in the world.

The rift between angels is unlikely to be repaired, but canny adventurers could align themselves with a choir for personal gain, and possibly even egg on the factions to the point of violence. The treetop angels don't have much gold, but their stockpiles of frankincense and myrrh run deep.

Locale: The overlooking cliff

A precipice directly above the deepest part of the valley. Ancient, crumbling steps descend in fits and starts into the crevasse. It's screamingly windy here, shredding the wisps of steam that rise up.

When the sun is high, you can see through eddies in the mist below: parts of the Blissful Homogenate extend from the valley's caverns. It looks like a colourful smear across the rocks, as if vomited by some vast sherry-soused god on its way home to a mountaintop paradise to sleep it off.

There is a little shanty town here, made from rough-hewn pine wood, stacked boulders, and reindeer hides. A motley bunch of people have come here, mostly on bad information, and are unsure of what to do next. There's a continual argument simmering like an eternal stew.

Currently about twenty people live in the shacks (detailed in the encounter table below). Many others before them have returned to the lowlands, or descended into the valley to become one with the Blissful Homogenate.

There are also four treetop angels hanging around here:

• Numerica Of The Last Apex Unclimbed. Studying the Blissful Homogenate by observing those who may or may not eventually enter it. She's conducting an ongoing census and interviews. Currently taking measurements.
• Radiala Of The Final Pinnacle Unmatched. Feels a desperately personal relationship with the Blissful Homogenate. Paranoid. Fanatical. Has given up everything. Will keep herself out of the homogenate for all eternity to fulfil her self-appointed role of keeping it safe. Currently making patrols.
• Levitica Of The Ultimate Peak Unsurmounted. She's trying to enforce a taboo against hanging around the valley through persuasive sermons. Mostly she has succeeded in making everyone annoyed with her. Currently standing on a boulder and lecturing to the wind.
• Honoria Of The True Zenith Unparalleled. She's dipped a toe in the Blissful Homogenate and will soon be part of it. She's flown back up the cliff to spread the good word. Currently ecstatically dissolving.

Random cliff encounters (1d10):

1. Inkoo and Shmo. Pair of gigantic lumbering penguins. Mountain natives who make a simple living guiding curious people out here, then usually earning even more to guide them back again. Very disliked by the treetop angels.
2. Jenk Holdfraught. Withered old man. A would-be lich who hasn't managed to walk any of the normal dark paths. He's decided that eternity will still be worth it even if filled with tinsel, whistling, and the cross-talk of a happy hivemind, but it's not his first choice, and he's waiting until the last moment possible. If he waits much longer he won't be able to get down the steps under his own power. Has a small amount of treasure, mostly in the form of magical scrolls and cursed ritual equipment.
3. Five tuskers (huge tusked trolls) all wearing enormous boots and ceremonial bells. Not very smart. A small religious pilgrimage from the Grove Where The Snow Is Like Icing, over Rime Ridge. They were trying to find the Big Rock Candy Mountain and are unsure of what they've stumbled upon. That thing down there... is it pudding?
4. Prudence Dearborn. Half-angel. Skilled chef. Her current ambition is to make the ultimate festive spice mix, and she's travelled here for inspiration.
5. Old Father Chrysalis. A white-bearded wizard who touched the Blissful Homogenate and is becoming one with it, but much more slowly than usual. Meanwhile, he's wandering the valley and the cliff. Nobody knows his real name. Doesn't converse. Mumbles a slurpy bubbly mixture of arcane half-secrets and mystic half-truths. (Probably warded himself against the homogenate's effects and only partly succeeded.)
   
   
   
6. Snarlface, Dayglo, and Toad. Three escaped orcs of the Red Lord (see magnoliakeep.blogspot.com/2025/11/blog-bandwagon-orcish-toy-factory.html). One of several secret orc cells combing the world for potential superweapons to wield against their despicable master. Cautiously excited by the potential of the Blissful Homogenate, but underequipped to do anything with it.
7. Plush Carl. Three-eyed misfit toy. Trying to track down his happy-go-lucky great aunt, missing for months. She's one with the homogenate already.
8. Terrrence Norrbrright. Gangly hollow-eyed elf. Legate of a deposed tyrant. Truly hates good cheer, but is pretending otherwise. Smile like a death rictus. Hums off-key. Secretly wants to destroy the Blissful Homogenate and has brought a sorcerous weapon looted from his old boss's treasury to accomplish this. With the right invocation, the Cauldron Of Inversion should turn the homogenate's boiling, joyous form into something cold and hard and miserable. It won't, though. It'll just splatter dangerous chunks of it all over the landscape.
9. Jephrow Bosk. A skeleton percussionist. Inexpertly plays his ribcage like a xylophone. Thinking of branching out into skull bongos. Extremely cheerful; was drawn to this place by a mysterious inner pressure he can't explain. Jephrow wears the bejewelled Tiara Of Undead Control, giving him enormous amounts of self-actualisation. If it is removed he will become a mindless bloodthirsty monster.
   
    
10. Zephany. A westerly wind, separated from her easterly sister Gale (see thegloaminglog.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-quiet-season.html?m=1). Gale was last seen above these mountains, having talked to a treetop angel on the way past. She has left already, but Zephany doesn't know that, and deeply dreads descending into the valley. She hopes her brother Eddy will catch up to her here to lend some support.

 

Locale: The cheer-clogged depths

The rocky valley floor is in shadow for much of the day (the parts near the walls, perpetually so). A small stream of snowmelt pours the length of the middle and ends up in a sinkhole, feeding who knows what underground river further on.

Steam shrouds much of the valley depths, stirred by the omnipresent mountain wind, and occasionally scattered in wisps to the top of the overlooking cliff. It's slightly warm down here, and feels shockingly hot compared to the rest of the freezing mountains.

There's a pleasant humming sound.

Entity: The Blissful Homogenate

Larger than most lakes, and composed of colourful whorls of half-liquid, half-solid organic strands. These flow and wobble and slowly move about by themselves, occasionally splitting off and wandering semi-independently, never far from the main mass. Looks like the aftermath of an inconceivably huge and ultimately failed modeling clay project.

Vestiges of faces smile back at you.

It smells of cinnamon and hot plastic.

Background and expansion

The world's most optimistic and spirited are instinctually drawn to this place on their deathbeds, making it an elephant's graveyard of the merry. They make up the bulk of the homogenate. It has also amalgamated various stupid or unlucky animals (most avoid this place), unwanted experiments/victims who were disposed of here long ago, and a certain number of people who couldn't hack it as liches.

The rest of the homogenate is made up of molten treetop angels. They've been joining it pretty regularly over the years.

If you touch the Blissful Homogenate, you immediately start turning into it. You go runny bit by bit, the event horizon slowly travelling up your arm. You can be saved from the effect if you strike off the digit (or, for the incautious, the limb). Just make sure you cut far enough up.

It usually takes a few hours, after touching the Blissful Homogenate, to collapse into a pile of goo. Features slide off the face. The face drips off the body. Limbs elongate. Clothing melds with flesh. A distinct cheerfulness is felt all the while.

Once it's done, you're indistinguishable. Now if anybody touches you, they start turning, too.

Capabilities

The Blissful Homogenate is in a sense an intelligent hivemind, but undirected. It has never been known to take any real action; it is continually thrilled beyond mortal comprehension just to be experiencing the world around it.

The entity only cares for things that are lively and moving and glittery; it doesn't eat through rock and trees.

The Blissful Homogenate is extremely hot to the touch, like flowing candle wax. Hot enough to warm the rock of the valley and melt the snow above. Bits can be struck off its mass, and if this happens, they slowly cool, losing their animation. They will try to return to the main mass before this happens.

The entity doesn't retaliate if struck. There's an ocean of this stuff, much of it underground. What could possibly harm it?

Challenges and opportunities:

• The Blissful Homogenate is always happily humming. Its underground parts sometimes break out into full-on carols. The distant singing could draw characters into the dangerous cave systems around the valley walls where the goo level ebbs and flows.
• There's tall cliffs above and below the valley, and the rock is porous. A landslide, snowmelt-heavy river, earth tremor, or explosion could knock things into motion. An avalanche of hot homogenate would flow into the network of valleys below like a rainbow lahar, eventually reaching inhabited pastures. There'd be enough mass for it to last for weeks or months independently of the main blob, with all the trouble that would ensue.
• The trouble that's brewing with the treetop angels could easily reach a head. The outlook for their custodianship of the Blissful Homogenate is different depending on which faction wins.
• The shantytown inhabitants all want different things. Trouble is particularly likely from Terrrence Norrbrright, Jephrow Bosk, the orc trio, or the not-too-clever tuskers.
• If a small part of Blissful Homogenate is separated from the main mass, it will eventually cool down, deanimating. But it does not become completely inert. If a small part got into a town's water table before rotting away completely, it could cause strange hallucinations, and toys to be born as misfits.
• Buried in the caverns of the Blissful Homogenate are a few bits of magical treasure too dull and/or cold to be homogenised. The Sceptre Of The Snow Miser turns a foot-wide sphere of solid matter into snow with a touch (exactly as horrid as it sounds). The Woadstone is a simple stone amulet which dyes you blue as long as it is worn. The Snow Deanimation Orb projects a league-wide field which annihilates the consciousness of any snow-based lifeforms.
• The Blissful Homogenate has never been stirred to anger... to date. Characters who presented a genuine threat to it would find out how mobile it really is.

Rumours about this hex (1d6):

1. The long-sought Fountain of Merriment really does exist, and it's closer than you'd think! A drop of its waters would leave you happy for the rest of your life.
2. The Banshee Queen, whose voice was the demise of thousands, did not herself perish but is still alive somewhere in a hidden valley, kept alive by unnatural magics.
3. There's a geothermal springs with miraculous healing properties deep in the mountains. Their waters can even heal a damaged spirit!
4. Should a treetop angel be slain in anger by its brethren, the body's angelic halo can be snatched up by a mortal to grant an unearned textra life.
5. Some deranged alchemist created a dangerous substance called Colourful Amalgamising Clay. If you survive a brush with it, your mind will be forever changed.
6. A cabal of the world's most naturally cheerful people have a secret mountain retreat where they recharge their optimistic energy and make blood sacrifice to a great chthonic god.

Credits

The text of this post is released under a Creative Commons BY (4.0) license. Do what you like with it as long as you follow the terms: credit me, link here, and link to the license.

Illustrations licensed from Alderdoodle (alderdoodle.co.uk), Amanda Lee Franck, Jose Eduardo "Jegs" Gonzalez, and Art SilverGlass / Sophie Grunnet. Some illustrations by Fernando Salvaterra - used with permission.

Blogwagon: The Transient Snowfields

Merry hexmas! Here's a weird hex I made for Prismatic Wasteland's end-of-year blogwagon. Use it however you like! Creative commons license at the end. If you link one of your hex edges to mine, drop a comment or message me on Bluesky and I'll update the post!

Download link

If you'd like a copy of these Christmas hexes in PDF form, get it for free here: https://periapt-games.itch.io/hexmas-locations

Summary

A highland region of magically-animated snow. It is home to a village of 'roblings', creatures cursed to compulsively steal. A dysfunctional team of researchers has travelled here in a gingerbread mecha, now broken down.

 

Hex terrain description

This hilly region rises out of the rich pastures to the south and grassy steppe to the southeast. Here little grows beyond a dark moss, with snow always blanketing the ground.

The snowscape is dotted with missing patches, each one beginning a trail of footprints, as if areas of snow were getting up and walking away.

The region otherwise appears devoid of villages, hamlets, or other habitation. It rises higher into tall mountains at the northwest edge.

Connecting hexes

• Northeast: Three Calves (see https://elsewhere-elsewhere.neocities.org/posts/2025-12-07-23.-hexmas)
• Northwest: The Valley of Eternal Cheer (see https://periaptgames.blogspot.com/2025/12/blogwagon-valley-of-eternal-cheer.html)
• Southwest: The town of Borsk (see https://coppershaman.com/merry-hexmas-babbling-baboon/)
• Southeast: The Silver Steppe (see https://www.fluoriteguillotine.com/blog/2025/11/08/blogwagon-broken-bronco-on-the-silver-steppe/)
• ➡️ Let me know if I should change any for organisational purposes.

Description

The landscape is not-quite-beautiful. The sparkling white snow is thoroughly dotted with missing patches and criss-crossed with tracks. The wind gently sighs, except for when it's howling.

Transient snow can be found covering the hex. The large hilly snowfields look quite mundane, but are home to intelligent creatures who fall as snow during the night and collapse into quickly-dissolving piles of slush by the following afternoon.

The transient snow creatures all have names, personal stories lining up with hazy false memories of the world, and often relationships with each other. They have a dull understanding of the broader world, but only come to comprehend their own immediate mortality through the course of the day. Each has a unique appearance, as if bespokely made by a snow artist. They have equipment, clothing, and skills, all of which dissolves as the sun descends.

 

 

Locale: The village of the roblings

Roblings are part mischievous goblin, part red-breasted robin, although they joke that there's more magpie than robin. Something in the genetic mix gives them tails and claws, too, and makes them taller than most humans. They're muscular and very quick, and with the aforementioned claws, each one is about as dangerous as a bear if it comes to a fight.

These folk are all covered in long fur. Apart from a touch of red at the chest, they are dark green shading to black, the same colour as the moss and lichen under the snow. The roblings harvest those tiny plants, and hunt the reindeer that compete for it. They supplement their diets with small river fish and with sugared oranges of unclear origin.

Their village is two hundred roblings, of all ages. They hatch from knobbly hairy eggs, and their yurt homes have a nest-like look to them, low communal structures made from reindeer hides stitched with sinew, huge mammoth tusk struts, dried moss, and goose down.

The roblings are hospitable, but seem a little concerned that they are receiving visitors. A village elder will explain their circumstances:

• Background: The roblings as a species are cursed with kleptomaniac episodes. They are individually compelled at random intervals to go to the nearest place where they think some valuable objects might be, taking a big sack, and loot it all in a mischievous frenzy. They then return to wherever they live and find they don't care about the things they've taken, feeling fairly embarrassed about it (but not inclined to give anything back).
• Community: Because they are otherwise normal, the roblings don't like the outcomes from this behaviour. Their attempts to sublimate the urges failed, so a couple of generations ago they formed this community, leagues away from anywhere. A big part of their local culture consists of stealing from each other and the attendant little customs of going around to find their stuff again. Relatively few robling robberies now take place outside the village, but they have a big collection of things they stole in the past.
• Transient snow: Because the ancestral curse is about stealing valuable things, the roblings can safely live here amongst the transient snow creatures. The creatures' snow equipment (which evaporates daily) is largely worthless, so the robling instinct never targets them.
• History: The roblings were created in vats as an arcane experiment. Oral history says their creator was a genius archwizard whose hobby was thievery. She was betrayed by her apprentice who killed her, stole her powers, and abandoned the roblings for a new project, making some kind of huge mechanical baboon (see https://coppershaman.com/merry-hexmas-babbling-baboon/)

The roblings are smiling. Self-actualised. Happy with the niche they've carved out for themselves. They only admit to two worries:

1. In the distant future, population growth could have them brushing up against regions with other kinds of people, with friction as a result. They'd like to find a way to lift their curse if they could.
2. More immediately, some big, pricy, well-defended target could come along, prove irresistible, and the village would suffer some violent retaliation after robbing it. (They don't know about the W.A.I. gingerbread mech yet – see below)

If you could somehow alleviate either fear, you'd have the gratitude of a lot of interesting people.

Notable items stolen from the outside world by roblings (1d10):

1. Mrs Clause's rocking chair. She probably wants it back, but it's pretty heavy and unwieldy.
2. Treacle hourglass. Ornate ceremonial timepiece. The dark liquid very slowly flowing through it has almost finished counting down a decade.
3. Sack of large rubies and sapphires. Used as 'practise gems' by an apprentice gnome lapidary, they are all quite misshapen or in some cases have been split in half. Still valuable.
4. A set of telescope lenses once belonging to the Snow Miser (see https://tbr.bearblog.dev/merry-hexmas-blog-bandwagon-snow-misers-houseboat/)
5. Two large golden rings, from a set of five. A recent political intrigue is said to have revolved around them. Sounds like a tall tale to you.
   
6. A taxidermied chimerical denizen of some nightmarish realm. This particular chimera has the glassy-eyed head of a reindeer, body of a giant penguin, and feathers of a turkey, duck, and chicken combined. It also has human arms, holding a knife and fork.
7. Trunk-sized golden key to the city of Sniffleheim, fortified ancestral home of the frost giants. Etched on one side with the Sniffleheim coat of arms (a stylised scowl) and on the other with "Property of Jarl Keith".
   
8. Tongs of the Heat Miser. Magically room-temperature kitchen tongs. Once used by this mysterious figure to manipulate objects without melting them into white-hot blobs, before he learned a measure of control over his eldritch power.
9. Bottomless Pouch of Sugared Oranges. Vital to the roblings, who use it to supplement their moss-based diet with extra calories and vitamins.
   
10. Single-use doomsday device stolen from the Red Lord (see https://magnoliakeep.blogspot.com/2025/11/blog-bandwagon-orcish-toy-factory.html). Ugly pear-shaped mess of steel pipes, loose wires, and warning symbols. If activated, it instantly tinselifies all organic life in a six-league radius, leaving nothing but glittering strands and a mass of fused slag at the epicentre.

 

 

 

Locale: A curious expedition

A campsite huddles around the legs of a massive gingerbread mecha. The five-storey-tall delicious biscuit robot is currently immobile.

Houses a research party from the Weather Advancements Institute (W.A.I.), here to study the magical properties of the snow. They are competing with the North Pole Ironworks and the Hannukademy for funding, and would offer trade tips and small favours for news about either group or for leads on new sources of private equity.

The gingerbread mecha is a quadrupedic walking vehicle constructed from pastry, icing, spun sugar, high-tensile marzipan, and rolled steel. The inside smells like a holiday drink made from hot machine oil. The mecha broke down slightly short of its destination two leagues further into the snowfield, so the expedition has set up camp here while mechanic Grace tinkers with it.

The mecha is armed with a devastating heat ray and six pop-out autocannon turrets which lob chocolate shells at an unbelievable rate of fire. Part of an experimental fleet belonging to the Heat Miser, who contracted the design out to the W.A.I., funded the construction, and leased it back in a sweetheart deal.

Weather Advancements Institute team members (1d8):

1. Dr Margrit Blithely. Principal investigator. Stressed out. Really needs this expedition to work. Has only just found out about the roblings and is worried there could be a violent clash. The mecha has autonomous defences which can't be deactivated.
2. Thab Xnox. Research assistant. Hammock enthusiast. Has raised laziness to an artform. Motivated by nothing but new excuses not to do his job.
3. Magus Kaleb Baiseen. Academic wizard. Fascinated with the elements. His life's work is the construction of a periodic table partitioned along the lines of which elements can or cannot be animated or summoned.
4. Jennet Jensdottir. Meteorologist. Seven feet tall, platinum blonde, glittering celebrity smile, mind like a steel trap. Sociopath. Prolific writer. Managing editor for a journal of sorcerous metereology.
5. Dward Blue. Former jolly postman. Current grouchy mech driver. Chain smoker. Mood made worse by the expedition's limited stock of booze and their current inability to get out of here on a moment's notice if anything goes wrong.
6. Grace Isthmus. Gingerbread mechanic. Green-skinned and covered in warts. Wears black overalls, bright red sequinned shoes, a permanent grin. Omnidirectionally overoptimistic. Very confident. Loves her job. Currently trying to work out why the gingerbread engine in Knee #3 won't start.
7. Snid Kipper. Dogsbody. Young, anxious, splay-eared. Self-consciously amateur bagpiper and even more amateur poet. Very earnest.
8. Chunk. Team mascot. Salamander. Little salamander collar with her name on it. Sleeps in the main boiler. Eats coal kibble. Very fat.

 

 

 

Random hex encounters (1d10):

1. Jessica Bonechill. Transient snow creature in the form of an axe-wielding skeleton. Mercenary for hire, briefly. She wears a windbreaker and complains of the cold.
2. Magus Glace von Zephyrous. Transient snow creature in the form of a pretentious floating wizard. Capable of casting up to fourth level spells, but will thoroughly indulge his fondness for riddles before being any help at all.
3. Mister Hiphup. Transient snow creature in the form of a snowman. Hiking through the snow, eager to explore this new world he has found himself in, unaware he will live only a few more hours
4. Megafrosty. Transient snow creature in the form of a gigantic three-headed snowman. Sings in a robotic voice. Has false memories of having lived thirty centuries. Dislikes solemnity and may attack the maudlin.
5. Ia Snowhorn. Transient snow creature in the form of a fearsome ice centaur. He is struggling to traverse the snow on icicle legs which sink knee-deep with every stride.
6. Kel Brittlegrasp. A young wandering robling, curious about foreigners.
7. A small team of gnomes wearing piping hot steamsuits for warmth. They are crossing the snow on coal-burning sledges on a long journey to the big city. All of them are accomplished builders and interior designers, absolutely desperate for work (perhaps at a place like this).
8. 
   Three roblings (Bok, Twik, and Winston) armed with spears and big empty sacks, stalking a small herd of reindeer across the snow.
9. A small herd of reindeer.
10. Snid Kipper from the W.A.I., looking for a bit of solitude to practise the bagpipes. He keeps bumping into slightly simple-minded transient snow creatures and is finding it hard to shake them.

 

 

Rumours about this hex (1d8):

1. There's a whole town of grinning demons out beyond the steppe, dark green like the algae-slick walls of an old well. They live to steal.
2. A privately-funded research group has sent an expedition armed with gingerbread technology after something valuable out in the deep snowfields.
3. There's a place where the snow gets up and walks around, asking confused questions.
4. There was a string of odd thefts a couple of decades ago. Mrs Clause's rocking chair. The key to the city of Sniffleheim. The Tongs of the Heat Miser. Things that have never been fenced.
5. Some strange naive chap walked down from the hills. He was white as snow and dressed in strange baubles. He got drunk enough at the public house to cause problems, and couldn't pay his tab. When they opened up the gaol cell the next day there was nothing left of him but a puddle.
6. The Red Lord has been furious about a break-in which he was never able to avenge. He's put a big bounty on the head of something called a 'robling'.
7. If you find a place where odd folk are birthed from the snow itself, the flowering lichen there should be cut under a full moon, dried, powdered, and burned as incense. You'll have oracular visions.
8. Up beyond the snowline there's an orc spawning pit that went wrong and all the orcs there are obsessed with theft.

 

 

Credits

The text of this post is released under a Creative Commons BY (4.0) license. Do what you like with it as long as you follow the terms: credit me, link here, and link to the license.

The illustrations incorporated here are by Alderdoodle (alderdoodle.co.uk), Joe-Austin Flynn (www.patreon.com/c/u95234086/), Evlyn Moreau (www.patreon.com/c/evlynmoreau/), Steven Colling (https://stevencolling.itch.io/), and Jeffrey Koch (https://legacy.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/26533/Jeff-Koch-Stock-Art). Used with permission.

Wiki Articles Are Wizards!

Wizards are bizarre uniquities who carve their own paths through reality like rogue stars.

Wiki Articles Are Wizards [citation needed] is my new zine for crafting these characters out of wiki articles, then pitting them against each other in a wizard-off!

To get a thematically consistent weird wizard with spooky powers and an appropriately unpleasant set of personality traits, you'll want to use procedural generation rather than strictly random generation. This small book gives you a comprehensive method for doing that, using wiki articles as the inspirational material, and has all sorts of bonus wizard-lore to boot.

🧙 Available today!

 

And I'm publishing a companion piece: a collection of troublesome characters, 30 Wicked Wizards!

From Miarthetrolut the Regulator (who meddles with fish kinematics) to Sthogar the Ambitious (and his reanimated giant spiders)!

The thirty wizards and archwizards in this zine-style book are all made using the Wiki Articles Are Wizards rules, all laid out in a splattery OSR style, and all very weird and wicked.

🧙 Also available today!

 

As well as print copies, you can get a digital edition of either zine!

Are you interested in both? Hey! You can grab the PDF bundle!

 

The retconned lifepath

I want to develop an idea about a novel RPG progression mechanic which was pitched here:

https://www.tumblr.com/alexanderwales/771838390587047936/pitchposting-retcon

The main idea is this: it's a narrative game where the majority of the gameplay involves placing the pieces of your own past.
[...]
So the whole game would be this: slowly adding to your own backstory, penning yourself in over time, until there's no room to maneuver anymore, and shortly thereafter, the game ends. The fundamental tension of the game is that you want to keep the character as amorphous as possible, to commit to as few details as possible, but commitment is necessary to actually accomplish things.
[...]
in this game "progression" does not come from increasing skills because you got better, it comes from defining the past.

I view this as an interesting twist on lifepaths.

 

Refresher: Lifepath mechanics

In TTRPG gaming, characters are classically generated by picking character elements (or clusters of them) from a set of options, supplemented with dice rolls to instantiate numerical attributes. Most games still do something in this vein.

A lifepath character generation system switches this up. Now you make early life decisions as your character, and/or roll to see what happened to them before gameplay began, and the outcome of that process is your character's start state.

(Aside: I made a comprehensive lifepath character generation book for D&D 5e which you can check out here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/438774/Steps-to-a-Hero)

Lifepaths are an attractive alternative because they (can) restrict a player's decisions to only those of their character, not a bunch of things that their character was never in a position to choose themselves like their 'intelligence' stat. As a result,

• They add more gameplay to the game
• They feel more real
• They reduce the pressure on the player to be creative
• They replace the part of a role-playing game that has little to no role-playing (character generation) with a version that is mostly role-playing

Refresher: Retcon mechanics

Retcon is retroactive continuity. It's a broad category of ideas, and 'deciding parts of the past which were left undecided' is just one very narrow part.

The main RPG retcon mechanic I'm familiar with is the one Alexander Wales mentions in his pitch. Blades In The Dark, the GLOG, etc, permit a character by 'careful preparation' to retcon in things they have available to them, e.g., by carrying a bundle of unspecified equipment.

Outside of RPGs, something like this is a common part of story-telling games, where there are mechanisms for a player (as opposed to game master) to determine or replace parts of the world, often to the benefit of a character favoured or controlled by that player.

 

A possible synthesis

So we have this idea for, essentially, building a character by determining underdetermined bits of a lifepath.

➡️ Let's say characters all start at age 25, having had formative experiences since the age of 15, and initially have just one or two of their traits determined.

➡️ There's experience points, and you 'spend' xp at any time to declare how you 'spent' one year of your life (a nice little verbal correspondence).

➡️ Each year of your life grants you an appropriate character trait: an ability, skill, power, whatever.

➡️ Each trait you 'gain' in this way is, of course, one you've always had within the continuity of the game world. You're just revealing it now.

So you decide you spent a year traipsing the desert trade routes, and get increased endurance. Or you were pressed into military service as an archer, and are capable with a war bow. Or you spent a year repairing fishing trawlers, and have basic sailing and carpentry skills.

This setup allows for ten "level-ups", one for each adult / young adult year of your life prior to starting the game proper. You could tweak the time periods to get more buffer. If you do bump into the end game having 'spent' all your undetermined years, the game master would need to contrive a year-long time skip between adventures for the player characters to keep progressing, or switch to a different progression system.

Other than managing time, I see two main open problems. They're shared by most retcon / story-influencing mechanics:

1. Things in the game world can / should be able to interact with your character's history before you're "ready" to determine it. When this happens, the choices are: do the character advancement early, contrive a way out of revealing (deciding) it, or suffer contradiction later on.
2. When you do determine part of your character's history, it may make previous in-character choices and outcomes seem very stupid indeed. "You're telling me you apprenticed as an acrobat for a year? So have you been deliberately clumsy these last few weeks?"

 

Closing thoughts

By its nature, I think as a class of game mechanic this idea leans a bit towards the story-telling game end of the spectrum. It doesn't have many of the advantages of lifepaths which I mentioned.

It's a way for players to influence the overall narrative or game world more than their character's decisions. So I think if you were to develop it further, you'd be better off implementing it in a story-telling game or hybrid game rather than a 'strict' TTRPG.

What if every D&D power could be used at will?

Seriously, what would happen?

I think that in D&D 5e:

• Resource tracking is fiddly, takes valuably game time, and isn't particularly fun.
  
• The game's built-in resource management is one of its weakest design elements. So much hinges on the long rest mechanic that resources feel all-or-nothing. Between published adventure content and the relative lack of 'living world' rules under the hood, resting tends to be either impossible or unpunished, with little middle ground, depending on the situation. The DM gets little guidance on making it work.
• Resource management decisions are only sometimes important, and seldom very engaging or fun, compared to the other decisions made during play. You learn good spells and tactics, and it's seldom important to change them. You may sometimes have intel leading to an opportunity to prepare differently, but the game isn't so difficult that doing so is necessary, and there isn't much in the way of DM guidance or built-in mechanics for getting intel into the PCs' hands.
• Most of the game's rules are about tactical life-or-death combat, and therefore the game itself is about tactical life-or-death combat (although of course not everyone plays it this way). Trying to conserve resources in combat is a big gamble. After the particularly resource-limited early levels, play styles tend to converge on 'open with full broadside' and not be punished for that.
• It is a game where characters don't just have 'powers' but extravagant superpowers, and it's highly character-focused.
• Character classes all have a fairly similarly design, considered in the abstract. They get an array of at-will small superpowers plus various rate-limited superpowers, almost all of which can be used a low-single-digit number of times between rests. Other limiters on powers (e.g. HP or GP costs) are rare.
• The game's balance is precarious and a DM needs to develop skill to tread the line between 'feeling dangerous' and 'being unfair'.

Let's say you mostly agree with these premises. I think it follows that making all D&D 5e powers at-will – that is, removing their rate limits...

• Would remove part of the game, but not an important one
  
• Wouldn't get rid of interesting choices
• Would work for all classes without changing typical playstyles
• Would lean into the existing superpowered and character-focused feeling of the game
• Would make gameplay much faster
• Wouldn't upset a perfect game balance that doesn't exist.

Spam spells all you like. Action surge on every turn. Put ki points on every attack; metamagic on every spell; enter rage or confer bardic inspiration whenever you can spare a bonus action.

This is an idle fancy – I've never seen it done. But I'd be fascinated to see how it played out. Extrapolating some consequences that seem plausible:

1. The DM could then abandon CR and offer challenges which would otherwise be completely unfair, then see what the players come up with.
2. If the DM created a 'too easy' encounter as a result, it wouldn't matter, because the power disparity and lack of resource tracking means the encounter gets settled in a fraction of the time that combat, spell-based trickery, or the various resource-conserving hedges usually take at the table.
3. The DM could alternatively keep CR but remove all the rate limiters on adversaries' resources: recharges, dailies, slots, etc. (But unlike character classes, this would affect some creatures much more than others)
4. PCs wouldn't need to keep lesser powers and spell choices for backup offense. With normal ideas of challenge abandoned there should be more situations where a particular utility spell or defence is desperately needed. That suggests that spell selection might become a more interesting decision!

Now, historically this sort of thing would lead to a worsening of 'linear fighters, quadratic wizards', but I don't think the difference would be as large in this edition of the game, at least before the highest levels. Fighters getting two actions every turn via action surge is pretty huge, for example. The biggest difference might be in high-level utility powers, the kind where you normally have one use of a valuable high-level spell slot and have to consider whether to save it for a fight. Now you could Fabricate or create a permanent Wall of stone every ten minutes, Mind blank the whole party, spam divination spells, and so on.

What other issues would you need to navigate?

• A few character powers stop mattering. For example, second-rate but 'cheap' healing features are mostly obviated by having lay on hands or a decent healing spell. You might need to introduce some 'alternative features' available to all classes.
• Some character powers would become irrelevant as the character increased in level. This wouldn't matter except that I doubt they're evenly distributed over character classes. You'd want to add a mechanic for swapping defunct powers out once you grow out of them, for those classes that don't already have one.
• There are some slightly more or less resource-limited classes, and they become slightly better or worse choices respectively as a result. I don't think this matters except for warlocks, who deviate from the overarching class design patterns. They'd keep their major disadvantage (few powers) while everyone gets a better version of their major advantage (powers usable more often).
• At the highest levels, powers (and spells especially) can become absurdly strong. But having poked around, I think only a few of them would be real trouble. It might literally just be Wish and Divine Intervention!
• If you're abandoning material costs from spells as well as spell slots, you'd want to look at the few spells that are highly constrained by GP cost: Forcecage, Clone, Sequester, Gate, etc.
• I might be wrong; maybe top-tier spellcasting really does outcompete other classes. You could make level 8-9 spells the sole exception to the 'infinite resources' rule, perhaps sticking to slots or limiting them in some other way (once per hour?).
• Rogues would now get infinite Stroke of Luck as their capstone: their attacks always hit and their ability checks always succeed. I don't think this actually outshines having infinite spells, but it might be boring.
• If the PCs' opponents also have no constraints, there might be a risk at high levels of the game devolving into win-initiative-to-win-combat, but hopefully it would lead to unique solutions.

Implications for the world

Obviously things would get absurd, especially if this is the norm for all people in the setting. But I already think the implied and official D&D settings don't actually develop most of the implications of the things that are canonically possible within them. All sorts of things (technologies, prices, lifestyles, community structures, social structures, etc) ought to look completely alien on the basis of low-level spells alone, and yet the setting (with its dramatic mixture of tech levels, dramatic mixture of society types, dramatic mixture of stakes, etc) stands unaffected.

But overall, losing even more immersion in a typical fantasy setting does strike me as a glaring issue, yes. Maybe abandoning rate limits would work in a more (post-)apocalyptic setting? One where everything is chaotic and in flux, where huge changes happen in the world very quickly, where absurdly spectacular powers are harnessed to mundane ends, and where nightmarishly powerful entities regularly make an appearance?

Upon training your character's replacement

I was thinking about the value of a long time scale for fantasy TTRPG adventures, and how it actually ties in neatly with many aspects of old-school style of play:

• Gold-as-xp, and treasure-hunting as the foundational mode of play
• Delves and expeditions
• A slower, more plausible pace of character advancement including training costs for levelling up
• Costs for character death; replacement characters who aren't automatically the same power level as their predecessor
• Emphasis on investing in a base, community, big player-driven projects, and other aspects of the game world
• Social connections, hirelings, delegation, and realm play
• A slower or more 'realistic' time required to recover from injury

Let's say you implement seasonal play, as in e.g. http://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-long-haul-time-and-distance-in-d.html. The PCs have a meagre initial home base. They have some local adventures and make some coin. Enough that they can plan a modest expedition, one that will take months. They come home and spend their wealth, advancing their characters, improving their base, and acquiring the resources for a big expedition, one that will take seasons to complete.

Now let's build on this basis, by adding some game elements to do with character advancement, followers, and character replacement, and see what other common rules might be tweaked.

Character advancement

Character advancement has a cost in looted wealth (e.g., at 1 gp = 1 xp or whatever works with your game rules). Up to half of looted wealth can be used for training; the rest is available for improving the characters' lives and pursuing their goals in other ways.

The requirement that xp must be from looted wealth (e.g. dungeon treasure) ties it back in to the idea that the characters are getting something out of their experiences on delves and expeditions, and also prevents advancement based on capitalism; it feels gamey, but not TOO gamey.

Looted wealth is used to pay for training, tutors, study materials, and so on. Early on, these things are readily available. At higher levels, they might have to be sought out in the world, as it gets harder to find more advanced texts, teachers more skilled than your character, and so on.

Character advancement therefore represents costly, high-intensity learning and study (with an undertone of the character having gone out and had perilous experiences, resulting in both the necessary wealth and the motivation to excel in the training). Advancement takes a long time; let's say a season per level. You could have a more fine-grained system with an increasing time requirement, though.

Followers and character replacement

From say level 2 or 3, players can acquire a number of followers. In D&D-likes, we might say they have followers up to one third of their Charisma score. In those games that already have fleshed-out follower mechanics, you'll need to call them something else or combine the systems.

Followers are just characters like any other, starting at level 1, created with the same character creation rules. They are distinguished from hirelings and other NPCs by an understanding at the table that they are essentially backup PCs; in particular, they won't ever betray the PCs, and they won't be killed 'off-screen' unless the players decided to send them into danger.

Players can invest looted wealth in their followers to advance them, exactly as for their primary PC. This has the same training costs and time and so on. A PC's followers can advance to 1 level lower than the PC and no further.

In-world, followers are squires, apprentices, butlers, bodyguards, family members, and so on. Some of a PC's followers might be their own apprentices (if the same class). But the wizard could retain a loyal housecarl, or the barbarian might have adopted a witch. And some of a PC's followers might be apprentices of other PCs.

The crucial detail for all of this: A player's next character will be drawn from their pool of followers. 

If a player's character is safe back home, the player may choose to retire that character, taking all its wealth and social connections and so on with it. If they choose retirement, the player can have some decent portion of the character's experience transferred directly to their followers, including their new character. Let's say, 50% of earned experience, with no more than 20% allocated to any one follower, and no advancement further than the level of the retiring character. Importantly, the old character then becomes a tool of the GM and is kept out of the way, not a free resource for the remaining PCs to hit up at any time.

But if a player's character dies, the player either takes on a new character at starting level or chooses a candidate from their followers.

Tweaking the rules

This framework works best when the cost of character advancement increases drastically with ever level (as in most editions of D&D). That way, a PC isn't terribly disadvantaged by diverting a split of their wealth/xp to maintain a small coterie of backups.

The GM may need to tweak the total size of wealth awards, and/or give a small bonus to any xp allocated to followers (so that it doesn't feel like the current character is losing out). There should be a balance; players should feel a tension between the risk of investing in their PC and the surety of investing in their followers (in case their PC dies).

Different play groups can organise things differently. One player could pick another's follower as a replacement if they agree, and possibly if a bonus/weregild is paid to compensate. Players could trade followers. A group might decide to divert some initial split of their loot into a set of replacement characters, then treat them as a communal resource.

Followers are also a resource in themselves, providing spells and character abilities and so on, giving additional incentive to invest in them. However, in a world where returning from death is cheap and easy, players won't feel as compelled to 'waste' xp on maintaining a pool of followers. The GM might need to make resurrection spells cost additional wealth/xp, or improve the rate of return on follower advancement, to balance it out.

This system would be easily adapted to a playstyle where everyone plays multiple characters at the same time.

What are the benefits?

So going back to that initial list of old-school play elements...

- Gold-as-xp, and treasure-hunting as the foundational mode of play
- Delves and expeditions
This framework, being predicated on plundered gold-for-xp, puts the focus squarely on treasure-hunting. Having a long time frame and big expeditions also helps emphasise the sheer amount of wealth in the adventure location: it's worthwhile planning a trek across the sea, continent, or world for.

- A slower, more plausible pace of character advancement including training costs for levelling up
- Costs for character death; replacement characters who aren't automatically the same power level as their predecessor
This framework achieves these while offering the players a lot of important choices. The long time frame with seasonal expeditions means that there are regular opportunities for the characters to advance via lengthy training without the pace of adventures precluding it, and without the game devolving into fine-grained in-world scheduling puzzles.

- Emphasis on investing in a base, community, big player-driven projects, and other aspects of the game world
Having increasingly huge amount of treasure in more distant and difficult-to-get to dungeons, alongside increasing wealth costs for levelling up, also helps with game world investment. PCs can do social climbing, come up with their own megaprojects, invest in capital, build fortresses, improve their communities, and so on, with the half of their looted treasure that they can't use for character advancement.

Having an expedition 'off season' (winter) creates room to breathe, and for PCs to get entangled in whatever the player finds compelling: planning, hiring, selling treasure, magic item creation, wheeling and dealing, starting a family, capital investment, politicking, dealing with long-term campaign events, and so on.

- Social connections, hirelings, delegation, and realm play
Expedition-based play encourages use of hirelings, and managing a coterie of followers ties in well with managing hirelings and paves the way to realm-based play. Travelling for a long time to an adventure location necessitates retaining staff or paying friends back home to tend to the character's other, broader concerns while the character is off adventuring.

- A slower or more 'realistic' time required to recover from injury
Not everyone cares about verisimilitude, but for those of us who do, the long time scale and the group of followers together permit a GM to tweak rules and powers towards needing long-term recovery. A character who gets injured has the time required to heal up before the next expedition. When a character is knocked out of a delve due to injury, their player isn't sidelined for a session or two; they have followers with them who can go in instead. Or they can attempt the risky proposition of having their PC continue while seriously injured, knowing they have the backstop of having levelled followers back home if 'injured' turns into 'dead' as a result.

...And finally, as the Against The Wicked City article noted, players will have a chance to actually update the age written on their character sheet.