Those Fragile Bridges (Aclas Hexcrawl)

Far in the south of Aclas, in the Yaladine archipelago, is an island, and a looming tower. Sailors call it the Lure - they say it glows at night, and is the home of misshapen beasts and a cult who wishes to flood the world - so they keep their distance.

It is, in truth, a prison, or a toybox. Domain of the Mystic who calls himself Puyinthel - mystic of the focus Control. From his tower he watches you dance, and he calls you his. Escape attempts are untenable as long as he lives - from miles away he looks down, reading thoughts and breaking necks.

Your parents lived and died on this island. You don't plan to do the same.

Random Encounters

2. The mystic's attention - he checks a snapshot of your fears, emotional state, and obsessions (as Insight) for anything out of the ordinary. The hair on the back of your neck rises.

3. 2d4 Pursuers (1 HD, shields, swords, shortbows) - Puyinthel's guards and killers, armed with figments of his imagination. Barbed arrows damage you again each time you move between hexes - but they'll catch you if you slow. If you roll an 8, this is the full set of Pursuers and includes Inga.

4. A cow-sized nudibranch (stats as carrion crawler) festooned with Sithican decorations in verdigrised bronze.

5. A recurring NPC - if the players have met no one, a fisher from Home out on a pleasant walk :)

6. 1d6 predatory lungfish (1 HD, slow movement, ambush predators, bite +1 1d6) drag themselves out from the damp earth.

7. Siwatu Amaechi, a hapless soldier (2 HD, big spear, real armor) from some island or another, now washed up on the Lure. 

8. The Ghost.

Hex Keys

A1: Home

A fishing village of a couple hundred - with no boats. Its residents dive, or fish with spears, but never further from shore than they can swim.  

Well, almost no boats - Puyinthel's eight Pursuers live in a long hall, and keep one among them to hunt for those desperate few who try to swim. Their foreign captain (and Duelist A, with the Vom Tag technique of her former Ossean training), Inga, tires of this post - Puyinthel provides them little for their loyalty. She is, in a way, just as much a captive as you. If you hunted down the deserter in C2, this would be enough to turn her towards you, and away from the Mystic.

A2: Sea Serpent

A great snake made of gold writhes offshore - it has been dying, bleeding glowing ichor into the sea, for decades. Ever since Puyinthel struck it down.

Serpentists see this as an extremely heavy-handed and not particularly positive omen - and for more materialist PCs, the dying snake means anyone swimming or sailing through this region has a 4-in-6 chance to be crushed, drowned, reduced to splinters, et cetera. 

Its blood ignites like gasoline. Its hatred of Puyinthel burns like the sun.

B1: Graveyard

Where the Mystic leaves broken toys. Sometimes, whether he doesn't trust them or because he's just bored, someone from Home gets an invitation to his tower - and when he's tired of them, they find themselves thrown, bodily, to the west to shatter on the ground.

These people are only buried at night, when the villagers think the Mystic isn't looking. 

And during these nights, and their vigils, a ghost stalks the graveyard. It tears at its own grave, howls at the rising sun, howls at the Panopticon, screams and screams and screams and screams its childrens' names and its parents' names and then, in the middle of a syllable, falls silent.

If it were given someone to possess, it could think. And it could take revenge. It knows this - and it screams this, in those moments when it is conscious enough to communicate.

B2: Panopticon

The pillar of the tyrant, manifestation of Control. To be detailed in an upcoming GLAUGUST post. 

B3: Shipwreck

Once the pirate ship Never Seen This Man In My Life, Officer - now, a ruin, scythed apart by coral and stones. Inside is a sole survivor, mind fizzing from exposure to Puyinthel, maddened by the belief that he is that mystic.

On his hip is an immense break-action pistol (1d8+4 damage, ignores armor, two-handed) - four brass cartridges jangle in his pouch, and a fifth is loaded.

C1: Sithican Temple

A buried ruin, carved with angular squid. Its half-sunken, gateless door is just large enough for you to crawl through, into a claustrophobic tunnel flooded with sticking, drowning mud.

Past this, the temple opens - a dark room, filled up to your knees in silty water. Rolling in it, desperate to stop itself from asphyxiating, is a multicolored cow-sized sea slug (stats as carrion crawler). 

Behind the nudibranch, on a mud-covered stone plinth, is a pearlescent chalice of piercingly blue water. Those who sip from it feel as if they are drowning, and then "die", for three hours - they still move, and speak, and think, but according to spells, spirits, anyone you ask, and mind-reading, there is nothing here but a corpse. There are six doses.

C2: Deserter's Camp

Surrounded by noisemakers on strings. In the center, Matvei fails to sleep. He fled from the Pursuers out of conscience - unable to bear any more time acting as the Mystic's boot.

Inga will execute him if he is captured - she has a reputation to uphold. 

For G L Å U G U S T 2 0 2 5 - prompt 5:1 "Tiny regional hexcrawl" 

Navigator "Gunsmith's Societies" (Lanthanide Horizon)

The "gunsmith's society" is an occult ritual organization within the clan-ship society of the Navigators, specializing in military leadership, mutual aid, and mediation across the lines of the three Navigator "assemblies".

Behavior
Gunsmiths have an inverse set of virtues when compared to mainline Navigators - where they are invasive, obsessed with equal treatment and insult, expected to react with high emotion, and aim for decisiveness in action and thought, gunsmiths are instead expected to keep the secrets of their order, accept the hierarchy of masters and journeymen, remain calm, and forsake immediate action to instead consider all angles.

This makes them, in the eyes of their neighbors, frightening - difficult to predict, difficult to understand. Additionally, members of the society are the only Navigators with the permission to ignore demands of their Imperious tyrants.

Social Function
Members of the society have a monopoly on the authorized production of Navigator airguns. Manufacture of these weapons is not hidden, nor even particularly difficult - any Navigator ship-tender has the necessary understanding of pressurized systems - but it is socially prevented. Navigators behave in a saga-like way (i.e. they go flying off the handle for basically no reason all the time) - do you trust them with guns? Really?

The society, with its more restrained social expectation, keeps these weapons to themselves, and to those Select and Imperious they can trust to keep them turned away from each other for use in war and against machines.

As a group they theoretically have no political desires beyond mediation - in practice, individual gunsmiths tend to stand in opposition to the twin cultural shifts of Legalism (who seek the development of writing, sedentary agriculture, and other ideas taken from the local Oases) and the Golden Sphere Revelation (which believes in an alternate eschatology than mainline Navigators). 

Mythological Basis
One of the secrets revealed during initiation into the gunsmith's society is the secret of heredity. Members of the society are not, in fact, descended of Parva Weightless (the mythohistorical first Navigator) - but instead children of Saveriu, a hunter and minor character in conventional tellings that the gunsmiths expand into the warrior-philosopher-king of Parva's home pre-Navigator culture. As members of the society are not children of Parva, they are thus not Navigators, permitting them to act as the society demands.

This was written for G L Å U G U S T 2 0 2 5 - prompt 1:2 "He Wields A Gun", maximum word count 500

More Treasures and Sept-Vessels of the Navigators

The third in the set (one, two) - I'm making another attempt at a play-by-post Navigator domain game and realized I put half of the obligatory PC starting treasures on the map somewhere, so. I need. more of those.

New Sept-Vessels

Falsifier - centerpiece of the secretive ritual “gunsmith’s society”. Members of this group appear in many septs, providing mediation, calming advice, and firearms expertise to the Select and Imperious - but they consider Falsifier their home.

• Left-Handed, Assembly Elegiast, Level 1: Reliquaries 1 (society lodge), Gunsmith’s Workshop (asset)
• The Select of this vessel is called Breathless - and the head of the gunsmith’s society is titled Occluder.
• This sept’s fabled ancestor is Ansgar, thief-inventor of the air rifle.

Indemnifier - a vessel with great potential. As well as the standard solid radiators found on any sept-vessel, Indemnifier holds an emergency high-flow loop using 1400 °F vaporized potassium. In the future, this could let it run all sorts of extreme technologies - for now, it acts as a convenient anti-boarding measure.

• Right-Handed, Assembly Cloudspinner, Level 2: Trade Goods 1 (potassium gathering), Mysteries 1 (Ti/K Vapor Tube Radiator)
• The Select of this vessel is called Optimist.
• The famed ancestor of this sept is Dydier, who was thought lost in distant lands but crawled back to his sept on foot.

Decalcifier - a baleful ship clad in carbon fiber. They hope to arm themselves, and then follow Sidereal into the Next World as a sentry, rather than join the assembly-ship’s crew; or, if the few of its members who fell into the Golden Sphere Revelation have their way, become self-sufficient and then vanish into that bleak place.

• Left-Handed, Assembly Sidereal, Level 1: Weaponry 1 (trained wanderers)
• The Select of this vessel is called Absent.
• The famed ancestor of this sept is Per, a poisoner reviled by all others.

additionally, sept Listener has been remade, now that Arcologists are no longer part of the setting:

Listener - a new-made vessel. Its people are celebratory, and its halls are shining. Crewed, in part, by glass-masked Firstborn… refugees? orphans?, slowly adapting to the thunder and glory of Navigation.

• Left-Handed, Level 1: Trade Goods 1 (3D-printed fabric), Reliquaries 1 (shrine to the voice ringing in your head)
• The Select of this vessel is called Stargazer.
• The famed ancestor of this sept is split; both Yzabé, whose descendants form the born-Navigator core of the sept, and the bodiless voice are revered.

New Treasures

10. Metamaterial Cloak - a misshapen parallelogram of tarp-like plastic. Refracts light, making its wearer invisible.

11. Ninety-Seventh Casket - a boron monolith the size of a shipping container, taken from the Hanging Gardens. Diagnostics sweep across its surface - the thing inside is not yet ready.

12. Eye Closer - a blue stone box with a mouthpiece on one end and a barrel on the other, filled with 5 doses of baleful powder. Those afflicted with it are first paralyzed by spasms, then driven to hallucination and paranoia.

13. Grain of Sand - contained in a magnetic apparatus. Glows with a blinding white heat. If it was released, it would fall, burning, forever. 

14. Bladeless Hilt - a +1 light “weapon”. Deals no damage to living things. If a machine is “killed” with it, it follows the commands of the hilt’s holder until another machine is “killed”.

15. The Volume’s Most Eligible Bachelorette - [sept] Balsinde Hierosme. Superlatively intelligent, kind, well-spoken, virtuous, et cetera, et cetera. Puts you in the best possible position for marriage arrangements.

16. Scalpel - an uparmored monopropellant-driven ultralight with an octet of laser-guided missiles. Carries one pilot and six desanting passengers.

17. Speaking Fire - carried rarely by Firstborn officers. A point of oilslick light, hovering by your shoulder. Lights your path, magnifies your voice, flashbangs people, and projects a burning shield of the same light (+2 AC, lights fires).

18. Siege Fusil - masterpiece of the gunsmith’s society. Fires 5 millimeter pellets at 6 kilometers per second, powered by a two-stage hydrogen gas-piston. 2d12 damage, +2 to-hit increasing by one for each turn spent aiming. Disadvantage on attack rolls if firing from an unsupported position.

Small Rules for Lanthanide Horizon (Dissection, Climbing/Caving)

Usually, I shift between genre with each campaign - but I'm now two failed Navigator sept campaigns deep and still haven't stopped thinking about them, probably because of the. failing...

As a break from three hundred years in the mines making Lanthanide Horizon hexcrawls I can't post because all my theoretical players read this, here are some leetle rules-modules I stapled to the latter campaign and barely used. 🙂

(later - I want to alter the Navigator backgrounds (i don't like Skald or Ropemaker), rewrite the Navigator septs so they can be used as NPC factions, and write some kind of generator for their Imperious management-kings) 

Machine Dissection

Ripped off from this system by Benign Brown Beast, but inverted - assigning dice, then rolling them, instead of rolling them before being assigned. 

When you move to salvage, pool 2+[INT bonus] d10s - with a relevant skill, add 2 more. Before rolling, divide them as you wish between three categories:

• Receive answers to [dice] questions about this machine and others like it (HD, AC, attacks, purpose, etc).
• Obtain minor components - roll all dice in this category and sum them together. Addone to the first digit of the sum to determine how many slots are collected, and the last digit keys what component is obtained. Any results that say "either X or Y", the player chooses. (For example, “26” is 2+1 = 3 slots of component #6)
• Take [best] on a secret table of attempts to recover a major component - a machine-specific tool that could be repaired, with work. (OK I realized that this is kind of a pain in the neck, "the table" is honestly probably just. 1-5 you really do it wrong and the dying machine catches your hand in some gears and crushes it, 6-8 you get Nothing, 9-10 you get "broken component that could do Thing The Machine Does In Its Statblock if you fix it) 

Minor Component Table

1. Wire (either stout copper or beautiful fiber-optic).

2. Either intact batteries, or manganese dioxide (flammable, used as a dark green pigment).

3. Propylene glycol, used as a coolant and lubricant - startlingly, somehow, safe for human consumption.

4. Jumbles of small springs and synthetic tendon, or fragments of soft solder.

5. Elbow-sized servomotors, or shin-long electric pistons.

6. Contact adhesive, or screws and bolts.

7. Multicolored plastic insulating sheaths, or dice-sized blocks of graphite.

8. Strings of status LEDs, or single lightbulbs.

9. Lengths of metal skeleton, or external plates.

0. A clicking mechanical eye, or the tangled-bismuth brain - a piece you can’t understand, but the men of the Vault will buy. ("the men of the Vault" are a local group of Foreign Types - more generally you could just say "[...] understand, but have value as decoration and trophies.")

Climbing/Caving

Also ripped off, this time from Sam Sorensen's Lowlife, and this blog post by Xenophon, and the classic Veins of the Earth system. I've been alternating between this and a stat-damage-mapped-segment thing with every campaign and I'm not happy with either of them, but this one is faster which makes it better.

When climbing/caving, roll 1d6 - looking for a 4-in-6 normally, or a 2-in-6 under poor conditions (evil overhang wall, evil your-head-is-touching-the-wall-and-ceiling-simultaneously tunnel). 

Add 1 to your chances if:

• you have an already-set rope line
• you have 15 or more STR (for climbing) or DEX (for caving)
• you have a theoretically relevant skill (if you literally have Climbing or Going Through Tunnels, add 2) 
• you've had at least ten minutes to study the route

and subtract one if:

• you have at least 5 filled inventory slots
• you have something in one of your hands
• you are in darkness
• the ascent is, in some way, out to get you (a general situational penalty for icy climbs, rubble-filled tunnels, or other such things)

If you pass, you're good! Probably. Reroll every 10 minutes or if your situation ever suddenly changes.

If you fail, roll 1d4 - this is how many quarters (25/50/75/99.9) of the obstacle you made it through before either falling on a climb, or becoming trapped in a tunnel. If you have and are using sufficient rope and pitons, you fall only 1 quarter and take that much fall damage before becoming caught. 

If you ever have to crawl vertically, do the math for your chances at both and then roll a single d6. Experience the wonders of falling 30 feet down a pipe and getting stuck still 80 feet up.

(this system removes the large tables of possible failures in Lowlife and Veins. Instead, I get to build on this basic system by keying climbs and tunnels - electrified walls, pipes flooding with boiling water, or places with added or changed failure penalties - "fall one segment before being caught in the moving gears", "fall, and also wake up the robots that live in the walls", etc) 

Considerata

Another city for deus ex parabola's superhero/cyberpunk GLOG.

Considerata is an unincorporated community, welded inescapably to Las Vegas, the real city worth mentioning. At night, it is empty - its population drained into Vegas for work. During the day, it sleeps, and suffers through the unending drought. 

Before it was a city, it was a testing range. In the northern half, closest to the Air Force base, people still live in 1950s facade-houses, meant to be torn down by atomic force.

Major Factions

Consolidated Guild of Actors, Stage Performers, and Magicians

A Martial-specced superhuman throws a knife over his head, and a second through the first, and on and on and on. Then he steps to the side, and down falls a statue of him, made of merged steel. It's a job, if you can't find anything better to do. 

Along with the rest of their work, the Guild picked up the contract for citywide defense in Vegas - and they abhor a scab. In Vegas, independent heroic-types are liable to get their house burned down in an hour or less; in Considerata, you're still under their jurisdiction, but further from their eyes. Keep your head down.

They hold on to some dozen low-level superheroes - primarily "perigons", Brawn/Durable/Martial splits with powers like "fights good" and "doesn't die when you shoot them, probably".

Kangaroo Rats

I Re takes half the water - Las Vegas takes the rest. Everyone else dies. Lake Mead is empty. The Colorado River has a cement bed and a reflective cover to minimize losses to the earth and the air. 

New branches sprout from the Colorado - some for collection, into dusty plastic buckets. Some for spite, draining into cracked ground. If we have to suffer, they can too.

Red Ring (Martial I, Weird - projects circular forcefields in front of his hands and whacks them around like a paddleball) is a known member (according to the FBI, who are insistent that this is a regimented group with "members" and "leadership") - in hiding somewhere after crashing stolen construction equipment through the Colorado's roof.

Hermes Trismegistus

1700 years old. Within his line of sight, he can turn any material into any other. Lead to gold, air to chlorine. He ruled Vegas, for a while - Magister Ludi, king of games. The last remnants of the Mob are still out for his head; they shoved him out of Vegas a decade ago, and now they wait for him to step out of his platinum-iridium palace, down in one of the old test site craters.

He'll rule again, come hell or high water.

[redacted]

SUVs with tinted windows and no license plates go down to the river in the dark, full of masked men and LED-studded equipment. 

Independent Freaks

The Vampire

Survivor of a plane crash in the Yukon. Lived for months on meltwater and force of will. Unusually fast (30 MPH, short sprints at 60) flight, though it requires her to take a particular rigid pose. Perfect control of body temperature - provides utility benefits (immunity to hypothermia, invisibility to thermal sensors), and both negative and positive peaks cause her to deal 1d6 damage on contact (via frostbite or burns, respectively). 

Spider Eater II

A superhero from the future, who came back to kill the past version of himself. He did, and, somehow, still exists. Flies, radiates cones of invisible grinding force that turn things to dust, has useless knowledge of the future corrupted by the death of Spider Eater I. Really wishes people would call him something else.

Dead Zone

10 foot radius of complete silence. Increased speed and agility. 12.7mm anti-materiel rifle.

Oasis-Cities of the Megastructure (Lanthanide Horizon)

You walk the path to Vyeku Proxy Tekha, member of the nomenklatura, the contending-class. You walk it first in trepidation, then in terror, then in resolve - your tin fingertip-covers click against the handle of your knife. He deserves it.

First, into the city, over the red-and-violet mosaic that marks its border (for the city has a border, and the men of the city say they need no wall to protect it), then into the favored-district, where the houses are tiled and plastered instead of painted metal, and the street glows with a calming light, then through Vyeku's gate, past the brass statues of his father, his grandmother, his brother (taken far too early), still clothed and fed as well as he.

When you see him - running a hand across the cheek of the statue of his wife - and he sees you, you feel that telltale click in your hindbrain and watch that telltale symbol (who could say what it means, except for the presence of your patron) flash before your eyes as your heart leaps with joy.

You pull out your knife - and then hand it to him by the hilt. You could never do anything else.

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At the peak, the hedrarchs, fountains of food and water, who take all goods into the bureaucracy of the palace economy to be distributed to those below. 

Below them, the nomenklatura, those who have passed their civil service examinations and become eligible for election to the hedrarchy. Subjects of the system of names - their ration set individually by the hedrarchs, to reward and punish. (Among the nomenklatura, the Proxies, legally identical to those they represent.)

At the base (apart from foreigners), the citizenry, who give fealty to their favored nomen in votes, in corvee labor, and in military service in exchange for patronage in goods - for the tribute to the citizen class is thin - and favors. (Among the citizens, the Sworn, prosthetic armigers given new limbs and strange weapons stolen from the machines of the world in exchange for lifelong service.)

These chains of patronage radiate downwards - hedrarchs summon individual supporters in the nomenklatura to rouse their subordinate nomen, and them to raise their citizen-levies. 

Source

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To foreigners, it is your modifications that make you recognizable. Augmentation - lacquered steel limbs and glittering golden eyes - is not ubiquitous, but is common enough to mark you. One alteration, however, is universal, or near enough - a click in the hindbrain. Complete conscious control of emotion.

Firstly, control of your own - it takes a second too long for your face to contort in rage as you seek the dial and tune it to what you desire.

Secondly, for the nomenklatura, control of your clients'. A scale to weigh their hearts.

Among the Navigators (who the northern Oases, like the vast city Lightning-in-Amber, see on their yearly pilgrimages, or when they come to collect their salt-and-electrical-component payment for mercenary service) this power is called "telepathy" - and their modernizing factions dream of it. 

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Sworn (generic): 5 HD, AC 18, 2 DR, two attacks with bare hands at +4 2d8 + superhuman combat maneuver. Their arms and legs are too long, cast in gold and aluminum, engraved and lacquered.

Sworn armor/prosthetic complexes are unique (coming with not only the generic statblock, but with heart-seeking javelins, irradiating curselights, and so forth), named, and inherited - their nerve hasps have felt the touch of innumerable forebears. Recovery of Sworn bodies is paramount, and often features as the inciting incident of their wars and war-stories.

Swarms of prosthetists surround them, pulling off limbs to tune and retune, replace motors, solder wires, apply unguents and oils. Without constant maintenance, nerves delaminate and contacts rot.

Best Case Scenario Mission - INTERSECT BINARY WAVES [O-E]

Player Intro

A dozen unstable psychics, recovered from the ruins of the Center for Coordination [see archival documents SECOND HAND CLOCK/PIKES GATHER SUNFLOWERS/SYNTHETIC TOMORROWS AWAIT] must be delivered, alive, to a holding/burial facility in Denver, Colorado, operating beneath HealthOne Mountain Ridge.

Two armored vans have been provided - van 1 holds 4 telekinetic, 2 intrusively-telepathic, and 2 energetic/pyrokinetic subjects. These eight are sedated - however, due to the increased metabolism of psychic subjects, they are expected to awaken immediately if sedative injection is interrupted. IV glucose has also been provided, to ensure none of them starve during delivery. Foil helmet-inserts have also been provided, to dampen telepathic interference.

Van 2 contains four biofeedback-specialized psychics. These subjects cannot be sedated due to their immunity to medicines and poisons, and are thus only physically restrained.

Your drive goes just fine, up until you notice the garbage truck flying down a side road at 60 miles an hour…

The Ambush

    Garbage truck “A” - stops side-on in the middle of Pearl St. in an attempt to block the frontmost of the agents’ vans. Assuming all goes well, 2 occupants (soft-armored and rifle-armed driver and front-seat passenger) throw smoke grenades over van 1, then approach while a pair of hard-armored LMG soldiers hop out the back and keep the vans under suppression. The riflemen then cut through the back door with torches and start pulling out psychics’ sedative IVs. Early warning or really sick driving may let van 1 avoid this trap - thus its superposition on the map.

    Garbage truck “B” - flies up the street at 60 and gladly impacts van 2, assuming the biofeedback-specialists will survive. Another team of 4, all soft-armored shotgunners, move to open it. 

Psychic Statistics

All are as average humans except otherwise stated. Psychic Potential rolls are on 1d6 - the result is both the [sum] of the psychic ability (as GLOG spells) and treated as an Attack against the psychic using it. Effects of wounds and death from these attacks occur after the psychic ability is resolved.

Telekinetics can make a Psychic Potential roll to throw [sum]*200 pounds of matter at 30 miles an hour. Assume agents weigh 200 pounds, and cars 3000. Telekinetics can cooperate to lift weights equal to the total of their rolls. Throwing an agent is an attack, as is throwing an agent-sized object at an agent. Dropping a car on someone kills them instantly.

Telepaths take over [sum] people for a [sum] minute duration. As long as they’re wearing helmets, pawns are only assaulted with whispers and shifting shadows in the corners of their eyes. Civilians have no such protections.

Pyrokinetics set [sum] people or objects On Fire. Agents who are On Fire are attacked every turn until they do something about it. When an agent dies of being on fire, if they had any grenades in their inventory they detonate from overheating.

Biofeedback turns psychic potential inside-out, into the body. For [sum/2] rounds their speed and jump distance is tripled, they can run on walls, and they can make two attacks a round (even unarmed, biofeedback specialists can attack without penalty). For this duration, the specialist is immune to injury and death - on a 6, their head may explode, but they won’t stop moving until time runs out. If you miss, it’s because they caught the bullet.