Campaign Starter: Tales From The Bonecart

Campaign Starter: Tales from the Bonecart

Whether it's due to superstition or a distaste for a toilsome and muddy trade, folk tend to pay little attention to gravediggers. This makes for an awfully convenient cover for your travelling troupe of tombrobbers as they tour around the realm's backroads filling their pockets with mementos purloined from the dead.

Planning adventures for "evil" campaigns can be tough, but sometimes you and your players just want an excuse to get your hands dirty. What better opportunity to get DEEP down in the dirt than to hand out shovels and have them start out as a group of travelling undertakers/thieves?

Setup: A handful of crews have run the bonecart scam over the past several generations, tempering their skullduggerous actions with a bit of honest gravemaking. This dichotomy is no better represented in the current heads of the operation: Dour and hardworking Heliana, who minds the cart's reigns and keeps the crew on track, and the knavish academic Benjamin Eelpot who loves delving into things that should best stay buried. These two have taken the party on for a series of jobs that will likely require a cold heart and a strong stomach, stealing from both the living and the dead and hoping not to get caught in the meantime.

Adventure Hooks:

The party's first outing on the bonecart should be a meat-and-potatoes sort of job, used to set the tone of the campaign, which happens to sound like "Someone old and rich and lonely has died, leaving their house haunted and their valuables unguarded".

While being stewards of the dead is a great cover, it sometimes attracts the wrong sort of attention, such as when a nobleman offers the party a great reward to investigate an abandoned necropolis and the source of the terrifying dreams that haunt him. Gold is gold though, and surely this couldn't have too many long reaching complications for them.

Irony of ironies, Shortly after one of their scores the party is setupon by a group of bandits disguised as dead men, who manage to make off with a good portion of their illgotten gain. There's no way to recover their goods through official channels, so they'll have to do it themselves.

Throughout their early adventures the party will need to avoid the attention of the heavy handed sheriff hired by the local nobility to quietly and brutally dispose of criminals like themselves.

You get a lot of weird jobs being a gravedigger, but "limo service" is not usually one of them. Still, money is money, and when a bloodsoaked countess offers to pay the bonecart well to defend and transport her coffin across the lands so she can attend a gathering of the great and the ghoulish who are they to say no?

Heliana will eventually approach the party once they've gotten enough shared time , experience, and nightmarish close calls under their belts. She's got some personal matters to attend to, which involve a list of names belonging to an old secret society and a series of graves across the countryside that may contain clues to the locations of some great treasure. Its a bolder job then the crew usually pulls, and will draw unwanted attention, but they can rely on eachother to pull through, right?

Art 1 Art 2 Art 3

We created and released the Aboleth Hood a few months back, but one of our viewers on Twitch (go follow!) wanted a sentient version that still had the Aboleth in it. Please put this in your campaign and let us know how it goes. :) Who has a character who would wear this?

Awakened Aboleth Hood

Wondrous item, artifact (requires attunement)

“This hood was made from the hide of an ancient Aboleth. Rows of razor sharp teeth line the hood and the three eyes on top still occasionally blink. The skin of the Aboleth sometimes sweats and twitches. The hood has a long tail that reaches down to the back and will erratically sway from side to side.”

While wearing this magic item you can speak telepathically to any creature you can see. If a creature communicates with you telepathically you learn its greatest desire.

While wearing this magic item you can breathe underwater.

Beguiling Presence. You have advantage on Charisma skill checks and creatures who make saving throws to resist being charmed by you do so at disadvantage. The mind of the Aboleth also has sway over the minds of creatures charmed by you.

Precision. Before you make an attack against a creature you can choose to add +10 to the attack and damage roll. The damage of this attack becomes psychic damage. You can do this a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus and regain expended uses after a long rest.

Psychic Lash. When you score a critical hit and deal psychic damage you can manifest a psychic tendril and make a follow-up melee weapon attack. This attack has a reach of 10 feet and uses your weapon attack modifier and bonuses. It deals 3d6+10 psychic damage. Once you have used this feature you cannot use it again until you finish a short rest.

Sentience. The Awakened Aboleth Hood is a sentient lawful evil magic item with an Intelligence of 18, a Wisdom of 15, and a Charisma of 18. It has hearing and darkvision out to a range of 120 feet.

Personality. The Aboleth inside the hood has a flawless memory and has been around since before the gods molded the world as it is known today. It promises to share its ageless wisdom and dark secrets with the wearer if they help it exact revenge on whoever defeated it and fashioned it into a magic hood. The Aboleth despises the Divine and all who would worship them and stand for them.

Destroying the Aboleth. The mind of the Aboleth can be removed from the hood, but doing so will also remove some of its power. In order to expel the mind of the Aboleth it must be taken to the primordial pool in which it was spawned. If the pool is mixed with holy water and lit aflame by a spell of 6th-Level or higher that deals radiant damage, the hood can be dipped in the pool and cleansed of the Aboleth’s presence. With the mind of the Aboleth gone, this magic item loses its Sentience and Beguiling Presence properties, as well as its ability to learn the greatest desires of creatures and no longer requires attunement.

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15 Things To See In The Astral Plane

Several dwarf stars are dotted around you, shining with spectral light.

You gently drift towards a dense orange nebula cloud, surrounded by intense magnetic fields that spark lighting across the sky.

You spot a young star incubating in a molecular cloud.

A comet with a tail of ionized gas whizzes past the outer edges of your vision.

Two stars in close orbit, connected by fiery tendrils of energy, light a path ahead of you.

A hypergiant star generates a turbulent solar wind that threatens to blow you away!

A shower of metallic and crystalline asteroids pelts your Party!

A turbulent gravitational wave that rips spacetime apart causes you and your allies to experience some strange warping sights.

A distant star emitting waves of plasma causes you and your allies to begin to feel lightheaded.

A swirling storm of ionized gas, thousands of times more massive than the sun, is on course to collide with your and your allies!

A star that flickers with bursts of intense plasma, creating a brilliant, rapidly moving point of light in a dark night sky.

A giant molecular cloud that burns hot and bright, sending out strange waves of sound and light.

An asteroid that glows with white hot molten metals leaves trails of burning lava in it’s wake.

Chunks of metallic silver wreckage, along with torn off pieces of a blackened purplish rubber-like substance, float past the Party at a speed just slow enough to catch.

A battle scene of years past has left several dead floating, perfectly preserved, along the banks of a dense fog cloud.

💎 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗺! Stardust Hat
Wondrous item, uncommon (requires attunement by a druid, warlock, or wizard) ___

This wizard’s hat is split into a starburst pattern along the bottom. Small star pendants hang from each of its points. While wearing this hat, you always know which direction is north. At night, you can’t become lost by nonmagical means, provided you can see the sky.

In addition, while wearing the hat, you can use an action to cast the “moonbeam” spell from the hat, using your spell save DC. Between dusk and dawn, this version of the spell creates a wave of radiant energy when the moonlit beam crashes onto the ground; until the start of your next turn, the cylinder has a radius of 10 feet, instead of 5 feet. Once this property of the hat has been used, it can’t be used again until the next dawn or dusk. ___

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Places you should add to your little town/city in your fantasy world!!

Post offices. Wild, I know. But give me the unhinged kind. Pingeons and little postal dragons all over the place. You enter. The most disgusting smell fucking assaults your nostrils. You know what it is. Letter in hand, you go up to the counter. The postal worker is just a slightly bigger pigeon. You shed a tear.

PLAYGROUNDS!! Create the most dangerous kinds of playgrounds, the ones suburban moms would TRIP if they ever saw one. Monkey bars that are way too tall, swings that go full circle... The metal slide stays the same, it's already painful enough.

PARKS!! MAKE IT ALIVE!! Show people going on walks, reading beneath trees. C'mon most of them are already hundred years old (And are going to die after that CR 15 creature wrecks the town) anyways!! Show couples and picnics, show a family enjoying the sunday, give me someone picking flowers for their loved ones.

A bakery! Do you know how much these places are underrated? And do you know how much plot potential they have? Every good story starts with food poisoning or granny's recipe! Give me a place your players/readers are going to treat like home and, for once, it's not a tavern or a guild.

Government buildings! Give me a town hall that has a kilometric line in front of it. Give me a registry that is as old as this town. Give me police stations! Give me courtrooms! Make one of your players get arrested and now all of the party has to go through burocracy like a bunch of normal people!

(Who am I kidding? You don't need to make them get arrested. They are going to do that for you.)

Touristic attractions! Give me a full-on statue of the country's leader! Give me museums! Give me streets, ruins and whatnot that attract thousands of tourists everyday! Give me an annoying city guide that tries to get the party's attention everytime!

Magazine stands! Magazines don't exist? Newspaper stands! From the Queen's Journal to the most questionable new piece of Fox's Tailtracker, you have it all! Make your players doubt what's actually happening, sprinkle a little fake news... Or is it fake at all?

...Toy stores. OK HEAR ME OUT. Make magic toys; miniature skyships that actually fly, metal toy dragons that expel fire, little wands that make little light spells, wooden creatures that can move and make noises... Make children happy! And your players too because they will waste their money on these stuff.

Instrument store!! Make your bards happy with special instruments or just weird ones! Give me a battle in one of those that is just filled with funny noises and the worst battle soundtrack ever!!

Not exactly a place but... Cleaning carts!!! Show me people cleaning the streets, picking up the trash, cutting trees!! Make the town look clean!! Give me an old man that is really proud of his work!!!

(or ways to make your players feel even worse when the villain destroys the town later on :) )

Numenera Oddities

So. Numenera does the thing I love from D&D 5e, and that is trinket tables. Or, in this case, oddity tables.

Oddities are ancient salvaged techno-magical items that aren’t necessarily directly useful, like the more powerful one-shot cyphers or reusable artefacts, but are more there for the flavour of the world. Characters often start with them, GM assigned, and I assume you can find more of them out and about. And … I do love them. These are from the Oddity Table on pgs 305-307 of the Discovery corebook, and they’re just … so illustrative of this future fantasy, scavenger world, 'remants of past civilisations' setting.

I think one of the things that I most love is that, from the characters’ POV, in their medieval fantasy setting, these are inscrutable artefacts of a bygone civilisation, but from our POV, with our technology, you can so clearly see what some of them are intended to be:

26 – Series of thin plastic cards that show all kinds of unknown creatures. (Somebody had trading cards or card games during the past billion years)

20 – Plastic bottle that contains a spray that cleans any stain and never runs out. (Somebody finally invented a universal household cleaner, an infinite universal household cleaner, I bet they made an absolute mint)

30 – Metallic jar that maintains the temperature of liquid inside indefinitely. (Somebody made an improved thermos)

60 – Cup that instantly boils any liquid poured into it. (As well as an instant tea/instant pot noodle/instead meal cup)

33 – Small wand-like device that keeps away normal insects in a 5ft radius. (As well as mobile personalised insect zappers)

55 – Shirt that displays your muscles, bones and internal organs when you wear it. (And, for whatever reason, a portable x-ray shirt? Was this a practical invention first, for field x-rays, or was it for funsies, or both?)

58 – Bracelet with a tiny bell charm that rings like a massive bell when intentionally rung. (Personal protective device?)

80 – A bracelet that rends you unable to reproduce while worn. (An easy, non-invasive contraceptive device, interesting)

76 – Ceramic ring that makes you feel as though gentle hands are caressing your body. (As well as a possible sex toy? Or aide for touch-hunger? Not going to lie, if I touched this with no context and no idea what it was going to be, I’d freak the hell out)

79 – A pair of small, floating cubes that keep a small, enclosed room at the temperature at which water freezes. (Portable refrigeration)

Like, a lot of these are clearly futuristic novelty items or household appliances, as well as some more in-depth and casual medical technology. And I love that? I love that. You’re in a medieval fantasy scavenger world where the detritus of past super-futuristic civilisations litter your world, and you’re there picking up random bits of ancestor junk and trying from your own frame of reference to figure out what the fuck they had going on.

Some of the oddities are a bit more inscrutable even from our POV.

7 – Box with a tiny group of musicians in it who play when it is opened and look horrified when it is closed. (Now, this could be a novelty item again, but this is also a setting where ancient crystal obelisks eat people and trans-dimensional portals and pocket dimensions are also a thing, so … not beyond the bounds of possibility that those are live and enslaved musicians getting shunted into a pocket stasis dimension every time you close the lid)

And some have a language barrier in effect:

16 – Small rod that emits a voice saying the same thing in an unknown language every time a button is pushed. (Could be anything from a personal memo to an ancient distress call)

47 – Five metallic plates that orbit around your head and display ever-changing, unknown symbols. (I fucking love this one, if I was a scholar in this world I would dedicate my life to figuring out this language from the presumption that those symbols are some form of reading from me and if I can just figure out what they’re reading from what symbols show when, maybe I can Rosetta stone this language out? I mean, that’s a lot of assumptions, but you’d have to at least try, right?)

There’s also a series of oddities that are clearly communication/monitoring devices:

17 – Glass plate that shows what seems to be a live image of the moon, but from a closer vantage.

43 – Glass cube that shows what seems to be a live aerial view of an unknown, ruined city.

89 – Plate of glass that, when you view the night sky through it, reveals ten times as many stars.

And we, the players, know that the setting does have ancient satellites still in orbit around the planet, full of nanomachines and other ancestors-know-what. So these are clearly receivers for satellite feeds, or possibly in the last case a light-pollution filter. Though I’d be interested to know if that last one is a live image, or if it’s an image of the stars of this world several million years ago.

And then, in the midst of all that, there are several oddities that are clearly just art, or novelties, or just for fun:

57 – Amulet that, when worn, projects holographic images of fish swimming around you.

Is this a nightlight? A holographic art piece? A fun fashion accessory? I don’t know, but I desperately want one, and no matter how useless it is, I would not sacrifice this one oddity for any number of more useful cyphers or artefacts. It’s pretty, and I love it.

I love the design philosophy of these, the illustration of the world and its history that they provide. And, I mean, some of them, like D&D trinkets, can also function as plot hooks. Where is that unknown city on the live feed? Are those musicians real people trapped in a horrifying pocket dimension? Could you Rosetta-stone one of the ancient languages from that metallic plate device, and if you could, what other, potentially more powerful secrets would it unlock?

They’re just … I love trinkets. I love environmental worldbuilding, I love archaeology, I love the illustration of setting inherent in physical objects. These are fantastic.  

Trinket tables are the best. Honestly, if you are designing a game, do put in a class of objects that don’t exist for any mechanical, game purpose, but are just there to show your world. To show the ethos of your world via the tiny details and physical objects that populate it.

Also, this game appears to be, to a large extent, ‘fantastic archaeology: the setting’, and I’m here for it. Absolutely!