Rumors about Froghemoths

Just thought I'd come up with some ideas for everyone's favorite giant three-eyed alien monsters. Roll a dice or whatever to find out which ones are true.

1. Froghemoths are actually sapient on their native world, but the chemical composition of this world's atmosphere is a neurotoxin to them that gives adults brain damage and stunts the mental development of the young. No froghemoth on this world has ever died of old age, only the accumulated effects of these poisonous gases in their system, which build up over the years like heavy metal poisoning.
2. Froghemoths neither lay eggs nor birth live young but reproduce by budding a new froghemoth at the back of their throat, which they vomit forth when it is developed enough to survive. A gravid froghemoth cannot swallow, and the process takes the better part of three years, which is why they are so ravenous the rest of the time
3. Froghemoths are artificial life-forms, created to be piloted by gnome-sized mechanical creatures-- in essence, they are reverse mechas. Their strange and aggressive behavior is due to their AI going haywire if left on autopilot too long.
4. Froghemoth proteins have reverse chirality to the creatures of this world-- their flesh is indigestible and provides almost no nutritional value. Roast froghemoth tentacle is a popular solution for rich adventurers and nobles trying to lose weight. This also means they are dependent on food from their own world or magically-created food.
5. Some think that Froghemoths howl at the moon, but that's a misconception. They howl in despair and confusion at finding that this planet has three moons fewer than they expect to see in the sky.
6. Froghemoths are to Bullywugs what Father Dagon is to the Deep Scum.
7. Froghemoth eyes make excellent scrying devices, but all three must be used by identical triplets for them to be at their most effective.
8. Froghemoths are actually more closely related to our horses than to our frogs.
9. The moisture in a froghemoth's body is mostly oil rather than water-- anywhere you find one there are surely petroleum deposits nearby that it has been drinking from.
10. Froghemoths cannot digest brains, they store them in an internal pouch that eventually links each brain to their nervous system. While this does little for their intelligence (as the brains function too fundamentally differently), it does improve their reflexes and reaction times. Illithids sometimes tame froghemoths to use as shock cavalry as humans might tame elephants, and at the end of a long career, the froghemoth will be slaughtered and the aged brains feasted upon-- most illithids consider them an acquired taste and enjoying them to be a mark of fine breeding.
11. Froghemoths make for natural alchemical plants-- various bodily fluids, hormones, and secretions in their bodies can be distilled to form a wide variety of useful potions.
12. Froghemoths have no bones, they're supported by a system of muscular and cartilaginous rings like the squids in The Future Is Wild-- and in fact, their skin is as fragile as rice paper; their natural armor comes almost entirely from the toughness of these rings.

More on Completionism

(Whoa, two posts in one month, when was the last time I pulled that off?)

I don't expect this will be a very lengthy post, just an addendum to what I had to say in February about feeling the need to have everything I  want present and accounted for. Much as this previously led me to spend a great deal of time and stress attempting to get the exact system I wanted, it also tends to haunt my creative process when it comes to creating settings or planning out adventures or campaigns. A place for everything and everything in its place is a fine ethos when it comes to tidying up the house, but when it comes to worldbuilding it is somewhat trickier-- it's fine to utilize it, but sometimes that place has to be well off from the path the adventure is likely to follow.

Let us take the Eberron campaign setting as an example, mainly because it consigns some very popular elements off to certain corners of the world, well away from the continent where most of the "main" action takes place. As obvious as it might seem, an Eberron campaign will probably not involve a lot of giants and dragons, unless one goes out of one's way to allow for trips to Xen'Drik and Argonessen. Something focused on the internal politics of the five nations doesn't generally need them-- and that's perfectly alright, more than that, it's something that one needs to learn and internalize to DM Eberron well. This does not only apply to published settings, of course-- it's okay for things to be out there in your campaign world that the players may never see, may never even hear directly about.

I guess what I'm getting at is that an important skill in GMing, and one I struggle to master, is restraint in the name of focus. This is important in general, but especially so when one is building from the bottom upwards-- a barony or province in the Tiny Bickering Fiefdoms does not need to contain the whole of your Monster Manual, just enough variety to keep things interesting. This is something that to the mind that has already internalized it seems obvious, but something I think it benefits us all to hear now and again.

The Great Karameikos Campaign

Over at RPGnet, the inestimably clever Blacky the Blackball and NPCDave have been doing a retrospective of each Mystara/Known World setting product in turn. Reading it has helped me to gain a new appreciation for a setting I've traditionally been somewhat ambivalent about. Today Dave posted the writeup for the AD&D2e Karameikos: Kingdom of Adventure box set, largely focusing (logically, since obviously much of the rest of the information is similar) on the changes that did-- and occasionally inexplicably didn't-- happen during the 12 in-setting years that passed between Karameikos's previous iteration in the GAZ series. There's actually quite a bit, from Karameikos seceding from Thyatis to the disappearance of Alphatia. Either way, it was eventful enough, as were some of his remarks on the smaller details of the setting that seemingly stagnated during that time, that it got my mind moving a little.

One of the most beloved RPG supplements of all time is Pendragon's The Great Pendragon Campaign, a massive volume largely concerned with detailing the events of the 8 decades between Uther's rise to power and the end of Camelot. The sense of grand, sweeping, momentous history happening with the players right in the thick of events is a big reason why the Campaign is so beloved. Although not quite as grand, either in scope or in scale, as the entirety of the Matter of Britain, those dozen years offer no shortage of interesting times. Why, indeed, could one not create a similar detailed project about Karameikos, perhaps taking more or less inspiration from some of the BECMI modules set in the region?

I dunno, just something I've been thinking about the last few hours. Maybe it'll go somewhere. Maybe not. I should probably take this to the Piazza or Vaults of Pandius or something, surely it'll either fire the imaginations of the community or drag out the obsessive lore-experts to shout me down and point out exactly how and why it's utterly misbegotten.

Maybe the rivers of the Thunder Rift make more sense than I gave them credit for?

Over at the Piazza (and right here on this blog as well), some feedback on my rant about the fluvial system of everyone's favorite micro-setting reached me that I thought was particularly interesting. Maybe these things were more thought-out than I initially assumed they were, or maybe it's just a happy accident that they seem to hold up to surface analysis. Either way, it put me in a good mood. Here's the comment itself reposted for the convenience of those of you who don't follow links.

Possible ret-cons or reinterpretations:

• Change the flow of the southern rivers. They now empty into Lake Melinir. We can’t really tell the slope of that SE canyon/channel from eyeballing the map. 

• Where does Lake Melinir drain? It drains into a subterranean river system that leads into cavernous realm connected to the Rift. Thunder Rift’s Underark, if you will. 

• The Gloomfens, as you note, may be whacky due to magic origins. But why not Wizardspire, too? Does the stream in fact flow uphill in contravention of the laws of nature? That would be pretty trippy. These two sites, Gloomfens and Wizardspire, have linked histories, of course. The Wizard-Warrior feud, magical curses thrown down.

• Option two Wizardspire- Somebody left the tap water one when the assassins wiped out the magic-users. That’s not ONE stream flowing uphill and then down, but TWO streams flowing downhill from two windows/spouts/gutters on the hidden side of the spire. 

13 Monstrous rumors

Some ideas I had while paging through the 5e Monster Manual (which I'm quite impressed with, I may have to write a review later.)

• The basilisk is the female of the species. The cockatrice is male. To stumble upon them as they mate is not a pleasant experience.
• There once lived an albino red dragon whose favorite amusement was battling wizards who, believing him to be a white dragon, had filled their minds with fire spells.
• Erelhei-Cinlu and Menzoberranzan are the drow equivalent of the (ahem) Deep South. While dark elf society is decadent and duplicitous, other drow mock their excessive devotion to Lolth and cultural obsession with slavery.
• Dryads love to ride on the shoulders of treants. It makes them feel safe.
• Gargoyles only move when no one is watching... or so they believe; they are in fact rather poor judges of other creatures' visual acuity.
• All genies are able to grant wishes, but only nobles are authorized to do so.
• Ghouls and ghasts are actually a living race, not a type of undead, they merely recoil from holiness as if they were.
• Ice devils are not truly devils, but have lived in the nine hells so long as to work their way into the hierarchy anyhow.
• It is a mercy that the Invisible Stalker cannot be seen, and an even greater one that enchantments to see the invisible relay only a vague, formless outline. Those under the effects of truesight who have seen an Invisible Stalker uncloaked invariably retreat beyond the farthest shores of madness.
• "Blibdoolpoolp" is just an approximation of the name of the Kuo-Toa's lobster-headed goddess. Her real name is pronounced identically to the last three bubbles of air that leave a drowning man's lungs.
• In the far north, the deathless creature we call a mummy is known as a draugr.
• A shadow that impresses Orcus may become a shadow demon.
• All wraiths are bound to a magical item they coveted in life, all wights are bound to the tomb in which they were buried, and all spectres to a particular bloodline they wish to exterminate.

The rivers of the Thunder Rift make zero sense

I like Thunder Rift, it's a solid little setting. But seriously, did everyone at TSR flunk Earth Science when they were in school or something? There are all kinds of rivers intersecting at extremely unlikely angles, flowing uphill, and branching off miles from any delta.

I'm not claiming I'm the world's foremost physical geography expert, but I at least know what gravity is-- screw a wizard did it, rivers flow downhill.

Oddly, if you scoop most of the rivers out it actually starts to work pretty quickly. Are the dynamics on this perfect, hell no, but they at least stand up to a quick skimming over (I could probably get rid of the southern swamp near the Black Knight's Keep-- I'm willing to at least entertain the notion that the Gloomfens are magically created). Credit goes to Havard, whose map I used as a quick'n'dirty template in hexographer when I made this and which you can still see a little of if you look closely.

EDIT:

In the interests of clarity, here's the original drawn map (with, for some reason, the towns removed but a hex overlay added), both so you can see the rivers I removed and in the interests of demonstrating that it seems to me that the general slope of the valley is north to south-- the narrow canyons in the southern mountains are a little weird still, but that seems the implication to me.

Discovering the Thunder Rift

So I read Thunder Rift for the first time tonight. On the whole I was pretty impressed. This is what, growing up, I always thought D&D settings would be mostly like, but they mostly weren't. Classic, compact, rife with hooks.

But I'm not without complaint-- it seems almost too tiny. I can't imagine based on the data given that there are more than a thousand humans or so in the entire region, which (if I estimated right) could be crossed in a matter of three or four days from north to south. I think if I was running it I'd multiply the size and the population significantly (with a few small villages scattered about accordingly). As it stands it feels at once too dense with monsters, and too small to explore. But that's a pretty easy fix. If I were running it, I'd also probably make it slightly easier to travel beyond the canyon (with at least a bare-bones outline of the surrounding territory). I have thoughts in place already... maybe the makings of a series of future posts?