Where’s the dwarven beef?

Review Originally Published October 9th, 2001

Azadmere is a HârnWorld supplement, containing four Encyclopedia Hârnica articles: Azadmere (10 pages), Khuzdul (4 pages), Habe (6 pages), and Zerhun (10 pages). It also includes full-page Player Maps (black and white, unlabelled) and Common Maps (full-color, labelled) for Azadmere (the kingdom), Habe, Zerhun, and Azadmere (the town).

AZADMERE

The titular subject of the supplement, the article on Azadmere devotes one page to discussing the history, government, economics, and religion of the Kingdom of Azadmere. In short: Azadmere is ancient, predating human civilization on Hârn by several millennia. When the first humans (the Jarin) reached Hârn, a symbiotic relationship grew up between the two cultures – with the dwarves increasingly focusing on their mining and craft, while the humans farmed the surrounding land for food. Eventually some human families were adopted into the dwarven clan structure. This caused some problems, however, because the original city of Azadmere was forbidden to humans. To solve this, the Outer City was constructed outside of the mountain (while the original city, within the mountain, became known as the Inner City).

Following this extremely brief summary (figure it out – if less than a page is spent in the book itself on this material, there can’t be that much information left out of my summary of the summary) we are given a full page map of the Outer City. The next two pages give a key for every single building in the outer city (naturally, almost all of these descriptions are extremely brief).

From there we get an even briefer look at the Inner City: Four pages of maps reveal the three primary levels of the Inner City (in relation to the Outer City and with detailed maps of Levels 1 and 2). The description of these maps is summarily squeezed into a single page, leaving room for a one page chart showing the clans of Azadmere and their primary assets.

And that’s it.

All right, I’ll be totally up front with you: My primary reason for buying the book was for the dwarven city. I’ve got a major dwarven city adventure looming on the horizon in my campaign, and so I went looking for extant dwarven city resources to draw upon.

But I’ve got to believe that I would be underwhelmed by this even if it hadn’t been my primary interest in the book.

I mean, the maps are fantastic. No doubt about it. Not only are they gorgeous in the execution, the Outer and Inner Cities are just plain well-designed from the look of it: They make sense, as so many fantasy cities do not.

But I have to admit that I want more description: I want to know what these rooms on the map look like. I want to know more about the people who live here. I want to know more about the politics. I want to know—

You know what? I just want to know more, period. And it’s not that “wow, you’ve told me so much and I’m still hungry for more” feeling (which is a great feeling) – it’s that “uh, did you forget to print something?” feeling (which is a bad feeling).

KHUZDUL

The four page Khuzdul article which follows the Azadmere article didn’t do much to alleviate my trepidations. Again, we are given the lightest coverage seemingly possible for dwarven history, culture, religion, and economics (and at least some of this is repeated from the Azadmere article).

To put this in perspective: The article on the Khuzdul in the Harndex (one of the books which comes as part of the second edition of HârnWorld) is nearly a page long. I would guess that the amount of information has only been expanded by approximately a factor of 5. Maybe.

Actually, the Khuzdul article as it stands in this book would make more sense as the Harndex entry. Or, at best, the outline for a Khuzdul supplement.

HABE & ZERHUN

The last two articles in the book are slightly better. Zerhun, in particular, seems to give a fairly complete picture of its subject matter (a dwarven fort guarding the southern reaches of the kingdom). But this actually serves as a major tip-off to the larger problems this supplement faces: If you need 10 pages to adequately describe a fort and the small town which supports it, what on earth makes you believe that 10 pages will be adequate to describe an entire dwarven city (which is 30 times larger in population alone)?

Habe is a small town, the oldest Jarin settlement in Azadmere. This article is still a little lighter than it probably should be, but doesn’t fare too badly. The maps of the keep in Habe, in particular, are a valuable resource. The maps of the Inn, in my opinion, less so.

CONCLUSION

The problem Azadmere has as a supplement can be summed up simply:

Where’s the dwarven beef?

If this book did nothing except describe the dwarven city of Azadmere, it could most likely do justice to its subject of choice. Similarly, if this book did nothing except describe dwarven culture and history, it could almost certainly do justice to its subject of choice.

Instead, Azadmere chooses to spread its focus too wide – and ends up failing to do justice to any of the material it chooses to present.

What’s in the book is of high quality. But the book remains deeply flawed because of what isn’t to be found here.

I, for one, am disappointed.

Style: 3
Substance: 3

Author: N.R. Crossby, Tom Dalgliesh, and Edwin King
Publisher: Columbia Games, Inc.
Line: Hârn
Price: $15.98
ISBN: 0-920711-09-X
Product Code: 5004
Pages: 40

Does, “Where’s the beef?” still have any cultural cachet?

I was, in fact, hunting for a great dwarven city supplement that I could plug into my ongoing D&D 3rd Edition campaign. Azadmere was not, as I recall, my only disappointment. (I believe there was also a Moria supplement I sampled and rejected, among others.) If I could go back in time and offer a guiding light to my younger self, I’d point him in the direction of DL4: Dragons of Desolation by Tracy Hickman and Michael Dobson, which includes an incredible set of dwarven city geomorphs.

Looking back, I’m realizing that my younger self had, in fact, read that module, but only in a used copy of the DLC1 reprint collection which, vitally, was missing all the geomorphs.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

What appears, at first, to be a copy of the Book of Athor is nothing of the sort: The pages inside are covered with scrawled diagrams and heretical desecrations of the Nine Gods.

A closer reading reveals this to be a cult manual for the “Brotherhood of the Blooded Knife”. The cult venerates chaos in all its forms, focusing their blasphemous rituals around the practice of human sacrifice. These sacrifices are given to a Galchutt named Abhoth, who they venerate as the “Source of All Filth” and the “Lord of the Zaug”.

Disturbingly, much of the book is given over to material designed to mock the holy rituals of the Church. It appears that the cult establishes itself secretly in society by posing as other religious orders. Actual followers of the deity may choose to join them, usually to their dismay – either they come to join the cult itself or they die beneath the cult’s “blooded knife”.

In other cases, a few cultists will infiltrate another religion and use force, blackmail, magic, or simple persuasion to sway its members into secretly worshipping chaos. This process can take years, but eventually the cult eats the other religion from the inside out, consuming it until the temple is entirely a front for the altars of the Brotherhood hidden in their subterranean complexes.

The last few pages of the book appear to be a prophetic rambling of sorts, beginning with the words: “In the days before the Night of Dissolution shall come, our pretenses shall drop like rotted flies. In those days the Church shall be broken, and we shall call our true god by an open name.”

The remainder of this section is a description of the faux religious practices for a fanciful “Rat God”, with the apparent intention being that a church could be openly established for this “god”. Eventually, the prophecies, say even this “last pretense” will be abolished and “Abhoth shall be worshipped by all who are not blooded by the knife”.

DESIGN NOTES

This book is designed to reveal that the Temple of the Rat God (Ptolus, p. 363) is the front for a chaos cult. If you can drop some benign references to the Temple of the Rat God into your campaign before the PCs’ find this book, you can get an, “Oh no! They’re already here!” reaction as they finish reading the lorebook. Drop the references into the campaign after they’ve read the lorebook and you’ll instead get a, “Wait a minute! I know that name!”

Back to Chaos Lorebooks

Venom does not merely destroy. To the flesh it may bring mortality, but it serves a higher purpose. It transforms. It translates. To endure venom’s bite is to find strength. This is how we will bring strength to the world; by being the venom which will test its worth.

This small, gray-covered volume is a paean to all manners of vile activities – drug abuse, sexual perversions, acts of cruelty and violence – treated with the reverence of holy ritual.

In totality, the book appears to be a cult manual for the “Brotherhood of Venom”. They worship chaos, speaking of the “slow swarm of the Elder Brood” – by which they appear to mean the slow, methodical, and (above all) secret sowing of chaos and dissolution. They perceive ordered society as a curse and seek to undermine it through a slow and steady erosion of disintegration.

Entire passages are given over to describing the basic dynamics of power and how to subvert them – serving as a generic manual on how to infiltrate the highest levels of a society through its most important individuals.

The cult prefers the clandestine. They are patient and careful, never wanting the authorities or other potential opponents to know they exist.

A name is scrawled on the inside back cover:

BROTHERHOOD OF PTOLUS

DESIGN NOTES

The Brotherhood of Venom appear in “Temple of Deep Chaos,” one of the adventures from The Night of Dissolution.

Back to Chaos Lorebooks

Kandahar asks:

Can you run hexcrawls in a very small location? For example, I have a a single valley I want my players to explore. I made a map in Worldographer, but I used 2-mile hexes. I don’t think it’s reasonable to impose very slow travel. Even if this is densely populated, is there any way I can run this properly?

The Alexandrian hexcrawl uses a player-unknown 12-mile hexes because I’ve found huge advantages to using this as a default structure. But there are lots of reasons for why you might want to make different choices. For example, in my remix of Desccent Into Avernus, I used a 60-mile hex for the Avernian hexcrawl, partly because I wanted vast, empty spaces and partly because the PCs are expected to be using fast-moving war machines.

So you can absolutely use a hexcrawl for a smaller location. But there will be specific challenges you’ll want to think about.

First, as you note, travel speed will not constrain the PCs’ exploration range to a reasonable number of hexes. Therefore, you need some other constraint. This might be:

• geographic – e.g., mountain ranges restrict and slow down movement
• magical – e.g., this all takes place inside a tiny pocket dimension; there’s a magical dome over the valley; the PCs are trapped in the valley by a magical curse and cannot leave
• non-diegetic – e.g., “This campaign is about the Valley of the Moon, so we don’t leave the Valley of the Moon.”

Second, hex visibility. I use 12-mile hexes because it lets me plausibly only think about the hex the PCs are currently in and specific, highly visible-from-a-distance landmarks. When you’re using smaller 2-mile hexes, spot distances suddenly start creating problems.

One problem is needing to communicate lots of different terrain types to the players: A human should know not only their hex, but all the hexes around them, too. And they’ll probably have at least a general idea of the terrain two hexes away, too! Even a little bit of elevation could easily let them see three hexes away. Pick any hex on the map above and think about how you could describe all of that in a rolling, detailed, meaningful fashion as the PCs move across the valley.

To help counteract this, you may want to use player-known hexes. This will have the advantage of creating a clear communication channel for the terrain. (The disadvantage is that it becomes much more difficult to handle getting lost and, aesthetically, I’ve found this significantly reduces immersion.)

The other problem, though, is juggling keyed locations: If the PCs can see seven hexes, it’s not just about communicating terrain. You’re also juggling seven different hex keys to know what you need to describe to them. That’s a lot of page-flipping to load that information and a lot of mental juggling to keep it all straight. Then they’ll immediately move to another hex and you’ll need to pull 3+ more hexes all at once to describe what they see.

You can counteract this a bit by labeling visible locations directly on the GM’s hex map. You might even want to prep a one-page cheat sheet with 1-2 sentence descriptions of each visible location. That way you can identify what to describe directly from the map and use the cheat sheet to describe it without needing to flip through all the detailed hex descriptions. (This is, of course, extra prep, but trust me, you’ll want it. Even with larger 12-mile hexes, I’ll still do this prep for any locations large enough to be visible from distant hexes.)

Your third challenge is that the combination of all these factors means that wilderness exploration will likely not be a significant part of the campaign: The PCs are going to rapidly move through the entire area and know where everything is.

On the one hand, you can lean into this with not only player-known hexes, but also by just giving them the entire terrain map at the beginning of the campaign. (You’ll often discover this also makes sense diegetically, since the relatively smaller scope of the make makes it harder to believe that, for example, the local villagers don’t know that there’s a forest 10 miles to the east.)

This, of course, calls into question why you’re using a hexcrawl structure in the first place. (There are better, cleaner structures for having lots of targeted movement.) To counteract this, I recommend keying lots of hidden locations – sites where the PCs will need to go to a specific hex and deliberately explore it in order to find out what’s hiding there. (Although they’d still have a chance of stumbling across it randomly while simply moving through the hex.)

And by lots, I mean lots and lots and lots. My gut says you probably want a majority of the hexes in a smaller hexcrawl like this to be hidden.

MECHANICAL TWEAKS

At this point, of course, we’ve moved away from the core gameplay loop of the Alexandrian hexcrawl: Players are now largely looking at a known hex map and pointing at a specific hex they want to go to and explore so that they can fill in its secrets on their map. To make this a smoother experience, you’re going to want to throw out some other stuff and redesign it.

For example, I would throw out D&D’s traditional movement system and recalculate movement rate as a per-way or per-day hex budget. The exact budget, of course, would depend on the hex scale you’re using, but you likely want a base rate of 1 movement point = 1 hex. Then rate terrain types by the number of movement points required to move into them. (You will not be able to make these values match by-the-book movement rates. I would suggest getting your base movement rate “close enough” and then creating a tier of 2-point terrain and a tier of 3-point terrain.)

You may also want to jettison navigation checks entirely. Or, alternatively, simplify these mechanics so that getting lost just means getting turned around inside your current hex (e.g., pay the movement cost of the hex, but don’t actually move out). The thing to think about, as you’re fine-tuning this for your needs, is what makes Being Lost an interesting experience. (With the player-unknown 12-mile hexes of the Alexandrian hexcrawl, players are making and/or navigating with their own map and if they become disoriented those activities become challenging in their own right and can also lead the players to make unexpected discoveries. This tends not to happen with player-known hexes, where it’s almost always obvious when they’ve gone astray.)

You may, of course, discover other pain points once you start actually running your modified hexcrawl. That’s to be expected! But with a little forethought, hopefully you won’t have to do much more than tweak things in response to your playtesting to have a great campaign!

Go to Ask the Alexandrian #1

As part of my In the Shadow of the Spire campaign, I’ve developed a number of chaos lorebooks, some of which have featured in various Ptolus Remixes and others have appeared in the In the Shadow of the Spire campaign journal. They’re based around a network of chaos cults — an extensive node-based campaign campaign which incorporated adventures from Monte Cook’s Night of Dissolution along with almost two dozen original scenarios. These lorebooks delve deep into:

• chaos cults
• chaositech
• the demon court
• servitors of the Galchutt
• the elder brood
• the cults’ plans for the Night of Dissolution

The time has come to present the full collection, so that they can be used in your own campaigns and/or used as examples of how you can create your own lorebooks. I’m presenting them here exactly as they were written for my personal Ptolus campaign. This is important because I placed the city of Ptolus into my own campaign world and adapted its mythology. Notably, the Galchutt of Ptolus were integrated into the wider mythos of my Demon Court. If you use these chaos lorebooks in a standard Ptolus campaign, then you will find these lorebooks filled with many strange and apocryphal references… but perhaps that’s appropriate for chaos gods.

DISTRIBUTING CHAOS LOREBOOKS

For a detailed description of how and why I create lorebook handouts, check out Using Lorebooks. Lorebooks are one of my “secret weapons” as a GM, and I use them pretty extensively in my games.  They can be prep intensive — although the technique is designed to minimize that as much as possible — but have a huge payoff at the table. As a result, in most of my games they tend to be relatively rare drops

But not always. In my Eternal Lies Remix I designed three huge lorebook dumps, each presented as a list of titles that the players could read by investing significant in-game time. This evoked the experience of actually researching in a library, with the players exploring the lorebooks via topic and cross-reference based on the needs of their current investigation. For the chaos lorebooks, on the other hand, I decided to scatter them throughout the chaos cults so that the players could discover them slowly over time, piecing together their understanding of the cults and the dark gods they worshiped.

The nice thing about lorebooks like this is that multiple copies exist: If the PCs miss the book in one location, they can still find a different copy in another location. Following something akin to the Three Clue Rule, therefore, I created a spreadsheet with a list of chaos lorebooks cross-referenced to the various scenarios I had planned for this section of the campaign. Then I simply charted where each lorebook could be found. My design philosophy here was:

• The chaos lorebooks should be spread around, without any scenario (except the big finale) including more than four or five at most.
• No two locations should have an identical set of lorebooks. This meant that, while the PCs would almost certainly find duplicate lorebooks over time, in any given scenario they were likely to find new lorebooks they hadn’t encountered yet (no matter what path they charted through the node-linked cults).

The Book of Faceless Hate serves as a kind of introductory text, although it’s not strictly necessary for it to be the first to fall in to the PCs’ hands. The other thing they received in the introductory cult scenario was the Cult Diagram, as seen above: Sketched as a mural on the wall, this diagram showed the icons of various cults while, importantly, not giving their names. This diagram served as a kind of checklist, cross-referenced to holy symbols and lorebooks as the PCs work to identify and locate each of the cults.

The original Night of Dissolution adventure included The Book of Faceless Hater, but presented it as a far more encyclopedic resource — a one-stop shop of all chaos cult lore. Because I had expanded the scope of the chaos cults — from four adventures to a couple dozen — I wanted to pace these revelations instead of presenting them as a single exposition dump: What were the chaos cults really doing? How many cults were working together? What was the true nature and secret history of the “gods” they worshiped?

I’ve organized the various chaos lorebooks into four categories:

• Chaos Cults, which describe various chaos cults (including some cults who were not actually part of the campaign; creating both the sense of a wider world and a sense of doubt about the exact scope of the cults’ activities in Ptolus).
• The Demon Court, detailing the various chaos gods.
• Servitors of the Demon Court, powerful servitors of the Demon Court.
• Book of the Elder Brood, describing the lesser demonic servants of the Demon Cult. Many become tools of the cults

I expanded the ranks of all these — cults, gods, servitors, and brood — so if you’re familiar with Ptolus, don’t be surprised to see a few unfamiliar names below.

CHAOS CULTS

The Book of Faceless Hate
Book of Venom’s Truth
Truth of the Hidden God
The Masks of Death
Touch of the Ebon Hand
Eschatonic Visions (Tolling Bell)
Whispers of the Beast
Song of Chaos
Words of the Plague
The Scarlet Oath
The Worm of the Void
Oath of the Divided Eye

THE DEMON COURT

Lore of the Demon Court
The Source of All Filth (Abhoth)
Eye of Legion (Bhor Kei)
Mouth of the Void (Dhar Rhyth)
The Shapeless Codex (Jubilex)
The Writhing Obelisk (Kihomenethoth)
The Shepherd of Malignancy (Merihim)
The Beast Without Shadow (Ravvan)
The Shadow That Never Passes (Shallamoth Kindred)
The Hand of Gellasatrac

SERVITORS OF THE DEMON COURT

The Assassins of Chaos (Carach)
The Earthbound Demons (Rhodintor)
The Magi of Chaos (Shaddom)
The Grey Veiled (Vreeth)
The Bloated Lords (Zaug)

BOOK OF THE ELDER BROOD

Book of the Elder Brood – Akop
Book of the Elder Brood – Bulugon
Book of the Elder Brood – Essyat
Book of the Elder Brood – Gadacro
Book of the Elder Brood – Marbassik Spawn
Book of the Elder Brood – Nintha
Book of the Elder Brood – Nyogoth
Book of the Elder Brood – Obaan
Book of the Elder Brood – Solesik
Book of the Elder Brood – Sscreeth
Book of the Elder Brood – Tesk
Book of the Elder Brood – Tilaxic