Rainy City Hacked with Cube World Beasts
“It’s the end of the world. It always rains. Rain beats against the walls. It seeps through the shutters. It pours off the mossy backs of the gargoyles. It turns streets into streams and rivers.” The opening lines of the Guide to the Rainy City, an RPG zine setting that is just …. well ...amazing! It is also soooo relevant because our little island in Southern Japan had 17 days of straight rain which can make it feel like the rain will just never end. I ran an adventure for what I`ll call Group C, which is basically some players from my Cube World, Land of the Southern Daimyos group plus a some new players that were unlucky enough to be visiting our island during rainy season.
The session started with the players as refugees on a ship, months at sea in constant driving wind, rain and monstrous, churning waves...... when they finally spotted an apparent lighthouse on a little speck of land in the middle of the great gray ocean, but “to see it is to know it’s wrong, one knows it in their bones. The water just around it seems too rough and too deep, the shoreline too regular and rounded, the trees too stiff and bristly for such high winds. The light is right where it ought to be, but it’s just off somehow. The lamp itself looks like aspic, a ball of blue-white light propped up on a column of cloudy-clear jelly.”
The players didn't know it, but what they stumbled across was not land at all, but the Aspic Lantern, which is a cross between a fabled aspidochelone sea creature, this one a tentacled cephalopod and a deep-sea, angler fish that hunts by dangling a false bio-luminescent light to attract prey. The unsuspecting prey in this case are the characters, what they thought was a place, was actually a beast! And a beast this large usually attracts other smaller predators looking for leftover tidbits!
Drawn to the false light, the players made for the little island until they were too close to turn back. And that was the rub, they knew something was amiss, but they could see signs of life on the “island”; birds, movement, greenery and their supplies were so low they almost couldn't pass it up. The swells were too powerful to attempt to land the ship, so they dropped the life boats and four of the six players along with a few NPCs jumped in. A monumentally bad decision because the aspic lantern`s tentacles fell upon these tiny boats as soon as they were in range. None of the three boats remained intact and the players were thrown bloodied and bruised into the raging seas and the “gauntlet of predators” surrounding the Aspic Lantern.
I could have used stereotypical reef sharks…. But meh! I turned to my “go-to content”, Cube World!! for some monsters with a little depth and gnarl. So I filled the waters with Cube World's Albino Lampreys and Dragon fish (See the Cube World Bestiary) I wanted monsters that cause lingering damage. And the albino lampreys converge en masse towards anything that is near them in the water @ speed of 120` a +1 to hit and do 1d6 bloodsucking damage (I used that for the entire swarm, not not per lamprey, (low level characters and all) but once they lock on they stay latched to the characters body even if killed, until removed. This may not seem like much, but imagine of the extra weight of having 4-5 lampreys 3-5 feet long each attacking or just adding literal dead weight to character in the open water. Once attached, I had characters roll strength checks each round, if they failed I said they were pulled under the water for the succeeding round; and if they remained underwater for 3 consecutive rounds, plus a failed con check…… they drowned.
Simultaneously some characters ran up against Dragonfish… "a strange, ornate fish, 10’ long that squirm through the debris field surrounding the Aspic Lantern. +2 to hit, bite at 1d8 PLUS their needle-like teeth break off and stay in doing the victim doing 1d4 damage per round until removed. Removal requires Sleight of Hand or a Dex check at disadvantage. Failure does d4 extra damage."
The players that remained on the ship watched all this from the deck and believed themselves safe, that was until the ship was knocked…. by something from below that was large enough to change the direction of a 60` ship. They sent an NPC below deck to check for damage and leaks, while giving an all clear call her voice was drowned out by the sound of splintering wood and rushing water because the ship was hit so hard that those on deck had to make dex checks at disadvantage of 17 or higher just to remain on their feet. And then the ship began to sink .....without life boats amoungst the large outer swells in the strange blue-white light of the Aspic Lantern.
As they prepared to jump into the water from the highest remaining part of the ship, they saw a shadow about 50` long in the trough of giant swell, What they didn't know was the boat had been hit by a Gargantuan Black Lantern Shark which is known to bite the hull out of a ship ….and then eat the passengers. After seeing what happened to their comrades trying to get to shore, these two successfully climbed on to floating pieces of their recent ship. I let them jointly roll a d8 (one side per each 45 degrees compass segment) to see which way the currents were driving… unfortunately for them they didn't roll on to the direction of the Aspic Lantern and were drifting away, so they lowered their legs into the water and began kicking toward shore, which immediately attracted the attention of the Black Lantern Shark who bore down on their position with incredible speed and attacked…..miserably! I handled the 1 on the attack roll by describing how the gargantuan shark opened its gigantic, megladon-sized maw for a devastating attack, but was lifted out of the water at the last moment by one the giant tentacles of the aspic lantern and had the life and guts squeezed out of it just above the character's heads. These two characters ultimately made to the “shore” albeit with a few dragonfish teeth in them.
In the end, all characters had 6hp or less, no food or water and no way off this strange little island. (The players know this place is strange but I don't believe any of them have put the pieces together that this is not an island, but an aspidochelone.) They climbed the small mound of on island and perceived 3 things:
a) a line of boats ( in an apparent shipping lane heading to some intermittently visible lights on a far mist obscured horizon) ...but all these ships seem to be staying well away from this little is place…hmmm.
b) what appears to be a giant, calcified 5' -blow hole next to the gelatinous stalk that anchors the false light high in the air at the apex of this island mound. It has enough ledges and footholds extending downward into the darkness of the mound that a descent is not out of the question. (Also provides a nice little conundrum, if the players pick up on it…if the blow hole is calcified and no air coming in or out, is the creature to which it is apart still alive? But if its dead, what is powering the bioluminescent light atop the gelatinous stalk providing the luminosity of small sun for miles around in the darkness of rainy nights.)
c) Occasionally on the wind driven rain, can be heard what appears to be singing or whistling carrying up from an area of shrubbery at the bottom of one of the island slopes .
Unfortunately, with character creation, session zero crap and brand new player learning curve this is as far as we got. My characters are still in the Outer Swells and havent even made it into The Rainy City-proper, but we had such a good time that it doesnt even come close to mattering!
I cant recommend Beasts of the Outer Swells and The Guide to the Rainy City enough. Ive read the entire initial zine and its progeny cover to cover, and love the setting, the quirkiness, the beautiful writing (I think the author is an English prof), the cast of characters, monsters, oozes, locations, wizards, gangs and factions, I hope to get immersed in this world for many, many sessions. All the materials are relatively inexpensive and available on DriveThru.
The CubeWorld Bestiary comes with each edition of CubeWorld and is updated as new content is released. I think all the monsters that I used here are a part of the core bestiary so should be in there no matter what version you might pick up. All the monsters are alphabetized and you can do word searches if you are looking for monsters on specific theme or type as I was for this encounter. No matter what Im running I always seem to find an original or interesting monster in the Cube World content.
In fact, CubeWorld has become my core content all around, it covers everything from classic medieval tropes, Japanese themes, swamps, mountains, desert, dungeons, hex crawls, factions, mysteries, jousting tournaments, naval ships, royalty etc etc. It has an entire world atlas, and when paired with his blog posts on character generation, kung fu fighting styles, combat mechanics, scores of tables, magical items, not to mention creative, original art etc, I actually dont need WotC or anything else to have immersive, unpredictable, deadly-fun sessions. I run and hack other OSR material to maintain a quiver of ideas, philosophy, perspectives and bad-assery. But at the core its CubeWorld that Im running over and over. Again highly recommended, especially for the price!
Currently, Im playing around and designing an augmented PirateBorg! beta setting with Cube World hacks and the Aspic Lantern from the Beasts of the Outer Swells. Due to the demands of work and mismatching schedules Im unable to run or play in my A group (Dark Sun), and our B group, (the ones currently running in the Cube World, Lands of the Southern Daimyo) has been unable to meet. So, the grand finale of Forest of 500 Shadows and Serene Temple of the White Octopus Maiden is currently on pause! But one of our players has been prototyping some T-shirts based on an original Zak S design for when we play again!
Good review!
ReplyDeleteCool shirts!