The Unfinished World is a setting by G. R. Michael of Numbers Aren't Real. This is a pulpy, stupid module in which the PCs go on a cross-country adventure. Its structure is that of a pointcrawl, but the characters will spend days between points, so you can probably let them regenerate all their HPs and spells and so on in between flashpoints. This, plus handwaving a lot of the logistics, is intended to contribute to the pulp adventure feel. Because the routes characters in this setting are likely to be severely restricted by the fact that being outside of a town when night falls is a death sentence, you can be pretty ham-fisted about making PCs go from point to point. If they take another, equally reasonable route, improvise a new point with this encounter prompt table:
(2d6) Encounter
2. wizard
3. The Buddha
4. monke
5. masked cleric(s) and/or angels
6. snooty authority figure
7. persnickety locals
8. The Dead, in some building or circumstance where they can hide from the sun
9. Fairy
10. Freak people- want to dig a hole
12. horrifically dangerous freak monster
I'm certain my depiction of the Unfinished World diverges somewhat from what is known and lacks certain elements of the original author's pizzazz. Such is life. Some characters in this module are named using Vayra's famous name generator.
Background
Overwise immortal Kino Kinokin can step a thousand leagues in a moment, cast funny spells, and when he would die his body turns into soggy rice and he is reborn the next day. Just a few hours ago, he found what he believes to be the Stone Primordiale, an artifact that is reputed to allow its wielder nearly unlimited power if they can reach a certain site in the barbarian wastes of the South. However, by magical decree the Stone cannot travel over the ocean, and so he sends his agents to smuggle it through Umbersheen and Arel to the wastes.
The PCs will start knowing most of this, perhaps not exactly where the Stone is going. This module assumes the characters will try to follow the agents carrying the Stone, beat them there by taking a ship, or following the agents for a while and then taking the ship. When following the agents, keep track of the number of delays and shortcuts or expedients the PCs encounter. If they ever make more surprise advances than delays, they catch up to Kinokin's agents, a party of 2d4 dumb-ish adventurers. They carry the Stone Primordial, a jagged brick of iron-troubled bedrock. If the PCs get their hands on the Stone, any scholars they consult posit it can only be destroyed with the power it unlocks in the wastes, at the Builder meeting site called Øyelokk. They will probably consider this a good way of getting rid of Kinokin, who will manifest every day or so to bother them if they stay in one place for too long.
If some random NPCs are described as attacking the PCs and the reason is not elaborated upon, it's the direct fuckery of Kino Kinokin.
Key
1. Outside Warkunst is an ancient Losian site recently excavated. The PCs start the game here, picking over Kinokin’s massacre of the diggers after solving a very simple logic puzzle to access the vault. A dying scholar exposits that he is taking the Stone Primordiale south to “wake the Old Man,” that it cannot pass over the ocean water, and that it will secure him untold riches and power, etc.
2. Under an aqueduct is Kino Kinokin and a magically charmed sword-saint. He’ll brag about his plans and immortality, then probably sic the saint on the PCs
3. Forty friendly peasants. Say they’re traveling laborers, but one of them is training to become a sleight of hand artist. If you let him demonstrate, he’ll find a coin behind your ear (and let you keep it!), juggle anything sharp you give him (throw him a couple more midway!), and for his third trick you need to have your arms tied (so he and the thirty-nine other red heretic laypeople can carve you up with knives and eat you to gain your power.)
4. Deelft. When the party comes to this walled town, they find its gate ajar and hastily daubed with an incomplete message, “DEAD IN”. It has been overtaken by the Unburied. Only an hour until dark, and it’s hours and hours to the next town or to backtrack.
5. Nordmaerz. Fortified town from which armed caravans depart for Umbersheen. Everyone is up in arms because the marquis refuses to shelter the followers of any heresy-- an insane cruelty that is sure to bolster the hordes of the dead. Blue-masked, oiled-up hunks shout insults from the southern hills. If you seem like an authority figure, they’ll throw a snake at you as you pass.
6. Wiswood Forest. Interesting-looking travelers are waylaid by Walaric, an Umbern outlaw, and his Dour Men. They wear gi and tights of lindwurm green, and fight with staves. Will "invite" you to his forest holdfast and treat you to a feast, but will then extort you for your belongings unless you're obviously humble and charitable.
If challenged, will happily duel you with staves on a log over a river, and if you win he will invite you to join his company. If you explain your quest after defeating him, he will send his son, Vanhoe (ninja 2), to help you.
7. Pail Trump's Holdfast. A renowned and generous Shee lady of war, Pail will host and outfit travelers. However, she demands they wear embarrassing Shee clothing and eat frightening Shee foods, such as an oddly textured egg, jiggly bread, and "eel lip" (which is made from worse ingredients than it sounds.)
8. Besieged port town, surrounded by overzealous raiders and overflowing with unhappy sheep. There is a longship captained by the disgraced Arelian captain Wooden Zopittybop-bop-bop of the Sur Le Canon, who is willing to take travelers to dangerous places but won't put to port in Arel because of his many enemies.
At every sea and coastal point, there's a 1-in-6 chance his old rival Half-Dead Vikenti will arrive with his ship Mieuxquetoi to pursue the bounty on Wooden's head.
9. City of Umbern. A rare unwalled city, for it was decided that if there were not stout men to guard the four passes into the city, that would be the night it should be destroyed. Doctors and clerics attempt to cure the venomous bite which is slowly killing the Umbern heroine Marguerite. Her pained screams have draped themselves over the city for a month now.
If the PCs spend the night here, a beggar in a green dog mask will find one of them, mime digging with a mattock, mime crying, mime holding something aloft, mime inserting something, then mime being decapitated. Under no circumstances will the beggar speak, and if not prevented they will lope away on all fours.
10. Highrock, a city which is the center of culture in Arel. Weirdos like the PCs are sure to attract the attention of corrupt officials who will extort them severely. Otherwise, all manner of supply is available here. A cruel mustachioed dog-catcher pursues a clever Arelian Shorthair, a grey terrier with grape-white eyes. If the party aids the pooch, it will become fast friends with them, barking to thwart any ambushes against them and otherwise being handy.
11. Etroit, a town at the mouth of a tunnel under the mountains. Halfway through the tunnel, sloshing through freezing mud, a trio of Purple-mask clerics try to cut the party off for esoteric reasons they smugly refuse to elaborate on. Each has inscribed Deserving Truth on a wooden board they will set up as a sort of barricade. They are guarded by a single cockney zouave named Desk.
12. Daemon, a seedy city of Arel and home to weirdos and iconoclasts. Guild thugs are available as hirelings. If you're low on funds, asking around can (improbably) get you in on a bank heist going down tonight.
13. Angulaire, a city home to the Free Labor Company, run by Builders. If the party comes through here, a gang of Builders will stop them and attack with sledgehammers in the middle of some crowded street with a vendor selling wrinkled apples from a cart and a group of men loading fragile vases into a ceramic shop.
14. Guanost, a backwater coastal town. In the port is docked the Pikram, a king vessel of eccentric make with sails at eccentric angles. The captain, Klotho, suspects that the monkey team she hired to fill out her crew are of pirate stock, and is willing to take paying customers far if they look like they can keep her safe from mutiny.
15. Private orchards of the proud noble Luisinho Van Der Waal, tended by odious centipede-men imported from the west. If aid is requested, he will allow them to charter his junk, Poor Fashion Decision, (named after losing a bet). However, Kino Kinokin will appear and use imperial courtesy and his status as a rich guy to convince Van Der Waal that the PCs are troublemakers, and by the time the ship is almost ready he will try to apprehend them.
16. Depressing shipping towns importing tons and tons of tobacco. Very unfriendly, but you could pick up a braggadocious zouave guide to the islands ahead.
17. Parrot-faced duke happy to host and supply PCs. Partway through, his compound is broken down by Builder workers, seemingly in spontaneous protest but actually in terror of Kinokin, for lo! He has arrived to screw with you.
18. House of Enlightning. Ruined temple with a stone Losian-faced statue visible above the trees from the shore. Quicksand surrounds the temple, trapping a half-starved and aggressive tiger.
In the depths of the temple are sarcophagi dense with muttering and shaking Dead, as well as antique apparati that convert their movement into energy stored in a humming copper coil, which will electrocute anyone who touches it. You can see their skeleton. The coffins have lasted for centuries— they're great at resisting the struggling dead within, but pretty fragile when messed with from the outside. If you get a box open, you will learn how the Losians contrived to make their dead squirm. Piled up in the room are many valuable grave goods (gilded vestments, silver mugs, polished amber paperweights, jade beards, ritual dongs) and a defaced statue.
19. Wild angels of the spell shoal, doing the backstroke.
20. Pirate Attack! Two Deltan pirate ships, tipped off to your location by Kino Kinokin. Formerly partisans of the Aeshean Colonial Authority, now lacking friends, scruples, and supplies. One ship is swift and fragile, and its crew prefers to board its targets. The other is a lumbering old cog laden with gear, and the crew angles its single cannon to face almost any direction.
21. More tobacco plantations, wealthy parrot-face dukes, and field hands. If the party lingers here for more than an hour, an Aeshean vigilante will stow aboard their ship and die of her severe wounds, happening to leave them her belongings when they detect something stinking behind the pickle barrel.
Foremost among these objects is SIDEREAL HEAVEN STAKE, a light adamant xiphos +3 with a dragon-antler handle and colorful ribbons running from his pommel. Says he is an avenger, and that he can only wound the truly evil, a claim that will humble the wielder as they find he cuts down priest and pillager alike. His voice is gravelly and grave, and he sees everything as a slight or betrayal. When he rolls maximum damage, the wielder makes an extra attack against someone in range— if not another enemy, an ally, and if there is no ally, themselves.
22. Like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch but instead of microplastics, undead corpses. In addition to a thousand Drowned there flits a hundred-foot long undead serpent with the face of Ben Carson, for some reason.
23. Isolated Plantations. Tall, tall yellow heretic begrudgingly laying the dead to rest in a depopulated village. A boatman ignored the symptoms of a deadly disease and died without anyone to notice before he rose as an Unburied the following night. Remaining villagers are jumpy and unhappy.
24. Stilt-House Settlement. Forest dense with flesh-tearing weasels. Tobacco fieldhands use weasel-repellent whistles. This village, Joyeuse, is the brainchild of an Arelian tycoon who rules with the veneer of democracy.
25. Sandy cove, a stopover for those too shady for Cacheleaf. Grotto fort guarded by the most wretched smugglers in existence. An entitled baby-faced cleric bosses them around, knowing they can’t afford to alienate him.
26. Cacheleaf, a coastal town which holds an Academy of Manufacturing. If entreated for aid, the academy will send Vanesa Coke, a level 4 Manufactory, as well as a team of twenty undergrads, to assist the party. Coke will plan to betray the party as soon as they get their hands on the Stone.
27. Snow-choked Mountains. Horrific travel conditions. Make a CLBG check or lose a couple random items. Make a Save or lose 1d4 max hp. Make a HRTS check or be miserable.
Also, if coming from Cacheleaf, a work gang of Builders attacks from hiding with hastily constructed boulder traps.
28. Evil monolith. It’s said Timotheos made it after getting too many annoying questions. Those who see it must save or walk towards it. As you get closer, you can see it writhes with fiery malevolence. Indeed, it is magma-hot and to touch it is death.
29. Coastal whirlpool. By the time you see it, you’re already in its pull. Unless you have a good idea, it threatens to smash your vessel onto the rocks. There’s an old shipwreck with Unburied inside.
30. Abandoned monuments of undressed stone. As the party travels through here, Kinokin will conjure rainbow-color lights which bring about a heavy blizzard. Those who press on take 3d6 cold damage, save for half, that won't naturally heal until they're in a warmer clime. Those who take shelter in one of the stone structures must only save or take 1d6 cold damage, but the Old Man in the Ice will see them through the magic eyes there carved, which may have some effect?
31. Øyelokk. A huge moot of thousands of builders in two hundred camps. Set up in a circle a respectful distance from a huge round depression in the ground. Maybe you could sneak past everyone in a big black cloak? Perhaps you could convince them you work for Kinokin. A slick duct in the ice is the site of a huge temple of unworked stone. The duct has three stone gates held shut by three magic wax seals. Slitting them open is easy enough for a mortal.
If his agents manage to get the Stone here, they will bring it to the temple and Kinokin will descend the duct with it, hoping to command the power of the Old Man of the Ice and become as a god. The party may have the same plan. The issue is that the Stone is a fake— an ancient fake made by some pre-Aeshean scholar, good enough to fool Kinokin completely.
At the bottom of the duct within the temple are three things— a springy, spongy floor that weeps a salty fluid; a crusty, salty creature that acts like a Dark Souls knight boss, and a pillar decorated with scenes of an armored giant twirling around stout humanoids. Within the pillar is an obvious depression which, if the correct Stone is inserted into it, will flood the room with the spiritual energy of thousands of dead Builders, granting the operator incredible power.
When the fake Stone is inserted, it explodes (1d6 damage, save to avoid), and then the room half-floods with the spiritual energy of a few hundred dead Builders, giving terrifying visions of torment, soul fugue, and drain. Everyone present must save or take 2d6 psychic damage, then on all following combat rounds anyone present must save or go totally insane, entering a Builder frenzy and having a 2-in-6 chance each combat round of attacking without distinguishing friend from foe. For every cleric doom a character has incurred, they get +3 to this save, as they are increasingly adapted to chaos.
[To the tune of DEVO's cover of It Takes A Worried Man] Freak people/Want To Dig A Hole
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