The Pink Dice Chronicles

Some of the things that fly in the Ninth World: There is a winged creature with feathers, webbed feet and a large circular mouth. This so-called suckler bird likes to land on large pieces of shiney metal and glass and suck the debris off it.  A large flock of them can clean all the windows in a good sized town in a day. The young, however, have been know to attach to eyeglasses, mostly just frightening the wearer. Numenera hunters near Beoth reported disturbing some sort of nest before leaving town.  A week later small flying disks appeared, cutting through timbers of local buildings. The residents were able to take shelter in stone buildings after one resident was killed, but are scared to go outside. There is a four-legged animal in the Wyr river valley that can spread its limbs and glide.  The 3 foot creature has generally been content with swooping down and grabbing live food from the river, but recently it has taken to snatching livestock and small animals in se...

A few thoughts concerning the sky in the Ninth World: A man in Uxphon has found a Numenera in the mountains. For 10 shins he will let you point it at the sky on a dark night where is shows large invisible cities floating in the sky. In Navarene, several people have found objects left behind by a lumbering automaton that rambles quickly across the land. Friends and neighbors described the objects as large eggs. One witness said that when activated they glow crimson. A short time after, those that had the object were found burnt to death after a bright flash from the sky. A large forest of trees stands outside of Dobrin, metallic with large metal leaves that point toward the sky.  On the first day of summer and the first day of winter, the sky above them pops and crackles with lightning. Anything above the forest is burnt into dust. Near Mt Jaspar there is a machine in the sky that flies from a fixed spot out past the Deeplight and back every week, as if on an invisible cable...

A few more thoughts related to trees in the Ninth World: There is a remote village, south of the Cloudcrystal Sky Fields, where the trees seems to change color randomly. When the trees turn red, the residents close up their houses and refuse to go outside. Just outside of Hamuth, there is an strange old man who grows a garden of trees. If you go near the trees at night, the trees will glow and chitter, and the old man comes out and chases you off with a numenera that gives off a blinding bright light. A guide in Bodrov warned me just the other day that if I get lost in the Westwood to seek out trees with triangle leaves. He says if you tap them, they produce clear water suitable to drink with an odd smells that keeps danger away, In Charmonde, wealthier citizens started planting a new fractal-leaved tree that were all the rage. There is a uproar at the moment: the trees are slowly moving a few inches each night and seem to all be leaving the city. Numenera hunters in the Ba-Ade...

A few thoughts related to trees in the Ninth World: In the Westwood, there is a tree that grows square paper-like leaves with holes in them. When you place one of the leaves in a slot in the trunk, the leaves change color randomly and the tree make artificial beeping noises.  In Navarene, 3 hours walk south of the Amber Monolith, there is a tree that grows a new trunk each year, always in a slightly different direction, straight, always exactly the same length, 17 meters. The locals reckon  that it is 78 years old, since there are 78 trunks coming out in random directs. It is running out of space for new trunks. There is a tree that grows straight up near Stirthal with no visible leaves or branches. It is so impossibly tall that the top is no longer visible. The local loggers *really* want to cut is down, but the there is no telling which way would fall In the Beyond, near White Lake, there are rumors of a tree whose leaves sing when the breeze blows a certain way. A lo...

Necromancers are great, except when you're in a party with one with a hoard of undead. 25 Minutes after initiative starts you get to take your turn after all of the skeletons and zombies have done their thing. For this reason, I limit a player to one PC + 2 other combatants in most cases. Sure, you can have 10 zombies following you around, but only two are fighting, because we're not all waiting on the rest to do something. The problem with this rule is that is really pulls the rug out from under the necromancer. I don't really want to do that. So here is my rewrite to Animate Dead to help fix the problem. The CR derivation used in this new "At Higher Levels" is meant to balance the raw CR increase with the action economy. Time will tell if I got it right. Replace the "At Higher Levels" text of Animate Dead with this text: At Higher Levels: When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 4th level or higher, you animate or reassert control over st...

Interesting encounters are short descriptions of encounters that GMs can use to build on.  They combine unique aspects of different types of foes, terrain, skill checks, weather, combat, etc in order to provide more unique challenges than hit monster; repeat. It has been a while, but I've finally gotten back around to blogging. This week we're working through a divide and conquer trap scenario. WARNING: We're going to use a bit of a qunatum ogre in this scenario. A "quantum ogre" is a case where the outcome doesn't depend on the choices that the player makes. The story goes that a PC reaches a tunnel where he can go either left or right. However, wherever the PC goes, he finds an ogre. The ogre is in both places (and not in both places) at once until the PC chooses, then it is placed. Thus the name... quantum ogre. Start out with a room. In this room, there is a pressure plate in the center of the room. The plate is unremarkable and easily mistaken as pa...

A woman goes to her brother-in-law's funeral. There she meets a friend of the family, a man that she doesn't know. They talk, they laugh, and the woman finds herself really liking this man. However, at some point she loses track of the man and never gets his name, number, and no one seems to know who he is.  A week later, the woman kills her sister. Why? If you don't know the answer, it is because most people have a part of their reasoning that discounts certain solutions to problems because they don't make sense. In this case, you might have missed the logic that the woman kills her sister so there will be another funeral, and she can find this man again. This solution seems unreasonable, so most folks can't find their way to it easily. True evil is like this woman. It doesn't place the same weight on things as we do. What seems completely unreasonable to a normal person, seems like a logical solution to evil. Because most GMs are reasonable people (despite...