Four More Campaign Worlds And Retrospective Lessons

Three years ago I made this moderately popular post about past campaign worlds, and I think it's about time I updated it with what I've run since then and perhaps what was learned.

CASTLE NOWHERE

A drawing of the most active characters- Leah the thief and her goblin minions, Blix and her fairy and spider sidekicks, Aten Bast the mighty wizard (Later replaced by the also mighty Thirbaek Merrymace after Aten's many deaths cheapened his life in the players eyes), Olaf the wicked old usurper of the Sheriff position, Leo and Pilgrim/Lily the Witch, character and decoy replacement character after some party PKing, and finally Ambrose Noure, the sociopathic but easy to work with Gothic Villain and his pigman retainer Lump. There were other important characters such as Erhard De Vend as well, but such is the nature of open table games that there is no snapshot of the party that is perfectly comprehensive.

After the politicking of Crownless Lands, I wanted to return to ye dungeoncrawling, and an individual sense of struggle and survival rather than faction jockeying. At this time I had been playing quite a bit of Enter the Gungeon and Darkest Dungeon and had belatedly gotten into the lore of Undertale, so I had a notion of looping time where each adventure would go through similar areas, with increasing familiarity allowing easy bypassing, knowledge of where the plate armor was to upgrade the frontliner, and so on. Additionally, death would be irrelevant, a time loop ensuring a way to keep characters constant but threat level high, even easier than even widespread Raise Dead. To keep the focus on individual treasures rather than gold hoards, I used a copper standard without changing rulebook prices. 1 copper piece was worth 1 xp, making lanterns and other mundane items valuable treasures, and a suit of plate stolen from Castle Noure's armory racks

Not much of this design sentiment survived the early drafts, as I think it would have required a singular carefully crafted megadungeon to work, but I did not have that sort of prep time available. So the focus of the campaign was a single small village beneath the eponymous Castle Noure

A quick view of the village map. Upgrading the village wasn't the focus of the game, but was a satisfying part

With a very small hex map in case the players got cabin fever and wished to wander, though this campaign was set in the Moonlands, a place where the sun was a rare occurrence and the lights of alien moons warped reality and spawned monsters. It was no place for mortals to go wandering about narratively, and on the meta level, this was not a hex crawl campaign.

With the dire outside established, the focus then turned to the accursed, time-looped estate which was composed of 3 modules- Ynn, Castle Gargantua, and Maze of the Blue Medusa, with Ynn as the ever-changing grounds of the estate that must be crossed, Castle Gargantua as filling for the towers and 'minidungeons' that might be found from entering buildings that were not Noure proper, and MotBM as the 'Final Area' within which were contained the secrets of the decadent nobles and mad experimentation that caused this loop. All were warped to suit the campaign setting rather than used as is, but Ynn was praised, MotBM disappointed, and Castle Gargantua was mostly ignored, but I feel like, with some tweaking, could be worth trying again.

Another sleeper hit was a tweaked version of the Meal of Oreshegaal, (which I still can't spell) which in my warped version had the Tuskmen as once-human peasants subjected to famine that Oresh turned to pig-people so that they could survive via cannibalism rather than become ghouls. As some of the more ghastly elements of the manor were removed, Oresh became everyone's favorite creepy wizard uncle and the party allied with him against the entity responsible for the time loop (which in a twist, was not a time loop at all, but a manual reset using clockwork machinery, cloning facilities, which then gave everyone a bit of an identity crisis upon the revelation that many of them were clones made to play out assigned roles).

Player attendance became wobbly near the end, but a final epic conclusion or three were achieved, and a combination of retirement and new recruitment was set out for the next portion of the campaign.

Things I learned from Castle Noure
1. Having the players be desperately poor is fun, but can wear thin in the long run- I am more likely to switch to 'barter only, coin isn't real' than go full on copper standard but silver/gold book prices again.
2. Making death a non-issue has mixed results depending on playgroup. Some players had more fun not having to worry about permadeath, and/or learned the value of permadeath by seeing the effects of hanging on to a character who had outstayed their welcome. While others used it as a crutch to support existing over investment and loss-aversion and were led astray, perhaps. I think future games of mine will have to pick a path, so to speak, either making death more menacing, or leaning harder into the 'fantasy soulpunk' idea I have for the setting, where death is just deportation to the netherworld and human consciousness in artificial bodies is the new transhumanism mood.
3. An absolutely hostile wilderness less fantasy wilds and more 'cosmic horror' is very fun, but again can wear thin in the long run. I am greatly amused by my veteran players who survived the Moonlands chuckling to each other when newbies ask about the Moonlands or naively assume that they couldn't be that bad out loud.
4. Reliable 'crafting systems' for potions and the like have a sort of appeal, but I think are doomed for a variety of reasons. Most importantly, I think potion ingredients must be confined to things that cannot be farmed safely, or you run the risk of having to run Magical Industrial Revolution with potions/magic items. Which could be fun if that's the premise of the game, but if it's just one player wanting to set up basilisk and mandrake factory farming, you probably get a pacing/tone/balance issue.
5. Having a premise to do 'one thing' in a campaign is great and good and has always been more successful than keeping things strictly 'get in ye dungeon and get rich and figure out what you REALLY want along the way". "Break the Curse of House Noure or Get Rich Trying" was the initial goal of the campaign, it fragmented into other goals, and finally, when the campaign was over, some characters retired, but some had formed a proper adventuring party forged from the unity of their common goal.

If there was a theme to the 54 sessions or so of Castle Noure, it was something about leaving past trauma behind and focusing on found friendships and family. But of course, it was not to last, for call no PC happy till they are safely retired offscreen...

IRON-CROWNED OROBORO

Map lacks some player added portions

After the party finished with Castle Noure, their next goal was to take their 60-foot tall clockwork fighting robot and walk it out of the hellish moonlands to sanity and sunlit lands, for a variety of reasons. Thirbaek Merrymace, cleric of dead gods, had properly put one of his gods to rest, and now sought to find the sunshard fragments of Riikhus and reassemble him. Blix wanted to honor the wishes of some bugfolk and bury them on the isle of Ebetheron, and also go on a honeymoon with their protein polymorph gf. But mostly, people just wanted to keep playing and get out of the moonlands, and Oroboro was a part of the setting that was well-fleshed out due to the past Crownless Lands campaign, so it made for a good destination.

Oroboro was supposed to be a city crawl+megadungeon, and I had a vision for the megadungeon, with rooms that would fill and empty with seawater, making timing very important, and equipment more important yet, as armor protected from monsters, but not drowning. A hell of undead and fishy monstrosities, a corrupt sore at the heart of the city that had formed from the unfinished business of Oroboro.

After the very positive experience with Ynn, I did not prep the Sunken Sepulchre megadungeon,but instead filled it on the go with random tables. I think dungeons benefit from building in advance so parts coincide, but I think the enemy composition between sea creatures, outlaws, and undead was a memorable mix as they required different tactics to approach and the players rarely rushed in, rather scouting, then returning to 'lair' areas with preparation.

Looming threats were the cult of Janus, cthonic demon god of blood and gold, their temple a crater filling with seawater, and the dread Ningen King, a giant merman made into immortal monster by the artifact Topaz, and his rivalry with King Samuel Goffnagoff, an old PC who had become king, as well as the machinations of the ancient serpent rulers of the city, a necromancer cult which outlived the loss of its head, a giant wasp-queen Happy who was raised by humans but whose offspring lacked morality and hungered for brains, and the neighboring country of Fassulia in a magical cold war with Oroboro.

The players were no mere murderhobos delving with rusty spoonshivs now, however- levels started at about 3-5, and reached 6-7. Waterbreathing and light were spells that trivialized some of the mundane threats of the dungeon, which was slightly disappointing, but the players found the place disgusting and dangerous enough that they probably would not have been willing to delve it without these magical tools. A fine balance is required to make dungeon delving at higher levels still feel dangerous, and I think it was barely met here, but, especially once teleportation and flight became available, it surely felt like the players were outgrowing many of the problemsolving parts of dungeon delving.

However, their heightened power, especially mobility-wise opened them up to the wonders of hexcrawling and domain building, and I soon found myself in need of prep far beyond the Sepulchre.

They fought (and lost against) blue dragons in the deserts relying on their metal clockwork battle bot (but came back with a plan and grapple ballista and a small army and won), delved a ghoul-missile silo in Fassulia and uncovered the machinations of the lich Magister Verdurus (villain of Crownless Lands), riddled with terrible ifrits who could only be tricked and outwitted, not beaten, visited the islands of the realm and other city-states like Phavea and the accursed City of the Emerald (within which a kiss-spread curse made all appear as the lost Queen of that city), met the Knights of the realm in their castles, accidentally assassinated Oroboron Queen Buckley at the machinations of a player from Crownless Lands picking up an old character, igniting mroe Fassulian-Oroboron intrigue (tho necromancers were behind it all) and made war Against the GiantsSaga of the Giants™ and defeated and claimed the hill giant section of that module to dip their toes into that hazy theoretical realm of 'domain play, ' which really came into full force after the players defeated the Heart of the Kingen (and betrothed the High Incarceratrix of Janus) removing the two main sources of evil at the heart of Oroboro, only to be confronted with a choice- both the King of Oroboro, Samuel Goffnagoff, and the Serpent Queen Tinnea, giant platinum medusa (one of three medusa) offered payment for the monstrous-immortality granting Topaz, but each was vying for rulership of the city. Tinnea got it in the end, simply because she could pay the ONE MILLION SILVER bounty upfront, while King Samuel offered a payment plan.

Apologies for that doozy of a runon, have an image of Blix, Erhard, and Thierbaek, as well as retainers Serenity the hatecubus/Erhard's Sword, and Kitadatapa, moral compass spider cleric.



Samuel was petrified and overthrown, which led to what would later be known as the Oroboron Civil War, in which some supported the legitimate claim of the Serpent Queens, while others supported the human Goffnagoff family who refused political marriage and opted for revolt (Princess Evalyn being the Rebel leader). I rolled reactions amongst Samuel's knights to see who would join the rising serpent queen and who would rebel, and was surprised to see that most rebelled (save for the most mercenary of them). More surprising still was the split of player loyalty to different sides of the civil war. Each side was largely identical in politics, so it really was down to character moments- Some valued their feudal oaths to the knights, or had sinister mirror-cult conspiracies at play, or simply sided with their best friends or just were double-agent lesbians

hey, a motive's a motive

Anyway, each side was given private channels to communicate in, and they plotted and schemed, drawing allies from local factions they met in more standard play to aid them, employed counter-measures and counter-countermeasures via spying and double agents and intelligence work, and I as GM was just the neutral arbiter of all this. Though some people felt betrayed, for the most part this was very enjoyable to everyone, as playing against other players with GM as arbiter lead to lots of problem solving. In the end people died, players retired, and the Serpent Queens were cast into prison or the pocket dimension from which they came (or beheaded by KAN for inscrutable purposes), the Lumarian conspiracy was revealed and [REDACTED] (he sold his name to a bugbear) the Mirror-Pope fled to the mirror realm, and the party's ties were now shooketh and everyone resolved to sail away from this political squabbling on a boat to become pirates instead.

What did I learn from this 65 session campaign? Well, one thing was what D&D in the 5-7 range really starts to look like. I would not go so far as to say this was 'true' domain play as we did not get deep into the nitty gritty of how many pikemen can guard a 5' wide breach in a player-build castle wall, there were mercenary troops hired, there were night raids on war camps, there was A player castle built on the ruins of the reclaimed Hill Giant Steading, there were religious conspiracies and marriage angles, it was all pretty great. With regards to 'domain play' I think there needs to be a goal- idly upgrading and sleeping at Fort Fortenfort (said player castle) was briefly fun, then ignored, but the goal of the Civil War galvanized players into 'domain level' actions. The trick might be setting- you need it to be wilderness enough that the players have room to grow, but also have nearby factions of all types so the players aren't just clearing hexes of direwolves or whatever.

According to one player, the theme of this campaign was 'Loyalty' not just to fellow party members and maximising loot, but to ideological goals. While fun, the Civil War took a lot out of people and they resolved to go on a piratical boat adventure with no complicated politics, just a desire to escape Oroboron politics and stop a prophesy that said the fled wasp-princess might bring about the end of the world via domination of brain-eating wasps.

VOYAGE OF THE THIEFBOAT

Things seemed to start off well- the party scrying the wasp-princess, robbing a tower of an archmage of its goodies (even learning the Wish spell, albeit a Glogified one), dealing with plague rats on the ship and pressganging pirates into joining. Then came Cycladea, a Lungfungus created island module meant to emulate bronze-age greek mythology.

In and out, talk to the wasp-princess out of causing the apocalypse, and definitely don't get caught up in Iliad/Gigantomachia shenanigans, 20 minute adventure

Bouncing around Cycladea started low-impact, looting some dungeons, helping villagers, meeting wizards. But these were not fresh characters. They had strings on them. Arsem's madness and Firstborn(the forsaken homunculous 'daughter' of Blix)'s pact with the Great Raven led them to piss off a terrible wizard who was cursed by the gods after their initial friendly meeting. Animated skeletons (and covert vampires who snuck on in Oroboro) caused a mutiny on the ship, and Finzu, the Pyromancer, lit a city aflame with everburning fire with some magical shenanigans. The party sided with the king who had imperialist dreams, and vowed to defeat the goddesses of Cycladea who were admittedly jerks in the greek pantheon way. The temples of the goddesses were burnt and pillaged, the kings forced to bow. Those of the party who enjoyed the chaos revelled, those with morals left the boat behind, Kithri the halfling slipping off to garden and raise sabre-toothed tigers elsewhere, Firstborn teleporting back to Fassulia to atone and work on the side of law, mourning the lost friendships the Civil War had ruined, Thirbaek and his wife the High Incarceratrix used a sunshard and miracles to have a vampire-dwarf-sunchild and started a new pantheon and went on to rule Stonefast 2 in other lands, Grift died and joined said pantheon as a new incarnation of Kispiritis, and so on. The islands fought back, but frankly, Lungfungus's world was not meant to deal with level 7-8 adventurers with a wide variety of spells and multiple spellcasting systems, especially when supported by arguably the most powerful faction there.

However, the victory-drunk party did not heed the hint that they may be succumbing to hubris when the previously pissed off wizard got a good lightning bolt off, and did not correlate characters leaving them to their capabilities weakening. After the final temple was burned and the Cyclops were freed, they sailed to the forbidden Isle of the gods, slapped around some fantasy creatures, then picked a fight with 13 lions lazing under a tree.

After round 3 arrived and half the party was dead,

This is how a high (for OSR) level campaign ends- hubris, and cats

The survivors retrieved a teleport scroll from a corpse, and tried to teleport out. The teleport landed on the 100 result, the dreaded 1% chance to teleport yourself into rock and die (though we left it open to interpretation that they ended up in the Veins or another plane of existence) and so ended the campaign, on a wild but somewhat anticlimactic note Those players who had quit while they were ahead got happy endings at least.

I was gladdened to hear feedback that the 22 sessions of Thiefboat were satisfying to players though. It was not a glorious story, it was a tragedy of the corruption of power, hubris, and how fractures in interpersonal relationships go deep. What did I learn from Thiefboat?

1. High level play is strange, with its teleportations and flight and so on. Verisimilitude-wise, GMs must think of how cities and rival wizards will defend themselves from obscure methods of attack like, say, 2000-foot long dragon turtle shells being dropped from the sky, or magical arson. But things are still dangerous, and reliance on the big obvious tools can leave the players blind to the fact that they have 23 HP and that can go away from 3 dudes with arrows in one round.
2. Boat travel can be hard to make interesting without succumbing to the temptation of  shipwrecks and krakens. One of the more interesting things was the homicidal Captain Arsem secretly engineering a mutiny as an excuse to kill the 3 crew his madness demanded die to save the future from the prophecy, only to have that mutiny coopted by the vampires who had snuck aboard a while ago. While that's a rather extreme example, social scenes with people on a boat have a lot of potential, as can problems like 'how to get rid of plague rats' or 'find out who is drinking all the rum' or 'secure limes' and so on.
3. Player attrition, especially on open tables, may be inevitable as the scope of campaigns shift away from what originally drew them. Part of why Castle Nowhere/Oroboro/Thiefboat lasted as long as it did was thanks to player recruitment persisting so even when some players had to leave, there were usually some waiting to take their place.

Anyway, player numbers had dropped from 'open table' to more 'single party of regulars' by the end of thiefboat, so it was time to move on, and time to do something a little different (no no, we aren't at Lancer yet)

BETRAYAL AT QUEENS COAST

 

 

As a change of pace,  Betrayal was a game in a more idyllic, Shrek-like realm. Having read a great deal of Otome manga such as Bakarina I wanted to have a shorter more storygame style game where the players would be expelled from the Queen's Court and have to clear their name, gain the support of the provincial lords, and return to turn the tables on their nemesis Alicce Von Dumandred. The players had a pretty good time, though the single-group model as opposed to open table immediately showed its weaknesses as players couldn't make sessions, which led to cancelled sessions, which led to lower investment, and I knew its days were numbered... which was fine, as it was a palate cleanser more than anything. The players had to sleep in a haunted manor, saved a nun wedding from Alf Lords after diamond shoes, bullied Good Doctor Ogudugu, had intrigue with and married a Frog Prince, helped on eof Alicce's cronies throw off her influence and accept herself as a centaur, visited the castle of the Dark Lord in the Wurderlands (within an anarcho-communist city of mutants, in stark contrast to the feudal human-central lands of Queen's Coast), infiltrated the manor of Alicce Von Dumandred and had the dreamy Prince of Saresare seduce Alicce(or be seduced?) so they could escape with the party's Gothic Villain's imprisoned one true love, and had exciting dance parties with opaque rules. It was all very fun, though the final dance party conclusion never came together due to scheduling conflicts, but the conclusion was mostly foregone at that point- the party had restored their honor, and Alicce's misdeeds had been brought to enough light that she would flee to Saresare with the Prince (The mysterious foreign prince subplot with a wicked foreign bride and ulterior motives from both of them be good fuel for a potential future campaign)

Whimsical castle Daotengard, overtaken by demon-frogs and a contagious froggification curse

Anyway! I learned a few things here
1.Turning social scenes into more gamified spaces (I had a 'Dance Pentagon' where entering exposed you to various NPCs who could help or hinder you, attacking HP intentionally or unintentionally via mean words or simple dance exertion, but you had to do it to get private conversations) can help to make them feel like they have timing and stakes compared to just 'you talk at NPCs for 12 hours.' Just roleplaying via chat is fine too of course, but I think making weird social games based on positioning and resource management (spare dresses if wine is spilled on you!) is better than making them about rolling a skill check for Diplomacy or what have you.
2. Similar to wolf moons, this was a bloated disaster of houserules... having received the DCC RPG book as a gift from a player, I eagerly sought to add it to the game... on top of GLOG casting... on top of all my other houserules to BFRPG... on top of a mixed level up system using both BFRPG GP=XP and Die Trying X's and DCC's model... suffice it to say that this abominable frankenhack would have been better served by leaping into the nearest dumpsterfire and leaving us to play Fate or PbtA or a proper story game. We squeezed great roleplay and schemes despite the system, and used the system for a few janky heists and dungeon delving for coin, but it was really a ball-and-chain, especially the XP thing. We survived 22 sessions under its yoke, but I could feel my bloated house-rules coming apart at the scenes as it barely supported the story-game mode of play on it.

coins to XP is an elegant system IF you stick to the prescribed purpose of dungeons and dragons as a dungeon delver. This campaign departed far from those goals, but really made me think of the limitations I was working under. In short, I needed an OSR break to ponder what to do rules-wise upon my return. I dread subjecting players to a homebrew rulebook after the disasters of Wolf Moons's Nightmare Glog, but I think I have reached the point where 'BFRPG with houserules' is something I can only run if I return to very bare-bones 'delve the megadungeon!' campaigns, and even if I do that, I need to make a definititive houserules/setting primer document.

Anyway, I'm running and playing in Lancer games at the moment, and we'll see how long that phase lasts, and if I return to OSR immediately, or if my 'break' continues to run some storygames. However, even Lancer takes place in the same setting (after a fashion) so I hope to continue stacking layer upon layer of lore regardless of what the system is.

No proofreading, only post

Flightless Bird, Giant Frog, Frogfolk, Violet Fungi/Shriekers

 AD&D Flightless Bird- This entry refers to beasties like the ostirich, emu, dodo and similar, rather than the monstrous axebeak of more prehistoric or fantastical form. There is nothing particularly noteworthy about these creatures, and probably should have been a footnote in the axebeak entry. For all the thought given to selling other baby animals, I am surprised no 'market value' for ostriches is included.


AD&D Giant Frog
Giant frogs are mechanically interesting due to being probably the lowest HD monster that utilizes 'swallow whole' rules. They also are tactically distinct from many other monsters due to their unusual attack pattern, which is rather convoluted but I will attempt to summarize here.
1- Frog attacks with sticky tongue at +4 to hit but no damage
2- Those struck get an opportunity(though not a free attack I believe) to strike the tongue, which if struck, withdraws, and the frog will not expose its tongue to that target again.
3- If not struck, the tongued target is pulled to the frog and automatically takes maximum damage, assuming the weight is appropriate.

With regards to the load-bearing capacity of frog-tongues, the frogs come in 3 sizes- small 50 pounders dealing 1d3 damage, 150 pounders dealing 1d6, and big fat frogs dealing 2d4, with HD scaling up from 1-3 as weight increases
If you weigh more than the frog, the tongue-drawing in takes 3 rounds, giving an extra chance on round 2 to strike the tongue, and only taking the max-bite on round 3. If you weigh over twice the frog, you will not be dragged at all, and the frog will give up on the 3rd round.

The frogs also leap shorter horizontal distances (losing ~10% their normally twice-human movespeed leap) per 50 pounds of weight over 50lbs, and are terribly slow outside of their typical leaping. Seeing as how the frogs show up in numbers of 5d8, tracking all this seems like lunacy, but suffice it to say that if you flee from 5-40 giant frogs you will likely be unable to escape the smaller 1HD ones if they can hop, possibly able to escape the 2HD ones if you are unarmored/unburdened/unhindered by terrain, and probably able to flee the 3HD frogs if not too burdened once you realize they can't hop more than 45 degrees left or right without having to adjust their facing (this is true for all the frogs, but the smaller one's long jumps make them more difficult to evade).

Curiously, they can all hop an astounding 30 feet straight up regardless of weight, making them pretty good monsters to lurk in watery pits and moats to devour those who would cross.

As for the swallowing whole, they swallow small humans, elves, halflings, and similarly sized targets whole on a nat 20. I believe the frogs can bite without going through the tongue routine and so instantly gobble someone up, but it is unclear if this should be expanded to include nat20 tongue hits resulting in swallowing rather than biting. Those swallowed have 3 chances (Which I believe, given the wording of the tongue effect is 3 rounds) to cut themselves out with a sharp edged weapon and an attack roll of 18+, after which it is unclear if they are dead or simply unable to free themselves due to suffocation or crushing stomach muscles (as no mention of damage is made here but it is mentioned for creatures such as the purple worm, I would assume rescue from outside sources remains possible for a few minutes).
However, attempts to slay the frog that swallowed your friend menaces said friend, as attacks against such a frog have a 1/3 chance to harm the character within as well as the frog.

They are said to fear giant fish, turtles, snakes, and fire, and retreat when wounded.

Though admittedly the AD&D rules are rather convoluted and could be simplified, I think giant frogs having special rules makes them likely to be a memorable and interesting encounter compared to other 'beast' encounters with all the breaking tongue grapples, outmaneuvering hops, and occasionally maybe rescuing Frodo from a frog-stomach, and multiple ways to frighten them off are given as well.

There are also 'killer frogs' which are just small frogs with a weak claw-claw-bite routine and 1HD, and poison frogs which have poison skin secretions and bite with a +4 to the save. These variants are not as interesting and do not have much uniqueness going for them, alas.

AD&D Violet Fungi-
I find it interesting that D&D has a fair few monsters that resemble other monsters. Mimicry in nature is common enough, but it can sometimes feel a bit like a 'gotcha' moment in a fictitious play-space. However, for the most part I think it shakes things up and keeps the players from being too complacent upon encountering something they think they know, provided cautious players can ascertain the threat with investigation somehow.

More to the point, Violet Fungi are mimics of Shriekers found 75% of the time with these companions, which are slow, ambulatory giant fungus that shriek when disturbed by light or movement. As this makes them, essentially, living alarms for dungeon environments, players frequently may wish to disable Shriekers if they deem the risk of noise now is worth removing the risk of noise later, but rushing in to chop them up will expose one to the Violet Fungi. Violet Fungi flail with 1-4 tentacles that rot flesh upon hit (requiring Cure Disease or a save vs poison to resist) and so, while easily dispatched with range, are a menace in melee. (Though unclear what 'rot flesh' actually means, it mentions this occurs in a single round, and since the other mentions of Rot in AD&D refer to Mummy Rot or the Periapt of Foul Rotting, both of which are lethal eventually, I believe this is intended to be a 'save or die' effect)

A mildly interesting note is that 3.5 makes shriekers stationary, and only violet fungi ambulatory.


Sunset Realm Flightless Birds- Birds that have wings but do not fly are exempt from the pecking order hierarchy of the other birds. Legends have it that they descended from a mighty ancestor bird who flew into the night sky to steal the stars, but upon discovering what they were, learned fear and humility and returned to earth and swore never to challenge the high howling darkness again. In Saresaren court politics, someone who is willfully blind to opportunities to further ambition is sometimes called an ostrich, a creature apart from the game of lion and gazelle.

Sunset Realm Giant Frogs
Basically anything can grow to giant size for various reasons, and frogs are no exception. Frogs lost the war against snakes in ancient times, but survived complete extermination by developing their legless tadpole stage to hide from the leg-detecting servants of Yg until they had grown into size and experience. This metamorphosis came with a cost, however, their mutable forms becoming steeped with the powers of Chaos and their god Zaba becoming known as a demon-god instead of simply an animal god due to developing strange and unnatural powers that some wizards who do not mind becoming froggy use for their own ends.

Now that the Serpent Empire is no more, frogs need not hide from all the world, and they grow fat and greedy and think themselves mighty once more and, though snakes are notorious gluttons, frogs are known for biting off more than they can chew.

Zaba, lord of frogs, was lounging in the swamp when one of his children came to visit. "Lord Zaba, I have seen a creature even greater than you!"
"Impossible" replied Zaba. "I am the fattest in all the land. None can match my breadth, my depth, my girth. And if they try, I can do this." And Zaba sucked in air to make himself even larger than his already considerable bulk.
"No, Lord Zaba, the beast stood high on four legs, and higher still with two horns!"
Zaba was astonished, and blew himself up even huger. "Well, height isn't everything. You see I am surely broader than this beast now."
"No Lord Zaba, for the monster was wide and powerful enough to pull a cart!"
This alarmed Lord Zaba so he huffed and puffed and blew himself up till he more resembled a melon than frog. "How is this, then?"
"Alas, bigger, bigger still."
So Zaba gulped and inhaled air and swelled larger and larger, and finally said "I am sure I am the biggest now" at which point he exploded. Being a god, this was not the end of him, but as his children did not have the heart to tell him he was still smaller than an ox after all that, no lessons were learned.
-Rewriting of the Aesop's fable The Frog and the Ox

Thanks to Doctor Ogudugu's 10 step training program I went from 'frog on a log' to 'hog of the bog' in just 2 weeks! Click now to find out how

 

Sunset Realm Frog Folk
No doubt due to an excess of princes turned into frogs by bog witches, there are anthropomorphic frog-people in the Bog of the Canal, and have been for at least 3 solar ages. They are not well loved by Our Lady of Gardens, for she would turn them into humans, nor by Lord Zaba, who would turn them into frogs, but the Lord of Calamities, Murulu, has a liking for the hybrid froggy folk and as such they are always untouched by the marching mutant armies of the Calamitous Lord that must cross the Bog of the Canal to menace the Tripartite realm, and indeed the frogfolk sometimes join up to see the world beyond the bog.

While most of the frog folk are content to swim in the swamp, play catgut banjos, and live simple lives in their reed huts, they do have a higher organization of sorts born of the terror of intersolar periods- the Order of the Lantern. This order developed outfits to help keep their skin moist when traveling beyond the swamp and train their bodies and minds to battle against monsters that threaten the livelihood of the froggy bogfolk.

The Order of the Lantern enjoys the communal access to resources the frog-folk swear by and can expect to always have clothing, room and board, and travelling gear at least, but sometimes greater wealth is required, mainly to deal with the economies of humans. As such, the Order of the Lantern also has experience delving for treasure in the ancient Frog Kingdom ruins that have sunk into the swamp over centuries, dealing with ancient basilisks, demon-toads, frog-bog mummies, Zaba cultists and all manner of lingering and fresh horrors that enjoy the soggy ruins. As such, the occupation of 'adventurer' is not uncommon among the otherwise placid and prosaic bog folk.

Frog Folk must consume extra rations of water (up to 5 times normal) to keep themselves hydrated even with a wet suit (a hooded cloak and bandages wrapped around most their body) and feel a little fragile out of warm wetlands, whether it be too hot or too cold.

They cannot breathe water, but are powerful swimmers thanks to their webbed feet and hands, and assuming they grew up in the bog of the canal, a lifetime of swimming experience. Apart from that, they are largely identical to humans, just with a tendency to develop musculature more in the legs than the upper body and of course, green, spotted skin similar to a leopard frog. Some have very long tongues capable of catching flies, chicken drumsticks, etc, and all manner of similar froggish features (like the children being tadpole like, or poison skin) can be found in individual families thanks to the lingering chaos within all frog-kind.


Sunset Realm Violet Fungi
While I'm all for shriekers having hidden threats, I'm just not thrilled about 'tentacled flesh-rotting mushroom.' Something just doesn't click with me about that idea.. So here's a quick table of 'alternate threats to spice up shrieker encounters' in similar ways that Violet Fungi do.

1- Conquerer Worms- These brain parasite grubs hide in the whistling holes shriekers blow air through to shriek, and leap out to steal the bodies of those who come too close, and creatures drawn to the noise are likely being controlled by other worms.
2- Giant Centipedes- These poisonous vermin eat anything remotely edible, and scavenge those fallen in battles caused by the alarming shriekers, and protect the shriekers themselves in a territorial display that benefits both.
3- Cordyceps Shrieker- This subspecies of shrieker blows out spores along with its whistling that infest the living (or the undead, I suppose) and create fungal zombies who start out as living but diseased and deranged, but end up as corpses puppeted by shriekers bursting from the skull, until the corpse falls apart and the killer mushrooms wander off to start the cycle anew. Again, random encounters drawn by the noise are likely to be the infected.
4-Boomers- This subspecies of shrieker stops shrieking, closes off its whistle-pores, and bloats and swells with spores and gas until struck, at which point it detonates mightily. Exploding mushrooms are a D&D classic and it seems a more appropriate mushroomy threat.
5- Slimers- Some species of ooze could live inside a shrieker and flow out in a bubbling mess when the shrieker is disturbed.  Infested shriekers would look melty, wet, and be incapable of whistling, and grey oozes, green slime, or smaller ochre jellies could all be appropriate.
6- Mushroom Men- Appearing as just another giant mushroom wobblign around, upon getting nearer they reveal themselves to be the guardians of the shriekers, like a farmer to cattle, and they may strike with debilitating spores and poisoned weapons

Elves, Ettins, Floating Eyes, Eyes of the Deep

AD&D Elves
It's largely understood that D&D elves are a rip off of Tolkein elves, but I think they were well along becoming their own thing even in the earlier editions of D&D that were straight up calling halfling 'hobbits.'

Anyway, they have the typical hominid thing of appearing in numbers of 20-200, and they have 1+1 HD by default, a hobgoblin equivalent. Multiclassing is explicitly their thing, and not just magic-user fighters- Cleric-Fighter is the explicitly mentioned combo. Once you get to 100+ elves or a lair, a bunch of high level multiclassed elves show up, in the form of fighter/MUs mainly but also a fair few fighter/MU/Clerics. Female elves are mentioned as 'appearing in equivalent numbers to the others' and there being 1 young per 20 elves, because it wouldn't be a real gygaxian entry on humanoids without casual sexism and a reminder to kill all the children.

Elves are woodland dwellers with a 65% chance to have 2d6 giant eagles guarding their 'lair' which is probably just token tolkeinism. Gear for the warrior elves is 10% with sword and bow, 20% with sword and spear, 20% with sword, 5% with 2-handed sword, 30% with spear, and 15% with bow only, with most in chain-adjacent armors and shields. This may be extra relevant because all the 'levelled' elves have a 10% per level per class of having a usuable magical items for the class and MUs of above level 4 have 1d4+1 magic items instead of just one.
1/20 elf bands will have 5d6 female fighters (called elfmaids) mounted on unicorns so I guess spoke too soon earlier, sexism in D&D is dead and Gygax killed it on page 39 of the AD&D MM. Just like he killed all the demihuman younglings

As some minor mechanical notes, elves have +1 to hit with swords and bows, a 4-in-6 chance to surprise in woodland settings (and being invisible in such setting so long as they don't attack), and a 90% chance to resist sleep and charm. They can also move, fire their bows, and move back all in the same round, making them basically unbeatable with hit-and-run guerrilla warfare against conventional foes.

In addition to their scads of magic items, they have a decent treasure type of G, S, and T in lair, which is basically dragon hoard-lite with extra scrolls and potions, and elves carry the only worthwhile individual treasure type N, which is1-6 platinum pieces each. In short, elves are stuffed to the gills with magic loot and it's no surprise people oft use elves as stand-ins for old-money capitalists.

Bonus Subtype Round
Aquatic Elves are friends with dolphins and enemies to sahuagin and sharks and 'attack either if the elves outnumber them.' This is poorly thought out because while 'they(elves) do not use magic and cannot forge underwater,' the Sahuagin have 2+2HD by default, superior senses and intellect, 3-5 unarmed attacks, natural armored hides, and clerics, so I see no possible way they would survive if their strategy was to attack with such a feeble advantage as 'numbers.'
They also have blue or green hair and greeny silver skin, which should be useful when describing Sahuagin furniture.

Drow only got their own proper entry in the Fiend Folio, and here are just blathered on about being mysterious and wicked, with I assume all the spidery matriarch stuff showing up in later publications. As a brief note on that later entry, suffice it to say they have altogether too many abilities for my liking, having a bunch of magic items (which decay in sunlight to prevent ridiculous power creep) magic resistance, stealth, a bunch of magic abilities based on either gender and/or level AND class levels and abilities to keep track of on top of all that does not appeal greatly to me.

Grey elves, noted as 'faerie' in parentheses, are 'noble' 'rare' 'powerful' but apart from bigger brains and some giffons/hippogriffs, are not actually the fey beings seen in, say, A Midsummer Night's Dream. They're just double-elves with the oddly specicified sub-subtypes of silver hair and amber eyes (grey elf) or golden hair and violet eyes (Faerie).

Half-Elves (Or Helves if u ask me) are noted mainly in terms of how player characters play them.

Wood Elves are the dumb hunks of the elves, having extra strength but less intelligence and hang out with giant owls and lynx and have assorted pointless changes to weapon percentages and appearance.

While the Drow became wildly popular, there are some other sad elf subtypes in the later books I'll go over briefly-

Grugach- This pointless entry describes slightly buffer even more xenophobic Wood Elves who are also druids and trap-setters who make up 20% of 'wood elves'.

Valley Elf- The peak of pointless elvish palette swaps, these elves are gray elves from a Greyhawk location called the Valley of the Mage. With trivial improvements like AC4 instead of 5 and HD 1+2 instead of 1+1, it is impossible to say how many trees perished to bloat the Monster Manual II with this entirely unnecessary half-page of minutiae.

3.5 Elves
Largely a repeat of prior entries, with a sharp change in focus from the elves as 'band of humanoids to be encountered' to 'this is how your stats change if you play one as a character.' Apart from the drow entry being thankfully condensed and streamlined (though admittedly, also lacking in details), the only thing I find notable here is that Aquatic Elves are further doomed to become chum with a -2 intelligence score.

Ettin- See Giant entry later in this series. AD&D proclaims them to be closely related to Orcs, rather than just being two-headed giants, which is clearly a load of bunk that I shan't entertain a moment longer.

Floating Eye- In nethack, these creatures paralyze you when you smack 'em, and years later I'm still mad that I accidentally hit one while trying to clear out a monster zoo and was eaten by a lynx while paralyzed. In AD&D, they are weird monocular fish that paralyze you if you look at 'em and then you get eaten by predator fish companions. While I am not against 'paralyzing but weak eyeball monster' having them be wholly harmless (rather than, say, disgustingly parasitic) seems a lost opportunity, as does having them be a salt-water monster.

Eye of the Deep- A weird lobster-clawed aquatic beholder without the interesting facing-based magical death rays, instead just having a flashbang central eye and smaller eyes that can cast hold person or hold monster on their own, or an illusion together. I am curious as to whether anyone has ever used this creature instead of simply saying 'underwater beholder,' and what would motivate them to use the lobster knockoff instead of the classic.

Sunset Realm Elves

 
 I've gone over elves already a little bit here and have sat on this post so long I'll just rush through a quick history of elves in the realms.

Elves show up in the 2nd age around the fall of the Serpent Empire. They team up with animals and fight a horrifying war of fire and plague against the ghuls and dragons, eventually triumphing (this is where elvish immunity to ghul paralysis comes from). They then work with other early hominids(Svarts, Ningen) to create the Alfstar, the 3rd sun, in the intersolar period after Yg-A, the 2nd sun, is trapped at the center of the earth. Thusly situated, they laze around and stop being ash-clad muscle-barbarians and over centuries become jaded aesthete sorcerer-elites ruling over humans. Internal instability rises and the Witch-Queens overthrow the increasingly malevolent Alves, trapping them in the Iron Moon(the broken husk of the Alfstar) and forcing retreats to dream realms as humans gain dominance over the sunlit realms. Elves retreat to stagnant cities of silver and crystal to reincarnate endlessly through eternity, while the corrupted Alves scheme to regain their lost glory in culturally distinct ways depending on if they became the Seasonal Courts in the dreams of trees (Summer/Spring/Autumn) or ice (winter) or within the Iron Moon (Fomorians).

Quibbles over the details include whether the elves came from the outer darkness and are alien visitors, if they are just serpent-designed overengineered apes, or if they just developed alongside humans but 'won' the tech race, essentially being neanderthalesque.

Also in question is if the fall of the Elf Empire was really from civil war and an uprising of the human servant class, experimentation with darkness that retroactively altered those involved across space and time into hyperbolic fey A-holes (fay-holes?) explaining the Elf/Alf split, or if it was really just an embarassing economic collapse caused by an overeliance on fake leprechaun gold.

In any case, elves exist in part because it's expected. They're in the book, after all, not just in the monster section, but right there at the beginning, almost as sacred a cow as STR/DEX/CON/INT/WIS/CHA. Maybe they'll vanish from the realms someday like they never were, but for now, you can have a few elves. As a treat.

Beetles of Unusual Size

OG Giant Beetles
 I haven't heard much about the use of giant beetles. Of course there is the beloved fire beetle, that bioluminescent torch substitute found in many a low-level dungeon. I'm sure other people have used giant rhinocerous beetles as substitute mounts as well.

There are six varieties in the monster manual, and two more in the MMII

• Bombadier Beetle-a 2hd menace with a dangerous cloud of stunning and deafening acid and respectable numbers appearing. They would certainly make short work of any party that clustered tightly together.
• Boring Beetle- They are notable for actually having treasure, cultivating mold and fungi, and rumored to have a communal hive mind intelligence on par with a human brain.
• Fire Beetle- They have glowing glands behind the eyes and on the butt, they're basically armored orcs threat wise, they may be the first monster encountered for low level parties that signifies hey monster parts might be handy.
• Rhinocerous Beetle- Boasting 12hd and 2 attacks of 3d6 and 2d8, these giant beetles are straightforward jungle monsters.
• Stag Beetle-  At a mere 7hd, packs of these creatures are pretty similar statwise to harder-hitting, more sociable tigers.
• Water Beetle- hitting for 3d6, these 4hd critters serve all your needs, if your needs are 'I desperately want the players to fight a giant water beetle'
• Death Watch Beetle-Basically just a banshee scream stapled onto a not-very-dangerous (for 9hd, that is) beetle that does the death ticking from stealth. This smacks of the sort of save-or-die stuff that gives save-or-die such a bad rep, honestly. I'd like it more if it had something mythic going on, like 'these beetles are the hounds of Time that sally forth to count down the hours, and to fall on Time's sword at the end of the day, returning the hours of the day to their source and their master' Lord Dunsany style
• Slicer Beetle- Not as ridiculously tough and hard hitting as some of the other beetles, it nevertheless can chop off limbs on a 19-20. I like maiming over killing, and they come with a bonus mini-table on what wearing only one Boot of Levitation or one Gauntlet of Ogre Power will do, as their lair is decently likely to have magic gloves and boots bitten off and carried away by the beetle.

Beetles in general have several other features I find interesting- first off, while they are 'basically unintelligent and always hungry' they also taste things with their antennae of feeler before attacking things, on account of having poor vision and hearing, so despite being very dangerous, they're also pretty easy to just throw food at and leave, and won't be attacking people in surprise rounds, but rather will likely 'taste' them first to ascertain if you are edible. Hiding in a stone sarcophagus or whatever is probably enough to make beetles leave you alone. Heck, being clad in full plate might render you unpalatable if you don't aggravate the beetle.

What's really interesting is that, even for the lowly fire beetle, 'nothing actually eaten by giant beetles can be revived in any manner short of a wish.' To be fair, the real reason nobody got revived after they were eaten by fire beetles is because they were level one nobodies, but normally 'can only be revived by a wish' is reserved for stuff like soul destroying undead and so on. It is utterly hilarious to me to imagine some advertisement for a high temple filled with mighty priests who can turn back death itself!*
*Does not apply if you were eaten by beetles
Or for some undying monster to be all 'aww hell naw is that a beetle, nope, I'm out'

Anyway...

Sunset Realm Beetles
Yuba worships/fears the Beetle's Moon, which is a moon too lazy to fly that is instead rolled around by Great Scvabhat, a scarab the size of  a mountain that is revered as a goddess. Several historic cities have been crushed by the Beetle's Moon, but the moon has not been seen since the age of the 4th sun Riikhus. However, the 5th sun is not as bright, and Yuba is now back in the moonlands, and Great Scvabhat is prophesied to return someday and do battle with the Jackal God.

Giant beetles (usually of the smaller varieties) are popular in the Beast Islands as trainable beasts. They are strong, single-minded, and a good middle ground when it comes to being both intimidating and aesthetically pleasing, familiar to most but strange enough that it's easy to stay a little detached if they perish in battle.

Most giant beetles of the Daylands are of the Fire Beetle variety, and the dwarf-tunnels of the Mountains of Mercia are positively infested with the things, and are more popular than dogs as pets in the deep fortresses.

The exotically cosmopolitan city state of Oroboro boasts a great many exotic beetles due to its proximity to the Isle of Ebeth, and actually has the greatest academy for insect studies in the world. Their local subspecies of firebeetle can glow with the white light of their own souls, or hide in their own shadows as emitted darkness, are very popular both in the arena and as exports to the Beast Islands. Subspecies that eat wood and cultivate mold, and swimmers can be found beyond the Royal Gate of Oroboro, but adventurers who delve deep beyond the demon-infested gate typically are on specific missions from the Iron and Jewel-Crowned king rather than animal trapping missions.  A little north, the Insect Tribes ride huge rhinoceros beetles that occasionally serve as war beasts when tensions between them and Oroboro rise too high, and smaller beetles act as war dogs.


As for the Isle of Ebeth itself, the beetles there have grown more bipedal and intelligent due to feasting on the flesh of the self-sacrificing dragon god Ebetheron, whose bones are the island. Though the cult of Ebeth among humans is one of charity and giving, the insect cult views the gift of Ebetheron's corpse as one that was meant only for those who need it for sustenance, meaning that the humans who view dragon-god bones as a commodity rather than a food source are nothing but greedy thieves. To humans, the beetlefolk seem a united and jealously possessive force on the island, but this is incorrect. Beetles  are not eusocial insects like ants, and each decides their own rules to follow. Some attract smaller beetles as disciples, others walk their chosen paths alone. There are other insect-people on Ebeth (a hive of hyperintelligent brainwasp sorceresses are the chief foes of the beetlefolk) but the beetlefolk stand out to humans due to their adoption of blades, at first scavenged from adventurers, later forged by the beetles themselves to support various styles of 4-armed combat.

BEETLEFOLK RACE/CLASS
Saves, xp required, etc As fighter assuming the techniques are used, otherwise as whatever class they are. They make for better thieves than you might expect given their bulk on account of them being able to pose as barrels in low-light scenarios.

• May not wear armor besides shields, but they get +1 AC per level as they molt into thicker and harder shells.

• Four arms that have limited mobility and grasping finesse compared to a human. Each additional arm used on a separate weapon or shield incurs a -1 penalty to hit on all attacks, in addition to usual dual-wielding penalties.

• May fly short distances (10 ft per level), though this is quite noisy and tiring- each flight costs 1hp and alerts nearby beings/incurs a wandering monster check.

• Equally fast scuttling on all fours as they are on two legs, but are too heavy to climb walls or ropes (unless a thief) and commonly carry modular pole ladders in rough terrain. They are very inflexible and large and must take an entire round of nothing else to pass through a human sized door.
  
• Poor sight and hearing make them 3-in-6 likely to be surprised, and they cannot effectively use any form of ranged combat.

• Beetlefolk start with a simple code like 'I Feed the Hungry' or 'Duel Erry Day' that they follow, and can revise a code every even level, and must add a new code every odd level. These codes do not have moral reasoning or even emotion behind them, at least initially, and a session where the beetlefolk can both follow their code and engage in a discussion about their code and actions should give a small experience boost- like 100xp, or a 10% bonus, both to themselves and all who discussed it with them. Choosing not to follow a code results in no xp for the session. These codes are necessary to keep their divinely granted intellect- without this self-imposed mental discipline and self reflection, arbitrary as they seem, they revert to beasts that care only for food, and molt into an entirely beetle like form and become an NPC if their code is irrelevant and/or ignored for too long.

Beetlefolk codes apply only to their own conduct, not as prescriptive dictums addressed to 'society.' Their codes should always be framed as 'I Feed The Hungry,' not 'The hungry should be fed.' The codes are not an attempt to create behavioral standards for a greater good, or even necessarily a reflection of the beetles outlook on life. This can be very strange for humans, but perhaps enlightening for those who take the time to engage with the topic when, as a random example, a beetle decides to feed a hungry monster before slaying it. Was that act pointless? Kindness? Betrayal? What does your answer reveal about yourself?
Beetle Style Secret Techniques
Gained on even levels, either moving down from Four Sword or up from Zero Sword. Typical Secret Fighter Techniques can be learned as well, though in that case, whoever teaches them the technique will pick their next Code. Beetle techniques are not particularly subtle or complex and have more to do with physiology than training.

Stance of Four Swords- Equip four short, straight, slashing swords or daggers, used mainly for backhanded slashes and parrying. Though less flexible than modern human swordplay, the simple minded assault and multiple parries make it an effective style against soft targets, provided the beetle can wait for their foes to come to them (this stance is a stationary one). When using 4 sword style, 4 attacks, using an unmodified d20 roll and dealing an unmodified d6 damage on hit, can be made against frontal targets.

Pincer Two Swords- Wield two greatswords, ideally sharpened on an interior curve, used either in 'horn' style, with each pair of arms on each side gripping the sword to attack and defend each flank in a stationary stance, preventing flanking and allowing 2 attacks per round without dual-wielding or arm penalties (assuming the beetle has an enemy at each flank anyway), or hold the swords crossed and frontal in 'pincer' style, with them held crossways to assault someone in front of the beetle with a nigh-unblockable simultaneous assault high and low, left and right. Shields and similar parry attempts are useless in defending against Pincer Sword.

Lone Sword- A long, straight sword with a single cutting edge, the size of a pike. Only a four armed and large being such as a beetlefolk could wield such a weapon. The Lone Sword deals d20 damage, but takes an entire round to hoist back into attack position after each ponderous swing. Alternately, it may attack for d12 and not require a recovery round.

Half Shell- Shields provide no penalty to attack, and can defend the beetlefolk from the flanks as well as the front.

Zero Sword- Beetlefolk techniques may be made unarmed, each claw serving either as a shield or a d6 weapon, the beetle's wing-casings being used for d10 Pincer Swords, and their horn being used in brief fly-and-dive attacks for One Horn.

Apes, Gorilla and Carnivorous

OG APE
Apes, in this case gorillas, are basically bears, statwise, but with 'rending' instead of a 'bear hug' extra damage if both their unarmed attacks hit, and represent both normal gorillas, and mythical man-eater gorillas. Honestly there's not much more to say about them, other than they can provide a certain swords-and-sorcery vibe to use them as trained guards of some probably shirtless sorcerer in a desert tower.
GORILLA OF THE SUNSET REALM

The original mammalian bipeds of the realms, raised from the heat of Yg-A (like all animals) and the machinations of Yg in the volcanic jungles of ancient times. Intelligent but animal-souled and less prone to existential folly, they were prototype Elves, and indeed elves who have decided to live in the wild places of the world, forsaking their crystal castles and artificial glories, tend to get along quite well with any enclaves of gorillas they find.

But the Ape-Men once built ancient temples of their own, directed overtly or covertly by the greater Serpent Empire that the Apes were borne of, and though most modern gorillas do not recall that once they too had sorcerer kings and stone temples, the ruined temples of forgotten gods can be found in secluded archipelagos of the Beast Islands, and occasionally in monster-haunted jungles of the continental Moonlands. Though humans are ill-formed to use ancient copper gorilla arms and armor, their plus-sized jewelry is still quite tempting to treasure-seekers.

Eventually, the ape experiment was replaced by the serpent's experimentation with Elves, but then Yg-A, the second sun, the Dragon-Sun, fell into the earth and the Serpent Empire collapsed in the chillier climate. This marked the second intersolar period, where all the world was lit only by flame, for in those days moons feared dragons. The warm-blooded Elves arose and banded together with all the people of the earth in casting down the firewyrms, but quickly followed the footsteps(such as they are) of the Serpent Empire and created their own servants from ape-stock, while the rest of the gorillas, forgotten now by both their creators and their creator's creations, faded into obscurity and were content to live as exceptionally clever animals, civilization being more trouble than it's worth in the minds of most. But not all...

Bandar-Log-
The last civilization of tool-using, Common-speaking gorillas is hidden somewhere in the moonlands near Yuba and Saresare, wary of humans and uninvolved with their wars, but willing to trade for goods they cannot manufacture, sending elephant and rhino caravans laden with shiny baubles to trade for more practical items.  Martial arts schools emulating 'Gorilla-Palm' spring up among the humans, as well as knock-off branches overseen by mandrills (but more on them in the baboon post). One particularly tenacious rumor is that there is a ritual that transforms man to monkey, and that the silverbacks of Bandar-Log scheme to undo what they see as the corruption of humankind from their original forms... but then again, perhaps intruders to the secret land of the apes are simply imprisoned or slain to keep the place secret from the greed of men.

GORILLA AS RACE
Gorillas cannot throw things further than 10', and require most equipment to be special-fitted to them at great expenditure unless, of course, the market is in Bandar Log.
Unarmored, they have AC as leather+shield, and unarmed they can strike for d3/d3/d6 damage, making 3 attacks against the same target. Armed and armored, same as a human.

They must eat x20 the usual (vegetarian) rations as a human, gobbling fruits and vegetables nearly constantly, but if there is heavy vegetation in the area, they can survive off of shoots, leaves, and other vegetation. If there is only sparse or unfamiliar vegetation, such as temperate plains or forests in early spring or late autumn, perhaps half their requirements can be handled via foraging.

Despite being very strong, roll strength as usual- awkwardness in tool manipulation means unarmed is often more effective than armed combat for them, and they do not necessarily have the same endurance as a human when it comes to long weight hauling. However, for shorter feats of strength, a gorilla can move 100 pounds per point of strength it has.

They may sprint at twice the speed of an average human, but cannot keep this up for long-distance.

GORILLA AS CLASS
To hit, XP, saves, etc as fighter.

1-Bigger, Faster, and Stronger Too-
At level one, a Gorilla gets all the incredible abilities depicted above.
2-She Can Float Through The Air, And Climb Up Trees
May brachiate as per ground movement speed, and climb as a thief of equivalent level, but only on natural surfaces like cliffs and trees.

3-He Has No Style, He Has No Grace
A bit of humor usually goes over well with humans and you have the advantage of being apart from their social castes and standards of charisma- by causing a social faux pas or slapstick shenanigans, you may reroll a reaction check with no penalties or bonuses based on social class or charisma.

4-Back Again, And About Time Too
You may wander 'off-screen' once per session if not actively prevented from reaching an exit by some circumstance, and return at a dramatically appropriate time, having been off eating leaves or something.

5-Can Pick Up A Boulder, With Relative Ease
You may reroll your physical stats and HP and take the better results each level hereafter.

6+-Silverback
You attract 1d4+Cha Mod gorillas of various motivation, and another one every level. Reroll duplicates or replace them with new ones, or just go down from the top.
1- Suitor, considers you to be hot stuff and has a compatible personality to your own.
2- Hot-blooded rival attempting to one up you and become the new top banana, but has your back at the end of the day.
3- Worried relative trying to convince you to come back to Bandar Log.
4- Spunky younger gorilla (3hd) having the time of their life on an adventure. Thief abilities.
5-Lazy gorilla with magical powers, here for exotic fruits and comic relief.
6-Mutant gorilla cursed with meat-eating and other mutations. Dark past and brooding.

Svart Alf Dwarf Elf, Part 1

In the common parlance of the kingdoms of day in the sunset realms, dwarves are stubby but sturdy underground-dwelling folk, and elves are haughty and aloof tree-huggers with pointy ears. Both are rare and a bit weird, but not TOO different from humans at the end of the day.

That's because they are human-adjacent beings, on the borders of humanity but not removed. They mainly exist because they are in the BFRPG book and new players expect them to exist after reading through the book. I don't actively encourage players to play as elves, dwarves, or halflings, but the sky is broad enough to encompass them and I do take an approach where the setting has familiar starting points before it veers off into madness, so this is another lengthy setting document that will, alas, likely be far more useful to me than to you.

ELF-
If you want to play a cool beauty,

Or at least someone who thinks they're a cool beauty

mysterious and much better looking than the average medieval peasant, with keen senses and fast reflexes, elves are the go to. They have slow but efficient metabolisms, slight frames, and feel cool to the touch. Elves are cool-headed, and do not panic as humans do when caught between flight-or-flight adrenal crises. They do not sweat, and so to manage body heat they tend to rely on cool baths after the battle or race or whatever, which is often misinterpreted as them being obsessive about cleanliness. They barely age, due to a superior elemental contract where their bodies are not taxed as severely as humans are for hosting non-elemental souls, and instead of relying on any external being or collective religion to support an afterlife, their souls reincarnate into new (soulless) elf babies after said baby is washed in a Lunar Mirror, a name for a body of enchanted water from the days of the 3rd sun. It is questionable if new elf souls can even be created at this point, or if it's all recycling. Elf cities(what few remain in the age of the 5th sun) exist for the sole sake of fortifying these soul-pools and keeping their existence secret and safe, and ensuring that no elf finds themselves inadvertently drawn into the Iron Moon after death. Their cities also exist to identify reincarnated High Elves and either contain them, either creating an illusion of continued elvish superiority and world domination to keep the Alf distracted and happy, or keeping them in formidable prison-dungeons that human treasure hunters inaccurately identify as magical item vaults ripe for audacious heists. Elves who leave their cities often decide to do so out of disillusionment with their single-minded, isolationist societies, and are willing to risk death, or more specifically, willing to risk reincarnating into the Iron Moon, for the sake of their own lives, or perhaps for the sake of some ideology spawned within the elven city. Some have no city or Lunar Mirror, and live in the wild as hermits or loose tribal units, untethered, for better or worse, from the chill and stagnant glory of elvish civilization.

They can see in the dark, but only in the kingdoms of day where true darkness is far away. Many elves who enter the moonlands are shocked by this development and feel a closer kinship with humans when faced with truly alien life-forms, out there in the dark... though they can still see by starlight. They are immune to the paralyzing touch of ghouls and infection from the Grinning Plague, but willing cannibalism will cause them to develop into ghasts. They lose 1hp if they force themselves to touch or speak to something really ugly, and elves with positive charisma modifiers are a bit Alfish and lose 1hp when touching iron. They do not have stat limitations, as is standard for all species, but otherwise are read-as-written.

Half-Elves and Quarter-Elves and 'Oh yeah I'm totally one thirteenth Elf' people exist and though they have varying degrees of pointy ears, slender bones, and small pores, they only 'count as elven' to other elves if their souls are drawn to Lunar Mirrors, and then after their first reincarnation they'll be pure-strain elf, but with a human cultural background. Due to the whole reincarnation thing, elves don't really go in for hereditary inheritance, but aren't above hijacking human inheritances that way and replacing hothead human political leaders with more cool-headed (and pointy-eared) elvish ones if that would avoid war.

To human visitor(for humans are not allowed to live in elf cities), an elf city is quiet, clean, stable and beautiful, but also unsettling, like a museum of a city. Elves lost a very high-intensity war against the Witch-Queens or the High Alves(depending on whose side they took) two whole suns ago, and they are still worn out by it, still remembering the wild excesses of sorcerous combat and the exiling of the High Elves to the Iron Moon, still dealing with the occasional reincarnated High Elf megalomaniac. Humans have forgotten, and elves have forgiven(not the megalomaniac high elves tho), and so the elves remain isolationist, keeping birth rates staggeringly low and carefully managing their environment to serve them in case of further calamity. Any conflict that would require mass mobilization is a conflict they will quietly defer from, and those who press the conflict to their gates will be met with a hail of elf-shot heavy enough to dissuade all but the stupidest would-be conquerors, and kill the stupid ones outright. Most Elves would prefer to simply outlive mortal problems while they concentrate on the eternal problems of the corrupted High Elves and the cycle of Suns and Moons.

DWARF- 

not gonna lie I included this mainly for that lovely cartoony donkey

If being ashort, wide, gruff, grizzled, no-nonsense human just isn't good enough, there are dwarves. They hail from the mountains of Mercia, and have long held a relationship with humans as a societal bedrock, where their long lives temper ambition from corrupting their tenets (at least on a human timescale) and dwarf society provides a constant backdrop to the roiling strife and eternal war of human society. Nigh-unassailable cavern fortresses, open to humanity in times of peace and locked implacably shut in times of war, retain vast stone libraries of information and hoards of goods and materials, the carefully curated and chosen contents offered out piecemeal to humans. There are two main pieces of tech the dwarves work to keep a monopoly on- clockwork, and gunpowder. Saresare, the perpetual rival of Mercia, has no dwarves, and as such Saresaren alchemists have developed gunpowder and dwarves have not been able to suppress the proliferation of the technology outside of Mercia.

Dwarves tend to be impatient with humans, and you must realize, from the point of view of a single dwarf(though not quite as immortal as elves, dwarves mostly just get rockier, not decrepit with age), humans are a gibbering horde of morons who undermine their own efforts constantly and are too short-lived to learn valuable lessons or ever truly master a profession. Unlike elves, who are typically isolationist and willfully ignorant of human society, a dwarf will see every step of their social engineering efforts wasted as crowns pass innumerable hands until they are sold as curios from a dead nation, a nation a dwarf probably outlived. Nonetheless, they soldier on, trying to forge the bad iron of humanity into a straight bar of steel, for the kingdoms of day are human-dominated, and for all their faults, humans are easier to get along with than the madness of the moonlands or the deep, dark earth. Some dwarves resent this simultaneously patronizing but servile role in relation to Mercian human society and leave, while dwarves who try to stay but do not conform to the rigid life in the underground are banished.

While humans surge and fall like the tide, dwarf society is crumbling from the bottom up, the darkness of the deep earth gnawing at their roots as it did their progenitors. Their subterranean cities tend to be half abandoned, with forgotten dangers in the lower levels that have been festering since the days when elves ruled the world. This is not well known to outsiders, but it is not a secret, it simply isn't talked about outside of grim and impossible quests to reclaim the lower levels from the dark. The dwarves are, so to speak, caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to choosing whether to live above the ground or below it, unable to shape human society to their satisfaction but lacking the ability to stand against the deep dark forever.

Dwarves do not technically see in the dark. They love fire, and glowing bugs, and eerie phosphorescent mushrooms, but in the absence of these things, they learn to navigate like bats via echoes of clicking tongues or tapping picks, callused but exquisitely sensitive hands tracing the stone, and to fight like this, though they prefer to have flame. This does not work well except in enclosed spaces. Dwarves do not like weapons- a tool that can only be used to kill is a tool that is a waste of space and iron 99% of the time. Dwarves also do not like ranged weapons- their subterranean hunts are very different from chasing a deer through thickets in the wilderness, and in the close quarters of the underground, even throwing weapons are a risky business. What a dwarf does like is a good trap. Bear traps, deadfalls, nooses and snares, caltrops. All very easy to set up with a bit of time and an almost assured path the enemy must travel. They can even automate and time traps with their clockwork contraptions ticking away in the darkness. Dwarves name their gear that they've had for more than one session out of a combination of code-efficiency and sentimental hoarder attachment, and lose 1hp if they lose a named piece of equipment.

This is not a dwarf city. A dwarf city looks like the inside of a very cramped dungeon room with some dwarf-runes informing you whose house/workstation you're inside, because dwarves don't have empty space for the sake of empty space.

To a human visitor, a Dwarf city is cramped, smoky, undersized, and impossible to navigate naturally. They are often given lodgings in a large cavern to give them a break from the claustrophobia, and,are rarely told that caverns are weak points in dwarf defenses, bubbles of old chaos in the earth, at odds with an orderly and regimented maze of tunnels. The only thing a human visitor is likely to enjoy are the mysterious mechanisms(usually clockwork) that pump water, move elevators, and keep air circulating. These mechanisms are also commonly retrofitted into deadly traps if the fortress is compromised.

HALFLINGS-
The Beast Islands have little people living on them. They are the most like humans, simply shorter and more resistant to exotic ailments that are so common on the Beast Islands. Humans believe they shrunk to fit their small islands like the pygmy beasts and minimals so often found on the islands, while halflings believe it is humans who grew huge and clumsy when they found their way to the mainland from some lost island home in forgotten times. Some halflings adhering to this theory often call humans 'hugemans.' It is patently obvious to halflings and dwarves that they have nothing in common, though ignorant humans may confuse the two.
If you're playing as a human child, you may as well just use the halfling 'race.' The only difference is that you won't have any island-specific traits that a halfling would (low-light vision out to 30' being a common trait of Moonlander halflings).

Apart from a tendency towards individual halfling islands being a pastiche of whatever form of government I've read about most recently, I pretty much treat halflings as humans, just with frayed nerves from everything being bigger than they.

ALF

no, not this

True/High Elves, or Alfs, or Fey, have souls derived from the nameless and forgotten First Sun, self modified via the sorcerous Third Sun that begat the lesser Elves, then warped by exposure to a mote of True Darkness that brought about the end of their world-spanning civilization, combined with the revolt of the 'lesser bipeds.' Elven ruins scatter the moonlands, filled with bizarre wonders and terrors and things you recognize from legends only in how they aren't like the legends after all.

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You can think of them as Elves+, beautiful enough to make people go blind, more graceful than a cat, able to pick up a spell after seeing it cast once, with dance moves for combat and an unbridgeable cultural gap between them and mortal races. 99.9% of them are sealed away in the rusting hulk of the Iron Moon, where they plot escape and create new servitor races in the crumbling darkness. Each one is like elf Lex Luthor or something, hardly a unified species, just a bunch of immortal supervillains all nursing old, old grudges.

Unable to produce new elven souls after the Iron Moon debacle, they have swelled their ranks with the Fey, servitor creatures spun out of shadow and dream that are better suited for escaping the Moon. Fairies are actually spells. Goblins have no name, and their shapes are ill-defined save for being wretched, humanoid, and shadowy. If they can steal a name, they'll become much more real and human. Hmmm, best not to think too hard on that, eh? Moving on to Ogres, the muscle of the bunch, you get tough bastards who can turn into anything they've eaten, of a size of anything they've eaten. It's these 3 types of Fey you see most commonly in the trenches and ravines the massive chain of the Iron Moon digs into the earth as it wanders the sky, trying their dimwitted best to usurp the realms of men and usher back in the age of the Elves.

SVART
The original Dwarves, or Svarts, have souls indirectly derived from Yg-A, the undersun, and an accompanying greed that cements their true nature as dragon-kin. They are stone statues with bellies of fire, and must work constantly to balance the composition of their forms with the nature of the flame within, lest they hatch into a Dragon, or fade away into a lifeless statue (or more disturbingly for delvers in the Veins of the Earth, an almost lifeless and very hungry statue). They eat gems and gold and ore to gain experience, and flammable materials (especially alcohol) to fuel their inner flames. They also can devour light itself to fuel those flames, either from torches or souls. Their civilization is a thousand years broken, their deep ruins haunted by Grues and worse, their people lapsed into quiet dormancy. The last two great works of the Svarts were the Iron Moon, to contain the madness the Alfs fell to, and the Dwarves, who were instilled with soulfire of the 3rd sun, not the voracious 2nd Sun Yg-A, but not overcoming, their more fleshy sunlit forms. They fed upon light, but were consumed by darkness. Some are still born from the flaming wombs of the earth, stalactites dripping from the ceiling of magma chambers and forming a Svart instead of a Stalagmite. But they are born alone, and likely to succumb to the terrors of the deep earth before meeting another of their kind. Some Svarts live amongst Dwarves as semi-captive curios, each typically unaware of the other's true nature.

Preemptive link to Part II, in which I stop waffling on and on about ancient made up history and start waffling on and on about 'race as class' and possibly Ningen and Ghouls as well
Or maybe not, after all