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Secret Santicorn: Cold Waste Encounters

I wrote this up for Secret Santicorn for Khajeet, whose original gift giver had to bow out.  Merry Hannukwanzimas, Khajeet!   Fafhrd was a barbarian from the cold north.  I only recall the vaguest bits of those books, but between that and having snow and ice at home four months of the year, here are some reforgings of those thoughts. Cold Environments When your party is venturing through temperatures around -20°C (that’s -4F°), even hiking in armor isn’t going to get you through those freezing nights.  The party’s going to need some really good gear.   Winged flyers, usually limited in load, do very poorly in these environments if they aren’t similar to their home terrain, because they can’t carry the load of insulating clothes. Survival Gear Clothes Sleeping Gear Effect Full Snow Gear (20 gp): waterproof boots, overcoat, cape, and cap if fully armored, add leggings and a tunic if not, and mitts, all insulated.  Outfits for people from such environment...
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Secret Santicorn: Stealing the Sitch

Prompt: Stealing situations from books, movies, and videogames for fun and profit. Movie: Inception:      The party has to get into someone’s mind and either remove, or harder still, implant a memory or idea there.  This will make them much easier to manipulate in the real world.     The characters have a limited macguffin to enter the mind of the target, and have to heist-like move through surrealistic situations, with a limited ability to impose their own visions, with the assistance of mundane “seed” objects that have a stronger persistence than the mindscape they are in.  These seed objects should provide a limited narrative control to the players, and for maximum effect should be things that they identify through research of the target, things that link to strong emotions and memories the target has associated with them. Movie: Dark City:      There is a device that lets its user extract memories as bodily fluids which they can then...

End of Times; or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Enjoy the Apocalypse

    This is post is for this month's  RPG Blog Carnival topic: End of Times  hosted on Advantage Arcana .  I'm going to examine the topic  Games that have to do with an imminent and/or ongoing Apocalypse , specifically causes of potential apocalypses, and what can be done about it, in broad brush strokes.      This is more about thinking about how to run these situations as a Game Master than it is about mechanics or specific details.

The Feast of the Winter Solstice

This is post is for this month's  RPG Blog Carnival topic: feasts and festivals hosted on Of Dice & Dragons .  This post covers a beggar's feast as part of the Feast of Winter Solstice. Feast of the Winter Solstice This feast is done on the evening of the longest night of the year, right before New Year's day.  During the day, people seek to pay off debts and settle grudges. Everyone also makes sure their fellows all have an invitation to a feast gathering, as it is believed those left out will easily invoke Hekate for a curse on those who have spurned them. The wise among the wealthy and powerful ensure a beggar's feast for the destitute and the sheltered, supplying good food and inviting the everyone in their area to make sure they have a place to socialize and make merry. In the evening, people gather for their feast. An hour before midnight, they take a good serving to a crossroad, and lay it out in honor of Hekate.  It is usually eaten by dogs.  If al...

Rifts (SWADE) - Terror on the Dark Frontier, sessions 2025-10-23

  Last session     October 23, 2025  In the morning, we all walk back to Tanky McTank face through the soaked terrain.  Despite taking about an hour to get to the mansion last night, we find it was only about a kilometer away. Shan's cousin is making breakfast when we arrive.  Midnight goes out on his own, hunting.  He comes back as we're finishing breakfast, and lets us know he's got a track on a slaver barge.  Tony asks them if they're good with staying with us while we hunt them.  Ardyn agrees, and asks if he can have one of our "mule" shotguns. It turns out Midnight & Tony have actually had brief encounters with them, and the rest of us have at least heard credible information about Splugorth. Ardyn and Paruuku bundle into Tanky's cabin, and we set off. Our survival/navigation/driving team of Midnight, Faith, and Shan all succeed on their rolls, and we get to position ourselves as we want to. We found the slaver barge near a ramshac...

Rifts (SWADE) - Terror on the Dark Frontier, sessions 2025-10-03 & 2025-10-17

  October 3, 2025 The  team was traveling north after a stop to repair Tanky McTankface, Shan's armored hospital on wheels, when we ran into a ley line storm. Our electronics mostly went to crud, so we hunkered down, with the mystically sensitive having bad headaches.  That's when we started hearing a woman or girl sobbing on our radio.  Not getting any responses to our hails, Tony suited up into his SAMAS, and the rest of the party dressed for the weather. Based on triangulation, we went in the direction of the signal, which seemed to be a hut on a hilltop. The going was slick, and we decided to go stealthily, so Tony waited until they breached and called him in psychically.  Faith and Midnight took the lead, breaking into the decrepit mansion, where they saw a woman of some sort torturing a young woman, with a young and scared man sitting a few feet away from them. As they burst in, about a dozen humanoids apparently made of worms, oozed out of the walls,...