The Forgotten Depths 1pg wilderness.

Once a seabed, now a tropical wilderness hidden away in the cold north. What secrets does it contain? What horrors of the dark and deep places remain, nurturing their unwholesome appetites, waiting for a chance to feed?


Anyway, one night about a month ago I was reading Warlord of Mars and, although there is no atmosphere plant in the story itself, there are references to the one Carter visited at the end of Under the Moons of Mars, which got me thinking about such things and how they might impact the landscape around them, which led to this-

One page wilderness hextravaganza... Metal Earth Style.
Get it here:
The Forgotten Depths

Note- there are no game stats with the hex descriptions, but I'm working on a short Metal Earth Critter Kodex (TM) that will give stats for all the varmints. Look for it soon; expect it later.
There is also a 1pg dungeon adventure in the works (it's pretty much done, I just need to redraw the map. It's called The Tower of the Changer, and is located in hex 0501 of the map above. I tried to get all three ready for the holidays, but it didn't work out.

I'll try to post one of the two over the next week or so.
Also, I have three new character classes in the works: Scout, Emissary and Slayer.

New Spell: Power Up

Power up
Spell Level: M1
Range: Touch
Duration: 1 min (1 charge)/ level:

The caster has the ability to power up any technological device such as an autonm, computer, raygun, or a electronic door.

The Changers

Sometimes science goes wrong- or worse yet, as in the case of the Changers, scientists go wrong. The Changers are a mysterious group of vivisectionists who delight in capturing creatures of all sorts and types and performing strange experiments upon them. Sometimes, they switch out hands for flippers, or give a beautiful maiden the head of an ant, or the stink of a decaying corpse. On other occasions, they release someone with virtually no physical changes, but with new and unwholesome appetites or manias. If it can be imagined, the Changers have likely done it to some unfortunate creature at one time or another.

Although they are based in the Southern Ruingulf on the island that bears their name, the Changers have access to large areas of the ME, because they understand the mostly unused network of Teleportation Pools and are accomplished at avoiding or negating the many dangers of the Between Sea. They delight in exploring new territory and collecting unique "specimens". No one can say what a Changer is likely to look like, because they have altered themselves as well.

Note- Posting should pick back up here shortly. I'm a grad student and this is a busy time in an especially crucial year.

Metal Earth Religion

Religion is fairly rare in most parts of the Metal Earth.
Why is this?
There are two things to keep in mind the age of the culture in question, and the means of food production.
Big organized religion comes in with agriculture- or possibly just sedentisim (In the upper paleolithic there were several areas of the world that were productive enough to support large sedentary population without the agriculture; for what is worth, these were mostly ecotones). In our world, and in many fantasy settings, agriculture has been around for a comparatively short period of time.

In the Metal Earth agriculture has been around a very long time (millions of years maybe) and, therefore, so has religion. However, in the Age of Lead (and for eons previous to it) agriculture takes place mostly underground and is controlled more by technology than by the rhythm of nature; this is pretty important, because it removes two important tools of control from the priestly arsenal- the knowledge necessary to facilitate agriculture is no longer tied to a calender and the sun, a big focal point worthy of worship, has also been removed from the equation.

Obviously, the importance and dominance of religion varies from culture to culture- and over time. Large disasters can really shake the foundations of religious (and secular) power. It's thought that this sort of power loss occurred during the Mayan "collapse"- and it certainly did occur after the black death in Europe. The Metal Earth is pretty much in perpetual state of disaster. Secular power is on the run, and religion has pretty much moved on without leaving a forwarding address.

Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, humans are nearly extinct, and are thought to be (through science, sorcery or evolution) the progenerators of all the other races. This undermines any belief in an all powerful/supernatural creator for most groups. The supernatural does exist, and is accepted as real, but it is hardly ever beneficial. Therefore, in most regions and cultures, faith has largely been replaced by a cynical sort of fatalism.

Which brings us to the topic of clerics. despite their rarity on the landscape, players should feel free to play clerics; Taarna from Heavy Metal is perhaps the archetype of a Metal Earth cleric- an ass kicking servant of a forgotten god.

Weather and related climatic hazards:

Climate varies a good across the breadth of the Metal Earth, but for millennia prior to the Wars of Unreason (The semi-mythical Age of Gold), there was a worldwide network of weather control stations. Powered by a combination of atomic and arcane energy, this station worked to homogenize climate conditions across the face of the entire world. The system was broken during the war, but normal patterns did not reassert themselves. Quite the opposite in fact- weather went wild- breaking and reshaping the world all at once. Efforts were made by sorcerers and scientists stop this from happening- but if they had any impact it was only to make things worse. Eventually, an ice age commenced- that has never really ended. It also but violent storms are common, which brought with it a modicum of climatic stability. This ice age has never really ended since that time, although there have been some slightly warmer periods. The time of the shattering is long over but extreme weather is more the norm than the exception. You are far more likely to get a blizzard than a light snowfall or a torrential downpour than a light rain, although mild weather is not completely uncommon in some microclimatic areas.

Beyond the extremity of most storms, the breaking of the weather control network and the resultant release of ungoverned arcane and atomic energies into the world’s climate system had other ongoing effects as well: Curse Squalls and Timestorms.

Timestorms:
Timestorms are not common, but they do occur with some frequency. Fortunately, most of them occur over water and are relatively if not always, harmless. Timestorms are usually preceded by the formation of dark cloud funnels, which are crisscrossed with purple cloud-to-cloud lightning, as the storm grows in intensity so to do the electrical activity. It is at the peak of the electrical activity that the storm really gets underway. Time vortex open up- sometimes one, sometimes one hundred or more, depending on the intensity of the storm. There are two kinds of Timestorms, takers and givers.
Takers: During a taker storm, things are sucked into the time vortexes and moved to a distant temporal location, past or future- it can go either way.
Givers: during a giver storm, things emerge from the time holes. What kinds of things? Just about fucking anything really, from dinosaurs to toasters to people.
Note: it is entirely possible to whisk a party of adventurers off into time during a taker storm; it is also possible to bring in a new PC (say a 20th century human into the Metal Earth with a giver storm.)


Curse Squalls:
Curse squalls (or storms), are far more common than Timestorms, and usually more dangerous. Curse storms look like normal rainstorms (albeit of an extremely violent nature, even for the Metal Earth) except the raindrops have faint green luminescence.
Anywhere curse rain falls horrible shit happens. Sometimes the dead rise from their graves (corpse burning is a near world wide custom due to this). Other times simple field crops mutate into horrible carnivorous plants. Good men caught out in the curse rain sometime turn completely evil. Other times the rain is like acid burning and destroying all it touches. Nobody can say what will happen for certain when the Curse Rain falls, but whatever it is it wont be good. Sometimes these effects last only until the rain dries, or until sunrise of the next day- other times they last forever.
The magical element Arcanum can help protect crops and many other things from the curse rain. Farmers often sprinkle small amounts onto their crops as they plant them, and it is also an integral ingredient in the brick making and construction in general. Arcanum is naturally occurring in many rock formations and can be mined. It isn’t debilitating expensive, but it isn’t cheap either, though. Because of this, despite the dangers sometimes corners are cut- with predictably disastrous results, such as buildings turning into huge carnivorous stone monsters.

War Worm
AC: 5
Hit Dice 3
Special: See Below
Move: 12
XP: 75
War Worms came to the Metal Earth thousands of years ago as part of a failed invasion from beyond the Dark Boundary (entry forthcoming). The invasion was broken, but many War Worms were trapped on the Metal Earth as a result. In the current day (The Age of Lead), most War Worms serve as mercenaries for evil sorcerers or live as bandits or pirates. Although, they do at times, maintain their own settlements, these usually occupy ruins or villages they have overrun. War Worms make nothing but war. Like the other Worms of the Metal Earth, they eat anything they can get.

Physically they are about five meters in length with putrid grey boil ridden hide. They fight with any available weapon, but their jagged teeth will do in a pinch.

Special: Some war warms still possess the technological weapons their forebears brought to the Metal Earth. These are usually solar powered blasters. These weapons can fire 3 times a day, they do 1d6 damage and negate all non magical/ technological armor types and have a +5 hit against creatures with natural armor- like scales . this last part may create a need for referee adjudication. The to hit bonus should not be in effect against creatures that get their AC primarily from dextarity, like monkeys or big cats.

What I really need to do is come up with a system for dealing with technological weapons vs. archaic armor.

Campaign Two, session 1

First a little background: The Metal Earth has been cooking for years under a variety of names. I finally settled on this name because I was reading a lot of old Richard Corben (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Corben) comics in Heavy Metal (which lead to me watching the movie again- especially the Den and Taarna sequences) when I started to work on this version in 2006. Also I liked the pun.
So anyway, the world has seen some use with at least three different sets of rules: in it's earliest form I used a homebrew, later we tried to adapt Earthdawn to it, but I can't look at those rules without thinking of the setting that is built into them (maybe because it's mentioned about once every five words). The longest game, which took place in the setting pretty much as it stands now, used True20. We'll call that Campaign 1. What we're doing now is Campaign 2 and I'm using Swords and Wizardry, white box.
I'm playing with my two sons who are six and eight years of age. Kids, as it turns out, have no trouble with settings like this one (obviously I'm toning down the Corben influence a little- no weird giant penis bugs, or over-endowed nude pseudo-Aztec princesses, which kind of hurts, really).
The two pc's are an "Army Man" named Sergent Jack, and an amphibian mutant guy known as "The Unknown Warrior" (TUW). They both work for the 21st century US government, and TUW is a product of government experiments. The two of them have been sent into the future to capture something known as the Sonic Cyborg Arm.
By the way, I'm doing a couple of things that are new to me here , I'm playing with kids- which means no chemical enhancement and not so much description of the splatter, obviously; I'm using S&W; and we're playing Jeff Rient's megadungeon Under Xylarthen's Tower- marking the first time I've ever (in 30+ years of gaming) used an adventure I didn't write myself.

So here we go.

After leaving their time machine, Jack and TUW find themselves on a bleak and blasted plain under a darkening sky. A ruin-covered low hilltop looms in the near distance and the black line of a mountain range can be seen on the eastern horizon. Reports from other Temporal agents have placed the Sonic Cyborg Arm in an underground complex beneath a ruined tower. The adventures decide to climb the hill and check out the ruins.
Searching around in the ruins they find a staircase leading down. The stair ends in a dusty old corridor. Turning on their flashlights they set out to explore the place. walking down the corridor they pass through a t- intersection, but keep on in their original direction.
The corridor ends in a door; TUW opens it, and together, the warriors enter a half collapsed room. Suddenly a giant snake rears up from the rubble- and strikes! A fierce battle takes ensues. Sgt. Jack is caught up in the snakes coils, but TUW draws his vibroblade (which does, 1d6 damage just like everything else, btw) and hacks at the snake. Jack draws a pocket knife and attacks it as well. In no time at all the snake is defeated.
The victors search the rubble.
They find some gold and silver pieces which TUW puts into his bag
The room has several doors, but they pass these up to go back out the way they came in. Once back out in the corridor, they return to the t- intersection. This time they go left and come to another door. TUW pushes this one open. Entering into the room the pair is confronted by a huge ogre. He shouts something unintelligible at them, and- they attack! They both get banged up this time, but are ultimately victorious. The room has two doors besides the one which they came in, one to the north and another to the south. They select the southern door. It has staircase leading down, and that's where we'll leave them for now.