Lore24 Week 10

12 Mar, 2024

This week I am once again leaning on my Lore24 Quick d20 Table to take off the burden of thinking of a prompt everyday for my Lore24 work on Sablevine.

This week, Sablevine gets knights in mecha, 4d8 golems, and I have a small rant about religion in TTRPGs!

Week 10

from Five Star Stories

Day 61

I was reading some of Knock! Issue 4 today and came across blog post/now article Elements of Incongruity by Joseph Manola. I decided to add this d36 (1d3, 1d6) roll to my NPC template.

Day 62

Today I'm feeling inspired to begin writing up the Imperial Cohorts. These were specialized troops serving on behalf of the gods of the Divine Empire but at the pleasure of the King, or Queen, of the Empire. They are figures of myth now, having been disbanded generations ago following a sordid and confused end to their legacy.

The gist of them is this: the Divine Empire settled and secured footholds in the unruly lands of the Continent¹ thanks to their potent, divine magick and the Cohorts. The Cohorts carved the bloody path and the priests came behind and quickly stood up cities with towering walls in their wake.

The Cohorts were each, originally, suited to hunting beasts in a given biome. The Sand Fellows, the Bloody Boggers, the Order of Sant Oskar², the Sharp Hawks³, the Imperial Expedition Squad, and the Royal Cohort each had storied histories of glory and mystery. The key to each Cohort's success across their dedicated terrain was their use of specialized equipment⁴.

An important footnote in the history of the Cohorts is that the original equipment of the Cohorts was decommissioned in the middle of their path from west to east, replacing the repurposed utilitarian suits secreted over on ships from the West with much-improved "armors" improved with the help of Dwarven crafters. Crucially, instead of destroying this equipment it was given to local Constabularies throughout the empire.

After they had cut a swath through much of the western Continent they came up against the impassable mountains of the east, abutting the Elven Empire. As the Cohorts struggled with idleness, the burgeoning Divine Empire was struggling with assimilation of its vast territories and maintaining centralized control over most of a Continent. Thus came the fateful decision to turn the Cohorts to quashing unrest within the Divine Empire. When these peacekeeping details began to turn bloody, the fiercely loyal Cohorts began to rebuke their missions or abdicate their positions entirely.

This spelled the beginning of the end for the Cohorts. A civil war briefly threatened as Cohorts chose their allegiances, but in the end the whole of the Cohorts were disbanded⁵ before this fighting could begin and potentially shatter the Empire.

Generations on now the exploits of the Cohorts are thoroughly enshrined in myth and rumor.

Day 63

Rolled an 8 - Add a new rumor to a random wiki page.

Added a merchant-turned-potter Ediah Olt to the entry on Bannora. He has all sorts of tall tales, which are of course mostly true. This has yielded us some rumors on a strange group of mercenaries (an Imperial Cohort thought lost), a new town in the south⁶, and a pub in Bannora--the Green Stave Tavern.

Day 64

Another 8 - Add a new rumor to a random wiki page.

Ediah is spinning more tales. This time about a hidden court of a Beast God and how to find it.

Day 65

Seems I've spent my inspiration for the time being, so we're back to rolling. 15 - find inspiration.

What a nebulous entry! Who wrote this table??

Luckily, I still have Knock! Issue 4 to work most of the way through, and I haven't yet cracked open The Valley of Flowers.

Reading the Knock! article on 4d8 Golems has inspired me to make my own golems entries. These are not the same sort of historic golems you or I might know⁷. Golems in Sablevine are made for honored dwarves after they die so that they can continue their work, walking slabs of consecrated stone donning the Dwarf's own funeral mask.

4d8 Sablevine Golems

Day 66

I have brought over an old table on the Gods of the Divine Empire, now dead, once known as the Gods of the Folk. I have included this more for the sake of completion.

Rant time

I find most RPG pantheon lists stale and sort of missing the point. With hindsight we can look to a culture like then Greeks or the Roman Empire and tabulate a list of their 'polytheistic pantheon' but 1.) it was never so codified and static in the day-to-day lives OR over generations, 2.) each god would have their own cult and temple(s)--rarely would there be a singular temple to the "entire pantheon", and 3.) the importance of gods in an RPG, to players, is different than their importance in history and our real world. The influence of so-called Gods in an RPG should be:

1. Set Dressing and Theming: Example: the town of Anthalien boasts a temple to Miura. Their harvest festival is the largest for many miles and attracts so many visitors that folk are sleeping tents in fields. As you wander the streets, gaggles of children rush by all in a giggle. This one is less about the deity and more about the people and culture of the town.
2. Mechanical Benefit: pray at shrine in a certain way, get a certain boon. Resurrect a lost shrine to extend the benefit of the boon or to make it more accessible on the PCs' travels.
3. Patron/Quest Giver: if the god is "real" in your world, they should be able to be interacted with. They should give out quests, reward adventurers for recovering artifacts, etc. But because they are interactive they are also vulnerable. To me this is counter to the typical "cleric gets magic powers, don't know how or why, we think it's that god, better just keep praying". At that point the cleric is a lazier wizard.
4. Minor Faction: in my opinion this is more fun than the god as a quest-giver: make them real and physical via cults as minor factions. Example: the Pontifex of the temple to Belit-Sheri worries for her apprentice, who has not been seen since they left to seek a relic of the god, a legendary Runestone. What's the difference? Here these are real people, with real people quirks, virtues, and flaws, as a layer over an otherwise straightforward and (imo) stale "religion".

/Rant over

So I do not expect to ever give players a handout on the "Twelve Gods of the Divine Empire", as one would assign textbook reading in a classroom, but players may discover a few through natural play in the world, seeing their lingering effects on places, shrines, and people.

Day 67

The monsters created by the God of Terrors are each unique, but to players are a take on "standard" D&D monsters: The Goblin, The Orc, The Owlbear, The Kobold, The Ogre, The Beholder⁸, The Ooze, The (Purple) Worm, The Gargoyle, The Gnoll, The Troll. I just feel like these are way more evocative than "5d4 Kobolds". Familiar, but new, is a theme I'm going for with Sablevine and this helps reinforce it.

^{Last edited 2 months ago}

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