Lore24 Week 9

03 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. If I start an entry with just a number, that's my d20 roll for the day.

This week we...

find a huge tree wherever you wander in the woods, then climb it! It'll help you escape the jaws of a pack of wolves that reach your shoulder standing.

learn what the Elves are whistling. Could your character learn these secrets? Honestly this entry sort of surprised me, in a good way!

Week 9

Day 53

3 - New Place. Optional: roll on the POI Table.

I don't think I need to roll this week. I can jump-start the Acropolis hinted at in the Empyrean Knights faction entry. I envision it as half faction HQ, half buried dungeons. This all takes place on one of the moons of the world, and the Acropolis itself started as a crashed expeditionary spacefaring vessel.

Day 54

7 - new situation or mechanics tie-in¹.

I think we'll go with a mechanics tie-in. By this I mean mechanics which reinforce the setting/theme/fiction with the players. A great example is the Dolmenwood camping rules:

Dolmenwood Player's Guide, 1/25/2024 preview version

They're nothing mind-blowing but they

1. emphasize a part of adventuring that is often glossed over
2. allow everyone to participate
3. impart the cozy feeling of huddling up around a fire against the cold of the woods by
4. giving bonuses to things like bringing a cooking pot or sharing story and song:

Dolmenwood Player's Guide, 1/25/2024 preview version

For Sablevine I want to emphasize that player characters are small fish in a big pond, and that the flora and fauna can and often do dwarf them (no pun intended).

We can adapt the climbing rules of Lowlife² for scaling humongous trees in just about any forest. I will look to the climbing rules for "walls" as close enough to tree trunks, add some new modifiers to climbing rolls, and keep fall damage.

To save space on this post I wrote up the rest in another post.

Day 55

Making good progress yesterday and today on:

1. Climbing rules for behemoth trees
2. Heights of forest canopies in Sablevine
3. Chances to find a given size of tree, and whether it is easy to climb
4. The size of monsters and creatures in Sablevine. More in another post, but I think a good rule of thumb is 3' per HD. This can be at the shoulder or at the head, whichever makes more sense for the given creature. That's right. Things are getting big! I have also been roughly sketching...
5. How to escape a given size of creature by climbing a tree, including if they can jump.

I feel like this exercise has been very helpful in putting nebulous thoughts about the world of Sablevine down to paper.

Day 56

2 - New Person (NPC, historical figure, deity)

I recently saw a post about a culture in Paris wherein people semi-permanently inhabit the Paris catacombs. Pantries, raves, libraries. People might not come out for days or weeks. The Elves express their experience of immortality in sadness, regret, and loss, so I'm inspired to give them extensive catacombs.

But for this entry I want to place a little guy in the catacombs. He will be a Llyfant (toad person) merchant living in the catacombs of an Elven region of Sablevine. Meet Binijita, Llyfanti merchant of the catacombs of Natsese, also known as Natseshita.

For those wondering, I am getting the d6666 NPC miens from d6666 Miens by Thriftomancer.

Day 57

6 - New Historic Event

The Battle of the Quiet Valley

A battle fought between the Divine Empire and the Elven Empire. Knowing where battle was to be met, hundreds of Elven spell weavers sowed dangerous traps beneath the very earth of a wide valley field. Their magicks, upon their command, would have: raised up towering dolmens, sending infantry flying and erecting barriers of sight for the skyborne archers atop their rafts; opened a maw into the earth, swallowing cavalry; and spring forth a fortification woven from thick, deep roots for the Elves to use as high ground.

None of this was to be, as the Divine Empire spies also knew of these preparations. Their Rune mages snuck to the perimeter of the valley in the nights and laid a large, but simple spell circle: silence.

Before the Elves could loose their whistles and set forth their machinations, the mages settles their quietude across the valley. Their advantage lost, the elves died by the score in complete silence and lost the day.

More importantly, for adventuring in the here and now, rumors say that valley still keeps the elven enchantments. One with knowledge of the proper Leitmotifs could spring the trap. Who knows what has become of the buried, root-woven fortress in the ensuing centuries?

Day 58

18 - New Magick

A companion to Elven Spell-songs are something called Leitmotifs. Spell-songs are powerful, often subtle magicks that nevertheless take time to build and weave. To an outsider, these sound like harmonious and haunting rounds sung by troupes of elves in a language both familiar yet indistinct³.

To call upon this cultural Magick in a pinch Elves use a trick called Leitmotifs (at least, so-called by the Folk). These sound closer to whistles or bird-calls. They allow an Elf, or learned Elf-friend, to reawaken deeply imbued Spell-songs.

Examples include: calling Spell-songs woven handholds out of the trunk of a tree, summoning a bonded mount from across leagues, or reminding an arrow in flight that it now echoes a song of seeking.

Day 59

8 - Random wiki page: new rumor

The random page button brought me to See Amcoed. I think there should be a way to run into this dwarf without taking a trip to the moon. Maybe he has a favorite dove bar he sneaks off to every month or so?

Day 60

Not going to roll today. Instead I'm going to capture the battle write-up I did earlier this week on the wiki. This yields: a historic event, a couple of rumors, and a new (secret) location.

Gustav Klimt

^{Last edited 2 months, 2 weeks ago}

Footnotes:

#Sablevine #lore24 #mechanics