The Knights of East Lake

 
This is a lore post and a sequel to my post on The Red Iron Horde.  You can check that out for more context. 

To catch you up quickly: 

 The Red Iron Horde is composed of thinking machines from a bygone age of technological wizardry. When that time reached a cataclysmic end (as they tend to) its machine servants became a semi nomadic army, scavenging the bad lands for metals and other materials needed to maintain themselves. They're very fanatical about it and travelers along the edge of Red Iron territory will often divest themselves of any metal before setting out.  

The Red Iron Horde posed an existential threat to the southern kingdoms. Flesh and blood soldiers couldn't hope to win in a war of attrition with self repairing machines. It was this reality that lead to the creation of...

 The Knights of East Lake

The knights are a martial order dedicated to containing The Red Iron Horde and other remnants of the old world. 

 They're also all undead. 

They're not this big though - just a sketch I had lying around

Just as the machines of the horde pick over the battlefield for scraps to refresh their numbers the Knights of East Lake are able to resurrect their fallen soldiers. This has helped them create a bulwark between the machines and the softer, living lands to the south. 

The knights operate independently of the various kingdoms and stay out of any disputes between them. However it isn't uncommon to see silent, visored members of the order in southern cities or encounter masked attache's from Fort East Lake in southern courts. 

Of course the most common form the order's presence takes in most places is the local branch of The East Lake Trust. 

The East Lake Trust 

In addition to being vigilant guardians of the realm, The Knights of East Lake are the region's predominant financial institution. 

Via The East Lake Trust, nobles, merchants, and common folk have ready access to cheap loans. The terms are very reasonable with every point of interest payable with a commitment of time, to be served in the East Lake legions upon the borrower's death.  

In this way the southern kingdoms have ready access to capital and the Knights maintain a steady flow of new recruits. 

Account manager's understand how to negotiate loan conditions with tact and often have a rotation of masks somewhere in their office, allowing them to select a visage that will put clients most at ease. 
As they will tell you, the prospect of a decade or two facing the Red Iron Horde needn't put you off making a sizeable investment in your future. In most cases, the degree of consciousness required to serve on the front lines is minimal and the Knights of East lake are nothing if not frugal in their use of animating essences.

 Families of account holders can be reassured that The Knights of East Lake are appropriately reverential of their loved ones remains and would never do anything to jeopardise the immortal soul of any recruit. It is precisely for this reason that they maintain a strict monopoly on all means of reanimation in the southern kingdoms - a monopoly they defend by hunting down any unscrupulous freelancers with extreme prejudice.

Keeping Things Dry

The East Lake, High Marshall's take a very dim view of any unregulated messing with the veil. Of particular concern for them is the possibility of any contagious forms of un-death. Vampirism and ghouldom are abominations that must be stamped out whenever they're encountered. 

The problem, as the High Marshall's see it, is all the messy, fleshy-ness of these conditions. Mortal flesh is full of corrupting appetites and humors. Conditions that achieve a sort of organic immortality are volatile and dangerous. To better carry out their long service in a state of selfless, rational, duty the knights aspire to a level of asceticism they casually refer to as 'bone dry'. Often new recruits will be described as 'needing to dry out a bit'. Inversely if a Knight starts describing things in terms of being 'damp' it indicates disapproval and should they start using words like 'sodden' or 'saturated' there's a chance someone is about to be executed as a heretic.  

                                                                                                               

 Ok, there's my second ever lore post. 

I feel I need to acknowledge 'this amazing post' by Arnold K here as it was something that got me thinking about 'mechanised undeath'. Arnold's descriptions in that post are really great and if you liked this at all chances are you'll love The Runied City of Braxa.     

The Theatre of Bones

I've made another adventure! 

You can order a physical copy and PDF from Cairn Press HERE 

Or you can get a PDF from my itch HERE 

Fellow Australians (and others) may notice the shipping is pretty steep at the moment. I believe other distribution options are on the way. I'll update this blog as they become available. 

So what's it about?

In The Theatre of Bones players explore an underground/underworld theatre full of skeletons. 

The skeletons are there to see the show (or perform in it) and the party are there to find a lost adventurer, or end a curse, or possibly stop the Skeleton Queen's un-ssassination. 

If a design process is the kind of the thing that interests you and you're not planning on being a player in this adventure anytime soon, I unpack a bit of how I went about making it below.

SPOILERS AHEAD!   

How I went about making this dungeon:

This started as an attempt to make a quick dungeon for an itch jam. I can't find the original jam page because I left it when it became apparent that this project was ballooning outwards and wouldn't be anywhere near done in time. For a title I rolled on a dungeon name generator I made years ago and got, "The Hidden Theatre of Bones". 

As the focus of the original jam was DIY art, I was focused on sketching out the dungeon first. So I googled some cross sections of The Globe theatre and began trying to map it out. 

Developmental sketch based on Shakespeare's Globe Theatre

 

I often let my drawing lead the design process: rooms come into being because that's where there's space for a room, a squiggle suggests a detail or a monster and so I resolve it into one etc. Eventually I turn things sideways, at which point I know I've committed to a double page spread and some kind of zine similar to my last project.

 

Work in progress - rooms and details are becoming more distinct  At the same time as building the map I was busy populating it with NPC's and different threads. I find it can be fruitful to merge two broad themes and then riff on those in combination. In this case I had Elizabethan theatre meets the undead. I find it easier to work with stuff when it's visual so I a built a relationship map in parallel with the dungeon map:  NPC relationship map

I thought of including a polished version of this relationship map in the adventure, but it was competing for space with a Dramatis Personae (which felt more on theme). In the end I opted for deeper written descriptions of characters, to paint a slightly fuller picture of them, over a tool to clarify the interconnections between characters. 

It was around this time that the, We Read The Bloggies, project was happening and Sean Mcoy's blog post about writing rooms in pairs (with related content in them), had me revisiting both my Dungeon map and my NPC map to ensure the characters and places were nicely enmeshed. I love dungeon ecology - thinking of this imaginary space as a living, moving thing. To that end, in addition to having rooms relate to other rooms, I like to ensure everything on the encounter table connects to a place, person or quest thread in the dungeon. The hope is that these encounters push, pull and point players towards undiscovered elements of the adventure. 

 

 Things start taking shape 

As I work through the details and run play tests, I continue drawing the map. Each time a group goes through the theatre I make adjustments to iron out issues and hopefully make engaging with the dungeon easier (for players not PC's). I'm working digitally so it's relatively easy to swap ideas in and out. By the end I have a map that looks like this:

Changes that emerged through play testing were:

- A prologue section so that PC's could gather info on what they were walking into. Being confronted by a 9ft demon straight away really intimidated my first group.

 

- A second tunnel from the starting area down to the underground forest. I like that area and it has some fun tools to help the party explore. However it was getting missed, because of the interactive elements in front of it. I didn't want to force parties to interact with it but I did want it to be a little easier to end up there. 

- A secret passage to The Play of The Dead. I felt the dungeon needed a big treasure and also more out of the way places to create some space and reward exploration. 

- Making the Queen and her consort harder to reach by making a royal box with guards at the stairs (seems obvious but sometimes you ignore the obvious stuff at first). 

 

- Making the Crones kinda friendly: There's so much stuff to 'repel' the players in the dungeon (demonic bouncers, locked doors, cagey conspirators). I needed something that said 'come here' rather than 'go away'. The witches could fill that role by being on the look out for outsiders to help prevent Lacrimosa's un-ssassination and then their entry on the encounter table (a floating. eyeball) could point the party in helpful directions (like the fairy in Zelda games). 

Getting help

 I had a lot of help as I fleshed out the Theatre and its occupants. Each of my playtesters had great advice to offer and other friends and family helped me weed out typos and asked important questions. 

Eventually I had a PDF I was ready to show someone beyond my immediate circle of friends. 

Yochai Gal had expressed an interest in seeing what I was working on and we got talking about the possibility of publishing through Cairn Press. 

 

I want to say here that it's really great that Yochai is out there doing what he's doing. He seems to have a LOT of drive and energy to create momentum for Cairn and a commitment to supporting independent artists and adventure writers as part of that. There seems to be a vibe in the NSR/Cairn ecosystem of open minded collaboration and a lack of insularity and gate-keeping and that's a very good thing. 

After chatting with Yochai, I made some changes in line with his input.

- I changed the title, dropping the 'Hidden' 

- I reworked the 'Break The Curse' hook so it better foreshadowed the Witches. 
- I reworked the prologue a bit to make the path into the dungeon less linear. The upshot of this was that I got to add a giant mud skipper eating a zombie. 

 

Through Cairn Press I also worked with Yossi Krausz as a copy editor who helped polish the wording and the final details. It was invaluable having Yossi poke at my phrasing to ensure that the adventure was as clear as it could be.  

 

Oh I almost forgot! 

 

The biggest change I made after talking with Yochai was that I shifted the whole project from Canva to Affinity. The end result is better for it but this was a minor nightmare, with missing fonts and eldritch kerning issues that drove me up the wall. If you don't know what kerning is, don't worry, neither did I (but now I wake up screaming it at 3am). The biggest issue in the switch was that, across all 40 pages of the document, each line of text was split into individual text boxes. I had to go through and cut and paste them all back together one at a time. I'm sure there's some professional affinity users out there thinking 'that's easy to fix'. Well, where were you when I needed you? 

 

I don't share this to complain. More to point out that, in my experience, any creative project puts you on a collision course with your own limitations. That the path between a vision and its execution runs through a thorny morass of incompetence before reaching a more solid footing on the other side. Thankfully I seem to be able to get excited enough by an idea to charge off naively each time thinking I'm equipped before finding out I'm not and having to do the learning as I go. The OSR adventure writing sphere can be intimidating, populated as it is with professional designers, illustrators, and writers but I think it is mostly built on an ethic of hacking away in the weeds rather than gliding above them.  

What's next? 

Now that The Theatre of Bones is out there I'm turning back to a larger dungeon idea I've been tinkering with. I want to make something that's a little more classically dungeon crawly, with mastery of the environment being the key to surviving and progressing. I hope it will have more of the 'empty rooms and poking things' feel of classic dungeons. My last two modules have been full of NPC's and highly interactive on that front. I'd like this one to feel more spacious and focused on exploration. 

I'd also like to try and develop a small, ticking clock, tournament style offering partially inspired by Pokemon.  

I'll post about those when they become a thing. 


 
 

 

 

 

The Red Iron Horde.

 

Everyone knows about The God Kings - how they built glittering towers that pierced the heavens. 

How their citadels and palaces spread out from the tops of those towers like flowers of crystal and steel.  

Everyone also knows how the towers fell, how The God Kings and their palaces came crashing to earth, how the forests burned and the seas turned to steam.   

Everyone knows these things. 

The Red Iron Horde 

When The God Kings fell many of their servants perished with them... but some survived. 

Among these were machines, possessed with their own relentless will. Cut loose from the guiding designs for which they'd been created many of the machines had only one directive remaining - persist. 

The Red Iron Horde is a semi nomadic army of thinking machines. They patrol the lands where the towers first took root. With the plas-steel extruders and star-metal foundries that birthed them no longer functioning, they have resorted to scavenging suitable materials wherever they can find them. 
Consequently most Red Iron warriors are a motley collection of improvised, rusty (hence 'red'), parts taken from travelers that got too close to their territory. 

Over the centuries the horde's need to maintain itself has taken on something of a fanatical aspect; they believe all metal (and other useful elements) rightfully belong to them:

Is that a metal sword? It is about to be requisitioned by the horde. 

Are those horse shoes metal? Better get them off quick before the red iron collectors put their circular saw arms to good use. 

Were you hiding a gold filling in your mouth? Sacrilege!! 

The discovery of a pre-cataclysm artifact can send them into an absolute frenzy, often inspiring horrifically violent excursions into neighbouring lands. 

Fighting the Red Iron Horde has taken an enormous toll on the kingdoms to the south. Oceans of blood and treasure have been spent pushing them back beyond The Windy Waste. The crablike red iron scouts are soon crawling over the field of even the greatest victory - collecting the scraps, rebuilding. Even maintaining a stalemate required the southern cities to adapt. This is what led to the creation of the Knights of East Lake. 

_______________________________________

 Ok, so that was a bit of lore from one of my home games. I've never done a lore post before so hopefully that suits anyone reading this (because I'm going to do another one on the Knights of East Lake). 

As a little offer of game-able stuff, let's make some Red Iron Horde monsters (for Cairn since that's what I'm playing at the moment). 

 ________________________________________________

Red Iron Scout
 4 Hp, 8 STR, 13 DEX, 5 WILL, Needle limbs (d6+d6) 

• Small, crab-like automata that seek out metal scraps for The Red Iron Horde
• Often carrying weapons and armour 
• Combine with other scouts into Red Iron Tumblers 

__________________________________________________

Red Iron Tumbler 
3 Armour, 6 HP, 15 STR, 6 DEX, 5 WILL,  Rolling over you (d12) 

• A collection of rolling scrap metal (guided by the Red Iron Scouts that have combined to create it). A Tumbler's prime goal is to get back to a red iron smelter.   
• If destroyed (or significantly impeded) 2d4 Red Iron Scouts emerge from the Tumbler

__________________________________________________
 

Red Iron Collector 
2 Armour, 5HP, 13 STR, 9 DEX, 8 WILL, Circular Saw (d10) 

• A violent machine resembling an armoured ape. Considers all metal the rightful property of the Red Iron Horde.  
• May incorporate useful pieces of armour and weaponry.
• Critical Damage: Severs an extremity - probably the one connected to the most valuable piece of metal (E.g. sword, shield, helmet etc)