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Apricot Ziggurat

2025-02-11T17:11:18Z

The Wyzard: /* Wealth */

[[BREAK!!:_Nightmare_Over_Ragged_Hollow | Back to main page]]

==Apricot Ziggurat==

'''Apricot Ziggurat''' is a bio-mechanoid. A lot of her surface is skin-like, but there are enough obviously mechanical components and protuberances that one cannot ''actually'' mistake her for a human. For a general guideline, she looks a bit like the protagonist of the classic NES game, The Guardian Legend. She has stubby metal wings that don't actually do much in aerodynamic terms, some artificial electronic gems, antenna/fin things where her ears should be, etc.

As to her origin: Deep in a cave there is an enormous tree-like structure made of biomechanical cabling and armatures. Large cocoons hang from the branches like fruit, connected by glowing filaments to the larger branches. Apricot Ziggurat fell out of one of these one day, and wandered for a long time before reaching the surface world. And, eventually, stumbling into Ragged Hollow. Neither she nor anyone else has ever been able to find the cave again. Her memory and personality modules seemed to boot up gradually, so her memories of her first months are pretty confused. Her programming is to function as a protector, and so she tried to work as a town guard for a while. However, she turned out to not have a lot of talent for peacekeeping or investigation. She ''did try.'' Apricot lived in Ragged Hollow for years, and went on a Halloo because some of her friends were doing it. Her age is sort of indeterminate. She might be very old but have gone through a regeneration cycle.

She chose the name Apricot because she grew on a tree like a fruit.

*Calling: Battle Princess
*Rank 2 (XP 7/12)
*Species: Bio-Mechanoid
*Homeland: Wistful Dark
*History: Town Guard
*Languages: Low Speech, Dream Call

===Purviews===
My history grants me a Minor Bonus (+2) on...

*Seeing the truth of a situation
*Throwing my weight around
*Powering through obstacles

===Aptitudes===
*8 Might (Base 8)
*8 Deftness (Base 8)
*10 Grit (Base 10)
*6 Insight (Base 6)
*11 Aura (Base 11)

'''Quirks:'''
Buster Arm: One of your arms is equipped with a powerful, long range energy weapon. It draws its power from your internal energy reserves, so you need to be careful how much you use it.
*Your (right/left?) arm has an energy cannon, it is fitted in such a way that it does not inhibit your dexterity.
*The cannon functions like a Mechanical Missile Weapon (Small), except:
**It does Bright Damage
**It does not require reloading
*You can fire the cannon once per Fight without penalty, but...
**If discharged again during the same Fight, your suffer 1 Heart of Damage for every shot you take
**If you have 0 Hearts the weapon cannot be used, it just gives out a sad bleep

===Abilities===
*'''Not of Flesh and Blood:''' You have a synthetic body. You do not eat or breathe and need maintenance rather than rest to heal.
**You can suffer different effects when you roll on the Injury Table, and must be healed with Bio-Mechanical Treatment (p262).
**For better or worse, you are immune to things that target organic life. For example, neither healing potions or poisons affect you.
**You do not need to eat, and are immune to Starvation.
**You must go offline periodically to recharge. This is the mechanical equivalent of sleep. If missed or skipped you suffer Fatigue.
*'''Personal Analytics:''' Your heads-up display affords a greater perceptive range than organic beings.
**If you focus, you can detect the general distance and direction of:
***Any living creatures
***Sources of great energy, such as imbued items, powerful undead, or other mechanoids
**Your scan has a 50ft range
**During a Fight, this Ability requires the use of your Action
*'''Heart's Blade:''' She can manifest a special weapon immediately, without using an action.
**Sky Steel Mighty melee weapon (Dragon Buster)
***Requires both hands to wield or take a Minor Penalty when using one-handed
***Crushing Blow: You do 2 Hearts of damage, instead of 1, on a successful Attack.
***Extra Damage: +1 Heart for Attack roll totals of 20 and above.
**You can call this weapon into existence through force of will.
***Melee Weapons are formed instantly and can be used on the same Turn they are called.
***Your Heart’s Blade will vanish instantly on command.
**Only a single form of the Heart’s Blade may be summoned at any one time: either the primary, secondary, or combination form.
**If the weapon is Sundered or lost during combat, you can will it away and summon a new Blade.
*'''Shield of Love:''' Once per fight I can place a force field around an ally within sight that absorbs 1 heart of damage, then disappears. This has to be used on my turn but doesn't take an action.
*'''Soul Companion:''' Disco is a UFO/flying saucer looking thing on little chicken legs.
*'''Rank 2: Glittering Machine'''. She can summon a Sky Steel tool instead of her Heart's Blade. It can be anything simple, such as a grappling hook or lockpick. +1 bright allegiance.
**Remains until you swap it for another tool or call your Heart's Blade.

===Social Bonds & Reputations===
*Allegiance: +1 bright from Glittering Machine.
**Gifts:

===Conflict===
*Attack Bonus: +2
*Hearts: 3
**Injuries:
*Defense: 10
*Speed: Average

===Gear===
Retrieving items takes 2 Actions from a Backpack and 1 Action from a Traveler's Bag

Worn Outfit: Normal Clothes
*Medium Armor
*Lantern Implant
*Lantern Fuel
*Functional Outfit (Worn)
*Traveler's Bag

===Companions===
'''Disco:''' A toy Soul Companion, who looks a bit like a UFO with legs. He can plug into a circular mount on Apricot's back.
*Brave Toy Companion: +0 Attack, Hearts 2, Defense 14, Average Speed
*Languages: Bright Tongue, Low Speak. Your Companion will only talk with you unless otherwise requested.
*Range: They can exist up to 40 ft away from you. Beyond that range they vanish, only to reappear by your side.
*Fighting: Your Companion can only provide limited support during a Fight:
**Attack: They are not powerful enough to harm foes, but can perform Attack Assists for you or your allies.
**Health: At 0 Hearts they puff out of existence, but will return after you’ve slept and rested.
*Ability: '''Booster''' - Disco can convert into a jetpack, cling onto your back, and lift you to safety.
**You gain the power of flight at an Average Speed Rating.
**The boost grants enough lift for you to reach one visible destination.
**During a Fight, your Companion loses a single Heart for each Turn this Ability is in use.
*Ailments: They are immune to the direct effect of Ailments; however they suffer the symptoms of any Ailments you contract!
*Gear: They cannot use any Gear; Armor falls off, weapons are dropped, etc. However, they can carry items.

===Wealth===
*Stones:45
*Coins: 28
*Gems:

Apricot Ziggurat

2024-11-02T15:00:12Z

The Wyzard: /* Apricot Ziggurat */

[[BREAK!!:_Nightmare_Over_Ragged_Hollow | Back to main page]]

==Apricot Ziggurat==

'''Apricot Ziggurat''' is a bio-mechanoid. A lot of her surface is skin-like, but there are enough obviously mechanical components and protuberances that one cannot ''actually'' mistake her for a human. For a general guideline, she looks a bit like the protagonist of the classic NES game, The Guardian Legend. She has stubby metal wings that don't actually do much in aerodynamic terms, some artificial electronic gems, antenna/fin things where her ears should be, etc.

As to her origin: Deep in a cave there is an enormous tree-like structure made of biomechanical cabling and armatures. Large cocoons hang from the branches like fruit, connected by glowing filaments to the larger branches. Apricot Ziggurat fell out of one of these one day, and wandered for a long time before reaching the surface world. And, eventually, stumbling into Ragged Hollow. Neither she nor anyone else has ever been able to find the cave again. Her memory and personality modules seemed to boot up gradually, so her memories of her first months are pretty confused. Her programming is to function as a protector, and so she tried to work as a town guard for a while. However, she turned out to not have a lot of talent for peacekeeping or investigation. She ''did try.'' Apricot lived in Ragged Hollow for years, and went on a Halloo because some of her friends were doing it. Her age is sort of indeterminate. She might be very old but have gone through a regeneration cycle.

She chose the name Apricot because she grew on a tree like a fruit.

*Calling: Battle Princess
*Rank 2 (XP 7/12)
*Species: Bio-Mechanoid
*Homeland: Wistful Dark
*History: Town Guard
*Languages: Low Speech, Dream Call

===Purviews===
My history grants me a Minor Bonus (+2) on...

*Seeing the truth of a situation
*Throwing my weight around
*Powering through obstacles

===Aptitudes===
*8 Might (Base 8)
*8 Deftness (Base 8)
*10 Grit (Base 10)
*6 Insight (Base 6)
*11 Aura (Base 11)

'''Quirks:'''
Buster Arm: One of your arms is equipped with a powerful, long range energy weapon. It draws its power from your internal energy reserves, so you need to be careful how much you use it.
*Your (right/left?) arm has an energy cannon, it is fitted in such a way that it does not inhibit your dexterity.
*The cannon functions like a Mechanical Missile Weapon (Small), except:
**It does Bright Damage
**It does not require reloading
*You can fire the cannon once per Fight without penalty, but...
**If discharged again during the same Fight, your suffer 1 Heart of Damage for every shot you take
**If you have 0 Hearts the weapon cannot be used, it just gives out a sad bleep

===Abilities===
*'''Not of Flesh and Blood:''' You have a synthetic body. You do not eat or breathe and need maintenance rather than rest to heal.
**You can suffer different effects when you roll on the Injury Table, and must be healed with Bio-Mechanical Treatment (p262).
**For better or worse, you are immune to things that target organic life. For example, neither healing potions or poisons affect you.
**You do not need to eat, and are immune to Starvation.
**You must go offline periodically to recharge. This is the mechanical equivalent of sleep. If missed or skipped you suffer Fatigue.
*'''Personal Analytics:''' Your heads-up display affords a greater perceptive range than organic beings.
**If you focus, you can detect the general distance and direction of:
***Any living creatures
***Sources of great energy, such as imbued items, powerful undead, or other mechanoids
**Your scan has a 50ft range
**During a Fight, this Ability requires the use of your Action
*'''Heart's Blade:''' She can manifest a special weapon immediately, without using an action.
**Sky Steel Mighty melee weapon (Dragon Buster)
***Requires both hands to wield or take a Minor Penalty when using one-handed
***Crushing Blow: You do 2 Hearts of damage, instead of 1, on a successful Attack.
***Extra Damage: +1 Heart for Attack roll totals of 20 and above.
**You can call this weapon into existence through force of will.
***Melee Weapons are formed instantly and can be used on the same Turn they are called.
***Your Heart’s Blade will vanish instantly on command.
**Only a single form of the Heart’s Blade may be summoned at any one time: either the primary, secondary, or combination form.
**If the weapon is Sundered or lost during combat, you can will it away and summon a new Blade.
*'''Shield of Love:''' Once per fight I can place a force field around an ally within sight that absorbs 1 heart of damage, then disappears. This has to be used on my turn but doesn't take an action.
*'''Soul Companion:''' Disco is a UFO/flying saucer looking thing on little chicken legs.
*'''Rank 2: Glittering Machine'''. She can summon a Sky Steel tool instead of her Heart's Blade. It can be anything simple, such as a grappling hook or lockpick. +1 bright allegiance.
**Remains until you swap it for another tool or call your Heart's Blade.

===Social Bonds & Reputations===
*Allegiance: +1 bright from Glittering Machine.
**Gifts:

===Conflict===
*Attack Bonus: +2
*Hearts: 3
*Defense: 10
*Speed: Average

===Gear===
Retrieving items takes 2 Actions from a Backpack and 1 Action from a Traveler's Bag

Worn Outfit: Normal Clothes
*Medium Armor
*Lantern Implant
*Lantern Fuel
*Functional Outfit (Worn)
*Traveler's Bag

===Companions===
'''Disco:''' A toy Soul Companion, who looks a bit like a UFO with legs. He can plug into a circular mount on Apricot's back.
*Brave Toy Companion: +0 Attack, Hearts 2, Defense 14, Average Speed
*Languages: Bright Tongue, Low Speak. Your Companion will only talk with you unless otherwise requested.
*Range: They can exist up to 40 ft away from you. Beyond that range they vanish, only to reappear by your side.
*Fighting: Your Companion can only provide limited support during a Fight:
**Attack: They are not powerful enough to harm foes, but can perform Attack Assists for you or your allies.
**Health: At 0 Hearts they puff out of existence, but will return after you’ve slept and rested.
*Ability: '''Booster''' - Disco can convert into a jetpack, cling onto your back, and lift you to safety.
**You gain the power of flight at an Average Speed Rating.
**The boost grants enough lift for you to reach one visible destination.
**During a Fight, your Companion loses a single Heart for each Turn this Ability is in use.
*Ailments: They are immune to the direct effect of Ailments; however they suffer the symptoms of any Ailments you contract!
*Gear: They cannot use any Gear; Armor falls off, weapons are dropped, etc. However, they can carry items.

===Wealth===
*Stones: 75
*Coins: 13
*Gems:

Apricot Ziggurat

2024-10-12T14:56:43Z

The Wyzard: /* Apricot Ziggurat */

[[BREAK!!:_Nightmare_Over_Ragged_Hollow | Back to main page]]

==Apricot Ziggurat==

'''Apricot Ziggurat''' is a bio-mechanoid. A lot of her surface is skin-like, but there are enough obviously mechanical components and protuberances that one cannot ''actually'' mistake her for a human. For a general guideline, she looks a bit like the protagonist of the classic NES game, The Guardian Legend. She has stubby metal wings that don't actually do much in aerodynamic terms, some artificial electronic gems, antenna/fin things where her ears should be, etc.

As to her origin: Deep in a cave there is an enormous tree-like structure made of biomechanical cabling and armatures. Large cocoons hang from the branches like fruit, connected by glowing filaments to the larger branches. Apricot Ziggurat fell out of one of these one day, and wandered for a long time before reaching the surface world. And, eventually, stumbling into Ragged Hollow. Neither she nor anyone else has ever been able to find the cave again. Her memory and personality modules seemed to boot up gradually, so her memories of her first months are pretty confused. Her programming is to function as a protector, and so she tried to work as a town guard for a while. However, she turned out to not have a lot of talent for peacekeeping or investigation. She ''did try.'' Apricot lived in Ragged Hollow for years, and went on a Halloo because some of her friends were doing it. Her age is sort of indeterminate. She might be very old but have gone through a regeneration cycle.

She chose the name Apricot because she grew on a tree like a fruit.

*Calling: Battle Princess
*Rank 2 (XP 6/12)
*Species: Bio-Mechanoid
*Homeland: Wistful Dark
*History: Town Guard
*Languages: Low Speech, Dream Call

===Purviews===
My history grants me a Minor Bonus (+2) on...

*Seeing the truth of a situation
*Throwing my weight around
*Powering through obstacles

===Aptitudes===
*8 Might (Base 8)
*8 Deftness (Base 8)
*10 Grit (Base 10)
*6 Insight (Base 6)
*11 Aura (Base 11)

'''Quirks:'''
Buster Arm: One of your arms is equipped with a powerful, long range energy weapon. It draws its power from your internal energy reserves, so you need to be careful how much you use it.
*Your (right/left?) arm has an energy cannon, it is fitted in such a way that it does not inhibit your dexterity.
*The cannon functions like a Mechanical Missile Weapon (Small), except:
**It does Bright Damage
**It does not require reloading
*You can fire the cannon once per Fight without penalty, but...
**If discharged again during the same Fight, your suffer 1 Heart of Damage for every shot you take
**If you have 0 Hearts the weapon cannot be used, it just gives out a sad bleep

===Abilities===
*'''Not of Flesh and Blood:''' You have a synthetic body. You do not eat or breathe and need maintenance rather than rest to heal.
**You can suffer different effects when you roll on the Injury Table, and must be healed with Bio-Mechanical Treatment (p262).
**For better or worse, you are immune to things that target organic life. For example, neither healing potions or poisons affect you.
**You do not need to eat, and are immune to Starvation.
**You must go offline periodically to recharge. This is the mechanical equivalent of sleep. If missed or skipped you suffer Fatigue.
*'''Personal Analytics:''' Your heads-up display affords a greater perceptive range than organic beings.
**If you focus, you can detect the general distance and direction of:
***Any living creatures
***Sources of great energy, such as imbued items, powerful undead, or other mechanoids
**Your scan has a 50ft range
**During a Fight, this Ability requires the use of your Action
*'''Heart's Blade:''' She can manifest a special weapon immediately, without using an action.
**Sky Steel Mighty melee weapon (Dragon Buster)
***Requires both hands to wield or take a Minor Penalty when using one-handed
***Crushing Blow: You do 2 Hearts of damage, instead of 1, on a successful Attack.
***Extra Damage: +1 Heart for Attack roll totals of 20 and above.
**You can call this weapon into existence through force of will.
***Melee Weapons are formed instantly and can be used on the same Turn they are called.
***Your Heart’s Blade will vanish instantly on command.
**Only a single form of the Heart’s Blade may be summoned at any one time: either the primary, secondary, or combination form.
**If the weapon is Sundered or lost during combat, you can will it away and summon a new Blade.
*'''Shield of Love:''' Once per fight I can place a force field around an ally within sight that absorbs 1 heart of damage, then disappears. This has to be used on my turn but doesn't take an action.
*'''Soul Companion:''' Disco is a UFO/flying saucer looking thing on little chicken legs.
*'''Rank 2: Glittering Machine'''. She can summon a Sky Steel tool instead of her Heart's Blade. It can be anything simple, such as a grappling hook or lockpick. +1 bright allegiance.
**Remains until you swap it for another tool or call your Heart's Blade.

===Social Bonds & Reputations===
*Allegiance: +1 bright from Glittering Machine.
**Gifts:

===Conflict===
*Attack Bonus: +2
*Hearts: 3
*Defense: 10
*Speed: Average

===Gear===
Retrieving items takes 2 Actions from a Backpack and 1 Action from a Traveler's Bag

Worn Outfit: Normal Clothes
*Medium Armor
*Lantern Implant
*Lantern Fuel
*Functional Outfit (Worn)
*Traveler's Bag

===Companions===
'''Disco:''' A toy Soul Companion, who looks a bit like a UFO with legs. He can plug into a circular mount on Apricot's back.
*Brave Toy Companion: +0 Attack, Hearts 2, Defense 14, Average Speed
*Languages: Bright Tongue, Low Speak. Your Companion will only talk with you unless otherwise requested.
*Range: They can exist up to 40 ft away from you. Beyond that range they vanish, only to reappear by your side.
*Fighting: Your Companion can only provide limited support during a Fight:
**Attack: They are not powerful enough to harm foes, but can perform Attack Assists for you or your allies.
**Health: At 0 Hearts they puff out of existence, but will return after you’ve slept and rested.
*Ailments: They are immune to the direct effect of Ailments; however they suffer the symptoms of any Ailments you contract!
*Gear: They cannot use any Gear; Armor falls off, weapons are dropped, etc. However, they can carry items.

===Wealth===
*Stones: 75
*Coins: 13
*Gems:

Apricot Ziggurat

2024-10-11T01:18:38Z

The Wyzard:

Apricot Ziggurat

2024-10-10T00:21:36Z

The Wyzard: Created page with " Back to main page ==Apricot Ziggurat== '''Apricot Ziggurat''' is a bio-mechanoid. A lot of her surface is skin-like, but there ar..."

BREAK!!: Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow

2024-10-10T00:05:54Z

The Wyzard:

[https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/development-closed-cortex-prime-4e-paragon-swords-planet-spelljammer.911773/ Development thread] | [https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/cortex-prime-tome-robber-star-voyages-of-the-zephyr.912705/ OOC] | [https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/cortex-prime-tome-robber-star-voyages-of-the-zephyr.913605/ IC]

[[File:Ragged Hollow resize.png]]

==Player Characters==

{| class="wikitable"
! Character
! Species + Calling
! Native Plane
! Played by
|
| '''Defense'''
| '''Hearts'''
| '''Speed'''
| '''Allegiance'''
| '''Quirk'''
|-
! [[Jet Chthonios]]
! Native Human Champion
! Buried Kingdom
! Funkadelic
|
| 14
| 3
| Average
| Unaligned
| Mage Breaker: Aura Check/Contest vs magical effects
|-
! [[Apricot Ziggurat]]
! Bio-Mechanoid Battle Princess
! Wistful Dark
! The Wyzard
|
|
| 3
| Average
|
| Buster Arm: Bright damage energy cannon, can be powered by Heart
|-
! Natsumi
! Rai-Neko Murder Princess
! Buried Kingdom
! Falkus
|
|
| 3
| Average
|
| Angelic Countenance: protective aura of guileless, heavenly innocence
|-
! [[Diamanti Rebuk't]]
! Elf Heretic
! Wistful Dark
! ESkemp
|
| 14/15
| 2
| Average
| Unaligned (Dark 1)
| Ferrous: iron skin + heart make a physical and emotional fortress; body mass Snag
|-
!
! Native Human Sage
! Wistful Dark
! Lysus
|
|
| 2
| Average
|
| Soul Link: can share thoughts/feelings with X, Minor Penalty when not linked
|-
|}
Diamanti is immune to the Ballooned and Putrefied ailments.

[[BREAK!!:_Nightmare_Over_Ragged_Hollow:_Sample_Charsheet | Sample character sheet]]

==Character Generation Custom Rules==

Characters are Rank 2. Chargen has four main defining selections and two auxiliary components to flesh out the character.

'''Defining Selections:'''

*Calling
*Species
*Homeland
*History

'''Auxiliary Components:'''

*Traits
*Quirk

You have two '''Choice Points''' you can spend to make a choice with the defining selections. The other selections will each be rolled for twice, and you may select your favorite of the two rolls.
*With Traits, you may either roll two Positive Traits and one Negative Trait, or you may select one Positive Trait but then will need to select two Negative Traits.
*Quirks are initially determined by your Species. You may then select the category of Quirk if you wish, but will need to roll for the actual Quirk on that sub-category table. You are allowed one re-roll, but must accept it.

==BREAK!! Setting Deviation==
Instead of distinct geographies that experience 100% night, day, or twilight, I'd like to stipulate an environment that shifts between the three states. A magi-planar phenomenon results in a sudden shift between states every day, contingent on the homeland. The landscape, and what's in it, might shift dependent on the plane that is in effect.

The game will be set in the Twilight Meridian, where the majority of each day is spent in Twilight between the Dark and the Blaze. This transitive state has led to the Twilight Meridian becoming a natural trading zone between Dark and Blaze communities.

*In the '''Twilight Meridian''', it's twilight for sixteen hours each day. Dark reigns from midnight to 4am, and the Blaze reigns from 10am to 2pm. The other hours belong to Twilight.
*In the '''Wistful Dark''', it's Dark except for two hours from noon to 2pm when the Blaze reigns and four hours of the Twilight from 10am to noon and 2pm to 4pm.
*In the '''Blazing Garden''', it's Dark from midnight to 2am and Twilight from 10pm to midnight and 2am to 4am.

Natives of each planar cycle have a Minor Bonus when that cycle is active. Natives of the Buried Kingdom have a Minor Bonus underground.

==Ragged Hollow==
A quaint little town overlooking the river Rime, its low slate roofs nestled under the white-walled Temple of Halcyon. Best known for its flax, jumbugs, and the temple. The flax is pulped into paper and used to make books at the Temple of Halcyon, or made into cloth and oil (each family owns a loom and an oil press used during the long winter evenings). The town and its 750 inhabitants are governed by a council of priests from the Temple. There is no army or town guard.

To the west lies a mountainous region dominated by Mount Mourn that no one ever goes into. To the north across the Rime River is the Gloam Wood, a deep dark forest that one generally
avoids exploring. To the south stretch the notoriously ill-famed Wailing Hills, an area few enter willingly, though a trail leading to a few frontier villages some three days walk away does cross through them. To the east begins the Kingdom, where the first important city is a week away.

[[File:Ragged Hollow map resize.png]]

===Key Descriptions===
====1. The Temple of Halcyon====
Curving white towers nestle on a lovely green lawn. Soaring stained glass windows depicting images of angels teaching, ancient scrolls, and arcane books. The temple sports greenhouse roofs and gleaming bronze doors.

====2. Split Anvil Smithy====
A blacksmith selling mostly farming supplies and tools. Joanna, the blacksmith, is a human woman in her 30s who immigrated to Ragged Hollow from the Wistful Dark.

====3. Sharp's General Store====
General supplies like rope, canvas, glass jars, feed & seed. Run by Twelve-Seven, a bio-mechanoid.

====4. Alchemical Solutions====
Omar, a human man in his 40s from another place entirely, sells acids and healing supplies and can produce custom items on commission. (High-end Workshop - Alchemy)

====5. Radomir====
The edifice of the local Sage Radomir, a non-binary Tenebrate from the Wistful Dark. Radomir's home and parlor is only present during the Twilight Meridian and Wistful Dark periods of the day. (High-end Workshop - Artificing)

====6. Lost Ox Inn====
Rooms, brews, and victuals (Pleasant Room & Hearty Meal). Thurm Muttonchops, the proprietor, is a middle-aged dwarf. He's originally from the Blazing Garden.

====7. Dun’Myff Paper Mill====
The local industry is managed by Naofri Squeezenibble, a chib woman.

====8. The Dancing Needle====
A clothing and accessories store run by Laban & Leep Uluuk, a gruun couple.

====9. The Hooked Fin====
A fishing supplies store that sells fresh fish and eels and has basic accommodation (Basic Room & Meal), out of the home of Taar Thuuk, a gruun woman.

====10. Jumbug Farm====
Run by Skritch, a non-binary goblin, their brother Skrunch, and their mom TapTap. Raises jumbugs (mounts), buzzers (pets), and plump meat-beetles (food).

====11. The Rime River====
High grassy banks overlook this sluggish brown river. Chunks of white ice float by. Small fishing boats sit lashed to stumps and rocks. A decrepit gray house hunches on the small wooded island in the center of the current.

====Neighboring Areas====
*Journeying to the '''Gloam Wood''' takes one into the Wistful Dark.
*'''Mount Morn''' and the '''Wailing Hills''' are both native to the Twilight Meridian

==Important NPCs==
Home plane
* 01-15 Wistful Dark
* 16-85 Twilight Meridian
* 86-00 Blazing Garden

==Rumors and Leads==
*
*

==Notable Posts==

BREAK!!: Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow

2024-10-10T00:05:28Z

The Wyzard:

[https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/development-closed-cortex-prime-4e-paragon-swords-planet-spelljammer.911773/ Development thread] | [https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/cortex-prime-tome-robber-star-voyages-of-the-zephyr.912705/ OOC] | [https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/cortex-prime-tome-robber-star-voyages-of-the-zephyr.913605/ IC]

[[File:Ragged Hollow resize.png]]

==Player Characters==

{| class="wikitable"
! Character
! Species + Calling
! Native Plane
! Played by
|
| '''Defense'''
| '''Hearts'''
| '''Speed'''
| '''Allegiance'''
| '''Quirk'''
|-
! [[Jet Chthonios]]
! Native Human Champion
! Buried Kingdom
! Funkadelic
|
| 14
| 3
| Average
| Unaligned
| Mage Breaker: Aura Check/Contest vs magical effects
|-
! Apricot Ziggurat
! Bio-Mechanoid Battle Princess
! Wistful Dark
! The Wyzard
|
|
| 3
| Average
|
| Buster Arm: Bright damage energy cannon, can be powered by Heart
|-
! Natsumi
! Rai-Neko Murder Princess
! Buried Kingdom
! Falkus
|
|
| 3
| Average
|
| Angelic Countenance: protective aura of guileless, heavenly innocence
|-
! [[Diamanti Rebuk't]]
! Elf Heretic
! Wistful Dark
! ESkemp
|
| 14/15
| 2
| Average
| Unaligned (Dark 1)
| Ferrous: iron skin + heart make a physical and emotional fortress; body mass Snag
|-
!
! Native Human Sage
! Wistful Dark
! Lysus
|
|
| 2
| Average
|
| Soul Link: can share thoughts/feelings with X, Minor Penalty when not linked
|-
|}
Diamanti is immune to the Ballooned and Putrefied ailments.

[[BREAK!!:_Nightmare_Over_Ragged_Hollow:_Sample_Charsheet | Sample character sheet]]

==Character Generation Custom Rules==

Characters are Rank 2. Chargen has four main defining selections and two auxiliary components to flesh out the character.

'''Defining Selections:'''

*Calling
*Species
*Homeland
*History

'''Auxiliary Components:'''

*Traits
*Quirk

You have two '''Choice Points''' you can spend to make a choice with the defining selections. The other selections will each be rolled for twice, and you may select your favorite of the two rolls.
*With Traits, you may either roll two Positive Traits and one Negative Trait, or you may select one Positive Trait but then will need to select two Negative Traits.
*Quirks are initially determined by your Species. You may then select the category of Quirk if you wish, but will need to roll for the actual Quirk on that sub-category table. You are allowed one re-roll, but must accept it.

==BREAK!! Setting Deviation==
Instead of distinct geographies that experience 100% night, day, or twilight, I'd like to stipulate an environment that shifts between the three states. A magi-planar phenomenon results in a sudden shift between states every day, contingent on the homeland. The landscape, and what's in it, might shift dependent on the plane that is in effect.

The game will be set in the Twilight Meridian, where the majority of each day is spent in Twilight between the Dark and the Blaze. This transitive state has led to the Twilight Meridian becoming a natural trading zone between Dark and Blaze communities.

*In the '''Twilight Meridian''', it's twilight for sixteen hours each day. Dark reigns from midnight to 4am, and the Blaze reigns from 10am to 2pm. The other hours belong to Twilight.
*In the '''Wistful Dark''', it's Dark except for two hours from noon to 2pm when the Blaze reigns and four hours of the Twilight from 10am to noon and 2pm to 4pm.
*In the '''Blazing Garden''', it's Dark from midnight to 2am and Twilight from 10pm to midnight and 2am to 4am.

Natives of each planar cycle have a Minor Bonus when that cycle is active. Natives of the Buried Kingdom have a Minor Bonus underground.

==Ragged Hollow==
A quaint little town overlooking the river Rime, its low slate roofs nestled under the white-walled Temple of Halcyon. Best known for its flax, jumbugs, and the temple. The flax is pulped into paper and used to make books at the Temple of Halcyon, or made into cloth and oil (each family owns a loom and an oil press used during the long winter evenings). The town and its 750 inhabitants are governed by a council of priests from the Temple. There is no army or town guard.

To the west lies a mountainous region dominated by Mount Mourn that no one ever goes into. To the north across the Rime River is the Gloam Wood, a deep dark forest that one generally
avoids exploring. To the south stretch the notoriously ill-famed Wailing Hills, an area few enter willingly, though a trail leading to a few frontier villages some three days walk away does cross through them. To the east begins the Kingdom, where the first important city is a week away.

[[File:Ragged Hollow map resize.png]]

===Key Descriptions===
====1. The Temple of Halcyon====
Curving white towers nestle on a lovely green lawn. Soaring stained glass windows depicting images of angels teaching, ancient scrolls, and arcane books. The temple sports greenhouse roofs and gleaming bronze doors.

====2. Split Anvil Smithy====
A blacksmith selling mostly farming supplies and tools. Joanna, the blacksmith, is a human woman in her 30s who immigrated to Ragged Hollow from the Wistful Dark.

====3. Sharp's General Store====
General supplies like rope, canvas, glass jars, feed & seed. Run by Twelve-Seven, a bio-mechanoid.

====4. Alchemical Solutions====
Omar, a human man in his 40s from another place entirely, sells acids and healing supplies and can produce custom items on commission. (High-end Workshop - Alchemy)

====5. Radomir====
The edifice of the local Sage Radomir, a non-binary Tenebrate from the Wistful Dark. Radomir's home and parlor is only present during the Twilight Meridian and Wistful Dark periods of the day. (High-end Workshop - Artificing)

====6. Lost Ox Inn====
Rooms, brews, and victuals (Pleasant Room & Hearty Meal). Thurm Muttonchops, the proprietor, is a middle-aged dwarf. He's originally from the Blazing Garden.

====7. Dun’Myff Paper Mill====
The local industry is managed by Naofri Squeezenibble, a chib woman.

====8. The Dancing Needle====
A clothing and accessories store run by Laban & Leep Uluuk, a gruun couple.

====9. The Hooked Fin====
A fishing supplies store that sells fresh fish and eels and has basic accommodation (Basic Room & Meal), out of the home of Taar Thuuk, a gruun woman.

====10. Jumbug Farm====
Run by Skritch, a non-binary goblin, their brother Skrunch, and their mom TapTap. Raises jumbugs (mounts), buzzers (pets), and plump meat-beetles (food).

====11. The Rime River====
High grassy banks overlook this sluggish brown river. Chunks of white ice float by. Small fishing boats sit lashed to stumps and rocks. A decrepit gray house hunches on the small wooded island in the center of the current.

====Neighboring Areas====
*Journeying to the '''Gloam Wood''' takes one into the Wistful Dark.
*'''Mount Morn''' and the '''Wailing Hills''' are both native to the Twilight Meridian

==Important NPCs==
Home plane
* 01-15 Wistful Dark
* 16-85 Twilight Meridian
* 86-00 Blazing Garden

==Rumors and Leads==
*
*

==Notable Posts==

CPRED Future So Dark: Redhand

2023-10-14T18:21:33Z

The Wyzard: Created page with " == Background Details == *Real Name *Street Name *Role === Looks === Type notable things about your appearance here. === Background === Copypasta the most notable stuff f..."

== Background Details ==
*Real Name
*Street Name
*Role

=== Looks ===
Type notable things about your appearance here.

=== Background ===
Copypasta the most notable stuff from your lifepaths here.

=== Connections ===
Put any special connections with NPCs here, starting with anything from your lifepaths. The objective is that the GM has an quick-reference spot for people who might call you with Problems or cause you Problems.
*Friend
*Friend
*Enemy
*Enemy
*Tragic Love Affair.
*Whatever Else

== Stats ==
*Role Ability:
*LUCK: X out of Y
*MOVE:
*BODY:
*HP: xx/yy
*Seriously Wounded: -2 to all actions at XX.
*Death Save:
*Critical Injuries:
*Improvement Points:

{| class="wikitable" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-right: auto;"
|+ Skills
|-
|- style="color: red;"
! INT !! (number) !! Base !! WILL !! (number) !! Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
|- style="color: red;"
! REF !! (number) !! Base !! COOL !! (number) !! Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
|- style="color: red;"
! DEX !! (number) !! Base !! TECH !! (number) !! Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|- style="color: red;"
! EMP !! (number) !! Base !! Humanity !!
|-
| Human Perception || Level || Base || Current: || Maximum:
|-
|}

== Assets ==

=== Reputation ===
*Reputation:
**Event:
**Event:
**Event:

===Cyberware===
*List
*Things
*Here

=== Money & Lifestyle ===
*Eddies On-Hand:
*Bank Account(s): ???
*Lifestyle & Time Left:
*Favors Owed
**To You:
**To Others:
*Debts Owed
**To You:
**To Others:
*Workshops:
**???
**???

=== Fashion ===
*Fashionware:
*Clothing:

=== Gear ===
*List
*Stuff
*Here

=== Tools ===
*List
*Tools
*Here

=== Armor ===
*Stored:
*Worn, Head:
*Worn, Body:

=== Weapons ===
*Melee Weapon:
**To Hit: 1d10+XX Damage: YD6
*Melee Weapon:
**To Hit: 1d10+XX Damage: YD6
*Unarmed:
**To Hit: 1d10+XX Damage: YD6
*Ammunition:
**One Type
**Two Type
**Red Type
**Blue Type

{| class="wikitable" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-right: auto;"
|+ Ranged Weapons
|-
! Weapon Name !! To Hit: 1d10+XX !! Damage: YD6 !! Ammo: !! ROF !! Hands !! Concealable
|-
! Range Band !! 0-6 !! 7-12 !! 13-25 !! 26-50 !! 51-100 !! 101-200 !! 201-400 !! 401-800
|-
! DV !! AA !! BB !! CC !! DD !! EE !! FF !! GG !! HH
|-
! Weapon Name !! To Hit: 1d10+XX !! Damage: YD6 !! Ammo: !! ROF !! Hands !! Concealable
|-
! Range Band !! 0-6 !! 7-12 !! 13-25 !! 26-50 !! 51-100 !! 101-200 !! 201-400 !! 401-800
|-
! DV !! AA !! BB !! CC !! DD !! EE !! FF !! GG !! HH
|}

CPRED Future So Dark: Blank Sheet

2023-10-14T18:15:44Z

The Wyzard: /* Assets */

CPRED Future So Dark: Blank Sheet

2023-10-14T18:14:42Z

The Wyzard: /* Stats */

== Background Details ==
*Real Name
*Street Name
*Role

=== Looks ===
Type notable things about your appearance here.

=== Background ===
Copypasta the most notable stuff from your lifepaths here.

=== Connections ===
Put any special connections with NPCs here, starting with anything from your lifepaths. The objective is that the GM has an quick-reference spot for people who might call you with Problems or cause you Problems.
*Friend
*Friend
*Enemy
*Enemy
*Tragic Love Affair.
*Whatever Else

== Stats ==
*Role Ability:
*LUCK: X out of Y
*MOVE:
*BODY:
*HP: xx/yy
*Seriously Wounded: -2 to all actions at XX.
*Death Save:
*Critical Injuries:
*Improvement Points:

{| class="wikitable" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-right: auto;"
|+ Skills
|-
|- style="color: red;"
! INT !! (number) !! Base !! WILL !! (number) !! Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
|- style="color: red;"
! REF !! (number) !! Base !! COOL !! (number) !! Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
|- style="color: red;"
! DEX !! (number) !! Base !! TECH !! (number) !! Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|- style="color: red;"
! EMP !! (number) !! Base !! Humanity !!
|-
| Human Perception || Level || Base || Current: || Maximum:
|-
|}

== Assets ==

===Cyberware===
*List
*Things
*Here

=== Money & Lifestyle ===
*Eddies On-Hand:
*Bank Account(s): ???
*Lifestyle & Time Left:
*Favors Owed
**To You:
**To Others:
*Debts Owed
**To You:
**To Others:
*Workshops:
**???
**???

=== Fashion ===
*Fashionware:
*Clothing:

=== Gear ===
*List
*Stuff
*Here

=== Tools ===
*List
*Tools
*Here

=== Armor ===
*Stored:
*Worn, Head:
*Worn, Body:

=== Weapons ===
*Melee Weapon:
**To Hit: 1d10+XX Damage: YD6
*Melee Weapon:
**To Hit: 1d10+XX Damage: YD6
*Unarmed:
**To Hit: 1d10+XX Damage: YD6
*Ammunition:
**One Type
**Two Type
**Red Type
**Blue Type

{| class="wikitable" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-right: auto;"
|+ Ranged Weapons
|-
! Weapon Name !! To Hit: 1d10+XX !! Damage: YD6 !! Ammo: !! ROF !! Hands !! Concealable
|-
! Range Band !! 0-6 !! 7-12 !! 13-25 !! 26-50 !! 51-100 !! 101-200 !! 201-400 !! 401-800
|-
! DV !! AA !! BB !! CC !! DD !! EE !! FF !! GG !! HH
|-
! Weapon Name !! To Hit: 1d10+XX !! Damage: YD6 !! Ammo: !! ROF !! Hands !! Concealable
|-
! Range Band !! 0-6 !! 7-12 !! 13-25 !! 26-50 !! 51-100 !! 101-200 !! 201-400 !! 401-800
|-
! DV !! AA !! BB !! CC !! DD !! EE !! FF !! GG !! HH
|}

CPRED Future So Dark: Blank Sheet

2023-10-14T18:11:17Z

The Wyzard: /* Stats */

== Background Details ==
*Real Name
*Street Name
*Role

=== Looks ===
Type notable things about your appearance here.

=== Background ===
Copypasta the most notable stuff from your lifepaths here.

=== Connections ===
Put any special connections with NPCs here, starting with anything from your lifepaths. The objective is that the GM has an quick-reference spot for people who might call you with Problems or cause you Problems.
*Friend
*Friend
*Enemy
*Enemy
*Tragic Love Affair.
*Whatever Else

== Stats ==
*Role Ability:
*LUCK: X out of Y
*MOVE:
*BODY:
*HP: xx/yy
*Seriously Wounded: -2 to all actions at XX.
*Death Save:
*Critical Injuries:

{| class="wikitable" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-right: auto;"
|+ Skills
|-
|- style="color: red;"
! INT !! (number) !! Base !! WILL !! (number) !! Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
|- style="color: red;"
! REF !! (number) !! Base !! COOL !! (number) !! Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
|- style="color: red;"
! DEX !! (number) !! Base !! TECH !! (number) !! Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|- style="color: red;"
! EMP !! (number) !! Base !! Humanity !!
|-
| Human Perception || Level || Base || Current: || Maximum:
|-
|}

== Assets ==

===Cyberware===
*List
*Things
*Here

=== Money & Lifestyle ===
*Eddies On-Hand:
*Bank Account(s): ???
*Lifestyle & Time Left:
*Favors Owed
**To You:
**To Others:
*Debts Owed
**To You:
**To Others:
*Workshops:
**???
**???

=== Fashion ===
*Fashionware:
*Clothing:

=== Gear ===
*List
*Stuff
*Here

=== Tools ===
*List
*Tools
*Here

=== Armor ===
*Stored:
*Worn, Head:
*Worn, Body:

=== Weapons ===
*Melee Weapon:
**To Hit: 1d10+XX Damage: YD6
*Melee Weapon:
**To Hit: 1d10+XX Damage: YD6
*Unarmed:
**To Hit: 1d10+XX Damage: YD6
*Ammunition:
**One Type
**Two Type
**Red Type
**Blue Type

{| class="wikitable" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-right: auto;"
|+ Ranged Weapons
|-
! Weapon Name !! To Hit: 1d10+XX !! Damage: YD6 !! Ammo: !! ROF !! Hands !! Concealable
|-
! Range Band !! 0-6 !! 7-12 !! 13-25 !! 26-50 !! 51-100 !! 101-200 !! 201-400 !! 401-800
|-
! DV !! AA !! BB !! CC !! DD !! EE !! FF !! GG !! HH
|-
! Weapon Name !! To Hit: 1d10+XX !! Damage: YD6 !! Ammo: !! ROF !! Hands !! Concealable
|-
! Range Band !! 0-6 !! 7-12 !! 13-25 !! 26-50 !! 51-100 !! 101-200 !! 201-400 !! 401-800
|-
! DV !! AA !! BB !! CC !! DD !! EE !! FF !! GG !! HH
|}

CPRED Future So Dark: Blank Sheet

2023-10-14T18:10:38Z

== Background Details ==
*Real Name
*Street Name
*Role

=== Looks ===
Type notable things about your appearance here.

=== Background ===
Copypasta the most notable stuff from your lifepaths here.

=== Connections ===
Put any special connections with NPCs here, starting with anything from your lifepaths. The objective is that the GM has an quick-reference spot for people who might call you with Problems or cause you Problems.
*Friend
*Friend
*Enemy
*Enemy
*Tragic Love Affair.
*Whatever Else

== Stats ==
*Role Ability:
*LUCK: X out of Y
*MOVE:
*BODY:
*HP: xx/yy
*Seriously Wounded: -2 to all actions at XX.
*Death Save:
*Critical Injuries:

{| class="wikitable" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-right: auto;"
|+ Stats & Skills
|-
|- style="color: red;"
! INT !! (number) !! Base !! WILL !! (number) !! Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
|- style="color: red;"
! REF !! (number) !! Base !! COOL !! (number) !! Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
|- style="color: red;"
! DEX !! (number) !! Base !! TECH !! (number) !! Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|-
| Skill Name || Level || Base || Skill Name || Level || Base
|- style="color: red;"
! EMP !! (number) !! Base !! Humanity !!
|-
| Human Perception || Level || Base || Current: || Maximum:
|-
|}

== Assets ==

===Cyberware===
*List
*Things
*Here

=== Money & Lifestyle ===
*Eddies On-Hand:
*Bank Account(s): ???
*Lifestyle & Time Left:
*Favors Owed
**To You:
**To Others:
*Debts Owed
**To You:
**To Others:
*Workshops:
**???
**???

=== Fashion ===
*Fashionware:
*Clothing:

=== Gear ===
*List
*Stuff
*Here

=== Tools ===
*List
*Tools
*Here

=== Armor ===
*Stored:
*Worn, Head:
*Worn, Body:

=== Weapons ===
*Melee Weapon:
**To Hit: 1d10+XX Damage: YD6
*Melee Weapon:
**To Hit: 1d10+XX Damage: YD6
*Unarmed:
**To Hit: 1d10+XX Damage: YD6
*Ammunition:
**One Type
**Two Type
**Red Type
**Blue Type

{| class="wikitable" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-right: auto;"
|+ Ranged Weapons
|-
! Weapon Name !! To Hit: 1d10+XX !! Damage: YD6 !! Ammo: !! ROF !! Hands !! Concealable
|-
! Range Band !! 0-6 !! 7-12 !! 13-25 !! 26-50 !! 51-100 !! 101-200 !! 201-400 !! 401-800
|-
! DV !! AA !! BB !! CC !! DD !! EE !! FF !! GG !! HH
|-
! Weapon Name !! To Hit: 1d10+XX !! Damage: YD6 !! Ammo: !! ROF !! Hands !! Concealable
|-
! Range Band !! 0-6 !! 7-12 !! 13-25 !! 26-50 !! 51-100 !! 101-200 !! 201-400 !! 401-800
|-
! DV !! AA !! BB !! CC !! DD !! EE !! FF !! GG !! HH
|}

CPRED Future So Dark

2023-10-14T17:01:21Z

The Wyzard: /* Characters */

=Cyberpunk RED: The Future's so Dark, We've Gotta Wear Shades=
=Introduction=

A crew of edgerunners tries to make their mark in the gritty world of 2045 Night City.

=Characters=
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Player !! Character Name !! Character Role
|-
| Dawgstar|| [https://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/CPRED_Future_So_Dark:_Triage Triage] || Medtech
|-
| Kittlefish|| [https://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/CPRED_Future_So_Dark:_Jaelyn_Higurashi Jaelyn Higurashi] || Media
|-
| Dersen Lowery || [https://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/CPRED_Future_So_Dark:_Crowbar Crowbar]|| Tech
|-
| NightGoblyn|| [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IdxkY9OguMipUsMkhbkLSJs1Q4I3g_1M56NvK28M3q4/edit?usp=sharing Aoki Natsuki] || Solo
|-
| Stormraven || [https://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/CPRED_Future_So_Dark:_Cruitaire Cruitaire]|| Rockergirl
|-
| The Wyzard|| [https://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/CPRED_Future_So_Dark:_Redhand Redhand]|| Solo
|}
[https://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/CPRED_Future_So_Dark:_Blank_Sheet Blank Sheet]

=Locations=

=NPCs=

=Screamsheets=
[https://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/File:Screamsheet_intro.jpg Morning edition 10.18.24]

=Links=
*[https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/development-cyberpunk-red-the-futures-so-dark-weve-gotta-wear-shades.914217/ Development thread]
*[https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/cyberpunk-red-the-futures-so-dark-weve-gotta-wear-shades.914252/ OOC thread]
*[https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/cyberpunk-red-the-futures-so-dark-weve-gotta-wear-shades.914253/ IC thread]
*[https://www.nightcity.io/red/ Map of Night City in 2045]
*[https://orokos.com/roll/ Orokos Dice Roller]

CPRED Future So Dark

2023-10-14T16:59:53Z

The Wyzard: /* Characters */

=Cyberpunk RED: The Future's so Dark, We've Gotta Wear Shades=
=Introduction=

A crew of edgerunners tries to make their mark in the gritty world of 2045 Night City.

=Characters=
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Player !! Character Name !! Character Role
|-
| Dawgstar|| [https://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/CPRED_Future_So_Dark:_Triage Triage] || Medtech
|-
| Kittlefish|| [https://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/CPRED_Future_So_Dark:_Jaelyn_Higurashi Jaelyn Higurashi] || Media
|-
| Dersen Lowery || [https://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/CPRED_Future_So_Dark:_Crowbar Crowbar]|| Tech
|-
| NightGoblyn|| [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IdxkY9OguMipUsMkhbkLSJs1Q4I3g_1M56NvK28M3q4/edit?usp=sharing Aoki Natsuki] || Solo
|-
| Stormraven || [https://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/CPRED_Future_So_Dark:_Cruitaire Cruitaire]|| Rockergirl
|-
| The Wyzard|| [https://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/CPRED_Future_So_Dark:_Redhand Redhand]|| Solo
|}

=Locations=

=NPCs=

=Screamsheets=
[https://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/File:Screamsheet_intro.jpg Morning edition 10.18.24]

=Links=
*[https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/development-cyberpunk-red-the-futures-so-dark-weve-gotta-wear-shades.914217/ Development thread]
*[https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/cyberpunk-red-the-futures-so-dark-weve-gotta-wear-shades.914252/ OOC thread]
*[https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/cyberpunk-red-the-futures-so-dark-weve-gotta-wear-shades.914253/ IC thread]
*[https://www.nightcity.io/red/ Map of Night City in 2045]
*[https://orokos.com/roll/ Orokos Dice Roller]

Into the Wild Woods:Thalin the Dauntless

2023-04-18T02:54:13Z

The Wyzard: /* Skills */

[[Into the Wild Woods]]

== Rank ==
*Elf (PHM 12) Level 6
*XP: 65k/120k XP (+10% adjustment)
*Neutral
*Full PC
*Winter Court Exile (Permanent Resist Cold)

== Attributes ==
*STR 13: +1 h/d, 3-in-6 open doors
*INT 6: Basic Literacy, -1 skill slot
*WIS 11
*DEX 16: +2 missile & AC, +1 initiative
*CON 9
*CHA 18: +2 Reaction, 7 retainers, 10 base loyalty.

== Skills ==
*Languages
**Common
**Faery
**
*General Skills
**Riding (1 slot)
**Bargain (Skilled, 10+, Charisma mod +3)
**
*Maneuvers
**Knock-Out (2 slots, 10+, +2 Dex)
*Fighting Styles
**Sword & Shield: One ally adjacent to, and up to two allies immediately behind, the fighter gain a +1 bonus to their armor class.
**Unarmed: The character can attack twice per round when fighting unarmed, with each blow inflicting 1d2 points of damage plus Strength modifier. They gain a +1 bonus to initiative, as well. This damage increases to 1d3 per blow at 6th level, 1d4 at 10th level, and 1d6 at 14th level
*Class Abilities
**►Immune to ghoul paralysis.
**►When targeted by charm or illusion magic they save with advantage; elves may make a saving throw against sleep spells.
**►Can see in dim light as if it were full daylight.
**►Can detect secret doors and hear noises with a1-2 in 6 chance.
**►As with most fey creatures, elves do not have souls. When they die they cannot be resurrected or returned to life; they cannot become undead, although their bodies can be used as vessels by undead creatures.
**►Elves are vulnerable to weapons of bronze. Attacks made against elves by bronze weapon have Advantage, and damage is rolled twice, taking the better result.
**►Word and Bond. Elves may lie with impunity, but may not break an oath they have sworn. They may certainly obey the letter and not the intention, though, twisting the words as they are able.
*Knacks
**Toughness
**Self-Improvement, Primary (Dex +2)

== Combat ==
*AC 18
*HP 34/34
*Movement Rate 90/30
*Initiative +1
*Attacks
**Primary Melee Attack: Magic Sword +6, 1d8+2 damage, or +7 & 1d8+3 against lycanthropes.
**Secondary Melee Attack: Two-fisted, +5x2, 1d3+1 damage per hit.
**Primary Ranged Attack: Shortbow +6, 1d6 damage.
*Saves:
**Petrification & Paralysis 10
**Death/Poison 9
**Breath 11
**Rods, Staves, & Spells 11
**Wands 10

== Spells, Caster Level 5 ==
*First Level: 2 per day from: Charm Person, Sleep, Light, Detect Magic, Entangle
*Second Level: 1 per day from: Animal Friendship, Speak with Animals, Knock

== Equipment ==
*Gear, Armor, Weapons: 410 + 103=513.
**Equipment: Backpack (80), 1 wk standard rations, 3 wks iron rations, 12 torches, tinderbox, 2 waterskins, small sack, Potion of Flying (10), Quiver w/ 20 arrows. Thalin has a selection of small personal grooming implements crafted with mother-of-pearl. They are probably worth 200gp or so as a set, but he would only sell them in the most desperate circumstances.
**Armor: Chain Mail +1 (200), Shield +1 (50)
**Weapons: Sword +1 (30) Short Bow (30) Dagger (10)
**Coins & Gems: 3x 1,000 gp gems + 100 platinum coins. (103)

*Star, a warhorse
**This is the horse Thalin rides. Star has a saddle he can secure his backpack to, but doesn't carry extra cargo, except for a lance in a scabbard.

*Stone, a riding horse
**This horse has a pack saddle suitable for its size. It isn't really intended to be overloaded.

Into the Wild Woods:Thalin the Dauntless

2023-04-18T00:35:00Z

The Wyzard: /* Equipment */

[[Into the Wild Woods]]

== Rank ==
*Elf (PHM 12) Level 6
*XP: 65k/120k XP (+10% adjustment)
*Neutral
*Full PC
*Winter Court Exile (Permanent Resist Cold)

== Attributes ==
*STR 13: +1 h/d, 3-in-6 open doors
*INT 6: Basic Literacy, -1 skill slot
*WIS 11
*DEX 16: +2 missile & AC, +1 initiative
*CON 9
*CHA 18: +2 Reaction, 7 retainers, 10 base loyalty.

== Skills ==
*Languages
**Common
**Faery
**
*General Skills
**Riding (1 slot)
**Bargain (Skilled, 10+, Charisma mod +3)
**
*Maneuvers
**Knock-Out (2 slots, 10+, +2 Dex)
*Fighting Styles
**Sword & Shield: One ally adjacent to, and up to two allies immediately behind, the fighter gain a +1 bonus to their armor class.
**Unarmed: The character can attack twice per round when fighting unarmed, with each blow inflicting 1d2 points of damage plus Strength modifier. They gain a +1 bonus to initiative, as well. This damage increases to 1d3 per blow at 6th level, 1d4 at 10th level, and 1d6 at 14th level
*Class Abilities
**►Immune to ghoul paralysis.
**►When targeted by charm or illusion magic they save with advantage; elves may make a saving throw against sleep spells.
**►Can see in dim light as if it were full daylight.
**►Can detect secret doors and hear noises with a
1-2 in 6 chance.
**►As with most fey creatures, elves do not have souls. When they die they cannot be resurrected or returned to life; they cannot become undead, although their bodies can be used as vessels by undead creatures.
**►Elves are vulnerable to weapons of bronze. Attacks made against elves by bronze weapon have Advantage, and damage is rolled twice, taking the better result.
**►Word and Bond. Elves may lie with impunity, but may not break an oath they have sworn. They may certainly obey the letter and not the intention, though, twisting the words as they are able.
*Knacks
**Toughness
**Self-Improvement, Primary (Dex +2)

== Combat ==
*AC 18
*HP 34/34
*Movement Rate 90/30
*Initiative +1
*Attacks
**Primary Melee Attack: Magic Sword +6, 1d8+2 damage, or +7 & 1d8+3 against lycanthropes.
**Secondary Melee Attack: Two-fisted, +5x2, 1d3+1 damage per hit.
**Primary Ranged Attack: Shortbow +6, 1d6 damage.
*Saves:
**Petrification & Paralysis 10
**Death/Poison 9
**Breath 11
**Rods, Staves, & Spells 11
**Wands 10

== Spells, Caster Level 5 ==
*First Level: 2 per day from: Charm Person, Sleep, Light, Detect Magic, Entangle
*Second Level: 1 per day from: Animal Friendship, Speak with Animals, Knock

== Equipment ==
*Gear, Armor, Weapons: 410 + 103=513.
**Equipment: Backpack (80), 1 wk standard rations, 3 wks iron rations, 12 torches, tinderbox, 2 waterskins, small sack, Potion of Flying (10), Quiver w/ 20 arrows. Thalin has a selection of small personal grooming implements crafted with mother-of-pearl. They are probably worth 200gp or so as a set, but he would only sell them in the most desperate circumstances.
**Armor: Chain Mail +1 (200), Shield +1 (50)
**Weapons: Sword +1 (30) Short Bow (30) Dagger (10)
**Coins & Gems: 3x 1,000 gp gems + 100 platinum coins. (103)

*Star, a warhorse
**This is the horse Thalin rides. Star has a saddle he can secure his backpack to, but doesn't carry extra cargo, except for a lance in a scabbard.

*Stone, a riding horse
**This horse has a pack saddle suitable for its size. It isn't really intended to be overloaded.

Into the Wild Woods:Thalin the Dauntless

2023-04-16T23:41:56Z

The Wyzard:

[[Into the Wild Woods]]

== Rank ==
*Elf (PHM 12) Level 6
*XP: 65k/120k XP (+10% adjustment)
*Neutral
*Full PC
*Winter Court Exile (Permanent Resist Cold)

== Attributes ==
*STR 13: +1 h/d, 3-in-6 open doors
*INT 6: Basic Literacy, -1 skill slot
*WIS 11
*DEX 16: +2 missile & AC, +1 initiative
*CON 9
*CHA 18: +2 Reaction, 7 retainers, 10 base loyalty.

== Skills ==
*Languages
**Common
**Faery
**
*General Skills
**Riding (1 slot)
**Bargain (Skilled, 10+, Charisma mod +3)
**
*Maneuvers
**Knock-Out (2 slots, 10+, +2 Dex)
*Fighting Styles
**Sword & Shield: One ally adjacent to, and up to two allies immediately behind, the fighter gain a +1 bonus to their armor class.
**Unarmed: The character can attack twice per round when fighting unarmed, with each blow inflicting 1d2 points of damage plus Strength modifier. They gain a +1 bonus to initiative, as well. This damage increases to 1d3 per blow at 6th level, 1d4 at 10th level, and 1d6 at 14th level
*Class Abilities
**►Immune to ghoul paralysis.
**►When targeted by charm or illusion magic they save with advantage; elves may make a saving throw against sleep spells.
**►Can see in dim light as if it were full daylight.
**►Can detect secret doors and hear noises with a
1-2 in 6 chance.
**►As with most fey creatures, elves do not have souls. When they die they cannot be resurrected or returned to life; they cannot become undead, although their bodies can be used as vessels by undead creatures.
**►Elves are vulnerable to weapons of bronze. Attacks made against elves by bronze weapon have Advantage, and damage is rolled twice, taking the better result.
**►Word and Bond. Elves may lie with impunity, but may not break an oath they have sworn. They may certainly obey the letter and not the intention, though, twisting the words as they are able.
*Knacks
**Toughness
**Self-Improvement, Primary (Dex +2)

== Combat ==
*AC 18
*HP 34/34
*Movement Rate 90/30
*Initiative +1
*Attacks
**Primary Melee Attack: Magic Sword +6, 1d8+2 damage, or +7 & 1d8+3 against lycanthropes.
**Secondary Melee Attack: Two-fisted, +5x2, 1d3+1 damage per hit.
**Primary Ranged Attack: Shortbow +6, 1d6 damage.
*Saves:
**Petrification & Paralysis 10
**Death/Poison 9
**Breath 11
**Rods, Staves, & Spells 11
**Wands 10

== Spells, Caster Level 5 ==
*First Level: 2 per day from: Charm Person, Sleep, Light, Detect Magic, Entangle
*Second Level: 1 per day from: Animal Friendship, Speak with Animals, Knock

== Equipment ==
*Gear, Armor, Weapons: 410
**Equipment: Backpack (80), 1 wk standard rations, 3 wks iron rations, 12 torches, tinderbox, 2 waterskins, small sack, Potion of Flying (10)
**Armor: Chain Mail +1 (200), Shield +1 (50)
**Weapons: Sword +1 (30) Long Bow (30) Dagger (10)
**Coins & Gems:

*Star, a horse
**

*Stone, a horse
**

Into the Wild Woods:Thalin the Dauntless

2023-04-16T23:03:55Z

The Wyzard: Created page with "Into the Wild Woods == Rank == *Race Class Level *XP: XX/YY *Alignment (, stick to neutral or lawful please.) *List whether the character is a full PC or henchman, if the..."

[[Into the Wild Woods]]

== Rank ==
*Race Class Level
*XP: XX/YY
*Alignment (, stick to neutral or lawful please.)
*List whether the character is a full PC or henchman, if the latter list chain of command to a PC.
*List any titles or holdings

== Attributes ==
*STR
*INT
*WIS
*DEX
*CON
*CHA

== Skills ==
*Languages
**
**
**
*General Skills
**(please give a very short summary of what your skills do, if they have mechanical effects, if it's not too much effort. Elsewise, a page number is nice.)
**
**
*Class Abilities
**
**
**
*Knacks
**
**
**

== Combat ==
*AC
*HP (just list the max here, list current HP on the front page.)
*Movement Rate
*Initiative Modifier
*Attacks (For the below, write in what it is. Like, "Two-Handed Sword: Stats."
**Primary Melee Attack: (List the attack throw with all magical, ability, etc., modifiers, like 5+ or whatever), (Damage.)
**Secondary Melee Attack:
**Primary Ranged Attack:
*Saves:
**Petrification & Paralysis
**Poison & Death
**Blast & Breath
**Staves & Wands
**Spells

== Spells ==
*First Level: Spells Per Day
**A first level spell in your repertoire
**Another first-level spell in your repertoire
**Etc
*Second Level: Spells Per Day
**One
**Two
**You-know-what-to-do

== Equipment ==
*Gear, Armor, Weapons: Total Encumbrance. Don't list party treasure here. That's what the ape is for on the front page. This is to keep track of those things that are relatively permanently staying with your character.
**Then list
**Those things
**Individually

Into the Wild Woods

2023-04-15T21:04:31Z

The Wyzard: /* Characters */

[[File:ItW Cover for Upload-800x600.jpg|400 pxl]]

[https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/interest-semi-closed-recruitment-into-the-wild-woods-hexcrawl.909132/ Recruitment Thread] | [https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/into-the-wild-woods.909497/ OOC Thread]

=Characters=
*Main PC
**Retainer A
**Retainer B
*[[Into_the_Wild_Woods:Thalin the Dauntless | Thalin the Dauntless]]
**No Retainers Yet
*[[Into_the_Wild_Woods:Orcanu | Orcanu]]
**[[Into_the_Wild_Woods:Tsaf | Tsaf]]
**[[Into_the_Wild_Woods:Peldar | Peldar]]
*[[Into_the_Wild_Woods:Itzalaryn | Itzalaryn]]
*[[IWW Blank Character Sheet]]

=Encumbrance=

=Maps=

=Treasure=

=Rumors=

Pei Feverfew

2022-09-22T00:20:36Z

The Wyzard: /* Abilities */

=Pei Feverfew=
*Background: Physician
*Appearance: A man with graceful bearing and a noble demeanor...if he puts his mind to it. And bothers to shave that day. Pei has dark hair tied usually tied back in a loose bun or ponytale, with dark eyes and sharp cheekbones to match. The elegance of his long fingers and soft hands is marred only by the occasional chemical burn stain or small, enigmatic scar that speaks to a more chaotic past.
*Description: A former adventuring party's medic, Pei found that the cushy job he gained in the city brought him wealth and comfort but also a great deal of boredom. As grumpy as he seems to be about the situation, part of his heart delights in the chance to finally do something interesting again.
*Goal:
*Class: Expert

*Legendary Expertise: Once per scene, as an Instant action, automatically succeed at any non-combat skill check of difficulty 12 or less. If used in an opposed skill check, you may instead reroll the check and use the best roll of the two.
*Heroic Skill: Pick any one non-combat, non-Magic skill; that skill is immediately set to level-4 proficiency, regardless of your character level and the usual maximum allowed. If you already have that skill at some level from some other source, you may exchange the existing score for an equal rating in any other non-combat, non-Magic skill of your choice that you don’t already have.
*Quick Learner: When you advance a character level, you gain an extra skill point which may only be spent on gaining or improving non-combat skills or raising attributes. You may save this point to spend later if you wish.
*Heroic Expert’s Fray: Once per round, as an On Turn action, inflict 1d8 damage plus half your level, rounded down, to any one target within reach of
any of your Readied weapons, provided they have equal or fewer hit dice than you have levels. This damage is not modified by any ability or bonus, and can affect any creature who could be hurt by that Readied weapon.

*HP: 26/26
*System Strain: 9/9
*Level: 3
*XP: 6/12

=Attributes=
*Strength: 9
*Dexterity: 12
*Constitution: 9
*Intelligence: 14 (+1)
*Wisdom: 11
*Charisma: 10

=Combat=
*Movement: 30
*Armor: (List the actual armor + shield worn)
**AC: (+shield, if any)
*Base Attack Bonus: +1
*Weapon:
**+X, XdX+X. Shock: Range:
*Weapon:
**+X, XdX+X. Shock: Range:
*Physical: 13
*Evasion: 12
*Mental: 13
*Luck: 13

=Abilities=

==Skills==
*Administer - 0
*Craft - 4
*Convince - 0
*Heal - 0

==Foci==
*Polymath
**You have a passing acquaintance with a vast variety of practical skills and pastimes, and can make a modest attempt at almost any exercise of skill or artisanry. Note
that the phantom skill levels granted by this Focus don’t stack with normal skill levels or give a skill purchase
discount. Only Experts or Partial Experts can take this Focus.

Level 1: Gain any one bonus skill. You treat all non-combat skills as if they were at least level-0 for purposes
of skill checks, even if you lack them entirely.

*Gifted Chirurgeon
You have an unusual gift for saving Mortally Wounded allies and quickening the natural recovery of the wounded in your care.
**Level 1: Gain Heal as a bonus skill. You may attempt to stabilize one Mortally Wounded adjacent person per round as an On Turn action. When rolling Heal skill checks, roll 3d6 and drop the lowest die. You heal twice as many hit points as usual when applying first aid after a battle, as described on page 48.

*Cultured
**Through wide travel, careful observation, or extensive study, you’ve obtained a wide experience of the cultures
of your region and an ability to navigate their customs, laws, and languages. You know what to do and say to
impress others with the reasonableness of your wishes.

Level 1: Gain Connect as a bonus skill. You can fluently speak all the common languages of your native region and convey at least basic information in the
uncommon or esoteric ones. You can learn a new language with only a week’s practice with a native speaker. Once per game day, your polished ways automatically gain a minor favor from an NPC that would not put them to significant expense or risk, assuming the NPC isn’t hostile to you.

=Gear=
*Readied Items:
**Total: X/X
*Stowed Items:
**Total: X/X

=Miscellanea=

==Notes==

==Assets==

Pei Feverfew

2022-09-21T22:55:52Z

The Wyzard:

=Pei Feverfew=
*Background: Physician
*Appearance: A man with graceful bearing and a noble demeanor...if he puts his mind to it. And bothers to shave that day. Pei has dark hair tied usually tied back in a loose bun or ponytale, with dark eyes and sharp cheekbones to match. The elegance of his long fingers and soft hands is marred only by the occasional chemical burn stain or small, enigmatic scar that speaks to a more chaotic past.
*Description: A former adventuring party's medic, Pei found that the cushy job he gained in the city brought him wealth and comfort but also a great deal of boredom. As grumpy as he seems to be about the situation, part of his heart delights in the chance to finally do something interesting again.
*Goal:
*Class: Expert

*Legendary Expertise: Once per scene, as an Instant action, automatically succeed at any non-combat skill check of difficulty 12 or less. If used in an opposed skill check, you may instead reroll the check and use the best roll of the two.
*Heroic Skill: Pick any one non-combat, non-Magic skill; that skill is immediately set to level-4 proficiency, regardless of your character level and the usual maximum allowed. If you already have that skill at some level from some other source, you may exchange the existing score for an equal rating in any other non-combat, non-Magic skill of your choice that you don’t already have.
*Quick Learner: When you advance a character level, you gain an extra skill point which may only be spent on gaining or improving non-combat skills or raising attributes. You may save this point to spend later if you wish.
*Heroic Expert’s Fray: Once per round, as an On Turn action, inflict 1d8 damage plus half your level, rounded down, to any one target within reach of
any of your Readied weapons, provided they have equal or fewer hit dice than you have levels. This damage is not modified by any ability or bonus, and can affect any creature who could be hurt by that Readied weapon.

*HP: 26/26
*System Strain: 9/9
*Level: 3
*XP: 6/12

=Attributes=
*Strength: 9
*Dexterity: 12
*Constitution: 9
*Intelligence: 14 (+1)
*Wisdom: 11
*Charisma: 10

=Combat=
*Movement: 30
*Armor: (List the actual armor + shield worn)
**AC: (+shield, if any)
*Base Attack Bonus: +1
*Weapon:
**+X, XdX+X. Shock: Range:
*Weapon:
**+X, XdX+X. Shock: Range:
*Physical: 13
*Evasion: 12
*Mental: 13
*Luck: 13

=Abilities=

==Skills==
*Heal - 0
*Convince - 0
*Administer - 0]

[[+2 Physical]]

==Foci==
*Polymath
**You have a passing acquaintance with a vast variety of practical skills and pastimes, and can make a modest attempt at almost any exercise of skill or artisanry. Note
that the phantom skill levels granted by this Focus don’t stack with normal skill levels or give a skill purchase
discount. Only Experts or Partial Experts can take this Focus.

Level 1: Gain any one bonus skill. You treat all non-combat skills as if they were at least level-0 for purposes
of skill checks, even if you lack them entirely.

*Gifted Chirurgeon
You have an unusual gift for saving Mortally Wounded allies and quickening the natural recovery of the wounded in your care.
**Level 1: Gain Heal as a bonus skill. You may attempt to stabilize one Mortally Wounded adjacent person per round as an On Turn action. When rolling Heal skill checks, roll 3d6 and drop the lowest die. You heal twice as many hit points as usual when applying first aid after a battle, as described on page 48.

*Cultured
**Through wide travel, careful observation, or extensive study, you’ve obtained a wide experience of the cultures
of your region and an ability to navigate their customs, laws, and languages. You know what to do and say to
impress others with the reasonableness of your wishes.

Level 1: Gain Connect as a bonus skill. You can fluently speak all the common languages of your native region and convey at least basic information in the
uncommon or esoteric ones. You can learn a new language with only a week’s practice with a native speaker. Once per game day, your polished ways automatically gain a minor favor from an NPC that would not put them to significant expense or risk, assuming the NPC isn’t hostile to you.

=Gear=
*Readied Items:
**Total: X/X
*Stowed Items:
**Total: X/X

=Miscellanea=

==Notes==

==Assets==

Pei Feverfew

2022-09-13T23:20:22Z

The Wyzard: /* Combat */

[=Pei Feverfew=]
*Background: Physician
*Appearance: A man with graceful bearing and a noble demeanor...if he puts his mind to it. And bothers to shave that day. Pei has dark hair tied usually tied back in a loose bun or ponytale, with dark eyes and sharp cheekbones to match. The elegance of his long fingers and soft hands is marred only by the occasional chemical burn stain or small, enigmatic scar that speaks to a more chaotic past.
*Description: A former adventuring party's medic, Pei found that the cushy job he gained in the city brought him wealth and comfort but also a great deal of boredom. As grumpy as he seems to be about the situation, part of his heart delights in the chance to finally do something interesting again.
*Goal:
*Class: Expert

*Legendary Expertise: Once per scene, as an Instant action, automatically succeed at any non-combat skill check of difficulty 12 or less. If used in an opposed skill check, you may instead reroll the check and use the best roll of the two.
*Heroic Skill: Pick any one non-combat, non-Magic skill; that skill is immediately set to level-4 proficiency, regardless of your character level and the usual maximum allowed. If you already have that skill at some level from some other source, you may exchange the existing score for an equal rating in any other non-combat, non-Magic skill of your choice that you don’t already have.
*Quick Learner: When you advance a character level, you gain an extra skill point which may only be spent on gaining or improving non-combat skills or raising attributes. You may save this point to spend later if you wish.
*Heroic Expert’s Fray: Once per round, as an On Turn action, inflict 1d8 damage plus half your level, rounded down, to any one target within reach of
any of your Readied weapons, provided they have equal or fewer hit dice than you have levels. This damage is not modified by any ability or bonus, and can affect any creature who could be hurt by that Readied weapon.

*HP: 26/26
*System Strain: 9/9
*Level: 3
*XP: 6/12

=Attributes=
*Strength: 9
*Dexterity: 12
*Constitution: 9
*Intelligence: 14 (+1)
*Wisdom: 11
*Charisma: 10

=Combat=
*Movement: 30
*Armor: (List the actual armor + shield worn)
**AC: (+shield, if any)
*Base Attack Bonus: +1
*Weapon:
**+X, XdX+X. Shock: Range:
*Weapon:
**+X, XdX+X. Shock: Range:
*Physical: 13
*Evasion: 12
*Mental: 13
*Luck: 13

=Abilities=

==Skills==
*Heal - 0
*Convince - 0
*Administer - 0]

[[+2 Physical]]

==Foci==
*Polymath
**You have a passing acquaintance with a vast variety of practical skills and pastimes, and can make a modest attempt at almost any exercise of skill or artisanry. Note
that the phantom skill levels granted by this Focus don’t stack with normal skill levels or give a skill purchase
discount. Only Experts or Partial Experts can take this Focus.

Level 1: Gain any one bonus skill. You treat all non-combat skills as if they were at least level-0 for purposes
of skill checks, even if you lack them entirely.

*Gifted Chirurgeon
You have an unusual gift for saving Mortally Wounded allies and quickening the natural recovery of the wounded in your care.
**Level 1: Gain Heal as a bonus skill. You may attempt to stabilize one Mortally Wounded adjacent person per round as an On Turn action. When rolling Heal skill checks, roll 3d6 and drop the lowest die. You heal twice as many hit points as usual when applying first aid after a battle, as described on page 48.

*Cultured
**Through wide travel, careful observation, or extensive study, you’ve obtained a wide experience of the cultures
of your region and an ability to navigate their customs, laws, and languages. You know what to do and say to
impress others with the reasonableness of your wishes.

Level 1: Gain Connect as a bonus skill. You can fluently speak all the common languages of your native region and convey at least basic information in the
uncommon or esoteric ones. You can learn a new language with only a week’s practice with a native speaker. Once per game day, your polished ways automatically gain a minor favor from an NPC that would not put them to significant expense or risk, assuming the NPC isn’t hostile to you.

=Gear=
*Readied Items:
**Total: X/X
*Stowed Items:
**Total: X/X

=Miscellanea=

==Notes==

==Assets==

Pei Feverfew

2022-09-13T23:15:45Z

The Wyzard:

[=Pei Feverfew=]
*Background: Physician
*Appearance: A man with graceful bearing and a noble demeanor...if he puts his mind to it. And bothers to shave that day. Pei has dark hair tied usually tied back in a loose bun or ponytale, with dark eyes and sharp cheekbones to match. The elegance of his long fingers and soft hands is marred only by the occasional chemical burn stain or small, enigmatic scar that speaks to a more chaotic past.
*Description: A former adventuring party's medic, Pei found that the cushy job he gained in the city brought him wealth and comfort but also a great deal of boredom. As grumpy as he seems to be about the situation, part of his heart delights in the chance to finally do something interesting again.
*Goal:
*Class: Expert

*Legendary Expertise: Once per scene, as an Instant action, automatically succeed at any non-combat skill check of difficulty 12 or less. If used in an opposed skill check, you may instead reroll the check and use the best roll of the two.
*Heroic Skill: Pick any one non-combat, non-Magic skill; that skill is immediately set to level-4 proficiency, regardless of your character level and the usual maximum allowed. If you already have that skill at some level from some other source, you may exchange the existing score for an equal rating in any other non-combat, non-Magic skill of your choice that you don’t already have.
*Quick Learner: When you advance a character level, you gain an extra skill point which may only be spent on gaining or improving non-combat skills or raising attributes. You may save this point to spend later if you wish.
*Heroic Expert’s Fray: Once per round, as an On Turn action, inflict 1d8 damage plus half your level, rounded down, to any one target within reach of
any of your Readied weapons, provided they have equal or fewer hit dice than you have levels. This damage is not modified by any ability or bonus, and can affect any creature who could be hurt by that Readied weapon.

*HP: 26/26
*System Strain: 9/9
*Level: 3
*XP: 6/12

=Attributes=
*Strength: 9
*Dexterity: 12
*Constitution: 9
*Intelligence: 14 (+1)
*Wisdom: 11
*Charisma: 10

=Combat=
*Movement: 30
*Armor: (List the actual armor + shield worn)
**AC: (+shield, if any)
*Base Attack Bonus
*Weapon:
**+X, XdX+X. Shock: Range:
*Weapon:
**+X, XdX+X. Shock: Range:
*Physical: 13
*Evasion: 12
*Mental: 13
*Luck: 13
=Abilities=

==Skills==
*Heal - 0
*Convince - 0
*Administer - 0]

[[+2 Physical]]

==Foci==
*Polymath
**You have a passing acquaintance with a vast variety of practical skills and pastimes, and can make a modest attempt at almost any exercise of skill or artisanry. Note
that the phantom skill levels granted by this Focus don’t stack with normal skill levels or give a skill purchase
discount. Only Experts or Partial Experts can take this Focus.

Level 1: Gain any one bonus skill. You treat all non-combat skills as if they were at least level-0 for purposes
of skill checks, even if you lack them entirely.

*Gifted Chirurgeon
You have an unusual gift for saving Mortally Wounded allies and quickening the natural recovery of the wounded in your care.
**Level 1: Gain Heal as a bonus skill. You may attempt to stabilize one Mortally Wounded adjacent person per round as an On Turn action. When rolling Heal skill checks, roll 3d6 and drop the lowest die. You heal twice as many hit points as usual when applying first aid after a battle, as described on page 48.

*Cultured
**Through wide travel, careful observation, or extensive study, you’ve obtained a wide experience of the cultures
of your region and an ability to navigate their customs, laws, and languages. You know what to do and say to
impress others with the reasonableness of your wishes.

Level 1: Gain Connect as a bonus skill. You can fluently speak all the common languages of your native region and convey at least basic information in the
uncommon or esoteric ones. You can learn a new language with only a week’s practice with a native speaker. Once per game day, your polished ways automatically gain a minor favor from an NPC that would not put them to significant expense or risk, assuming the NPC isn’t hostile to you.

=Gear=
*Readied Items:
**Total: X/X
*Stowed Items:
**Total: X/X

=Miscellanea=

==Notes==

==Assets==

Pei Feverfew

2022-09-12T21:18:57Z

The Wyzard:

=Pei Huai=
*Background: Physician
*Appearance:
*Description:
*Goal:
*Class: Expert

*Class Ability: Masterful Expertise
**Once per scene, the Expert may reroll any non-combat
skill check as an Instant action. This allows the Expert
to make a roll and then immediately use this ability if
the resulting total isn’t good enough to succeed. In cases
where it matters, the better of the two rolls may be used.
*Class Ability: Quick Learner
**When you advance a character level, you gain an extra
skill point which may only be spent on gaining or improving non-combat skills or raising attributes. You may
save this point to spend later if you wish.

=Attributes=
*Strength: 9 (+/-)
*Dexterity: 12 (+/-)
*Constitution: 7 (-1)
*Intelligence: 14 (+1)
*Wisdom: 11 (+/-)
*Charisma: 10 (+/-)

=Combat=
*Movement:
*Armor: (List the actual armor + shield worn)
**AC: (+shield, if any)
*Base Attack Bonus
*Weapon:
**+X, XdX+X. Shock: Range:
*Weapon:
**+X, XdX+X. Shock: Range:
*Physical:
*Evasion:
*Mental:
*Luck:
=Abilities=
==Skills==
*Heal - 0
*Convince - 0
*Administer - 0

[[+2 Physical]]

==Foci==
*Polymath
**You have a passing acquaintance with a vast variety of
practical skills and pastimes, and can make a modest attempt at almost any exercise of skill or artisanry. Note
that the phantom skill levels granted by this Focus don’t
stack with normal skill levels or give a skill purchase
discount. Only Experts or Partial Experts can take this
Focus.
Level 1: Gain any one bonus skill. You treat all non-combat skills as if they were at least level-0 for purposes
of skill checks, even if you lack them entirely.

*Gifted Chirurgeon
You have an unusual gift for saving Mortally Wounded
allies and quickening the natural recovery of the wounded in your care.
**Level 1: Gain Heal as a bonus skill. You may attempt to
stabilize one Mortally Wounded adjacent person
per round as an On Turn action. When rolling Heal
skill checks, roll 3d6 and drop the lowest die. You
heal twice as many hit points as usual when applying first aid after a battle, as described on page 48.

*Cultured
**Through wide travel, careful observation, or extensive
study, you’ve obtained a wide experience of the cultures
of your region and an ability to navigate their customs,
laws, and languages. You know what to do and say to
impress others with the reasonableness of your wishes.
Level 1: Gain Connect as a bonus skill. You can fluently speak all the common languages of your native
region and convey at least basic information in the
uncommon or esoteric ones. You can learn a new
language with only a week’s practice with a native
speaker. Once per game day, your polished ways automatically gain a minor favor from an NPC that
would not put them to significant expense or risk,
assuming the NPC isn’t hostile to you.

=Gear=
*Readied Items:
**Total: X/X
*Stowed Items:
**Total: X/X

=Miscellanea=

==Notes==

==Assets==

Caverns Without Number

2022-09-11T18:02:25Z

The Wyzard: /* Character Creation & Advancement */

This is a page for the Caverns of Thracia game, run by The Wyzard using Worlds Without Number. Its content is tentative.

'''Before we start:''' Combat is intended to be a little more interesting than normal B/X. I strongly suggest that you all familiarize yourself with how Shock Damage works, and secondarily with how the combat maneuvers work. Shock Damage is going to mess you up if you aren't ready for it.

[[File:GMG4615-Thracia-455x600.jpg]]

=The Adventurers=

==Dramatis Personae==
*[[Kastalos the Untouchable]]
*[[Yacob Muleskinner|Cob Muleskinner]]
*[[Pei Feverfew]]
*[[Merida the Mellifluent]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[WWN Sample Character Sheet]]

=Introduction=
The greatest city of the world, in terms of cosmopolitan fun, wealth, and knowledge, is Nibiru, the Peregrinate Acropolis. A heavily fortified castle-city built on a large stone mesa, it has the look of a vast ziggurat capped with a wonder of colorful towers. The undercity inside the mesa is a maze of carved and worked tunnels, warehouses, reservoirs, and hidden temples. The lower levels of the city are a chaos of tenements, manufactories, brightly tiled plazas, and cafeterias. The vast towers contain luxury apartments for the rich, in addition to colleges, libraries, laboratories, training halls and so forth. The outer walls are dotted with fortifications, weapon emplacements, signal towers, and windmills that power various machinery, particularly water pumps. Real estate is tremendously valuable, most people live in spaces little larger than a walk-in closet. Hence the desperate need for the public bathhouses and cafeteria-style restaurants that support the life and hygiene of the city - there simply isn't space for people to have their own kitchens and so forth.

What makes Nibiru so wealthy and influential, such a center of knowledge, is that it moves. Every week, the city disappears in vast cloud of opaque fog, and reappears somewhere else on Terminus. The engines that accomplish this have been carefully maintained for centuries, so that it has functioned without interruption. It peregrinates along a semi-regular trade route, with space built into the schedule for necessary or opportunistic deviations, and a cadre of mages, merchants, and scholars of economics carefully plot its course for maximum advantage. Wherever it lands, the vast trading apparatus fires up into action. Enormous loads of commodities and rarer goods are sold to local merchant houses, wherever the city might land. The vast caverns of the undercity can carry an amount of cargo beyond imagination. The limiting factor is how much of it can be hauled out and traded for new goods, which must in their turn be loaded within six days.

You are natives of this city - you have the invisible, UV-reactive tattoo of a citizen in at least three places on your body. This marks you as one of the exalted, an individual with the right to enter the city's gates and remain within the confines as it peregrinates. Even the meanest beggar who is a citizen of Nibiru has something that the wealth of an emperor might not purchase. And, like all natives, you know the rule - the first six days are for business, but the seventh is a day of rest. No one leaves the city on the seventh day, or lingers outside for even one second beyond midnight of the sixth. The risk of being left behind is just too high.

Guess how you fucked up?

==The Local Environment==
It's early spring and you're probably going to be stuck here for about the next year, until Nibiru returns and you can get home. The city-state of Amarna is located on a fertile river delta that empties into a sea. That's where Nibiru came to rest. The area around the great river is a green and well-developed valley, with large towns and farming villages served by a regular geometric pattern of irrigation channels. To the east, about a day's walk down the coast, is a small semi-fortified city named Tjaru, in an undesirable and swampy region. It is used as a place of exile for criminals and the disgraced. That's where you've currently ended up. And you've heard rumors of a recently-discovered Deep, one of the vast underground fastnesses built by various ancient civilizations.

Deeps are dangerous, in ways both mundane and exotic. However, they frequently contain raw wealth left behind by the Ancients. Also, the even more precious sorcerous, alchemical, or technological artifacts that they seem to have had such a panoply of. This would be an outstanding way to support yourselves for the next year. And, if you're lucky, you might go beyond supporting yourself in reasonable style, and find that you've recovered something valuable enough to earn a higher station in Nibiru.

Note: Tjaru and other nearby settlements are all part of the same Amar "city-state," ruled over by the central city Amarna. It is also styled as Amar-Na in more formal writings. The people that live here are Amars. The adjective form is Amaric.

==Distance & Timekeeping==
I'll eventually post a hexmap with some local points of interest and so forth, but I don't envision hexcrawling to be a major component. You're going to be in a relatively civilized area, albeit on the very edge of it. You won't need to make wilderness encounter checks to get to the dungeon and back.

My assumption is that you'll be largely based in Tjaru. My thought is that rather than keep strict track of days, a single delve (which might span multiple sessions) will just cross a week off the calendar, and we'll assume that resting, re-equipping, and so forth takes about that long. The dungeon is going to be maybe two hour's walk from Tjaru, so you can go out there, screw around for a while, and still get back before dark.

In-town intrigues and investigations likely WILL be a component of this game. It's not pure dungeon-crawling. And there's a significant amount of factionalism and other interesting stuff going on inside the Deep itself. It's not just dozens of rooms full of combat encounters.

==Questions for Session Zero==
*Anything anybody definitely wants to see
*Anything anyone definitely doesn't want to see, particularly in terms of "does anything already on this wiki bother someone a lot?"
*Lines & Veils or whatever, PM me if you have to
*I don't intend the game to include explicit sexual content, and even the implication of sexual violence is right out
*I actually find some of the gene-modified human strains in WWN to be kind of interesting, but they might be too problematic, I dunno, opinions?
*

=Encumbrance & Beasts of Burden=
WWN's encumbrance system is simple enough that I'm not sure we'll actually need this section, but I included it as a matter of habit. Note that every full 100 coins counts as an item. Count normal gems as a single coin. Jewelry and small art objects are counted as a bulk good - you can pack together three items such as carved ivory necklaces, jade hairbrushes, jeweled crowns, rings, etc. I'll let you know about larger art objects.
==The Pocket Change Rule==
Your first up-to-100-coins worth of regular coins and gems do not count towards encumbrance, so long as they're yours alone. Found treasure is tracked separately until you return to civilization, such as it is.
==The Bling Rule==
The PCs may ignore the encumbrance requirements of jewelry if they simply wear the jewelry openly, within reason. No more than a single crown at a time, etc. This has two downsides: If you are presently in a Deep, you may find out an object is cursed at a most inconvenient time. Secondly, your enemies may become ravenously motivated to relieve you of those items. Morale is an important component of combat in this game, and if you are draped in the wealth of nations, then opponents may get a morale bonus.

=NPCs=

=Notes & Logs=

=Maps=

=House Rules & Character Creation=

==Character Creation & Advancement==
*For attributes, arrange the following array to taste: 14, 12, 11, 10, 9, and 7. See pg. 8.
*When you pick a background, you get a free skill associated with it at level 0. Then, make a total of three rolls on the growth or learning table for your background.
*Choose a class. We're only using the classes available in the free version.
*Assume you roll a 6 on your first hit die.
*Skip the equipment step, read up on the languages stuff on this wiki.
*Everyone levels up twice. We start at level 3. Assume you roll a 4 on these two hit dice.
*You can start with 1,000 silver pieces worth of equipment. Note that this game is on a silver standard. If you want one of the packages on page 29, assume it's 100 silver pieces for any of the packages. No swapping or whatever. Discard any money you didn't spend on equipment.
*For ready cash, you each start with 3d6 gold, 3d20 silver, and 1d4+1 gems worth 50 sp apiece.
*Your first month of living expenses is prepaid, at a Common standard of living. After the first month you need to pay that much, which amounts to 80sp per month, due on the first of each month. Adventurers cannot voluntarily spend less than this, because they are intolerant of living in more straitened circumstances. Note that this includes rations - it's not any more expensive to buy rations than it is to eat at the tavern. You do still have to determine how many you're carrying, for encumbrance purposes.
*We're using fast advancement, pg 54. Additionally, a full continuous month lived at a Rich lifestyle (200sp per week, or 800 for the whole month) gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 6th level. A full continuous month lived at a Noble lifestyle (1,000sp per week, or 4,000 for the whole month), gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 9th level.
*You will each start with one or more rumors about the nearby Caverns of Thracia.

=Setting=
Disregard the setting as written in WWN. I dig the general vibe but I'm mostly going to be doing my own thing. The name of this world is Terminus (players in my previous campaigns may recognize the name; consider this a reboot.)

==History==
Terminus is not known to have ever had any natively intelligent life. Various intelligent beings from other places, human and otherwise, have come to settle there. It also has its own complement of extradimensional entities, beings which some might refer to as gods.

The earliest human settlers came from other worlds forgotten to the modern person. Something, however, caused a lapse in communication and logistical capability. The settlers were cut off from home. Whatever disaster occurred has cut off almost all contact with civilizations outside the solar system. Visitation by spacecraft is extremely rare and not well-known. Visitors who arrive via stranger means are, if they exist, keeping it on the down-low.

It is believed by some scholars and most small children that there are inhabited cities on the moons.

==A Hypercompressed Timeline==
So as not to engage in the fantasy world designer's great sin of just adding a bunch of zeroes onto a reasonable timeline, I'm not providing any numbers here. Think of these as the approximate ages of the world, liberally seasoned with disinformation, misunderstanding, propaganda, temporal anomalies, and genuinely antique texts from different planets that were improperly mixed into the local historical record.

*'''Era Zero: The Precursors.''' There are occasionally objects or devices (such as the Cidrian Gates or the Sublunar Machinery) which seem to correspond to some time or people before the era of the Lizard Kings. Anything that old which is still operational can be presumed to have unimaginable power and sophistication. They may have been built by prior human civilizations or by entities even further removed from our understanding. It is presumed that human colonization occurred during this era due to the fact that some of these devices appear made for beings on the approximate size and body plan of modern humanity.
*'''Era One: Early Human Colonization.''' During this period, large numbers of humans arrived on the planet via means which are not known for certain, and engaged in widespread terraforming and genetic resequencing of themselves and everything else they could get their hands on. The early colonies “failed,” in that C&C with whoever sent them was lost, and whatever early governments were established collapsed. Humans went through a period of barbaric savagery, and then got it out of their systems. There is little evidence of heavy industry during this period, indicating a break from the precursor era, which did engage in large-scale engineering.
*'''Era Two''': '''The Lizard Queens'''. The Lizardfolk were for a time the apex sophont on the planet. They built crystalline devices that ran on psionic rather than technological or magical principles, subjugated humans when they felt the need, and built ziggurats, pyramids, and canals. They revived the precursor habit of constructing Deeps, or at least cleared and restored to use a number that were already ancient. These enormous underground spaces were considered proof against enemies approaching overland or from the skies. It is believed that airborne attacks must have been a major hazard at the time. The decline in cognitive capability among lizardfolk is most likely what allowed humanity to eventually overtake them.
*'''Era Three:''' '''The Amaranthan Empire'''. This human empire rose out of a small but wealthy kingdom by a bay, where innovative magicians laid down the foundation-stones of modern sorcery. It was a darker, cruder magic that they practiced, and they were insatiable for more power. Within a handful of generations, the leaders of the Amaranthan kingdoms had as much magic in their veins as blood, and they conquered the vast majority of the world. Between their spells, and pre-Saurian technology and learning they recovered from the Deeps, they easily brought to heel the feudal human societies that arose to fill the vacuum left by the Lizard Kings.
*'''Era Four:''' '''The Hubris.''' The Amaranthans declared war on everyone and everything that would not bend the knee to their Emperor. After a hundred years of blood and fire, they lost.
*'''Era Five:''' '''The Long Dark.''' Little enough of this era is recorded. Vengeful beings of every sort preyed on humanity and dominated their cities. Much awful tribute was extracted, and the lore of the Amaranthans was destroyed whenever it could be found. The tech level at this time was definitely more medieval in character, as humans were lucky if their masters allowed them pointy sticks, in most places. This was the era of the Lex Sanguinis, codified by the Vampire Regents who ruled so many city-states. Much of the current law and custom is descended from these dark times, with appropriate adaptations.
*'''Era Six: The Thracian Hegemony'''. The Thracians began as a small group of seafaring city-states, in which a few privileged human servants formed a conspiracy. They managed to throw off the yokes of their inhuman masters and institute democracy. They rapidly became masters of the exchange of goods. Thracian civilization avoided reliance on direct sorcery, since they didn't wish to repeat the mistakes of the Amaranthans. They pursued alchemy, artifice, and technology. While they never approached the sophistication of Precursor technology, they could produce much more sophisticated machinery at scale than is possible in the current era. They were able to free most of the rest of human civilization via a combination of disaster capitalism and laser-armed airships. They also standardized weights, measures, and coinage, which standards are still used today. Currency from pre-Thracian cultures is often extremely non-standard.
*'''Era Seven: The Decapitation'''. The leaders of the Thracian Combines attempted to make treaty with the various Lunar civilizations, just as they had done to the monstrous kingdoms that had existed on the terrestrial sphere. For whatever reason (but probably because the Lunatics weren't ignorant of how this had worked out for the vampire princes, etc.), negotiations fell through, and ended in several nights of orbital bombardment. When the smoke cleared, the Thracian civilization came apart at the seams. They had always kept their leadership and industrial base centralized, to maintain their hegemony. Unfortunately, that meant it was all destroyed by the swarm of large iron meteorites that turned their five greatest cities into a morass of smoking, flooded craters. Bereft of leadership and centralized industrial production, the Thracians were raided into nonexistence by tribal or feudal peoples, monsters, and various nonhuman intelligences. Their society disintegrated, and the lore of operating their great machines and mysterious facilities became lost.
*'''Era Eight: The Age of City-States'''. You are here! Over much of the world, humanity has reorganized itself into independent and semi-independent city-states. There is trade and communication between the various civilizations, but vast waste-lands full of ruins and ancient roads occupy the space between them. Human civilization seems to be somewhat drowsy at this time in history, and the people of the world are plagued by hedonism and sybaritic boredom. Greed takes the place of ambition, and everywhere men and women take the low and easy road to comfort. Globe-spanning ambitions are distinctly out of fashion. Non-human intelligences have many thriving civilizations of their own, and so far there's so much room that large-scale conflict hasn't broken out.

==Contemporary Material Culture==
Industrial manufacturing and supply chains no longer exist. However, books and other repositories of information are still available, and it's not uncommon for people to be educated to a (real-world) modern standard, even if they can't lay hands on so much as a flashlight.

The vast majority of work is done using human or animal muscle, or relatively simple wind or water mills. That being said, the situation is not at all comparable to medieval Europe. Many technologies that have an extremely high payoff-to-effort ratio if you are already at a high Roman or Renaissance-era level of technology are still used. Movable-type printing presses are not common, but they have supplanted scriptoriums. They’re just too easy to build in comparison to how much effort they save.

The essential difficulty is that the creation of an industrial economy is a great deal of work, and nobody is really inclined to go to that kind of effort. Anyone with the resources, ambition, and will to build a steam train or an air conditioner factory is probably better off becoming an archmage and obligating their neighbors to appease them.

Further, Precursor humanity genetically engineered a variety of plants to be unnaturally useful, and those strains are still cultivated. A wide variety of food plants and several types of mushroom are known to be results of the original sequencing project; they can be easily and rapidly farmed, and are tailored to human dietary needs. For this reason, simply supplying the population with food is not the crushing burden it was in real-world medieval societies, and even impoverished areas have sufficient time for leisure and social or intellectual pursuits. There are other examples, as well, such as the Library Trees with leaves uniquely suited to paper-making.

Advanced alloys, both alchemical and mundane, are still manufactured, although not in modern quantities.

'''Summary:'''
*Individual artificers, magicians, and alchemists do produce items of enchantment or high technology, but these are rare, hand-crafted, and expensive.
*High technology as it exists in our world is rarely available and typically only in very simple configurations. A hand-held UV light might be obtainable, but a computer is out of the question.
*The advanced technology that does exist often involves large glowing synthetic gemstones, runic circuitry, and alchemical materials. Gears, moving parts, conventional batteries, and other steampunk apparatuses are relatively rare. The dividing line between magic and this sort of science can be somewhat thin at times. Consult the rules for mods in the WWN rulebook for ideas.
*The "hurlants" described on pg. 36 are available for purchase. In-setting, they're referred to as coilguns. They function via an extremely high-tension, alchemically produced metal spring, housed inside a barrel, which must be carefully wound with an integral handle before a specially made steel dart is loaded and clipped into place. Rather than the barrel being rifled, the dart is designed with a subtly helical fluting. Hand hurlants are often mounted on an arm bracer, but either may be made in a configuration similar to a modern firearm. They are, however, typically ornately carved or filigreed. They are considered a weapon of war or murder, and may not be carried openly in civilized cities. The user is expected to have them unloaded, "broken down" into components, and carried packed away. Note the AP tag on them - they ignore non-magical armor. A hand hurlant can throw its sliver of steel directly through an armored knight's breastplate and out his back. They are, therefore, especially disliked by the sorts of people wealthy enough to invest in heavy armor.

==Astronomy & Weather==
Terminus lacks the axial tilt & wobble of our own world. Seasons are caused by its eccentric and elliptical orbit. In plain terms, its distance from the sun varies sufficiently over the course of the year to produce winter and summer. This means the north and south hemisphere experience winter and summer at the same time. Terminus' magnetic poles are precisely perpendicular to the plane of orbit. It is highly likely that some intelligent agency altered these factors at some point in times ancient beyond reckoning.

Terminus has three moons in an equidistant orbit around the planet. One is nearly white, like our own, and the other two are tinted red and blue. Absent cloud cover, the night sky almost always provides a little more light than a full moon on our own Earth.

==Calendar==
There are 13 lunar months, each of exactly 28 days. There are three months in each of the seasons that would be recognizable to us - a spring, a summer, an autumn, a winter. Even without axial tilt and wobble, the nature of the seasons varies according to distance from the equator and local geography. Coastal areas are milder, areas close to the poles are colder.

The calendar of 13 months is standard almost all across the globe, at least in human civilizations. What varies is which months are counted part of which season. In general, an area with extreme conditions during one month of the year will count the "extra" month as outside of a regular season. A northern city might take the part of the year of most intense cold and count it as "Fimbulwinter," a time outside of even regular winter. An equatorial land might have the Dog Days, that month which is too hot to be placed within regular summertime. In a coastal land, the inhabitants might take the time of most intense storm activity, and name it the Monsoon Season.

The area this campaign takes place in is a Mediterranean type of climate. Due to the proximity of a large body of water, while the summers can be hellishly humid, the extremes of temperature aren't as bad as they could be.

==Languages==
The PCs start out knowing Common & Trade Cant, with additional languages per their Connect & Know skills. See pg. 28 of WWN.

*Common is a modern form of Thracian, and is the most wide-spread human language. Insular or remote human civilizations might have divergent or distinct languages.
*Trade Cant is a limited pidgin tongue commonly used in highly cosmopolitan areas or by far-traveling merchants. It's not good for higher pursuits, but has special vocabulary for economic concerns, commodities, travel & accommodations, et cetera.
*Old Thracian has about as much in common with Common as classical Latin does with modern Italian. It was the language of the last powerful and widespread human civilization.
*Amaranthan, also known as Sorcerer's Speech, is even older than Old Thracian. It was the tongue of a powerful sorcerous empire that collapsed in blood and fire.
*Lizard, or in derogatory terms "Hiss," is the language of the common lizardfolk and other reptilian intelligences. It's hard for humans to pronounce, and even harder for them to think in. The brains of the reptilian people are formed very differently to human ones. Something has gone very wrong with the lizardfolk, and 90% of them have cognitive limitations not present in their ancestors. The result is that only about 10% of them are literate in their own tongue. Note that in Lizard, humans are referred to as "Monkey Men," and their terms for our language are even more derogatory than "Hiss."
*Pelagic, or in derogatory terms "Glub," is the common language of undersea peoples. It's impossible to pronounce in atmosphere, so it can mostly only be learned underwater. Water-Adapted PCs (see pg. 27, under xeno-blooded) can learn to speak and understand this.
*Fae is the language of the various half-worlder beings. It has Seelie and Unseelie dialects, and while most people will be more familiar with one or the other, they are comprehensible to each other.
*Sign Language exists for the use of the deaf, and is also commonly used by beings for whom normal conversation is difficult. For example, a non-water-adapted human and a greater octopus might both be intelligent, but the octopus can only speak underwater, and the human can only speak in the air. If they met at the shore, they could communicate via sign, with each staying in its own preferred medium. The gestures are abstract enough for beings with significantly different anatomy, so long as they have limbs. Dolphins don't have sufficient limbs to Sign, although they can learn to understand it, but they're telepathic anyway.
*Various other species have their own languages.
*The Precursor civilization of humans presumably had their own language, but they don't seem to have written much down, or if they did, it was lost long ago.

==Random Notes==
*"Greater" creatures are intelligent forms. A Greater Octopus is therefore a sophont form of octopod. The lizardfolk are greater lizards. Nonhuman intelligences, in their own languages, would typically refer to humans as Greater Monkeys. This is a scientific or technical classification and it is rude to refer to any intelligent being in their own person this way. This is distinct from a "Dire" form, which is a larger and usually more ferocious form of a more common creature. See the classical example, the Dire Wolf. Note that nonhumans often classify Ogres as Dire Humans, which humans are not especially appreciative of in most cases.
*Human biology is rather enhanced by precursor engineering. The average lifespan, uninterrupted by disease or violence, is about 120 years, with only the last fifteen or so involving serious senescence. Most people will recover relatively fully from injuries or diseases that don't amount to amputation, and sepsis due to injuries is rare. Birth defects as we know them are unheard-of. Fertility is also optional for humans. Basically, look at the healing rules and be astonished how little medicine is required for stabbing victims.
*There are no elves & dwarves in the typical D&D sense, so the Special Origin focus is not used. The Xenoblooded focus is freely available and represents the efforts of precursor genetic engineers, passed down through the long millenia; aquatic-adapted humans are still well-known in coastal areas. The Unique Gift focus is also available, and typically represents some inheritable genetic gift.

==Nibiru==
I don't want to spend too much time on this, because the whole point of the campaign is that you aren't there. But maybe a few notes won't go too far wrong.
*There is a system of public education, welfare, and public works that is unrivaled in the world. If you don't find a useful occupation for yourself, you '''will''' be trained and pressed into service in some capacity or another.
*Nibiru has the wealth to support its people, but no room for idlers and malingerers. Literally, physical space is at a premium.
*Social stratification is severe in terms of power and resources commanded, but there are no mansions or palaces. Everyone must make use of public spaces and facilities, hence they are well-maintained.
*Security is tight. If any enemy ever penetrated to the machinery that allows peregrination, they could damage it in a way no one now living would know how to repair. Foreigners are allowed into the city itself only on an extremely limited basis. Criminal gangs are unheard of; and criminal activity is not tolerated.
*All citizens are educated to at least something resembling a high school level and then given some additional training, vocational or otherwise, unless their employment is destined to be entirely menial. For those such as the PCs who have exceptional abilities, they may have attended one of the following programs:
**The Athenaeum is a tower most like a "university" program in Nibiru. Conventional scholarly and engineering students are likely to graduate from here.
**The Scholomance is the tower dedicated to magic, both High Magic & New Magic. The individual in charge of it, known as the Rector, is a black-robed figure wearing an alabaster mask. Their true identity has not been known in centuries - it may be the same superannuated individual, or it is possible that the Chairs of the various departments are electing a new individual from time to time. The board of the scholomance is is deeply secretive, and nothing can be said with certainty.
**The Charterhouse tower trains Vowed. Charterhouse Vowed can select as their bonus skill (see pg. 86) either Exert or Sneak. PCs can take any path they wish, but the typical Charterhouse graduate works as a spy, agent, bodyguard, or assassin.
**Skull Plaza is the military school. Obviously, many people learn the combat arts in more practical ways, but the regular army goes through Skull Plaza. Note that Nibiru does not maintain cavalry of any kind. Their combat doctrines and equipment are focused on siege defense and man-to-man or small unit combat. They produce numerous skilled duelists, and marching on the city would be a death sentence for nearly any attacker, but Nibiru can't field a large army.

=Gods & Religion=
This is the part where I complain. Feel free to skim this section at most.

I don't like the way that religion and clerics are portrayed in D&D. I'm most interested in what the PCs choose to do, in pursuing their own ends. Those ends may be selfless - a character might be dedicated to justice, for example. But it should be their own choice and for their own reasons, subject to their own reevaluation. Other, more selfish motivations are certainly easy enough to understand. "I would like that large pile of gold coins to belong to me rather than whoever currently lays claim to it" and "I would prefer not to die beneath this ghost-haunted pyramid I have been abandoned in" are both immediately relatable.

This is consistent with what I would consider to be most of the essential texts of the genre. So of course D&D, in its lack of wisdom, had to make a character option to subsume PC choices and priority to some half-baked imagining of how a pantheistic religion might work, if you stripped it of all interest and cultural factors.

So we're not going to do that.

There is nothing like a D&D Cleric in this world. There are healers. There are also persons who are "high priests" or the like. The former is someone who has bent their talents to medicine. Or, in the case of the Healer partial class, someone who has devoted themselves to using psychic energy as a substitute for complex pharmaceutical substances that can no longer be manufactured. A "priest" is a social role. They may or may not be a member of a class that provides magical powers. If they are serious about relationships with supernatural beings, they may have a respectable ability with the Pray skill.

==Religion on Terminus==
Gods are a highly varied lot. There are extradimensional entities and spirits that seem to have influence over greater or lesser amounts of real estate. There are also some extremely physically real beings with supernatural powers that are more flexible or focused than the Spells and Arts available to mortal magicians. A local crocodilian river-deity, for example, may be both a physically verifiable giant crocodile, and also capable of causing or preventing flooding in the river. But, notably, ONLY their own river. A deity of some more abstract principle, such as the North Wind, might be more indeterminate and widespread in their presence.

The thing to keep in mind is that the gods are distant, weird, and inhuman, in all cases. The crocodile god is not up for a friendly chat. The North Wind was never a human, likely has no human feelings, and if it takes some anthropomorphic shape it is only as a matter of whimsy. Deities are typically not worshipped and revered in the way that a modern person in the US might imagine a religion to imply. The sailors do not love the gods of the seas. They fear them and respect them, and make offerings in the hope of improving their chances of coming home alive. Deities (in the vast majority of cases) make no guarantees or offers regarding the fate of a person's soul after death, which is a mystery, and of little concern to the typical person. Everyday matters loom larger, and death must take care of its own.

Devoted servants of deities may have some special power or another, which is typically minor and has a cost. For more serious exertions of divine power, if such a thing is desirable, the cultists will likely need to conduct some ritual. This will involve an offering, and a Pray roll from their leader. Note that the offering need not be a material object or bloodletting - some gods might look favorably on a night of frenzied dancing by at least twenty or thirty dervishes. It depends on the god and the ritual undertaken. This isn't something I expect to see a lot of in-game, since divine intervention is generally not an effective way to obtain human goals.

Anyway. Expect weird and inhuman genius loci, snake cults, and sui generis beings of cosmic horror, not some kind of benevolent god of farming with an organized and hierarchical temple structure.

==Alignment==
These game rules don't make use of alignment, so it's not a thing on the character sheet. You should know that my preference, though, which informs the cosmic background of the world, is law vs. chaos rather than good vs. evil. Conditions of extreme law or extreme chaos are not survivable for human beings - the large central curve of neutrality is the only zone humans can inhabit. As such, PCs don't need alignments. The gods and other beings may be aligned with law or chaos. Their machinations are equally dangerous to human life.

==Known Deities==
I dunno, I'll put some stuff here eventually.

=Links=

Caverns Without Number

2022-09-11T17:54:07Z

The Wyzard: /* The Adventurers */

This is a page for the Caverns of Thracia game, run by The Wyzard using Worlds Without Number. Its content is tentative.

'''Before we start:''' Combat is intended to be a little more interesting than normal B/X. I strongly suggest that you all familiarize yourself with how Shock Damage works, and secondarily with how the combat maneuvers work. Shock Damage is going to mess you up if you aren't ready for it.

[[File:GMG4615-Thracia-455x600.jpg]]

=The Adventurers=

==Dramatis Personae==
*[[Kastalos the Untouchable]]
*[[Yacob Muleskinner|Cob Muleskinner]]
*[[Pei Feverfew]]
*[[Merida the Mellifluent]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[WWN Sample Character Sheet]]

=Introduction=
The greatest city of the world, in terms of cosmopolitan fun, wealth, and knowledge, is Nibiru, the Peregrinate Acropolis. A heavily fortified castle-city built on a large stone mesa, it has the look of a vast ziggurat capped with a wonder of colorful towers. The undercity inside the mesa is a maze of carved and worked tunnels, warehouses, reservoirs, and hidden temples. The lower levels of the city are a chaos of tenements, manufactories, brightly tiled plazas, and cafeterias. The vast towers contain luxury apartments for the rich, in addition to colleges, libraries, laboratories, training halls and so forth. The outer walls are dotted with fortifications, weapon emplacements, signal towers, and windmills that power various machinery, particularly water pumps. Real estate is tremendously valuable, most people live in spaces little larger than a walk-in closet. Hence the desperate need for the public bathhouses and cafeteria-style restaurants that support the life and hygiene of the city - there simply isn't space for people to have their own kitchens and so forth.

What makes Nibiru so wealthy and influential, such a center of knowledge, is that it moves. Every week, the city disappears in vast cloud of opaque fog, and reappears somewhere else on Terminus. The engines that accomplish this have been carefully maintained for centuries, so that it has functioned without interruption. It peregrinates along a semi-regular trade route, with space built into the schedule for necessary or opportunistic deviations, and a cadre of mages, merchants, and scholars of economics carefully plot its course for maximum advantage. Wherever it lands, the vast trading apparatus fires up into action. Enormous loads of commodities and rarer goods are sold to local merchant houses, wherever the city might land. The vast caverns of the undercity can carry an amount of cargo beyond imagination. The limiting factor is how much of it can be hauled out and traded for new goods, which must in their turn be loaded within six days.

You are natives of this city - you have the invisible, UV-reactive tattoo of a citizen in at least three places on your body. This marks you as one of the exalted, an individual with the right to enter the city's gates and remain within the confines as it peregrinates. Even the meanest beggar who is a citizen of Nibiru has something that the wealth of an emperor might not purchase. And, like all natives, you know the rule - the first six days are for business, but the seventh is a day of rest. No one leaves the city on the seventh day, or lingers outside for even one second beyond midnight of the sixth. The risk of being left behind is just too high.

Guess how you fucked up?

==The Local Environment==
It's early spring and you're probably going to be stuck here for about the next year, until Nibiru returns and you can get home. The city-state of Amarna is located on a fertile river delta that empties into a sea. That's where Nibiru came to rest. The area around the great river is a green and well-developed valley, with large towns and farming villages served by a regular geometric pattern of irrigation channels. To the east, about a day's walk down the coast, is a small semi-fortified city named Tjaru, in an undesirable and swampy region. It is used as a place of exile for criminals and the disgraced. That's where you've currently ended up. And you've heard rumors of a recently-discovered Deep, one of the vast underground fastnesses built by various ancient civilizations.

Deeps are dangerous, in ways both mundane and exotic. However, they frequently contain raw wealth left behind by the Ancients. Also, the even more precious sorcerous, alchemical, or technological artifacts that they seem to have had such a panoply of. This would be an outstanding way to support yourselves for the next year. And, if you're lucky, you might go beyond supporting yourself in reasonable style, and find that you've recovered something valuable enough to earn a higher station in Nibiru.

Note: Tjaru and other nearby settlements are all part of the same Amar "city-state," ruled over by the central city Amarna. It is also styled as Amar-Na in more formal writings. The people that live here are Amars. The adjective form is Amaric.

==Distance & Timekeeping==
I'll eventually post a hexmap with some local points of interest and so forth, but I don't envision hexcrawling to be a major component. You're going to be in a relatively civilized area, albeit on the very edge of it. You won't need to make wilderness encounter checks to get to the dungeon and back.

My assumption is that you'll be largely based in Tjaru. My thought is that rather than keep strict track of days, a single delve (which might span multiple sessions) will just cross a week off the calendar, and we'll assume that resting, re-equipping, and so forth takes about that long. The dungeon is going to be maybe two hour's walk from Tjaru, so you can go out there, screw around for a while, and still get back before dark.

In-town intrigues and investigations likely WILL be a component of this game. It's not pure dungeon-crawling. And there's a significant amount of factionalism and other interesting stuff going on inside the Deep itself. It's not just dozens of rooms full of combat encounters.

==Questions for Session Zero==
*Anything anybody definitely wants to see
*Anything anyone definitely doesn't want to see, particularly in terms of "does anything already on this wiki bother someone a lot?"
*Lines & Veils or whatever, PM me if you have to
*I don't intend the game to include explicit sexual content, and even the implication of sexual violence is right out
*I actually find some of the gene-modified human strains in WWN to be kind of interesting, but they might be too problematic, I dunno, opinions?
*

=Encumbrance & Beasts of Burden=
WWN's encumbrance system is simple enough that I'm not sure we'll actually need this section, but I included it as a matter of habit. Note that every full 100 coins counts as an item. Count normal gems as a single coin. Jewelry and small art objects are counted as a bulk good - you can pack together three items such as carved ivory necklaces, jade hairbrushes, jeweled crowns, rings, etc. I'll let you know about larger art objects.
==The Pocket Change Rule==
Your first up-to-100-coins worth of regular coins and gems do not count towards encumbrance, so long as they're yours alone. Found treasure is tracked separately until you return to civilization, such as it is.
==The Bling Rule==
The PCs may ignore the encumbrance requirements of jewelry if they simply wear the jewelry openly, within reason. No more than a single crown at a time, etc. This has two downsides: If you are presently in a Deep, you may find out an object is cursed at a most inconvenient time. Secondly, your enemies may become ravenously motivated to relieve you of those items. Morale is an important component of combat in this game, and if you are draped in the wealth of nations, then opponents may get a morale bonus.

=NPCs=

=Notes & Logs=

=Maps=

=House Rules & Character Creation=

==Character Creation & Advancement==
*Don't come with a character concept, we'll create characters in a session zero. It's okay to have a few vague ideas just so we don't have to look up too much.
*For attributes, arrange the following array to taste: 14, 12, 11, 10, 9, and 7. See pg. 8.
*When you pick a background, you get a free skill associated with it at level 0. Then, make a total of three rolls on the growth or learning table for your background.
*Choose a class. We're only using the classes available in the free version. However, the odder partial classes are available.
*Note that I don't like the Cleric class in D&D for complicated reasons, so please don't try to emulate one in terms of being a dedicated servant of a god. If you want to play a Healer (one of the partial classes) you certainly can, but I don't have a sense as to whether one is strictly necessary. PCs can die in this game but I'm probably going to tone down the "if you fail this save you die" kind of stuff.
*Assume you roll a 6 on your hit die.
*Skip the equipment step, read up on the languages stuff on this wiki.
*Everyone levels up twice. We start at level 3. Assume you roll a 4 on these two hit dice.
*You can start with 1,000 silver pieces worth of equipment. Note that this game is on a silver standard. If you want one of the packages on page 29, assume it's 100 silver pieces for any of the packages. No swapping or whatever. Discard any money you didn't spend on equipment.
*For ready cash, you each start with 3d6 gold, 3d20 silver, and 1d4+1 gems worth 50 sp apiece.
*Your first month of living expenses is prepaid, at a Common standard of living. After the first month you need to pay that much, which amounts to 80sp per month, due on the first of each month. Adventurers cannot voluntarily spend less than this, because they are intolerant of living in more straitened circumstances. Note that this includes rations - it's not any more expensive to buy rations than it is to eat at the tavern. You do still have to determine how many you're carrying, for encumbrance purposes.
*We're using slow advancement, pg 54. However, a full continuous month lived at a Rich lifestyle (200sp per week, or 800 for the whole month) gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 6th level. A full continuous month lived at a Noble lifestyle (1,000sp per week, or 4,000 for the whole month), gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 9th level.
*You will each start with one or more rumors about the nearby Caverns of Thracia.

=Setting=
Disregard the setting as written in WWN. I dig the general vibe but I'm mostly going to be doing my own thing. The name of this world is Terminus (players in my previous campaigns may recognize the name; consider this a reboot.)

==History==
Terminus is not known to have ever had any natively intelligent life. Various intelligent beings from other places, human and otherwise, have come to settle there. It also has its own complement of extradimensional entities, beings which some might refer to as gods.

The earliest human settlers came from other worlds forgotten to the modern person. Something, however, caused a lapse in communication and logistical capability. The settlers were cut off from home. Whatever disaster occurred has cut off almost all contact with civilizations outside the solar system. Visitation by spacecraft is extremely rare and not well-known. Visitors who arrive via stranger means are, if they exist, keeping it on the down-low.

It is believed by some scholars and most small children that there are inhabited cities on the moons.

==A Hypercompressed Timeline==
So as not to engage in the fantasy world designer's great sin of just adding a bunch of zeroes onto a reasonable timeline, I'm not providing any numbers here. Think of these as the approximate ages of the world, liberally seasoned with disinformation, misunderstanding, propaganda, temporal anomalies, and genuinely antique texts from different planets that were improperly mixed into the local historical record.

*'''Era Zero: The Precursors.''' There are occasionally objects or devices (such as the Cidrian Gates or the Sublunar Machinery) which seem to correspond to some time or people before the era of the Lizard Kings. Anything that old which is still operational can be presumed to have unimaginable power and sophistication. They may have been built by prior human civilizations or by entities even further removed from our understanding. It is presumed that human colonization occurred during this era due to the fact that some of these devices appear made for beings on the approximate size and body plan of modern humanity.
*'''Era One: Early Human Colonization.''' During this period, large numbers of humans arrived on the planet via means which are not known for certain, and engaged in widespread terraforming and genetic resequencing of themselves and everything else they could get their hands on. The early colonies “failed,” in that C&C with whoever sent them was lost, and whatever early governments were established collapsed. Humans went through a period of barbaric savagery, and then got it out of their systems. There is little evidence of heavy industry during this period, indicating a break from the precursor era, which did engage in large-scale engineering.
*'''Era Two''': '''The Lizard Queens'''. The Lizardfolk were for a time the apex sophont on the planet. They built crystalline devices that ran on psionic rather than technological or magical principles, subjugated humans when they felt the need, and built ziggurats, pyramids, and canals. They revived the precursor habit of constructing Deeps, or at least cleared and restored to use a number that were already ancient. These enormous underground spaces were considered proof against enemies approaching overland or from the skies. It is believed that airborne attacks must have been a major hazard at the time. The decline in cognitive capability among lizardfolk is most likely what allowed humanity to eventually overtake them.
*'''Era Three:''' '''The Amaranthan Empire'''. This human empire rose out of a small but wealthy kingdom by a bay, where innovative magicians laid down the foundation-stones of modern sorcery. It was a darker, cruder magic that they practiced, and they were insatiable for more power. Within a handful of generations, the leaders of the Amaranthan kingdoms had as much magic in their veins as blood, and they conquered the vast majority of the world. Between their spells, and pre-Saurian technology and learning they recovered from the Deeps, they easily brought to heel the feudal human societies that arose to fill the vacuum left by the Lizard Kings.
*'''Era Four:''' '''The Hubris.''' The Amaranthans declared war on everyone and everything that would not bend the knee to their Emperor. After a hundred years of blood and fire, they lost.
*'''Era Five:''' '''The Long Dark.''' Little enough of this era is recorded. Vengeful beings of every sort preyed on humanity and dominated their cities. Much awful tribute was extracted, and the lore of the Amaranthans was destroyed whenever it could be found. The tech level at this time was definitely more medieval in character, as humans were lucky if their masters allowed them pointy sticks, in most places. This was the era of the Lex Sanguinis, codified by the Vampire Regents who ruled so many city-states. Much of the current law and custom is descended from these dark times, with appropriate adaptations.
*'''Era Six: The Thracian Hegemony'''. The Thracians began as a small group of seafaring city-states, in which a few privileged human servants formed a conspiracy. They managed to throw off the yokes of their inhuman masters and institute democracy. They rapidly became masters of the exchange of goods. Thracian civilization avoided reliance on direct sorcery, since they didn't wish to repeat the mistakes of the Amaranthans. They pursued alchemy, artifice, and technology. While they never approached the sophistication of Precursor technology, they could produce much more sophisticated machinery at scale than is possible in the current era. They were able to free most of the rest of human civilization via a combination of disaster capitalism and laser-armed airships. They also standardized weights, measures, and coinage, which standards are still used today. Currency from pre-Thracian cultures is often extremely non-standard.
*'''Era Seven: The Decapitation'''. The leaders of the Thracian Combines attempted to make treaty with the various Lunar civilizations, just as they had done to the monstrous kingdoms that had existed on the terrestrial sphere. For whatever reason (but probably because the Lunatics weren't ignorant of how this had worked out for the vampire princes, etc.), negotiations fell through, and ended in several nights of orbital bombardment. When the smoke cleared, the Thracian civilization came apart at the seams. They had always kept their leadership and industrial base centralized, to maintain their hegemony. Unfortunately, that meant it was all destroyed by the swarm of large iron meteorites that turned their five greatest cities into a morass of smoking, flooded craters. Bereft of leadership and centralized industrial production, the Thracians were raided into nonexistence by tribal or feudal peoples, monsters, and various nonhuman intelligences. Their society disintegrated, and the lore of operating their great machines and mysterious facilities became lost.
*'''Era Eight: The Age of City-States'''. You are here! Over much of the world, humanity has reorganized itself into independent and semi-independent city-states. There is trade and communication between the various civilizations, but vast waste-lands full of ruins and ancient roads occupy the space between them. Human civilization seems to be somewhat drowsy at this time in history, and the people of the world are plagued by hedonism and sybaritic boredom. Greed takes the place of ambition, and everywhere men and women take the low and easy road to comfort. Globe-spanning ambitions are distinctly out of fashion. Non-human intelligences have many thriving civilizations of their own, and so far there's so much room that large-scale conflict hasn't broken out.

==Contemporary Material Culture==
Industrial manufacturing and supply chains no longer exist. However, books and other repositories of information are still available, and it's not uncommon for people to be educated to a (real-world) modern standard, even if they can't lay hands on so much as a flashlight.

The vast majority of work is done using human or animal muscle, or relatively simple wind or water mills. That being said, the situation is not at all comparable to medieval Europe. Many technologies that have an extremely high payoff-to-effort ratio if you are already at a high Roman or Renaissance-era level of technology are still used. Movable-type printing presses are not common, but they have supplanted scriptoriums. They’re just too easy to build in comparison to how much effort they save.

The essential difficulty is that the creation of an industrial economy is a great deal of work, and nobody is really inclined to go to that kind of effort. Anyone with the resources, ambition, and will to build a steam train or an air conditioner factory is probably better off becoming an archmage and obligating their neighbors to appease them.

Further, Precursor humanity genetically engineered a variety of plants to be unnaturally useful, and those strains are still cultivated. A wide variety of food plants and several types of mushroom are known to be results of the original sequencing project; they can be easily and rapidly farmed, and are tailored to human dietary needs. For this reason, simply supplying the population with food is not the crushing burden it was in real-world medieval societies, and even impoverished areas have sufficient time for leisure and social or intellectual pursuits. There are other examples, as well, such as the Library Trees with leaves uniquely suited to paper-making.

Advanced alloys, both alchemical and mundane, are still manufactured, although not in modern quantities.

'''Summary:'''
*Individual artificers, magicians, and alchemists do produce items of enchantment or high technology, but these are rare, hand-crafted, and expensive.
*High technology as it exists in our world is rarely available and typically only in very simple configurations. A hand-held UV light might be obtainable, but a computer is out of the question.
*The advanced technology that does exist often involves large glowing synthetic gemstones, runic circuitry, and alchemical materials. Gears, moving parts, conventional batteries, and other steampunk apparatuses are relatively rare. The dividing line between magic and this sort of science can be somewhat thin at times. Consult the rules for mods in the WWN rulebook for ideas.
*The "hurlants" described on pg. 36 are available for purchase. In-setting, they're referred to as coilguns. They function via an extremely high-tension, alchemically produced metal spring, housed inside a barrel, which must be carefully wound with an integral handle before a specially made steel dart is loaded and clipped into place. Rather than the barrel being rifled, the dart is designed with a subtly helical fluting. Hand hurlants are often mounted on an arm bracer, but either may be made in a configuration similar to a modern firearm. They are, however, typically ornately carved or filigreed. They are considered a weapon of war or murder, and may not be carried openly in civilized cities. The user is expected to have them unloaded, "broken down" into components, and carried packed away. Note the AP tag on them - they ignore non-magical armor. A hand hurlant can throw its sliver of steel directly through an armored knight's breastplate and out his back. They are, therefore, especially disliked by the sorts of people wealthy enough to invest in heavy armor.

==Astronomy & Weather==
Terminus lacks the axial tilt & wobble of our own world. Seasons are caused by its eccentric and elliptical orbit. In plain terms, its distance from the sun varies sufficiently over the course of the year to produce winter and summer. This means the north and south hemisphere experience winter and summer at the same time. Terminus' magnetic poles are precisely perpendicular to the plane of orbit. It is highly likely that some intelligent agency altered these factors at some point in times ancient beyond reckoning.

Terminus has three moons in an equidistant orbit around the planet. One is nearly white, like our own, and the other two are tinted red and blue. Absent cloud cover, the night sky almost always provides a little more light than a full moon on our own Earth.

==Calendar==
There are 13 lunar months, each of exactly 28 days. There are three months in each of the seasons that would be recognizable to us - a spring, a summer, an autumn, a winter. Even without axial tilt and wobble, the nature of the seasons varies according to distance from the equator and local geography. Coastal areas are milder, areas close to the poles are colder.

The calendar of 13 months is standard almost all across the globe, at least in human civilizations. What varies is which months are counted part of which season. In general, an area with extreme conditions during one month of the year will count the "extra" month as outside of a regular season. A northern city might take the part of the year of most intense cold and count it as "Fimbulwinter," a time outside of even regular winter. An equatorial land might have the Dog Days, that month which is too hot to be placed within regular summertime. In a coastal land, the inhabitants might take the time of most intense storm activity, and name it the Monsoon Season.

The area this campaign takes place in is a Mediterranean type of climate. Due to the proximity of a large body of water, while the summers can be hellishly humid, the extremes of temperature aren't as bad as they could be.

==Languages==
The PCs start out knowing Common & Trade Cant, with additional languages per their Connect & Know skills. See pg. 28 of WWN.

*Common is a modern form of Thracian, and is the most wide-spread human language. Insular or remote human civilizations might have divergent or distinct languages.
*Trade Cant is a limited pidgin tongue commonly used in highly cosmopolitan areas or by far-traveling merchants. It's not good for higher pursuits, but has special vocabulary for economic concerns, commodities, travel & accommodations, et cetera.
*Old Thracian has about as much in common with Common as classical Latin does with modern Italian. It was the language of the last powerful and widespread human civilization.
*Amaranthan, also known as Sorcerer's Speech, is even older than Old Thracian. It was the tongue of a powerful sorcerous empire that collapsed in blood and fire.
*Lizard, or in derogatory terms "Hiss," is the language of the common lizardfolk and other reptilian intelligences. It's hard for humans to pronounce, and even harder for them to think in. The brains of the reptilian people are formed very differently to human ones. Something has gone very wrong with the lizardfolk, and 90% of them have cognitive limitations not present in their ancestors. The result is that only about 10% of them are literate in their own tongue. Note that in Lizard, humans are referred to as "Monkey Men," and their terms for our language are even more derogatory than "Hiss."
*Pelagic, or in derogatory terms "Glub," is the common language of undersea peoples. It's impossible to pronounce in atmosphere, so it can mostly only be learned underwater. Water-Adapted PCs (see pg. 27, under xeno-blooded) can learn to speak and understand this.
*Fae is the language of the various half-worlder beings. It has Seelie and Unseelie dialects, and while most people will be more familiar with one or the other, they are comprehensible to each other.
*Sign Language exists for the use of the deaf, and is also commonly used by beings for whom normal conversation is difficult. For example, a non-water-adapted human and a greater octopus might both be intelligent, but the octopus can only speak underwater, and the human can only speak in the air. If they met at the shore, they could communicate via sign, with each staying in its own preferred medium. The gestures are abstract enough for beings with significantly different anatomy, so long as they have limbs. Dolphins don't have sufficient limbs to Sign, although they can learn to understand it, but they're telepathic anyway.
*Various other species have their own languages.
*The Precursor civilization of humans presumably had their own language, but they don't seem to have written much down, or if they did, it was lost long ago.

==Random Notes==
*"Greater" creatures are intelligent forms. A Greater Octopus is therefore a sophont form of octopod. The lizardfolk are greater lizards. Nonhuman intelligences, in their own languages, would typically refer to humans as Greater Monkeys. This is a scientific or technical classification and it is rude to refer to any intelligent being in their own person this way. This is distinct from a "Dire" form, which is a larger and usually more ferocious form of a more common creature. See the classical example, the Dire Wolf. Note that nonhumans often classify Ogres as Dire Humans, which humans are not especially appreciative of in most cases.
*Human biology is rather enhanced by precursor engineering. The average lifespan, uninterrupted by disease or violence, is about 120 years, with only the last fifteen or so involving serious senescence. Most people will recover relatively fully from injuries or diseases that don't amount to amputation, and sepsis due to injuries is rare. Birth defects as we know them are unheard-of. Fertility is also optional for humans. Basically, look at the healing rules and be astonished how little medicine is required for stabbing victims.
*There are no elves & dwarves in the typical D&D sense, so the Special Origin focus is not used. The Xenoblooded focus is freely available and represents the efforts of precursor genetic engineers, passed down through the long millenia; aquatic-adapted humans are still well-known in coastal areas. The Unique Gift focus is also available, and typically represents some inheritable genetic gift.

==Nibiru==
I don't want to spend too much time on this, because the whole point of the campaign is that you aren't there. But maybe a few notes won't go too far wrong.
*There is a system of public education, welfare, and public works that is unrivaled in the world. If you don't find a useful occupation for yourself, you '''will''' be trained and pressed into service in some capacity or another.
*Nibiru has the wealth to support its people, but no room for idlers and malingerers. Literally, physical space is at a premium.
*Social stratification is severe in terms of power and resources commanded, but there are no mansions or palaces. Everyone must make use of public spaces and facilities, hence they are well-maintained.
*Security is tight. If any enemy ever penetrated to the machinery that allows peregrination, they could damage it in a way no one now living would know how to repair. Foreigners are allowed into the city itself only on an extremely limited basis. Criminal gangs are unheard of; and criminal activity is not tolerated.
*All citizens are educated to at least something resembling a high school level and then given some additional training, vocational or otherwise, unless their employment is destined to be entirely menial. For those such as the PCs who have exceptional abilities, they may have attended one of the following programs:
**The Athenaeum is a tower most like a "university" program in Nibiru. Conventional scholarly and engineering students are likely to graduate from here.
**The Scholomance is the tower dedicated to magic, both High Magic & New Magic. The individual in charge of it, known as the Rector, is a black-robed figure wearing an alabaster mask. Their true identity has not been known in centuries - it may be the same superannuated individual, or it is possible that the Chairs of the various departments are electing a new individual from time to time. The board of the scholomance is is deeply secretive, and nothing can be said with certainty.
**The Charterhouse tower trains Vowed. Charterhouse Vowed can select as their bonus skill (see pg. 86) either Exert or Sneak. PCs can take any path they wish, but the typical Charterhouse graduate works as a spy, agent, bodyguard, or assassin.
**Skull Plaza is the military school. Obviously, many people learn the combat arts in more practical ways, but the regular army goes through Skull Plaza. Note that Nibiru does not maintain cavalry of any kind. Their combat doctrines and equipment are focused on siege defense and man-to-man or small unit combat. They produce numerous skilled duelists, and marching on the city would be a death sentence for nearly any attacker, but Nibiru can't field a large army.

=Gods & Religion=
This is the part where I complain. Feel free to skim this section at most.

I don't like the way that religion and clerics are portrayed in D&D. I'm most interested in what the PCs choose to do, in pursuing their own ends. Those ends may be selfless - a character might be dedicated to justice, for example. But it should be their own choice and for their own reasons, subject to their own reevaluation. Other, more selfish motivations are certainly easy enough to understand. "I would like that large pile of gold coins to belong to me rather than whoever currently lays claim to it" and "I would prefer not to die beneath this ghost-haunted pyramid I have been abandoned in" are both immediately relatable.

This is consistent with what I would consider to be most of the essential texts of the genre. So of course D&D, in its lack of wisdom, had to make a character option to subsume PC choices and priority to some half-baked imagining of how a pantheistic religion might work, if you stripped it of all interest and cultural factors.

So we're not going to do that.

There is nothing like a D&D Cleric in this world. There are healers. There are also persons who are "high priests" or the like. The former is someone who has bent their talents to medicine. Or, in the case of the Healer partial class, someone who has devoted themselves to using psychic energy as a substitute for complex pharmaceutical substances that can no longer be manufactured. A "priest" is a social role. They may or may not be a member of a class that provides magical powers. If they are serious about relationships with supernatural beings, they may have a respectable ability with the Pray skill.

==Religion on Terminus==
Gods are a highly varied lot. There are extradimensional entities and spirits that seem to have influence over greater or lesser amounts of real estate. There are also some extremely physically real beings with supernatural powers that are more flexible or focused than the Spells and Arts available to mortal magicians. A local crocodilian river-deity, for example, may be both a physically verifiable giant crocodile, and also capable of causing or preventing flooding in the river. But, notably, ONLY their own river. A deity of some more abstract principle, such as the North Wind, might be more indeterminate and widespread in their presence.

The thing to keep in mind is that the gods are distant, weird, and inhuman, in all cases. The crocodile god is not up for a friendly chat. The North Wind was never a human, likely has no human feelings, and if it takes some anthropomorphic shape it is only as a matter of whimsy. Deities are typically not worshipped and revered in the way that a modern person in the US might imagine a religion to imply. The sailors do not love the gods of the seas. They fear them and respect them, and make offerings in the hope of improving their chances of coming home alive. Deities (in the vast majority of cases) make no guarantees or offers regarding the fate of a person's soul after death, which is a mystery, and of little concern to the typical person. Everyday matters loom larger, and death must take care of its own.

Devoted servants of deities may have some special power or another, which is typically minor and has a cost. For more serious exertions of divine power, if such a thing is desirable, the cultists will likely need to conduct some ritual. This will involve an offering, and a Pray roll from their leader. Note that the offering need not be a material object or bloodletting - some gods might look favorably on a night of frenzied dancing by at least twenty or thirty dervishes. It depends on the god and the ritual undertaken. This isn't something I expect to see a lot of in-game, since divine intervention is generally not an effective way to obtain human goals.

Anyway. Expect weird and inhuman genius loci, snake cults, and sui generis beings of cosmic horror, not some kind of benevolent god of farming with an organized and hierarchical temple structure.

==Alignment==
These game rules don't make use of alignment, so it's not a thing on the character sheet. You should know that my preference, though, which informs the cosmic background of the world, is law vs. chaos rather than good vs. evil. Conditions of extreme law or extreme chaos are not survivable for human beings - the large central curve of neutrality is the only zone humans can inhabit. As such, PCs don't need alignments. The gods and other beings may be aligned with law or chaos. Their machinations are equally dangerous to human life.

==Known Deities==
I dunno, I'll put some stuff here eventually.

=Links=

Pei Feverfew

2022-08-16T20:30:34Z

The Wyzard: Created page with "A sample character sheet developed for The Wyzard's WWN Caverns Without Number campaign. =Character Name= *Background: (This is a game mechanical term, details go under "D..."

A sample character sheet developed for The Wyzard's WWN [[Caverns Without Number]] campaign.
=Character Name=
*Background: (This is a game mechanical term, details go under "Description.")
*Appearance:
*Description:
*Goal:
*Class:
**Class benefits go here
**Class benefits go here
**Class benefits go here
*HP: X/X
*System Strain: X/X
*Level:
*XP: X/X

=Attributes=
*Strength: X (+/-X)
*Dexterity: X (+/-X)
*Constitution: X (+/-X)
*Intelligence: X (+/-X)
*Wisdom: X (+/-X)
*Charisma: X (+/-X)

=Combat=
*Movement:
*Armor: (List the actual armor + shield worn)
**AC: X
*Weapon:
**+X, XdX+X. Shock: Range:
*Weapon:
**+X, XdX+X. Shock: Range:
*Physical:
*Evasion:
*Mental:
*Luck:

=Abilities=
==Skills==
*Administer
*Connect
*Convince
*Craft
*Exert
*Heal
*Know
*Lead
*Magic
*Notice
*Perform
*Pray
*Punch
*Ride
*Sail
*Shoot
*Sneak
*Stab
*Survive
*Trade
*Work- Porter

==Foci==
*(Name)
**(Summary)
*(Name)
**(Summary)
*(Name)
**(Summary)
*(Name)
**(Summary)
==Spells & Arts==
*Spells Per Day: X/X
*Effort: X/X
*Known Arts:
*Prepared Spells:
*Spells Known:
**Spell: Summary
**Spell: Summary
**Spell: Summary
**Spell: Summary
**Spell: Summary

=Gear=
*Readied Items:
**Total: X/X
*Stowed Items:
**Total: X/X

=Miscellanea=

==Notes==

==Assets==

Caverns Without Number

2022-08-16T20:30:14Z

The Wyzard: /* Dramatis Personae */

This is a page for the Caverns of Thracia game, run by The Wyzard using Worlds Without Number. Its content is tentative.

'''Before we start:''' Combat is intended to be a little more interesting than normal B/X. I strongly suggest that you all familiarize yourself with how Shock Damage works, and secondarily with how the combat maneuvers work. Shock Damage is going to mess you up if you aren't ready for it.

[[File:GMG4615-Thracia-455x600.jpg]]

=The Adventurers=
==Basic Wiki Practice==
I'm used to keeping information on my campaigns on a wiki. Some of you may not be used to this. Your character sheet is the first challenge you will face! Please ask for help on the discord if you aren't familiar with this stuff. So here is what you do, in order:
*Make a wiki account if you can't just log in with your regular RPGnet account, I can't remember.
*Anyway, be logged into the wiki.
*Open the sample character sheet in a new tab.
*Then hit "Edit" on this section (The Adventurers.)
*You can see the double-brackets around "Fill This In Yourself." Those double brackets will make a link to another wiki page, and the title will be whatever is the text inside the double brackets. You're going to put your character's name in there. Your character's name should be sufficiently unusual that there isn't already a PC somewhere on the wiki with that name. A good formula is something like (Name) the (Descriptor), where the descriptor is either some literal or figurative detail about the character. Maybe your character is Jeanette the Ravensworn, and you don't know what Ravensworn is yet. That's fine, maybe we'll find out!
*Save your edit and click on the new link that is your character's name.
*Now, hit the Edit button on the sample character sheet.
*Hit CTRL-A to select all text in the editing window. Then CTRL-C to copy it. Then close the window on the sample character sheet because you don't actually want to change it.
*Now hid the Edit button on YOUR character sheet, and paste in all the text from the sample one.
*Now fill in all the details.
*This sounds like a lot when I break it down like this, but honestly it takes seconds and I will probably do it for you during Session Zero.
==Dramatis Personae==
*[[Kastalos the Untouchable]]
*[[Yacob Muleskinner|Cob Muleskinner]]
*[[Pei Feverfew]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[WWN Sample Character Sheet]]

=Introduction=
The greatest city of the world, in terms of cosmopolitan fun, wealth, and knowledge, is Nibiru, the Peregrinate Acropolis. A heavily fortified castle-city built on a large stone mesa, it has the look of a vast ziggurat capped with a wonder of colorful towers. The undercity inside the mesa is a maze of carved and worked tunnels, warehouses, reservoirs, and hidden temples. The lower levels of the city are a chaos of tenements, manufactories, brightly tiled plazas, and cafeterias. The vast towers contain luxury apartments for the rich, in addition to colleges, libraries, laboratories, training halls and so forth. The outer walls are dotted with fortifications, weapon emplacements, signal towers, and windmills that power various machinery, particularly water pumps. Real estate is tremendously valuable, most people live in spaces little larger than a walk-in closet. Hence the desperate need for the public bathhouses and cafeteria-style restaurants that support the life and hygiene of the city - there simply isn't space for people to have their own kitchens and so forth.

What makes Nibiru so wealthy and influential, such a center of knowledge, is that it moves. Every week, the city disappears in vast cloud of opaque fog, and reappears somewhere else on Terminus. The engines that accomplish this have been carefully maintained for centuries, so that it has functioned without interruption. It peregrinates along a semi-regular trade route, with space built into the schedule for necessary or opportunistic deviations, and a cadre of mages, merchants, and scholars of economics carefully plot its course for maximum advantage. Wherever it lands, the vast trading apparatus fires up into action. Enormous loads of commodities and rarer goods are sold to local merchant houses, wherever the city might land. The vast caverns of the undercity can carry an amount of cargo beyond imagination. The limiting factor is how much of it can be hauled out and traded for new goods, which must in their turn be loaded within six days.

You are natives of this city - you have the invisible, UV-reactive tattoo of a citizen in at least three places on your body. This marks you as one of the exalted, an individual with the right to enter the city's gates and remain within the confines as it peregrinates. Even the meanest beggar who is a citizen of Nibiru has something that the wealth of an emperor might not purchase. And, like all natives, you know the rule - the first six days are for business, but the seventh is a day of rest. No one leaves the city on the seventh day, or lingers outside for even one second beyond midnight of the sixth. The risk of being left behind is just too high.

Guess how you fucked up?

==The Local Environment==
It's early spring and you're probably going to be stuck here for about the next year, until Nibiru returns and you can get home. The city-state of Amarna is located on a fertile river delta that empties into a sea. That's where Nibiru came to rest. The area around the great river is a green and well-developed valley, with large towns and farming villages served by a regular geometric pattern of irrigation channels. To the east, about a day's walk down the coast, is a small semi-fortified city named Tjaru, in an undesirable and swampy region. It is used as a place of exile for criminals and the disgraced. That's where you've currently ended up. And you've heard rumors of a recently-discovered Deep, one of the vast underground fastnesses built by various ancient civilizations.

Deeps are dangerous, in ways both mundane and exotic. However, they frequently contain raw wealth left behind by the Ancients. Also, the even more precious sorcerous, alchemical, or technological artifacts that they seem to have had such a panoply of. This would be an outstanding way to support yourselves for the next year. And, if you're lucky, you might go beyond supporting yourself in reasonable style, and find that you've recovered something valuable enough to earn a higher station in Nibiru.

Note: Tjaru and other nearby settlements are all part of the same Amar "city-state," ruled over by the central city Amarna. It is also styled as Amar-Na in more formal writings. The people that live here are Amars. The adjective form is Amaric.

==Distance & Timekeeping==
I'll eventually post a hexmap with some local points of interest and so forth, but I don't envision hexcrawling to be a major component. You're going to be in a relatively civilized area, albeit on the very edge of it. You won't need to make wilderness encounter checks to get to the dungeon and back.

My assumption is that you'll be largely based in Tjaru. My thought is that rather than keep strict track of days, a single delve (which might span multiple sessions) will just cross a week off the calendar, and we'll assume that resting, re-equipping, and so forth takes about that long. The dungeon is going to be maybe two hour's walk from Tjaru, so you can go out there, screw around for a while, and still get back before dark.

In-town intrigues and investigations likely WILL be a component of this game. It's not pure dungeon-crawling. And there's a significant amount of factionalism and other interesting stuff going on inside the Deep itself. It's not just dozens of rooms full of combat encounters.

==Questions for Session Zero==
*Anything anybody definitely wants to see
*Anything anyone definitely doesn't want to see, particularly in terms of "does anything already on this wiki bother someone a lot?"
*Lines & Veils or whatever, PM me if you have to
*I don't intend the game to include explicit sexual content, and even the implication of sexual violence is right out
*I actually find some of the gene-modified human strains in WWN to be kind of interesting, but they might be too problematic, I dunno, opinions?
*

=Encumbrance & Beasts of Burden=
WWN's encumbrance system is simple enough that I'm not sure we'll actually need this section, but I included it as a matter of habit. Note that every full 100 coins counts as an item. Count normal gems as a single coin. Jewelry and small art objects are counted as a bulk good - you can pack together three items such as carved ivory necklaces, jade hairbrushes, jeweled crowns, rings, etc. I'll let you know about larger art objects.
==The Pocket Change Rule==
Your first up-to-100-coins worth of regular coins and gems do not count towards encumbrance, so long as they're yours alone. Found treasure is tracked separately until you return to civilization, such as it is.
==The Bling Rule==
The PCs may ignore the encumbrance requirements of jewelry if they simply wear the jewelry openly, within reason. No more than a single crown at a time, etc. This has two downsides: If you are presently in a Deep, you may find out an object is cursed at a most inconvenient time. Secondly, your enemies may become ravenously motivated to relieve you of those items. Morale is an important component of combat in this game, and if you are draped in the wealth of nations, then opponents may get a morale bonus.

=NPCs=

=Notes & Logs=

=Maps=

=House Rules & Character Creation=

==Character Creation & Advancement==
*Don't come with a character concept, we'll create characters in a session zero. It's okay to have a few vague ideas just so we don't have to look up too much.
*For attributes, arrange the following array to taste: 14, 12, 11, 10, 9, and 7. See pg. 8.
*When you pick a background, you get a free skill associated with it at level 0. Then, make a total of three rolls on the growth or learning table for your background.
*Choose a class. We're only using the classes available in the free version. However, the odder partial classes are available.
*Note that I don't like the Cleric class in D&D for complicated reasons, so please don't try to emulate one in terms of being a dedicated servant of a god. If you want to play a Healer (one of the partial classes) you certainly can, but I don't have a sense as to whether one is strictly necessary. PCs can die in this game but I'm probably going to tone down the "if you fail this save you die" kind of stuff.
*Assume you roll a 6 on your hit die.
*Skip the equipment step, read up on the languages stuff on this wiki.
*Everyone levels up twice. We start at level 3. Assume you roll a 4 on these two hit dice.
*You can start with 1,000 silver pieces worth of equipment. Note that this game is on a silver standard. If you want one of the packages on page 29, assume it's 100 silver pieces for any of the packages. No swapping or whatever. Discard any money you didn't spend on equipment.
*For ready cash, you each start with 3d6 gold, 3d20 silver, and 1d4+1 gems worth 50 sp apiece.
*Your first month of living expenses is prepaid, at a Common standard of living. After the first month you need to pay that much, which amounts to 80sp per month, due on the first of each month. Adventurers cannot voluntarily spend less than this, because they are intolerant of living in more straitened circumstances. Note that this includes rations - it's not any more expensive to buy rations than it is to eat at the tavern. You do still have to determine how many you're carrying, for encumbrance purposes.
*We're using slow advancement, pg 54. However, a full continuous month lived at a Rich lifestyle (200sp per week, or 800 for the whole month) gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 6th level. A full continuous month lived at a Noble lifestyle (1,000sp per week, or 4,000 for the whole month), gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 9th level.
*You will each start with one or more rumors about the nearby Caverns of Thracia.

=Setting=
Disregard the setting as written in WWN. I dig the general vibe but I'm mostly going to be doing my own thing. The name of this world is Terminus (players in my previous campaigns may recognize the name; consider this a reboot.)

==History==
Terminus is not known to have ever had any natively intelligent life. Various intelligent beings from other places, human and otherwise, have come to settle there. It also has its own complement of extradimensional entities, beings which some might refer to as gods.

The earliest human settlers came from other worlds forgotten to the modern person. Something, however, caused a lapse in communication and logistical capability. The settlers were cut off from home. Whatever disaster occurred has cut off almost all contact with civilizations outside the solar system. Visitation by spacecraft is extremely rare and not well-known. Visitors who arrive via stranger means are, if they exist, keeping it on the down-low.

It is believed by some scholars and most small children that there are inhabited cities on the moons.

==A Hypercompressed Timeline==
So as not to engage in the fantasy world designer's great sin of just adding a bunch of zeroes onto a reasonable timeline, I'm not providing any numbers here. Think of these as the approximate ages of the world, liberally seasoned with disinformation, misunderstanding, propaganda, temporal anomalies, and genuinely antique texts from different planets that were improperly mixed into the local historical record.

*'''Era Zero: The Precursors.''' There are occasionally objects or devices (such as the Cidrian Gates or the Sublunar Machinery) which seem to correspond to some time or people before the era of the Lizard Kings. Anything that old which is still operational can be presumed to have unimaginable power and sophistication. They may have been built by prior human civilizations or by entities even further removed from our understanding. It is presumed that human colonization occurred during this era due to the fact that some of these devices appear made for beings on the approximate size and body plan of modern humanity.
*'''Era One: Early Human Colonization.''' During this period, large numbers of humans arrived on the planet via means which are not known for certain, and engaged in widespread terraforming and genetic resequencing of themselves and everything else they could get their hands on. The early colonies “failed,” in that C&C with whoever sent them was lost, and whatever early governments were established collapsed. Humans went through a period of barbaric savagery, and then got it out of their systems. There is little evidence of heavy industry during this period, indicating a break from the precursor era, which did engage in large-scale engineering.
*'''Era Two''': '''The Lizard Queens'''. The Lizardfolk were for a time the apex sophont on the planet. They built crystalline devices that ran on psionic rather than technological or magical principles, subjugated humans when they felt the need, and built ziggurats, pyramids, and canals. They revived the precursor habit of constructing Deeps, or at least cleared and restored to use a number that were already ancient. These enormous underground spaces were considered proof against enemies approaching overland or from the skies. It is believed that airborne attacks must have been a major hazard at the time. The decline in cognitive capability among lizardfolk is most likely what allowed humanity to eventually overtake them.
*'''Era Three:''' '''The Amaranthan Empire'''. This human empire rose out of a small but wealthy kingdom by a bay, where innovative magicians laid down the foundation-stones of modern sorcery. It was a darker, cruder magic that they practiced, and they were insatiable for more power. Within a handful of generations, the leaders of the Amaranthan kingdoms had as much magic in their veins as blood, and they conquered the vast majority of the world. Between their spells, and pre-Saurian technology and learning they recovered from the Deeps, they easily brought to heel the feudal human societies that arose to fill the vacuum left by the Lizard Kings.
*'''Era Four:''' '''The Hubris.''' The Amaranthans declared war on everyone and everything that would not bend the knee to their Emperor. After a hundred years of blood and fire, they lost.
*'''Era Five:''' '''The Long Dark.''' Little enough of this era is recorded. Vengeful beings of every sort preyed on humanity and dominated their cities. Much awful tribute was extracted, and the lore of the Amaranthans was destroyed whenever it could be found. The tech level at this time was definitely more medieval in character, as humans were lucky if their masters allowed them pointy sticks, in most places. This was the era of the Lex Sanguinis, codified by the Vampire Regents who ruled so many city-states. Much of the current law and custom is descended from these dark times, with appropriate adaptations.
*'''Era Six: The Thracian Hegemony'''. The Thracians began as a small group of seafaring city-states, in which a few privileged human servants formed a conspiracy. They managed to throw off the yokes of their inhuman masters and institute democracy. They rapidly became masters of the exchange of goods. Thracian civilization avoided reliance on direct sorcery, since they didn't wish to repeat the mistakes of the Amaranthans. They pursued alchemy, artifice, and technology. While they never approached the sophistication of Precursor technology, they could produce much more sophisticated machinery at scale than is possible in the current era. They were able to free most of the rest of human civilization via a combination of disaster capitalism and laser-armed airships. They also standardized weights, measures, and coinage, which standards are still used today. Currency from pre-Thracian cultures is often extremely non-standard.
*'''Era Seven: The Decapitation'''. The leaders of the Thracian Combines attempted to make treaty with the various Lunar civilizations, just as they had done to the monstrous kingdoms that had existed on the terrestrial sphere. For whatever reason (but probably because the Lunatics weren't ignorant of how this had worked out for the vampire princes, etc.), negotiations fell through, and ended in several nights of orbital bombardment. When the smoke cleared, the Thracian civilization came apart at the seams. They had always kept their leadership and industrial base centralized, to maintain their hegemony. Unfortunately, that meant it was all destroyed by the swarm of large iron meteorites that turned their five greatest cities into a morass of smoking, flooded craters. Bereft of leadership and centralized industrial production, the Thracians were raided into nonexistence by tribal or feudal peoples, monsters, and various nonhuman intelligences. Their society disintegrated, and the lore of operating their great machines and mysterious facilities became lost.
*'''Era Eight: The Age of City-States'''. You are here! Over much of the world, humanity has reorganized itself into independent and semi-independent city-states. There is trade and communication between the various civilizations, but vast waste-lands full of ruins and ancient roads occupy the space between them. Human civilization seems to be somewhat drowsy at this time in history, and the people of the world are plagued by hedonism and sybaritic boredom. Greed takes the place of ambition, and everywhere men and women take the low and easy road to comfort. Globe-spanning ambitions are distinctly out of fashion. Non-human intelligences have many thriving civilizations of their own, and so far there's so much room that large-scale conflict hasn't broken out.

==Contemporary Material Culture==
Industrial manufacturing and supply chains no longer exist. However, books and other repositories of information are still available, and it's not uncommon for people to be educated to a (real-world) modern standard, even if they can't lay hands on so much as a flashlight.

The vast majority of work is done using human or animal muscle, or relatively simple wind or water mills. That being said, the situation is not at all comparable to medieval Europe. Many technologies that have an extremely high payoff-to-effort ratio if you are already at a high Roman or Renaissance-era level of technology are still used. Movable-type printing presses are not common, but they have supplanted scriptoriums. They’re just too easy to build in comparison to how much effort they save.

The essential difficulty is that the creation of an industrial economy is a great deal of work, and nobody is really inclined to go to that kind of effort. Anyone with the resources, ambition, and will to build a steam train or an air conditioner factory is probably better off becoming an archmage and obligating their neighbors to appease them.

Further, Precursor humanity genetically engineered a variety of plants to be unnaturally useful, and those strains are still cultivated. A wide variety of food plants and several types of mushroom are known to be results of the original sequencing project; they can be easily and rapidly farmed, and are tailored to human dietary needs. For this reason, simply supplying the population with food is not the crushing burden it was in real-world medieval societies, and even impoverished areas have sufficient time for leisure and social or intellectual pursuits. There are other examples, as well, such as the Library Trees with leaves uniquely suited to paper-making.

Advanced alloys, both alchemical and mundane, are still manufactured, although not in modern quantities.

'''Summary:'''
*Individual artificers, magicians, and alchemists do produce items of enchantment or high technology, but these are rare, hand-crafted, and expensive.
*High technology as it exists in our world is rarely available and typically only in very simple configurations. A hand-held UV light might be obtainable, but a computer is out of the question.
*The advanced technology that does exist often involves large glowing synthetic gemstones, runic circuitry, and alchemical materials. Gears, moving parts, conventional batteries, and other steampunk apparatuses are relatively rare. The dividing line between magic and this sort of science can be somewhat thin at times. Consult the rules for mods in the WWN rulebook for ideas.
*The "hurlants" described on pg. 36 are available for purchase. In-setting, they're referred to as coilguns. They function via an extremely high-tension, alchemically produced metal spring, housed inside a barrel, which must be carefully wound with an integral handle before a specially made steel dart is loaded and clipped into place. Rather than the barrel being rifled, the dart is designed with a subtly helical fluting. Hand hurlants are often mounted on an arm bracer, but either may be made in a configuration similar to a modern firearm. They are, however, typically ornately carved or filigreed. They are considered a weapon of war or murder, and may not be carried openly in civilized cities. The user is expected to have them unloaded, "broken down" into components, and carried packed away. Note the AP tag on them - they ignore non-magical armor. A hand hurlant can throw its sliver of steel directly through an armored knight's breastplate and out his back. They are, therefore, especially disliked by the sorts of people wealthy enough to invest in heavy armor.

==Astronomy & Weather==
Terminus lacks the axial tilt & wobble of our own world. Seasons are caused by its eccentric and elliptical orbit. In plain terms, its distance from the sun varies sufficiently over the course of the year to produce winter and summer. This means the north and south hemisphere experience winter and summer at the same time. Terminus' magnetic poles are precisely perpendicular to the plane of orbit. It is highly likely that some intelligent agency altered these factors at some point in times ancient beyond reckoning.

Terminus has three moons in an equidistant orbit around the planet. One is nearly white, like our own, and the other two are tinted red and blue. Absent cloud cover, the night sky almost always provides a little more light than a full moon on our own Earth.

==Calendar==
There are 13 lunar months, each of exactly 28 days. There are three months in each of the seasons that would be recognizable to us - a spring, a summer, an autumn, a winter. Even without axial tilt and wobble, the nature of the seasons varies according to distance from the equator and local geography. Coastal areas are milder, areas close to the poles are colder.

The calendar of 13 months is standard almost all across the globe, at least in human civilizations. What varies is which months are counted part of which season. In general, an area with extreme conditions during one month of the year will count the "extra" month as outside of a regular season. A northern city might take the part of the year of most intense cold and count it as "Fimbulwinter," a time outside of even regular winter. An equatorial land might have the Dog Days, that month which is too hot to be placed within regular summertime. In a coastal land, the inhabitants might take the time of most intense storm activity, and name it the Monsoon Season.

The area this campaign takes place in is a Mediterranean type of climate. Due to the proximity of a large body of water, while the summers can be hellishly humid, the extremes of temperature aren't as bad as they could be.

==Languages==
The PCs start out knowing Common & Trade Cant, with additional languages per their Connect & Know skills. See pg. 28 of WWN.

*Common is a modern form of Thracian, and is the most wide-spread human language. Insular or remote human civilizations might have divergent or distinct languages.
*Trade Cant is a limited pidgin tongue commonly used in highly cosmopolitan areas or by far-traveling merchants. It's not good for higher pursuits, but has special vocabulary for economic concerns, commodities, travel & accommodations, et cetera.
*Old Thracian has about as much in common with Common as classical Latin does with modern Italian. It was the language of the last powerful and widespread human civilization.
*Amaranthan, also known as Sorcerer's Speech, is even older than Old Thracian. It was the tongue of a powerful sorcerous empire that collapsed in blood and fire.
*Lizard, or in derogatory terms "Hiss," is the language of the common lizardfolk and other reptilian intelligences. It's hard for humans to pronounce, and even harder for them to think in. The brains of the reptilian people are formed very differently to human ones. Something has gone very wrong with the lizardfolk, and 90% of them have cognitive limitations not present in their ancestors. The result is that only about 10% of them are literate in their own tongue. Note that in Lizard, humans are referred to as "Monkey Men," and their terms for our language are even more derogatory than "Hiss."
*Pelagic, or in derogatory terms "Glub," is the common language of undersea peoples. It's impossible to pronounce in atmosphere, so it can mostly only be learned underwater. Water-Adapted PCs (see pg. 27, under xeno-blooded) can learn to speak and understand this.
*Fae is the language of the various half-worlder beings. It has Seelie and Unseelie dialects, and while most people will be more familiar with one or the other, they are comprehensible to each other.
*Sign Language exists for the use of the deaf, and is also commonly used by beings for whom normal conversation is difficult. For example, a non-water-adapted human and a greater octopus might both be intelligent, but the octopus can only speak underwater, and the human can only speak in the air. If they met at the shore, they could communicate via sign, with each staying in its own preferred medium. The gestures are abstract enough for beings with significantly different anatomy, so long as they have limbs. Dolphins don't have sufficient limbs to Sign, although they can learn to understand it, but they're telepathic anyway.
*Various other species have their own languages.
*The Precursor civilization of humans presumably had their own language, but they don't seem to have written much down, or if they did, it was lost long ago.

==Random Notes==
*"Greater" creatures are intelligent forms. A Greater Octopus is therefore a sophont form of octopod. The lizardfolk are greater lizards. Nonhuman intelligences, in their own languages, would typically refer to humans as Greater Monkeys. This is a scientific or technical classification and it is rude to refer to any intelligent being in their own person this way. This is distinct from a "Dire" form, which is a larger and usually more ferocious form of a more common creature. See the classical example, the Dire Wolf. Note that nonhumans often classify Ogres as Dire Humans, which humans are not especially appreciative of in most cases.
*Human biology is rather enhanced by precursor engineering. The average lifespan, uninterrupted by disease or violence, is about 120 years, with only the last fifteen or so involving serious senescence. Most people will recover relatively fully from injuries or diseases that don't amount to amputation, and sepsis due to injuries is rare. Birth defects as we know them are unheard-of. Fertility is also optional for humans. Basically, look at the healing rules and be astonished how little medicine is required for stabbing victims.
*There are no elves & dwarves in the typical D&D sense, so the Special Origin focus is not used. The Xenoblooded focus is freely available and represents the efforts of precursor genetic engineers, passed down through the long millenia; aquatic-adapted humans are still well-known in coastal areas. The Unique Gift focus is also available, and typically represents some inheritable genetic gift.

==Nibiru==
I don't want to spend too much time on this, because the whole point of the campaign is that you aren't there. But maybe a few notes won't go too far wrong.
*There is a system of public education, welfare, and public works that is unrivaled in the world. If you don't find a useful occupation for yourself, you '''will''' be trained and pressed into service in some capacity or another.
*Nibiru has the wealth to support its people, but no room for idlers and malingerers. Literally, physical space is at a premium.
*Social stratification is severe in terms of power and resources commanded, but there are no mansions or palaces. Everyone must make use of public spaces and facilities, hence they are well-maintained.
*Security is tight. If any enemy ever penetrated to the machinery that allows peregrination, they could damage it in a way no one now living would know how to repair. Foreigners are allowed into the city itself only on an extremely limited basis. Criminal gangs are unheard of; and criminal activity is not tolerated.
*All citizens are educated to at least something resembling a high school level and then given some additional training, vocational or otherwise, unless their employment is destined to be entirely menial. For those such as the PCs who have exceptional abilities, they may have attended one of the following programs:
**The Athenaeum is a tower most like a "university" program in Nibiru. Conventional scholarly and engineering students are likely to graduate from here.
**The Scholomance is the tower dedicated to magic, both High Magic & New Magic. The individual in charge of it, known as the Rector, is a black-robed figure wearing an alabaster mask. Their true identity has not been known in centuries - it may be the same superannuated individual, or it is possible that the Chairs of the various departments are electing a new individual from time to time. The board of the scholomance is is deeply secretive, and nothing can be said with certainty.
**The Charterhouse tower trains Vowed. Charterhouse Vowed can select as their bonus skill (see pg. 86) either Exert or Sneak. PCs can take any path they wish, but the typical Charterhouse graduate works as a spy, agent, bodyguard, or assassin.
**Skull Plaza is the military school. Obviously, many people learn the combat arts in more practical ways, but the regular army goes through Skull Plaza. Note that Nibiru does not maintain cavalry of any kind. Their combat doctrines and equipment are focused on siege defense and man-to-man or small unit combat. They produce numerous skilled duelists, and marching on the city would be a death sentence for nearly any attacker, but Nibiru can't field a large army.

=Gods & Religion=
This is the part where I complain. Feel free to skim this section at most.

I don't like the way that religion and clerics are portrayed in D&D. I'm most interested in what the PCs choose to do, in pursuing their own ends. Those ends may be selfless - a character might be dedicated to justice, for example. But it should be their own choice and for their own reasons, subject to their own reevaluation. Other, more selfish motivations are certainly easy enough to understand. "I would like that large pile of gold coins to belong to me rather than whoever currently lays claim to it" and "I would prefer not to die beneath this ghost-haunted pyramid I have been abandoned in" are both immediately relatable.

This is consistent with what I would consider to be most of the essential texts of the genre. So of course D&D, in its lack of wisdom, had to make a character option to subsume PC choices and priority to some half-baked imagining of how a pantheistic religion might work, if you stripped it of all interest and cultural factors.

So we're not going to do that.

There is nothing like a D&D Cleric in this world. There are healers. There are also persons who are "high priests" or the like. The former is someone who has bent their talents to medicine. Or, in the case of the Healer partial class, someone who has devoted themselves to using psychic energy as a substitute for complex pharmaceutical substances that can no longer be manufactured. A "priest" is a social role. They may or may not be a member of a class that provides magical powers. If they are serious about relationships with supernatural beings, they may have a respectable ability with the Pray skill.

==Religion on Terminus==
Gods are a highly varied lot. There are extradimensional entities and spirits that seem to have influence over greater or lesser amounts of real estate. There are also some extremely physically real beings with supernatural powers that are more flexible or focused than the Spells and Arts available to mortal magicians. A local crocodilian river-deity, for example, may be both a physically verifiable giant crocodile, and also capable of causing or preventing flooding in the river. But, notably, ONLY their own river. A deity of some more abstract principle, such as the North Wind, might be more indeterminate and widespread in their presence.

The thing to keep in mind is that the gods are distant, weird, and inhuman, in all cases. The crocodile god is not up for a friendly chat. The North Wind was never a human, likely has no human feelings, and if it takes some anthropomorphic shape it is only as a matter of whimsy. Deities are typically not worshipped and revered in the way that a modern person in the US might imagine a religion to imply. The sailors do not love the gods of the seas. They fear them and respect them, and make offerings in the hope of improving their chances of coming home alive. Deities (in the vast majority of cases) make no guarantees or offers regarding the fate of a person's soul after death, which is a mystery, and of little concern to the typical person. Everyday matters loom larger, and death must take care of its own.

Devoted servants of deities may have some special power or another, which is typically minor and has a cost. For more serious exertions of divine power, if such a thing is desirable, the cultists will likely need to conduct some ritual. This will involve an offering, and a Pray roll from their leader. Note that the offering need not be a material object or bloodletting - some gods might look favorably on a night of frenzied dancing by at least twenty or thirty dervishes. It depends on the god and the ritual undertaken. This isn't something I expect to see a lot of in-game, since divine intervention is generally not an effective way to obtain human goals.

Anyway. Expect weird and inhuman genius loci, snake cults, and sui generis beings of cosmic horror, not some kind of benevolent god of farming with an organized and hierarchical temple structure.

==Alignment==
These game rules don't make use of alignment, so it's not a thing on the character sheet. You should know that my preference, though, which informs the cosmic background of the world, is law vs. chaos rather than good vs. evil. Conditions of extreme law or extreme chaos are not survivable for human beings - the large central curve of neutrality is the only zone humans can inhabit. As such, PCs don't need alignments. The gods and other beings may be aligned with law or chaos. Their machinations are equally dangerous to human life.

==Known Deities==
I dunno, I'll put some stuff here eventually.

=Links=

Fill This In Yourself

2022-08-16T19:23:48Z

The Wyzard: Reverted edits by Seiberwing (talk) to last revision by Lee Casebolt

=Kastalos the Untouchable=
*Background: Thug (Professional duelist)
*Appearance:
*Description:
*Goal:
*Class: Warrior
**Killing Blow
Whenever a Warrior inflicts damage with any attack,
spell, or special ability they may add half their character
level, rounded up, to the damage done. This damage is
also added to any Shock they may inflict.
Combined with Foci meant to improve Shock attacks
such as Armsmaster, Close Combatant, or Shocking
Assault, this ability ensures that an experienced Warrior
will almost always kill any ordinary human soldier
or minor monster, regardless of their attack roll result.
**Veteran’s Luck
Once per scene, as an Instant action, the Warrior may
turn a missed attack they have made into a hit. Alternately,
they may turn a successful attack against them into a
miss, also as an Instant action. This ability is particularly
lethal when used with the Make a Snap Attack action
and leveled against weaker monsters or ordinary human
warriors, as explained on page 44.
Only one exercise of this ability is possible in a scene,
either to force a miss or ensure a hit on a foe; both options
may not be employed in the same fight.
A Warrior may use this ability with crew-served
weapons they are assisting in firing. This ability cannot
be used to negate environmental damage or damage done
to a vehicle or mount they are riding.
**Slayer
Your hit rolls are always successful against any creature with equal or fewer hit dice than you have levels, assuming it’s physically possible for your weapon to harm them
**Unbroken
Once per day as an Instant action, when reduced to 0 hit points or affected by hostile magic, you can negate the magical effect or push through the injury. Using this ability reduces you to 1 HP.
**Heroic Warrior’s Fray
Once per round, as an On Turn action, inflict 1d8 damage plus your level on any one target within reach of any of your Readied weapons, provided they have equal or fewer hit dice than you have levels. This damage is not modified by any ability or bonus, and can affect any creature who could be hurt by that Readied weapon.
**Heroic Resilience
+12 HP (included)
**Heroic Reflexes
Heroic PCs always win initiative at the start of hostilities unless their foes successfully ambush them or otherwise have the drop on the group
**Heroic Determination
Once per scene, as an On Turn actions, a Heroic PC can accept a point of System Strain to automatically heal 1d8 hit points of damage plus their character level. This can return them to the fray from a Mortally Wounded condition. Outside of combat, they can use this ability as often as they like during a five-minute rest, assuming they have the System Strain to support it.
*HP: 32+con bonus/X
*System Strain: X/X
*Level: 3
*XP: X/X

=Attributes=
*Strength: 10 (+/-0)
*Dexterity: 14 (+1)
*Constitution: 14 (+1)
*Intelligence: 7 (-1)
*Wisdom: 9 (+/-0)
*Charisma: 11 (+/-0)

=Combat=
*Movement:
*Armor: (List the actual armor + shield worn)
**AC: 18 (+shield, if any)
*Base Attack Bonus +3
*Weapon:
**+X, XdX+X. Shock: Range:
*Weapon:
**+X, XdX+X. Shock: Range:
*Physical: 14
*Evasion: 14
*Mental: 15
*Luck: 15
=Abilities=
==Skills==
*Connect - 0
*Sneak - 0
*Stab - 2

==Foci==
*Impervious Defense
**Whether through uncanny reflexes, remarkable luck, supernatural
heritage, or magical talent, you have natural
defenses equivalent to high-quality armor. The benefits
of this Focus don’t stack with armor, though Dexterity
or shield modifiers apply.
Level 1: You have an innate Armor Class of 15 plus half
your character level, rounded up. (AC 17+dex+shield)
*Close Combatant
**You’ve had all too much practice at close-in fighting and
desperate struggles with drawn blades. You’re extremely
skilled at avoiding injury in melee combat, and at level
2 you can dodge through a melee scrum without fear of
being knifed in passing.
Level 1: Gain any combat skill as a bonus skill. You can
use knife-sized thrown weapons in melee without
suffering penalties for the proximity of melee attackers.
You ignore Shock damage from melee assailants,
even if you’re unarmored at the time, but
invoking this benefit disrupts any spellcasting you
might do that round due to the need for violently
active evasion.
*Nullifier
**Something about your hero interferes with easy use of
magic on them. It may be a strangely powerful birth
blessing, a particular supernatural bloodline, or simple
occult incompatibility. This Focus cannot be taken by
Mages or Partial Mages.
Level 1: You and all allies within twenty feet gain a +2
bonus to all saving throws against magical effects.
As an On Turn action, you can feel the presence or
use of magic within twenty feet of you, though you
can’t discern details about it or the specific source.
The first failed saving throw against a magical effect
you suffer in a day is turned into a success.

=Gear=
*Readied Items:
**Total: X/X
*Stowed Items:
**Total: X/X

=Miscellanea=

==Notes==

==Assets==

Caverns Without Number

2022-07-31T17:31:45Z

The Wyzard: /* Alignment */

This is a page for the Caverns of Thracia game, run by The Wyzard using Worlds Without Number. Its content is tentative.

'''Before we start:''' Combat is intended to be a little more interesting than normal B/X. I strongly suggest that you all familiarize yourself with how Shock Damage works, and secondarily with how the combat maneuvers work. Shock Damage is going to mess you up if you aren't ready for it.

[[File:GMG4615-Thracia-455x600.jpg]]

=The Adventurers=
==Basic Wiki Practice==
I'm used to keeping information on my campaigns on a wiki. Some of you may not be used to this. Your character sheet is the first challenge you will face! Please ask for help on the discord if you aren't familiar with this stuff. So here is what you do, in order:
*Make a wiki account if you can't just log in with your regular RPGnet account, I can't remember.
*Anyway, be logged into the wiki.
*Open the sample character sheet in a new tab.
*Then hit "Edit" on this section (The Adventurers.)
*You can see the double-brackets around "Fill This In Yourself." Those double brackets will make a link to another wiki page, and the title will be whatever is the text inside the double brackets. You're going to put your character's name in there. Your character's name should be sufficiently unusual that there isn't already a PC somewhere on the wiki with that name. A good formula is something like (Name) the (Descriptor), where the descriptor is either some literal or figurative detail about the character. Maybe your character is Jeanette the Ravensworn, and you don't know what Ravensworn is yet. That's fine, maybe we'll find out!
*Save your edit and click on the new link that is your character's name.
*Now, hit the Edit button on the sample character sheet.
*Hit CTRL-A to select all text in the editing window. Then CTRL-C to copy it. Then close the window on the sample character sheet because you don't actually want to change it.
*Now hid the Edit button on YOUR character sheet, and paste in all the text from the sample one.
*Now fill in all the details.
*This sounds like a lot when I break it down like this, but honestly it takes seconds and I will probably do it for you during Session Zero.
==Dramatis Personae==
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[WWN Sample Character Sheet]]

=Introduction=
The greatest city of the world, in terms of cosmopolitan fun, wealth, and knowledge, is Nibiru, the Peregrinate Acropolis. A heavily fortified castle-city built on a large stone mesa, it has the look of a vast ziggurat capped with a wonder of colorful towers. The undercity inside the mesa is a maze of carved and worked tunnels, warehouses, reservoirs, and hidden temples. The lower levels of the city are a chaos of tenements, manufactories, brightly tiled plazas, and cafeterias. The vast towers contain luxury apartments for the rich, in addition to colleges, libraries, laboratories, training halls and so forth. The outer walls are dotted with fortifications, weapon emplacements, signal towers, and windmills that power various machinery, particularly water pumps. Real estate is tremendously valuable, most people live in spaces little larger than a walk-in closet. Hence the desperate need for the public bathhouses and cafeteria-style restaurants that support the life and hygiene of the city - there simply isn't space for people to have their own kitchens and so forth.

What makes Nibiru so wealthy and influential, such a center of knowledge, is that it moves. Every week, the city disappears in vast cloud of opaque fog, and reappears somewhere else on Terminus. The engines that accomplish this have been carefully maintained for centuries, so that it has functioned without interruption. It peregrinates along a semi-regular trade route, with space built into the schedule for necessary or opportunistic deviations, and a cadre of mages, merchants, and scholars of economics carefully plot its course for maximum advantage. Wherever it lands, the vast trading apparatus fires up into action. Enormous loads of commodities and rarer goods are sold to local merchant houses, wherever the city might land. The vast caverns of the undercity can carry an amount of cargo beyond imagination. The limiting factor is how much of it can be hauled out and traded for new goods, which must in their turn be loaded within six days.

You are natives of this city - you have the invisible, UV-reactive tattoo of a citizen in at least three places on your body. This marks you as one of the exalted, an individual with the right to enter the city's gates and remain within the confines as it peregrinates. Even the meanest beggar who is a citizen of Nibiru has something that the wealth of an emperor might not purchase. And, like all natives, you know the rule - the first six days are for business, but the seventh is a day of rest. No one leaves the city on the seventh day, or lingers outside for even one second beyond midnight of the sixth. The risk of being left behind is just too high.

Guess how you fucked up?

==The Local Environment==
It's early spring and you're probably going to be stuck here for about the next year, until Nibiru returns and you can get home. The city-state of Amarna is located on a fertile river delta that empties into a sea. That's where Nibiru came to rest. The area around the great river is a green and well-developed valley, with large towns and farming villages served by a regular geometric pattern of irrigation channels. To the east, about a day's walk down the coast, is a small semi-fortified city named Tjaru, in an undesirable and swampy region. It is used as a place of exile for criminals and the disgraced. That's where you've currently ended up. And you've heard rumors of a recently-discovered Deep, one of the vast underground fastnesses built by various ancient civilizations.

Deeps are dangerous, in ways both mundane and exotic. However, they frequently contain raw wealth left behind by the Ancients. Also, the even more precious sorcerous, alchemical, or technological artifacts that they seem to have had such a panoply of. This would be an outstanding way to support yourselves for the next year. And, if you're lucky, you might go beyond supporting yourself in reasonable style, and find that you've recovered something valuable enough to earn a higher station in Nibiru.

Note: Tjaru and other nearby settlements are all part of the same Amar "city-state," ruled over by the central city Amarna. It is also styled as Amar-Na in more formal writings. The people that live here are Amars. The adjective form is Amaric.

==Distance & Timekeeping==
I'll eventually post a hexmap with some local points of interest and so forth, but I don't envision hexcrawling to be a major component. You're going to be in a relatively civilized area, albeit on the very edge of it. You won't need to make wilderness encounter checks to get to the dungeon and back.

My assumption is that you'll be largely based in Tjaru. My thought is that rather than keep strict track of days, a single delve (which might span multiple sessions) will just cross a week off the calendar, and we'll assume that resting, re-equipping, and so forth takes about that long. The dungeon is going to be maybe two hour's walk from Tjaru, so you can go out there, screw around for a while, and still get back before dark.

In-town intrigues and investigations likely WILL be a component of this game. It's not pure dungeon-crawling. And there's a significant amount of factionalism and other interesting stuff going on inside the Deep itself. It's not just dozens of rooms full of combat encounters.

==Questions for Session Zero==
*Anything anybody definitely wants to see
*Anything anyone definitely doesn't want to see, particularly in terms of "does anything already on this wiki bother someone a lot?"
*Lines & Veils or whatever, PM me if you have to
*I don't intend the game to include explicit sexual content, and even the implication of sexual violence is right out
*I actually find some of the gene-modified human strains in WWN to be kind of interesting, but they might be too problematic, I dunno, opinions?
*

=Encumbrance & Beasts of Burden=
WWN's encumbrance system is simple enough that I'm not sure we'll actually need this section, but I included it as a matter of habit. Note that every full 100 coins counts as an item. Count normal gems as a single coin. Jewelry and small art objects are counted as a bulk good - you can pack together three items such as carved ivory necklaces, jade hairbrushes, jeweled crowns, rings, etc. I'll let you know about larger art objects.
==The Pocket Change Rule==
Your first up-to-100-coins worth of regular coins and gems do not count towards encumbrance, so long as they're yours alone. Found treasure is tracked separately until you return to civilization, such as it is.
==The Bling Rule==
The PCs may ignore the encumbrance requirements of jewelry if they simply wear the jewelry openly, within reason. No more than a single crown at a time, etc. This has two downsides: If you are presently in a Deep, you may find out an object is cursed at a most inconvenient time. Secondly, your enemies may become ravenously motivated to relieve you of those items. Morale is an important component of combat in this game, and if you are draped in the wealth of nations, then opponents may get a morale bonus.

=NPCs=

=Notes & Logs=

=Maps=

=House Rules & Character Creation=

==Character Creation & Advancement==
*Don't come with a character concept, we'll create characters in a session zero. It's okay to have a few vague ideas just so we don't have to look up too much.
*For attributes, arrange the following array to taste: 14, 12, 11, 10, 9, and 7. See pg. 8.
*When you pick a background, you get a free skill associated with it at level 0. Then, make a total of three rolls on the growth or learning table for your background.
*Choose a class. We're only using the classes available in the free version. However, the odder partial classes are available.
*Note that I don't like the Cleric class in D&D for complicated reasons, so please don't try to emulate one in terms of being a dedicated servant of a god. If you want to play a Healer (one of the partial classes) you certainly can, but I don't have a sense as to whether one is strictly necessary. PCs can die in this game but I'm probably going to tone down the "if you fail this save you die" kind of stuff.
*Assume you roll a 6 on your hit die.
*Skip the equipment step, read up on the languages stuff on this wiki.
*Everyone levels up twice. We start at level 3. Assume you roll a 4 on these two hit dice.
*You can start with 1,000 silver pieces worth of equipment. Note that this game is on a silver standard. If you want one of the packages on page 29, assume it's 100 silver pieces for any of the packages. No swapping or whatever. Discard any money you didn't spend on equipment.
*For ready cash, you each start with 3d6 gold, 3d20 silver, and 1d4+1 gems worth 50 sp apiece.
*Your first month of living expenses is prepaid, at a Common standard of living. After the first month you need to pay that much, which amounts to 80sp per month, due on the first of each month. Adventurers cannot voluntarily spend less than this, because they are intolerant of living in more straitened circumstances. Note that this includes rations - it's not any more expensive to buy rations than it is to eat at the tavern. You do still have to determine how many you're carrying, for encumbrance purposes.
*We're using slow advancement, pg 54. However, a full continuous month lived at a Rich lifestyle (200sp per week, or 800 for the whole month) gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 6th level. A full continuous month lived at a Noble lifestyle (1,000sp per week, or 4,000 for the whole month), gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 9th level.
*You will each start with one or more rumors about the nearby Caverns of Thracia.

=Setting=
Disregard the setting as written in WWN. I dig the general vibe but I'm mostly going to be doing my own thing. The name of this world is Terminus (players in my previous campaigns may recognize the name; consider this a reboot.)

==History==
Terminus is not known to have ever had any natively intelligent life. Various intelligent beings from other places, human and otherwise, have come to settle there. It also has its own complement of extradimensional entities, beings which some might refer to as gods.

The earliest human settlers came from other worlds forgotten to the modern person. Something, however, caused a lapse in communication and logistical capability. The settlers were cut off from home. Whatever disaster occurred has cut off almost all contact with civilizations outside the solar system. Visitation by spacecraft is extremely rare and not well-known. Visitors who arrive via stranger means are, if they exist, keeping it on the down-low.

It is believed by some scholars and most small children that there are inhabited cities on the moons.

==A Hypercompressed Timeline==
So as not to engage in the fantasy world designer's great sin of just adding a bunch of zeroes onto a reasonable timeline, I'm not providing any numbers here. Think of these as the approximate ages of the world, liberally seasoned with disinformation, misunderstanding, propaganda, temporal anomalies, and genuinely antique texts from different planets that were improperly mixed into the local historical record.

*'''Era Zero: The Precursors.''' There are occasionally objects or devices (such as the Cidrian Gates or the Sublunar Machinery) which seem to correspond to some time or people before the era of the Lizard Kings. Anything that old which is still operational can be presumed to have unimaginable power and sophistication. They may have been built by prior human civilizations or by entities even further removed from our understanding. It is presumed that human colonization occurred during this era due to the fact that some of these devices appear made for beings on the approximate size and body plan of modern humanity.
*'''Era One: Early Human Colonization.''' During this period, large numbers of humans arrived on the planet via means which are not known for certain, and engaged in widespread terraforming and genetic resequencing of themselves and everything else they could get their hands on. The early colonies “failed,” in that C&C with whoever sent them was lost, and whatever early governments were established collapsed. Humans went through a period of barbaric savagery, and then got it out of their systems. There is little evidence of heavy industry during this period, indicating a break from the precursor era, which did engage in large-scale engineering.
*'''Era Two''': '''The Lizard Queens'''. The Lizardfolk were for a time the apex sophont on the planet. They built crystalline devices that ran on psionic rather than technological or magical principles, subjugated humans when they felt the need, and built ziggurats, pyramids, and canals. They revived the precursor habit of constructing Deeps, or at least cleared and restored to use a number that were already ancient. These enormous underground spaces were considered proof against enemies approaching overland or from the skies. It is believed that airborne attacks must have been a major hazard at the time. The decline in cognitive capability among lizardfolk is most likely what allowed humanity to eventually overtake them.
*'''Era Three:''' '''The Amaranthan Empire'''. This human empire rose out of a small but wealthy kingdom by a bay, where innovative magicians laid down the foundation-stones of modern sorcery. It was a darker, cruder magic that they practiced, and they were insatiable for more power. Within a handful of generations, the leaders of the Amaranthan kingdoms had as much magic in their veins as blood, and they conquered the vast majority of the world. Between their spells, and pre-Saurian technology and learning they recovered from the Deeps, they easily brought to heel the feudal human societies that arose to fill the vacuum left by the Lizard Kings.
*'''Era Four:''' '''The Hubris.''' The Amaranthans declared war on everyone and everything that would not bend the knee to their Emperor. After a hundred years of blood and fire, they lost.
*'''Era Five:''' '''The Long Dark.''' Little enough of this era is recorded. Vengeful beings of every sort preyed on humanity and dominated their cities. Much awful tribute was extracted, and the lore of the Amaranthans was destroyed whenever it could be found. The tech level at this time was definitely more medieval in character, as humans were lucky if their masters allowed them pointy sticks, in most places. This was the era of the Lex Sanguinis, codified by the Vampire Regents who ruled so many city-states. Much of the current law and custom is descended from these dark times, with appropriate adaptations.
*'''Era Six: The Thracian Hegemony'''. The Thracians began as a small group of seafaring city-states, in which a few privileged human servants formed a conspiracy. They managed to throw off the yokes of their inhuman masters and institute democracy. They rapidly became masters of the exchange of goods. Thracian civilization avoided reliance on direct sorcery, since they didn't wish to repeat the mistakes of the Amaranthans. They pursued alchemy, artifice, and technology. While they never approached the sophistication of Precursor technology, they could produce much more sophisticated machinery at scale than is possible in the current era. They were able to free most of the rest of human civilization via a combination of disaster capitalism and laser-armed airships. They also standardized weights, measures, and coinage, which standards are still used today. Currency from pre-Thracian cultures is often extremely non-standard.
*'''Era Seven: The Decapitation'''. The leaders of the Thracian Combines attempted to make treaty with the various Lunar civilizations, just as they had done to the monstrous kingdoms that had existed on the terrestrial sphere. For whatever reason (but probably because the Lunatics weren't ignorant of how this had worked out for the vampire princes, etc.), negotiations fell through, and ended in several nights of orbital bombardment. When the smoke cleared, the Thracian civilization came apart at the seams. They had always kept their leadership and industrial base centralized, to maintain their hegemony. Unfortunately, that meant it was all destroyed by the swarm of large iron meteorites that turned their five greatest cities into a morass of smoking, flooded craters. Bereft of leadership and centralized industrial production, the Thracians were raided into nonexistence by tribal or feudal peoples, monsters, and various nonhuman intelligences. Their society disintegrated, and the lore of operating their great machines and mysterious facilities became lost.
*'''Era Eight: The Age of City-States'''. You are here! Over much of the world, humanity has reorganized itself into independent and semi-independent city-states. There is trade and communication between the various civilizations, but vast waste-lands full of ruins and ancient roads occupy the space between them. Human civilization seems to be somewhat drowsy at this time in history, and the people of the world are plagued by hedonism and sybaritic boredom. Greed takes the place of ambition, and everywhere men and women take the low and easy road to comfort. Globe-spanning ambitions are distinctly out of fashion. Non-human intelligences have many thriving civilizations of their own, and so far there's so much room that large-scale conflict hasn't broken out.

==Contemporary Material Culture==
Industrial manufacturing and supply chains no longer exist. However, books and other repositories of information are still available, and it's not uncommon for people to be educated to a (real-world) modern standard, even if they can't lay hands on so much as a flashlight.

The vast majority of work is done using human or animal muscle, or relatively simple wind or water mills. That being said, the situation is not at all comparable to medieval Europe. Many technologies that have an extremely high payoff-to-effort ratio if you are already at a high Roman or Renaissance-era level of technology are still used. Movable-type printing presses are not common, but they have supplanted scriptoriums. They’re just too easy to build in comparison to how much effort they save.

The essential difficulty is that the creation of an industrial economy is a great deal of work, and nobody is really inclined to go to that kind of effort. Anyone with the resources, ambition, and will to build a steam train or an air conditioner factory is probably better off becoming an archmage and obligating their neighbors to appease them.

Further, Precursor humanity genetically engineered a variety of plants to be unnaturally useful, and those strains are still cultivated. A wide variety of food plants and several types of mushroom are known to be results of the original sequencing project; they can be easily and rapidly farmed, and are tailored to human dietary needs. For this reason, simply supplying the population with food is not the crushing burden it was in real-world medieval societies, and even impoverished areas have sufficient time for leisure and social or intellectual pursuits. There are other examples, as well, such as the Library Trees with leaves uniquely suited to paper-making.

Advanced alloys, both alchemical and mundane, are still manufactured, although not in modern quantities.

'''Summary:'''
*Individual artificers, magicians, and alchemists do produce items of enchantment or high technology, but these are rare, hand-crafted, and expensive.
*High technology as it exists in our world is rarely available and typically only in very simple configurations. A hand-held UV light might be obtainable, but a computer is out of the question.
*The advanced technology that does exist often involves large glowing synthetic gemstones, runic circuitry, and alchemical materials. Gears, moving parts, conventional batteries, and other steampunk apparatuses are relatively rare. The dividing line between magic and this sort of science can be somewhat thin at times. Consult the rules for mods in the WWN rulebook for ideas.
*The "hurlants" described on pg. 36 are available for purchase. In-setting, they're referred to as coilguns. They function via an extremely high-tension, alchemically produced metal spring, housed inside a barrel, which must be carefully wound with an integral handle before a specially made steel dart is loaded and clipped into place. Rather than the barrel being rifled, the dart is designed with a subtly helical fluting. Hand hurlants are often mounted on an arm bracer, but either may be made in a configuration similar to a modern firearm. They are, however, typically ornately carved or filigreed. They are considered a weapon of war or murder, and may not be carried openly in civilized cities. The user is expected to have them unloaded, "broken down" into components, and carried packed away. Note the AP tag on them - they ignore non-magical armor. A hand hurlant can throw its sliver of steel directly through an armored knight's breastplate and out his back. They are, therefore, especially disliked by the sorts of people wealthy enough to invest in heavy armor.

==Astronomy & Weather==
Terminus lacks the axial tilt & wobble of our own world. Seasons are caused by its eccentric and elliptical orbit. In plain terms, its distance from the sun varies sufficiently over the course of the year to produce winter and summer. This means the north and south hemisphere experience winter and summer at the same time. Terminus' magnetic poles are precisely perpendicular to the plane of orbit. It is highly likely that some intelligent agency altered these factors at some point in times ancient beyond reckoning.

Terminus has three moons in an equidistant orbit around the planet. One is nearly white, like our own, and the other two are tinted red and blue. Absent cloud cover, the night sky almost always provides a little more light than a full moon on our own Earth.

==Calendar==
There are 13 lunar months, each of exactly 28 days. There are three months in each of the seasons that would be recognizable to us - a spring, a summer, an autumn, a winter. Even without axial tilt and wobble, the nature of the seasons varies according to distance from the equator and local geography. Coastal areas are milder, areas close to the poles are colder.

The calendar of 13 months is standard almost all across the globe, at least in human civilizations. What varies is which months are counted part of which season. In general, an area with extreme conditions during one month of the year will count the "extra" month as outside of a regular season. A northern city might take the part of the year of most intense cold and count it as "Fimbulwinter," a time outside of even regular winter. An equatorial land might have the Dog Days, that month which is too hot to be placed within regular summertime. In a coastal land, the inhabitants might take the time of most intense storm activity, and name it the Monsoon Season.

The area this campaign takes place in is a Mediterranean type of climate. Due to the proximity of a large body of water, while the summers can be hellishly humid, the extremes of temperature aren't as bad as they could be.

==Languages==
The PCs start out knowing Common & Trade Cant, with additional languages per their Connect & Know skills. See pg. 28 of WWN.

*Common is a modern form of Thracian, and is the most wide-spread human language. Insular or remote human civilizations might have divergent or distinct languages.
*Trade Cant is a limited pidgin tongue commonly used in highly cosmopolitan areas or by far-traveling merchants. It's not good for higher pursuits, but has special vocabulary for economic concerns, commodities, travel & accommodations, et cetera.
*Old Thracian has about as much in common with Common as classical Latin does with modern Italian. It was the language of the last powerful and widespread human civilization.
*Amaranthan, also known as Sorcerer's Speech, is even older than Old Thracian. It was the tongue of a powerful sorcerous empire that collapsed in blood and fire.
*Lizard, or in derogatory terms "Hiss," is the language of the common lizardfolk and other reptilian intelligences. It's hard for humans to pronounce, and even harder for them to think in. The brains of the reptilian people are formed very differently to human ones. Something has gone very wrong with the lizardfolk, and 90% of them have cognitive limitations not present in their ancestors. The result is that only about 10% of them are literate in their own tongue. Note that in Lizard, humans are referred to as "Monkey Men," and their terms for our language are even more derogatory than "Hiss."
*Pelagic, or in derogatory terms "Glub," is the common language of undersea peoples. It's impossible to pronounce in atmosphere, so it can mostly only be learned underwater. Water-Adapted PCs (see pg. 27, under xeno-blooded) can learn to speak and understand this.
*Fae is the language of the various half-worlder beings. It has Seelie and Unseelie dialects, and while most people will be more familiar with one or the other, they are comprehensible to each other.
*Sign Language exists for the use of the deaf, and is also commonly used by beings for whom normal conversation is difficult. For example, a non-water-adapted human and a greater octopus might both be intelligent, but the octopus can only speak underwater, and the human can only speak in the air. If they met at the shore, they could communicate via sign, with each staying in its own preferred medium. The gestures are abstract enough for beings with significantly different anatomy, so long as they have limbs. Dolphins don't have sufficient limbs to Sign, although they can learn to understand it, but they're telepathic anyway.
*Various other species have their own languages.
*The Precursor civilization of humans presumably had their own language, but they don't seem to have written much down, or if they did, it was lost long ago.

==Random Notes==
*"Greater" creatures are intelligent forms. A Greater Octopus is therefore a sophont form of octopod. The lizardfolk are greater lizards. Nonhuman intelligences, in their own languages, would typically refer to humans as Greater Monkeys. This is a scientific or technical classification and it is rude to refer to any intelligent being in their own person this way. This is distinct from a "Dire" form, which is a larger and usually more ferocious form of a more common creature. See the classical example, the Dire Wolf. Note that nonhumans often classify Ogres as Dire Humans, which humans are not especially appreciative of in most cases.
*Human biology is rather enhanced by precursor engineering. The average lifespan, uninterrupted by disease or violence, is about 120 years, with only the last fifteen or so involving serious senescence. Most people will recover relatively fully from injuries or diseases that don't amount to amputation, and sepsis due to injuries is rare. Birth defects as we know them are unheard-of. Fertility is also optional for humans. Basically, look at the healing rules and be astonished how little medicine is required for stabbing victims.
*There are no elves & dwarves in the typical D&D sense, so the Special Origin focus is not used. The Xenoblooded focus is freely available and represents the efforts of precursor genetic engineers, passed down through the long millenia; aquatic-adapted humans are still well-known in coastal areas. The Unique Gift focus is also available, and typically represents some inheritable genetic gift.

==Nibiru==
I don't want to spend too much time on this, because the whole point of the campaign is that you aren't there. But maybe a few notes won't go too far wrong.
*There is a system of public education, welfare, and public works that is unrivaled in the world. If you don't find a useful occupation for yourself, you '''will''' be trained and pressed into service in some capacity or another.
*Nibiru has the wealth to support its people, but no room for idlers and malingerers. Literally, physical space is at a premium.
*Social stratification is severe in terms of power and resources commanded, but there are no mansions or palaces. Everyone must make use of public spaces and facilities, hence they are well-maintained.
*Security is tight. If any enemy ever penetrated to the machinery that allows peregrination, they could damage it in a way no one now living would know how to repair. Foreigners are allowed into the city itself only on an extremely limited basis. Criminal gangs are unheard of; and criminal activity is not tolerated.
*All citizens are educated to at least something resembling a high school level and then given some additional training, vocational or otherwise, unless their employment is destined to be entirely menial. For those such as the PCs who have exceptional abilities, they may have attended one of the following programs:
**The Athenaeum is a tower most like a "university" program in Nibiru. Conventional scholarly and engineering students are likely to graduate from here.
**The Scholomance is the tower dedicated to magic, both High Magic & New Magic. The individual in charge of it, known as the Rector, is a black-robed figure wearing an alabaster mask. Their true identity has not been known in centuries - it may be the same superannuated individual, or it is possible that the Chairs of the various departments are electing a new individual from time to time. The board of the scholomance is is deeply secretive, and nothing can be said with certainty.
**The Charterhouse tower trains Vowed. Charterhouse Vowed can select as their bonus skill (see pg. 86) either Exert or Sneak. PCs can take any path they wish, but the typical Charterhouse graduate works as a spy, agent, bodyguard, or assassin.
**Skull Plaza is the military school. Obviously, many people learn the combat arts in more practical ways, but the regular army goes through Skull Plaza. Note that Nibiru does not maintain cavalry of any kind. Their combat doctrines and equipment are focused on siege defense and man-to-man or small unit combat. They produce numerous skilled duelists, and marching on the city would be a death sentence for nearly any attacker, but Nibiru can't field a large army.

=Gods & Religion=
This is the part where I complain. Feel free to skim this section at most.

I don't like the way that religion and clerics are portrayed in D&D. I'm most interested in what the PCs choose to do, in pursuing their own ends. Those ends may be selfless - a character might be dedicated to justice, for example. But it should be their own choice and for their own reasons, subject to their own reevaluation. Other, more selfish motivations are certainly easy enough to understand. "I would like that large pile of gold coins to belong to me rather than whoever currently lays claim to it" and "I would prefer not to die beneath this ghost-haunted pyramid I have been abandoned in" are both immediately relatable.

This is consistent with what I would consider to be most of the essential texts of the genre. So of course D&D, in its lack of wisdom, had to make a character option to subsume PC choices and priority to some half-baked imagining of how a pantheistic religion might work, if you stripped it of all interest and cultural factors.

So we're not going to do that.

There is nothing like a D&D Cleric in this world. There are healers. There are also persons who are "high priests" or the like. The former is someone who has bent their talents to medicine. Or, in the case of the Healer partial class, someone who has devoted themselves to using psychic energy as a substitute for complex pharmaceutical substances that can no longer be manufactured. A "priest" is a social role. They may or may not be a member of a class that provides magical powers. If they are serious about relationships with supernatural beings, they may have a respectable ability with the Pray skill.

==Religion on Terminus==
Gods are a highly varied lot. There are extradimensional entities and spirits that seem to have influence over greater or lesser amounts of real estate. There are also some extremely physically real beings with supernatural powers that are more flexible or focused than the Spells and Arts available to mortal magicians. A local crocodilian river-deity, for example, may be both a physically verifiable giant crocodile, and also capable of causing or preventing flooding in the river. But, notably, ONLY their own river. A deity of some more abstract principle, such as the North Wind, might be more indeterminate and widespread in their presence.

The thing to keep in mind is that the gods are distant, weird, and inhuman, in all cases. The crocodile god is not up for a friendly chat. The North Wind was never a human, likely has no human feelings, and if it takes some anthropomorphic shape it is only as a matter of whimsy. Deities are typically not worshipped and revered in the way that a modern person in the US might imagine a religion to imply. The sailors do not love the gods of the seas. They fear them and respect them, and make offerings in the hope of improving their chances of coming home alive. Deities (in the vast majority of cases) make no guarantees or offers regarding the fate of a person's soul after death, which is a mystery, and of little concern to the typical person. Everyday matters loom larger, and death must take care of its own.

Devoted servants of deities may have some special power or another, which is typically minor and has a cost. For more serious exertions of divine power, if such a thing is desirable, the cultists will likely need to conduct some ritual. This will involve an offering, and a Pray roll from their leader. Note that the offering need not be a material object or bloodletting - some gods might look favorably on a night of frenzied dancing by at least twenty or thirty dervishes. It depends on the god and the ritual undertaken. This isn't something I expect to see a lot of in-game, since divine intervention is generally not an effective way to obtain human goals.

Anyway. Expect weird and inhuman genius loci, snake cults, and sui generis beings of cosmic horror, not some kind of benevolent god of farming with an organized and hierarchical temple structure.

==Alignment==
These game rules don't make use of alignment, so it's not a thing on the character sheet. You should know that my preference, though, which informs the cosmic background of the world, is law vs. chaos rather than good vs. evil. Conditions of extreme law or extreme chaos are not survivable for human beings - the large central curve of neutrality is the only zone humans can inhabit. As such, PCs don't need alignments. The gods and other beings may be aligned with law or chaos. Their machinations are equally dangerous to human life.

==Known Deities==
I dunno, I'll put some stuff here eventually.

=Links=

Caverns Without Number

2022-07-31T17:22:43Z

The Wyzard: /* Distance & Timekeeping */

This is a page for the Caverns of Thracia game, run by The Wyzard using Worlds Without Number. Its content is tentative.

'''Before we start:''' Combat is intended to be a little more interesting than normal B/X. I strongly suggest that you all familiarize yourself with how Shock Damage works, and secondarily with how the combat maneuvers work. Shock Damage is going to mess you up if you aren't ready for it.

[[File:GMG4615-Thracia-455x600.jpg]]

=The Adventurers=
==Basic Wiki Practice==
I'm used to keeping information on my campaigns on a wiki. Some of you may not be used to this. Your character sheet is the first challenge you will face! Please ask for help on the discord if you aren't familiar with this stuff. So here is what you do, in order:
*Make a wiki account if you can't just log in with your regular RPGnet account, I can't remember.
*Anyway, be logged into the wiki.
*Open the sample character sheet in a new tab.
*Then hit "Edit" on this section (The Adventurers.)
*You can see the double-brackets around "Fill This In Yourself." Those double brackets will make a link to another wiki page, and the title will be whatever is the text inside the double brackets. You're going to put your character's name in there. Your character's name should be sufficiently unusual that there isn't already a PC somewhere on the wiki with that name. A good formula is something like (Name) the (Descriptor), where the descriptor is either some literal or figurative detail about the character. Maybe your character is Jeanette the Ravensworn, and you don't know what Ravensworn is yet. That's fine, maybe we'll find out!
*Save your edit and click on the new link that is your character's name.
*Now, hit the Edit button on the sample character sheet.
*Hit CTRL-A to select all text in the editing window. Then CTRL-C to copy it. Then close the window on the sample character sheet because you don't actually want to change it.
*Now hid the Edit button on YOUR character sheet, and paste in all the text from the sample one.
*Now fill in all the details.
*This sounds like a lot when I break it down like this, but honestly it takes seconds and I will probably do it for you during Session Zero.
==Dramatis Personae==
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[WWN Sample Character Sheet]]

=Introduction=
The greatest city of the world, in terms of cosmopolitan fun, wealth, and knowledge, is Nibiru, the Peregrinate Acropolis. A heavily fortified castle-city built on a large stone mesa, it has the look of a vast ziggurat capped with a wonder of colorful towers. The undercity inside the mesa is a maze of carved and worked tunnels, warehouses, reservoirs, and hidden temples. The lower levels of the city are a chaos of tenements, manufactories, brightly tiled plazas, and cafeterias. The vast towers contain luxury apartments for the rich, in addition to colleges, libraries, laboratories, training halls and so forth. The outer walls are dotted with fortifications, weapon emplacements, signal towers, and windmills that power various machinery, particularly water pumps. Real estate is tremendously valuable, most people live in spaces little larger than a walk-in closet. Hence the desperate need for the public bathhouses and cafeteria-style restaurants that support the life and hygiene of the city - there simply isn't space for people to have their own kitchens and so forth.

What makes Nibiru so wealthy and influential, such a center of knowledge, is that it moves. Every week, the city disappears in vast cloud of opaque fog, and reappears somewhere else on Terminus. The engines that accomplish this have been carefully maintained for centuries, so that it has functioned without interruption. It peregrinates along a semi-regular trade route, with space built into the schedule for necessary or opportunistic deviations, and a cadre of mages, merchants, and scholars of economics carefully plot its course for maximum advantage. Wherever it lands, the vast trading apparatus fires up into action. Enormous loads of commodities and rarer goods are sold to local merchant houses, wherever the city might land. The vast caverns of the undercity can carry an amount of cargo beyond imagination. The limiting factor is how much of it can be hauled out and traded for new goods, which must in their turn be loaded within six days.

You are natives of this city - you have the invisible, UV-reactive tattoo of a citizen in at least three places on your body. This marks you as one of the exalted, an individual with the right to enter the city's gates and remain within the confines as it peregrinates. Even the meanest beggar who is a citizen of Nibiru has something that the wealth of an emperor might not purchase. And, like all natives, you know the rule - the first six days are for business, but the seventh is a day of rest. No one leaves the city on the seventh day, or lingers outside for even one second beyond midnight of the sixth. The risk of being left behind is just too high.

Guess how you fucked up?

==The Local Environment==
It's early spring and you're probably going to be stuck here for about the next year, until Nibiru returns and you can get home. The city-state of Amarna is located on a fertile river delta that empties into a sea. That's where Nibiru came to rest. The area around the great river is a green and well-developed valley, with large towns and farming villages served by a regular geometric pattern of irrigation channels. To the east, about a day's walk down the coast, is a small semi-fortified city named Tjaru, in an undesirable and swampy region. It is used as a place of exile for criminals and the disgraced. That's where you've currently ended up. And you've heard rumors of a recently-discovered Deep, one of the vast underground fastnesses built by various ancient civilizations.

Deeps are dangerous, in ways both mundane and exotic. However, they frequently contain raw wealth left behind by the Ancients. Also, the even more precious sorcerous, alchemical, or technological artifacts that they seem to have had such a panoply of. This would be an outstanding way to support yourselves for the next year. And, if you're lucky, you might go beyond supporting yourself in reasonable style, and find that you've recovered something valuable enough to earn a higher station in Nibiru.

Note: Tjaru and other nearby settlements are all part of the same Amar "city-state," ruled over by the central city Amarna. It is also styled as Amar-Na in more formal writings. The people that live here are Amars. The adjective form is Amaric.

==Distance & Timekeeping==
I'll eventually post a hexmap with some local points of interest and so forth, but I don't envision hexcrawling to be a major component. You're going to be in a relatively civilized area, albeit on the very edge of it. You won't need to make wilderness encounter checks to get to the dungeon and back.

My assumption is that you'll be largely based in Tjaru. My thought is that rather than keep strict track of days, a single delve (which might span multiple sessions) will just cross a week off the calendar, and we'll assume that resting, re-equipping, and so forth takes about that long. The dungeon is going to be maybe two hour's walk from Tjaru, so you can go out there, screw around for a while, and still get back before dark.

In-town intrigues and investigations likely WILL be a component of this game. It's not pure dungeon-crawling. And there's a significant amount of factionalism and other interesting stuff going on inside the Deep itself. It's not just dozens of rooms full of combat encounters.

==Questions for Session Zero==
*Anything anybody definitely wants to see
*Anything anyone definitely doesn't want to see, particularly in terms of "does anything already on this wiki bother someone a lot?"
*Lines & Veils or whatever, PM me if you have to
*I don't intend the game to include explicit sexual content, and even the implication of sexual violence is right out
*I actually find some of the gene-modified human strains in WWN to be kind of interesting, but they might be too problematic, I dunno, opinions?
*

=Encumbrance & Beasts of Burden=
WWN's encumbrance system is simple enough that I'm not sure we'll actually need this section, but I included it as a matter of habit. Note that every full 100 coins counts as an item. Count normal gems as a single coin. Jewelry and small art objects are counted as a bulk good - you can pack together three items such as carved ivory necklaces, jade hairbrushes, jeweled crowns, rings, etc. I'll let you know about larger art objects.
==The Pocket Change Rule==
Your first up-to-100-coins worth of regular coins and gems do not count towards encumbrance, so long as they're yours alone. Found treasure is tracked separately until you return to civilization, such as it is.
==The Bling Rule==
The PCs may ignore the encumbrance requirements of jewelry if they simply wear the jewelry openly, within reason. No more than a single crown at a time, etc. This has two downsides: If you are presently in a Deep, you may find out an object is cursed at a most inconvenient time. Secondly, your enemies may become ravenously motivated to relieve you of those items. Morale is an important component of combat in this game, and if you are draped in the wealth of nations, then opponents may get a morale bonus.

=NPCs=

=Notes & Logs=

=Maps=

=House Rules & Character Creation=

==Character Creation & Advancement==
*Don't come with a character concept, we'll create characters in a session zero. It's okay to have a few vague ideas just so we don't have to look up too much.
*For attributes, arrange the following array to taste: 14, 12, 11, 10, 9, and 7. See pg. 8.
*When you pick a background, you get a free skill associated with it at level 0. Then, make a total of three rolls on the growth or learning table for your background.
*Choose a class. We're only using the classes available in the free version. However, the odder partial classes are available.
*Note that I don't like the Cleric class in D&D for complicated reasons, so please don't try to emulate one in terms of being a dedicated servant of a god. If you want to play a Healer (one of the partial classes) you certainly can, but I don't have a sense as to whether one is strictly necessary. PCs can die in this game but I'm probably going to tone down the "if you fail this save you die" kind of stuff.
*Assume you roll a 6 on your hit die.
*Skip the equipment step, read up on the languages stuff on this wiki.
*Everyone levels up twice. We start at level 3. Assume you roll a 4 on these two hit dice.
*You can start with 1,000 silver pieces worth of equipment. Note that this game is on a silver standard. If you want one of the packages on page 29, assume it's 100 silver pieces for any of the packages. No swapping or whatever. Discard any money you didn't spend on equipment.
*For ready cash, you each start with 3d6 gold, 3d20 silver, and 1d4+1 gems worth 50 sp apiece.
*Your first month of living expenses is prepaid, at a Common standard of living. After the first month you need to pay that much, which amounts to 80sp per month, due on the first of each month. Adventurers cannot voluntarily spend less than this, because they are intolerant of living in more straitened circumstances. Note that this includes rations - it's not any more expensive to buy rations than it is to eat at the tavern. You do still have to determine how many you're carrying, for encumbrance purposes.
*We're using slow advancement, pg 54. However, a full continuous month lived at a Rich lifestyle (200sp per week, or 800 for the whole month) gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 6th level. A full continuous month lived at a Noble lifestyle (1,000sp per week, or 4,000 for the whole month), gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 9th level.
*You will each start with one or more rumors about the nearby Caverns of Thracia.

=Setting=
Disregard the setting as written in WWN. I dig the general vibe but I'm mostly going to be doing my own thing. The name of this world is Terminus (players in my previous campaigns may recognize the name; consider this a reboot.)

==History==
Terminus is not known to have ever had any natively intelligent life. Various intelligent beings from other places, human and otherwise, have come to settle there. It also has its own complement of extradimensional entities, beings which some might refer to as gods.

The earliest human settlers came from other worlds forgotten to the modern person. Something, however, caused a lapse in communication and logistical capability. The settlers were cut off from home. Whatever disaster occurred has cut off almost all contact with civilizations outside the solar system. Visitation by spacecraft is extremely rare and not well-known. Visitors who arrive via stranger means are, if they exist, keeping it on the down-low.

It is believed by some scholars and most small children that there are inhabited cities on the moons.

==A Hypercompressed Timeline==
So as not to engage in the fantasy world designer's great sin of just adding a bunch of zeroes onto a reasonable timeline, I'm not providing any numbers here. Think of these as the approximate ages of the world, liberally seasoned with disinformation, misunderstanding, propaganda, temporal anomalies, and genuinely antique texts from different planets that were improperly mixed into the local historical record.

*'''Era Zero: The Precursors.''' There are occasionally objects or devices (such as the Cidrian Gates or the Sublunar Machinery) which seem to correspond to some time or people before the era of the Lizard Kings. Anything that old which is still operational can be presumed to have unimaginable power and sophistication. They may have been built by prior human civilizations or by entities even further removed from our understanding. It is presumed that human colonization occurred during this era due to the fact that some of these devices appear made for beings on the approximate size and body plan of modern humanity.
*'''Era One: Early Human Colonization.''' During this period, large numbers of humans arrived on the planet via means which are not known for certain, and engaged in widespread terraforming and genetic resequencing of themselves and everything else they could get their hands on. The early colonies “failed,” in that C&C with whoever sent them was lost, and whatever early governments were established collapsed. Humans went through a period of barbaric savagery, and then got it out of their systems. There is little evidence of heavy industry during this period, indicating a break from the precursor era, which did engage in large-scale engineering.
*'''Era Two''': '''The Lizard Queens'''. The Lizardfolk were for a time the apex sophont on the planet. They built crystalline devices that ran on psionic rather than technological or magical principles, subjugated humans when they felt the need, and built ziggurats, pyramids, and canals. They revived the precursor habit of constructing Deeps, or at least cleared and restored to use a number that were already ancient. These enormous underground spaces were considered proof against enemies approaching overland or from the skies. It is believed that airborne attacks must have been a major hazard at the time. The decline in cognitive capability among lizardfolk is most likely what allowed humanity to eventually overtake them.
*'''Era Three:''' '''The Amaranthan Empire'''. This human empire rose out of a small but wealthy kingdom by a bay, where innovative magicians laid down the foundation-stones of modern sorcery. It was a darker, cruder magic that they practiced, and they were insatiable for more power. Within a handful of generations, the leaders of the Amaranthan kingdoms had as much magic in their veins as blood, and they conquered the vast majority of the world. Between their spells, and pre-Saurian technology and learning they recovered from the Deeps, they easily brought to heel the feudal human societies that arose to fill the vacuum left by the Lizard Kings.
*'''Era Four:''' '''The Hubris.''' The Amaranthans declared war on everyone and everything that would not bend the knee to their Emperor. After a hundred years of blood and fire, they lost.
*'''Era Five:''' '''The Long Dark.''' Little enough of this era is recorded. Vengeful beings of every sort preyed on humanity and dominated their cities. Much awful tribute was extracted, and the lore of the Amaranthans was destroyed whenever it could be found. The tech level at this time was definitely more medieval in character, as humans were lucky if their masters allowed them pointy sticks, in most places. This was the era of the Lex Sanguinis, codified by the Vampire Regents who ruled so many city-states. Much of the current law and custom is descended from these dark times, with appropriate adaptations.
*'''Era Six: The Thracian Hegemony'''. The Thracians began as a small group of seafaring city-states, in which a few privileged human servants formed a conspiracy. They managed to throw off the yokes of their inhuman masters and institute democracy. They rapidly became masters of the exchange of goods. Thracian civilization avoided reliance on direct sorcery, since they didn't wish to repeat the mistakes of the Amaranthans. They pursued alchemy, artifice, and technology. While they never approached the sophistication of Precursor technology, they could produce much more sophisticated machinery at scale than is possible in the current era. They were able to free most of the rest of human civilization via a combination of disaster capitalism and laser-armed airships. They also standardized weights, measures, and coinage, which standards are still used today. Currency from pre-Thracian cultures is often extremely non-standard.
*'''Era Seven: The Decapitation'''. The leaders of the Thracian Combines attempted to make treaty with the various Lunar civilizations, just as they had done to the monstrous kingdoms that had existed on the terrestrial sphere. For whatever reason (but probably because the Lunatics weren't ignorant of how this had worked out for the vampire princes, etc.), negotiations fell through, and ended in several nights of orbital bombardment. When the smoke cleared, the Thracian civilization came apart at the seams. They had always kept their leadership and industrial base centralized, to maintain their hegemony. Unfortunately, that meant it was all destroyed by the swarm of large iron meteorites that turned their five greatest cities into a morass of smoking, flooded craters. Bereft of leadership and centralized industrial production, the Thracians were raided into nonexistence by tribal or feudal peoples, monsters, and various nonhuman intelligences. Their society disintegrated, and the lore of operating their great machines and mysterious facilities became lost.
*'''Era Eight: The Age of City-States'''. You are here! Over much of the world, humanity has reorganized itself into independent and semi-independent city-states. There is trade and communication between the various civilizations, but vast waste-lands full of ruins and ancient roads occupy the space between them. Human civilization seems to be somewhat drowsy at this time in history, and the people of the world are plagued by hedonism and sybaritic boredom. Greed takes the place of ambition, and everywhere men and women take the low and easy road to comfort. Globe-spanning ambitions are distinctly out of fashion. Non-human intelligences have many thriving civilizations of their own, and so far there's so much room that large-scale conflict hasn't broken out.

==Contemporary Material Culture==
Industrial manufacturing and supply chains no longer exist. However, books and other repositories of information are still available, and it's not uncommon for people to be educated to a (real-world) modern standard, even if they can't lay hands on so much as a flashlight.

The vast majority of work is done using human or animal muscle, or relatively simple wind or water mills. That being said, the situation is not at all comparable to medieval Europe. Many technologies that have an extremely high payoff-to-effort ratio if you are already at a high Roman or Renaissance-era level of technology are still used. Movable-type printing presses are not common, but they have supplanted scriptoriums. They’re just too easy to build in comparison to how much effort they save.

The essential difficulty is that the creation of an industrial economy is a great deal of work, and nobody is really inclined to go to that kind of effort. Anyone with the resources, ambition, and will to build a steam train or an air conditioner factory is probably better off becoming an archmage and obligating their neighbors to appease them.

Further, Precursor humanity genetically engineered a variety of plants to be unnaturally useful, and those strains are still cultivated. A wide variety of food plants and several types of mushroom are known to be results of the original sequencing project; they can be easily and rapidly farmed, and are tailored to human dietary needs. For this reason, simply supplying the population with food is not the crushing burden it was in real-world medieval societies, and even impoverished areas have sufficient time for leisure and social or intellectual pursuits. There are other examples, as well, such as the Library Trees with leaves uniquely suited to paper-making.

Advanced alloys, both alchemical and mundane, are still manufactured, although not in modern quantities.

'''Summary:'''
*Individual artificers, magicians, and alchemists do produce items of enchantment or high technology, but these are rare, hand-crafted, and expensive.
*High technology as it exists in our world is rarely available and typically only in very simple configurations. A hand-held UV light might be obtainable, but a computer is out of the question.
*The advanced technology that does exist often involves large glowing synthetic gemstones, runic circuitry, and alchemical materials. Gears, moving parts, conventional batteries, and other steampunk apparatuses are relatively rare. The dividing line between magic and this sort of science can be somewhat thin at times. Consult the rules for mods in the WWN rulebook for ideas.
*The "hurlants" described on pg. 36 are available for purchase. In-setting, they're referred to as coilguns. They function via an extremely high-tension, alchemically produced metal spring, housed inside a barrel, which must be carefully wound with an integral handle before a specially made steel dart is loaded and clipped into place. Rather than the barrel being rifled, the dart is designed with a subtly helical fluting. Hand hurlants are often mounted on an arm bracer, but either may be made in a configuration similar to a modern firearm. They are, however, typically ornately carved or filigreed. They are considered a weapon of war or murder, and may not be carried openly in civilized cities. The user is expected to have them unloaded, "broken down" into components, and carried packed away. Note the AP tag on them - they ignore non-magical armor. A hand hurlant can throw its sliver of steel directly through an armored knight's breastplate and out his back. They are, therefore, especially disliked by the sorts of people wealthy enough to invest in heavy armor.

==Astronomy & Weather==
Terminus lacks the axial tilt & wobble of our own world. Seasons are caused by its eccentric and elliptical orbit. In plain terms, its distance from the sun varies sufficiently over the course of the year to produce winter and summer. This means the north and south hemisphere experience winter and summer at the same time. Terminus' magnetic poles are precisely perpendicular to the plane of orbit. It is highly likely that some intelligent agency altered these factors at some point in times ancient beyond reckoning.

Terminus has three moons in an equidistant orbit around the planet. One is nearly white, like our own, and the other two are tinted red and blue. Absent cloud cover, the night sky almost always provides a little more light than a full moon on our own Earth.

==Calendar==
There are 13 lunar months, each of exactly 28 days. There are three months in each of the seasons that would be recognizable to us - a spring, a summer, an autumn, a winter. Even without axial tilt and wobble, the nature of the seasons varies according to distance from the equator and local geography. Coastal areas are milder, areas close to the poles are colder.

The calendar of 13 months is standard almost all across the globe, at least in human civilizations. What varies is which months are counted part of which season. In general, an area with extreme conditions during one month of the year will count the "extra" month as outside of a regular season. A northern city might take the part of the year of most intense cold and count it as "Fimbulwinter," a time outside of even regular winter. An equatorial land might have the Dog Days, that month which is too hot to be placed within regular summertime. In a coastal land, the inhabitants might take the time of most intense storm activity, and name it the Monsoon Season.

The area this campaign takes place in is a Mediterranean type of climate. Due to the proximity of a large body of water, while the summers can be hellishly humid, the extremes of temperature aren't as bad as they could be.

==Languages==
The PCs start out knowing Common & Trade Cant, with additional languages per their Connect & Know skills. See pg. 28 of WWN.

*Common is a modern form of Thracian, and is the most wide-spread human language. Insular or remote human civilizations might have divergent or distinct languages.
*Trade Cant is a limited pidgin tongue commonly used in highly cosmopolitan areas or by far-traveling merchants. It's not good for higher pursuits, but has special vocabulary for economic concerns, commodities, travel & accommodations, et cetera.
*Old Thracian has about as much in common with Common as classical Latin does with modern Italian. It was the language of the last powerful and widespread human civilization.
*Amaranthan, also known as Sorcerer's Speech, is even older than Old Thracian. It was the tongue of a powerful sorcerous empire that collapsed in blood and fire.
*Lizard, or in derogatory terms "Hiss," is the language of the common lizardfolk and other reptilian intelligences. It's hard for humans to pronounce, and even harder for them to think in. The brains of the reptilian people are formed very differently to human ones. Something has gone very wrong with the lizardfolk, and 90% of them have cognitive limitations not present in their ancestors. The result is that only about 10% of them are literate in their own tongue. Note that in Lizard, humans are referred to as "Monkey Men," and their terms for our language are even more derogatory than "Hiss."
*Pelagic, or in derogatory terms "Glub," is the common language of undersea peoples. It's impossible to pronounce in atmosphere, so it can mostly only be learned underwater. Water-Adapted PCs (see pg. 27, under xeno-blooded) can learn to speak and understand this.
*Fae is the language of the various half-worlder beings. It has Seelie and Unseelie dialects, and while most people will be more familiar with one or the other, they are comprehensible to each other.
*Sign Language exists for the use of the deaf, and is also commonly used by beings for whom normal conversation is difficult. For example, a non-water-adapted human and a greater octopus might both be intelligent, but the octopus can only speak underwater, and the human can only speak in the air. If they met at the shore, they could communicate via sign, with each staying in its own preferred medium. The gestures are abstract enough for beings with significantly different anatomy, so long as they have limbs. Dolphins don't have sufficient limbs to Sign, although they can learn to understand it, but they're telepathic anyway.
*Various other species have their own languages.
*The Precursor civilization of humans presumably had their own language, but they don't seem to have written much down, or if they did, it was lost long ago.

==Random Notes==
*"Greater" creatures are intelligent forms. A Greater Octopus is therefore a sophont form of octopod. The lizardfolk are greater lizards. Nonhuman intelligences, in their own languages, would typically refer to humans as Greater Monkeys. This is a scientific or technical classification and it is rude to refer to any intelligent being in their own person this way. This is distinct from a "Dire" form, which is a larger and usually more ferocious form of a more common creature. See the classical example, the Dire Wolf. Note that nonhumans often classify Ogres as Dire Humans, which humans are not especially appreciative of in most cases.
*Human biology is rather enhanced by precursor engineering. The average lifespan, uninterrupted by disease or violence, is about 120 years, with only the last fifteen or so involving serious senescence. Most people will recover relatively fully from injuries or diseases that don't amount to amputation, and sepsis due to injuries is rare. Birth defects as we know them are unheard-of. Fertility is also optional for humans. Basically, look at the healing rules and be astonished how little medicine is required for stabbing victims.
*There are no elves & dwarves in the typical D&D sense, so the Special Origin focus is not used. The Xenoblooded focus is freely available and represents the efforts of precursor genetic engineers, passed down through the long millenia; aquatic-adapted humans are still well-known in coastal areas. The Unique Gift focus is also available, and typically represents some inheritable genetic gift.

==Nibiru==
I don't want to spend too much time on this, because the whole point of the campaign is that you aren't there. But maybe a few notes won't go too far wrong.
*There is a system of public education, welfare, and public works that is unrivaled in the world. If you don't find a useful occupation for yourself, you '''will''' be trained and pressed into service in some capacity or another.
*Nibiru has the wealth to support its people, but no room for idlers and malingerers. Literally, physical space is at a premium.
*Social stratification is severe in terms of power and resources commanded, but there are no mansions or palaces. Everyone must make use of public spaces and facilities, hence they are well-maintained.
*Security is tight. If any enemy ever penetrated to the machinery that allows peregrination, they could damage it in a way no one now living would know how to repair. Foreigners are allowed into the city itself only on an extremely limited basis. Criminal gangs are unheard of; and criminal activity is not tolerated.
*All citizens are educated to at least something resembling a high school level and then given some additional training, vocational or otherwise, unless their employment is destined to be entirely menial. For those such as the PCs who have exceptional abilities, they may have attended one of the following programs:
**The Athenaeum is a tower most like a "university" program in Nibiru. Conventional scholarly and engineering students are likely to graduate from here.
**The Scholomance is the tower dedicated to magic, both High Magic & New Magic. The individual in charge of it, known as the Rector, is a black-robed figure wearing an alabaster mask. Their true identity has not been known in centuries - it may be the same superannuated individual, or it is possible that the Chairs of the various departments are electing a new individual from time to time. The board of the scholomance is is deeply secretive, and nothing can be said with certainty.
**The Charterhouse tower trains Vowed. Charterhouse Vowed can select as their bonus skill (see pg. 86) either Exert or Sneak. PCs can take any path they wish, but the typical Charterhouse graduate works as a spy, agent, bodyguard, or assassin.
**Skull Plaza is the military school. Obviously, many people learn the combat arts in more practical ways, but the regular army goes through Skull Plaza. Note that Nibiru does not maintain cavalry of any kind. Their combat doctrines and equipment are focused on siege defense and man-to-man or small unit combat. They produce numerous skilled duelists, and marching on the city would be a death sentence for nearly any attacker, but Nibiru can't field a large army.

=Gods & Religion=
This is the part where I complain. Feel free to skim this section at most.

I don't like the way that religion and clerics are portrayed in D&D. I'm most interested in what the PCs choose to do, in pursuing their own ends. Those ends may be selfless - a character might be dedicated to justice, for example. But it should be their own choice and for their own reasons, subject to their own reevaluation. Other, more selfish motivations are certainly easy enough to understand. "I would like that large pile of gold coins to belong to me rather than whoever currently lays claim to it" and "I would prefer not to die beneath this ghost-haunted pyramid I have been abandoned in" are both immediately relatable.

This is consistent with what I would consider to be most of the essential texts of the genre. So of course D&D, in its lack of wisdom, had to make a character option to subsume PC choices and priority to some half-baked imagining of how a pantheistic religion might work, if you stripped it of all interest and cultural factors.

So we're not going to do that.

There is nothing like a D&D Cleric in this world. There are healers. There are also persons who are "high priests" or the like. The former is someone who has bent their talents to medicine. Or, in the case of the Healer partial class, someone who has devoted themselves to using psychic energy as a substitute for complex pharmaceutical substances that can no longer be manufactured. A "priest" is a social role. They may or may not be a member of a class that provides magical powers. If they are serious about relationships with supernatural beings, they may have a respectable ability with the Pray skill.

==Religion on Terminus==
Gods are a highly varied lot. There are extradimensional entities and spirits that seem to have influence over greater or lesser amounts of real estate. There are also some extremely physically real beings with supernatural powers that are more flexible or focused than the Spells and Arts available to mortal magicians. A local crocodilian river-deity, for example, may be both a physically verifiable giant crocodile, and also capable of causing or preventing flooding in the river. But, notably, ONLY their own river. A deity of some more abstract principle, such as the North Wind, might be more indeterminate and widespread in their presence.

The thing to keep in mind is that the gods are distant, weird, and inhuman, in all cases. The crocodile god is not up for a friendly chat. The North Wind was never a human, likely has no human feelings, and if it takes some anthropomorphic shape it is only as a matter of whimsy. Deities are typically not worshipped and revered in the way that a modern person in the US might imagine a religion to imply. The sailors do not love the gods of the seas. They fear them and respect them, and make offerings in the hope of improving their chances of coming home alive. Deities (in the vast majority of cases) make no guarantees or offers regarding the fate of a person's soul after death, which is a mystery, and of little concern to the typical person. Everyday matters loom larger, and death must take care of its own.

Devoted servants of deities may have some special power or another, which is typically minor and has a cost. For more serious exertions of divine power, if such a thing is desirable, the cultists will likely need to conduct some ritual. This will involve an offering, and a Pray roll from their leader. Note that the offering need not be a material object or bloodletting - some gods might look favorably on a night of frenzied dancing by at least twenty or thirty dervishes. It depends on the god and the ritual undertaken. This isn't something I expect to see a lot of in-game, since divine intervention is generally not an effective way to obtain human goals.

Anyway. Expect weird and inhuman genius loci, snake cults, and sui generis beings of cosmic horror, not some kind of benevolent god of farming with an organized and hierarchical temple structure.

==Alignment==
These game rules don't make use of alignment, so it's not a thing on the character sheet. You should know that my preference, though, which informs the cosmic background of the world, is law vs. chaos rather than good vs. evil. Conditions of extreme law or extreme chaos are not survivable for human beings - the large central curve of neutrality is the only zone humans can inhabit. As such, PCs don't need alignments. The gods and other beings may have be aligned with law or chaos. Their machinations are equally dangerous to human life.

==Known Deities==
I dunno, I'll put some stuff here eventually.

=Links=

Caverns Without Number

2022-07-16T04:58:28Z

The Wyzard: /* The Local Environment */

This is a page for the Caverns of Thracia game, run by The Wyzard using Worlds Without Number. Its content is tentative.

'''Before we start:''' Combat is intended to be a little more interesting than normal B/X. I strongly suggest that you all familiarize yourself with how Shock Damage works, and secondarily with how the combat maneuvers work. Shock Damage is going to mess you up if you aren't ready for it.

[[File:GMG4615-Thracia-455x600.jpg]]

=The Adventurers=
==Basic Wiki Practice==
I'm used to keeping information on my campaigns on a wiki. Some of you may not be used to this. Your character sheet is the first challenge you will face! Please ask for help on the discord if you aren't familiar with this stuff. So here is what you do, in order:
*Make a wiki account if you can't just log in with your regular RPGnet account, I can't remember.
*Anyway, be logged into the wiki.
*Open the sample character sheet in a new tab.
*Then hit "Edit" on this section (The Adventurers.)
*You can see the double-brackets around "Fill This In Yourself." Those double brackets will make a link to another wiki page, and the title will be whatever is the text inside the double brackets. You're going to put your character's name in there. Your character's name should be sufficiently unusual that there isn't already a PC somewhere on the wiki with that name. A good formula is something like (Name) the (Descriptor), where the descriptor is either some literal or figurative detail about the character. Maybe your character is Jeanette the Ravensworn, and you don't know what Ravensworn is yet. That's fine, maybe we'll find out!
*Save your edit and click on the new link that is your character's name.
*Now, hit the Edit button on the sample character sheet.
*Hit CTRL-A to select all text in the editing window. Then CTRL-C to copy it. Then close the window on the sample character sheet because you don't actually want to change it.
*Now hid the Edit button on YOUR character sheet, and paste in all the text from the sample one.
*Now fill in all the details.
*This sounds like a lot when I break it down like this, but honestly it takes seconds and I will probably do it for you during Session Zero.
==Dramatis Personae==
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[WWN Sample Character Sheet]]

=Introduction=
The greatest city of the world, in terms of cosmopolitan fun, wealth, and knowledge, is Nibiru, the Peregrinate Acropolis. A heavily fortified castle-city built on a large stone mesa, it has the look of a vast ziggurat capped with a wonder of colorful towers. The undercity inside the mesa is a maze of carved and worked tunnels, warehouses, reservoirs, and hidden temples. The lower levels of the city are a chaos of tenements, manufactories, brightly tiled plazas, and cafeterias. The vast towers contain luxury apartments for the rich, in addition to colleges, libraries, laboratories, training halls and so forth. The outer walls are dotted with fortifications, weapon emplacements, signal towers, and windmills that power various machinery, particularly water pumps. Real estate is tremendously valuable, most people live in spaces little larger than a walk-in closet. Hence the desperate need for the public bathhouses and cafeteria-style restaurants that support the life and hygiene of the city - there simply isn't space for people to have their own kitchens and so forth.

What makes Nibiru so wealthy and influential, such a center of knowledge, is that it moves. Every week, the city disappears in vast cloud of opaque fog, and reappears somewhere else on Terminus. The engines that accomplish this have been carefully maintained for centuries, so that it has functioned without interruption. It peregrinates along a semi-regular trade route, with space built into the schedule for necessary or opportunistic deviations, and a cadre of mages, merchants, and scholars of economics carefully plot its course for maximum advantage. Wherever it lands, the vast trading apparatus fires up into action. Enormous loads of commodities and rarer goods are sold to local merchant houses, wherever the city might land. The vast caverns of the undercity can carry an amount of cargo beyond imagination. The limiting factor is how much of it can be hauled out and traded for new goods, which must in their turn be loaded within six days.

You are natives of this city - you have the invisible, UV-reactive tattoo of a citizen in at least three places on your body. This marks you as one of the exalted, an individual with the right to enter the city's gates and remain within the confines as it peregrinates. Even the meanest beggar who is a citizen of Nibiru has something that the wealth of an emperor might not purchase. And, like all natives, you know the rule - the first six days are for business, but the seventh is a day of rest. No one leaves the city on the seventh day, or lingers outside for even one second beyond midnight of the sixth. The risk of being left behind is just too high.

Guess how you fucked up?

==The Local Environment==
It's early spring and you're probably going to be stuck here for about the next year, until Nibiru returns and you can get home. The city-state of Amarna is located on a fertile river delta that empties into a sea. That's where Nibiru came to rest. The area around the great river is a green and well-developed valley, with large towns and farming villages served by a regular geometric pattern of irrigation channels. To the east, about a day's walk down the coast, is a small semi-fortified city named Tjaru, in an undesirable and swampy region. It is used as a place of exile for criminals and the disgraced. That's where you've currently ended up. And you've heard rumors of a recently-discovered Deep, one of the vast underground fastnesses built by various ancient civilizations.

Deeps are dangerous, in ways both mundane and exotic. However, they frequently contain raw wealth left behind by the Ancients. Also, the even more precious sorcerous, alchemical, or technological artifacts that they seem to have had such a panoply of. This would be an outstanding way to support yourselves for the next year. And, if you're lucky, you might go beyond supporting yourself in reasonable style, and find that you've recovered something valuable enough to earn a higher station in Nibiru.

Note: Tjaru and other nearby settlements are all part of the same Amar "city-state," ruled over by the central city Amarna. It is also styled as Amar-Na in more formal writings. The people that live here are Amars. The adjective form is Amaric.

==Distance & Timekeeping==
I'll eventually post a hexmap with some local points of interest and so forth, but I don't envision hexcrawling or the like to be a major component. You're going to be in a relatively civilized area, albeit on the very edge of it. You won't need to make wilderness encounter checks to get to the dungeon and back.

My assumption is that you'll be largely based in Tjaru. My thought is that rather than keep strict track of days, a single delve (which might span multiple sessions) will just cross a week off the calendar, and we'll assume that resting, re-equipping, and so forth takes about that long. The dungeon is going to be maybe two hour's walk from Tjaru, so you can go out there, screw around for a while, and still get back before dark.

==Questions for Session Zero==
*Anything anybody definitely wants to see
*Anything anyone definitely doesn't want to see, particularly in terms of "does anything already on this wiki bother someone a lot?"
*Lines & Veils or whatever, PM me if you have to
*I don't intend the game to include explicit sexual content, and even the implication of sexual violence is right out
*I actually find some of the gene-modified human strains in WWN to be kind of interesting, but they might be too problematic, I dunno, opinions?
*

=Encumbrance & Beasts of Burden=
WWN's encumbrance system is simple enough that I'm not sure we'll actually need this section, but I included it as a matter of habit. Note that every full 100 coins counts as an item. Count normal gems as a single coin. Jewelry and small art objects are counted as a bulk good - you can pack together three items such as carved ivory necklaces, jade hairbrushes, jeweled crowns, rings, etc. I'll let you know about larger art objects.
==The Pocket Change Rule==
Your first up-to-100-coins worth of regular coins and gems do not count towards encumbrance, so long as they're yours alone. Found treasure is tracked separately until you return to civilization, such as it is.
==The Bling Rule==
The PCs may ignore the encumbrance requirements of jewelry if they simply wear the jewelry openly, within reason. No more than a single crown at a time, etc. This has two downsides: If you are presently in a Deep, you may find out an object is cursed at a most inconvenient time. Secondly, your enemies may become ravenously motivated to relieve you of those items. Morale is an important component of combat in this game, and if you are draped in the wealth of nations, then opponents may get a morale bonus.

=NPCs=

=Notes & Logs=

=Maps=

=House Rules & Character Creation=

==Character Creation & Advancement==
*Don't come with a character concept, we'll create characters in a session zero. It's okay to have a few vague ideas just so we don't have to look up too much.
*For attributes, arrange the following array to taste: 14, 12, 11, 10, 9, and 7. See pg. 8.
*When you pick a background, you get a free skill associated with it at level 0. Then, make a total of three rolls on the growth or learning table for your background.
*Choose a class. We're only using the classes available in the free version. However, the odder partial classes are available.
*Note that I don't like the Cleric class in D&D for complicated reasons, so please don't try to emulate one in terms of being a dedicated servant of a god. If you want to play a Healer (one of the partial classes) you certainly can, but I don't have a sense as to whether one is strictly necessary. PCs can die in this game but I'm probably going to tone down the "if you fail this save you die" kind of stuff.
*Assume you roll a 6 on your hit die.
*Skip the equipment step, read up on the languages stuff on this wiki.
*Everyone levels up twice. We start at level 3. Assume you roll a 4 on these two hit dice.
*You can start with 1,000 silver pieces worth of equipment. Note that this game is on a silver standard. If you want one of the packages on page 29, assume it's 100 silver pieces for any of the packages. No swapping or whatever. Discard any money you didn't spend on equipment.
*For ready cash, you each start with 3d6 gold, 3d20 silver, and 1d4+1 gems worth 50 sp apiece.
*Your first month of living expenses is prepaid, at a Common standard of living. After the first month you need to pay that much, which amounts to 80sp per month, due on the first of each month. Adventurers cannot voluntarily spend less than this, because they are intolerant of living in more straitened circumstances. Note that this includes rations - it's not any more expensive to buy rations than it is to eat at the tavern. You do still have to determine how many you're carrying, for encumbrance purposes.
*We're using slow advancement, pg 54. However, a full continuous month lived at a Rich lifestyle (200sp per week, or 800 for the whole month) gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 6th level. A full continuous month lived at a Noble lifestyle (1,000sp per week, or 4,000 for the whole month), gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 9th level.
*You will each start with one or more rumors about the nearby Caverns of Thracia.

=Setting=
Disregard the setting as written in WWN. I dig the general vibe but I'm mostly going to be doing my own thing. The name of this world is Terminus (players in my previous campaigns may recognize the name; consider this a reboot.)

==History==
Terminus is not known to have ever had any natively intelligent life. Various intelligent beings from other places, human and otherwise, have come to settle there. It also has its own complement of extradimensional entities, beings which some might refer to as gods.

The earliest human settlers came from other worlds forgotten to the modern person. Something, however, caused a lapse in communication and logistical capability. The settlers were cut off from home. Whatever disaster occurred has cut off almost all contact with civilizations outside the solar system. Visitation by spacecraft is extremely rare and not well-known. Visitors who arrive via stranger means are, if they exist, keeping it on the down-low.

It is believed by some scholars and most small children that there are inhabited cities on the moons.

==A Hypercompressed Timeline==
So as not to engage in the fantasy world designer's great sin of just adding a bunch of zeroes onto a reasonable timeline, I'm not providing any numbers here. Think of these as the approximate ages of the world, liberally seasoned with disinformation, misunderstanding, propaganda, temporal anomalies, and genuinely antique texts from different planets that were improperly mixed into the local historical record.

*'''Era Zero: The Precursors.''' There are occasionally objects or devices (such as the Cidrian Gates or the Sublunar Machinery) which seem to correspond to some time or people before the era of the Lizard Kings. Anything that old which is still operational can be presumed to have unimaginable power and sophistication. They may have been built by prior human civilizations or by entities even further removed from our understanding. It is presumed that human colonization occurred during this era due to the fact that some of these devices appear made for beings on the approximate size and body plan of modern humanity.
*'''Era One: Early Human Colonization.''' During this period, large numbers of humans arrived on the planet via means which are not known for certain, and engaged in widespread terraforming and genetic resequencing of themselves and everything else they could get their hands on. The early colonies “failed,” in that C&C with whoever sent them was lost, and whatever early governments were established collapsed. Humans went through a period of barbaric savagery, and then got it out of their systems. There is little evidence of heavy industry during this period, indicating a break from the precursor era, which did engage in large-scale engineering.
*'''Era Two''': '''The Lizard Queens'''. The Lizardfolk were for a time the apex sophont on the planet. They built crystalline devices that ran on psionic rather than technological or magical principles, subjugated humans when they felt the need, and built ziggurats, pyramids, and canals. They revived the precursor habit of constructing Deeps, or at least cleared and restored to use a number that were already ancient. These enormous underground spaces were considered proof against enemies approaching overland or from the skies. It is believed that airborne attacks must have been a major hazard at the time. The decline in cognitive capability among lizardfolk is most likely what allowed humanity to eventually overtake them.
*'''Era Three:''' '''The Amaranthan Empire'''. This human empire rose out of a small but wealthy kingdom by a bay, where innovative magicians laid down the foundation-stones of modern sorcery. It was a darker, cruder magic that they practiced, and they were insatiable for more power. Within a handful of generations, the leaders of the Amaranthan kingdoms had as much magic in their veins as blood, and they conquered the vast majority of the world. Between their spells, and pre-Saurian technology and learning they recovered from the Deeps, they easily brought to heel the feudal human societies that arose to fill the vacuum left by the Lizard Kings.
*'''Era Four:''' '''The Hubris.''' The Amaranthans declared war on everyone and everything that would not bend the knee to their Emperor. After a hundred years of blood and fire, they lost.
*'''Era Five:''' '''The Long Dark.''' Little enough of this era is recorded. Vengeful beings of every sort preyed on humanity and dominated their cities. Much awful tribute was extracted, and the lore of the Amaranthans was destroyed whenever it could be found. The tech level at this time was definitely more medieval in character, as humans were lucky if their masters allowed them pointy sticks, in most places. This was the era of the Lex Sanguinis, codified by the Vampire Regents who ruled so many city-states. Much of the current law and custom is descended from these dark times, with appropriate adaptations.
*'''Era Six: The Thracian Hegemony'''. The Thracians began as a small group of seafaring city-states, in which a few privileged human servants formed a conspiracy. They managed to throw off the yokes of their inhuman masters and institute democracy. They rapidly became masters of the exchange of goods. Thracian civilization avoided reliance on direct sorcery, since they didn't wish to repeat the mistakes of the Amaranthans. They pursued alchemy, artifice, and technology. While they never approached the sophistication of Precursor technology, they could produce much more sophisticated machinery at scale than is possible in the current era. They were able to free most of the rest of human civilization via a combination of disaster capitalism and laser-armed airships. They also standardized weights, measures, and coinage, which standards are still used today. Currency from pre-Thracian cultures is often extremely non-standard.
*'''Era Seven: The Decapitation'''. The leaders of the Thracian Combines attempted to make treaty with the various Lunar civilizations, just as they had done to the monstrous kingdoms that had existed on the terrestrial sphere. For whatever reason (but probably because the Lunatics weren't ignorant of how this had worked out for the vampire princes, etc.), negotiations fell through, and ended in several nights of orbital bombardment. When the smoke cleared, the Thracian civilization came apart at the seams. They had always kept their leadership and industrial base centralized, to maintain their hegemony. Unfortunately, that meant it was all destroyed by the swarm of large iron meteorites that turned their five greatest cities into a morass of smoking, flooded craters. Bereft of leadership and centralized industrial production, the Thracians were raided into nonexistence by tribal or feudal peoples, monsters, and various nonhuman intelligences. Their society disintegrated, and the lore of operating their great machines and mysterious facilities became lost.
*'''Era Eight: The Age of City-States'''. You are here! Over much of the world, humanity has reorganized itself into independent and semi-independent city-states. There is trade and communication between the various civilizations, but vast waste-lands full of ruins and ancient roads occupy the space between them. Human civilization seems to be somewhat drowsy at this time in history, and the people of the world are plagued by hedonism and sybaritic boredom. Greed takes the place of ambition, and everywhere men and women take the low and easy road to comfort. Globe-spanning ambitions are distinctly out of fashion. Non-human intelligences have many thriving civilizations of their own, and so far there's so much room that large-scale conflict hasn't broken out.

==Contemporary Material Culture==
Industrial manufacturing and supply chains no longer exist. However, books and other repositories of information are still available, and it's not uncommon for people to be educated to a (real-world) modern standard, even if they can't lay hands on so much as a flashlight.

The vast majority of work is done using human or animal muscle, or relatively simple wind or water mills. That being said, the situation is not at all comparable to medieval Europe. Many technologies that have an extremely high payoff-to-effort ratio if you are already at a high Roman or Renaissance-era level of technology are still used. Movable-type printing presses are not common, but they have supplanted scriptoriums. They’re just too easy to build in comparison to how much effort they save.

The essential difficulty is that the creation of an industrial economy is a great deal of work, and nobody is really inclined to go to that kind of effort. Anyone with the resources, ambition, and will to build a steam train or an air conditioner factory is probably better off becoming an archmage and obligating their neighbors to appease them.

Further, Precursor humanity genetically engineered a variety of plants to be unnaturally useful, and those strains are still cultivated. A wide variety of food plants and several types of mushroom are known to be results of the original sequencing project; they can be easily and rapidly farmed, and are tailored to human dietary needs. For this reason, simply supplying the population with food is not the crushing burden it was in real-world medieval societies, and even impoverished areas have sufficient time for leisure and social or intellectual pursuits. There are other examples, as well, such as the Library Trees with leaves uniquely suited to paper-making.

Advanced alloys, both alchemical and mundane, are still manufactured, although not in modern quantities.

'''Summary:'''
*Individual artificers, magicians, and alchemists do produce items of enchantment or high technology, but these are rare, hand-crafted, and expensive.
*High technology as it exists in our world is rarely available and typically only in very simple configurations. A hand-held UV light might be obtainable, but a computer is out of the question.
*The advanced technology that does exist often involves large glowing synthetic gemstones, runic circuitry, and alchemical materials. Gears, moving parts, conventional batteries, and other steampunk apparatuses are relatively rare. The dividing line between magic and this sort of science can be somewhat thin at times. Consult the rules for mods in the WWN rulebook for ideas.
*The "hurlants" described on pg. 36 are available for purchase. In-setting, they're referred to as coilguns. They function via an extremely high-tension, alchemically produced metal spring, housed inside a barrel, which must be carefully wound with an integral handle before a specially made steel dart is loaded and clipped into place. Rather than the barrel being rifled, the dart is designed with a subtly helical fluting. Hand hurlants are often mounted on an arm bracer, but either may be made in a configuration similar to a modern firearm. They are, however, typically ornately carved or filigreed. They are considered a weapon of war or murder, and may not be carried openly in civilized cities. The user is expected to have them unloaded, "broken down" into components, and carried packed away. Note the AP tag on them - they ignore non-magical armor. A hand hurlant can throw its sliver of steel directly through an armored knight's breastplate and out his back. They are, therefore, especially disliked by the sorts of people wealthy enough to invest in heavy armor.

==Astronomy & Weather==
Terminus lacks the axial tilt & wobble of our own world. Seasons are caused by its eccentric and elliptical orbit. In plain terms, its distance from the sun varies sufficiently over the course of the year to produce winter and summer. This means the north and south hemisphere experience winter and summer at the same time. Terminus' magnetic poles are precisely perpendicular to the plane of orbit. It is highly likely that some intelligent agency altered these factors at some point in times ancient beyond reckoning.

Terminus has three moons in an equidistant orbit around the planet. One is nearly white, like our own, and the other two are tinted red and blue. Absent cloud cover, the night sky almost always provides a little more light than a full moon on our own Earth.

==Calendar==
There are 13 lunar months, each of exactly 28 days. There are three months in each of the seasons that would be recognizable to us - a spring, a summer, an autumn, a winter. Even without axial tilt and wobble, the nature of the seasons varies according to distance from the equator and local geography. Coastal areas are milder, areas close to the poles are colder.

The calendar of 13 months is standard almost all across the globe, at least in human civilizations. What varies is which months are counted part of which season. In general, an area with extreme conditions during one month of the year will count the "extra" month as outside of a regular season. A northern city might take the part of the year of most intense cold and count it as "Fimbulwinter," a time outside of even regular winter. An equatorial land might have the Dog Days, that month which is too hot to be placed within regular summertime. In a coastal land, the inhabitants might take the time of most intense storm activity, and name it the Monsoon Season.

The area this campaign takes place in is a Mediterranean type of climate. Due to the proximity of a large body of water, while the summers can be hellishly humid, the extremes of temperature aren't as bad as they could be.

==Languages==
The PCs start out knowing Common & Trade Cant, with additional languages per their Connect & Know skills. See pg. 28 of WWN.

*Common is a modern form of Thracian, and is the most wide-spread human language. Insular or remote human civilizations might have divergent or distinct languages.
*Trade Cant is a limited pidgin tongue commonly used in highly cosmopolitan areas or by far-traveling merchants. It's not good for higher pursuits, but has special vocabulary for economic concerns, commodities, travel & accommodations, et cetera.
*Old Thracian has about as much in common with Common as classical Latin does with modern Italian. It was the language of the last powerful and widespread human civilization.
*Amaranthan, also known as Sorcerer's Speech, is even older than Old Thracian. It was the tongue of a powerful sorcerous empire that collapsed in blood and fire.
*Lizard, or in derogatory terms "Hiss," is the language of the common lizardfolk and other reptilian intelligences. It's hard for humans to pronounce, and even harder for them to think in. The brains of the reptilian people are formed very differently to human ones. Something has gone very wrong with the lizardfolk, and 90% of them have cognitive limitations not present in their ancestors. The result is that only about 10% of them are literate in their own tongue. Note that in Lizard, humans are referred to as "Monkey Men," and their terms for our language are even more derogatory than "Hiss."
*Pelagic, or in derogatory terms "Glub," is the common language of undersea peoples. It's impossible to pronounce in atmosphere, so it can mostly only be learned underwater. Water-Adapted PCs (see pg. 27, under xeno-blooded) can learn to speak and understand this.
*Fae is the language of the various half-worlder beings. It has Seelie and Unseelie dialects, and while most people will be more familiar with one or the other, they are comprehensible to each other.
*Sign Language exists for the use of the deaf, and is also commonly used by beings for whom normal conversation is difficult. For example, a non-water-adapted human and a greater octopus might both be intelligent, but the octopus can only speak underwater, and the human can only speak in the air. If they met at the shore, they could communicate via sign, with each staying in its own preferred medium. The gestures are abstract enough for beings with significantly different anatomy, so long as they have limbs. Dolphins don't have sufficient limbs to Sign, although they can learn to understand it, but they're telepathic anyway.
*Various other species have their own languages.
*The Precursor civilization of humans presumably had their own language, but they don't seem to have written much down, or if they did, it was lost long ago.

==Random Notes==
*"Greater" creatures are intelligent forms. A Greater Octopus is therefore a sophont form of octopod. The lizardfolk are greater lizards. Nonhuman intelligences, in their own languages, would typically refer to humans as Greater Monkeys. This is a scientific or technical classification and it is rude to refer to any intelligent being in their own person this way. This is distinct from a "Dire" form, which is a larger and usually more ferocious form of a more common creature. See the classical example, the Dire Wolf. Note that nonhumans often classify Ogres as Dire Humans, which humans are not especially appreciative of in most cases.
*Human biology is rather enhanced by precursor engineering. The average lifespan, uninterrupted by disease or violence, is about 120 years, with only the last fifteen or so involving serious senescence. Most people will recover relatively fully from injuries or diseases that don't amount to amputation, and sepsis due to injuries is rare. Birth defects as we know them are unheard-of. Fertility is also optional for humans. Basically, look at the healing rules and be astonished how little medicine is required for stabbing victims.
*There are no elves & dwarves in the typical D&D sense, so the Special Origin focus is not used. The Xenoblooded focus is freely available and represents the efforts of precursor genetic engineers, passed down through the long millenia; aquatic-adapted humans are still well-known in coastal areas. The Unique Gift focus is also available, and typically represents some inheritable genetic gift.

==Nibiru==
I don't want to spend too much time on this, because the whole point of the campaign is that you aren't there. But maybe a few notes won't go too far wrong.
*There is a system of public education, welfare, and public works that is unrivaled in the world. If you don't find a useful occupation for yourself, you '''will''' be trained and pressed into service in some capacity or another.
*Nibiru has the wealth to support its people, but no room for idlers and malingerers. Literally, physical space is at a premium.
*Social stratification is severe in terms of power and resources commanded, but there are no mansions or palaces. Everyone must make use of public spaces and facilities, hence they are well-maintained.
*Security is tight. If any enemy ever penetrated to the machinery that allows peregrination, they could damage it in a way no one now living would know how to repair. Foreigners are allowed into the city itself only on an extremely limited basis. Criminal gangs are unheard of; and criminal activity is not tolerated.
*All citizens are educated to at least something resembling a high school level and then given some additional training, vocational or otherwise, unless their employment is destined to be entirely menial. For those such as the PCs who have exceptional abilities, they may have attended one of the following programs:
**The Athenaeum is a tower most like a "university" program in Nibiru. Conventional scholarly and engineering students are likely to graduate from here.
**The Scholomance is the tower dedicated to magic, both High Magic & New Magic. The individual in charge of it, known as the Rector, is a black-robed figure wearing an alabaster mask. Their true identity has not been known in centuries - it may be the same superannuated individual, or it is possible that the Chairs of the various departments are electing a new individual from time to time. The board of the scholomance is is deeply secretive, and nothing can be said with certainty.
**The Charterhouse tower trains Vowed. Charterhouse Vowed can select as their bonus skill (see pg. 86) either Exert or Sneak. PCs can take any path they wish, but the typical Charterhouse graduate works as a spy, agent, bodyguard, or assassin.
**Skull Plaza is the military school. Obviously, many people learn the combat arts in more practical ways, but the regular army goes through Skull Plaza. Note that Nibiru does not maintain cavalry of any kind. Their combat doctrines and equipment are focused on siege defense and man-to-man or small unit combat. They produce numerous skilled duelists, and marching on the city would be a death sentence for nearly any attacker, but Nibiru can't field a large army.

=Gods & Religion=
This is the part where I complain. Feel free to skim this section at most.

I don't like the way that religion and clerics are portrayed in D&D. I'm most interested in what the PCs choose to do, in pursuing their own ends. Those ends may be selfless - a character might be dedicated to justice, for example. But it should be their own choice and for their own reasons, subject to their own reevaluation. Other, more selfish motivations are certainly easy enough to understand. "I would like that large pile of gold coins to belong to me rather than whoever currently lays claim to it" and "I would prefer not to die beneath this ghost-haunted pyramid I have been abandoned in" are both immediately relatable.

This is consistent with what I would consider to be most of the essential texts of the genre. So of course D&D, in its lack of wisdom, had to make a character option to subsume PC choices and priority to some half-baked imagining of how a pantheistic religion might work, if you stripped it of all interest and cultural factors.

So we're not going to do that.

There is nothing like a D&D Cleric in this world. There are healers. There are also persons who are "high priests" or the like. The former is someone who has bent their talents to medicine. Or, in the case of the Healer partial class, someone who has devoted themselves to using psychic energy as a substitute for complex pharmaceutical substances that can no longer be manufactured. A "priest" is a social role. They may or may not be a member of a class that provides magical powers. If they are serious about relationships with supernatural beings, they may have a respectable ability with the Pray skill.

==Religion on Terminus==
Gods are a highly varied lot. There are extradimensional entities and spirits that seem to have influence over greater or lesser amounts of real estate. There are also some extremely physically real beings with supernatural powers that are more flexible or focused than the Spells and Arts available to mortal magicians. A local crocodilian river-deity, for example, may be both a physically verifiable giant crocodile, and also capable of causing or preventing flooding in the river. But, notably, ONLY their own river. A deity of some more abstract principle, such as the North Wind, might be more indeterminate and widespread in their presence.

The thing to keep in mind is that the gods are distant, weird, and inhuman, in all cases. The crocodile god is not up for a friendly chat. The North Wind was never a human, likely has no human feelings, and if it takes some anthropomorphic shape it is only as a matter of whimsy. Deities are typically not worshipped and revered in the way that a modern person in the US might imagine a religion to imply. The sailors do not love the gods of the seas. They fear them and respect them, and make offerings in the hope of improving their chances of coming home alive. Deities (in the vast majority of cases) make no guarantees or offers regarding the fate of a person's soul after death, which is a mystery, and of little concern to the typical person. Everyday matters loom larger, and death must take care of its own.

Devoted servants of deities may have some special power or another, which is typically minor and has a cost. For more serious exertions of divine power, if such a thing is desirable, the cultists will likely need to conduct some ritual. This will involve an offering, and a Pray roll from their leader. Note that the offering need not be a material object or bloodletting - some gods might look favorably on a night of frenzied dancing by at least twenty or thirty dervishes. It depends on the god and the ritual undertaken. This isn't something I expect to see a lot of in-game, since divine intervention is generally not an effective way to obtain human goals.

Anyway. Expect weird and inhuman genius loci, snake cults, and sui generis beings of cosmic horror, not some kind of benevolent god of farming with an organized and hierarchical temple structure.

==Alignment==
These game rules don't make use of alignment, so it's not a thing on the character sheet. You should know that my preference, though, which informs the cosmic background of the world, is law vs. chaos rather than good vs. evil. Conditions of extreme law or extreme chaos are not survivable for human beings - the large central curve of neutrality is the only zone humans can inhabit. As such, PCs don't need alignments. The gods and other beings may have be aligned with law or chaos. Their machinations are equally dangerous to human life.

==Known Deities==
I dunno, I'll put some stuff here eventually.

=Links=

Caverns Without Number

2022-07-16T04:49:19Z

The Wyzard: /* Religion on Terminus */

This is a page for the Caverns of Thracia game, run by The Wyzard using Worlds Without Number. Its content is tentative.

'''Before we start:''' Combat is intended to be a little more interesting than normal B/X. I strongly suggest that you all familiarize yourself with how Shock Damage works, and secondarily with how the combat maneuvers work. Shock Damage is going to mess you up if you aren't ready for it.

[[File:GMG4615-Thracia-455x600.jpg]]

=The Adventurers=
==Basic Wiki Practice==
I'm used to keeping information on my campaigns on a wiki. Some of you may not be used to this. Your character sheet is the first challenge you will face! Please ask for help on the discord if you aren't familiar with this stuff. So here is what you do, in order:
*Make a wiki account if you can't just log in with your regular RPGnet account, I can't remember.
*Anyway, be logged into the wiki.
*Open the sample character sheet in a new tab.
*Then hit "Edit" on this section (The Adventurers.)
*You can see the double-brackets around "Fill This In Yourself." Those double brackets will make a link to another wiki page, and the title will be whatever is the text inside the double brackets. You're going to put your character's name in there. Your character's name should be sufficiently unusual that there isn't already a PC somewhere on the wiki with that name. A good formula is something like (Name) the (Descriptor), where the descriptor is either some literal or figurative detail about the character. Maybe your character is Jeanette the Ravensworn, and you don't know what Ravensworn is yet. That's fine, maybe we'll find out!
*Save your edit and click on the new link that is your character's name.
*Now, hit the Edit button on the sample character sheet.
*Hit CTRL-A to select all text in the editing window. Then CTRL-C to copy it. Then close the window on the sample character sheet because you don't actually want to change it.
*Now hid the Edit button on YOUR character sheet, and paste in all the text from the sample one.
*Now fill in all the details.
*This sounds like a lot when I break it down like this, but honestly it takes seconds and I will probably do it for you during Session Zero.
==Dramatis Personae==
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[WWN Sample Character Sheet]]

=Introduction=
The greatest city of the world, in terms of cosmopolitan fun, wealth, and knowledge, is Nibiru, the Peregrinate Acropolis. A heavily fortified castle-city built on a large stone mesa, it has the look of a vast ziggurat capped with a wonder of colorful towers. The undercity inside the mesa is a maze of carved and worked tunnels, warehouses, reservoirs, and hidden temples. The lower levels of the city are a chaos of tenements, manufactories, brightly tiled plazas, and cafeterias. The vast towers contain luxury apartments for the rich, in addition to colleges, libraries, laboratories, training halls and so forth. The outer walls are dotted with fortifications, weapon emplacements, signal towers, and windmills that power various machinery, particularly water pumps. Real estate is tremendously valuable, most people live in spaces little larger than a walk-in closet. Hence the desperate need for the public bathhouses and cafeteria-style restaurants that support the life and hygiene of the city - there simply isn't space for people to have their own kitchens and so forth.

What makes Nibiru so wealthy and influential, such a center of knowledge, is that it moves. Every week, the city disappears in vast cloud of opaque fog, and reappears somewhere else on Terminus. The engines that accomplish this have been carefully maintained for centuries, so that it has functioned without interruption. It peregrinates along a semi-regular trade route, with space built into the schedule for necessary or opportunistic deviations, and a cadre of mages, merchants, and scholars of economics carefully plot its course for maximum advantage. Wherever it lands, the vast trading apparatus fires up into action. Enormous loads of commodities and rarer goods are sold to local merchant houses, wherever the city might land. The vast caverns of the undercity can carry an amount of cargo beyond imagination. The limiting factor is how much of it can be hauled out and traded for new goods, which must in their turn be loaded within six days.

You are natives of this city - you have the invisible, UV-reactive tattoo of a citizen in at least three places on your body. This marks you as one of the exalted, an individual with the right to enter the city's gates and remain within the confines as it peregrinates. Even the meanest beggar who is a citizen of Nibiru has something that the wealth of an emperor might not purchase. And, like all natives, you know the rule - the first six days are for business, but the seventh is a day of rest. No one leaves the city on the seventh day, or lingers outside for even one second beyond midnight of the sixth. The risk of being left behind is just too high.

Guess how you fucked up?

==The Local Environment==
It's early spring and you're probably going to be stuck here for about the next year, until Nibiru returns and you can get home. The city-state of Amarna is located on a fertile river delta that empties into a sea. That's where Nibiru came to rest. The area around the great river is a green and well-developed valley, with large towns and farming villages served by a regular geometric pattern of irrigation channels. To the east, about a day's walk down the coast, is a small semi-fortified city named Tjaru, in an undesirable and swampy region. It is used as a place of exile for criminals and the disgraced. That's where you've currently ended up. And you've heard rumors of a recently-discovered Deep, one of the vast underground fastnesses built by various ancient civilizations.

Deeps are dangerous, in ways both mundane and exotic. However, they frequently contain raw wealth left behind by the Ancients. Also, the even more precious sorcerous, alchemical, or technological artifacts that they seem to have had such a panoply of. This would be an outstanding way to support yourselves for the next year. And, if you're lucky, you might go beyond supporting yourself in reasonable style, and find that you've recovered something valuable enough to earn a higher station in Nibiru.

==Distance & Timekeeping==
I'll eventually post a hexmap with some local points of interest and so forth, but I don't envision hexcrawling or the like to be a major component. You're going to be in a relatively civilized area, albeit on the very edge of it. You won't need to make wilderness encounter checks to get to the dungeon and back.

My assumption is that you'll be largely based in Tjaru. My thought is that rather than keep strict track of days, a single delve (which might span multiple sessions) will just cross a week off the calendar, and we'll assume that resting, re-equipping, and so forth takes about that long. The dungeon is going to be maybe two hour's walk from Tjaru, so you can go out there, screw around for a while, and still get back before dark.

==Questions for Session Zero==
*Anything anybody definitely wants to see
*Anything anyone definitely doesn't want to see, particularly in terms of "does anything already on this wiki bother someone a lot?"
*Lines & Veils or whatever, PM me if you have to
*I don't intend the game to include explicit sexual content, and even the implication of sexual violence is right out
*I actually find some of the gene-modified human strains in WWN to be kind of interesting, but they might be too problematic, I dunno, opinions?
*

=Encumbrance & Beasts of Burden=
WWN's encumbrance system is simple enough that I'm not sure we'll actually need this section, but I included it as a matter of habit. Note that every full 100 coins counts as an item. Count normal gems as a single coin. Jewelry and small art objects are counted as a bulk good - you can pack together three items such as carved ivory necklaces, jade hairbrushes, jeweled crowns, rings, etc. I'll let you know about larger art objects.
==The Pocket Change Rule==
Your first up-to-100-coins worth of regular coins and gems do not count towards encumbrance, so long as they're yours alone. Found treasure is tracked separately until you return to civilization, such as it is.
==The Bling Rule==
The PCs may ignore the encumbrance requirements of jewelry if they simply wear the jewelry openly, within reason. No more than a single crown at a time, etc. This has two downsides: If you are presently in a Deep, you may find out an object is cursed at a most inconvenient time. Secondly, your enemies may become ravenously motivated to relieve you of those items. Morale is an important component of combat in this game, and if you are draped in the wealth of nations, then opponents may get a morale bonus.

=NPCs=

=Notes & Logs=

=Maps=

=House Rules & Character Creation=

==Character Creation & Advancement==
*Don't come with a character concept, we'll create characters in a session zero. It's okay to have a few vague ideas just so we don't have to look up too much.
*For attributes, arrange the following array to taste: 14, 12, 11, 10, 9, and 7. See pg. 8.
*When you pick a background, you get a free skill associated with it at level 0. Then, make a total of three rolls on the growth or learning table for your background.
*Choose a class. We're only using the classes available in the free version. However, the odder partial classes are available.
*Note that I don't like the Cleric class in D&D for complicated reasons, so please don't try to emulate one in terms of being a dedicated servant of a god. If you want to play a Healer (one of the partial classes) you certainly can, but I don't have a sense as to whether one is strictly necessary. PCs can die in this game but I'm probably going to tone down the "if you fail this save you die" kind of stuff.
*Assume you roll a 6 on your hit die.
*Skip the equipment step, read up on the languages stuff on this wiki.
*Everyone levels up twice. We start at level 3. Assume you roll a 4 on these two hit dice.
*You can start with 1,000 silver pieces worth of equipment. Note that this game is on a silver standard. If you want one of the packages on page 29, assume it's 100 silver pieces for any of the packages. No swapping or whatever. Discard any money you didn't spend on equipment.
*For ready cash, you each start with 3d6 gold, 3d20 silver, and 1d4+1 gems worth 50 sp apiece.
*Your first month of living expenses is prepaid, at a Common standard of living. After the first month you need to pay that much, which amounts to 80sp per month, due on the first of each month. Adventurers cannot voluntarily spend less than this, because they are intolerant of living in more straitened circumstances. Note that this includes rations - it's not any more expensive to buy rations than it is to eat at the tavern. You do still have to determine how many you're carrying, for encumbrance purposes.
*We're using slow advancement, pg 54. However, a full continuous month lived at a Rich lifestyle (200sp per week, or 800 for the whole month) gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 6th level. A full continuous month lived at a Noble lifestyle (1,000sp per week, or 4,000 for the whole month), gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 9th level.
*You will each start with one or more rumors about the nearby Caverns of Thracia.

=Setting=
Disregard the setting as written in WWN. I dig the general vibe but I'm mostly going to be doing my own thing. The name of this world is Terminus (players in my previous campaigns may recognize the name; consider this a reboot.)

==History==
Terminus is not known to have ever had any natively intelligent life. Various intelligent beings from other places, human and otherwise, have come to settle there. It also has its own complement of extradimensional entities, beings which some might refer to as gods.

The earliest human settlers came from other worlds forgotten to the modern person. Something, however, caused a lapse in communication and logistical capability. The settlers were cut off from home. Whatever disaster occurred has cut off almost all contact with civilizations outside the solar system. Visitation by spacecraft is extremely rare and not well-known. Visitors who arrive via stranger means are, if they exist, keeping it on the down-low.

It is believed by some scholars and most small children that there are inhabited cities on the moons.

==A Hypercompressed Timeline==
So as not to engage in the fantasy world designer's great sin of just adding a bunch of zeroes onto a reasonable timeline, I'm not providing any numbers here. Think of these as the approximate ages of the world, liberally seasoned with disinformation, misunderstanding, propaganda, temporal anomalies, and genuinely antique texts from different planets that were improperly mixed into the local historical record.

*'''Era Zero: The Precursors.''' There are occasionally objects or devices (such as the Cidrian Gates or the Sublunar Machinery) which seem to correspond to some time or people before the era of the Lizard Kings. Anything that old which is still operational can be presumed to have unimaginable power and sophistication. They may have been built by prior human civilizations or by entities even further removed from our understanding. It is presumed that human colonization occurred during this era due to the fact that some of these devices appear made for beings on the approximate size and body plan of modern humanity.
*'''Era One: Early Human Colonization.''' During this period, large numbers of humans arrived on the planet via means which are not known for certain, and engaged in widespread terraforming and genetic resequencing of themselves and everything else they could get their hands on. The early colonies “failed,” in that C&C with whoever sent them was lost, and whatever early governments were established collapsed. Humans went through a period of barbaric savagery, and then got it out of their systems. There is little evidence of heavy industry during this period, indicating a break from the precursor era, which did engage in large-scale engineering.
*'''Era Two''': '''The Lizard Queens'''. The Lizardfolk were for a time the apex sophont on the planet. They built crystalline devices that ran on psionic rather than technological or magical principles, subjugated humans when they felt the need, and built ziggurats, pyramids, and canals. They revived the precursor habit of constructing Deeps, or at least cleared and restored to use a number that were already ancient. These enormous underground spaces were considered proof against enemies approaching overland or from the skies. It is believed that airborne attacks must have been a major hazard at the time. The decline in cognitive capability among lizardfolk is most likely what allowed humanity to eventually overtake them.
*'''Era Three:''' '''The Amaranthan Empire'''. This human empire rose out of a small but wealthy kingdom by a bay, where innovative magicians laid down the foundation-stones of modern sorcery. It was a darker, cruder magic that they practiced, and they were insatiable for more power. Within a handful of generations, the leaders of the Amaranthan kingdoms had as much magic in their veins as blood, and they conquered the vast majority of the world. Between their spells, and pre-Saurian technology and learning they recovered from the Deeps, they easily brought to heel the feudal human societies that arose to fill the vacuum left by the Lizard Kings.
*'''Era Four:''' '''The Hubris.''' The Amaranthans declared war on everyone and everything that would not bend the knee to their Emperor. After a hundred years of blood and fire, they lost.
*'''Era Five:''' '''The Long Dark.''' Little enough of this era is recorded. Vengeful beings of every sort preyed on humanity and dominated their cities. Much awful tribute was extracted, and the lore of the Amaranthans was destroyed whenever it could be found. The tech level at this time was definitely more medieval in character, as humans were lucky if their masters allowed them pointy sticks, in most places. This was the era of the Lex Sanguinis, codified by the Vampire Regents who ruled so many city-states. Much of the current law and custom is descended from these dark times, with appropriate adaptations.
*'''Era Six: The Thracian Hegemony'''. The Thracians began as a small group of seafaring city-states, in which a few privileged human servants formed a conspiracy. They managed to throw off the yokes of their inhuman masters and institute democracy. They rapidly became masters of the exchange of goods. Thracian civilization avoided reliance on direct sorcery, since they didn't wish to repeat the mistakes of the Amaranthans. They pursued alchemy, artifice, and technology. While they never approached the sophistication of Precursor technology, they could produce much more sophisticated machinery at scale than is possible in the current era. They were able to free most of the rest of human civilization via a combination of disaster capitalism and laser-armed airships. They also standardized weights, measures, and coinage, which standards are still used today. Currency from pre-Thracian cultures is often extremely non-standard.
*'''Era Seven: The Decapitation'''. The leaders of the Thracian Combines attempted to make treaty with the various Lunar civilizations, just as they had done to the monstrous kingdoms that had existed on the terrestrial sphere. For whatever reason (but probably because the Lunatics weren't ignorant of how this had worked out for the vampire princes, etc.), negotiations fell through, and ended in several nights of orbital bombardment. When the smoke cleared, the Thracian civilization came apart at the seams. They had always kept their leadership and industrial base centralized, to maintain their hegemony. Unfortunately, that meant it was all destroyed by the swarm of large iron meteorites that turned their five greatest cities into a morass of smoking, flooded craters. Bereft of leadership and centralized industrial production, the Thracians were raided into nonexistence by tribal or feudal peoples, monsters, and various nonhuman intelligences. Their society disintegrated, and the lore of operating their great machines and mysterious facilities became lost.
*'''Era Eight: The Age of City-States'''. You are here! Over much of the world, humanity has reorganized itself into independent and semi-independent city-states. There is trade and communication between the various civilizations, but vast waste-lands full of ruins and ancient roads occupy the space between them. Human civilization seems to be somewhat drowsy at this time in history, and the people of the world are plagued by hedonism and sybaritic boredom. Greed takes the place of ambition, and everywhere men and women take the low and easy road to comfort. Globe-spanning ambitions are distinctly out of fashion. Non-human intelligences have many thriving civilizations of their own, and so far there's so much room that large-scale conflict hasn't broken out.

==Contemporary Material Culture==
Industrial manufacturing and supply chains no longer exist. However, books and other repositories of information are still available, and it's not uncommon for people to be educated to a (real-world) modern standard, even if they can't lay hands on so much as a flashlight.

The vast majority of work is done using human or animal muscle, or relatively simple wind or water mills. That being said, the situation is not at all comparable to medieval Europe. Many technologies that have an extremely high payoff-to-effort ratio if you are already at a high Roman or Renaissance-era level of technology are still used. Movable-type printing presses are not common, but they have supplanted scriptoriums. They’re just too easy to build in comparison to how much effort they save.

The essential difficulty is that the creation of an industrial economy is a great deal of work, and nobody is really inclined to go to that kind of effort. Anyone with the resources, ambition, and will to build a steam train or an air conditioner factory is probably better off becoming an archmage and obligating their neighbors to appease them.

Further, Precursor humanity genetically engineered a variety of plants to be unnaturally useful, and those strains are still cultivated. A wide variety of food plants and several types of mushroom are known to be results of the original sequencing project; they can be easily and rapidly farmed, and are tailored to human dietary needs. For this reason, simply supplying the population with food is not the crushing burden it was in real-world medieval societies, and even impoverished areas have sufficient time for leisure and social or intellectual pursuits. There are other examples, as well, such as the Library Trees with leaves uniquely suited to paper-making.

Advanced alloys, both alchemical and mundane, are still manufactured, although not in modern quantities.

'''Summary:'''
*Individual artificers, magicians, and alchemists do produce items of enchantment or high technology, but these are rare, hand-crafted, and expensive.
*High technology as it exists in our world is rarely available and typically only in very simple configurations. A hand-held UV light might be obtainable, but a computer is out of the question.
*The advanced technology that does exist often involves large glowing synthetic gemstones, runic circuitry, and alchemical materials. Gears, moving parts, conventional batteries, and other steampunk apparatuses are relatively rare. The dividing line between magic and this sort of science can be somewhat thin at times. Consult the rules for mods in the WWN rulebook for ideas.
*The "hurlants" described on pg. 36 are available for purchase. In-setting, they're referred to as coilguns. They function via an extremely high-tension, alchemically produced metal spring, housed inside a barrel, which must be carefully wound with an integral handle before a specially made steel dart is loaded and clipped into place. Rather than the barrel being rifled, the dart is designed with a subtly helical fluting. Hand hurlants are often mounted on an arm bracer, but either may be made in a configuration similar to a modern firearm. They are, however, typically ornately carved or filigreed. They are considered a weapon of war or murder, and may not be carried openly in civilized cities. The user is expected to have them unloaded, "broken down" into components, and carried packed away. Note the AP tag on them - they ignore non-magical armor. A hand hurlant can throw its sliver of steel directly through an armored knight's breastplate and out his back. They are, therefore, especially disliked by the sorts of people wealthy enough to invest in heavy armor.

==Astronomy & Weather==
Terminus lacks the axial tilt & wobble of our own world. Seasons are caused by its eccentric and elliptical orbit. In plain terms, its distance from the sun varies sufficiently over the course of the year to produce winter and summer. This means the north and south hemisphere experience winter and summer at the same time. Terminus' magnetic poles are precisely perpendicular to the plane of orbit. It is highly likely that some intelligent agency altered these factors at some point in times ancient beyond reckoning.

Terminus has three moons in an equidistant orbit around the planet. One is nearly white, like our own, and the other two are tinted red and blue. Absent cloud cover, the night sky almost always provides a little more light than a full moon on our own Earth.

==Calendar==
There are 13 lunar months, each of exactly 28 days. There are three months in each of the seasons that would be recognizable to us - a spring, a summer, an autumn, a winter. Even without axial tilt and wobble, the nature of the seasons varies according to distance from the equator and local geography. Coastal areas are milder, areas close to the poles are colder.

The calendar of 13 months is standard almost all across the globe, at least in human civilizations. What varies is which months are counted part of which season. In general, an area with extreme conditions during one month of the year will count the "extra" month as outside of a regular season. A northern city might take the part of the year of most intense cold and count it as "Fimbulwinter," a time outside of even regular winter. An equatorial land might have the Dog Days, that month which is too hot to be placed within regular summertime. In a coastal land, the inhabitants might take the time of most intense storm activity, and name it the Monsoon Season.

The area this campaign takes place in is a Mediterranean type of climate. Due to the proximity of a large body of water, while the summers can be hellishly humid, the extremes of temperature aren't as bad as they could be.

==Languages==
The PCs start out knowing Common & Trade Cant, with additional languages per their Connect & Know skills. See pg. 28 of WWN.

*Common is a modern form of Thracian, and is the most wide-spread human language. Insular or remote human civilizations might have divergent or distinct languages.
*Trade Cant is a limited pidgin tongue commonly used in highly cosmopolitan areas or by far-traveling merchants. It's not good for higher pursuits, but has special vocabulary for economic concerns, commodities, travel & accommodations, et cetera.
*Old Thracian has about as much in common with Common as classical Latin does with modern Italian. It was the language of the last powerful and widespread human civilization.
*Amaranthan, also known as Sorcerer's Speech, is even older than Old Thracian. It was the tongue of a powerful sorcerous empire that collapsed in blood and fire.
*Lizard, or in derogatory terms "Hiss," is the language of the common lizardfolk and other reptilian intelligences. It's hard for humans to pronounce, and even harder for them to think in. The brains of the reptilian people are formed very differently to human ones. Something has gone very wrong with the lizardfolk, and 90% of them have cognitive limitations not present in their ancestors. The result is that only about 10% of them are literate in their own tongue. Note that in Lizard, humans are referred to as "Monkey Men," and their terms for our language are even more derogatory than "Hiss."
*Pelagic, or in derogatory terms "Glub," is the common language of undersea peoples. It's impossible to pronounce in atmosphere, so it can mostly only be learned underwater. Water-Adapted PCs (see pg. 27, under xeno-blooded) can learn to speak and understand this.
*Fae is the language of the various half-worlder beings. It has Seelie and Unseelie dialects, and while most people will be more familiar with one or the other, they are comprehensible to each other.
*Sign Language exists for the use of the deaf, and is also commonly used by beings for whom normal conversation is difficult. For example, a non-water-adapted human and a greater octopus might both be intelligent, but the octopus can only speak underwater, and the human can only speak in the air. If they met at the shore, they could communicate via sign, with each staying in its own preferred medium. The gestures are abstract enough for beings with significantly different anatomy, so long as they have limbs. Dolphins don't have sufficient limbs to Sign, although they can learn to understand it, but they're telepathic anyway.
*Various other species have their own languages.
*The Precursor civilization of humans presumably had their own language, but they don't seem to have written much down, or if they did, it was lost long ago.

==Random Notes==
*"Greater" creatures are intelligent forms. A Greater Octopus is therefore a sophont form of octopod. The lizardfolk are greater lizards. Nonhuman intelligences, in their own languages, would typically refer to humans as Greater Monkeys. This is a scientific or technical classification and it is rude to refer to any intelligent being in their own person this way. This is distinct from a "Dire" form, which is a larger and usually more ferocious form of a more common creature. See the classical example, the Dire Wolf. Note that nonhumans often classify Ogres as Dire Humans, which humans are not especially appreciative of in most cases.
*Human biology is rather enhanced by precursor engineering. The average lifespan, uninterrupted by disease or violence, is about 120 years, with only the last fifteen or so involving serious senescence. Most people will recover relatively fully from injuries or diseases that don't amount to amputation, and sepsis due to injuries is rare. Birth defects as we know them are unheard-of. Fertility is also optional for humans. Basically, look at the healing rules and be astonished how little medicine is required for stabbing victims.
*There are no elves & dwarves in the typical D&D sense, so the Special Origin focus is not used. The Xenoblooded focus is freely available and represents the efforts of precursor genetic engineers, passed down through the long millenia; aquatic-adapted humans are still well-known in coastal areas. The Unique Gift focus is also available, and typically represents some inheritable genetic gift.

==Nibiru==
I don't want to spend too much time on this, because the whole point of the campaign is that you aren't there. But maybe a few notes won't go too far wrong.
*There is a system of public education, welfare, and public works that is unrivaled in the world. If you don't find a useful occupation for yourself, you '''will''' be trained and pressed into service in some capacity or another.
*Nibiru has the wealth to support its people, but no room for idlers and malingerers. Literally, physical space is at a premium.
*Social stratification is severe in terms of power and resources commanded, but there are no mansions or palaces. Everyone must make use of public spaces and facilities, hence they are well-maintained.
*Security is tight. If any enemy ever penetrated to the machinery that allows peregrination, they could damage it in a way no one now living would know how to repair. Foreigners are allowed into the city itself only on an extremely limited basis. Criminal gangs are unheard of; and criminal activity is not tolerated.
*All citizens are educated to at least something resembling a high school level and then given some additional training, vocational or otherwise, unless their employment is destined to be entirely menial. For those such as the PCs who have exceptional abilities, they may have attended one of the following programs:
**The Athenaeum is a tower most like a "university" program in Nibiru. Conventional scholarly and engineering students are likely to graduate from here.
**The Scholomance is the tower dedicated to magic, both High Magic & New Magic. The individual in charge of it, known as the Rector, is a black-robed figure wearing an alabaster mask. Their true identity has not been known in centuries - it may be the same superannuated individual, or it is possible that the Chairs of the various departments are electing a new individual from time to time. The board of the scholomance is is deeply secretive, and nothing can be said with certainty.
**The Charterhouse tower trains Vowed. Charterhouse Vowed can select as their bonus skill (see pg. 86) either Exert or Sneak. PCs can take any path they wish, but the typical Charterhouse graduate works as a spy, agent, bodyguard, or assassin.
**Skull Plaza is the military school. Obviously, many people learn the combat arts in more practical ways, but the regular army goes through Skull Plaza. Note that Nibiru does not maintain cavalry of any kind. Their combat doctrines and equipment are focused on siege defense and man-to-man or small unit combat. They produce numerous skilled duelists, and marching on the city would be a death sentence for nearly any attacker, but Nibiru can't field a large army.

=Gods & Religion=
This is the part where I complain. Feel free to skim this section at most.

I don't like the way that religion and clerics are portrayed in D&D. I'm most interested in what the PCs choose to do, in pursuing their own ends. Those ends may be selfless - a character might be dedicated to justice, for example. But it should be their own choice and for their own reasons, subject to their own reevaluation. Other, more selfish motivations are certainly easy enough to understand. "I would like that large pile of gold coins to belong to me rather than whoever currently lays claim to it" and "I would prefer not to die beneath this ghost-haunted pyramid I have been abandoned in" are both immediately relatable.

This is consistent with what I would consider to be most of the essential texts of the genre. So of course D&D, in its lack of wisdom, had to make a character option to subsume PC choices and priority to some half-baked imagining of how a pantheistic religion might work, if you stripped it of all interest and cultural factors.

So we're not going to do that.

There is nothing like a D&D Cleric in this world. There are healers. There are also persons who are "high priests" or the like. The former is someone who has bent their talents to medicine. Or, in the case of the Healer partial class, someone who has devoted themselves to using psychic energy as a substitute for complex pharmaceutical substances that can no longer be manufactured. A "priest" is a social role. They may or may not be a member of a class that provides magical powers. If they are serious about relationships with supernatural beings, they may have a respectable ability with the Pray skill.

==Religion on Terminus==
Gods are a highly varied lot. There are extradimensional entities and spirits that seem to have influence over greater or lesser amounts of real estate. There are also some extremely physically real beings with supernatural powers that are more flexible or focused than the Spells and Arts available to mortal magicians. A local crocodilian river-deity, for example, may be both a physically verifiable giant crocodile, and also capable of causing or preventing flooding in the river. But, notably, ONLY their own river. A deity of some more abstract principle, such as the North Wind, might be more indeterminate and widespread in their presence.

The thing to keep in mind is that the gods are distant, weird, and inhuman, in all cases. The crocodile god is not up for a friendly chat. The North Wind was never a human, likely has no human feelings, and if it takes some anthropomorphic shape it is only as a matter of whimsy. Deities are typically not worshipped and revered in the way that a modern person in the US might imagine a religion to imply. The sailors do not love the gods of the seas. They fear them and respect them, and make offerings in the hope of improving their chances of coming home alive. Deities (in the vast majority of cases) make no guarantees or offers regarding the fate of a person's soul after death, which is a mystery, and of little concern to the typical person. Everyday matters loom larger, and death must take care of its own.

Devoted servants of deities may have some special power or another, which is typically minor and has a cost. For more serious exertions of divine power, if such a thing is desirable, the cultists will likely need to conduct some ritual. This will involve an offering, and a Pray roll from their leader. Note that the offering need not be a material object or bloodletting - some gods might look favorably on a night of frenzied dancing by at least twenty or thirty dervishes. It depends on the god and the ritual undertaken. This isn't something I expect to see a lot of in-game, since divine intervention is generally not an effective way to obtain human goals.

Anyway. Expect weird and inhuman genius loci, snake cults, and sui generis beings of cosmic horror, not some kind of benevolent god of farming with an organized and hierarchical temple structure.

==Alignment==
These game rules don't make use of alignment, so it's not a thing on the character sheet. You should know that my preference, though, which informs the cosmic background of the world, is law vs. chaos rather than good vs. evil. Conditions of extreme law or extreme chaos are not survivable for human beings - the large central curve of neutrality is the only zone humans can inhabit. As such, PCs don't need alignments. The gods and other beings may have be aligned with law or chaos. Their machinations are equally dangerous to human life.

==Known Deities==
I dunno, I'll put some stuff here eventually.

=Links=

Caverns Without Number

2022-07-16T04:30:08Z

The Wyzard: /* Contemporary Material Culture */

This is a page for the Caverns of Thracia game, run by The Wyzard using Worlds Without Number. Its content is tentative.

'''Before we start:''' Combat is intended to be a little more interesting than normal B/X. I strongly suggest that you all familiarize yourself with how Shock Damage works, and secondarily with how the combat maneuvers work. Shock Damage is going to mess you up if you aren't ready for it.

[[File:GMG4615-Thracia-455x600.jpg]]

=The Adventurers=
==Basic Wiki Practice==
I'm used to keeping information on my campaigns on a wiki. Some of you may not be used to this. Your character sheet is the first challenge you will face! Please ask for help on the discord if you aren't familiar with this stuff. So here is what you do, in order:
*Make a wiki account if you can't just log in with your regular RPGnet account, I can't remember.
*Anyway, be logged into the wiki.
*Open the sample character sheet in a new tab.
*Then hit "Edit" on this section (The Adventurers.)
*You can see the double-brackets around "Fill This In Yourself." Those double brackets will make a link to another wiki page, and the title will be whatever is the text inside the double brackets. You're going to put your character's name in there. Your character's name should be sufficiently unusual that there isn't already a PC somewhere on the wiki with that name. A good formula is something like (Name) the (Descriptor), where the descriptor is either some literal or figurative detail about the character. Maybe your character is Jeanette the Ravensworn, and you don't know what Ravensworn is yet. That's fine, maybe we'll find out!
*Save your edit and click on the new link that is your character's name.
*Now, hit the Edit button on the sample character sheet.
*Hit CTRL-A to select all text in the editing window. Then CTRL-C to copy it. Then close the window on the sample character sheet because you don't actually want to change it.
*Now hid the Edit button on YOUR character sheet, and paste in all the text from the sample one.
*Now fill in all the details.
*This sounds like a lot when I break it down like this, but honestly it takes seconds and I will probably do it for you during Session Zero.
==Dramatis Personae==
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[WWN Sample Character Sheet]]

=Introduction=
The greatest city of the world, in terms of cosmopolitan fun, wealth, and knowledge, is Nibiru, the Peregrinate Acropolis. A heavily fortified castle-city built on a large stone mesa, it has the look of a vast ziggurat capped with a wonder of colorful towers. The undercity inside the mesa is a maze of carved and worked tunnels, warehouses, reservoirs, and hidden temples. The lower levels of the city are a chaos of tenements, manufactories, brightly tiled plazas, and cafeterias. The vast towers contain luxury apartments for the rich, in addition to colleges, libraries, laboratories, training halls and so forth. The outer walls are dotted with fortifications, weapon emplacements, signal towers, and windmills that power various machinery, particularly water pumps. Real estate is tremendously valuable, most people live in spaces little larger than a walk-in closet. Hence the desperate need for the public bathhouses and cafeteria-style restaurants that support the life and hygiene of the city - there simply isn't space for people to have their own kitchens and so forth.

What makes Nibiru so wealthy and influential, such a center of knowledge, is that it moves. Every week, the city disappears in vast cloud of opaque fog, and reappears somewhere else on Terminus. The engines that accomplish this have been carefully maintained for centuries, so that it has functioned without interruption. It peregrinates along a semi-regular trade route, with space built into the schedule for necessary or opportunistic deviations, and a cadre of mages, merchants, and scholars of economics carefully plot its course for maximum advantage. Wherever it lands, the vast trading apparatus fires up into action. Enormous loads of commodities and rarer goods are sold to local merchant houses, wherever the city might land. The vast caverns of the undercity can carry an amount of cargo beyond imagination. The limiting factor is how much of it can be hauled out and traded for new goods, which must in their turn be loaded within six days.

You are natives of this city - you have the invisible, UV-reactive tattoo of a citizen in at least three places on your body. This marks you as one of the exalted, an individual with the right to enter the city's gates and remain within the confines as it peregrinates. Even the meanest beggar who is a citizen of Nibiru has something that the wealth of an emperor might not purchase. And, like all natives, you know the rule - the first six days are for business, but the seventh is a day of rest. No one leaves the city on the seventh day, or lingers outside for even one second beyond midnight of the sixth. The risk of being left behind is just too high.

Guess how you fucked up?

==The Local Environment==
It's early spring and you're probably going to be stuck here for about the next year, until Nibiru returns and you can get home. The city-state of Amarna is located on a fertile river delta that empties into a sea. That's where Nibiru came to rest. The area around the great river is a green and well-developed valley, with large towns and farming villages served by a regular geometric pattern of irrigation channels. To the east, about a day's walk down the coast, is a small semi-fortified city named Tjaru, in an undesirable and swampy region. It is used as a place of exile for criminals and the disgraced. That's where you've currently ended up. And you've heard rumors of a recently-discovered Deep, one of the vast underground fastnesses built by various ancient civilizations.

Deeps are dangerous, in ways both mundane and exotic. However, they frequently contain raw wealth left behind by the Ancients. Also, the even more precious sorcerous, alchemical, or technological artifacts that they seem to have had such a panoply of. This would be an outstanding way to support yourselves for the next year. And, if you're lucky, you might go beyond supporting yourself in reasonable style, and find that you've recovered something valuable enough to earn a higher station in Nibiru.

==Distance & Timekeeping==
I'll eventually post a hexmap with some local points of interest and so forth, but I don't envision hexcrawling or the like to be a major component. You're going to be in a relatively civilized area, albeit on the very edge of it. You won't need to make wilderness encounter checks to get to the dungeon and back.

My assumption is that you'll be largely based in Tjaru. My thought is that rather than keep strict track of days, a single delve (which might span multiple sessions) will just cross a week off the calendar, and we'll assume that resting, re-equipping, and so forth takes about that long. The dungeon is going to be maybe two hour's walk from Tjaru, so you can go out there, screw around for a while, and still get back before dark.

==Questions for Session Zero==
*Anything anybody definitely wants to see
*Anything anyone definitely doesn't want to see, particularly in terms of "does anything already on this wiki bother someone a lot?"
*Lines & Veils or whatever, PM me if you have to
*I don't intend the game to include explicit sexual content, and even the implication of sexual violence is right out
*I actually find some of the gene-modified human strains in WWN to be kind of interesting, but they might be too problematic, I dunno, opinions?
*

=Encumbrance & Beasts of Burden=
WWN's encumbrance system is simple enough that I'm not sure we'll actually need this section, but I included it as a matter of habit. Note that every full 100 coins counts as an item. Count normal gems as a single coin. Jewelry and small art objects are counted as a bulk good - you can pack together three items such as carved ivory necklaces, jade hairbrushes, jeweled crowns, rings, etc. I'll let you know about larger art objects.
==The Pocket Change Rule==
Your first up-to-100-coins worth of regular coins and gems do not count towards encumbrance, so long as they're yours alone. Found treasure is tracked separately until you return to civilization, such as it is.
==The Bling Rule==
The PCs may ignore the encumbrance requirements of jewelry if they simply wear the jewelry openly, within reason. No more than a single crown at a time, etc. This has two downsides: If you are presently in a Deep, you may find out an object is cursed at a most inconvenient time. Secondly, your enemies may become ravenously motivated to relieve you of those items. Morale is an important component of combat in this game, and if you are draped in the wealth of nations, then opponents may get a morale bonus.

=NPCs=

=Notes & Logs=

=Maps=

=House Rules & Character Creation=

==Character Creation & Advancement==
*Don't come with a character concept, we'll create characters in a session zero. It's okay to have a few vague ideas just so we don't have to look up too much.
*For attributes, arrange the following array to taste: 14, 12, 11, 10, 9, and 7. See pg. 8.
*When you pick a background, you get a free skill associated with it at level 0. Then, make a total of three rolls on the growth or learning table for your background.
*Choose a class. We're only using the classes available in the free version. However, the odder partial classes are available.
*Note that I don't like the Cleric class in D&D for complicated reasons, so please don't try to emulate one in terms of being a dedicated servant of a god. If you want to play a Healer (one of the partial classes) you certainly can, but I don't have a sense as to whether one is strictly necessary. PCs can die in this game but I'm probably going to tone down the "if you fail this save you die" kind of stuff.
*Assume you roll a 6 on your hit die.
*Skip the equipment step, read up on the languages stuff on this wiki.
*Everyone levels up twice. We start at level 3. Assume you roll a 4 on these two hit dice.
*You can start with 1,000 silver pieces worth of equipment. Note that this game is on a silver standard. If you want one of the packages on page 29, assume it's 100 silver pieces for any of the packages. No swapping or whatever. Discard any money you didn't spend on equipment.
*For ready cash, you each start with 3d6 gold, 3d20 silver, and 1d4+1 gems worth 50 sp apiece.
*Your first month of living expenses is prepaid, at a Common standard of living. After the first month you need to pay that much, which amounts to 80sp per month, due on the first of each month. Adventurers cannot voluntarily spend less than this, because they are intolerant of living in more straitened circumstances. Note that this includes rations - it's not any more expensive to buy rations than it is to eat at the tavern. You do still have to determine how many you're carrying, for encumbrance purposes.
*We're using slow advancement, pg 54. However, a full continuous month lived at a Rich lifestyle (200sp per week, or 800 for the whole month) gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 6th level. A full continuous month lived at a Noble lifestyle (1,000sp per week, or 4,000 for the whole month), gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 9th level.
*You will each start with one or more rumors about the nearby Caverns of Thracia.

=Setting=
Disregard the setting as written in WWN. I dig the general vibe but I'm mostly going to be doing my own thing. The name of this world is Terminus (players in my previous campaigns may recognize the name; consider this a reboot.)

==History==
Terminus is not known to have ever had any natively intelligent life. Various intelligent beings from other places, human and otherwise, have come to settle there. It also has its own complement of extradimensional entities, beings which some might refer to as gods.

The earliest human settlers came from other worlds forgotten to the modern person. Something, however, caused a lapse in communication and logistical capability. The settlers were cut off from home. Whatever disaster occurred has cut off almost all contact with civilizations outside the solar system. Visitation by spacecraft is extremely rare and not well-known. Visitors who arrive via stranger means are, if they exist, keeping it on the down-low.

It is believed by some scholars and most small children that there are inhabited cities on the moons.

==A Hypercompressed Timeline==
So as not to engage in the fantasy world designer's great sin of just adding a bunch of zeroes onto a reasonable timeline, I'm not providing any numbers here. Think of these as the approximate ages of the world, liberally seasoned with disinformation, misunderstanding, propaganda, temporal anomalies, and genuinely antique texts from different planets that were improperly mixed into the local historical record.

*'''Era Zero: The Precursors.''' There are occasionally objects or devices (such as the Cidrian Gates or the Sublunar Machinery) which seem to correspond to some time or people before the era of the Lizard Kings. Anything that old which is still operational can be presumed to have unimaginable power and sophistication. They may have been built by prior human civilizations or by entities even further removed from our understanding. It is presumed that human colonization occurred during this era due to the fact that some of these devices appear made for beings on the approximate size and body plan of modern humanity.
*'''Era One: Early Human Colonization.''' During this period, large numbers of humans arrived on the planet via means which are not known for certain, and engaged in widespread terraforming and genetic resequencing of themselves and everything else they could get their hands on. The early colonies “failed,” in that C&C with whoever sent them was lost, and whatever early governments were established collapsed. Humans went through a period of barbaric savagery, and then got it out of their systems. There is little evidence of heavy industry during this period, indicating a break from the precursor era, which did engage in large-scale engineering.
*'''Era Two''': '''The Lizard Queens'''. The Lizardfolk were for a time the apex sophont on the planet. They built crystalline devices that ran on psionic rather than technological or magical principles, subjugated humans when they felt the need, and built ziggurats, pyramids, and canals. They revived the precursor habit of constructing Deeps, or at least cleared and restored to use a number that were already ancient. These enormous underground spaces were considered proof against enemies approaching overland or from the skies. It is believed that airborne attacks must have been a major hazard at the time. The decline in cognitive capability among lizardfolk is most likely what allowed humanity to eventually overtake them.
*'''Era Three:''' '''The Amaranthan Empire'''. This human empire rose out of a small but wealthy kingdom by a bay, where innovative magicians laid down the foundation-stones of modern sorcery. It was a darker, cruder magic that they practiced, and they were insatiable for more power. Within a handful of generations, the leaders of the Amaranthan kingdoms had as much magic in their veins as blood, and they conquered the vast majority of the world. Between their spells, and pre-Saurian technology and learning they recovered from the Deeps, they easily brought to heel the feudal human societies that arose to fill the vacuum left by the Lizard Kings.
*'''Era Four:''' '''The Hubris.''' The Amaranthans declared war on everyone and everything that would not bend the knee to their Emperor. After a hundred years of blood and fire, they lost.
*'''Era Five:''' '''The Long Dark.''' Little enough of this era is recorded. Vengeful beings of every sort preyed on humanity and dominated their cities. Much awful tribute was extracted, and the lore of the Amaranthans was destroyed whenever it could be found. The tech level at this time was definitely more medieval in character, as humans were lucky if their masters allowed them pointy sticks, in most places. This was the era of the Lex Sanguinis, codified by the Vampire Regents who ruled so many city-states. Much of the current law and custom is descended from these dark times, with appropriate adaptations.
*'''Era Six: The Thracian Hegemony'''. The Thracians began as a small group of seafaring city-states, in which a few privileged human servants formed a conspiracy. They managed to throw off the yokes of their inhuman masters and institute democracy. They rapidly became masters of the exchange of goods. Thracian civilization avoided reliance on direct sorcery, since they didn't wish to repeat the mistakes of the Amaranthans. They pursued alchemy, artifice, and technology. While they never approached the sophistication of Precursor technology, they could produce much more sophisticated machinery at scale than is possible in the current era. They were able to free most of the rest of human civilization via a combination of disaster capitalism and laser-armed airships. They also standardized weights, measures, and coinage, which standards are still used today. Currency from pre-Thracian cultures is often extremely non-standard.
*'''Era Seven: The Decapitation'''. The leaders of the Thracian Combines attempted to make treaty with the various Lunar civilizations, just as they had done to the monstrous kingdoms that had existed on the terrestrial sphere. For whatever reason (but probably because the Lunatics weren't ignorant of how this had worked out for the vampire princes, etc.), negotiations fell through, and ended in several nights of orbital bombardment. When the smoke cleared, the Thracian civilization came apart at the seams. They had always kept their leadership and industrial base centralized, to maintain their hegemony. Unfortunately, that meant it was all destroyed by the swarm of large iron meteorites that turned their five greatest cities into a morass of smoking, flooded craters. Bereft of leadership and centralized industrial production, the Thracians were raided into nonexistence by tribal or feudal peoples, monsters, and various nonhuman intelligences. Their society disintegrated, and the lore of operating their great machines and mysterious facilities became lost.
*'''Era Eight: The Age of City-States'''. You are here! Over much of the world, humanity has reorganized itself into independent and semi-independent city-states. There is trade and communication between the various civilizations, but vast waste-lands full of ruins and ancient roads occupy the space between them. Human civilization seems to be somewhat drowsy at this time in history, and the people of the world are plagued by hedonism and sybaritic boredom. Greed takes the place of ambition, and everywhere men and women take the low and easy road to comfort. Globe-spanning ambitions are distinctly out of fashion. Non-human intelligences have many thriving civilizations of their own, and so far there's so much room that large-scale conflict hasn't broken out.

==Contemporary Material Culture==
Industrial manufacturing and supply chains no longer exist. However, books and other repositories of information are still available, and it's not uncommon for people to be educated to a (real-world) modern standard, even if they can't lay hands on so much as a flashlight.

The vast majority of work is done using human or animal muscle, or relatively simple wind or water mills. That being said, the situation is not at all comparable to medieval Europe. Many technologies that have an extremely high payoff-to-effort ratio if you are already at a high Roman or Renaissance-era level of technology are still used. Movable-type printing presses are not common, but they have supplanted scriptoriums. They’re just too easy to build in comparison to how much effort they save.

The essential difficulty is that the creation of an industrial economy is a great deal of work, and nobody is really inclined to go to that kind of effort. Anyone with the resources, ambition, and will to build a steam train or an air conditioner factory is probably better off becoming an archmage and obligating their neighbors to appease them.

Further, Precursor humanity genetically engineered a variety of plants to be unnaturally useful, and those strains are still cultivated. A wide variety of food plants and several types of mushroom are known to be results of the original sequencing project; they can be easily and rapidly farmed, and are tailored to human dietary needs. For this reason, simply supplying the population with food is not the crushing burden it was in real-world medieval societies, and even impoverished areas have sufficient time for leisure and social or intellectual pursuits. There are other examples, as well, such as the Library Trees with leaves uniquely suited to paper-making.

Advanced alloys, both alchemical and mundane, are still manufactured, although not in modern quantities.

'''Summary:'''
*Individual artificers, magicians, and alchemists do produce items of enchantment or high technology, but these are rare, hand-crafted, and expensive.
*High technology as it exists in our world is rarely available and typically only in very simple configurations. A hand-held UV light might be obtainable, but a computer is out of the question.
*The advanced technology that does exist often involves large glowing synthetic gemstones, runic circuitry, and alchemical materials. Gears, moving parts, conventional batteries, and other steampunk apparatuses are relatively rare. The dividing line between magic and this sort of science can be somewhat thin at times. Consult the rules for mods in the WWN rulebook for ideas.
*The "hurlants" described on pg. 36 are available for purchase. In-setting, they're referred to as coilguns. They function via an extremely high-tension, alchemically produced metal spring, housed inside a barrel, which must be carefully wound with an integral handle before a specially made steel dart is loaded and clipped into place. Rather than the barrel being rifled, the dart is designed with a subtly helical fluting. Hand hurlants are often mounted on an arm bracer, but either may be made in a configuration similar to a modern firearm. They are, however, typically ornately carved or filigreed. They are considered a weapon of war or murder, and may not be carried openly in civilized cities. The user is expected to have them unloaded, "broken down" into components, and carried packed away. Note the AP tag on them - they ignore non-magical armor. A hand hurlant can throw its sliver of steel directly through an armored knight's breastplate and out his back. They are, therefore, especially disliked by the sorts of people wealthy enough to invest in heavy armor.

==Astronomy & Weather==
Terminus lacks the axial tilt & wobble of our own world. Seasons are caused by its eccentric and elliptical orbit. In plain terms, its distance from the sun varies sufficiently over the course of the year to produce winter and summer. This means the north and south hemisphere experience winter and summer at the same time. Terminus' magnetic poles are precisely perpendicular to the plane of orbit. It is highly likely that some intelligent agency altered these factors at some point in times ancient beyond reckoning.

Terminus has three moons in an equidistant orbit around the planet. One is nearly white, like our own, and the other two are tinted red and blue. Absent cloud cover, the night sky almost always provides a little more light than a full moon on our own Earth.

==Calendar==
There are 13 lunar months, each of exactly 28 days. There are three months in each of the seasons that would be recognizable to us - a spring, a summer, an autumn, a winter. Even without axial tilt and wobble, the nature of the seasons varies according to distance from the equator and local geography. Coastal areas are milder, areas close to the poles are colder.

The calendar of 13 months is standard almost all across the globe, at least in human civilizations. What varies is which months are counted part of which season. In general, an area with extreme conditions during one month of the year will count the "extra" month as outside of a regular season. A northern city might take the part of the year of most intense cold and count it as "Fimbulwinter," a time outside of even regular winter. An equatorial land might have the Dog Days, that month which is too hot to be placed within regular summertime. In a coastal land, the inhabitants might take the time of most intense storm activity, and name it the Monsoon Season.

The area this campaign takes place in is a Mediterranean type of climate. Due to the proximity of a large body of water, while the summers can be hellishly humid, the extremes of temperature aren't as bad as they could be.

==Languages==
The PCs start out knowing Common & Trade Cant, with additional languages per their Connect & Know skills. See pg. 28 of WWN.

*Common is a modern form of Thracian, and is the most wide-spread human language. Insular or remote human civilizations might have divergent or distinct languages.
*Trade Cant is a limited pidgin tongue commonly used in highly cosmopolitan areas or by far-traveling merchants. It's not good for higher pursuits, but has special vocabulary for economic concerns, commodities, travel & accommodations, et cetera.
*Old Thracian has about as much in common with Common as classical Latin does with modern Italian. It was the language of the last powerful and widespread human civilization.
*Amaranthan, also known as Sorcerer's Speech, is even older than Old Thracian. It was the tongue of a powerful sorcerous empire that collapsed in blood and fire.
*Lizard, or in derogatory terms "Hiss," is the language of the common lizardfolk and other reptilian intelligences. It's hard for humans to pronounce, and even harder for them to think in. The brains of the reptilian people are formed very differently to human ones. Something has gone very wrong with the lizardfolk, and 90% of them have cognitive limitations not present in their ancestors. The result is that only about 10% of them are literate in their own tongue. Note that in Lizard, humans are referred to as "Monkey Men," and their terms for our language are even more derogatory than "Hiss."
*Pelagic, or in derogatory terms "Glub," is the common language of undersea peoples. It's impossible to pronounce in atmosphere, so it can mostly only be learned underwater. Water-Adapted PCs (see pg. 27, under xeno-blooded) can learn to speak and understand this.
*Fae is the language of the various half-worlder beings. It has Seelie and Unseelie dialects, and while most people will be more familiar with one or the other, they are comprehensible to each other.
*Sign Language exists for the use of the deaf, and is also commonly used by beings for whom normal conversation is difficult. For example, a non-water-adapted human and a greater octopus might both be intelligent, but the octopus can only speak underwater, and the human can only speak in the air. If they met at the shore, they could communicate via sign, with each staying in its own preferred medium. The gestures are abstract enough for beings with significantly different anatomy, so long as they have limbs. Dolphins don't have sufficient limbs to Sign, although they can learn to understand it, but they're telepathic anyway.
*Various other species have their own languages.
*The Precursor civilization of humans presumably had their own language, but they don't seem to have written much down, or if they did, it was lost long ago.

==Random Notes==
*"Greater" creatures are intelligent forms. A Greater Octopus is therefore a sophont form of octopod. The lizardfolk are greater lizards. Nonhuman intelligences, in their own languages, would typically refer to humans as Greater Monkeys. This is a scientific or technical classification and it is rude to refer to any intelligent being in their own person this way. This is distinct from a "Dire" form, which is a larger and usually more ferocious form of a more common creature. See the classical example, the Dire Wolf. Note that nonhumans often classify Ogres as Dire Humans, which humans are not especially appreciative of in most cases.
*Human biology is rather enhanced by precursor engineering. The average lifespan, uninterrupted by disease or violence, is about 120 years, with only the last fifteen or so involving serious senescence. Most people will recover relatively fully from injuries or diseases that don't amount to amputation, and sepsis due to injuries is rare. Birth defects as we know them are unheard-of. Fertility is also optional for humans. Basically, look at the healing rules and be astonished how little medicine is required for stabbing victims.
*There are no elves & dwarves in the typical D&D sense, so the Special Origin focus is not used. The Xenoblooded focus is freely available and represents the efforts of precursor genetic engineers, passed down through the long millenia; aquatic-adapted humans are still well-known in coastal areas. The Unique Gift focus is also available, and typically represents some inheritable genetic gift.

==Nibiru==
I don't want to spend too much time on this, because the whole point of the campaign is that you aren't there. But maybe a few notes won't go too far wrong.
*There is a system of public education, welfare, and public works that is unrivaled in the world. If you don't find a useful occupation for yourself, you '''will''' be trained and pressed into service in some capacity or another.
*Nibiru has the wealth to support its people, but no room for idlers and malingerers. Literally, physical space is at a premium.
*Social stratification is severe in terms of power and resources commanded, but there are no mansions or palaces. Everyone must make use of public spaces and facilities, hence they are well-maintained.
*Security is tight. If any enemy ever penetrated to the machinery that allows peregrination, they could damage it in a way no one now living would know how to repair. Foreigners are allowed into the city itself only on an extremely limited basis. Criminal gangs are unheard of; and criminal activity is not tolerated.
*All citizens are educated to at least something resembling a high school level and then given some additional training, vocational or otherwise, unless their employment is destined to be entirely menial. For those such as the PCs who have exceptional abilities, they may have attended one of the following programs:
**The Athenaeum is a tower most like a "university" program in Nibiru. Conventional scholarly and engineering students are likely to graduate from here.
**The Scholomance is the tower dedicated to magic, both High Magic & New Magic. The individual in charge of it, known as the Rector, is a black-robed figure wearing an alabaster mask. Their true identity has not been known in centuries - it may be the same superannuated individual, or it is possible that the Chairs of the various departments are electing a new individual from time to time. The board of the scholomance is is deeply secretive, and nothing can be said with certainty.
**The Charterhouse tower trains Vowed. Charterhouse Vowed can select as their bonus skill (see pg. 86) either Exert or Sneak. PCs can take any path they wish, but the typical Charterhouse graduate works as a spy, agent, bodyguard, or assassin.
**Skull Plaza is the military school. Obviously, many people learn the combat arts in more practical ways, but the regular army goes through Skull Plaza. Note that Nibiru does not maintain cavalry of any kind. Their combat doctrines and equipment are focused on siege defense and man-to-man or small unit combat. They produce numerous skilled duelists, and marching on the city would be a death sentence for nearly any attacker, but Nibiru can't field a large army.

=Gods & Religion=
This is the part where I complain. Feel free to skim this section at most.

I don't like the way that religion and clerics are portrayed in D&D. I'm most interested in what the PCs choose to do, in pursuing their own ends. Those ends may be selfless - a character might be dedicated to justice, for example. But it should be their own choice and for their own reasons, subject to their own reevaluation. Other, more selfish motivations are certainly easy enough to understand. "I would like that large pile of gold coins to belong to me rather than whoever currently lays claim to it" and "I would prefer not to die beneath this ghost-haunted pyramid I have been abandoned in" are both immediately relatable.

This is consistent with what I would consider to be most of the essential texts of the genre. So of course D&D, in its lack of wisdom, had to make a character option to subsume PC choices and priority to some half-baked imagining of how a pantheistic religion might work, if you stripped it of all interest and cultural factors.

So we're not going to do that.

There is nothing like a D&D Cleric in this world. There are healers. There are also persons who are "high priests" or the like. The former is someone who has bent their talents to medicine. Or, in the case of the Healer partial class, someone who has devoted themselves to using psychic energy as a substitute for complex pharmaceutical substances that can no longer be manufactured. A "priest" is a social role. They may or may not be a member of a class that provides magical powers. If they are serious about relationships with supernatural beings, they may have a respectable ability with the Pray skill.

==Religion on Terminus==
Gods are a highly varied lot. There are extradimensional entities and spirits that seem to have influence over greater or lesser amounts of real estate. There are also some extremely physically real beings with supernatural powers that are more flexible or focused than the Spells and Arts available to mortal magicians. A local crocodilian river-deity, for example, may be both a physically verifiable giant crocodile, and also capable of causing or preventing flooding in the river. But, notably, ONLY their own river. A deity of some more abstract principle, such as the North Wind, might be more indeterminate and widespread in their presence.

The thing to keep in mind is that the gods are distant, weird, and inhuman, in all cases. The crocodile god is not up for a friendly chat. The North Wind was never a human, likely has no human feelings, and if it takes some anthropomorphic shape it is only as a matter of whimsy. Deities are typically not worshipped and revered in the way that a modern person in the US might imagine a religion to imply. The sailors do not love the gods of the seas. They fear them and respect them, and make offerings in the hope of improving their chances of coming home alive. Deities (in the vast majority of cases) make no guarantees or offers regarding the fate of a person's soul after death, which is a mystery, and of little concern to the typical person. Everyday matters loom larger, and death must take care of its own.

Devoted servants of deities may have some special power or another, which is typically minor and has a cost. For more serious exertions of divine power, if such a thing is desirable, the cultists will likely need to conduct some ritual. This will involve an offering, and a Pray roll from their leader. Note that the offering need not be a material object or bloodletting - some gods might look favorably on a night of frenzied dancing by at least twenty or thirty dervishes. It depends on the god and the ritual undertaken. This isn't something I expect to see a lot of in-game, since divine intervention is generally not an effective way to obtain human goals.

Anyway. Expect weird and inhuman genius loci, snake cults, and sui generis beings of cosmic horror, not some kind of benevolent god of farming with an organized and hierarchical temple structure.

==Known Deities==
I dunno, I'll put some stuff here eventually.

=Links=

Caverns Without Number

2022-07-16T04:22:50Z

The Wyzard: /* The Local Environment */

This is a page for the Caverns of Thracia game, run by The Wyzard using Worlds Without Number. Its content is tentative.

'''Before we start:''' Combat is intended to be a little more interesting than normal B/X. I strongly suggest that you all familiarize yourself with how Shock Damage works, and secondarily with how the combat maneuvers work. Shock Damage is going to mess you up if you aren't ready for it.

[[File:GMG4615-Thracia-455x600.jpg]]

=The Adventurers=
==Basic Wiki Practice==
I'm used to keeping information on my campaigns on a wiki. Some of you may not be used to this. Your character sheet is the first challenge you will face! Please ask for help on the discord if you aren't familiar with this stuff. So here is what you do, in order:
*Make a wiki account if you can't just log in with your regular RPGnet account, I can't remember.
*Anyway, be logged into the wiki.
*Open the sample character sheet in a new tab.
*Then hit "Edit" on this section (The Adventurers.)
*You can see the double-brackets around "Fill This In Yourself." Those double brackets will make a link to another wiki page, and the title will be whatever is the text inside the double brackets. You're going to put your character's name in there. Your character's name should be sufficiently unusual that there isn't already a PC somewhere on the wiki with that name. A good formula is something like (Name) the (Descriptor), where the descriptor is either some literal or figurative detail about the character. Maybe your character is Jeanette the Ravensworn, and you don't know what Ravensworn is yet. That's fine, maybe we'll find out!
*Save your edit and click on the new link that is your character's name.
*Now, hit the Edit button on the sample character sheet.
*Hit CTRL-A to select all text in the editing window. Then CTRL-C to copy it. Then close the window on the sample character sheet because you don't actually want to change it.
*Now hid the Edit button on YOUR character sheet, and paste in all the text from the sample one.
*Now fill in all the details.
*This sounds like a lot when I break it down like this, but honestly it takes seconds and I will probably do it for you during Session Zero.
==Dramatis Personae==
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[WWN Sample Character Sheet]]

=Introduction=
The greatest city of the world, in terms of cosmopolitan fun, wealth, and knowledge, is Nibiru, the Peregrinate Acropolis. A heavily fortified castle-city built on a large stone mesa, it has the look of a vast ziggurat capped with a wonder of colorful towers. The undercity inside the mesa is a maze of carved and worked tunnels, warehouses, reservoirs, and hidden temples. The lower levels of the city are a chaos of tenements, manufactories, brightly tiled plazas, and cafeterias. The vast towers contain luxury apartments for the rich, in addition to colleges, libraries, laboratories, training halls and so forth. The outer walls are dotted with fortifications, weapon emplacements, signal towers, and windmills that power various machinery, particularly water pumps. Real estate is tremendously valuable, most people live in spaces little larger than a walk-in closet. Hence the desperate need for the public bathhouses and cafeteria-style restaurants that support the life and hygiene of the city - there simply isn't space for people to have their own kitchens and so forth.

What makes Nibiru so wealthy and influential, such a center of knowledge, is that it moves. Every week, the city disappears in vast cloud of opaque fog, and reappears somewhere else on Terminus. The engines that accomplish this have been carefully maintained for centuries, so that it has functioned without interruption. It peregrinates along a semi-regular trade route, with space built into the schedule for necessary or opportunistic deviations, and a cadre of mages, merchants, and scholars of economics carefully plot its course for maximum advantage. Wherever it lands, the vast trading apparatus fires up into action. Enormous loads of commodities and rarer goods are sold to local merchant houses, wherever the city might land. The vast caverns of the undercity can carry an amount of cargo beyond imagination. The limiting factor is how much of it can be hauled out and traded for new goods, which must in their turn be loaded within six days.

You are natives of this city - you have the invisible, UV-reactive tattoo of a citizen in at least three places on your body. This marks you as one of the exalted, an individual with the right to enter the city's gates and remain within the confines as it peregrinates. Even the meanest beggar who is a citizen of Nibiru has something that the wealth of an emperor might not purchase. And, like all natives, you know the rule - the first six days are for business, but the seventh is a day of rest. No one leaves the city on the seventh day, or lingers outside for even one second beyond midnight of the sixth. The risk of being left behind is just too high.

Guess how you fucked up?

==The Local Environment==
It's early spring and you're probably going to be stuck here for about the next year, until Nibiru returns and you can get home. The city-state of Amarna is located on a fertile river delta that empties into a sea. That's where Nibiru came to rest. The area around the great river is a green and well-developed valley, with large towns and farming villages served by a regular geometric pattern of irrigation channels. To the east, about a day's walk down the coast, is a small semi-fortified city named Tjaru, in an undesirable and swampy region. It is used as a place of exile for criminals and the disgraced. That's where you've currently ended up. And you've heard rumors of a recently-discovered Deep, one of the vast underground fastnesses built by various ancient civilizations.

Deeps are dangerous, in ways both mundane and exotic. However, they frequently contain raw wealth left behind by the Ancients. Also, the even more precious sorcerous, alchemical, or technological artifacts that they seem to have had such a panoply of. This would be an outstanding way to support yourselves for the next year. And, if you're lucky, you might go beyond supporting yourself in reasonable style, and find that you've recovered something valuable enough to earn a higher station in Nibiru.

==Distance & Timekeeping==
I'll eventually post a hexmap with some local points of interest and so forth, but I don't envision hexcrawling or the like to be a major component. You're going to be in a relatively civilized area, albeit on the very edge of it. You won't need to make wilderness encounter checks to get to the dungeon and back.

My assumption is that you'll be largely based in Tjaru. My thought is that rather than keep strict track of days, a single delve (which might span multiple sessions) will just cross a week off the calendar, and we'll assume that resting, re-equipping, and so forth takes about that long. The dungeon is going to be maybe two hour's walk from Tjaru, so you can go out there, screw around for a while, and still get back before dark.

==Questions for Session Zero==
*Anything anybody definitely wants to see
*Anything anyone definitely doesn't want to see, particularly in terms of "does anything already on this wiki bother someone a lot?"
*Lines & Veils or whatever, PM me if you have to
*I don't intend the game to include explicit sexual content, and even the implication of sexual violence is right out
*I actually find some of the gene-modified human strains in WWN to be kind of interesting, but they might be too problematic, I dunno, opinions?
*

=Encumbrance & Beasts of Burden=
WWN's encumbrance system is simple enough that I'm not sure we'll actually need this section, but I included it as a matter of habit. Note that every full 100 coins counts as an item. Count normal gems as a single coin. Jewelry and small art objects are counted as a bulk good - you can pack together three items such as carved ivory necklaces, jade hairbrushes, jeweled crowns, rings, etc. I'll let you know about larger art objects.
==The Pocket Change Rule==
Your first up-to-100-coins worth of regular coins and gems do not count towards encumbrance, so long as they're yours alone. Found treasure is tracked separately until you return to civilization, such as it is.
==The Bling Rule==
The PCs may ignore the encumbrance requirements of jewelry if they simply wear the jewelry openly, within reason. No more than a single crown at a time, etc. This has two downsides: If you are presently in a Deep, you may find out an object is cursed at a most inconvenient time. Secondly, your enemies may become ravenously motivated to relieve you of those items. Morale is an important component of combat in this game, and if you are draped in the wealth of nations, then opponents may get a morale bonus.

=NPCs=

=Notes & Logs=

=Maps=

=House Rules & Character Creation=

==Character Creation & Advancement==
*Don't come with a character concept, we'll create characters in a session zero. It's okay to have a few vague ideas just so we don't have to look up too much.
*For attributes, arrange the following array to taste: 14, 12, 11, 10, 9, and 7. See pg. 8.
*When you pick a background, you get a free skill associated with it at level 0. Then, make a total of three rolls on the growth or learning table for your background.
*Choose a class. We're only using the classes available in the free version. However, the odder partial classes are available.
*Note that I don't like the Cleric class in D&D for complicated reasons, so please don't try to emulate one in terms of being a dedicated servant of a god. If you want to play a Healer (one of the partial classes) you certainly can, but I don't have a sense as to whether one is strictly necessary. PCs can die in this game but I'm probably going to tone down the "if you fail this save you die" kind of stuff.
*Assume you roll a 6 on your hit die.
*Skip the equipment step, read up on the languages stuff on this wiki.
*Everyone levels up twice. We start at level 3. Assume you roll a 4 on these two hit dice.
*You can start with 1,000 silver pieces worth of equipment. Note that this game is on a silver standard. If you want one of the packages on page 29, assume it's 100 silver pieces for any of the packages. No swapping or whatever. Discard any money you didn't spend on equipment.
*For ready cash, you each start with 3d6 gold, 3d20 silver, and 1d4+1 gems worth 50 sp apiece.
*Your first month of living expenses is prepaid, at a Common standard of living. After the first month you need to pay that much, which amounts to 80sp per month, due on the first of each month. Adventurers cannot voluntarily spend less than this, because they are intolerant of living in more straitened circumstances. Note that this includes rations - it's not any more expensive to buy rations than it is to eat at the tavern. You do still have to determine how many you're carrying, for encumbrance purposes.
*We're using slow advancement, pg 54. However, a full continuous month lived at a Rich lifestyle (200sp per week, or 800 for the whole month) gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 6th level. A full continuous month lived at a Noble lifestyle (1,000sp per week, or 4,000 for the whole month), gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 9th level.
*You will each start with one or more rumors about the nearby Caverns of Thracia.

=Setting=
Disregard the setting as written in WWN. I dig the general vibe but I'm mostly going to be doing my own thing. The name of this world is Terminus (players in my previous campaigns may recognize the name; consider this a reboot.)

==History==
Terminus is not known to have ever had any natively intelligent life. Various intelligent beings from other places, human and otherwise, have come to settle there. It also has its own complement of extradimensional entities, beings which some might refer to as gods.

The earliest human settlers came from other worlds forgotten to the modern person. Something, however, caused a lapse in communication and logistical capability. The settlers were cut off from home. Whatever disaster occurred has cut off almost all contact with civilizations outside the solar system. Visitation by spacecraft is extremely rare and not well-known. Visitors who arrive via stranger means are, if they exist, keeping it on the down-low.

It is believed by some scholars and most small children that there are inhabited cities on the moons.

==A Hypercompressed Timeline==
So as not to engage in the fantasy world designer's great sin of just adding a bunch of zeroes onto a reasonable timeline, I'm not providing any numbers here. Think of these as the approximate ages of the world, liberally seasoned with disinformation, misunderstanding, propaganda, temporal anomalies, and genuinely antique texts from different planets that were improperly mixed into the local historical record.

*'''Era Zero: The Precursors.''' There are occasionally objects or devices (such as the Cidrian Gates or the Sublunar Machinery) which seem to correspond to some time or people before the era of the Lizard Kings. Anything that old which is still operational can be presumed to have unimaginable power and sophistication. They may have been built by prior human civilizations or by entities even further removed from our understanding. It is presumed that human colonization occurred during this era due to the fact that some of these devices appear made for beings on the approximate size and body plan of modern humanity.
*'''Era One: Early Human Colonization.''' During this period, large numbers of humans arrived on the planet via means which are not known for certain, and engaged in widespread terraforming and genetic resequencing of themselves and everything else they could get their hands on. The early colonies “failed,” in that C&C with whoever sent them was lost, and whatever early governments were established collapsed. Humans went through a period of barbaric savagery, and then got it out of their systems. There is little evidence of heavy industry during this period, indicating a break from the precursor era, which did engage in large-scale engineering.
*'''Era Two''': '''The Lizard Queens'''. The Lizardfolk were for a time the apex sophont on the planet. They built crystalline devices that ran on psionic rather than technological or magical principles, subjugated humans when they felt the need, and built ziggurats, pyramids, and canals. They revived the precursor habit of constructing Deeps, or at least cleared and restored to use a number that were already ancient. These enormous underground spaces were considered proof against enemies approaching overland or from the skies. It is believed that airborne attacks must have been a major hazard at the time. The decline in cognitive capability among lizardfolk is most likely what allowed humanity to eventually overtake them.
*'''Era Three:''' '''The Amaranthan Empire'''. This human empire rose out of a small but wealthy kingdom by a bay, where innovative magicians laid down the foundation-stones of modern sorcery. It was a darker, cruder magic that they practiced, and they were insatiable for more power. Within a handful of generations, the leaders of the Amaranthan kingdoms had as much magic in their veins as blood, and they conquered the vast majority of the world. Between their spells, and pre-Saurian technology and learning they recovered from the Deeps, they easily brought to heel the feudal human societies that arose to fill the vacuum left by the Lizard Kings.
*'''Era Four:''' '''The Hubris.''' The Amaranthans declared war on everyone and everything that would not bend the knee to their Emperor. After a hundred years of blood and fire, they lost.
*'''Era Five:''' '''The Long Dark.''' Little enough of this era is recorded. Vengeful beings of every sort preyed on humanity and dominated their cities. Much awful tribute was extracted, and the lore of the Amaranthans was destroyed whenever it could be found. The tech level at this time was definitely more medieval in character, as humans were lucky if their masters allowed them pointy sticks, in most places. This was the era of the Lex Sanguinis, codified by the Vampire Regents who ruled so many city-states. Much of the current law and custom is descended from these dark times, with appropriate adaptations.
*'''Era Six: The Thracian Hegemony'''. The Thracians began as a small group of seafaring city-states, in which a few privileged human servants formed a conspiracy. They managed to throw off the yokes of their inhuman masters and institute democracy. They rapidly became masters of the exchange of goods. Thracian civilization avoided reliance on direct sorcery, since they didn't wish to repeat the mistakes of the Amaranthans. They pursued alchemy, artifice, and technology. While they never approached the sophistication of Precursor technology, they could produce much more sophisticated machinery at scale than is possible in the current era. They were able to free most of the rest of human civilization via a combination of disaster capitalism and laser-armed airships. They also standardized weights, measures, and coinage, which standards are still used today. Currency from pre-Thracian cultures is often extremely non-standard.
*'''Era Seven: The Decapitation'''. The leaders of the Thracian Combines attempted to make treaty with the various Lunar civilizations, just as they had done to the monstrous kingdoms that had existed on the terrestrial sphere. For whatever reason (but probably because the Lunatics weren't ignorant of how this had worked out for the vampire princes, etc.), negotiations fell through, and ended in several nights of orbital bombardment. When the smoke cleared, the Thracian civilization came apart at the seams. They had always kept their leadership and industrial base centralized, to maintain their hegemony. Unfortunately, that meant it was all destroyed by the swarm of large iron meteorites that turned their five greatest cities into a morass of smoking, flooded craters. Bereft of leadership and centralized industrial production, the Thracians were raided into nonexistence by tribal or feudal peoples, monsters, and various nonhuman intelligences. Their society disintegrated, and the lore of operating their great machines and mysterious facilities became lost.
*'''Era Eight: The Age of City-States'''. You are here! Over much of the world, humanity has reorganized itself into independent and semi-independent city-states. There is trade and communication between the various civilizations, but vast waste-lands full of ruins and ancient roads occupy the space between them. Human civilization seems to be somewhat drowsy at this time in history, and the people of the world are plagued by hedonism and sybaritic boredom. Greed takes the place of ambition, and everywhere men and women take the low and easy road to comfort. Globe-spanning ambitions are distinctly out of fashion. Non-human intelligences have many thriving civilizations of their own, and so far there's so much room that large-scale conflict hasn't broken out.

==Contemporary Material Culture==
Industrial manufacturing and supply chains no longer exist. However, books and other repositories of information are still available, and it's not uncommon for people to be educated to a (real-world) modern standard, even if they can't lay hands on so much as a flashlight.

The vast majority of work is done using human or animal muscle, or relatively simple wind or water mills. That being said, the situation is not at all comparable to medieval Europe. Many technologies that have an extremely high payoff-to-effort ratio if you are already at a high Roman or Renaissance-era level of technology are still used. Movable-type printing presses are not common, but they have supplanted scriptoriums. They’re just too easy to build in comparison to how much effort they save.

The essential difficulty is that the creation of an industrial economy is a great deal of work, and nobody is really inclined to go to that kind of effort. Anyone with the resources, ambition, and will to build a steam train or an air conditioner factory is probably better off becoming an archmage and obligating their neighbors to appease them.

However, Precursor humanity genetically engineered a variety of plants to be unnaturally useful, and those strains are still cultivated. A wide variety of food plants and several types of mushroom are known to be results of the original sequencing project; they can be easily and rapidly farmed, and are tailored to human dietary needs. For this reason, simply supplying the population with food is not the crushing burden it was in real-world medieval societies, and even impoverished areas have sufficient time for leisure and social or intellectual pursuits. There are other examples, as well, such as the Library Trees with leaves uniquely suited to paper-making.

Advanced alloys, both alchemical and mundane, are still manufactured, although not in modern quantities.

'''Summary:'''
*Individual artificers, magicians, and alchemists do produce items of enchantment or high technology, but these are rare, hand-crafted, and expensive.
*High technology as it exists in our world is rarely available and typically only in very simple configurations. A hand-held UV light might be obtainable, but a computer is out of the question.
*The advanced technology that does exist often involves large glowing synthetic gemstones, runic circuitry, and alchemical materials. Gears, moving parts, conventional batteries, and other steampunk apparatuses are relatively rare. The dividing line between magic and this sort of science can be somewhat thin at times. Consult the rules for mods in the WWN rulebook for ideas.
*The "hurlants" described on pg. 36 are available for purchase. In-setting, they're referred to as coilguns. They function via an extremely high-tension, alchemically produced metal spring, housed inside a barrel, which must be carefully wound with an integral handle before a specially made steel dart is loaded and clipped into place. Rather than the barrel being rifled, the dart is designed with a subtly helical fluting. Hand hurlants are often mounted on an arm bracer, but either may be made in a configuration similar to a modern firearm. They are, however, typically ornately carved or filigreed. They are considered a weapon of war or murder, and may not be carried openly in civilized cities. The user is expected to have them unloaded, "broken down" into components, and carried packed away. Note the AP tag on them - they ignore non-magical armor. A hand hurlant can throw its sliver of steel directly through an armored knight's breastplate and out his back. They are, therefore, especially disliked by the sorts of people wealthy enough to invest in heavy armor.

==Astronomy & Weather==
Terminus lacks the axial tilt & wobble of our own world. Seasons are caused by its eccentric and elliptical orbit. In plain terms, its distance from the sun varies sufficiently over the course of the year to produce winter and summer. This means the north and south hemisphere experience winter and summer at the same time. Terminus' magnetic poles are precisely perpendicular to the plane of orbit. It is highly likely that some intelligent agency altered these factors at some point in times ancient beyond reckoning.

Terminus has three moons in an equidistant orbit around the planet. One is nearly white, like our own, and the other two are tinted red and blue. Absent cloud cover, the night sky almost always provides a little more light than a full moon on our own Earth.

==Calendar==
There are 13 lunar months, each of exactly 28 days. There are three months in each of the seasons that would be recognizable to us - a spring, a summer, an autumn, a winter. Even without axial tilt and wobble, the nature of the seasons varies according to distance from the equator and local geography. Coastal areas are milder, areas close to the poles are colder.

The calendar of 13 months is standard almost all across the globe, at least in human civilizations. What varies is which months are counted part of which season. In general, an area with extreme conditions during one month of the year will count the "extra" month as outside of a regular season. A northern city might take the part of the year of most intense cold and count it as "Fimbulwinter," a time outside of even regular winter. An equatorial land might have the Dog Days, that month which is too hot to be placed within regular summertime. In a coastal land, the inhabitants might take the time of most intense storm activity, and name it the Monsoon Season.

The area this campaign takes place in is a Mediterranean type of climate. Due to the proximity of a large body of water, while the summers can be hellishly humid, the extremes of temperature aren't as bad as they could be.

==Languages==
The PCs start out knowing Common & Trade Cant, with additional languages per their Connect & Know skills. See pg. 28 of WWN.

*Common is a modern form of Thracian, and is the most wide-spread human language. Insular or remote human civilizations might have divergent or distinct languages.
*Trade Cant is a limited pidgin tongue commonly used in highly cosmopolitan areas or by far-traveling merchants. It's not good for higher pursuits, but has special vocabulary for economic concerns, commodities, travel & accommodations, et cetera.
*Old Thracian has about as much in common with Common as classical Latin does with modern Italian. It was the language of the last powerful and widespread human civilization.
*Amaranthan, also known as Sorcerer's Speech, is even older than Old Thracian. It was the tongue of a powerful sorcerous empire that collapsed in blood and fire.
*Lizard, or in derogatory terms "Hiss," is the language of the common lizardfolk and other reptilian intelligences. It's hard for humans to pronounce, and even harder for them to think in. The brains of the reptilian people are formed very differently to human ones. Something has gone very wrong with the lizardfolk, and 90% of them have cognitive limitations not present in their ancestors. The result is that only about 10% of them are literate in their own tongue. Note that in Lizard, humans are referred to as "Monkey Men," and their terms for our language are even more derogatory than "Hiss."
*Pelagic, or in derogatory terms "Glub," is the common language of undersea peoples. It's impossible to pronounce in atmosphere, so it can mostly only be learned underwater. Water-Adapted PCs (see pg. 27, under xeno-blooded) can learn to speak and understand this.
*Fae is the language of the various half-worlder beings. It has Seelie and Unseelie dialects, and while most people will be more familiar with one or the other, they are comprehensible to each other.
*Sign Language exists for the use of the deaf, and is also commonly used by beings for whom normal conversation is difficult. For example, a non-water-adapted human and a greater octopus might both be intelligent, but the octopus can only speak underwater, and the human can only speak in the air. If they met at the shore, they could communicate via sign, with each staying in its own preferred medium. The gestures are abstract enough for beings with significantly different anatomy, so long as they have limbs. Dolphins don't have sufficient limbs to Sign, although they can learn to understand it, but they're telepathic anyway.
*Various other species have their own languages.
*The Precursor civilization of humans presumably had their own language, but they don't seem to have written much down, or if they did, it was lost long ago.

==Random Notes==
*"Greater" creatures are intelligent forms. A Greater Octopus is therefore a sophont form of octopod. The lizardfolk are greater lizards. Nonhuman intelligences, in their own languages, would typically refer to humans as Greater Monkeys. This is a scientific or technical classification and it is rude to refer to any intelligent being in their own person this way. This is distinct from a "Dire" form, which is a larger and usually more ferocious form of a more common creature. See the classical example, the Dire Wolf. Note that nonhumans often classify Ogres as Dire Humans, which humans are not especially appreciative of in most cases.
*Human biology is rather enhanced by precursor engineering. The average lifespan, uninterrupted by disease or violence, is about 120 years, with only the last fifteen or so involving serious senescence. Most people will recover relatively fully from injuries or diseases that don't amount to amputation, and sepsis due to injuries is rare. Birth defects as we know them are unheard-of. Fertility is also optional for humans. Basically, look at the healing rules and be astonished how little medicine is required for stabbing victims.
*There are no elves & dwarves in the typical D&D sense, so the Special Origin focus is not used. The Xenoblooded focus is freely available and represents the efforts of precursor genetic engineers, passed down through the long millenia; aquatic-adapted humans are still well-known in coastal areas. The Unique Gift focus is also available, and typically represents some inheritable genetic gift.

==Nibiru==
I don't want to spend too much time on this, because the whole point of the campaign is that you aren't there. But maybe a few notes won't go too far wrong.
*There is a system of public education, welfare, and public works that is unrivaled in the world. If you don't find a useful occupation for yourself, you '''will''' be trained and pressed into service in some capacity or another.
*Nibiru has the wealth to support its people, but no room for idlers and malingerers. Literally, physical space is at a premium.
*Social stratification is severe in terms of power and resources commanded, but there are no mansions or palaces. Everyone must make use of public spaces and facilities, hence they are well-maintained.
*Security is tight. If any enemy ever penetrated to the machinery that allows peregrination, they could damage it in a way no one now living would know how to repair. Foreigners are allowed into the city itself only on an extremely limited basis. Criminal gangs are unheard of; and criminal activity is not tolerated.
*All citizens are educated to at least something resembling a high school level and then given some additional training, vocational or otherwise, unless their employment is destined to be entirely menial. For those such as the PCs who have exceptional abilities, they may have attended one of the following programs:
**The Athenaeum is a tower most like a "university" program in Nibiru. Conventional scholarly and engineering students are likely to graduate from here.
**The Scholomance is the tower dedicated to magic, both High Magic & New Magic. The individual in charge of it, known as the Rector, is a black-robed figure wearing an alabaster mask. Their true identity has not been known in centuries - it may be the same superannuated individual, or it is possible that the Chairs of the various departments are electing a new individual from time to time. The board of the scholomance is is deeply secretive, and nothing can be said with certainty.
**The Charterhouse tower trains Vowed. Charterhouse Vowed can select as their bonus skill (see pg. 86) either Exert or Sneak. PCs can take any path they wish, but the typical Charterhouse graduate works as a spy, agent, bodyguard, or assassin.
**Skull Plaza is the military school. Obviously, many people learn the combat arts in more practical ways, but the regular army goes through Skull Plaza. Note that Nibiru does not maintain cavalry of any kind. Their combat doctrines and equipment are focused on siege defense and man-to-man or small unit combat. They produce numerous skilled duelists, and marching on the city would be a death sentence for nearly any attacker, but Nibiru can't field a large army.

=Gods & Religion=
This is the part where I complain. Feel free to skim this section at most.

I don't like the way that religion and clerics are portrayed in D&D. I'm most interested in what the PCs choose to do, in pursuing their own ends. Those ends may be selfless - a character might be dedicated to justice, for example. But it should be their own choice and for their own reasons, subject to their own reevaluation. Other, more selfish motivations are certainly easy enough to understand. "I would like that large pile of gold coins to belong to me rather than whoever currently lays claim to it" and "I would prefer not to die beneath this ghost-haunted pyramid I have been abandoned in" are both immediately relatable.

This is consistent with what I would consider to be most of the essential texts of the genre. So of course D&D, in its lack of wisdom, had to make a character option to subsume PC choices and priority to some half-baked imagining of how a pantheistic religion might work, if you stripped it of all interest and cultural factors.

So we're not going to do that.

There is nothing like a D&D Cleric in this world. There are healers. There are also persons who are "high priests" or the like. The former is someone who has bent their talents to medicine. Or, in the case of the Healer partial class, someone who has devoted themselves to using psychic energy as a substitute for complex pharmaceutical substances that can no longer be manufactured. A "priest" is a social role. They may or may not be a member of a class that provides magical powers. If they are serious about relationships with supernatural beings, they may have a respectable ability with the Pray skill.

==Religion on Terminus==
Gods are a highly varied lot. There are extradimensional entities and spirits that seem to have influence over greater or lesser amounts of real estate. There are also some extremely physically real beings with supernatural powers that are more flexible or focused than the Spells and Arts available to mortal magicians. A local crocodilian river-deity, for example, may be both a physically verifiable giant crocodile, and also capable of causing or preventing flooding in the river. But, notably, ONLY their own river. A deity of some more abstract principle, such as the North Wind, might be more indeterminate and widespread in their presence.

The thing to keep in mind is that the gods are distant, weird, and inhuman, in all cases. The crocodile god is not up for a friendly chat. The North Wind was never a human, likely has no human feelings, and if it takes some anthropomorphic shape it is only as a matter of whimsy. Deities are typically not worshipped and revered in the way that a modern person in the US might imagine a religion to imply. The sailors do not love the gods of the seas. They fear them and respect them, and make offerings in the hope of improving their chances of coming home alive. Deities (in the vast majority of cases) make no guarantees or offers regarding the fate of a person's soul after death, which is a mystery, and of little concern to the typical person. Everyday matters loom larger, and death must take care of its own.

Devoted servants of deities may have some special power or another, which is typically minor and has a cost. For more serious exertions of divine power, if such a thing is desirable, the cultists will likely need to conduct some ritual. This will involve an offering, and a Pray roll from their leader. Note that the offering need not be a material object or bloodletting - some gods might look favorably on a night of frenzied dancing by at least twenty or thirty dervishes. It depends on the god and the ritual undertaken. This isn't something I expect to see a lot of in-game, since divine intervention is generally not an effective way to obtain human goals.

Anyway. Expect weird and inhuman genius loci, snake cults, and sui generis beings of cosmic horror, not some kind of benevolent god of farming with an organized and hierarchical temple structure.

==Known Deities==
I dunno, I'll put some stuff here eventually.

=Links=

Caverns Without Number

2022-07-16T04:21:16Z

The Wyzard: /* Introduction */

This is a page for the Caverns of Thracia game, run by The Wyzard using Worlds Without Number. Its content is tentative.

'''Before we start:''' Combat is intended to be a little more interesting than normal B/X. I strongly suggest that you all familiarize yourself with how Shock Damage works, and secondarily with how the combat maneuvers work. Shock Damage is going to mess you up if you aren't ready for it.

[[File:GMG4615-Thracia-455x600.jpg]]

=The Adventurers=
==Basic Wiki Practice==
I'm used to keeping information on my campaigns on a wiki. Some of you may not be used to this. Your character sheet is the first challenge you will face! Please ask for help on the discord if you aren't familiar with this stuff. So here is what you do, in order:
*Make a wiki account if you can't just log in with your regular RPGnet account, I can't remember.
*Anyway, be logged into the wiki.
*Open the sample character sheet in a new tab.
*Then hit "Edit" on this section (The Adventurers.)
*You can see the double-brackets around "Fill This In Yourself." Those double brackets will make a link to another wiki page, and the title will be whatever is the text inside the double brackets. You're going to put your character's name in there. Your character's name should be sufficiently unusual that there isn't already a PC somewhere on the wiki with that name. A good formula is something like (Name) the (Descriptor), where the descriptor is either some literal or figurative detail about the character. Maybe your character is Jeanette the Ravensworn, and you don't know what Ravensworn is yet. That's fine, maybe we'll find out!
*Save your edit and click on the new link that is your character's name.
*Now, hit the Edit button on the sample character sheet.
*Hit CTRL-A to select all text in the editing window. Then CTRL-C to copy it. Then close the window on the sample character sheet because you don't actually want to change it.
*Now hid the Edit button on YOUR character sheet, and paste in all the text from the sample one.
*Now fill in all the details.
*This sounds like a lot when I break it down like this, but honestly it takes seconds and I will probably do it for you during Session Zero.
==Dramatis Personae==
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[WWN Sample Character Sheet]]

=Introduction=
The greatest city of the world, in terms of cosmopolitan fun, wealth, and knowledge, is Nibiru, the Peregrinate Acropolis. A heavily fortified castle-city built on a large stone mesa, it has the look of a vast ziggurat capped with a wonder of colorful towers. The undercity inside the mesa is a maze of carved and worked tunnels, warehouses, reservoirs, and hidden temples. The lower levels of the city are a chaos of tenements, manufactories, brightly tiled plazas, and cafeterias. The vast towers contain luxury apartments for the rich, in addition to colleges, libraries, laboratories, training halls and so forth. The outer walls are dotted with fortifications, weapon emplacements, signal towers, and windmills that power various machinery, particularly water pumps. Real estate is tremendously valuable, most people live in spaces little larger than a walk-in closet. Hence the desperate need for the public bathhouses and cafeteria-style restaurants that support the life and hygiene of the city - there simply isn't space for people to have their own kitchens and so forth.

What makes Nibiru so wealthy and influential, such a center of knowledge, is that it moves. Every week, the city disappears in vast cloud of opaque fog, and reappears somewhere else on Terminus. The engines that accomplish this have been carefully maintained for centuries, so that it has functioned without interruption. It peregrinates along a semi-regular trade route, with space built into the schedule for necessary or opportunistic deviations, and a cadre of mages, merchants, and scholars of economics carefully plot its course for maximum advantage. Wherever it lands, the vast trading apparatus fires up into action. Enormous loads of commodities and rarer goods are sold to local merchant houses, wherever the city might land. The vast caverns of the undercity can carry an amount of cargo beyond imagination. The limiting factor is how much of it can be hauled out and traded for new goods, which must in their turn be loaded within six days.

You are natives of this city - you have the invisible, UV-reactive tattoo of a citizen in at least three places on your body. This marks you as one of the exalted, an individual with the right to enter the city's gates and remain within the confines as it peregrinates. Even the meanest beggar who is a citizen of Nibiru has something that the wealth of an emperor might not purchase. And, like all natives, you know the rule - the first six days are for business, but the seventh is a day of rest. No one leaves the city on the seventh day, or lingers outside for even one second beyond midnight of the sixth. The risk of being left behind is just too high.

Guess how you fucked up?

==The Local Environment==
It's early spring and you're probably going to be stuck here for about the next year, until Nibiru comes back and you have the ability to get back onboard. The city-state of Amarna is located on a fertile river delta that empties into a sea. That's where Nibiru came to rest. The area around the great river is a green and well-developed valley, with large towns and farming villages served by a regular geometric pattern of irrigation channels. To the east, about a day's walk down the coast, is a small semi-fortified city named Tjaru, in an undesirable and swampy region. It is used as a place of exile for criminals and the disgraced. That's where you've currently ended up. And you've heard rumors of a recently-discovered Deep, one of the vast underground fastnesses built by various ancient civilizations.

Deeps are dangerous, in ways both mundane and exotic. However, they frequently contain raw wealth left behind by the Ancients. Also, the even more precious sorcerous, alchemical, or technological artifacts that they seemed to have such a panoply of. This would be an outstanding way to support yourselves for the next year. And, if you're lucky, you might go beyond supporting yourself in reasonable style, and find that you've recovered something valuable enough to earn a higher station in Nibiru.

==Distance & Timekeeping==
I'll eventually post a hexmap with some local points of interest and so forth, but I don't envision hexcrawling or the like to be a major component. You're going to be in a relatively civilized area, albeit on the very edge of it. You won't need to make wilderness encounter checks to get to the dungeon and back.

My assumption is that you'll be largely based in Tjaru. My thought is that rather than keep strict track of days, a single delve (which might span multiple sessions) will just cross a week off the calendar, and we'll assume that resting, re-equipping, and so forth takes about that long. The dungeon is going to be maybe two hour's walk from Tjaru, so you can go out there, screw around for a while, and still get back before dark.

==Questions for Session Zero==
*Anything anybody definitely wants to see
*Anything anyone definitely doesn't want to see, particularly in terms of "does anything already on this wiki bother someone a lot?"
*Lines & Veils or whatever, PM me if you have to
*I don't intend the game to include explicit sexual content, and even the implication of sexual violence is right out
*I actually find some of the gene-modified human strains in WWN to be kind of interesting, but they might be too problematic, I dunno, opinions?
*

=Encumbrance & Beasts of Burden=
WWN's encumbrance system is simple enough that I'm not sure we'll actually need this section, but I included it as a matter of habit. Note that every full 100 coins counts as an item. Count normal gems as a single coin. Jewelry and small art objects are counted as a bulk good - you can pack together three items such as carved ivory necklaces, jade hairbrushes, jeweled crowns, rings, etc. I'll let you know about larger art objects.
==The Pocket Change Rule==
Your first up-to-100-coins worth of regular coins and gems do not count towards encumbrance, so long as they're yours alone. Found treasure is tracked separately until you return to civilization, such as it is.
==The Bling Rule==
The PCs may ignore the encumbrance requirements of jewelry if they simply wear the jewelry openly, within reason. No more than a single crown at a time, etc. This has two downsides: If you are presently in a Deep, you may find out an object is cursed at a most inconvenient time. Secondly, your enemies may become ravenously motivated to relieve you of those items. Morale is an important component of combat in this game, and if you are draped in the wealth of nations, then opponents may get a morale bonus.

=NPCs=

=Notes & Logs=

=Maps=

=House Rules & Character Creation=

==Character Creation & Advancement==
*Don't come with a character concept, we'll create characters in a session zero. It's okay to have a few vague ideas just so we don't have to look up too much.
*For attributes, arrange the following array to taste: 14, 12, 11, 10, 9, and 7. See pg. 8.
*When you pick a background, you get a free skill associated with it at level 0. Then, make a total of three rolls on the growth or learning table for your background.
*Choose a class. We're only using the classes available in the free version. However, the odder partial classes are available.
*Note that I don't like the Cleric class in D&D for complicated reasons, so please don't try to emulate one in terms of being a dedicated servant of a god. If you want to play a Healer (one of the partial classes) you certainly can, but I don't have a sense as to whether one is strictly necessary. PCs can die in this game but I'm probably going to tone down the "if you fail this save you die" kind of stuff.
*Assume you roll a 6 on your hit die.
*Skip the equipment step, read up on the languages stuff on this wiki.
*Everyone levels up twice. We start at level 3. Assume you roll a 4 on these two hit dice.
*You can start with 1,000 silver pieces worth of equipment. Note that this game is on a silver standard. If you want one of the packages on page 29, assume it's 100 silver pieces for any of the packages. No swapping or whatever. Discard any money you didn't spend on equipment.
*For ready cash, you each start with 3d6 gold, 3d20 silver, and 1d4+1 gems worth 50 sp apiece.
*Your first month of living expenses is prepaid, at a Common standard of living. After the first month you need to pay that much, which amounts to 80sp per month, due on the first of each month. Adventurers cannot voluntarily spend less than this, because they are intolerant of living in more straitened circumstances. Note that this includes rations - it's not any more expensive to buy rations than it is to eat at the tavern. You do still have to determine how many you're carrying, for encumbrance purposes.
*We're using slow advancement, pg 54. However, a full continuous month lived at a Rich lifestyle (200sp per week, or 800 for the whole month) gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 6th level. A full continuous month lived at a Noble lifestyle (1,000sp per week, or 4,000 for the whole month), gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 9th level.
*You will each start with one or more rumors about the nearby Caverns of Thracia.

=Setting=
Disregard the setting as written in WWN. I dig the general vibe but I'm mostly going to be doing my own thing. The name of this world is Terminus (players in my previous campaigns may recognize the name; consider this a reboot.)

==History==
Terminus is not known to have ever had any natively intelligent life. Various intelligent beings from other places, human and otherwise, have come to settle there. It also has its own complement of extradimensional entities, beings which some might refer to as gods.

The earliest human settlers came from other worlds forgotten to the modern person. Something, however, caused a lapse in communication and logistical capability. The settlers were cut off from home. Whatever disaster occurred has cut off almost all contact with civilizations outside the solar system. Visitation by spacecraft is extremely rare and not well-known. Visitors who arrive via stranger means are, if they exist, keeping it on the down-low.

It is believed by some scholars and most small children that there are inhabited cities on the moons.

==A Hypercompressed Timeline==
So as not to engage in the fantasy world designer's great sin of just adding a bunch of zeroes onto a reasonable timeline, I'm not providing any numbers here. Think of these as the approximate ages of the world, liberally seasoned with disinformation, misunderstanding, propaganda, temporal anomalies, and genuinely antique texts from different planets that were improperly mixed into the local historical record.

*'''Era Zero: The Precursors.''' There are occasionally objects or devices (such as the Cidrian Gates or the Sublunar Machinery) which seem to correspond to some time or people before the era of the Lizard Kings. Anything that old which is still operational can be presumed to have unimaginable power and sophistication. They may have been built by prior human civilizations or by entities even further removed from our understanding. It is presumed that human colonization occurred during this era due to the fact that some of these devices appear made for beings on the approximate size and body plan of modern humanity.
*'''Era One: Early Human Colonization.''' During this period, large numbers of humans arrived on the planet via means which are not known for certain, and engaged in widespread terraforming and genetic resequencing of themselves and everything else they could get their hands on. The early colonies “failed,” in that C&C with whoever sent them was lost, and whatever early governments were established collapsed. Humans went through a period of barbaric savagery, and then got it out of their systems. There is little evidence of heavy industry during this period, indicating a break from the precursor era, which did engage in large-scale engineering.
*'''Era Two''': '''The Lizard Queens'''. The Lizardfolk were for a time the apex sophont on the planet. They built crystalline devices that ran on psionic rather than technological or magical principles, subjugated humans when they felt the need, and built ziggurats, pyramids, and canals. They revived the precursor habit of constructing Deeps, or at least cleared and restored to use a number that were already ancient. These enormous underground spaces were considered proof against enemies approaching overland or from the skies. It is believed that airborne attacks must have been a major hazard at the time. The decline in cognitive capability among lizardfolk is most likely what allowed humanity to eventually overtake them.
*'''Era Three:''' '''The Amaranthan Empire'''. This human empire rose out of a small but wealthy kingdom by a bay, where innovative magicians laid down the foundation-stones of modern sorcery. It was a darker, cruder magic that they practiced, and they were insatiable for more power. Within a handful of generations, the leaders of the Amaranthan kingdoms had as much magic in their veins as blood, and they conquered the vast majority of the world. Between their spells, and pre-Saurian technology and learning they recovered from the Deeps, they easily brought to heel the feudal human societies that arose to fill the vacuum left by the Lizard Kings.
*'''Era Four:''' '''The Hubris.''' The Amaranthans declared war on everyone and everything that would not bend the knee to their Emperor. After a hundred years of blood and fire, they lost.
*'''Era Five:''' '''The Long Dark.''' Little enough of this era is recorded. Vengeful beings of every sort preyed on humanity and dominated their cities. Much awful tribute was extracted, and the lore of the Amaranthans was destroyed whenever it could be found. The tech level at this time was definitely more medieval in character, as humans were lucky if their masters allowed them pointy sticks, in most places. This was the era of the Lex Sanguinis, codified by the Vampire Regents who ruled so many city-states. Much of the current law and custom is descended from these dark times, with appropriate adaptations.
*'''Era Six: The Thracian Hegemony'''. The Thracians began as a small group of seafaring city-states, in which a few privileged human servants formed a conspiracy. They managed to throw off the yokes of their inhuman masters and institute democracy. They rapidly became masters of the exchange of goods. Thracian civilization avoided reliance on direct sorcery, since they didn't wish to repeat the mistakes of the Amaranthans. They pursued alchemy, artifice, and technology. While they never approached the sophistication of Precursor technology, they could produce much more sophisticated machinery at scale than is possible in the current era. They were able to free most of the rest of human civilization via a combination of disaster capitalism and laser-armed airships. They also standardized weights, measures, and coinage, which standards are still used today. Currency from pre-Thracian cultures is often extremely non-standard.
*'''Era Seven: The Decapitation'''. The leaders of the Thracian Combines attempted to make treaty with the various Lunar civilizations, just as they had done to the monstrous kingdoms that had existed on the terrestrial sphere. For whatever reason (but probably because the Lunatics weren't ignorant of how this had worked out for the vampire princes, etc.), negotiations fell through, and ended in several nights of orbital bombardment. When the smoke cleared, the Thracian civilization came apart at the seams. They had always kept their leadership and industrial base centralized, to maintain their hegemony. Unfortunately, that meant it was all destroyed by the swarm of large iron meteorites that turned their five greatest cities into a morass of smoking, flooded craters. Bereft of leadership and centralized industrial production, the Thracians were raided into nonexistence by tribal or feudal peoples, monsters, and various nonhuman intelligences. Their society disintegrated, and the lore of operating their great machines and mysterious facilities became lost.
*'''Era Eight: The Age of City-States'''. You are here! Over much of the world, humanity has reorganized itself into independent and semi-independent city-states. There is trade and communication between the various civilizations, but vast waste-lands full of ruins and ancient roads occupy the space between them. Human civilization seems to be somewhat drowsy at this time in history, and the people of the world are plagued by hedonism and sybaritic boredom. Greed takes the place of ambition, and everywhere men and women take the low and easy road to comfort. Globe-spanning ambitions are distinctly out of fashion. Non-human intelligences have many thriving civilizations of their own, and so far there's so much room that large-scale conflict hasn't broken out.

==Contemporary Material Culture==
Industrial manufacturing and supply chains no longer exist. However, books and other repositories of information are still available, and it's not uncommon for people to be educated to a (real-world) modern standard, even if they can't lay hands on so much as a flashlight.

The vast majority of work is done using human or animal muscle, or relatively simple wind or water mills. That being said, the situation is not at all comparable to medieval Europe. Many technologies that have an extremely high payoff-to-effort ratio if you are already at a high Roman or Renaissance-era level of technology are still used. Movable-type printing presses are not common, but they have supplanted scriptoriums. They’re just too easy to build in comparison to how much effort they save.

The essential difficulty is that the creation of an industrial economy is a great deal of work, and nobody is really inclined to go to that kind of effort. Anyone with the resources, ambition, and will to build a steam train or an air conditioner factory is probably better off becoming an archmage and obligating their neighbors to appease them.

However, Precursor humanity genetically engineered a variety of plants to be unnaturally useful, and those strains are still cultivated. A wide variety of food plants and several types of mushroom are known to be results of the original sequencing project; they can be easily and rapidly farmed, and are tailored to human dietary needs. For this reason, simply supplying the population with food is not the crushing burden it was in real-world medieval societies, and even impoverished areas have sufficient time for leisure and social or intellectual pursuits. There are other examples, as well, such as the Library Trees with leaves uniquely suited to paper-making.

Advanced alloys, both alchemical and mundane, are still manufactured, although not in modern quantities.

'''Summary:'''
*Individual artificers, magicians, and alchemists do produce items of enchantment or high technology, but these are rare, hand-crafted, and expensive.
*High technology as it exists in our world is rarely available and typically only in very simple configurations. A hand-held UV light might be obtainable, but a computer is out of the question.
*The advanced technology that does exist often involves large glowing synthetic gemstones, runic circuitry, and alchemical materials. Gears, moving parts, conventional batteries, and other steampunk apparatuses are relatively rare. The dividing line between magic and this sort of science can be somewhat thin at times. Consult the rules for mods in the WWN rulebook for ideas.
*The "hurlants" described on pg. 36 are available for purchase. In-setting, they're referred to as coilguns. They function via an extremely high-tension, alchemically produced metal spring, housed inside a barrel, which must be carefully wound with an integral handle before a specially made steel dart is loaded and clipped into place. Rather than the barrel being rifled, the dart is designed with a subtly helical fluting. Hand hurlants are often mounted on an arm bracer, but either may be made in a configuration similar to a modern firearm. They are, however, typically ornately carved or filigreed. They are considered a weapon of war or murder, and may not be carried openly in civilized cities. The user is expected to have them unloaded, "broken down" into components, and carried packed away. Note the AP tag on them - they ignore non-magical armor. A hand hurlant can throw its sliver of steel directly through an armored knight's breastplate and out his back. They are, therefore, especially disliked by the sorts of people wealthy enough to invest in heavy armor.

==Astronomy & Weather==
Terminus lacks the axial tilt & wobble of our own world. Seasons are caused by its eccentric and elliptical orbit. In plain terms, its distance from the sun varies sufficiently over the course of the year to produce winter and summer. This means the north and south hemisphere experience winter and summer at the same time. Terminus' magnetic poles are precisely perpendicular to the plane of orbit. It is highly likely that some intelligent agency altered these factors at some point in times ancient beyond reckoning.

Terminus has three moons in an equidistant orbit around the planet. One is nearly white, like our own, and the other two are tinted red and blue. Absent cloud cover, the night sky almost always provides a little more light than a full moon on our own Earth.

==Calendar==
There are 13 lunar months, each of exactly 28 days. There are three months in each of the seasons that would be recognizable to us - a spring, a summer, an autumn, a winter. Even without axial tilt and wobble, the nature of the seasons varies according to distance from the equator and local geography. Coastal areas are milder, areas close to the poles are colder.

The calendar of 13 months is standard almost all across the globe, at least in human civilizations. What varies is which months are counted part of which season. In general, an area with extreme conditions during one month of the year will count the "extra" month as outside of a regular season. A northern city might take the part of the year of most intense cold and count it as "Fimbulwinter," a time outside of even regular winter. An equatorial land might have the Dog Days, that month which is too hot to be placed within regular summertime. In a coastal land, the inhabitants might take the time of most intense storm activity, and name it the Monsoon Season.

The area this campaign takes place in is a Mediterranean type of climate. Due to the proximity of a large body of water, while the summers can be hellishly humid, the extremes of temperature aren't as bad as they could be.

==Languages==
The PCs start out knowing Common & Trade Cant, with additional languages per their Connect & Know skills. See pg. 28 of WWN.

*Common is a modern form of Thracian, and is the most wide-spread human language. Insular or remote human civilizations might have divergent or distinct languages.
*Trade Cant is a limited pidgin tongue commonly used in highly cosmopolitan areas or by far-traveling merchants. It's not good for higher pursuits, but has special vocabulary for economic concerns, commodities, travel & accommodations, et cetera.
*Old Thracian has about as much in common with Common as classical Latin does with modern Italian. It was the language of the last powerful and widespread human civilization.
*Amaranthan, also known as Sorcerer's Speech, is even older than Old Thracian. It was the tongue of a powerful sorcerous empire that collapsed in blood and fire.
*Lizard, or in derogatory terms "Hiss," is the language of the common lizardfolk and other reptilian intelligences. It's hard for humans to pronounce, and even harder for them to think in. The brains of the reptilian people are formed very differently to human ones. Something has gone very wrong with the lizardfolk, and 90% of them have cognitive limitations not present in their ancestors. The result is that only about 10% of them are literate in their own tongue. Note that in Lizard, humans are referred to as "Monkey Men," and their terms for our language are even more derogatory than "Hiss."
*Pelagic, or in derogatory terms "Glub," is the common language of undersea peoples. It's impossible to pronounce in atmosphere, so it can mostly only be learned underwater. Water-Adapted PCs (see pg. 27, under xeno-blooded) can learn to speak and understand this.
*Fae is the language of the various half-worlder beings. It has Seelie and Unseelie dialects, and while most people will be more familiar with one or the other, they are comprehensible to each other.
*Sign Language exists for the use of the deaf, and is also commonly used by beings for whom normal conversation is difficult. For example, a non-water-adapted human and a greater octopus might both be intelligent, but the octopus can only speak underwater, and the human can only speak in the air. If they met at the shore, they could communicate via sign, with each staying in its own preferred medium. The gestures are abstract enough for beings with significantly different anatomy, so long as they have limbs. Dolphins don't have sufficient limbs to Sign, although they can learn to understand it, but they're telepathic anyway.
*Various other species have their own languages.
*The Precursor civilization of humans presumably had their own language, but they don't seem to have written much down, or if they did, it was lost long ago.

==Random Notes==
*"Greater" creatures are intelligent forms. A Greater Octopus is therefore a sophont form of octopod. The lizardfolk are greater lizards. Nonhuman intelligences, in their own languages, would typically refer to humans as Greater Monkeys. This is a scientific or technical classification and it is rude to refer to any intelligent being in their own person this way. This is distinct from a "Dire" form, which is a larger and usually more ferocious form of a more common creature. See the classical example, the Dire Wolf. Note that nonhumans often classify Ogres as Dire Humans, which humans are not especially appreciative of in most cases.
*Human biology is rather enhanced by precursor engineering. The average lifespan, uninterrupted by disease or violence, is about 120 years, with only the last fifteen or so involving serious senescence. Most people will recover relatively fully from injuries or diseases that don't amount to amputation, and sepsis due to injuries is rare. Birth defects as we know them are unheard-of. Fertility is also optional for humans. Basically, look at the healing rules and be astonished how little medicine is required for stabbing victims.
*There are no elves & dwarves in the typical D&D sense, so the Special Origin focus is not used. The Xenoblooded focus is freely available and represents the efforts of precursor genetic engineers, passed down through the long millenia; aquatic-adapted humans are still well-known in coastal areas. The Unique Gift focus is also available, and typically represents some inheritable genetic gift.

==Nibiru==
I don't want to spend too much time on this, because the whole point of the campaign is that you aren't there. But maybe a few notes won't go too far wrong.
*There is a system of public education, welfare, and public works that is unrivaled in the world. If you don't find a useful occupation for yourself, you '''will''' be trained and pressed into service in some capacity or another.
*Nibiru has the wealth to support its people, but no room for idlers and malingerers. Literally, physical space is at a premium.
*Social stratification is severe in terms of power and resources commanded, but there are no mansions or palaces. Everyone must make use of public spaces and facilities, hence they are well-maintained.
*Security is tight. If any enemy ever penetrated to the machinery that allows peregrination, they could damage it in a way no one now living would know how to repair. Foreigners are allowed into the city itself only on an extremely limited basis. Criminal gangs are unheard of; and criminal activity is not tolerated.
*All citizens are educated to at least something resembling a high school level and then given some additional training, vocational or otherwise, unless their employment is destined to be entirely menial. For those such as the PCs who have exceptional abilities, they may have attended one of the following programs:
**The Athenaeum is a tower most like a "university" program in Nibiru. Conventional scholarly and engineering students are likely to graduate from here.
**The Scholomance is the tower dedicated to magic, both High Magic & New Magic. The individual in charge of it, known as the Rector, is a black-robed figure wearing an alabaster mask. Their true identity has not been known in centuries - it may be the same superannuated individual, or it is possible that the Chairs of the various departments are electing a new individual from time to time. The board of the scholomance is is deeply secretive, and nothing can be said with certainty.
**The Charterhouse tower trains Vowed. Charterhouse Vowed can select as their bonus skill (see pg. 86) either Exert or Sneak. PCs can take any path they wish, but the typical Charterhouse graduate works as a spy, agent, bodyguard, or assassin.
**Skull Plaza is the military school. Obviously, many people learn the combat arts in more practical ways, but the regular army goes through Skull Plaza. Note that Nibiru does not maintain cavalry of any kind. Their combat doctrines and equipment are focused on siege defense and man-to-man or small unit combat. They produce numerous skilled duelists, and marching on the city would be a death sentence for nearly any attacker, but Nibiru can't field a large army.

=Gods & Religion=
This is the part where I complain. Feel free to skim this section at most.

I don't like the way that religion and clerics are portrayed in D&D. I'm most interested in what the PCs choose to do, in pursuing their own ends. Those ends may be selfless - a character might be dedicated to justice, for example. But it should be their own choice and for their own reasons, subject to their own reevaluation. Other, more selfish motivations are certainly easy enough to understand. "I would like that large pile of gold coins to belong to me rather than whoever currently lays claim to it" and "I would prefer not to die beneath this ghost-haunted pyramid I have been abandoned in" are both immediately relatable.

This is consistent with what I would consider to be most of the essential texts of the genre. So of course D&D, in its lack of wisdom, had to make a character option to subsume PC choices and priority to some half-baked imagining of how a pantheistic religion might work, if you stripped it of all interest and cultural factors.

So we're not going to do that.

There is nothing like a D&D Cleric in this world. There are healers. There are also persons who are "high priests" or the like. The former is someone who has bent their talents to medicine. Or, in the case of the Healer partial class, someone who has devoted themselves to using psychic energy as a substitute for complex pharmaceutical substances that can no longer be manufactured. A "priest" is a social role. They may or may not be a member of a class that provides magical powers. If they are serious about relationships with supernatural beings, they may have a respectable ability with the Pray skill.

==Religion on Terminus==
Gods are a highly varied lot. There are extradimensional entities and spirits that seem to have influence over greater or lesser amounts of real estate. There are also some extremely physically real beings with supernatural powers that are more flexible or focused than the Spells and Arts available to mortal magicians. A local crocodilian river-deity, for example, may be both a physically verifiable giant crocodile, and also capable of causing or preventing flooding in the river. But, notably, ONLY their own river. A deity of some more abstract principle, such as the North Wind, might be more indeterminate and widespread in their presence.

The thing to keep in mind is that the gods are distant, weird, and inhuman, in all cases. The crocodile god is not up for a friendly chat. The North Wind was never a human, likely has no human feelings, and if it takes some anthropomorphic shape it is only as a matter of whimsy. Deities are typically not worshipped and revered in the way that a modern person in the US might imagine a religion to imply. The sailors do not love the gods of the seas. They fear them and respect them, and make offerings in the hope of improving their chances of coming home alive. Deities (in the vast majority of cases) make no guarantees or offers regarding the fate of a person's soul after death, which is a mystery, and of little concern to the typical person. Everyday matters loom larger, and death must take care of its own.

Devoted servants of deities may have some special power or another, which is typically minor and has a cost. For more serious exertions of divine power, if such a thing is desirable, the cultists will likely need to conduct some ritual. This will involve an offering, and a Pray roll from their leader. Note that the offering need not be a material object or bloodletting - some gods might look favorably on a night of frenzied dancing by at least twenty or thirty dervishes. It depends on the god and the ritual undertaken. This isn't something I expect to see a lot of in-game, since divine intervention is generally not an effective way to obtain human goals.

Anyway. Expect weird and inhuman genius loci, snake cults, and sui generis beings of cosmic horror, not some kind of benevolent god of farming with an organized and hierarchical temple structure.

==Known Deities==
I dunno, I'll put some stuff here eventually.

=Links=

Caverns Without Number

2022-06-30T18:01:05Z

The Wyzard: /* Setting */

This is a page for the Caverns of Thracia game, run by The Wyzard using Worlds Without Number. Its content is tentative.

'''Before we start:''' Combat is intended to be a little more interesting than normal B/X. I strongly suggest that you all familiarize yourself with how Shock Damage works, and secondarily with how the combat maneuvers work. Shock Damage is going to mess you up if you aren't ready for it.

[[File:GMG4615-Thracia-455x600.jpg]]

=The Adventurers=
==Basic Wiki Practice==
I'm used to keeping information on my campaigns on a wiki. Some of you may not be used to this. Your character sheet is the first challenge you will face! Please ask for help on the discord if you aren't familiar with this stuff. So here is what you do, in order:
*Make a wiki account if you can't just log in with your regular RPGnet account, I can't remember.
*Anyway, be logged into the wiki.
*Open the sample character sheet in a new tab.
*Then hit "Edit" on this section (The Adventurers.)
*You can see the double-brackets around "Fill This In Yourself." Those double brackets will make a link to another wiki page, and the title will be whatever is the text inside the double brackets. You're going to put your character's name in there. Your character's name should be sufficiently unusual that there isn't already a PC somewhere on the wiki with that name. A good formula is something like (Name) the (Descriptor), where the descriptor is either some literal or figurative detail about the character. Maybe your character is Jeanette the Ravensworn, and you don't know what Ravensworn is yet. That's fine, maybe we'll find out!
*Save your edit and click on the new link that is your character's name.
*Now, hit the Edit button on the sample character sheet.
*Hit CTRL-A to select all text in the editing window. Then CTRL-C to copy it. Then close the window on the sample character sheet because you don't actually want to change it.
*Now hid the Edit button on YOUR character sheet, and paste in all the text from the sample one.
*Now fill in all the details.
*This sounds like a lot when I break it down like this, but honestly it takes seconds and I will probably do it for you during Session Zero.
==Dramatis Personae==
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[WWN Sample Character Sheet]]

=Introduction=
The greatest city of the world, in terms of cosmopolitan fun, wealth, and knowledge, is Nibiru, the Peregrinate Acropolis. A heavily fortified castle-city built on a large stone mesa, it has the look of a vast ziggurat capped with a wonder of colorful towers. The undercity inside the mesa is a maze of carved and worked tunnels, warehouses, reservoirs, and hidden temples. The lower levels of the city are a chaos of tenements, manufactories, brightly tiled plazas, and cafeterias. The vast towers contain luxury apartments for the rich, in addition to colleges, libraries, laboratories, training halls and so forth. The outer walls are dotted with fortifications, weapon emplacements, signal towers, and windmills that power various machinery, particularly water pumps. Real estate is tremendously valuable, most people live in spaces little larger than a walk-in closet. Hence the desperate need for the public bathhouses and cafeteria-style restaurants that support the life and hygiene of the city - there simply isn't space for people to have their own kitchens and so forth.

What makes Nibiru so wealthy and influential, such a center of knowledge, is that it moves. Every week, the city disappears in vast cloud of opaque fog, and reappears somewhere else on Terminus. The engines that accomplish this have been carefully maintained for centuries, so that it has functioned without interruption. It peregrinates along a semi-regular trade route, with space built into the schedule for necessary or opportunistic deviations, and a cadre of mages, merchants, and scholars of economics carefully plot its course for maximum advantage. Wherever it lands, the vast trading apparatus fires up into action. Enormous loads of commodities and rarer goods are sold to local merchant houses, wherever the city might land. The vast caverns of the undercity can carry an amount of cargo beyond imagination. The limiting factor is how much of it can be hauled out and traded for new goods, which must in their turn be loaded within six days.

You are natives of this city - you have the invisible, UV-reactive tattoo of a citizen in at least three places on your body. This marks you as one of the exalted, a citizen. Even the meanest beggar who is a citizen of Nibiru has something that the wealth of an emperor might not purchase. And, like all natives, you know the rule - the first six days are for business, but the seventh is a day of rest. No one leaves the city on the seventh day, or lingers outside for even one second beyond midnight of the sixth. The risk of being left behind is just too high.

Guess how you fucked up?

==The Local Environment==
It's early spring and you're probably going to be stuck here for about the next year, until Nibiru comes back and you have the ability to get back onboard. The city-state of Amarna is located on a fertile river delta that empties into a sea. That's where Nibiru came to rest. The area around the great river is a green and well-developed valley, with large towns and farming villages served by a regular geometric pattern of irrigation channels. To the east, about a day's walk down the coast, is a small semi-fortified city named Tjaru, in an undesirable and swampy region. It is used as a place of exile for criminals and the disgraced. That's where you've currently ended up. And you've heard rumors of a recently-discovered Deep, one of the vast underground fastnesses built by various ancient civilizations.

Deeps are dangerous, in ways both mundane and exotic. However, they frequently contain raw wealth left behind by the Ancients. Also, the even more precious sorcerous, alchemical, or technological artifacts that they seemed to have such a panoply of. This would be an outstanding way to support yourselves for the next year. And, if you're lucky, you might go beyond supporting yourself in reasonable style, and find that you've recovered something valuable enough to earn a higher station in Nibiru.

==Distance & Timekeeping==
I'll eventually post a hexmap with some local points of interest and so forth, but I don't envision hexcrawling or the like to be a major component. You're going to be in a relatively civilized area, albeit on the very edge of it. You won't need to make wilderness encounter checks to get to the dungeon and back.

My assumption is that you'll be largely based in Tjaru. My thought is that rather than keep strict track of days, a single delve (which might span multiple sessions) will just cross a week off the calendar, and we'll assume that resting, re-equipping, and so forth takes about that long. The dungeon is going to be maybe two hour's walk from Tjaru, so you can go out there, screw around for a while, and still get back before dark.

==Questions for Session Zero==
*Anything anybody definitely wants to see
*Anything anyone definitely doesn't want to see, particularly in terms of "does anything already on this wiki bother someone a lot?"
*Lines & Veils or whatever, PM me if you have to
*I don't intend the game to include explicit sexual content, and even the implication of sexual violence is right out
*I actually find some of the gene-modified human strains in WWN to be kind of interesting, but they might be too problematic, I dunno, opinions?
*

=Encumbrance & Beasts of Burden=
WWN's encumbrance system is simple enough that I'm not sure we'll actually need this section, but I included it as a matter of habit. Note that every full 100 coins counts as an item. Count normal gems as a single coin. Jewelry and small art objects are counted as a bulk good - you can pack together three items such as carved ivory necklaces, jade hairbrushes, jeweled crowns, rings, etc. I'll let you know about larger art objects.
==The Pocket Change Rule==
Your first up-to-100-coins worth of regular coins and gems do not count towards encumbrance, so long as they're yours alone. Found treasure is tracked separately until you return to civilization, such as it is.
==The Bling Rule==
The PCs may ignore the encumbrance requirements of jewelry if they simply wear the jewelry openly, within reason. No more than a single crown at a time, etc. This has two downsides: If you are presently in a Deep, you may find out an object is cursed at a most inconvenient time. Secondly, your enemies may become ravenously motivated to relieve you of those items. Morale is an important component of combat in this game, and if you are draped in the wealth of nations, then opponents may get a morale bonus.

=NPCs=

=Notes & Logs=

=Maps=

=House Rules & Character Creation=

==Character Creation & Advancement==
*Don't come with a character concept, we'll create characters in a session zero. It's okay to have a few vague ideas just so we don't have to look up too much.
*For attributes, arrange the following array to taste: 14, 12, 11, 10, 9, and 7. See pg. 8.
*When you pick a background, you get a free skill associated with it at level 0. Then, make a total of three rolls on the growth or learning table for your background.
*Choose a class. We're only using the classes available in the free version. However, the odder partial classes are available.
*Note that I don't like the Cleric class in D&D for complicated reasons, so please don't try to emulate one in terms of being a dedicated servant of a god. If you want to play a Healer (one of the partial classes) you certainly can, but I don't have a sense as to whether one is strictly necessary. PCs can die in this game but I'm probably going to tone down the "if you fail this save you die" kind of stuff.
*Assume you roll a 6 on your hit die.
*Skip the equipment step, read up on the languages stuff on this wiki.
*Everyone levels up twice. We start at level 3. Assume you roll a 4 on these two hit dice.
*You can start with 1,000 silver pieces worth of equipment. Note that this game is on a silver standard. If you want one of the packages on page 29, assume it's 100 silver pieces for any of the packages. No swapping or whatever. Discard any money you didn't spend on equipment.
*For ready cash, you each start with 3d6 gold, 3d20 silver, and 1d4+1 gems worth 50 sp apiece.
*Your first month of living expenses is prepaid, at a Common standard of living. After the first month you need to pay that much, which amounts to 80sp per month, due on the first of each month. Adventurers cannot voluntarily spend less than this, because they are intolerant of living in more straitened circumstances. Note that this includes rations - it's not any more expensive to buy rations than it is to eat at the tavern. You do still have to determine how many you're carrying, for encumbrance purposes.
*We're using slow advancement, pg 54. However, a full continuous month lived at a Rich lifestyle (200sp per week, or 800 for the whole month) gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 6th level. A full continuous month lived at a Noble lifestyle (1,000sp per week, or 4,000 for the whole month), gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 9th level.
*You will each start with one or more rumors about the nearby Caverns of Thracia.

=Setting=
Disregard the setting as written in WWN. I dig the general vibe but I'm mostly going to be doing my own thing. The name of this world is Terminus (players in my previous campaigns may recognize the name; consider this a reboot.)

==History==
Terminus is not known to have ever had any natively intelligent life. Various intelligent beings from other places, human and otherwise, have come to settle there. It also has its own complement of extradimensional entities, beings which some might refer to as gods.

The earliest human settlers came from other worlds forgotten to the modern person. Something, however, caused a lapse in communication and logistical capability. The settlers were cut off from home. Whatever disaster occurred has cut off almost all contact with civilizations outside the solar system. Visitation by spacecraft is extremely rare and not well-known. Visitors who arrive via stranger means are, if they exist, keeping it on the down-low.

It is believed by some scholars and most small children that there are inhabited cities on the moons.

==A Hypercompressed Timeline==
So as not to engage in the fantasy world designer's great sin of just adding a bunch of zeroes onto a reasonable timeline, I'm not providing any numbers here. Think of these as the approximate ages of the world, liberally seasoned with disinformation, misunderstanding, propaganda, temporal anomalies, and genuinely antique texts from different planets that were improperly mixed into the local historical record.

*'''Era Zero: The Precursors.''' There are occasionally objects or devices (such as the Cidrian Gates or the Sublunar Machinery) which seem to correspond to some time or people before the era of the Lizard Kings. Anything that old which is still operational can be presumed to have unimaginable power and sophistication. They may have been built by prior human civilizations or by entities even further removed from our understanding. It is presumed that human colonization occurred during this era due to the fact that some of these devices appear made for beings on the approximate size and body plan of modern humanity.
*'''Era One: Early Human Colonization.''' During this period, large numbers of humans arrived on the planet via means which are not known for certain, and engaged in widespread terraforming and genetic resequencing of themselves and everything else they could get their hands on. The early colonies “failed,” in that C&C with whoever sent them was lost, and whatever early governments were established collapsed. Humans went through a period of barbaric savagery, and then got it out of their systems. There is little evidence of heavy industry during this period, indicating a break from the precursor era, which did engage in large-scale engineering.
*'''Era Two''': '''The Lizard Queens'''. The Lizardfolk were for a time the apex sophont on the planet. They built crystalline devices that ran on psionic rather than technological or magical principles, subjugated humans when they felt the need, and built ziggurats, pyramids, and canals. They revived the precursor habit of constructing Deeps, or at least cleared and restored to use a number that were already ancient. These enormous underground spaces were considered proof against enemies approaching overland or from the skies. It is believed that airborne attacks must have been a major hazard at the time. The decline in cognitive capability among lizardfolk is most likely what allowed humanity to eventually overtake them.
*'''Era Three:''' '''The Amaranthan Empire'''. This human empire rose out of a small but wealthy kingdom by a bay, where innovative magicians laid down the foundation-stones of modern sorcery. It was a darker, cruder magic that they practiced, and they were insatiable for more power. Within a handful of generations, the leaders of the Amaranthan kingdoms had as much magic in their veins as blood, and they conquered the vast majority of the world. Between their spells, and pre-Saurian technology and learning they recovered from the Deeps, they easily brought to heel the feudal human societies that arose to fill the vacuum left by the Lizard Kings.
*'''Era Four:''' '''The Hubris.''' The Amaranthans declared war on everyone and everything that would not bend the knee to their Emperor. After a hundred years of blood and fire, they lost.
*'''Era Five:''' '''The Long Dark.''' Little enough of this era is recorded. Vengeful beings of every sort preyed on humanity and dominated their cities. Much awful tribute was extracted, and the lore of the Amaranthans was destroyed whenever it could be found. The tech level at this time was definitely more medieval in character, as humans were lucky if their masters allowed them pointy sticks, in most places. This was the era of the Lex Sanguinis, codified by the Vampire Regents who ruled so many city-states. Much of the current law and custom is descended from these dark times, with appropriate adaptations.
*'''Era Six: The Thracian Hegemony'''. The Thracians began as a small group of seafaring city-states, in which a few privileged human servants formed a conspiracy. They managed to throw off the yokes of their inhuman masters and institute democracy. They rapidly became masters of the exchange of goods. Thracian civilization avoided reliance on direct sorcery, since they didn't wish to repeat the mistakes of the Amaranthans. They pursued alchemy, artifice, and technology. While they never approached the sophistication of Precursor technology, they could produce much more sophisticated machinery at scale than is possible in the current era. They were able to free most of the rest of human civilization via a combination of disaster capitalism and laser-armed airships. They also standardized weights, measures, and coinage, which standards are still used today. Currency from pre-Thracian cultures is often extremely non-standard.
*'''Era Seven: The Decapitation'''. The leaders of the Thracian Combines attempted to make treaty with the various Lunar civilizations, just as they had done to the monstrous kingdoms that had existed on the terrestrial sphere. For whatever reason (but probably because the Lunatics weren't ignorant of how this had worked out for the vampire princes, etc.), negotiations fell through, and ended in several nights of orbital bombardment. When the smoke cleared, the Thracian civilization came apart at the seams. They had always kept their leadership and industrial base centralized, to maintain their hegemony. Unfortunately, that meant it was all destroyed by the swarm of large iron meteorites that turned their five greatest cities into a morass of smoking, flooded craters. Bereft of leadership and centralized industrial production, the Thracians were raided into nonexistence by tribal or feudal peoples, monsters, and various nonhuman intelligences. Their society disintegrated, and the lore of operating their great machines and mysterious facilities became lost.
*'''Era Eight: The Age of City-States'''. You are here! Over much of the world, humanity has reorganized itself into independent and semi-independent city-states. There is trade and communication between the various civilizations, but vast waste-lands full of ruins and ancient roads occupy the space between them. Human civilization seems to be somewhat drowsy at this time in history, and the people of the world are plagued by hedonism and sybaritic boredom. Greed takes the place of ambition, and everywhere men and women take the low and easy road to comfort. Globe-spanning ambitions are distinctly out of fashion. Non-human intelligences have many thriving civilizations of their own, and so far there's so much room that large-scale conflict hasn't broken out.

==Contemporary Material Culture==
Industrial manufacturing and supply chains no longer exist. However, books and other repositories of information are still available, and it's not uncommon for people to be educated to a (real-world) modern standard, even if they can't lay hands on so much as a flashlight.

The vast majority of work is done using human or animal muscle, or relatively simple wind or water mills. That being said, the situation is not at all comparable to medieval Europe. Many technologies that have an extremely high payoff-to-effort ratio if you are already at a high Roman or Renaissance-era level of technology are still used. Movable-type printing presses are not common, but they have supplanted scriptoriums. They’re just too easy to build in comparison to how much effort they save.

The essential difficulty is that the creation of an industrial economy is a great deal of work, and nobody is really inclined to go to that kind of effort. Anyone with the resources, ambition, and will to build a steam train or an air conditioner factory is probably better off becoming an archmage and obligating their neighbors to appease them.

However, Precursor humanity genetically engineered a variety of plants to be unnaturally useful, and those strains are still cultivated. A wide variety of food plants and several types of mushroom are known to be results of the original sequencing project; they can be easily and rapidly farmed, and are tailored to human dietary needs. For this reason, simply supplying the population with food is not the crushing burden it was in real-world medieval societies, and even impoverished areas have sufficient time for leisure and social or intellectual pursuits. There are other examples, as well, such as the Library Trees with leaves uniquely suited to paper-making.

Advanced alloys, both alchemical and mundane, are still manufactured, although not in modern quantities.

'''Summary:'''
*Individual artificers, magicians, and alchemists do produce items of enchantment or high technology, but these are rare, hand-crafted, and expensive.
*High technology as it exists in our world is rarely available and typically only in very simple configurations. A hand-held UV light might be obtainable, but a computer is out of the question.
*The advanced technology that does exist often involves large glowing synthetic gemstones, runic circuitry, and alchemical materials. Gears, moving parts, conventional batteries, and other steampunk apparatuses are relatively rare. The dividing line between magic and this sort of science can be somewhat thin at times. Consult the rules for mods in the WWN rulebook for ideas.
*The "hurlants" described on pg. 36 are available for purchase. In-setting, they're referred to as coilguns. They function via an extremely high-tension, alchemically produced metal spring, housed inside a barrel, which must be carefully wound with an integral handle before a specially made steel dart is loaded and clipped into place. Rather than the barrel being rifled, the dart is designed with a subtly helical fluting. Hand hurlants are often mounted on an arm bracer, but either may be made in a configuration similar to a modern firearm. They are, however, typically ornately carved or filigreed. They are considered a weapon of war or murder, and may not be carried openly in civilized cities. The user is expected to have them unloaded, "broken down" into components, and carried packed away. Note the AP tag on them - they ignore non-magical armor. A hand hurlant can throw its sliver of steel directly through an armored knight's breastplate and out his back. They are, therefore, especially disliked by the sorts of people wealthy enough to invest in heavy armor.

==Astronomy & Weather==
Terminus lacks the axial tilt & wobble of our own world. Seasons are caused by its eccentric and elliptical orbit. In plain terms, its distance from the sun varies sufficiently over the course of the year to produce winter and summer. This means the north and south hemisphere experience winter and summer at the same time. Terminus' magnetic poles are precisely perpendicular to the plane of orbit. It is highly likely that some intelligent agency altered these factors at some point in times ancient beyond reckoning.

Terminus has three moons in an equidistant orbit around the planet. One is nearly white, like our own, and the other two are tinted red and blue. Absent cloud cover, the night sky almost always provides a little more light than a full moon on our own Earth.

==Calendar==
There are 13 lunar months, each of exactly 28 days. There are three months in each of the seasons that would be recognizable to us - a spring, a summer, an autumn, a winter. Even without axial tilt and wobble, the nature of the seasons varies according to distance from the equator and local geography. Coastal areas are milder, areas close to the poles are colder.

The calendar of 13 months is standard almost all across the globe, at least in human civilizations. What varies is which months are counted part of which season. In general, an area with extreme conditions during one month of the year will count the "extra" month as outside of a regular season. A northern city might take the part of the year of most intense cold and count it as "Fimbulwinter," a time outside of even regular winter. An equatorial land might have the Dog Days, that month which is too hot to be placed within regular summertime. In a coastal land, the inhabitants might take the time of most intense storm activity, and name it the Monsoon Season.

The area this campaign takes place in is a Mediterranean type of climate. Due to the proximity of a large body of water, while the summers can be hellishly humid, the extremes of temperature aren't as bad as they could be.

==Languages==
The PCs start out knowing Common & Trade Cant, with additional languages per their Connect & Know skills. See pg. 28 of WWN.

*Common is a modern form of Thracian, and is the most wide-spread human language. Insular or remote human civilizations might have divergent or distinct languages.
*Trade Cant is a limited pidgin tongue commonly used in highly cosmopolitan areas or by far-traveling merchants. It's not good for higher pursuits, but has special vocabulary for economic concerns, commodities, travel & accommodations, et cetera.
*Old Thracian has about as much in common with Common as classical Latin does with modern Italian. It was the language of the last powerful and widespread human civilization.
*Amaranthan, also known as Sorcerer's Speech, is even older than Old Thracian. It was the tongue of a powerful sorcerous empire that collapsed in blood and fire.
*Lizard, or in derogatory terms "Hiss," is the language of the common lizardfolk and other reptilian intelligences. It's hard for humans to pronounce, and even harder for them to think in. The brains of the reptilian people are formed very differently to human ones. Something has gone very wrong with the lizardfolk, and 90% of them have cognitive limitations not present in their ancestors. The result is that only about 10% of them are literate in their own tongue. Note that in Lizard, humans are referred to as "Monkey Men," and their terms for our language are even more derogatory than "Hiss."
*Pelagic, or in derogatory terms "Glub," is the common language of undersea peoples. It's impossible to pronounce in atmosphere, so it can mostly only be learned underwater. Water-Adapted PCs (see pg. 27, under xeno-blooded) can learn to speak and understand this.
*Fae is the language of the various half-worlder beings. It has Seelie and Unseelie dialects, and while most people will be more familiar with one or the other, they are comprehensible to each other.
*Sign Language exists for the use of the deaf, and is also commonly used by beings for whom normal conversation is difficult. For example, a non-water-adapted human and a greater octopus might both be intelligent, but the octopus can only speak underwater, and the human can only speak in the air. If they met at the shore, they could communicate via sign, with each staying in its own preferred medium. The gestures are abstract enough for beings with significantly different anatomy, so long as they have limbs. Dolphins don't have sufficient limbs to Sign, although they can learn to understand it, but they're telepathic anyway.
*Various other species have their own languages.
*The Precursor civilization of humans presumably had their own language, but they don't seem to have written much down, or if they did, it was lost long ago.

==Random Notes==
*"Greater" creatures are intelligent forms. A Greater Octopus is therefore a sophont form of octopod. The lizardfolk are greater lizards. Nonhuman intelligences, in their own languages, would typically refer to humans as Greater Monkeys. This is a scientific or technical classification and it is rude to refer to any intelligent being in their own person this way. This is distinct from a "Dire" form, which is a larger and usually more ferocious form of a more common creature. See the classical example, the Dire Wolf. Note that nonhumans often classify Ogres as Dire Humans, which humans are not especially appreciative of in most cases.
*Human biology is rather enhanced by precursor engineering. The average lifespan, uninterrupted by disease or violence, is about 120 years, with only the last fifteen or so involving serious senescence. Most people will recover relatively fully from injuries or diseases that don't amount to amputation, and sepsis due to injuries is rare. Birth defects as we know them are unheard-of. Fertility is also optional for humans. Basically, look at the healing rules and be astonished how little medicine is required for stabbing victims.
*There are no elves & dwarves in the typical D&D sense, so the Special Origin focus is not used. The Xenoblooded focus is freely available and represents the efforts of precursor genetic engineers, passed down through the long millenia; aquatic-adapted humans are still well-known in coastal areas. The Unique Gift focus is also available, and typically represents some inheritable genetic gift.

==Nibiru==
I don't want to spend too much time on this, because the whole point of the campaign is that you aren't there. But maybe a few notes won't go too far wrong.
*There is a system of public education, welfare, and public works that is unrivaled in the world. If you don't find a useful occupation for yourself, you '''will''' be trained and pressed into service in some capacity or another.
*Nibiru has the wealth to support its people, but no room for idlers and malingerers. Literally, physical space is at a premium.
*Social stratification is severe in terms of power and resources commanded, but there are no mansions or palaces. Everyone must make use of public spaces and facilities, hence they are well-maintained.
*Security is tight. If any enemy ever penetrated to the machinery that allows peregrination, they could damage it in a way no one now living would know how to repair. Foreigners are allowed into the city itself only on an extremely limited basis. Criminal gangs are unheard of; and criminal activity is not tolerated.
*All citizens are educated to at least something resembling a high school level and then given some additional training, vocational or otherwise, unless their employment is destined to be entirely menial. For those such as the PCs who have exceptional abilities, they may have attended one of the following programs:
**The Athenaeum is a tower most like a "university" program in Nibiru. Conventional scholarly and engineering students are likely to graduate from here.
**The Scholomance is the tower dedicated to magic, both High Magic & New Magic. The individual in charge of it, known as the Rector, is a black-robed figure wearing an alabaster mask. Their true identity has not been known in centuries - it may be the same superannuated individual, or it is possible that the Chairs of the various departments are electing a new individual from time to time. The board of the scholomance is is deeply secretive, and nothing can be said with certainty.
**The Charterhouse tower trains Vowed. Charterhouse Vowed can select as their bonus skill (see pg. 86) either Exert or Sneak. PCs can take any path they wish, but the typical Charterhouse graduate works as a spy, agent, bodyguard, or assassin.
**Skull Plaza is the military school. Obviously, many people learn the combat arts in more practical ways, but the regular army goes through Skull Plaza. Note that Nibiru does not maintain cavalry of any kind. Their combat doctrines and equipment are focused on siege defense and man-to-man or small unit combat. They produce numerous skilled duelists, and marching on the city would be a death sentence for nearly any attacker, but Nibiru can't field a large army.

=Gods & Religion=
This is the part where I complain. Feel free to skim this section at most.

I don't like the way that religion and clerics are portrayed in D&D. I'm most interested in what the PCs choose to do, in pursuing their own ends. Those ends may be selfless - a character might be dedicated to justice, for example. But it should be their own choice and for their own reasons, subject to their own reevaluation. Other, more selfish motivations are certainly easy enough to understand. "I would like that large pile of gold coins to belong to me rather than whoever currently lays claim to it" and "I would prefer not to die beneath this ghost-haunted pyramid I have been abandoned in" are both immediately relatable.

This is consistent with what I would consider to be most of the essential texts of the genre. So of course D&D, in its lack of wisdom, had to make a character option to subsume PC choices and priority to some half-baked imagining of how a pantheistic religion might work, if you stripped it of all interest and cultural factors.

So we're not going to do that.

There is nothing like a D&D Cleric in this world. There are healers. There are also persons who are "high priests" or the like. The former is someone who has bent their talents to medicine. Or, in the case of the Healer partial class, someone who has devoted themselves to using psychic energy as a substitute for complex pharmaceutical substances that can no longer be manufactured. A "priest" is a social role. They may or may not be a member of a class that provides magical powers. If they are serious about relationships with supernatural beings, they may have a respectable ability with the Pray skill.

==Religion on Terminus==
Gods are a highly varied lot. There are extradimensional entities and spirits that seem to have influence over greater or lesser amounts of real estate. There are also some extremely physically real beings with supernatural powers that are more flexible or focused than the Spells and Arts available to mortal magicians. A local crocodilian river-deity, for example, may be both a physically verifiable giant crocodile, and also capable of causing or preventing flooding in the river. But, notably, ONLY their own river. A deity of some more abstract principle, such as the North Wind, might be more indeterminate and widespread in their presence.

The thing to keep in mind is that the gods are distant, weird, and inhuman, in all cases. The crocodile god is not up for a friendly chat. The North Wind was never a human, likely has no human feelings, and if it takes some anthropomorphic shape it is only as a matter of whimsy. Deities are typically not worshipped and revered in the way that a modern person in the US might imagine a religion to imply. The sailors do not love the gods of the seas. They fear them and respect them, and make offerings in the hope of improving their chances of coming home alive. Deities (in the vast majority of cases) make no guarantees or offers regarding the fate of a person's soul after death, which is a mystery, and of little concern to the typical person. Everyday matters loom larger, and death must take care of its own.

Devoted servants of deities may have some special power or another, which is typically minor and has a cost. For more serious exertions of divine power, if such a thing is desirable, the cultists will likely need to conduct some ritual. This will involve an offering, and a Pray roll from their leader. Note that the offering need not be a material object or bloodletting - some gods might look favorably on a night of frenzied dancing by at least twenty or thirty dervishes. It depends on the god and the ritual undertaken. This isn't something I expect to see a lot of in-game, since divine intervention is generally not an effective way to obtain human goals.

Anyway. Expect weird and inhuman genius loci, snake cults, and sui generis beings of cosmic horror, not some kind of benevolent god of farming with an organized and hierarchical temple structure.

==Known Deities==
I dunno, I'll put some stuff here eventually.

=Links=

Caverns Without Number

2022-06-27T20:06:32Z

The Wyzard:

This is a page for the Caverns of Thracia game, run by The Wyzard using Worlds Without Number. Its content is tentative.

'''Before we start:''' Combat is intended to be a little more interesting than normal B/X. I strongly suggest that you all familiarize yourself with how Shock Damage works, and secondarily with how the combat maneuvers work. Shock Damage is going to mess you up if you aren't ready for it.

[[File:GMG4615-Thracia-455x600.jpg]]

=The Adventurers=
==Basic Wiki Practice==
I'm used to keeping information on my campaigns on a wiki. Some of you may not be used to this. Your character sheet is the first challenge you will face! Please ask for help on the discord if you aren't familiar with this stuff. So here is what you do, in order:
*Make a wiki account if you can't just log in with your regular RPGnet account, I can't remember.
*Anyway, be logged into the wiki.
*Open the sample character sheet in a new tab.
*Then hit "Edit" on this section (The Adventurers.)
*You can see the double-brackets around "Fill This In Yourself." Those double brackets will make a link to another wiki page, and the title will be whatever is the text inside the double brackets. You're going to put your character's name in there. Your character's name should be sufficiently unusual that there isn't already a PC somewhere on the wiki with that name. A good formula is something like (Name) the (Descriptor), where the descriptor is either some literal or figurative detail about the character. Maybe your character is Jeanette the Ravensworn, and you don't know what Ravensworn is yet. That's fine, maybe we'll find out!
*Save your edit and click on the new link that is your character's name.
*Now, hit the Edit button on the sample character sheet.
*Hit CTRL-A to select all text in the editing window. Then CTRL-C to copy it. Then close the window on the sample character sheet because you don't actually want to change it.
*Now hid the Edit button on YOUR character sheet, and paste in all the text from the sample one.
*Now fill in all the details.
*This sounds like a lot when I break it down like this, but honestly it takes seconds and I will probably do it for you during Session Zero.
==Dramatis Personae==
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[WWN Sample Character Sheet]]

=Introduction=
The greatest city of the world, in terms of cosmopolitan fun, wealth, and knowledge, is Nibiru, the Peregrinate Acropolis. A heavily fortified castle-city built on a large stone mesa, it has the look of a vast ziggurat capped with a wonder of colorful towers. The undercity inside the mesa is a maze of carved and worked tunnels, warehouses, reservoirs, and hidden temples. The lower levels of the city are a chaos of tenements, manufactories, brightly tiled plazas, and cafeterias. The vast towers contain luxury apartments for the rich, in addition to colleges, libraries, laboratories, training halls and so forth. The outer walls are dotted with fortifications, weapon emplacements, signal towers, and windmills that power various machinery, particularly water pumps. Real estate is tremendously valuable, most people live in spaces little larger than a walk-in closet. Hence the desperate need for the public bathhouses and cafeteria-style restaurants that support the life and hygiene of the city - there simply isn't space for people to have their own kitchens and so forth.

What makes Nibiru so wealthy and influential, such a center of knowledge, is that it moves. Every week, the city disappears in vast cloud of opaque fog, and reappears somewhere else on Terminus. The engines that accomplish this have been carefully maintained for centuries, so that it has functioned without interruption. It peregrinates along a semi-regular trade route, with space built into the schedule for necessary or opportunistic deviations, and a cadre of mages, merchants, and scholars of economics carefully plot its course for maximum advantage. Wherever it lands, the vast trading apparatus fires up into action. Enormous loads of commodities and rarer goods are sold to local merchant houses, wherever the city might land. The vast caverns of the undercity can carry an amount of cargo beyond imagination. The limiting factor is how much of it can be hauled out and traded for new goods, which must in their turn be loaded within six days.

You are natives of this city - you have the invisible, UV-reactive tattoo of a citizen in at least three places on your body. This marks you as one of the exalted, a citizen. Even the meanest beggar who is a citizen of Nibiru has something that the wealth of an emperor might not purchase. And, like all natives, you know the rule - the first six days are for business, but the seventh is a day of rest. No one leaves the city on the seventh day, or lingers outside for even one second beyond midnight of the sixth. The risk of being left behind is just too high.

Guess how you fucked up?

==The Local Environment==
It's early spring and you're probably going to be stuck here for about the next year, until Nibiru comes back and you have the ability to get back onboard. The city-state of Amarna is located on a fertile river delta that empties into a sea. That's where Nibiru came to rest. The area around the great river is a green and well-developed valley, with large towns and farming villages served by a regular geometric pattern of irrigation channels. To the east, about a day's walk down the coast, is a small semi-fortified city named Tjaru, in an undesirable and swampy region. It is used as a place of exile for criminals and the disgraced. That's where you've currently ended up. And you've heard rumors of a recently-discovered Deep, one of the vast underground fastnesses built by various ancient civilizations.

Deeps are dangerous, in ways both mundane and exotic. However, they frequently contain raw wealth left behind by the Ancients. Also, the even more precious sorcerous, alchemical, or technological artifacts that they seemed to have such a panoply of. This would be an outstanding way to support yourselves for the next year. And, if you're lucky, you might go beyond supporting yourself in reasonable style, and find that you've recovered something valuable enough to earn a higher station in Nibiru.

==Distance & Timekeeping==
I'll eventually post a hexmap with some local points of interest and so forth, but I don't envision hexcrawling or the like to be a major component. You're going to be in a relatively civilized area, albeit on the very edge of it. You won't need to make wilderness encounter checks to get to the dungeon and back.

My assumption is that you'll be largely based in Tjaru. My thought is that rather than keep strict track of days, a single delve (which might span multiple sessions) will just cross a week off the calendar, and we'll assume that resting, re-equipping, and so forth takes about that long. The dungeon is going to be maybe two hour's walk from Tjaru, so you can go out there, screw around for a while, and still get back before dark.

==Questions for Session Zero==
*Anything anybody definitely wants to see
*Anything anyone definitely doesn't want to see, particularly in terms of "does anything already on this wiki bother someone a lot?"
*Lines & Veils or whatever, PM me if you have to
*I don't intend the game to include explicit sexual content, and even the implication of sexual violence is right out
*I actually find some of the gene-modified human strains in WWN to be kind of interesting, but they might be too problematic, I dunno, opinions?
*

=Encumbrance & Beasts of Burden=
WWN's encumbrance system is simple enough that I'm not sure we'll actually need this section, but I included it as a matter of habit. Note that every full 100 coins counts as an item. Count normal gems as a single coin. Jewelry and small art objects are counted as a bulk good - you can pack together three items such as carved ivory necklaces, jade hairbrushes, jeweled crowns, rings, etc. I'll let you know about larger art objects.
==The Pocket Change Rule==
Your first up-to-100-coins worth of regular coins and gems do not count towards encumbrance, so long as they're yours alone. Found treasure is tracked separately until you return to civilization, such as it is.
==The Bling Rule==
The PCs may ignore the encumbrance requirements of jewelry if they simply wear the jewelry openly, within reason. No more than a single crown at a time, etc. This has two downsides: If you are presently in a Deep, you may find out an object is cursed at a most inconvenient time. Secondly, your enemies may become ravenously motivated to relieve you of those items. Morale is an important component of combat in this game, and if you are draped in the wealth of nations, then opponents may get a morale bonus.

=NPCs=

=Notes & Logs=

=Maps=

=House Rules & Character Creation=

==Character Creation & Advancement==
*Don't come with a character concept, we'll create characters in a session zero. It's okay to have a few vague ideas just so we don't have to look up too much.
*For attributes, arrange the following array to taste: 14, 12, 11, 10, 9, and 7. See pg. 8.
*When you pick a background, you get a free skill associated with it at level 0. Then, make a total of three rolls on the growth or learning table for your background.
*Choose a class. We're only using the classes available in the free version. However, the odder partial classes are available.
*Note that I don't like the Cleric class in D&D for complicated reasons, so please don't try to emulate one in terms of being a dedicated servant of a god. If you want to play a Healer (one of the partial classes) you certainly can, but I don't have a sense as to whether one is strictly necessary. PCs can die in this game but I'm probably going to tone down the "if you fail this save you die" kind of stuff.
*Assume you roll a 6 on your hit die.
*Skip the equipment step, read up on the languages stuff on this wiki.
*Everyone levels up twice. We start at level 3. Assume you roll a 4 on these two hit dice.
*You can start with 1,000 silver pieces worth of equipment. Note that this game is on a silver standard. If you want one of the packages on page 29, assume it's 100 silver pieces for any of the packages. No swapping or whatever. Discard any money you didn't spend on equipment.
*For ready cash, you each start with 3d6 gold, 3d20 silver, and 1d4+1 gems worth 50 sp apiece.
*Your first month of living expenses is prepaid, at a Common standard of living. After the first month you need to pay that much, which amounts to 80sp per month, due on the first of each month. Adventurers cannot voluntarily spend less than this, because they are intolerant of living in more straitened circumstances. Note that this includes rations - it's not any more expensive to buy rations than it is to eat at the tavern. You do still have to determine how many you're carrying, for encumbrance purposes.
*We're using slow advancement, pg 54. However, a full continuous month lived at a Rich lifestyle (200sp per week, or 800 for the whole month) gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 6th level. A full continuous month lived at a Noble lifestyle (1,000sp per week, or 4,000 for the whole month), gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 9th level.
*You will each start with one or more rumors about the nearby Caverns of Thracia.

=Setting=
Disregard the setting as written in WWN. I dig the general vibe but I'm mostly going to be doing my own thing. The name of this world is Terminus (players in my previous campaigns may recognize the name; consider this a reboot.)

==History==
Terminus is not known to have ever had any natively intelligent life. Various intelligent beings from other places, human and otherwise, have come to settle there. It also has its own complement of extradimensional entities, beings which some might refer to as gods.

The earliest human settlers came from other worlds forgotten to the modern person. Something, however, caused a lapse in communication and logistical capability. The settlers were cut off from home. Whatever disaster occurred has cut off almost all contact with civilizations outside the solar system. Visitation by spacecraft is extremely rare and not well-known. Visitors who arrive via stranger means are, if they exist, keeping it on the down-low.

It is believed by some scholars and most small children that there are inhabited cities on the moons.

==Contemporary Material Culture==
Industrial manufacturing and supply chains no longer exist. However, books and other repositories of information are still available, and it's not uncommon for people to be educated to a (real-world) modern standard, even if they can't lay hands on so much as a flashlight.

The vast majority of work is done using human or animal muscle, or relatively simple wind or water mills. That being said, the situation is not at all comparable to medieval Europe. Many technologies that have an extremely high payoff-to-effort ratio if you are already at a high Roman or Renaissance-era level of technology are still used. Movable-type printing presses are not common, but they have supplanted scriptoriums. They’re just too easy to build in comparison to how much effort they save.

The essential difficulty is that the creation of an industrial economy is a great deal of work, and nobody is really inclined to go to that kind of effort. Anyone with the resources, ambition, and will to build a steam train or an air conditioner factory is probably better off becoming an archmage and obligating their neighbors to appease them.

However, Precursor humanity genetically engineered a variety of plants to be unnaturally useful, and those strains are still cultivated. A wide variety of food plants and several types of mushroom are known to be results of the original sequencing project; they can be easily and rapidly farmed, and are tailored to human dietary needs. For this reason, simply supplying the population with food is not the crushing burden it was in real-world medieval societies, and even impoverished areas have sufficient time for leisure and social or intellectual pursuits. There are other examples, as well, such as the Library Trees with leaves uniquely suited to paper-making.

Advanced alloys, both alchemical and mundane, are still manufactured, although not in modern quantities.

'''Summary:'''
*Individual artificers, magicians, and alchemists do produce items of enchantment or high technology, but these are rare, hand-crafted, and expensive.
*High technology as it exists in our world is rarely available and typically only in very simple configurations. A hand-held UV light might be obtainable, but a computer is out of the question.
*The advanced technology that does exist often involves large glowing synthetic gemstones, runic circuitry, and alchemical materials. Gears, moving parts, conventional batteries, and other steampunk apparatuses are relatively rare. The dividing line between magic and this sort of science can be somewhat thin at times. Consult the rules for mods in the WWN rulebook for ideas.
*The "hurlants" described on pg. 36 are available for purchase. In-setting, they're referred to as coilguns. They function via an extremely high-tension, alchemically produced metal spring, housed inside a barrel, which must be carefully wound with an integral handle before a specially made steel dart is loaded and clipped into place. Rather than the barrel being rifled, the dart is designed with a subtly helical fluting. Hand hurlants are often mounted on an arm bracer, but either may be made in a configuration similar to a modern firearm. They are, however, typically ornately carved or filigreed. They are considered a weapon of war or murder, and may not be carried openly in civilized cities. The user is expected to have them unloaded, "broken down" into components, and carried packed away. Note the AP tag on them - they ignore non-magical armor. A hand hurlant can throw its sliver of steel directly through an armored knight's breastplate and out his back. They are, therefore, especially disliked by the sorts of people wealthy enough to invest in heavy armor.

==Astronomy & Weather==
Terminus lacks the axial tilt & wobble of our own world. Seasons are caused by its eccentric and elliptical orbit. In plain terms, its distance from the sun varies sufficiently over the course of the year to produce winter and summer. This means the north and south hemisphere experience winter and summer at the same time. Terminus' magnetic poles are precisely perpendicular to the plane of orbit. It is highly likely that some intelligent agency altered these factors at some point in times ancient beyond reckoning.

Terminus has three moons in an equidistant orbit around the planet. One is nearly white, like our own, and the other two are tinted red and blue. Absent cloud cover, the night sky almost always provides a little more light than a full moon on our own Earth.

==Calendar==
There are 13 lunar months, each of exactly 28 days. There are three months in each of the seasons that would be recognizable to us - a spring, a summer, an autumn, a winter. Even without axial tilt and wobble, the nature of the seasons varies according to distance from the equator and local geography. Coastal areas are milder, areas close to the poles are colder.

The calendar of 13 months is standard almost all across the globe, at least in human civilizations. What varies is which months are counted part of which season. In general, an area with extreme conditions during one month of the year will count the "extra" month as outside of a regular season. A northern city might take the part of the year of most intense cold and count it as "Fimbulwinter," a time outside of even regular winter. An equatorial land might have the Dog Days, that month which is too hot to be placed within regular summertime. In a coastal land, the inhabitants might take the time of most intense storm activity, and name it the Monsoon Season.

The area this campaign takes place in is a Mediterranean type of climate. Due to the proximity of a large body of water, while the summers can be hellishly humid, the extremes of temperature aren't as bad as they could be.

==Languages==
The PCs start out knowing Common & Trade Cant, with additional languages per their Connect & Know skills. See pg. 28 of WWN.

*Common is a modern form of Thracian, and is the most wide-spread human language. Insular or remote human civilizations might have divergent or distinct languages.
*Trade Cant is a limited pidgin tongue commonly used in highly cosmopolitan areas or by far-traveling merchants. It's not good for higher pursuits, but has special vocabulary for economic concerns, commodities, travel & accommodations, et cetera.
*Old Thracian has about as much in common with Common as classical Latin does with modern Italian. It was the language of the last powerful and widespread human civilization.
*Amaranthan, also known as Sorcerer's Speech, is even older than Old Thracian. It was the tongue of a powerful sorcerous empire that collapsed in blood and fire.
*Lizard, or in derogatory terms "Hiss," is the language of the common lizardfolk and other reptilian intelligences. It's hard for humans to pronounce, and even harder for them to think in. The brains of the reptilian people are formed very differently to human ones. Something has gone very wrong with the lizardfolk, and 90% of them have cognitive limitations not present in their ancestors. The result is that only about 10% of them are literate in their own tongue. Note that in Lizard, humans are referred to as "Monkey Men," and their terms for our language are even more derogatory than "Hiss."
*Pelagic, or in derogatory terms "Glub," is the common language of undersea peoples. It's impossible to pronounce in atmosphere, so it can mostly only be learned underwater. Water-Adapted PCs (see pg. 27, under xeno-blooded) can learn to speak and understand this.
*Fae is the language of the various half-worlder beings. It has Seelie and Unseelie dialects, and while most people will be more familiar with one or the other, they are comprehensible to each other.
*Sign Language exists for the use of the deaf, and is also commonly used by beings for whom normal conversation is difficult. For example, a non-water-adapted human and a greater octopus might both be intelligent, but the octopus can only speak underwater, and the human can only speak in the air. If they met at the shore, they could communicate via sign, with each staying in its own preferred medium. The gestures are abstract enough for beings with significantly different anatomy, so long as they have limbs. Dolphins don't have sufficient limbs to Sign, although they can learn to understand it, but they're telepathic anyway.
*Various other species have their own languages.
*The Precursor civilization of humans presumably had their own language, but they don't seem to have written much down, or if they did, it was lost long ago.

==Random Notes==
*"Greater" creatures are intelligent forms. A Greater Octopus is therefore a sophont form of octopod. The lizardfolk are greater lizards. Nonhuman intelligences, in their own languages, would typically refer to humans as Greater Monkeys. This is a scientific or technical classification and it is rude to refer to any intelligent being in their own person this way. This is distinct from a "Dire" form, which is a larger and usually more ferocious form of a more common creature. See the classical example, the Dire Wolf. Note that nonhumans often classify Ogres as Dire Humans, which humans are not especially appreciative of in most cases.
*Human biology is rather enhanced by precursor engineering. The average lifespan, uninterrupted by disease or violence, is about 120 years, with only the last fifteen or so involving serious senescence. Most people will recover relatively fully from injuries or diseases that don't amount to amputation, and sepsis due to injuries is rare. Birth defects as we know them are unheard-of. Fertility is also optional for humans. Basically, look at the healing rules and be astonished how little medicine is required for stabbing victims.
*There are no elves & dwarves in the typical D&D sense, so the Special Origin focus is not used. The Xenoblooded focus is freely available and represents the efforts of precursor genetic engineers, passed down through the long millenia; aquatic-adapted humans are still well-known in coastal areas. The Unique Gift focus is also available, and typically represents some inheritable genetic gift.

==Nibiru==
I don't want to spend too much time on this, because the whole point of the campaign is that you aren't there. But maybe a few notes won't go too far wrong.
*There is a system of public education, welfare, and public works that is unrivaled in the world. If you don't find a useful occupation for yourself, you '''will''' be trained and pressed into service in some capacity or another.
*Nibiru has the wealth to support its people, but no room for idlers and malingerers. Literally, physical space is at a premium.
*Social stratification is severe in terms of power and resources commanded, but there are no mansions or palaces. Everyone must make use of public spaces and facilities, hence they are well-maintained.
*Security is tight. If any enemy ever penetrated to the machinery that allows peregrination, they could damage it in a way no one now living would know how to repair. Foreigners are allowed into the city itself only on an extremely limited basis. Criminal gangs are unheard of; and criminal activity is not tolerated.
*All citizens are educated to at least something resembling a high school level and then given some additional training, vocational or otherwise, unless their employment is destined to be entirely menial. For those such as the PCs who have exceptional abilities, they may have attended one of the following programs:
**The Athenaeum is a tower most like a "university" program in Nibiru. Conventional scholarly and engineering students are likely to graduate from here.
**The Scholomance is the tower dedicated to magic, both High Magic & New Magic. The individual in charge of it, known as the Rector, is a black-robed figure wearing an alabaster mask. Their true identity has not been known in centuries - it may be the same superannuated individual, or it is possible that the Chairs of the various departments are electing a new individual from time to time. The board of the scholomance is is deeply secretive, and nothing can be said with certainty.
**The Charterhouse tower trains Vowed. Charterhouse Vowed can select as their bonus skill (see pg. 86) either Exert or Sneak. PCs can take any path they wish, but the typical Charterhouse graduate works as a spy, agent, bodyguard, or assassin.
**Skull Plaza is the military school. Obviously, many people learn the combat arts in more practical ways, but the regular army goes through Skull Plaza. Note that Nibiru does not maintain cavalry of any kind. Their combat doctrines and equipment are focused on siege defense and man-to-man or small unit combat. They produce numerous skilled duelists, and marching on the city would be a death sentence for nearly any attacker, but Nibiru can't field a large army.

=Gods & Religion=
This is the part where I complain. Feel free to skim this section at most.

I don't like the way that religion and clerics are portrayed in D&D. I'm most interested in what the PCs choose to do, in pursuing their own ends. Those ends may be selfless - a character might be dedicated to justice, for example. But it should be their own choice and for their own reasons, subject to their own reevaluation. Other, more selfish motivations are certainly easy enough to understand. "I would like that large pile of gold coins to belong to me rather than whoever currently lays claim to it" and "I would prefer not to die beneath this ghost-haunted pyramid I have been abandoned in" are both immediately relatable.

This is consistent with what I would consider to be most of the essential texts of the genre. So of course D&D, in its lack of wisdom, had to make a character option to subsume PC choices and priority to some half-baked imagining of how a pantheistic religion might work, if you stripped it of all interest and cultural factors.

So we're not going to do that.

There is nothing like a D&D Cleric in this world. There are healers. There are also persons who are "high priests" or the like. The former is someone who has bent their talents to medicine. Or, in the case of the Healer partial class, someone who has devoted themselves to using psychic energy as a substitute for complex pharmaceutical substances that can no longer be manufactured. A "priest" is a social role. They may or may not be a member of a class that provides magical powers. If they are serious about relationships with supernatural beings, they may have a respectable ability with the Pray skill.

==Religion on Terminus==
Gods are a highly varied lot. There are extradimensional entities and spirits that seem to have influence over greater or lesser amounts of real estate. There are also some extremely physically real beings with supernatural powers that are more flexible or focused than the Spells and Arts available to mortal magicians. A local crocodilian river-deity, for example, may be both a physically verifiable giant crocodile, and also capable of causing or preventing flooding in the river. But, notably, ONLY their own river. A deity of some more abstract principle, such as the North Wind, might be more indeterminate and widespread in their presence.

The thing to keep in mind is that the gods are distant, weird, and inhuman, in all cases. The crocodile god is not up for a friendly chat. The North Wind was never a human, likely has no human feelings, and if it takes some anthropomorphic shape it is only as a matter of whimsy. Deities are typically not worshipped and revered in the way that a modern person in the US might imagine a religion to imply. The sailors do not love the gods of the seas. They fear them and respect them, and make offerings in the hope of improving their chances of coming home alive. Deities (in the vast majority of cases) make no guarantees or offers regarding the fate of a person's soul after death, which is a mystery, and of little concern to the typical person. Everyday matters loom larger, and death must take care of its own.

Devoted servants of deities may have some special power or another, which is typically minor and has a cost. For more serious exertions of divine power, if such a thing is desirable, the cultists will likely need to conduct some ritual. This will involve an offering, and a Pray roll from their leader. Note that the offering need not be a material object or bloodletting - some gods might look favorably on a night of frenzied dancing by at least twenty or thirty dervishes. It depends on the god and the ritual undertaken. This isn't something I expect to see a lot of in-game, since divine intervention is generally not an effective way to obtain human goals.

Anyway. Expect weird and inhuman genius loci, snake cults, and sui generis beings of cosmic horror, not some kind of benevolent god of farming with an organized and hierarchical temple structure.

==Known Deities==
I dunno, I'll put some stuff here eventually.

=Links=

File:GMG4615-Thracia-455x600.jpg

2022-06-27T20:06:12Z

The Wyzard:

Caverns Without Number

2022-06-27T20:03:01Z

The Wyzard:

This is a page for the Caverns of Thracia game, run by The Wyzard using Worlds Without Number. Its content is tentative.

'''Before we start:''' Combat is intended to be a little more interesting than normal B/X. I strongly suggest that you all familiarize yourself with how Shock Damage works, and secondarily with how the combat maneuvers work. Shock Damage is going to mess you up if you aren't ready for it.

=The Adventurers=
==Basic Wiki Practice==
I'm used to keeping information on my campaigns on a wiki. Some of you may not be used to this. Your character sheet is the first challenge you will face! Please ask for help on the discord if you aren't familiar with this stuff. So here is what you do, in order:
*Make a wiki account if you can't just log in with your regular RPGnet account, I can't remember.
*Anyway, be logged into the wiki.
*Open the sample character sheet in a new tab.
*Then hit "Edit" on this section (The Adventurers.)
*You can see the double-brackets around "Fill This In Yourself." Those double brackets will make a link to another wiki page, and the title will be whatever is the text inside the double brackets. You're going to put your character's name in there. Your character's name should be sufficiently unusual that there isn't already a PC somewhere on the wiki with that name. A good formula is something like (Name) the (Descriptor), where the descriptor is either some literal or figurative detail about the character. Maybe your character is Jeanette the Ravensworn, and you don't know what Ravensworn is yet. That's fine, maybe we'll find out!
*Save your edit and click on the new link that is your character's name.
*Now, hit the Edit button on the sample character sheet.
*Hit CTRL-A to select all text in the editing window. Then CTRL-C to copy it. Then close the window on the sample character sheet because you don't actually want to change it.
*Now hid the Edit button on YOUR character sheet, and paste in all the text from the sample one.
*Now fill in all the details.
*This sounds like a lot when I break it down like this, but honestly it takes seconds and I will probably do it for you during Session Zero.
==Dramatis Personae==
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[WWN Sample Character Sheet]]

=Introduction=
The greatest city of the world, in terms of cosmopolitan fun, wealth, and knowledge, is Nibiru, the Peregrinate Acropolis. A heavily fortified castle-city built on a large stone mesa, it has the look of a vast ziggurat capped with a wonder of colorful towers. The undercity inside the mesa is a maze of carved and worked tunnels, warehouses, reservoirs, and hidden temples. The lower levels of the city are a chaos of tenements, manufactories, brightly tiled plazas, and cafeterias. The vast towers contain luxury apartments for the rich, in addition to colleges, libraries, laboratories, training halls and so forth. The outer walls are dotted with fortifications, weapon emplacements, signal towers, and windmills that power various machinery, particularly water pumps. Real estate is tremendously valuable, most people live in spaces little larger than a walk-in closet. Hence the desperate need for the public bathhouses and cafeteria-style restaurants that support the life and hygiene of the city - there simply isn't space for people to have their own kitchens and so forth.

What makes Nibiru so wealthy and influential, such a center of knowledge, is that it moves. Every week, the city disappears in vast cloud of opaque fog, and reappears somewhere else on Terminus. The engines that accomplish this have been carefully maintained for centuries, so that it has functioned without interruption. It peregrinates along a semi-regular trade route, with space built into the schedule for necessary or opportunistic deviations, and a cadre of mages, merchants, and scholars of economics carefully plot its course for maximum advantage. Wherever it lands, the vast trading apparatus fires up into action. Enormous loads of commodities and rarer goods are sold to local merchant houses, wherever the city might land. The vast caverns of the undercity can carry an amount of cargo beyond imagination. The limiting factor is how much of it can be hauled out and traded for new goods, which must in their turn be loaded within six days.

You are natives of this city - you have the invisible, UV-reactive tattoo of a citizen in at least three places on your body. This marks you as one of the exalted, a citizen. Even the meanest beggar who is a citizen of Nibiru has something that the wealth of an emperor might not purchase. And, like all natives, you know the rule - the first six days are for business, but the seventh is a day of rest. No one leaves the city on the seventh day, or lingers outside for even one second beyond midnight of the sixth. The risk of being left behind is just too high.

Guess how you fucked up?

==The Local Environment==
It's early spring and you're probably going to be stuck here for about the next year, until Nibiru comes back and you have the ability to get back onboard. The city-state of Amarna is located on a fertile river delta that empties into a sea. That's where Nibiru came to rest. The area around the great river is a green and well-developed valley, with large towns and farming villages served by a regular geometric pattern of irrigation channels. To the east, about a day's walk down the coast, is a small semi-fortified city named Tjaru, in an undesirable and swampy region. It is used as a place of exile for criminals and the disgraced. That's where you've currently ended up. And you've heard rumors of a recently-discovered Deep, one of the vast underground fastnesses built by various ancient civilizations.

Deeps are dangerous, in ways both mundane and exotic. However, they frequently contain raw wealth left behind by the Ancients. Also, the even more precious sorcerous, alchemical, or technological artifacts that they seemed to have such a panoply of. This would be an outstanding way to support yourselves for the next year. And, if you're lucky, you might go beyond supporting yourself in reasonable style, and find that you've recovered something valuable enough to earn a higher station in Nibiru.

==Distance & Timekeeping==
I'll eventually post a hexmap with some local points of interest and so forth, but I don't envision hexcrawling or the like to be a major component. You're going to be in a relatively civilized area, albeit on the very edge of it. You won't need to make wilderness encounter checks to get to the dungeon and back.

My assumption is that you'll be largely based in Tjaru. My thought is that rather than keep strict track of days, a single delve (which might span multiple sessions) will just cross a week off the calendar, and we'll assume that resting, re-equipping, and so forth takes about that long. The dungeon is going to be maybe two hour's walk from Tjaru, so you can go out there, screw around for a while, and still get back before dark.

==Questions for Session Zero==
*Anything anybody definitely wants to see
*Anything anyone definitely doesn't want to see, particularly in terms of "does anything already on this wiki bother someone a lot?"
*Lines & Veils or whatever, PM me if you have to
*I don't intend the game to include explicit sexual content, and even the implication of sexual violence is right out
*I actually find some of the gene-modified human strains in WWN to be kind of interesting, but they might be too problematic, I dunno, opinions?
*

=Encumbrance & Beasts of Burden=
WWN's encumbrance system is simple enough that I'm not sure we'll actually need this section, but I included it as a matter of habit. Note that every full 100 coins counts as an item. Count normal gems as a single coin. Jewelry and small art objects are counted as a bulk good - you can pack together three items such as carved ivory necklaces, jade hairbrushes, jeweled crowns, rings, etc. I'll let you know about larger art objects.
==The Pocket Change Rule==
Your first up-to-100-coins worth of regular coins and gems do not count towards encumbrance, so long as they're yours alone. Found treasure is tracked separately until you return to civilization, such as it is.
==The Bling Rule==
The PCs may ignore the encumbrance requirements of jewelry if they simply wear the jewelry openly, within reason. No more than a single crown at a time, etc. This has two downsides: If you are presently in a Deep, you may find out an object is cursed at a most inconvenient time. Secondly, your enemies may become ravenously motivated to relieve you of those items. Morale is an important component of combat in this game, and if you are draped in the wealth of nations, then opponents may get a morale bonus.

=NPCs=

=Notes & Logs=

=Maps=

=House Rules & Character Creation=

==Character Creation & Advancement==
*Don't come with a character concept, we'll create characters in a session zero. It's okay to have a few vague ideas just so we don't have to look up too much.
*For attributes, arrange the following array to taste: 14, 12, 11, 10, 9, and 7. See pg. 8.
*When you pick a background, you get a free skill associated with it at level 0. Then, make a total of three rolls on the growth or learning table for your background.
*Choose a class. We're only using the classes available in the free version. However, the odder partial classes are available.
*Note that I don't like the Cleric class in D&D for complicated reasons, so please don't try to emulate one in terms of being a dedicated servant of a god. If you want to play a Healer (one of the partial classes) you certainly can, but I don't have a sense as to whether one is strictly necessary. PCs can die in this game but I'm probably going to tone down the "if you fail this save you die" kind of stuff.
*Assume you roll a 6 on your hit die.
*Skip the equipment step, read up on the languages stuff on this wiki.
*Everyone levels up twice. We start at level 3. Assume you roll a 4 on these two hit dice.
*You can start with 1,000 silver pieces worth of equipment. Note that this game is on a silver standard. If you want one of the packages on page 29, assume it's 100 silver pieces for any of the packages. No swapping or whatever. Discard any money you didn't spend on equipment.
*For ready cash, you each start with 3d6 gold, 3d20 silver, and 1d4+1 gems worth 50 sp apiece.
*Your first month of living expenses is prepaid, at a Common standard of living. After the first month you need to pay that much, which amounts to 80sp per month, due on the first of each month. Adventurers cannot voluntarily spend less than this, because they are intolerant of living in more straitened circumstances. Note that this includes rations - it's not any more expensive to buy rations than it is to eat at the tavern. You do still have to determine how many you're carrying, for encumbrance purposes.
*We're using slow advancement, pg 54. However, a full continuous month lived at a Rich lifestyle (200sp per week, or 800 for the whole month) gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 6th level. A full continuous month lived at a Noble lifestyle (1,000sp per week, or 4,000 for the whole month), gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 9th level.
*You will each start with one or more rumors about the nearby Caverns of Thracia.

=Setting=
Disregard the setting as written in WWN. I dig the general vibe but I'm mostly going to be doing my own thing. The name of this world is Terminus (players in my previous campaigns may recognize the name; consider this a reboot.)

==History==
Terminus is not known to have ever had any natively intelligent life. Various intelligent beings from other places, human and otherwise, have come to settle there. It also has its own complement of extradimensional entities, beings which some might refer to as gods.

The earliest human settlers came from other worlds forgotten to the modern person. Something, however, caused a lapse in communication and logistical capability. The settlers were cut off from home. Whatever disaster occurred has cut off almost all contact with civilizations outside the solar system. Visitation by spacecraft is extremely rare and not well-known. Visitors who arrive via stranger means are, if they exist, keeping it on the down-low.

It is believed by some scholars and most small children that there are inhabited cities on the moons.

==Contemporary Material Culture==
Industrial manufacturing and supply chains no longer exist. However, books and other repositories of information are still available, and it's not uncommon for people to be educated to a (real-world) modern standard, even if they can't lay hands on so much as a flashlight.

The vast majority of work is done using human or animal muscle, or relatively simple wind or water mills. That being said, the situation is not at all comparable to medieval Europe. Many technologies that have an extremely high payoff-to-effort ratio if you are already at a high Roman or Renaissance-era level of technology are still used. Movable-type printing presses are not common, but they have supplanted scriptoriums. They’re just too easy to build in comparison to how much effort they save.

The essential difficulty is that the creation of an industrial economy is a great deal of work, and nobody is really inclined to go to that kind of effort. Anyone with the resources, ambition, and will to build a steam train or an air conditioner factory is probably better off becoming an archmage and obligating their neighbors to appease them.

However, Precursor humanity genetically engineered a variety of plants to be unnaturally useful, and those strains are still cultivated. A wide variety of food plants and several types of mushroom are known to be results of the original sequencing project; they can be easily and rapidly farmed, and are tailored to human dietary needs. For this reason, simply supplying the population with food is not the crushing burden it was in real-world medieval societies, and even impoverished areas have sufficient time for leisure and social or intellectual pursuits. There are other examples, as well, such as the Library Trees with leaves uniquely suited to paper-making.

Advanced alloys, both alchemical and mundane, are still manufactured, although not in modern quantities.

'''Summary:'''
*Individual artificers, magicians, and alchemists do produce items of enchantment or high technology, but these are rare, hand-crafted, and expensive.
*High technology as it exists in our world is rarely available and typically only in very simple configurations. A hand-held UV light might be obtainable, but a computer is out of the question.
*The advanced technology that does exist often involves large glowing synthetic gemstones, runic circuitry, and alchemical materials. Gears, moving parts, conventional batteries, and other steampunk apparatuses are relatively rare. The dividing line between magic and this sort of science can be somewhat thin at times. Consult the rules for mods in the WWN rulebook for ideas.
*The "hurlants" described on pg. 36 are available for purchase. In-setting, they're referred to as coilguns. They function via an extremely high-tension, alchemically produced metal spring, housed inside a barrel, which must be carefully wound with an integral handle before a specially made steel dart is loaded and clipped into place. Rather than the barrel being rifled, the dart is designed with a subtly helical fluting. Hand hurlants are often mounted on an arm bracer, but either may be made in a configuration similar to a modern firearm. They are, however, typically ornately carved or filigreed. They are considered a weapon of war or murder, and may not be carried openly in civilized cities. The user is expected to have them unloaded, "broken down" into components, and carried packed away. Note the AP tag on them - they ignore non-magical armor. A hand hurlant can throw its sliver of steel directly through an armored knight's breastplate and out his back. They are, therefore, especially disliked by the sorts of people wealthy enough to invest in heavy armor.

==Astronomy & Weather==
Terminus lacks the axial tilt & wobble of our own world. Seasons are caused by its eccentric and elliptical orbit. In plain terms, its distance from the sun varies sufficiently over the course of the year to produce winter and summer. This means the north and south hemisphere experience winter and summer at the same time. Terminus' magnetic poles are precisely perpendicular to the plane of orbit. It is highly likely that some intelligent agency altered these factors at some point in times ancient beyond reckoning.

Terminus has three moons in an equidistant orbit around the planet. One is nearly white, like our own, and the other two are tinted red and blue. Absent cloud cover, the night sky almost always provides a little more light than a full moon on our own Earth.

==Calendar==
There are 13 lunar months, each of exactly 28 days. There are three months in each of the seasons that would be recognizable to us - a spring, a summer, an autumn, a winter. Even without axial tilt and wobble, the nature of the seasons varies according to distance from the equator and local geography. Coastal areas are milder, areas close to the poles are colder.

The calendar of 13 months is standard almost all across the globe, at least in human civilizations. What varies is which months are counted part of which season. In general, an area with extreme conditions during one month of the year will count the "extra" month as outside of a regular season. A northern city might take the part of the year of most intense cold and count it as "Fimbulwinter," a time outside of even regular winter. An equatorial land might have the Dog Days, that month which is too hot to be placed within regular summertime. In a coastal land, the inhabitants might take the time of most intense storm activity, and name it the Monsoon Season.

The area this campaign takes place in is a Mediterranean type of climate. Due to the proximity of a large body of water, while the summers can be hellishly humid, the extremes of temperature aren't as bad as they could be.

==Languages==
The PCs start out knowing Common & Trade Cant, with additional languages per their Connect & Know skills. See pg. 28 of WWN.

*Common is a modern form of Thracian, and is the most wide-spread human language. Insular or remote human civilizations might have divergent or distinct languages.
*Trade Cant is a limited pidgin tongue commonly used in highly cosmopolitan areas or by far-traveling merchants. It's not good for higher pursuits, but has special vocabulary for economic concerns, commodities, travel & accommodations, et cetera.
*Old Thracian has about as much in common with Common as classical Latin does with modern Italian. It was the language of the last powerful and widespread human civilization.
*Amaranthan, also known as Sorcerer's Speech, is even older than Old Thracian. It was the tongue of a powerful sorcerous empire that collapsed in blood and fire.
*Lizard, or in derogatory terms "Hiss," is the language of the common lizardfolk and other reptilian intelligences. It's hard for humans to pronounce, and even harder for them to think in. The brains of the reptilian people are formed very differently to human ones. Something has gone very wrong with the lizardfolk, and 90% of them have cognitive limitations not present in their ancestors. The result is that only about 10% of them are literate in their own tongue. Note that in Lizard, humans are referred to as "Monkey Men," and their terms for our language are even more derogatory than "Hiss."
*Pelagic, or in derogatory terms "Glub," is the common language of undersea peoples. It's impossible to pronounce in atmosphere, so it can mostly only be learned underwater. Water-Adapted PCs (see pg. 27, under xeno-blooded) can learn to speak and understand this.
*Fae is the language of the various half-worlder beings. It has Seelie and Unseelie dialects, and while most people will be more familiar with one or the other, they are comprehensible to each other.
*Sign Language exists for the use of the deaf, and is also commonly used by beings for whom normal conversation is difficult. For example, a non-water-adapted human and a greater octopus might both be intelligent, but the octopus can only speak underwater, and the human can only speak in the air. If they met at the shore, they could communicate via sign, with each staying in its own preferred medium. The gestures are abstract enough for beings with significantly different anatomy, so long as they have limbs. Dolphins don't have sufficient limbs to Sign, although they can learn to understand it, but they're telepathic anyway.
*Various other species have their own languages.
*The Precursor civilization of humans presumably had their own language, but they don't seem to have written much down, or if they did, it was lost long ago.

==Random Notes==
*"Greater" creatures are intelligent forms. A Greater Octopus is therefore a sophont form of octopod. The lizardfolk are greater lizards. Nonhuman intelligences, in their own languages, would typically refer to humans as Greater Monkeys. This is a scientific or technical classification and it is rude to refer to any intelligent being in their own person this way. This is distinct from a "Dire" form, which is a larger and usually more ferocious form of a more common creature. See the classical example, the Dire Wolf. Note that nonhumans often classify Ogres as Dire Humans, which humans are not especially appreciative of in most cases.
*Human biology is rather enhanced by precursor engineering. The average lifespan, uninterrupted by disease or violence, is about 120 years, with only the last fifteen or so involving serious senescence. Most people will recover relatively fully from injuries or diseases that don't amount to amputation, and sepsis due to injuries is rare. Birth defects as we know them are unheard-of. Fertility is also optional for humans. Basically, look at the healing rules and be astonished how little medicine is required for stabbing victims.
*There are no elves & dwarves in the typical D&D sense, so the Special Origin focus is not used. The Xenoblooded focus is freely available and represents the efforts of precursor genetic engineers, passed down through the long millenia; aquatic-adapted humans are still well-known in coastal areas. The Unique Gift focus is also available, and typically represents some inheritable genetic gift.

==Nibiru==
I don't want to spend too much time on this, because the whole point of the campaign is that you aren't there. But maybe a few notes won't go too far wrong.
*There is a system of public education, welfare, and public works that is unrivaled in the world. If you don't find a useful occupation for yourself, you '''will''' be trained and pressed into service in some capacity or another.
*Nibiru has the wealth to support its people, but no room for idlers and malingerers. Literally, physical space is at a premium.
*Social stratification is severe in terms of power and resources commanded, but there are no mansions or palaces. Everyone must make use of public spaces and facilities, hence they are well-maintained.
*Security is tight. If any enemy ever penetrated to the machinery that allows peregrination, they could damage it in a way no one now living would know how to repair. Foreigners are allowed into the city itself only on an extremely limited basis. Criminal gangs are unheard of; and criminal activity is not tolerated.
*All citizens are educated to at least something resembling a high school level and then given some additional training, vocational or otherwise, unless their employment is destined to be entirely menial. For those such as the PCs who have exceptional abilities, they may have attended one of the following programs:
**The Athenaeum is a tower most like a "university" program in Nibiru. Conventional scholarly and engineering students are likely to graduate from here.
**The Scholomance is the tower dedicated to magic, both High Magic & New Magic. The individual in charge of it, known as the Rector, is a black-robed figure wearing an alabaster mask. Their true identity has not been known in centuries - it may be the same superannuated individual, or it is possible that the Chairs of the various departments are electing a new individual from time to time. The board of the scholomance is is deeply secretive, and nothing can be said with certainty.
**The Charterhouse tower trains Vowed. Charterhouse Vowed can select as their bonus skill (see pg. 86) either Exert or Sneak. PCs can take any path they wish, but the typical Charterhouse graduate works as a spy, agent, bodyguard, or assassin.
**Skull Plaza is the military school. Obviously, many people learn the combat arts in more practical ways, but the regular army goes through Skull Plaza. Note that Nibiru does not maintain cavalry of any kind. Their combat doctrines and equipment are focused on siege defense and man-to-man or small unit combat. They produce numerous skilled duelists, and marching on the city would be a death sentence for nearly any attacker, but Nibiru can't field a large army.

=Gods & Religion=
This is the part where I complain. Feel free to skim this section at most.

I don't like the way that religion and clerics are portrayed in D&D. I'm most interested in what the PCs choose to do, in pursuing their own ends. Those ends may be selfless - a character might be dedicated to justice, for example. But it should be their own choice and for their own reasons, subject to their own reevaluation. Other, more selfish motivations are certainly easy enough to understand. "I would like that large pile of gold coins to belong to me rather than whoever currently lays claim to it" and "I would prefer not to die beneath this ghost-haunted pyramid I have been abandoned in" are both immediately relatable.

This is consistent with what I would consider to be most of the essential texts of the genre. So of course D&D, in its lack of wisdom, had to make a character option to subsume PC choices and priority to some half-baked imagining of how a pantheistic religion might work, if you stripped it of all interest and cultural factors.

So we're not going to do that.

There is nothing like a D&D Cleric in this world. There are healers. There are also persons who are "high priests" or the like. The former is someone who has bent their talents to medicine. Or, in the case of the Healer partial class, someone who has devoted themselves to using psychic energy as a substitute for complex pharmaceutical substances that can no longer be manufactured. A "priest" is a social role. They may or may not be a member of a class that provides magical powers. If they are serious about relationships with supernatural beings, they may have a respectable ability with the Pray skill.

==Religion on Terminus==
Gods are a highly varied lot. There are extradimensional entities and spirits that seem to have influence over greater or lesser amounts of real estate. There are also some extremely physically real beings with supernatural powers that are more flexible or focused than the Spells and Arts available to mortal magicians. A local crocodilian river-deity, for example, may be both a physically verifiable giant crocodile, and also capable of causing or preventing flooding in the river. But, notably, ONLY their own river. A deity of some more abstract principle, such as the North Wind, might be more indeterminate and widespread in their presence.

The thing to keep in mind is that the gods are distant, weird, and inhuman, in all cases. The crocodile god is not up for a friendly chat. The North Wind was never a human, likely has no human feelings, and if it takes some anthropomorphic shape it is only as a matter of whimsy. Deities are typically not worshipped and revered in the way that a modern person in the US might imagine a religion to imply. The sailors do not love the gods of the seas. They fear them and respect them, and make offerings in the hope of improving their chances of coming home alive. Deities (in the vast majority of cases) make no guarantees or offers regarding the fate of a person's soul after death, which is a mystery, and of little concern to the typical person. Everyday matters loom larger, and death must take care of its own.

Devoted servants of deities may have some special power or another, which is typically minor and has a cost. For more serious exertions of divine power, if such a thing is desirable, the cultists will likely need to conduct some ritual. This will involve an offering, and a Pray roll from their leader. Note that the offering need not be a material object or bloodletting - some gods might look favorably on a night of frenzied dancing by at least twenty or thirty dervishes. It depends on the god and the ritual undertaken. This isn't something I expect to see a lot of in-game, since divine intervention is generally not an effective way to obtain human goals.

Anyway. Expect weird and inhuman genius loci, snake cults, and sui generis beings of cosmic horror, not some kind of benevolent god of farming with an organized and hierarchical temple structure.

==Known Deities==
I dunno, I'll put some stuff here eventually.

=Links=

Caverns Without Number

2022-06-27T20:02:43Z

The Wyzard:

This is a page for the Caverns of Thracia game, run by The Wyzard using Worlds Without Number. Its content is tentative.

'''Before we start:''' Combat is intended to be a little more interesting than normal B/X. I strongly suggest that you all familiarize yourself with how Shock Damage works, and secondarily with how the combat maneuvers work. Shock Damage is going to mess you up if you aren't ready for it.
[[File:Goodman 001.jpg]]

=The Adventurers=
==Basic Wiki Practice==
I'm used to keeping information on my campaigns on a wiki. Some of you may not be used to this. Your character sheet is the first challenge you will face! Please ask for help on the discord if you aren't familiar with this stuff. So here is what you do, in order:
*Make a wiki account if you can't just log in with your regular RPGnet account, I can't remember.
*Anyway, be logged into the wiki.
*Open the sample character sheet in a new tab.
*Then hit "Edit" on this section (The Adventurers.)
*You can see the double-brackets around "Fill This In Yourself." Those double brackets will make a link to another wiki page, and the title will be whatever is the text inside the double brackets. You're going to put your character's name in there. Your character's name should be sufficiently unusual that there isn't already a PC somewhere on the wiki with that name. A good formula is something like (Name) the (Descriptor), where the descriptor is either some literal or figurative detail about the character. Maybe your character is Jeanette the Ravensworn, and you don't know what Ravensworn is yet. That's fine, maybe we'll find out!
*Save your edit and click on the new link that is your character's name.
*Now, hit the Edit button on the sample character sheet.
*Hit CTRL-A to select all text in the editing window. Then CTRL-C to copy it. Then close the window on the sample character sheet because you don't actually want to change it.
*Now hid the Edit button on YOUR character sheet, and paste in all the text from the sample one.
*Now fill in all the details.
*This sounds like a lot when I break it down like this, but honestly it takes seconds and I will probably do it for you during Session Zero.
==Dramatis Personae==
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[WWN Sample Character Sheet]]

=Introduction=
The greatest city of the world, in terms of cosmopolitan fun, wealth, and knowledge, is Nibiru, the Peregrinate Acropolis. A heavily fortified castle-city built on a large stone mesa, it has the look of a vast ziggurat capped with a wonder of colorful towers. The undercity inside the mesa is a maze of carved and worked tunnels, warehouses, reservoirs, and hidden temples. The lower levels of the city are a chaos of tenements, manufactories, brightly tiled plazas, and cafeterias. The vast towers contain luxury apartments for the rich, in addition to colleges, libraries, laboratories, training halls and so forth. The outer walls are dotted with fortifications, weapon emplacements, signal towers, and windmills that power various machinery, particularly water pumps. Real estate is tremendously valuable, most people live in spaces little larger than a walk-in closet. Hence the desperate need for the public bathhouses and cafeteria-style restaurants that support the life and hygiene of the city - there simply isn't space for people to have their own kitchens and so forth.

What makes Nibiru so wealthy and influential, such a center of knowledge, is that it moves. Every week, the city disappears in vast cloud of opaque fog, and reappears somewhere else on Terminus. The engines that accomplish this have been carefully maintained for centuries, so that it has functioned without interruption. It peregrinates along a semi-regular trade route, with space built into the schedule for necessary or opportunistic deviations, and a cadre of mages, merchants, and scholars of economics carefully plot its course for maximum advantage. Wherever it lands, the vast trading apparatus fires up into action. Enormous loads of commodities and rarer goods are sold to local merchant houses, wherever the city might land. The vast caverns of the undercity can carry an amount of cargo beyond imagination. The limiting factor is how much of it can be hauled out and traded for new goods, which must in their turn be loaded within six days.

You are natives of this city - you have the invisible, UV-reactive tattoo of a citizen in at least three places on your body. This marks you as one of the exalted, a citizen. Even the meanest beggar who is a citizen of Nibiru has something that the wealth of an emperor might not purchase. And, like all natives, you know the rule - the first six days are for business, but the seventh is a day of rest. No one leaves the city on the seventh day, or lingers outside for even one second beyond midnight of the sixth. The risk of being left behind is just too high.

Guess how you fucked up?

==The Local Environment==
It's early spring and you're probably going to be stuck here for about the next year, until Nibiru comes back and you have the ability to get back onboard. The city-state of Amarna is located on a fertile river delta that empties into a sea. That's where Nibiru came to rest. The area around the great river is a green and well-developed valley, with large towns and farming villages served by a regular geometric pattern of irrigation channels. To the east, about a day's walk down the coast, is a small semi-fortified city named Tjaru, in an undesirable and swampy region. It is used as a place of exile for criminals and the disgraced. That's where you've currently ended up. And you've heard rumors of a recently-discovered Deep, one of the vast underground fastnesses built by various ancient civilizations.

Deeps are dangerous, in ways both mundane and exotic. However, they frequently contain raw wealth left behind by the Ancients. Also, the even more precious sorcerous, alchemical, or technological artifacts that they seemed to have such a panoply of. This would be an outstanding way to support yourselves for the next year. And, if you're lucky, you might go beyond supporting yourself in reasonable style, and find that you've recovered something valuable enough to earn a higher station in Nibiru.

==Distance & Timekeeping==
I'll eventually post a hexmap with some local points of interest and so forth, but I don't envision hexcrawling or the like to be a major component. You're going to be in a relatively civilized area, albeit on the very edge of it. You won't need to make wilderness encounter checks to get to the dungeon and back.

My assumption is that you'll be largely based in Tjaru. My thought is that rather than keep strict track of days, a single delve (which might span multiple sessions) will just cross a week off the calendar, and we'll assume that resting, re-equipping, and so forth takes about that long. The dungeon is going to be maybe two hour's walk from Tjaru, so you can go out there, screw around for a while, and still get back before dark.

==Questions for Session Zero==
*Anything anybody definitely wants to see
*Anything anyone definitely doesn't want to see, particularly in terms of "does anything already on this wiki bother someone a lot?"
*Lines & Veils or whatever, PM me if you have to
*I don't intend the game to include explicit sexual content, and even the implication of sexual violence is right out
*I actually find some of the gene-modified human strains in WWN to be kind of interesting, but they might be too problematic, I dunno, opinions?
*

=Encumbrance & Beasts of Burden=
WWN's encumbrance system is simple enough that I'm not sure we'll actually need this section, but I included it as a matter of habit. Note that every full 100 coins counts as an item. Count normal gems as a single coin. Jewelry and small art objects are counted as a bulk good - you can pack together three items such as carved ivory necklaces, jade hairbrushes, jeweled crowns, rings, etc. I'll let you know about larger art objects.
==The Pocket Change Rule==
Your first up-to-100-coins worth of regular coins and gems do not count towards encumbrance, so long as they're yours alone. Found treasure is tracked separately until you return to civilization, such as it is.
==The Bling Rule==
The PCs may ignore the encumbrance requirements of jewelry if they simply wear the jewelry openly, within reason. No more than a single crown at a time, etc. This has two downsides: If you are presently in a Deep, you may find out an object is cursed at a most inconvenient time. Secondly, your enemies may become ravenously motivated to relieve you of those items. Morale is an important component of combat in this game, and if you are draped in the wealth of nations, then opponents may get a morale bonus.

=NPCs=

=Notes & Logs=

=Maps=

=House Rules & Character Creation=

==Character Creation & Advancement==
*Don't come with a character concept, we'll create characters in a session zero. It's okay to have a few vague ideas just so we don't have to look up too much.
*For attributes, arrange the following array to taste: 14, 12, 11, 10, 9, and 7. See pg. 8.
*When you pick a background, you get a free skill associated with it at level 0. Then, make a total of three rolls on the growth or learning table for your background.
*Choose a class. We're only using the classes available in the free version. However, the odder partial classes are available.
*Note that I don't like the Cleric class in D&D for complicated reasons, so please don't try to emulate one in terms of being a dedicated servant of a god. If you want to play a Healer (one of the partial classes) you certainly can, but I don't have a sense as to whether one is strictly necessary. PCs can die in this game but I'm probably going to tone down the "if you fail this save you die" kind of stuff.
*Assume you roll a 6 on your hit die.
*Skip the equipment step, read up on the languages stuff on this wiki.
*Everyone levels up twice. We start at level 3. Assume you roll a 4 on these two hit dice.
*You can start with 1,000 silver pieces worth of equipment. Note that this game is on a silver standard. If you want one of the packages on page 29, assume it's 100 silver pieces for any of the packages. No swapping or whatever. Discard any money you didn't spend on equipment.
*For ready cash, you each start with 3d6 gold, 3d20 silver, and 1d4+1 gems worth 50 sp apiece.
*Your first month of living expenses is prepaid, at a Common standard of living. After the first month you need to pay that much, which amounts to 80sp per month, due on the first of each month. Adventurers cannot voluntarily spend less than this, because they are intolerant of living in more straitened circumstances. Note that this includes rations - it's not any more expensive to buy rations than it is to eat at the tavern. You do still have to determine how many you're carrying, for encumbrance purposes.
*We're using slow advancement, pg 54. However, a full continuous month lived at a Rich lifestyle (200sp per week, or 800 for the whole month) gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 6th level. A full continuous month lived at a Noble lifestyle (1,000sp per week, or 4,000 for the whole month), gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 9th level.
*You will each start with one or more rumors about the nearby Caverns of Thracia.

=Setting=
Disregard the setting as written in WWN. I dig the general vibe but I'm mostly going to be doing my own thing. The name of this world is Terminus (players in my previous campaigns may recognize the name; consider this a reboot.)

==History==
Terminus is not known to have ever had any natively intelligent life. Various intelligent beings from other places, human and otherwise, have come to settle there. It also has its own complement of extradimensional entities, beings which some might refer to as gods.

The earliest human settlers came from other worlds forgotten to the modern person. Something, however, caused a lapse in communication and logistical capability. The settlers were cut off from home. Whatever disaster occurred has cut off almost all contact with civilizations outside the solar system. Visitation by spacecraft is extremely rare and not well-known. Visitors who arrive via stranger means are, if they exist, keeping it on the down-low.

It is believed by some scholars and most small children that there are inhabited cities on the moons.

==Contemporary Material Culture==
Industrial manufacturing and supply chains no longer exist. However, books and other repositories of information are still available, and it's not uncommon for people to be educated to a (real-world) modern standard, even if they can't lay hands on so much as a flashlight.

The vast majority of work is done using human or animal muscle, or relatively simple wind or water mills. That being said, the situation is not at all comparable to medieval Europe. Many technologies that have an extremely high payoff-to-effort ratio if you are already at a high Roman or Renaissance-era level of technology are still used. Movable-type printing presses are not common, but they have supplanted scriptoriums. They’re just too easy to build in comparison to how much effort they save.

The essential difficulty is that the creation of an industrial economy is a great deal of work, and nobody is really inclined to go to that kind of effort. Anyone with the resources, ambition, and will to build a steam train or an air conditioner factory is probably better off becoming an archmage and obligating their neighbors to appease them.

However, Precursor humanity genetically engineered a variety of plants to be unnaturally useful, and those strains are still cultivated. A wide variety of food plants and several types of mushroom are known to be results of the original sequencing project; they can be easily and rapidly farmed, and are tailored to human dietary needs. For this reason, simply supplying the population with food is not the crushing burden it was in real-world medieval societies, and even impoverished areas have sufficient time for leisure and social or intellectual pursuits. There are other examples, as well, such as the Library Trees with leaves uniquely suited to paper-making.

Advanced alloys, both alchemical and mundane, are still manufactured, although not in modern quantities.

'''Summary:'''
*Individual artificers, magicians, and alchemists do produce items of enchantment or high technology, but these are rare, hand-crafted, and expensive.
*High technology as it exists in our world is rarely available and typically only in very simple configurations. A hand-held UV light might be obtainable, but a computer is out of the question.
*The advanced technology that does exist often involves large glowing synthetic gemstones, runic circuitry, and alchemical materials. Gears, moving parts, conventional batteries, and other steampunk apparatuses are relatively rare. The dividing line between magic and this sort of science can be somewhat thin at times. Consult the rules for mods in the WWN rulebook for ideas.
*The "hurlants" described on pg. 36 are available for purchase. In-setting, they're referred to as coilguns. They function via an extremely high-tension, alchemically produced metal spring, housed inside a barrel, which must be carefully wound with an integral handle before a specially made steel dart is loaded and clipped into place. Rather than the barrel being rifled, the dart is designed with a subtly helical fluting. Hand hurlants are often mounted on an arm bracer, but either may be made in a configuration similar to a modern firearm. They are, however, typically ornately carved or filigreed. They are considered a weapon of war or murder, and may not be carried openly in civilized cities. The user is expected to have them unloaded, "broken down" into components, and carried packed away. Note the AP tag on them - they ignore non-magical armor. A hand hurlant can throw its sliver of steel directly through an armored knight's breastplate and out his back. They are, therefore, especially disliked by the sorts of people wealthy enough to invest in heavy armor.

==Astronomy & Weather==
Terminus lacks the axial tilt & wobble of our own world. Seasons are caused by its eccentric and elliptical orbit. In plain terms, its distance from the sun varies sufficiently over the course of the year to produce winter and summer. This means the north and south hemisphere experience winter and summer at the same time. Terminus' magnetic poles are precisely perpendicular to the plane of orbit. It is highly likely that some intelligent agency altered these factors at some point in times ancient beyond reckoning.

Terminus has three moons in an equidistant orbit around the planet. One is nearly white, like our own, and the other two are tinted red and blue. Absent cloud cover, the night sky almost always provides a little more light than a full moon on our own Earth.

==Calendar==
There are 13 lunar months, each of exactly 28 days. There are three months in each of the seasons that would be recognizable to us - a spring, a summer, an autumn, a winter. Even without axial tilt and wobble, the nature of the seasons varies according to distance from the equator and local geography. Coastal areas are milder, areas close to the poles are colder.

The calendar of 13 months is standard almost all across the globe, at least in human civilizations. What varies is which months are counted part of which season. In general, an area with extreme conditions during one month of the year will count the "extra" month as outside of a regular season. A northern city might take the part of the year of most intense cold and count it as "Fimbulwinter," a time outside of even regular winter. An equatorial land might have the Dog Days, that month which is too hot to be placed within regular summertime. In a coastal land, the inhabitants might take the time of most intense storm activity, and name it the Monsoon Season.

The area this campaign takes place in is a Mediterranean type of climate. Due to the proximity of a large body of water, while the summers can be hellishly humid, the extremes of temperature aren't as bad as they could be.

==Languages==
The PCs start out knowing Common & Trade Cant, with additional languages per their Connect & Know skills. See pg. 28 of WWN.

*Common is a modern form of Thracian, and is the most wide-spread human language. Insular or remote human civilizations might have divergent or distinct languages.
*Trade Cant is a limited pidgin tongue commonly used in highly cosmopolitan areas or by far-traveling merchants. It's not good for higher pursuits, but has special vocabulary for economic concerns, commodities, travel & accommodations, et cetera.
*Old Thracian has about as much in common with Common as classical Latin does with modern Italian. It was the language of the last powerful and widespread human civilization.
*Amaranthan, also known as Sorcerer's Speech, is even older than Old Thracian. It was the tongue of a powerful sorcerous empire that collapsed in blood and fire.
*Lizard, or in derogatory terms "Hiss," is the language of the common lizardfolk and other reptilian intelligences. It's hard for humans to pronounce, and even harder for them to think in. The brains of the reptilian people are formed very differently to human ones. Something has gone very wrong with the lizardfolk, and 90% of them have cognitive limitations not present in their ancestors. The result is that only about 10% of them are literate in their own tongue. Note that in Lizard, humans are referred to as "Monkey Men," and their terms for our language are even more derogatory than "Hiss."
*Pelagic, or in derogatory terms "Glub," is the common language of undersea peoples. It's impossible to pronounce in atmosphere, so it can mostly only be learned underwater. Water-Adapted PCs (see pg. 27, under xeno-blooded) can learn to speak and understand this.
*Fae is the language of the various half-worlder beings. It has Seelie and Unseelie dialects, and while most people will be more familiar with one or the other, they are comprehensible to each other.
*Sign Language exists for the use of the deaf, and is also commonly used by beings for whom normal conversation is difficult. For example, a non-water-adapted human and a greater octopus might both be intelligent, but the octopus can only speak underwater, and the human can only speak in the air. If they met at the shore, they could communicate via sign, with each staying in its own preferred medium. The gestures are abstract enough for beings with significantly different anatomy, so long as they have limbs. Dolphins don't have sufficient limbs to Sign, although they can learn to understand it, but they're telepathic anyway.
*Various other species have their own languages.
*The Precursor civilization of humans presumably had their own language, but they don't seem to have written much down, or if they did, it was lost long ago.

==Random Notes==
*"Greater" creatures are intelligent forms. A Greater Octopus is therefore a sophont form of octopod. The lizardfolk are greater lizards. Nonhuman intelligences, in their own languages, would typically refer to humans as Greater Monkeys. This is a scientific or technical classification and it is rude to refer to any intelligent being in their own person this way. This is distinct from a "Dire" form, which is a larger and usually more ferocious form of a more common creature. See the classical example, the Dire Wolf. Note that nonhumans often classify Ogres as Dire Humans, which humans are not especially appreciative of in most cases.
*Human biology is rather enhanced by precursor engineering. The average lifespan, uninterrupted by disease or violence, is about 120 years, with only the last fifteen or so involving serious senescence. Most people will recover relatively fully from injuries or diseases that don't amount to amputation, and sepsis due to injuries is rare. Birth defects as we know them are unheard-of. Fertility is also optional for humans. Basically, look at the healing rules and be astonished how little medicine is required for stabbing victims.
*There are no elves & dwarves in the typical D&D sense, so the Special Origin focus is not used. The Xenoblooded focus is freely available and represents the efforts of precursor genetic engineers, passed down through the long millenia; aquatic-adapted humans are still well-known in coastal areas. The Unique Gift focus is also available, and typically represents some inheritable genetic gift.

==Nibiru==
I don't want to spend too much time on this, because the whole point of the campaign is that you aren't there. But maybe a few notes won't go too far wrong.
*There is a system of public education, welfare, and public works that is unrivaled in the world. If you don't find a useful occupation for yourself, you '''will''' be trained and pressed into service in some capacity or another.
*Nibiru has the wealth to support its people, but no room for idlers and malingerers. Literally, physical space is at a premium.
*Social stratification is severe in terms of power and resources commanded, but there are no mansions or palaces. Everyone must make use of public spaces and facilities, hence they are well-maintained.
*Security is tight. If any enemy ever penetrated to the machinery that allows peregrination, they could damage it in a way no one now living would know how to repair. Foreigners are allowed into the city itself only on an extremely limited basis. Criminal gangs are unheard of; and criminal activity is not tolerated.
*All citizens are educated to at least something resembling a high school level and then given some additional training, vocational or otherwise, unless their employment is destined to be entirely menial. For those such as the PCs who have exceptional abilities, they may have attended one of the following programs:
**The Athenaeum is a tower most like a "university" program in Nibiru. Conventional scholarly and engineering students are likely to graduate from here.
**The Scholomance is the tower dedicated to magic, both High Magic & New Magic. The individual in charge of it, known as the Rector, is a black-robed figure wearing an alabaster mask. Their true identity has not been known in centuries - it may be the same superannuated individual, or it is possible that the Chairs of the various departments are electing a new individual from time to time. The board of the scholomance is is deeply secretive, and nothing can be said with certainty.
**The Charterhouse tower trains Vowed. Charterhouse Vowed can select as their bonus skill (see pg. 86) either Exert or Sneak. PCs can take any path they wish, but the typical Charterhouse graduate works as a spy, agent, bodyguard, or assassin.
**Skull Plaza is the military school. Obviously, many people learn the combat arts in more practical ways, but the regular army goes through Skull Plaza. Note that Nibiru does not maintain cavalry of any kind. Their combat doctrines and equipment are focused on siege defense and man-to-man or small unit combat. They produce numerous skilled duelists, and marching on the city would be a death sentence for nearly any attacker, but Nibiru can't field a large army.

=Gods & Religion=
This is the part where I complain. Feel free to skim this section at most.

I don't like the way that religion and clerics are portrayed in D&D. I'm most interested in what the PCs choose to do, in pursuing their own ends. Those ends may be selfless - a character might be dedicated to justice, for example. But it should be their own choice and for their own reasons, subject to their own reevaluation. Other, more selfish motivations are certainly easy enough to understand. "I would like that large pile of gold coins to belong to me rather than whoever currently lays claim to it" and "I would prefer not to die beneath this ghost-haunted pyramid I have been abandoned in" are both immediately relatable.

This is consistent with what I would consider to be most of the essential texts of the genre. So of course D&D, in its lack of wisdom, had to make a character option to subsume PC choices and priority to some half-baked imagining of how a pantheistic religion might work, if you stripped it of all interest and cultural factors.

So we're not going to do that.

There is nothing like a D&D Cleric in this world. There are healers. There are also persons who are "high priests" or the like. The former is someone who has bent their talents to medicine. Or, in the case of the Healer partial class, someone who has devoted themselves to using psychic energy as a substitute for complex pharmaceutical substances that can no longer be manufactured. A "priest" is a social role. They may or may not be a member of a class that provides magical powers. If they are serious about relationships with supernatural beings, they may have a respectable ability with the Pray skill.

==Religion on Terminus==
Gods are a highly varied lot. There are extradimensional entities and spirits that seem to have influence over greater or lesser amounts of real estate. There are also some extremely physically real beings with supernatural powers that are more flexible or focused than the Spells and Arts available to mortal magicians. A local crocodilian river-deity, for example, may be both a physically verifiable giant crocodile, and also capable of causing or preventing flooding in the river. But, notably, ONLY their own river. A deity of some more abstract principle, such as the North Wind, might be more indeterminate and widespread in their presence.

The thing to keep in mind is that the gods are distant, weird, and inhuman, in all cases. The crocodile god is not up for a friendly chat. The North Wind was never a human, likely has no human feelings, and if it takes some anthropomorphic shape it is only as a matter of whimsy. Deities are typically not worshipped and revered in the way that a modern person in the US might imagine a religion to imply. The sailors do not love the gods of the seas. They fear them and respect them, and make offerings in the hope of improving their chances of coming home alive. Deities (in the vast majority of cases) make no guarantees or offers regarding the fate of a person's soul after death, which is a mystery, and of little concern to the typical person. Everyday matters loom larger, and death must take care of its own.

Devoted servants of deities may have some special power or another, which is typically minor and has a cost. For more serious exertions of divine power, if such a thing is desirable, the cultists will likely need to conduct some ritual. This will involve an offering, and a Pray roll from their leader. Note that the offering need not be a material object or bloodletting - some gods might look favorably on a night of frenzied dancing by at least twenty or thirty dervishes. It depends on the god and the ritual undertaken. This isn't something I expect to see a lot of in-game, since divine intervention is generally not an effective way to obtain human goals.

Anyway. Expect weird and inhuman genius loci, snake cults, and sui generis beings of cosmic horror, not some kind of benevolent god of farming with an organized and hierarchical temple structure.

==Known Deities==
I dunno, I'll put some stuff here eventually.

=Links=

File:Goodman 001.jpg

2022-06-27T20:02:13Z

The Wyzard:

Caverns Without Number

2022-06-27T19:56:08Z

The Wyzard: /* The Local Environment */

This is a page for the Caverns of Thracia game, run by The Wyzard using Worlds Without Number. Its content is tentative.

'''Before we start:''' Combat is intended to be a little more interesting than normal B/X. I strongly suggest that you all familiarize yourself with how Shock Damage works, and secondarily with how the combat maneuvers work. Shock Damage is going to mess you up if you aren't ready for it.

=The Adventurers=
==Basic Wiki Practice==
I'm used to keeping information on my campaigns on a wiki. Some of you may not be used to this. Your character sheet is the first challenge you will face! Please ask for help on the discord if you aren't familiar with this stuff. So here is what you do, in order:
*Make a wiki account if you can't just log in with your regular RPGnet account, I can't remember.
*Anyway, be logged into the wiki.
*Open the sample character sheet in a new tab.
*Then hit "Edit" on this section (The Adventurers.)
*You can see the double-brackets around "Fill This In Yourself." Those double brackets will make a link to another wiki page, and the title will be whatever is the text inside the double brackets. You're going to put your character's name in there. Your character's name should be sufficiently unusual that there isn't already a PC somewhere on the wiki with that name. A good formula is something like (Name) the (Descriptor), where the descriptor is either some literal or figurative detail about the character. Maybe your character is Jeanette the Ravensworn, and you don't know what Ravensworn is yet. That's fine, maybe we'll find out!
*Save your edit and click on the new link that is your character's name.
*Now, hit the Edit button on the sample character sheet.
*Hit CTRL-A to select all text in the editing window. Then CTRL-C to copy it. Then close the window on the sample character sheet because you don't actually want to change it.
*Now hid the Edit button on YOUR character sheet, and paste in all the text from the sample one.
*Now fill in all the details.
*This sounds like a lot when I break it down like this, but honestly it takes seconds and I will probably do it for you during Session Zero.
==Dramatis Personae==
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[WWN Sample Character Sheet]]

=Introduction=
The greatest city of the world, in terms of cosmopolitan fun, wealth, and knowledge, is Nibiru, the Peregrinate Acropolis. A heavily fortified castle-city built on a large stone mesa, it has the look of a vast ziggurat capped with a wonder of colorful towers. The undercity inside the mesa is a maze of carved and worked tunnels, warehouses, reservoirs, and hidden temples. The lower levels of the city are a chaos of tenements, manufactories, brightly tiled plazas, and cafeterias. The vast towers contain luxury apartments for the rich, in addition to colleges, libraries, laboratories, training halls and so forth. The outer walls are dotted with fortifications, weapon emplacements, signal towers, and windmills that power various machinery, particularly water pumps. Real estate is tremendously valuable, most people live in spaces little larger than a walk-in closet. Hence the desperate need for the public bathhouses and cafeteria-style restaurants that support the life and hygiene of the city - there simply isn't space for people to have their own kitchens and so forth.

What makes Nibiru so wealthy and influential, such a center of knowledge, is that it moves. Every week, the city disappears in vast cloud of opaque fog, and reappears somewhere else on Terminus. The engines that accomplish this have been carefully maintained for centuries, so that it has functioned without interruption. It peregrinates along a semi-regular trade route, with space built into the schedule for necessary or opportunistic deviations, and a cadre of mages, merchants, and scholars of economics carefully plot its course for maximum advantage. Wherever it lands, the vast trading apparatus fires up into action. Enormous loads of commodities and rarer goods are sold to local merchant houses, wherever the city might land. The vast caverns of the undercity can carry an amount of cargo beyond imagination. The limiting factor is how much of it can be hauled out and traded for new goods, which must in their turn be loaded within six days.

You are natives of this city - you have the invisible, UV-reactive tattoo of a citizen in at least three places on your body. This marks you as one of the exalted, a citizen. Even the meanest beggar who is a citizen of Nibiru has something that the wealth of an emperor might not purchase. And, like all natives, you know the rule - the first six days are for business, but the seventh is a day of rest. No one leaves the city on the seventh day, or lingers outside for even one second beyond midnight of the sixth. The risk of being left behind is just too high.

Guess how you fucked up?

==The Local Environment==
It's early spring and you're probably going to be stuck here for about the next year, until Nibiru comes back and you have the ability to get back onboard. The city-state of Amarna is located on a fertile river delta that empties into a sea. That's where Nibiru came to rest. The area around the great river is a green and well-developed valley, with large towns and farming villages served by a regular geometric pattern of irrigation channels. To the east, about a day's walk down the coast, is a small semi-fortified city named Tjaru, in an undesirable and swampy region. It is used as a place of exile for criminals and the disgraced. That's where you've currently ended up. And you've heard rumors of a recently-discovered Deep, one of the vast underground fastnesses built by various ancient civilizations.

Deeps are dangerous, in ways both mundane and exotic. However, they frequently contain raw wealth left behind by the Ancients. Also, the even more precious sorcerous, alchemical, or technological artifacts that they seemed to have such a panoply of. This would be an outstanding way to support yourselves for the next year. And, if you're lucky, you might go beyond supporting yourself in reasonable style, and find that you've recovered something valuable enough to earn a higher station in Nibiru.

==Distance & Timekeeping==
I'll eventually post a hexmap with some local points of interest and so forth, but I don't envision hexcrawling or the like to be a major component. You're going to be in a relatively civilized area, albeit on the very edge of it. You won't need to make wilderness encounter checks to get to the dungeon and back.

My assumption is that you'll be largely based in Tjaru. My thought is that rather than keep strict track of days, a single delve (which might span multiple sessions) will just cross a week off the calendar, and we'll assume that resting, re-equipping, and so forth takes about that long. The dungeon is going to be maybe two hour's walk from Tjaru, so you can go out there, screw around for a while, and still get back before dark.

==Questions for Session Zero==
*Anything anybody definitely wants to see
*Anything anyone definitely doesn't want to see, particularly in terms of "does anything already on this wiki bother someone a lot?"
*Lines & Veils or whatever, PM me if you have to
*I don't intend the game to include explicit sexual content, and even the implication of sexual violence is right out
*I actually find some of the gene-modified human strains in WWN to be kind of interesting, but they might be too problematic, I dunno, opinions?
*

=Encumbrance & Beasts of Burden=
WWN's encumbrance system is simple enough that I'm not sure we'll actually need this section, but I included it as a matter of habit. Note that every full 100 coins counts as an item. Count normal gems as a single coin. Jewelry and small art objects are counted as a bulk good - you can pack together three items such as carved ivory necklaces, jade hairbrushes, jeweled crowns, rings, etc. I'll let you know about larger art objects.
==The Pocket Change Rule==
Your first up-to-100-coins worth of regular coins and gems do not count towards encumbrance, so long as they're yours alone. Found treasure is tracked separately until you return to civilization, such as it is.
==The Bling Rule==
The PCs may ignore the encumbrance requirements of jewelry if they simply wear the jewelry openly, within reason. No more than a single crown at a time, etc. This has two downsides: If you are presently in a Deep, you may find out an object is cursed at a most inconvenient time. Secondly, your enemies may become ravenously motivated to relieve you of those items. Morale is an important component of combat in this game, and if you are draped in the wealth of nations, then opponents may get a morale bonus.

=NPCs=

=Notes & Logs=

=Maps=

=House Rules & Character Creation=

==Character Creation & Advancement==
*Don't come with a character concept, we'll create characters in a session zero. It's okay to have a few vague ideas just so we don't have to look up too much.
*For attributes, arrange the following array to taste: 14, 12, 11, 10, 9, and 7. See pg. 8.
*When you pick a background, you get a free skill associated with it at level 0. Then, make a total of three rolls on the growth or learning table for your background.
*Choose a class. We're only using the classes available in the free version. However, the odder partial classes are available.
*Note that I don't like the Cleric class in D&D for complicated reasons, so please don't try to emulate one in terms of being a dedicated servant of a god. If you want to play a Healer (one of the partial classes) you certainly can, but I don't have a sense as to whether one is strictly necessary. PCs can die in this game but I'm probably going to tone down the "if you fail this save you die" kind of stuff.
*Assume you roll a 6 on your hit die.
*Skip the equipment step, read up on the languages stuff on this wiki.
*Everyone levels up twice. We start at level 3. Assume you roll a 4 on these two hit dice.
*You can start with 1,000 silver pieces worth of equipment. Note that this game is on a silver standard. If you want one of the packages on page 29, assume it's 100 silver pieces for any of the packages. No swapping or whatever. Discard any money you didn't spend on equipment.
*For ready cash, you each start with 3d6 gold, 3d20 silver, and 1d4+1 gems worth 50 sp apiece.
*Your first month of living expenses is prepaid, at a Common standard of living. After the first month you need to pay that much, which amounts to 80sp per month, due on the first of each month. Adventurers cannot voluntarily spend less than this, because they are intolerant of living in more straitened circumstances. Note that this includes rations - it's not any more expensive to buy rations than it is to eat at the tavern. You do still have to determine how many you're carrying, for encumbrance purposes.
*We're using slow advancement, pg 54. However, a full continuous month lived at a Rich lifestyle (200sp per week, or 800 for the whole month) gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 6th level. A full continuous month lived at a Noble lifestyle (1,000sp per week, or 4,000 for the whole month), gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 9th level.
*You will each start with one or more rumors about the nearby Caverns of Thracia.

=Setting=
Disregard the setting as written in WWN. I dig the general vibe but I'm mostly going to be doing my own thing. The name of this world is Terminus (players in my previous campaigns may recognize the name; consider this a reboot.)

==History==
Terminus is not known to have ever had any natively intelligent life. Various intelligent beings from other places, human and otherwise, have come to settle there. It also has its own complement of extradimensional entities, beings which some might refer to as gods.

The earliest human settlers came from other worlds forgotten to the modern person. Something, however, caused a lapse in communication and logistical capability. The settlers were cut off from home. Whatever disaster occurred has cut off almost all contact with civilizations outside the solar system. Visitation by spacecraft is extremely rare and not well-known. Visitors who arrive via stranger means are, if they exist, keeping it on the down-low.

It is believed by some scholars and most small children that there are inhabited cities on the moons.

==Contemporary Material Culture==
Industrial manufacturing and supply chains no longer exist. However, books and other repositories of information are still available, and it's not uncommon for people to be educated to a (real-world) modern standard, even if they can't lay hands on so much as a flashlight.

The vast majority of work is done using human or animal muscle, or relatively simple wind or water mills. That being said, the situation is not at all comparable to medieval Europe. Many technologies that have an extremely high payoff-to-effort ratio if you are already at a high Roman or Renaissance-era level of technology are still used. Movable-type printing presses are not common, but they have supplanted scriptoriums. They’re just too easy to build in comparison to how much effort they save.

The essential difficulty is that the creation of an industrial economy is a great deal of work, and nobody is really inclined to go to that kind of effort. Anyone with the resources, ambition, and will to build a steam train or an air conditioner factory is probably better off becoming an archmage and obligating their neighbors to appease them.

However, Precursor humanity genetically engineered a variety of plants to be unnaturally useful, and those strains are still cultivated. A wide variety of food plants and several types of mushroom are known to be results of the original sequencing project; they can be easily and rapidly farmed, and are tailored to human dietary needs. For this reason, simply supplying the population with food is not the crushing burden it was in real-world medieval societies, and even impoverished areas have sufficient time for leisure and social or intellectual pursuits. There are other examples, as well, such as the Library Trees with leaves uniquely suited to paper-making.

Advanced alloys, both alchemical and mundane, are still manufactured, although not in modern quantities.

'''Summary:'''
*Individual artificers, magicians, and alchemists do produce items of enchantment or high technology, but these are rare, hand-crafted, and expensive.
*High technology as it exists in our world is rarely available and typically only in very simple configurations. A hand-held UV light might be obtainable, but a computer is out of the question.
*The advanced technology that does exist often involves large glowing synthetic gemstones, runic circuitry, and alchemical materials. Gears, moving parts, conventional batteries, and other steampunk apparatuses are relatively rare. The dividing line between magic and this sort of science can be somewhat thin at times. Consult the rules for mods in the WWN rulebook for ideas.
*The "hurlants" described on pg. 36 are available for purchase. In-setting, they're referred to as coilguns. They function via an extremely high-tension, alchemically produced metal spring, housed inside a barrel, which must be carefully wound with an integral handle before a specially made steel dart is loaded and clipped into place. Rather than the barrel being rifled, the dart is designed with a subtly helical fluting. Hand hurlants are often mounted on an arm bracer, but either may be made in a configuration similar to a modern firearm. They are, however, typically ornately carved or filigreed. They are considered a weapon of war or murder, and may not be carried openly in civilized cities. The user is expected to have them unloaded, "broken down" into components, and carried packed away. Note the AP tag on them - they ignore non-magical armor. A hand hurlant can throw its sliver of steel directly through an armored knight's breastplate and out his back. They are, therefore, especially disliked by the sorts of people wealthy enough to invest in heavy armor.

==Astronomy & Weather==
Terminus lacks the axial tilt & wobble of our own world. Seasons are caused by its eccentric and elliptical orbit. In plain terms, its distance from the sun varies sufficiently over the course of the year to produce winter and summer. This means the north and south hemisphere experience winter and summer at the same time. Terminus' magnetic poles are precisely perpendicular to the plane of orbit. It is highly likely that some intelligent agency altered these factors at some point in times ancient beyond reckoning.

Terminus has three moons in an equidistant orbit around the planet. One is nearly white, like our own, and the other two are tinted red and blue. Absent cloud cover, the night sky almost always provides a little more light than a full moon on our own Earth.

==Calendar==
There are 13 lunar months, each of exactly 28 days. There are three months in each of the seasons that would be recognizable to us - a spring, a summer, an autumn, a winter. Even without axial tilt and wobble, the nature of the seasons varies according to distance from the equator and local geography. Coastal areas are milder, areas close to the poles are colder.

The calendar of 13 months is standard almost all across the globe, at least in human civilizations. What varies is which months are counted part of which season. In general, an area with extreme conditions during one month of the year will count the "extra" month as outside of a regular season. A northern city might take the part of the year of most intense cold and count it as "Fimbulwinter," a time outside of even regular winter. An equatorial land might have the Dog Days, that month which is too hot to be placed within regular summertime. In a coastal land, the inhabitants might take the time of most intense storm activity, and name it the Monsoon Season.

The area this campaign takes place in is a Mediterranean type of climate. Due to the proximity of a large body of water, while the summers can be hellishly humid, the extremes of temperature aren't as bad as they could be.

==Languages==
The PCs start out knowing Common & Trade Cant, with additional languages per their Connect & Know skills. See pg. 28 of WWN.

*Common is a modern form of Thracian, and is the most wide-spread human language. Insular or remote human civilizations might have divergent or distinct languages.
*Trade Cant is a limited pidgin tongue commonly used in highly cosmopolitan areas or by far-traveling merchants. It's not good for higher pursuits, but has special vocabulary for economic concerns, commodities, travel & accommodations, et cetera.
*Old Thracian has about as much in common with Common as classical Latin does with modern Italian. It was the language of the last powerful and widespread human civilization.
*Amaranthan, also known as Sorcerer's Speech, is even older than Old Thracian. It was the tongue of a powerful sorcerous empire that collapsed in blood and fire.
*Lizard, or in derogatory terms "Hiss," is the language of the common lizardfolk and other reptilian intelligences. It's hard for humans to pronounce, and even harder for them to think in. The brains of the reptilian people are formed very differently to human ones. Something has gone very wrong with the lizardfolk, and 90% of them have cognitive limitations not present in their ancestors. The result is that only about 10% of them are literate in their own tongue. Note that in Lizard, humans are referred to as "Monkey Men," and their terms for our language are even more derogatory than "Hiss."
*Pelagic, or in derogatory terms "Glub," is the common language of undersea peoples. It's impossible to pronounce in atmosphere, so it can mostly only be learned underwater. Water-Adapted PCs (see pg. 27, under xeno-blooded) can learn to speak and understand this.
*Fae is the language of the various half-worlder beings. It has Seelie and Unseelie dialects, and while most people will be more familiar with one or the other, they are comprehensible to each other.
*Sign Language exists for the use of the deaf, and is also commonly used by beings for whom normal conversation is difficult. For example, a non-water-adapted human and a greater octopus might both be intelligent, but the octopus can only speak underwater, and the human can only speak in the air. If they met at the shore, they could communicate via sign, with each staying in its own preferred medium. The gestures are abstract enough for beings with significantly different anatomy, so long as they have limbs. Dolphins don't have sufficient limbs to Sign, although they can learn to understand it, but they're telepathic anyway.
*Various other species have their own languages.
*The Precursor civilization of humans presumably had their own language, but they don't seem to have written much down, or if they did, it was lost long ago.

==Random Notes==
*"Greater" creatures are intelligent forms. A Greater Octopus is therefore a sophont form of octopod. The lizardfolk are greater lizards. Nonhuman intelligences, in their own languages, would typically refer to humans as Greater Monkeys. This is a scientific or technical classification and it is rude to refer to any intelligent being in their own person this way. This is distinct from a "Dire" form, which is a larger and usually more ferocious form of a more common creature. See the classical example, the Dire Wolf. Note that nonhumans often classify Ogres as Dire Humans, which humans are not especially appreciative of in most cases.
*Human biology is rather enhanced by precursor engineering. The average lifespan, uninterrupted by disease or violence, is about 120 years, with only the last fifteen or so involving serious senescence. Most people will recover relatively fully from injuries or diseases that don't amount to amputation, and sepsis due to injuries is rare. Birth defects as we know them are unheard-of. Fertility is also optional for humans. Basically, look at the healing rules and be astonished how little medicine is required for stabbing victims.
*There are no elves & dwarves in the typical D&D sense, so the Special Origin focus is not used. The Xenoblooded focus is freely available and represents the efforts of precursor genetic engineers, passed down through the long millenia; aquatic-adapted humans are still well-known in coastal areas. The Unique Gift focus is also available, and typically represents some inheritable genetic gift.

==Nibiru==
I don't want to spend too much time on this, because the whole point of the campaign is that you aren't there. But maybe a few notes won't go too far wrong.
*There is a system of public education, welfare, and public works that is unrivaled in the world. If you don't find a useful occupation for yourself, you '''will''' be trained and pressed into service in some capacity or another.
*Nibiru has the wealth to support its people, but no room for idlers and malingerers. Literally, physical space is at a premium.
*Social stratification is severe in terms of power and resources commanded, but there are no mansions or palaces. Everyone must make use of public spaces and facilities, hence they are well-maintained.
*Security is tight. If any enemy ever penetrated to the machinery that allows peregrination, they could damage it in a way no one now living would know how to repair. Foreigners are allowed into the city itself only on an extremely limited basis. Criminal gangs are unheard of; and criminal activity is not tolerated.
*All citizens are educated to at least something resembling a high school level and then given some additional training, vocational or otherwise, unless their employment is destined to be entirely menial. For those such as the PCs who have exceptional abilities, they may have attended one of the following programs:
**The Athenaeum is a tower most like a "university" program in Nibiru. Conventional scholarly and engineering students are likely to graduate from here.
**The Scholomance is the tower dedicated to magic, both High Magic & New Magic. The individual in charge of it, known as the Rector, is a black-robed figure wearing an alabaster mask. Their true identity has not been known in centuries - it may be the same superannuated individual, or it is possible that the Chairs of the various departments are electing a new individual from time to time. The board of the scholomance is is deeply secretive, and nothing can be said with certainty.
**The Charterhouse tower trains Vowed. Charterhouse Vowed can select as their bonus skill (see pg. 86) either Exert or Sneak. PCs can take any path they wish, but the typical Charterhouse graduate works as a spy, agent, bodyguard, or assassin.
**Skull Plaza is the military school. Obviously, many people learn the combat arts in more practical ways, but the regular army goes through Skull Plaza. Note that Nibiru does not maintain cavalry of any kind. Their combat doctrines and equipment are focused on siege defense and man-to-man or small unit combat. They produce numerous skilled duelists, and marching on the city would be a death sentence for nearly any attacker, but Nibiru can't field a large army.

=Gods & Religion=
This is the part where I complain. Feel free to skim this section at most.

I don't like the way that religion and clerics are portrayed in D&D. I'm most interested in what the PCs choose to do, in pursuing their own ends. Those ends may be selfless - a character might be dedicated to justice, for example. But it should be their own choice and for their own reasons, subject to their own reevaluation. Other, more selfish motivations are certainly easy enough to understand. "I would like that large pile of gold coins to belong to me rather than whoever currently lays claim to it" and "I would prefer not to die beneath this ghost-haunted pyramid I have been abandoned in" are both immediately relatable.

This is consistent with what I would consider to be most of the essential texts of the genre. So of course D&D, in its lack of wisdom, had to make a character option to subsume PC choices and priority to some half-baked imagining of how a pantheistic religion might work, if you stripped it of all interest and cultural factors.

So we're not going to do that.

There is nothing like a D&D Cleric in this world. There are healers. There are also persons who are "high priests" or the like. The former is someone who has bent their talents to medicine. Or, in the case of the Healer partial class, someone who has devoted themselves to using psychic energy as a substitute for complex pharmaceutical substances that can no longer be manufactured. A "priest" is a social role. They may or may not be a member of a class that provides magical powers. If they are serious about relationships with supernatural beings, they may have a respectable ability with the Pray skill.

==Religion on Terminus==
Gods are a highly varied lot. There are extradimensional entities and spirits that seem to have influence over greater or lesser amounts of real estate. There are also some extremely physically real beings with supernatural powers that are more flexible or focused than the Spells and Arts available to mortal magicians. A local crocodilian river-deity, for example, may be both a physically verifiable giant crocodile, and also capable of causing or preventing flooding in the river. But, notably, ONLY their own river. A deity of some more abstract principle, such as the North Wind, might be more indeterminate and widespread in their presence.

The thing to keep in mind is that the gods are distant, weird, and inhuman, in all cases. The crocodile god is not up for a friendly chat. The North Wind was never a human, likely has no human feelings, and if it takes some anthropomorphic shape it is only as a matter of whimsy. Deities are typically not worshipped and revered in the way that a modern person in the US might imagine a religion to imply. The sailors do not love the gods of the seas. They fear them and respect them, and make offerings in the hope of improving their chances of coming home alive. Deities (in the vast majority of cases) make no guarantees or offers regarding the fate of a person's soul after death, which is a mystery, and of little concern to the typical person. Everyday matters loom larger, and death must take care of its own.

Devoted servants of deities may have some special power or another, which is typically minor and has a cost. For more serious exertions of divine power, if such a thing is desirable, the cultists will likely need to conduct some ritual. This will involve an offering, and a Pray roll from their leader. Note that the offering need not be a material object or bloodletting - some gods might look favorably on a night of frenzied dancing by at least twenty or thirty dervishes. It depends on the god and the ritual undertaken. This isn't something I expect to see a lot of in-game, since divine intervention is generally not an effective way to obtain human goals.

Anyway. Expect weird and inhuman genius loci, snake cults, and sui generis beings of cosmic horror, not some kind of benevolent god of farming with an organized and hierarchical temple structure.

==Known Deities==
I dunno, I'll put some stuff here eventually.

=Links=

Caverns Without Number

2022-06-27T19:41:06Z

The Wyzard: /* Setting */

This is a page for the Caverns of Thracia game, run by The Wyzard using Worlds Without Number. Its content is tentative.

'''Before we start:''' Combat is intended to be a little more interesting than normal B/X. I strongly suggest that you all familiarize yourself with how Shock Damage works, and secondarily with how the combat maneuvers work. Shock Damage is going to mess you up if you aren't ready for it.

=The Adventurers=
==Basic Wiki Practice==
I'm used to keeping information on my campaigns on a wiki. Some of you may not be used to this. Your character sheet is the first challenge you will face! Please ask for help on the discord if you aren't familiar with this stuff. So here is what you do, in order:
*Make a wiki account if you can't just log in with your regular RPGnet account, I can't remember.
*Anyway, be logged into the wiki.
*Open the sample character sheet in a new tab.
*Then hit "Edit" on this section (The Adventurers.)
*You can see the double-brackets around "Fill This In Yourself." Those double brackets will make a link to another wiki page, and the title will be whatever is the text inside the double brackets. You're going to put your character's name in there. Your character's name should be sufficiently unusual that there isn't already a PC somewhere on the wiki with that name. A good formula is something like (Name) the (Descriptor), where the descriptor is either some literal or figurative detail about the character. Maybe your character is Jeanette the Ravensworn, and you don't know what Ravensworn is yet. That's fine, maybe we'll find out!
*Save your edit and click on the new link that is your character's name.
*Now, hit the Edit button on the sample character sheet.
*Hit CTRL-A to select all text in the editing window. Then CTRL-C to copy it. Then close the window on the sample character sheet because you don't actually want to change it.
*Now hid the Edit button on YOUR character sheet, and paste in all the text from the sample one.
*Now fill in all the details.
*This sounds like a lot when I break it down like this, but honestly it takes seconds and I will probably do it for you during Session Zero.
==Dramatis Personae==
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[Fill This In Yourself]]
*[[WWN Sample Character Sheet]]

=Introduction=
The greatest city of the world, in terms of cosmopolitan fun, wealth, and knowledge, is Nibiru, the Peregrinate Acropolis. A heavily fortified castle-city built on a large stone mesa, it has the look of a vast ziggurat capped with a wonder of colorful towers. The undercity inside the mesa is a maze of carved and worked tunnels, warehouses, reservoirs, and hidden temples. The lower levels of the city are a chaos of tenements, manufactories, brightly tiled plazas, and cafeterias. The vast towers contain luxury apartments for the rich, in addition to colleges, libraries, laboratories, training halls and so forth. The outer walls are dotted with fortifications, weapon emplacements, signal towers, and windmills that power various machinery, particularly water pumps. Real estate is tremendously valuable, most people live in spaces little larger than a walk-in closet. Hence the desperate need for the public bathhouses and cafeteria-style restaurants that support the life and hygiene of the city - there simply isn't space for people to have their own kitchens and so forth.

What makes Nibiru so wealthy and influential, such a center of knowledge, is that it moves. Every week, the city disappears in vast cloud of opaque fog, and reappears somewhere else on Terminus. The engines that accomplish this have been carefully maintained for centuries, so that it has functioned without interruption. It peregrinates along a semi-regular trade route, with space built into the schedule for necessary or opportunistic deviations, and a cadre of mages, merchants, and scholars of economics carefully plot its course for maximum advantage. Wherever it lands, the vast trading apparatus fires up into action. Enormous loads of commodities and rarer goods are sold to local merchant houses, wherever the city might land. The vast caverns of the undercity can carry an amount of cargo beyond imagination. The limiting factor is how much of it can be hauled out and traded for new goods, which must in their turn be loaded within six days.

You are natives of this city - you have the invisible, UV-reactive tattoo of a citizen in at least three places on your body. This marks you as one of the exalted, a citizen. Even the meanest beggar who is a citizen of Nibiru has something that the wealth of an emperor might not purchase. And, like all natives, you know the rule - the first six days are for business, but the seventh is a day of rest. No one leaves the city on the seventh day, or lingers outside for even one second beyond midnight of the sixth. The risk of being left behind is just too high.

Guess how you fucked up?

==The Local Environment==
It's early spring and you're probably going to be stuck here for about the next year, until Nibiru comes back and you have the ability to get back onboard. The city-state of Amarna is located on a fertile river delta that empties into a sea. That's where Nibiru came to rest. The area around the great river is a green and well-developed valley, with large towns and farming villages served by a regular geometric pattern of irrigation channels. To the east, about a day's walk down the coast, is a small semi-fortified city named Tjaru, in an undesirable and swampy region. It is used as a place of exile for criminals and the disgraced. That's where you've currently ended up. And you've heard rumors of a recently-discovered Deep, one of the vast underground fastnesses built by various ancient civilizations.

Deeps are dangerous, in ways both mundane and exotic. However, they frequently contain raw wealth left behind by the Ancients. Also, the even more precious sorcerous, alchemical, or technological artifacts that they seemed to have such a panoply of. This would be an outstanding way to support yourselves for the next year. And, if you're lucky, you might go beyond supporting yourself in reasonable style, and find that you've recovered something valuable enough to earn a higher station in Nibiru.

==Questions for Session Zero==
*Anything anybody definitely wants to see
*Anything anyone definitely doesn't want to see, particularly in terms of "does anything already on this wiki bother someone a lot?"
*Lines & Veils or whatever, PM me if you have to
*I don't intend the game to include explicit sexual content, and even the implication of sexual violence is right out
*I actually find some of the gene-modified human strains in WWN to be kind of interesting, but they might be too problematic, I dunno, opinions?
*

=Encumbrance & Beasts of Burden=
WWN's encumbrance system is simple enough that I'm not sure we'll actually need this section, but I included it as a matter of habit. Note that every full 100 coins counts as an item. Count normal gems as a single coin. Jewelry and small art objects are counted as a bulk good - you can pack together three items such as carved ivory necklaces, jade hairbrushes, jeweled crowns, rings, etc. I'll let you know about larger art objects.
==The Pocket Change Rule==
Your first up-to-100-coins worth of regular coins and gems do not count towards encumbrance, so long as they're yours alone. Found treasure is tracked separately until you return to civilization, such as it is.
==The Bling Rule==
The PCs may ignore the encumbrance requirements of jewelry if they simply wear the jewelry openly, within reason. No more than a single crown at a time, etc. This has two downsides: If you are presently in a Deep, you may find out an object is cursed at a most inconvenient time. Secondly, your enemies may become ravenously motivated to relieve you of those items. Morale is an important component of combat in this game, and if you are draped in the wealth of nations, then opponents may get a morale bonus.

=NPCs=

=Notes & Logs=

=Maps=

=House Rules & Character Creation=

==Character Creation & Advancement==
*Don't come with a character concept, we'll create characters in a session zero. It's okay to have a few vague ideas just so we don't have to look up too much.
*For attributes, arrange the following array to taste: 14, 12, 11, 10, 9, and 7. See pg. 8.
*When you pick a background, you get a free skill associated with it at level 0. Then, make a total of three rolls on the growth or learning table for your background.
*Choose a class. We're only using the classes available in the free version. However, the odder partial classes are available.
*Note that I don't like the Cleric class in D&D for complicated reasons, so please don't try to emulate one in terms of being a dedicated servant of a god. If you want to play a Healer (one of the partial classes) you certainly can, but I don't have a sense as to whether one is strictly necessary. PCs can die in this game but I'm probably going to tone down the "if you fail this save you die" kind of stuff.
*Assume you roll a 6 on your hit die.
*Skip the equipment step, read up on the languages stuff on this wiki.
*Everyone levels up twice. We start at level 3. Assume you roll a 4 on these two hit dice.
*You can start with 1,000 silver pieces worth of equipment. Note that this game is on a silver standard. If you want one of the packages on page 29, assume it's 100 silver pieces for any of the packages. No swapping or whatever. Discard any money you didn't spend on equipment.
*For ready cash, you each start with 3d6 gold, 3d20 silver, and 1d4+1 gems worth 50 sp apiece.
*Your first month of living expenses is prepaid, at a Common standard of living. After the first month you need to pay that much, which amounts to 80sp per month, due on the first of each month. Adventurers cannot voluntarily spend less than this, because they are intolerant of living in more straitened circumstances. Note that this includes rations - it's not any more expensive to buy rations than it is to eat at the tavern. You do still have to determine how many you're carrying, for encumbrance purposes.
*We're using slow advancement, pg 54. However, a full continuous month lived at a Rich lifestyle (200sp per week, or 800 for the whole month) gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 6th level. A full continuous month lived at a Noble lifestyle (1,000sp per week, or 4,000 for the whole month), gives 1 bonus XP to any character below 9th level.
*You will each start with one or more rumors about the nearby Caverns of Thracia.

=Setting=
Disregard the setting as written in WWN. I dig the general vibe but I'm mostly going to be doing my own thing. The name of this world is Terminus (players in my previous campaigns may recognize the name; consider this a reboot.)

==History==
Terminus is not known to have ever had any natively intelligent life. Various intelligent beings from other places, human and otherwise, have come to settle there. It also has its own complement of extradimensional entities, beings which some might refer to as gods.

The earliest human settlers came from other worlds forgotten to the modern person. Something, however, caused a lapse in communication and logistical capability. The settlers were cut off from home. Whatever disaster occurred has cut off almost all contact with civilizations outside the solar system. Visitation by spacecraft is extremely rare and not well-known. Visitors who arrive via stranger means are, if they exist, keeping it on the down-low.

It is believed by some scholars and most small children that there are inhabited cities on the moons.

==Contemporary Material Culture==
Industrial manufacturing and supply chains no longer exist. However, books and other repositories of information are still available, and it's not uncommon for people to be educated to a (real-world) modern standard, even if they can't lay hands on so much as a flashlight.

The vast majority of work is done using human or animal muscle, or relatively simple wind or water mills. That being said, the situation is not at all comparable to medieval Europe. Many technologies that have an extremely high payoff-to-effort ratio if you are already at a high Roman or Renaissance-era level of technology are still used. Movable-type printing presses are not common, but they have supplanted scriptoriums. They’re just too easy to build in comparison to how much effort they save.

The essential difficulty is that the creation of an industrial economy is a great deal of work, and nobody is really inclined to go to that kind of effort. Anyone with the resources, ambition, and will to build a steam train or an air conditioner factory is probably better off becoming an archmage and obligating their neighbors to appease them.

However, Precursor humanity genetically engineered a variety of plants to be unnaturally useful, and those strains are still cultivated. A wide variety of food plants and several types of mushroom are known to be results of the original sequencing project; they can be easily and rapidly farmed, and are tailored to human dietary needs. For this reason, simply supplying the population with food is not the crushing burden it was in real-world medieval societies, and even impoverished areas have sufficient time for leisure and social or intellectual pursuits. There are other examples, as well, such as the Library Trees with leaves uniquely suited to paper-making.

Advanced alloys, both alchemical and mundane, are still manufactured, although not in modern quantities.

'''Summary:'''
*Individual artificers, magicians, and alchemists do produce items of enchantment or high technology, but these are rare, hand-crafted, and expensive.
*High technology as it exists in our world is rarely available and typically only in very simple configurations. A hand-held UV light might be obtainable, but a computer is out of the question.
*The advanced technology that does exist often involves large glowing synthetic gemstones, runic circuitry, and alchemical materials. Gears, moving parts, conventional batteries, and other steampunk apparatuses are relatively rare. The dividing line between magic and this sort of science can be somewhat thin at times. Consult the rules for mods in the WWN rulebook for ideas.
*The "hurlants" described on pg. 36 are available for purchase. In-setting, they're referred to as coilguns. They function via an extremely high-tension, alchemically produced metal spring, housed inside a barrel, which must be carefully wound with an integral handle before a specially made steel dart is loaded and clipped into place. Rather than the barrel being rifled, the dart is designed with a subtly helical fluting. Hand hurlants are often mounted on an arm bracer, but either may be made in a configuration similar to a modern firearm. They are, however, typically ornately carved or filigreed. They are considered a weapon of war or murder, and may not be carried openly in civilized cities. The user is expected to have them unloaded, "broken down" into components, and carried packed away. Note the AP tag on them - they ignore non-magical armor. A hand hurlant can throw its sliver of steel directly through an armored knight's breastplate and out his back. They are, therefore, especially disliked by the sorts of people wealthy enough to invest in heavy armor.

==Astronomy & Weather==
Terminus lacks the axial tilt & wobble of our own world. Seasons are caused by its eccentric and elliptical orbit. In plain terms, its distance from the sun varies sufficiently over the course of the year to produce winter and summer. This means the north and south hemisphere experience winter and summer at the same time. Terminus' magnetic poles are precisely perpendicular to the plane of orbit. It is highly likely that some intelligent agency altered these factors at some point in times ancient beyond reckoning.

Terminus has three moons in an equidistant orbit around the planet. One is nearly white, like our own, and the other two are tinted red and blue. Absent cloud cover, the night sky almost always provides a little more light than a full moon on our own Earth.

==Calendar==
There are 13 lunar months, each of exactly 28 days. There are three months in each of the seasons that would be recognizable to us - a spring, a summer, an autumn, a winter. Even without axial tilt and wobble, the nature of the seasons varies according to distance from the equator and local geography. Coastal areas are milder, areas close to the poles are colder.

The calendar of 13 months is standard almost all across the globe, at least in human civilizations. What varies is which months are counted part of which season. In general, an area with extreme conditions during one month of the year will count the "extra" month as outside of a regular season. A northern city might take the part of the year of most intense cold and count it as "Fimbulwinter," a time outside of even regular winter. An equatorial land might have the Dog Days, that month which is too hot to be placed within regular summertime. In a coastal land, the inhabitants might take the time of most intense storm activity, and name it the Monsoon Season.

The area this campaign takes place in is a Mediterranean type of climate. Due to the proximity of a large body of water, while the summers can be hellishly humid, the extremes of temperature aren't as bad as they could be.

==Languages==
The PCs start out knowing Common & Trade Cant, with additional languages per their Connect & Know skills. See pg. 28 of WWN.

*Common is a modern form of Thracian, and is the most wide-spread human language. Insular or remote human civilizations might have divergent or distinct languages.
*Trade Cant is a limited pidgin tongue commonly used in highly cosmopolitan areas or by far-traveling merchants. It's not good for higher pursuits, but has special vocabulary for economic concerns, commodities, travel & accommodations, et cetera.
*Old Thracian has about as much in common with Common as classical Latin does with modern Italian. It was the language of the last powerful and widespread human civilization.
*Amaranthan, also known as Sorcerer's Speech, is even older than Old Thracian. It was the tongue of a powerful sorcerous empire that collapsed in blood and fire.
*Lizard, or in derogatory terms "Hiss," is the language of the common lizardfolk and other reptilian intelligences. It's hard for humans to pronounce, and even harder for them to think in. The brains of the reptilian people are formed very differently to human ones. Something has gone very wrong with the lizardfolk, and 90% of them have cognitive limitations not present in their ancestors. The result is that only about 10% of them are literate in their own tongue. Note that in Lizard, humans are referred to as "Monkey Men," and their terms for our language are even more derogatory than "Hiss."
*Pelagic, or in derogatory terms "Glub," is the common language of undersea peoples. It's impossible to pronounce in atmosphere, so it can mostly only be learned underwater. Water-Adapted PCs (see pg. 27, under xeno-blooded) can learn to speak and understand this.
*Fae is the language of the various half-worlder beings. It has Seelie and Unseelie dialects, and while most people will be more familiar with one or the other, they are comprehensible to each other.
*Sign Language exists for the use of the deaf, and is also commonly used by beings for whom normal conversation is difficult. For example, a non-water-adapted human and a greater octopus might both be intelligent, but the octopus can only speak underwater, and the human can only speak in the air. If they met at the shore, they could communicate via sign, with each staying in its own preferred medium. The gestures are abstract enough for beings with significantly different anatomy, so long as they have limbs. Dolphins don't have sufficient limbs to Sign, although they can learn to understand it, but they're telepathic anyway.
*Various other species have their own languages.
*The Precursor civilization of humans presumably had their own language, but they don't seem to have written much down, or if they did, it was lost long ago.

==Random Notes==
*"Greater" creatures are intelligent forms. A Greater Octopus is therefore a sophont form of octopod. The lizardfolk are greater lizards. Nonhuman intelligences, in their own languages, would typically refer to humans as Greater Monkeys. This is a scientific or technical classification and it is rude to refer to any intelligent being in their own person this way. This is distinct from a "Dire" form, which is a larger and usually more ferocious form of a more common creature. See the classical example, the Dire Wolf. Note that nonhumans often classify Ogres as Dire Humans, which humans are not especially appreciative of in most cases.
*Human biology is rather enhanced by precursor engineering. The average lifespan, uninterrupted by disease or violence, is about 120 years, with only the last fifteen or so involving serious senescence. Most people will recover relatively fully from injuries or diseases that don't amount to amputation, and sepsis due to injuries is rare. Birth defects as we know them are unheard-of. Fertility is also optional for humans. Basically, look at the healing rules and be astonished how little medicine is required for stabbing victims.
*There are no elves & dwarves in the typical D&D sense, so the Special Origin focus is not used. The Xenoblooded focus is freely available and represents the efforts of precursor genetic engineers, passed down through the long millenia; aquatic-adapted humans are still well-known in coastal areas. The Unique Gift focus is also available, and typically represents some inheritable genetic gift.

==Nibiru==
I don't want to spend too much time on this, because the whole point of the campaign is that you aren't there. But maybe a few notes won't go too far wrong.
*There is a system of public education, welfare, and public works that is unrivaled in the world. If you don't find a useful occupation for yourself, you '''will''' be trained and pressed into service in some capacity or another.
*Nibiru has the wealth to support its people, but no room for idlers and malingerers. Literally, physical space is at a premium.
*Social stratification is severe in terms of power and resources commanded, but there are no mansions or palaces. Everyone must make use of public spaces and facilities, hence they are well-maintained.
*Security is tight. If any enemy ever penetrated to the machinery that allows peregrination, they could damage it in a way no one now living would know how to repair. Foreigners are allowed into the city itself only on an extremely limited basis. Criminal gangs are unheard of; and criminal activity is not tolerated.
*All citizens are educated to at least something resembling a high school level and then given some additional training, vocational or otherwise, unless their employment is destined to be entirely menial. For those such as the PCs who have exceptional abilities, they may have attended one of the following programs:
**The Athenaeum is a tower most like a "university" program in Nibiru. Conventional scholarly and engineering students are likely to graduate from here.
**The Scholomance is the tower dedicated to magic, both High Magic & New Magic. The individual in charge of it, known as the Rector, is a black-robed figure wearing an alabaster mask. Their true identity has not been known in centuries - it may be the same superannuated individual, or it is possible that the Chairs of the various departments are electing a new individual from time to time. The board of the scholomance is is deeply secretive, and nothing can be said with certainty.
**The Charterhouse tower trains Vowed. Charterhouse Vowed can select as their bonus skill (see pg. 86) either Exert or Sneak. PCs can take any path they wish, but the typical Charterhouse graduate works as a spy, agent, bodyguard, or assassin.
**Skull Plaza is the military school. Obviously, many people learn the combat arts in more practical ways, but the regular army goes through Skull Plaza. Note that Nibiru does not maintain cavalry of any kind. Their combat doctrines and equipment are focused on siege defense and man-to-man or small unit combat. They produce numerous skilled duelists, and marching on the city would be a death sentence for nearly any attacker, but Nibiru can't field a large army.

=Gods & Religion=
This is the part where I complain. Feel free to skim this section at most.

I don't like the way that religion and clerics are portrayed in D&D. I'm most interested in what the PCs choose to do, in pursuing their own ends. Those ends may be selfless - a character might be dedicated to justice, for example. But it should be their own choice and for their own reasons, subject to their own reevaluation. Other, more selfish motivations are certainly easy enough to understand. "I would like that large pile of gold coins to belong to me rather than whoever currently lays claim to it" and "I would prefer not to die beneath this ghost-haunted pyramid I have been abandoned in" are both immediately relatable.

This is consistent with what I would consider to be most of the essential texts of the genre. So of course D&D, in its lack of wisdom, had to make a character option to subsume PC choices and priority to some half-baked imagining of how a pantheistic religion might work, if you stripped it of all interest and cultural factors.

So we're not going to do that.

There is nothing like a D&D Cleric in this world. There are healers. There are also persons who are "high priests" or the like. The former is someone who has bent their talents to medicine. Or, in the case of the Healer partial class, someone who has devoted themselves to using psychic energy as a substitute for complex pharmaceutical substances that can no longer be manufactured. A "priest" is a social role. They may or may not be a member of a class that provides magical powers. If they are serious about relationships with supernatural beings, they may have a respectable ability with the Pray skill.

==Religion on Terminus==
Gods are a highly varied lot. There are extradimensional entities and spirits that seem to have influence over greater or lesser amounts of real estate. There are also some extremely physically real beings with supernatural powers that are more flexible or focused than the Spells and Arts available to mortal magicians. A local crocodilian river-deity, for example, may be both a physically verifiable giant crocodile, and also capable of causing or preventing flooding in the river. But, notably, ONLY their own river. A deity of some more abstract principle, such as the North Wind, might be more indeterminate and widespread in their presence.

The thing to keep in mind is that the gods are distant, weird, and inhuman, in all cases. The crocodile god is not up for a friendly chat. The North Wind was never a human, likely has no human feelings, and if it takes some anthropomorphic shape it is only as a matter of whimsy. Deities are typically not worshipped and revered in the way that a modern person in the US might imagine a religion to imply. The sailors do not love the gods of the seas. They fear them and respect them, and make offerings in the hope of improving their chances of coming home alive. Deities (in the vast majority of cases) make no guarantees or offers regarding the fate of a person's soul after death, which is a mystery, and of little concern to the typical person. Everyday matters loom larger, and death must take care of its own.

Devoted servants of deities may have some special power or another, which is typically minor and has a cost. For more serious exertions of divine power, if such a thing is desirable, the cultists will likely need to conduct some ritual. This will involve an offering, and a Pray roll from their leader. Note that the offering need not be a material object or bloodletting - some gods might look favorably on a night of frenzied dancing by at least twenty or thirty dervishes. It depends on the god and the ritual undertaken. This isn't something I expect to see a lot of in-game, since divine intervention is generally not an effective way to obtain human goals.

Anyway. Expect weird and inhuman genius loci, snake cults, and sui generis beings of cosmic horror, not some kind of benevolent god of farming with an organized and hierarchical temple structure.

==Known Deities==
I dunno, I'll put some stuff here eventually.

=Links=

Caverns Without Number

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The Wyzard: /* Nibiru */

Caverns Without Number

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The Wyzard: /* Random Notes */

Caverns Without Number

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The Wyzard: /* Contemporary Material Culture */

Caverns Without Number

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The Wyzard: /* Technology */

Caverns Without Number

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The Wyzard: /* Contemporary Culture */

Caverns Without Number

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The Wyzard: /* Calendar */