Editing Caverns Without Number

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=