Tenochtitlan another City of the Pyramid

 I am afraid last months posting of my City of the Pyramid has thrown me into to research mode. Although I have known the of Cortez's conquest of Mexico since my youth, I had not appreciated the size of the city. According to my sources it was a city of 200,000 souls at a time when the largest cities in Europe, London and Venice, were only 100,000. Seville the largest city most of Cortez's had seen was probably only 60,000. To conqueror it with only 600 men took some cojones,  definitely not first level fighters. Above is a woodcut from 1524 based on the conquistadors descriptions. Below are a couple of more contemporary illustrations from Wikmedia based on the archaeological evidence.

City of the Pyramid

At the junction of the great causeway and the great underway lies a nexus of great power. After the fall of the elves during the Golden age it was here the golden ones came to build pyramid temples to their dark gods. Seven tiers for the Burning One, Five for the Breaker of Hope, a mere two for the Mistress of the still pool, an unimportant goddess worshiped only by females and pondlings. Still her pyramid is required to balance the fearsome dread of the uncounted tiers of the underpyramid of the Drowner in Darkness. The Treader of the Secret Ways required no pyramid, stealing his worship by masquerading as the other gods. Once the pyramids were complete the Sorcerer Kingpriests focused their energy to forge the Great Artifact. During the catastrophe the Great Artifact was split into to the sphere, the cube, and the tetrahedron. As the artifact was split into three so were majority of the golden ones, into the kobolds, lizardmen, and weygn. Their ensuing battles to reunite the Artifact soon destroyed the city, and the inhabitants dispersed into the black swamp which broke the canal walls and swallowed the city whole. Their descendants still squabble, fight, and dream of reuniting the artifact to restore the glory of the Golden age. A mere half days journey from the newcomers Clerics Post on the Great river, the ruined city still lures adventurers to doom and glory. The lizardman "people of the turtle" will lead you there for a few trinkets, but warn that the "people of the shark" who inhabit the ruins proper are not as friendly, and are only fond of strangers as barbecue. Below is the mosaic in the chamber of the map showing the city as it was in the Golden age.

Note: The City of the Pyramids served as my anchor dungeon for my great river campaign of the early '90s. She-Who-Must-be-Obeyed still remembers this campaign with fondness.It was a bit of a breakthrough in style for me as well as I replaced my megadungeons of the past with little 3-5 room mini dungeons which could be completed in a night or two. However most of the mini-dungeons remained connected by the Great Underway a 30' wide straight barrel vaulted corridor leading on for miles leading god knows where (although one was bound to stumble on to a secret door leading to the next mini-dungeon just in time for the next session). Due to its connection to the Great Underway my wandering adventurers found themselves in the City of the Pyramids more often then  they would have liked.

A is atmosphere, F is for flame on, Z for zzzzzz (loud snoring)

Ok I have completed the complete alphabet in a single post, can we move on. Maybe is the fact that its tax day (as usual I did just enough to make sure Uncle Sam owed me money and pushed it off to October), or maybe its the fact that the stats show that a blank piece of note book paper has shot up to my third most popular post (someone on stumble-on though it was cute), but I feel the urge to complain about the mindless A-Z meme that has inflected my Old School Renaissance. Most blogs are luckily if they can get one post out a week, but it is usually from the heart and thought provoking, but the A-Z meme has led them to believe they can up their production to one a day with some meaningless trivia. Most of them are sputtering out about  O, so soon things will be back to normal, and I can stop skipping over posts at greater than the normal rate. I of course did have to look at P is for Prostitute at Appendix N (little imredave wanted to see it, however he was disappointed). Appendix N does point out that "Old School" it should be H is for Harlot. It did bring back memories of a certain adventure in She-Who-Must-be-Obeyed running of the city of Karse. We had turned down an alley way into a small square, and encountered a lizard woman in fish net stockings leaning up against the wall near the entrance to the bar, clearly indicating we were no longer in the high class neighborhood. Since we were in desperate need of a certain substance from a certain alchemist shop across the square we pressed on. We were also not surprised when the 1st level got shanked (We were surprised later to find out it was one of our party members who shanked him). She-Who-Must-be-Obeyed later reviewed her notes to find out a little more about the lizard lady, and discovered that all it actually said was "Rough Bar". Such is the power of imagination. Well its time to go to work, so this rambling flame must end. Next time something of substance.

Multipurpose Wilderness/Dungeon Planner, DM Reference, and Char Sheet

What we used for wilderness and dungeon planning, dungeon master reference notes, and character sheets, and many other purposes
Old School:

My little joke for April 1st, but also true.

Dungeon in the Raw

Here's a dungeon I call "Palace of the Dragon Prince". I sketched it out a couple of weeks ago in hopes of cleaning it up and entering it into the one page dungeon contest. Unfortunately business travel and a nasty computer virus on the computer with the scanner intervened. Everything is back under control, but I ran out of time to improve my entry. I thought about sending it in "as is". However, without clean-up it is unlikely to win, and in order to enter since they want real names I would have to reveal my "secret identity" for all the world to see. She-Who-Must-be-Obeyed says she thinks its "cute" the way it is, so I am posting it on the blog. Be aware that even the way it is, it more than sufficient for me to DM it, because that's the way we do it OLD SCHOOL.

Crimson Blades of Ara Review

My friend Carter Soles over at The  Lands of Ara has graciously posted the game system he and and friend Dave Miller wrote in 1989. You pick up the rules for "Crimson Blades of Ara" over at his blog. Although the author claims these are rough notes they are a dam site more impressive than my pencil scribbles on lined paper I call notes. As with many youthful endeavours it is chock-a-blog full with novel ideas and concepts, despite Carters claim that he was reinventing Runequest without knowing it (actually about all that Runequest and His system share are a use of a list of skills to determine abilities and percentile dice to resolve actions). Actually his character point chart with its exponential increase cost as skills move towards 100%, solves one of the great shortcomings of Runequest. Runequests advance system based on dice rolls against skills you use rewards lucky rather than skillful play, and results in great silliness amongst the power gaming crowd of continual weapon switching and trivial skill checks. All in all I was quite impressed, although I have not completed my analysis of the combat system which seems to exude a strong preference for some weapons over others. I am unlikely to attempt to run the whole game as written, but will likely borrow pieces for my homebrew rules. The crown jewel of these rules are the skill and trait level cost chart. I also enjoyed the eastern school mages who cast spells by "the creation of small,
animated beings called golems"; Orge player characters which are immensely strong but forced take quirks to compensate; and the two strikes per round combat system which allows you the ability to drop your chance to parry a opponents blow and counter attack instead. I thought having the agility stat determine who goes first, while dexterity and strength determine (for the most part, longsword is agility based) your chance to hit was wise; Fantasty trip and its successor GURPS put dexterity on both who goes first and your chance to hit biasing their games to uber dexers with nothing else. I am intrigued by the concept presented of different weapons having different caps on how much skill one can apply to ones attack, but I'll want to finish my math analysis before I can say I am in favor of it. A big thanks to Carter and Dave for sharing. Pick up a copy and check out for yourself. If you are unhappy you can always ask for your NO MONEY back.

World of Bad Neighbor Mountain

Here are several maps of the campaign I ran from 1982-1985. My Regulars have already seen the detail map of Bad Neighbor Mountain from this campaign. I started this map by tracing coastlines out of my Altas and combining them. The bottom of this map is a backwards outline of Finland combined with the tip of India (Note: I ignored scale for the most part). I then placed the outline on a hex grid which I filled in with mountains, lakes, rivers, and settlements. The hexes are 25 miles across. Note the concept behind this map was to place it in the southern hemisphere, so the climate gets warmer as one moves towards the top of the map. The southern tip I envisioned as glaciated lake country similar to Minnesota or Finland.



Once I had the large map done, I took it to the copy store and made several copies to start laying different aspects of the campaign out. Below is an inset of the political divisions. Orange is the Anvan empire, a once great power slipping into decline. Light green is the Free city of Lirpan. Dark green are the Dwarven Holds in the mountains. Light blue is the southern elven forests. Dark purple are the towns of the sea raiders. Finally magenta is the Valley an area of small feudal states, where most of the adventures took place.

After laying out the political map on the southern tip. I noticed some issue with the map as I had drawn it. First the entire continent was completely mountainous. Second the terrain north of the lake country was completely the same repeat of mountains, rivers and towns BORING!!! So being the creator, I took the part I liked ,used a pair of scissors to cut that part away from the rest of the map, and taped it back down on a blank piece of hex paper which I then redrew as below. Now north of the valley is the Sea of sand.

Finally, I copied the map again using the enlarge function on the copier to give me a bigger map of the region I was most interested, used a light box to trace the map onto a blank piece of white paper, and worked it over with colored pencils to produce the map below, which I used as my map to show the players.

Of course almost all these steps can be done much easier with a computer graphics program these days (although I am still fond of the look and feel of my colored pencil work).