Jack Daniel
Legend
Warning: this post is very long, but it’s fun if you’re as pedantic as I am.
I’m posting it because some people might find it entertaining or useful; and because I need an easily searchable document to reference as I run my next game session.
I haven’t played any D&D since August! Aaaaaaaaaaaggggghhhh!!!—Ahem. Sorry, just had to vent there for a moment. I knew I’d be too busy for it this last semester, so after my last campaign ended, I didn't start up a new one. But, hey, I aced all my classes, so I guess it was worth the hiatus.
Oh, and half my players moved away at the end of the summer, so that also kind of threw a wrench into the works. But they’re back for the holidays, at least temporarily, so you know what that means!
…ONE-SHOT!!!
Yes, a singular adventure to be played out over the course of a one-day, marathon-length game session! I love those! Not as much as I love campaigns, to be sure, but one-shots do offer other opportunities. For example, they’re great environments for experimenting with new house-rules. You can tinker with the game mechanics in little ways to try out new things, without having to worry that your machinations will ruin an entire months-long campaign down the line. If you’re a relentless house-ruler, that’s awesome!
The other great thing about a one-shot is that it’s a chance to cut loose. You don’t have to be any kind of serious in a one-shot. Over-the-top action, comedy, cinematics… the more madcap hijinks you can pack into the game, the better. In devising the adventure that I plan to run this holiday, I thought to myself, “what should it be about?” and the answer came back, “…PIRATES!!!” That was easy. Then I sought a theme… and, perhaps because I’m presently in the middle of binge-watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus, this time my addlepated noggin returned, “…extended Monty Python joke reference!” So that’s my adventure design bible: a pirate-centric, Monty Python themed adventure module. I’ll get to that in a moment (don’t worry, it’s fine; my players are casuals and don’t read gaming forums, so they won’t be spoiled). First I want to talk about the rules.
Da Roolz (and da Wurld)
My game of choice these days is OD&D, 4th (Mentzer) edition, but using just the red Basic and blue Expert booklets. Tacked onto this is my steampunk setting for the same, Engines & Empires. But, while I’ll begin with the rules from E&E, I won’t be using its setting (Gaia) for this particular adventure.
I devised the Gaia setting to do three things in particular: (1) to reflect a world in which the concept of demi-human “race-as-class” (i.e. all dwarves are fighters, all gnomes are technologists, all centaurs are cavaliers, etc.) is a deeply-ingrained, fundamental rule of the universe; (2) to meld together a variety of influences from fantasy that I personally adore, chiefly the video games Final Fantasy VI, Final Fantasy VII, Shining Force, and most especially Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura; and (3) to bring suitably simple and easy steampunk rules to OD&D.
But now I want to experiment with something a little different. Just because differential equations and thermodynamics have kept me from actually playing D&D these past few months, that doesn’t mean I haven’t been doing what DMs are always doing naturally, that is, cooking up ideas, tinkering with worlds and rules. And one of the ideas that I had recently was a world called the Lands of Älyewinn, which, likely inspired by the recent spate of Hobbit movies, is a total Tolkien pastiche. It’s basically Middle-Earth plus steampunk. What if Saurman and goblinkind brought more industry and machinery to bear in the big war, and after all was said and done, men and dwarves turned this technology to peaceful purposes, bringing about less nature-rapey sort of industrial revolution than the bad guys would have? Then fast-forward the timeline about two generations, and you have a setting conceit right there.
To that end, I realized that I needed a far more parsimonious list of races and monsters than I’m used to. (A Middle-Earth type world is emphatically not a fantasy kitchen-sink.) Also, I wanted to try ditching race-as-class, opening things up a little for non-human characters. Finally, I wanted to try my hand at yet again balancing out the martial and magical character classes. (The inspiration for this last goal was undoubtedly D&D 5E’s new warlock class. I really like the mechanics behind all of 5E’s classes, but the warlock is my favorite—it got me thinking, “what if all the spell-caster types basically worked like this?” The end result is actually a bit more complex than a classic D&D magic-user, but I love how it balances out on both a per-day and a per-encounter basis.)
Ability Scores
I’ve put far more time and thought than might be considered strictly healthy into ability score generation. I don’t know what it is about “rolling stats” that has such mystique, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who worries about it to an inordinate degree. Arrays and point-buys are terrible things for OD&D: they invite min-maxing into a place where it should never be allowed to go. Plus they’re boring. Dice are the only option here, but they present two inherent problems. First, they can create a wild imbalance between players within the same group who roll well versus those who roll poorly. Second, they have a tendency to produce hopeless characters with debilitating penalties. Any version of OD&D from the 3rd (Moldvay) edition onward uses an ability score table where modifiers for most of the scores can range from –3 to +3. This is quite an impactful spread! And, personally, I quite like that ability scores have an impact on the characters mechanically. I’m not an adherent of the school that says one should look to the very first edition of OD&D, pre-Greyhawk, and just limit bonuses and penalties to a +1 for very high scores or a –1 for very low scores. But neither do I want players to suffer running characters with heavy penalties.
I think the problem of disparity between characters actually takes care of itself thanks to the rarity of rolled characters with lots of extreme scores. Generating abilities with a simple roll of 3d6 already produces a bell-curve; on top of that, the Moldvay/Cook//Mentzer//Denning/Allston ability score table exaggerates that curve by shrinking the ranges of scores that give very high or low modifiers. Frankly, disparate character power from rolled scores is a problem that can occur, but rarely does.
Rolling up a hopeless character is another issue altogether. After tinkering with a variety of more or less clever dice mechanics for a while, I decided that the best way to deal with it is simple, brute-force elimination. Exclude the low scores by fiat, but keep rolling stats on 3d6 as usual, so that high scores remain relatively rare. Then, if after all is said and done, a player’s scores still add up to more penalties than bonuses, a full re-roll is permitted.
Thus, the first rule for my one-shot: player characters roll their abilities using 3d6, in order. Any score below 6 (carrying a penalty of –2 or worse) can be re-rolled immediately. Once all six scores are generated, the character is valid of the sum of all penalties and bonuses is zero or positive. Finally, the player may swap any one pair of scores, if desired, to make the rolled character more suitable to whatever class the player might wish to play.
This last rule, one swap of any two scores, is an old favorite of mine. It helps players make the character they want without altogether giving up the randomness of rolling in order, and I use it in place of OD&D’s rather intricate and clunky rules for raising one’s prime requisite by lowering other scores.
The Races
I noticed something odd the last time I sat down and really thought about what elves and dwarves are like in Tolkien’s literature (and its many imitators) vs. what they’re like in D&D. Things don’t quite add up. For instance, I don’t recall any mention of dwarves being able to see in the dark. Indeed, infravision seems to be entirely invented for the sake of D&D’s dungeon-crawl conceit, an advantage that elves and dwarves have for the sake of having an advantage. (And between humans carrying torches and their demi-human allies trying to see in the dark, it’s frankly quite an annoying thing to adjudicate while playing—better to eliminate the ability for player characters altogether!)
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that giving demi-humans lists of special powers and annoying little modifiers was something I’d like to avoid this time around. Instead, I wanted to give the non-humans in this new setting I’m working up no more than one or two very limited, very situationally useful, and very flavorful abilities. A lot of what follows here was actually inspired by Dennis L. McKiernan’s “Mithgar” novels (of all the Tolkien knockoffs out there, he’s my favorite because his books are such shameless imitations—really, read The Iron Tower trilogy, you’ll love it).
Okay, so the five playable races for this setting are humans, dwarves, gnomes, ogres, and elves.
Humans have no real special abilities and no ability score requirements. They do get two bonus skill points (I’ll expound upon my skill system in a moment). The world is home to two major human civilizations. In the north are the Lands of Älyewinn, which are all the free kingdoms who acknowledge of the rule of the High King of Índright: old, storied, decaying lands in the north like Bǽlgode and Fordonster, and all the bustling little merchant-principalities along the seacoast in the middle of the continent—Dúguth, Gladmón, Tylwýth, Fríthinglow, Séylvad, and Hýragild. (Like all Anglo-Saxon sounding names, the stress generally falls on the first syllable—the accent marks are denoting long vowels. They just look nicer than macrons.) Opposed to the free kingdoms is a vast human empire that fills the southern half of the continent, a tyrannical theocracy known as the Ephesian Confederation (with a culture that draws on a combination of Hellenistic Egypt under the Ptolemaic pharaohs and medieval Byzantium).
Dwarves are pretty much just like you’d imagine dwarves to be. In the Lands of Älyewinn, there is only one great dwarven kingdom left, under a mountain range called the Chozelrunds. Within the dwarven halls, society is strictly hierarchical and utterly Machiavellian. Dwarves have minds like iron and wheels: always calculating, assessing, scheming. There are two ways to elevate the status of one’s family within dwarven society: illicitly, by disgracing or assassinating the competition; or legitimately, by purchasing a higher social position with huge sums of gold. Thus, acquiring treasure is of utmost importance to kingdom-dwarves. However, not all dwarves are like this: a great many of their kin live on the surface in towns and villages, some amongst the human kingdoms, and many more in the Heathlands. These surface-dwarves tend to be the most technophilic and inventive of all the common races, more inclined to science and engineering than even humans are.
A dwarf must have a Constitution score of at least 9. Dwarves have the innate ability to spot unusual stonework, including the ability to notice gradual slopes and intuit relative depth under the ground. Any path that a dwarf has trod before, a dwarf can always retrace flawlessly from memory, even if blindfolded: thus, dwarves rarely get lost in mazelike environments, and they are almost never fooled by shifting walls or passages.
Gnomes dwell in the Heathlands, a vast stretch of mostly unpopulated wilderness in the interior of the middle of Älyewinn. Some live in villages on the edge of the vast northern forests; most live in sprawling settlements of hillside burrows surrounded by simple farms. Quiet, pastoral types, gnomes basically fulfill this setting’s halfling/hobbit/warrow/nelwyn/kender role. A gnome must have a Dexterity of at least 9. Mechanically speaking, the gnomes’ small size is their only noteworthy trait. This prevents them from wielding the largest weapons, but it also means that they can squeeze into small spaces that others can’t reach; hide with relatively little cover and go unnoticed by most if they choose; and in battle, move through spaces occupied by allies or very large monsters almost unhindered.
Elves of Älyewinn are magical because they are dragon-blooded. The mythic past of Älyewinn is a long and twisted history of the gods creating various life-forms to populate the world, only to discover that each successive generation of beings proved despotic once it rose to dominance. The dragons were created to free the world from the tyranny of the stone giants, and they themselves became conquerors and tyrants once the giants were defeated. When the gods turned on the dragons, some—the firedrakes—did as the gods asked and went to sleep beneath the earth. Others pacted with the evil god Mórgrundel and were warped into dragons of darkness and cold—the murkwyrms. Before the firedrakes vanished from the world, though, they left behind descendants—a mingling of dragon and human blood, a race of vast magical power called the eldar. The eldar, as a hybrid and magical race, are almost immortal—practically demigods—but they have difficulty reproducing amongst themselves. Mingling their blood further with humans, though, has produced a lesser race of what might rightly be called either half-eldar or dragon-blooded, and these are the common elves.
Elves possess a lifespan of two or three centuries, but they are neither ageless nor immortal. Since the true eldar are so few anymore, they rarely leave their forest sanctuary at Eádnessa. Instead, the elves are their agents in the world, their eyes and ears abroad. They serve both the eldar and the even more mysterious Gáldre, immortal beings cloaked in mortal flesh who act as prophets and messengers of the gods.
An elf must have both Dexterity and Wisdom of 9 or higher. Elves are attuned to the heavens and always know the precise position of the sun, moon, and stars in the sky, even when they are deep underground or have been unconscious for some unknown length of time—thus, an elf always knows the precise day of the year and time of day. Elves are highly sensitive to both magic and evil: should an elf spend a full turn (ten minutes) or more in any area that would by itself set off either a detect magic or detect evil spell, the elf will become nauseated (by evil) or intoxicated (by magic) until they can spend a full turn resting in an unaffected area. At the DM’s discretion, elves may sometimes be capable of extraordinary feats of balance or perception, according to the situation—but these moments are highly circumstantial and often come upon the elf like a vision or a waking trance, without warning and not precisely under the elf’s control.
Ogres are a giant-blooded race, kin to humans, strong of arm and green of skin. They fill the role of the D&D half-orc or the Elder Scrolls orc, without actually using the name “orc” and carrying its implication of “evil goblinoid”. Ogre society is nomadic and clannish, with individual tribes named after a particular totem animal. The five greatest ogre nations are the clans of the cat, the serpent, the eagle, the wolf, and the bear—and the bear clan has always been the most noble. The bear totem is important to all ogres of all the clans. (Ogres are likewise inspired by Middle-Earth’s Beornings, as well as Viking berserkers—thus their racial ability.) An ogre must have a Strength of at least 9. Whenever an ogre falls to 0 hit points in battle, the ogre must roll a saving throw. If the save is failed, the ogre falls dying, like any other wounded character; but if the save is made, the ogre remains conscious and able to fight, consumed by a berserk frenzy. The ogre is +2 to all damage rolls, barely able to distinguish friend from foe, and will continue fighting until wounded again (and thus likely slain) or until all foes have been slain or routed, at which point the frenzy will end and the ogre will then succumb to the original wound and fall dying.
Other races operating in the world include the Gáldre, mysterious demigods who go about disguised as wandering wizards in service to the Válodre, the gods. The gods number six: Ánzehu, the mother-goddess and patron of humans; Aéltfyr the fire-god, patron of elves and firedrakes; Vordúlven, earth-god, patron of dwarves and stone-giants; Léoma, storm-goddess, patron of gnomes and growing plants; Yechéla, frost-goddess, patron of ogres and wild beasts; and Mórgrundel, chaos-god, patron of murkwyrms and evil humanoids. Mórgrundel brought two humanoid races into being: goblin-kind (kobolds, goblins, orcs, hobgoblins, orogs, and bugbears) and troll-kind (gnolls, trolls, and ettins). Numerous other monster species exist in the world, most of them created by one god or another at various moments in the world’s long history. Of special note are the wood-wosen, the tree-folk; they seem to have existed for always, even going back to that distant age before the gods found the world and started filling it with life; and the wood-wosen owe their only allegiance to some deeper spirit within the world that predates even the gods.
(cont'd...)

I haven’t played any D&D since August! Aaaaaaaaaaaggggghhhh!!!—Ahem. Sorry, just had to vent there for a moment. I knew I’d be too busy for it this last semester, so after my last campaign ended, I didn't start up a new one. But, hey, I aced all my classes, so I guess it was worth the hiatus.
Oh, and half my players moved away at the end of the summer, so that also kind of threw a wrench into the works. But they’re back for the holidays, at least temporarily, so you know what that means!
…ONE-SHOT!!!
Yes, a singular adventure to be played out over the course of a one-day, marathon-length game session! I love those! Not as much as I love campaigns, to be sure, but one-shots do offer other opportunities. For example, they’re great environments for experimenting with new house-rules. You can tinker with the game mechanics in little ways to try out new things, without having to worry that your machinations will ruin an entire months-long campaign down the line. If you’re a relentless house-ruler, that’s awesome!
The other great thing about a one-shot is that it’s a chance to cut loose. You don’t have to be any kind of serious in a one-shot. Over-the-top action, comedy, cinematics… the more madcap hijinks you can pack into the game, the better. In devising the adventure that I plan to run this holiday, I thought to myself, “what should it be about?” and the answer came back, “…PIRATES!!!” That was easy. Then I sought a theme… and, perhaps because I’m presently in the middle of binge-watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus, this time my addlepated noggin returned, “…extended Monty Python joke reference!” So that’s my adventure design bible: a pirate-centric, Monty Python themed adventure module. I’ll get to that in a moment (don’t worry, it’s fine; my players are casuals and don’t read gaming forums, so they won’t be spoiled). First I want to talk about the rules.
Da Roolz (and da Wurld)
My game of choice these days is OD&D, 4th (Mentzer) edition, but using just the red Basic and blue Expert booklets. Tacked onto this is my steampunk setting for the same, Engines & Empires. But, while I’ll begin with the rules from E&E, I won’t be using its setting (Gaia) for this particular adventure.
I devised the Gaia setting to do three things in particular: (1) to reflect a world in which the concept of demi-human “race-as-class” (i.e. all dwarves are fighters, all gnomes are technologists, all centaurs are cavaliers, etc.) is a deeply-ingrained, fundamental rule of the universe; (2) to meld together a variety of influences from fantasy that I personally adore, chiefly the video games Final Fantasy VI, Final Fantasy VII, Shining Force, and most especially Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura; and (3) to bring suitably simple and easy steampunk rules to OD&D.
But now I want to experiment with something a little different. Just because differential equations and thermodynamics have kept me from actually playing D&D these past few months, that doesn’t mean I haven’t been doing what DMs are always doing naturally, that is, cooking up ideas, tinkering with worlds and rules. And one of the ideas that I had recently was a world called the Lands of Älyewinn, which, likely inspired by the recent spate of Hobbit movies, is a total Tolkien pastiche. It’s basically Middle-Earth plus steampunk. What if Saurman and goblinkind brought more industry and machinery to bear in the big war, and after all was said and done, men and dwarves turned this technology to peaceful purposes, bringing about less nature-rapey sort of industrial revolution than the bad guys would have? Then fast-forward the timeline about two generations, and you have a setting conceit right there.
To that end, I realized that I needed a far more parsimonious list of races and monsters than I’m used to. (A Middle-Earth type world is emphatically not a fantasy kitchen-sink.) Also, I wanted to try ditching race-as-class, opening things up a little for non-human characters. Finally, I wanted to try my hand at yet again balancing out the martial and magical character classes. (The inspiration for this last goal was undoubtedly D&D 5E’s new warlock class. I really like the mechanics behind all of 5E’s classes, but the warlock is my favorite—it got me thinking, “what if all the spell-caster types basically worked like this?” The end result is actually a bit more complex than a classic D&D magic-user, but I love how it balances out on both a per-day and a per-encounter basis.)
Ability Scores
I’ve put far more time and thought than might be considered strictly healthy into ability score generation. I don’t know what it is about “rolling stats” that has such mystique, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who worries about it to an inordinate degree. Arrays and point-buys are terrible things for OD&D: they invite min-maxing into a place where it should never be allowed to go. Plus they’re boring. Dice are the only option here, but they present two inherent problems. First, they can create a wild imbalance between players within the same group who roll well versus those who roll poorly. Second, they have a tendency to produce hopeless characters with debilitating penalties. Any version of OD&D from the 3rd (Moldvay) edition onward uses an ability score table where modifiers for most of the scores can range from –3 to +3. This is quite an impactful spread! And, personally, I quite like that ability scores have an impact on the characters mechanically. I’m not an adherent of the school that says one should look to the very first edition of OD&D, pre-Greyhawk, and just limit bonuses and penalties to a +1 for very high scores or a –1 for very low scores. But neither do I want players to suffer running characters with heavy penalties.
I think the problem of disparity between characters actually takes care of itself thanks to the rarity of rolled characters with lots of extreme scores. Generating abilities with a simple roll of 3d6 already produces a bell-curve; on top of that, the Moldvay/Cook//Mentzer//Denning/Allston ability score table exaggerates that curve by shrinking the ranges of scores that give very high or low modifiers. Frankly, disparate character power from rolled scores is a problem that can occur, but rarely does.
Rolling up a hopeless character is another issue altogether. After tinkering with a variety of more or less clever dice mechanics for a while, I decided that the best way to deal with it is simple, brute-force elimination. Exclude the low scores by fiat, but keep rolling stats on 3d6 as usual, so that high scores remain relatively rare. Then, if after all is said and done, a player’s scores still add up to more penalties than bonuses, a full re-roll is permitted.
Thus, the first rule for my one-shot: player characters roll their abilities using 3d6, in order. Any score below 6 (carrying a penalty of –2 or worse) can be re-rolled immediately. Once all six scores are generated, the character is valid of the sum of all penalties and bonuses is zero or positive. Finally, the player may swap any one pair of scores, if desired, to make the rolled character more suitable to whatever class the player might wish to play.
This last rule, one swap of any two scores, is an old favorite of mine. It helps players make the character they want without altogether giving up the randomness of rolling in order, and I use it in place of OD&D’s rather intricate and clunky rules for raising one’s prime requisite by lowering other scores.
The Races
I noticed something odd the last time I sat down and really thought about what elves and dwarves are like in Tolkien’s literature (and its many imitators) vs. what they’re like in D&D. Things don’t quite add up. For instance, I don’t recall any mention of dwarves being able to see in the dark. Indeed, infravision seems to be entirely invented for the sake of D&D’s dungeon-crawl conceit, an advantage that elves and dwarves have for the sake of having an advantage. (And between humans carrying torches and their demi-human allies trying to see in the dark, it’s frankly quite an annoying thing to adjudicate while playing—better to eliminate the ability for player characters altogether!)
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that giving demi-humans lists of special powers and annoying little modifiers was something I’d like to avoid this time around. Instead, I wanted to give the non-humans in this new setting I’m working up no more than one or two very limited, very situationally useful, and very flavorful abilities. A lot of what follows here was actually inspired by Dennis L. McKiernan’s “Mithgar” novels (of all the Tolkien knockoffs out there, he’s my favorite because his books are such shameless imitations—really, read The Iron Tower trilogy, you’ll love it).
Okay, so the five playable races for this setting are humans, dwarves, gnomes, ogres, and elves.
Humans have no real special abilities and no ability score requirements. They do get two bonus skill points (I’ll expound upon my skill system in a moment). The world is home to two major human civilizations. In the north are the Lands of Älyewinn, which are all the free kingdoms who acknowledge of the rule of the High King of Índright: old, storied, decaying lands in the north like Bǽlgode and Fordonster, and all the bustling little merchant-principalities along the seacoast in the middle of the continent—Dúguth, Gladmón, Tylwýth, Fríthinglow, Séylvad, and Hýragild. (Like all Anglo-Saxon sounding names, the stress generally falls on the first syllable—the accent marks are denoting long vowels. They just look nicer than macrons.) Opposed to the free kingdoms is a vast human empire that fills the southern half of the continent, a tyrannical theocracy known as the Ephesian Confederation (with a culture that draws on a combination of Hellenistic Egypt under the Ptolemaic pharaohs and medieval Byzantium).
Dwarves are pretty much just like you’d imagine dwarves to be. In the Lands of Älyewinn, there is only one great dwarven kingdom left, under a mountain range called the Chozelrunds. Within the dwarven halls, society is strictly hierarchical and utterly Machiavellian. Dwarves have minds like iron and wheels: always calculating, assessing, scheming. There are two ways to elevate the status of one’s family within dwarven society: illicitly, by disgracing or assassinating the competition; or legitimately, by purchasing a higher social position with huge sums of gold. Thus, acquiring treasure is of utmost importance to kingdom-dwarves. However, not all dwarves are like this: a great many of their kin live on the surface in towns and villages, some amongst the human kingdoms, and many more in the Heathlands. These surface-dwarves tend to be the most technophilic and inventive of all the common races, more inclined to science and engineering than even humans are.
A dwarf must have a Constitution score of at least 9. Dwarves have the innate ability to spot unusual stonework, including the ability to notice gradual slopes and intuit relative depth under the ground. Any path that a dwarf has trod before, a dwarf can always retrace flawlessly from memory, even if blindfolded: thus, dwarves rarely get lost in mazelike environments, and they are almost never fooled by shifting walls or passages.
Gnomes dwell in the Heathlands, a vast stretch of mostly unpopulated wilderness in the interior of the middle of Älyewinn. Some live in villages on the edge of the vast northern forests; most live in sprawling settlements of hillside burrows surrounded by simple farms. Quiet, pastoral types, gnomes basically fulfill this setting’s halfling/hobbit/warrow/nelwyn/kender role. A gnome must have a Dexterity of at least 9. Mechanically speaking, the gnomes’ small size is their only noteworthy trait. This prevents them from wielding the largest weapons, but it also means that they can squeeze into small spaces that others can’t reach; hide with relatively little cover and go unnoticed by most if they choose; and in battle, move through spaces occupied by allies or very large monsters almost unhindered.
Elves of Älyewinn are magical because they are dragon-blooded. The mythic past of Älyewinn is a long and twisted history of the gods creating various life-forms to populate the world, only to discover that each successive generation of beings proved despotic once it rose to dominance. The dragons were created to free the world from the tyranny of the stone giants, and they themselves became conquerors and tyrants once the giants were defeated. When the gods turned on the dragons, some—the firedrakes—did as the gods asked and went to sleep beneath the earth. Others pacted with the evil god Mórgrundel and were warped into dragons of darkness and cold—the murkwyrms. Before the firedrakes vanished from the world, though, they left behind descendants—a mingling of dragon and human blood, a race of vast magical power called the eldar. The eldar, as a hybrid and magical race, are almost immortal—practically demigods—but they have difficulty reproducing amongst themselves. Mingling their blood further with humans, though, has produced a lesser race of what might rightly be called either half-eldar or dragon-blooded, and these are the common elves.
Elves possess a lifespan of two or three centuries, but they are neither ageless nor immortal. Since the true eldar are so few anymore, they rarely leave their forest sanctuary at Eádnessa. Instead, the elves are their agents in the world, their eyes and ears abroad. They serve both the eldar and the even more mysterious Gáldre, immortal beings cloaked in mortal flesh who act as prophets and messengers of the gods.
An elf must have both Dexterity and Wisdom of 9 or higher. Elves are attuned to the heavens and always know the precise position of the sun, moon, and stars in the sky, even when they are deep underground or have been unconscious for some unknown length of time—thus, an elf always knows the precise day of the year and time of day. Elves are highly sensitive to both magic and evil: should an elf spend a full turn (ten minutes) or more in any area that would by itself set off either a detect magic or detect evil spell, the elf will become nauseated (by evil) or intoxicated (by magic) until they can spend a full turn resting in an unaffected area. At the DM’s discretion, elves may sometimes be capable of extraordinary feats of balance or perception, according to the situation—but these moments are highly circumstantial and often come upon the elf like a vision or a waking trance, without warning and not precisely under the elf’s control.
Ogres are a giant-blooded race, kin to humans, strong of arm and green of skin. They fill the role of the D&D half-orc or the Elder Scrolls orc, without actually using the name “orc” and carrying its implication of “evil goblinoid”. Ogre society is nomadic and clannish, with individual tribes named after a particular totem animal. The five greatest ogre nations are the clans of the cat, the serpent, the eagle, the wolf, and the bear—and the bear clan has always been the most noble. The bear totem is important to all ogres of all the clans. (Ogres are likewise inspired by Middle-Earth’s Beornings, as well as Viking berserkers—thus their racial ability.) An ogre must have a Strength of at least 9. Whenever an ogre falls to 0 hit points in battle, the ogre must roll a saving throw. If the save is failed, the ogre falls dying, like any other wounded character; but if the save is made, the ogre remains conscious and able to fight, consumed by a berserk frenzy. The ogre is +2 to all damage rolls, barely able to distinguish friend from foe, and will continue fighting until wounded again (and thus likely slain) or until all foes have been slain or routed, at which point the frenzy will end and the ogre will then succumb to the original wound and fall dying.
Other races operating in the world include the Gáldre, mysterious demigods who go about disguised as wandering wizards in service to the Válodre, the gods. The gods number six: Ánzehu, the mother-goddess and patron of humans; Aéltfyr the fire-god, patron of elves and firedrakes; Vordúlven, earth-god, patron of dwarves and stone-giants; Léoma, storm-goddess, patron of gnomes and growing plants; Yechéla, frost-goddess, patron of ogres and wild beasts; and Mórgrundel, chaos-god, patron of murkwyrms and evil humanoids. Mórgrundel brought two humanoid races into being: goblin-kind (kobolds, goblins, orcs, hobgoblins, orogs, and bugbears) and troll-kind (gnolls, trolls, and ettins). Numerous other monster species exist in the world, most of them created by one god or another at various moments in the world’s long history. Of special note are the wood-wosen, the tree-folk; they seem to have existed for always, even going back to that distant age before the gods found the world and started filling it with life; and the wood-wosen owe their only allegiance to some deeper spirit within the world that predates even the gods.
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