The Mushroom Press Design Blog

Stuff's that’s I’ve been's doing's lately

Two things have been eating my design time in recent days. The first is the sword-and-plant crawl I’ve been dreaming of since the Barbarian Conquerors of Kanahu kickstarter dropped. Here’s how I’m making that happen:

A big hex map was my first stop (thank you hexographer):

While I was making it, I noted that tropical things felt very Barsoom-y to me, but deciduous forests and the like did not. This made me realize that, when going to my sourcebooks:

That I would need to edit the monster lists to exclude creatures that didn’t fit my planetcrawl theme. Also, taking some inspiration from the “(color) men” of this fine product:

I re-painted the elves as “Purple Men” (might have been channeling the drow there, but I mixed in a healthy dose of Moorecock’s Melnibonians) and my hated orcs became the savage Orange Men. I also retrofitted the fascinating ACKS-race of the Throgrin as Chaos-worshipping Green Men. Finally, I re-purposed gnomes as the rare and diminutive race of pterodactyl-riding Grey Men.

Next, I wanted to put some muscle into making a city crawl. And what better city than dim, distant Carcosa?

I used a variation of the techniques in my supplementary books (most notably Vornheim) to make the map, charts and tables. I also yoinked some of the amazing ideas on Urbancrawls from the Alexandrian. (I had to cut and paste two different takes on the city together on a bit of cardboard to complete the map)

Each of my supplementary books had a particular bit that I loved:

About Vornheim, much has been said . I find the charts in the back to be excellent templates to use when designing a city:

I yank NPCs from Red and Pleasant Land pretty commonly (I re-purposed the hatter as a priest of Thoth, to give one notable example). But the break-out star was the Guests, who you generate with these great tables as your players watch in horror:

Yoon-Suin is the book which keeps on giving, but a favorite bit of mine is the humble artifacts section:

It provides great grist for “we’ve found a weird device and we don’t know what it does”. Probably my most-consulted chart in the book, up there with the Opium section (also referenced with alarming frequency!)

And what Carcosa would be complete without mega dungeons within the city walls?