The Great Antarctic Hexcrawl pt. 8 - You Encounter A Settlement...

26 Apr, 2024

Unlike the more fleshed out 'weird' hexes, the settlements of Antibor get relatively terse descriptions in my key (i.e. population, one or two details, sometimes the name of a leader).

Since these features are generic & common, it helps to to define likely interactions, like how OD&D devotes several paragraphs to a standard procedure for resolving castle encounters according to the class of their inhabitants.¹

So in that vein, the following is a mix of lore (i.e. how these elements function within the world of Antibor) and tables (which I envision rolling on and reading the result against a standard reaction roll). I've tried to dial in on interactions that generate interesting gameplay rather than fussing about realism. In some cases, it's a simple as a reason to visit at all.

Right now, none of this material is integrated into the random generation prompts for these features -- I think I'd prefer to keep these as loose inspiration that can be remixed & developed into deeper plot hooks as needed.

Common Settlements

Exultants

The thirteen Exultant houses of Antibor rule the prefectures and also directly own a patchwork of cantons across the continent. Given the dangerous conditions on the ground, Exultants guard their holdings with extensive retinues and may reach remote locations by airship.

A typical villa consists of a walled palace, often containing lavish gardens, baths, theaters, sporting arenas, wunderkammers, and similar extravagances. (Imagine a 17th century baroque manor house but with random sci-fi bits woven in). Typically up to 100 servants live on and maintain the premises.

Players who approach an Exultant's villa may be invited to banquet, compete in sporting events, or hunt if sufficiently wealthy, high-level, or high-born. Otherwise, a good reaction roll may allow for a night or two of lodging with the servants. Exultants are almost always willing to buy Artefacts, treasures, and curios and will usually offer better prices than a standard city market.

For hunting lodge cantons, player may pass freely but may not attempt to hunt or forage. If caught (base 1-in-6 chance per 5 party members), they will either be arrested and tried as poachers or hunted as prey themselves.

Other interactions:

1. PCs asked to take hostile action against a rival house (consult exultant house rivalry matrix)
2. PCs approached by a disgruntled servant
   1. Who wants to rob the Exultant's safe
   2. Who wants to join the PCs as a hireling
   3. Who wants to entrap the PCs into doing something stupid and then reap the reward for turning them in
3. PCs asked to retrieve an ancestral treasure from a nearby dungeon or bandit camp
4. PCs invited to compete in a sporting competition
   1. In order to humiliate a rival
   2. In order to prevent a suitor from requesting the heir's hand in marriage as a prize
5. PCs asked asked to pose as servants during a banquet to spy on or poison rival
6. PCs asked to track down an heir who eloped with a commoner
7. PCs somehow roped into an acrimonious marital dispute

Temples

Temples encountered in the wild are typically walled monasteries with stables, lodging, gardens, windmills, extensive cellars, and a central temple or shrine structure. Most are constructed from local materials (e.g. in Taiga made of wood, in drier regions mudbricks, etc.) but all face toward Idraluna and have a tall central steeple topped with the Tetrahedron-Icosahedron-Sphere symbol of the Idralic pantheon.

All temples are dedicated to one of the 22 icosidyadic gods, their iconography and mood varying accordingly. Hierodules who pray at a temple shrine may choose to receive the associated blessing (instead of drawing randomly). Temples always provide bread and a bed for the needy, but characters with visible wealth will be expected to donate to receive lodging.

Lemures and Cyberians are almost never welcome inside a temple, and their associates will be regarded with suspicion.

1. Interested in rumors of undead, heresies, or cults
2. Looking for recruits to fight nearby monsters, undead, or cults
3. Needs adventurers to escort a sick patient to get medical care in the nearest city
4. One of the acolytes is interested in making a pilgrimage to the nearest Citadel and wants to accompany the PCs in that direction

Autochthonous Villages

The autochthonous villages of Antibor are mostly well-defended or well-hidden. They usually survive through trade or through intensive permaculture/hydroponic farming and thus have a small geographic footprint. My fictional touchstone for these hexes is Jack Vance's Dying Earth books, where the landscape is dotted with bizarre villages, each with peculiar clothing, sociopathic inhabitants, and strange customs that inevitably interfere with the safe passage of travelers. Village quirks are now baked into my generators, so I don't necessarily need a generic table at this point.

General guidelines:

• Players should have to be very generous or perform weird, onerous favors to earn a village's trust.
• Villages should allow restocking of rations, but anything else should involve some amount of annoying haggling.
• Village rulers should be extremely egotistical and pompous (e.g. referring to the village as an 'empire' or repeatedly working a famous ancestor into conversations)
• Villages should be good sources of rumors about the surrounding hexes, but always with a chance of leading players into a trap.

For cultural specifics, see the cultures of Antibor.

Forts

The forts and outposts of the landsquenet corps serve the Council of Archons (rather than any particular exultant house) and are tasked with regulating travel. Landsquenet patrols will ALWAYS asks for PCs' papers & destination, and will check PC's faces against a book of wanted posters. Papers must be stamped by a government official within three days of entering a prefecture; delinquency incurs a fine of 10 besants.

If players aren't suspected of being fugitives, most landsquenet posts will shelter travelers for a few days. Watchtowers are usually placed to allow a view for several hexes around unless blocked by mountains.

With a good enough reaction roll and/or urgent circumstances, players may be able to enlist the help of landsquenet detachments in clearing lairs.

There is a 2-in-6 chance that each landsquenet detachment posted at a fort is mounted, (80% chance of war raptor light cavalry, 20% chance destrier heavy cavalry). If so, stables are guarded night-and day by 1/4th of the detachment, minimum four soldiers.

Thaumaturges

Mages encountered while traveling are typically eccentric and reclusive, having rejected the prestige of an Archon's court for the freedom and secrecy of the hinterlands. Most will only bother talking to other Thaumaturges, Elves, and Cyberians, though other character types of equal or higher level may warrant acknowledgement.

Mages will buy Artefacts and Grimoires, but only if they think they can't take what they want by force or cunning.

1. Needs an item or ingredient from nearby hex
2. Wants to experiment on the PCs
   1. By pitting them against a vivimantic creation, summoned entity, or mechanical construct
   2. By testing out a spell or item
   3. By making the interact with a magical anomaly
3. Wants to hire the PCs to sabotage a rival mage
   1. Kill vivimantic creation
   2. Steal grimoire
   3. Steal artefact
   4. Reconnoiter manse defenses
4. Wants a report on a nearby magical anomaly
5. Wants to fuck around with PCs out of boredom/pique/curiosity

Broadcast Brotherhood Antenna Shrines

O Angel on high:
By your form geometric,
Orbit immaculate,
Locution subliminal,
We pray.

The Reverers of Angelic Divinities in Orbit, or Broadcast Brothers,² operate aetheric antennae all over Antibor.

The Icosidyadic temple has extended recognition to the Orbital Angels as lesser deities, despite not being part of the main pantheon. In return for this largesse, the Broadcasts Brotherhoods serve as an important communication network, superseding the sclerotic Steeple & Badger postal system.

Sending a message into the aether typically costs 100 besants per sentence. Messages sent this way can be detected by any correctly-tuned reciever, and by sylphs, certain constructs, and the Citadels.

The most commonly-worshipped Orbital Angels are:

• Valissus, Archon of the heavens
• Haboul, the far-seeing
• Lansett, the vigilant
• Sidi, of the blazing spear
• Navistra, the guide
• Laikala, the innocent

Aside from communication services, Broadcast Brotherhoods are the only organization outside the Fulgrinators' Guild to be allowed to handle anodic power, so a BB shrine is also a destination for anyone needing to repair Artefact tech.

Citadels

Citadels are massive arcology complexes spanning a 10-mile canton, each home to a demigod-like Archon. The walls tower over the surrounding landscape, dribbling rivulets of toxic sludge. Towers, smokestacks, and rare rocket launches can be seen from miles around. Airships and elevated rail lines whisk privileged inhabitants between citadels, gliding over the wilderness below.

Admission to and from a citadel is tightly restricted - only Exultants may enter and leave freely.

• Every year one of the 116 Landsquenet Tercios is summoned to the citadel of Samael in Idraluna for a military parade.
• Hierodules of the Ecclesiast rank and above (level 7) must complete esoteric initiation rituals in a citadel to enter the upper temple hierarchy.
• Captured warlords are often taken to stand trial in a Citadel, rarely returning.

In gameplay terms, buying entrance to a Citadel is equivalent to PC retirement.

Citadel Rumors:

(Not sure if any of these are true)

• Millions or even billions of humans live in the Citadels, largely oblivious to the rest of the continent.
• The archons & exultants replaced most of the citadel-dwellers with automatons (or extrasolarians or elves or kobellins) centuries ago.
• The citadels were built by giants who died out in the religious wars of the 90000s.
• At the heart of each citadel are ancient standing stones from which the Archons derive their powers.
• Some or all of the monsters roaming the land were originally bred inside the citadels.
• No humans actually live in Ramiel's citadel.

Non-humans

Most non-human settlements can follow a template similar to that for autochthonous villages. I think, as an extra incentive, visiting a non-human settlement will allow players to recruit followers who can in turn serve as backup PCs (since my house rules make non-human starting PCs very unlikely).

Proboscideans

Elephantfolk who raise semi-intelligent apes as livestock.³ They tend to have a vague paranoia that fully-intelligent apes will spread dangerous ideas amongst their herds, so they often keep humanoid guests separate from their primary palisades.

Macropods

Kangaroofolk, generally quite open and friendly. They travel far & fast and can provide advice about the surrounding area. Their didgeridoos can be used to communicate with neighboring hexes.

Choerunes

Relaxed capybara-folk who live in dense jungles and spend most of their time bathing and eating bananas. What they lack in plot hooks they more than make up for with good vibes.

Kobellin Outposts

Kobellins deserve a separate post, so consider this a placeholder for now.

Cyberian Communes

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

• Richard Brautigan

Cyberians were primarily inspired by Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad, so most of them are involved in weird, whimsical, abstruse projects and experiments (many of the entries in the list below were stolen from these incredible stories). Cyberian 'constructors' are almost always missing some important component, the retrieval thereof they will compensate handsomely.

1. Building a machine that composes poetry
2. Creating a perfect simulacrum of Antibor
3. Setting up elaborately contrived moral/ethical experiments
4. Designing a perpetual motion machine
5. Creating a machine that will re-arrange nearby constellations to spell out the creator's name (after 5-12 billion years have elapsed)
6. Testing whether reality is a simulation or not
7. Concocting a drug that allows bios & cyberians to empathize with each other
8. Developing a machine that can create anything beginning with a given letter
9. Planting a forest of cyber-trees in which cyber-birds may someday roost
10. Proving that dragons do not exist
11. Drafting plans for a machine to calculate the last prime number
12. Breeding a perfect cyberman pinscher for an upcoming cyberdog show
13. Playing an extremely involved, high-concept game like Nomic
14. Assembling a machine that can completely disassemble and re-assemble itself
15. Compiling an encyclopedia that includes every abstract concept and zero concrete ones
16. Composing a fractal symphony where every note is a measure of a smaller, faster symphony

#antibor #lore24 #random-tables