En5ider Author Debut: Falkenburg Times-Pale Moon Consortium

I can't begin to convey how excited I am to announce the publication of my first effort as a freelance RPG author in EN Publishing's En5ider Magazine #4! As announced by EN Publishing earlier this year, En5ider, which has run for over ten years, has been relaunched in a monthly magazine format. I had the amazing privilege of having my article on the Pale Moon Consortium, and intriguing organization specializing in smuggling magical items and other illicit goods in and around the town of Falkenburg in EN Publishing's Elissar setting.

I had an outstanding time working through this new experience with veteran editor and creator Mike Myler and hope for future opportunities to collaborate with the amazing team at EN Publishing. If you'd like to check out the article, along with access to over 600 past En5ider articles, please consider subscribing to their Patreon!

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By Mark A. Hart, King and Country in En5ider 16, outlines the idea of using nationality as a background. This is in contrast to the typical approach in 2014 5e of basing backgrounds on occupation. It provides a list of fourteen nationality background themes, and provides the tools to create custom backgrounds, along with a couple examples of fleshed out ones.

Overall I like the approach this article takes. Equating background with nationality could be a problematic topic, leaning into negative stereotypes. However, this treatment does a good job of showing how various fantasy tropes can be tied into a player character’s background about an interesting place. As a practical matter, it is a great guide to how to develop custom backgrounds in general, breaking down the pieces into a more step-by-step process.

Looking forward to future En5ider articles!

Ptolus: Doctrine of Ghul Review

Spoilers follow for the Doctrine of Ghul...

An adventure for Monte Cook's Ptolus city setting, Doctrine of Ghul, provides some awesome dungeon design for adventurers to explore, but makes a few major missteps with its overall plot and adventure hooks.

The Doctrine of Ghul, like many Ptolus adventures, involves investigating another of the many (oh so many) chaos cults the city is afflicted with. However, it doesn't provide a very strong investigative structure to lead into finding the first dungeon, nor does it provide any clues for a GM to use. You have to come up with those yourself. I would also argue that it lacks strong motivation and direction on what to accomplish with the adventure hooks. 

Instead the party needs to be guided to the point when they can read the eponymous doctrine, which then railroads them into the plot of seeking additional pieces of the text to avoid being pulled into "Ghul's Utterdark." The adventure, and frankly the Ptolus sourcebook are also pretty unclear on what that means too, meaning that should the party fail to complete the adventure on the generous timeline provided, the GM may also need to generate their own consequence. There is also a bit of a snub section providing a rival adventuring party, but it lacks much assistance in how to utilize the rival party in the adventure, and doesn't provide any specific encounters or vignettes to guide those interactions, especially in the dungeons.

The three dungeons are the best part of the adventure. They are amazing in terms of cool ambient effects and generally just being different from normal dungeon fare. They aren't perfect thought. One problem with the Frozen Crypt is that if the players don’t touch anything and aren’t aggressive in their investigations then nothing happens. They can largely walk through the dungeon except for the ambient cold effects. 

While I love the concept of the Breeding Pits of Formless Hunger, and really enjoyed the fact that the characters could generate oozes due to the environment, the dungeon didn't work completely for my playthrough. I think this is because it is based on a couple of assumptions—one that characters will climb down into gross pits, and two that the GM will use fiat to have the Formless Hunger shove characters into random pits throughout the dungeon. My issue too with the tentacle of the Formless Hunger is that it plays a bit of a deus-ex-machina role. Shuffling the characters around or herding them seems to be the intention. There also isn't really any fleshed out discussion of whether you are able to make opportunity attacks against it as it slams through the doors of the dungeon and even down the long passage to the secret shrine almost instantaneously.

Galchutt Cyst is a really cool and well crafted dungeon, just hurt by some unclear layout of information placing essential bits in different portions of the text, making referencing it difficult to do quickly. The musical puzzle is evocative and cool, and my players really seemed to enjoy it, although one disliked the GM fiat in calling for saving throws against the ambient noise generated in the Cyst.

As an overall comment on the plot, it seemed completely out of left field for a wizard from the Inverted Pyramid to be behind everything. Nor did it make much sense for that individual to 1) be interested in promulgating the Doctrine of Ghul, or 2) to appear at the end to fight the party themselves. The adventure also leaves an escape for this appearance though, as it implies the wizard does not appear if they leave his magical dark blot which is a lens for scrying into the Galchutt Cyst's shrine. My characters did nothing to damage this magic effect, although they found it unnerving, so I never had the mage appear. Perhaps he'll make his appearance known later, if I can make the plot make sense. 

Lacking a player who speaks Abyssal or with comprehend languages makes finishing the questline of reading the doctrine difficult. As mentioned above, the consequences of being pulled into “Ghul’s Utterdark” are also not well defined. What does that mean? Is it GM fiat where I make a player character disappear like the Void card from the Deck of Many Things?

A final critique, perhaps localized to my particular game and group of players. My players never engaged with the Chaositech devices causing the effects in each of the shrines, which was a disappointment. I described them in such a way that I think any other group would have investigated further. However, they may need to return to the shrines, as their own actions have not stopped the effects of the doctrine by breaking the chain.

To recap, the dungeons of Doctrine of Ghul are generally amazing, and well worth playing through. The overall plot is a bit take it or leave it. If you can work in either a current or fallen BBEG who experiments with weird magic, then these dungeons would make great drop in pieces for any campaign.

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Image is copyright MCDM Productions 

The question is whether it’s a human skull surrounded by tiny fey, or a giant skull surrounded by large fey? It does remind me of the location of Giant’s Rest, which Matt Colville used in his Dusk campaign, and featured a giant skull. Regardless, the cover by Ian Ameling is very cool. Reminds me of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

The editor’s note by James Introcaso focuses on the common theme of nature in this issue’s articles. 

The first is The Pickling Guild, by Sharang Biswas. In my previous glances at this issue I’ve skipped over this article due to the title, but this time I took a closer look—and I’m glad I did! I was missing out! While the guild masquerades as a group of food aficionados focused on pickling and fermentation, it really is a front for an inner circle that seeks to heal the sick and prevent terrible diseases and poisons from being unleashed on the world. The article offers plenty of adventure seeds to introduce the guild and a number of interesting NPCs with their own quest hooks to add to a campaign. Additionally, membership in the guild provides some fun benefits including privileged access to information, weapons, and facilities. I may introduce them in my Ptolus campaign. Finally, I was in error in my last observation on the Grim Accord—this article also provides an NPC domain for the Pickling Guild—meaning there is a little more support for domain play from Kingdoms & Warfare.

The next article is Wonders From the Wild, by Hannah Rose, which focuses on new nature themed magic items and spells. It’s noted that these are primarily intended for druids and rangers. This is a very mechanically dense article, with lots of interesting things to potentially add to your game. This includes no less than fifteen magic items, all of which are unique and very well suited to nature themed characters. One of my personal favorites is the Cloak of the Grove Guardian, a legendary item allowing a druid to animate two trees, giving them non-intelligent treant stats. This feels exactly like the type of thing a druid should be capable of at high levels. The various magic staffs are also great and very thematic, even including story hooks providing options of ways to inject them into your story, like the Staff of Granite Peaks being in its bridge form across a chasm (super cool, right?) and the command word appearing in the player who will gain its mind when they touch the handrail (the illustration of this is also a beautiful piece by Kent Davis Jr.). Other, less interesting items essentially remove the spell slot and preparation tax of taking speak with animals and other similar spells. These aren’t game breaking, and give druids and rangers more story opportunities to highlight their connections to nature and living creatures. 

The spells also seem well designed, and perhaps modeled on other spells with more appropriate flavoring for nature-based descriptions. They are primarily battlefield control spells from my read through, but I’m sure creative players could find interesting applications.

Aethelfaer, by Sara Thompson, is the final article of this issue. This is a unique article, detailing one specific NPC rather than a group, and providing an encounter (really a mini-adventure scenario) to introduce him. The titular character is Aethelfaer, which when broken into the component parts, aethel and faer, seems to mean "noble" or "princely" "traveler" according to the often incorrect internet. This meaning does seem to hit the character's traits on the nose though. Aethelfaer is characterized as a wood elf, who is a defender and respecter of nature. The intro paragraph of character fiction depicts him hunting a deer, which he kills quickly and cleanly with an arrow, then does a ritual to thank the creature for it's sacrifice to nourish him and confirm that he will not waste any part of it. Aethelfaer was also born with meromelia, a condition that causes the absence of limbs. He makes use of some very cool prosthetics (said to be made of "red elm and owlbear teeth" in place of a right arm and foot. I appreciate both a discussion of how Aethelfaer uses and views his prosthetics, which I think helps both accurately and sensitively portray these in gameplay. I also like the discussion of how players might also use prosthetics, from the standpoint of inclusion and providing an awesome opportunity to roleplay a different life experience.

The artwork of Aethelfaer is by Grace Cheung, MCDM's on-staff artist, and is an outstanding piece. In the article is also include a d12 table of plot hooks to include Aethelfaer, some of which are very fleshed out and detailed. The stat block isn't anything crazy, with Aethelfaer having ranger traits and abilities. The interesting details are tied to a vial of poison he hides in his prosthetic arm, along with a once per day Deflect feature, allowing him to reduce a ranged weapon's attack damage with his arm, or to catch the object and hurl it back if the damage is reduced to zero. The other cool inclusion is "Common Signs" as a language, which is presented in a sidebar as a universal language amongst disabled communities. A cool bit of inclusive worldbuilding that could be pulled into other scenarios and games (for instance, a cleric in my Empire of the Ghouls game spent a downtime attempting to learn sign language to be able to communicate silently with his teammates).

On to Arcadia 8!

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