Liminal Ark

I'm working on an adventure using Best Left Buried (Or hacking it?) based in the home setting my brother and I have played for years. The gist is an industrial fantasy setting based on the American West where a theocracy run by dragons has fallen into ruin and caused a schism in the country where disparate factions and city states want to remake it in their own image. You are Damned, people who are buried in debt meaning that they cannot enter heaven and their only way out is to plunder the riches of the golden age within the technomagical hellscape known as the Perdition. Inspired by STALKER, Hunt Showdown, and the Myth (And Death) of the American Dream. Also Late Stage Capitalism. I've decided to begin by creating Bounty Targets; special monsters the Damned will be hunting in the Perdition. So first up, the Burrowing Railbird. Burrowing Railbird A terrestrial bird of prey the size of a large bear who makes its lair out of abandoned saloons and casinos using the remains to dec...

Trouble Jam! Just put up my Trouble on itch.io for the Trouble Jam go check it out along with all the other submissions !  https://itch.io/jam/ob-trouble-jam https://theark485.itch.io/trouble-never-again And another one! https://theark485.itch.io/cold-black-cloud-a-trouble-for-orbital-blues

 Best Left Buried Defensive Items Quick one. Currently running a Resident Evil inspired mega-dungeon for my brother and I. His Cryptdiggers have been having a real rough go of it and he was trying to find a way to spend Grip in order to save one of their lives' after a particularly vicious attack but to no avail. I feel bad for these poor souls but I also see an opportunity to try to introduce a cool mechanic I enjoy from the Resident Evil remakes; Defensive Items A defensive item is a special piece of equipment that provides a passive benefit when equipped but can be destroyed to provide a more powerful one for a short time. The take the same amount of slots as a normal item of their type. Shield. Provides +1 Defense when held in your hand. Can be expended to block an attack entirely. Lamellar Cuirass . Functions as Heavy Armor. Expend to deflect an Injury inflicted by a foe. Combat Knife : A Light Weapon that can also be Thrown. When Restrained or Grappled by a creature can be ex...

Best Left Buried: Zones, Props, and Hazards Inspired by Ava Islam's (@yungdumbitch) tweet talking about Monster Manuals and their lack of terrain / environmental pieces that can be dropped into combat encounters I've decided to do some of that work myself using Best Left Buried. However, the subject of the environment is huge with many layers intersecting with adventure design, worldbuilding, and tons of other stuff. What I'm interested in unpacking here will are the parts of the environment we interact with on a regular basis inside of a conflict. For that purpose we use...                                                           ZONES For our purposes Zones are pieces of an environment grouped together by a specific use or theme relative to the scale of the action. A city, a trench, that bookcase and the area ar...

This week instead of working on my dungeon like I was supposed to I've cobbled together something a little weird. Here are a bunch of strange, scary, and cute doggos statted as BLB monsters you can use however you like. Some are probably good guards while others will perform well as special retainers if your players can train them to be good. Adaptation's are taken from the Cryptdigger's Guide and the Hunter's Guide to Monsters unless stated otherwise. Thanks for reading.  Temple Dog Made of stone with a lions face. Though a living creature can hold its breathe for long periods of time while on watch allowing it to become indistinguishable from its surroundings. It's bite causes paralysis and eventually turns one to stone.  Brawn: 1 Wit: 1 Will: 0 Vigour: 15  Armour: 9 Disguise, Petrifying Fangs* Stone Fangs (Hand) Special Adaptation: Petrifying Fangs . As Petrifying Gaze but its range is reduced to Melee. If the Temple Dog inflicts an injury with Stone Fangs can c...

This week we're doing something a little different. I just launched a podcast HERE that is going to become an audio component to this here blog. Going forward the Arkcast will become an extension of the blog posts or sometimes an entirely other thing depending on my wildly shifting moods. Now you can still read what amounts to show notes below but I'd really appreciate if you'd give the audio a listen and leave your feedback here or on Twitter. Now on to remakes.  Remakes and Dragons Remakes and remasters are common enough in our media that most of us have a dream property we'd love to see modernized in some way. Whether that is updated CGI or a less problematic narrative while keeping the core of what we enjoyed intact. However, tabletop RPG modules or adventures (Whatever you want to call them) are unique in that even though we're reading the same print of Keep on the Borderlands or Rime of the Frost Maiden our interpretations of that text and the game experience...

  Rather than another selection of bits and bobs for your Cryptdiggers this week I'd like to opine about the mess I just dragged myself into. That is of course  @pangalactic's  Random Adventure Jam over on Itch.io. The idea behind the jam is to use the Random Adventure Title Generator to get an evocative title and then make an adventure for your system of choice. At first, I had no plans to actually participate in the jam but I am such a sucker for online generators of all types I just had to see what it would give me.  One of the first rolls of the dice gave me the title "Hallowed Halls of the Reptile Gods" which seemed interesting enough until I was struck by a bolt of delightful nostalgia for an old adventure I ran for Pathfinder 2E that was my first experiment running a real dungeon of mostly my own making. "Mazebek's Tomb", as it is known in my hastily scrawled notes, was a large underground cistern that was the prison of an ancient crocodile river ...