Archives of Nabu: School of Water Now Available

Archives of Nabu: School of WaterArchives of Nabu: School of Water is now available to buy on DriveThruRPG.

Published by Sad Fishe Games, this is a supplement to which we have contributed and it has 36 water spells for OSR systems.

One Week Bundle: Zombie

One Week Bundle: ZombieFor one week eight zombie supplements have been bundled together with 50% off. They are as follows:

Click here to get the bundle for $5.12, reduced from $10.23.

Born in The Boneyard

100 Effects of a PrimquakeBorn in The Boneyard is a piece of fiction from 100 Effects of a Primquake, one of the supplements for Cities of Sundara.

Elisa’s pregnancy had been exceptionally difficult. She’d lost three children before they could be born already, and Iosef had told her that as long as she wished him to, he would keep trying. He had died of a flux during the winter, though, and the last remnant of him was quickening even now in her belly.

She would not lose this child.

She had done all the things the mid wife had recommended. She’d eaten black root, drunk half moon tea and been careful with her movements, but she was taking no risks. Which was why she had taken her old staff, and begun walking toward the place called the Giant’s Hand when she felt her time drawing near.

It had been more than a week of hard traveling to reach the standing stones, surrounded by the cairns of heroes and commoners alike. Wind blew through that place, so hard that it was impossible to keep any kind of fire alight. She arrived to that place late, so Elisa had to navigate by the light of the moon, and its reflections off the pale rocks all around her. Wolves had bayed in the distance, and vultures watched her with their beady eyes from atop bare-branched trees, but nothing had stood in her way. Nothing except time, of course.

The Giant’s Hand was in sight, at the top of a long, spiraling staircase that led round the hill it crested, when Elisa felt her water break. She made herself move slowly, mounting the steps one at a time, rather than running for the top of the hill in a blind panic. It was hard, and it got even harder when the constant aches she’d felt for weeks grew teeth and blossomed into real pain. By the time she reached the crest of the stairs, every breath she took was a dull agony, and she was teetering on her feet. So she crawled into the center of the ring of stones, shrugging off her pack, her muscles straining as she pushed herself into the birthing position. She took a deep, ragged breath, and started to push.

Time lost all meaning as her breaths bled into one another, and waves of pain crashed over her, each one closer than the last. Elisa’s fingers dug into the hard, rocky soil; the tufts of rough grass coarse against her palms as she balled her hands into fists. The sky above roiled, and black clouds gathered like bad dreams, blotting out the stars, and casting the hill in darkness. Heat lightning shot between the clouds, sparking the heavens and giving brief glimpses of the world before once more leaving Elisa swathed in gloom. The pressure inside her hurt so badly, but she couldn’t stop. She’d come too far, and lost too much, merely to give up now. Even though she could taste blood in her mouth from how hard she was gritting her teeth, she pushed harder, her eyes screwed up tightly.

Elisa didn’t see the cracks opening up in the earth around the hill. She didn’t see the green light bleeding between the clouds. She couldn’t even hear the roiling voices that filled the air over how loudly her heart thundered in her ears. The stones around her groaned, as if they could feel her pain as her back arched, and the cords stood out in her neck. She felt her baby coming, pushing out from her, and into the world. She gave one last push, and felt the life she carried for so long leave her.

The world spun, and blackness encroached on the edges of Elisa’s vision, but she fought it back. She panted, struggling for her pack, pulling it open with shaking fingers. She withdrew the soft cloths she’d packed, and forced herself to sit up. She lifted her child, wiping away the blood and afterbirth that had splattered them. She smiled as she cleaned him… she had a son. Just like she and Iosef had said they would. Her smile broke, and crumbled when she realized he wasn’t crying. Not a single noise had passed his lips. She cupped her hand over his mouth, and felt no stirring of air.

Elisa screamed, and held her baby tight. She cried out to the gods whose name she didn’t know not to take him away from her… not now. Not after everything. A cold wind buffeted her, and she held her son tightly against her, instinctively shielding him with her body. The earth settled, the lights in the sky faded and the wind died down. When it did, she heard her son cry in her ear.

Yelping in surprise, Elisa held her baby up, and stared at him. He was fussing, kicking his small legs and voicing his displeasure. His cries faded, first to burbles, and then to silence. He regarded his mother curiously, his wide, blue eyes staring up at her. Then he smiled, and reached for her with his small, pudgy hands.

Even as she cut his cord and finished cleaning him, Elisa knew there was something different about her son. Beneath her exhaustion and relief, beneath her mingled joy and longing to share this moment with her departed husband, she suddenly felt a premonition. She knew that chill in her son’s skin would never truly leave him, and that whatever quirk of fate had allowed her to keep him would spread challenges in the road before him. The Wyrd had seen fit to let her keep him, though, and for that she would be eternally grateful, no matter what burden she would have to help him carry.

The two of them spent the night, sitting high above the gathered ranks of the dead, sitting quietly beneath their stone blankets. Her son called out to the wind, as if speaking to the ghosts of those passed in his babbling, nonsense words. He laughed in delight, as if unseen spirits had responded to him. Elisa did not sleep until the moon began to fade, her finger clutched in both of her son’s hands. When the sun was high in the sky, and both of them had fed, she took up her staff, and made the descent back down the hill. It was even harder coming down again, but this time, at least, she didn’t have to make the trip alone.

Audio Version

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Releasing in January 2024

Coming Soon

January 6th

  • 100 Items and Oddities to Find for Sale
  • 100 Marks of Darkness for Aysle
  • 100 Random Magic Effects to Encounter in a Dungeon (5E)
  • Map – Cellar Tavern

January 13th

  • 100 Books to Find in or about Bard’s Gate II (Lost Lands)
  • 100 Books to Find in or About the Trojan Reach II
  • 100 Robots to Encounter

January 20th

  • 100 Books to Find in or About Hollowfaust
  • 100 Things to Find in a Mage’s Tower (PFRPG)
  • Merchants of Sundara

January 27th

  • 100 Post-Apocalyptic Underwater Encounters
  • 100 Post-Apocalyptic Underwater Encounters (Mutant Future)
  • d666 Mementos for Vaesen

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100 Encounters for a War-Torn Land, 100 Walls to Find in a Dungeon (5E) and 100 Encounters for the Borderland Regions (Zweihander) Now Available

100 Encounters for a War-Torn Land100 Encounters for a War-Torn Land, 100 Walls to Find in a Dungeon (5E) and 100 Encounters for the Borderland Regions (Zweihander) are now available to buy on DriveThruRPG.

Lands in a state of conflict will show the signs of this and 100 Encounters for a War-Torn Land has 100 such signs, ranging from background colour to the potentially dangerous.

Dungeons need walls to separate floors and ceilings, and 100 Walls to Find in a Dungeon (5E) has 100 such to encounter. This is a conversion of the original supplement to 5th Edition.

The borderlands are those areas that are not quite tame, not quite wild. 100 Encounters for the Borderland Regions (Zweihander) has 100 encounters to enliven journeys through such regions.

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Neal Litherland Reads “Secrets of the Shadowed Heart” from 100 Dark Secrets

In this video, Neal Litherland reads the fiction “Secrets of the Shadowed Heart” from 100 Dark Secrets.

d66 Fantasy Urban Encounters: Volume II Now Available

d66 Fantasy Urban Encounters: Volume IId66 Fantasy Urban Encounters: Volume II is now available to buy from DriveThruRPG.

Published by Sad Fishe Games, this is a collection of 36 fantasy city encounters to which a number of authors, including us, have contributed.

100 Items to Salvage from a Spaceship PDF Preview

A new video has been published on YouTube that previews the first few pages of 100 Items to Salvage from a Spaceship.

D10: The Strange Rumours – The Strange

WorldsThe Strange is a game published by Monte Cook Games. It is, at least in part, set in the normal world, but there are other worlds out there, in the Strange. This list has ten rumours for that setting, similar to the various different adventure hooks in the books, and these can be used as adventure hooks or simple misinformation.

  1. Creatures that are not native to the Strange become alienated the more time they spend in the Strange, though there are other factors that also increase is. There are rumours that some organisations are performing deliberate experiments in alienation on unwilling subjects to find out all the ways alienation might affect them.
  2. In the Strange, the edge of a recursion permeable to the Strange rarely has an interface surface more than a few miles in diameter. There are rumours, though, that further out in the Strange, away from the Shoals of Earth, there are recursions with interface surfaces that are much, much bigger. Though no-one has any proof of this as yet.
  3. Just as there are black holes in space, there are rumoured to be similar things in the Strange, perhaps corresponding to black holes in the baryonic universe. Such things are said to have a tremendous pull that’s practically impossible to escape, and may well be portals to elsewhere.
  4. Navigating the Strange can be difficult, especially without the original sentient protocols designed by the Precursors, but there are rumours of something described as navigational beacons out in the deeper parts. Most assume that these rumours are just that, for such beacons would make more sense in the better-travelled regions; others believe they are lures designed to capture the unwary.
  5. People and objects that move through the Strange leave a faint wake, that can be used, with difficulty, to track them. There are rumours of travellers discovering wakes that were anything but faint, though, leading to speculation as to just what might have caused them, and how large such a thing might be.
  6. Planetovores are the creatures interested in using the Strange to find and take over a prime world, and they can vary tremendously in origin and personality, but all are powerful. There are rumours that some planetovores, possibly alien AIs, cooperate with each other to help achieve their goals more easily.
  7. Reality seeds can be grown into a recursion for those with the right skills and resources, when planted in the Strange. There are rumours that some unknown party is buying up as many reality seeds as they can, through different fronts, presumably with some unknown goal in mind.
  8. Some explorers believe that portions of the Strange have gained intelligence, with parts moving as if they are thinking and alive. A more out there claim is that the Strange as a whole is a single, vast, intelligent being of unknown goals and motivations. And some of them claim that “God” is a perfectly justifiable name for the Strange in that case.
  9. The Strange has been described as a chaotic flow of spiralling fractal patterns iterating in on itself. Some say that the patterns have meaning, and if they are studied for long enough, this meaning will be revealed. Others says that only madness will come from spending too much time attempting to find meaning in the Strange.
  10. Untethered recursions in the Strange are rare and are often hard to understand. Some of the recursions seem to bear more in common with traditional depictions of Hell than anything else, and some recursors have posited that they are in fact the inspiration for descriptions of such.

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100 Strange Side-Effects from Potions, 100 Hooks and Rumours for the City of Dolmvay II and 100 Hooks and Rumours for Terrinoth III Now Available

100 Strange Side-Effects from Potions100 Strange Side-Effects from Potions, 100 Hooks and Rumours for the City of Dolmvay II and 100 Hooks and Rumours for Terrinoth III are now available to buy on DriveThruRPG.

Potions may end up having odd side-effects, perhaps from improper manufacture or storage. 100 Strange Side-Effects from Potions has 100 such to experience, from cosmetic to beneficial to harmful.

Characters may come across information when asking around and 100 Hooks and Rumours for the City of Dolmvay II has 100 rumours for use with the City of Dolmvay from Small Niche Games.

Characters can gain information from a variety of sources and 100 Hooks and Rumours for Terrinoth III has 100 things for them to hear. These can be used as background colour or as potential adventure hooks.

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