Welcome to Weatherfield

Weatherfield is an old clifftop estate (and seaside village) playground for your daily does of quirky Edwardian manners meets surreal seafaring folklore. Meet selkies, travel to the flooded realm, try not to get stuck in conversation with a boring ghost, and embark on an eccentric tour of death to make Tim Burton jealous in Weatherfield mansion, offering attractions such as necromantic fauna, a watery curse, and a deed to immortality.

But what is it really? A picture patchwork setting which began as my attempt to weave together a series of ideas and pictures and is now being adapted for a One Page Dungeon (with varying degrees of success). Much has been cut to fit on to one page so I'm dumping the supplemental information on here. First up, a bit about the estate and the notable residents you are likely to meet should you take a tour.

One Page Mansion

So I decided to enter the One Page Dungeon contest for the first time because you know, why not? The fact that it would be only the second proper adventure I had written and the first 'dungeon' was ignored for the time being and I dove in. Getting past the inevitable discouragement after reviewing some of the brilliant entries from past years was the first challenge, actually cramming my idea onto a single page was the next. Here is the questionable fruit of said labour:

I did two things I swore I wouldn't: 1) try to fit an existing idea that had been bouncing around my head onto a single page rather than design something specifically to take advantage of the one page nature and 2) make the text smaller to cope with issue 1. Still, the type is not too small and I still managed to get most of my ideas in there so that's something, even if I'm not happy with the overall graphic design.

Still, it's the content that counts and I hope at least a few people will enjoy a quirky, open-ended mansion-crawl featuring far too many ghostly relatives, grim children, an inverted flooded realm packed with necromantic coral and vengeful selkies, and a deed to immortality (if you can find it).

Clarifications:
The Deed (original version) - by 'tied to the Necromantic Tree' I meant that the deed was actually in the tree's name (because it is truly immortal and so will forever seal the Flooded Realm), not literally tied to the tree. The deed itself is locked away in the study. Terribly confusing wording on my part, unfortunately it is now too late to submit a revision.

Constance - Constance was intended to be a boy with a girl's name because that's just how the Weatherfields roll. He could just as easily be female in your game. It doesn't really make a difference except you might need an explanation as to why the younger sibling inherited the estate, because the Weatherfields are also terribly old fashioned, pseudo Edwardian-ish (as Constance will often lament).

God bless,
Kezle

A Matter of 200 Words

Last year I entered the 200 Word RPG Challenge with Babble and was more than a little surprised when it ended up being a finalist. Looking back, I still like the concept but I'm not sure it is really playable. This year I'm entering again with not one but two equally questionably playable games. Game number 1: A Matter of Time.

Blood and Bark

A surreal mini-sandbox adventure of woods that are not a wood at all 

 

They call it The Wolf Woods. No wolves have been known to roam it but the trees shift and travellers vanish. Sometimes they are found, picked clean to the bone. Still, no howls are heard on the wind. Yet the name is more accurate than they know.

The truth is the wood is not a wood at all. The towering black pines are furry legs of Sepnir, outcast from both the heaven above and the dark below. Once the terror of the land, he was tricked into being chained to the earth and now he is little more than a corpse. The ‘trees’ are his many skeletal legs, some still with clumps of fur. But his consciousness has not passed away. He can still haul his bones just enough for the ‘trees’ to shift and the paths to be lost. But chained to the earth, he cannot stray far and his hunger never dissipates. His body has died, sapped of all strength by the chain, but the right meal can change that and he knows it.

 Blood and Bark is a mini-sandbox adventure I wrote for an 8 page adventure design contest with a 'winter wonderland' theme. You say winter wonderland, I say primeval wolf-forest with hallucinogenic blood-sap.

And So it Begins...

New blog, first post, introduction, and all that. I'll save any lurkers who may have stumbled upon this blog the chatter. To sum it up, I love RPGs and creating new things and inevitably the two collided in a messy collection of random ideas. So instead of leaving them to languish forever on my hard drive, I decided to dump them on this blog whenever I have time (where they can at least languish in peace). That will mostly include:

• Setting stuff
• Characters/creatures/and things for PCs to interact with (with varying degrees of success)
• Themed challenges for myself (because yes I really do this)
• And possibly the odd game design, mechanic, or class

Most if not everything will be system neutral but any illusions to mechanics will probably be some flavour of Apocalypse World-ish or OSR. If anyone is reading this, I hope you find stumble across something at least semi-useful in my ramblings.

God bless,
Kezle

P.S: for more RPG-related chatter, you can find me over on RPGGeek.