Posts

• Nov 23, 2023

  Let's Read Neverwinter: Kolthunral, the Flying Fortress

  Kolthunral is the Netherese flying fortress currently besieging Surcross. We’ll look at it first because it kinda dominates the skyline and its goals are important to contextualize everything else that’s going on in this area.

  The arrival of the fortress was a complete surprise even to Szass Tam, who considered the current conflict with the Netherese to be a distant and minor dispute over Shadowfell supply routes way off to the west in Neverwinter.

  That conflict is happening because, as we already know, both sides have ongoing plots happening in the Neverwinter area and need a constant influx of material and personnel from home: Valindra’s group is at the Dread Ring, and Clariburnus’ group is at Xinlenal. The Prince of Shade evidently disagreed with the lich about the importance of the dispute and dispatched the fortress to solve it once and for all.

  There are many rumors and theories about why Szass Tam hasn’t gotten personally involved in this battle. Some say that if he did it would attract the collective attention of the other Princes of Shade and lead to one of those Realms-scouring epic level wars everyone wants to avoid. Others say he realized all of this is ultimately Valindra’s fault and he wants to see how she gets out of it.

  Kolthunral is captained by Duchess Antheriss, one of Prince Caliburnus’ subordinates. She was a shadar-kai in life, and is now a Spirit Devourer.

  Construction

  Kolthunral uses the same principles as any Netherese flying enclave to stay in the air, with a mythalar and everything. The thing that makes it atypical is that it’s thoroughly militarized. Most of the inhabitants are soldiers, and the rest are only here to work support jobs for the army.

  The bottom of the flying island is encased in thick enchanted metal armor, and the city has towers jutting out at all angles (even from the bottom) festooned with siege and anti-air artillery similar to the engines used by Thay to defend its borders.

  Spatial Distortions

  The interior of the fortress is partly made of shadow-stuff that warps and distorts space, meaning it’s bigger on the inside and can actively misdirect and confuse intruders. The same techniques were used to build its ultimate weapons, the meteor tubes.

  Meteor tubes are, well, straight metal tubes that connect the inside of the fortress to circular hatches in its bottom armor. Their enchantments make them “ritual paths” very similar to the Shadowfell Road. You drop a big rock through the entry hole of a meteor tube, and it falls an unfathomable distance through the weirdest and most inhospitable reaches of the Shadowfell, coming out the exit hatch at a speed many times greater than terminal velocity. They’re hard to aim precisely, but the kinetic energy of an impact is so big it can obliterate everything within a few dozen yards.

  A meteor salvo could flatten Surcross or Veil if it hit directly, but the cities’ defenses have held so far. Surcross has a force field projected by its five defense towers, and Veil has the Veil of Shadow that gives it its name. This is the main cause of the current protracted siege.

  The Prison of Night

  Kolthurnal’s prison is a large empty chamber where prisoners are held in place by levitation magic near the center of the space. They’re stuck in place because they’re too far away from the walls to push off, and the magic is too strong to let them move by random thrashing. There’s only the one door, and it’s always guarded, just in case.

  This room is reserved for those the Shadovar judge might be useful in a future hostage exchange, which to them means officers or members of “civilized races”. Lower-ranking orcs, gnolls and undead are instead killed outright.

  Movement and Power

  Kolthunral can fly at a leisurely ten miles per hour, and the only thing limiting its maximum altitude is the fact that it’s not sealed against vacuum. It could easily have flown over the plateau to attack the Thayan heartland, but it’s actual goal is to stop the Thayans from using Shadowfell Road. To do that it needs to destroy Veil and/or Surcross.

  The fortress contains doors that are enchanted to become portals to the Shadowfell when it passes over an area where the boundaries are weak. Ironically, this means that it hovers over Veil whenever it needs to take in new supplies.

  The city’s mythalar power plant is stored in a nondescript tower near its center. It’s a standard piece of Netherese tech. Destroying it would make the city drop from the sky. There are actually rules for this!

  Magical safety measures slow the city’s fall, but its mass is so high they can only do so much, and only for a short time. This gives occupants (and PCs!) time to evacuate, but they’re still in for a bad time if they fail to do so. And you are supposed to give them a good chance to get out - the goal would be to scare them, not force a TPK.

  When the city hits the ground, effects depend on what its initial altitude was when it started falling. If it was 100 feet or less, everyone inside takes damage as if they had fallen that distance - the slowed fall speed is counteracted by all the collapsing buildings. If it was higher, everyone inside will be automatically squished.

  Impressions

  It looks like this region presents the PCs with a sticky situation. Kolthunral’s goals align perfectly with their own, but both factions here are pretty terrible. The group can side with one to defeat the other, but the victor will get a significant boost back in Neverwinter. PCs who don’t want either of them to win will have to defeat them both here in Thay.

• Nov 21, 2023

  Computering Interval: Fast Firefox Video the Hard Way

  

  I usually write about roleplaying games around here, but I just spend quite a bit of time chasing down a weird computer issue and I want to write about it somewhere to record the steps I took.

  If you’re not a big Linux nerd, feel free to skip this. If you are and have issues with how I did things, feel free to skip this as well. If you want to read this anyway, I try to explain some of the basic concepts behind this quixotic adventure in footnotes.

  What Happened

  I run Ubuntu on my home desktop, and I currently updated to the latest release version, 23.10. It was a small upgrade, as I was already running 23.04. Everything worked fine.

  Then I saw a video with some news about version 545 of the nVidia drivers being released. I was using 535, which again worked fine, but I heard that 545.29.02 fixed a lot of bugs and added some improvements I had been waiting for.

  These weren’t part of the official Ubuntu distribution yet, so I added the Graphics Drivers PPA to my system, which did have them:

  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
  
  sudo apt update
  

  I installed the new drivers, tweaked my Firefox config to use Wayland¹, and tested the new setup with a Youtube video. I saw that the videos there remained weirdly laggy, so I went back to X11 but decided to keep the new driver around for its other improvements.

  It worked quite well for games and everyday usage… but I noticed that my Youtube videos were still weirdly laggy on X11, and that my computer was getting quite a bit hotter while playing them than it used to. The “Stats for Nerds” menu told me they were dropping more or less 50% of their frames, which is bad.

  A little investigation showed me that the Firefox browser did not in fact play very well with that new graphics driver, at least not in the Snap version that was installed by default on Ubuntu Linux². It didn’t really “see” my video card and so was sending all of its graphical work to the processor instead. It already did this with videos, but now it was doing this for everything.

  The easiest solution to this problem by far, would have been to go back to version 535 of my graphics driver, the one I had before that worked just fine. I could wait for this stuff to get fixed upstream without worrying about it.

  This is not what I did.

  What I Did Instead

  I went spelunking into the depths of DuckDuckGo, looking for a way to enable hardware-based graphical acceleration on Firefox. That would make it use my video card both for displaying web pages and for playing video.

  Firefox has been able to do this for a while now, but the option was only enabled by default on Windows or in Linux computers with Intel graphic cards. I have an Nvidia card with proprietary drivers, so I’m out of luck.

  Firefox uses something called VA-API to talk to the video card when hardware acceleration is on. On machines like mine the capability is forcibly disabled, because those drivers don’t support VA-API. It’s possible to bridge the gap, but the process for that seems to be a bit experimental still. Most people do not have the time or inclination to worry about that, and are happier for it.

  After some trial and error, this was the sequence of events that led me to success.

  Step One: Bridging the Gap

  A developer with the horrible user name of El Farto has a Github repository that contains the code for nvidia-vaapi-driver a little wrapper program that translates VA-API calls into something the Nvidia drivers understand and vice-versa. The package is actually part of my default Linux distribution, but since I’m on the 545 drivers I needed a more recent version straight from the source. That’s v0.0.11, which has support for those drivers.

  Following the excellent documentation in that repository, I did the following:

  • Compiled nvidia-vaapi-driver v0.0.11 from source and installed it.

  • Edited /etc/default/grub and changed the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT variable to the follwing:

  GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nvidia_drm.modeset=1"
  

  • Edited /etc/environment and added the following environment variables to it:

  LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=nvidia
  MOZ_DISABLE_RDD_SANDBOX=1
  NVD_BACKEND=direct
  

  Then I rebooted my computer, and found out the Snap version of Firefox didn’t detect my video card. Whoops!

  The next step was therefore to get rid of Snap Firefox in favor of the traditionally-packaged version. Give up? Never!

  Step Two: Fox Replacement Surgery

  First, I added the repository with the “traditional” packages for Firefox:

  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/ppa
  sudo apt update
  

  Then I added a file named /etc/apt/preferences.d/mozilla-firefox with the following contents:

  Package: firefox*
  Pin: release o=LP-PPA-mozillateam
  Pin-Priority: 1001
  
  

  This ensures that the PPA’s version is chosen over the Snap. The next step is to remove the Snap and install the traditional package:

  sudo snap remove firefox
  
  sudo apt remove firefox
  
  sudo apt install -t 'o=LP-PPA-mozillateam' firefox
  

  Since my user profile is in my home directory this preserved all of my bookmarks and add-ons. Whew! And Firefox could now see my graphics card.

  Step Three: Chant the Deep Magic

  The final step was to change some advanced browser configurations in the dreaded about:config screen.

  • gfx.webrender.all to true -> This lets it use the graphics card to render web pages.

  • media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled to true -> for video acceleration

  • media.rdd-ffvpx.enabled to false -> This disables the built-in-software codecs in Firefox.

  • gfx.x11-egl.force-enabled and widget.dmabuf.force-enabled to true -> These are needed to get past the “hard blocks” imposed on the browser due to its default configuration.

  These take effect after I restart the browser. Finally, hardware acceleration works! My computer heads up considerably less than it did, my videos in Firefox have a buttery-smooth framerate, and I only had to battle a maximum of two Elder Things to acquire the knowledge of how to do so.

  1. A compositor, the part responsible for drawing windows and whatnot on the screen of a Linux computer. Wayland is the new hotness in that area, X11 is the older thing it’s replacing. ↩

  2. Snaps are a form of packaged program that’s a bit more isolated from your base system than usual. They’re less dependent on the specific traits of your base system. Snaps are a bit more tricky for developers to configure right, but they only have to do that once. ↩

• Nov 16, 2023

  The Great Tabletop Hackathon: Neon City Overdrive

  

  Neon City Overdrive is a game written by Nathan Russel and published by Peril Planet Game Studio in 2020. This is the smallest core book of all the ones we’ve seen so far at 72 pages.

  We’ll also be looking at a supplement named The Grid, which focuses on hacking and has another 60 pages.

  Setting Overview

  Most of those 132 pages are dedicated to the setting and to a set of adventure seeds, both of which are largely based on vibes instead of relying on laboriously crafted timelines or detailed maps. This is the game of stylish cyberpunks running dangerous jobs in a neon-lit sprawl. The reader is expected to take it from there to add details as needed.

  The setting as provided is just a basic sketch. The game takes place in The City, which is divided into dense residential and commercial zones called Metroplexes, equally dense hellish industrial blocks named Grinders, and the Streets that flow in between. The City and the world it’s in are covered by the Grid, a global computer network where nearly every device that can be described as “electronic” or “computerized” has a presence.

  The Grid gets a somewhat more detailed description because I’m using material from the supplement here. Like the physical world it has several components. The Signal lets all those devices connect to the Grid. It’s maintained by an army of antennas, and repeater drones. The devices attuned to the Signal generate The Overlay, which is projected into the physical world as a combination of holograms and augmented reality. Most devices have an augmented reality interface instead of physical controls, and most signage exists in the Overlay only. Hubs are big static computers. Some of them help route and maintain the Signal and the Overlay, or host public virtual environments, but others are private servers used by the sort of organization your cyberpunks need to hack.

  You can use the grid through an interface that resembles a real-world smartphone or desktop browser, but it’s also possible to go into full immersion VR. This works as you’d expect if you’re familiar with the genre (and if you’ve read the other entries in this series, you are). We have our Gibsonian matrix here, with wireframe or low-poly graphics by default, but with specific hubs represented as more realistic environments. The more powerful the owner, the more realistic their hubs’ presentation.

  A lot of social events happen entirely in the Grid’s virtual reality, from important business conferences to sport tournaments and nightclub gatherings. Virtual reality ensures they feel mostly like physical events. That sure would have been handy during our real world pandemic.

  The downside is that “common” grid users are constantly monitored and tracked. Player characters and other dirty criminals have their ways of evading this, and despite the efforts of law enforcement agencies and corporate security, grid crime is very common and not going away any time soon.

  When you go into VR, you emerge at the Local Area Zone corresponding to your physical location but can move to any other LAZ you can access with a thought. Movement within a LAZ is restricted to the sort of thing a real person would be able to do in the physical world, and the landscape reflects this. Want to go to a site in your LAZ? You need to walk. The book recognizes this is inconvenient. Some area zones are private, either disconnected from the public Grid entirely or separated from it by virtual gates that admit only those with the proper credentials. A skilled enough hacker might be able to break through a gate. Totally isolated networks can only be accessed by physically jacking into their hubs.

  People can access the grid using wearable computers, which are cheap and widely available. Serious hackers (called codeslingers here) have an implanted interface chip that has all the same functions and allows diving into VR as well. Those who can’t or won’t use implants can make do with a “Grid-box”, a VR helmet that also covers the mouth and nose. And both can further benefit from a sensory deprivation chamber if they’re really serious.

  This default presentation is subject to change, as GMs are encouraged to tweak the arrangement to get the right vibe they want. By tweaking the list of available technologies and how common they are you could get anything from mainframes-and-telephones with a chrome veneer to a Ghost in the Shell-like ubiquitous net where everyone has implanted computers.

  Mechanics Overview

  From what I understand the rules of Neon City Overdrive belong to the lineage of Forged in the Dark games. There are no specific mechanics for the Grid here, not even if you use the supplement. Hacking uses the exact same mechanics as everything else.

  Tests use six-sided dice. You start with one Action Die, and gain more for each factor in your character sheet or the story that helps you succeed, and a Danger Die for each factor that gets in the way. Then you roll the resulting pool. Each Danger Die cancels an Action Die that rolled the same value. You take the highest value rolled in the remaining Action Dice, and use it to determine the result. A 3 or less is a failure, a 4 or 5 is a partial success with a cost attached, and a 6 is a complete success. The book goes into a bit more detail than this, but we don’t need it for this article.

  Narration and the fiction it creates are supremely important because they’ll set the stakes for the roll and inform you of which positive and negative factors are in play to build your die pool. Players are the only ones who roll dice. Enemies and obstacles are a source of Danger Dice but the GM never needs to roll for them.

  Hacking also uses those rules. The additional rules material in the Grid supplement is just a clarification that purely physical traits and tags don’t apply to tests made in the Grid, and Grid-specific ones don’t apply to the meat world. Can´t use your muscle grafts to hack the Gibson, can’t use your fancy programs to lift a car. Mental traits might apply to either “reality”, though. The book encourages focusing on the imagery of the simulation and making it as close to the physical world as possible, to make it easier for the group to describe actions without needing to know a lot about computers.

  Run Parameters

  We’re supposed to set the exact shape of our Grid when we play, so let’s say it’s more or less the same as Shadowrun 4th Edition’s. It’s not a pure mesh network, there’s cell tower hubs and such, but it’s close enough for our purposes.

  Our hacker will be going along with the physical team. The target office’s Grid layout is the same as in the SR4 version. The physical location surely has its own set of tags but the one that affects us is that our good disguises give us the element of surprise. Losing this might be one of the consequences for a hacking complication here. In a real game that’d affect the rest of the team too.

  Target Systems

  We have an office intranet that’s connected to the general Grid through a firewall, which we bypass by being inside the office. Its security from the inside is nothing special except that access to the bank accounts is well-guarded.

  The internal security wireless network covers the office but not connected to the outside. It’s hardened against intrusion and has a piece of Blue ICE that will trigger at the first complication.

  Our secret server in the records room with no wireless network at all. Our hacker must physically jack into it. It’s also hardened, and has Black ICE constantly watching over it.

  Our Hacker

  Pixie (non-binary human)

  Trademarks and Edges: Metroplexer, Codeslinger (Hacking, Cyber Combat), Infiltrator (Alarms, Locks)

  Flaws: Greedy, Socially Awkward

  Gear: Interface Chip (Fast, Advanced), Icebreaker (Silent, Deadly), Stealth Program Suite (Mimetic, Subtle), something else non-hacking related.

  Pixie is kinda min-maxed to fit our scenario, to be honest, with lots of traits that would apply to hacking. They’re a passable sneak in the physical world but not very good at physical combat and bad at social interaction. That’s what the rest of the team is for.

  Run Summary

  Our team gets into the office as usual - we always assume this part works out. Pixie hides in the bathroom to find the security network and hack into it via VR.

  I decide to roll the security server hack as an extended task, since those require three successes and we have three goals in here. Pixie decides to use Infiltrator instead of Codeslinger for this, since it is an infiltration of sorts and that’s where they put put their Alarms and Locks edges. I’m being lenient towards my player (who is also me) here. Those traits plus all other relevant tags give Pixie a total of seven action dice.

  Pixie is opposed by a single danger die, from the server being Hardened, but that die rolls a six and eats the one I rolled on the action dice. They’re left with a 5 and a 4, which count as successes towards our goal but apply consequences as well. So I rule we lost our Element of Surprise and that the Blue ICE on the server activated.

  I rule that the ICE hasn’t found Pixie yet, but it does get to add its relevant tags as danger dice on the next roll as it looks for them. Fortunately none of those roll a six and the action dice do, allowing Pixie to unlock the final door ahead of time. Tests from this point on are made using Codeslinger as expected, since they deal purely with stuff that lives in the computer.

  We get to the secret server and I rule that the Black Ice in there is already active but will only spot Pixie as a consequence - they start out stealthy. The ICE however does get to add its Counter-Intrusion and Scary tags as danger dice even so. Fortunately its rolls are crap and Pixie gets a 6, finding and downloading the evidence.

  Finally, let’s go for the money! This means the office network’s Well-Guarded tag becomes a danger die, but as before the ice only comes online as a consequence. We roll a 5 here, so it does come online, but not before we transfer the money.

  The physical team proceeds to try to leave the office, but as usual we stop our simulation here since the main hacking bits are done.

  Total elapsed time: 15 minutes.

  Run Analysis

  I love engaging with crunchy mechanics but narrative systems do have their advantages! 15 minutes is the fastest time we have so far, beating the “silent run” from SR 4th Edition by 2 minutes. And this only took so long because I have absolutely no experience with Neon City Overdrive and had to keep looking at the books.

  It’s possible this run was too easy, but it’s okay because it’s inserted into the larger context of the physical break-in. Pixie would have plenty to do in that part of the run. I might have made a mistake here in simply having “unaware” ICE add some of its tags to the hacking roll. The system is abstract enough that I could have ruled slipping past the ICE undetected would require “fighting” it and filling its Harm boxes while describing it as a sneaking attempt. Whatever form it took in the narrative, combat would have made things take longer, but not by much.

  The mechanical bits of the run would probably be much faster than the 50/90 minutes I’ve been assuming here, but this would be offset in all cases by the extended narration and roleplaying the game demands to frame those mechanics and establish all the influencing factors for each roll.

  Our experiment however does allow us to conclude the obvious: when you use the exact same simple resolution mechanic for everything, everyone has more or less the same spotlight time and the classic “Decker problem” won’t manifest.

• Nov 13, 2023

  Underwater Dungeon Fantasy 2: Items and Artifacts

  A while ago I posted a compilation of methods and tools for underwater adventuring. In this post, I’ll add a few items and artifacts that further help with that or that make sense as possessions for underwater people. This is a grab-bag article without much direction, but I hope it will be useful nonetheless.

  Alchemical Pills

  Any drinkable concoction (including magic potions) might be made as a solid pill instead. Pills tend to be round, thumbnail sized, hard, and meant to be swallowed whole. Pills are popular with alchemists and herbalists who don’t have a line to a crystal vial supplier, and with underwater civilizations since liquid potions don’t really work there.

  A pill costs the same as the equivalent liquid potion. It’s waterproof and not at risk of breaking from falls and the like, but it also can’t be put into bandoliers for easy access during combat. Dry-swallowing a pill during a fight requires either two Ready maneuvers or a single maneuver and a HT roll.

  You can put each of your pills into a separately-purchased crystal vial (DF1 p. 111) in order to have them in your potion belt, but that does add an extra Ready maneuver to the process of ingesting it since you have to open the vial first.

  Elixir of Water Breathing

  This alchemical elixir can be found on GURPS Magic, and is “reprinted” here with additional options. It’s a drinkable potion that lets you breathe underwater as if you had Gills for 1d hours.

  The GM rolls the die in secret when you drink it, and you remain unaware of how long you have… until 5 minutes before that time expires, when you get an instinctive mental warning that you only have 5 minutes left.

  GMs who dislike the randomness can set a fixed duration based on how much they want their PCs to spend on these potions. I suggest from 1 to 3 hours.

  Purely aquatic people can instead get Elixirs of Air Breathing for the same price and with the equivalent effect for air. Both variants are very likely to be found in pill form (see above).

  In all cases, the potion is $600, 0.25kg (0.5 lbs).

  Coral Items (+4 CF)

  Coral is a new implausible material: items made from it have a somewhat porous texture but are covered in intricate natural patterns of bright colors. Coral comes in rough or polished varieties, though both cost the same. Surfacers value it because it’s pretty, underwater civilizations value it for its incidental properties.

  Coral items can be made without fire, though they do require special magic and techniques known to underwater armorers. They also have neutral buoyancy: their weight does not count towards Encumbrance when determining the user’s penalty to Swimming. Anything that’s usually made of metal or wood can be made of coral instead. Being made of coral adds +4 CF to the item’s total cost.

  Artifact: Atlantean Armbands

  Origin: Divine.

  This is a pair of gilded orichalcum armbands decorated with reliefs of sharks and other marine creatures. The Atlantean Armbands were said to be a gift of the gods to a human hero destined to become the queen of a great underwater nation. That did indeed happen, and since all of the queen’s descendants were born with the ability to live underwater the armbands became honored museum pieces.

  That ancient empire has long since fallen to the tides of history, so who knows where these artifacts might surface next?

  • Sell Price: $50.000.
  • Weight: 0.5kg (1 lb) for the pair.
  • Power Item Capacity: 20 FP.

  Properties

  • When worn (one in each arm), they allow the wielder to freely breathe and move underwater as if they had the Gills and Amphibious traits.

  • If used as power items, any FP from the armbands that’s spent on the Swim and Breathe Water spells is worth double the energy.

  Variations

  Some legends tell of another pair of armbands, of silver-plated orichalcum and decorated with land-animal motifs, that would allow an aquatic wearer to breathe air and walk on land, assuming a humanoid form if necessary. These were created by an evil but powerful witch for a mermaid that wanted to walk among humans, and are Druidic in origin.

  Instead of armbands, you could have rings, piercings, or amulets with the same enchantments.

• Nov 13, 2023

  Let's Read Neverwinter: Thay

  The Shadowfell Road ends in Thay.

  This is where the book technically breaks its promises. While every other place so far has been presented as somewhere the party could go, the text here sounds almost scared when it talks about the Thayan heartland because that’s where Szass Tam and all his epic-level wizard buddies live. It makes it very clear that the PCs should not go there.

  Fortunately, the bulk of this section is not actually talking about the massive plateau that makes up the Thayan heartland, but about the peripheral areas surrounding that plateau. Special attention is given to Surcross and Veil, a pair of fortified towns at its base, as well as to the Netherese flying fortress that’s currently besieging them.

  Veil is where the Shadowfell Road ends. Surcross is a short distance away and is where all of Valindra’s supplies come from. The main reason the PCs would want to come here is to disrupt that supply network in order to defeat her back in Neverwinter. Depending on how the GM sets things up, it’s also possible her soul vessel is hidden somewhere in Surcross.

  The area around these two cities is a horrifying wasteland of destroyed nature and abandoned villages whose ground is coated in bits of bone and flesh that were too broken up to animate. We’ll take a look at the general area here, and then zoom into the cities and fortress in future posts.

  Overview of Thay

  In editions past, Thay used to be a slave-holding nation of evil wizards whose schtick was over-specializing in one of D&D’s schools of magic. Their ideology was very similar to fascism with wizards at the top of the heap, but they tried to present a more “friendly” face to the outside world, setting up trade enclaves while keeping their dastardly schemes secret.

  I believe the lich Szass Tam used to be a member of Thay’s ruling council, but now he’s taken over completely and became its supreme leader. He turned Thay into a “nation of undeath”, equally devoted to necromancy and conquest. Why pretend to be friendly to other nations when you can just invade them and take their stuff? The only deity whose worship Tam permits is Bane, the evil god of conquest, and he’s suspicious of even that. Yes, worship of Vecna is completely forbidden - I think Tam sees him as the competition.

  Thay remains in this state when we switch to 5th Edition, by the way - it’s one of the things they didn’t change back.

  Climbing to the top of the Thayan plateau is discouraged not only by the book’s scared tone, but by the many defenses placed around it. Its walls are almost vertical and the only ways up are a set of narrow switchbacks that leave characters exposed to artillery fire from both sides of the ongoing war.

  Both Surcross and the Netherese fortress of Kolthunral have amazingly powerful weapons and defenses at their disposal. Kolthunral’s mission is to cut Valindra’s supply line by destroying Surcross and/or Veil, which is why it hasn’t moved away. The PCs arrive to find them locked in a prolonged siege, as neither is able to fully overcome the others’ defenses.

  A significant portion of Thay’s forces are composed of undead, both at the grunt and officer levels. Their living soldiers are mostly humans, orcs, and gnolls, with plenty of spellcasters.

  A character like the Renegade Red Wizard could be very helpful here if they still have friends in the region, but they’re also coming back to the lion’s den and if the Thayans realize the renegade is here they will be relentless in their pursuit.

  In addition to any friends of the Red Wizard PC that might be here, the area also contains a bunch of spies and infiltrators sent by Dempharis Sibront, an elderly Red Wizard who escaped Tam’s conquest of the nation. Sibront considers himself nobility in exile and his network of infiltrated rebels is looking for any way to weaken’s Tam’s hold on the country. The PCs can form an alliance of convenience with him to fulfill their own goals, since they align, and his forces will be genuinely helpful in that situation.

  However he is likely to interpret this situation as the PCs agreeing to serve him indefinitely, and could become an enemy in future adventures when he realizes that wasn’t the case. That seems like an interesting opportunity for continuing the campaign past the material in the book.

  The Charnel Fields

  The horrifying plains of death in the area surrounding the two Thayan towns are a product not just of the war, but also of Thayan fuckery. Since right after the first battles, the Thayans started hauling corpses from the battlefield for animation. But since some of those battles happened far away, they decided to enact a “little” ritual to make things more convenient, using the blood of the fallen as a focus.

  Any corpse left on or under the earth within a hundred miles of Surcross will be sucked by the enchanted soil and transported to an area near the city, where it will be extruded to the surface. This makes it easy for Thayan necromancers to haul them back for reanimation, and it also attracts all sorts of natural and supernatural predators who want to feast on the remaining bits. The Netherese have also started hauling corpses away from the charnel fields, to deny the “raw material” to their enemies and maybe animate some of it themselves.

  Relsforin

  The desperate inhabitants of this small village survived by making themselves useful to Thay. They make up the bulk of the labor force that hauls corpses from the Charnel Fields to Surcross, and in exchange receive some protection from Netherese attacks. They fear the Netherese more than they resent the Thayans, and if they think a group of strangers (such as the PCs) are likely to be enemies of their masters, they will turn them in.

  Echo Village

  This village belonged to the neighboring nation of Thesk until a short while ago. The mercantile Theskans built it as a trade post near the Thayan border, to facilitate commerce with the wizard nation.

  Shortly after the war started the Thayans invaded the village and slaughtered all of its inhabitants to turn them into more undead soldiers. They left the village behind as an empty husk, but the angry ghosts of the inhabitants soon appeared to haunt the place and wail about the hatred they felt for their murderers. This attracted the spirits of other Thayan victims, turning Echo Village into a sort of gathering point for ghosts with a grudge against Thay.

  The ghosts’ default reaction to any living people approaching their village is violence - they’ll attack while shouting rants against Thay. PC groups who are perceptive and diplomatic enough might be able to figure things out from these rants and convince the ghosts that they too are enemies of Thay.

  This would ironically make Echo Village the safest refuge for the PCs in the entire region, as the ghosts would allow them to stay while still attacking any intruders. It’s an interesting contrast with Relsforin, which seems safe but is not.

  If the PCs then manage to lure the Thayan legion that contains the villagers’ original bodies back to Echo, the ghosts will be able to “repossess” their bodies and turn against their commanders, potentially slaughtering the whole legion. This will finally let them rest, and they will inform the PCs of any sensitive information their bodies learned before moving on from the world.

  Impressions

  Yikes! War crimes as far as the eye can see. It does put the events happening in Neverwinter into context. GMs and players might be used to thinking of heroic-tier campaigns as being “no big deal” in the grand scheme of things, but everything that’s happening here in Thay is a B plot for the events in Neverwinter.

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