Posts

• Oct 25, 2023

  The Great Tabletop Hackathon, part 00: Introduction

  

  I recently got into a forum discussion about hacking in cyberpunk tabletop RPGs, as one does. This one was mostly centered around Shadowrun, and it touched on a lot of the reasons why one might want to play without a hacker PC even when you want to feature hacking in your game. It also got a bit into edition arguments, as it often does.

  Shadowrun’s problems are more or less universal to the genre, as mentioned in the other post linked above. The first three editions go heavy into the whole Gibsonian VR Dungeon aesthetic and suffer from the classic problems from that approach. It’s also very inspired by how 80s mainframes worked, and rules aside it all made so much more sense to me once I realized that.

  The fourth has something that visually resembles Ghost in the Shell or Cyberpunk 2077, where the hacker follows along with the group and hacks a series of smaller devices using an augmented reality interface. My recollection is that this is supposed to be faster, but the discussion in question had people complaining it wasn’t.

  Cyberpunk-the-game is similar, with CP 2020 going in fully for VR dungeons, and CP RED going in for smaller localized servers that are also supposed to only take a small series of rolls to solve instead of an hours-long minigame. They’re are much less inspired by reality than Shadowrun’s (though this is of course not a knock on them, merely an observation).

  There are also more recent games that try to either capture the nostalgic feel of old-school cyberpunk or to express the same themes in a more modern way. I’m thinking of Neon City Overdrive and Hard Wired Island, respectively. I’m not very familiar with them yet but I intend to change that.

  And then you have GURPS, which has a few hacking systems of its own depending on which genre you’re talking about. The ones I’m interested in are the one from Pyramid #3/21, which emulates classic cyberdecks-and-mainframes hacking but could also work for GitS-style shenanigans, and the more streamlined one from GURPS Action.

  And I kinda want to see if they all match the memories and impressions I have of them. Let’s try them all!

  Hackathon Scenario and Rules

  Picture a team of flawed but stylish urban mercenaries composed of a hacker, a sneaky talker, and a pair of sneaky bruisers. They’re on a mission to take down a corrupt and racist businessman, and they learned a company he owns stores the sort of evidence that can’t be ignored by the government: proof of rampant embezzling and tax evasion, in both digital and hardcopy forms.

  Our mercenaries are going to infiltrate a small, single-office company, one of the many owned by the target. It does do legitimate business but also serves as a “stash” for records about the target’s illegal activities. Secret ledgers, blackmail material, and so on. Some of this lives in the company’s computer system, some of it is stored in hardcopy in a “records room” whose access is restricted to normal employees.

  Employees and other authorized personnel can wander the legitimate business area of the office freely, but the “records room” can only be accessed by a small group of people who work directly for the target and drop by occasionally to use it. There’s a back entrance with an electronic lock so that these lieutenants can get in and out outside of business hours and/or without bringing too much employee attention to themselves.

  The records room is watched by a camera and protected by an alarm that triggers if a stranger or even a normal employee tries to get close to it. There’s a small guard shift here during the day which increases at night. The guards know who the lieutenants are, and their duties involve keeping everyone else away from the room.

  The office’s computer system will be different in every game. In all of them it’s supposed to be small but with tighter than expected security, because of what it hides.

  The team’s mission is to infiltrate this office, steal all the evidence, and if possible drain the company’s accounts on the way out, because at the end of the day ya still gotta eat, chummer. Here’s how things are supposed to go, with a greater focus on the hacker’s part since this is what I’m interested in:

  First, the team enters the building disguised as a maintenance crew. We’ll assume this part succeeds, giving them limited freedom of movement inside the office.

  Next they must enter the records room. For them to be able to do this, the hacker must turn off a security camera and an alarm.

  If the previous step succeeds, the hacker must locate and steal the target data from the office’s computer system. Technically, the best strategy would be to steal the evidence first and only then drain the accounts, but our hacker will do things in the order in which they run into the corresponding locations. The lure of money is strong when the account is right there.

  Finally, the hacker must unlock the back door so the team can leave. Ideally they will do so quietly and with no one the wiser, but this could happen in the middle of a firefight. Possibly one caused by the hacker triggering an alert in the computer system.

  For each of the following systems, I’m going to stat up a hacker character and a computer system that conforms to that game’s paradigm and rules. And then I’ll roll through the target session while timing how long it takes me.

  • Shadowrun 1st Edition

  • Cyberpunk 2020

  • Shadowrun 4th Edition, 20th Anniversary.

  • Cyberpunk RED

  • Shadowrun 5th Edition.

  • Neon City Overdrive

  • Hard Wired Island

  • GURPS Action with the Pyramid #3/21 system, both in “classic” and “modern” modes.

  • GURPS Action with its own system. Not sure this can accommodate the scenario, but we’ll see.

  I’m using this particular list because those are the books I happen to own at present. I’m not sure if I want to spend money to acquire the hacking systems used in Shadowrun 2nd and 3rd Edition, though I do remember they are notably different from SR1.

  The hacker and their equipment will be at roughly starting character level for each game, possibly with a slight tweak or two, and the challenges faced should be challenging but not impossible for the hacker. Whether the target devices are separate or part of the same single “target system”, and whether the hacker is even with the physical team, will depend on the system in question.

  I have more practical experience with some of these systems than with others, but I will be studying all of them to ensure I do each run “right”. Preliminary study doesn’t count towards the timed session, but consultations that happen during the actual run do, because I’ve never been in a session where people didn’t have to consult the books for something like this.

  I’ll be writing a lot of stuff down during the actual run, but I’ll try to be as brief as possible there. It’s still going to take a bit more time than doing it verbally, but I think it evens out because there will be no table talk or extra player questions getting in the way. I’ll write wordier summaries after the run is done, and these are the ones that will see publication.

  All rolls will be made on Orokos, but I’m not going to save them and will just report the results in the article.

• Oct 25, 2023

  Let's Read Neverwinter: Evernight, part 02

  This post concerns itself with specific landmarks in Evernight. A lot of them are “coterminous” with Neverwinter landmarks, occupying the corresponding location in space and having the exact same boundaries.

  Black Mound

  The district of Black Mound is named that because of the hill that dominates it. It’s coterminous with the Protector’s Enclave in Neverwinter. The houses and manors here are larger than in the rest of Evernight, but just as dilapidated. Undead are not known for their tidiness.

  Most of the city’s relevant landmarks are here.

  House of Screams

  Located in the same spot as Neverwinter’s Hall of Justice, the House of Screams is the oldest manor in the city and the closest thing Evernight has to a courthouse or city hall.

  The Tribunal holds court in the upper levels. When it’s time to adjudicate a dispute, they slam iron portcullises over all exits until the session is done, because as mentioned in the previous post the ghouls eat the losers. They do find vampires to be a particular pain in the neck to deal with, as they can transform into mist and fly through the grates.

  The House’s wide open cellar works as an arena where citizens can work out their problems without getting the Tribunal involved. There’s usually some bored ghouls, wights and vampires hanging around hoping to watch a fight or three, and they will gladly act as witnesses to confirm that the few rules of engagement were obeyed by both parties.

  Temple of Filth

  Coterminous with the House of Knowledge in Neverweinter, the Temple of Filth used to be dedicated to Bhaal and Myrkul, ancient gods of murder and death who died during the switch-over from AD&D 1e to AD&D 2e. Now it’s dedicated to Orcus and Dorensain.

  All of the temple’s decorations, including its altar and holy symbols, are built from corpses and corpse bits. No special care is taken to preserve these bits. They’re just replaced with new ones when they rot away. Ewwww.

  The undead of Evernight sometimes ask the priests here to resolve their disputes, because they tend to demand services from both parties instead of eating one of them like the Tribunal does. The temple’s chief priest is Ursuntos, whose stats are those of an Adept of Orcus (Level 6 Controller, from the MM3). He has a bunch of ghoul and vampire underlings, and his political power in the city is second only to the Tribunal’s.

  The grounds of the Temple are considered both defiled and necrotic ground as per the DMG2. Very cursed, but surprisingly not quite as cursed as the Dread Ring, which has additional effects on top of that.

  Pool of Daylight

  Deep within the temple, behind a bunch of locked doors, traps and magical darkness areas, is a literal pool of radiance (is this a name drop?) that shines as bright as the world’s mid-day sun. Any undead entering its chamber suffers terrible pain, and touching the pool can actually destroy the weaker among them. This is here as the ultimate security measure, for the pool is said to hide an artifact at its bottom that works as a weapon of mass destruction against undead. The Temple doesn’t want anyone else getting a hold of this.

  Good thing living PCs don’t need to fear the light, huh? This could be just the thing to use against those pesky Thayans and Shadovar.

  The Graveyard

  Evernight’s Graveyard occupies the same area as the pauper section of Neverwinter’s own graveyard. Despite the name, and despite being absolutely filled with crypts and tombs and graves, from the point of view of the city’s ghouls this place is a restaurant.

  You see, when an Evernight ghoul catches a living “tourist”, they don’t eat right away. Instead, they take the paralyzed victim to a place called Lamantha’s Mortuary, where the resident necromancer will inject them with longer-term paralytics. Then the ghoul arranges for a “funeral procession” for the still-living victim, who is buried alive in the Graveyard. Only after the victim has died and “ripened” a bit does the ghoul crack open the coffin and eat.

  Corpse Market

  Coterminous with the “rich” section of Neverdeath in the world, this is exactly what it says on the tin. A market where undead merchants sell meals to undead customers who are too busy to catch their own. From preserved blood for vampires to assorted corpse bits for ghouls to necromantic supplies, you can find all of that here for affordable prices.

  This is also the place to go if you want to hire undead labor. Renting a zombie laborer costs 10gp per day and requires leaving a chunk of your flesh as collateral. The chunk is alchemically preserved, so it stays fresh and can be reattached later. While it’s missing, you lose a healing surge.

  You might also be able to hire undead guides for about 100gp per day. Some of these guides might be able to smell specific “flavors” of death from a long distance away, so they might be useful to an Uthgardt Barbarian who wants to find their tribe’s missing thunderbeast skeleton, or to PCs looking for Gauntlgrym. Undead guides charge a premium for going into particularly dangerous places, refuse to fight for their clients and might in fact run away if a fight breaks out. Other than that, though, they’re reliable as long as they’re getting paid.

  A creepy old man known as the Resurrectionist wanders the Market every day, looking for a piece of someone specific he wishes to bring back to life. He never finds the right one, so he keeps coming back to continue searching. He’s been at this long enough that most standard resurrection magic wouldn’t work any more, but the man guarantees he can bring anyone back no matter how long it’s been.

  There’s a fenced off area here that contains warehouses and some of the merchant’s residences. While anyone can walk through the market, unauthorized people caught in this area are assumed to be prowling thieves and are killed on sight.

  Dark Creeper Enclave

  This large manor close to the Graveyard is the Netherese consulate on Evernight. The Netherese pay a family of Dark Ones, the Glumguts, to mind the place. They don’t have any official authority - their job is to maintain the house, serve any actual dignitaries in the rare occasions they stay here, and receive any packages dropped off at the embassy.

  Family members like to supplement their income with the occasional spot of burglary or robbery, though they are careful to restrict their activities to the living (who can do less about it). They also only target Thayans if they can get one of them alone, to avoid reprisals.

  This is a proper gothic family too: their patriarch Blackclaw, a dark stalker (level 10 lurker), rules them through fear. The only ones who have the courage to defy him are his young cousins Thrax and Vinnia, and his son Blackcut. The trio believes they’re protected by Blackcut’s relation to his father, and free to do whatever they want. The truth is Blackclaw simply doesn’t know most of what they’ve been up to, and will be livid when he finds out. Their shenanigans have actually been quite detrimental to the family’s duties.

  Thayan Outpost

  The Thayans are based out of a warehouse near one of the city’s haunted piers in the Black Mound. They have a permanent garrison here commanded by Katrice Ansar (stats as a human hexer from the MM2, Level 7 Controller). She’s convinced they are being watched by Shadovar spies besides the obvious dark creepers, but has yet to find them.

  Near the warehouse, in an abandoned neighborhood, is an iron gate that acts as a “dusk crevice” linked to Neverdeath cemetery. It’s guarded around the clock by a unit that includes undead loyal to the Thayans.

  Locations Outside Black Mound

  There are only three of these described here.

  Lamantha’s Mortuary

  Mentioned above in the Graveyard description, this is run by a living human necromancer named Lamantha who works as a mortician and taxidermist.

  One of her main jobs is preparing mortal victims for burial in the Graveyard, which she does by injecting them with long-term paralytic drugs and dressing them up. She can also disguise undead so they look like living people through wardrobe and makeup adjustments, and she can turn bodies or bits of bodies into trophies and tools (or sporting equipment, as the book makes sure to mention).

  Since she provides valuable services, the rulers of Evernight gave Lamantha citizenship and allow her conduct her research in peace. Only the necromancer herself knows its precise nature - it’s something to do with observing the nature of growth and change among undead. Maybe she’s a necro-sociologist?

  Despite being completely amoral and quite unhinged, Lamantha is happy to receive living visitors and get the latest gossip from the middle world. PCs who are polite to her might be able to use the mortuary as a safe place to rest for a couple of days, though she will become impatient with them if they overstay their welcome.

  The Demon Pit

  Coterminous with Neverwinter’s Chasm, this opened up at the same time, though it did not disrupt “life” in the cursed undead city nearly as much as it did on the living one. Like in Neverwinter, the average civilian does not know why this rift opened up, nor what’s down there.

  Evernight’s inhabitants call their rift the Demon Pit because rumor has it that it goes all the way down to Dorensain’s kingdom in the Abyss. No one tried to explore it, but they sometimes throw living mortals into the Pit as sacrifices to Orcus and Dorensain. That’s more of a folk ritual than established Temple practice, mind you.

  Like the Temple of Filth, this area counts as both defiled and necrotic ground, and is still not as cursed as the Dread Ring.

  Castle Nowhere

  Coterminous with Castle Never. It looks much more intact and much creepier than its worldly counterpart, and not even the most ancient of Evernight’s undead citizens can tell when it was built. Like a few other places we’ve seen in previous posts, Castle Nowhere only exists sometimes, vanishing and appearing in a ten-day cycle.

  No one in Evernight knows much about what goes on inside the castle. They avoid going in because, get this, they think it’s haunted. This is hilarious, but it also makes you wonder what kind of haunting would scare an undead city.

  Some of the legends about the place say that if you’re inside the castle when it vanishes, you don’t come back when it does. Others say that the ghosts inside it feed on the hunger of others. This means they can cause the living to starve to death, but they can also cause a ghoul or vampire to become trapped in a state of eternal starvation and use them as permanent food sources. A fate worse than a second death!

  There’s a box here with a power you can add to any incorporeal undead creature to make it into a ghost of Castle Nowhere. Consume is a melee attack vs. AC that removes the target from play and inflicts 10 ongoing damage (save ends both). The target reappears adjacent to the monster when they make their save.

  Living creatures reduced to 0 HP by this reappear normally and become immune to the power for the rest of the encounter. They make death saves and can be healed as normal. Undead reduced to 0 HP do not die, and remain trapped until willingly released by the ghost, or until the ghost is destroyed.

  Impressions

  That’s a proper creepy city, yes indeed. There’s more than enough material to fuel a whole horror-themed campaign, though I suspect most typical groups who are focused on other stories wouldn’t want to linger here too long.

  Still, there are good reasons to visit the place. That artifact hidden in the Pool of Radiance would be extremely useful to wreck the Thayans, for example, and if the PCs want to follow the Shadowfell Road to their home base they would also need to start at the Thayan outpost in Evernight.

  Castle Nowhere would make an awesome dungeon, but as written there’s barely any reason for PCs to enter the place. Perhaps they could use it to lure and trap a powerful undead foe like Valindra, or maybe the quickest way to access the Tomb of the Nine is by entering Castle Nowhere and crossing to the world through a dusk crevice.

• Oct 23, 2023

  On Cyberpsychosis

  There are a number of tropes that are specific to Cyberpunk-the-game¹, but which many people end up thinking are integral to cyberpunk-the-genre. And “cyberpsychosis” is the one that annoys me the most by far.

  Cyberpsychosis is Cyberpunk’s term for the general concept that cybernetic implants make you less human. This concept made the way into the game because its author Mike Pondsmith used the AD Police anime as one of his sources of inspiration, and the anime goes heavily into it.

  You probably already know how it works in the game, but here’s a refresher: characters have an Empathy stat that determines how well they relate to other people. This gives them a Humanity score that’s equal to Empathy x 10. Each implant has a “Humanity cost” that gets deducted from that score when installed, and for every 10 points of Humanity you lose you also lose 1 Empathy. This makes it harder to succeed at social tasks. When both Humanity and Empathy reach 0, you become a “cyberpsycho” and an NPC.

  I agree with the mechanical purpose of these rules, which is to limit how much cyberware a character can have. But this is heavily entangled with the “this stuff makes you less human” story concept, from the terms used to the in-fiction justification to the setting elements built around it.

  Cyberpunk 2020 was particularly bad about this. Cyberpunk RED is much better about it due to thirty years of progress in popular thinking about mental health, but I still have issues with it.

  In Which I Talk About My Issues

  In CP RED, Humanity loss is more or less equated with psychological trauma. You can lose Humanity by experiencing traumatic events, and modifications that are purely cosmetic or therapeutic in nature don’t cost Humanity. Therapy helps you recover and restores your Humanity. And I’m happy to report it’s “merely” difficult and expensive instead of the sinister tracker-injecting conspiracy it was in CP 2020.

  However, the mechanics remain exactly the same as before for cyberware that has game benefits. The explanation given is that the act of “going beyond the human baseline” is traumatic. Cyberpsychosis is the dissociative disorder you get when you do it too much, and makes you start seeing yourself and others as collections of replaceable parts instead of living, thinking beings. You can use therapy to partially recover the Humanity lost to cyberware, but to recover those final points, you need to get rid of the implants.

  The concept of “human baseline” isn’t examined very deeply here. You know it when you see it, and your Empathy reduces when you move away from it. It’s the act of implantation that causes harm.

  This feels really backward to me, because a theme I often see in literature or media I like is that cybernetic implants are more like the scars of trauma than its cause.

  Molly Millions from Neuromancer has implanted mirrorshades because her traumatic past made her wary of opening herself up emotionally. The windows to her soul are shuttered.

  Burton and his ex-Haptic Recon buddies from The Peripheral have a number of twitchy combat implants that mostly serve as symbols for the PTSD they got from their time at war. Flynne, one of the main protagonists, has similar psychological scars from her time playing realistic military simulations for money, but she has no implants because her trauma comes through in her viewpoint narration.

  David Martinez from Edgerunners was already a reckless putz with a hero complex² before getting his first implant. Each one he has installed is either a reminder of someone he feels he failed to protect, or a reflection of his desire to be strong enough to protect those who are left.

  I’ve heard it said that someone who gets an implanted gun or blade is declaring themselves the kind of person who needs to be ready to kill someone at all times, and that erodes their humanity. But isn’t “feels the need to be ready to fight and kill at all times” a common trait to all Cyberpunk PCs, chromed or not? It’s a lot easier to find a PC with no implants than one with no weapons, armor, or combat skills.

  It doesn’t really matter whether your gun is inside your coat or inside your arm. And since I don’t think a Cyberpunk character should lose Humanity for carrying a conventional gun, they also shouldn’t lose it for carrying an implanted one³.

  What I’d Do Instead

  Like I said above, I still agree that there must be some sort of rule limiting the amount of cyberware Cyberpunk PCs can get. A lot of it gives powerful abilities and you don’t want them to be able to install the whole catalog at once. That would make the game less fun in a variety of ways.

  I want to base it on some stat other than Empathy, though, and I’m going to pick Body for that. I find it much easier to imagine that cyberware has concrete impacts on your body than on your mind.

  Under this new rule, your maximum Cyberware Capacity (CC) is your natural Body x 10. “Natural” here means the base stat value before any modifications from cyberware. Cyberware’s “humanity loss” stat now represents its “capacity cost” instead. Your current Cyberware Capacity is the cost of all your implants added together. This represents both minor health issues caused by the implant’s presence and the increased need for maintenance.

  If you exceed your maximum Cyberware Capacity, you die. The good news is there are no other game penalties until you get to that point. Note that medical exams to measure your CC values are standard pre-op procedures even at mall clinics. No ethical ripperdoc will ever agree to perform an operation that would kill the patient. Not all of them are ethical, though.

  Body-scultping (including full gender transition), medical-grade replacements, and cosmetic mods continue to have zero cost⁴. The implants involved in all of these processes are designed to be minimally invasive and to require near-zero maintenance.

  Cyberware Maintenance (Optional)

  GMs who wish to make a commentary on the cruelty of capitalism might institute this optional rule.

  When it’s in effect, you need to pay a monthly cyberware maintenance cost equal to your current CC x 10eb. This represents anything from periodic check-ups and implant cleaning to a regime of targeted immunosuppressors at the high end.

  If you skip a month, your current CC increases by 1d6. If you’re also living under harsh and unsanitary conditions during that time, such as from being lost in the desert or having to sleep in the gutter, it increases by 2d6 instead. If it goes over your maximum, you die as above. And yeah, this extra CC also increases your maintenance costs next month. Field-expedient maintenance and a Medicine roll might reduce the increase from 2d6 to 1d6, at the GM’s discretion, but there’s no reducing it to zero without making that monthly payment.

  Excess CC from neglected maintenance can be removed through treatments that cost and work the same as the psychological therapies from page 229 of the core book: 500eb (or 100eb and a DV15 Medicine roll) to restore 2d6, and 1000eb (or 500eb and a DV17 Medicine roll) to restore 4d6. These consist of extensive drug courses, therapeutic surgery, and physical rehabilitation.

  As a further optional rule, the GM could also use these stats for “tune-up” treatments to reduce Cyberware Capacity to the minimum values described in the book: 2 per piece of cyberware, 4 per piece of borgware. Gotta spend money to save money.

  What About Humanity?

  Empathy and Humanity continue to exist in a game where Cyberware Capacity rules are in play. Since we’re renaming things anyway, let’s rename Humanity to Stability because suffering from mental trauma doesn’t make you less human either.

  You can still suffer Stability and Empathy loss when you suffer actual mental trauma, as described in the CP RED core book. The same therapy options are still available and they can help you as described there. Reaching 0 EMP will cause a breakdown that will leave the character unplayable until they can recover, but this will not necessarily be violent.

  The one case where cyberware still causes Stability loss is when a victim is forcibly implanted. The Maelstrom gang in CP 2077 loves doing that to random civilians, and it definitely qualifies as a traumatic experience. In that case, recovering from the trauma follows all standard core book rules, including the one where you need to remove the offending implants for a complete recovery.

  What About Cyberpsychosis?

  Again we follow CP 2077’s example here. Cyberpsychosis is a myth, a label without any science behind it that gets thrown around by corps and media as an easy explanation for a number of tragedies. Corporate strike team shoots an activist, well, that was a cyberpsycho who had it coming.

  People can have real mental breakdowns, and these can get ugly when the victim has a predisposition towards violence and a few combat implants and/or some weapons on hand.

  However, violent breakdowns are never caused by implants. They’re always a consequence of the inherently traumatic nature of life in the shit future of Cyberpunk. I bet a lot of “cyberpsychos” turn out to have very few or even no implants. Just easy access to guns and no access to mental healthcare.

  1. The original edition was named “Cyberpunk”, and it was followed by Cyberpunk 2020 and Cyberpunk RED, with a couple of extra editions that were considered “non-canon” between those last two. If I capitalize the word I’m talking about this game line. ↩

  2. A condition also known as “Shonen Protagonist Syndrome”. ↩

  3. A game where owning a weapon brings you closer to becoming a monster is a perfectly valid concept, but if that’s what you want to play you’re better off moving away from action-oriented systems like Cyberpunk RED. I suggest Wanderhome, which does implement that very concept in one of its archetypes and is otherwise a non-violent game. ↩

  4. This also applies to stuff that has no tangible game benefits but still causes Humanity Loss in the core book, like the “sex booster” implants or the color shift cybereye option (which is purely cosmetic like shift-tacts but costs Humanity in the book). ↩

• Oct 23, 2023

  Let's Read Neverwinter: Evernight Overview

  Evernight is Neverwinter’s reflection on the Shadowfell, but it’s also a city in its own right, inhabited by a large number of undead and undead-adjacent people (cultists, necromancers, and the like). This book doesn’t go too deep into its history, but it does give me the impression Evernight has existed for a long time. It was probably described in a previous edition when the Shadowfell was called “the plane of Shadow”.

  Evernight is ruled by a Tribunal composed by its most influent citizens, all of whom are ghouls and ghasts who worship Orcus and his exarch Dorensain. The Tribunal makes the laws and settles disputes. It does the latter by deciding who is right and eating the loser.

  The city is very dangerous for living mortals who aren’t citizens, though it’s a bit less dangerous than you’d think. Only its vampire and ghoul inhabitants feel the need to feed on the living, and since the ambient energies of the Shadowfell help sustain them this happens much less often than it would in the world. Mortals and undead alike can apply for citizenship. Mortal citizens gain legal protection from random attacks on the street, though they should probably keep their token of citizenship within easy reach at all times. Living merchants who pass through the city on the way to other locations can also acquire tokens of safe passage.

  The legal status of a mortal who doesn’t have any of that can best be summed up as “fresh meat”, but even that isn’t an automatic death sentence. Undead who see the living brazenly walking down the streets of Evernight tend to assume they belong there, and will only challenge that assumption if given reason to be suspicious. Such as when the “tourists” make horrified faces at the deeply fucked up stuff that happens in the city’s routine unlife.

  There are no official portals between Evernight and Neverwinter, but the planar membrane separating the two is awfully thin and becomes fully permeable in certain places known as “dusk crevices”. These crossings link a place in Evernight to its corresponding worldly location, which is always in dim light or darkness. Some are fixed, some temporary or mobile. They’re the true cause of most spooky stories about disappearances in Neverwinter since before the Spellplague. Mortals who fall through these crevices into Evernight make up a significant portion of the diet of its ghoul and vampire population.

  Despite its (literally!) ghoulish culture and society, Evernight is a major Shadowfell trade hub, so it often sees passing caravans that link it to other settlements in the plane. One of the trade routes passing through here is the Shadowfell Road, a mystical path that has a ritual component. It only exists if approached and traversed in a very specific way. The Thayans use it to supply the Dread Ring, and the Tribunal allows them to use it for that purpose because the Thayans pay them in people. A similar arrangement allows the Netherese to maintain an embassy in the city and use their own share of trade and supply routes.

  Part of the reason the Tribunal accepts these deals is that both factions represent powerful nations who are very adept at necromancy, but the ghouls still draw the line at permitting hostilities within city limits. Evernight is neutral territory, and violating this edict is one of the things that would cause the Tribunal to take drastic action against the rule-breaker. In practice that means conflict within the city takes the form of sordid spy stories of intrigue and assassination.

  The city did suffer some changes during the cataclysm. A reflection of the Chasm, known locally as the Demon Pit, opened up in the corresponding Shadowfell coordinates. And while the eruption of mount Hotenow was a quick affair in the world, its shadowy counterpart continues to expel a slow and steady stream of lava that flows through the equivalent of the Neverwinter River’s bed. Sometimes you can see crew-less ghost ships sailing the lava, docking in abandoned piers, and leaving after a few days. All of the other horrific stuff we’ll see in the following posts was already there before that.

  Impressions

  Evernight comes as a bit of a surprise to me, since I think it was only mentioned in one place in the book before this section and that mention didn’t hint at the full scope of the thing. I’m guessing old FR hands already know all about it, though.

• Oct 16, 2023

  Let's Read Neverwinter: Gauntlgrym, Part 02

  Here we cover the lower strata of Gauntlgrym, where the place’s greatest dangers live.

  Duergar Mines

  The duergar of Gauntlgrym live in this sector, which lies deeper than most of Gauntlgrym. The book says they’ve been here for “a few generations”, which is a lot longer than I thought before even if these are human generations. Their situation, however, still matches: they’ve taken over old mining tunnels and dug new ones under the direction of their leader Kholzourl.

  They’ve unearthed several veins of useful metal, including iron, silver, mithral and hellthorn (the one that likes infernal enchantments). Their work is ceaseless, grueling, and mostly done by slaves, which they replenish by capturing any non-duergar they lay eyes on down here. Tunnels built by the original dwarves show their characteristic sloped walls and tend to be both safe and clean. Duergar tunnels are slapdash and hazardous, sometimes nearly vertical due to their leader’s need to go ever deeper. Some of these shafts are so deep that they contain semi-permanent work camps where duergar and enslaved workers live instead of going back to the city at the end of every day.

  The duergar don’t care about the big mithral gates. They got here from below, via tunnels that link their camps to the deep Underdark. Some of these tunnels have since been taken over by plaguechanged mind flayers, which are as much a cause of injury and death as the work itself.

  Somewhere in the mines is also a temple to Asmodeus built from desecrated material taken from the Iron Tabernacle, which Kholzourl uses to commune with his god and summon the occasional devil.

  And why exactly are the duergar so intent on digging ever deeper? Only Kholzourl and the GM really now. The book gives us several possible reasons - GMs can either pick one or use them as inspiration for a bespoke sinister plot.

  • Hellthorn comes from a meteorite that fell here in primeval times, and the main body of the thing contains far more power than the mere shards that have been found so far. Maybe it contains an alien diabolic entity, millions of years old, waiting for the moment when it is found and awakened.

  • The duergar want to drain the magma from Maegera’s resting place and transport her slumbering form to some place where she can wake up and destroy an enemy of Asmodeus.

  • The mining is just a cover and their actual goal is to observe the mind flayers and track down their aboleth masters. The duergar suspect they want to open a permanent portal to the Far Realm and want to hijack the procedure so the portal leads to Hell instead.

  • Or maybe the interaction of all the different types of bad magic that bathe this region (infernal, aberrant, necromantic, oh my!) has created something terrible underground that they wish to claim for themselves.

  The Fiery Pit

  The lowest halls of Gauntlgrym are occupied by this enormous lake of magma, at the center of which spins a white-hot whirlpool that marks Maegera’s resting place.

  The prison devised by the ancient mages if Illusk used bound water elementals fed by a continuous stream of sea water pumped here by magical means. The system could only be turned off by a true heir of Delzoun. The cataclysm happened when Valindra found one to pull the lever, causing Maegera to nearly awaken. Drizzt and his buddies prevented a full awakening back then, but the partial one was still enough to ruin Neverwinter.

  Unfortunately one of the channels had been destroyed, and so was not reactivated when the rest of them were. This caused the binding to become imperfect and to slowly fade over time. Now Maegera is dangerously close to another awakening.

  Maegera is meant to be used as a looming threat - the bad guys want to wake her, the PCs want to stop that from happening. PCs could fix the broken arcane pump by using the notes found in the Waterclock Crypt in Neverwinter, which would make the whole thing stable once more.

  Unless of course the Heir of Delzoun PC is foolish enough to pull the “off” switch again, causing another cataclysm. Then the whole Sword Coast is due for a TPK.

  The Great Forge

  In addition to the water elemental-based restraints, the structure around Maegera also contains a complex network of pipes and wires made from all sorts of enchanted and rune-carved metal, from copper to adamantine. These act as conduits for the primordial’s power, which was siphoned to this sector of the city.

  The heat arrived at a great adamantine pyramid known as the Burning Heart, which collected it and distributed it to the various forges and manufactories in the sector. This heat could melt through any metal in short order, making it extremely easy to shape and ensuring the resulting products would carry a little of Maegera’s power with them.

  PCs investigating the Forge can find remains of an ancient battle here, and will find with the appropriate skill tests that the bones of the invading force belong to legion devils.

  The Heart itself can also be investigated by characters competent in Arcana. Beating a DC of 11 reveals the obvious (lots of fire magic!); beating a 16 reveals this fire magic is being moderated by water magic; and beating a 23 reveals that the energy is being drained by a third party (the aboleths, which use it in their research).

  “Normal” areas of the Forge are subject to the Unearthly Heat terrain effect, and since Maegera is partially unbound some terrain here can display more overtly supernatural fire features.

  Breaching one of the conduits from the Heart or the Forge will bathe the offending character in primordial fire magic, making them resistant to fire and better at using fire attacks, but vulnerable to and worse at using some other element of the GM’s choice. Also, they get a bonus to Diplomacy with elemental creatures and a corresponding penalty when dealing with immortal ones.

  The character loses three healing surges when this happens, and it wasn’t clear to me whether they could be recovered normally. The mutations are permanent until cured by Remove Affliction or an equivalent power. A cure removes all effects - there’s no way to keep just the beneficial ones!

  The Deepest Depths

  This is the part of Gauntlgrym that connects to the Underdark. The duergar originally came in through here, but the place has since become very inhospitable even to them. Many species of aberrant creature dwell in these dark passages, chief among them the plaguechanged mind flayers that are giving the duergar trouble. Their mission is to prevent anyone from messing with Maegera, and thus from getting in the way of the AbSov’s remote experiment with her.

  This means they fight the duergar, but they aren’t any less evil than their foes. Like most Underdark villains mind flayers are fond of slavery, and they keep their captives here as well.

  This region is also where the dwarves built secure vaults to store a variety of horrors they found in their delves. Most are still secure, but some have been opened over the centuries. One of the vaults that are already open is the one that housed the original population of dire corbies, and which has become their largest nest. They keep a lot of treasure there that no other faction has managed to claim yet.

  Beneath even this, you get into tunnels that aren’t part of Gauntlgrym, and which snake their way downwards to the Underdark. Whatever is down there is out of scope of the campaign. It could perhaps be an interesting segue into Paragon Tier when the PCs do finish it, should the group be willing.

  Impressions

  The areas detailed in this post have a definite “endgame” feeling. Whatever your reasons for coming to Gauntlgrym, if you’re here you’ll need to deal with the mess of adversarial factions described in this post, finish what Drizzt and company could not, and make sure Maegera stays asleep.

  This would be a fitting end to a campaign centered on the Heirs of Delzoun, but others might go from here to the bottom of the Chasm as they follow the clues left by the mind flayers to their real masters.

  Conversely, if the group doesn’t include any heirs or anyone else who’d be interested in the lost city, Gauntlgrym can be safely and entirely removed from the campaign. Just say that Maegera is in no danger of waking up, and focus on those elements that are relevant to your players.

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