The worldship arrives in your world...

I was once asked which ‘world’ my setting was in and to be honest I use my own. But it got me thinking, how would you use it in another world?

For this thought I’m going to assume the ship is and has been in poor repair for an extended period. This allows you to use my map below as is. I only really use one deck of the whole ship as I assume lower decks are buried and upper decks extend beyond the atmosphere of a world.  Your can simply run with it being the only pressurised deck if you don't crash it. Assume the Visitor kingdoms are intact, but the human occupants would be optional to use.

Maybe I will explore an undamaged map in the future with multiple decks. Though if you did this the whole ship would likely follow the rules for the visitor territories I currently use.

So how does it did the ship arrive in your world?

The world scar

Like in my world the ship crashes onto your world. You will need to consider how the crash didn’t destroy your world, be it local magic or technology on the now crashed ship. This could have happened a long time ago or it could be a recent campaign event. Where did it crash? What did it destroy? It is big enough to wipe out all or part of a whole kingdom. In Kanahu this could be directly off the map in the sea to the west or south west or in the unknown lands to the east.

The district nine problem (but bigger)

The ship arrives and is floating a mile above the terrain. It’s still functional gravity systems maintain it in a static position over your world. Or maybe it drifts following some pattern? What happens to the terrain underneath? The worldship is massive and would block out the sun killing all plant life underneath! If this is a recent arrival and kingdom underneath will be rushing to have it moved assuming their people haven’t already fled. If it has been there a long time a dark land underneath will be dead and decayed, maybe becoming a place filled with long dead cities to plunder.

The new moon (it's really a space station)

A more distant arrival, a new moon arrives in the heavens and strange visitors arrive stealing resources and people for purposes unknown. With the aid of an astronomer the moon is identified as a vessel of some kind, do your players explore it? They could use a teleport spell or kidnap a visitor ship to arrive onboard. Do they encounter humans from a distant world or are the Visitor remnants the only survivors?

Combinations (the Sokovia solution) 

Combining world scar with a new moon above. Is a solution to a world ending event in your campaign one where your players or some other force deliberately seeks to crash the ship into a kingdom or location with the intent to destroy it? How would they do this? what are the implcations? 

Maybe the crash is going to occur in a year, the new moon will fall! Can the players stop it? 

My efforts to revise the map

I have been playing with worldographer recently and have made a few icons to differentiate the workshops terrain. They have started doing small updates and the recent changes have improved the user experience for me, though I think more is needed still. Asside from the new icons below I have also added some fungus areas as a forest proxy in the map to give it a bit more texture. For these fungus forests I focused them away from the more inhabited front of the ship. The new hexes are explained below the map.

My current progress is as follows:

The Worldship 6 mile hex revised map

Plaza: plaza hexes are dominated by giant mile high and wide corridors with natural terrain beneath. They are often illuminated with sun lamps and make natural passageways through the vessel. They are similar to the blank machinery areas but are dominated by the plaza terrain types.

Hab-cylinder: these giant cylinders six miles wide and high provide unique terrains from alien worlds within. The map icons show them as fertile or conducive to human life or as zones that are infertile or hostile to life. These were originally detailed in my first map here with the starting city of Avril being in a prominant cylinder.

Hanger bay: these massive open structures have access hangers to the outside world where visitor fleets once berthed. Many opens underneath the vessel and if it has crashed landed will now be filled with dirt and are mainly inaccessible.

Power is money

For my setting the players are adventuring on a crashed giant spaceship. As such standard gems seemed a little out of place. What I did was replace gems with crystals as a major form of treasure and currency. This is reflected in the treasure allocations from last week's map.

Energy crystals in this setting are abundant given most items were powered by them when the ship was fully operational. But the secret to their creation is restricted to the Visitor admirality and as such they are a limited resource. This makes them the perfect currency. Most quests will be for crystals, they are in strong demand and are the main form of exchange outside of silver based coins minted by the various kingdoms.

Aside from the standard fully charged crystal in BCK I include half and quarter full crystals. Their value decreases disproportionately to their charge with less charged crystals having value lower than their charge. This reflects their lack of endurance when used in technological items, and from a game perspective choice for the characters. All crystals use the same weight categories as gems, so you can carry 1,000 of any type for one stone of encumbrance.

Energy crystal type, charge and values:

• Dim, quarter charge, 5 gp value
• Luminescent, half charge, 25 gp value
• Incandescent, full charge, 100 gp value

To facilitate this in play I altered the coinage and gems tables on the treasure table in ACKS as follows using three terms for crystals in place of the gem types:

Worldship adjusted tresure table

Type	Method	Avg. gp	1000s of Slivers	1000s of Grands	Energy crystals
A	Incidental	275	35% 1d8	None	30% 1d4 stashes
B	Hoarder	500	80% 2d6	None	70% 1d4 stashes
C	Incidental	700	50% 3d4	None	40% 1d6 caches
D	Hoarder	1,000	80% 3d8	None	80% 1d6 stashes
E	Raider	1,250	80% 3d10	15% 1d3	60% 1d4 stashes
F	Incidental	1,500	35% 1d8	15% 1d4	40% 1d6 caches
G	Raider	2,000	80% 3d20	15% 1d3	50% 1d6 stashes
H	Hoarder	2,500	80% 5d12	None	80% 1d6 caches
I	Incidental	3,250	40% 1d6	25% 1d6	50% 1d8 caches
J	Raider	4,000	80% 4d20	40% 1d6	50% 1d6 caches
K	Incidental	5,000	30% 2d8	25% 1d8	25% 1d4 troves
L	Raider	6,000	80% 5d20	55% 1d8	60% 1d6 caches
M	Incidental	8,000	35% 4d6	35% 1d10	30% 1d6 troves
N	Hoarder	9,000	70% 8d12	80% 1d6	80% 1d8 caches
O	Raider	12,000	80% 6d20	70% 2d6	30% 1d4 troves
P	Incidental	17,000	35% 4d6	30% 2d6	40% 1d4 troves
Q	Hoarder	22,000	70% 5d12	75% 4d6	60% 1d6 troves
R	Hoarder	45,000	60% 7d6	75% 8d6	70% 1d4 troves

The three types of crystal treasure types are:

Crystal Stash

1d6 dims

1d2-1 luminescent 

Crystal Cache

1d4 dim

1d10 luminescent 

1d2-1 incandescent 

Crystal Trove

4d20 incandescent

Simplifying coins

My players like hordes of treasure but can be terrible bookkeepers at times. As such I greatly simplified coins for my game. Looking at the historical coinage from Guns at War made me consider alternative coinage. 

The silver Grand replaces the gold coin. This is a large silver piece with the same value as a gold coin (maintaining gp as the standard term to partly avoid confusion). Gold is not easy to find onboard an alien vessel and tends to be reserved for non-coin uses. These coins follow a 2,000 gp to a stone in terms of weight. 

The silver Sliver fits between copper and silver, being worth 1/20th of a gp. Slivers can be tiny minted coins or Grand coins cut into half, or quarters, but they are always reflected in an sp value regardless of their size. They follow a 40,000 per stone weight value similar to the soldi in GoW. This means they follow the same weight to gold value found in gold coins.

The convenience of this is that all coins can be recorded as 2,000 gp per stone, So the value can be used instead of the number, this helps later on to just enable the recording of a single amount.

Tracking treasure

Combining these two changes allows characters to just track four things for most treasure, the gp value of coins (2,000 gp per stone), and the three crystal types (1,000 crystals per stone). This has greatly speed up my inventory checks and maintenance in game. 

This allows me to have vast hordes of treasure in my game and simplify the tracking. Treasure is fun and treasure for XP drives my sandbox style games very nicely. So, the thought of removing this elements completely is not something I want to do. I have played many different games over time that reward attendance for XP, missions for xp and treasure for XP. All create their own style of game and for sandbox play I find the treasure for XP model works really well. To simplify it on my end i keep a running tally on a piece of paper of using the gp value of treasure and monster xp then add and divide the amounts when they get to town, this takes less effort than i originally thought it would once you get in the habit, again the key is to keeping it simple.

Another element common to these treasure types is that many different items enter play through these random tables. In the past I thought of that as a negative, but my players are loving it. Many items are discarded, handed to henchmen or sold off. But the items themselves become a part of the characters advancement. They become prized possessions with a story that help build the characters. 

The Warrens of Mystery, Zone A

Rather than having dungeon "levels" in the Warrens I use zones. The deeper the players go the harder the zones become. For each zone I create a cheat sheet for play, a one page summary of that area.

The zone below is the main starting area I have used for both my groups, technically there are other potential starting areas but I created this as I went. 

There is no particular theme for this zone, though a large Bog'an nest in the entry themes that area. To make this encounter harder cause a cascade effect as the Bog'ans from other rooms flow through, or release the lizard in room 10 and have the Bog'ans fall back as it does its job. It was mostly randomly generated using the standard tables in ACKS and my monster random table previously covered. The encounter/restock number represents a dungeon level 2 table roll with a modifier of -3 to the d12 roll for the monster encounter level. 

I have no idea if this will work but I think the following code imbeds the PDF. I tend to run with a few key words and detail, so I don't have to read massive amounts of text as I am running the game and this sheet reflects this. I may expand on some of the flavour elements in future posts.

The Warrens of Mystery

For the last... eight months my group switched to video play over discord to keep our gaming fun alive. To keep things simple, I went back to basics and setup a mega-dungeon for play. Here I use Gimp to create a layer over the top of the map that I can erase as they explore to reveal room. It has worked surprisingly well and has been a great play experience over discord.

After eight months both of my groups are near the end, they have opened each about five vaults with wildly different results based on party composition and approach. The fun thing for me the last few months has been seeing how radically different groups get wildly different results from the interactions of monsters and factions in the dungeon. 

The dungeons premise is that there are six hidden vaults that can be opened with keys and have hidden treasures in them. There is also a master vault that can be opened with all six keys (something my players have only recently learned). I revealed this through a session zero and through interactions with factions and groups in the dungeons.

Below is the blank map to this dungeon that I drew in March. I have split it into sections of 15-25 rooms and the deeper you go the harder it gets. Over the next few months, I will post the "one-page" summaries of these zones.

I used a hex grid here mainly because my second play group is my home group and my old battlemap is worn on the square grid side. The hex side though has never been used so I thought I would get some life out of it. It also strangely represents the BCK inspired sci-fi elements of my hybrid game that is set on the worldship very nicely.

The Warrens of Mystery

Near the village of Avril rumours have circulated of a recently located visitor vault being opened in the nearby warrens. Strange people dressed in cloaks have come to the village to trade goods in pristine condition that are rarely seen. These goods are surely from a hidden vault, and where there is one vault there are often more to be found. Scouts of house Avril have traced them to a region inhabited known to be inhabited vagrant bog’ans, barbarians, bugfolk and ogres. The have noted also that recent patrols of visitor’s keen on uncovering the vaults hidden within have been spotted in the region.

Parties of adventures have stared the journey to these warrens in recent times to uncover the keys to these vaults and unlock the treasure withing, but many have never returned. Will you brave the dangers of the warrens to unlock its hidden treasures?

The Warrens of Mystery blank map

Practical automaton sizes

Have you ever asked the question:
Can I walk my 10 HD automaton down a dungeon corridor?

No, well, never fear for I am here to ask it anyway, well, my players asked it ok!

TLDR - I allow them to be 25% heavier than the maximum in Lairs and Encouners.

What is a dungeon corridor and what is a large creature?

Lets keep this simple, I'm going to assume a 10' by 10' corridor, ye good old standard. Under normal rules we assume a "large" creature can fit into such a corridor.

In ACK's a large creature is defined in L&E (p.150) as being 401-2000 lbs and 8' to 12' long/tall.

The large size is important as it is the point at which a creature fits inside a 5' foot square (if you use them). and can navigate corridors with relative ease in a standard internal environment for a game.

What kinds of creatures can we use to check an automatons weight?

A good example of a large creature is the ogres (600 lbs, 9-10'). but they are made of flesh. 

Some benchmarks for weight per cubic foot tell me:

Water - 62 lb per cubic foot

Meat in a freezer - allow 35-40 pounds for cut and wrapped meat

Metal - 500lb for a solid mass of iron/copper

Gold - 1,200 lb for a mass of gold in a cubic foot

So strait away I want to allow some deviation, noting an automaton is not a solid mass of metal and has spaces in it. At the very least Automatons should be in the upper mass of any band of size.

We don't have weight for golems, which are close to automatons.

An interesting reference point here is the humble Iron Golem, ACKs doesn't give weights for these.  Google says that in some editions they are large, 12' and 5,000 lbs. This puts them a bit over double the mass of a large creature.

Bronze Golems in ACKS are Large in DaWC but carry 300 stone... for a humanoid 0.033 CCF this would indicate a mass of 90,909 lb. This puts them more at Gigantic/Colossal, which matches what I saw on Jason and the Argonauts on Netflix the other day. I wonder if this was the original inspiration for the bronze golem? My Cyclopedia says they are 16' tall for 20 HD as well, Putting them more in the ACKS huge. Either way this is not helping.

Visitor technology is hard to match and seems lighter in most cases, the 5HD large warbot is only 1,000 lbs. While the vehicles are sized more of actual size rather than mass.

Should automatons follow the same mass rules?

Well, normally yes. But sort of no... Let's go with no, I think they can be heavier per size category than the normal amounts. But in most cases it's easier to follow the standard rules for mass bands in L&E. 

The key question here is how heavy an Automaton will I allow to fit into a dungeon corridor? Players can after all use the mass rules in automatons to "shrink" the down relative to their HD.  

Let's look at BME to match size to mass. Ogres are 1.734 to get a 4 HD match, a bit under the Human 2.176 to get a 1 HD match. Now in BME terms automatons are an easy 2 in L&E terms. We can put all this in a table as follows:

BME comparison mass (lbs) and automaton size (dark grey as large)

	Ogre	Human	Automaton	Automaton
HD	1.734	2.176	2	Size
1	54	150	100	Small
2	180	678	400	Medium
3	364	1,638	900	Large
4	600	3,063	1,600
5	883	4,977	2,500	Huge
6	1,211	7,400	3,600
7	1,583	10,350	4,900
8	1,995	13,840	6,400
9	2,447	17,883	8,100	Gigantic
10	2,938	22,491	10,000

That means under standard rules for mass to HD the automatons of 3-4 HD are large, and no others are. But I have allowed Automatons of up to 5HD to be large in the case of Clockwork Stevedore's. To date this has been a bit of a benchmark (2,500 lbs), but should it be more?

The humble Iron golem seems to be 2.5 times the standard mass under other editions. But this seems very powerful as a rule of thumb. 

Using a rule of thumb

Ultimately I will chicken out and say a Judge should use the mass relative to the needs of their campaign, but I think a starting rule of thumb is about double the upper amount of mass to size should be a usable upper limit for consideration. This still allows for HD to location size that pushes my boundaries though. At this weight a judge should weight off the designs impact on their game. 

A more conservative 2,500 lbs upper limit for large category (25% increase on upper mass, the 5HD benchmark) is a much safer line to use if you need a hard limit with your players. This allows for strong automatons to size but still ramps up the cost if players want to cram in the most HD to location for their automatons. This means the size bands are 500 man sized, 2,500 Large, 10,000 Huge, 40,000 Gigantic, and above that Colossal.

As a quick check the following table may assist showing hit dice and weight reductions impacting size of an automaton:

Automaton large size weight (lbs) to hit dice using +25% rule (dark grey as large)

	No	one	two	three	four
HD	reduction	reductions	reductions	reductions	reductions
1	100	50	25	13	6
2	400	200	100	50	25
3	900	450	225	113	56
4	1,600	800	400	200	100
5	2,500	1,250	625	313	156
6	3,600	1,800	900	450	225
7	4,900	2,450	1,225	613	306
8	6,400	3,200	1,600	800	400
9	8,100	4,050	2,025	1,013	506
10	10,000	5,000	2,500	1,250	625
11	12,100	6,050	3,025	1,513	756
12	14,400	7,200	3,600	1,800	900
13	16,900	8,450	4,225	2,113	1,056
14	19,600	9,800	4,900	2,450	1,225
15	22,500	11,250	5,625	2,813	1,406
16	25,600	12,800	6,400	3,200	1,600
17	28,900	14,450	7,225	3,613	1,806
18	32,400	16,200	8,100	4,050	2,025
19	36,100	18,050	9,025	4,513	2,256
20	40,000	20,000	10,000	5,000	2,500