An Abominable Fancy

The kids have been settling into a steady diet of murderhoboism, so I wanted to get them investigating and interacting a bit more. I pulled a slightly undercooked adventure out of a collection of Five Room Dungeons, and reworked it as a Five Node Mystery. The original adventure: The Nobleman's Daughter Five Room Dungeon Five Node Mysteries by the Alexandrian The system: Maze Rats, 2nd Edition Assisted by Adventuresmith for Android I hadn't really paid much attention to Maze Rats as a game, until today. I was a little miffed that the 2nd Edition departed so much from its Into the Odd roots, and had bought the pdf just for the random tables. But it's a great little game, and I'll want to play it again. Perfect for a spontaneous Saturday afternoon. Here's the resultant adventure: In the seaside town of Battersea, the PCs have two different job offers: One from Lord Cazalet, whose daughter is missing, and one from the merchant Geraldo Luxurioso, whose

Languages are a lot of fun for world-building, but fun-stoppers during play. Sure, it would be great to haggle with the fungus apes, but dang, no one thought to take the Middle Plains Dialect of Sporetongue. I’ve seen scenarios that were intentionally built around a group without a shared language that worked ( Why are these mysterious mere-creatures beckoning us? Should we trust them? ), but never one where checking the available languages on your character sheet and coming up short made the game better. But you know what is fun? Trying to speak with weird limitations on what you can say. Especially after a beer or two. Besides, in a fantasy milieu, where weird species languages exist cheek-by-jowl, there's going to be all kinds of linguistic crossing. You don't need to be fluent in the language of the Balloon-Herders, you just need to share enough loan words with them to muddle through. So: when you encounter a language for the first time during play, and the