Animal Arena

Weeks in the making, with a cast of hundreds, I bring you Animal Arena!

Resplendent in silks and hennaed patterns, radiant with gilded hooves and tusks, the animals are led into the amphitheatre to the peal of bells and horns. And those placed together are often so exotic and absurd, it all seems more a holy pageant sacrifice or display of decadence than a fighting event.

In a nutshell:

• roll to see which of the almost 100 animals will enter the arena
• Each has an attack die of different strength-- roll these to see which bests the other
• Three rounds determines the winner

We had a session last night that involved a kudu goring a camel, a tortoise bitten to death by rattlesnakes, and a grizzly fighting a walrus. Players seemed to enjoy it.

Okay, it's still Beta if you want to bet on the outcomes.  I envision players getting to bet at the announcement of the first animal, at the end of round 1 and at the end of round 2.  But the odds should really adjust based on the attack power of each animal involved and how the rounds have gone so far.  Unfortunately, I am neither mathematician nor bookie.  Maybe someone can offer a system/chart of odds I could include in a revision.

Shopping in Nidus

This is still a work in progress. I've tweaked the numbers a little added local guides and now that I have my campaign's first rogue, figured I'd give him a bonus too.


I'm still thinking about making regions-- The Grand Bazaar, The Docks-- or landmarks-- The Bronze Statue of the Laughing God, The Plaza of Forgotten Gods-- that might affect the likelihood of finding certain things. But I'm hesitant to pin Nidus down too much. I want it to be bigger than life, and mapping seems to work against that.

Nidus - The Shifting City

So, I last left my daring players looking for a town. My initial thought was to make some small medievalesque town they could travel to, just big enough to get rid of their loot. But what I immediately became obsessed with was something completely different.

Once, I ran across a picture of a real town in a book that grabbed my brain and transported me. I think it was in Italy or Greece, it showed an old town with stairways leading to doors and a door under the stairs and another set of stairs going a different way, leading to a different door. Doors and stairs. It was like a urban labyrinth. Aha, I thought, what if a whole city was like how I imagined the Tenderloin of Lankhmar or the Maze, in the Sanctuary of Thieves' World to be. Something unmappable, unknowable, dangerous territory.

This is not the same picture,

but similar. The city is not just a maze in two dimensions, it's a nest of stairs and passages, doors and plazas. It is carved from stone and whitewashed. And it is on a tiny island.

Nidus, City of Pirates, City of Thieves, City of Lost Things, of cultists and heretics. The shops and lodging places shift constantly, those doing poorly forced to smaller holes-in-the-walls, those thriving taking over plazas. No one is in charge. No thieves' guild, no demon, no great mage. Nidus, City of Uncertainty.

In my mind it is a visual amalgam of the troglodyte houses of Matmata, Tunis:


the Greek isles of Santorini:


And Elkep Evi in Turkey:


My post about dicey lodgings was my first attempt at embodying this location in rules. But how do I convey this teeming white maze of doors and stairs to my players?