Swords Against Madness

Edryk, Miria, and Kale face a terrifying onslaught on the dismal beaches of Abzû.

This game sues the crocodile stats from Swords & Wizardry, It also delves pretty deep into the Dungeons & Dragons theory of the Soul that was made central to the concept of planar travel in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons starting later in the 1st edition and refined in the Planescape setting.

I also wanted to share the Enuma Elish, if you want to read some ancient Mesopotamian myth.

Roger Dean’s Cover for the first Asia album self-titled “Asia” was a huge inspiration for the setting of Abzu. I spent a great many hours staring at this album cover and listening to the record when I was a kid. In fact a great deal of the campaign aesthetics in – in my head at least – are inspired by Dean’s art.

Roger Dean was a major influence on the aesthetics of the Psychedelic art and music movement and redefined what Fantasy looked like through the 60s and 70’s.

I would be remiss if I didn’t send a link to his homepage where you can get prints of this truly amazing work.

Notes

*Forlorn Camp: a wretched set of huts of bone, skin, and scale overrun by wasp’s nests. Most inhabitants are dead, but 1d6 diseased and mad cultists linger.

**Duregar Mining Camp: 2d10 Duregar oversee 5d20 beast-men slaves in mining scale and bone from Tiamat.

***Tiamat Stirs: The ground shakes and strange omens fill the sky before a deafening scream splits the sky. All creatures must save vs spells or be paralyzed with terror for 1d3 turns. Check for additional encounter.

Owen Rideout as The Psisquid

From the Free Music Archive:

From Pixabay:

Miria, Kale, & Edryk cross the shimmering plane of Amber, and then into the darkness of Abzû, beset on all sides by monsters and mysteries.

This episode includes a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster: the Aurumvorax, reproduced here based on the stats in the AD&D2e Monstrous Manual for Swords & Wizardry.

I did take liberties with the speed of the aurumvorax to make it more of a threat and more weasel-like.

The Aurumvorax or gold-gorger is an eight-legged weasel-like creature about 12′ long. It can burrow through solid rock. The aurumvorax eats gold, which it processes in order to produce teeth, claws, and fur of naturally shaped gold, and its flesh is infused with the metal.

Aurumvorax: HD: 12; AC: 0 [19]; Att: bite (2d4 + grab); SV: 3; Special: grab, bludgeoning resistance; MV: 24 or Burrow 3; AL: Neutrality; ML: 11; No. Appearing: 1; CL/XP: 15/5,800

Notes

*Chaos Shock Troops: roll 1d6: 1-2: 3d6 Orcs, 3-4: 3d6 Gnolls, 5: 3d10 beast men; 6: 1d6 Ogres; led by an evil fighter level 2d4+2.

**The Yearning: All mortals must make a save or feel compelled to rest, stay, and seek service at the castle. They become blissful, being automatically surprised by later encounters, and at -2 to attacks and damage until they leave Amber. If all members of the party fail, they will seek to serve at the castle.

†Paragons: Nearly perfect divine reflectiosn of humanity. Generate an adventuring party but all statrs are at 2d4+10, maximum hit points, magical equipment. Loyalty to the Prunces of Amber

‡Sight of the Palace: A view of the crystal palace of Amber.

⁰Scar of Chaos: A rent in reality caused by wars to rule amber. Roll for an encounter from another random plane.

Original Music:

From the Free Music Alliance:

From Pixabay:

Miria contemplates her past as she, Edryk, and Kale cross the Divine Seed of Amber, a place of beauty, perfection, and cruelty.

This episode draws its inspiration from the setting of the Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny, one of the top six inspirations for Dungeons & Dragons listed in AD&D‘s Appendix N.

This scifi-dense story is mostly told in flashback. Much of my Scifi elements of my campaign are played using Cepheus Deluxe and White Star: Swords & Wizardry in Space, Galaxy Edition.

I also mention a classic D&D monster, the Flail Snail.

This issue introduces a race of humanoid cyborgs, The Zaeth.

Zaeth: HD: 1; AC: 5 [14]; Att: Sonic Disruptor (1d6); SV: 18; Special: agility, bionics, sonar; MV: 12; AL: Neutrality; ML: 7; No. Appearing: 1d4; CL/XP: 3/90

I am also collecting emails for an AMA bonus epsiode!! Get in touch with me here!

Used with permission:

From the Free Music Alliance:

From Pixabay:

Miria, Edryk, Kale, The All-Knowing, and the Squid set sail across the Astral plane and discover that it is anything but empty.

This episode uses a mix of planar travel rules found in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Dungeons & Dragons 3.5e, and the D&D3.5e Planar Handbook, as the players travel across the Astral Plane.

It also features a monster from Dungeons & Dragons3.5e: The Elsewhale.

Elsewhale: HD: 16; AC: 6 [13]; Att: bite (4d8); SV: 4; Special: plane shift, adaptation, telepathy; MV: swimming 18, flying 18; AL: Neutrality; ML: 9; No. Appearing: 1d3; CL/XP: 20/2,4,400

Elsewhales are magical cetaceans that can be found on almost any plane. They wander the multiverse endlessly in pursuit of their own ineffable ends, devouring astral krakens and other planar creatures. They can sometimes be bribed to carry small groups in their mouths from plane to plane.

Elsewhales Originally appeared in the Dungeons & Dragons Planar Handbook.

From the Free Music Alliance:

From Pixabay:

A summary of Episodes 21-29.

Swords Against Madness episode 30 is a summary of the plot from episodes 21 through 29. An opportunity to catch up on the plot or just refresh your memory. It adds nothing to the main plot-line.

This episode includes performances by:

From the Free Music Alliance:

From Pixabay:

This is a special bonus episode of Swords Against Madness featuring my new TTRPG, Undeadwood: Weird West RPG. Follow the Lost Soul Carson Swift, as he tries to help a bounty hunter track down a stolen item, only to be dragged into a battle between a powerful land-owner and a dark cult of alien mystics.

This episode is played using my Undeadwood: Weird West TTRPG system, and its dark, American folklore-enriched setting of Wonkatonkwa County.

The game is available on DriveThruRPG.

You can also learn more about it through the game development podcast, Dead Man’s Dice, and on my weblog: Welcome to the Deathtrap.

All music and Sound Effects are courtesy of Pixabay.

Miria, Edryk, and Kale finally reach the place where the All-Knowing believes there is a means to travel to the planes. The object they discover is far stranger than anything they could have imagined.

In this session I reference the amazing role-playing game Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG from Goodman Games. DCC catches the strange psychedelic vibe of the books that inspired D&D – and Swords Against Madness – better than any other game on the market.

It also borrows some rules for planar travel and plane shifting from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition to fill in the gaps in the Swords & Wizardry rule-set.

The Wizard Van is an enchanted 1974 Ford Econoline with air-brushed fantasy art on the sides and comfortable couches in the back. It is fuelled by magic-user spells. Each level of spell cast into its Flux Capacitor provides two hours of fuel. The van can shift to the Astral Plane by using 2 hours of fuel. It can also fly at 55 miles per hour, but has a ceiling of 50ft. and consumes twice as much fuel.

I mentioned the song Wizard Wagon by Glitter Wizard; if you want to check out this awesome (if explicit) song, you can hear it here!

This episode includes performances by:

From the Free Music Alliance:

AI Generated Pieces:

From Pixabay:

The party may have destroyed the Dread Silkworm, a half-giant-caterpillar-half-god monster… but there are still more creatures devouring the juju garden, and a mission to fulfill.

This episode opens with rounds 8-14 of a brutal gruelling battle! The Dread Silkworm may have fallen, but it is far from the only threat that the party was facing!

This is an AI-free episode of Swords Against Madness.

This episode includes performances by:

From the Free Music Alliance:

Used with special permission:

From Pixabay:

Sometimes folks head out West, and just fall off the edge of the world. 

They end up here. Wonkatonkwa County. 

They just show up, confused, frightened, missing a year off their life with no idea where it went. A place full of walking dead, prehistoric monsters, black magic.

t takes a special kind of grit to make your way here. You gotta be crazy, or nearly so just to make sense of what you are seeing. And if you weren’t crazy before, circumstance will be happy to oblige you.

Best thing to do is get yourself a gun, and sober up the preacher so that he can give it a proper blessing, then find yourself something to hold on To. A bible. A bottle. It don’t really matter which… 

After all, You ain’t in Texas anymore.

Undeadwood: Weird West is a dark weird west game that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It embraces some of the stranger, more offbeat elements of American Folklore. Along with the devils, ghosts, cursed treasure, and mad scientists, you can expect to see hodags, jackalopes, and thunderbirds. My goal is to play a game that has all the action and grit of a pulp Western story from Lariat or Triple-X, but fused with the humorously macabre of The Addams Family or Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Played using 2d6. And featuring work from some of the greatest artists to ever grace the pages of pulp western magazines.

Now available on DriveThruRPG

The party attempts to help the Nilkin clear the Ravenous Caterpillars from their sacred garden, only to find the threat is much greater than anyone anticipated.

Mythic Game Master Emulator throws a number of crazy curve-balls at the PCs this session, showing just how wild and unpredictable it can make a game become…

…Especially when you are willing to truly let your imagination run wild with the prompts it creates.

This is the first fully AI free episode of Swords Against Madness.

This episode includes performances by:

This episode includes two home-brewed monsters.

Ravening Caterpillar: HD: 4; AC: 4 [15]; Att: bite (d6) or silk (ranged, entangle); SV: 15; Special: poison spines, regeneration; MV: 3; AL: Neutrality; ML: 7; No. Appearing: 1d4; CL/XP: 8/900

The Dread Silkworm: HD: 6 (27 hp); AC: 4 [15]; Att: bite (d8) or silk (ranged, entangle); SV: 15; Special: poison spines, regeneration, spells; MV: 3; AL: Neutrality; ML: 10; No. Appearing: 1 (unique) CL/XP: 11/2,400

From the Free Music Alliance:

From Pixabay:

The Party joins the mysterious wild halflings, the Nilkin, in their village in hopes that the local shaman might be able to help them find the planar travel device. The Nilkin are not as firendly as they might seem, and have a dangerous task that needs doing.

This episode of Swords Against Madness includes a discussion of the Dungeons & Dragons module Hot Springs Island by Jacob Hurst et al. at Swordfish Islands.

This age-of-sail tropical island hexcrawl has set the standard for me for adventure design and I used many of its monsters and encounters in designing Nar. It consists of two books: A Field Guide to Hot Springs Island and the Dark of Hot Springs Island, although some of the dungeons included are also sold separately as The Lapis Observatory and Toxic Elvish Smut.

Kuji Bird: HD: 3+3; AC 2 [17]; Bite: 1d4; MV: 12; SV: 16; AL: N; ML: 7; CL/XP: 3/60

Wild Halflings: HD: 1d6; AC 6 [13]; Atk: sling (1d3) or short sword (1d6); SV: 19; AL: N; ML: 8; CL/XP: B/10

Plant Zombie: HD: 2; AC 5 [14]; Atk: slam (1d6); SV: 17; AL: N; ML: 11; CL/XP: 1/15

From the Free Music Alliance:

From Pixabay:

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