Rowan, Rook and Decard

Art by Rollin Kunz

Adventure Calendar is a series of 25 winter-themed random tables that mesh together to build an evolving setting and campaign for your favourite fantasy RPG, whatever that might be. You can learn more about the project and find the full list of published tables here.

1: CLENCH HARDWHISTLE, a Big Damn Hero and a level thirteen fighter (he states this aloud in the street to anyone who’ll listen) who’s never met a problem he couldn’t stab to death. Clench is unaccompanied but has a magical talking sword that acts as a sidekick – the sword hates him, but can’t leave and wouldn’t ever dare speak out against him when he could hear in case he uses the Punishment Scabbard again. Likely cause of death: frozen solid attempting to stab a blizzard.

2: VENERANCE SKALL, who’s technically an evil necromancer but it’s the end of the world so the overall standard for heroes has been significantly lowered. Venerance is leading an army of skeletal thralls that are immune to the freezing cold – she started with her family burial plot and travelled north, following visions delivered to her in dreams of torment, picking up or creating large amounts of corpses en route – and, bundled up in magically-warmed fox-furs on a sled pulled by six undead wolves, she intends to strike at the heart of the eternal winter in the north and kill it. What she does after that isn’t super-clear, but people aren’t asking too many questions so long as there’s a person in charge of the north, rather than the First and Final God. Likely cause of death: stabbed by eight skeletons during a labour dispute, causing her entire army to collapse at once.

3: BRILLIA GOLDTOWER, a shiny paladin with good teeth and better hair, acting as a representative from The Great Harvest Temple in lands far to the south. Driven by visions from her god, she has gathered together a people’s crusade made up of malnourished but terribly faithful farmers armed with improvised weapons, glory-hungry noble scions eager to earn a place in heaven, and a dubious selection of adventurers who believe that if the First and Final God is this powerful then it’s probably got something worth stealing. Brillia is a good egg and has a kind word for almost anyone, and really makes you think that this Harvest Temple lark might be worth looking into. Likely cause of death: drowned after heavy armour caused ice covering frozen lake to crack.

4: FRANZISKA, an ingenious red-headed burglar with a heart of gold, leading a gang of legendary thieves to steal the Winter’s Heart from the peak of Svartfjell. (Her compatriots are: Dwarven mountebank Brigham Goldtooth, half-ogre spellthief Krug Etherbreath, master lock-picking gnome Honks McCavity and the reformed abyssal cultist Erebus Wardshadow.) Likely cause of death: temple collapse.

5: HAUNCH MERRYWEATHER, chosen of the Summer Court, a permanently shirtless and perpetually well-lit man with a big hearty belly, bulging muscles, and chest hair you could bed down in for the night. Haunch has never been cold in his life, even in the midst of a driving blizzard, and to be honest he can’t even imagine what it would feel like. (He’s not tremendously bright.) He’s heading up a collection of kissable sprites and elegantly-dressed feybloods on a last-ditch mission/sexy cross-country party to seal the arctic rift shut before the First and Final God overwhelms the world. Likely cause of death: betrayal by Autumn Court double-agent.

6: THE BEAST, technically a collection of about fourteen druids who have soul-bound themselves to each other allowing them to transform into a huge and protean monster easily capable of eating an elder kenning-wolf whole or giving an angry frost giant a good run for its money. Outside of beast form, the druids are rapidly coming apart as the soul-binding process has given them unwanted access to each other’s memories and thoughts leading to no end of arguments. They don’t have a leader – but the one of them that does most of the talking to outsiders, Derenthal, is looking for a way out of the group or some way of silencing the thoughts of the other members in his head. Likely cause of death: massive cardiac arrest as giant heart attempts to beat in fourteen different patterns and gives up.

Previous: D6 Cults Who are Attempting to Curry Favour with the First and Final God
Next: D20 Signs of the Apocalypse

Art by Beck Michalak

Adventure Calendar is a series of 25 winter-themed random tables that mesh together to build an evolving setting and campaign for your favourite fantasy RPG, whatever that might be. You can learn more about the project and find the full list of published tables here.

As the world becomes a frozen wasteland, the people of the north are searching for meaning and security in unusual places. For years now, as the echoes of the First and Final God’s awakening reverberated backwards through time, cults in service of it have blossomed into being as human minds attempt to rationalise what’s about to happen to them – although none of them have got the name right. While each of these cults is devoted to a facet of the First and Final God, they certainly don’t know that (and if they do they don’t care), and will happily go to war with one another in an effort to please their deity.

1: WRETCHES. Followers of Pondiferous Wretch, prophet of the end times, who froze to death thirty years ago but hasn’t let that stop him leading an effective cult. Pondiferous is kept in a windswept temple on the northern slopes of Svartfjell where he never defrosts, and from his frostbitten and withered lips come vile orders from the cult’s patron diety – The Bastard Winter. 

A monstrously cruel god, The Bastard Winter doesn’t go in for the ineffable you-are-as-ants-to-me shtick that a lot of immortals wind up in – he hates the living, hates sunlight, and hates when anyone’s doing better than him. He is the god of grandparents frozen to death, of rotting harvests, of gangrene and necrosis. The Wretch cult are hell-bent on taking everything they can get from people too weak, kind or stupid to stop them in an effort to outlast the apocalypse on the right hand of their misanthropic lord.

2: SLAYERS OF THE PINNED GOD. The Pinned God – they never got a name – was a primordial storm of frost, a walking wasteland, an end-of-the-world waiting to happen. They were speared in the chest by one of those handsome gods with good hair and a sensible number of limbs and, while they couldn’t be killed per se, they were pinned to the earth and damned to spend the rest of eternity caught between life and death. When they breathe in a ragged and sucking lungful of air, the world experiences summer – when they breathe out, a fraction of their power spreads through the land, and the land freezes over. The Slayers reckon that the god who threw the spear did half a job, and that – with the correct rituals and maybe tricking a few other immortals to help out – they can rid the world of winter and bring in a perpetual summer, ending hunger forever.

They’ve just now pulled out the spear – it’s within the centre of the mountain Svartfjell and also the mountain itself, which is hard to wrap your head around but they’re doing their best – and realised how much trouble they’re in. The Slayers are a group of well-meaning academics and militant gnostics whose careful calculations and algorithmic ur-calendars have done nothing to prepare them for an unfettered eternal winter.

3. THE MIDWIVES. Blood-soaked aunts and grandmothers who have buried more than their fair share of stillborn babies, the Midwives are a sect of zealots devoted to ending this world and replacing it with a better one. As hopeful and glorious spring comes from the depths of hideous winter, they reason, a truly glorious spring must await the survivors on the other side of the worst winter the world has ever seen – and so they rolled up their sleeves and set about making it happen. First, they must descend into the great stone womb beneath the temples of Dovescopp to the west, then deliver the avatar of the great winter and overcome the labour throes of the earth herself, and only then begin the task of raising it to adulthood before ritually slaying it in the depths of winter.

All that happened roughly seventeen years ago. The avatar of the great winter is an unremarkable girl who guts fish in some smokey Bostivol back-room and can’t seem to keep her hands warm, no matter how long she sits by the fire, and with luck the Midwives will be able to drown her in a lake on her eighteenth birthday – as long as no-one else determines her true nature and tries to exploit her latent power for themselves, or she learns of what’s happening and tries to change things. 

4. ONIEROMANCERS. “The Dreaming Deep! The God Beneath the Earth, whose dreams are the flickering auroras in the sky that bring blessed madness to men! Whose body is stone and whose tongue is lashing meltwater! Whose mouth is a thousand caves! Whose voice is wolf-song and scything wind! God of star-sight and obsidian visions, who slumbers fitful awaiting the coming dawn!”  

The Onieromancers are a cult of soothsayers, wizards and warlocks who believe that they have seen behind the curtain of divinity and fate and witnessed the terrible truth – that the Dreaming Deep, the God Beneath The Earth, is behind it all. All other gods are but facets of its majesty or fractured interpretations of the truth by mortal minds unable to comprehend the enormity of the cosmos. The most eldest members of the society operate in a chemically-induced trance that allows them to slip into the living dreams of the God and “ride” them to gain impossible foresight and arcane power at the cost of being asleep all of the time and coming wholly unattached from reality. They believe their god’s awakening is an inevitability and they hope to hide within its consciousness to escape the coming apocalypse.

5. SEERS OF THE TWELVE. The mountain is going to give birth to twelve terrible horses and they will trample us all to death. Storm, whose mane is lightning, will run to the north; Darkness, upon who light does not shine, runs to the east; Terror whose eyes are pitiless stars, runs to the west; Tumult, the thousand-legged, runs to the south; Murder the bloody-hoofed, Treachery the white-barded, Starfall the sky-spanning and Frost the glacial-paced cover the four intercardinal directions; the identities and directions of the remaining four are subject to much discussion amongst elders.

The seers are part of an ancient tradition that originated in the nomadic tribes of the Bone Steppes; on a clear day you can see all the way to Svartfjell even from the southern coast. The horses are representations of natural (or unnatural) phenomena but also, crucially, actual horses that an enterprising eschatologist could ride, assuming they don’t immediately die upon contact. As the end of time draws forth, many of the tribes in the steppes have selected a champion to ride one of the horses and are offering sacrifices in an attempt to secure a seat on the back of the apocalypse.  

6. THE TRANQUIL. Life is chaotic and strange and dangerous; far better is still and stable death, a gradual and predictable decline into nothingness and peace. The Tranquil are a cult that attracts broken, melancholic individuals who feel like life passed them by; husbands jilted at altars, mothers of dead children, or those unable to pursue their passions due to injury, circumstance or lack of talent are common recruits, but there are no end of tragedies both great and small that have driven desperate people to find solace in religion.

The Tranquil preach that death is the natural state of the universe (far more of it is dead than not, after all) and life, as frantic and surprising as it is, is an abomination that we have been cursed with in exchange for some ancient sin. There is peace in understanding that you, and the world of those around you, are wrong – that it’s not you, it’s everyone, and you’re the only one smart enough to have figured it out. In addition to standing motionless in the cold to bring themselves closer to understanding the perfection of death, the Tranquil espouse many small acts of faith rather than singular gestures – poisoning harvests, setting fires, strangling cats, stealing heirlooms, and sabotaging machinery. To be alive is to hope, and to allow others to hope in the face of their inevitable demise is a sin.

Previous: D8 Ancient Magic Items, Sensing Chaos and Unrest, That Rise to Prominence
Next: D6 Heroes who are Probably Not Going to Avert the Apocalypse but Might be Useful Distractions

Illustration by Annabelle Lee

Adventure Calendar is a series of 25 winter-themed random tables that mesh together to build an evolving setting and campaign for your favourite fantasy RPG, whatever that might be. You can learn more about the project and find the full list of published tables here.

1. STONEKILLER. A great double-handed dwarven hammer covered in fine hexagonal decoration and words of unmaking. Stonekiller absolutely loathes buildings – the fact that it was probably made in a building fills it with an existential disgust that can only be drowned out by destroying a few buildings, or at the very least knocking over a watchtower. Like most dwarven weapons, Stonekiller is fuelled by the transferred wrath and malaise of the crafter (who runs a nice craft workshop for dwarven kids four days a week down by the coast thousands of miles from here) and as such it is furious whenever awoken, so most users keep the business end under a blanket to avoid having to calm it down. Stonekiller is convinced that the First and Final God built Svartfjell and, as such, wants to knock it down. It won’t be able to – it’s a mountain! – but it might be worth bringing it along for the ride. [+4 greathammer. Ignore hardness and/or DR of buildings and inflict double damage against them.]

2. ASHES. Ashes hasn’t met a flaming sword it didn’t kill and eat. Ashes is a flaming sword itself – a classic magic item for a reason – and it is singularly devoted to being the only flaming sword in existence. At a pinch, it’ll make do with eating regular fires, but what it really wants is to get up amongst the echelons of the gods and see what kind of flaming swords they have on offer. [+3 flaming sword. If Ashes is held against another weapon with a fire enchantment, it will consume that weapon’s enchantment and boost its own bonus by half of that conferred by the other weapon until the next new moon.]

3. THE MURDER STONE. Everyone’s heard the story of the first murder – two brothers, one of whom was kind of a dick, you get the gist. This stone was the evil brother’s weapon of choice. It is forever stained with dried blood, it feels heavier than it ought to in the hand, and all it wants to do all day is kill. [+2 D4 hand weapon. Every time you roll an attack against someone you’re trying to kill with this weapon and don’t land a critical hit, its crit range improves by 1 and its crit damage increases by one step (triple, quadruple, five times, etc). Once you crit, the bonuses reset and the red mist clears from your vision.]

4. DEATH’S MESSENGER. This bow is ridiculous. Stolen from Death Herself (which is why she uses the scythe now), it was designed by a forge god who had a dramatic and entirely unrequited crush on her and as such is hugely over-embellished and awkward to use. The bearer is perpetually surrounded by ravens; clouds dramatically swirl over their head when it’s drawn; nocking and drawing back an arrow causes all sound to cease around the shooter; it’s covered in ruby-eyed skulls and platinum bones; etc. [Critical hits with this weapon kill the target. Critical misses with this weapon kill the user.]

5. DOOM COMPASS. This simple iron compass, lightly patterned with rust, uses the sharpened fingerbone of a doom elf instead of a magnet – and instead of north, it points towards the nearest available source of doom. [In the Adventure Calendar campaign, it will tend to point towards the location of the First and Final God.]

6. WINTER’S EDGE. Winter’s Edge is a beautiful knife created by elven artisans from some fallen and forgotten kingdom that once ruled these lands. (It’s certainly older than anything you’ve seen before.) In addition to being a well-made magical weapon, it is legally married to the First and Final God and is very excited to reunite with its spouse after what feels like, and has indeed been, millennia. Winter’s Edge is actively recruiting people to bring it closer to the First and Final God so they might once again be together. [3+ dagger.]

7. SOULTAKER. Soultaker is an ostentatiously evil-looking punch dagger that feels heavier than it should and is always unsettlingly warm to the touch. Those slain by Soultaker enter the service of their killer as undead thralls – for a while, at least, until they go off – and after that their souls are taken. The weapon has its own bespoke universe where it lives surrounded by the enslaved spirits of the thousands of people killed by the weapon, waited on hand and foot. (Or: waited on pommel and blade, at least.) [+4 Punch dagger. Creatures slain by this weapon become a dim-witted zombie under the control of the wielder for D6+(their level) hours, at which point they decompose at an accelerated rate and must be abandoned.]

8. GLORY’S CHAMPION. This mighty greatsword shines like the rising dawn and sparkles with all the splendour of heaven; the parchments attached speak of sacred missions to slay wicked sorcerers and promise that the angels themselves have your back. With this at your side, nothing can stop you. [+0 Greatsword that’s desperate to take part in averting the apocalypse so it’s lying about how good it is. If it comes up, it functions as a +4 greatsword that also adds +4 to the AC of anything you hit with it, but don’t tell the player about the second part]

Previous: D8 Colours of Northern Lights that Spark Madness
Next: D6 Cults Who are Attempting to Curry Favour with the First and Final God

Art by Kanesha Bryant

Adventure Calendar is a series of 25 winter-themed random tables that mesh together to build an evolving setting and campaign for your favourite fantasy RPG, whatever that might be. You can learn more about the project and find the full list of published tables here.

As the world freezes solid and reality cracks like ice on a pond, the sky above the battered earth fractures into new and terrifying patterns. Auroras dance and flicker across the heavens – the dreams of dying gods spilling out in multichromatic sprays that burrow into the weak minds of mortals and skew them into patterns unthought of.

1: RED. The bringer of fury – a crimson stain on the snow leaving spilt blood as black as the unadorned vastness of the night sky. Brother turns on brother; father on son; beasts of the field gnash and tear at one another, hungry for meat. [Average Will save for each hour of exposure; on a fail you double your rolled melee damage until the aurora passes, but for each hour you don’t spill someone or something’s blood, take D8 psychic damage.]

2: BLUE. The bringer of despair – a sadness as vast and heavy as winter’s snowfall, creeping under curtains, settling on the roof with an audible creak. The afflicted lose all sense of purpose and lay down in the snow to die, or collapse on the floor of their house until the sun rises once more (or the colour of the aurora changes). [Average Will save when you first see the blue light; on a fail, drop to the floor where you’re standing until the aurora passes or someone drags you out of the light.]

3: WHITE. The bringer of greed – a hunger that ransacks heavens and murders mothers. Those struck by this light become frantic and desperate with greed, and have no qualms about carrying out atrocities in the name of securing more wealth. [Easy Will save at the start of the night, increasing to an Average by midnight and Hard by the early morning. On a fail, you are possessed with a frantic lust for wealth, and must secure D100GP worth of supplies before the morning or the aurora changes. When the effect wears off, lose 1 HP for each GP unclaimed.]

4: PRISMATIC. The bringer of waking dreams – a puppeteer plucking at the strings of the world by accident or design. Towns have been overtaken with dozens of sleepwalkers, their eyes unfocused and mouths slack, working in tandem to achieve nonsensical tasks – slaughtering every pig in the village and draining the blood into a pool in the market square, building mazes out of dirt mounds and discarded planks of wood, writing epic poetry in esoteric languages on the walls of buildings, and so on. [Easy Will save or spend the night engaged in a strange task set by an unseen hand. Sharp pain allows the target to make another save attempt.]

5: GREEN. The bringer of fire – strange flames that spark into life when bonfires or torches are struck by the light from the heavens. Quickly spreading out of control and burning an eerily beautiful emerald green, they consume buildings and forests in raging conflagrations but leave snow untouched. [20% chance an open flame will spread out of control when exposed to the aurora. Snow won’t extinguish it – you need water, or sand, or some other solution.]

6: YELLOW. The bringer of tumult – a ringing, reverberating metallic noise that echoes throughout the valleys of the world. The light from the heavens is loud – people caught in the open when it comes into effect are deafened, and even those safe inside can’t sleep or focus on much. [Recovery rates halved due to the maddening ring. Hard Toughness save if you’re caught in the light; on a fail, you’re deafened for a day or two.]

7: BRONZE. The bringer of time – chronological aberrations spill out from the dreams of dying gods and mar the landscape beneath them. Trees sprout overnight, houses crumble and rot, skin wrinkles and bones grow fragile, minds strain and break. Sometimes the land reverts to normal once the aurora has passed, sometimes not. [Everything within the light ages a year for every ten minutes of exposure; Hard Will save to reduce it to a year per hour instead.]

8: TURQUOISE. The bringer of water – strange, shimmering waves descending from the heavens to the ground. The light acts as though it was clear, traversable liquid, meaning that unattended items have a chance of floating off and anyone or anything caught in the light will, eventually, drown.

Previous: D8 Concerned Villagers

Art by R Michalak

Adventure Calendar is a series of 25 winter-themed random tables that mesh together to build an evolving setting and campaign for your favourite fantasy RPG, whatever that might be. You can learn more about the project and find the full list of published tables here.

As the weather grows increasingly bleak – even as far as winters up in the far north go – and monster attacks increase, and the Doomsayers preach apocalyptica in the streets, the people start to take action.

1: THE BLACKSMITH, who’s never made a sword in his life and much preferred doing horseshoes and the occasional copper sculpture, has started churning out as many weapons as he can to fight off the coming dark. He says that there’s a vein of particularly resonant ore in the foothills near Dovescopp, but his son went missing a few days ago after he left to look for it. If you can make sure he’s okay, there’s a magic weapon in it for you. [They’re not brilliant magic weapons; they function as +1 flaming weapons, but each of them has D20 charges when made. Expend a charge every time you hit with an attack.]

2. OLD MR FELL, who was never especially in touch with reality since his wife left him, has given away all his worldly possessions (there’s a perfectly good armoire in there that no-one seems to be claiming, if you’re interested) and walks out into the snow to die “amongst the voices.” If you keep an eye on him he’s sure to lead you to something interesting (and you might be able to talk him out of dying too).

3. YOUR COUSIN MELAS was always rather quiet and bookish so it came as a surprise when you heard she was sneaking out at night to sacrifice stolen farm animals to dark gods. Her dad caught her and stopped her, but now the attacks on the town from strange beasts have increased, and she says that it’s because she can’t do her sacrifices. Are you going to help her, or try to keep the monsters at bay some other way?

4. THE WIZARD, who you always thought was a bit aloof and never quite fit in with everyone else around these parts, decided to get the hell out of town and magicked her entire tower (with her in it) to an adjacent alternate reality. Unfortunately, due to the rules of As Above So Below, a wizard from the reality they fled to (and their tower) has taken their place, and they’re understandably furious about the whole thing. They have some cool books from an alternate reality – and green hair, which is fancy! – but no way to get back home without the help of some brave adventurers willing to steal stuff from wizards in neighbouring towns. They offer to bring you along for the ride, if you’re willing to lend a hand.

5. THE OTHER WIZARD, who you always suspected was kind of a shyster and didn’t actually know any magic, is offering teleportation spells away from here. A few of the richer families have taken him up on it; upon investigation, you’ll discover that he’s just fed everyone poison, took their stuff, and then fed the bodies to his three identical pig familiars to get rid of them. If he was sacrificing them to some dark god that might be exciting and perhaps worthy of respect, but it looks like he was just robbing them.

6. THE BARON, who has boarded himself up in his chateau and surrounded himself with guards whilst hoarding supplies. People are going hungry and the town is defenceless against a spate of wild animal and monster attacks – maybe someone could persuade him to share with everyone else. There’s bound to be a way to get in that he’s missed. Or maybe you could just threaten to burn it down.

7. SISTER BELLIGERENCE, who loves celebrations and getting everyone in the village together during the festive season, and is attempting to keep the Winter Festival going despite the terrible weather and general lack of enthusiasm from the townsfolk. She has a few other hangers-on who are stringing up bunting, handing out little cakes (they’re not very good) and trying to get volunteers who are willing to help decorate the tree. It’s pretty sad, but if you help out and put the effort in, a party might give the town a much-needed boost.

8. VESTERAS, a brilliant but difficult scholar who was sent up here by their university to study ptarmigan migration patterns, has packed in the ornithology and is instead trying to work out what’s in store for the north by recording, cross-referencing and analysing everything that the Doomsayers are yelling in the town square. It’s not an exact science, but they have some theories – the primary one being that the drugged-up prophets are plugging into potential futures, and that the clearer and more common a particular topic is, the more likely it is to happen. [Vesteras has access to several of the tables from this collection, each missing a couple of entries, and written in an academic and speculative tone.]

Previous: D6 Things You See On The Outskirts Of The Village
Next: D8 Concerned Villagers

Illustration by Rowan MacColl

Adventure Calendar is a series of 25 winter-themed random tables that mesh together to build an evolving setting and campaign for your favourite fantasy RPG, whatever that might be. You can learn more about the project and find the full list of published tables here.

1: SICKLY MIMIC. The north used to be full of dungeons back during the Second Lich Period – no end of undead magicians made their homes here and used their mouldering armies to conquer nearby towns and villages, repair damaged buildings, and improve regional transport infrastructure. Adventurers arrived in force, which triggered the end of the Second Lich Period as they killed all of the Liches, but their dungeons (and weird genetic inventions) remain to this day. 

This one is a mimic that looks to have been malnourished as an infant and not properly trained in transformation by a parental figure, so while it’s doing its level best to look like a chest full of gold and jewels it isn’t really pulling it off. Other things it attempts to look like are: a nice warm fire (the flames look like painted tinfoil), a rescuable princess (face is on sideways, wrong number of legs) and a Sunday lunch (roast chicken the size and shape of a large dog, all cutlery is spoons).

2: JUDAS HUMAN. Wolves tend not to hunt people, but times are tight. Kenning-Wolves sneak into the houses of desperate inhabitants and coerce them into helping with their scheme – gain the attention of someone tasty-looking, lead them into a copse of trees just outside of the village, and watch as they’re torn apart by the pack. It’s a fair deal – the wolves give their pet person meat from their non-humanoid kills, which is becoming increasingly hard to come by. Plus, the wolves are good at sniffing out someone who carries a lot of grudges and wouldn’t mind having a pack of wolves on hand to tear apart those who have wronged them in the past.

3: ICE GHOST. If you die from the cold, you come back as an ice ghost. Unlike most ghosts who often have complex and multilayered requirements to put them to rest, ice ghosts have a pretty straightforward motivation – to get warm. Fire no longer works for them, and their ethereal bodies don’t produce heat on their own so no matter how much they bundle up they’ll never get warm – instead, they have to leech warmth from the bodies of people and animals foolish or curious enough to come near. Depending on how long a ghost suffered before it died, it’s actually relatively straightforward for them to move on to the next plane of existence; there’s a folk song about a woman who brings Bad Men to his dead lover’s ice ghost so he can rest. There are five verses, and three victims total, so helping them isn’t entirely out of the question as long as the song’s accurate.

4: DIFFICULT WINTER SPIRIT. There are legends about this sort of thing all over the province – a beautiful, pale-skinned, feminine ice-spirit meets a wanderer in the countryside, they have an exchange of some kind, and the wanderer ends up dead. Sometimes you have to tell them you’re pretty or they stab you; sometimes you have to look at but not speak to them or they shove you down a ravine; sometimes they give you a baby that attracts snow so quickly it buries you; sometimes you have to give them hot water if they ask for water because if you give them cold water you die. It would appear that these different stories point to either lots of different ice spirits with different rules, but in fact there’s only one of it and it just likes being difficult to give it an excuse to kill people.

5. TREE MOTHER. It’s considered traditional to descend into the dark forests and catch wily and recalcitrant trees for display during the Festive season. This tree – this especially large, ancient and gnarled tree – is out for revenge. Someone in town has taken her favoured child and she means to steal it back and kill anyone responsible for taking it. She doesn’t move, per se – it’s more that she appears exactly where she needs to be, when unobserved. Occasionally she’ll attack by manifesting a dark-wooded branch directly through someone’s chest. The snowstorm that picks up as you approach her stings the eyes, so she has a chance to relocate when you blink. [Hard Fortitude save to keep your eyes open in a snowstorm; on a success, she can’t move for a minute or so.]

6. A FRIENDLY SNOWMAN. What fun! Some local children look to have built a jolly snowman on the edge of town. It’s got everything you’d expect from a snowman – a strong three-segment body, a battered but respectable hat, and a big pointy nose which you presume is a carrot. In fact, the buttons on its chest look like they’re made out of gold coins! However, when you get close enough to steal them, the horrible ruse is revealed – in fact, local goblin scallywags have built it, and they’re hiding in trees and under snowdrifts around it ready to leap out and mug you for whatever you’ve got in your pockets. There’s one hiding in the head, too, which explains the nose.

Previous: D6 Travellers from Abroad Who Probably Want to Hire You, An Adventurer
Next: D8 Concerned Villagers

Art by Annabelle Lee

Adventure Calendar is a series of 25 winter-themed random tables that mesh together to build an evolving setting and campaign for your favourite fantasy RPG, whatever that might be. You can learn more about the project and find the full list of published tables here.

1: Prince Otto Castellan, fourth son of a family who have long fought against the darkness and played central roles in over a dozen prophecies in the last couple of centuries. Wessex Castellan slew the Night Hag that plagued the benighted city of Yarim with nightmares; the young Spuria Castellan returned the Astral Chalice to its rightful resting place in Ebon Vault; and the indominatable matriarch Quaria Castellan personally destroyed a vampiric invasion that threatened her estate with nothing but a handful of injured knights and a single cannon. 

Otto has been shipped off to the north in order to keep an eye out for any evil and slay it should the chance arise – although really the Castellans just wanted him out of the way somewhere his romantic dalliances and mild alcoholism wouldn’t cause too much trouble in society. He has noticed the coming of this particularly dire winter and is really not looking forward to leaving the fireside and killing whatever’s causing it.

2: Three Wise Men who have traveled here from the far south upon the backs of strange many-legged creatures in search of a messiah. Last two kingdoms they had a shot at came up empty and they don’t want to go back home empty-handed, so they’re asking around to see if anyone’s got any spare spiritual leaders being born just in case. Balkarian, the eldest and by far the smartest of the three, looks like he’s desperate to go home and would probably be open to taking part in some sort of ruse to convince the other two to do so.

3: Kane, just Kane, wears a big hat and coat, likes to hang out in dark corners of bars nursing a single pint and mutters grimly if anyone attempts to drum up a conversation. Kane is a hunter of Doom Elves and he’s heard tell that there are a few round these parts, so he brought his crossbow and silvered blade and got to huntin’. Despite being a terrible misanthrope and enthusiastically willing to throw other people in the way of danger, Kane is an expert on doom, so he could probably teach you a thing or two.

4: Sintil, a scholarly-looking druid (they pair a tweed jacket with the typical thatched-roof druid haircut) who has long been touring magical colleges espousing restraint on the use of sorcery due to the increasing likelihood of widescale environmental backlash. After being forced out of their lodgings down south by proactive venture-capitalist wizards, they’ve steered their crusade north and are handing out literature on the various different magical apocalypses that await the mortal inhabitants of the material plane should they carry on recklessly firing arcana into the atmosphere.

5: Bryn Broadham, adventurer-at-large, more moustache than you’d know what to do with, wearing a now-tattered wedding suit under his cold weather gear and armour. His impossibly beautiful husband-to-be Horatio was abducted at the altar by a jealous winter fey, and the heartbroken Bryn is looking to find ice dragons that he can train to pull his special Ethersled that – he reckons – will allow him access to whatever backwater dimension his beloved is frozen solid in. Best of luck to him.

6: Quinn Hyssop, half-elf astrologer, interested in taking readings of the stars at the foot of Svartfjell. Quinn believes (correctly) that the stars here are “going backwards,” in as much as stars that were thought lost centuries ago are now visible in the night sky. He’ll pay handsomely for anyone who’s willing to accompany him (and help carry his bulky, heavy equipment) to the mountain and keep watch while he stares up into the uncanny heavens

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Art by Rollin Kunz

Adventure Calendar is a series of 25 winter-themed random tables that mesh together to build an evolving setting and campaign for your favourite fantasy RPG, whatever that might be. You can learn more about the project and find the full list of published tables here.

Doomsaying is an ancient and often disrespected art in the northern territories where down-on-their-luck sages ingest dangerous amounts of hallucinogenic drugs blessed by a priest from one of a variety of religions and attempt to attune their minds to a higher state of consciousness, peering into the machinations of the cosmos and unveiling the secrets of the universe. It doesn’t often work for a number of obvious reasons, but of late the number of doomsayers has increased (it’s a buyer’s market at present when it comes to prophecies) and many of them are saying broadly similar things.

If questioned, Doomsayers won’t know much about what they’re saying (although they’ll attempt to pass themselves off as clued-in with some apocalyptic ad-lib) – they’re more of a receiver than a scholar, picking up messages from the heavens and relaying them as best they can through their inferior, whacked-out mortal mouths. 

1: “THE DREAMING DEEP! The wretched fire beneath the earth, trapped and struggling like a stuck pig! The maddening pulse! The dawn unending!”

2: “The mountain is going to give birth to twelve terrible horses and they will trample us all to death.”

3: “Have you heard the whispers of the muttering godsworn dwarves? Have you listened beneath your floorboards in the dead of night as they shuffle and scheme beneath our feet? Can you hear the click-clack of their metal teeth, plotting our doom? They will come!”

4: “They pulled out the pin! They damned us all! They spilled this eternal winter from a gaping heart-wound!”

5: “The great wolf has tasted the blood of the gods and knows their words – she alone can spin solace from endings!”

6: “Old Mother Absolution’s blood is ready! The dying soil begs lifeless and cold for her nourishment! Slit her, slay her, flense her, bleed her dry!”

7: “Take off your shoes! Your feet are the roots of the soul and you are spitting in the faces of the gods by sheathing them. Let your feet unadorned and glorious scratch and chafe upon this perfect world; let your blood mingle with the earth’s!”

8: “I alone have seen the truth! I alone have been touched by the finger of destiny! I have clenched the skeins of fate in my hands and I alone control the future! Come into my house! Everyone! Inside! Before it’s too late! Take off your clothes and get into my back room!”

9: “The azure crest across the ink-black sky! Heavy and insidious despair, hollowing and all-consuming, a blight on the mind! Close your eyes – hide away from it – look not upon the sky when it comes!”

10: “The First and Final God awakens from eons of wretched dreaming slumber! It brings a great and terrible winter upon the world – a winter that will last forever more!”

11: “The Brimstone Church welcomes all! Only there can you be cleansed of the sin that perverts the world! Eat deep of our fiery blessings and be purified with fragrant light! Kids under five eat free, please take this menu – uh, I mean, scripture.”

12: “The Spiteful Ones hold the key! Watch for their signs – lettering on window panes, flickers in mirrors, a whisper as you sleep! These vicious abortlings will be the architects of our salvation!”

Previous: D8 Slumbering Creatures That Have Awoken With The Coming of This Dreadful Winter

Illustration by Kanesha Bryant

Adventure Calendar is a series of 25 winter-themed random tables that mesh together to build an evolving setting and campaign for your favourite fantasy RPG, whatever that might be. You can learn more about the project and find the full list of published tables here.

1: DOOM ELVES. Doom Elves are a naturally-occurring phenomenon that appear when something absolutely terrible is about to happen; they emerge from somewhere, newborn and fully-grown, and observe it happening. They are scholars of misfortune and tragedy. They write down events in great books bound with leather and slate in a tiny font produced by puncturing their ink glands with their nib-sharp fingernails and scratching it out on the page. Doom Elf libraries – accessed by opening any suitably grand door with the key hanging around the neck of every Doom Elf – have a wealth of information on a wide variety of apocalypses. But they seem unwilling to give up the key, and that ink also functions as a powerful neurotoxin. [Medium Fortitude save or take 2D6 damage on a successful attack.]

2: GODLING SWARMS. Gods come from the old places – the deep forests, the caves, the crevices where light is scared to shine and time slows until it’s molasses-thick. When people visit these places (and they really oughtn’t if they know what’s good for them) sometimes godlings – tiny parasitic aether-entities, barely real in any given universe, let alone this one – latch on to them like leeches, give them funny ideas about the meaning of life and how we should treat one another, and before you know it you’ve got a full-blown religion on your hands. 

But: something’s driven them out of those ancient places, and now they’ve gathered together for mutual protection and are stumbling through the foothills and woods in vague humanoid shapes. Unobserved, they’re invisible – observed, they flicker into the appearance of whatever they reckon will be most impressive to the viewer. They’re not very good at it, and some nights the outskirts of Bostivol and Dovescopp are lousy with animal-headed wretches stuttering from one avatar to the next in a frantic attempt to find a believer or two. [Easy Will save (medium up close, hard if you’re in arms’ reach) or become infected with the seed of a new religion.]

3: FIRE TROLLS. Waiting – writhing – cursing one another, and the thoughtless god that made them – in the depths of the earth, near the molten core, in a world of smoke and darkness, huffing on sulphur to survive. These slug-like creatures have blood of molten stone and, like cicadas, bury themselves beneath the earth and surface only occasionally to mate. Unlike cicadas, they’re each the size of a horse, and they’re so hot you can’t come within a few yards of them without catching fire – and they’re fully conscious and furious for the duration of their imprisonment under the earth. 

Once it gets cold enough on the surface, they’ll climb up through winding tunnels, find one another, mate, and then die after disgorging their horrid larvae back down the way they came. This sets everything around them on fire and leaves them as statue-corpses wracked in coital tension – neither of which do much for property prices in the region. This year – the first time in centuries, you believe – it’s cold enough for them to clamber up to the surface world.

4: YETIS. Yetis celebrate the Festive Season too, and they normally keep to themselves and make do with gutting musk oxen and standing on mountaintops instead of coming into areas inhabited by non-yetis. But this year their celebrations seem to be falling earlier than usual (it’s based on ambient temperature rather than date, yetis round these parts don’t belong to a calendar-focused culture) and the animals they’d hunt to give away to one another are nowhere to be seen having fled south earlier in the season. Confused and desperate for gifts, yetis are raiding farmsteads for anything that could be classed as a present – cows, pigs, wagons, things that are on fire, chimney stacks, a shed, etc. 

5: GIANT MAMMOTHS. Really giant mammoths, too. They’ve got backs broad enough to build a small village on, tusks that could overturn a farm in a matter of seconds, and when they walk the ground shakes. The druid visiting town believes that they evolved to survive and prosper in an incredibly cold environment, but – until now – the only place cold enough for them to live was around the peak of Svartfjell. With the advent of this particularly grim winter, they’ve been able to come down the mountain and eat all sorts of interesting new things like trees, houses, and the occasional person. They’re far too big to fight; you might as well try to stab a house to death.

6: ICE ELEMENTALS. The Ice Elementals of the Northern Kingdoms, and of Svertfjell in particular, are a proud and noble folk with complex, multi-layered etiquette and ritual practices taught to one another in their reverberating, haunting voices. Their jewelry is especially beautiful – made from captured weather patterns bundled into everfrost, each year’s winter is its own unique vintage and refracts light in a particular way. They are keen to establish an embassy down in the lowlands to encourage trade with the people there, and offer their mastery of frost and ancient creaking-ice poetry in exchange for establishing transit routes and – maybe? – marrying off a princess or two to cement the allegiance. 

Unfortunately, the tallest known Ice Elemental to date is 9 inches tall, as a result, and no-one takes them seriously. 

7: CRYSTALLINE ROCS. Great fractal birds made of hollow crystal bones and thousands of razor-sharp glass feathers that swoop almost invisible through the sky. Crystalline rocs are rarer than most beasts round these parts and prefer to sit in quiet contemplation of a thousand thousand sunsets atop mountain peaks, so if they’re moving south, you know that something’s up. The first sign that a roc is above you is the low drone of the wind rushing over their bodies and reverberating through their bodies; the second is a loose feather tumbling from the sky, scything clean through anything foolish or immobile enough to be underneath it, and smashing to pieces once it hits the ground.

8: WITCH SUMMER HOUSES. And: outhouses, observatories, etc. There was a fashion a while ago for witches to put great big legs on the bottom of their houses so they could stomp around to be wherever they needed to be. Even seasonal places of residence or specialised buildings were retrofitted with unnecessary legs – often bird-themed, but sometimes they looked like stag limbs, octopus tentacles, spider legs, and so on. Now, with the coming of the coldest winter in living memory, dozens of these mountain residences are blindly fleeing the blizzards of their own accord. Their legs don’t quite work properly due to poor maintenance and the cold, so they’re unstable on their many feet, and it seems like some of them are trying to steal parts of other houses for repairs, or food, or maybe just out of spite. 

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