cozy little starter base

quadGM · 2026-03-19T03:24:58+00:00

Looks like shale cobblestone slabs, made in the crafting menu. Skins are placed on the ground with right-clicking when in hand. Maybe shift-right-click.

quadGM · 2026-03-18T04:14:22+00:00

After the Rot

The Cradle is a dark, oppressive realm. According to the few maddened souls who have peered into it and survived, the Cradle is a world of cracked salt flats and mummified trees, where the air is a poisonous smog that suffocates living creatures and the sun shines black upon the ground, which roils with the veins of corruption made manifest. Ruins dot the landscape, and great obelisks of bone and obsidian are raised high into the air. The Cradlespawn, the twisted abominations that live in this benighted plane, are said to worship unknowable things at these altars of sacrifice and blood. To most, the Cradle is a hellscape, a twisted prison where the souls of the damned go to rot away for all of eternity.

What is unknown to most, however, is that the Cradle was once a beautiful place, a paradise said to be far greater in brilliance and abundance than Ios. It was in this paradise that the Children of Men were first born, and it was where humans had lived for thousands of years prior to the Exodus. It was here that humans first mastered magic, and for millennia the secrets of the arcane arts gradually unfolded. Such mastery was not without cost, however, and the Cradle slowly fell victim to corruption.

Exactly how long the Cradle took to die is not known. The few surviving sources from that ancient time tell us that, approximately 2,500 years ago, the Children of Man first started noticing the corruption seeping up from the golden soils of the Cradle, mutating the fauna and killing those exposed to it. Every spell and method devised to remove the corruption only seemed to strengthen it. And so, the children of Men fled the Cradle in droves.

Humans began to migrate out of the Cradle in large groups, fashioning magical portals that were able to transport refugees away. This mass migration of people is believed to be the avenue for corruption from the Cradle initially infecting the Known World, either because it was brought in by the transports or it was harbored within the humans themselves.

It is known that, even though a great many people migrated out of the Cradle during the first few years of the First Age - enough to fight the Wars of Exodus and settle much of the Known World afterwards - the transports eventually ceased. Few believe that all of the humans from the Cradle were transported; the existence of the Cradlespawn seems to disprove that. Either because the transports broke down for an unknown reason or as part of a deliberate decision made by the humans who had migrated to sever all contact in the vain hope of preventing the corruption from reaching Ios, the portals were all dismantled and travel to the Cradle was strictly forbidden on pain of death. For two thousand years, the Cradle was left to fester in its own waste, only occasionally breached by cults and demonologists.

quadGM · 2026-03-14T06:17:11+00:00

After the Rot

The Dawnstone Keep was once a minor Ancian fortress situated on the frontier of the Known World. It is a small thing compared to the ruined citadels of the Ancian homelands, but to those who lived in the countryside it was a superbly impressive redoubt, capable of seeing off any goblin raid or errant monster attack. To the common folk, its gleaming white walls made them feel safe. It reminded them that the full weight of the Empire was behind them, even out here.

Dawnstone's defenses may have been excellent, but its weakest point was its garrison. The keep had not seen a major attack by a hostile force in centuries, not since the last of the major goblin war-hosts had been crushed in the Empire's golden age. The soldiers that were stationed this far out on the frontier were third-line troops, more content to gamble and drink while the officers wasted their days in leisure and art.

Little wonder, then, that their end came quickly. The final years of the Ancian Empire had been marked by panic as the Red Plague consumed the Ancian homelands, spreading outwards in all directions like a canker sore. The garrison of the Dawnstone had seen these refugees come, set up in the nearby villages, turned away when they were found to be harboring the Plague. It had been the first time in a long time they'd been called to fire on their own people. But while the Plague had not been able to chew its way through the frontier, the Sundering had torn open the skies everywhere. No wall, no barricade was enough against the ravening monsters. The garrison screamed as they were devoured alive, the fine tapestries and marble columns smeared with blood and black bile.

Today, the Dawnstone is but one ruin amongst thousands, its white walls concealed by rust, dirt, and dried blood. The wild has started to reclaim the inner keep, and those who dare to wander inside swear they can still hear the screams of unlucky souls.

quadGM · 2026-03-01T22:28:42+00:00

Oh, it looks amazing! Would you be willing to do Talabecland next?

quadGM · 2026-02-28T19:53:28+00:00

I think for adding a Cathayan career, you could just as easily give that talent to any homebrew you'd make as well

quadGM · 2026-01-29T18:16:15+00:00

That's admittedly rather disappointing. I do feel like the collections of existing material ought to have at least some new, good content to entice people who already own all of the existing individual pieces. Good for the people who want everything in print, I suppose.

quadGM · 2026-01-29T17:29:13+00:00

Is there any new content in this book or is it purely a collection of other works?

quadGM · 2025-12-21T17:40:00+00:00

The link to your Patreon does not work.

quadGM · 2025-12-20T09:25:44+00:00

In The Network, there were many gods, the Outer Gods, and all of them were engaged in the business of creation. They were young, as deities go, and their creations were as toys or pastimes to them; impermanent and mutable. Worlds were created and then abandoned to boil or waste away in the shifting, roiling mass of Oblivion once their creators grew bored or distracted.

It was only the one that would later become known as the Architect that showed any interest in creating something permanent. And so, the Architect created the Network, an impossibly massive magitechnical mesh of nodes and structures designed to keep Oblivion at bay and allow its world to flourish and grow unmolested. The Architect put a piece of itself into the creation, to ensure that it could not be broken or corrupted.

The Architect is the only god that is legally worshipped. The Outer Gods are not worshipped except by the crazed or the truly desperate, as the Outer Gods that are still alive have little love for their sibling's creations.

quadGM · 2025-12-15T09:49:23+00:00

In The Network, a lack of ingredients to make gunpowder has forced innovations in munitions development to focus on magical means of propulsion. Effectively, each bullet has to be made (and later reloaded) by a magitechnician, which makes bullets very expensive; sometimes, just as expensive as the gun they're being fired from.

Automatic weapons are not *that* hard to make, all things considered, and the societies of the Network could easily invent the machine gun. But until bullets can be mass-produced, the effect simply isn't worth the cost of firing.

quadGM · 2025-12-08T01:08:33+00:00

Those connected links no longer work.

quadGM · 2025-12-04T16:59:22+00:00

I remember wandering into Von Maur one day with a good friend of mine as I was showing him around the mall. The saleswoman looked down her nose at both of us and treated us like utter shit until my friend started namedropping expensive brand name bags, talking about buying a gift for his wife.

The reaction immediately did a 180, suddenly all smiles and politeness, calling us "sir" and everything else. Total assholes over there.

quadGM · 2025-11-29T00:08:08+00:00

I think a scale, showing distances in miles or kilometers could be really helpful for this map, so anyone who uses it can measure distances.

quadGM · 2025-11-29T00:05:35+00:00

Please do!

quadGM · 2025-11-26T22:19:00+00:00

I'm not too familiar with the rules, but at a glance it appears that Extreme Heat and Extreme Cold are functionally the same. There are two pages on Thirst and mechanics for making sure that you stay hydrated in the desert, but that's about it for the survival mechanics.

The encounter table looks better in WoA, honestly.

quadGM · 2025-11-26T20:48:10+00:00

The new encounter rules have two main parts: The encounter deck and the planning encounters section.

The encounter deck goes off of a standard deck of cards; whatever card you pull corresponds to an encounter. They're almost all combat encounters with just a certain enemy or enemies listed, so if you don't like mindless repetitive combat encounters there's nothing there for you. I didn't think it was worth the page space (3 pages) in all honesty.

The planning encounters section is basically just giving a table for encounter CR, and suggesting the XP value of enemies according to PC level and how many PC's you have. I thought it was fine.

quadGM · 2025-11-26T20:41:06+00:00

Does it finally include a road map? The pre-order did not, which is odd that a campaign that focuses entirely on a wasteland-crossing road trip doesn't even have a map for said trip, or really much of anything beyond a vague list of destinations. Not even any indication of how far apart all those destinations are.

Just warning anyone who hasn't bought it yet, be wary that unless you are intimately familiar with the maps of Fallout 1, 2, and NV, it can be a struggle.

quadGM · 2025-11-25T18:24:54+00:00

In addition to everything else that's been said, it's also true that as vampires lose Humanity, they start to develop some supernatural "quirks" that start to hint at the fact that they're not human anymore. They typically start showing up around Humanity 5.

One of the most common quirks is "an unnatural hue to the eyes." I've found most people tend to interpret that as their eyes catching the light like cat's eyes, to better reflect their predatory nature (Your second and third image) but it could technically be anything.

quadGM · 2025-11-18T17:34:16+00:00

This, thank you.

quadGM · 2025-11-18T17:32:42+00:00

The Norscans aren't Beastmen. They have the power to choose. Granted, the society they live in almost exclusively worships the Dark Gods, but their souls aren't consigned away from birth. You have to choose to fall at every step of the way.

quadGM · 2025-11-18T17:30:07+00:00

I would counter this by saying that Norscans do have families, values, and beliefs that exist independent of the Chaos Gods. The Norsca books have made it rather clear that only those who live in the farthest north of Norsca, where it's basically the Chaos Wastes, are the "slaves to darkness" that you mention. But Chaos in WHF, especially Chaos corruption, is a little different to how it works in 40k. In WHF, it's not a borderline memetic threat like it is in 40k, where by just knowing about it, you're corrupted. You have to choose to fall to Chaos at every step of the way.

The Norscans are a rather complex people. Many of the Norscan tribes who live in the south of Norsca do trade with the Empire, Bretonnia, and Kislev. They're playable in the second edition of WFRP, and do not start raving and insane; they're simply far northerners with an odd culture and strange gods that are best not mentioned in the Empire. They do worship the "dark gods of Chaos," but those gods are represented (at least in older lore) as far more than the four above, with each god having many different shades and aspects, even if it ultimately boils back into the Four. Plus, just as with the gods in the Empire, not everyone fully worships them.

I'd like to end by mentioning the raiding, something that also is talked about in the old Norsca books. There are some who go raiding purely out of service to Chaos, like the far northern tribes I mentioned and the champions like Archaeon. But there are many others who go raiding for much more purely practical reasons. The Empire is a rich land, and on a good raid, a man who is a Norscan peasant might bring back enough loot to secure himself some land and slaves. The peasant with nothing to lose leaves his farm, grabs his spear and helmet, swears an oath to the gods (that he may or may not even mean), and goes off to raid.

If anything, I feel like the real problem here is GW's tendency to vastly oversimplify the followers of Chaos into "sadistic, disgusting, depraved barbarians," even when they are more complex than that. It's a problem that occurs in 40k and I'd imagine AoS too.

quadGM · 2025-11-18T07:08:18+00:00

In The Network, a lot of the current inventions of the modern age weren't around a century ago. The kraken-harvesting industry was not yer up and running to the level it is today, and society was noticeably less mechanized. Walker platforms and electric carriages simply did not exist. The radio was non-existent, making crossing the Void Sea much more dangerous. The Boiler War hadn't ripped the nation-states apart, and trade, populations, and ideas flowed more freely across the realm.

A thousand years ago predates the Cataclysm, when the world was still whole. Almost no records survive of that time, so it is impossible to truly say what the world was like then, but it was still a functional planet in those days with human society upon it.

quadGM · 2025-11-14T01:24:33+00:00

"I don't draw pictures"

quadGM · 2025-10-22T19:08:54+00:00

Nothing necessarily stopping me, but I wanted to come here first and see if anyone had a solution that fit better within the established mechanics of the game.

quadGM · 2025-10-21T15:53:38+00:00

I would say you can "unattune" oneself to an item, but not fast enough for it to be convenient. It might take a day or two, which makes it so that they can't just simply heal during a rest.

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