The Halls Untoward YZE conversions

THE HALLS UNTOWARD - 

            "Centuries ago, an underground road pierced the Strielwal mountains, carrying trade in both directions. The halls grew from a humble waystation at the mid-point, but soon sprouted hostels, workshops, trading posts, and shrines.             When war with Grinvolt sealed the western end, the halls were abandoned, though rumor held that some remained behind. Now that peace reigns once more, visitors have set out to find plunder, opportunity, or the lost route through to the West. But what has become of the Halls Untoward during their strange century of evolution in the dark?"

Michael Prescott, 2-page dungeon-maker extraordinaire, and mastermind behind Trilemma Adventures put out a crowd-sourced dungeon a while back called the Halls Untoward. It’s still pay what you want on DTRPG and is packed full of his illustrations and fits really well into my favorite fantasy setting of Forbidden Lands. The dungeon is fully described and as can be expected from Michael has its own internal logic, and fun if weird locations.

I worked with Michael to turn the creatures he designed for his 2-page adventures, contained in the Trilemma Compendium, into useable monsters for fantasy games using the Year Zero Engine. This companion bestiary book became Trilemma: Servants of Memory and is specifically compatible with Forbidden Lands from Free League Games (we were given permission for a disclaimer in the front of the book).

Whilst working on the kickstarter we workshopped some ideas for stretch goals and one of the ideas that I threw into the mix was an add-on for the bestiary which would have covered creatures included in The Halls Untoward. Now, some of the creatures from the collaborative dungeon are already included in Servants of Memory but this would have added 6 additional entries and would have forced me to flex my creative muscles as most of the other entries in Servants started as conversions of 5E material (by now you should know I am fond of conversions!).

Although this idea was ultimately rejected, mainly due to trying to reconcile the YZE OGL with the CC-BY-NC that Halls' is released under, I still think its something worth looking at. As my contributions to another top secret project I am working on may be coming to an end, I thought that I would resurrect this idea for my poorly provisioned blog.

If this goes well, and doesn't take me years to complete, as you know I haven't been very active, then I may move on to the magical items that can also be found in the dungeon, and anything else that takes my interest.

Over the next few weeks I will start working through the list below, and see how far I get. Please feel free to contribute in the comments for each entry:- 

All Monster Names and Descriptions are taken from The Halls Untoward by Michael Prescott et. al. which is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC license v4.0

All Monster Stat Blocks and Attack Descriptions are copyright Craig Atkins 2022.

• APOCALYPSE LARVA (Trilemma: Servants of Memory pg 9, stats by Craig Atkins)
• CAVE SQUID (Trilemma: Servants of Memory pg 26, stats by Craig Atkins)
• CAVE STITCHER (Trilemma: Servants of Memory pg 28, stats by Craig Atkins)
• CARREG (Trilemma: Servants of Memory pg 24, Kin Talents pg 184, stats by Craig Atkins)
• DEEP-SHRIMP
• DRADKIN (Trilemma: Servants of Memory pg 44, Kin Talents pg 184, stats by Craig Atkins)
• DREAD REAVERS
• DUNGEON BARNICLE/CIRRIPEDE
• FIRE BEETLES (Trilemma: Servants of Memory pg 56, stats by Craig Atkins)
• JORN (Trilemma: Servants of Memory pg 88, stats by Craig Atkins)
• MURK STARS (Trilemma: Servants of Memory pg 105, stats by Craig Atkins)
• PSEUDOSCION
• RICALU (Trilemma: Servants of Memory pg 122, Kin Talents pg 185, stats by Craig Atkins)
• ROCK WORMS
• SANDPUFFER
• TCHETH (Trilemma: Servants of Memory pg 148, Kin Talents pg 186, stats by Craig Atkins)
• WHIP SCORPIAN (Trilemma: Servants of Memory pg 167 stats by Simon Bokvist)

All Monster Names and Descriptions are taken from The Halls Untoward by Michael Prescott et. al. which is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC license v4.0

All Monster Stat Blocks and Attack Descriptions are copyright Craig Atkins 2022.

Year Zero Bestiary Kickstarter

Over the past few weeks I have been a bit preoccupied, and my work on the Giant Spider has sadly remained unfinished, hopefully I will get back to my conversions soon.

But as many of you know I have been working alongside other contributors to develop a fantasy bestiary for the Trilemma Adventures Compendium (available here)! The work on this is now and on 4th August we will be launching the kickstarter for this Year Zero Engine edition! To follow along and make sure you are notified of the launch please click here.

Trilemma Adventures Bestiary

Trilemma Adventures Bestiary

In my previous post I mentioned the Trilemma Adventure Compendium, available here - Trilemma-Adventures-Compendium-Volume-I. This post will go into more detail about how the Forbidden Lands version of the Bestiary came about.

What is the Trilemma Adventures Bestiary?

This is a long story, so I will try to keep it brief. In May 2019 Michael Prescott of www.trilemma.com ran a kickstarter to publish a compendium of his monthly adventures that have been published on his blog blog.trilemma.com. Michael has been working away at these adventures for quite a few years and was inundated with support, garnering 2,248 backers (unfortunately I wasn't one of them due to the shipping cost of the hardback book to the UK, sorry Michael).

Stretch Goals during the campaign were for Bestiaries of the creatures and beasties that appeared in the adventure compendium, there were individual stretch goals for 5E, Dungeon World and OSR, these stretch goals were smashed like all other stretch goals for the campaign.

Michael could have just done a black and white, quick reference document to fulfill the stretch goals but as well as finishing layout of the Deluxe Compendium, Michael set about commissioning stats, drawing new art and commissioning new cover art.  These bestiaries are moving forward, with the 5E PDF version now up for sale - Trilemma-Adventures-Bestiary-5e.

Ok, so where does the Forbidden Lands Version come from?

Well, I was aware of Trilemma, and the kickstarter, but thats as far as it went. Until late 2019 a post popped up on the Forbidden Lands FB group asking if anyone would be interested on working on a Forbidden Lands bestiary for this book.  I responded in the positive and then actually got in touch with Michael to start the conversation.  Life got in the way and the instigator unfortunately dropped out of the project.

In the meantime I had been working on a few things myself:

• A Forbidden Lands Monster Generator
• A Forbidden Lands Session Generator
• Guidelines for converting 5E to Fbl - 5E to Fbl converter

So I had learnt the intricacies of monster design, and how to convert across monsters between two RPG systems.

As I knew Michael was working on the 5E version of the bestiary I asked for an advance copy that he kindly supplied. I then spent a couple of months using my formulas to roughly convert all the entries.

So, is it just you then?

Definitely not.  As the project moved forward I contacted a few people who had created other things for Forbidden Lands to see if they wanted to work with me on this mammoth project, I also asked for volunteers that previously showed an interest in helping out.

In the end there were four of us working on the project, my good friend Doug Ruff, and two people new to me; Reilly Heijkoop-Logan and Simon Bokvist. We all worked on any entries that took our interest, I also took on the project manager role, and OCD taskmaster. I also have a few additional people looking through the entries and highlighting anything that doesn't work or needs further explanation. They have been really good at calling things out and helping to tighten things up, so thanks to them (you know who you are).

Is Fria Ligan OK with this?

Sure, Michael got in touch with Tomas from Fria Ligan and we have worked something out,  They are kindly giving permission for us to produce the book, as long as they get to see it before it is launched.

What's in the book?

The book contains over 110 (I can't be precise as the number keeps changing) entries of monsters, creatures and humanoids (or Kin in Forbidden Lands speak), and will also include a few artifacts (or oddities in Trilemma speak). It has a load of new art, a new cover and should be pretty awesome once complete.

When is it out?

The Forbidden Lands is going to be the last of the four bestiaries published as Michael rightly wants to complete his kickstarter stretch goals before moving on to do layout of this additional product.  The 5E version has recently been released, next up is the OSR (or B/X) version, the Dungeon Worls version.  My estimate is that the Forbidden Lands version will probably be ready sometime in July, but if Michael has time and I stop tinkering it might be ready a smidge sooner.

How can we get our hands on this?

The intention is to have both a PDF and POD (print on demand) versions up on https://www.drivethrurpg.com/.

How can I be notified?

If you want to be notified about the launch of the Forbidden Lands version or any of the other versions, either subscribe to this blog or better yet subscribe to the Trilemma newsletter by visiting the website. 

Welcome

Welcome to "Is it a monster?".

What is this blog about?

This blog is my first foray into putting my ideas and thoughts on my favorite games on the internet for posterity.

In this blog I will catalogue my work in designing (or converting) monsters, artifacts and encounters for the Fria Ligan produced Forbidden Lands RPG.  That is my intent as I start this blog anyway, although I will likely also write entries about other games and maybe also share some of my thoughts on game-design and how to be a GM.

As this blog is about monsters, a good place to start is the Classic Monster conversions -  New, Old, Monsters for Forbidden Lands.

Who are you then?

Well, my name is Craig Atkins (often known as lupex on Reddit and other forums), and I am a 46 year old gamer.  I have been roleplaying for about 35 years, playing various games from AD&D to start, to modern games such as Alien RPG. I am currently running Forbidden Lands as my normal game and Mutant: Year Zero during lockdown. 

During this time I have mainly been a GM, and my passion has been to run all iterations of the Star Wars RPG.  I like to build living worlds, where stuff happens regardless of the actions of the players but then whatever actions the players do perform have consequences.  I rarely design adventures from scratch, preferring to use published adventures and locations that are adapted to fit the story, I also like to combine different adventures to ramp up the tension and to give players lots of options but not enough time to complete everything.

If you want to know more about me have a look at my profile.

What is your favorite RPG?

At the moment I spend most of my time engrossed in anything by Fria Ligan, particularly Forbidden Lands, hence my background picture - 

What are you famous for?

Not sure I am famous for anything really, but I am pretty active on the Forbidden Lands FB group, and forum and I participate in various other forums.  I am currently working on a Forbidden Lands version of the Bestiary for the Trilemma Adventures Compendium.  

This came about due to someone on the Forbidden Lands facebook page asking for contributors to work on this project.  I volunteered and made contact with Michael Prescott from Trilemma Adventures to see if this was something he would be interested in allowing.  He was happy for this work to happen, and contacted Tomas at Fria Ligan to get agreement.  Due to a number of things the original poster dropped out and I was left to move this project forward, so after gathering some additional contributors that is what we did. I written some more details about this here - Trilemma Adventures Bestiary.

The Trilemma Adventure Compendium can be purchased here - Trilemma-Adventures-Compendium-Volume-I

That's enough about me for now.  Over the next few weeks and months I will post up conversions of classic creatures and hopefully have some previews of the upcoming book.

Please leave comments below if there is anything you would like me to write about.