#gm advice

dungeonsandkobolds:

YO I think we as a DnD community need to address the fact that when PCs flirt with NPCs they put the DM in the position of having to play that NPC and not all DMs are comfortable with that all the time and it shouldn’t be an expectation that the DM is comfortable playing NPCs that are being flirted with

I think that is something that you should talk about as a group before playing. In our group we allow npcs and PCs to have romantic interactions but we have respect for each other.

If someone is not comfortable we don’t push it. We don’t get graphic or cross lines with players or DMs that are not ok with it. If you are in a group that doesn’t respect your boundaries talk to them about it. If they don’t listen it is time to find another group.

I am a female Dm with a group of all males(one is my boyfriend of 10 years) all but 1 player has a romantic interest NPC. None of them have ever crossed my boundaries or made me (or my boyfriend) uncomfortable. Other DMs have no npcs that have romantic interest in the players. If you are clear about what you want from the game and what is allowed I find there is rarely a problem with a good group.

The Halidom City of Rho – Urban Adventure Location for use with the GammaFinder SettingbyOwen K.C. Stephens

It drifts along, some seven & a half miles above the scarred, broken wasteland stretched-out far beneath it, pushing effortlessly against the hellish winds of ash, glass, and the blood-thick dust of Empires.

Through storms of lightning and radiation, poison and caustic vapor, alien screams and unnatural flame … it drifts.

It makes long, strange circuits over the shattered world below: loops & whorls across the wastes, following designs scarcely comprehensible to the tens of thousands who cling desperately to the titanic chains, ropes and improvised city-structures hanging from its impossible, ancient bulk.

Whatever insane gods constructed the massive, weightless behemoth upon which the Halidom City of Rho now grows & hangs, they are long-since dead.

And yet this triumph of esoteric engineering still edges along the bruise-colored skies beneath a half-shattered moon, sweeping lightly over still forests of soot-smeared rebar and through canyons of shattered asphalt & gore-spattered iron pipes. For those in need, stranded far out in the deep desert as it draws close, the leviathan of Rho is nothing less than a miracle: sunrise at midnight, a crack of bright lightning along the spine of the rainbow.

For those who clutch precariously at the long shackles which drape down from the eerie alien-wrought heavens, eking out a meager living among the clacking pillars of ozone & rust, it is a home: nothing less, and nothing more.

Brought to you absolutely free to play, to test & to share, as always, by the fine folks of my Patreon.

image from here

FUN FACTS ABOUT RHO

• The gently-curved “Crown” at the absolute top of Rho hangs effortlessly in the sky at an altitude of about 12 kilometers (7.45 miles; 52,500 feet) straight up, drifting across the very bottom of the stratosphere. The very lowest levels of the city, conversely, are built to alternately hang a few feet into the air or drag gently along the ground, adjusted individually by the inhabitants of the Gasoline Docks to the specifics of the local terrain as needs arise.
  
• The Crown itself is about 2 kilometers wide and generates a number of unnatural phenomena, the vast majority of which are indirectly beneficial to the maintenance of the city below. For example, every part of the great column beneath the Crown – 151 cubic kilometers of swaying, densely-packed Urban city-sprawl – has a breathable atmosphere and functions as a Low Gravity environment. In addition, the Crown seems to repel the worst excesses of wastelands weather by some unknown means: dozens of citizens die each year when Rho passes through truly lethal sections of the wastes, certainly … but not hundreds or thousands.
  
• The majority of Rho is anchored – directly or indirectly – to one of the massive crystalline “crown-chains” that descend from the superstructure above the city; constructed of an unknown, seemingly indestructible translucent material found nowhere else in the known world, these vast crown-chains provide more than simple constructional support: the chains generate soft lighting at night, produce electricity for those with the means to tap them, remain cold to the touch even in temperatures exceeding 140 Fahrenheit, and slowly absorb a variety of dangerous environmental effects – including poisonous fumes and radiation – into their milky, hypnotically-glowing depths.
• The city generally moves at a speed of about 8 to 24 kilometers an hour (5-15 mph), making infrequent stops for unknown reasons; the longest recorded full stop lasted for just over 137 hours before the city abruptly began moving once again. The city follows something approximating a “route,” although attempts to predict where the city will move to more than a week out have only about a 20% chance of being correct. Some seemingly-arbitrary sites in the wasteland are visited seasonally (passing close-by three to four times a year), while other destinations are utterly unique: approached only once, then forever abandoned.
  
• The city of Rho still passes within walking-distance of the twin corpse-pits where Alpha and Beta once stood, slowing to a crawl as it does so. In the wake of the Omega Invasion, Rho is perhaps the single largest and most prosperous city in the known world; Rho escaped the most direct attentions of Omega by pure good fortune, spending the majority of the invasion sailing across a near-impassable radioactive desert, all-but-inaccessible to the majority of Omega’s forces. Although casualties were still high, as the city more than once came under savage assault by aerial troops sent from distant Omega, Rho survived when far greater cities fell.
  
• Exposure to the weird energies of the Crown and its chains is known to cause any number of particularly abnormal mutations; among the most extreme are those who – born to human parents – develop into haan at puberty. Haan who metamorphose in this way are believed to breed true and are viewed with a kind of quasi-religious terror by the more-human denizens of Rho; the majority of these creatures ascend to Crownside at the invitation of their predecessors, dwelling high above the city in what those below imagine to be an incomprehensible alien splendor. Foreign Haan – those born outside of Rho – are viewed with grave suspicion.
  
• Rho has enormous sections – some of them thousands of feet tall and hundreds of feet wide – of abandoned, crumbling buildings damaged during the assault by Omega: foundries, laboratories, water-treatment facilities, power-plants, greenhouses, libraries, art galleries and stranger locales – hanging amongst the otherwise densely-packed hovels, speakeasies, windmills, turbines, farms, tenements, gambling-dens and swaying rope-bridges. Superstitious locals avoid these corpse-buildings for a variety of reasons … some of them purely practical, as bizarre alien predators birthed of Omega’s unnatural weaponry are, on occasion, successfully tracked-down and slain there.
  

History: No records purport to describe the construction of Rho; it seemingly was, is, and always shall be. As long as people have wandered the ashen-grey wastes in search of food and shelter, the Halidom City of Rho has drifted from horizon to horizon, endlessly spitting-forth shrieking raiders on motorbikes or loosing waves of white-robed flower-children tasked with spreading the gospel of their mysterious apocalypse-faith.

Rho has acted as a kaiju-scale mobile base to any number of cults, war-bands and forbidden esoteric societies over the centuries, and as many wars of conquest have been fought directly beneath the distant, ever-glowing glassy disk of the Crown – staining the dimly-luminous chains of the city a dripping crimson – as have been waged against the outside world by ravenous believers seeking to climb into heaven and confront God eye-to-eye.

In recent years, Rho has come under the control of a powerful, charismatic outsider: the mutant Atlas Hagane.

THE HAGANE TWINS

Fifteen years ago, Atlas & Althea Hagane were motorcycle-soldiers of the Kló Slátrunar, reaving across the Labyrinth-Trees Obsidian beneath the marrow-stained banner of Yotun Juss, Clanfather at the Seven Peaks of Xi.

Ten years ago, each of the twins was a blooded Flotaforingiof Clan Juss, commanding a full fleet in the name of their power-mad Yotun.

Five years ago, the smiling twins came to Rho with their Stríðsbandalag forming a vast war-procession behind them.

Today … well, now Atlas rules the city – presiding over the Council of Clockwrights with an iron fist – while his sister operates in the shadows, working her strange flesh-sorcery wherever she pleases.

Atlas finds himself quite popular with the people after instituting reforms to curb corruption, relax taxes on several vices & abolish the slave-trade, and many low-born adore him for allowing certain neighborhoods in good standing beneath Clockside a token representation on the High Council. The people are less enthusiastic about Althea Hagane, admittedly … although she is highly regarded in certain circles for her sponsorship in ordering the construction of several new hospitals in Rho.

That she uses these hospitals are her private feeding-grounds is a closely kept secret in Clockside.

Atlas is a technological genius with a mutant gift for manipulating large carbon polymers; this may be treated as a Super-Strength Tiered Mutation with a range of 30 feet (rather than touch) that only affects plastics. He is a lean & hungry man with sharp features, small round glasses, and a cold, brusque demeanor, known to smile only when he has outwitted an enemy.

Althea has some more-mysterious ability to manipulate biochemistry with a touch, although her gifts of healing & poison are little understood by anyone other than herself and her brother. Well-built, attractive and outgoing, Althea gladly plays the role of the blushing socialite for anyone stupid enough to fall for the act. In truth, she is far more dangerous than her “little brother”.

The two keep a close-knit gang of former motorcycle raiders – blooded clansmen of Kló Slátrunar – as their personal entourage, and rarely make appearances below Clockside without them.

Atlas dreams of finally unlocking the incomprehensible codes to pilot the Crown of Rho directly. Althea dreams of living forever, a goddess over the wastes, indulging her obscene appetites eternally.

Althea is far closer to achieving her dream than her brother is to realizing his own.

Economy: A city adrift, endlessly wandering, Rho is a massive trade-hub that gobbles-up & sheds cargo across the wastes. Exotic and high-tech goods are more common here than nearly anywhere else in the world, as the city makes brisk trade in oddities from every corner of the wasteland … yet the Nomad City is ever-hungry for the most basic of goods, including potable water, medicine, building supplies, livestock, leather, weapons, steel, fuel and food.

Those who are willing to barter & bargain-hunt in the clanking, claustrophobic  markets of Rho soon find that the towering Halidom City more than lives up to its reputation: priceless relics and unusual treasures available nowhere else in the world can – on occasion – be bought or sold for little more than a loaf of moldy bread or a warm half-sixer of sugary, caffeinated Blood-Fast Juice.

A clever trader can make a tidy fortune here.

Of course, there’s a reason why one of Rho’s primary exports is stripped-naked corpses, littering the parched desert earth behind it in waves.

Government: Three distinct tiers of government rule over three distinct tiers of citizenry dwelling on Rho, although – in theory – all citizens living beneath the glorious heights of Crownside are obedient to the Council of Clockwrights and to their master, High Clockwright Atlas Hagane.

The unquestioned masters of Rho are the haan, who dwell above the disk and the city … and who may or may not possess some means of guiding the Crown, steering Rho and her people safely through the wasteland to new destinations. There’s no actual proof that the haan have the technology or the know-how to even attempt such a feat, but that doesn’t stop citizens – desperate for something to believe in – from offering-up sacrifices & sacraments to the haan whenever they make their infrequent journeys below the gleaming heavens.

The haan communicate rarely, if at all, stepping along the petal-shrouded walkways before them to take whatever they desire from the city or her citizens in exchange for their eerie glowing-glass coins with little ceremony. Haan within the city are subject to no laws but their own: if a haan violates a Code under the Clockwrights, that haan is exiled to Crownside and – in theory – never seen again.

No one has ever gotten a straight answer as to what, precisely, the haan are doing up there.

Of greater interest to visitors is the legal code of the Council of Clockwrights. This parliament is elected democratically from among the citizens of Clockside (in theory, the finest minds in the known world) and their decisions are (again, in theory) reached via negotiation and compromise, implemented according to majority rule … but it should be noted that their dictums are not subject to the legal restraint of a constitution or even of precedent.

In other words, if the Council decides that it wants you – you, personally – dead, they can simply vote to have you executed. Or, more likely, to place a sizable bounty on your head and be done with it.

LAW & ORDER

It’s worth noting that Rho doesn’t have a standing police-force. Doesn’t need one, either. Instead, it uses a system of bounties.

Basically anyone can become a bounty-hunter, but you do have to register first; the Council of Clockwrights levies a small fee to register, and they can revoke your license if you piss them off. Anyone can place a bounty on anyone, but frivolous or malicious bounties may be nullified by a simple yes/no vote from the Council of Clockwrights; if they catch you abusing the system, you pay the full price of the bounty to the city’s coffers and half the price to the wronged target of your bounty … or to their next of kin, if the Council didn’t get around to nullifying a lethal bounty-contract before a hunter could collect.

Most bounties are not lethal.

Most simply require the target to be brought before a judge … sometimes by violence, of course.

97% of criminals in Rho are not hauled all the way up to the Council of Clockwrights to stand trial. The Council is busy, and they don’t care about you. Instead, the accused are subject to the whims of a traveling bounty-judge, who rules in the stead of the Council. Again, pretty much anyone can become a bounty-judge, but you have to register first. This is significantly more expensive than becoming a bounty-hunter, and you have to prove citizenship in Rho going back at least three years.

Note that you do NOT need to prove anything approximating “competence in adjudicating legal disputes”.

Both parties in a suit must agree to the use of the same bounty-judge; for this reason, bounty-judges carefully cultivate their reputations as fair, wise and impartial – or at the very least easy to bribe – so that they can ensure plenty of business.

The ruling of a bounty-judge is final.

People who don’t like a bounty-judge – or the particular ruling of a bounty-judge – usually make their displeasure known by murdering the bounty-judge. Popular bounty-judges are, of course, significantly more difficult to murder than unpopular ones, so bounty-judges have a distinct incentive to rule in a way that matches the expectations of the mob.

It’s a surprisingly efficient self-regulating system, if you care significantly more about maintaining a semblance of public order among desperate survivors & career criminals than some abstract concept of “justice”.

Rho has no prisons; punishments are usually levied in the form of involuntary indentured servitude, monetary fines, or as particularly amusing, poetic & ironic penalties: a man who steals fish from a widow might first be beaten with fish, then placed in a stockade dressed as a fish, then forced to spend a year – dressed as a fish – working in a hatchery of the Creaking Farms, with a portion of his wage garnished to support the victim & her family.

Bounty-judges with a sense of humor are more popular, so judges often compete to establish a name for themselves as “quirky”.

Theoretically, the Council is guided by an impartial High Clockwright: the wisest and most honorable citizen of Clockside, a population selected from the rabble below for their genius. In practice, of course, the High Clockwright is invariably the most calculating & charismatic strongman of their generation, ruling over a cowed chamber of hereditary senators through threat of violence.

Far beneath the glorious heights of Crownside, of course, rival gangs and cults extend their own rule just as far as their knives will allow, creating their own courts & punishments as they see fit. By the time a dictum from the Council of Clockwrights has trickled-down to the scavengers, scrappers, tradesmen, pirates, grease-monkeys and gamblers of the Gasoline Docks, it’s usually viewed as a little more than pomp & puffery.

SLICING THROUGH CHAINS

In the chain-forest of Rho, any weapon that can (quickly) carve through metal is strictly forbidden. The punishment for carrying or brandishing any weapon that could detach a chunk of the city – and everything beneath it! – in the heat of a brawl is swift, merciless execution.

For that reason, laser & plasma-weapons are the most valuable form of contraband in Rho, and make a tempting commodity for those who dare to try their luck smuggling such tech into the Halidom City.

Places of Interest:

• Crownside: Above the clouds, above the great & shining disk, it is said that the haan – the high aristocracy of Rho – live much as the very wealthiest ancients of the Unburned Times once did: walking wide, well-swept cobblestone boulevards which curl & weave through sparkling forests between massive mansions, tending to their palatial gardens among riverbeds & waterfalls, doted upon by legions of well-bred servants. In their copious free time, it is supposed, they must somehow guide or otherwise serve the disk. Of course, no one goes Crownside except the haan and those they select to accompany them; what’s they are up to up there, precisely, only they know.
  
• Clockside: Just beneath the disk, among towering buildings lit only by the glow of the Crown directly above, the Council of Clockwrights and their extended families inhabit a dense spider-web of laboratories & libraries, observatories & orreries, colleges & cathedrals brought up from the aching earth below at inconceivable cost. The Halidom City of Rho imagines itself the most glorious of meritocracies (technically, a geniocracy), wherein any mechanical genius – no matter the station of their birth – capable of puzzling-out the mysterious engines of the ancients may earn themselves a name & rank among the clerks and courts that eternally bet-upon the city’s next move.
• The Creaking-Farms: Just beneath the illuminated marvels of on-high are cubic miles-upon-miles of hatcheries, hydroponic gardens and hanging plantations thick with cash-crops. Rho is, after all, fed not just by what can be stripped from the wastes below but also by industrial-scale agricultural engineering carried-out with brutal space-saving efficiency. Tenements of farm-workers are crowded upon one another in endless hive-stacks, mingling in filth with the insects & fungus they tend. The wet life-web of the Farms absorbs airborne pollutants from the Reaches below, while providing fresh delicacies for those above.
  
• The Rusted Reaches: Beneath the farms, the smoldering and lightning-wreathed factories of Rho bustle with workers, churning out goods for trade, use & sale by the ton. Several of the massive, half-broken 3D-printing facilities plucked from the wasteland & caught-up in the iron webs of the Rusted Reaches are capable of producing objects otherwise unknown to the world: these ancient buildings strain, spark & creak, vomiting-forth weird, tilted treasures often less valuable than the raw materials used in their creation … and, on rare occasion, devices more valuable than any cache of earthly riches.
  
• Lower Depths: The detritus of six miles of industry & experimentation above is collected here, where gutter-rats scrape by filtering-out whatever valuables can be collected from the rain of poison, madness and shattered, ill-understood tech cascading endlessly down from the heights. This is the last stop for waste: anything that can’t be used here goes unceremoniously off the edge of Rho to topple a few thousand feet into that unforgiving desert which trails endlessly behind the city.
  
• The Gasoline Docks: Rho lives or dies by what can be scrounged by hand – often at gunpoint – from the cracked, dust-choked & sun-baked earth below. The very bottom of the city thus represents a thriving, boisterous melting-pot of cultures, as the Nomad City pulls-in whatever it deems potentially valuable & discards the rest. This is the face of Rho to outsiders, as the great majority of visitors to the Halidom City never make it more than a half-mile above the surface of the planet before returning to earth … one way or another.
  

Adventures in Rho

• An Undiscovered Route: When word comes down from Clockside that the city has adjusted course and will soon be heading over nearly-impassible territory toward a new, unexplored destination, the excitement is furious. News travels fast in the waste, and soon raiders from nearby settlements have made the pilgrimage to Rho, hoping to ride the well-stoked, unstoppable leviathan to a treasure-trove of long-shuttered vaults of elder technology ripe for the taking. The locals are not necessarily taking this influx of new “citizens” to the Gasoline Docks well.
  
• Neutral Ground: When two or more powerful war-bands of the waste must negotiate, the city of Rho often plays host to such parlay. If the PCs need to arrange a meeting with a dangerous & well-armed enemy, Rho can serve as the perfect odd & flavorful backdrop for an audience: the Gasoline Docks are made up of dozens of curious neighborhoods and districts, and the PCs should get a chance to explore the scum & villainy to their heart’s content ,,, and maybe get embroiled in local politics.
  
• Theft from the Ancients: An up-&-coming gang out of the Gasoline Docks has an ambitious scheme: when the Halidom City next comes within a day’s motorcycle-ride of a building-sized technological oasis which serves as a crossroads between several small settlements, the gang means to steal it. Yes, the building. Armed with hover-skiffs, ropes, trucks, anti-grav plates, axes, welding equipment and explosives, the gang intends to lift the whole damn structure out of the ground and deliver it to back to Rho. They’ll need plenty of extra hands on-deck for a heist like this, for those with a mercenary bend.
• Hired Help: The current High Clockwright and his twin sister are looking for something in the deep desert. Something old. Something valuable. Something they don’t want anyone in Clockside to know about. They have a few hints as to where this mysterious object might be found, somewhere out there in the wastes, but they can’t afford to send any of their private Kló Slátrunar clansmen to go poking around the radioactive dunes. That’s where the PCs, as outsiders to Rho, come in.
• The Pillar of God’s Hunger: What the city of Rho wants, the city of Rho takes. A tiny farming-community built around a potent Halidom listening-device of the ancients calls for aide: the Nomad City is on the horizon, drawing nearer by the hour. When it sweeps close enough, Rho will very simply devour every last bit of the village: claiming food, livestock, water, building-material, human lives, stray technology, even the rich soil of the fields. The city cannot be stopped. Can the PCs evacuate the village & its mysterious treasures in time?