Showing posts with label campaign. Show all posts
Showing posts with label campaign. Show all posts

Saturday, January 23, 2021

Lesser Gods of Rone

I recently completed a short BX D&D romp called Lesser Gods of Rone. Well... the campaign is called that, but this was just one adventure. Let's call it The Sleeper.

Here in these posts I talk about this whole island campaign concept:

First Post

Second Post

Third Post

The game ran for 7 sessions of 2 hours each. The characters were searching for the father of the party's wizard, Vonz. Vonz' dad had allegedly joined the crew of a wizard's ship in search of an ancient treasure. They explored 3 islands and ultimately had a standoff with a wizard who was locked in mental combat with a giant monstrosity beneath the waters. In the end everything exploded, like it does.



My incredible maps were a huge hit.

One of the main ideas behind this setting is that Lake Rone isn't mapped. It's amorphous. The positions of islands are not rigidly fixed. Or rather, the physics of space isn't fixed. To navigate between two islands you need to understand the path and it's not linear.

I invented a Mariner class just for this setting. Their trick is they "get it". They intuit the ways of the Lake and they are privy to secrets.

I tried to make navigation procedural in the tradition of basic D&D. You roll a die to determine how many hours a journey might take. You roll every 4 hours on a navigation table to see how well you're doing. The journey could become shorter or longer and hazards could be encountered. For example, in The Sleeper the PCs ran into a magic whirlpool created by some underwater villains. This was a fun bit because it let me introduce a little bit of the lore of the Lake to the party that they might later revisit and unpack.

I feel like the navigation rules worked pretty well. I worried that they would become tedious but I feel like with some variety in the tables this would be fine, not unlike the various procedures used in most hexcrawling campaigns.

The idea is that you would island-crawl. You'd randomly determine an island, then explore it. From there you might randomly visit another or the DM could establish detailed island locations as desired. It allows for individual islands to be highly detailed and mapped, if that's what you want. But the Lake itself would never be mapped in that way.


THE VISION

Here's what I'm thinking right now, in terms of what this project looks like.

Drawing the islands is fun. I will do more. I'd like to publish them eventually as a deck of cards where each card simply shows the image on one side and has some simple details about the island on the other side. Name, key features, inhabitants, special stuff. We're talking bullet point lists, not much text, and no stats. So this is utterly system neutral.

Accompanying the cards would be a PDF with the rules for navigating the Lake, a few classes such as the Mariner and Lake Thing, and maybe some new monsters and spells. A simple, short thing written for BX (OSE) rules, free to download.

That's the idea. I don't know exactly when I will do it. My habit is to back away from a project after running a playtest and give it time to stew. We're in the stewing phase.


Sunday, November 22, 2020

Lesser Gods of Rone Campaign

I am going to run a new campaign for the Monday night Doomslakers group. It is set in a world called Rone, which is a lake world I dreamed up maybe 15 years ago. I pitched it to the group like this:

Jack Kirby and Mike Ploog fall into an EC Comics fantasy world controlled by the better side of Vaughn Bodé's imagination. A mist-covered lake riddled with tall, mossy islands and weird creatures. Old gods beneath the dark waters. Strange races of weirdos. Long lost temples. Robots. Armies of ants. Waterlogged dungeons where slumbering computers reboot as you tread the dead hallways. It is a platform game slick with algae.

It's a BX D&D based campaign with 9 custom classes, including the one pictured here. Should be a hoot! Might even be a published thingie for Old School Essentials to be squeezed out of it.



Saturday, May 2, 2020

DCC: Chainbound

During the old 'Rona, I started running a new DCC RPG campaign for a few family and friends via Skype. This is maybe the fourth DCC campaign I've ran (?). Anyway... this game always brings out the "let's just roll with it" in me. I don't do a lot of planning. I allow myself to grab any ole thing that looks like fun and toss it into the mix. I have never written a DCC-based book, so I never think about it as a playtest.

This time I started with one of the dungeons from Black Pudding #1, replacing the stinking nobberlochs with hideous mutant spiders. The tomb was hidden in the sand until the zero-levels dug it up, acting against their will as slaves to the tyrannical Mad King of Zyrrum. I grabbed an old, unused map I drew years ago and plopped it down as the known world for the campaign. Zyrrum is the southernmost city, on the edge of a great desert. The PCs, slaves, won their freedom in the funnel.

Next up they set spent a year apart and came back together as level one PCs in order to rid themselves of the Mad King's slave mark. This mark, magical in nature, is very hard to remove. The PCs have discovered that they must embark on a quest to find the Lost Treasure Vaults of Zadabad in order to find the phylacteries of the Mad King and destroy him, giving them their final freedom.

So far they have spent most of their time in Zyrrum hitting up the local sages and sorcerers to learn all this information. It has been fun. Some heads have been busted.

Notably, one of the players is new to RPGs. This is his first game. So imagine my surprise when, in the first combat as a level one warrior, he fucking died. Like, instantly. Brutally. I rolled two natural 20s against him as the PCs were ambushed in an alley by men trying to capture and return escaped slaves. I gave him a Luck check to survive, which he failed.

But hey... death is not the only way to have a good time. It's DCC. The PCs were whispered to by an old witch in a nearby hovel (this was the sage and seer district). They were instructed to bring in their dead friend, which they decided to do.

The witch used wicked magic to bring him back to life. I gave him another Luck check, which he failed again. This meant the witch had complete control over his soul. She could end his life at her will. She controlled him. So she set him and his allies on a task. "Go and slay the master of the Red Brick Tower... so that my soul can be freed!"

Needless to say they hiked it on over the two day foot journey to the Red Brick Tower, killed a couple of man-bats, and defeated a mad, crazy old wizard who kept shards of his soul in various statues... one of which was an old witch.

Now the PCs have boarded the Soulcatcher on the river and are headed out to sea to find the location of the Rod of the Crescent Moon and, ultimately, the key to freeing themselves of their slaver marks.

Good times indeed.

I used a Dyson Logos map for the Red Brick Tower and for the life of me I cannot find the original link. So go to Dyson's blog and check out about a zillion awesome maps.

Dyson Logos draws a lot of towers.

Saturday, March 21, 2020

The DM's Notebook vs. The Campaign Bible

Over on this post, Froth sagely points us to this post by The Angry GM about a delicious little idea called the campaign bible. A campaign bible is just your GM notebook filled to whatever degree you deem necessary with your notes about the game you want to run or are running. You don't show it to anyone because it's yours and it's a mess. You don't write it for anyone to read. You don't write it for publication. It is a tool. It is called a bible because it's the repository of reference information necessary to make your campaign good.

Sweet idea.

Today I happened to pull the old TSR World Builder's Guidebook (Richard Baker, 1996) off the shelf. What a wonderful little saddle-stitched tome this is. Not only is it chock full of useful tables and ideas for creating a fantasy world, but it's got the best of the late-era TSR page design going on. The headers and callouts are color, the art is monochromatic, the tables have that nice gray bar thing going on. It's a solid book if you can score a copy. You can get the official PDF here.

As a sad side note, the artist who illustrated this book, Glen Michael Angus, died in 2007. He was born the same year as me and his work was very stunning. I'll post a few pieces from this book below. R.I.P. Glen Angus.

Anyway, I'm flipping through for ideas when I hit page 4 and Baker tells us that we should definitely keep a DM's notebook. This is a great example of the idea of the Campaign Bible expressed in an official AD&D product 24 years ago, which is pretty cool. I'm guessing there are other examples even older, perhaps in the pages of ye olde Dragon or perhaps White Dwarf, but I don't know as I'm not an expert on the matter.


Baker's bullet list is pretty good. If you followed his advice to the letter, you'd at least be a well-prepared GM. I particularly liked his inclusion of a "tickler file" where you jot down the various goals, desires, and needs of your Players' PCs for use in adventure design, with the nod that Players might be more interested in adventures that ping their individual or group interests. Sage indeed.

So how does Baker's advice compare to The Angry GM? The Angry advice is more random, more angry, more visceral. And I really loved this bit right here because it's truth:

Creativity is what happens when random things bump into each other in your head and form some kind of connection.
Also, this hits home for me because I have always kept such fact sheets myself:

A fact sheet is a sheet of facts. Short, succinct lists of informational bits and bobs. Not prose. If you can’t master the vital skill of distilling things down to the important points and removing the excess crap, you can’t communicate effectively. Quit GMing.

The Angry GM gives you many more reasons to keep a bible while the Baker entry is short, sweet, and to the point about what you should include in it. I don't think these two things contradict as they are clearly talking about the same idea, just 20+ years separated in time and with wildly different formats. Both have one goal: to make you a better GM. Noble.

Here's an oldie: The Dungeon Master's Design Kit, for AD&D 1e. I never owned this. But it's got a lot of form sheets for the DM to use in creating NPCs, monsters, encounters, chases, and big ass finales. Sounds great. Given the nature of much of the official material of the time, I suspect it is dry and wordy and not very compelling. But I do see a fair number of random tables, so that's a plus. And who the fuck is going to fill out a whole one page form on a single chase scene before it happens? Talk about a bit of a railroad approach. I guess this was the era of Dragonlance.


And check out that badass art by Glen Michael Angus!

As to my own version of the DM's notebook/campaign bible, it's not well organized at all. But I do have some habits I've been following for many years.

Prior to the internet, I always kept a literal file on each major project. Inside the file would be various sketches, maps, and notebook sheets scrawled with madness. Before that I would use spiral notebooks to draw and write everything in. And I was kinda obsessive about keeping things separated. I wanted a different notebook for each idea. Most of them were filled with blank pages buffered by 1-20 pages of actual notes.

Post-internet, I started keeping digital files exactly the same way: filled with sketches, art, reference pictures, and various word docs and spreadsheets (these are my fact sheets, per the paragraphs above). Today I tend to keep my docs and spreadsheets on Google Docs or in DropBox so I can get them at work. I always have a spreadsheet and I have even named them "bibles" in the past. They contain lists of names, places, and ideas for the thing, along with random tables.

None of this stuff gets shared. Not because that's a rule, but because why on earth would you share your own personal random scrawlings? The stuff you share is what comes out of those scrawlings. The adventures you run, the finished art, the finished books (if you're publishing). You don't share your bible stuff. It's fuckin' ugly.

Swipe File

One thing I would add to the notebook/bible concept is the swipe file, a term I swiped from the comics industry, who apparently swiped it from the advertising industry. Whatever the history, my use of the term is very simple. A swipe file is a file full of images and ideas that inspire you or have the potential to inspire you. I find this a highly valuable tool for creative work. I tend to keep multiple digital files full of stuff as well as private Pinterest boards and other such nonsense. When I'm feeling slow, I browse the files and see what gets drummed up in my brain. Never be a afraid to borrow and steal little nuggets from other creators because they damn sure did the same thing and anyone who tells you differently is a fuckin' liar. Nobody makes shit up whole cloth. Nobody.

Glen Michael Angus

When I Googled Glen Angus' art for this book I got nothing. Nada. Zilch. He did work on M:tG and other TSR books, and some of that comes up, but I wanted to showcase his work on The World Builder's Guidebook. So I scanned a little bit of it. Here are a few images from the book by the late Glen Michael Angus.




Tuesday, November 12, 2019

The Wonderful & Terrible Things That Effervesced in the OSR Scene, Part 2

Where was I? Oh right. I was supposed to be talking about the OSR scene. More-or-less. Sorry about the lengthy DCC RPG campaign posts. I gotta do it though.

Around April 2014, within 2 years of my getting into the old school RPG scene, I started up an online group. We met one Monday night at 9:30 PM, EST, for 2 hours. We are still to this day meeting every Monday night at 9:30 PM, EST. This is a net good in the world.

This group consists of one of my oldest and dearest friends named Jayne as well as four others that I have only met/known through the Monday game and/or other RPG scenes: Andy, Bill, Dyson, and Matt. These I now also call great friends.

Sometimes I call this group the Doomslakers, whether they like it or not.

The whole thing started because god damn it to fucking shit I wanted to run some old school D&D. I was running DCC RPG in my face-to-face games but I had this burning itch to run D&D. I got the group together to play Labyrinth Lord, which had quickly become my absolute darling by 2014. Here was a game that was basically exactly the D&D rules I used to play when I was young. It was a mix of basic and advanced... the same shit I always did! Someone had put it in a book, slapped the best name on it since D&D, and gave an open license to let me make shit up and publish it. I was in.

To start out, I ran a Labyrinth Lord campaign for the group and it lasted somewhere around 50 sessions. I kept copious notes. I tracked XP. The entire campaign was original and I eventually published one module born from it: Winds of the Ice Forest, which got a very nice review on my favorite podcast Save or Die. It was a wonderful little moment in time in this tiny niche hobby.

My second module!
The campaign was tons of fun for me. At the time, the players were Andy, Jayne, Bill and Matt with an occasional fifth player (I think we had 2 or 3 who popped in and out). It was a strongly northern-themed game with lots of snow and ice and it culminated in the party battling a tremendous purple worm monster that killed one of the PCs in an epic moment. The materials I created for the campaign are still in my folders waiting for me to write the god damned follow-up modules Ur-Kak the Swine and Shrine of Worms. (I will write them, I tell you!)

After the Labyrinth Lord campaign we played DCC RPG, Star Frontiers, Bean!, The Black Hack, and others I cannot remember. The group plays on to this day, thankfully.

Labyrinth Lord is crack cocaine for someone like me who just really really wanted to write D&D stuff. Leading up to the time when I discovered the OSR scene, I was creating RPG materials in a vacuum and they were largely meant to satisfy my desire to make D&D stuff. In fact, in the year prior to 2012 (see here) I was writing a funny animals RPG that was explicitly riffing on the D&D tropes that we all know and love. Zyn Dweomer, which was a webcomic I was doing at the time, was the precursor to Rabbits & Rangers. It was talking D&D animals.


My first module!
Anyway, I wrote my first OSR module, Howler, as an OSRIC adventure first then converted it to Labyrinth Lord once I realized the truth. I was blown away by the amount of material that had already been created specifically for Labyrinth Lord. Some of it was brilliant, such as Barrowmaze (I'll get around to that soon). Some of it was just kinda OK. I won't call out specific books that were just OK (or worse), but they do exist. It's damn easy and fast to crank out a Labyrinth Lord adventure that has no sizzle. Just a few rooms on a crude map, some orc stat blocks, a treasure horde, give it a bit of Microsoft Word layout and call it done.

And yeah sure that's really all you need in order to run a fun little dungeon crawl. I totally get that. Hell you don't even need that. You can crank that shit out in a few minutes. But it is nice when someone else does the work. And let's face it... that's the nature of DIY publishing. Very little gatekeeping means you get the good and the bad...

Monday, November 11, 2019

The DCC RPG Tangent Part 3

One more DCC post. Short and sweet to finish this bastard up because I feel like I'm in the "long winded description of your game" territory. And nobody wants that.

The PCs had to deal with The Blue Queen. They found themselves back in their native village, 150 years later. And it was a winter hellscape. They fought some wicked ice witches, contended with a foul witch who gave them some guidance, and somehow ended up on X1: The Isle of Dread... but the island was caught in a time storm and all the dinosaurs were undead. The pirates they encountered (there were pirates) were the ones described in the DCC RPG rulebook... on flying boats. And of course they captured a flying boat and kept it for the next 2 or 3 game sessions.

After escaping the Isle of Dread, they finally confronted The Blue Queen and her 50' ape protector. The wheel of fortune from Hole in the Sky was back, which resulted in one PC becoming a cyborg and another PC becoming a monkey. Which he liked very much.

They killed The Blue Queen. They were now level 4 PCs. I then ran the DCC RPG adventure The Making of the Ghost Ring and we left the campaign as the PCs attained level 5. We have not revisited in over 2 years. Maybe we never will. I don't know. But the entire campaign left me with lots of great RP memories and some new friends. How can you go wrong when your campaign involves space-faring Viking ships, ninja monkeys, cyborgs with chainsaw-action battle axes, and undead T-Rex?

DCC RPG is fucking awesome. It was awesome for me particularly because it did exactly the thing Goodman advertised on the tin... it brought me back to a time when gaming was fun and imagination was king. I was ripe for it too. Like so many other people my age who played RPGs when we were young, this was a thing we badly wanted, and badly needed. It was a net good. DCC RPG told me it was OK to be wildly creative, mixing genres like peanut butter and chocolate, killing characters like a madman, and getting people excited at the table again. And like it or not, sometimes you really gotta be told that shit. It's not always enough to be neutral in game design. Say what you mean, mean what you say.

Of course DCC isn't all good for me. I could nitpick and quibble about the system. While I love the many funky dice I also fucking hate them. I still can't quickly grab a d24 or d16 without carefully examining them. And one of the main reasons I never really got into designing stuff for DCC is because the god damn spell descriptions alone are a huge endeavor. Whereas I could write a B/X style spell in two sentences, you need a solid page or two to write a good DCC spell. And don't even think about patrons. I wrote one patron, which I handed out at Gary Con in the form of a little zine. Hella Nor was her name and I used her in my other DCC RPG campaign which I ran online in my Monday night sessions. It was a bit of a chore. I don't particularly enjoy that side of DCC and perhaps that is one reason the published materials are so popular? Someone else did the labor? I'm not sure.

Anyway. DCC RPG = big fun. 'Nuff said.

The DCC RPG Tangent Part 2

EDIT: Changed the title of this because it's kind of its own thing. I also know how to use "its" and "it's" correctly so blow me.

Continuing what I was saying earlier about my first DCC RPG campaign... no juicy bits here. Apparently I really really want to talk about my DCC game for a minute.

Peril on the Lost City!


The PCs had crashed their cool new Viking ship on a purple planet next to a big pyramid thing. I was only loosely using the content from Peril on the Purple Planet so I made the atmosphere outside absolutely toxic. They got out and realized very quickly that as the weirding sun faded, the air became less breathable. There was a realization that if they didn't find shelter soon they'd die. So they immediately made for the pyramid.

(Sneaky of me, right?)

They ascended to the summit looking for a way in and found it. A trap door. They entered the pyramid and I used the map from B4: The Lost City for the remainder of the adventure. I only vaguely used the contents of B4, allowing the room contents to guide me in certain directions. They were searching for one of the Blue Queen's generals, a demon whose name I cannot remember. They found him locked in a bird cage in the pyramid. Between fighting some kith and dealing with the machinations of the demon in the cage, they eventually set the thing free (something they also did in Hole in the Sky). It didn't help matters.

I don't recall all the events but the culmination of the adventure had them facing a cult of sorcerers devoted to the green stones and the death orms. The green stones, it turns out, were the crystals used to power the Viking ship. But more importantly, the great death orm mother was being summoned in a ritual and, with some clever use of green stones, the PCs were able to sort of take control of the orm (after slaying the entire cult) and took it on a magic carpet ride across the cosmos back to their own home world.

Naturally they crash landed the great, dying death orm in a fury of exploding bits. Plot twist: Their long distance adventure resulted in a huge time lensing effect. They arrived back home after merely 3 days as they experienced it but some 150 years per home time. The Blue Queen had taken over the entire world and was turning it into an ice planet. It was the PCs' actions that allowed her to do this.

Of course they vowed to depose her and stop the madness.


Sunday, November 10, 2019

The DCC RPG Tangent Part 1

EDIT: Changed the name of this DCC RPG sub-thread.

These posts are going to be all over the fucking place, so pardon me ahead of time. This is an act of stream-of-consciousness commentary to summarize/explore my experiences in the gaming community since 2012 (and maybe before). This time it seems that I'm writing mostly about DCC RPG, my entry point to the old school scene. This post has little or no juicy "terrible things about the OSR" bits. If you're here for the controversies all you'll find is my gushing on and on about my first DCC RPG campaign. Maybe next time I'll bitch.

In 2012 I distinctly remember being super-duper inspired to get a local gaming group together and play some DCC RPG. I didn't buy the book until I listened to a couple of episodes of Spellburn, then I pulled that trigger pretty fast. I got the wizard cover because it's the most badass.

It was totally the enthusiasm of Judges Jen, Jeffrey, Jim, and Jobe that got me to buy that book. It was a $50 investment, after all. And I had never held it in my hands. But their description of the rules compelled me. I was all in.

As soon as the book arrived I started pouring over it and I got a group together to play. The first game I ran was with 3 players at my house and the very first die roll of the night killed a zero level character. I think everyone at the table fell in love immediately. It was Portal Under the Stars, the zero level adventure that was in the original printings of the book. It's a solid adventure that you can run in a few hours so I highly recommend it as a starter.


After that we got together relatively regularly with 4-7 players each night. I ran a campaign that got it's start initially with Portal, then with Sailors on the Starless Sea when others joined in. Of course that adventure was memorable and one of my players still to this day mentions his poor little female halfling who was yanked off the ship into the deep where the leviathan waited. He had high hopes for her.

We went from Sailors to Hole in the Sky... this was shortly after I got back from my trip to Gary Con (was it V? I can't remember!). Hole in the Sky had just been published and I snagged it at the con. It was a huge hit with the group and a huge blast to run. By this time our core group was fairly well established and we had a nice party of level 1 PCs.

From that point I started mixing it up with old TSR modules as well as Goodman Games adventures and some homebrewed ones as well. During this time I was creating and publishing materials for Labyrinth Lord more than anything, and playing that game online. But locally, face-to-face, it was mostly DCC RPG. I allowed
myself to just play and have fun with DCC rather than worrying about creating publishable materials.

I used certain items and ideas from those funnel adventures to form the basis for the entire campaign. The key NPC from Hole in the Sky became The Blue Queen, the chief villain of the game. The PCs "worked" for her several times (whose gonna say no?) and eventually became her mortal enemies. I went from Hole in the Sky to the classic D&D module B4: The Lost City... which I mashed up with DCC's Peril on the Purple Planet box set. I had snagged that lovely treasure via the Kickstarter and was eager to give it a spin.

I mean come on. Have you seen Peril on the Purple Planet? It's lovely. So much gamable stuff in that box, so I gamed some of it. Not all of it, not by a stretch. But enough.

I know you're going to ask me, so here is how I mashed it up. If you weren't going to ask and don't care, just fuck right off for a minute while I spew my fanboyish gamer squelchies.

The PCs got the boat from Sailors but didn't get to keep it for some reason. I cannot remember why. Anyway, after Hole they found the boat again or another boat. Again, I'm old and I take shitty notes. The point is they found a Viking style ship. There were some undead monsters too. They had been set on a task by The Blue Queen to find one of her warlords, a demon who had been locked up someplace far away. They had a clue about the location of the ship, which would help them find him.

So they find the ship and it's got this funky crystal-based control panel at the helm instead of a wheel. One of the part members, perhaps Nando the Thief, was able to ascertain its usage. There was a helmet he put on and was shown a vast panoramic view of the cosmos. He made some nice saves and was not driven insane and was in fact able to activate the ship which proceeded to propel them through space at warp speed. It was an epic little session and I remember being quite proud of how I described this event and the players seemed to be hugely into it.

Nando wasn't a good pilot and didn't land very smoothly. The party crash landed on a purple world near a large purple ziggurat. This was, in fact, the pyramid from B4.

Here's Part 1 of this meandering series if you're a completist.

Sunday, February 3, 2019

Void Panther

I used these on the PCs in the first session of Lost Land of Zkoth. They faced 6 panthers in a foliage-dense area in daylight. One of the PCs had a magic eye that allowed him to see the creatures, so there was no surprise roll. They also had a lot of retainers and a couple of beefy NPCs, so I probably should have chucked a lot more panthers at them.

Still, one PC was voided from his left hand all the way to the neck, barely avoiding the torso and head. He yet lives, so don't get out the tissues.

I think these summoned beasts are utilized by the primary enemies of the campaign... a race of strange people from a world far away. They haven't made an appearance yet. I figure more void panthers are on the horizon.

Void Panther


Armor Class: 4
No. Enc: 2d6
Hit Dice: 2+1
Save: F2
Move: 150' (50')
Morale: 11
Attacks: 3 (2 claws/1bite)
Hoard Class: Nil
Damage: 1d4/1d4/1d6 + special
Alignment: Chaotic

Negative space, black as the cosmos, takes panther shape in these sinister summoned predators. No light plays off their form, no glittering eyes or shining teeth - only blackness. They form a pack and hunt their quarry with pack coordination, preferring open landscapes where they can surround or divide the enemy. Moving with great speed and silence, they surprise on 1-3 in 6 in daylight or 1-5 in 6 at night or in darkness. They are able to hide in shadows or darkness with perfect skill, becoming visible only when attacking.

Non-magical weapons hitting a void panther will vanish after dealing damage. A Light spell cast directly upon a panther will destroy it. If the spell is cast in the area, the creatures will suffer 1d6 points of damage, but they will not suffer damage from simply entering a lighted area.

If the creature's attack is successful, the target must save vs. Spells or else the body part that was struck takes on the blackness of the void and cannot be used. Each combat round thereafter, the PC must save vs. Spells or the void spreads to the next adjacent body part. If the chest or head are voided, the PC must save vs. Death or instantly die. Passing any of these saving throws negates the panther's magic and returns the affected body parts to normal. A voided body part is like a ghost and cannot physically interact with the world.

To determine which body part is hit, roll on the table.

2d12 ROLL
BODY PART AFFECTED
SPECIAL EFFECT
2
Torso
Incorporeal, save or die
3-4
Right hand
Incorporeal
5-6
Left hand
Incorporeal
7-9
Right arm (including hand)
Incorporeal
10-12
Left arm (including hand)
Incorporeal
13-14
Right foot
Incorporeal, move slowed
15-16
Left foot
Incorporeal, move slowed
17-19
Right leg (including foot)
Incorporeal, cannot walk
20-22
Left leg (including foot)
Incorporeal, cannot walk
23
Neck
Incorporeal
24
Head
Incorporeal, save or die