The City in Darkness

Shrouded in perpetual darkness, the City in Darkness floats impossibly within a void of absolute nothingness. The flickering glow of thousands of lanterns and torches casts an eerie light upon a colossal rock, suspended in the vast expanse of space. Perched atop this rock are tightly clustered buildings, reaching ever skyward toward an empty, starless sky.

This blog endeavors to chronicle the mysteries of this enigmatic city and hopefully, in the process, improve my writing skills.

Fey Ancestry

Here’s another quick and easy encounter, designed to make a player feel good because an oft-forgotten ability got them out of a scrape. I introduced this idea more fully in the last post, but in short, I plan to make a bunch of these. They haven’t been playtested yet, so if you use one, let me know how it goes!

The willow dryad’s demand

Target Ability: The Elf Fey Ancestry racial ability.

Ability Summary: Advantage to end the Charmed condition.

Description: An ancient willow tree by the side of the path marks the stream you’ve been seeking this day. Before you can quench your thirst though, the gnarls of the tree twist and expand, forming a door which promptly opens.

A creature, its skin twisted as much as the willow it emerges from appears through the door. It smiles evilly.

”Welcome to my realm. By coming to this place you must offer a sacrifice. Except for you my child (referring the the PC with Fey Ancestry), welcome home”.

The fey demands the sacrifice of a magic item of any rarity. Alternatively the PCs could run, fight(use the Dryad stats from the Monster Manual for an easy fight) or try to talk their way out of it. In any of those cases though, the fey is friendly to the fey ancestry PC, considering them a grandchild.

I’ll attempt to write a bunch more of these, so stay tuned.

More Reading

These are my most recent posts:

Short Encounters to Make Players Excel
I plan to publish a series of small, simple encounters for Dungeons & Dragons (5.5e). Encounters that take just a few minutes to solve, and are designed to make PCs feel special because they’re an easy win if you’ve got a particular ability. Not every encounter needs to be complex, resource draining, or a near death experience to make the players feel like they’ve accomplished something. It is a good idea to throw in small, quick encounters between big ones to break up the pace while still adding depth and interest to a campaign.
New Blog, New tools
Just a quick one to say that I’ve updated the blog to a brand new look, powered by hugo and magick.css. Part of this involves getting rid of comments, if you’d like to chat about any of the content on here, or about the gaming tools on the City in Darkness in general, then jump into the City in Darkness Discord. What’s next? I really should get some more writing done, but I’m also working on a Vampire: The Masquerade(V5) character sheet and accompianing dice roller and Storyteller screen.
Introducing my new skirmish game Campaign Managment Tool
In my last post, I mentioned that I’d be spending some time on building gaming tools. I achieved a bunch of things on my roadmap but in this post I want to tell you about a particular itch I had, and how I’ve built a new thing to scratch it. I play skirmish wargames like Necromunda and Mordheim. In these games, there’s quite a bit of admin to do outside the actual playing of the game.
Plans
I’d like to start writing again. It isn’t quite ten years since I started this blog, and the city of darkness is nearing the 20 year mark, but prolonged absences mean I feel like I have more to say on the topic. Lately, I have also been spending more time on the tools I build for myself to aid in wargaming and roleplaying. I might as well write about those here too.
Random UK Ireland placename generator
I combined a list of random placename roots in the UK and Ireland to create a generic placename generator It is extremely simple, there’s no way to clear the list and I can’t bothered capitalizing words other than the first one. I got the base words from Wikipedia and used the frankly awesome Last Gasp Grimoire choose your own generator tool to base it off. Generate Generic UK / Irish Placename
New Year, New Summary
My short break from the blog turned into a little longer than expected, but it’s a new year, so I’m going to start trying to post regularly again. I have a bunch of topics on the backburner in various stages of completion. I’m running a group through the Anabella Girando adventure right now, so I’ll wait and see how this new group handles it before publishing. My town history generator is done, but it needs some tweaking and I’ll probably remove the mechanics associated with town growth, since they don’t add much value.
Dark Albion Review Part 1
I am in two minds about Dark Albion and I can’t quite figure out why. I think I will do my usual steal random bits for Nocte thing, but before that I want to do a more traditional review. Dark Albion is a pseudo-historical setting based on England during the War of the Roses. Notable pieces of pseudo-ness include replacing the Catholic Church with The Church of the Unconquered Sun(TCotUS) and replacing the French with actual frogmen.
Elves
Elves do not exist, a myth, a fairytale. But why then, are there so many stories of their glory, but also their wrath? There are worse things in this world; the undead, dragons, and all manner of savage creatures. There are more beautiful creatures in this world too, unicorns, nymphs and the like. Why then, do the stories tell of the great and powerful elves? The great empires of forgotten ages, elves.
Twitter
I have been tweeting for a while now under the @CityInDarkness moniker. It’s time I added a feed to the blog, so that’s what I did. I tweet about my own blogs, but mostly about all the incredible blogs and ideas that I find around the web. I hope you find it useful.
The start of an adventure.
An introduction to a module I am writing set primarily in the City: Annabella Girando is the matriarch of a nouveau riche family already on the downslide. Annabella though, is determined to reclaim her Grandmother’s fortune but this time by playing politics, she thinks she can reverse her families fortune in a matter of years, not a lifetime like her grandmother. Lucia Giorando, Anabella’s grandmother was one of the first denizens of the city to venture out in the swamps and communicate with the usually hostile Kobold tribes.