LESS THAN 48 HOURS REMAIN

Only 46 hours remain for you to back the first issue of In the Hall of the Third Blue Wizard. Featuring contents as advertised, plus "The Devil in the Land of the Rushes", a weird science fantasy hexmap from yours truly. 

That is all. Fly, my pretties. 

How Your Favourite Authors Cheat, Why That's OK, and Why Every DM Should Too

[Warning: this entry contains mild spoilers for A Song of Ice and Fire and The Book of the New Sun.]

When reading an intricately-plotted novel, it is easy to fall into the trap of feeling intimidated by the author's great intellect and technical skill. How can this author have planned this all out in advance?

The truth of the matter is, it is almost certainly the case that the story was largely made up as the writer went along. (If memory serves, Bernard Cornwell and Kurt Vonnegut are notable exceptions.) They have followed Humpty Dumpty's advice and begun at the beginning and kept going until they have got to the end, and then stopped. The intricate plotting really just comes from the author using what he has already written as seeds for future plot developments ("I know, wouldn't it be interesting if the lady in the red hat from way back in Chapter Two turned out to be the sister of the dwarf who I've just written into Chapter Nine?"), and then going back and ret-conning things later to keep things tidy. It's a product of being constantly attentive to what one has written and how it might tie into what one is writing, or imagining, now - coming up with interesting premises, situations and characters and then making connections between them as one goes.

Think, for example, of Dr Talos and Baldanders in The Book of the New Sun. I don't care how much has been read into that book, or Gene Wolfe's writing process, but you will have a hell of a job convincing me that those two didn't just appear as interesting figments of the imagination to begin with ("Wouldn't it be cool if Severian ended up in cahoots with a fox-like playwright and his giant companion?"), who Wolfe later on decided to bestow with much greater significance during the course of the writing of what became The Sword of the Lictor. He didn't plot out the entirety of their role before sitting down to begin the first sentence of The Shadow of the Torturer. He wove it into the telling of the story as it unfolded in the course of the writing. Once it was clear who Baldanders really was, and he had completed his first run-through of what would become the final version of the book, Wolfe then presumably went back and made all the necessary amendments in the rewrite so you couldn't see the "join". 

Think also of Tyrion killing Tywin Lannister towards the end of A Storm of Swords. Did George RR Martin have it in mind that would happen at the start of writing A Game of Thrones? Almost certainly not. The idea that Tyrion might end up killing Tywin may have crept up on him gradually over the course of writing the first drafts of the books, or occurred to him in a flash of insight, but it would have been something that emerged from the story - and how the relationship between those two characters, and the characters themselves, had developed in Martin's mind - during the initial writing process.

What seems like very clever plotting, in other words, is clever, but it is really better described as clever rereading and rewriting. As readers, it is very easy to forget we are not reading the story as the writer wrote it. We are reading the final product of a long process of rewriting and editing: the final version that is presented to the world, not the first draft that was 100,000 words too long and will forever remain locked in the author's attic.

It helps to bear this in mind as a DM. The idea that one could plot out "an adventure" in advance (except for a very simple and boring railroad), or could fill in all the details of a campaign setting before play commences, is a pie-in-the-sky. As with writing a novel, DMing is really an iterative process - it's just that while an author merely riffs on his own ideas, a DM can also riff on those of the players. Events transpire not because they were carefully detailed back before the start of the campaign itself. They transpire because the interesting locations and NPCs the DM has come up with, and the PCs' interactions with them, bring about connections in his mind. It's not that Steffi the Orc was intended to be the PCs' arch enemy all along. It's that Steffi the Orc was captured by the PCs after the rest of her companions were killed in a random encounter, and she was then released, and the DM thought, "Wouldn't it be interesting if she decided to get her revenge? And wouldn't it be nice if she teamed up with Cedric, the hireling the PCs kicked out of their party for stealing, after finding him wandering in the wilderness? And wouldn't it be good if the two of them decided to burgle the PCs' treasure stash while they were away...?"

The exercise comes, in other words, not from pre-plotting, but plotting as a continuous process or flow.

[I am running a Kickstarter throughout April. You can read more about it, and back it, here.]

[I also did a nice interview with the ever-interesting Solomon VK of Worldbuilding & Woolgathering here. You will find it relevant to your interests.]

Books that I like in theory but dislike in practice

The title of this entry is probably self-explanatory, but in case it isn't: there are some books that are recommended to you again and again over the course of your life, or which you see described in glowing terms on repeated occasions, and which you feel very strongly that you ought to like...but really do not care for. 

Here is a non-exhaustive list of mine:

• Little, Big by John Crowley is really the paradigm case. A series of worlds, each contained within one another like Russian dolls, at the heart of which is a faerie realm, and the plot revolves around a house that has been built so as to contain a portal into that realm? I want to read that book very much. Just not the version of it that John Crowley ended up writing. The experience of hearing about Little, Big is one of intrigue and wonder. The actual experience of reading Little, Big is like that of having been dropped into a tin of treacle and being aware that the only way to stop oneself from drowning is to stop struggling and give up, then await rescue. 
• Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. I have made several running jumps at beginning this series, but the fact of the matter is that I just do not like Stephenson's prose - which somehow manages to be  both smarmy and bland - in any of its iterations. I'm willing to believe that it is all marvellously complex, interesting, insightful and immersive - for some people. I'm afraid I'm not one of them.
• Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon. Some books are difficult - indeed, some are nigh on impenetrable - but you feel it is worth the struggle: The Critique of Pure Reason, Thoughts on Machiavelli, the Oresteia, The Mabinogion, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa... many others spring to mind. Books that you may not fully understand, or feel as though you do not, but which nonetheless seem enriching - as though the act of trying to understand them has made you more intelligent. Mason & Dixon belongs in the opposite category: books which are both difficult and substantively slight, so that at a certain point you feel as though to read on would be to somehow damage your soul - like being forced to do a job which is both boring and actively bad for you all at once.
• Leviathan Wakes by James S A Corey. Whenever anybody tells me I should read this, which has happened to me more than a handful of times, I smile politely and say something like, "Sounds interesting" - but deep down inside I am crossing them off my Christmas card list forever, and quite possibly plotting their murder. This is a bad, bad book, though once again the thumbnail description - it's credible semi-hard SF in which humans have only just about colonised the solar system - attracts me. 
• Steven Erikson's Malazan stuff. I am persuaded Erikson can write. I am also persuaded his books are probably the best modern epic fantasy has to offer. And the premise - turning epic fantasy to 11 (no, to fucking 12) with a plot of Byzantine complexity spanning millennia - is one I can thoroughly support. I dipped into House of Chains and really enjoyed it for the first two-thirds or so before it began to get samey and hard to follow. But I have tried to start Gardens of the Moon several times and found it so terribly po-faced that it is beyond cringe - like I would rather crawl into the nearest bin than have to go on reading it. 
• Anything of the Iain M. Banks SF books. I've tried. God knows, I've tried. Is it just that I find the whole idea of the Culture to be stultifyingly dull, or is it just the mundanity of Banks' writing? Then again, why discriminate? It can be, and probably is, both.

What's on yours? 

[I am running a Kickstarter throughout April. You can read more about it, and back it, here.]

Demonic Incursions and Other Shenanigans in the Relationship Hexmap

Years ago (11 years ago - just let that sink in) I wrote an entry about using a hexmap to plot out interpersonal relationships. I deployed this system informally for a Cyberpunk 2020 game I ran for some time, but otherwise never did anything with it.

The basic idea behind the relationship hexmap was coming up with a visual way to keep track of the social dynamics between NPCs. I'm not sure it is actually a great way of doing that, but it is worth fiddling around with. Have a look at this example (and excuse crappy visuals and silly names):

So: blue blobs are physical locations which connect NPCs. Green blobs are NPCs. If I had PCs in there, they would be purple or some other colour, but PCs complicate matters a bit too much. 

The Blue Room is a bar; Frasier, Eric the Red, Miss Moss and Temujin are regulars at it. They are connected to each other through the bar. 

The Art School is an art school; the Cathedral is a cathedral. Same idea.

The circle of people around the Art School (students and teachers) is connected to the circle around the Cathedral (church officials, parishioners, etc.) because Swedish Amanda is a sometime lover of Vivaldi. And it is also connected to the Blue Room because Billy Bob and Caligula have hated each other since they were childhood "friends", and Caligula happens to be married to Miss Moss, who goes to the Blue Room a lot.

Bill and Wendy are a married couple who are otherwise not connected to the other NPCs in the chart.

In the bottom right are Jeremy's gang - a bunch of hoodlums with their eponymous leader. 

Now, the most obvious way of using something like this (I emphasise that I'm aware this is all rather half-baked) seems to me to be to track relationships in an investigative kind of game, whether a police procedural, a Call of Cthulhu style paranomal investigation affair, or whatever. The PCs encounter Vivaldi and ask him questions and pretty soon they're led to Diana Ross and hence the Cathedral, and also perhaps to Swedish Amanda and thereby the Art School and that circle. As it becomes necessary the hexmap expands in size and more and more people are added.

Another use for it, however, might be to function as a visual aid or reference for running a "demonic incursion" type campaign in a location not amenable to geographic representation.

Imagine for the sake of illustration the campaign is about a cell of madmen, eccentrics and weirdos who have discovered that sinister alien presences are manifesting themselves in their local city. One could deploy a method similar to that I advocated here and in the follow-up here, but transposed to an abstract non-physical "map" like the relationship hexmap above. So, what you would do is list the locations and NPCs present on the map in a table, like so:

Dice	Hex
1	0203 Temujin
2	0302 Frasier
3	0303 The Blue Room
4	0307 Vivaldi
5	0308 The Cathedral
6	0309 Bishopy McBishopface
7	0402 Eric the Red
8	0403 Miss Moss
9	0404 Caligula
10	0406 Swedish Amanda
11	0407 Diana Ross
12	0408 Woolly Mammoth
13	0505 Billy Bob
14	0506 The Old Monkey
15	0510 Aragorn
16	0601 Bill
17	0604 Karl
18	0605 Art School
19	0606 Bartholomew
20	0608 The Whisperer
21	0609 Jeremy
22	0701 Wendy
23	0705 The Silver Fox
24	0706 Dorcas
25	0709 Cthulhu
26	0710 The Artful Dodger

Now, instead of generating a "demonic incursion" and locating it on a physical hexmap, you instead associate the "alien presence" you'll be generating on your cool random table with a location or person. So, let's imagine your "alien presence" generator looks something like this:

D6	Base type	Number	Ability Orientation	Motive	Special
1	“Gray”	Single	Combat	Kidnap	Rivalry with other presences
2	Insectoid		Psionic	Raid	Limited time
3	Blob	Pair or small group	Mutation	Breeding	Wounded or sickening
4	Monstrous		Possession	Personality stealing	Driven insane by Earth conditions
5	Robotic	Large group	Manipulation	Study	Non-corporeal
6	Shapeshifter		Confusion	Settlement	Must eat continually to survive

And you roll for your "alien presence" a blobby thing in a pair or small group, oriented towards confusion, with the motive of settlement, and having been driven insane by Earth conditions. And then let's imagine that you roll a 26 for its association, and thus come up with the Artful Dodger. This now gives you the hook: the member of Jeremy's Gang in question sighted these strange presences (maybe the cellar of a house he was burgling) and they deployed their confusion-causing powers to make him blind and scramble his power of speech. He has turned up at Jeremy's hideout and the other members of the gang can't figure out what's wrong with him. Knowing the PCs, they get in touch and ask them to investigate. 

And so on.

C+ so far - must try harder. But I think the effort could be worth it.

[I am running a Kickstarter throughout April. You can read more about it, and back it, here.]

The Incursion Generator Expanded

The other day, I posted a random demonic incursion generator and an example of its usage in a traditional D&D hexcrawl campaign.

Somebody made the excellent point in the comments that you could reskin this method for a more 'fey' setting (perhaps even a New Troy or Summerland), with the demons replaced by faeries, witches, and other fantastical entities, and the Abyss replaced by Faerie/Muspel/'The Woods'/etc. It got me thinking that I may inadvertently have hit upon a method that could have almost universal application for campaigns in which the PCs are the 'good guys' and you want to ensure that player agency remains the driving principle in the context of sandbox style play. All you would need to do would be to come up with a better set of tables than the simplistic ones I put in the entry, and then tweak them for different genres. Hence, for example:

• A Raveloft-esque horror campaign in which zombies/warlocks/ghosts/etc emerge from Hell, Hades (insert afterlife of choice) to bother the living; the PCs are priests, paladins, and the like
• An X-Files affair in which the PCs are paranormal investigators of some kind in a particular region of the world; the intruders are aliens abducting farmers, annoying cows, and so on
• Lovecraft: A band of scholars has discovered the awful truth about the universe; horrible entities from beyond the stars or under the sea keep appearing in the area, and only this group of academics, philosophers and cranks has any idea what they are or how to stop them
• The things in the looking-glass world have found a way to slip into our own, and the PCs are a secret cabal trying to put them back....

And so on. 

This method is also readily transposed between time periods and locations. The four examples I posted above could all take place in more or less any setting; the scholars investigating Lovecraftian interlopers could just as well be Ancient Greeks as 1920s academics; the 'paranormal investigators' fighting off secretive alien intruders could just as well be low-ranking officials in the Inca Empire as Mulder and Scully. 

My own personal interest at the moment is using this method for a longstanding ambition to do Shadowrun properly: it's Cyberpunk 2020, but reality is fraying and the supernatural is intruding into the natural in all manner of terrifying ways... 

The crucial next step is to expand the generator's geographical scope to include not just hexmaps, but also cities and other locations which are not so readily mapped in that way. More on this tomorrow. 

On Being Shameless

There are 10 days to go until the end of my Kickstarter campaign for Issue #1 of my zine, In the Hall of the Third Blue Wizard. We are now well and truly funded (approximately 250% of the target having been obtained at the time of writing), and are drawing close to the single stretch goal - if the campaign hits £8,000, I will include in the zine my never-released sophomoric effort "The Devil in the Land of the Rushes". This is largely unseen, although I did make a post containing some of it here. To cut a long story short, it's a hex map in which the devil has caused time to stand still, thus foiling an imminent assassination attempt 11,111 years in the making.

I recently did an interview with my friend Dan, which you can access at his blog. True to form the conversation rambles a lot, but does include some info about the zine. 

In preparation for the interview I also sent a list of thumbnail descriptors for Issue #1 of the zine's contents. These are they:

• The Well at the World's End by Roger Giner-Sorolla - an essay about the William Morris book of the same name, and how to use it to inform old school play, complete with a usable hexmap and key.
• Offspring of the Siphoned Demon by Ben Gibson - a dungeon based on that oldest of old favourites, the prison of an ancient demon. 
• The Chevrelier by Brian Saliba - a clever piece of flash fiction, or a micro-story; if I described it in any more detail, the description would be almost as long as the story itself. 
• The Beloved and Oft-Recounted Tale of the Marvellous Birth by JC Luxton - a story I recently described to a friend as being "Like Little, Big but good". 
• The Cerulean Valley by George Seibold - a genuine old school hexcrawl, containing everything one could possibly need in such an offering: a near-perfect example of its type (and worth the price alone for the beautifully evocative monster name, "The Nightening Beast"). 
• The Black Pyramid by 'Terrible Sorcery' - a jungle temple built over the cave of a gigantic carnivorous worm which was worshipped by an ancient cult; D&D's answer to a Werner Herzog film? 
• The Hollow Tomb by Harry Menear - described by its own author as "if Chekhov or Gorky wrote as part of the OSR (and were much, much worse) they might have written this". Be that as it may, it's an extremely well-written and put-together module. Again, a near-perfect example of its type. 
• A Turn of Fortune by Jose Carlos Dominguez - an excellent example of an almost non-violent puzzle adventure. 
• She Who Came Once to Oldgraves by Autumn Moore - a really exceptionally good entry in the "dungeoneering fiction" genre I seek to nurture; it has shades of Gene Wolfe, I thought. Whoever Autumn Moore is, they've got talent. 
• Winter in Bugtown by J. Colussy-Estes - it's an underground city inhabited by various sentient insect races and it has "mothman necromancers". YOU HAD ME AT MOTHMAN NECROMANCERS.
• The Garden of Khal-Adel by Zane Schneider - a whimsical-in-the-right-way adventure, about music and sorrowful giants and...flumphs. 
• The Thirteen Dwarves by Jason Blasso-Gieseke - anything I say about this story will spoil it, so I can't say anything, really. 
• Moonrhythm Mire by Dave Greggs - a bizarre and brilliant feast for the senses; OSR DIY D&D turned up to 11.

I think the contents are a nice spread of the fantastical, weird, beautiful, horrible and humorous, and the total word count will be about 55,000 words, 45,000 of which are usable in your game. You can't say that's bad value for the price of two large quarter-pounder-with-cheese meals and a six-pack. 

Random Demonic Incursion Generator Test Case

 

Yesterday's post was about a campaign in which the PCs are figurative or literal knights-errant in a world beset by incursions from the Abyss. I threw together this little illustration of what I meant - the real life version would be much bigger, more detailed and better in every respect.

First, the key to the hexmap, scale 1-mile:

• 00.04 - The camp of a travelling circus, a la Something Wicked This Way Comes. Complete with strange magicians, fortune tellers, sword swallowers, two-headed dwarves, and so on. 
• 01.00 - A forest pool which according to legend is the home of an eel-haired woman, who seduced a wicked local petty king long ago and led him here to his drowning, thus freeing the people of the area from his tyranny. A small sect of nuns and their blind guards have administered a shrine here ever since. 
• 01.05 - A ruined fortress, remnant from the days of an empire long fallen, which once stood on solid ground but is now slowly being swallowed up by boggy wetland that has spread in the eon since the fortress was built. Haunted (natch).
• 02.04 - The village of Confluence, whose inhabitants fish the labyrinth of waterways, walled by reeds, in the basin around the Dank Lake (at 02.05). They were once headhunters, and remain only a step removed from that practice; some of most hotheaded youths are given to recidivism. 
• 02.07 - The Graizelound Hole. A cave buried at the bottom of a mossy cliff face in a thickly-wooded valley called the Graizelound. The hole was burrowed by a race of bearded goblins whose wraiths, along with various outcasts, robbers and monsters, are still purported to infest its tunnels. 
• 03.01 - The camp of the Quiet Company, a mercenary band who, returning from a distant war, have found this region to their liking and taken to sheer banditry. They communicate using their own jargon, a mixture of sign language, whistles, and semaphore. 
• 04.06 - Lord Fane’s tower. The local lord and his thirteen sons and their households inhabit this high tower of red stone, built, it is said, by a race of giants now long dead. Lord Fane himself is a man of honour and dignity, who struggles to keep his rebellious progeny from running wild. 
• 05.02 - The village of Hardgrounded, whose inhabitants fight an unending war to maintain their pastures and fields against encroaching marshland. Given to melancholy and stoicism, they are a people renowned as poets and bards. 
• 06.07 - The Fivestone Gate. A small circle of five standing stones, twisted and scarred by eons of rain, on a lonely hilltop rising from the woods. A gate to the Abyss itself, shunned by all who know of it, but rumoured to be the site of wild bacchanals on black, windy nights. 
• 07.04 - An abbey, home to a brotherhood of monks sworn to administer to a colony of victims of the Treacher Dance. This malady causes sufferers to undergo attacks of bizarre dance-like convulsions without warning, rendering them unable to lead normal lives. Victims come from far and wide to live with the monks.

Now that the basic setup is in place, we come to the Demon Incursion Generator. The idea here is to create a dynamic environment in which the PCs can either act at their own initiative, following up rumours, or be enlisted into 'quests' depending on taste. (Or they can simply go to the Abyss itself to explore, through the Fivestone Gate at [06.07].) Demonic incursions, in order to be interesting, are tied to existing hex contents: the demons are here for a reason, and interact with the natural world in more interesting ways than just "they want to kill people". 

The core of the system would be that every 1d30 days of game time, there is a chance of a demonic incursion (say, 1 in 3). For every demonic incursion, the DM would then roll on a set of nested random tables to find out the type of demon, its mission, where it appears and so on, and use that to create hooks. These tables in greatly simplified form would resemble something like this:

Demon Generator

D6	Base Type	Number	Ability Orientation	Motive	Special
1	Humanoid	Single	Combat	Kidnap	Rivalry with other intruders
2	Hybrid		Confusion	Raid	Limited time
3	Insectoid	Pair or small group	Mutation	Soul-stealing	Restrictions or oaths
4	Reptilian		Dream-inducing	Conversion	Summoned
5	Amoeba	Large group	Disease or poison spreading	Sacrifice	Blessed
6	Monstrous	Horde	Manipulation	Settlement	Wounded or sickening

Incursion Location

D12	Location
1	Travelling circus (00.04)
2	Shrine (01.00)
3	Ruined fortress (01.05)
4	Confluence (02.04)
5	Cave lair (02.07)
6	Quiet company camp (03.01)
7	Lord Fane's tower (04.06)
8	Hardgrounded (05.02)
9	Fivestone Gate (06.07)
10	Abbey (07.04)
11	Random (2d8 for X/Y axis)
12	Random (2d8 for X/Y axis)

So, giving it a whirl, I just rolled for two incursions and got:

• A large group of insectoid demons, built for combat, whose motive is conversion and who have been summoned. The location of their intrusion is random - hex 04.05. Just outside Lord Fane’s tower. I picture a band of many man-sized, bright-red lily beetles with the heads of beautiful women with jet-black eyes and forelegs tapering to narrow points with which to stab victims. They are intent on converting any humans they can find to the worship of their god, Sharagat the Scarlet, and the twist is that they were summoned by a wayward son of Lord Fane, who has been experimenting with demon worship without his father’s knowledge. 

• A large group of reptilian demons, built for manipulation, whose motive is settlement and who are wounded or sickened in some way. The location of their intrusion is 03.01 - The camp of the Quiet Company. Here, I imagine a band of chameleon-things who are capable of heroic feats of persuasion. Having been sickened due to a curse laid upon them by enemies in the Abyss, they have come to the natural world to permanently settle within it. Arriving at the Quiet Company’s camp, they intend to use the mercenaries to conquer a domain for themselves in the region.

So now, hey presto!, you now should have no problem generating hooks from that material. 

I would suggest beginning a campaign with a much larger regional hexmap with many more locations and interesting contents, and a far bigger and more extensive set of tables to generate incursions. I would begin with, say, 6-10 incursions already in effect, so as to generate a set of beginning rumours. (One of these, of course, would refer to the gate to the Abyss itself - and there would be a further set of tables for generating Abyssal contents too.) And then I would have the PCs begin as newcomers to the area who fancy themselves as "regulators" - and watch from there. 

[I am running a Kickstarter throughout April. You can read more about it, and back it, here.]

Into the Abyss: More on Being the Good Guys

 

This is one of my favourite pieces of Diterlizzi's Planescape art. (It's from Planes of Chaos.) On the face of it, it's no masterpiece, though I do like the way it is composed, with that wizard-like figure in the background (is he a friend, another one of the party, or a foe, who the two adventurers have sensed watching them but not yet seen?). What I like about it is what it signifies in its context: this is a picture purportedly set in the Abyss. But this isn't your father's Abyss, all cramped tunnels and lava and torture chambers. No - this is a forest under a crepuscular, starlit sky. It hints at both vastness and variety: hell is infinite, and thus possesses infinite scope for demonic creativity. You're not stuck with the basket of caricatures and cliches that the word "hell" tends to conjure within the mind of modern Western man.* The Abyss, this picture tells us, can resemble more or less anything.

(Rather boringly, the text accompanying the image is about a "viper forest" in which the vines on the trees are snakes. This is one of the main problems with Planescape in a nutshell - a vast canvas on which are ultimately painted rather mundane ideas. I prefer to imagine an infinite forest permanently shrouded in twilight, from which the stars themselves descend silvery entities in love with sorrow.)

In any event, looking at this picture at Easter I return to the theme of rethinking old school D&D from a self-consciously good against evil perspective. The Abyss as an endless pit of malice from which emerge a constantly-changing array of demonic entities to trouble humanity; the PCs as, while not necessarily paladins in the classical sense, knights-errant (literally or figuratively) who wander the land - and perhaps also the Abyss itself - to right what wrongs they can. The underlying theme being something like that informing The Star Thrower; one can't possibly win the war against entropy, but one can win some battles, however small, and that is worth doing. 

My previous post on the topic and the comments mention various ways in which to revamp the XP system so as to reward "rescue" rather than looting. I would also consider it necessary to come up with methods for generating Abyssal layers and also their inhabitants in very wide scope - I would want to have an extensive series of nested tables which produce genuinely non-repetitive, novel results for both. There would also need to be a similar series of tables for generating events - episodes in which the Abyss and its inhabitants come into contact with the natural world - so as to create the feeling of constant and evolving threat. 

What I picture in other words is a campaign set on a hexmap with dynamic contents, in which interlopers from the Abyss appear to wreak a wide variety of wrongs, and which also contains entrances - almost certainly in obscure and isolated places and requiring special rituals or procedures to open - to the Abyss itself. The PCs can engage with all of this content actively or passively: they can wait to be 'hooked' with requests for help, or they can range freely across the sandbox, even delving into the Abyss should they wish so as to find innocents to rescue and foes to smite. 

I wonder if I would even want to egg up the Judeo-Christianity and daub this on the canvas of an ancient Near East, or a Dark Ages Europe, in which the fight against The Accuser is real.

*Yes, I know the "Nine Hells"/"Baator" is also a thing. 

[I am running a Kickstarter throughout April. You can read more about it, and back it, here.]