Fever-flipping-Swamp

The air is moist. The moisture mixes with your sweat — the heat is relentless. The drone of insects gives you headaches, and the fever from the infected wounds has left you delirious. Your raft is damaged, and there are spirits in the trees.

You’ve only been here for three days.

Fever Swamp is a hex-crawl sandbox adventure compatible with Lamentations of the Flame Princess and most other Dungeons & Dragons clones.

Fever Swamp was written by Young Master +Luke Gearing , previously famed for his contributions to the world's favourite outsider role-playing 'zine, The Undercroft, and illustrated by +Andrew Walter, who surreptitiously inserted sigil magic into his work on our previous publication, Crypts of Indormancy, to uncertain ends.

On top of this, +Christian Kessler  and +Jarrett Crader have done an outrageously good job on the layout. The PDF is a thing of functional beauty.


Hard copies+PDF direct from us (PDF now, order shipped when the books arrive)

Just the PDF, from RPGNow

Some thoughts on god

Everything is metaphors, everything is reflected from above downwards. By observing the dramas that unfold between the dragonflys and the bees one can ascertain the movements of the stars.

"Hell" is anything sufficiently removed from the acquaintance of god that it looks like a degenerate satire.

Hell is therefore relative according to your position.

"Heaven" as a definitive end point is nothing like what anyone expects. Multiple heavens therefore exist and represent idealised versions of the sphere from which it is viewed. There may be clouds and naked babies, or it might just be less awful.

Definitive, terminal heaven is inconceivable oneness. Impractical though factual.

When planning a campaign be a seer. From tea leaves you see the future: broaden that. Take the interplay of simple things and apply it to larger scales higher up the ladder. The Demon Sea is the Mariana Trench with bigger fish and plans.

Everything is true, even when you're making it up. If you can't fit everything together now that just means hyper-god works in mysterious ways.

Hyper-god does not work. Hyper-god is not the totality of existence. The spheres are a series of reflections of hyper-god of increasing obscurity. He does not move the spheres, the spheres move in response to him.

Spherical reflections are distorting.

Visiting an aeon

Reflections are different but not independent.

Every campaign as a 70s sci-fi novel. The world is a wall; the world is a tree; owls can't die and are sent here to observe us by some unknown party; golden barges are like boats; they're just spaceships; they're, like, a state of mind man; everyone except the players sees an idealised world while the players see filth and muck (who's right?).

Every campaign as a mystery. Have a complicated network of logic between strange people and things and then introduce the players without any context. They have to learn.

Every campaign as a farce of manners. Social traps: does the snake-crab-thing want us to drink the tea or make the tea? Choose wrong and it might snip off your head a lay eggs in your belly. Do it right and it might let you ride on its shell to the nearest barge repairman.

Campaign ship

A basic campaign structure for Troika! is to give the party a golden barge, or horizon fort, or some other convenient mode of cosmic travel. At the beginning of the campaign they might be aware of a handful of spheres, or parts of spheres, or at least discrete locations. Provide some information about what can be found in these places.

Information handed out like this should be in the same way you'd expect a 10th century sailor would have it. Spices comes from that way sorta and there are dragons there and a fountain that grants eternal life and the emperor owns a tea set that summons swans when served from. There should be desirous things that players may want.

The spiders of the spider bank have found a way to weave more robust golden sails. They refuse to sell it, ensuring their treasure ships are the fastest vessels in the spheres. Getting your hands on it would ensure faster and safer journeys.

While travelling between spheres the players must expend huge resources to fuel the ships. Most of them run on gold, but more elaborate ones might have plasmic engines.

The ship will encounter troubles between places. Go watch the ship episodes of Cowboy Beebop. Turn the ship in to a little dungeon and play the Alien film.

Bad cosmic weather, or too many beasts have attached themselves to the sails and weighed it down. The further you go without stopping to scrape of these horrifying barnacles the more dangerous the trip will be, eventually scraping your metaphysical hull against the tip of a sphere, causing reality to crash right in to you.

Keeping the ship running becomes a driving factor. Making the ship nicer, or getting a better ship, or hijacking and staffing a horizon fort: also fun. Eventually the hold will be full of arcane treasures.

Golden Barge

Horizon Fort