An adventure for Rules-Light D&D. [Adaptable to other D&D systems based on personal experience and flexibility.]
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Rule System: Into the Odd (the old version)
Author: Patrick Stuart
Artist: Dirk Detweiler Leichty
Graphic Design & Development: Christian Kessler
A4, with extensive colour illustrations throughout.
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The peninsula of Wir-Heal is built upon the bodies of sleeping Titans whose dreams warp the world. They are waking up. To save reality you must creep into their dreaming minds and steal their Golden Thoughts, sending them back to sleep.
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Silent Titans is an adventure, a work of art, a mystery, a book of post-singularity dream-imagery and local history, and a sensory feast for the eyes. It can be a bit much for some people.
The book includes an overland area isolated by mysterious phenomena, a central town, a scattering of settlements and five unique non-Euclidian dungeons. Brave the strange environment, investigate the dungeons, get the treasure and you can escape. If you are familiar with the general conventions of old-school play or light d20 mechanics, you should be able to expand Silent Titans to any of the main OSR systems.
The book contains advice on creating encounters, an interview with Chris McDowall about his design goals and creation of the ruleset, slimmed down simple character generation that gives everyone a vivid and engaging character to interpret and play right away and an opening encounter designed to kick off the adventure and teach the basics of conceptualisation and play at the same time. So if you have never played or run an RPG before, you can probably run this, all on its own. (That was the intention anyway.)
The players are thrown immediately into conflict with a twisted antagonist who has stripped from their minds all recall of their mission and purpose. As they discover the world of Wir-Heal, and the sleeping Titans who make up its strata, they must find out what is going on; why do wavering dreams from a blizzard of ruined futures poison the air? Why is a medieval world threatened by drone war and extradimensional beings? Why does the Marcher Lord in charge of this frontier town own a sub-machine gun? What are the Titans, where did they come from? And most importantly, who are the players and why are they here?
Silent Titans is set in a world wracked by time spasms and dimensional collapse. In its geography, society, environments and characters are warped or alternate versions of the Wirral Peninsula in North West England. Driven through this like needles through skin, are terrifying shards of a distant, ruined, high-technology reality whose broken weapons and poisonous ontological waste has been dumped and hidden in its own past. It has both sword fights and robots.
Silent Titans combines the fervid, intensely vibrant, Escher-like artwork of Dirk Detweiler Leichty and the strange dream-vision prose of Patrick Stuart on every page, all tied together by the graphic design of Christian Kessler. Its dungeons are also heraldic glyphs, its monsters and characters sprawl across double-page spreads like the figures of an illuminated gospel from a fallen post-singularity world.
For a small price you get; an adventure, a game, an original work of art, a mystery story, a dark science-fantasy paraverse, a sombre warning about the dangers of letting hyperdimensional giant robots run the world, an off-kilter guide to the Wirral Peninsula, so if you ever go there you can freak out locals by pointing out places where you were murdered by a mad pig in a mask.
(In the interests of full disclosure; this book has been accused of racism against the Welsh.)
