Rate the LotFP Modules!

... because the Dragonsfoot people are doing it with the TSR B series, and I haven't got anything actually interesting to post, I thought I'd do this here.

• Death Frost Doom
• The Grinding Gear
• No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides

1. Which adventure is your favorite? Least favorite? Why?
2. Which adventure do you think is the most difficult? Easiest? Why?
3. What is the one thing, between all the modules, you most wish you had come up with?
4. What's the best "screw you!" moment of any of the modules?
5. If there was one thing you would change about one of the adventures, what would it be?

RPG Resource reviews No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides

Read that here.

Review of No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides

Here.

No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides review by The RPGPundit

Here.

Lengthy No Dignity in Death and People of Pembrooktonshire review now online!

Game Cryer has it here.

Capsule Reviews of NDiD and PoP

Savage Swords of Athanor talks about them here.

I've Identified a Difference Between My Gaming Philosophy and Others'

Reviews of No Dignity in Death and People of Pembrooktonshire continue to trickle in (including private emails and IMs) - today has a batch of reviews on Chgowiz's blog here - and I notice a common element of the reviews.

"Some DMs might quibble that no stats are given for the NPCs, but that makes this book useful in that its system neutrality makes it accessible to all." - from the review linked above.

"I was mildly disappointed that Raggi made no effort to place these NPCs within the game context of D&D and its clones/simulacra..." - from the Grognardia review.

Those are just the publicly available comments of that sort.

The "system neutrality" is a by-product of my philosophy, after-the-fact residue, not an intentional feature of the book.

Everyone is 0 level (with maybe, maybe, a half dozen examples that are level 1, and that one magic guy who would technically be higher level but it now old and senile and is effectively just a normal guy that remembers just one spell), with generally average stats, and those with better stats made obvious in the text. And 3/4ths of the people under thirty being a bit more physically gifted and a bit less mentally gifted if you're using that one character in your version of the town.

And that's spread between the two adventures.

Stats for everyone else would look like this:

Bob Jones, lvl 0, STR 12 INT 9 WIS 9 DEX 10 CON 12 CHA 11

... repeated literally over 100 times with only the most minor of variations.

It didn't even occur to me that people would wonder if and how any of these people were statistically unusual (and I figured that People of Pembrooktonshire was included in the last line of the Overview on page 3 of No Dignity in Death). In my games, leveled characters really don't fit into or exist within society very well. Town guards, kings, important people... level 0, with few exceptions.

Oh, and Shorten also gave me a plug here. Much appreciated!

Grognardia reviews No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides

Here.

"It's a bold, original product that shows off the true potential of the old school renaissance to use the wisdom of the past as a springboard for new ventures that avoid the mistakes of the past."

No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides, People of Pembrooktonshire, Green Devil Face #3 Now Available!

In North America, order from Noble Knight Games
(and check out Noble Knight's Old School Renaissance section!)
Worldwide, order direct from LotFP!

(Coming Soon: In Finland, order from Arkkikivi)

PDFs will be available from Your Games Now and RPGNow on August 27


No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides
40 A5 pages
5 page PDF Preview

In the distant past, a woman died in agony. A victim of secret forces. In a present so close you just missed it, a woman died suddenly. At the hands of one who now looks you in the eyes. Tomorrow, a woman will just begin to die slowly, as one so chosen died a decade ago. And a decade before that.

No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides tells the tale of a peculiar town of Pembrooktonshire, the home to many mysteries. Here happened a horrible crime whose perpetrator runs free. Here happens a strange festival and sporting competition with dire consequences for its participants. Here happened the tale of an explorer seeking his fortune, and taking several local youths with him into oblivion.

An overzealous holy warrior. A storybook highwayman. A couple outcast for their forbidden love across racial lines.

Civilization is more wicked than any dark wood or deep dungeon.

No Dignity in Death is an adventure module for low-level characters. There are three distinct adventures described within, each fully usable independently or as a linked series.


People of Pembrooktonshire
36 A5 pages
5 page PDF Preview

Isolated, insane, proud. This is Pembrooktonshire!

Inside this book you will find writeups to 137 of the most bizarre, wicked, and unsettling NPCs ever assembled between two covers, as well as details about the town itself.

Everything included in PoP is modular, so you can take as little or as much as you want in order to fashion the town in a manner that suits YOUR campaign! Do you want to run a horror game? Standard fantasy? Comedy? A surrealistic farce? A nightmare dystopia along the lines of 1984 or Brave New World? ... Or all of these at the same time? People of Pembrooktonshire gives you the tools.

Although written as an optional add-on to No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides, most of the NPC descriptions are independent of that module and from each other, allowing you to use them, with very little modification, in any fantasy setting, campaign, or game.


Green Devil Face #3
16 A5 pages

A variety of traps, challenges, and tests of bravery from a number of authors come together between two perilous covers! Included in this issue:

• Pool of Fideceal: A Vexing Dungeon Furnishing by Alfred John Dalziel
• The Heat of Greed by Andreas Davour
• The Hypercube of Doom by Andreas Davour
• Sparkling in the Night by Andreas Davour
• The Zigzag Path of Doom by Akseli Envall
• Beware the Red Stream by Caleb Jensen
• Between a Rock and a Hard Place by James Edward Raggi IV
• The Great Golden Ball by James Edward Raggi IV
• This Is Seriously Unfair By James Edward Raggi IV
• Affluentarium by Settembrini
• Swallow of Summoning by Chris Weller

All LotFP releases are compatible with Advanced, Original, Basic, and Expert fantasy RPGs published between 1974 – 1983 as well as modern “Clone” games including Labyrinth Lord™, OSRIC™, and Swords & Wizardry™.

A Tale of Courageous Hobbits and Dead Wives

Back from Oulu. Took the scenic route on the return trip, so it was over 10 hours in the car.

Apparently a lot happened while I was gone. Swords & Wizardry placed in the Ennies, which is good for them, good for all of us, and good for me as long as everyone remembers LotFP releases are fully compatible with that game. :D

But right now, as I'm supposed to be processing a couple orders that came in over the weekend and preparing the package for the Official Finland vendor for LotFP (anyone else want to step forward for other countries?), I have a little tale to tell about No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides.

I never really wanted to be a full-time publisher. Or should I say, I really didn't intend to put in the work necessary to be one. I was happy putting out my one or two projects a year, available from just my own site, hoping that maybe one or another project would get "picked up" again by a bigger outfit, and being happy with my contributions that way.

... but Brave Halfling Publishing had made it known that they were accepting submissions and getting my name in print in different places was for some reason appealing. An email confirmed BHP was interested in publishing some of my work.

So I looked through what I had in my folder ready to go. First I was going to do one of my puzzle dungeons I'd annoyed my players with sometime back. I hit a wall when writing the actual manuscript (my adventure notes aren't much to look at and would require telepathy to understand as-is). I just wasn't feeling it. So what else did I have in my folder?

"Dead bride. Dead bride. Dying bride." I came up with a few ideas to combine those all into one adventure, and I made a few artwork thumbnails to show the visual presentation I had in mind. BHP was using a "B&W... and red" cover format for their "original edition" releases, and so I did my cover concept in that style. And I submitted it. John (Boss Halfling) liked the idea, so I went about writing the actual thing, and a couple drafts later had something I thought was ready.

My reasoning for seeking an outside publisher:

1. I really didn't want to deal with getting artwork. Laura hadn't completed the Insect Shrine artwork at this point, and it had been almost 9 months. Every other artist I'd dealt with had either declined a further project or simply disappeared after agreeing to work for me. I thought gathering art for another project would take another year and I didn't want the stress. Not to mention making the maps...
   
2. I'm horrible at selling. At least I was at that point. The original Creature Generator did a little over 20 copies, FFV did half that. Green Devil Face was still in the future at this point.
3. As a Serious Publisher, BHP would get its releases into places that I, as amateur publisher, couldn't.
   
4. I was hoping that as a publisher, BHP would perform some hard-core editing duties on my work.

Of course, what I really wanted was for someone to release the thing exactly the way I wanted it released, just without my doing any of the grunt work. After sending exacting art specs and distribution demands and blah blah blah, John let me know that perhaps I'm expecting too much and that it "wasn't the right time" for our collaboration.

I'd already released Green Devil Face by this time this happened (and proving I was capable of sales), and had already announced (and started work on) Death Frost Doom.

Since Death Frost Doom art was already commissioned (and being completed much faster since I told Laura that she didn't need to use that huge A3 paper for the original pieces), I decided to complete and release that first.

But since I was taking No Dignity in Death back in-house and was going to do all the stuff I didn't want to do in the first place, I decided that maybe I should just go all the way with it and do it right. Or at least as right as I was capable of.

As Death Frost Doom was completed, I looked into registering as an official business. Then I found out about the government subsidy for new full-time businesses. In preparing my presentations to convince the caseworkers about my business plan, I convinced myself it was possible (probable is a different story of course).

That was all eventually approved. I was open for business, and things have been going well. Death Frost Doom is in the three-figure sales figures (barely, but it is there) after less than a month in release. It caused a big splash at Noble Knight (I was told that the original shipment to them was expected to take months to sell out). I have two new books plus another Green Devil Face that will be officially released as soon as the post office delivers the big package to Janesville, WI. I'll be finishing the deal for that second Official National Vendor (as I mentioned above) this week, and I really hope their order ends up selling out astonishly fast as well. If I can build a distribution network like that, vendor by vendor, country by country, I may sell numbers so small any "real" publisher would cry and cancel the line immediately, but it just might be enough that I can still do this full-time even when my subsidy ends.

And I have three more projects fully conceptualized and ready to knock out, and in one case, almost totally complete already. And plenty more ideas for what to do after those are done, just waiting to be filtered and fiddled with to determine what's good enough and what's not.

I like my chances.

And now Brave Halfling is preparing for proper distribution supporting games from larger publishers. I like their chances too.

I can't be all dramatic and say "BHP rejected me and thus inspired me to start up a real publishing company just to show 'em," but I can say that if they had accepted No Dignity in Death with all the conditions and demands I had attached to it, Death Frost Doom would never have been at Noble Knight, I'd probably be charting my follow-up release for sometime early next year, and I'd still be applying for "dumb-shit-foreigner-can't-speak-the-language" level jobs.

It's really funny. No Dignity in Death was written first, and as I readied Death Frost Doom for release I was terrified that it was going to be seen as an ordinary dungeon crawl, and I didn't want to be pigeonholed that way, and it was a shame NDiD wasn't coming out first so people could see how wild my ideas were before going into the DFD dungeon.

Now that Death Frost Doom has gotten reviews beyond anything I ever could have hoped (I've gotten some nice emails and IMs beyond what I've linked as reviews), is selling steadily and well, and now that the review copies for the next releases are arriving, I'm terrified that No Dignity in Death and People of Pembrooktonshire are going to be incredible disappointments to people. We'll see.

It's going to be a wild ride, and it's only just begun.

The 137

I just finished the 137 character writeups for People of Pembrooktonshire. Now that goes down to the Proofreading and Quality Control Department here at LotFP Corporate Headquarters (aka "18 inches to my right where Maria will sit on the couch and take the red pen to it and question everything about it") while I do the introductory pages.

This is going to be a 36 page companion book to the No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides adventure module. They will be released simultaneously.

Still waiting on the cover art but I hope to go to press with both of them on Monday. 250 print run on each. Cross fingers.

No Dignity in Death and People of Pembrooktonshire and Green Devil Face Updates

Death Frost Doom seems have been received well and has sold decently, on its small scale, in the little while it has been available.

No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides is complete, save for a final round of proofreading. I even made a mockup (which is about as good as Death Frost Doom in production values) to take around to printers yesterday to get quotes. And oh are there stories about some of these printers. Of the near dozen places we visited, I think only a few of them were actually working on anything. And those were the ones with the best prices.

Glossy covers (with a splash of color for NDiD) with full bleeds for the next releases! That will result in a price increase (but combined with the ISBN that I found out is free to receive in Finland, this will now be theoretically distribution-ready, even if I have no such retail deals set up yet) but seeing as how there is a production upgrade and the thing is 40 pages compared to DFD's 28, I hope you can forgive it. The truth is everything here costs more than in the US (not to mention it's got to be shipped to the US) so the same standard of physical product is going to cost a bit more than the equivalent from a small US publisher.

My only hope is that the amount of content per page (my goal is to have the text be dense yet easily legible) and the quality of the content makes up for it. And starting this weekend I'll have that feature in Roolipelaaja so maybe business will pick up locally.

People of Pembrooktonshire is in progress. Laura's got the art specs and this companion piece to NDiD will just have cover art and is otherwise all text. I'm just about halfway done with the writing, and then it needs proofreading and layout. Actually, I might be two-thirds done. My goal is 137 NPCs with bizarre plot hooks plus some general information about Pembrooktonshire, but fleshing out passably clever and/or weird hooks or twists for this many people is rather taxing. When I get to 100 I'll reasses whether to soldier on to 137, as 100 is a nice round respectable number that wouldn't feel like laziness. The hooks will be a mix of simple oddity, strange coincidence, flourishes of the supernatural, and a healthy dose of the macabre. See ifyou can spot all the references!

I do want Green Devil Face #3 ready with those. It will be produced as it has been, so it won't get the production upgrade. Get your late submissions in quick to pad this thing out to a respectable length. I'd feel weird producing a 16 page issue, but GDF is the community project. I'll gladly do layout and fulfill orders and have a couple entries myself and all that, but forgive me if my creative energies are focused on the paying work!

All work on these projects will stop between Thursday and Monday coming up. Friday through Sunday is Ropecon and my insane schedule of games I'll be running there, Thursday is prep day for that, and Monday I have a periodontist appointment, which should be fifteen shades of fun. But I expect all work to be done by the end of next week, and then we can go into the production phase, and then hopefully a great big ridiculously sized shipment to Noble Knight (with these titles and a restock of DFD). When that arrives and goes on sale there, the new items will also go on sale on my website. And a week later, through the PDF vendors.

And then we'll see if this "Build a Catalog" keystone of my business plan shows any signs of life.

There will be no rest after those are released. Insect Shrine of Goblin Hill will be next, and it will not take forever. This is my job now. After that I can decide whether the Grinding Gear Inn, Stone Hold Sanitarium, or Carcosa adventure will be next. Or whether I should finish up that Random God Generator. Or maybe something new from my own game will jump out between now and then as being well-served to be fleshed out for publication. Or whatever.

I do want to show you two No Dignity in Death art pieces. The book still needs an "official" layout to be done, but I think the mockup is going to wind up looking very much like the final product, so these two drawings are going to be either greatly cropped or shrunk. Here they are in full splendor, click for a bigger version. Both by Laura Jalo.

The Gossipers

Gypsy Wagons

No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides Artwork and Status Report!

Maria has already taken the red pen to NDiD and corrections have been made. She caught a couple of embarrassing textual contradictions that I'm glad didn't see print. Those things are worse than typos! The corrected text is now on her desk again for another go-through.

The artwork is all finished! Here is a digital camera shot of the last thing to be completed: Pembrooktonshire itself. I'll be picking up these last six pieces of artwork tomorrow and getting them scanned in.


This should be 100% wrapped up, including layouts, sometime Saturday.

But that's not a wrap. I am currently writing a companion piece to No Dignity in Death called People of Pembrooktonshire. It's a completely optional, all-"fluff" expansion/supplement/setting giving details about 137 citizens of the town plus adding general setting details. Again, it is completely optional, as only one of those 137 appears in the adventure proper. Without PoP, No Dignity in Death takes place in an isolated, backwater town. Using PoP in its entirety, NDiD takes place in a bizarre, hellish alternate reality where nothing is normal. The degree to which a referee uses PoP is entirely up to him (with only a very few exceptions the 137 are stand-alone characters), and it can also be used as a general weird NPC sourcebook for any setting.

I estimate that to take another couple of weeks to finish, plus whatever time it takes to have it proofread and laid out. There will only be one piece of artwork for it, which will be a "wraparound" cover.

When this is done, it will be released alongside No Dignity in Death. I know won't be nearly as big a deal (I think there was a slight farting noise from the otherwise silent gallery when I was posting bits from People of PembrooktonshirePoP on the blog), but NDiD won't feel complete to me without it, yet it really is unnecessary for the adventure so it needs to be separate, and it would be really lame for those that are interested to release PoP later on because modifications and alterations to a setting in an already-released product are FUCKING LAME. So bear with me.

Well, maybe you'll instead throw vegetables at me for it as Noble Knight has indicated that due to the per-unit costs of smaller shipments, they'll be restocking Death Frost Doom at the same time this stuff is ready, so it'll be around a month's wait before they have it again. Sorry...

In other good news, half of the art debt for Insect Shrine has been paid off. That will 100% for sure be the next project to be tackled. Thanks for all the interest so far in Death Frost Doom, as it has been very encouraging.

And maybe someday I can get the website looking tight as well. :P

Meet the Three Brides

... or at least catch a glimpse of them.


This is just a rough draft of the cover I threw together after receiving the artwork yesterday (more on that tomorrow). Scans need to be cleaned up and color levels evened out, the formatting will be a bit different (I can't imagine the LotFP logo remaining that large, for starters), the text at the bottom will change... but... this is the general idea of what the cover will look like. A little splash of color certainly livens things up, doesn't it?

(and really... nobody caught the reference in Monday's Moo-Cows of Pembrooktonshire?)

Meet Cows #125, 163 and 265, Grazers and Milk-Givers and Good Livestock of Pembrooktonshire

The farms and pastures around Pembrooktonshire are peaceful, rolling, and beautiful. The livestock is healthy, the land is fertile. The usual drudgery and uncertainly that farmers elsewhere face is instead rewarding and profitable here.

Long ago, longer than any of the current citizens can remember, Pembrooktonshire welcomed visitors, had their own men worthy of note, and on occasion had problems common to outlying communities: monsters. All of these qualities are now distant memories, but there are reminders to be found if one knows where to look for them.

Some time back there was an infestation of doppelgangers in the area. Four of them set themselves up in Pembrooktonshire. Their activities were stealthy enough to be undetected by the powers that be, but in their own subtle way, they caused much mayhem, not to mention the number of villagers they murdered, ate, and replaced. They were eventually defeated by a traveling group of powerful adventurers, but instead of killing them, the adventuring wizard decided to have some fun. He polymorphed the four into cows and made sure they did not remember their lives previous to grazing and saying, “mooooo!” Collecting their treasure, the adventurers went on their merry way, never again returning to Pembrooktonshire. The cows became known as good quality stock, giving plenty of milk and somehow never growing old, so they have been sold and thieved and traded by the townsfolk over the years.

Today, cows 125, 163, and 265 are coincidentally part of the same herd again. The three still graze and give milk, but if the magic that keeps them bound to these forms is ever dispelled…

Learn more about Pembrooktonshire in the adventure module No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides, coming soon from LotFP.

Meet Alexandra Morgan, Schoolmarm and Good Citizen of Pembrooktonshire

Ms. Morgan is the local schoolteacher and the foremost authority on manners and custom in Pembrooktonshire. Courted for her expertise when festivals and important events occur, she is normally not engaged socially as most of the townsfolk believe she takes the rules of social behavior a bit too far. Her interpretations of everything from proper dress to courtship are subjects of discussion all over town amongst adults of parenting age. Older folks are set in their ways, and of course the younger folk don’t care.

Or at least they think they don’t care. Pembrooktonshire youngsters are incredibly better behaved than most children after about age nine or so, directly due to the influence of Ms. Morgan. That family-aged adults seriously debate her opinions is no accident either.

Some decades ago, when Alexandra was a pre-teen, a local man set off to seek his fortune. This angered Ms. Morgan as she took this to mean that the perfect town of Pembrooktonshire was not good enough for this malcontent. What an insult! When he returned years later with an alien bride, Alexandra was furious and mounted a campaign of social condemnation that drove the couple away into the nearby mountains (another blasphemy – nobody goes into the mountains!).

She swore such social contamination would never happen again. For decades now she has been the school teacher in Pembrooktonshire, and the prosperity of the town ensures that most children receive at least a basic education. At exam time, Ms. Morgan knows that she has her students’ complete attention and that others would not disturb such intense study time, so she uses her talents at mesmerism to not only impress the real lessons into the children, but make them more susceptible to and place far more importance on tradition and social pressures. Her hypnotism skills are quite weak, and without such a captive audience and an overall environment that supports her intentions, it would never work. But she has both, and so Pembrooktonshire grows more uniform and insular as the years pass by…

Learn more about Pembrooktonshire in the adventure module No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides, coming soon from LotFP.

Meet Rachel Whispers, Landowner and Good Citizen of Pembrooktonshire

Whispers is a comely young widow, just twenty-three years of age. She now runs the decently-sized apple tree orchard that’s been owned by her husband’s family for generations. She’s an able administrator and a kind employer.

Rachel Whispers is scared to death. She became convinced that her husband’s death from falling from a ladder was no accident, and she came to believe their three year old son was responsible. She came to believe he was possessed by a demon. On one stormy night, when she was struggling with the decision to turn him over to the priests, the child said something particularly blasphemous and in a fit of pure terror she killed her only child. Her panic only increased as she realized what she’d done as the boy’s dead, innocent face stared up blankly at her.

Knowing this would mean she would go to the gallows, Whispers brought the body to her secret basement to give herself time to think about what to do next. To her horror, when she woke up the next morning, she found her son playing in the front yard, talking to the neighbors. Firmly convinced of his diabolic nature, she killed him again when he came inside and brought the body down to the basement, no longer troubled by guilt.

But every morning, there the child is, laughing, playing, being seen by the neighbors. And every late morning, she brains him with a cast iron frying pan, or a piece of furniture, or perhaps even stabs him with a large knife. The way she kills her son seems to be different every day. But nothing stops him from being alive and happy the next day.

And Rachel’s basement is getting full…

Learn more about Pembrooktonshire in the adventure module No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides, coming soon from LotFP.

Meet Benedict Onions, Junior Priest and Good Citizen of Pembrooktonshire

Onions is the youngest priest at the church in Pembrooktonshire, yet his artistic talent and impeccable calligraphic skills have caused Father Rhydderch to put him in charge of archiving and copying of old texts (presses being considered too vulgar to duplicate holy works). Onions enjoys his duties immensely.

Benedict is also quite the forger, and is a former employee of the Reuter bookbindery, where he learned the ins and outs of book manufacturing. Onions has been rewriting the chief texts that Rhydderch uses for his sermons one page at a time, and then replacing those pages late at night. The rewritten passages carry the same general meanings as before, but when taken as a whole are beginning to resemble something else altogether…

Learn more about Pembrooktonshire in the adventure module No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides, coming soon from LotFP.

Meet Morris Simons, Composer, Bard, and Good Citizen of Pembrooktonshire.

Morris makes his living composing great musical works for great orchestras in larger cities, but around town he’s known as the minstrel who performs down at the Good Shepherd. He’s a young man for one of his abilities, merely in his mid-thirties, but he has an old haggard look about him. Sometimes it seems like he’s staring at things that aren’t there. His performances always draw a crowd because people never know how he’s going to act.

You see, when Morris plays an instrument, and it doesn’t matter if it’s his lute, a violin, his mandolin, or even his prized dragonskin drum, he sometimes travels through time. There seems to be no pattern, no way to predict when or if it will happen. When he does time travel, he always appears in the midst of other performing musicians, sometimes in rehearsal, sometimes in performance, and a few times, on live television. Because he’s never playing the same thing the others are, the performance breaks down immediately, and when Simons stops playing, he is instantly transported back to his own time at the same moment he left; onlookers don’t even notice that he’d gone. And that’s the moment his performances become eccentric and interesting.

Learn more about Pembrooktonshire in the adventure module No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides, coming soon from LotFP.

Meet Titricia Finn, Midwife and Good Citizen of Pembrooktonshire

A spinster in her early 60s, Ms. Finn is handles the deliveries for the majority of Pembrooktonshire’s births. She’s very good; she’s never lost a mother or child in her care.

While she goes to Church every Sunday and keeps up appearances, Titricia is not what she seems. She worships the Outer Powers, and they have given her a task. After delivering a baby, she takes it into a private room to “be cleaned.” She insists on privacy, and because of her flawless reputation, no one argues. Here the child is traded to an agent of the Outer Powers for a changeling; a facsimile of the child so perfect that neither the parents nor child will ever realize it isn’t a natural human. Changelings are more impulsive and stubborn than the norm, and tend to be more physical than intellectual (-1 intelligence and wisdom, +1 strength and constitution), but otherwise are human. The only clues that they are something else are that protection spells affect them as if they were summoned beings, and because they have no true souls they can never be raised from the dead.

Because she does not handle every birth in town, and because sometimes she just doesn’t have the opportunity to do the switch in time, there is a 1 in 4 chance that any Pembrooktonshire native under the age of 30 is a natural, normal human.

Learn more about Pembrooktonshire in the adventure module No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides, coming soon from LotFP.