The Doctors Ruby have taken advantage of this wildlife mutation to import and breed them to roam the island. Not good for the local fauna, but they soon deal with any unsuspecting visitors in an environmentally friendly manner.
Land Pirahnas are particularly good at detecting methane.
Land Pirahna
First thoughts:
AC 12, HD 2, Bite: 2d4, Kick: 1d4, Tail:1d3
Can use claws for minor effect or tails like cudgels if wanting to leap away, which is not very likely in a kill frenzy. Add morale modifiers for that.
In 2042 the supervillian Dr Ruby apparently died. The Superhero 2044 game setting is post a six day nuclear war in 2003 and in 2029 the aliens from Formalhaut arrived.
Dr Ruby destroyed the premier superteam. Ruby was a geologist and comuter scientist of fantastic ability. In their final standoff he threatened nuclear devastation, he instead ended up blowing up Mount Inguri, causing an eruption, killing most of the team and presumably Ruby.
Not so. His forcefield and lava armour let him escape through a prepared tunnel out of the mountain – traces of which vanished in the volcanic eruption.
Dr Ruby and Force FieldDr Ruby – Lava Armour
The good doctor absconded to Lord Howe Island. Unknown to anyone, Dr Ruby was a team. His sister, a talented spy who could pass for the mysterious doctor and an even better computer scientist and physicist had prepared a lair there. Ironically, in a volcanic shield cone.
There, she had made a breakthrough. Time travel. Limited, in that it could only go to one place and only backwards – around as far as a century. So most of the time she had been working on a base for the pair of them – but off the coast of 1830s to be Australia.
Her brother’s antics provided cash and also distracted the Science Police and the Freedom League from finding out about her and her research.
The fantasy 1830 version of such, anyway. Lord Howe Island is an extinct shield cone – much smaller than it used to be. Natural place for an evil villain lair.
Many moons ago I backed the Blades In the Dark Kickstarter – one of the stretch goals was a supplement based on Steven Brust’s Jhereg series.
I kept checking, then things got way too busy post Google+ death and I hadn’t checked if it actually came into existence.
So, it does! I basically thought to check again because the last book of the Jhereg novel series comes out early next year – a long time reading things one of my all time favourites.
Matteo Ferla has written a python 5E D&D encounter simulator that I have been meaning to get to for some time. Too many real life models to deal with until now.
“One more reflection on the Original D&D wilderness encounter charts. Last week we were using some tabulated charts to decide between two possible rules interpretations, and one was clearly much nicer. But that was based on just looking at the average EHD (Equivalent Hit Dice) for each encounter type, which is maybe a little sketchy. Since I’m obsessive about these things, I wrote a simulator program that actually rolls up the individual encounters (varying the number appearing by psuedo-random dice), and I had it spit out a thousand random encounters for each terrain type.”
This all looks like pretty reasonable results to me!
Looking forward to giving this a shot [with hopefully minimal swearing at java]
ARENA – Java Package for Simulating Original D&D Combat
This code package provides routines for simulating combat in a tabletop Fantasy Role-Playing Game (FRPG) similar to Original D&D or closely-related games. Combat is done as per “theater of the mind” without tracking exact spatial locations; targets of attacks are chosen by random method (as per 1E AD&D DMG). In most cases, the intent here is to output aggregate statistics based on many trials of the game between men and monsters. This package provides only command-line, text output; there are no graphics or visualizations, and generally few options for output regarding individual combats.
For a precompiled JAR executable made from this package, and full JavaDoc pages, visit:
