[OSSR]Lankhmar - City of Adventure

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Ancient History
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Post by Ancient History »

Fighter 5.
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

Fritz Leibner's Council of Thirteen certainly is a source of Skaven; but it's possibly the inspiration for the variety of [Thing]+Rat monsters that exist in D&D's science-fantasy kitchensink (Ashrat, & Moonrat, come to immediate recollection) solely in populated areas, to undermine humanoid civilization.
Let's just say the stories started weird and got weirder.
I guess it depends if the audience is informed the content is a work of weird fiction, or led to believe it was of some other genre. The thing is, even Ron Howard's Conan was discussed with Lovecraft by Howard from the start to have overlap with the Lovecraftian Mythos. As soon as you imply you're in "sort of" Conanese Hyperborean Ages.

Although, from what little I've read/seen from Fafhd & Grey Mouser about the setting is that it feels more like Jack Vance's Dying Earth 4,999,100 AD than it does look like Conan's Hyperborea ~13,000 BCE. There are no central empires of note, b/c there's no point. There are no proto-expies of historical cultures. The world has fallen into a massive dark age where only iron tools are the highest technology (but cheap fire lances that are super old, also don't exist, possibly lost/forbidden knowledge; or considered not worth remembering to the now fallen Ancients, and lost when their empires broke and cultures collapsed). While the possibility of high technology (magic) is possible to some few, the dedication to sticking with it is always a turn to the inhuman.

Also, having it's own world map that is clearly not contemporary Earth, but also "possibly Earth with +100k years of tectonic movement and the ice caps all melted" style world map.
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Post by maglag »

Mord wrote:The regions in the east of Gondor (Ithilien, Anorien, Cair Andros) used to be more heavily populated, but then the Shadow returned and everything went to shit. The stewards were forced to move the seat of government to a minor fortress-city on the edge of the gigantic military buffer zone that used to be the heartland of Gondor. Much like how the capital of the Western Roman Empire moved from Rome to Mediolanum and then to Ravenna as the military situation on the border got worse and the security of the Italian peninsula could no longer be taken for granted.

I would expect Gondor west of Minas Tirith and south of the White Mountains to be substantially better-cultivated.
This. Tolkien also mentions that even Sauron controls a lot of working farms off-screen in the east to feed his orc hordes at Mordor.
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Post by Starmaker »

Ancient History wrote:and of course, sort of highlights the tendency in D&D to load up on magic items which are often quite scarce in fantasy. Gimli makes it through all of The Lord of the Rings without any magical weapons, for example.
Gimli makes it through The Lord of the Rings without artifact weapons. In the D&D paradigm, his ancestral axe or something is probably at least +3.
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Chapter 6, Lankhmar's Gods
The highest authorities of Nehwon are Chance, Fate, and the Lords of Necessity. They are to the gods as the gods are to men. These powers rule over many planes.

The Lord of Necessity decreed that gods must exist in Nehwon. Capricious Chance decided that these gods would be short-lived and have many of the same weaknesses as men. Fate continues to toy with gods and men alike, and all must accept Fate's judgments.

In order to come into existence, a god must have believers. This does not mean that people like or even worship the god, although worship does make a god stronger and more powerful. All human beings must do is believe in the deity's godhood. The more humans who worship a god, the more powerful the god, but mere belief creates a god. Unfortunately, the qualities which believes ascribed to their deity become his or her actual traits, good or bad.
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Fantasy religion is a funky thing; it's something that every edition of D&D and many fantasy writers have struggled with at some level. There are two essential problems: 1) most of the people are familiar with the concept of god and religion through the Judeo-Christian context, with an intangible, omniscient, omnipotent entity served through earthly churches of various levels of organization; and 2) they want to kitchensink in several different pantheons, mythologies, and cosmologies, many of which are not compatible.

One of the things that fallout of 1) is that most of the "gods" you see in fantasy are not gods as Jews or Christians (or agnostics raised in Judeo-Christian milieu) would understand as "God." They're usually some variety of false god or demon - powerful, perhaps; immortal, maybe; but they might be a flesh-and-blood creature (like Lovecraft's Cthulhu) or they might be a more limited entity in terms of appetites and abilities (like the various Greco-Roman gods). Many of them plain don't exist, at least as far as the narrative is concerned; Conan might curse by Crom, Bel, and Ishtar, but those deities don't take notice and act - maybe because they cannot. Maybe they're all fictions and all religion is bogus. That was certainly a view that many fantasy writers entertained, to some degree.

But it's a problem that strikes at the heart of religion in D&D, and to a lesser extant real world religion: if you can't see them, where are the gods? And if the gods are so powerful, why don't they do things you can see? Any god that bleeds can die, after all.

The only fantasy writer I know that really tried to get a grip on this concept was Terry Pratchett in Small Gods; everybody else was just fucking around. Lovecraft's "gods" were largely alien entities, although the mythology is so confuzzled that you can't tell where the cosmic principles begin and the tentacles end; Robert E. Howard largely borrowed his gods from different mythologies, without caring about their context and without giving them any real screentime - these were gods perhaps closer to what would have been experienced back in antiquity, where you could swear "By the Brass Balls of Poseidon!" but never actually see said orbs unless a sculptor had been really attentive to detail on the temple statue; J. R. R. Tolkien took it a step further - his Valar actually existed, and the Maiar you could meet and interact with, they just took a hands-off approach to things because their Boss told them to; and Fritz Leiber...took a middle road.

For the most part, Leiber's gods are like Howard's gods. You don't have priests regularly invoking miracles, the gods themselves don't come out of Godsland to drum up belief or anything. Some of them aren't even gods as folks would normally understand those things in the D&D context. Certainly, they're not omniscient or omnipotent. But that's okay. One of the upsides to all this is that while Newhon has gods, it has no clerics; instead it has priests - characters of various classes that act as religious representatives and maybe get a special gift. Even by other AD&D standards, this is pretty weaksauce, and to be fair a number of the entities within - the Dead Master Thieves, the Gods of Lankhmar, Death - don't want or have any priesthood.

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My favorite is probably the Dead Master Thieves:
In past centuries, the Lankhmar Thieves' Guild was a venerable, faithful institution. Master thieves were lovingly entombed with their accumulated riches upon their deaths. These Dead Master Thieves were spoken of with respect and affection by thieves still living, and their memories were honored. The Dead Masters were grateful.
These aren't exactly gods; they're closer to undead you can't turn, there is no priesthood. It's ancestor worship where if you try to steal their shit, Great-Grandma rises from the grave and strangles you to death. Very folkloric, even if it's hard on the economy.

None of the gods described in this section use the Demigod/Lesser God/Intermediate God/Greater God formula that Ed Greenwood worked out for the Forgotten Realms and which spread throughout AD&D 2nd Ed. The various gods have avatars and some of their granted abilities are better than others, but that's about as far as it goes. Also, there's no limit stated on a lot of these granted powers, so I'm going to assume they're at-will.

The gods run the gamut from personified concepts (Hate, Death) to individual personalities (Issek of the Jug, Kos, etc.) to more traditional fetishistic stuff (Mog is a giant spider, the Earth God is a volcano, the Rat God is a giant rat, etc.), and the bizarre (Votishal, god of Lawful Good thieves).
All priests of Votishal are lawful good thieves. This is the only case in in which Newhonese thieves may be of this alignment. Votishal-worshippers are extremely intolerant, often kidnapping thieves from other guilds and attempting to brainwash them to become lawful good.
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Look, all I'm saying is fun could be had with the concept.

Basically, in the Fafhrd & Grey Mouser stories, gods and religion are background elements and plot points; when his characters do "get religion," it's necessarily temporary. One of the glaring absences in this coverage is the afterlife; although there certainly is at least one in afterlife and the basic concept of an intangible self that survives physical death in Leiber's work, like a lot of pulp writers he doesn't go into any real detail about it. He might have made up some fantasy cults and religions (often varying shades of corrupt), but Leiber wasn't there to build an entire fantasy mythology that holds up under scrutiny (although he did attend seminary for a bit, which probably influenced a few things).

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Keep in mind that when the Christians were getting started and used the cross as a symbol, the cross is basically a torture device. So you can see the martyrdom/suffering parallels between Christ and Issek, is all I'm saying - and that's before we get to the wine bit.

I can understand and appreciate why D&D designers wanted a more methodical, organized, and hierarchical way to rank gods and their abilities in other settings, but the hodge-podge presented here does justice to Leiber's basic conception of gods as window dressing; these were the kind of deities you'd read about in old histories of exotic places, or in other pulp stories.
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Post by Blicero »

Ancient History wrote: The only fantasy writer I know that really tried to get a grip on this concept was Terry Pratchett in Small Gods; everybody else was just fucking around.
Scott Bakker attacks this question with gusto, although he's defs more recent than Leiber or even Pratchett.
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Post by Username17 »

Lankhmar today reads like pretty generic D&D land. There's no particular reason you'd want to set your campaign in specifically Lankhmar, because the feel is very much just Greyhawk with the serial numbers rubbed off.

Which in a roundabout way says a lot about how extremely influential Fritz was on fantasy as a genre and gaming as a millieu. Other things written earlier do not have the feel of a pickup game of D&D or cracking a Fighting Fantasy book in that way. But after The Swords of Lankhmar, lots of stuff does.

Lankhmar is extremely important to D&D. But I don't know that I actually need literal Lankhmar to be translated into D&D stats at all. Even if this book had done its game mechanical conversion extremely well (which it did not), the whole exercise seems a bit senseless.

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Post by Ancient History »

And in a lot of ways I'm talking more about Leiber than about the material in the book - because it is, ultimately, so generic once you boil it down to half-assed, ill-fitting AD&D 2nd edition mechanics. But mightn't there have been a market for it? I dunno. This isn't the first or even second time D&D had worked to adapt Leiber's Lankhmar, and while some of the AD&D books could get impressively obscure (*cough* historical reference series *hack*) this is about up there with their Conan the Barbarian modules as far as trying to adapt source material to the product it inspired. I think the only reason they didn't do it with Lord of the Rings and Elric is because they legally weren't allowed to.
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Ancient History wrote:Fighter 5.
I guess if you don't display any class abilities, that means you're a fighter.
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Post by Slade »

Ancient History wrote:Keep in mind that when the Christians were getting started and used the cross as a symbol, the cross is basically a torture device. So you can see the martyrdom/suffering parallels between Christ and Issek, is all I'm saying - and that's before we get to the wine bit.
Blame St. Patrick, besides chasing snakes out of Ireland (which is a myth because there are no snakes), he popularized the cross as a good thing.
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Chapter 7, Adventuring in Lankhmar
The Swords of Lankhmar wrote:...the City of Lankhmar, oldest in the world. Lankhmar, thick-walled against barbarians and beasts, thick-floored against creepers and crawlers and gnawers.

At the south of the City of Lankhmar, the Grain Gate, its twenty-foot thickness and thirty-foot width often echoing with the creak of ox-drawn wagons bringing in Lankhmar's tawny, dry, edible treasure. Also the Grand Gate, larger still and more glorious, and the smaller End Gate. Then the South Barracks with its black-clad soldiery, the Rich Men's Quarter, the Park of Pleasure and the Plaza of Dark Delights. Next Whore Street and the streets of other crafts. Beyond those, crossing the city from the Marsh Gate to the docks, the Street of the Gods, with its many flamboyantly soaring fanes of the Gods in Lankhmar and its single squat black temple of the Gods of Lankhmar—more like an ancient tomb except for its tall, square, eternally silent bell-tower. Then the slums and the windowless homes of the nobles; the great grain-towers, like a giant's forest of house-thick tree-trunks chopped off evenly. Finally, facing the Inner Sea to the north and the Hlal to the west, the North Barracks, and on a hill of solid, sea-sculptured rock, the Citadel and the Rainbow Palace of Glipkerio Kistomerces.
This chapter opens with this quote, which are essentially words to conjure with; it's the call to arms for adventurers, to go and explore this great metropolis. Unfortunately, Mister Cavern is seldom a poet, or at least not a good one, and to move from stale description to actual action can be a difficult row to hoe. But the immediate focus of the chapter is not on creating adventures in Lankhmar, but getting PCs to Lankhmar. Three basic options are presented:

1) Bring Lankhmar to your AD&D(R) campaign. That is, drop it wholesale into your game world. Over the horizon? Lankhmar! Not an impossibility, although some of the mechanical challenges from the different rulesets might pose an issue.

2) Bring the PCs to Lankhmar. That is, the PCs go through an interdimensional portal and end up in Nehwon. Leiber was early operating under the idea that different worlds coexisted - today we'd call it parallel dimensions or multiverse theory or whatever the science babble of the day is, but the idea of different worlds (as in, planets) was already currency in the early 20th century, and it only required a little stretch of the imagination and the advent of quantum physics for that to eventually work into different dimensions or planes. D&D was operating in comfortable territory when it developed its cosmology, and Lankhmar can slot right in there as a parallel prime material plane.

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3) And, finally, you can just start up a Lankhmar campaign where the PCs are natives. Easy-peesy.

Then the chapter shifts to Social Levels - I had spared you this, because it's a stupid mechanic, but it's a relative measure of social importance; base rating is 1/3 of your level plus modifiers (minimum of 1, unless you're a slave; maximum of 14, unless you're the Overlord of Lankhmar); SL gives you modifiers to encounter rolls (goddamit) and their perceived SL depends on how the player roleplays (gargle before giving Mister Cavern oral sex).

There's a bit devoted to the government, nobility, and guilds of Lankhmar (including a long list regarding initiation fees and dues, because this is D&D and no matter is too petty), which actually slightly address some of the invisible infrastructure of the city I was talking about earlier. Then there's...the calendar.
Lankhmarts do not number their years, a practice that has led to a myriad of datekeeping systems with the consequence that no one is entirely sure what historical events happened when or in what order. Each year is named for a creature, legendary object, or event. A Lankhmart cycle is made up of the fourteen named years, and record keeping is further complicated by the fact that years frequently change names or have a special name for a single year, going back to their original designation. Each year has twelve months, equivalent in days to our own earthly calendar. Each day is named for a different creature. This is confusing to many Lankhmarts, so days bear numbers as well, though this is not "official" practice.
So...yeah, that means it can be Beaver day (29th) in the in the Month of the Hedgehog, in the Year of the Feathered Death. I'd throw more stones, but that shit was kinda typical in fantasy, and was derived somewhat from older dating systems, and parodied to hell and back by Terry Pratchett (who declared it was the Century of the Fruitbat). Bah, humfuck.

Then we get several important Lankhmart festivals and holidays. Someone didn't think the numbering through, because by my count unless Lankhmar has leap-time the schedule for the ritual first days of Spring and Winter are going to get out of whack pretty damn quick, but who cares? My favorite festival is Vermin Day.
Vermin Day: A relatively recent addition to Lankhmar's calendar, Vermin Day celebrates the city's defeat of the rat invasion and the route of the armies of Lankhmar Below. In the day of the Rat, in the month of the Lion, when the rats and their 13 noble leaders were defeated by the combined forces of Lankhmar, the Gods of Lankhmar, the thirteen War Cats, and (as legend has recast Fafhrd's ghoulish allies) Death himself.

Prior to the festival, rats and other vermin are rounded up by the thousands and ceremonially killed in Punishment square for the entertainment of the watching masses. People in cat costumes prowl the streets, gifts are left before the temple of the Gods of Lankhmar, and carts are fed and pampered throughout the city. The rats of Lankhmar Below, who live beneath the streets, watch and wait, secretly plotting their revenge.
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Furry holiday!

Money in Lankhmar is, of course, bullshit. But it's kind of hilarious.

Iron Tik == Copper piece
Bronze Agol == Silver piece
Silver Smerduk == Electrum piece
Gold Rilk == Gold piece
Diamond in Amber Gluditch == 100 platinum pieces

Which gives my favorite note:
Platinum does not exist in Nehwon.
It's a game attempt to adapt Leiber's fantasy currency names to the bloated AD&D fantasy currency, and basically fails for much the same reason as trying to work out the dollar-to-gold piece buying power conversion ratio fails - D&D has prices set way too high for common goods, because their economy is inflated all to hell and gone.

Then there's basic and boring stuff on random price changes, moneychanging fees, money-lending fees (it is nice for them to acknowledge money-lending is a thing that exists, for once), taxes, fines and lawyer's fees, bribery, and specific stats and costs for new equipment (throwing dagger, throwing axe, and rapier)...and then the chapter finishes off with a long series of random encounter tables; Lankhmar itself gets several subtables, which reminds me of nothing more or less than those in the Sprawl Sites book. Example:
V. Noble
1-2: A dandied nobleman instructs his toadies to start a fight with the party so that he can watch from a safe distance and make useful comments.
...along with a handful of "Standard NPC" stat blocks and some new Magic Items (the veil of trueseeing, cloak of invisibility, rod of climbing (which is not actual magical), diminution potion, enlargement potion, bolts of love, winged dagger, wire of magical diversion, and potion of astral travel). Most of which are just what they say on the tin and all of which found their way into general AD&D magical item storehouses.

Next up: Chapter 8, Adventures in Lankhmar
Last edited by Ancient History on Mon Jul 03, 2017 8:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Thaluikhain »

Ancient History wrote:
Lankhmarts do not number their years, a practice that has led to a myriad of datekeeping systems with the consequence that no one is entirely sure what historical events happened when or in what order. Each year is named for a creature, legendary object, or event. A Lankhmart cycle is made up of the fourteen named years, and record keeping is further complicated by the fact that years frequently change names or have a special name for a single year, going back to their original designation. Each year has twelve months, equivalent in days to our own earthly calendar. Each day is named for a different creature. This is confusing to many Lankhmarts, so days bear numbers as well, though this is not "official" practice.
So...yeah, that means it can be Beaver day (29th) in the in the Month of the Hedgehog, in the Year of the Feathered Death. I'd throw more stones, but that shit was kinda typical in fantasy, and was derived somewhat from older dating systems, and parodied to hell and back by Terry Pratchett (who declared it was the Century of the Fruitbat). Bah, humfuck.
Oh, I like the idea that due to naming conventions people can't agree on when or in what order things occured, that'd be a real headache for historians and could be a useful things for DMs. Naming each day after an animal...not so much.
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Chapter 8, Adventures in Lankhmar

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Come get some.
In all the worlds of heroic fiction, none equals Lankhmar. No other fantastic city evokes such images of adventure, danger, and derring-do. The information in this book only presents the foundation of future adventures both within and outside Lankhmar's walls. The following short descriptions are intended to provide ideas for future adventures or as jumping-off places to multi-session campaigning.
These are adventure synopses. This is actually an insufficient number of adventure ideas, because there's a quarter-page of white space left at the end, like someone just hit their wordcount and said "fuck it." Some of these adventure ideas are serviceable, few are unique to the Lankhmar setting. One example:
A Deadly Sissy
New to Lankhmar from lands far to the east, Count Arykki is widely regarded as a wine-swilling fop, an easy mark for the Thieves' Guild. He is actually a skilled swordsman and acrobat, several levels higher than the most powerful PC.

The counter enters a drinking establishment occupied by the PCs and arrogantly orders the barmaid to bring him more wine. When the girl brings him the wine he takes a sip, then flings the contents of the cup into her face, insulting her loudly. If the PCs do not interfere, several other patrons do and are soundly thrashed. The situation escalates into a brawl, with Arykki finally drawing steel and challenging the PCs to a duel.

Should the count be defeated and survive the duel, he can be introduced into the party as a new PC or may show up in future adventures as a patron, friend, or enemy of the party.
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This is not a good adventure seed. It's not even a good scene in a scenario. It's the opening to a not-particularly original fantasy novel, maybe. The problem is that it focuses too much on the NPC; the PCs are only associated with it by chance. Why are they in the tavern? What if they walk away? What if they set shit on fire? The seed isn't about them, and so they probably have zero interest in it.

Which is not to say that the PCs have to be the protagonists of every narrative, but they damn well better be the protagonists of their own narratives. Samwise' main purpose in The Lord of the Rings might be to get Frodo and the Ring to the volcano, but it's still about Sam getting him to the volcano.

This kind of thing was rampant in D&D, and I think is part of the reason that World of Darkness games took off - the collaborative storytelling exercise let players be a bit more central to things. Well, unless the Storyteller was a complete dick that just wanted to tell a story about their own NPCs. (And, as a Mister Cavern, I can admit it's challenging to create an NPC that can effectively clash with the PCs without dominating them or just looking like a DM-dick NPC. But again, focus should be on the players and their characters.)

On the other hand, you've got some very workable synopses here.
Spies
Sheelba of the Eyeless Face suspects that the Rats of Lankhmar Below are up to something. He offers the party disguises and diminution potions, as well as a substantial reward, if they agree to venture into Lankhmar Below and reconnoiter. Upon entering the underwrold, the PCs discover that the evil Hisvet and Hisvin have infiltrated several major Lankhmart temples, secretly diverting them to evil and using them as paths to power in the city. Returning to Lankhmar Above, the PCs must evade attacks by Hisvin's rat-guards and then convince the city's rulers that the temples have been infiltrated. Can the PCs convince the Overlord and his ministers of the danger before Hisvin takes complete control?
Okay, this is better. Not great, but better. Sheelba of the Eyeless Face is made to hand out quests, and getting shrunk down and going to rat-city is a fun adventure. Once there, I suspect the adventure would go off the rails pretty quick, but at least it focuses on how the PCs get involved, and what the object of their mission is.

All-in-all, however, it makes me miss the harlot table.

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Next up: The Appendices, and we're done.
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Post by Ancient History »

Fourth of July, binging on Rick & Morty, rednecks setting off explosives all around. Let's finish this.

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Appendix 1: Floorplans
It's three pages of generic floorplans. Nothing Lankhmar-specific. This is the kind of gaming resource which was much more valuable before this shit could be found for free with a Google Image search.

Appendix 2: Neighborhood Geomorphs
These are the geomorphs mentioned earlier. They're actually really well done, insofar as they're competently made with some sort of computer drafting program. Three pages.

Appendix 3: Silver Eel Tavern
This is a tavern-in-depth, based on one of the more prominent inns from the Fafhrd & Grey Mouser tales. Every NPC has name and stats, there's a list of food and drink available with prices (a flagon of fermented mare's milk is 1 gold rilk, while a flagon of mead is 2 tiks. I know what I'm getting shitfaced on!), every room has a numbered entry like this was a dungeon. There's a two-page map layout that shows all four flours and the basement (which leads us to the interesting fact that while there are 35 beds, there are only four latrines and they are in a communal shitter on the first floor.), and including the "stairs to nowhere" since the fifth floor has been demolished.

This is actually rather nice - and as a location you can drop it pretty much anywhere - but it's the kind of detail which can be sort of random in D&D products.

This section also has a sidebar on "Lesser Monsters of Lankhmar," because ice cats and salt spiders weren't cool enough to get their own entries, apparently.

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Behold, the majesty of the astral wolf.

Monster Manual Entries
These are actually fifteen full-sized Monstrous Manual page entries, the kind that they used to make so that you could detach and put them in a binder. They didn't do that with these, but apparently they liked the formatting; it's the D&D version of several Nehwon monsters, and basically part of what you actually paid for this product to see. Some highlights:

Behemoth
There are three known species of Nehwon behemoths. All of them resemble killer whales with four stubby legs, and are ferocious predators with no fear of humans. Fortunately, these creatures are rare.
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Nobody tell the sharknado assholes about this.

War Cats are the "military aristocracy of all cat races" and "may be summoned to do battle against anyone or anything that threatens felines." I would love for the PCs to be fighting some sabertooth tigers or wemics or something and then when the cats start to lose they call in the War Cats as backup.

The Cold Woman is a white pudding that projects the illusion of being a beautiful woman, paralyzes her prey, then lays eggs (?) which hatch into baby puddings and eat the victims. When the Cold Woman dies, the spawn fight for dominance and the survivor becomes the new Cold Woman.
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The Devourers are the merchants from "The Bazaar of the Bizarre," which is one of the most infamous Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser stories ever...and basically inspired the Arcane/Mercane. Which makes me wonder why they didn't just use the Arcane/Mercane. Presumably by that point, the Arcane/Mercane were classified as project identity and they didn't want to infringe on their own territory. Which makes me think that if TSR ever did do a LOTR D&D supplement, Treants != Ents.

Nehwon Ghouls are...different. They are not undead, and statwise and as far as character classes are concerned, are basically normal humans. Their hair and flesh is transparent, so only their skeletons are visible, and they normally walk around nude. They're racist against "muddies" (humanoids without "crystal flesh") and have no qualms about eating them (since it "purifies" their victims bodies), and just generally don't care if people die, even other ghouls.
Ghouls consider themselves paragons of civilization and enlightenment. Other races need to be civilized by being eaten. Humans are referred to as "mud-men" since ghouls consider normal flesh muddy and impure. Ghouls can occasionally overcome their cannibalistic natures to join human adventuring bands. They can be overbearing at times as they consider themselves more civilized than lesser, "barbaric," races. Ghoulish women have been known to take humans as lovers, but this is rare.
Weird character idea: blind Nehwon ghoul. Still cannibalistic, but has no idea they look like a living skeleton, not racist. Also, this reminds me, this is a thing now:

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Bunch of adventurers in a dungeon get hungry, decide to eat the monsters. Seriously, that's it. At least they aren't fucking them first.

Ice Gnomes are...uh...not gnomes? Are they? I don't know.
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Some of the MM entries are a little generous in their faith in the PCs' combat abilities:
For every 30 ice gnomes encountered, there is a 3 HD fighter. If 100 or more are encountered, there is also a 4 or 5 HD fighter. If there are 150 or more ice gnomes, they are led by a 6 or 7 HD fighter.
An Ice Gnome mathematician claimed that with a couple million ice gnomes, one would emerge that could challenge the gods.

I mentioned Stardock before, but never went into much detail. It's the tallest mountain in Nehwon, and at it's peak is a series of caves inhabited by strange creatures...if you can get through the Ice Gnomes and Snow Serpents and other hazards. This race is called the Invisibles of Stardock because...they're invisible. Also, they have a natural ability to See Invisible, and keep the Ice Gnomes as their slaves, and ride around on invisible rayfish.
Stardock society is old and decadent. The sterility of invisible males has led to a severe decline in population and threatened the entire kingdom with collapse and extinction. Oomforafor has reluctantly decided to experiment with human-invisible crossbreeding, but the results of these experiments are not known.
"It is strange, sire. The humans have an unusual mating cry."
"What is it?"
"Wrong hole!"
Stardock currency is in the form of strange gems, visible to non-Stardockers only in the dark. These gems are worth 1,000-6,000 gp each to collectors.
And, bigass map aside, that's the book.

A Moment of Reflection
Did anyone need a Lankhmar book in 1993? As Frank pointed out, D&D had been stealing and riffing off of Fritz Leiber's work for decades by this point, and they had already published a number of Lankhmar products. Did this really add anything, besides a probably-mandatory update of stats to the latest edition? Should the creative people involved have aimed higher?

That's always a bit of a damnable question to ask when it comes to adaptations and licensed products, because the question of "should we go beyond the source material?" is bound to offend some fan. And yet...by itself, it feels pretty empty as a product. As Frank pointed out, much of this could have been culled and released in a Greyhawk book and nobody would have known the difference.

If anything, this is a reflection on just how much of a debt that D&D owes to Leiber - and how much of a compromise D&D is, compared to the various products it has borrowed from.
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Occluded Sun
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Post by Occluded Sun »

It has just occurred to me that petitioning the Dead Master Thieves to permit the humble mortals to 'borrow' some of their accumulated wealth, in exchange for promising to repay it on demand, could lead to a supernatural banking system.

What's wealth, compared to wealth with interest?
"Most men are of no more use in their lives but as machines for turning food into excrement." - Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
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