the Fiends OF THE SILTS
Mist Piggy setting by Steven Wu
The Supernatural FIEND
The floods of the Silt Road kicked open the gates to the underworld. Yao Guai, devils, demons, and ghosts of legend and myth, designed to scare children into staying close to home in the dark, have re-entered the world, and they want their hunger satiated. Stay out after dark, and you are guaranteed to meet one or more of these dastardly demons. Likely, not surviving to tell the tale another day.
As a kid, the nighttime was gasoline for the imagination engine in my head to create all manner of ghosts, demons, and monsters clandestinely waiting to pounce in the dark. No movie, or illustration in any book was worse than the nightmares of my own making. What if…those were real? What if…time itself is a resource? Or more specifically, daylight?
Many games come with impressive compendiums of monsters. A ‘folio’….of fiends to be used by gamemasters to challenge, thwart, or even punish players. At least in the pre D&D 5e era. Many, or all of these monsters come from creatures of legend/mythology, or famous fiction. Chinese culture is full of its own ghosts, devils, demons, monsters of lore, but I can only control one at a time when summoned!
A PEEK BEHIND THE CURTAIN
Rather than flood the game with a book full of monsters, barely a difference between them, aside from a few stat changes, every supernatural fiend, or category of such in some cases, is intended to feel unique and different from one another. Each inspiring fear in new and horrific ways. Thus, the process is slow, cumbersome, and often involved weeks or months of toiling things around in my head. A proper fright is the goal if characters enter the domain of a yao guai, and the moment that happens, the choices for a player can be removed from the table.
Enter the Zines…
This is why the Fiend-Zines exist, not only do they come with a unique Yao Guai for players to chew their fingernails off over (another pun), but they include a story-hook for gamemasters to quickly and easily drop them into your own game sessions, or at least learn from to design your own fright nights and ‘super’-fights. Zines are the perfect format for this.
While a couple supernatural fiends are found in The Silt Road campaign, zines allow me to unleash others as they are developed instead of a large book of generics. After all, the real fiends are the humans in the game. So grab your popcorn for the long form story, over time we’ll all have a plethora of tales from the crypt to tell.
THE PRICE OF FEAR
Being afraid induces various uncontrollable reactions in the body. This was a fun mechanic to build into the game. Some characters you build are better equipped to handle frightening encounters, the higher the WILLPOWER skill, the more dice you can roll. However, the more powerful or incredible a supernatural fiend it, the higher their FEAR FACTOR. A Fear Factor of 3 for example, requires a player to roll 3 or more successes to avoid succumbing to fear. If unbeaten, a roll is required each round until defeated, but each failure incurs a price.
FIGHT, FLIGHT, FREEZE!!! A failed roll means the gamemaster rolls a D3 to determine the outcome for your character. Using the dice roll (1-2, 3-4, or 5-6) triggers either —
FIGHT — you have no choice but to attack on your turn uncontrollably (no skill dice are rolled).
FLIGHT — you must use both actions on your turn to RUN, leaving behind your friends/companions to fend for themselves against this dark force. This continues each round unless you succeed at a Fear Factor roll on your turn.
FREEZE — you lose all actions on your turn. Your character is frozen in place and cannot attack, defend, or run away, until and unless you defeat the fear wracking your body.
Now that’s a proper fright!
NO ART — WHAT YOU ‘CAN’T’ SEE, WILL HURT YOU!
A design choice I made early on, was to exclude any depictions of supernatural fiends from the game. I have no intentions at this time to ever include or sanction — drawings, photos, videos, animations of supernatural fiends, and with good cause. What can outmatch the human imagination when it comes to depicting a monster? No game drawing, movie, etc has ever shown me something worse than what I can imagine.
I never looked at the AD&D Monster Manuals and felt a fright, so why try? When these beasts of the underworld are encountered, a description is all that is needed. Each and every player seated at the table, will conjure their own nightmare in their head. They feel the tension, rather than being distracted by a miniature figure of the fiend suddenly placed upon the map in front of them. Theatre of the mind in full, unadulterated form.
THE WORST FIEND OF ALL!!!
HUMANS SUCK!
That’s the lesson conveyed by Robert Kirkman, creator/write of The Walking Dead comic which inspired the popular TV show. I watched the early seasons, I think I ended with the ‘Lucille’ episode. A clear takeaway was Kirkman’s intended or unintended message — the true monsters, are the living, not the dead.
This inspired my own fiend design strategy. When it started during the lockdowns, the game missions were Scooby-Doo-style ‘monster of the week’. Episodics for the kids, where each monster always turned out to be a real human villain with nefarious aims. This evolved as the game became more in line with my vision — a gritty martial arts combat simulator, with limited resources, lo-magic, and survival horror components to keep the stakes high and create tension and agency like real life martial arts combat. Answering the — “why are we fighting all the time?”, question.
Evolving this theme into The Silt Road setting/campaign/story, humans in survival mode, and not in your tribe, become the worst monsters you can face. Natural fiends as they are referred to in the game. The 108 survivors, are your tribe. Those you have bonded with the in apocalyptic world. Those you have struggled with. Those you can count on when you re-enter the post-apocalyptic environment and find human fiends waiting to take everything you have, including your lives.
TIME FIGHTERS
Thus, as long as players avoid the night, fighting against time itself to return to safe shelter before their most powerful ally falls below the horizon, they will spend their days battling the darkest fiends they can find — humans in survival mode that want everything you have.
~FIN
