Wandering Titans, part IV - Hot and Cold, Plus Two More to Complete the Set

This is the final planned entry in a series of Wandering Titans, which are part weather, part giant monster. 

Previous parts with more titans: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

The Plague of Flame

AI Generated via Bing.
"Roman Tile Mosaic of a Rat kaiju towering above a burning city."

 On the horizon (visible in neighboring hexes)
: Smoke rising from burning forests or villages.

Environmental Effect 

:  Intense heat wave. Metal becomes too hot to touch barehanded. Outbreaks of fever-causing disease. Dry material spontaneously bursts into flame. Swarms of smoldering vermin spontaneously generate where you least expect it.

Appearance
:  Flickering apparition of a colossal Rat, wreathed in smoke. 

Behavior / Desires
: Hungry. Devours/burns fields, food stores, forests, and wooden buildings. 

Things to Discover or Encounter Nearby

• Pyromaniac Rat Cultists. Skin pockmarked and burnt. Constructs of flame or smoke fill their wounds, replace missing limbs, and grant a sort of manic undeath fueled by arson.
• The smoldering vermin sometimes contain valuable exotic chemical substances within their bodies. More common is that they contain nasty exotic diseases.
• Exotic fires and unusual forms of heat, which can be bottled by a skilled arcane technician. Floo, Bale, St. Elmo's, an unnamed species of flame that burns songs as fuel...
• Regular fire, too, if that's what you're into.

The Frigid Scapegoat

AI Generated via Bing.
"Roman Tile Mosaic of a giant sheep or goat creature towering above a frozen city. People pray to it."

On the horizon (visible in neighboring hexes)

: Snowstorm contained in a precise cylinder.

Environmental Effect 

:  Cold snap. Flames diminish and new fires cannot be lit. Pipes and vessels of water freeze and burst. Those who freeze to death will find themselves mysteriously revived and healthy when the goat moves on and the landscape thaws, but other harm remains.

Appearance
: Giant Ram with horns like icebergs. Flurries of snow drift out between matted locks of tangled wool.

Behavior / Desires
:  It seems to take a fascination in random things, tilting its head and fixing its eyes in place for hours at a time. Sometimes it takes the things, and not just a fascination. It lets out a massive breath, a downburst of bitter frigid air, causing collateral damage and knocking things aside, leaving only the object of the Scapegoat's interest sitting in a wind-blasted patch. This object - which is always perfectly intact whether it be a a statute, a mural, or something abstract - is then delicately picked up with teeth the size of warships and tucked deep into its fur.

Things to Discover or Encounter Nearby

• Ancient treasures tangled in its locks.
• Ancient people too.
• Also something called "slood", which no longer exists anywhere else.
• Petitioners beseech the Scapegoat to take their sins and obligations. If they attract its attention, it is often willing to oblige. It takes one of their limbs, too, frostbitten and broken off by its terrible breath.
• A caravan of frozen corpses. They corpses in question were people dying of something else, and will become so again once they leave the zone of cold. Their caretakers are trying to hitch a ride towards a specialist magical institution which can help them, but the Scapegoat is currently headed in the wrong direction.
• Lots of ice. Quite valuable in some settings.

And here are a couple bits of human-made giant goat artwork I found inspirational: "The Stilted Ram", by Michael MacRae,  "Summoning a god", by Calder Moore, and "Giant Goatman and his bridge", by Esteban Hernandez

The Fluffy Floppy Megabunny

AI Generated via Bing.
"Hyper fluffy giant bunny seen from below. Titanic rabbit towering into the sky. Tiny angry beady eyes. Ancient Painting."

 On the horizon (visible in neighboring hexes)
: The horizon and clouds in that direction look faintly blurry, as if seen through some lenses of the wrong prescription. Occasionally, a large white cloud seems to rise and then fall.

Environmental Effect 

:  Blades and claws are blunted. Stone becomes malleable. Iron becomes as plastic. Minus 1d6 damage when attacking unarmed or with physical weapons. Minus 1d6 from falling or other impacts, as well. A very faint ever-present mist moderates temperatures while making your hair bouncy and voluminous.

Appearance
:  Like an opaque cloud that leaps and bounds high into the air before slowly drifting back down.

Behavior / Desires
: Oh how it hates! It yearns in its heart to tear apart the pathetic creations of mortals. To trample their farms, and bring their empires to ruin, to lead mindless armies into pointless slaughter, and to hear their lamentations. Of course, none of that is obvious from its vast vacant expression. It just seems to bounce around harmlessly and at random.

Things to Discover or Encounter Nearby

• When the titan lands on top of you, it's said to be quite a relaxing experience, "like a fog made of hugs". It impairs visibility a bit, but doesn't impair movement and only lasts a few minutes at a time.
• Occasionally, patchs of "fluff" can get caught on brambles. These can be magically spun into a something like silk which is bouyant in air.
• Although the softening aura of the titan impedes the function of some devices, it enables forms of otherwise impossible crafting. A train of artisans follow the Megabunny in mobile workshops, creating ornate and durable artifacts out of materials which are difficult to work anywhere else.
• This train has grown over the years into a Wandering Festival which is part carnival and part trade show. In the big top, trapeze artists perform stunts without a net, jugglers juggle swords by the blade, and big dudes punch each other in the head while laughing. 
• Because blades and bludgeons are blunted, the most effective means of dealing with ne'er-do-wells (besides hiring a wizard) is via grappling. A tradition of wrestling has developed in the Wandering Festival, and the greatest wrestlers from all over the world come to demonstrate their prowess. Elaborate costumes are not required to enter the tournaments, but are appreciated by the crowds.
• Lots of happy people.

The Wretched Ape

"monkey"

 On the horizon (visible in neighboring hexes)
: Clouds of dust. Faint tremors and distant echoes of loud noises.

Environmental Effect 

:  Earthquakes.

Appearance
:  Big monkey. (Not actually an ape.)

Behavior / Desires
: It's a big monkey that knocks things over and shakes its fist at clouds. When it jumps around, it causes earthquakes.

Things to Discover or Encounter Nearby

• Things which have been knocked over by a big monkey.

Additional Titans: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Astropost: Astronomical Objects, Their Symbols, and Their Namesakes

I want to play a game set in a mythologized version of the Solar System. So I took some notes on the bits and bobs floating about.

Click to open in a new tab.

 The following is an incomplete list of objects in the Solar System, along with their namesakes and symbols.

Wandering Titans, part III - Making Things Personal

 Part 1, Part 2

Here's another batch of titans as weather. See part 1 for explanation. The unifying factor with this batch is that these titans interact more directly with people. The first stretches the concept of "weather" a bit.

The Hard-hearted King of Dragons

Logan Feliciano
The artist's description is also pretty good RPG brainfuel.

 On the horizon (visible in neighboring hexes)

: Just the dragon's sharp silhouette seen occasionally in the sky.

Environmental Effect 

:  Blades and claws become sharper. Stone becomes unchippable. Bones become unbreakable. Metal becomes impossible to bend.  +1d6 damage when attacking a target without hard armor, like plate or shell. Bouts of dart-like hail impale the ground.

Appearance
:  Gargantuan dragon with impenetrable scales. Wings held wide, blocking out the sun.

Behavior / Desires
: The King of Dragons hoards peace and stability. In a conflict between two states, it will rush to decimate the attacking armies. It will use its breath to turn revolters into glass. And there is nothing it finds more beautiful than a tyrant on their throne. 

Things to Discover or Encounter Nearby

• Sharp nailed dragon cultists on ineffable missions of political espionage.
• Piles of wicked stones, once merely gravel, now made impassibly dangerous by the Dragon King's presence.
• Woodland creatures impaled on supernaturally sharp brambles and branches.
• Beehives and waspnests grown to unreasonable size, their stingers empowered, and their queens driven mad with a lust for expansion.

Radiant Fowl

"The Dragon Prince" background by Michael MacRae, but I doodled a little bird on top. 

 On the horizon (visible in neighboring hexes)
: Light on the horizon. Most noticeable during the night.

Environmental Effect 

:   Brightness that rivals the sun's. Lights up the night like the day (including effects like vampire ensmoldering). Somehow penetrates indoors and into caverns. Don't need light sources, stealth is impossible.

Appearance
:  A giant glowing phoenix, wispy tail trailing off towards the horizon. Or maybe its more of a glowing rooster. The details are hard to nail down because you can't really look directly at the thing.

Behavior / Desires
: Witness it! Witness its luminous glory! This titan wants to be seen, appreciated, and maybe even worshiped. It tends to gravitate towards areas with large populations of people or polished surfaces, where it perches and preens.

Things to Discover or Encounter Nearby

• Fluffy, arm-length, radiant feathers fallen on the ground. They glow so brightly it hurts to look at them. A single small barb casts light like a torch. Frequently leads to deadly conflict between rival feather-hunters.
• Cold-blooded monsters, standing still, eyes closed, basking in the ever-present glow.
• Travelling titan researchers bedecked in reflective protective suits. Despite its proclivity for precariously perching on buildings and blinding pedestrians, it's overall the safest titan to observe and study.
• Nomadic lycanthropes following the titan to avoid transformation, driven only a wee bit mad by lack of sleep.
• Basements and dungeons choked with new sprouted vegetation.

Desiccant Prowler

Nutchapol Thitinunthakorn

On the horizon (visible in neighboring hexes)
: No clouds in the sky. No rain.

Environmental Effect 

:  Rivers and lakes dry up, soil turns to dust, plants wither. Deplete an extra water ration each day. Persistent magical effects falter.

Appearance
:  A dusty striped pantherine thing, surrounded by a thin choking haze

Behavior / Desires
: Lazily tears apart magical protections, sabotages water reserves. It doesn't kill things directly, but its mere presence is hazardous, and it likes to watch things die. Stares down at entire villages or herds as the life drains out of them, and them laps up their souls like a cat drinking milk.

Things to Discover or Encounter Nearby

• Fanatical dust elementals and living stone statues, helping wage war on water-based life-forms. The titan is ignorant of their devotion.
• Arcanohazard disposal teams dragging wagonloads of janky cursed items and failed enchantments into the titan's zone of influence, hoping the beast will rip them apart for fun.
• The desiccated corpses sometimes begin to crawl around and gnaw. Don't let them get their teeth into you, or they'll steal your blood and soul. Outside of the titan's hex, they crumble into ash, which can be sold to wizards for its magic-suppressing and water-absorbent properties.

Kekai Kotaki

Additional Titans: Part 1, Part 2, Part 4

Wandering Titans, part II - Fast and Slow

Giant monsters that are also weather phenomena.

The basic mechanism I suggested in the previous post is to roll 2d6 each day, and move the titan to a neighboring hex when doubles are rolled. Here's a pair of titans brainstormed while thinking about twists to those rules.

Stampeding Winds

Keep track of the direction the titan last moved. Each day, roll 2d6, and use the sum to decide whether this titan continues in that direction (6,7,8) turns left or right (3,4,5;9,10,11), abruptly reverses direction (2) or stalls in place (12).

Donato Giancola

On the horizon (visible in neighboring hexes)

: Swirling clouds, moving at a visible pace, forming and dissolving in the blink of an eye. Distant sounds of roaring winds and hooves.

Environmental Effect 

:  Hurricane-force winds topple structures and knock you to the ground. But if travelling downwind, you'll find yourself magically invigorated and full of energy.  Travelling through the hex in the same direction as the winds provides the same benefits as a long rest. Travelling through any other direction is difficult and hazardous. Exiting the hex in the upwind direction is impossible. 

Appearance
: A herd of charging ethereal stallions precipitating from the air. Clouds run through the sky, and smaller instantiations charge along the ground. Windward, the air speeds up, forming into visible near-tangible wind-creatures, and then slowly dissipate as they approach the leeward edge of the hex.

Behavior / Desires
: Wants to run. Wants to be free. Wants mortal creatures to charge alongside it without end.

Things to Discover or Encounter Nearby

• The smaller manifestations of the Stampede can be captured and used as a magical power source. Poacher-wizards try to do this with elaborate steel wind-traps. But it's dangerous work, as the winds speed up to impossible levels to batter down walls wherever a member of the herd gets trapped.
• Wind-dependent ecosystems of whirlibirds, tumbletrees, and lumbering strandbeests.
• Homes or even entire castles tumbling through the air.
• An encounter with an instance of the Stampeding Winds. If it likes you, there's a chance it will bless you with tailwinds for the rest of the day. Party travels twice as fast until the next time they sleep.
• Travelers hitching a ride on the winds
1. Two blokes calmly rowing along in an airborne canoe.
2. A gang of witches racing along on suped-up broomsticks.
3. A village of people, rapidly evacuated, carrying as many possessions as they could grab from their now-destroyed homes.
4. Bandits in a balloon with long hooks and nets, snatching up possessions that people left behind.
5. 140-years-old woman, hunched over with age, slowly walking with the wind. Hasn't stopped or slept for the past 50 years. Barely kept alive by the sustaining force of the titanic winds.
6. A whale which beached itself and just kept going.

The Ponderous Ox

This one's simpler. Roll 3d6 each day and move the titan when you roll triples.

While the party is awake within the titan's hex, don't advance the time of day, and don't roll for its movement.

On the horizon (visible in neighboring hexes)

: Clouds frozen in midair. Things sound slightly more quiet than they should.

Environmental Effect 

:  Silence. Stillness. Fires stop crackling and flickering, but still give out steady heat and light. Rivers freeze in place while remaining fluid. A diffuse mist fills the air. The sun and moon appear frozen in the sky. Your heart aches with nostalgia for things you've never seen. Loosed arrows slow to a stop and hover in midair.  Rest and rations are optional when near this titan. Cannot gain XP while in this hex. As you travel away from it, time suddenly returns to normal as if you never approached the titan to begin with.

Appearance
: A massive buffalo, with fur like boulders and horns like mountains.  Always faintly visible, far off in the distance, behind the next hill, shaded by the mists. You can always approach the titan, but can never reach it. 

Behavior / Desires
: No one has ever seen it move, or do much of anything at all but slowly breathe titanic breathes. (But surely it must move, for how else can it travel from hex to hex?)

Things to Discover or Encounter Nearby

• Void monk meditating on a hilltop. No, they haven't been following the titan. They've been here in this spot as long as they can remember. The titan hasn't moved in all that time, they say. 
• Small towns that don't exist, fiercely aggressive towards outsiders.
• Strange pillars, can be hacked apart (may trigger localized earthquakes) and sold to wizards to make immovable rods.
• Empty cabins, with a warm hearth and hot soup inside. If you sleep in the soft beds inside, you'll wake up on cold ground outside, weeks later, the titan having moved on.
• Incomprehensible alien geometries slipping through the gaps between moments in time. Probably nothing to worry about.

Additional Titans: Part 1, Part 3, Part 4

Wandering Titans (Monster as a Hex/Weather)

• Idea 1: Storms are fun in hexcrawls.
• See this system of tiered weather tables 
• or this Weather Hex Flower
• Idea 2: Giant Monsters are fun. Yes? Yes.

I trust you see where I am going with this.

Rules

In addition to the normal features of a hex, the presence of one of these Titans adds some sort of environmental effect and additional things to encounter to the hex it's in. 

The Titan should move about the map, but not nearly as quickly as PCs. It's a mountainous lumbering beast. Untested suggestion: Number the 6 hex directions. Once per day, roll 2d6, move the titan in that direction if you roll doubles.

Combat stats aren't given to the Titans for the same reason that combat stats aren't given to a hurricane. 

Some Example Beasties

Flood Serpent

Flood by Sandara

On the horizon (visible in neighboring hexes)

: Towering Rainclouds. Clouds being unnaturally pulled in.

Environmental Effect 
:  Torrential downpours. Banks overflowing. Ankle-deep water even where you might not expect. Poor visibility. Need sheltered high ground to rest.

Appearance
: A raging river, rising into the air, and then flowing wherever it pleases.

Behavior / Desires
: Capricious. Sometimes languidly arcs through the sky. Sometimes rapidly tears apart towns with sadistic glee.

Things to Discover or Encounter Nearby

• Bountiful fauna. Animals flee the floods, but mysteriously more than could possibly live in these areas.
• Strange fauna. Creatures subtly wrong in form. Alien mutations. When killed, their bones perpetually leak water.
• Landlocked Pirates. Special boats that allow them to sail along in the wake of the serpent's storms, pillaging evacuated villages. 
• Her sociable children. In calmer waters within the serpent's hex, you can find strange smaller serpents assigning quests and  promising various wet boons. Personally, I wouldn't trust the things. But if you think stealing a dozen cats in exchange for a sword that gives the wielder extra blood sounds like a good time, that's your prerogative. 

Lucas Roussel

gavi-gavi

Penumbral Hound

by Muroid

On the horizon (visible in neighboring hexes)

: Dimmed sky. Sun sets early if the titan is to the west, and rises late if the titan is to the east.

Environmental Effect 

:  Darkness. Like night during the day. The sun and moon appear constantly eclipsed. Light from large fires just doesn't seem to carry as far. Need held light sources to navigate. 

Appearance
: The stars blacked out by an indistinct silhouette. Two bright eyes like rival moons. An occasional glint of giant teeth.

Behavior / Desires
: Slowly and carefully plod across the forest. It wants to be left alone. It wants to contemplate the stars. It wants to sleep.

Things to Discover or Encounter Nearby

• The cult of Mother's Shadow. Blindfolded titan-worshippers, skilled in echolocation. Core dogma is that none who see the Hound's face should live to speak of it. 
• Wizard vision. Spend enough consecutive time near this beast and you'll begin see the unseen. Permanent if you spend at least a full consecutive lunar cycle in the Hound's hex, or a week there without sleep.
• Shadow pits. Places of deep shadow (small pits, crevices, overhangs) become physically deeper within the Hound's domain. Sometimes open to inhospitable worlds.
• Snarls of titan fur, tangled in tree-tops. Can be woven into coarse, scratchy, uncomfortable cloaks which  cling to shadow and help hide the wearer.

The Swine Which Seeks to Unite the Earth and Sky

MtG card art by G-Host Lee

On the horizon (visible in neighboring hexes)

: Clouds of dust, floating rocks seen in the distance. Occasional tremors as floating chunks of stone leave the area of the beast's influence and come crashing to the ground.

Environmental Effect 
:  The earth reaches towards to sky. Trees grow upwards at visible rates. You feel lighter on your feet and can lift more weight. Random updrafts and downdrafts. Whole chunks of land lift up into floating islands.  No fall damage. Bulky items easier to hold in inventory.

Appearance
: Thick vegetation spiraling upwards into the air, carrying masses of debris with it. Pieces flake off and float into the sky. The entire tangled grove always looks at least vaguely like a giant boar.

Behavior / Desires
: Uproots earthen structures and hurls them into the air. Carefully avoids damaging obelisks and towers. Bows in deference to particularly impressive spires and mountains.

Things to Discover or Encounter Nearby

• Foreign Isles. Some of the large floating chunks of rock have been drifting along behind the Swine for decades, and are host to strange endemic species.
• Skywood. Plants which have passed through the Swine's body become buoyant in air and desirable for building flying ships. Incredibly difficult to collect in large quantity without getting crushed.
• Vanguard Birds. A society of birdmen worship the beast, and zealously attack anyone who comes near (that can't fly). Easy to bribe with shiny objects.

More Titans:

Part 2, Part 3, Part 4