No peace for the heathen — Moving towns #2: Wheeled Holy Towns

Game Design Log #19

First things first: Today will be a short post, as I am hosting friends who came from far away. So possibly, next week I will not upload a post, but the first week of October I will be back with more about “No peace for the Heathen” (and my quest of setting a video-recording station to make a “how to play” for Up is Out).

As I told you in the last post, in “No Peace for the Heathen” (NPFTH) exists a type of native village called Sledging Villages. These are towns that move through Isla Grande following the weather cycles of the island, and that are inspired by the tradition of “la minga” from Chiloé (houses that are slid on long wooden logs to be relocated).

Inquisitors took this idea, and twisted it to create Wheeled holy towns; entire towns of fierce believers that move in eternal pilgrimage on the island, and that are meant to spread the power of their god over the land.

Today I want to tell you a bit about them and give you some tables to create your own…

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Wheeled holy towns — War Lands + Fallen Lands

Inspired by the local sledging villages, conquistadors have constructed wheeled holy towns. These holy towns move in an eternal pilgrimage, to spread the power and control of the all mighty man-king that is their god.

Each one is baptized with a different name, in the arcane language of Inquisitors, you have heard them referred to as “Psalms”.

As they move without following the weather cycles, many of these cities have been obliterated by extreme changes of the weather. These dead-wheeled-holy-towns mark the landscape as corpses of steel, wood, and stubbornness. In them, the spirits of the colonists manifests their violence and penance, they become what they believe, they serve in death the dreams of their man-king-god.

Theocracies, highly hierarchical. They are large, impractical, and cumbersome. Their wheels are gigantic.

Roll a d12 for each column and combine the results to generate the sledging village.

To clarify some entries, read at the bottom of this post everything below the title “Some concepts from the tables”. Also, you can read this post, where some locations of Isla Grande are briefly described. If an entry makes reference to an Inquisitor, you can use the inquisitor’s table at the end of this post. For Conquistadors, you can use any table for soldiers or bandits from the game you are playing.

Who lives in the Wheeled holy towns?

The people who live here are mostly fanatics, mostly settlers, maybe a few inquisitors and very rarely some retired conquistadors.

Roll a 2d6 (d6d6) for each column to generate a villager of the Wheeled Holy Town.

To clarify some entries, you can read the bottom of this post, everything below the title “Some concepts from the tables”. Also, you can read this post, where some locations of Isla Grande are briefly described. If an entry makes reference to an Inquisitor, you can use the inquisitor’s table at the end of this post. For Conquistadors, you can use any table for soldiers or bandits from the game you are playing.

Some concepts from the tables:

Underbelly: Vast underground network of caves. A place of dark omens, only inhabited by strange creatures and the members of La mayoría.

La mayoría: an organization of witches, worshippers of the spirit of flesh and blood.

Blood mutations: A discipline that uses blood magic to transform the flesh, enhance the abilities of mortals, and to create constructs as the Ivunche.

Spirits of the land: Spirits bound to Isla Grande, they can be summoned through a Rite of Calling. Conquistadors have criminalized the worship of these spirits.

Chasm: Gap that lies between the world as seen by invaders of the north and the people of Isla Grande. From it something emerges, a kind of energy that mutates living beings, transforms the world around it, and empowers objects with strange magic.

Prime: This is the maze city of Inquisitors at the north of your land. Under an eternal mist of soot.

San Cor: Vast city of your people, that rises pretentious on war-land, above multiple naturally connected plateaus. It is said that a great ruler of Isla Grande once lived here and buried their heart on the tallest plateau at the core of the city.

What about Dead Wheeled Holy Towns?

What I can tell you about these chasm-fed fallen cities is that they are a centrepiece of NPFTH as places of adventure and peril.

For that reason, I wanted to have more time to properly treat them, and to write an easy-to-follow guide so you can create your own, and all the locations within them. Currently, I’m treating each of these towns as point crawls of 6 to 10 points, with clues that hide in these locations, which point to the different secrets and hazards of the Dead Wheeled Holy Town.

Maybe next time I will tell you more about them.

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Among other things…

I just wanted to share my joy with my first small steps into the world of miniatures.

I just bought my first miniatures, and with the help of a friend, my first paints. So these weeks of sharing with friends will also be my first weeks of touching with my toes the vast waters of this hobby.

Driven by the same desire to get into the miniatures' hobby, I have also fallen into the spiral of reading books from the Black Library (Warhammer 40k books). It was a pleasant surprise to find a science fiction writer that I really like among the authors of Black Library, which made for a good entry point to their vast catalogue. I’m currently reading “Requiem Infernal” by Peter Fehervari and so far, the book seems promising.

I’m also thinking of buying some second hand Perry miniatures, to make some kitbashing and build a small Turnip28 army, but we will see.

Do you play any skirmish miniatures games? Are there any that you recommend I try? Maybe some good solo skirmish game?