I took it from Wikipedia, which says that it is from the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve in Costa Rica.

Truly, a scenario to warm the shriveled heart of any veteran GM.

From what I gather, there were actually fewer accidents under this system than with the ladders.

There’s even one still in operation, at Sankt Andreasberg where it’s used for maintenance at the local hydroelectric power plant installed in the former mine shaft.

I wish that someone had warned me that one of the most important aspects for picking a system to run is how difficult or complex it is to create NPCs or monsters.

I ran D&D 3.X for a time, which… wasn’t great for that.

Then I ran Exalted 1E and 2E, which were worse.

These days I mostly run D&D 5E, which is (a) vastly simpler when it comes to NPC prep, and (b) has so many stat blocks in both official and unofficial sources that I rarely need to come up with something custom.

A honorable mention goes out to GURPS, which is actually pretty easy to run for once you know what you are doing - first you need to keep in mind that “character points” are mostly for player characters, and can be ignored for NPCs for the most part. Then you also need to keep in mind not do overdo it with defensive stats, or else combat will get bogged down and boring.

The author isn’t wrong, and such issues are worth thinking about when either running campaigns or doing #ttrpg worldbuilding. At the very least, dungeon inhabitants tend to be people or creature who live in this marginal environment because they were pushed away from more fertile regions (such as the fertile surface lands typically inhabited by player character ancestries).

Even if you do use some of this default structure, it’s worth introducing some scenes and elements that could make the PCs (and the players) think: “Hold on, are we actually the good guys here?”

I’ve covered a few tales of the Holle/Hulda/Perchta myth-complex in my translations.

(I see these three as fundamentally the same entity, even if there are major regional variations.)

I’ve covered a few of these tales in my translations.

I suspect that there is quite a lot of overlap with kobolds and household spirits in German folklore.

I suspect that there are quite a few of these in German folklore. I have collected more than a hundred German folk tales of saints and holy people over the last few years, but I haven’t cross-referenced these with the list of canonical saints yet.

I do hope they use the ORC license for this, like they do for their other games.

I hope “Iron Gods” gets updated for 2E at some point, now that Starfinder 2E has been released and is cross-compatible.

Thanks, these are excellent and very helpful!

A good fit, thanks!

I mean, I realize that the margins in the TTRPG industry are razor-thin.

Still, this doesn’t sound like something that should require a lot of effort.

Yeah, but why should I be the one to do it, and not the company?

Occasionally, the Devil does show up as a fly in German folk tales.

Thanks for this information!

The way I see it, folk tales are basically a bundle of narrative tropes that can be switched out depending on the needs of the storyteller. So when the Wild Hunt narrative spread across Europe, people always tried to make it relevant to their local region. And in regions where there were still fragments of belief in Odin, it is not surprising that he appeared in one form or another - while in others, the Wild Hunt takes on rather stranger forms.

Ultimately, their main commonality is the strange noises you can hear in the countryside at night.

One possibility that might be interesting is if religions have some sort of ceremony that “marks” children for the afterlife of their religion, such as baptism for Christianity. Without this ceremony, the souls of children - or people in general - will develop into other types of spirits, instead of moving on to the afterlife.

I know - I have translated quite a few tales of witches’ gatherings.

Still, the insect that flies to each person’s head is a rather striking and unique element.

As the linked story shows, religious parents could be very distraught if they thought that their children would not end up in the same afterlife as they did.

So what happens if the parents end up in different afterlives? It’s certainly something to ponder.