White Chalk: Crow Moon 2/12 (Almanac 25)

The Crow Moon is the second month of the year, according to the Neolithic farmers of the White Chalk Coast . Each month I attempt to update this pariah almanac, with the end result being a calendar for an entire year, alongside supporting encounter and foraging tables, which in turn reflect the seasonal changes.

The first past in the series is here:
https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2025/02/white-chalk-almanac-25.html

The firs month is detailed here:
https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2025/03/white-chalk-cold-moon-almanac-25.html

Further context is provided here:
https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2023/05/white-chalk.html

I've decided to structure the post with the most specific information up front.

Crow by Leonard Baskin (illustration from Ted Hughes' collection of Crow poems)

The Crow Moon is a month of bitter hope. While there are signs that the Spring Princess is on her way (notably the white snowdrops and purple crocuses), it is still a month of frost and snow and cold, wet winds. So optimism is tempered, and prudence prevails. The month is named for the proliferation of jackdaws, magpies and carrion crows feasting on the worms, emerging from the cold ground with faint hope in their tiny hearts.

The Moon Realm

Since posting about the DAWN REALM a few months back now I've had a rethink about how to approach the spirit realms that sit parallel to the Here & Now. For all the novelty of "switching codes" when dipping toes into other places (and the notion that stripping the character down to its essence could be represented at the table i.e. by taking elements from the character sheet and writing them out afresh) the reality is it's disruptive to play. This isn't necessarily bad, but I'm much less convinced it adds anything to the experience than I was previously.

It also reduces the amount of player-facing chaff and allows them to get down to what the game's really about: exiled stone-age psychonauts exploring the spirit realm, just like Dungeons & Dragons [is/used to mostly be] about dungeons and dragons. 

A map of the Moon

Fly me to the Moon

Travel to the Moon Realm requires:

White Chalk: The Cold Moon 1/12 (Almanac 25)

Each full moon I intend to publish an update to the White Chalk sandbox here on this blog, describing the calendar year of a fantasy proto-Neolithic somewhat parallel to the world in which we live. At the time of writing we have already experienced 2 full moons (14th January 2025 and 12th February 2025), so I have 2 further posts due prior to March's full moon.

To begin I have drawn just one six-mile hex, divided further into 1 mile hexes. You can read an introductory overview in this post:

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2025/02/white-chalk-almanac-25.html

Draft planisphere for the first month of the year, discussed below

The Cold Moon rise with bitterness: though the shortest day—the solstice—is already passed, the worst of winter is yet to come. The peoples of the Chalk Coast brace themselves for battery by the cruel winds of the north.

City of a Hundred Gods pt 3/10: further along the Ladders

We return to the Ladders, the slum dwellings on the immediate interior of the City of a Hundred Gods. Day and night encounters are rolled on a 1d20 table found in the post linked below and repeated at the foot of this one.
https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2024/12/city-of-hundred-gods-part-210-remaining.html

The whole city is divided into wards, each one possessing a local spirit elevated to the status of god by those who worship it, both within and without the city. Each ward possess a handful of unique day and night encounters and additional details concerning the god's followers and priests—as well as others living and working in these streets.

Anselm Kiefer, Die fruchtbare Halbmond (The Fertile Crescent)

The Ladders refers  for both the high incidence of ladders to access the irregularly stacked mudbrick housing, but also for the tiny lanes intersecting the two parallel orbital avenues like the rungs of a ladder. It is a tightly packed slum rife with dirt, disease and regular fires.Though the Lord of the Dead treads the clay-tiled streets without fear this is also a place that expresses the wild, complex beauty of human life in all its glorious diversity. The Ladders provide an explosion of colour, scent and sound to rival the most potent entheogenic experience.

CW: animal slaughter, cannibalism

White Chalk (Almanac 25)

I'm so poor at keeping up with these annual challenges, so I thought I'd run my own.

Here is a single, 6 mile hex: it is divided into 30 one mile hexes, because PARIAH is a game of overland exploration (among other things). This is a development of White Chalk, itself an outgrowth of earlier proto-Neolithic Britain thoughts.

Initial 6 mile hex, divided into 1 mile hexes.

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The aim of this post is to provide an overview of a region by zooming into one six mile hex. Over the course of this year, I'll be producing regular posts providing typical events for this region as the game year. These include:

• seasonal movements of birds, animals and humanoids
• weather hex-flower specific to the season/month
• Star charts and astronomical information (meteor storms, eclipses etc.)
• plant and fungi information (foraging for food and medicine)
• human cultural information (festivals, rituals, transhumance etc.)

Like my other PARIAH sandboxes this is set in a fantasy proto-Neolithic i.e. late stone age with many anachronistic elements. Unlike the other setting (City of 100 Gods, Atop the Wailing Dunes, City of Ghosts) the climate is temperate rather than tropical. In fact, the entire map is based on the south coast of England, not least because this particular part of the UK is right on my doorstep—indeed, it is my doorstep.

N.B. This was largely inspired by the many Neolithic sites around Sussex, Hampshire and Kent. If you have come to this blog as an outsider to the weird hobby of RPGs please understand this as a piece of speculative fiction rather than archaeology.

Sorcerous rituals

Previously we exhumed and revived some mystic rituals, with the added details of where they might go wrong if performed by those not fully practised in their execution. This time we're going to look at sorcerous rituals, accompanied by an appropriate image:

Look at that face and tell me it wasn't done by AI

Mystic rituals produce reliable, specific results through complex procedures.

Less reliable (but more flexible) is the magic of sorcery: rituals of invocation, conjuration and binding. Practitioners are called “sorcerers” but possess no special power—beyond knowledge.

• Invocations bring forth a wisp of elemental power: a spell-spirit (see also AHPZ19)
• Conjurations summon elemental spirits of definite form, strong personality and great intelligence.
• Bindings enable the sorcerer to place contingencies on summoned entities, usually through a device and/or a command word
• Summonings are elaborate and highly specific rituals to conjure the most powerful spirits i.e. demons.
• Banishings return spirits to their realm of origin.

DEATH TO THE BLOGGIES

Hahaha only joking. I love the bloggies! 

Consider yourself clickbaited. 

I never do that: haven't previously will never do so again... but I just couldn't resist after Prismatic Wasteland's substack post titled Are the Bloggies Rigged?, which also featured my hilarious Goblin punch joke (uncited). I mean, anything I have to say has to be taken with a pinch of salt given that I was overlooked (thank you, general public) after being a finalist in 2023—see my handmade-by -Zedeck 2023 finalist pin, below!

This is very cute and I love it

Honestly, no sour grapes here, but I do have one or two things to say.

Rituals—including when they go wrong

The process of revising PARIAH continues apace. The most recent uploads to itch.io include two zinis-worth of rituals (amounting to a total of 3500 words), most of which are updated versions of magic previously published here or in PARIAH Vol. Rituals come in two distinct flavours: 

• Sorcerous rituals are concerned with invoking, conjuring, binding and banishing spirits to achieve a variety of magical ends. There are set procedures to follow, but these can be varied.
• Mystic rituals (formerly known as "shamanic") are much more specific in terms of both the procedure and the outcome

Within the world of pariah these rituals can be learned by anyone: there are no special talents or gifts required beyond knowledge. All of the Mystic rituals are learned by pariahs after assisting a set number of times. though not made explicit, the implication is that assisting in a ritual at least once offers some chance of it succeeding if attempted. Simply put, if usually I need to have assisted this ritual 3 times before "knowing" it: if I have assisted on only 1 occasion, I could ty doing it for myself... with a 33% chance of succeeding.

Spread from AHPZ21: Sorcerous Rituals

But what does failure mean, beyond the ritual not working. The sorcerous rituals have a failure system built in: there are displeased spirits, the necessity of entering their debt, and a series of random mishaps. But the mystic rituals are highly specific: it stands to reason that there should be highly specific outcomes for when they go wrong, too... so while I was at first reluctant to share these again, providing failure scenarios alongside them presents a good enough excuse to do so.

Exploring the Dawn Realm (RPG Blog Carnival Worlds Beyond)

This month's RPG Blog Carnival is curated by VDoughnut of VDonnut Valley and is titled: Other, Between, and Under – The Worlds Beyond. I have several of these parallel realities sitting around (or stacked on top of each other, like paper plates), many of which I'm actively working on. So this feels almost a little cheeky. I may have to do another before the month is out to show my seriousness.

This is a post about the DAWN REALM, the nearest thing Pariah has to a the feywilde. It's the source of organic life, illusion magic, charms and mutations where nothing is ever created or destroyed but often converted into other forms.

And while it bleeds, constantly, into the Here & Now, the best way to experience it first hand is through a heroic dose of Dawn Mushrooms.

In essence this is a depth crawl with a guaranteed end, as it uses real time (10 mins = 1 turn, ends after 12 turns) and most encounters are resolved conversationally.

An ink drawing by Jef Cox from Pariah volume 1

Navigating the City of a Hundred Gods—Another Approach to the City

In ancient times a man named Patrick Stuart shared a post about wrapping a dungeon around a die to create a non-Euclidean adventure site: http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2011/09/did-i-invent-this.html

I think about it a lot, and have been playing with multiple iterations of the concept for a number of years... but only recently did I consider it an interesting way to approach the "city crawl", specifically the settlement slowly being described in the City of a Hundred Gods series of posts. 

A hex map of a city, repeating endlessly.