I have been doing this for twelve years now. Writing against RPG-a-Day. Against. Again and again. Every day, every August, since 2015. Most often on my own, sometimes collaboratively with others here on d6ideas or across different (German) blogs.
2015: ArtifactaDay
2016: Loot-a-Day
2017: Rival-a-Day
2018: Ad-Blog
2019: RPG+Ally+a+Day
2020: Not One Step Back
2021: Veteran-a-Day
2022: The Thousand Titles of the Cat Emperor
2023: Sommerverdichtung (German only)
2024: CampaignConceptaDay
2025: A-Piece-of-History-Every-Day / Calculating World(s)history
And now? The German next door neighbours at Kritischer Fehlschlag have issued the rallying cry “Crime Scene” (German).
But here? After twelve years of doing this dirty work? There is but one possible answer:
The Dirty Dozen.
Interpreted via the lense of the so called Dirty Dozen of persistent organic pollutants such as DDT and dioxins (although an earlier thought was the likewise so called Dirty Dozen of biological weapons and this might still colour some of the entries).
One-hundred-and-fourty-four poisons and pollutants (in the widest, freest sense). Twelve each for twelve systems. Thirty-one days. Twelve years. Against RPG-a-Day. Again.
At first glance, Freeya might not appear as a particular fruitful world to examine in this endeavour. What is to come out of a pretty generic D&D-style fantasy campaign setting other than pretty generic D&D-style fantasy environmental pollutants – alchemical effluents, magical emanations, monstrous poisons? But Freeya heavily features great – often cyclic – environmental upheavals, ones that at least can be interpreted through the lens of environmental destruction.
- Solokay – Freeya’s evil dragons pollute the environment by their very presence – even throught their long sleep, more so in waking
- Vermay – and the same goes for good dragons, although the effects are less pronounced, now, that they will never wake from their sleep again, and it is just their echoes that still work upon the land and seas
- The Void – planar poisons, a great emptiness, threatening to hollow out all, wherever but a drop of it is spilled over its containment and into the material world
- The Sphere – planar poisons, a great something, chaotic, alien, and where it boils over and gushes into the world, it reshapes at alters it
- Elysian Blood – rubies, blooming after battle, still inimical to freedom and wild nature, a slow poison to fey and the souls of mortals
- Tears of Barar – black diamonds, death within them, spreading necromantic emanations
- The elements – shattered and scattered, wherever their pure substances do accumulate, they alter everything around them, bringing themselves forth again in the world they shaped, rebirthing and reawakening
- Golog’s brood – of the deities of the first circle, Golog is misery, and disease, and poison, and decay, and more than one of the lesser deities he elevated to the circle is but a pollutant given a soul, an environmental poison given godly powers
- Drai – the Drai do their fair share of polluting, but also they are themselves the product of planned pollution, the Solokay’s poison poured over and into the bodies and souls of other creatures
- Drakenkin – less virulently spreading than the Drai poison, the sendings of the dead Vermay have that much more of an impact on the few in whom they take root
- The grey wastes – Naschzar, a land from which colour drains, and whose grey wastes spread with their grey dust
- Stone curse – a poison that already did its work, whatever it might have been, by whatever means the dwarves of Freeya set it free or brought it onto the world, it lays dead and dormant now, after having taken all the dwarves’ children, and all dwarfish women