I worked up a 4x6 index card 5e character sheet.

These days I prefer a game that I can fit the whole sheet on a 4x6 card, so I guess 5e succeeds there.

Rotgut of Laramidia part 1: Skeeter Juice

The settlers of Laramidia have found many ways to ease the pain of existence. One of those ways is rotgut, alcohol made with whatever questionable ingredients are available locally. You might wonder why anyone would make let alone drink these concoctions, but they often turn out to have useful properties.

Skeeter Juice - a mix of tequila and saliva extracted from the mosquito people who infest the bayous, skeeter juice deadens pain, granting 1d6 temporary hit points per glass consumed. These hit points last for 2d12 hours. The drawback is that wounds heal more slowly with mosquitoperson saliva in your system. The drinker can not regain hit points for 1d12 hours per glass of mosquito juice consumed.

The GM should make these rolls and keep the results secret. If the imbiber would have negative hit points at the time the effects wear off, they die.

And of course, it’s gets you really drunk too. While under the influence, you have a -1 per glass consumed to all rolls.

As most mind altering substances do, skeeter juice has found it's way to Narcosa.

Shitty Coffee

Only the starving or insane eat the drupes of the purple lotus bush that grows on the Laramidian plains. To do so inevitably leads to addiction and death. But the snake-heads of Tunnel’s End have discovered a safe way to consume the purple lotus drupe. Longhorns are immune to the effects of the purple lotus and often eat them. The enzymes of the longhorn’s massive gut digest the out fruit while leaving the pit soft. When the longhorn shits one out in a pile of instant fertilizer, a new purple lotus bush is born. A snake-head alchemist discovered that when harvested from longhorn dung, these pits can be ground up and added to coffee. This euphoria inducing drink has become known as “shitty coffee.”

Since this discovery, Laramidian drug dens are often called “coffee shops.”

The effects of shitty coffee are unpredictable and last 2d6 turns. Anyone under its influence can also automatically read the script of the snakemen.

Roll to determine the other effects of the coffee:

2d6         Effect

2              Overdose: save vs. Poison or die screaming

3              Terrifying visions: save vs. poison or attack a random person or object

4-5           Bad trip: save vs. poison or take a -1 to all rolls for 1d3 days

6-8           Euphoria and strange visions

9-10         Mind opened: +4 to next roll using Wisdom

11            Vision: a distant place or object is revealed

12           Ecstasy: fall into an ecstatic coma for 1d3 days. When you awaken, you have -1 Con, but +1 Wis permanently. 

Portals to many strange and alien worlds have led to shitty coffee being found in many other places, especially in the land of Narcosa.

Styracomen - a race for 5e

I feel like I'm writing an 80's toy-line cartoon with this stuff.

Styracoman
Ability Score Increase: +2 Con and +1 Str.

Super Fucking Tough: Your hit point maximum increases by 1, and it increases by 1 every time you gain a level.
Age: Styracomen mature by 8 years old. Most adventuring Styracomen are 10-15 years old. They can live to be around 50 years old.

Size: 6 ½ to 7 feet tall usually.

Alignment: Styracomen tend toward Chaos. They are hot-headed and rarely think about consequences. They’d rather headbutt whatever is in their way.
Speed: 30 ft.
Horns and Frill: A Styracoman can make a charging attack that knocks her enemies to the ground. If you move at least 15 ft in a straight line at an enemy, you may make an attack with your horns. On a hit the target takes 1d10+Str bonus damage and you can make a shove attempt (Basic, pg 74).
About Styracomen: Young adult Styracomen are kicked out of their tribes between 8 and 10 years of age. These wandering young often seek adventure for a time before founding their own herd or joining another. Only slight variation in frill coloring distinguishes the Styracoman sexes, non-Styracomen cannot tell the difference. 

Laramidian Appendix N: Gwangi!

Of course one of the major influences for Riders of the Purple Lotus is Valley of the Gwangi. The original cowboys and dinosaurs movie. The image of cowboys roping a dinosaur feels like a natural fit. No wonder, since paleontologists were a part of the landscape of the old west. It was the time of the Bone Wars, after all. It feels natural that you'd find huge animals under the huge skies of west. And the deep time of a place like Arches National Park evokes prehistory from the present.

The trailblazing adventurers roaming the Laramidia of RotPL have it a lot rougher than the cowboys that capture Gwangi, though. This is a lost continent, not just a hidden valley. Huge herds of herbivores eat and trample crops, fearless predators, practically immune to gunfire, have no fear of humans.

Some OSR stats for Gwangi:

Gwangi - Move 180'(60'); HD 15; #AT: 1 bite; DM 4d6; AC: 1(descending)/18(ascending); SA: sever limb, on a natural 20, the target has a random limb bitten off.

Stegomen - a race for 5e

First in a series of posts on humanoid dinosaur races for D&D 5e.

Stegoman
Ability Score Increase: +2 Con and +2 Str (if it's good enough for dwarves, it's good enough for Stegomen).
Age: Stegomen count their age from the first ancestor in their racial memory. This makes no sense to non-stegomen.
Size: 7 ft tall when standing as straight as they can get. The tail, which is very flexible, is another 5 ft long.
Alignment: Stegomen are lawful, following the ways of their ancestors.
Speed: 25 ft.
Natural Armor: Stegomen cannot wear armor, but may use a shield. Their hide gives a natural AC of 14+Dex modifier. When they receive an ability score improvement from their class, they may instead raise their AC by 2, to a maximum of 20.
Tail: When only attacking with her thagomizer, a Stegoman's tail does 1d10 damage on a hit. It can also be used as an off-hand weapon for 1d4 damage. The regular weapon the Stegoman wields does not need to be a light weapon, but it does need to be one-handed.
About Stegomen: There are no sub-races of Stegomen, there are only Stegomen. Males and Females are indistinguishable to non-Stegomen. Subtle variations in the color of back plates clearly identifies sex to other Stegomen.

The Way the West Wasn't

When the miners finally drilled and blasted through the miles-high western mountains, they found a strange land filled gigantic animals the likes of which had never been seen in the east except in legend. Vast plains, dense forests, towering mountains, deep swamps, and an interior sea overflowed with deadly predators and immense herbivores. But man (and raptor) is nothing if not adaptable, and those seeking profit, adventure, and the unknown flocked to this land to settle, mine, farm, and explore. 

The land, now known as Laramidia, holds not only fantastic reptile and bird-like animals, but the ruins of ancient cities, abandoned thousands, if not millions of years ago. The artifacts of this vanished civilization show that the inhabitants were snake-like men. Some of their technology remains functional. And maybe they're not completely gone after all.

...So that's the pitch. This blog is where I'll tinker with the rules and setting of Riders of the Purple Lotus, my weird-west, dinosaur-centric setting. I've been posting a lot of stuff on Google+, and thought it was time to get into a blog. I'll also be posting about any geeky thing that strikes my fancy, but even if it's not RotPL related, expect dinosaurs.