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.

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.