Burgeoning Blogs 4

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76. What do goblins smell like? What about trolls? Do elves have a particular smell?
Goblin smell can only be described as “funky”. 

Trolls smell like wet earth, musk, and piss (from territory marking)

Elf smell depends on how I am interpreting elves at that moment, and could be either:

• Floral or fragrant wood scents (either magical effect or perfumes)
• Highly muted (because they don’t sweat)
• Normal human body odor

77. What do your cleric's holy symbols look like? Are they needed for turning?
Symbols have no benefit on their own; they’re helpful because they help keep the exorcist focused, but they aren’t required for the process.

The hamsa is your generic all-purpose atropaic symbol; deity-specific symbols will typically be an emblem (think mon or adinkra) incorporating stylized / modified names or titles, iconic items, and their most prominent symbolic concepts.

78. What does the "bare minimum" for you to run a game look like?
2 players, ~2 hours, 1 dice set or a phone app; I can run Last Things Last from memory.

79. What happens at 0 HP in play, can I get a healing potion down their throat?
0 HP means a character is downed (unconscious if they fail a save), so they’ll need to be stabilized within a turn or two before I start calling for death saves. Basically just Mothership rules.

80. What happens when a character dies in your setting?
They're gone: bodily death means that the soul can no longer maintain cohesion. With no breath to sustain it, the fire goes out and the shade will go down into the underworld. It’s not a conscious or individuated entity, but it might linger around for a bit.

Alternatively, if I want to completely upend everything I have, I do something real funky with how souls, planes, and reincarnation work and make an entire foundational magic system out of it.

81. What happens when someone eats dragon meat? Drinks their blood?
It’ll give you powerful dragon magic, start transforming you into a dragon / some kind of horrible hybrid abomination, and puts a target on your back; once you’ve started on the Burning Path, you’ve been upgraded to a meaningful threat by both dragons and other ascendants.

82. What Idea or concept are you "saving" for a future game/campaign?
I have no idea how practical it is (probably not practical at all), but I'd love to try “Delta Green in the Dreamlands using Runequest magic”.
 
83. What is a generous/stingy tip to a porter, stablehand, or potboy in your setting?
Either way it’s a small enough amount that I don’t find tracking it to be fun or meaningful.

84. What is a ruling you regret or wish you would have handled differently?
See #60. I should have hit pause, explained what the immediate consequences would, and then see how they wanted to proceed.

85. What is one food that differs from ours that everyone knows about in your game?
I normally stick to real-world foods tweaked slightly (ex: river-octopus takoyaki) or eaten outside of their presumed cultural context (ex: a king in Generic Fantasy PseudoEurope eating empanadas), but with all the giant bugs in D&D-derived fantasy I have to assume that someone out there has started farming them at scale.

86. What is plate mail in your game? Does armor come with gloves/gauntlets?
Plate armor lives in a weird place in my mind: I’m so used to seeing overdesigned concept-art versions of it, and find it so linked with the class marker of “murderous zealot landlord”, that I don’t really think about it much at all and just kind of go “yeah, it’s like Laios’ kit from Dungeon Meshi” and leave it like that. Not going to get fancy with it unless I’m channeling Elden Ring and / or playing Mythic Bastionland.

87. What is the perfect hex size for the number of features you place/stock?
1 parasang. Not the actual historical measurement, a Caves of Qud parasang, where an unfamiliar unit is used Gene Wolfe style to give the audience a trackable measurement without having to worry about exact detail. Worrying about the exact spatial scale of RPG travel is less important to me than the temporal one: how many days/turns/actions does it take?

88. What method do you use for tracking turns elapsing or hit points depleted?
Frantic scribbling on looseleaf. Or a spin down d20, though I think I've lost mine.

89 What other hobbies do you possess that seep into games, subtly or otherwise?
Look, you're already reading this blog you know there’s going to be linguistics, anthropology, and astronomy deep cuts.

90. What step in the common procedures do you often forget or elide/change?
If it involves exploration turns in dungeons, I am dogshit at it. Maybe I need to just get rid of the explicit time aspect and just treat them as Arbitrary Time Units. Spending ten minutes for an entire party to case a room that often doesn’t have all that much in it just never made sense to me, regardless of its mechanical practicality.

91. What topics or themes are off-limits in your games? How do you communicate this?
I do lines and veils and establish mood / tone before the first session, and make sure that if there is heavier material in the module that people know that going in. In my DG player’s guide, I wrote this up:

“Torture and sexual assault are not going to be encountered “on-screen”; they might be mentioned as prior events either directly or through implication. PCs will often find themselves dealing with the aftermath of horrific events.”

This has, so far, been a fruitful way to thread the needle.

92. What was one major conflict/war that has occurred within recent memory?
I use the Dayr War from MSF as my conflict template, tweaking specific details as needed while keeping the core of:

• Occurred 10~15 years ago
• Wizards were involved
• Was fought outside the region of play (so veterans went out and then came back)

93. What would be the punishment for stealing a loaf of bread? A horse?
A loaf of bread will get you pointed in the direction of the almshouse and community work-crew organizer; a stolen horse will likely net you a fine for replacement cost + lost wages, plus a big black mark on your reputation. Much cheaper to just rent the horse from the public stables down by the post office.

94. What's the deal with those alignment languages in your games?
They’re the liturgical languages of major religious traditions. Should make a post about that.

95. Where does lamp oil come from/how is it made?
Seed oil and animal fat, with specific varieties dependent on your region but ultimately mechanically identical 

For adventurers far from civilization, it’s trickier to procure; your best bet is to hunt a squonk, since you can use both its oily skin secretions and rendered fat and you can sell the surplus when you get back to town.

96. Which die from the typical (or atypical!) polyhedrals is your favorite and why?
I’m a basic bastard and will just say that a nice d20 is a satisfying shape.

97. Who digs those dungeons? Why do they attract so much treasure/danger?
One of my all-time favorite fantasy tropes is the city/town/castle/dungeon/ruins built on top of something old and horrible. Something terrible happened there long ago, but whatever it is and no matter how horrible it is people will build on the site and dig deep to find it. 

98. Who is the most powerful magic user in your setting? The most infamous thief?
Most powerful magic user is a toss-up; after a certain point it just becomes comparing nuclear arsenals. But it’s likely to be either the Grey Witch or the King of Wands in any case.

The most infamous thief is, of course, Arsene Lupin. Or Robin Red-Hood. Or Sinbad the Sailor. Honestly if they're good at being a thief they’re also good at hiding their identity, so there’s a lot of pseudonymous heisting going on.

99 Why are elves immune to ghoul paralysis? How long do they live?
Boring answer is that it's just some weird quirk of how proteins bind or don't bind and how that impacts neuron transmission blah blah blah blah. Elf lifespan is either "normal human", "average old tree", "bristlecone pine", and "fondly remembers mammoths"

100. Why do dwarves and elves have that classic enmity, or do they?
Nah. You might have something like it on a community level, but it’s going to be for normal reasons of why neighboring groups might dislike each other.

That’s for “elves and dwarves are types of humans”, of course; “elves and dwarves are magical beings” has less reason for the enmity IMO, as their habitats don’t really overlap. Elves in the forests, dwarves deep in the earth.