Violence, That Art of Fools

A sword? What good is a sword? I cannot clean my gutters with a sword, I cannot clear my garden with a sword, I cannot replace the roof of my shed with a sword. It is a tool for making ghosts and of those I have plenty. Away with you, go bother some other fool.

**

This is an expansion of my Sword That Cuts Heaven class into a game-wide framework, with the intention of making combat a whole load of anime bullshit, without actually having to do any extra work.

It is absolutely untested. It is probably a terrible idea.

 

Principles of the Art of Fools

1) All PCs, regardless of their class or their weapon, deal damage in Hit Dice, rather than Hit Points.

2) Weak enemies do damage in HP. Strong enemies do damage in HD, as a PC would.

3) HD / HP values are not changed from default for either PCs or monsters

4) Strong enemies are Named. They have connections, and their death will change the greater world. (note: if it makes no sense for a Named enemy to deal major damage, they won't deal it but should be treated as Named in terms of world-importance) 

5) If the enemy can understand the scope of the PCs threat, they will engage only if truly fanatical, desperate, or exceptionally well-prepared.

6) Named Enemies, as well as PCs, can get one action before they die, should they be struck down.

**

As is no doubt obvious, PCs are ludicrously overpowered under this system. A level 1 they have good odds of instantly killing most of what they run into, but that's a two-way street. This is intentional, as a way of cutting down combat into only the important fights - that is, if you're going to be fighting someone, it's going to be an actual NPC.

The Art of Fools is not for games about dungeoncrawling, obviously. But it's compatible with pre-existing material and that's important.

**

The Questions of Combat

When someone dies practicing the Art of Fools, consider the following questions.

• Who was hurt, what was damaged?
  
• What happens to the corpse?
• Who will hear of the death? When, how?
• What are the closest connections of the deceased?
  
• Are there any parties that will seek revenge for the violence?
• What is the relationship between the law and the act?
  
• What outside parties have a vested interest in the outcome of the violence?
• Does the death leave a vacuum? What moves in to fill the place?

Spin out the consequences and bring them into play. Deaths should have cascading effects.

 

An Example

The players escape from the orc encampment after negotiations with Esnellir na-Drusi, Warchief devolved into violence. 

Casualties: 

• Esnellir na-Drusi, orc warchief
• Turon Bull-Tusk, shoulderman
• Ghent na-Chir, battle-wife
• Six additional orc soldiers of the Black Eye band
• Filonius Duld, wizard (PC)

The corpses of the orcs are recovered by the survivors of the band and cremated according to custom. The corpse of Filonius was going to be carried by another PC, but had to be dropped as part of the escape. It was fed to the warband's boars. His silks and rings were taken. His spellbook was burned, forming a fire gnotic at the site.

Word of the battle will spread to nearby warbands by runner. The Curled Tusks will learn by day's end, and the River's Hand and Boar's Wives by the end of the next day. On the PC's side, they will inform the commander of Yellow Hawk garrison when they return that evening, and to Rondarium by morning.

Esnellir and Ghent leave behind two other battle-wives, a battle-were, and three large adult sons (all should get names now). Turon has an apprentice (give a name) and a now-voided spirit marriage to Unsun the Three-Eyed Bear. Filonius has noble parents (estranged) and a younger brother (broke university student).

The survivors of the Black Eyes will declare weregilt against the party, calling in the above listed bands into the pursuit. They are likely to reach out to the garrison and other encampments with offers that, should you be handed over, they will remain willing to negotiate the border treaty. It is likely that the garrison will take this offer seriously, even if the provincial government does not. Filonius' family is unlikely to care that he is dead, save his brother, who lacks the funds to make an appropriate offering to the Furies. Usun the Three-Eyed Bear will absolutely hunt down the PCs if they should intrude in his territory.

Orc law has already been invoked. Under the law of the human polity the PCs are working for, there would be no penalty, unless the garrison commander would invoke a punishment under military law (as it was their actions that derailed negotiations). This would likely be lashes.

On the greater scale, reactions are mixed. Orcs in and outside of the military will consider the event yet another act of senseless violence carried out by the human polity's mercenary armies, lowering an already abysmal opinion. The majority support of finalizing a treaty will not change for this event, but if other such events were to happen in swift succession it might be undermined.

Human leaders will be split between the apathetic, the warhawks, and the "oh come on what the shit" party.

Both human and orc polities will benefit from a peaceful border treaty on paper, but this is always the kind of situation where parties will look at a proposal and go "but we could be getting more" The warhawks are taking advantage of the generally apathetic majority.

The leadership of the Black Eye band will fall to Esnellir and Ghent's surviving battle-wives and were. Turon's apprentice will be made shoulderman, but their lack of experience and rather distressing habits of torturing small animals in secret are not a combination for stability.

The PCs will need to find a replacement wizard soon, though there are few to be had this far from the provincial capital. They might have to settle for more obscure reinforcement.

Summary:

While the larger situation hasn't budged, it's only because the PCs employers were able to write them off as violent idiot rogues and distance themselves from the event (they may or may not have intended it to go down this way, that is for further investigation Remaining Question: suss out whether or not the garrison leader is pro or anti-treaty).

The PC's though, the PC's are fucked. Best start thinking of creative ways to avoid getting tossed under that oncoming bus.

**

Even if mechanically it is a disaster, hopefully this provides a basis for "how to make combat interesting" in a only partially-mechanical way, and that can be refined in the future.

Insightful Experience

First off, I am terribly sorry to everyone who is excited for Lighthouse for my lack of work on it: as it turned out, 2020 has been a terrible year to write things that involve activist leftists barely surviving against the tides of the grand fascist deathcult. Wee too close to home, there.

But this post has also been sitting 3/4 done for months so it's high time I actually did something with it.

This idea first cropped up in a post I did a long while ago: this is an expanded version that will serve as the base for how XP will work in Lighthouse.

Design Goals

• Encourage players to seek out new experiences in the game.
• Serve as a form of lateral progression
• Encourage players to roleplay differently according to how deep they are in.
• Make it easy for veteran/newbie mixed parties and carrying characters between games.
• Make it easy for referees to just make up shit.

Madman's Knowledge

Insight is what serves as experience in Lighthouse, representing a character's accumulated interactions with the weird. It's gained whenever encountering a new manifestation of the paranormal - entity, phenomenon, location, etc - for the first time.

Insight gain will typically default to 1 per encounter. 3 would be suitable for a particularly potent encounter, or for a string of minor encounters in short succession. 5 Insight for a single encounter should be reserved for only the most terrible and wonderful revelations and might not ever come up in a series of sessions.

Things that can grant Insight often, but not always, will be grounds for a roll to Keep Your Shit Together. That, as always remains up to the player and the circumstance. 

Once you've gained Insight, you can spend it on Insights. This is not an ideal naming situation but I could not, for the life of me, think of a less confusing alternative. Work in progress, we'll cross that bridge when we get there. (edit: someone in discord recommended "revelations" - that is a good place to start)

Each character will have a certain number of Insight Slots. These are where your purchased Insights go, as the name would suggest, and there will be 16 of them. Maybe 12, but probably 16. 

Purchased Insights can include:

• Special abilities
• Skills
• Items
• Access to new areas, services, etc.

And will fall within a small set of potential ways they can be used

• Always works, no roll required (no stat value, obviously)
• Always works, roll stat to determine if complication occurs
• Roll stat to determine success / failure
• Burn point > get effect, no roll required.
• Burn point > get effect, roll stat to determine if complication occurs

Purchased Insights will have two of four tags

• Individual - Insight applies only to the purchaser.
  
• Group - Insight applies to all players. Can be purchased by pooling points together.
  
• Slot - Insight takes up a slot.
  
• Free - Insight does not take up a slot.
  

Standard notation for Insights would be the two relevant tags followed by cost ex: G-F-1 (Group, Free, 1) or I-S-5 (Individual, Slot, 5 cost)

Insights can be cycled out and replaced by paying an additional 2 Insight.

Insight can also be spent to increase a character's stats.

• Roll d20 for each stat. If you roll over, increase the stat by 1.
• This costs 2+X Insight (X = the number of times you have rolled for stat increases)

Insight Thresholds

As a character fills up their Insight Slots and becomes more and more in-tune with the Underworld, they will drift away from mundane surface life. This is not an insanity mechanic - more of a "reconsidering your priorities" mechanic. 

When you fill up 25% and 75% of your available slots, take -1 to your surface Contacts and gain +1 to your underworld Contacts

When you fill up 50% and 100% of your available slots, treat your Spirit score as -1 for all interactions with people on the surface, and + 1 for all interactions with people in the underworld.

It should be noted here that "surface" and "underworld" should be read as "ignorant" and "in the know" rather than a strict reference to physical location.

The Cost Reference Table

I want the relative power of basic Insights to have a stable relationship with cost, for ease of making up ones off the cuff during play. So an Insight with value X will cost Y. I don't have it set up in a way I like, and if it doesn't work out I can always go back to very rough guidelines similar to Insight gain.

Right now, it's set up as follows.

• 1-cost Insights are very basic, and will generally not have a value associated to them.
• Paying 3 would get you an Insight of value 10. 5 would get you 12, 7 would get you 14, 9 would get you 16, and 11 would get you 18. There might be tiers for 13 and 15 cost Insights as well.

Like I said, very rough and irregular at the moment. But it's something, at least. best can be hoped for for the lid of this dumpster fire year.

Lighthouse Design Corner: The Core Mechanic

These posts on twitter are always popular with folks, but twitter is a burning garbage fire on a good day and there haven't been many good days of late. So have the bigger version.

The Core Mechanic

I'm trying to get everything roll under on a d20.There are five stats, which are generated by rolling 4d4 (and so your success range, barring modification, is between 20 and 80% - if something would raise it above that level, it's just automatically granted advantage).

Body - Raw strength, endurance, gross motor skills, pushing your limits.

Reflex - Reaction, finesse, fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination.

Mind - Recall, deduction, computation, conceptualization.

Spirit - Willpower, empathy, charisma, gut checks.

Combat - The ability to commit violence against another being

So far so typical. These are general, and I'm not planning on doing a formal skill system ("eh, you'd know how to do that, roll with advantage" is the phrase of the day).

My main divergence is that I'm going to treat as much else as I can as stats on their own, rather than as modifiers to your own stats (in most cases - those modifiers will still exist here and there.)

This is where the lateral advancement comes into play, with Insights.

Every Lighthouse character comes with a number of Insight slots. Some backgrounds might start you with a few filled by default, but ordinary folks will start with a blank slate. Each slot costs 1 Insight to open, and then you can fill it with any of the Insights that you've unlocked for yourself.

A Confession: This is whole-heartedly stolen from the Thought Cabinet in Disco Elysium)

An Actual Quandary: Insight has morphed into both "special thing about your character" as well as "currency used to buy / unlock those special things". This is likely to pose problems in the future, so I need to figure out which one is what and find a replacement for the other.

So say you get a nifty new power, or a new magical item, or a new ally - you'll pencil that in on your character sheet with whatever number is associated with it, and whenever you're going to call on that resource you'll roll a d20 and try to get under, or burn off a point of its stat, or sometimes both. And if you happen to get a lot of Insight burning a hole in your pocket, you can upgrade the stats of your Insights (oh no the quandary!)

Most group insights will likely not take up a slot.

Some Insights, the ones that just are the way they are and there's no chance they can fail, do not have a stat.

Some generic Insight structures can include:

• Burn point > get effect, no roll required.
• Burn point > get effect, roll stat to determine if complication occurs
• Always works, no roll required
• Always works, roll stat to determine if complication occurs
• Roll stat to determine success / failure

Or in more practical examples:

• Convocation Call (5) - Burn one point to send a voice message of under a minute via sparrow. Regain a point by taking time out of your day to go feed the birds in the park. You can increase points in storage above 5.
• Blunted Knife (X) - A chipped butcher's chopper, heavy as lead and possessing a permanently dull blade. Completely useless against wood, flesh, or bone, but can cut metal and stone without resistance.
• The Blue Notebook (4) - The creature it calls forth hovers, crouched, indistinct and tense, in the corner of your vision. It is very hungry. It hates you in particular, but cannot yet strike back. It will hunt down and kill a target if you offer it one of their possessions. You will always gain a point of Hamartia for its use. Every time you roll above this Insight's score, increase it by one. If you roll successfully, increase it by two. If it reaches 16, the creature will be freed from its binding. It will go after your contacts first.
• Angry Tom (Minor Contact 10) - Activist, freelance layout guy, specialist marijuana gardener, very, very angry acquaintance. Roll under 10 to see if you can get some help. Rolling over means he is too busy, or getting the help would require you to provide something else to him.

Tune in next time when I talk about how combat is going to work, and the cost of committing violence.

Unicorn Meat Featurette: Card-Based Expeditions

This is a system I developed for Unicorn Meat, to simplify and abstract expeditions into the swamps of the Backwoods: I didn't want to rely on a hex map or point crawl since the goal is a unicorn to hunt rather than reaching a set location, and wandering around in circles, while appropriate, isn't fun to actually play.

The format can easily be used for anywhere else that would benefit from abstraction: wilderness, city, or dungeon. You can easily whip up a table for different areas in the same region or complex.

An expedition consists of 5 cards (this can go up or down depending on the effects of other cards) drawn in sequence. it costs 1 ration per participant and takes up the bulk of the day. The full table has a column for each suit and unique entries, but it sticks to this pattern.

• Ace - Unique treasure
• 2 - Nothing
• 3 - Nothing
• 4 - Nothing
• 5 - Encounter
• 6 - Encounter
• 7 - Unique encounter
• 8 - Unique item
• 9 - Supplies
• 10 - Incident
• Jack - Incident
• Queen - Special location
• King - Unicorn (Or whatever else is most important to find)

When an encounter is drawn, there's an accompanying d6 roll

• 1 = Surprise encounter.
• 2-3 = Encounter with warning.
• 4-5 = Trackable creature traces.
• 6 = You've got the drop on it.

When a unique treasure, monster, item or location is found, that card is removed from the deck for all future expeditions.

When a special location is drawn, the players now know how to find it: if they want to return to the place, they can substitute the card in exchange for the next card that would normally be played, which is set aside until the end of the expedition. Maybe you missed a deadly encounter, maybe you missed treasure.

And that's it - hack away!

Edit: Several people asked the difference between an encounter an an incident - encounters are beings you meet (crocodile, ghoul, etc), incidents are things that happen to you (bad weather, getting lost, twisting your ankle)

The Therefore Game

I was incredibly, absolutely, unreasonably bored at work, so I came up with a solo game.

The Therefore Game

This game has only two parts. Both of which are stolen. The first part is the FU Freeform/Universal RPG. The second bit is a nifty piece of writing advice that apparently comes from the South Park guys (whom I have no particular fondness for) that goes something like this: instead of "and then", events in a story should be chained with "therefore" or "however".

How to Play

Start with a character statement: "X, a Y, wants Z."

Then, add a "therefore..." and make a follow-up statement, presumably the first step in X's attempt to acquire Z.

When you have written that, roll a d6 to determine how that therefore statement turned out.

1. Negative / Failure, with a malus or just huge.
2. Negative / Failure
3. Negative / Failure, with a bonus.
4. Postive / Success, with a malus.
5. Positive / Success
6. Positive / Success, with a bonus or just huge.

If you are at work and can get away with it, just type "d6" into Google.

If you are dealing with two parties in competition with each other and want a change of POV, you can just reverse your outcome.

Repeat until X has achieved Z, or you feel a good place to end.

Example: Sir Percival, the Dragon, and the Princess Pat

• Sir Percival, a knight, wants to slay a dragon.
• Therefore, he begins his preparations by reading about them in the scriptorum (5)
• He learns that they love treasure and devouring maidens.
• Therefore, he plans a way to bait out the dragon with gold and one of the princesses. (5)
• He's able to get a chest of gems from the king and the Princess Par is on board with the idea
• Therefore they ride out to where the dragon lives. (6)
• They are able to set up an ambush outside the cave. Percival takes his position, Pat takes hers with the chest of gems and calls out to the dragon.
• Therefore, the dragon emerges from his cave to investigate the sound and smell. (2)
• The dragon pick's up Percival's scent and stays by the mouth of the cave, on guard.
• Therefore, Pat gives Percival a signal to back off and let the dragon come out. (2)
• Percival doesn't pick up on it and gets closer to the edge of the cave mouth.
• Therefore the dragon tries to sweep him off the cave lip with its tail. (4)
• Percival is knocked off, but manages to land on top of the dragon's back.
• Therefore he tries to plunge his sword into the dragon (3)
• The sword bounces off the dragon's scales, but Pat has thought of a recovery plan!
• Therefore Par begins to sing a magic song (4)
• The dragon falls asleep, but so does Percival.
• Therefore, Pat undoes the rope tying her to the tree to solve the problem herself (2)
• Unfortunately, Percival is really good at tying knots.
• Therefore, Pat tries to grab the pocketknife she always keeps with her (3).
• It falls from her hand, but it looks like Percival is waking up! 
• Therefore a terribly embarrassed Percival runs over and unties Pat (2)
• But the dragon wakes up before he can get there!
• Therefore it tries to roast them with its fire breath (1)
• The fireball gets caught in its throat and explodes! The dragon is wounded terribly! Pat is untied!
• Therefore Percival and Pat go in for the finisher! (5)
• With vorpal blade and Rigabamboo (it's red and gold and purple too) they chop off the dragon's head! Victory!

The story could, of course, keep going from there, but I think this is a suitable example. If you end up trying it out, let me know!

Disco Elysium All Night Long

God this game has some style.

Disco Elysium is the best CRPG since Planescape Torment. If we're talking from a mechanical perspective it is absolutely better and if we're talking story and characters it comes down purely to taste and frankly I don't want to make that call because comparing two super-good things like that is silly. It can be shelved right next to the other great OSR-adjacent video games: Darkest Dungeon, Dwarf Fortress, Caves of Qud, those ones. It is a game where a little offhand skill check or inspecting a random item can send you spirited away on a sidequest. It is a dense game and a detailed game, and what I describe here is not the game. It is a game in a mirror darkly world. It is a game that sits at the junction between incredible cynicism and incredible empathy and nails the point home with a goddamn railroad spike. This game made me feel things. I finished it and want to play it again.

Go play it. Don't worry about spoilers here. This post is about mechanics and a bit of dressing.

Most importantly for our purposes: Disco Elysium puts all of its mechanics up front to you. It shows you the dice rolls, it shows you the difficulty, it shows you circumstantial modifiers, it shows you the odds of success. This makes it terribly easy to see what is under the hood. It goes like this.

Character Creation

You start with 12 points to put into four attributes. The three premade templates distribute them 5/4/2/1 but you can go as high as 6. The number of points in a base attribute determines both your base score in that attribute, and the maximum level you can raise skills in that category to.

There are four attributes (Intellect, Psyche, Physique, Motorics), each with five related skills (see below). One of those skills starts with a pip in it (and you get +1 to the cap of all skills for that ability), if you choose it as a favored skill at generation.

Click for big

Skills for Bills

The skill system is the best thing this side of TROIKA!, for similar reasons. Instead of being limited to discrete actions, each skill encompasses a wider and open-ended swath of personal traits.

Skills can be increased via skill points (gained every 100 xp) items (which can also decrease them) and internalizing thoughts (which can also decrease them, and raise caps, and other things.)

Dice Rolls

Resolution in Disco Elysium is 2d6 + Attribute + Skill vs target number. Sometimes there are modifiers. Snake Eyes always fail, Boxcars always succeed.

Target numbers range from 6 (Trivial), to 20 (Impossible). Most are in the range between 10-16: anything lower than that is passive, and most things higher have alternate solutions. White Checks are ones you can retake (after spending a skill point in that skill, or finding out new information), Red Checks can be tried only once.

Taking full advantage of being a video game, Disco Elysium rolls for passive checks (hunches, thoughts, observations, and so on) on its own. These rarely go above 10 and will grant you a little bit of insight as to what is going on around you, sometimes opening up new dialog options or giving you a hint as a good one to take. This is the one part of the game that is not particularly great for tabletop adaptation as-is, but all it takes is an index card with a list of some skills for each player and the ref can just tell them they got a ping.

Alignment Shmalighnment I am HOBOCOP

Well first you have your cop type: rockstar, apocalyptic, sorry, boring. In all circumstances you are still a sad, drunken amnesiac.

Then you have your political alignment: communist, fascist, ultraliberal, moralist. In all circumstances these ideologies are divorced from reality and just make things worse because of their inherent disconnect from humanity.

You can be as many of these as you want.

Internalized Dumb Ideas

You can get bonuses or maluses to skills, caps, and other features by internalizing thoughts that come to you, if you have slots open in your Thought Cabinet (slots cost a skill point, forgetting something also costs a skill point.) and spend the in-game time. There are loads of these and they can reveal things about your character, the world, or make you depressed about the previous two things.

Combat

Doesn't exist in this game. Good riddance. Someone with a gun should be a Big Deal.

Using it at the Table 

I'd approach it how the game does it: a big mystery to solve in a small geographic area, with a bunch of NPCs with secrets and conflicts and flaws. Dump a spaghetti plate of threads at their feet. Throw a wrench in or two. It would be a lot of work, it would be a very different game, but it would be worth it. It'd be worth even the small things: imitating how it does skills or using Thoughts as XP milestones or or or...

It's such a goddamn good game.

Bonus: A Matter of Setting

Masterclass in how to build a wider setting while exploring only a small corner of it. Also a masterclass in that niche of "I mean it's technically fantasy but that's because it's a secondary world that is certainly not our own but it resembles it through a mirror darkly it's not like there are wizards"

More of this please.

Web of Million Lies

The internet was a mistake. Everyone knows it, but we're stuck with it. The breakdown of reliable information transfer is a Great Filter - there are dozens of failed civilizations in human space as testament to that. The passing centuries have made the net as dangerous to use as uncharted jungle is to walk through without boots, thanks to an overflowing ecosystem of constantly-adapting hostile data-life and the eternal shore of perniciously nasty humans.

Using the Internet

Unless there is something terribly wrong going on, players can always access the internet when in a station or colony that has a civilian population - military and corporate bases will have secure, pared-down networks that will have to be directly accessed via a terminal.

Basic usage includes things like looking up something on Space Wikipedia, hiring someone for a simple job (rideshares, etc), viewing a public personal page, making financial transactions with the Company, using a chat client, and so on. Players can just do this normally without incident.

Hacking a computer means getting access that you aren't supposed to have - getting into someone else's account, spoofing administrator privileges, and so on. This requires a skill check.

Venturing off the beaten track (weird imageboards, shady download sites, seemingly-abandoned conspiracy blogs, domain squatter hives) is dangerous: players should make a Sanity save (modified by a relevant computer or cultural skill).

On success, you find the information you want.

On critical success, you find the information you want AND either find something else interesting OR heal 1 stress.

On failure, you find nothing of worth and gain 1 Stress. Further research cumulatively increases Stress gained by failure by 1.

On critical failure, the player's device has picked up some hostile datalife. Gain 3 stress and a virus:

1. Identity stolen
2. Porn spambot
3. Advertising spambot
4. SEO spambot
5. Ransomeware
6. Datavore

Apps

Every settled system has its own separate network(s), but nearly all are built on the same foundation of nodes - overarching categories that sort the zillions of sites available into relatively-useable umbrellas. You'll always have a search engine, a wiki network, social media, and so on. If a site exists in real life, it's safe to assume that there's a space version. Just add '.space' at the end.

d50 Space Websites

1. I Know Someone - All-purpose find-a-service app.
2. Big Brother - Corporate search engine
3. Scrounge - Open-source and usually illegal search engine.
4. Silicon Fantasies - Forum for android fetishists
5. Mosaic - Hub for dedicated-topic forums.
6. Vent - Screaming into the abyss. Also provides counselors.
7. Corporate Core - Company social media.
8. Indenture Zone - Buy and sell yourself and others.
9. The Campfire - Home of creepy esoterica, errata, apocrypha, rumor and tall tale.
10. Interstellar Academic Database - Primary source of corporate-funded scientific studies.
11. Interstellar Pirate Academic Database - As above, sans paywall and DRM.
12. Green Market - Listings for terraforming jobs and planetary relocation.
13. DoubleTake - Unravelling hoaxes, countering propaganda, identifying deep fakes.
14. Matchbox - Dating service. Squeaky-clean corporate shlock.
15. Rabbit Hole - Algorithm-guided tour of the net's bizarre underbelly.
16. Union Square - Hub for union services and social media.
17. Lonely Star - Dating site. Shitty and hasn't been updated in forever, but less invasive.
18. Transistor Railroad - Forum for supporters of android emancipation.
19. Scrapyard - Everything you wanted to know about fixing old out-of-date junk tech.
20. Lend a Hand - Public board of volunteers offering services.
21. Swapworld - Swap your junk for their junk.
22. WIKI - Still doing its thing.
23. Open Blueprint Database - All the public domain printer blueprints that compiled in one place.
24. 5 Rivers - Shipping and warehousing conglomerate. Universal storefront.
25. The Longhauler Boards - Home for spacers out on the fringes. Filled with wild tales.
26. Ulthar Station - Popular slice-of-life VR sim based on the real space station.
27. Rot Luck Club - Commiserating over awful happenings.
28. CTANN - Colonial Trade Alliance News Network. Finest propaganda in the core.
29. Peanut Gallery - A cyberdemocracy moot specializing only in inconsequential or silly choices.
30. Freshers - Social network for those new to the system.
31. Yomi - Black market for slaved logic cores.
32. Bathroom on the Right - Venerable general-purpose community with devoted core user group.
33. The Quarantine - A site that is still up, but has been encrypted for so long and so thoroughly no one knows what is behind the wall.
34. Lady & Tiger - Possibly a mystery religion, we're not really sure. Paywalled community.
35. Go Hack Yourself - Biohacker forum.
36. The Allthing - Cyberdemocracy moot.
37. Neighborhood Network - Local community news and chat
38. Boarding Action - Social network for marines and mercenaries.
39. Mornington Crescent - Long-running hub of a still-fake game.
40. DevJam - Open coder community. love doing challenges with specific handicaps.
41. Fester - A livestream of a regularly-replenished pile of rotting foodstuffs.
42. As You Like It - Algorithm-generated media tailored to your tastes.
43. Fatberg - The weird, gross dregs of the internet.
44. Mud Blood and News - Crowd-sourced anarchist muckracker news.
45. Soapbox - Near-abandoned corporate social media platform. Was always awful and kept getting worse.
46. Atarexia - Laid-back friend-finding discussion forum.
47. Slipstreamline - Video streaming and hosting site.
48. The Altar - Payments of cryptocurrency and personal data will get you an AI-generated oracle.
49. Speak With Dead - AI replications of the beloved dead, for affordable per-minute fees.
50. The Embassy - Online home of Dog Knights.

The Greatest Table Ever Made

This is from the quickstart rules for Call of Cthulhu 7e. It's not in the main book, and that's a shame, because I think this might be the best table in RPGs.

With this table, we can toss out weapon-specific damage amounts and the mundane combat parts of bestiary entries entirely. All that boring stuff about firearm range and worrying about the damage difference between a machete and a crowbar, gone. Fumbling around shopping at WeaponMart, gone. All that chaff about precisely how much damage a betentacled horror can do, gone. Everything is boiled down into "what makes sense in this particular moment for this particular scenario". Any weapon could be anywhere on the list. All you have to do is look at the table.

I want more games to do this. I possibly want all games to do this.

I really don't have anything else to say on the matter. It's a good table.

A Look at Lancer

This is such a rad cover.

So Tom Parkinson-Morgan (Abaddon) of Kill Six Billion Demons fame just launched the kickstarter for his mech RPG Lancer.

Being a huge mark for anything that man has creative input on, I thought I'd finally get my ass in gear and do a read through of the beta document.

The Basics

It runs on Shadow of the Demon Lord bones (what I always want to see!): d20 + bonuses, try to beat 10. Target number varies in combat for attacks and save rolls.

Boons and banes appear as Accuracy and Difficulty. They work the same as boons and banes.

Skills can add bonuses, as well as a general Grit bonus of 1/2 player level.

I don't know how much I like Grit. At level 6 you only fail on a 6 or less before skills and Boons are even calculated. Seems to be an extra number that doesn't need to be there.

Cycle of Play

Split between missions and downtime. You level up after every mission. More Shadow shows itself. I like that the game is based on this framework, makes it good for stringing together sessions.

Characters

Characters have:

• A background
• Four personal skills at +2
• +2 to a single mech skill or  +1 to two
• 3 talents (you can do a special thing, each has 3 levels)
• Your gear

Okay, all good so far.

What I don't like here is that it's falling to the PbtA "renaming things that already have names" method of game design. There's no reason to name "get a boon / bane because your background is relevant" as "Invoke" and spend four paragraphs on it. Or naming pilot traits / skills as "triggers"- they're traits. If I say "character traits", everyone knows what I am talking about automatically.

Just say "if your background is relevant, you get a boon / bane". The wheel is perfectly functional, we don't need it re-invented.

Note Well: I have a bizarre, irrational hatred of this sort of mechanical name-changing. Read forward with bias acknowledged.

The more flavorful descriptors of traits ("Blow something up" instead of "Demolitions") is fun and pretty easily understandable, so I am not against that in practice.

Mechs

They're like big characters. They have stats, they have skills, they have a base frame with a special ability and certain number of slots for modules. Neat. I can get behind it, will be a lot better when it's formatted and I can read it better.

The mech designs are fucking fantastic, of course.

Gameplay

Downtime has certain actions you take between missions (like preparing reserve resources for future missions or other assorted options that have a lot of PbtA influence. At least they are named appropriately). Before a mission starts, you get briefed on the goal and can make preparations, before cutting directly to deployment. I like that. No futzing around. We're here for mechs to fight each other and that is what we are gonna get.

Got some good tables, that's all good.

But then we get to the part where we get multi-paragraph descriptions defining and codifying things like briefs, goals, stakes. A bullet point would suffice. We get this. Anyone opening up this book will get this. Small children will get this.

Being able to push a failed roll and risk major consequences, that's good. Like that as an idea.

From this point on there are a lot of subsystems. Combat and movement and whatnot. It's what you'd expect.

You can clone characters and there's a table of glitches, that's cool.

Big list of equipment tags, also cool, I like tags.

List of backgrounds is not connected to character generation section in the beta.

Then there are about four hundred pages of equipment, mechs, and lore. The mechs in particular border on unreadable in their current state - each takes about 4 pages, single column, and they overlap. That'll be fixed in formatting.

The Bad

This book is too goddamn big. The beta is 566 pages, and there's 71 + 38 + 46 + 174 = 329 additional supplement pages in the docs folder. Unformatted, sure. Mostly artless, yeah. Nit too big.

In the year of our beloved Holocene 12019 this amount of bloat in an RPG book is ludicrous. By Dan standards. Dandards. Too many words. Too much wasted space. It's Shadow of the Demon Lord at its core and you can fit those rules on five pages or less.

There are just too many words.

Likewise, I'm sad to say "there should be less lore" (it feels like blasphemy!) but there needs to be less lore. Minor factions (not the main corporations) can get 2-5 pages of 12 point, single spaced, single column font. Just cutting direct lore dump would drop it to 452 pages.

Lore doesn't help me run a game. Flavor does. The major corporations overflow with flavor, and I can get that all from small descriptions and art. I can take one look at one of those HORUS guys and know exactly what I can use them for. This is the greatest strength of the book and should be leaned into hard. More art, fewer words.

Final Thoughts

I love this idea. I love the core mechanics. I love the art. I want to love it as a book, but to put things into perspective my DCC hardcover is 476 pages (with, it should be noted, quickstart rules at 47 pages total including 2 dungeons). If your core book is 100 pages longer than DCC and has a further 329 pages of supplements it might be a bit too big.

Now, the properly laid-out pages on the Kickstarter have dual-column formatting, so shorter it will probably be. Hopefully this is me going on and on about nothing. But it makes me hesitant to say "yeah, I'll go for the hardcover." The Kickstarter still says 560 pages, and that's a book to be read and looked at, not used. If any would be worth it, it would be this one, but...

I can get over my irrational fear of renaming mechanics that already have functional names.

I trust it will turn out great, grand and wonderful.

But 560 pages is unwieldy as hell no matter how you slice it. I want to actually run this game, which means I the referee and my players need to be able to reference information fast and efficiently with 1 physical book at the table and the pdf on my computer. I'm thrown out of whack by this, because such an issue is a solved problem. It's been a solved problem for years. That the solution has not traveled particularly far saddens me.

Final Final Thought

The pdf better have some incredibly thorough bookmarks and internal hyperlinks.

A Few of My Favorite Things (Plus a Extra Stuff for Starters)

House rules! There are a lot of them out there. Here are some that I like. I threw in some general resources at the end that I've found useful.

Most veteran readers will be aware of some or all of these, so I am treating this post as something of a quick-start guide for people new to the DIY sphere who want some good places to start customizing.

House Rules

Shields Shall be Splintered
The classic: sacrifice your shield to negate damage from an attack.

Equipment Tags
While the example is for sci-fi there's no reason this can't be applied wherever for many more varied and special weapons and armor.

Powerful Weapons
Less of a house rule and more of just a class feature that adapts firearm rules to other powerful weapons, but I really like the mechanic: Ignore AC from armor and apply DR instead, roll 1 size higher damage die if you are using two hands.

Horrible Wounds
Instead of just dropping dead, you can get a fancy scar and lingering trauma! It's fun - players can survive a bit more, but there's always consequence and choices to follow - keep going, or retire? See if it can heal, or make a new character? Having it split up by damage type is also great fun.

Heavy vs Fast Weapons
It just makes sense, you know?  Use STR for bows and weapons of d8 damage or higher, and DEX for d6 or lower and other ranged weapons. Simple, easy, sensible.

Luck Rolls
DCC's luck stat is so good it should be used everywhere. It's a tool to solve problems on the fly, a means for players to have additional input on goings, and a resource to manage and make decisions with. 3d6 as normal, burn a point to gain +1 on a roll, roll under for a check. That's it.

Vaginas are Magic Casting
You can safely cast a number of spells equal to your level per day. Any further, and you have to make a save vs magic or roll on a terrible magical feedback table. (See AuraTwilight's wild magic for ultra funtimes)

Knave Inventory
You have slots = to your CON. No fuss. Heavier armor and weapons take up additional slots.

Extra Stuff for Starters

Darkest Dungeon Character Kits
I will recommend this to everyone who will listen and quite a few people who won't. It's the single best starting point for pre-made characters that really get the old school motif, and a great way to demonstrate to new players that classes are not monolithic: not all fighters are the same.

Corpathium
Is fucking awesome, is what it is. If you need a hub city, this is your hub city. Modify to taste. Use it for Sigil, for Ravnica, for Throne, the Yellow City, whatever.

The Infinigrad Tables 
The best way to populate Corpathium.The job tables in Blasphemous Roster have saved my bacon before and they certainly will in the future.

Every god damn Trilemma adventure
They're short, they're free, they're great.

100 Minor Magical Items and 100 Problem-Solvers
Gives treasure some personality and use.

Other Stuff

"The Coolest Thing Ray Ever Did" by Jeff Rients

"Orcs, Violence, and Evil" by Emmy Allen.

Ramanan's automatic level 1 character generator

Purple Sorcerer's level 0 party generator.

Links to Wisdom and the OSR Planet

Benton's Incunabuli is some bloody fantastic prose and I can't wait for the book.

Signs in the Wilderness is mythic Americana and I can't wait for the book.

There's more, there's always more, but these are the ones first in line.

Horizon Zero Dawn in the OSR

Tacosauceninja

Horizon Zero Dawn, despite the silly name, is a great game. And for our purposes a fine fit, like Banner Saga before it, for OSR conversion.

This is going to be spoilered to all hell.

Primer for Players

Far future Earth. Green apocalypse. Civilization is pre-industrial and, as far as we know, is centered in the western US (Colorado, Montana, Utah, Arizona in particular). The primary remnants of the old world are the machine-creatures found throughout the wilderness. Beyond that it's just some rusting ruins, hidden bunkers, and the occasional bit of salvage (metals and ceramics, no plastics). The robots have been getting more aggressive over the last decade or so (the Derangement).

Primer for DMs

There was a grey-goo scenario in the 2060s. self-replicating, biomass-eating warbots built without a remote shutdown backdoor, all that good stuff. Total biosphere collapse, extinction of all life on Earth. Project Zero Dawn was a last-ditch reboot effort - build an AI (GAIA) capable of brute-forcing the shutdown the Faro warbots, and then clean up and re-seed the biosphere from seed and gene banks using it's own robots. It succeeded (hence, why there is a game), but the subfunction APOLLO was sabotaged, wiping out the entire recorded history of humanity and destroying any resources for the humans raised in the Cradle facilities (this is why there are no cultural remnants of the Old World to be found in any of the post-ZD civilizations) The first Cradles started releasing people into the wild some 700 years ago or so. Current year is 3040.

Practical Basics

• Common weapons are simple and pretty standard: bows, spears, swords, axes, slings. Simple explosives and rapid-crossbows are less common but still widespread.More exotic weapons include tripwire launchers and restraining ropecasters.
• The Osteran have been able to develop proper cannons, and some Carja have fire-spear launchers of their own. Any other firearms are scavenged off of robots and usually in possession of the Eclipse.
• HZD does not match up to any pre-existing historical era particularly well, but it is safe enough to think "anachronistic bronze age".
• The largest animal seen in-game is a wild boar. Some livestock can be presumed, but it seems most of the bigger animals have gone extinct for good.
• Primary currency is metal shards chipped off of machine plating. Ruinations scrap works just fine to this end.

Characters

There are four primary cultures featured in the game, plus three minor.

• Nora - Matriarchal, isolationist. Strict taboos on personal behavior and even stricter against exploration of ruins or meddling with machines, punishable through exile. Keep to themselves in their Sacred Lands, which are in the general Colorado area.
• Carja - Theocratic cultural hub, largest civilization in the known world. Consider their king the vessel of the divine sun. The old king (Jiran) was a murderous tyrant and was overthrown by his son in a civil war. The current king (Avad) is a pretty cool dude: banned slavery, opened the borders, more rights for women and foreigners. The Carja Sundom includes a lot of territory in the Utah / Arizona region.
• Osteran - Industrious, mercantile, forthright. Smiths, miners, mercenaries, tinkerers. They come from the Claim, which should be Idaho and possibly some of Montana.
• Banuk - Survivalist, technospiritualist. Clans formed via trial rather than bloodline. Shamans deal with machines and commune with the "Blue Light". They live in Ban-Ur, which begins in Wyoming and proceeds further north, possibly to Canada.
• Utaru - Pastoral, pacifist. Live in the Plainsong (Kansas and Nebraska, likely), and are rarely seen in the Sundom or surrounding territories.
• Tenakth - Cannibalistic raiders from further south. Nasty motherfuckers.
• Carja-in-Shadow - Supporters of the previous Carja king, driven westward by the terms of the ceasefire. Mostly the old priesthood trying to claim legitimacy through the six year old Itamen (youngest son of Jiran by a different wife) and acting as a cover for the Eclipse cult (who believes that the HADES subfunction is the Buried Shadow of their myth come to rebalance the disorder caused by Avad).

Only two other Cradle facilities are confirmed: one in Xinjiang Province (China) and one under Mt. Namuli (Mozambique). Potential sites (via in-game graphics only) include Greenland, Nigeria, northern France and eastern Russia.

Land west of the Rockies is entirely fucked, according to in-game sources.

The Medicine Pouch

A successful survival check (takes 1 hour) will gather enough medicinal herbs to restore 1 HP. You can store up to your max HP in your medicine pouch.

Equipment & Mods

The heaviest armor available is the equivalent of chain, with the lightest being no more than common clothing. What is more important is an armor's quality, which determines how many modification weaves can be applied. There are three ranks of quality for armor (1/2/3 mods) and for modifications themselves. Modifications provide damage reduction (1/2/3) against one of the following types.

• Melee 
• Ranged
• Fire
• Freezing
• Spark
• Corruption 

So, for example, Quality 2 Light Armor has an AC of 14 and two mod slots.

Weapons can also be modded to do additional damage in the same manner, doing 1-3 additional damage when using the appropriate ammo type.

Machine Creatures

Machines are easy: just take your favorite wildlife from the Monster Manual, make it a robot, and give it a simple title related to what it does or what it's like ("Watcher", "Snapmaw", etc). While more exotic-appearing machines are certainly possible, it seems that HEPHAESTUS has kept it all within the boundaries of creatures that once existed on Earth (GAIA was quite fond of megafauna, it turned out.)

Major machine classifications include: terraformer (maintain soil fertility), purifier (clean & maintain air and water), acquisition (gathering and recycling resources), transport (moving resources), recon (detection, guiding other machines to needed locations), communication (maintaining network), combat (post-Derangement hunter-killers) and chariot (Old World warbots).

Each creature has a chance of dropping a lens (40%) or a heart (10%). These are worth, respectively, 10xHD and 50xHD shards.

Machines are generated in HEPHASTUS-run cauldron facilities.

Guns and Kung-Fu for Knaves of All Sorts

Arky Fitzwater

Guns

The bones of this are stolen wholesale from Luke Thomson and Ben Milton (again!)

Firearms come in two basic categories.

• Pistol - d8 damage, 1 slot, 3 quality, can be fired in melee
• Rifle - d10 damage, 2 slots, 3 quality, disadvantage when fired into melee.

Reloading depends on what kind of gun you have.

• Black powder - Must be reloaded after each shot, reloading takes a turn.
• Semi-automatic - Pistols have 6 shots, rifles have 8.

I tend to imagine the cutting edge of firearms in my games to be something akin to Colt revolvers and Winchester rifles. No further than an M1 Garand. Which will still co-exist with black powder muskets. Anachronism reigns supreme.

An ammo pouch and cleaning tools take up 1 slot. It can hold 24 charges / bullets

Rifles can be affixed with a bayonet (d6 damage, 3 quality, 1 slot), which can be removed and used as a normal melee weapon if needed.

For those who want more granularity / variety among their firearms, tags can be integrated, as per Luke's post.

A standard grenade takes up 1 slot and does 2d6 damage within a 10 foot radius, ignoring armor.

ATATATATATATATATATATATA

Martial Arts

Fighting styles fulfill the role of both weapon and armor, and take up equivalent slots. Multiple styles may be learned by a character, but only one can be equipped at a time - switching styles requires that you have the slots available for use. New styles can only be learned by finding a master and then leveling up while in their tutelage.

Each martial art has a perk and a drawback.

49 Empty Palms - d8 damage, 14 AC, 5 slots

• Perk - Your attacks count as magical.
• Drawback - Known only to angels.

Peasant's Path - d6 damage, 12 AC, 2 slots

• Perk - You blend in with crowds of commoners and rural folk.
• Drawback - You cannot hold a position of high social status.

Wheel of the Elements - d6 damage, 13 AC, Spells: Shape Earth, Control Fire, Bend Water, Move Air, 7 slots

• Perk - 1/2 damage from preferred element.
• Drawback - Double damage received from opposed element.

Crane Style - d8 damage, 13 AC, 4 slots

• Perk - Your reach is as a spear.
• Drawback - Disadvantage when resisting knockdown.

Mountain Stance - d10 damage, 18 AC, 9 slots

• Perk - You cannot be knocked down in this stance.
• Drawback -You cannot leave the ground in this stance.

Pressure Point Style - 0* damage, 15 AC, 5 slots   

• Perk - You can catch anything thrown to you.
• Drawback -Your hands are permanently numb.

* Target must pass a CON save or be paralyzed.

Way of the Pebble - d6 damage (ranged),  14 AC, 5 slots

• Perk - If you kill an enemy, you may make an additional attack on a second.
• Drawback -Skin takes on a rough, unpleasant appearance.

Porcelain Fist - d10 damage, 11AC, 3 slots

• Perk - You may damage yourself to do more damage (no greater than lvl)
• Drawback - Healing you receive is half as effective.

Drunken Monk - 2d4 damage, 13 AC, 4 slots

• Perk - Can use any item as an improvised weapon
• Drawback - Must be intoxicated to use this stance.

Way of the White Hand - d6 damage 16 AC, Spells; White Hand, Black Hand, 8 slots

• Perk - Knowledge of distant lands and cultures.
• Drawback -Vegetarian diet, deathly feud with the Red Hand.

 Several perks / drawbacks were suggested by twocalf on the Discord server. That gif is an edit from K6BD done by Cryophage.

Faction Progression: Knights of the Broken Sword

From Endless Legend

This is an example of one of the alternate progression systems I proposed back in this post and first worked on in my Shadow of the Eschaton hack.

Knights of the Broken Sword

Long ago there was a mighty sorcerer-king, who ruled over a vast and prosperous kingdom. When he had grown old, there came from the night, vile ghouls that rose from the earth and breached his castle by secret paths. They killed the king in his chambers and lapped up his golden blood, taking it into themselves and drawing upon this power. The king had no heir, and so the kingdom fell to ruin and dissolved among its lords. Few of his knights remained loyal, and swearing an oath to their Lady they waged a war against the goldbloods that lasts to this day.


A) Initiate
Requirements: Swear the Lady's Oath

• Stone mask, tabard bearing the order's regalia (+1 boon to social rolls within friendly territory)
• Lady's Compass (Detects goldbloods within 1000ft)
• Will be called upon by higher-ranking knights to assist in the hunt of goldbloods.

B) Knight
Requirements: Complete initiation

• Knight's Mask (Proof that one has completed initiation)
• Blessed broken sword (1 boon to hit goldbloods, 1d10 damage : d4 to all others)
• Lady's ring (Official seal of the order, legally binding)
• Lady's Burden (Must consume the blood of at least one goldblooded creature per month)
• May call up 1-2 initiates for aid in a hunt.

C) Veteran Knight
Requirements: Years of service and notable achievement. (Alt. bribery and politicking)

• Seat on the temple council (may vote on and direct order policy)
• Reputation precedes you (+2 boons to social rolls)
• Access to the uncensored Annals (contains order's true history & names of the great ghouls)
• May call up a lower knight for aid in a hunt, along with 2-3 initiates.

D) Lord Commander
Requirements: Elected to the position by meeting of the temple councils or by the Lady's wish.

• Access to the Lady's audience chamber.
• High broken sword (2 boons, 1d10+2 damage to goldbloods)
• Can request aid from outside the order to assist in a hunt.
• May direct the order in major hunts.
• Can command goldbloods with vocal commands (target resists with 2 banes).

Alternate Progression Methods

As I delve further into the endless abyss of do-it-yourself (and the reality that my games are destined to be pick up episodes rather than long-running consistent campaigns), I am becoming less invested in even gold-for-xp. So here are some musings on alternate progression systems.

Insight / Wonder

Ripped straight from Bloodborne. You gain Insight when you catch a glimpse of the true nature of things that lies underneath what you think you know.

• Characters begin with 0 Insight.
• Insight is gained by glimpsing the eldritch truth of reality.
• Gain 1 Insight at the baseline
• Gain 2 Insight for large revelations
• Gain 3 Insight for significant revelations
• Gain 5 Insight for shattering revelations

As one gains Insight, the world will begin to change around them. They will see, hear, and be able to interact with things others cannot. Doors will open. New beings will be encountered. More secrets will be revealed. You could build an entire adventure area map out of a bullet list of Insight triggers. Example:

At 10 Insight, the chains upon the cellar door in the Abandoned Farmhouse are shattered and scattered across the room. Muffled organ music might be heard from below.

Insight can be spent to gain spells or items. A lonely mailbox in the middle of nowhere, a talking doll, a Man of Leng; whoever the seller they ought not be reachable without Insight.

Wonder works just the same as Insight, but is triggered by different criteria. Wonder is gained by leaving your comfortable life of limits and known quantities and heading off to the hills, and seeing wonderful and fantastic things. The more Wonder you have, the more you are able to see, as it means you have gone further from home.

Wonder is spent at the expense of power. You can return home with a head full of the stuff and be no worse for wear, but the great temptation is to sell your experiences for all those shiny magic items.

Faction Progression

The best mechanical part of Degenesis, is how progression is linked to gaining higher rank within one's cult. The game attaches a lot of extra stuff like skill level requirements that you have to buy with XP and those will be ignored,

Progression within a faction is based around rights and privileges. As a character ranks up, they have access to better equipment, more connections,  greater authority, and so on. Along with the privileges, there will also be responsibilities; low-ranking members of the faction will be given commands, higher-ranking members will find themselves beholden to needs on a greater scope.

In my head, I see four major stages. You rank up by accomplishing major tasks:

1. Initiate - Sign of faction allegiance, basic equipment, basic rights.
2. Member - Connections, proper agent's equipment, privileges.
3. Veteran - Authority, access, the good stuff.
4. Leader - Top of the line, iconic stuff. Significant power within the faction and influence without. Underlings. Secrets.

This progression system is all about giving the players more tools to work with, rather than new abilities to learn. I've explored some of this in my Shadow of the Eschaton hack, and want to play with it more in the future.

Faction progression can also be used alongside typical class progression, or trimmed down into faction-specific reaction modifiers as one desires.

Party Progression

A variant of faction progression, except the party is the faction in question. In my mind the first comparison is the hamlet from Darkest Dungeon, where your investment improves the available services as the game goes on. Gold as XP for a building (which would have classes of their own) turns it all into "we have enough money to afford better equipment", rather than "I am rich, I am better at swinging a sword". Blacksmith, apothecary's shop, temple, etc.

Gold invested in the hamlet / home base / caravan wagon / spaceship etc. grants bonuses to the entire party, regardless of who is dropping in or out. To this is added the soft progression of allies, access, and authority that is gained naturally through adventuring, and we can have forward progression without falling prey to power creep (hopefully)

Unified Food Theory

Veronika Niersova

People in the DIY sphere really love cooking rules in their games, but I've never seen it all in one place. That's what this post is for. Featured herein is Arnold's K's GLOG lunch rule, Lungfungus' monster corpse usage (original post no longer up), Occultesque's dungeon gourmand, Skerples' Monster Menu-All, Wizzzargh's monsters-into-magic-items, Stewpot Witches (Benjamin Baugh in Chromatic Soup 01), and my own adipomancers.

Hunting and Gathering

• A dead monster has a 1-in-6 chance of being unusable.
• Taking 10+ damage in one attack, fire, acid, magic, etc increase failure by 1 each.
• Dead monsters can provide 1 field ration per hit die (Field rations last for 2 days).
• Salt, fire, and HD hours can turn a dead monster into HD^2 standard rations.
• A stewpot witch can do this naturally.
• A stewpot witch can spend 1 turn of foraging (ballpark it as an hour) to scrounge up enough herbs, edible plants, mushrooms, and other comestibles for 1d8 people. They have a 5-in-6 chance of finding a random exotic ingredient, or a 3-in-6 chance of finding a specific one.
• These ingredients, special or mundane, are treated as additions to monster meat.
• Meals cooked with special ingredients work as in Chromatic Soup 01. (pg 44-49) 

Preparation

• Base preparation chance is 1-in-6. Increase success odds by 1 for each of the following.
• Fire
• Water
• Utensils
• Pots & pans
• Spices
• A stewpot witch automatically succeeds at this. 
• A well-supplied party able to take time while camping also succeeds automatically.

The Meal

For normal meat, roll d6. Add +1 if the food was properly cooked and prepared, subtract -4 if the meat is rotten.

• 1: Save vs CON or no benefit from meal
• 2-5: No extra effect.
• 6: Heal 1 additional HP. 

Consult the Monster Menu-All to determine if the monster meat has any other properties.

Healing 

There are two methods:

• GLOG-style: A meal restores 1d6 + Lvl HP. A meal and restful sleep heals all HP.
• Dungeon Gourmand Method: HP restored is according to the amount of unique ingrediants used, as follows. This scale begins with two unique ingredients (meat and forage)
• (2) 1d6, (3) 2d6. (4) 3d6, (5) 2d6 + 6, (6) 3d6 + 6, (7) 2d6 + 12, (8) 3d6 + 12

Leftovers 

What is not eaten can be used in the creation of potions, spells, magical items, and magical weapons. The specific components needed might be found here and here (with more to come).

• Knowledge of what components are useful for magical purposes comes naturally to stewpot witches, and otherwise might be found in the pages of a well-notated field guide.

Generic components (hide, bones, etc) may be gathered up into a bundle and sold for the following prices (roll d6).

• 1-3: HD^2 * 3 silver
• 4-5: HD^2 * 6 silver
• 6:  HD^2 * 9 silver

Fin

And there you have it! Everything you need to picnic across the land and indulge all your Monster Hunter / Dungeon Meshi dreams. Don't forget to feed the monk, watch out for cannibals, and don't forget horrific mutations from magically-tainted meat.

Now YOU TOO can be like Laios!

"Forth, and Fear No Darkness!"

Scrap Princess had a good post about the standard spell list and what makes a good or bad spell, and that got me to thinking, and thinking led me to this.

Instead of re-imagining the spell, I'll turn it into the item(s) that it might as well be.

Marko Djurdjevic

Material Methods of Protection Against Evil

I'll have more to say on the subject of evil at a later time (Emmy Allen's essay on the topic was quite inspiring), but for now treat "evil" as related to demons and evil spirits. These are, at least in my default setting, generated by human action and belief just as gods are. None of these methods will stop an orc from burying an axe in your head, nor stop any spirits that are not demons. (With the exception of salt, which works on all spirits.)

Salt

A circle drawn in salt will create a barrier which spirits may not pass. One unit of salt per HD of the entity is required to maintain the barrier. If the circle is disturbed, the spirit will be able to escape. Material beings are able to pass over the circle, though most animals will instinctively avoid it.

A bag of salt costs 10 silver.

Holy Water

Burns evil spirits with 1d8 damage. Particularly zealous water burns for 1d10, socially religious water burns for 1d6, and mildly devout water burns for 1d4.

Holy water costs 25 silver.

Anointing with Oil

A mark is made upon the forehead, preventing possession and defending against mental effects for one hour. Length of effect is doubled if it is applied by ordained clergy or otherwise holy individual.

A vial of oil costs 100 silver and has enough for 6 uses. A permanent tattoo may be made by a specialist, for a cost equal to the character's first level-up.

Incense 

When burnt, produces a strong, pleasing smell that makes evil spirits sluggish and slothsome. Those effected (within 10 feet of the group) always act last in initiative and have a 2-in-6 chance per turn of not making an attack. The smell clings to clothing and is impossible to mask - sensitive noses can detect it from adjacent rooms.

A cake of incense costs 15 silver and burns for 2 hours. A thurible costs 50 silver.

Talismans

Provides wearer with a certain amount of psychological support, granting a minor bonus against fear. Substantial additional effects are unlikely, but possible.

Talismans range from 1-100 silver.

Laying on of Hands

A minor sign. Acts as Bless when made by a ordained cleric or holy individual as part of an appropriate ceremony.

No cost, but you'll probably have to sit through a sermon.

Health, Healing, and Injuries

This remains a work in progress, and is as-of-yet untested. It has been cobbled together from multiple sources of inspiration, including Into the Odd, Logan Knight's flesh and grit system, and Skerples' Rat on a Stick GLOG hack.

Further modifications are certain to follow.

Health

 

Characters have Hit Points and Body Points (or Grit and Flesh). HP represents a character's ability to avoid taking serious damage, and BP represents a character's actual bodily integrity. If you have HP, you can take a hit; if you've lost BP, there are things outside your body that really need to be put back inside.

HP at level 1 is equal to your full hit die + your CON bonus. At every subsequent level you roll for your HP with no CON bonus. HP caps at 20.

BP is equal to your CON score. It goes up and down according to that score, or in the occasional magical effect. Any damage taken to BP will be subtracted from both STR and CON. Taking BP damage means you are now bleeding out, and will lose and additional 1 BP / round until stabilized.

When you reach 0 HP, you are incapacitated. Any damage taken beyond this point will be taken from your BP. If you reach 0 BP, you are dead. If you are attacked while incapacitated, you are dead.

Healing

 

HP is restored to full by a restful night of sleep and a meal. Other circumstances, (sleep but no food, food only, partial sleep, etc) you will only recover 1d6 + lvl HP.

BP is recovered through the following methods, and is done so in the same intervals it is dealt in (minor, small, medium, great).

Panacea potions
Save vs magic to resist addiction. Addicts make saves to resist at -1. If health restored equals or exceeds character's max BP, they will progress to the next stage (gain 1 panacea mutation, save malus increased by 1). Total transformation into a panacea mutant occurs upon reaching stage 5.

Surgery
Chance of infection dependent on the surgeon's level of preparation. This will be a larger worry for players when in the field, but a visit to the barber should go with only minor risk.

Heal Serious Wounds
R: Touch T: Creature D: 0
Restores [sum] BP. Biomancy of this nature (the kind that won't give you cancer) is a carefully-guarded secret among the fleshcrafter guilds. They will charge you a premium for it, but it's possible to undo lingering injuries through this method.

Healing crystals
Can heal max BP equal to die type x 2. Healing crystals repair injury through absorbing and storing it; they will not only be rendered useless upon capacity, but become radioactive as hell. They are thoroughly illegal.

Rest
A stabilized character at rest will recover 1d4 BP per week.

Additional Skills

• Medicine - Setting bones, stopping bleeding, stabilizing the injured, identifying injuries, basic knowledge of herbs and medicines. Not a permanent solution, cannot recover BP.
• Surgery - See barbers.

Injuries

If you take BP damage, make a CON save against your new score. If you fail, you will take a lingering injury. Roll for one on your favorite table, and if you don't have a favorite table, James Introcaso has a good one.

Broken bones are healed after 10 days of rest.

Missing limbs can be repaired or replaced, but advanced prostethics  and grafts ought to be treated as quest rewards.

Special Injuries

Certain damage types will always leave specific lingering injuries, as appropriate.

Fire damage will result in burn scars.
Unholy damage will result in anathema.
Holy damage will result in sanctification.
Corrosive damage will result in acid scars.
Nectrotic damage will result in fleshrot.

Final Notes

This whole thing was made to retroactively fit into the normal LotFP health system I've been using with my group. I'll be running it proper when Hot Springs Island No Allergy Edition gets going in a couple weeks, and see what needs tweaked there.