Burgeoning Blogs 2

 Let's keep this ball rolling.

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> Part 4  

26. How could I go about acquiring a gryphon mount? 
Either raise one from an egg (not easy) or impress one with a feat of valor (also not easy, but typically faster) - the latter will usually involve killing a specific griffin's enemy or rival (often a manticore, as they fill similar predatory niches)

27. How difficult is it to be brought back from the dead? Is such a thing even possible? 
Impossible: attempts to maintain the soul’s cohesion after bodily death is the territory of mad wizards. Shades can be summoned up pretty easily, but that’s because they’re one component of the soul and aren’t conscious entities. 

28. How do you deal with any jitters or nerves before running a game? 
I’m usually chomping at the bit before a game, rather than jittery. The difficulty is getting me into the starting position.

29. How do you determine if a character can successfully swim in your games? 
I just presume that they can, unless given reason to believe otherwise (they’re a dwarf, they’re made of stone, they’re from a desert, the player arbitrarily decides their character can’t swim), in which case I will ask the player.

30. How do you determine the weather for the day or season in your game? 
I have never actually done this, so probably with a hex flower or random table or just like, a Farmer’s Almanac from the 1800s or something.

31. How do you feel about writing directly in RPG books? Forbidden or useful? 
I don’t do it for the same reason I don’t write in the margins of normal books - I rewrite or correct things often enough that it will just turn into a mess of crossouts and eraser burns.

32. How do you handle a shy/quiet player? What about a spotlight hungry one? 
Both of these are tied up in the same general idea, which is making sure to cycle through my players with some leading questions re: what their character is doing or feeling. 

33. How do you make particularly efficient weapons stand out from inefficient ones?
Low-quality weapons have a higher chance of breaking & doing less damage; high quality ones will have a higher minimum damage or better chance to hit.

34. How do you roll dice? In the open, behind a screen, let the players roll? 
In the open, players make their own rolls. I do a lot of DMing while standing so a screen is usually of limited use to me.

35. How do your players deal with losing a character? How do you get ’em back in play? 
If they die early enough in the game that they’d be sitting around for a while, I’ll hand them a hireling, already-introduced NPC, or just a rando who would make even a bit of sense for the party to run into. They can then decide if they want to keep playing as that character or roll up a new one for the next session. If I really need to keep them in, they can be the ghost of their PC.

36. How has access to magic influenced technology in your setting? 
I tend to say that the existence of magic allows for anachronistic jumps forward in scientific fields, with sanitation, medicine, food production and astronomy being the big ticket items. Like instead of turning magic into a sub-field of science, magic is a tool to help you do science. An advantage to this is that I can keep exactly what the magic is vague for ease-of-use and narrative convenience while still keeping the societal effects. Some examples:

• Field-specific craft-magic means that everything's just a bit higher quality than it would be in reality. Items last longer and work better, and craftsmen are able to do more with less.
• Ex. If I give glassmakers are bit of vaguely-defined trade magic, I can say that made the development of lenses just a touch easier which allows me to say that microscopes and telescopes show up earlier (in-universe equivalent of the Classical period, for ease of player reference) and I can skip right over geocentrism and humorism.
• If demons exist, people will have to develop a reliable means of diagnosing possessions, which I can lead to a earlier conceptualization of mental illness.

This is, if I think about it for any time at all, a very idiosyncratic approach to magic (or at least one I don't recall seeing anywhere besides like, the occasional tumblr post) and I don’t actually think it’s based on any specific influence. I just think real-life space science is cool and want to have characters know about it.

37. How have video games/other media influenced the way you approach these games? 
Fear and Hunger’s tightly woven and multiple-solution dungeon/world design is a thing of beauty and very worth emulating, especially how open-ended and complex it manages to be without bogging down the player in verbs and tools. It’s something I had tried to do in Unicorn Meat, but of course I wrote that before I knew about or played Fear and Hunger. 

38. How long does it take to have a custom set of armor made? A weapon? 
1-4 downtimes, depending on what you’re asking for.

39. How long is your average session? Have they ever gone longer than expected? Why? 
Usually 2-3 hours. If they go longer it’s usually because there’s only a little left and it’s less hassle than scheduling a second session.

40. How much are lifestyle expenses for your PCs "between adventures?" 
I’ve never considered this a particularly interesting thing to track;  I greatly prefer Delta Green’s downtime actions.

41 How much time do you spend preparing between games? What's that look like? 
A lot of bullet points and boxes connected with arrows, doesn’t matter if it’s a premade module or something I made. Time spent is dependent on how much text I need to compile and how much compiling I need to do to make it usable.

42. How were you Introduced to these games? Share your history with them! 
I saw some 3e books at Borders in ye olden days, but didn’t really play them until I got to college and took up an offer from someone in the fantasy/sci-fi book club. I know I had been collecting the odd free pdf before then, but I didn’t get around to playing until later.

43. How would a player go about brewing their own potion or making a scroll? 
They’d need the recipe / magical formula they want to use, and then downtime action(s) to do it.

44. How would you describe a 60' x 60' square room with 4 cardinal doors to the players? 
Material, temperature, smell, contents, art on walls / ceiling / floor, sound (in-room and from adjacent rooms).

45. How would you handle a party wanting to start a business or enterprise? 
I background it to one of two rolls made during downtime: how is the business doing, and has anything noteworthy happened?

46. Is it possible to play as something unusual in your setting? A dragon, balrog, minotaur? 
I love me a Star Wars cantina, but I try to be cognizant of the fact that it’s extremely easy to make a setting dull and samey by going for quantity over quality. Part of my method for avoiding this is  just saying “there’s a lot of variety you can get from ‘humans only’ if you interpret monopods as humans”; the other part is to try and keep the special options rooted in place and context, instead of treating them like another variety of human.

Example: if you want to play a minotaur, cool! You’re going to be one of the White Bull’s thousand sons. You’re immortal, everyone in the world knows what happened to your mother, all your brothers hate you (feeling’s mutual), and your father is an eldritch abomination locked inside a maze at the bottom of some Atlantean ruins.

D&D has a habit of genericizing and sterilizing mythic monsters and that’s a large part of why using them as the quote unquote exotic player options always strikes me as a failure of imagination. Like you’re stripping out the core of the monster, there goes your main avenue of reinterpretation.

47. Is magic innate or something that can be learned by anyone? Why? 
I roll with “learned by anyone” as the default, with innate magic generally caused by external influences (you got too close to a Powerful Magical Thing, usually). It’s never going to be a strictly heritable feature, because I fucking hate the fantasy genre’s obsession with magic eugenics. Fuck right off the edge of my dick with that shit, how about you try ripping off someone who isn’t Queen Terf of Wet Island for a change, Jesus Christ. (Yes I know the trope is older than that but most modern fantasy authors aren't ripping off particularly far back sources, you know?)

48. Is there a particular system or game that you are excited to run or play? Tell me about it! 
Before life got in the way, there were plans for Layla to run Mythic Bastionland for myself and a couple other friends. Was really looking forward to that; was the first time Into the Odd mechanics really clicked for me - amazing what changing the wording from “hit points” to “guard” can do. I was going to be the Emerald Knight, the most normal of the band,

49. Is there some kind of banking system/safe storage of treasure in your setting? 
If you’re friends with the moldywarps (and you should be, they’re cute little mole-people), they’ll gladly hold on to your valuables for you. It’s not really a bank, though, more just a favor for a friend: you aren’t insured, you accrue no interest, and sometimes the moldywarps will exchange your item for something “just as good” (according to their own non- monetary standards)

50. Let me hear about your fave character/NPC from a game! What made 'em special? 
Gotta be Ayo my drunken BEEFSTRONK tiefling monk. Longest-running character I’ve ever had.
 

Burgeoning Blogs 1

The ever-incredible ktrey over at d4Caltrops had a recent 1d100 table of potential blogpost topics: in my infinite wisdom I am going to shotgun the gamut and answer every single one of them. Split up into four posts of 25 each for my own sanity.

> Part 2

> Part 3

> Part 4 

1. Are phones/devices permitted at your table? How do you handle distractions?
I don’t have a rule against it. If people are really getting distracted, I'll throw them one of the softball “how does your character do X?” prompts to get them back in.


2. Are spellcasters rare? Common? How do "normal" people feel about them? 
Spells like "snap your fingers and light a match", "fix a clean break in a broken object" and "find the lost object that you swear you just set down" are an everyday part of life. Cunning men / women, witches, spirit mediums and other low-power practitioners are found basically everywhere, and are highly valued in their communities.

Mid-power practitioners (roughly where a magic-specialist PC would be) are not uncommon, and attitudes are more ambivalent. A letter of introduction from an initiatory society won’t smooth over everything, but it will help a traveling mage.

High-power practitioners (traditional wizards with the hat and tower & so on) are rare and considered extremely dangerous (for many well-attested reasons).


3. Are there secret societies or factions hiding in your world? Tell me about one!
I am habitually incapable of resisting cheeky references to SCP deep lore that no one else will get, regardless of what game I am running, though the actual group of interest I use is context-dependent. The most likely ones will be the occult historical factions (Daevites, Ortothans, Nalkans, and Mekhanists) appearing as mystery religions, since they lend themselves extremely well to evoking vast secrets lost to time.


4. Are there any interesting holidays/festivals in your world? 
One off the dome: an isolated village whose midsummer festival entails a giant red and white orb descends from the sky and gives each inhabitant an amorphous, blobby tie-die sculpture sort of thing with no apparent purpose or design. Then the orb leaves, the sculptures are installed next to the family shrine, and next year they are returned to the orb in exchange for new sculptures.

No one knows why this happens.


5. Are there any recurring jokes or humorous call-backs that occur in your games? 
At some point, there will be a skull with the name DENNIS carved into its forehead.


6. Are there constellations in your setting? Can you describe four of them? 
It's never come up, but if I had to do it on the fly I would rename existing constellations and probably mix different traditions together while doing it. Proper names would be swapped out but the titles would probably stay the same or be similar i.e. Taurus would be the Bison or the Bonnacon, the Dippers would be the Raccoon Brothers, Orion would be the Amazon, etc.

7. Are you working on your own system? What makes it stand out from others? 
My great open secret is that I generally don’t put high value on rulesets as a whole, and tend to treat them as modular assortments of mechanics (sorted by broad genus) that can be tweaked and recombined as needed.

Which is to say I have tried making my own system, but found no reason to see those projects through when I can just use what other people have made.


8. Can one buy magic items in your setting? Where would one go about doing this? 
There are two kinds of magical item, far as I'm concerned: those that inherently have magical properties (phoenix feathers, bonnacon turds, basilisk eyes, etc) and those that have been imbued with magical properties intentionally by a practitioner. Both can be bought, though the former is much easier to acquire than the latter since you can just go on down to the shop and pick up some mandrake root; to get a bespoke enchantment you need to find someone willing and able to do the enchantment, and then they'll need time and resources to make it happen.


9. Describe 4 things that qualify for deity disfavor and cause clerics to lose powers
In increasing order of severity (exact likelihood and specifics depend on the deity):

1. Violation of ritual praxis by accident or ignorance
• If you don't know or flub up the proper rites but are doing your honest best, most popular gods will let it slide. 
2. Minor violations of ethical praxis
• Overlooking minor sins is basically required in order to maintain a human priesthood, though all gods will get fed up with it eventually if left unaddressed for too long.
3. Ritual impurity 
• This will often be an instant disfavor, though will usually only last until the follower has ritually purified themselves; the more charitable gods will make exceptions for emergency situations (ex. violating dietary prohibitions under duress in order to save someone's life)
4. Knowing violation of ritual praxis / desecration of sacred space
•  Getting sloppy with rites can be tolerated to a (usually very small extent), but deliberate transgression is going to have pretty immediate consequences. 
5. Extreme violations of praxis or sacred space
•  This is the part of the gradient where violators are going to get their asses cursed or smote.
6. Uncategorized Fucking Around
•  Circumstances where the only natural outcome is Finding Out.

10. Describe a few pieces of expensive jewelry one might find in a dragon's hoard.

1. Jade and silver torc of two entwined serpents  from the 18th Dynasty of Thuria
2. Gold and lapis lazuli headdress of an exorcist-priestess of Nan-Sul-Gara
3. Amber nose stud with preserved insect of unknown provenance unknown
4. Marble touch-sculpture of the blind and bat-like Venusians; is actually biting political satire
5. Amulet containing the left navigular bone of Saint Jomo the Mortitian.
6. An electrum medallion; it menaces with spikes of obsidian; it is engraved with the image of an elephant and a dwarf in electrum: the elephant is striking down the dwarf; the elephant is on fire; the dwarf is screaming.

11. Describe a near death situation or TPK that you've been a part of at the table
The one time I played Mutant Year Zero (right before covid kicked off), the entire party died from radiation poisoning two hexes away from home because we didn’t have a scout. Mistakes were made.


12. Describe an occasion where a die roll or randomizer had everyone surprised! 
It’s been long enough since I’ve played regularly that I don’t have any good examples on hand.


13. Describe one big "mover and shaker" or local lord/lady in your world. 
I’ve yet to settle on a name for her, but there’s a drow / lilu / kin-yani diplomat-sorceress who’s one of those 4D plate-spinner types. She’s the overseer for a major (but relatively new) trade relationship between the surface and the subterrene, and has acquired an impressive number of enemies from both sides. A woman with a lot of use for deniable assets.


14. Do all dwarfs have beards or only certain ones? Why? 
Not all of them, but they’re common for both sexes (as is body hair in general), and female dwarves without beards will often grow out their sideburns.


15. Do you do any "funny voices" or accents when portraying? If so, what are they? 
Usually only for comedic characters, which usually boil down to “bloviating wizard”, “Eeyore”, and “goblin”.


16. Do you have any stories from games that your players can't stop talking about? 
Since I don't really have consistent groups I don't have many player stories, but I have plenty of Gm stories; the con game of Dead Planet I ran a couple years ago remains a highlight, when the players managed to open up the Gaunt hive in the Red Tower barracks without any casualties by tossing in a homemade gas bomb and welding the door shut as the player in maggot armor held it in place. Weird to recount a story of players committing war crimes as entertainment, but the clever thinking on their feet was just so good.


17. Do you take breaks during a game? Are they on a schedule or ad hoc? 
Ad hoc, usually around the mid-point and hour / hour and a half in.


18. Do you use "critical hits" or "fumbles" in your games? What have they added? 
The real benefit for a crit of either variety is that they provide a great opportunity for you to ask a player “all right, how does that play out?” They’re a tool for engagement.


19. Do you use music at the table? If so, what are some examples? If not then why? 
I’ve done it a couple times in the past (Waaaaaaaaaay back when I ran Deep Carbon Observatory, I used Elegiac for going upriver and Flutter Fly for the dueling wizard encounter), but I’ve found it low-benefit to high-hassle on the whole.


20. Does alignment ever change, what kind of things would lead to that? 
Changing either your political or spiritual alliance, depending on how I am interpreting alignment at that given moment.


21. Draw or describe a treasure map your players might discover in play 
A  grid of street patterns scribbled on the back of a receipt: the only indication of actual locations are a circled X and a handful of very loose interpretations of fast food logos.


22. Have you ever fudged die rolls? Do you have strong feelings about the concept? 
I’m most likely to fudge enemy health rather than rolls; if the players have the situation under control / it’s starting to get boring, I’ll just decide 1-3 more hits will do it in if it’s not going to surrender or run off.


23. How are skeletons made? Ghouls? Why haven't wraiths/vampires taken over? 
Skeletons are made by binding a minor spirit to a bunch of bones. They can follow some basic commands, and work a bit better when the spirit is the shade of an appropriate species (i.e. the shades of dead humans are best for a human skeleton, though the skeleton and shade don’t have to be from the same person.

The original ghouls were a species of entelodont that got imprinted in a specific shoggoth gene line, and emerge in the modern day as the result of a prion disease that causes all sorts of epigenetic / retroviral fuckery when a body containing dormant imprinted cells is cannibalized.

Ghosts and undead exist in their own ecosystems with checks and balances via predator-prey relationships. Vampires are something of the equivalent of a tiger - solitary predators with very large territories. Either that or horrible tick monsters.


24. How big does a dungeon have to be to qualify for the "mega" appellation? 
Big enough that the campaign setting doesn’t exist concretely outside of it: the dungeon is the setting.


25. How common are adventurers? How are they treated generally by normal folk?
Adventurers are migrant workers, so the locals’ opinions on them will vary a lot according to the present economic situation and assorted intersections of race and class. They go where the (monster hunting) work is, and so will usually make seasonal rounds (often as part of a circus) and use the winter for rest and recovery.

Sidrak the Sage Asks Some Questions

The blame for this can fall squarely on the Maniculum for introducing me to Sidrak and Bokkus, a medieval text wherein a Babylonian king named Bokkus (or Boctus, or Boccus…) asks several hundred questions to the philosopher Sidrak (or Sidrach, or Sydrac…) who provides some absolutely bonkers medieval-logic answers.

Unfortunately, the Middle English translation doesn’t seem to be easily available online, there is no modern English translation, and the dual-manuscript scholarly edition doesn’t have an ebook or the decency to release after creative commons was invented (This is my box of “translations of ancient and medieval texts should be released under creative commons so that people can freely read and share them” brand soap), and I am too impatient for interlibrary loan. It is on Internet Archive, but you have to have an account and check it out. (As of writing, the volume with the index of questions is checked out by someone else: damn you artificial digital scarcity!)

Anyway: since the master list of goofy medieval worldbuilding questions is out of my reach, I will content myself for now by using the ones that the Maniculum has used for its April Fool’s Day game show episodes.

Some of these questions are very clearly written by a Frenchman in the high middle ages, and are thus exemplars of being weird and uncomfortable.

IMPORTANT EDIT: Skerples has, in an act of sudden heroism, compiled the entire index. The questions are now available.

***

Brother Sidrak has spent the greater part of thirty years compiling a comprehensive survey of the Known World’s knowledge. From east to west and north to south he has wandered along the trade roads and pilgrimage paths with his Book of Questions, seeking volunteers for his great scholastic project. Anyone even modestly cooperative (and in many cases, not cooperative at all) will be peppered with selections from his list of 400-odd queries; whatever answers they give will be dutifully recorded and indexed for later tallying as he calculates which nations and peoples are more or less misguided and in need of salvation (He’s not doing this whole thing to find any answers - he’s certain that he already has them - only to see what other people’s answers are.)

• Appearance: Wrinkled, sun-darkened skin. Habit patched so many times that it now makes for surprisingly good desert camouflage. Thick grey hair and beard turned off-brown from accumulated dust and grime.
• Manner: Inquisitive, hyperfocused, performatively pious. Enjoys facts and lore, cares little for context or nuance. Does not consider differing worldviews worth arguing with or understanding, only recording.
• Wants: To compile all the Known World’s knowledge in a single work (with his name on it, of course); to prove that his sect (and by extension himself) has all the answers.
• Secret: Has a bastard son out there who has come into some notoriety on his own.

The following answers and their attendant questions were selected at random from volume twelve of the fifth book, The Vulgar, Also Called Cutters, Delvers, Vagrants, Hobos, and Gentlemen of the Road.

***

1. How are birds held aloft in the air?

• “All birds are avatars of the Simiurgh, who alone possesses the power of flight.”

• “Their bones are hollow and very light, and their wings push against the air like our feet push against the earth.”

• “As offspring of the dragon and the phoenix, birds are aligned with both fire and air, and thus naturally live above the earth and sea”

• “It’s punishment for their rebellion against the giants in the age before the sun.”

• “They are puppetted around on strings by Atlakhnakha for her amusement and our ruin.”

• “What the fuck is a bird?”

2. What becomes of falling stars after they fall?

• “Ever seen a fresh angel corpse? Wildest shit. They’ve got white meat, gold blood, feathers like a peacock show, and they don't rot. There’s one out past Jangar, fell a couple decades ago. Splattered itself across half the township when it hit. Might still be some bones left.”

• “The smith-priests of Kogan-Usan forge their metallic cores into the weapons of kings. Three are known to us, four are missing, an eighth is suspected and a ninth is pure supposition.”

• “They hatch into a dragon.”

• “They disgorge a legion of evil spirits and vile phantasms, after which they suck the vril from the land and poison all plants and animals that live there. They do this to restore their inner fires before returning to the heavens.”

3. Why is the Moon cold and the Sun hot?

• “The moon used to be hot, but it died and cooled off. That was before the demons took it over from the Moon King.”

• “If you look closely, you can see the sigil of the Frost Witch inscribed on the cislunar surface.”

• “Well one of them’s on fucking fire, ain’t it?”

• “It’s only temporary; the seasons of the heavenly bodies are extremely long, and they run opposite each other. The sun will enter autumn soon, and the moon will warm in its spring.”

• “The sun was made of Ghanjuk’s golden heart, the moon from his blinded left eye.”

• “You’ve got it backwards; heat and cold are extensions of Sunness and Moonness.”

4. Of which are there more, grains of earth or drops of water?

• “Trick question; their natural state is a singular whole, as evidenced by the tendency of both substances to coalesce. In this way every grain of earth and every drop of water is merely a temporary and circumstantial separation.”

• “They are two elements in a single substance, just in different concentrations along a dirt-water gradient.”

• “This line of inquiry was judged to be of sufficient stupidity to revoke the favor of Heaven and  banned at the Council of Hanharrat, as was the counting of angels found on pinheads; you are committing heresy by entertaining it.”

5. How many stars are in the sky?

• “Doesn’t matter, you only need to care about the seven that hate you.”

• “Twenty-one myriads of myriads, exactly. Minus one for the Betrayer.”

• “Only one star exists, and it is the Sun; the things called stars are enormous luminescent creatures similar to a great fish or a whale that drift through the aether and feed on moonlight.”

 

6. Why are some people tall and some short?

• “God saw fit to put the manhood of my enemies at the level of my fists.”

• “Trends of height come from residual influence of the giants. Most likely, the very tall were born in a land above one of the more intact corpses.”

• “The gods play dice with each soul, and this determines the qualities of the body they inhabit.”

7. What kind of apple did Adam eat?

• “It wasn’t the apple that was the issue, it was the cider. Drunkenness is the root of all evils.”

• “It was the golden fruit of the Hesperides, stolen by Eris and tossed casually into the garden as Adam was naming the zoa and valar. Adam, of course, escalated matters when his answer to the question of who was most beautiful was to ask to sleep with all three of the Tridevae. Simultaneously. He was ambitious, if nothing else.”

• “Common misconception, there are no apples in the land of Uz: it was a fig. A nasty, rotten fig filled with the larvae of wasps, for good and evil is terrible knowledge to have.”

• “Eve’s.” [Sidrak notes here that he does not know why the woman waggled her tongue.]

• “As best as modern scholarship can determine, it was the fruiting body of a shoggoth that had entered its sessile semi-vegetative life stage. This triggered a dramatic increase in neuron density.”

• “A stolen one. The angels had entrusted Lilith with care of the Tree; Adam wished to be like God but would not stand for having to share it with anyone else.”

8. Why do people sneeze?

• “Dust? Pollen? I don’t know what you want from me, man, my nose gets tickled and I sneeze.”

• “Some people say it is caused by invisible sickness spirits: modern natural science has taught us that it is in fact caused by extremely small sickness spirits!”

• “Your ancestors are fucking in the underworld.”

• “It’s the signal of a failed der0 transmission from the Air Loom.”

• “Your astral self has detected the presence of a nearby ghost.”

• “The air at the bottom of  your lungs is old and needs replaced."

9. What is the greenest thing in the world?

• “Couldn’t tell you, I’m colorblind.”

• “The gossamer robes of the Emerald Emperor, lord of all elves.”

• “There is no green more beautiful than the countenance of Yha’galuush, orc god(dess) of love and sex. To see a single glimpse of them is to see the greatest treasure on the earth.”

• “A tree in early summer, about midmorning or so, when the sun is warm and the sky is clear, and a faint breeze rustles the leaves above your head.”

• “Saw this one malachite idol once. Someone in one of the other cutter camps had dragged it out of the Tomb of the Serpent Kings and was showing it off. Got his ass cursed for it. Anyway, it was really green.”

10. What is the best animal?

• “Dogs is gods, y’know.”

• “The elephant; they are both the wisest and most moral of all creatures, far beyond mankind in both capacities.”

• “There’s this kind of slug down below - very brightly colored, glows in the dark - that feeds on blood. Its ooze foams up and gets gummy when it hits air, and it cleans inflection from a wound. See this scar on my neck? Woulda died without one of those things. Don’t eat em, though, poisonous as hell; numbs you for a while, then excruciating pain.”

• “The Questing Beast is of symbolic primacy, for it is the human condition; chasing that which we can’t ever catch.”

• “Dragons. Because if they can die, so can kings.”

• “Is not man merely an ape who has stolen fire from the gods?”

11. Why is seawater salty?

• “They are made of the Moon’s tears, after she was rebuked by the archons for changing her face.”

• “Lot’s wife was a giant, one of the Nephilim.”

• “It was struck by the star of Wormwood at the birth of the gods.”

• “It used to be blood!”

• “It is a vast dilute ooze, slowly dissolving the stone of the world.”

• “Fish piss.”

 

12. When dogs fuck, why are they more tightly joined than other animals?

• [Much of the page is taken up by a bloodstain and a note explaining that the interviewee, a cynocephalon from the kingdom of Prester John, had punched Brother Sidrak very hard in the nose when asked this question.]

13. Why did God make the Earth round like a ball?

• “It is the ideal shape for pondering.”

• “Easier for the elephants to keep balanced on their backs when the turtle moves, discs are usually too unstable for life to develop.”

• If you look at this diagram you will see that it is in fact a concave depression surrounded by vast walls of ice that then forms a dodecahedron…”

14. Is magic real?

• “Earlier today I lit a man on fire by snapping my fingers and then sold his possessions to a talking plant who walks the dying neurons of Yog-Sothoth. What do you fucking think?”

• “As everything that exists exists within nature, the supernatural cannot exist. Magic exists, therefore it is natural, and therefore it is not magic.”

15. Where in the body does the soul live?

• “In the lungs, with the breath.”

• “In the heart, with the blood.”

• “In the stomach, with the heat.”

• “In the testicles, with the seed.”

• “In the eyes, the brain, and the hands, where ideas turn to actions.”

• “In the womb, where two are made one.”

16. Why are some people white, some black, and some brown?

• “Presumably because they are not blue, red, or purple as they are in my homeland.”

• “You see only three colors in mankind? Such dullness”

• “I can only speak to the first; an albinic is a test from the gods, to see if men lose their wits and their morals when confronted with one who is different.”

• “Because humans, sadly, have lost their beautiful fur.”

• “God ran out of colored ink after painting all the birds and fish.”

17. If someone is deaf, blind, and mute, in what language do they think?

• “The feral howling that undergirds all of reality.”

• “Standardized Mi-Go Interface Language, if their ancestry can be traced back to Atlantis; otherwise they will think in either Ural-Altaic, Dravido-Koreanic, or Dene-Caucasian depending on which son of Noah their people descend from.”

• “None at all; they will think in pure thought, as the gods do. This is why they are so powerful in the magical arts.”

18. How should one remove a bone or thorn stuck in the throat?

• “Don’t eat things with thorns? Or at least pluck them out first, Jesus.”

• “The Von Heimlich Maneuver.”

• “I keep forgetting humans can’t just eat bones.”

19. Should the rich be judged in the same way as the poor?

• “Gods, I wish.”

• “No, because at least that way they’re honest about fucking us over.”

• “Of course not! Do you understand how long it took to quarantine all the rich men of the world on the Golden Isle? Bringing them to court for any of their heinous crimes against God, nature, and their fellow man would remind them that the rest of us exist! May God bless and keep those bastards as far away from us as possible.”

• “I do not know. We do not have poor men in my country, though  I suspect it is because we have yet to invent rich men.”

20. Why does shit stink?

• “It’s filled with the angry but extremely weak ghosts of everything you ate.”

• “You’d smell like shit too if you were chewed up and dunked in stomach bile.”

• “All the good qualities of the food have been taken into the body, leaving behind only the bad parts, and this produces the miasmatic effect.”

21. What animal lives the longest?

• “It’s a sliding scale of turtles. Small turtles, medium turtles, big turtles, zaratans, world-turtles, turtles all the way up and down.”

• “Not animals, but trees: Mighty Pando was old long before mankind was shaped from the clay.”

• “I was nineteen, and had just signed up with a mercenary company heading eastward. We went all the way to World’s End Lake before turning round, but when we were there - I don’t even recall what we were doing there anymore - we saw the Dragon. Not a dragon, the Dragon. She that watched the iron star fall from the sky and destroy the world of the Feathered Men. Was nearly eighty years ago now that I saw her, and those years are nothing. She has lived them a thousand thousand times over.”

22. What are the best colors of clothing to wear?

• “Context-dependent on what monster is trying to eat you - some manner of dappled green, brown, or grey is good for general purpose, but you’ll want to be careful about the saturation and contrast depending on what colors it can see. Not knowing a monster’s visible spectrum is a sure way for a greenhorn to get killed. Oh, and scrambler patterns are good to throw off enemy wizards, they have a real difficult time targeting you if they can’t make out your face.”

• “Blue. Dunno why, I just like it.”

• “A black tunic with a white sash, for that is what Emar wore when he assassinated the Five-and-One Emperors.”

23. What is the worthiest day of the year?

• “The vernal equinox, when we renew our vows with the spirits of the world.”

• “May the 25th, in honor of the One-Night Republic and the start of the Revolution.”

• “Calendrical division of time is arbitrary and false; all days are sacred.”

• “Every alternating Friday, ‘cause that’s when the paycheck clears.”

• “The vigil night of Inti, our lost Bringer of Day.”

24. What happens to fire after it goes out?

• “It reverts to its invisible aerial state as phlogiston.”

• “It is gone forever, and the cosmos is diminished.”

• “It returns to the smaller sun. Mankind has yet to steal fire from the greater sun.”

• “It is dead, having reached the end of its lifespan. Such elementals are brief things, compared with those of water and earth, yet not so brief as those of the air.”

25. How may a child come out of its mother’s womb?

• “Bloody, naked, and screaming battle-cries against this cruel world and its demiurge.”

• “Sometimes by surgery, sometimes by miracle, usually with great difficulty.”

• “What is a ‘womb’? Is that a variety of forge? Do you not carve new descendants out of the living stone?”

• “I’ve had three of the little bastards, and let me tell you, we made a mistake when we gave up laying eggs.”

• “You…use their true name to summon them out of the mother without pain or struggle? Like a reasonable person?”

26. How many children may a woman carry in her womb at one time?

• “One to three, barring any mythical importance. Then it can go up to seven, though I only know of one case in written memory. Which means we have two or possibly just one left before the end of the world, to satisfy the Law of Threes.”

27. What causes animals to go mad?

• “The Hell Star, obviously.”

• “Cannibalism of their own kind. Prion disease is scary shit.”

• “Long-term isolation within a zoological garden.”

• “Pain, stress, and loneliness, otherwise diseases of the mind or the influence of dread powers. Same as with man.”

28. Which women give the most benefit & delight to men?

• “I do, it’s me, it was me all along. My hips don’t lie and my thighs save lives. You’re welcome, men.”

• “Call me when you find a man who provides any benefit or delight to a woman and I might have an answer for you.”

• “Making some bold assumptions today, are we?”

• “A succubus woven from the hot black flame, bound by mask and name to fit the sorcerer’s specific desires. She will, inevitably and justly, stick a knife in his neck and string his corpse from the tower balcony as a warning.”

• “I do not consent to adventure in your magical realm. Away wi’ ye, foul wizard!”

29. What is the best and worst body part of man?

• “Oh fuck you, man. This is such an obvious setup to get me to say ‘his cock’, and then you’ll launch into a sermon about the importance of semen retention or some shit.”

• “His cock, obviously.”

30. Why did Noah take evil animals, such as scorpions, adders, and snakes, onto the ark?

• “He owed the Serpent a favor.”

• “I question why snakes are here twice while wasps are not mentioned at all. Scorpions only sting you if you fuck around with them and then you deserve it.”

• “One; because God said every animal. Two; no animal but man has knowledge of good and evil and thus all harmful animals are innocent by way of ignorance.”

• “Ah, it’s metaphorical, you see. Representative of a mass extinction event some thirty thousand years before Christ that saw a resurgence of the flying polyps.”

31. Which gives greater cunning, hot food or cold food?

• “Well, it’s not whatever I’m eating now. What the fuck is with you people and food temperature?”

• “If I eat a frozen chili pepper, is it cold or hot?”

• “Do I look like someone who cooks their food? I’m a fucking ghoul.”

• “Hot, naturally; you try thinking straight with a brain freeze.”

• “Cold, obviously; hot foods overheat and may potentially melt the brain. Your thoughts become sluggish, in any case.”

• “You must be one of those ‘salt has too much flavor’ types, eh?”

32. Sort from most to least numerous: animals, humans, fish, birds

• “Trick question; all of these are fish.”

• “What the fuck is a bird?”

33. Should people greet each other whenever they meet?

• “Hardly! Repeated headbutting, even for an orc, is bound to leave lasting damage.”

34. Which is worthier, maidenhood or virginity?

• “I have dealt with a lot of men who can’t get any and I used to be a preteen girl: both groups possess an immeasurable capacity for evil.”

• “Best of all is to be a kind and considerate lover.”

• “Never ask this question again.”

• “Motherfuckers like you who think virginity is magical are why I was sold into slavery in a unicorn slaughterhouse when I was eight. Crawl up your own ass and drown in shit.”

35. How are worms bred in the body and how do they feed?

• “Oh, do you not know? Congratulations! Today you get to learn about endoparasitic wasps!”

36. On what day and at what time will the Final Judgement occur?

• “Whatever the day, thanks to time zones it will take place at all hours at once.”

• “The final judgement will never occur, as the increased population of Earth has clearly overloaded the celestial bureaucracy and made it unable to render preliminary judgement - that’s why no one gets smote anymore.”

• “No one knows the day or the hour, dipshit.”

Jojiro's GM Exercises II

 As before, this is just a post of me answering the next set of Jojiro's questions.

Question Set 1 - "Using Your Words"

Some noise is coming from a building.

-A tired Game Master somewhere, probably

1) Rewrite this, still as a single sentence. You want to convey that the structure is not sound.

 

"The house groans in the wind like a dying man rising from his bed."

2) Rewrite this, still as a single sentence. You want players to picture a safe haven, a feeling of comfort that we get with freshly baked cookies at grandma’s house. But do it implicitly – “Grandma’s baking noise is coming from the safe haven” is not the point of the exercise, here.

"You flip through the station's shortband comm channels on the long drift towards the docking ring - geninfo, corpo, corpo, corpo - and settle on the bossa nova lounge music setting and listen to the hosts bicker to each other in what you think is Martian Diasporic (you can barely understand normal Martian Standard), but it's been 48 years, 7 months, 12 days out cold in the empty since you last heard a real human voice and that's all you need right now."

3) Rewrite this, still as a single sentence. You want to convey that this location is mildly dangerous.

 

"A dry, cold breeze pours out of the barrow mound's stone entryway, as if some enormous lung was sighing in deep, ancient frustration."

4) Rewrite this, no sentence limit. You want to convey that this location is lethally dangerous – try to suggest a different type of danger than what you used for exercise #3. 

 

"From somewhere just past the doorway you can hear the steady click of bullets loaded into a revolver and a woman singing quietly to herself - " I know that you mean so well, but I am not a vessel for your good intent..."

 

Question Set 2 - "Focus/Texture"

"Describe where you think the GM is trying to draw their players’ focus to. Describe what you find the texture/tone to be."

5) "The dungeon entrance is kinda big even to the humans in the party, but it positively looms over the halflings, like a bloated elephant. There’s even trumpeting and general cacophany to match! It’s a right circus in there." 

 

I have no idea what this GM is attempting to do here. None of these descriptions or word choices make sense without any greater context, so I will presume that they are ineptly describing a dungeon inhabited by several hobgoblin ska bands. Which, if this is the case, this entire thing could be expressed in "You hear the distant echoes of a great deal of trumpets, and someone screaming 'PICK IT UP!' in Gobbledegoblin."

6) "As you round the bend, Martha, you hear the crackling of flame and popping of glass. The upstairs window that you spent much of your childhood daydreaming from bulges outward and shatters with a resounding crash, and the stoop where your mother always stood in the evening to greet your father groans as it folds in on itself." 

 

GM is trying to focus on the personal connection of the location/event to the player. I think it's a bit redundant, since the player's connection would have been already established before going in. Focus on the explosion.

7) "The floorboards creak and groan despite the party’s best efforts to stay stealthy. The incessant scuttling sound continues too. First in the wall. Then in the ceiling. Then down another wall, and finally to the floor beneath your feet. Cackling follows the scuttling, half a beat delayed."

 

GM is trying to signpost the present and pressing danger through claustrophobia and the auditory presence of unseen enemies. By this point the attack is imminent, I'd say the group gets one more round of actions before combat starts.

 

Question Set 2A - "Focus/Texture Cont."

"A person hits a person.”

-That same tired Game Master, probably

 

8) Rewrite this, no sentence limit. The focus should be on a specific body part, the texture is meant to be visceral. You’re drawing out a moment and making the hit meaty and with impact.

"Ayo, you duck to the right and feel his sword swing wide just past your left shoulder. Your fist collides with his gut with a thoom, and then a crack of his breaking spine. He flies back, collides with the wall, you hop forward and catch his head as it bounces, catch solid footing, and with a heave-ho pulp him like a pumpkin and leave a halo of cracks in the stonework.

"This man is very, very dead. Little white maggoty things, stringlike soft and squirming, cascade down to the floor and squirm away out of sight. Several of them, like long silver hairs, start to burrow into your hand."

6) Rewrite this, no sentence limit. The focus is on the person who hits, not the person who is being hit. The texture is something personal to the person who hits – you’re framing this as an important moment for them as a character.

"It feels entirely too easy to do it. The man who had been for years this unreachable force of cruelty and hate drops like a sack of potatoes. You've seen chickens die with more dignity. Fitting, you suppose. He was in the end, nothing more than a cruel old man with a golden hole where his heart should be.

7) Rewrite this, no sentence limit. The focus is on the scenery, and the texture is one of bleakness. Whatever combat is happening is ultimately pointless, and you’re trying to make sure the party knows it. Zoom out, make the fight less personalized, less meaningful. Distance your description.

"The valley has been reduced to a sodden field of churned grey mud, and the downpour shows no signs of stopping. Both warbands retreated to higher ground hours ago, leaving only corpses. In the dying light and sheets of rain you can just make out a few distant lanterns from the heartbreakers at work. Wouldn't want any undead rising during the night. You have a sinking feeling that there are too many dead, and neither enough visibility nor breakers to get them all.

"The breaker closest to your position, the only one you can properly see, sets down their lantern, struggles a moment in rolling the corpse over, and with one heavy overhead swing of their pick punches through gambeson, rib cage, and heart"

8) Rewrite this, no sentence limit. The focus is on conveying facts. There should be as little texture as possible. It’s the end of the session, everyone is tired, and while making this accurate is important, making it anything more would be a waste of time. You can see one of your players is already half-asleep. You may want to rush this and call it a night.

"You crack the skeleton in the head with your warhammer and the skull shatters in a cough of yellow-white dust. Bones clatter to the floor and there's a little burst of blue flame. That's the last of them, and we'll call it here for tonight."

9) Rewrite this, no sentence limit. You are trying to focus on a pathetic target of the hit, but not like, an assault victim or anything serious. Tonally you’re aiming for a slapstick character who is the butt of jokes, bad timing, and who keeps getting beat on.

"The troll, who still looks barely awake, reaches over and grabs the goblin in one hand and slam-dunks them into the ground. They bounce straight up in the air until there's just a little speck and then the sun glare is to much to see them at all. The troll tears a tree out of the ground, yawns, waits a beat, then two, then you hear the screaming getting louder and clearer and closer and the troll wordlessly points towards the bald, rocky hill in the distance. It draws back the tree, the goblin's screaming reaches a fever pitch and !WHAM! the goblin careens screaming off into the distance again. Up on the hilltop, you see a little puff of dust followed a few seconds later by a roll of thunder, and a moment later there is a very faint "F U C K!"

Answering Setting Questions, Triple Deluxe Edition

For a setting I don't actually play games in, I will never turn down an opportunity to gab about Mother Stole Fire.

Via Lochiel (Nothic's Eye)

1) Which specific NPC do I want to piss off the least? 

Probably the White Queen and Black Queen of Tanniclen, they likely have the most personal and political power in the area in terms of practically making your day miserable. Now, the advantage here is that you have to get into the Old City in the first place - but if you can make it beyond the wall, you'll doubtlessly commit ample insult to the Queens just by being there and doing what you do, and they will find ample excuse to ruin your life afterwards with all the grace and sophistication of immortal noble sorceresses.

Given their isolation, actual meaningful details about the Queens are hard to come by, save the various designs of their body-veils. Their histories (and the nature of their relationship to each other), are a matter of intense (often lurid) speculation - thought that is all safely done outside their jurisdiction.

2) Which god should I want to piss off the most? 

Any of the Lords of Hell would suffice. Fuck them. Mammon in particular, as he seems to have come into prominence over the more directly warlike Lords in the wake of the War of the Bull. Thankfully, he is not subtle. Destroying his demons is good, stealing and distributing his wealth all the better.

3) What's the worst thing I could meet at a crossroads? 

Old Scratch, also called the Crooked Man or the Patchwork Man, is a very old demon of the Hespermont, predating Hell significantly. He preys upon desperation, offering gifts that are helpful in the short term, but will inevitably lead to self-destruction later. His favored appearence is that of a man in dark clothing, fine-looking but always a few generations out of style. Somewhere on his body will be a horrific injury - he will act as if nothing is wrong, moving without impediment even if limps are mangled and speaking clearly even if his jaw and throat are smashed.

4)What's the nearest thing that can utterly destroy me to your starting town? Or starting town equivalent? 

A demon. Nasty fuckers can show up anywhere (though they are, typically nastier and more common the closer you are to Hell.)

5) Is apotheosis open to my character? If not, why not?

Depending on who you ask, apotheosis has happened between zero and three times: DOG, Darvatius, and the Sable Maid. The ascension of DOG is generally agreed upon; Darvatius' is called into question on the grounds that Darvatius the man was killed long before Darvatius the Lord of Hell was first seen in Hell. The Sable Maid's case is complicated, and  is best described as a comparison to Catholic treatment of Mary - technically not a god, technically not worshiped, but when you've got a problem...

So no, asterisk. It is theoretically possible, but the criteria required to reach godhood are out of the scope of a typical game.

6) Do people in your world have souls? Why? 

Yes, but they are fragile, ephemeral flames. Without a living body to house and nurture them, they dissipate. Ghosts, necromany, soul-pearls, and the currency of Hell do not use souls proper, but their remnants, dregs, and afterimages.

It is possible to create a form of soul artificially, but this will be a motive soul - homunculi, even those few that possess speech, do not possess volition of their own. Considering the difficulty in creating them, they remain a curiosity

A devil is created when the soul is removed from a human (via removal of the heart) but the body's life is sustained through those certain sorceries (and of course undone if the heart should ever be returned to the devil in question)

7) Does jazz exist in your setting yet?

Yes. Blues and bluegrass, too.

8) What's the weirdest country/polity/region/area on your map? 

• Llaphedon is an island covered in fungus jungle, filled with immortal mushroom people building an enormous black ziggurat
• Amda long ago solved the constant squabble-wars of its kingdoms and principalities by mandating that kings may only marry other kings and heirs are adopted.
• Ist fell into ruin when its rulers were devoured by manticores.
• The Coast of Birds is named for several hundred miles of shoreline where one might find enormous statues of birds facing the sea. No one knows where they came from or who made them.
• The Cinders is, as best anyone cal tell, an ancient exclusion zone caused by arcane fallout. The concerning part is how thorough its ontological hostility to life is.
• The Magelands are soaked through with wild magic and are home to the only people who are magic instead of practicing it. It is encircled by the crumbling wall-arcology-city of Mund.
• Wend is a xenophobic cultural and linguistic isolate and no one can quite figure out where they came from - the inhabitants have claimed to come from Atri-Tun in the Uttermost North, but scholars A) are pretty sure it doesn't exist B) are baffled why anyone would live in the Uttermost North to begin with.
  

9) Do guns exist yet? If they do, is there anything making them weird/different?

An ordinary person might see or use bolt action rifles and revolvers, and cannons are regularly used in warfare. Hell will utilize machine guns on occasion (which has lead to no one else adopting them). Simple enchantments on ammo (named and blessed bullets being the most common) are easy enough to procure. The gun saints of An-Hehm are the ones who get very creative and esoteric, and their devotion to the Gun Gods means they have something of a monopoly on exotic weapon types. 

10) Is there a divide between mundane/magical animals? 

There's more of a gradient between more and less magical. Some creatures will have overt magical properties, some passive, some subtle. Is "turns you to stone" more or less magical that "thing that can fly but shouldn't be able to"? If the cows start up a crop circle ritual, is that or is that not magic?

Via Vayra (Mad Queen's Court) 

1) What class knows the most martial arts? Are they real martial arts like kung fu, or made up ones like krav maga?

In-setting: Ordinary folks might know a bit of river forms (read: tai chi) for exercise. Soldiers will likely know a bit of pankration (here being a particularly succinct way of dealing with a combat problem rather than wrestling). 

In terms of gameplay - adipomancer or adept are dedicated classes, fighters in general will be able to do things like grapples and disarms and joint attacks.

2) Can I start out having already made a deal with the devil or do I have to do that in game?

Oh yes, absolutely.

3) Do you want me to write an 8-page backstory? Can I write an 8-page backstory, if I want to? If I write something down in it like I'm the timelost princess of the brass city and the daughter of the sun and I commanded legions in the Hell War but was betrayed by my father's vizier but I don't know that, or that I'm elf conan and cooler than everyone else, will that be true?

8 pages is a bit more than I'd ever recommend for any game in any setting, but those two examples I can work with - offer things that are of the same spirit, tweaked for whatever setting happens to be on the table.

4) If I eat someone's heart, will I gain their powers? What about their brain?

Probably, also probably, and both will probably go horribly wrong for you, because that's how monsters tend to be made.

5) These classes are boring, can I be one from somewhere else? What about from a different system entirely?

Yeah we can figure out some conversion for it.

6) If I make a sword, which one of us gets to name it?

Player makes it, player names it.

7) Am I allowed to kill the other player characters? What would I have to do to be allowed to? Do I win if I kill them all? Actually, how do I win in general?

A question entirely too rooted in the specific situation at hand for this answer to be meaningful at all.

8) What language stands in for 'Common'? Or what are we all talking to each other in? Like the party, mostly, but also everyone else?

I have not figured it out in setting yet, come back later.

9) How do I learn how to talk to rocks? No not once a day just, like, normally?

I'm sure that the mouldywarps could teach you, if you have the patience for it.

10) Which kinds of wizards get to serve kings and live in towers and shit and which ones are run out of town or stoned to death in the streets? Can I be both? At the same time?

Both is good, typically because wizards in towers cause problems and sometimes these problems are solved by throwing rocks at them, so long as the problem is a wizard causing other problems.

Via Filth Pig (The Slopyard)

1. Is there Blood Magic? Necromancy? Can I start off with these powers or do I have to get them d-d-d-diegetically? Will these things get me hanged/drawn, quartered and burned over water/tortured/burned at the stake? Is your Necromancer working off the "divination from the dead" definition or is it cool?

The most common magic in the world is, technically, blood magic, on account that it's used to stabilize and mitigate menstruation. Every woman in the world can either perform it, or knows someone who can brew up the potion form.

Blood magic on the whole is less of its own category and more just "magic that involves this certain part of the body.

Necromancy is primarily practiced in the Necromantic Socialist Republic, which might get you killed in certain parts of the world but at that stage it's more just the easiest excuse. It is the cool kind, with skeletons.

You can start off with either or both.

2. Will my limbs get hacked off? Can I get new limbs? Do they have to be human or can I have monster parts? Is there a class that does all this or is it just an NPC?

If limbs get removed, your options are, from easiest to most difficult:

Simple prosthetic > advanced prosthetic > reattaching the arm > replacing it with someone else's arm > replacing it with a monster arm.

The last one would require a specialist fleshcrafter, the two before it would need either that or a lot of panacea potion.

3. When was the last plague in the setting and how soon can we expect the next one? Can we swindle people by selling fake plague cures? 

The Plague Years were roughly two centuries ago and there's no telling if or when there might be another one. Mundane disease outbreaks happen from time to time (certain cities in Acephavara can't seem to shake ghoul-leprosy), but on the whole the world is on the ball when it comes to containment and elimination of epidemics.

Fake plague cures will be sniffed out almost immediately, it's hardly worth the time of the swindle.

4. Cannibalism gives you: A) Kuru, B) Magical Powers, C) Full stomach, D) Yet Another Unexpected Twist ?

 

Funerary cannibalism, performed according to the proper rites, won't cause any problems. Moments of desperation, likewise. Consuming significant amounts, especially if you are killing the people yourself with the intention of eating them, is probably going to turn you into a horrifying monster.

 

So C -> A -> B/D

5. What's can't I do that isn't super obvious?

Hrm. Can't tell you off the top of my head, it's not super obvious to me either.