Lighthouse Rules 0.1

This idea has been percolating for a while. Not just a hack, but an actual ruleset.

Everything here is subject to change according to foppery and whim. 

Premise

Players are members of Lighthouse, a civilian volunteer organization that serves as an intermediary between the public and the paranormal, be that investigative, protective, interpretive, diplomatic, or scholarly.

• The first notes for this idea are dating to the summer of 2012. Let it never be said that I am not terribly patient with my ideas.
• Surprising no one, I am straight mainlining a whole lot of SCP influence on this one. More on that down the page.

Pithy Elevator Words

• A game about the paranormal, poverty, and holding on to hope in a fucked up world.

What is the paranormal?

• There is the 'normal'- the world defined by the laws of coherent cause and effect. The paranormal is everything that violates and bypasses this - paracausality. It shouldn't work, but here it is.
• The world is anticanonical - fluff will be provided as starting points and leading questions, the reader will draw the connections between points.
• No real-world folklore or esoteric tradition carries over into the setting. There are no fairies, vampires, werewolves, etc. If it ever looks like something like that, you ought to be suspicious, because it is definitely not the truth.
• The paranormal is absurd, as well as terrifying and often beautiful.

What about the poverty?

• You are neither rich nor powerful. You aren't playing as an organization with bottomless military black budget and cool toys. You have to make do with what you have.
• Rich and powerful people do not have your interests in mind and they will do everything they can to fuck you over.
• Humza Kazmi's community rules have a high priority of getting adapted in some way.

What's up with the fucked up world?

• Police brutality, the surveillance state, voter suppression, catastrophic climate change, insulin rationing, ultranationalists in the streets, pick an expression of systematized oppression and it will fit here.
• Because it is anticanonical, whether or not it is our own fucked up world is preferential. I prefer it as our own through a mirror darkly.
• Players have to navigate, survive, and resist the course of the fucked-up world.

I love myself some new-weird-modern-paranormal-conspiracy-horror, but (and I am certainly not the first person to say this) conspiracies aren't particularly fun anymore. They are something to be resisted.

Really Though, What Do You Do? 

• Weird shit is going down, go investigate it and try to keep everyone relatively safe.

Preliminary Rules

Corewise, this is a whole lot of GLOG and Black Hack, but for Esoteric Enterprises

• I love me some EE for it's compatibility with basically everything else I own, but I want to experiment with making a rule set more directed to the theme I have in mind.

Core mechanic is roll-under stat on a d20

• Straight from Black Hack. No need to change what works. It's nice and clean and I like it more than modifiers.

Stats are generated by rolling 4d4.

• Pulled directly from GLOG. I like the range this gives, as even at the absolute minimum you still have a 20% chance of success, and at highest you end up with 80%. 

If for whatever reason a stat would go above 16, you get Advantage.

• The only competition to advantage in my books is boons / banes from Shadow of the Demon Lord and since this is roll-under there's no simpler option than

The stats are (names subject to change) Body, Reflex, Mind, Spirit, Violence, and Thaumics

• The Tough / Fast / Booksmart / Emotional Intelligence quartet is solid as hell and sells itself. It works in Shadow of the Demon Lord, it works in Disco Elysium, it just works.
• Combat and magic get their own stats because they are separate disciplines. Just because someone is strong doesn't mean they are necessarily good at committing violence against other people, and just because someone is smart doesn't mean they can figure out the ontological knot of paracausality.  
• Thaumics is absolutely getting a different name, probably an acronym because "applied paracausality" is a mouthful.

Skills, I'm not certain about skills.

• Option 1: Skills work kinda like how they do in Troika!
• Skills are added to the appropriate stat when you try to roll under. 
• Minimum of 1, maximum of 4. Freeform, no set list.
• Any skill can be used for any stat, if you can swing the reason why halfway well.
• Skills that raise a stat above 16 just give you advantage vs 16.
• Option 2: Skills give you advantage on that thing.
• Can still be used for any stat if you can swing the reason,

Things That Are Definitely Going to Be Involved

• Lateral Advancement -You will be able to spend Insight gained while out to unlock new abilities, learn new spells, purchase items, upgrade your hideout, or unlock changes to the world around you. Think of it has your carryover currency in a roguelike.
• Armor negates damage - Straight from Black Hack. Since weapons will not do traditional damage in points, having typical damage reduction isn't needed.
• Spells for everyone - Magic is fun, everyone gets to use the fun things.This is what the Thaumics stat is for - spells have a cost, and if you fail your roll, you get a fun backfire table!
• Violence will fuck you up - Explanatory on its own.

Things That Are Definitely Not Featured

• HP - If the hit is successful, there shouldn't be 'not getting hit points" to make it a technical miss. That's boring and I don't like it.
• Levels and Traditional XP - Busywork. Toss it all.
• Money - The only time money has ever been fun for me was a Unicorn Meat playtest where the players had to budget out their rations and decide how much they could afford to spend on supplies, if they could risk hunting for more meat, and how much was to be kept to eat and restore HP. I want that. Any currency (Demon Liquor, likely) will only be in single digits.
• Worrying about food or light - Modern day game, these are irrelevant outside of special circumstances.
• A traditional bestiary - No stats, just descriptions of how they interact with their environment.

Stress and Keeping Your Shit Together

• Stress is player-directed. No interruptions from the referee calling for rolls breaking up the flow. When a player sees something that they would expect to freak out about, they make a Spirit check. On failure, they are forced into a fight/flight/freeze scenario, which might have an additional die roll (weighted according to the likeliness of outcomes)

Character Creation

• As of now it seems to be a choice of three "cards", essentially - archetype, background, and occupation. Each of these will have a trait and 3-4 points of skills (if that is indeed how skills will go.)
• It is very Troika! at the moment but I won't lie Trophy Gold is a fine piece of chargen too.
• This part is the most up in the air at the moment. I might even choose to forgoe it entirely and just lead with a bunch of premades.

Other Things

• Players will have input on creating the City, their hideout, and Delvers' the underworld hub-bar.
• The scope is tightened to the City, the surrounding environs, and the Underworld.

 And that's where we are so far. Tell me what you think!

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.

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.

Mother Stole the Flailsnails

Regourso (Who seems to have vanished from the web)

Decided it was time to throw out a player's guide for games I run. This will be updated, changed, and tweaked as needed in the future.

Basic Stuff 

• Lamentations of the Flame Princess as a base, Shadow of the Demon Lord initiative gets thrown in there too and don't be alarmed if I say "boon" or "bane" at some point.
• Stats are 3d6, arranged as you want.
  
• Starting money is 3d6 x 10 silver dollars.
• Games will take place in the setting of Mother Stole Fire, unless stated otherwise.

Classes

FLAILSNAILS principles are in effect, so anything even roughly compatible is A-OK. Daniel Dean has a really good list of options, and there are plenty more lying around the blogosphere. Make one of your own if you want. If you're feeling lazy, roll below.

1. Red Hat Hobo
2. White Hat Hobo
3. Wizard / Witch
4. Cleric
5. Link-Boy / Lantern-Girl
6. Rake
7. Barber 
8. Paladin
9. Hauflin
10. Lilu
11. Amazon
12. Wanderer
13. Conspiritor (On the Shoulders of Giants)
14. Corpse-Worker (On the Shoulders of Giants)
15. Prize Fighter (On the Shoulders of Giants)
16. Witch Doctor (On the Shoulders of Giants)
17. Stewpot Witch (Chromatic Soup 1)
18. Merchant Knight (Chromatic Soup 1)
19. Inventor Necromancer
20. Goblin, more different Goblin

Wizards use the GLOG magic sysem, though you don't have to worry about any of the additional templates if you don't want to. Beyond the schools developed by Arnold, you can also look through those made by Skerples or myself.  Don't forget the summoner!

Other Notable Bits

Expanded Equipment List

The Monster Menu-All

HP and Healing 

Shields Shall be Splintered!

Think I'm missing something? Give me a holler.