Cheap Lovecraft knockoffs

I had a whimsical surge while getting an international flight, and thus I present the works of Lovecraft on a reduced budget (with apologies to I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue).

• The Chemist
• Azathoth - Gesundheit!
• Beyond the Wall of the Back Garden
• The Morning Call of Cthulhu
• The Suitcase of Charles Dexter Ward
• The Collar out of Space
• The Curse of Pig
• The Dairy of Alonzo Typer
• The Train That Came to Sarnath
• The Dreams in the Beach House
• The Dunwich Haulier
• Fax concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family
• From Behind
• The Haunter of the Park
• Herbert West—Animator
• In the Walls of Eric's
• The Lurking Beer
• Out of Ian's
• Pickman’s Model Railway

This is actually more difficult than I envisioned, because so many of the titles are pretty mundane to begin with. There are some you could easily treat as low-budget puns (The Shadow over Innsmouth, for example; and indeed The Case of Charles Dexter Ward I only tweaked for clarification) but obviously people won't necessarily get what you're talking about...

Warlocks, revisited

Quite a long time ago, I talked about tweaking D&D 5e warlocks to reduce the system issues with eldritch blast and grant them more flexibility as a class. I also mentioned that I'd prefer to make broader changes.

I am nothing if not inclined to suddenly drop things I've been working on in favour of immediate whims reliable, so I'm going to revisit this topic now.

Visitant: Hostile Takeover

The latest installment of terrible game fiction for my incomplete sci-fi hack of World of Darkness.

---

Francis sat in his office, idly tapping an executive toy with his paperknife. The chrome spheres swayed and clacked softly as he waited. Everything was prepared. There was a knock.

“Come in.” He laid the paperknife carefully on his desk, and straightened up.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Hawarden.”

Cohesion and Numenera (again)

Hi, Numenera. Long time, no see! I actually haven't heard much about you for a year or so either. No, I didn't mean... well... it's just, y'know... nobody seems to be playing you? It's kind of sad now that I think about it.

So I was listening to Improvised Radio Theatre With Dice while running seven miles down a major road in the rain over a series of hills, as is my wont, and Michael Cule was talking about his attempts to get to grips with Numenera. They resembled my own so strongly that my heart went out to him, and indeed to the game, and it got me thinking again about why it is that I just couldn't get to grips with it.

The start of episode 23, and about 50 minutes into episode 24.

Numenera feels like fog; like the fragments of an intriguing dream you clutch at upon waking, trying and failing to reconstitute the fractured sensations into a meaningful whole. Or, more prosaically, like a bunch of pieces from different, but exquisite, jigsaws.

Lasers and Detectives and Being-Like

So a few weeks ago, I visited some friends and mentioned to them the deeply intriguing game Lasers and Feelings, which I'd come across on a podcast.

I actually won't link to the podcast, because although the game seemed fun, I found the podcast cringe-inducingly California-amdram-storygamerish and had to stop listening fairly soon, and it seems mean to link someone with that kind of recommendation.

In fact, weirdly, I've now tried listening to three different Actual Plays of Lasers and Feelings and couldn't stick with any of them. I don't remember the issue with the second; the third group were so fixated on the "Sexy" keyword that it got tiresome to listen to within a few minutes. I'm sure it's just a personal taste thing, they sounded like they were having a great time. I think it's partly that for me, a lot of amusement comes from playing silly tropes with a straight face, whereas a game where everyone is Sexy and people run around referring to that in-character and the actual plot features the Captain announcing that due to a terrible space-plague he has become *dun-dun-dah* Un-Sexy! ...is just too in-your face.

Anyway, I found the game enormous fun, as my alien doctor ran around trying to meet sexy humans and solve medical problems through sheer emotion. We had a fun pirate-themed plot and eventually crushed their plans to reverse time because, even though this would have vastly improved (and indeed, saved) the lives of thousands of people, it's always bad to change history in space opera because Morals You Guys.

The lightweight ruleset really appealed to me, and I started wondering what other genres might be amenable to this treatment. This led me to try and rough out a detective-themed game, which I'm going to call Monographs and Intuition.

The division is much like the one in Lasers and Feelings itself - Monographs represents academic knowledge, reasoning and induction based on evidence, whereas Intuition represents solving problems by understanding or manipulating emotions, as well as sheer inspiration. Recognising a tattoo, tracing origin of tobacco-ash or following the money would be Monographs; spotting a flash of guilt, encouraging someone to open up to you, or realising how social tensions might cause a spiral of murderous jealousy, would be Intuition. Let's assume that low is Intuition, and high is Monographs; you want to roll over Intuition, and under Monographs.

Then you'd just grab some archetypes. Something like this maybe?

Style

Learned, Inscrutable, Two-Fisted, Mild-Mannered, Eccentric, Hard-Boiled

Role

Police Officer, Private Eye, Dilettante, Bystander, Foreigner, Whippersnapper

So maybe Sherlock would be a Learned Dilettante with a 5 (Monographs). Miss Marple would be a Mild-Mannered Bystander on perhaps a 3. Poirot would be an Inscrutable Foreigner, on a 2-3. Sam Spade is a Hard-Boiled Private Eye on a 3-4. Why Didn't They Ask Evans? features two Whippersnappers, probably one Inscrutable and one Mild-Mannered from what I remember, with a 3 because honestly they're a bit rubbish at following clues but not that great at understanding people either.

But would it be a detective game?

One of the issues here is, how detectivish would this feel? As someone pointed out to me, this is basically the premise of The X-Files, but the playstyle might not be what's expected, particularly from players used to other investigative games like Call of Cthulhu. Those revolve around exploring scenarios that have been carefully designed by the GM with chains of evidence for the players to puzzle out using their characters' attributes; Lasers & Feelings is a very lightweight game with a ton of player agency and assumed most of the game is improvised.

As my much-lamented Los Diablos game was supposed to demonstrate, I don't think this is necessarily a problem. Investigative games traditionally rely on lots of pre-planning, but I don't particularly see why you can't have one that's mostly improvised around a core. The player agency is a completely different point, but again, I'm not sure it's a problem. What it's going to depend on is what the group considers to be "like a detective", and there are two axes here: the story and the game.

I don't think there will be any particular discrepancy between an improvised detective story and a pre-planned one. In fact, it's entirely possible that an improv game will end up more like a detective novel than one based on a prewritten clue chain. A series of weird rolls can lead to people missing or misinterpreting clues, or learning things the GM never expected; and of course they can simply go off on one and end up doing something utterly bizarre. In an improv game, the massive tangent can be incorporated into the plot; if the players think it's relevant, they can make it so. People working together to improvise a game that feels like a detective story around a loose plot should be at least as effective at doing so, as a group trying to create a detective story by confronting game-mechanical challenges that reveal or conceal parts of the plot.

The more important question is, what feels like "a detective game" to the players? And that's going to vary. I'm not sure whether it would actually need to be investigative or not.

A L&F-style game would basically involve improvising clues to fit around a rough plot. The players and DM would make up clues that seemed to make sense at the time. That sounds to me quite a lot like the Agatha Christie-esque style of stories, where most people are suspects most of the time and the crucial bit of evidence isn't always more convincing than the rest, hence Evil Voice.

That is mostly character-based mystery, though, which is a bit different from the likes of Sherlock Holmes or Sam Spade. It makes sense that you can sort of riff around in them, because that's basically what the authors do. But what if we want Sherlock? A lot of people do.

I like most of the original stories, but I must admit that like basically everything else involving Stephen Moffat, I have no time for the TV series.

I'm actually not sure whether Holmes stories are particularly investigative, though. At least, the experience of the reader is not one of carefully piecing together the puzzles and forming a logical understanding of the plot, which some other authors (like Agatha Christie) permit. In most of the stories, Holmes is constantly in possession of information that's kept from the reader, which means not only do we not know what conclusions he has drawn, but we are literally incapable of solving the mystery. So the audience isn't part of a slow process of logical investigation at all, they just encounter a series of baffling clues which Holmes eventually whips into a story by adding bits to form a coherent whole.

The question is, does is matter whether those connective bits that are added are a) devised by the GM and may or may not be found by the players; or b) stuff the players make up when they succeed at a roll? I think not.

Player mindsets

What we're running into here is the issue that people can have very different instincts and opinions about what it means to be Like X, whether that's Like A Detective Story or Like Sherlock Holmes, or even Like The Red-Headed League. I've talked about this before in terms of the Musketeers.

Player A says "this Sherlock Holmes game feels nothing like a Holmes story! I have to use my real world skills to put a bunch of in-character clues together, and I might get it wrong! To properly feel like Holmes I'd need a game where whatever deductions my character made were correct, then we'd get an outcome that really came close to being an improvised Holmesian narrative".

Player B says "this Sherlock Holmes game feels nothing like a Holmes story! I just have to roll my deduction skill, and then anything my character asserts becomes true in the game! To properly fell like Holmes, I'd need to be putting together real clues to a properly designed mystery, using real logic and deduction."

Broadly speaking, the schism here is whether you understand Like Sherlock Holmes to mean "this game guarantees that you will be able to do what Holmes does" or "this game challenges you to try to do what Holmes does".

Player A feels like Holmes by saying and doing things that look like what Holmes does and, like Holmes, having these be true parts of the story. Trying to second-guess the GM's attempt to build a mystery that is "exactly challenging enough" is basically a distraction from evoking that Holmesian atmosphere. It's sort of like being Sherlock Holmes in a play. You could say that the aesthetic trappings of Holmes are what provide that feeling.

Player B feels like Holmes by taking part in a mystery they know to have a solution, and patiently piecing together the clues. Being able to simply invent truths undermines that whole experience by trivialising it; there's little satisfaction in solving a mystery if you can simply declare victory, it's like playing a game with people you know are letting you win. The feeling of Being Holmes comes from doing in real life something that resembles what Holmes does in the stories, even though the reliance on player skill will naturally result in signficant differences from the inferences a genius detective can draw.

Both players want to feel like a great detective, but one player gets that from abstract mechanics that guarantee a great-detective-style outcome, and the other gets it from concrete systems that give them the chance to get closer to doing what great detectives do.

You can't please all of the people, etc.

On reflection, I suspect that the same thing probably applies to the other genres. I personally found Lasers and Feelings very satisfying, but other people might well find that they want to feel like they're really exploring strange new worlds, fending off Klingons and solving space-problems, and that being able to roll a 3+ on a die to succeed at stuff by handwavium doesn't feel like that. Those people might want a carefully-crafted pregen world to explore - and indeed I would probably also enjoy that, in fact that sounds exactly like something I'd enjoy.

I reckon that broadly speaking, you could probably apply the Lasers and Feelings template to just about any genre where the protagonists have the capacity to solve problems themselves, rather than being mostly passive. You just need to identify an axis that will provide a binary split you're mostly happy with. Regency Romance? Fours-in-Hand and Invitations. High Fantasy? Lores and Nobility, which balances knowledge of ancient times and subtle powers against selflessness and discipline. Swords-and-Sorcery? Well, eschewing the obvious, how about Thews and Deviltry, for an axis built on the balance between physical might and fearless cunning? Shounen manga about an exasperating teenager perpetually oblivious of the attentions of various (player character) women who protect him from supernatural peril? Study and Tsundere. Grimdark adventure in the Imperium of Man? That sounds like Zeal and Discipline for our Astartes game, Guile and Guts for our hive-gang adventures, Hubris and Acumen for our Rogue Traders, and perhaps Lockpicks and Cynicism for our cult-hunting Inquisitors.

Some of those might not work at all because I just made them all up. The point is, I suspect it's possible - providing the resulting playstyle is something that evokes the genre in an interesting way for you.

I should maybe also note what I carefully didn't do. I don't think any of the throwaway ideas above splits characters along a single axis, which is to say, two poles of the same idea. You want to be sure you're suggesting two different sets of problems the character is good at interacting with, which helps define the character while also avoiding restricting their approach to those problems.

I suppose a couple of those ideas sound a bit like that, but that's not my intention. Zeal and Discipline offers Zealous characters who solve problems by sheer enthusiasm (be those problems cowardly allies, overwhelming odds or the refusal of doors to open) as opposed to Disciplined characters who use analysis and practice. They can deal with many of the same problems, but their methods and the courses of action they actively pursue will differ.

Similarly, Guts and Guile is supposed to be about whether a character tends to take direct action and rely on resilience, or more indirect courses and rely on cunning.

But I mean, it's thirty seconds of work, you get what you pay for here.

The second thing is that you don't want stuff everyone does to be baked into the axes. It would be a relatively bad idea to have a Swords-and-Sorcery game divided into Battle and Sexytimes because, even though those are two cornerstones of the genre, they are completely different skillsets and can't really be applied to equivalent situations. All protagonists should be capable of both fighting enemies and seducing... okay, often also enemies. The point is, if you had a Battle character and a Sexytimes character then one would do all the fighting and one would do all the seducing, and it's really hard for either one to interact well with part of the core of the genre. In fact, there's a secondary problem, which is that having dice rolls for this stuff at all may be a bad idea. If you want people to fight and seduce in a really rules-light game, then assuming that everyone can do those things and the axes are about how they do them is probably better.

We ran into this a bit during Lasers and Feelings. I felt vaguely like I should be stealing an ID card to help infiltrate the pirate base, but there's no "stealing stuff" or "black ops" skill, so I assumed it would come off Lasers because it's practical, right? As was pointed out, there's no particular reason it couldn't come off Feelings if I used interpersonal skills to obtain a badge.

Travelogues: other little bits

There's a few bits of thoughts about travelogues that I wanted to get down, but don't really fit in. These just relate to the kinds of things that characters might contend with when travelling, which don't necessarily get much attention in mechanics designed for a more adventuring style of play, but which might offer some opportunities for interest.

This depends to some extent on the nature of the journey. Is the travelogue genuinely through actual wilderness, with never another human in sight bar perhaps a hunter or hermit? Or is it, more plausibly, through a succession of towns, villages and farming communities, with breaks of perhaps a few weeks across entirely unsettled regions? If the latter, are they unsettled because they're utterly inimical to life (in which case, a bad choice for travel), because they're full of monsters (a different kind of challenge), because they're actually occupied by wandering communities like hunter-gatherers or roving herdspeople, or because they're reserved for use by powerful nobles (in which case gamekeepers and soldiers are to be expected)?

All the following is just bits of ideas I've had.

Travelogues: trouble on the road

Random encounters from wandering monsters are the classic hazard, but more mundane problems are the mainstay of travelogues.

What I'd like to do is have a probability system for testing for different categories of hazard, adjusted to account for the players' decisions about how to approach the journey. For example, if they're hustling they should be more likely to rush into unsafe terrain and slower to notice creeping hazards, like strange gases or sunstroke. If they take time to examine and maintain their carts and tack, they should be less likely to suffer malfunctions.

Basically I think I'd like to have a "how do you spend your time and energy?" decision. You can travel at absolutely full speed, which makes all kinds of problems more likely to arise: walking into danger, exhaustion, injury, spoilage, accidents and so on. You can take excellent care of your mounts and gear, but travel slowly and use up both food (in travel time) and resources (for maintenance). So you're deciding what your priorities are.

Travel pace

I think (based on my mate's requirements) what I'll suggest is that each day has six 4-hour blocks, and you can choose how many to spend travelling. Those you don't, you can use for downtime activities. Travelling for more than 8 hours beyond this counts as Forced March, no matter in which order you do things!

Travel speeds, and their bonuses and penalties, are otherwise as in the DMG.

Okay, I've pretty much run out of subsystems now, so I need an actual main system... curses.

Right, let's have a stab at this.

The basic idea is much like the random encounter roll, except without monsters. There will be several rolls made each day (or whatever period), with various modifiers, to determine whether anything unusual happens.

I'm probably going to change that because I think it's too faffy on reflection, but let's take a look anywway.

Event Rolls

There are five categories of random events: Travel, Health, Gear, Animal and (of course) Encounter.

Each roll is a 2d10. All rolls are modified by party Morale.

Travel rolls gain a +5 bonus if anyone successfully Planned.

Gear rolls gain a +5 bonus if anyone successfully did Maintenance.

Animal rolls gain a +5 bonus if anyone successfully did Animal Care.

Characters roll Health individually, modified by their Health.

I'm not going to work up actual tables here because I suspect this model is just too faffy. Essentially, it would be low rolls resulting in serious problems, and high rolls resulting in either nothing or some small benefit (such as faster progress).

Composite Rolls

In this somewhat simpler model, there's just one roll to determine whether the notable event of the day is good, bad or indifferent. A secondary roll determines the type of event (such as Travel, Health etc.) and its effects are then calculated.

Roll 2d10 (modified by Morale) for the day's events to determine whether things go well or badly. Then use the highest of the two dice to determine the type of event that occurs. The DM is responsible for deciding exactly what has happened and (where appropriate) framing it as a challenge for the PCs.

If the group is forced marching, they suffer an additional -5 penalty on the roll.

Events allow rolls to avoid their effects. Activities performed in downtime and current status modify these rolls.

• 4 or less: Calamity! Something has gone seriously wrong. The party will make little or no progress today, and may suffer lasting effects.
• 5-7: Problems. Something significant goes wrong, and requires considerable effort to deal with.
• 8-10: Minor setback. The party will lose a little time, energy or patience.
• 11-15: Steady progress. There are no particular problems today.
• 16-17: Good going. The party makes better progress than expected.
• 18+: A stroke of luck!

Use the highest of the two dice faces (the Type Die) to determine the type of event from the chart below. For example, if you roll 4+7=11, the Type Die is a 7. If an event isn't appropriate (for example, the party has no animals with them) use the other face. If that also isn't appropriate, it's a Travel event.

Most events allow an Avoidance Roll to ignore the effects - only one character may make this roll, and in most cases the DM determines which. If the Avoidance Roll is successful, the DM narrates the issue that arises, but the party manage to overcome it without any significant difficulty: they pick a safe path through the marsh, fend off illness, notice the damaged reins in time to avoid an accident, and so on. If not, the party must deal with the issue in-game.

One further point: for some events to be meaningful, we need to assume that waving hands and chanting isn't a solution to everything. This is because with very little else happening, clerics can cheerfully cast cure spells all day. D&D's hit points are a handwavy mixture of stamina, resolve and physical injury. The simplest thing is to assume that, while clerics can easily heal battle wounds or virulent diseases, they can't do much about low-level illness or the time wasted when someone gets hurt. Maybe the gods just don't consider it serious enough? Injuries and illnesses still take time and exhaust the afflicted.

1. Animal event. Something happens involving one of the party's mounts, pets or pack animals. The event can be avoided with a successful Animal Handling roll (DC 20 - Type Die), with advantage if the party did Animal Care last night.
2. Health event. The party member with the lowest current Health is unwell or injured. The event can be avoided with a successful Constitution save (DC 20 - Type Die), with advantage if the character received Healthcare last night. If the unHealthiest party member is already afflicted by a Health event, choose the next unHealthiest.
3. Hostile encounter. The party encounters active antagonists, ranging from petty thieves to bandits to vicious monsters depending on the scope of the event roll. This is handled like any other encounter and there is no avoidance roll.
4. Gear event. There is a problem with some aspect of the party's gear (or, on an excellent roll, their equipment helps them progress faster than expected). This can be avoided with a successful Perception roll (DC 20 - Type Die) with advantage if the party did Maintenance last night.
5. Travel event. The broadest category! An issue arises with the weather, roads, navigation, terrain, natural hazards, other travellers, local residents, the authorities, or perhaps the party simply find something interesting to investigate along the way. The DM should choose an appropriate avoidance roll, typically Survival or a social skill (DC 20 - Type Die).
6. Health event
7. Animal event
8. Gear event.
9. Travel event.
10. Travel event.

A Hostile result isn't necessarily a combat. The party might choose to lay low while a raiding horde passes by, or plan a way to pass through a spider-filled forest without alerting the creatures. The difficulty of the challenge should reflect the event roll result - a Problem shouldn't be bypassed with a roll and no real loss of time.

But how does all that work?

Okay, how's this supposed to work? Here are some suggestions.

Animals

• 4 - A mount is badly hurt - it trips and injures a leg, sinks into a bog, is poisoned by a roadside plant, develops infected sores from poorly-fitted tack, or is attacked by an animal in the night. The party might choose to abandon the creature and keep going (redistributing possession as necessary), or stop travelling for the day while they rescue, tend and reassure it.
• 5 - A loud noise, strange animal or other surprise sends the pack mules racing off into the forest. The party will need to hurry to round them up, once they get their own mounts under control... and there are plenty of places for a mule to disappear.
• 8 - A horse is unusually irritable and badly-behaved after weeks of travel. The party are slowed down as they struggle to keep it moving as they want. An Animal Handling roll won't deal with this problem, because that's what the AH avoidance roll represented - they've had their chance.
• 11 - The horses feed from a cluster of strange herbs, and spend the rest of the day twitching and whinnying, but it has no serious consequences.
• 16 - As the party rests, a grazing animal wanders aside and reveals a hunter's track, which proves to be a useful shortcut through a difficult area.
• 18 - a ranger's companion bounds aside from the path, leading them to a suspicious patch of fresh-dug earth. A few minutes' digging reveals a small iron-bound chest containing silver pieces and a magic scroll.

Travel

• 4 - The route through the hills proves a mistake when the weather worsens, leaving the party slipping on wet scree and struggling against violent gusts. A pack of supplies is lost when a party member nearly falls from a narrow ledge. (Mechanically that's probably going to be food, but it could include some party gear as well. The DM might allow an attempt to find and recover it, but that should be a long and difficult task)
• 5 - The party enter a farmstead to ask for news and buy supplies. Instead, they find a secluded religious order who are angered by the intrusion, and by something about the party. The zealots order them off their land, and all the farms across this valley belong to the same unwelcoming group. It may not be possible to travel through this valley at all.
• 8 - after a shortcut through a thicket, the party are constantly plagued by insects, due to the lingering scent of certain leaves. Their progress will be slowed and patience frayed unless they find a way to escape the flies.
• 8 - a large band of bandit-hunting soldiers orders the party to halt for interrogation (Persuade or Bluff avoidance roll to quickly convince them to move on). A lengthy search and questioning delays the party and potentially inflicts some minor damage.
• 11 - unstable stepping-stones plunge someone into a stream, but thankfully nothing is lost.
• 11 - the party are forced to detour when they find a landslip has wiped out the cliffside path they hoped to take, but manage to make up lost time.
• 16 - A break in the trees on a hilltop offers the party a splendid vista of the landscape ahead, helping them plan the rest of their journey. They gain the benefits of journey planning for the next 1d3 days without spending downtime.
• 18 - The party encounters a band of wandering traders who are glad of some company. The traders can provide skilled Maintenance and give them advice about the route ahead. The party have a friendly contact in the next settlement they visit.

Health

• 4 - the party member is afflicted by food poisoning, and completely helpless. Even with magical healing, they will be too weak and exhausted to travel or pursue downtime activities. They can only engage in absolute necessities (i.e. they can still do combat if necessary). They cannot act in downtime until they make a successful Con save (DC 12-days elapsed).
• 5 - the party member wrenches a knee on unstable ground, and can only move slowly. The party's progress is reduced today.
• 8 - a fever affects the character's senses, so they see and hear illusory threats, and act erratically. The party must decide how to respond.
• 11 - a slight headache from the biting wind makes minimal difference to the journey.
• 16 - whether fresh or exhausted, the character feels unusually clear-headed and focused. Their attentiveness helps the party avoid difficult ground and push rapidly on with their journey.
• 18 - food the party gathered proves to be especially refreshing, and after the meal they all feel in good humour. The party's Morale increases by 1.

Gear

• 4 - A broken wheel leaves a cart useless. The party must choose whether to make long, difficult repairs (a challenge planned by the DM) or abandon the cart where it lies. If they have a spare wheel, they must hoist the cart (a dangerous job) and try to fit the new one.
• 5 - Vermin have found their way into a pack, chewing the bag and eating supplies. The party loses 1d4 daysworth of food.
• 8 - Cooking gear is damaged by poor packing. Unless the party has spares, someone must burn a downtime slot to fix the gear or rig up alternative cooking options.
• 11 - A poorly-fitted sadly leaves someone saddle-sore, but otherwise fine.
• 16 - The expensive telescope someone insisted on bringing allows you to spot a broken bridge up ahead, and the brigands apparently lurking nearby. You can take a different route and make good progress, or you could attempt to confront the bandits.
• 18 - you have exactly the obscure item you need to earn the gratitude of a passing wizard, who offers you a warm welcome at her well-hidden tower. The party can rest and feast well tonight, and has the chance to obtain some minor magical supplies.

That seems more or less workable to me?

Call of Cthulhu Scenario Tag Cloud

I think this is pretty self-explanatory? It's a tag cloud of all Call of Cthulhu scenarios published professionally, but not magazines because I forgot them and can't be bothered to redo it. Sorry.

alone beast beyond black blood children city curse dark dead death devil dreams evil eyes flight ghost god halloween hell hill horror house island king land light london lonely lost madness man moon mountain night project return rise sands sea secrets shadows stars terror trail war watcher water world yellow

created at TagCrowd.com

Travelogues: downtime activities

So, what about those downtime activities? Let's review.

New downtime activities

Discussions with my mate are looking like downtime might be spend in blocks of four hours in his campaign, which is fair enough. Let's assume that as the basis for now; DCs below have been adjusted accordingly.

There are basically two types of downtime activities here: essential and optional. It's pretty much essential (at least on longer journeys) to forage for food and water, and so these activities are relatively easy. The other activities give characters an opportunity to prepare and reduce the chances of something going wrong in future, but gaining these benefits is more difficult.

Travelogues: health

We're coming to the end of the subsystems for travelogues (thank goodness), and having thrown out some ideas about rest, food, morale and maintenance, I'm going to move on to health.

Health isn't a big part of most roleplaying games, particularly combat-adventure games like D&D, where there's a ferociously-handwavy zone of "either stabbed in the kidneys or badly bruised or forced to make a sudden dodge, we're not sure" around injuries and where diseases only exist as things that kill you quite quickly and probably turn you into a monster. That's fair enough. Head colds and carpal tunnel syndrome don't fit well with that brand of fantasy.

Nevertheless, travelogues do feature health as a concern. Characters worry about bad food, or getting poisoned by careless foraging. Bad weather makes them worry about chills, and marshes or infected wounds cause fevers. People and mounts alike twist ankles, grow footsore, and are afflicted by noxious miasmas.

Like Morale, I think Health will be mostly a tracking thing, tied into random encounters. Unlike Morale, this will be tracked individually. I know fantasy characters do differ in their stoicness, but I feel like it's specific characters that are ill during travelogues (thus burdening the rest of the party) while overall mood is typically more of a party thing. Also, having the entire party sick just feels wrong.

As per usual, I'm basically making this up as I go along.

Travelogues: Morale and Maintenance

Okay, so I've had an initial stab at the resting and foraging aspects of a travelogue, although I'm starting to think I planned on too small a scale. Never mind, onwards and upwards, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.

There are four more broad submechanics I think are relevant here:

1. Maintenance, in a broad sense: taking care of your animals, vehicles, gear and supplies en route. This is relatively straightforward on short journeys between towns or treks out to dungeons, but gets harder with long spells under constant strain and with little opportunity for professional care.
2. Health. This isn't often considered in dungeoneering (because it wouldn't be much fun, presumably) but long journeys are very taxing, and wilderness journeys offer lots of opportunity for illness and accident. These are in the source material, so let's try to offer something along those lines. I'm not intending to make this a major feature, but more of a stick: plan your journey, take sensible precautions, otherwise you'll get ill. This should help encourage players to maintain food supplies, spend time searching for water, and shelter in poor weather.
3. Morale. Journeys are tiring, and long treks across country can be dispiriting even for hardened warriors. If things are going well, morale is high; if things are going badly, morale is low. Taking steps to recover morale helps in the long run but can have short-term costs.
4. Incidents on the journey, which are essentially random encounters, but expanded to fill a whole range of problems, challenges, hazards and opportunities. Incidents will be informed by at least the Maintenance and Morale subsystems, because it makes sense that (for example) your cart is more likely to lose a wheel if you haven't been keeping it in good repair.

Intermission

Wow, it is so much harder to do post series building up systems from scratch when you actually have enough work to keep you busy at your day job.

I'm still working on the Travelogues (although discussion with my mate suggests I've aimed too small-scale for what he had in mind) but my brain is pretty frazzled from concentrating and task-switching all the time. Although I'm not going to complain about a job that actually keeps me busy, an advantage of my previous job was not having to concentrate a lot of the time, so I could design game stuff in my head while moving books around or whatever. Here my workflow looks more like this (looks like an exaggeration, actually a simplified summary):

Travelogues: foraging and food

Last time, I talked about possibly extensions to the resting mechanics for D&D 5e. Now, time to consider another important aspect of any holiday quest: cuisine.

As usual, this is being spooled off the top of my head here, so expect some pretty rough edges. There are also aspects I'm building to align with mechanics I vaguely intend in later parts of this series, so... I'm sure it will be fine.

Eating and Foraging

The Outlander feature will just make a mess of this vital aspect, which I'm not up for. It's not just that, either. According to the rules:

A character needs one pound of food per day... A character needs one gallon of water per day, or two gallons per day if the weather is hot. (PHB, p.66 in Basic Rules) and on a successful [foraging] check, a character finds 1d6+Wis modifier pounds of food, then repeat the roll for water (in gallons).

This means that on average, given that the DC for foraging will tend to be 15 in most kinds of wilderness, you can probably assume that at least one person in a party of four will roll a 15 and gain on average 4 pounds of food and water. In other words, most of the time this just isn't going to be an issue.

I think interpretation is key here. The foraging rules allow foraging when you're travelling at a normal or slow pace. Thing is, the travel rules are very vague about how pace works. They don't tie you down to committing a day, but nor does foraging take any actual time. It seems very much like you can just (by RAW) travel at normal pace for no more than an hour (assuming the DM is at least determined enough to limit you to 1-hour blocks) while foraging enough to feed you all for a day, then move fast for the rest of the day.

My version will be different.

Travelogues: more granular resting rules

Recently a friend mentioned that he's thinking of trying to do a D&D game that's more in the style of a lot of brick-thick fantasy novels. Which is to say, a large proportion of the pagecount will be devoted to travelling around. Specifically, he doesn't just want to do the kind of nominal journeys that often feature, which are mostly encounters interspersed with occasionally making camp or fording a stream. He wants the journey itself to be prominent. As so often, our discussion led to me saying I'd go away and maybe write a blogpost.

My instinct is that if you want travel to feel real (something you can get your teeth into in a game), you're going to have to pay attention to some things that games tend to (reasonably) gloss over for the sake of adventure, as well as digging out the D&D wilderness rules. Specifically, I think you need to make logistics important. Thinking back on the travel stories I've read - which includes a lot of autobiography, not just fantasy - a lot of the interest and drama and tension comes from the mundane details.

My idea, therefore, is that you probably want to de-emphasise the classic problems of "we are constantly attacked by monsters" and start worrying about things like food supplies, shelter, fatigue, rust and corrupt law enforcement.

A Skint New World

I was listening to Episode 11 of Improvised Radio Theatre with Dice, and was struck with a new D&D premise that I'm going to scrawl down while I can remember it.

The topic that was brought up was economics - specifically, how the gold price crashed in Spain when looted gold was hauled back by the ton from South America, coupled with a remark about how when governments feel hard-up, they tend to cut spending and consider starting a war. This was put into context with the way adventureres haul gold out of dungeons, which should really destablise economies in much the same way. My brain rattled around briefly and then settled on an idea: what does this do for adventurers?

Distinguishing D&D Alignments

Happy New Year, all!

This year my gaming ambitions are:

• to playtest at least one of the games I've blogged about here
• to get back to reading and reviewing Call of Cthulhu scenarios
• to update this blog a bit more predictably

Over the holidays I stayed with a gaming friend down in Oxford. We ended up playing board games rather than RPGs, but naturally we talked about both quite a lot (in fact, I wrote an entire latter based on discussion of the former - of which more another day).

Crosspost: Equipment and carry weight for real world adventures

As I've mentioned before, equipment and carrying capacity is something I'm vaguely interested in, at least in games that aim for some level of realism.

Hans of Shooting Dice has just put up a post about likely equipment for a modern-day investigator to carry. It's broadly aimed at Call of Cthulhu characters, but honestly, it's a good starting point for any real-world characters who are relatively ordinary folks.

Vampire Masks and Dirges

So earlier I tried out some character generation for Vampire: the Requiem and ran into some trouble with Masks and Dirges. I just want to dig a little bit further into that.

Here, for background, I present the text of these mechanics.

Mask is the bearing Kindred present to the world. It’s the façade, the pretty lie. It’s the excuse for why he can’t stay for breakfast in the morning. It’s the reason she gives the cab driver for dropping her off near an abandoned warehouse at odd hours of the night. It’s his excuse for barely touching his dinner. The First Tradition reads: “Do not reveal your nature to those not of the Blood. Doing so forfeits your claim to the Blood.” Kindred take this concept seriously, and extend it beyond the purview of their unnatural existences. Revealing oneself is a form of vulnerability. Vulnerability is a quick route to Final Death. Any time a vampire overcomes a small hurdle in defense of her Mask, she gains a point of Willpower. When committing atrocious or existentially risky acts in defense of her Mask, she regains all her spent Willpower points.

The Dirge is the truth behind the lies. It’s the vampire’s secret self; it’s who he is when the lights are off and nobody is present to witness his dirtiest moments. It’s his dark indulgence. It’s the self-loathing she will never admit. It’s his desire for an end. It’s her need for companionship.

A Dirge gives the Kindred a sense of identity. After all, her very existence is a lie. In the Danse Macabre, truth is rarely more than a pipe dream. For most vampires, honesty only exists within oneself. Defending that internal honesty helps her to maintain perspective. Any time a vampire withdraws from his outside life in defense of his truer self, he gains a point of Willpower. When committing terrible, damning acts in defense of his personal identity, he regains all his spent Willpower points.

Not the Man I Used to Be: a plug-in approach to World of Darkness chargen

So obviously I've spent a fair bit of time thinking about White Wolf stuff, what with the sci-fi game and all the nitpicking.

One of the things that's come up repeatedly, and is a regular source of bafflement-slash-frustration to me, is that sometimes White Wolf seem to have completely forgotten their own fluff when writing the rules. Or perhaps simply couldn't be bothered to try and implement these rules. Although the fact that Vampire, the very first game, has sort of the same problem, suggests that they never really thought about it.

I'll talk about Demon, because these two are basically the most egregious cases, but it applies in varying degrees to some of the other games. The issue I'm talking about here is how they mechanically handle becoming a supernatural being.

Visitant: Inside Job

It was a cold night. Frost was settling on the ground, glinting where the security lights touched it. Rounding the corner of his rooftop patrol, Geertz paused and stared dutifully around, scanning the grounds with naked eye, then thermal goggles. Nothing, as usual. The last group of protestors had been nine months ago. Still, they had to stay watchful. Seeing Thompson and his Alsatian making a counter-circuit below, he waved a habitual ‘nothing’, then turned and paced away. The outer wall was three hundred yards away and ten feet high; a fence topped with razorwire separated the car parks and grounds from the compound itself. It would take an intruder several minutes to make the crossing, let alone get inside, and that was plenty of time for the guard patrols to spot them. Nobody was breaking in, not after that business four years ago.

Nobody human, anyway.

Not in London

Another part of my sluggish attempts to appropriate cross-link my blogs.

I wrote about setting scenarios outside London (more generally, outside the major city of the region), and thought it was broad enough to cross-link here.

Looking back, it's a bit brief. For example, I dismissed the idea of exploring London, and I think there's something to that: if you're actually engaged in a scenario, in-character tourism is likely to limit itself to a few major landmarks. I know there's a glamour about the city for some people (Americans in particular, I suspect) but most of it is just, y'know, streets and things.

But an obvious flipside is familiarity-tourism. If players are familiar with London, then they may well get a lot of enjoyment from immersion, and so being able to wander through familiar districts or simply get the appropriate Tube lines can be a source of pleasure. And having those things handwaved might dispel the sense of immersion.

You have to weigh this sort of thing up. Broadly speaking, I think a scenario aimed at creating a Being In London experience does need to concern itself with verisimilitude. Cthulhu by Gaslight and suchlike games tend to fit into this category. However, a scenario that's set in London as a generic default doesn't, really. If London is simply a convenient place to nominally be, and all the action happens in named locations, then it's fair enough for the GM to skimp on it.

I think it's still true, though, that the smaller the settlement, the more significant each person and place becomes. In a hamlet, each of the six residents is significant, and the presence of a bridal shop is notable. In a city, there's going to be a bridal shop somewhere, so why not here? And we have to take it as read that there are far more NPCs in the place than players can possibly interact with, almost all of whom are irrelevant in the extreme.

And I do still plan to get back to that scenario, and rewrite it completely as a setting book with a couple of scenarios built in...

Good Neighbours: Visitants and other abhumans

Depending on the campaign design, visitants may encounter a range of other inhuman entities. Although it’s designed for a science fiction setting, Visitant can in theory be combined with any World of Darkness game, and it would be silly not to discuss the possibility.

As creatures living in the shadows, visitants are relatively likely to encounter other such beings. Aside from any philosophical or moral factors, there is often pragmatic reason for dealing between the groups: all are keen to preserve their anonymity, all have unusual goals to accomplish, and all have unusual capabilities. The exact relations between the groups could vary dramatically. Here are some suggestions for handling encounters with the two most straightforward abhumans, the werewolves and vampires.

One point to be established in a campaign is how easily abhumans can detect one another. The argument can be made that superhuman senses should reveal the true nature of each species. On the other hand, this ruling might sabotage any chance of subterfuge plots. In particular it will tend to penalise ansaid, whose shapeshifting is an important power.

Werewolves

Scientific explanations for werewolves can be advanced, and there is certainly no barrier to them in a setting which includes shapeshifting ansaid. However, it isn’t necessary at all to offer such an explanation, and attempting to do so may simply create new problems, or undermine the immersion of the game. Not everything needs a concrete explanation, even in science fiction.

Some possible explanations already used in science fiction include:

• Werewolves are a separate species from humans. They are somewhat akin to ansaid, having highly malleable tissue controlled by the endocrine system. Though they are far less mutable than ansaid, their more defined forms have evolved to grant specific physical advantages – speech and intellect in humanoid form, speed and agility in wolf form, and raw power in the intermediate forms.
• Werewolves are multidimensional beings. They do not actually change form, but shift between certain aspects of their multiversal self. Whether they are truly alien, or results of a strange evolutionary accident, is unknown.
• Werewolves are human, but affected by an alien symbiote passed on through bloodline or bite. The symbiote permeates the werewolf’s body, and can cause immense physical changes either through chemical stimulation, or through overlaying aspects of itself onto this reality. As the results are largely beneficial to the host, natural selection has favoured the werewolves.

Visitants are not a natural part of Earth’s ecosystem, but neither are they unnatural beings. In general, there is no specific cause for enmity nor alliance between the two. Visitants on a scientific mission may well find common ground with a werewolf pack: the werewolves can provide invaluable data, while a visitant may have ways to overcome problems the werewolves find challenging. Visitants with a political or corporate interest in Earth may be keen to help preserve its ecosystems.

On the other hand, predatory or exploitative visitants may find the werewolves to be an implacable enemy. Those seeking to learn about the Earth, or to prepare it for galactic contact, may be judged dangerous. Because a visitant is a loose cannon, even simply hiding amongst humanity may cause problems for a local pack. There are many reasons why werewolves might wish to eliminate them. There is also past history: previous bad experiences with visitants, or with a particular species, may prejudice werewolves against them, and vice versa.

Vampires

There are scientific explanations for vampires advanced in various stories, typically based on either a virus, a parasite or a transmissible genetic factor. Vampires have also been presented as non-human entities, but this is largely incompatible with the traditional White Wolf settings, though not impossible to work around. If the human-to-vampire transformation were restricted to particular families, they could easily be reskinned as an alien colony who ended up on Earth millennia ago and have learned to live amongst humans, either humanoid to begin with or made so through technology. Such a premise would tend to be better for vampire antagonists than for vampire protagonists.

Some vampires lose interest in visitants as soon as they realise they are not viable prey. However, matters are more complicated. A visitant is potentially a powerful and neutral actor, not allied with nor under the sway of any vampire faction. As such, wise vampires may look for ways to strike a bargain and gain the support of the visitant. Visitants are unaffected by many things harmful to vampires, and have the capability to obtain, arrange or learn things useful to a vampire ally. For their own part, vampires can assist in protecting the visitant’s identity. As a real, if lapsed, human being, a vampire can often deal with matters where a visitant would risk exposure.

As vampires prey on humanity, many have no particular issue with visitants who would do the same, but do resent the competition. The sea-change threatened by alien infiltrators, or by admission into a galactic fold, is highly unsettling to the vampiric society that relies on stability and rules from the shadows. As such, peaceful and well-meaning visitants may well encounter more hostility than creatures who actively hunt humans.

For visitants, there is no particular mystique to vampires. If the visitant knows about them at all, they are simply part of the planet’s ecosystem. Their unusual capabilities make them formidable, but not necessarily a greater threat than a human, since disclosure is the great fear. They have some scientific interest, but not necessarily more than other native species.

Due to the radical differences in their evolution, vampires cannot feed on most visitants.

• The blood of ansaid is distasteful and useless.
• The volatile blood of mosas attacks vampire tissue, inflicting Bashing damage and the Nauseated Tilt or Nauseous Condition.
• Shekt skinsuits have a small reservoir of artificial human blood, providing up to 1 unit of vitae for a vampire, and the vampire must make a suitable perception roll to detect that something is wrong with their prey.
• Ytaleh host-bodies provide blood as normal.

Playing with Traveller worldbuilding

As mentioned previously, I have for a while been considering running some Traveller, in a very desultory way, and started playing with the world-creation tools.

There are a number of potential "issues" with Traveller world creation. While I've spotted some of these myself, they're backed up to some extent by comments from others around the Net. As so often, this is an impressions-in-progress sort of post, and whether apparent "issues" actually end up being a problem is yet to be seen. Things that seem weird from one point of view may work perfectly well in play, and things that seem arbitrary may let you build a perfectly reasonable universe.

My feat are killing me

Henceforth a long, rambly exposition around the topic of feats.

So for whatever reason I've been messing around with a lot of D&D 5e chargen recently. I've put together about 20 different characters for various reasons, ranging from "this idea entertains me" to "I wonder if this is mechanically possible".

For example, I started wondering how feasible it is in 5e to make single-class parties. That is to say, parties composed entirely of characters from one class, with no multiclassing permitted. Because subclasses grant certain odd capabilities, this isn't quite as mad as it sounds. You can't make a party that replicates the classic Fighter Thief Wizard Cleric pattern, but you can arrange them in other ways.

On the Night-Wind: a ghoulish game

For those who care about such things, this post will contain massive spoilers for a story written a century ago.

Listening back to the archives of HP Podcraft recently, I was struck by a certain turn of phrase in the story that inspired me. Let me cite.

Now I ride with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night-wind, and play by day amongst the catacombs of Nephren-Ka in the sealed and unknown valley of Hadoth by the Nile. I know that light is not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any gaiety save the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid.

And somehow this filled me with the desire to do a game where you play mocking and friendly ghouls. There's a sense of hidden richness in that brief couple of sentences. Plus, funereal is cool set-dressing, as Vampire knew full well.

The Premise

So, drawing loosely on the collected works of Lovecraft, the premise is that you are all ghouls: dog-faced, rubbery, meeping, corpse-munching, tunnel-dwelling ghouls. By night, you ride the night-wind seeking not-very fresh bodies, adrenaline rushes, and the cheap thrill of scaring jocks at popular makeout spots. By day, you retreat through myriad secret ways to a moonlight realm that lies somewhere over there, wherein lie the catacombs of Nephren-Ka and the tombs of Neb and many other cities of the dead, which though once part of the waking world have drifted by degrees into the nightlands. Here you rollick and play and feast and rest awaiting the next excursion.

Being mocking and friendly ghouls, of course, you are no monsters. You eat dead people, but they don't mind. In fact, you take a benevolent interest in the affairs of mortals - you were one once, after all. And so, in your midnight revels, you keep a friendly eye out for your human neighbours, and take steps to guard your shared world against some of the more strange and terrible things that the universe holds. There are many secrets known to the ghouls, things buried with the dead or secrets whispered by the ancient things of the world.

Astute readers may notice that this bears a certain resemblance to Necromancers, and this is entirely true. For some reason I quite like the idea of combining friendly, benevolent adventurers with a gothic horror aesthetic. This is all compatible stuff really, settingwise, although arguably some necromancer concepts (like summoning armies of the dead) might not work in a fairly-strictly Lovecraftian 'verse.

I'm still trying to work out what system I'd like to run this in. There's a certain argument for FATE, except that I don't really have any confidence in my ability to run a successful FATE game and my players didn't seem particularly sold on the system. BRP is too swingy for lighthearted adventure. Either way, I'd better hold off any further work until I find out whether my players are actually interested.

Competent Protagonists in Horror

Various RPGs have played with the idea of letting characters just succeed at things they "should" (in some narrative sense) be able to do. In some it's an explicit rule, in others it's GM guidance, in still others it's a product of difficulty-based modifiers as they relate to mechanical character skill.

Reading Shamus Young's latest post about horror games, I suddenly wondered whether any computer games play with this idea?

The idea that struck me was that first-person games I've seen (which is an admittedly very limited subset) seem to fall into three categories.

You've got your full-blown FPSes which aren't trying to be anything else; you've got hybrids like Mass Effect where atmosphere, conversation and exploration are supposed to be part of the game but combat is essential; and you've got anti-combat games which want you to focus on other approaches to dealing with challenges.

In the straight FPS, the emphasis is on players developing suitable skill to dodge attacks, position themselves and shoot enemies effectively. The protagonists are usually supposed to be expert soldiers, assassins or whatnot.

Although the game emphasises how badass your character is, fundamentally it's up to the player to achieve badassery by getting good at the fighting. Failed attacks are just part of the learning process. As the game progresses, the

Podcasts I Like, Again

I’m always happy to find gaming podcasts that aren’t American, not because I Hate America but because there’s so many that are, it’s a welcome contrast. Also, I think it’s one of those areas where the sheer numbers of Americans putting out gaming and gaming-related content can skew perspective a bit. Living in different countries, there are different cultural contexts, practical concerns, and social norms that inevitably affect games built around a mixture of social interaction and imaginary worlds.

Today I present three of those, plus a bonus extra.

The Adventuring Party

The Adventuring Party is one of the most varied gaming podcasts I listen to. The podcast as a whole covers “Irish gaming”, which includes specific RPGs, board games, wargames, card games, LARP, con reports, and a lot of general discussion around games. They keep to one or two broad topics per podcast, which means I can skip the con reports and CCG discussions (the first being of limited use as I’m not in Ireland, and the second not being my thing) and get content that’s mostly of direct interest. There’s a fairly large cast, I think about eight all told, but they switch hosts around between episodes so it’s usually about four.

The discussions range pretty widely, covering the mechanical side of gaming, the social side, and a lot of associated issues. Thus, there are episodes discussing D&D 5e; game plots loosely based on Santa; gaming on a limited budget; problem players; and many other topics over the hundreds of podcast episodes they’ve done.

Despite the large number of hosts, the audio is good. There’s limited crosstalk, and they keep discussions fairly well on track despite the relaxed atmosphere. They’re a cheerful bunch, who neither veer off into general silliness (which isn’t exactly a problem, but not what you come for) nor engage in extended rants. The critique sections are generally positive, constructive and reasonable. The hosts’ varying interests and experiences mean they can offer very different viewpoints on issues, comparing and contrasting ideas and practices from tournament gaming, friendly gaming, wargaming, LARPing and so on. It’s just a really enjoyable listen, basically.

Improvised Radio Theatre With Dice

IRTD is probably the most chilled podcast I’ve ever listened to, which always conveys the sense of sitting in a warm study or on a veranda sipping a soothing drink. The hosts have great rapport, yet interesting differences in their viewpoints and opinions that help explore topics in interesting ways. The pacing and flow is good, and although editing probably helps, I think that is one of the great strengths of a two-man show: there’s less chance of interruption and it’s easier to make sure everyone gets to make all their points.

Michael and Roger have what seems like encyclopaedic knowledge of a vast array of games, many of which I’ve never even heard of, and roam far and wide through them in their discussions. That being said, they don’t hesitate to admit limited familiarity (or total ignorance) and frankly say that certain games or game types won’t be covered in a show because they don’t know enough about them.

There’s not a huge archive of episodes yet, around forty, but this is a really rich and varied podcast, ranging from high-level discussion of types and philosophies of game down to specific practical ideas, or the hosts’ own immediate gaming concerns and difficulties. I’ve never failed to find it interesting.

The audio quality is excellent, and it’s great to have another British podcast to listen to. If we lived in more enlightened times you could pop this on the BBC basically unchanged – in fact the hosts have rather BBC voices. Failing that, you’ll have to download it.

Going In Blind

I’ve just started listening to Going In Blind. It’s an actual play podcast on the face of it, but with what you could probably technically call a “gimmick”, though it’s kind of the opposite. The podcast is about playing games, specifically D&D, with players who are legally blind.

Leaving the entire premise aside for a moment, the thing that struck me immediately about this podcast was the first episode, in which nothing happens. That’s because this episode is dedicated to a warm, friendly, approachable explanation of what RPGs are and what it’s like to play them. It’s very probably the best thing in that line I’ve yet come across, and it has a great advantage over those “what is roleplaying?” sections you get at the start of most rulebooks: I think it’ll be far easier to convince a non-gamer to listen to a free podcast link on the bus than to read several pages of a book they may already regard with immense suspicion.

Another advantage is that roleplaying books don’t usually come with velvety narration in a delightful Australian accent and brimming with enthusiasm both for roleplaying games and for social inclusion. Because the “legally blind” bit of this podcast isn’t just a note in passing, it’s a deliberate project X has set out on, and the group touches regularly on the particular considerations this calls for in a game.

Don't know where the rest of this podcast will go, but it was a very strong beginning in my view.

I’m quite interested in this discussion and looking forward to finding out more. For example, many games are built around long lists of things and on blocks of preset powers, but visual impairment makes it hard to rapidly scan through lists and makes you rely more on memory. Even with audio content (which is, as far as I know, zero RPGs) you can’t skim at anything like the same pace. How does this affect play? Does it change the types of games that VI gamers find most accessible? Are broad, “you have four Aspects”-type games better than crunch-heavy ones? What kinds of adjustments are possible to help VI gamers deal with these situations? Of course as a player you can do things like pick minimal-list classes, but that's limiting.

Action Science Theatre

Action Science Theatre is very much not a gaming podcast, but it’s still a good listen. Essentially, it’s a modern radio drama along the lines of the old BBC series – Dick Barton and all that. There are a few key differences though.

To begin with, the podcast is strictly episodic and one-off. There are no recurring characters, let alone ongoing stories. Each episode is a short comedy story, themed loosely around a theory, fact or historical person related to science. True to the name, most of them also feature a certain amount of action-adventure, as well as some romance, although others are more like sitcom. They’re short, fast and lively fare, with enthusiasm papering over the cracks inevitable in a zero-budget indie production.

The audio quality is (as with most things I recommend) very good technically, and as a scripted show you don’t really have to worry about crosstalk. The acting is towards the amateur and sometimes cheesy end of the scale, so people with stronger artistic sensibilities may not appreciate it, but then if you’re planning on listening to Actual Play podcasts I’m assuming you can tolerate sub-Hollywood acting.

Why am I mentioning it here? Well, partly just because I enjoy it. However, you might also find it provides inspiration for games, particularly in the actiony and not very serious end of things.

Quiet summer

It feels super quiet on the blogging front right now. For my part that's for a mix of reasons. Most of it is Real Life Stuff that's both soaking up my energy, and limiting my gaming options. I've not done much gaming for months now due to being a long way from my group, and right now I'm in the middle of moving cities and have just started a new job. Once things settle down I hope to have more spark for writing.

It also depends what's going on, gameswise. We're playing a certain amount over VOIP at the moment, but mostly D&D. I love D&D, but being quite familiar, I have a limited amount to say about it, and I already voiced a lot of thoughts about the 5e rules. Generally it's running into new things that inspires me to write. Most of it is improvised as well, and I generally feel far more comfortable analysing the experience of playing prewritten modules (with a touch of the review) than whatever my friends were able to come up with on the fly.

I do have quite a few half-written games and settings lying around, but I just haven't been able to devote time to fleshing them out to my satisfaction. Plus, it's harder to do that when I don't have my group around to bounce ideas off.

Also Shannon is lying low at the moment, so who am I supposed to steal ideas off?

When I get some time to myself, I'll see about introducing you to my new D&D campaign slash Saturday morning TV show: The Seven Crystal Spheres.

Podcasts and the Nerds who Host Them

I listen to a lot of RPG podcasts, and I'm starting to detect some recurring themes.

The following is offered with the utmost affection to those who provide so much of my entertainment.

Wild Talents in yellow

So it looks like we might end up running Definitely Not X-Men for Wild Talents, and based on my previous posts Dan suggested that trying to stat up characters you already have in mind is the way to get into the system. He's been playing with making X-Men characters. That seems eminently sensible. Wild Talents is pretty much made for running some humans with a bunch of special powers.

Naturally I consider this laughably childish in its simplicity, so instead I am going to play at making the Adeptus Astartes for Wild Talents. What could possibly go wrong?

More fun with Demon: the Descent

You might want to read my Impressions of Demon: the Descent first, particularly the bits about powers, and also this one.

I was quietly doing random character generation, as I am wont to do, and I noticed this. These two powers sit side by side in the rulebook. You'd think someone might have noticed the discrepancy.

Name of power	Raw Materials	Shatter
Description	Nature abhors a vacuum. With this Embed, the demon can break an object to “summon” an object of similar Size. The object that she breaks is destroyed, never to be repaired or made functional again. The object she summons isn’t created out of nothing, but is brought to her location by a seemingly coincidental series of events.	Everything breaks. It’s just a matter of applying force in the right location. A demon who understands this principle can apply the force of entropy to an object and shatter it with a swift kick.
Dicepool	Manipulation + Crafts	Wits + Crafts
Limitation	No size limit specified. Durability is immaterial. Success doesn't risk Cover.	Object can be no larger than the demon. Used on an object with Durability 3+, she risks blowing Cover.
Mechanical Intention	Obtain an object by destroying another object of similar size.	Destroy an object.
Narrative Intention	I'm not sure.	As mentioned in the power, breaking down doors and smashing weapons.
Drawbacks	A failed roll risks Cover. The new object takes some time to arrive.	Failure causes injury. A success risks Cover if the object is Durable.

Why can't me and Wild Talents just get along?

I would start using a "Rambling" tag on these posts, but it would go on pretty much all of them.

So as mentioned previously, we recently attempted a campaigngen brainstorming session for Wild Talents, and I didn't get on with the game.

That rather confused me, because I don't understand why. I feel like this is the sort of game I should like. I like tinkering with mechanics, so shouldn't I like a game where you build your own powers and everything? What's putting me off? I wanted to try and work this out.

Okay, for a start, I think we got off on the wrong foot for a couple of reason that aren't to do with the game per se, but the attitude I read into it. The Introduction and What Is Roleplaying seem a tiny bit preachy to me - somewhat reminiscent of White Wolf, to be honest - and despite the attempts at catering to all tastes, I get the sense that really they want you to play a gritty game where you're people with superpowers, and think actual superheroes are a bit naff.

Worlds Unbuilt

Recently I threw out an idea for running a D&D game over VOIP, since I'm finding it difficult to travel to see the usual friends. Someone else suggested running some Wild Talents, and that got some traction (including that all of us are playing a certain amount of D&D anyway), so tonight we attempted to put together the basis of a game, also on VOIP (Ventrilo, specifically).

It really didn't work.

Basically I just wanted to waffle a bit about why that might be.

So Wild Talents is more or less a GURPS for superheroes. It's more or less completely customisable - even the superpowers are build component by component using a point-buy system with benefits and flaws that modify cost, although there are a few samples in the book. It has no default setting. Although they talk about different takes and tones in the game, like full "four-colour" spandex-wearing romps, the base assumption is still clearly a fairly gritty one where supers might get their head shot off and collateral damage exists. I'm actually inclined to place it near The Authority in terms of superhero takes, although there's a wide variety of possible power levels, including the ability to snuff out the sun. It's actually not that difficult.

One of the problems was absolutely that I wasn't particularly enthused to begin with. I don't have a problem with superheroes, mind. The fact that I'd proposed a different game was undoubtedly part of it, and I'm not going to dismiss that. To a large extent though, my apathy was down to Wild Talents, and the fact that my head began to hurt quite a short way into reading it.

Demon: the Bodging

I'm in a really White Wolfy mood right now.* I could really play some White Wolfy game. Admittedly I might get frustrated with it within a few hours when it turns out not actually to be what's advertised, but I hold out hope.

That was... a couple of months ago, when I started writing this. Same old, same old...

Anyway, my exhaustive (ahem) researches for Visitant involved rereading Demon: the Fallen and being reminded how promising it first sounded. Isn't there some way to get a faux-Judeo-Christian game about demons that are actually vaguely tied into real-life Judeo-Christian demon tropes (including, obviously, all the pop culture stuff that it's spawned) out of this?

Demon: the Descent is bad at character generation

So I'm in a bad mood today, and also playing with Demon: the Descent, and as a natural outcome of these activities I just want to take a few minutes to lay out in detail how the character generation instructions for Demon: the Descent are approaching a platonic ideal of wrongness. I have touched on this matter before.

Character generation rules always have problems, it's true. There's very rarely a way to make a character in one single pass - revisiting and revision are almost always needed, except in games with very light character mechanisation. But White Wolf seem to be singularly bad at chargen, and in their rules for both Demon games I feel they have reached a real nadir. This seems to stem, ultimately, from their abject refusal to acknowledge how their own game works, but some parts seem impossible to explain except by sheer incompetence.

Let us begin.

Character Creation, as outlined by White Wolf, has nine steps:

1. Character Concept
2. Select Attributes
3. Select Skills
4. Select Skill Specialties
5. Apply Demon Template
6. Select Merits
7. Determine Advantages
8. Age and Experience
9. The Fall

And here's a quick precis of the game, just in case. In Demon: the Descent you play a sort of Agent Smith. The God-Machine (SkyNet) is real and secretly rules the universe, or most of it, in a reality that's a conspiracy theorist's wet nightmare. You were an agent of the God-Machine, or "angel", a kind of biomechanical-metaphysical entity doing certain tasks. You used artifical human identities as necessary, creating, donning and doffing them whenever required. Then something went wrong in your programming, and you went rogue, a state called "demon". Now you're on the loose with your own motivations, and at least some of your old reality-warping power, in whatever human identity you were last assigned.

Using status mechanics to keep characters involved

Another day, another riff on Shannon. Shannon's post is quite specific, being about status in LARPS, and specifically a possible implementation for one of her own games. Inevitably, mine will be a general post about character status with no specific application in any of the games I'm not running.

Let me also point out that I think Shannon's solution seems absolutely fine.

One particular strength is that because it's reliant on rules and spends (rather than randomisation) it gives players a lot of control, and avoids rules causing silly results. If it's not practical to delegate the work, you can't delegate it (and hence, you have some incentive to find reasons why it's not practical...); you can only spend so much effort digging dirt on lower-status individuals, otherwise everyone will start thinking you're weird. And it's pretty simple!

It also limits players to a certain number of questions, for example, which means they can't just get around the restrictions by repeatedly asking questions about a high-status person until they get a good roll.

The reason I'm going to play with randomizer-based mechanical solutions is because I want to know whether, and how, it could work.

Visitant: Technological Gift trees

I'm still calling these "trees" all over the place, but let's be clear: they're very obviously pools. There is no hierarchy.

I actually really like the Demon: the Descent way of handling special abilities, and would have liked to use that. My original idea for Visitant was that there wouldn't be specific species at all. Instead, I'd discuss broad alien archetypes, and players could then combine certain low-level powers to make a species of their choice. More potent abilities would be keyed off these, just like D:tD.

For one reason and another (not insignificantly, a strong representation from a friend that Extremely Specific Splats were more White-Wolfy than vague mumbling, which seems true enough) I went the other way, and it has some advantages. Like, I don't have to worry about people combining completely arbitrary sets of abilities and producing some RAW-derived monstrosity. Only a small subset of abilities can be combined, which is frankly bad enough.

Today I present the last two Gift pools: the tech powers. Luminescence and Nanokinesis are both power sets I dreamed up out of nowhere. I started writing powers long before I'd nailed down exactly what the aliens would be. I originally intended these to be attached to a specific alien, but there were two things. One, I had no particular ideas for said alien. Two, I was very conscious that my aliens get a very restricted choice of powers compared to most White Wolf games, and allowing them free choice from some technology-based pools seemed both genre-appropriate and a useful getaround.

I may still write some more of these if I get inspired.

Trappery, part ten: goblin caves example

I just discovered this post lurking in my site, unpublished. It's a very long time since I wrote Trappery, and any train of thought I had going is long since dissolved. So this is a pretty short post, but it looks coherent so I thought I'd stick it out there rather than deleting all that work.

The Goblin Caves

In contrast to the last example, this one is far from reality. A band of utterly stereotypical goblins has holed up in a cave network. They are cunning, malevolent, nasty, brutish, and short. The goblin chiefs, led by Ugluk, want to protect their slightly-less-decrepit belongings from the light-fingered masses, as well as from any thieves that might come sneaking into their territory.

Into Ploughshares

So I've been thinking about Into Ploughshares again. This is partly because it just sort of got inside my head and niggles at me. Another reason is that I'm doing a lot of fiddling with games at the moment, and have managed to play a good few since I got back from abroad. The writing and reviewing parts, in particular, emphasised to me just how much time RPGs devote to fighting, or investigating grizzly deaths, and I started to feel rather down about it. I also had some interesting conversations with Dan about other types of genre and gameplay, which helped revive my interest.

What about characters?

The (silly) conceit of Into Ploughshares is an attempt to more-or-less directly map a combat-free pastoral narrative onto stereotypical traditional dungeon crawl mechanics. And that means character classes with distinct roles. I actually think this might work fairly well.

The idea that's come to mind is that, just as seasons (and their challenges) will map onto dungeons (and their rooms), individual challenges will map onto combats. Some will be unavoidable - winter descends on you inevitably, just as the minotaur hunts you down in its labyrinth. Others are optional challenges that can bring some benefit - destroying the undead guards in the vault will get you loot, forging a road through the forest will open up trade routes and speed communications.

Obviously, "fighting" a challenge means a damage system is needed, and the idea that comes to mind is Work Points.

Any given Challenge has, amongst other things, a pool of Work Points. This is a crude representation of how much effort will be needed to overcome the Challenge. Digging a privy requires relatively little effort and has few Work Points. Building an irrigation system for enough farmland to feed a village requires a lot more effort.

The first class we need, then, is naturally the fighter-analogue. Um... possibly. In our case, we have the Labourer. A Labourer is a pretty simple class with minimal special abilities. Where they shine is in plodding away at hard work. A Labourer has a high average Work output and is pretty reliable. They take on the lion's share of labour, freeing up other party members to handle fiddly stuff. In contrast, the other classes have more specialised roles that depend on application to be effective.

What about PCs, though? Most challenges aren't exactly damaging them, but PC Work Points would make no sense at all.

Dungeon crawls feature enemies that injure you, but often you're the one making decisions about pacing. I feel like season challenges need to work a bit different. Essentially, the challenge of pastoralism lies in whether you can overcome a challenge with the resources you have in the time available. This means a lot of challenges will tend to be on a schedule, with PCs only having a certain amount of time to deal with them.

In this case, I'm inclined to say that the obvious option is Fatigue. A PC's "attacks" indicate how much they manage to accomplish, but a challenge's "attacks" indicate how much the character's reserves are depleted by their efforts. This isn't the only option, though. A storm might damage infrastructure, so the challenge is to cope with it as quickly as possible to minimise the harm it does (PC "attacks" here will indicate taking precautions, minimising damage, repairing and so on).

The classic rogue/thief mechanics create a character who's good at sneaking around to find out the lay of the land and predict challenges. They can also deal with unexpected hazards (disarm traps), acquire unexpected benefits (theft) and position themselves to dish out heavy Hit Point damage, providing they can make the right setup rolls. How would we parallel that?

Clearly, we're looking at a Scholar.

The Scholar relies on some kind of theoretical roll to metaphorically 'navigate' the season, interpreting and predicting challenges and opportunities. They can find and deal with unexpected hazards (test of ingenuity or knowledge), acquire unexpected benefits (inspiration), and position themselves to deal heavy Work damage by application of theory to do a lot with a little.

Visitant: Ytaleh Gift trees

Almost finally, we come to the Gift pools for the ytaleh, little bundles of nervous tissue that they are. These critters get a rather woobly set of abilities, with the telepathic Mentalist pool granting ability to sense and manipulate other minds. Neuromancy is a harder one to pin down; as an electrochemical field-based pool, it combines tapping into the minds of host bodies, disrupting the functions of inconvenient humans, and sensing or manipulating electromagnetism. The ytaleh therefore tend towards a fairly low-action approach, sensing things and invisibly manipulating them to their own advantage. They're good when they have time to exploit their memory-stealing capabilities, but do have some combat capability too, and those are some of the subtlest attacks in the game.

If anyone's wondering, yes, the ytaleh are the Joe 90s of Beneath Dark Skies.

Visitant: Mistaken Identity

Observant readers may notice that, for someone trying to approximate a White Wolf game in a sci-fi setting, I have some major omissions.

Looking closely, almost everything published for Visitant so far is rules, of all things, while the rest is setting material. Where, oh where, is the terrible game fiction?

As mentioned, the six chapters of Prologue: We walk amongst them are only available to premium subscribers. I wouldn't breach their trust by betraying that. But that doesn't mean you get off scot-free you have to go without entirely.

Here, for your delectation and nausea, is the first ever piece of Visitant gamefic.

Visitant: Shekt Gift trees

You either know the score by now, or you have no idea what is going on. If the latter, I heartily encourage you to go back a few posts. In fact, maybe go all the way back to something more entertaining, like the Imperial Fists podcasts or the ones where I make sarcastic comments about poisonous doorknobs. Those were the days.

It may not come across, but I tried to give each Gift pool set of names that were thematically equivalent, so that you don't get a big aesthetic clash; I didn't want really purple names sitting next to "Levitate" or whatever. So the Guise names are a little fancy, Protoplasm is fairly matter-of-fact. Mosa Gifts have pretty short, punchy names that try to describe them as briefly as possible (Taste the Wind is an exception, admittedly).

Today, Shekt gifts! The insect swarm folks get two pools, one based on making buzzing noises, and the other on... well, being made of thousands of insects. Seems fair. For Shekt, I went with alliterative song-based names for the Cadence pool, and fancy-pants florid names for the swarmy ones. No particular reason, I just started with I Am Legion and went from there.

I would also like to note that I'm aware "One With Everything" sounds like a pizza. This is not accidental.

A beastly problem: animal companions in 5e D&D

So* recently I've been playing about with making a Beastmaster Ranger.

No, come back! I promise not to let this post descend into excoriating it for being sub-par or anything like that. Although it... kind of is. That may crop up. But it is not the primary thrust of this post.

* I am aware that an awful lot of my sentences start off with "so". Here my blog accurately recreates the experience of talking to me. See also: constantly going off on tangents, rarely reaching actual conclusions, talking far too much. On the plus side, here I tend to at least finish my sentences, instead of just tailing off, so...

See what I did there?

NOTE: since I wrote this, I've discovered that some issues are addressed by the PHB errata. I'm leaving this as written, partly because I'm too lazy to change it, partly because it frankly horrifies me that things like "is this animal less sentient than an actual literal zombie?" were not picked up before publication.

Visitant: Mosa Gift trees

As per the previous post, here are some powers, this time for the self-evolving Mosas.

The Mosa Gifts are somewhat odd, in that a lot of them don't require rolls, but simply provide various kinds of boosts. Quite a few don't even require require Focus. I'm not sure whether this will prove unbalancing, in that Mosa end up able to reserve their Focus for a small number of powers, or whether it's irrelevant because the utility of the powers is the main thing.

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