Academy of Doors

Simple Naval Combat for Cairn

noreply@blogger.com (AwkwardTurtle) — Mon, 29 May 2023 15:18:00 +0000

Naval Combat for Cairn

Ship rules for Cairn, partly based on my Space Ship Rules from Meteor. My Space Ship rules are about creating a ship occupied only by the players, where you're going to treat the ship as a sort of extra character and spend a lot of time upgrading bits and pieces and repairing things when they go wrong. For naval combat I wanted something snappier, where its more about the players directing a crew and hitting the notes of cinematic combat where actions are on a grander scale than you as an individual.

These rules assume the players are in control of a ship that has its own Crew beyond the PCs themselves.

If you’re in a ship by yourselves, use the normal Cairn rules to adjudicate the situation.

If you’re engaging with a ship significantly larger or smaller than yours, see Ship Scales.

Ship Attributes

HP: As HP for a player. A ship’s ability to avoid or compensate for incoming damage.
Hull: The ship’s durability and structural integrity.
Sails: The ship’s speed and maneuverability. Includes masts, sails, rowers, rudders.
Crew: The ship’s crew, and ability to support its crew. Includes food and water stores, as well as crew morale.

Ship Combat

On each round of combat, each Player Character may direct the crew in a single action. These will usually be Maneuver!, Fire!, Board!, or Repair! but could be anything else appropriate.

Actions are limited by the ship’s facilities. For example, if you only have a single set of cannon on board you can only Fire! once per round.

If an action is risky, make a Save as usual. If success depends on the ship’s capabilities use the ship’s attributes, if it depends more on personal skill use the character’s attributes.

Combat is simultaneous with both ships acting at once. If a ship is ambushed or taken by surprise in some other way, make a Crew Save to see if the Crew can prepare fast enough to act in the first round.

Maneuver!

Move the ship! Try to line up the optimal shot for you cannons, “cross the T” of the enemy ship, becalm them by blocking the wind with your own sails.

Fire!

Make an attack with one of the weapons on board the ship.

Attacks are done as usual for Cairn combat :

Roll damage die
Subtract armor
Reduce HP
Deal remainder to Attribute
If the Attribute is reduce, make a Critical Damage Save

Unlike normal Cairn combat, an attack can be directed at a ship’s Sails, Hull, or Crew depending on the weapon being used. Critical Damage Saves are made with the impacted attribute, and each have differing effects.

Board!

Applicable only when close enough to plausibly do so.

Treat this as normal Detachment combat, with damage being dealt to a ship’s Crew attribute.

Repair!

Restore 1d6 HP or fix a problem.

Attempt to patch a hole, put out fires, calm a panicked crew, or any other such thing.

Depending on context this might require a Save, promises made, bribes, or anything else that might be appropriate.

If a specific problem exists (such as those caused by taking Critical Damage) this fixes it. Otherwise this action will restore 1d6 HP (but not any Attribute loss).

Ship Harm

A ship at zero HP has its crew already stretched to the limit. Any further damage will start causing permanent harm to the ship.

Hull

Critical Damage to Hull means a significant breach. Lose 1 Hull per Round until repaired.

Hull at zero means the ship is taking on water and sinking fast.

Sails

Critical Damage to Sails means the ship is becalmed. Unable to maneuver until repaired.

Zero Sails means the ship is unable to maneuver under its own power, stuck drifting with ocean currents until repairs are made.

Crew

Critical Damage to Crew means the crew is panicked! Unable to command the crew to take actions until calmed.

Crew at zero means the ship’s company has been killed or disabled. There are no longer sufficient crew members to operate the ship.

Ship Scales

Under normal circumstances ship weapons are instantly lethal against individual targets, while personal weapons are completely ineffective against ships. If applied cleverly, powerful personal weapons or explosives could bypass this restriction.

The same is true for ships of dramatically different scales. A small ship’s weapons are ineffective or impaired against a massive ship, whereas the massive ship’s armaments are likely to be instantly lethal, or at least enhanced, in return.

Example Ship Weapons

This is where I’d list a bunch of different naval weaponry and example ships but unfortunately I am both not a naval buff and also too lazy to go look things up. I have, at best, a vague recollection of a single Horatio Hornblower book and I don’t think that’s enough to work with.

Instead have a Cannon with a few different kinds of shots.

Cannons

Standard Cannonballs: d6 damage
Chainshot: impaired against Hull, enhanced against Sails
Grapeshot: imparied against Hull, enhanced against Crew
Heated Shot: enhanced against Hull, risky to use on a wooden ship

Play Report & Micro Review: The Titan's Cliff

noreply@blogger.com (AwkwardTurtle) — Sun, 20 Nov 2022 13:38:00 +0000

Play Report & Review: Titan Cliffs

Background

Titan Cliffs is written by Jim Hall of Brooklet Games (itch.io, patreon, and storefront). The module is available as a stand alone, system agnostic PDF on drivethrurpg or with OSE stats in KNOCK #3, which is where I found it.

It’s a small, self contained module about a group of cultists attempting to reanimate a buried Titan. The adventure takes place within the dungeon-like interior of the magical mecha.

I’m running this using my own system, Brighter Worlds, in part as a playtest. Brighter Worlds (PDF, SRD) is a hack of Cairn, Electric Bastionland, and Macchiato Monsters. Without going into too much detail if you imagine Cairn, but with modular classes and a more whimsical tone you’re most of the way there.

I’ll include the Brighter Worlds conversions I used for the stats at the bottom.

Characters

You may remember most of these characters from their previous adventures in The Fangwitch’s Falls.

Granny Hexwhistle

A Witch on a flying broom with a small frog that sweats hallucinogen as her familiar. Slowly accumulating more arcane power with which to terrorize innocent bystanders. All-around bad person.

Jierdan Havarian

A Grimblade with a giant, floating (and possibly sentient) obsidian zweihander named Lilicore. He’s able to cast spells by hitting people with said sword.

Tibbius Sacrum

A skeletal Bag of Bones who delights in comic relief, pranks, and occasionally flipping the “horror switch” and turning from spoopy to spooky. He is accompanied by an undead skeletal river bear, and an undead fish skeleton he stores in his ribcage.

Pele

A Cleric of Small Gods with a small, divine, volcano headed golem (the God of Magmatic Renewal) riding around on his shoulders. She can change the nature of the world by speaking with her god’s voice.

The Session

Drawn by rumors of local apocalyptic cult activity, the party approach an area where a massive stone figure is visible, partly buried in the ground. Its huge open mouth spews a thick fog, while a lighthouse perches on large stone hand nearby.

My signature post it note "fog of war" ready to go.

The party decides to visit the lighthouse first, hoping to glean some information on the situation. Inside they find Sable, a pernickety wizard, who holds a deep grudge with the local cult. She worries they will awaken the Titan, which in turn will send her tower tumbling.

GM’s Note: The module does an interesting thing here, where a die is rolled to see how she feels about the cult. The result determines what degree of support, or sabotage, she will offer the party.

She offers them an invisibility spell to help them, with the understanding that they will prevent the Titan from awakening, or at least stop it from destroying her lighthouse.

GM’s Note: I quickly ad-libbed an invisibility spell, which previously had not existed for Brighter Worlds. Thinking it’d be fun to put a twist on what is otherwise, IMHO, a pretty boring spell I added a limitation to it. It made you, and anyone touching you, invisible as long as you held your breath.

Silly me, I’d forgotten that one of my players is playing a skeleton who explicitly doesn’t breathe. Whoops! We decided to roll with it for the duration of the session, but reworked the spell into a more restrictive ritual afterwards.

Tibbius gladly accepts the spell, which he promptly casts, and then spends nearly the rest of the session fully invisible. To extend the ~~abuse~~ clever use of the spell, they take further advantage of Tibbius’ skeletal state by detaching his arms to remain “in contact”, and therefore invisible, even while physically separated.

Thus prepared, and privately planning to reanimate the Titan for their own use, they enter the mouth of the Titan. Inside is an empty, dark room with a ladder descending into further darkness. Down the ladder and through a hallway, they enter a torch-lit circular room. The room is dominated by a magical circle filled with arcane runes, and pierced through with a large silver shaft bursting through the wall at an angle.

Granny Hexwhistle examines the circle for a few moments and is able to discern that it is designed to collect arcane energy, although the damage is diminishing its effectiveness. The party decides to leave through the door labeled with the image of a helmet, and manages to shrug off the poison trap that sprays across the group.

GM’s Note: I usually run very close to the ICI Doctrine where traps and secrets are heavily telegraphed. In this case, however, the players made it clear that they were deliberately taking no precautions and moving quickly, therefore: poison sprayed as they opened the door. Lucky bastards rolled well though, so no lessons were learned.

Through the door is a dark staircase, and halfway down the invisible Tibbius nearly trips over a figure lying injured on the stairs. After some invisible skeleton hijinks, the party becomes acquainted with Taba, an adventurer who had previously been investigating the cult but broke her leg on the stairs and has been stuck. The party helps her splint her leg, although she declines the extremely suspicious blood rituals Granny offered to fully heal it, and shares that she’d learned the cult leader, Gazuk, is deathly afraid of rats. Now mobile, and somewhat put off by the party’s (typical, by this point) unhinged behavior, she exits the Titan and leaves the party to finish their task.

At the bottom of the stairs is a criss-crossing intersection of pipes and conduits, among which two spider automata are drinking a strange fluid leaking from one of the pipes. After the most cursory of attempts at diplomacy, the party smashes the spiders to bits, and Granny Hexwhistle decides to sample the liquid. Of course. She grows a foot taller and declares this a victory.

GM’s Note: Props to the module for including the effect which occurs when someone drinks the fluid. In my experience players will always drink the fluid, no matter what or where it comes from.

Climbing up a ladder, they find a room in which a single cultist stands motionless while wearing a strange, steampunk-esque helmet and goggles which connect to the walls via a number of tubes. Tibbius opens “negotiations” by drop kicking the paralyzed cultist across the room.

The cultist finds himself on the ground, being attacked by a party of apparent lunatics all speaking to an invisible friend. Despite this, he keeps his loyalty to his leader and refuses to divulge any information, at which point the party promptly kills him.

Pele dons the helmet the cultist was wearing and finds herself looking at the sky, and fully immobile until Jierdan frees her.

This is where the obligatory Granny Hexwhistle war crimes begin, although it’s really more Tibbius’ fault this time around. Tibbius has the brilliant plan to reanimate the murdered cultist to act as an infiltrator, but is stymied by the fact that his ability only reanimates the skeleton, the flesh will simply slough off.

Granny comes up with the solution: they will take some spikes (harvested from the witchspawn in Fangwitch’s Falls) and use them to pin the flesh to the skeleton beneath.

Horrifying abomination in tow, they continue their exploration of the Titan’s inner workings. Returning down the ladder, they leave the pipe intersection by following the newest looking pipe until it runs directly into a wall. On close examination the wall looks like it’s been built much more recently than its surroundings. The party collectively decides that this couldn’t possibly be meaningful, promptly ignores it, and continues on their way.

GM’s Note: Guess that secret room will stay secret.

Around the corner the party enters what appears to be the living quarters of the cult. Bunk beds, chests, and the remains of a meal on a large table. Granny, who’s been on the lookout for rats since talking to Taba, manages to snag a rodent who had been picking on the leftovers with use of her Staring Contest spell.

Continuing through the quarters, the party finds the reason the rooms have been mostly deserted thus far, every cultist in the place is gathered together with Gazuk, their leader, in a large chamber containing a huge metallic heart!

GM’s Note: Here’s a place where random chance worked out in a serendipitous way. I’d rolled way more “no encounter” results than I expected, leading to tons of empty rooms. And then in this final room, I rolled the maximum number of cultists that could be there. Everything makes sense!

The party watches as the cult attempts to restart the Titan’s heart through a combination of compressions (by way of a battering ram) and shocks (by way of a lighting bolt spell). Rather than rushing in, the party makes a careful plan which involves Granny spending 10 minutes performing the Summon Swarm ritual to use her captured rat to create a horrible swarm of the things.

Just as the heart is resuscitated and the cult begins to celebrate, the party sends in their reanimated cultist flanked by a swarm of rats to interrupt the festivities. A horrible mess of a fight ensues, with spells, blades, and rats being thrown about, all against a backdrop of the floor moving wildly as the Titan begins to pick itself up.

GM’s Note: This timing was genuinely coincidental, despite how cinematic it turned out.

Outnumbered by the cult, the situation begins to turn against the party until Pele makes a dramatic move. Speaking with the power of her god, she attempts to flash boil the Titan’s blood within the largest artery leading into the heart to destroy it, and hopefully interrupt the revival. This succeeds, but in a way that creates a huge explosion impacting her, along with a number of nearby cultists. Pele is taken down by a face-full of boiling Titan blood, but her sacrifice allows Jierdan to defeat the (mildly panicking) Gazuk with a combo of blade and spell. The loss of their leader breaks the spirit of the remaining cultists, who flee for the exit as the half stood Titan begins to collapse.

The party makes it out alive before things truly fall apart (dragging Pele’s unconscious form with them before she bleeds out), in time to see their “good friend” Sable’s tower smashed to pieces across the ground. They console themselves that this couldn’t possibly be their fault, and make the decision to not go check on her before heading on to more adventures.

Thoughts on the Module

This module was a lot of fun to run, and I was able to do so with very little prep (just jotting down the stat conversions below). There’s lots of opportunity for shenanigans, and I think most groups will jump at the chance to try and take control of a giant fantasy mecha (even if my group entirely forgot their plans to do so in favor of ruining the cult’s day).

I would have had a complaint about the room encounters all turning up empty, leading to a somewhat austere interior, but it ended up working out and honestly that’s not something entirely within the control of a module like this to begin with.

Places where I think things could be improved is that I wish the interior did a bit more to emphasize the feeling of being inside a Titan. Aside from the occasional “lub dub” noise of the heart beating, this mostly felt like a (quite fun) normal dungeon crawl.

Second, this is by no means unique to this module, but I dislike when enemies are tagged as being “fanatically loyal” or “always hostile” because it cuts out so much potential interaction and politics. Obviously this is something I can adjust myself as a GM, but I’d prefer modules were written with more flexibility in mind (see my play report of Lair of the Gobbler for a module that does this really well).

Overall though, neither of those issues actually got in the way of what was a very fun session. I will highly recommend giving this a shot if you need a small crawl on short notice, especially if you’ve already got Knock #3 on your shelf.

Brighter Worlds Conversion

Room Specific Changes

Room 2: Poison Spray deals 1d10 damage and deprives on Critical Damage for 1 day or until treated.

Room 5: Grimoire contains incoherent scrawling about the titan, along with the following spells and rituals:

Finger Flare - Make finger guns and fire a bright, but harmless, magical flare.
Augury - Toss bones, draw cards, or otherwise cast lots to immediately divine the outcome of a specific action. There is a 3 in 6 chance of a meaningful answer of weal, woe, or uncertain. If the roll fails it is always uncertain. Increase the chance of a meaningful answer by 1 in 6 for each of: burning an offering, taking 10 minutes, involving a living creature.
Summon Swarm – [vermin] Kill an insect, rat, or other vermin with your bare hands. Summon a swarm of the sacrificed creature with total mass equal to a cow. You can control the direction the swarm moves in for ten minutes, but afterwards the swarm will act on its own.

Room 6: Lightning deals 1d12 damage.

Room 12: Scroll of Lighting Bolt: Launch a 1d10 damage electrical bolt that impairs the next Save or Attack the target makes on Critical Damage.

Bestiary

Spider Automaton

3 Grit, 1 Armor, d6/d6/d6, Bite (d6)

Automata: Unharmed by gas, fire, and mind altering spells.
Abilities
1. Nothing
2. Nothing
3. Flaming Blood: Deal 1d8 damage to attacker upon recieving Critical Damage (DEX Save to avoid).
4. Rush: Move at four times speed. +1 Armor while doing so.
5. Acid Spray: 1d6, damages equipment on Direct Damage, take 1d6 damage next round on Critical Damage.
6. Web: Spit nylon web (1d6 blast, damage to DEX, trapped on Critical Damage)

Cultist

3 Grit, d6/d6/d6, Quarterstaff or Crossbow (d6)

Fanatical: Cannot be persuaded, intimidated, or charmed.
Rarely make Morale Saves, enhanced when they do.

Gazuk

5 Grit, 1 Armor, d8/d6/d8, Mace (d8)

Grimoire Contains:
- Freezing Missile – Fire a d8 magical dart, Critical Damage freezes the target in place for a turn. Concentrate to hold them longer, they can break out by beating you in a STR vs WIL Save.
- Cause Fear – Force Morale Saves for NPCs. PCs make a WIL Save or are impaired on any aggressive actions until the next round.
- Silence – Anyone attempting to cast a spell in your presence must beat you in a WIL Save.
- Lightning Bolt – Launch a 1d10 damage electrical bolt that impairs the next Save or Attack the target makes on Critical Damage.

Select a repo

Wallet Dungeons - Text

noreply@blogger.com (AwkwardTurtle) — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 14:40:00 +0000

Just a place to host the text of Wallet Dungeons for reference.

I'll eventually have all the versions and languages stored here.

Colorful/Logo Version

Wallet Dungeons

Create a dungeon by rolling a handful of six sided dice and assembling based on results:

Dead End: Cannot touch more than 1 die
Passage: Cannot touch more than 2 dice
Split: Cannot touch more than 3 dice
Crossroads: Can touch up to 4 dice
Tower: Stack all, must touch at least 2 dice
Hall: Merge all, can touch up to 4 dice

For each room, add its value to all neighboring dice to find its contents. Halls and Towers are single rooms with all dice summed.

3.    Quarters
4.    Jail
5.    Sepulchre
6.    Statuary
7.    Store Room
8.    Courtyard
9.    Kitchen
10.    Forge
11.    Armory
12.    Garden
13.    Guard Post
14.    Library
15.    Arboretum
16.    Crypts
17.    Shrine
18.    Gallery
19.    Workshop
20-22.    Temple
23-25.    Throne Room
26-28.    Laboratory
29-31.    Menagerie
32+.    Labyrinth

Use the difference in values of the two dice where each room connects for the type of doorway.

0: Fully Open

1: Open Doorway

2: Locked Door

4: Trapped Door

5: Hidden Door.

Finish with an entrance where it makes sense.

For more go to awkwardturtle.games.

Lair of the Gobbler - Play Report & Micro Review

noreply@blogger.com (AwkwardTurtle) — Sat, 24 Sep 2022 15:33:00 +0000

Background

Two of my usual players in my Thursday night game were out of town this week, but I really wanted to run a playtest to try out some changes to Brighter Worlds. I was poking around for a small module I could run in a single night, and was pointed towards Lair of the Gobbler by Emiel Boven as my Sunday group is currently in the midst of another Emiel module the Rot King’s Sanctum (although heavily reskinned in that case).

It was a great suggestion! It’s immediately evocative, has good hooks, requires next to no prep, and has enough there to really feel substantial without so much that I thought I’d struggle to finish it in a night.

System

I’m running my own game, Brighter Worlds (SRD) which is a hack of Cairn, Electric Bastionland, and Macchiato Monsters.

It has lightweight core rules, “modular crunch” isolated within character classes (called Callings), and a whimsical storybook tone illustrated (literally) by the inimitable Evlyn Moreau.

The game is designed for tables that want low bookkeeping, options during character creation, some degree of mechanical advancement, and nothing that will clash with not taking it very seriously.

However if you just think “whimsical cairn with class abilities” you’re close enough for the purposes of this play report.

I’ve included my conversions at the bottom in case anyone has use for them.

Characters

Granny Hexwhistle

A returning, fan favorite from my Fangwitch’s Falls play reports, Granny is a Witch and also the worst person to exist. She flies around on a broom with her tiny frog familiar (which excretes hallucinogenic poison) while terrorizing whoever she can find.

Jierdan Havarian

The player of Mercutio from the Fangwitch’s Falls playthrough agreed to make a new character to help me test some things, and created Jierdan, a Grimblade. He has a giant, floating (and possibly sentient) Obsidian Zveihander named Lilicore with which he is able to cast spells by hitting people.

Jay/Dan Shades

Played by my wife, who plays in my usual Sunday game, Jay/Dan is a Sneaky Bastard and also apparently a tiktok zoomer. Jay/Dan can split a clone off of himself (Jay and Dan while doing so) and teleport (snap) one to the other, carrying anyone else in contact along for the ride.

Owner of a crystalline donkey used for transporting heavier items.

The Session

My post-it note "fog of war" read to go.

We jumped in with the party having been hired by the owner of their favorite local restaurant to find her new Sous-chef Moira who was supposed to arrive recently with a caravan. Instead she reportedly went missing while passing through the Berrenmoot Swamps after she wandered off in search of the burial place of an ancient mage (the bit that Granny actually cared about).

After some searching, they find a large earthen mound sticking up from the boggy swamp, with evidence of both ruins and current habitation. Guarding the entrance is a borgle, a salamander person, with a spear. The group, lead by Granny and leaving Jay/Dan’s crystalline donkey tied up, approaches in an obviously hostile manner which causes the borgle to dash into the mound along a narrow hallway with a strange hop-skip gait. Granny rushes in after him while Jierdan casts Anti-Gravity on the borgle causing him to float into the air. Granny Hexwhistle, in her rush, triggers the pressure plates the borgle was avoiding which causes the (previously unnoticed) carved faces to breath fire into the area.

Granny hits the deck and manages to avoid most of the blast, but the floating borgle is less lucky. Jay/Dan scouts ahead, and the party opts to not pass through the flooded chamber on the lower level, instead heading up the stairs. They find a guard room with six borgles shooting the shit, drinking beer, and complaining about the Elder Mother and her recent obsession with her “Large Son”.

Granny sends her frog in to poison their beer jug with hallucinogens, and three of the six are dosed out of their minds before the rest realize what’s going on. At that point the party rushes in, beats the living daylights out of the rest, and threatens them into cooperation.

GM’s Note: The module specifically notes that the guards are distracted, and players should have an easy time sneaking past. I extended this to Granny’s poisoning attempt, deciding that they also wouldn’t notice a tiny frog crawling into the room.

I rolled a d6 to see how many of the 6 drank the poisoned beer before the rest realized something was going on. After one round of combat, each (non-poisoned) guard had been injured and failed a morale save to keep fighting.

One borgle agrees to lead them to where Elder Mother Elharr is, thinking this might be a good chance to displace her while maintaining plausible deniability.

They reach a large room containing the Elder Mother, her “large son”, a few borgle guards, and a harried looking Moira, the chef they were sent to rescue! Elharr’s large son turns out to be the Gobbler: a massive, rotund, and immobile toad. Moira has been gang pressed into chopping and cooking a massive earthworm to feed the Gobbler.

Granny immediately gets into a shouting match of insults with Elharr, with Jierdan being a tall imposing presence, while Jay sneaks around to Moira and Dan stays near the room entrance.

Jay snaps back to Dan with Moira in tow as the shouting match erupts into violence as Elharr shoots lightning at Granny and Jierdan. Jierdan uses his giant floating sword to attack one borgle guard while he attacks another with an axe.

Despite rescuing Moira, Jay’s teleport leaves him exposed as the Gobbler flicks out it’s massive tongue and gobbles the clone into his huge mouth. Dan snaps Jay back to him, but as the Gobbler is in contact the huge toad comes alone for the ride and gets jammed in the too-small hallway, where the rescued Moira takes her revenge using her meat clever. Sadly this fails to get Jay out of the Gobbler’s stomach, leading him to perish within.

Jierdan finishes the battle with Elharr with a flying leap that reunites him with his sword. He brings the zweihander smashing down on the Elder Mother while simultaneously casting Chain Lightning to electrocute all the nearby borgle enemies. Upon seeing Elharr defeated, the remaining borgle guards decide it would be in their best interest to flee.

Granny intends to interrogate Elharr for mystic secrets but the Elder Mother’s will is too strong, which ends with Granny simply finishing her off and looting her corpse. Jay gets resummoned, although at considerably lower stats (Jay/Dan’s Attributes are split between the original and the clone).

Granny, having seen Elharr heal one of the borgles during the fight, believes the staff may contain healing powers and attempts to activate it on the newly summoned but very weak clone. Instead she discovers that the Twinning Staff can be used to copy spells, and accidentally double casts Painful Truths on both Jay and Dan, nearly killing them on the spot.

GM’s Note: I specifically asked Granny’s player if he prefers to simply be told what magic items do, or if he wants to experiment with them. He firmly chose the latter.

Moira carves some roasts out of the Gobbler’s corpse as the party catches their breath. She tells the party she’d really like to rescue Willow, a root-kin who she says was also captured by the borgles.

As the way they entered is now blocked by a dead, giant toad the party heads down the other path (where the fleeing borgles went) and discovers a soggy library. Within they manage to find an unknown tonic as well as a spell scroll, and eventually a secret passage hidden behind a bookshelf. Through there is the mage’s tomb! Inside is a dark stone sarcophagus and four faceless statues holding unlit braziers.

Within the tomb the party lights three of the four braziers prior to opening the sarcophagus.

Jierdan: “Don’t light all four, it might be a trap!”"

They open the tomb and the statue holding the sole unlit brazier releases a shadowed figure which immediately moves to attack the party. They defeat it with magic, and magic swords, but not before Moira has her shadow consumed by the creature.

GM's Note: The tomb is what I like to call a “player trap”, as each unlit brazier releases a shadow when the sarcophagus is opened. It’s positioned perfectly to impact players who try to be clever (as mine did) by not lighting all of them in an attempt to avoid a trap.

The party loots the tomb of treasure, magic items, and spell scrolls. Then, with the help of Granny’s flying broom and Jay/Dans teleportation, they rescue Willow and escape the ruins without further conflict (in spite of my efforts to tempt them into tentacle-filled water with shiny treasures).

Me, “Yeah you can cast spells, you just don’t currently have a Grimoire to copy those scrolls into.”

Jay/Dan’s player, “Grimoire,” putting a guttural emphasis on the second syllable. “It’s only a Grimoire if it’s from the Grimoire region of France, otherwise it’s a sparkling spellbook.”

However once outside, they discover that Jay/Dan’s crystalline donkey is missing. Granny flies into the sky and (due to the high visibility of the donkey) spots it being lead away by a group of borgles fleeing the ruins. Granny flies Jay ahead on her broom, and Dan teleports the rest of the group together. They rest up (giving Jay and Dan specifically a chance to recover a bit) before they ambush the borgles in the dead of night. Granny sufficiently impresses her terrifying nature to them, cementing her as a thing that goes bump in the night for future generations of borgles, while the rest recover the donkey along with the looted treasure the borgles had taken on their way out.

Micro Review

Both my players and I had a fantastic time with Lair of the Gobbler. I was able to run it with just reading it through once, and writing up stats for the creatures and items and honestly I could have done that on the fly without issues.

The art is fairly minimal, but what’s there is extremely fun. The map was helpful and managed to portray stacked floors without turning into a huge mess.

This ended up being the perfect length, with the party exploring nearly everything, and still finishing at a reasonable time even with the bonus borgle hunt at the end.

I really appreciate the extra guidance for each location as to the disposition of the borgles or creatures within. The added “lever” of the borgles’ dissatisfaction with their leader was fun, and something my players immediately grabbed onto. A less bloodthirsty group could have certainly found a way to navigate the ruins and politics therein without violence, but as I wanted to test out some combat mechanics I’m not going to complain about this outcome.

Overall, fantastic module that I highly recommend. Especially for anyone looking for a single session adventure that doesn’t require much prep.

Brighter Worlds Stats for Lair of the Gobbler

Creatures

Borgle

3 Grit, d6/d6/d6, Spear (d8) or Blow-Pipe (d6, paralyze on Critical Damage)

Lil’ salamander guys.
Slippery little buggers, difficult to pin down or grapple.
Wants: A relaxing swamp time.
Often found: Kvetching about the Elder Mother.

Elharr, the Elder Mother

4 Grit, d8/d6/d10, Twinning Staff (d6)

Borgle shaman, communes with bog spirits to cast spells (only loses 1 Grit to cast spells).
- Bolt - d8 damage, impair next attack or Save on Critical Damage.
- Bog Heal - Heal 1 Step of STR Damage and refresh Grit. Only works on bog creatures while in a bog.
Wants: To love and protect her Large Son.
Often Found: Neglecting the other Borgles in favor of cooing over the Gobbler.

The Gobbler

6 Grit, 2 Armor, d12/d4/d10, Tongue Lash (d8, eats target on Critical Damage)

Overgrown toad, can’t move or speak.
Vulnerable to ranged attacks.
Wants: to eat and sleep.
Often found: eating and sleeping.

Lurker

6 Grit, 1 Armor, d8/d8/d6, Tentacles (d6,d6,d6,d6, grapples on Critical Damage)

Four tentacled swamp predator.
Wants: Easy meals.
Often found: Lurking in dark waters to ambush prey.

Shadow

3 Grit, d6/d6/d6, Shadow Touch (d6, consumes shadow on Critical Damage, step up this attack’s damage)

Conjured shadow, only effected by spells or magical weapons.
Victims are turned into more Shadows.
Mindless, not effected by mental magic.
Wants: To consume living creature’s shadows, and create more of its own kind.
Often Found: Bound to protect tombs and burial places.

Rootkin

3 Grit, d6/d6/d6, Shovel (d6)

Little living root guy with glowing eyes.
Can see in the dark.
Wants: to not be eaten.
Often Found: distracting itself from its current troubles by reminiscing of its favorite pastries.

Moira

3 Grit, d6/d8/d8, Cleaver (d8)

Trained chef, forced to cook for the Gobbler.
Wants: To get free, and cook for someone who actually appreciates it.
Often Found: Prepping huge worms for Gobbler chow.

Items

Ring of Protection

+1 Armor
Makes your voice sound funny while active (like speaking through a fan).

Staff of Night (d6)

Wielder can see in the dark, and seems to melt into shadows if stationary.

Tonic of Health

Drinking restores on step of attribute loss and refreshes Grit to Max.

Cloak of Starlight

1 Armor
Discharge to release a flash of light, dazzling nearby creatures.
Recharges by absorbing starlight for 6 hours.

Twinning Staff (d6)

Step down WIL as you cast a spell to double-cast it.

Spells

Grasp of Yahzahar

As “Black Tentacles”

Shadow Blade

Condense shadow into a sword with damage equal to your WIL. You can immediately attack after casting this spell.

Bolt

d8 damage bolt of electricity, impairs next Save or Attack on Critical Damage.

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The Fangwitch’s Falls - Session 4 Play Report and Review

noreply@blogger.com (AwkwardTurtle) — Sun, 11 Sep 2022 15:39:00 +0000

Background

This is the fourth and final part of my play report for EmemyCo’s The Fangwitch’s Falls, read Session One, Session Two, and Session Three.

If you’re just interested in my players’ and my final thoughts on the module jump down to the end.

Fangwitch’s Falls can be purchased here, or alongside Em’s currently kickstarting module Try The Beetle Milk.

I’m using Brighter Worlds, which is my own hack of Cairn, Electric Bastionland, and Macchiato Monsters. You can pick it up here for free, or look at the SRD here, but if you imagine “Whimsical Cairn with Class Abilities” you’re most of the way there.

The Cast

Granny Hexwhistle

Witch on a flying broom with a small, frog that sweats hallucinogen. All-around bad person.

Mercutio Smock

Gentleman and Runewright extraordinaire, crafting interesting logic-based magics.

Tibbius Sacrum

A skeletal Bag of Bones slowly turning into a literal cartoon skeleton with all of his hijinks.

Pele

A Cleric of Small Gods with a small, divine, volcano headed golem (God of Magmatic Renewal) riding around on his shoulders. She can change the nature of the world by speaking with her god.

Previously On

The party got information about the Fangwitch from a strange Fae in the Deep Woods, and then concocted an elaborate plan to retrieve the Mask from the bottom of the lake. Surprising everyone, the plan worked. The Mask is some sort of ancient VR headset that would normally control the Fangwitch (an ancient terraforming engine), but currently cannot.

Session Four

The party begins to circumnavigate the Lake to head towards the Falls, behind which they know are a series of caves containing the Fangwitch. Along the way they run into a tadpole person: a traveling fencer by the name of Plukia. Plukia acts as a merchant of sorts, trading his goods and skills in exchange for fish and duels. Sadly none of the party takes him up on the offer for a duel to first blood (although Tibbius tries to cheat the system on account of not having blood). Granny trades the Jade Fish Amulet (a veritable lifetime supply of fish) for Plukia to train Pele in the ancient martial art technique of water running (plus some cooking spices).

GM’s Note: Plukia is one of my favorite NPCs from the module, and I was very happy I rolled his encounter here at the 11th hour. A bit disappointing none of my players wanted to duel him, but training montage is also pretty good.

After an intense training montage and parting ways with Plukia, the party arrives near the falls, but decides to make camp and attack the caves in the morning. They settle in a convenient cave located nearby, and are surprised by a River Bear returning home during the night.

The River Bear, upset by the home invasion, tries to chase them out but is instead insulted for its bachelor status (it seems to be the last of its kind), set aflame, and then killed. To add insult to injury Tibbius then raises it from the dead in skeletal form as the first member of his Skeleton Crew.

GM’s Note: Poor river bear, it didn’t deserve this.

Granny Hexwhistle messily eats the heart of this bear as part of the Perfect Divination ritual, which gives her perfect knowledge of the next 24 hours.

In the morning, the party uses the previously created Water Repelling Rune to open a gap in the waterfall so the party can make their way through. Inside, they navigate through the caves, avoiding a group of water logged ghouls with a combo of water running, broom flying, and runes.

Reaching a large underwater lake, the party sees the enormous Fangwitch coiled around a submerged stalagmite, and beyond it a glowing fissure in space. Mercutio dons the mask and attempts to force the Fangwitch through the fissure, but fails in a battle of wills and the Fangwitch attacks the party.

Pele tries to speak with her god to turn the rock pourous, thereby lowering the water level to stop the Fangwitch from getting close, but instead turns the stone into sand nearly dumping everyone into the water. Pele sprints away using her newly learned water walking, Granny flies on her broom, and Mercutio ducks back into the hallway leaving only Tibbius to get wet.

The battle ensues!

Granny flies overhead draining away the Fangwitch’s Grit with Entropic Drain, Tibbius swims around on his River Bear skeleton and opportunistically attacks the Fangwitch, and Mercutio continues his mental battle through the Mask. Eventually Pele is able to turn the tides by speaking with her god to open a series of magma vents in the base of the lake, blasting the Fangwitch with super-heated steam.

The Fangwitch breaks and runs, swimming swiftly through the glowing fissure.

GM’s Note: The module notes that the Fangwitch will flee through the fissure on a failed morale save, and Mercutio’s mental battle had weakened its will making it more prone to failure. It was still a funny moment of them battling to force it through the fissure, and then it deciding to turn and run through the fissure. The party sorta looked around and were like, “well, we let it run then?”

Mercutio (having by this point puzzled out the Mask’s interface somewhat) finds that he cannot close the fissure due to “another user” having set it open.

Tibbius takes the mask and swims down to investigate the fissure, through which he seems massive piles of gold and gems like those of a dragon’s hoard. Deciding to head through himself to investigate, he finds himself in a giant underground (not underwater) vault containing limitless riches, and some distance away a throne with a four armed skeleton wearing an identical Mask. Heading that way, Tibbius is ambushed by the Fangwitch who had been hiding inside one of the piles of gold. Taken by surprise, he’s sliced in twain, and even with his enhanced skeletal durability is crunched into dust by the Fangwitch.

Or that’s what would have happened, as Granny Hexwhistle reveals that was all simply what she saw in her Perfect Divination prediction. Time is “rewound” to just after the Fangwitch flees through the fissure and a new plan is formed.

GM’s Note: I’ve been trying to get this “iT wAs AlL a ViSiOn Of ThE fUtUrE” divination mechanic into and RPG for ages, and this was the first time it came up at the table. I was worried about it being annoying, but having a “reset button” floating in the background was actually a lot of fun. I may have to tweak some things to avoid overuse, but I like it a lot.

Mercutio engraves a rune onto Granny’s broom that makes anyone touching it weightless, allowing everyone to pile on together. A strange sight bursts into the treasure vault, of a witch’s broom with a Cleric riding up from, a Witch riding in the middle, a Runewright riding in the back, and a Skeleton hanging off the bottom.

Pele hops off the broom and dashes to the gold pile the Fangwitch is hiding within. She speaks with her god to instantly melt, then resolidify the gold managing to (at least temporarily) lock the Fangwitch in place.

The rest of the party flies over to the throne, rips the mask off the (thankfully actually dead) skeleton’s head, and flies back. They pick up Pele and make it through the fissue just as the Fangwitch breaks out of its golden cage, and after passing through don the masks and (with their powers combined!) close the fissure.

GM’s Note: The dramatic timing on this makes it seem like I had my finger on the scale, but it genuinely worked out this way as the Fangwitch finally managed a roll to break the gold, then failed the roll to reach the fissure in time.

The party celebrates! They’ve saved the world! Or at least the Fang Woods! And it doesn’t hurt that they technically still have the Masks and access to a vault filled with potentially limitless gold and riches (and a very angry Fangwitch).

Thoughts and Review

GM’s Opinions

I love this module. As I mentioned before, it hits a really good balance between providing information and leaving “blank spaces” for me to fill gaps. Having said that, I do think the module would benefit from more procedural “heft”. Even if I’d be likely to run things my own way, having a set procedure for travel, using the encounter table, and similar would improve things. Less experienced GMs may flounder a bit when presented with something as open ended as this without more structure for guidance.

One actual complaint about the module content I have is that despite the party spending 4-5 days within the area, only a single one of the calamities occurred. The calamities are a very cool mechanism, unique catastrophes that can occur at each location, but they happen only every 1d6 days. Maybe this is due to the travel rate I decided (6 hour blocks) but that goes back to a lack of provided procedure. On the same topic, I think having some mechanism that clearly communicates the time limit aspect of the calamities would be nice, rather than having them simply occur randomly.

Overall though, the Fangwitch’s Falls is fantastic. All of the NPCs are a genuine joy to meet and play. The art is adorable and does such a great job of setting the tone (one player described it as reminding him of Hollow Knight). There’s so much going on, and once you get dug in it’s easy to tie everything together and go hang out with all these weird guys in the weird woods. It’s flexible enough that you could run this as a one shot, or let it stretch out into a longer campaign. I highly recommend picking this up if any of this sounded like a good time.

Player Opinions

Since this was also a playtest for Brighter Worlds, I sent some feedback forms to my players after the session. I included some questions about Fangwitch’s Falls, which I’ll reproduce below.

It’s worth noting that my players only experienced the Fangwitch’s Falls through the lens of my GMing, and I took a fair degree of creative liberties. So feel free to distribute blame or credit between myself and the author as you see fit.

(Someone didn’t send me their responses yet, so I’ll edit those in when they arrive.)

What was your favorite thing or moment from the Fangwitch’s Falls?

Mercutio: Earthquake and how fangwitch affected environment. Mask was also cool.

Pele: The arc of the Seer from poorly rhyming skeleton to flying chicken demon was quite entertaining.

Tibbius: I enjoyed the world overall. It felt very real and full of life. Everywhere we went there was something going on.

Granny: Pretty solidly fun all the way through.

What was your least favorite thing or moment from the Fangwitch’s Falls?

Mercutio: First session, it was hard to know where to go, what to do and why. There should have been a more engaging conflict and stakes to get things rolling

Pele: The frog/ghoul area was a little anticlimactic. We couldn’t do much with the frog and mostly avoided the ghouls. It might’ve been different if we went back with the frog amulet we got later.

Tibbius: I loved it all!

Granny: Scheduling

Any other thoughts on Fangwitch’s Falls?

Pele: Lots of funny characters overall. Lots of unique creatures (fishbear, prawn fangwitch, demon chickens) to interact with.

Tibbius: I loved the feel of the world. It was cute, but dangerous. Weird, but didn’t feel forced.

Brighter World’s Playtest Notes

I got some good feedback from my players about the system from this (I won’t repeat it all here just for length considerations).

Overall the system is working as intended, with the Eulogy XP system in particular being well received. One repeated note that I agree with is that characters don’t start the game with enough equipment or tools. So taking a page from all of the RPGs I’m already stealing from for Brighter Worlds, a number of equipment tables to roll on at character creation will be added soon.

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The Fangwitch’s Falls - Session Three Play Report

noreply@blogger.com (AwkwardTurtle) — Fri, 02 Sep 2022 18:23:00 +0000

Background

This is the third part of my play report for EmemyCo’s The Fangwitch’s Falls, read Session One, and Session Two. The module can be purchased here, or alongside Em’s currently kickstarting module Try The Beetle Milk.

The Cast

Granny Hexwhistle

Witch on a flying broom with a small, frog that sweats hallucinogen. All-around bad person.

Mercutio Smock

Gentleman and Runewright extraordinaire, crafting interesting logic-based magics.

Tibbius Sacrum

A skeletal Bag of Bones slowly turning into a literal cartoon skeleton with all of his hijinks.

Pele

The Cleric of Small Gods couldn’t make it to this session on account of using his large amounts of PTO to have a fulfilling life going camping with his wife.

Previously On

The party arrives at Mahruko, chases down some rumors, talks to a rhyming skull, has tea with some long fish ladies, harasses some fishermen, rescues a gravekeeper, and fails to exploit a mushman himbo.

Session Three

The party wakes to a loud rumbling and grinding as the ground beneath them shakes in what seems like some sort of earthquake. Mercutio takes off running deeper into the Deep Woods in a panic (he will later claim he was trying to figure out where the epicenter of the quake was).

Mercutio barely manages to avoid hitting a spider silk trip wire, and after stopping just in time is greeted by a strange, raspy voice thanking him for not disturbing the traps. He turns to find an overly lanky, extremely thin figure draped in shapeless clothes with oversized hands like sledgehammers.

This figure introduces himself as Riko, a fae currently participating in the hunt for the Candlestag. Mercutio holds his shit together long enough to politely finish the conversation before running back to the rest of the party.

Reunited, they decide to head deeper into the Woods to see if the fae have any information about the Fangwitch. Granny Hexwhistle reveals that she has some knowledge of the fae, for which she traded a pinky finger in the past, and that if the fae are here they’re seeking something unique and interesting. Also that although they shouldn’t take their explanations about their own business seriously (or at least literally) they will always follow through on deals.

GM’s Note: Granny’s player asked me if she knew anything about fae, since it seemed like the sort of thing a witch would know about. Brighter Worlds doesn’t have any explicit knowledge or skill mechanics, so I just asked what Granny had to trade to gain this knowledge.

The party finds a different fae: this one is smaller, and floats in space surrounded by a billowing starlight cloak while wearing a half-moon mask with twisting horns. This fae introduces itself as Felu and agrees to an exchange of information for services, largely because Granny managed to remain polite the whole time.

While Mercutio enchants a chain with runework to eternally bind the Candlestag, Felu describes the original purpose of the Fangwitch to the party. It was one of many such organisms used by the “original creators” to reshape this world from an inhospitable waste into a place people could live. This one went rogue and refused the shut down command, leading to it being bound and sealed. A seal which is now breaking.

GM’s Note: Getting straightforward and unambiguous information about the mysterious “big bad” of the module needed to have a cost, especially if you’re getting it out of some fae whose whole deal is exchanges. Mechanically each of Mercutio’s runes cost him a point of Max Grit (Brighter Worlds’ HP) to activate, so if he holds his end of the deal he’s down a point of Grit forever.

Felu further expands that if they had access to tools of the original creators, they may be able to rebind the Fangwitch. The party immediately thinks of the ancient Mask they’ve been told is at the bottom of the Lake. Granny Hexwhistle and Tibbius decide that, given access to these tools, they’d be more likely to try and take over the world than save it. Felu finds this entertaining.

All parties satisfied with the exchange (although Mercutio ruminates that he’s likely to deactivate his runes at some point in the future to gain his Grit back) they go their separate ways. Upon reaching the lake they discover two things. First, the earthquake from earlier was the Lake splitting open on one side and creating a channel to the sea. Second, they’re blocked by a large group of Witchspawns: strange spiny creatures with some connection to the Fangwitch.

GM’s Note: The Fangwitch’s Falls has an interesting mechanism where each location has a potential catastrophe that can occur. One of these happens every d6 days, until 3 occur at which point the entire location falls apart. This was the first one to happen in this playthrough.

Granny Hexwhistle immediately provokes them with imperious commands to obey her. They respond with strange clicking and then a stab attempt as Granny realizes, in horror, that since they don’t have eyes her signature spell Staring Contest has no effect.

Granny, managing to shrug off the initial wound, flies up out of reach on her broom while Mercutio activates his runic armor and rushes in and Tibbius begins swinging his bone club around.

After downing two of the spawn, Tibbius turns on SPOOK MODE causing remaining Witchspawn break and flee at the terrifying sight. One doesn’t quite get away as Tibbius captures it by spinning it upside down and stabbing its spiny head into the ground.

GM’s Note: I gave each of the (at that point) four remaining Witchspawn a morale save to keep fighting. Each had a 50% chance of failure, and all four failed. Better lucky than good, as they say!

Granny attempts to interrogate the captured spawn, but being unable to communicate with it resorts to dissection. She finds the spines are made of a ceratin-like material, while inside they have a complex crystalline structure. Tucking a few of the spines into her bag the party turns to the problem of retrieving the Mask from the bottom of the lake.

The plan they devise is as follows:

Mercutio will inscribe runework onto Tibbius’ hand that, when placed in contact with the lake bed will move all the water away from him. Putting him at the center of a buoyant bubble and rocketing him towards the surface.
Granny Hexwhistle will watch the area using the Bone Sense ritual to keep an eye out for trouble.
Tibbius, being a skeleton and therefore free from the need to breathe, will be the one going into the Lake to retrieve the Mask.

Granny activates Bone Sense and finds a giant, “Loch Ness Monster” type creature (presumably Old Tago) is in the Like, but currently investigating the new sea channel. Taking this opportunity to be as good as it’s going to get, Tibbius heads into the water. He quickly swims down to the supposed location of the Mask by way of rotating his bony feet rapidly around his ankles like small propellers.

Tibbius finds the mask at the exact center of the lake. He notices that all the nearby fish have fled as Granny simultaneously senses Old Tago beginning to swim in the skelly-man’s direction. Tibbius grabs the mask and begins propeller feet-ing back towards shore as fast as possible.

He barely is not going to make it, and at the last second before Old Tago catches up activates his escape runes. The bubble bobs him to the surface like a cork, where Granny (having been watching through Bone Sense) is waiting to grab him out of the air by skewering her broom through his rib cage. Old Tago peers at them with interest, but doesn’t pursue as they make their way back to shore.

GM’s Note: Only two die rolls happened during this whole process. One was me rolling a die to see if Old Tago would notice and investigate the intrusion. The second was Tibbius rolling against Old Tago to see who was faster. The rest was a result of good planning (uncommon for this group) plus excellent application of skills, abilities, and magic. It’s nice when a good plan comes together.

Reunited, they begin to examine the Mask. Mercutio notes that the interior of the mask has incredibly dense and complex runework, and throwing caution to the wind puts it on. He immediately collapses to the ground as he enters a strange, virtual space where he can see the surrounding terrain along with the sites of future calamities highlighted. By scanning around he’s able to identify that there are some caverns hidden behind the Falls and sees what is likely the Fangwitch within, although everything is labeled in an unreadable language so it’s difficult to say.

Tibbius and Granny smack him around enough that he’s able to take off the Mask, and has just enough time to explain what he saw before Tibbius tries putting it on. Tibbius doesn’t collapse, and sees a similar view but for him it’s all bones. He notes that he’s able to “interact” somewhat with the Fangwitch though this view by focusing on it, but an (unreadable) error message pops up in his view when he tries to do so.

Although unable to fully decipher the interface, the party manages to at least understand that they’ve located the Fangwitch. On top of that there’s some ticking clock counting down towards total catastrophe unless they do something.

GM’s Note: In the module the Fangwitch’s purpose and motivation is randomized, along with the effects of the Mask. I definitely expanded/twisted it beyond what’s written in the book. “Environmental fail-safe” that wants to “devour all the earth has to offer” turned into an ancient terraforming engine. The Mask (whose location is also randomized) being able to “induce an eon-long magical slumber” turned into a control interface for said engine.

Did I follow what was strictly listed in the book? Absolutely not, but the results sparked a fun idea that I ended up running with.

Final Thoughts

This was a super fun session. I think Mercutio’s player really likes fiddling with mechanics to do clever things, so getting to create the “bubble escape button” runework was satisfying and fun. Conversing with the fae was a good time, always enjoyable to play a being who’s perspective and actions are just alien enough from the norm to be unsettling.

Looking forward to the finale of this adventure as the, hopefully complete, party goes to confront the Fangwitch.

Read on to Session Four + Reviews.

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The Fangwitch’s Falls - Session Two Play Report

noreply@blogger.com (AwkwardTurtle) — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 13:13:00 +0000

Background

This is the second part of my play report for EmemyCo’s The Fangwitch’s Falls, read Session One if you haven’t. The module can be purchased here, or alongside Em’s currently kickstarting module Try The Beetle Milk.

Previously On…

Granny Hexwhistle

Witch on a flying broom with a small, frog that sweats hallucinogen. All-around bad person.

Mercutio Smock

Gentleman and Runewright extraordinaire, crafting interesting logic-based magics.

Pele

Cleric of her Small God: a tiny golem with a volcanic head who is the God of Magmatic Renewal.

The party arrived at the town of Mahruko, chased down a rumor of quarreling ghosts, murdered some ~~chickens~~ cursed demons, treated with a ~~magic 8 ball~~ skull-based Seer, and chatted with two ~~strangely long and tall~~ normally proportioned fish sisters.

Overnight they’re joined by a new party member (our usual fourth player who was unavailable during session one):

Tibbius Sacrum

A Bag of Bones: a walking, talking skeleton wielding a (different) skeleton’s leg. Apparently the Seer’s college roommate. Able to switch between terrifying spooky skeleton and comical spoopy skellington on a whim.

GM’s Note: We spent maybe a minute trying to justify why a skeleton was joining the party, but I mostly didn’t think it was important for it to make sense “in the fiction”. Prioritizing speed over realism, we ended up with the absurdist idea that the Seer suggested he join this party because they “seemed cool” and everyone rolled with it.

Session Two

“The only good man is a dead man.” - Granny Hexwhistle welcoming Tibbius into the party.

The party (now including one boney boi) enjoys a morning teatime with the Yamuna Sisters before heading on towards the lake. They pass some strange stone structures and scrimshaw on the way, but cursory examination reveals no deeper or magical meaning.

Arriving at the lake the party spots a small boat riding deep in the water, containing two men waving for help. Mercutio whips up a set of linked runes carved into some driftwood: one to move the driftwood towards the men, and a second which triggers on contact with another piece of wood (the boat) that sets up a water current to bring the boat the shore.

As the boat is carried closer, it becomes apparent what the problem is: the boat is jam packed full of fish! To the point of nearly sinking!

GM’s Note: There’s a random table to determine what issue the fishermen are dealing with. I was about to roll on it when I spotted “Too Many Fish” as an entry, and decided that was far too funny to not be the case.

The party immediately begins questioning how the boat ended up in this situation, and why the fishermen don’t even have any fishing equipment. The fishermen have no good answers, which makes the party even more suspicious. Granny notices that one of the fishermen is wearing some sort of amulet beneath his shirt, and, being a covetous witch, immediately decides she wants it.

She makes a grab for it, which the fisherman objects to. Mercutio, always willing to escalate violence levels, pins the fisherman’s arms to allow Granny Hexwhistle to try and grab the amulet. The second fishermen, seeing the (totally unjustified) attack on his companion moves to try and push Granny back, who retaliates with a blast of magic. This breaks his spirit and he takes off running towards the woods, pursued by Granny on her broomstick.

GM’s Note: The fishermen’s initial inability to answer questions and their suspicious actions was a result of me not knowing why they had so many fish in their boat. I was mentally scrambling for a good reason, but in the mean time they were answering evasively. So, that much is my fault. What follows I take no responsibility for.

Tibbius begins tossing fish from the boat one by one back into the lake as a form of intimidation (???), while Pele and Mercutio interrogate Fisherman A. They find that the amulet is a large jade fish, apparently enchanted to make fish hop into the boat on their own. Despite belonging to a long line of excellent fishers this (still unnamed, whoops) fisherman had no skill at all. To fix this problem, the fisherman acquired this amulet trade from the Fae who are currently in the Deep Woods.

Meanwhile Granny Hexwhistle is circling the fleeing man on her broom, cackling madly the entire time.

Me: Okay so what is your goal with all this?

Granny’s Player: I want to completely terrify him, make this a total nightmare.

Me: Well, mission accomplished.

Hexwhistle eventually paralyzes him with the Staring Contest spell, then shoves her frog familiar in his mouth to dose him with hallucinogens, ultimately making him pass out from the extreme and wildly varying sensory inputs.

GM’s Note: Brighter Worlds uses a “Eulogy” system for earning XP. Anytime a character does something noteworthy enough to be read out at their eventual funeral gets added, and you gain 1 XP. Anything on the line gets voted on by the table. It serves to both let the table meter their own advancement rate, and also adds a “best of” campaign record to every character sheet.

In this case, the table voted that the extreme terrorizing of the fisherman qualified as an entry for Granny Hexwhistle’s Eulogy. I argued against it, both on the grounds that this feels like something Granny does all the time, and also because this is something I’d call a perverse incentive. Alas, I was outvoted.

Returning to the rest of the group with the passed out Fisherman B in tow, the party puts together the whole story. Tibbius dumps the boat full of fish back into the lake right before the party remembers they wanted to have a large gift of food to potentially appease Old Tago (the giant monster that apparently lives in the lake).

They send the two, now traumatized, fishermen off towards the not-at-all suspicious Yamuna Sisters’ house after “confiscating” the fish charm. Following some discussion the party heads towards the cemetery to follow up on the rumor they’d heard about the gravekeeper, as well as it being on the way to the Deep Woods to meet the Fae.

Me: Wow, they’re actually pretty close to finishing the module. That’s way faster than we usually get through things.

My Players: I know we’re literally right next to our goal, but instead lets go head off in the opposite direction to meet (and probably pick fights with) the weird ancient creatures we just heard about.

The Cemetery is flooded, both with bog water and ghouls. There’s a large mound in the center with a huge Toad sitting atop, as well as a particular tree-mushroom that the ghouls seem to be centered around. Granny heads to that tree-mushroom on her broom, while the rest of the party kites the slow moving ghouls to reach the topped mound.

Granny finds, and rescues, the beleaguered (and previously missing) grave-keeper before meeting up with the rest of the party near the giant toad. The rescued gravekeeper is sufficiently polite and thankful for the rescue the charm Hexwhistle, and informs them that the toad is Gol, a local Demigod of the Ponds. Gol is asleep, and ignores all attempts by the party to wake him. Pele eventually speaks through his God and collapses half of the mound Gol is on, forming a ramp for him to roll down. Unfortunately some godly power keeps Gol floating in empty space.

GM’s Note: I gave Gol a WIL Save to remain in place despite the ground being removed from beneath him. My logic at the time was that the module lists some specific ways Gol could be woken, and I took that as a further implication that it should be difficult to do so.

In retrospect, I should have let this attempt work. If for no reason than the image of a carriage sized toad rolling down a ramp into a crowd of ghouls is extremely funny.

It would also also have played into my favorite line of text in the module, which is that he “prefers to roll around like a misshapen wheel.”

Realizing that their attempt to displace Gol has left an easy path for the hoard of ghouls to get at them, the party makes themselves scarce (after making sure the gravekeeper is headed back towards Mahruko safely).

Onward to the Deep Woods! The sun is beginning to set just as the party reaches the outskirts of the forest. Pitiful wailing and the sound of heavy footsteps emerges from deeper into the forest, causing the party to prepare for combat only to see a giant mushroom man fleeing in terror from a cloud of butterflies.

Granny Hexwhistle gets very lucky, and manages to kill the magical, illusion-projecting butterfly (and feed it to her familiar), then immediately turns to try and extract some recompense from the mushman. Gari, the mushman in question, explains that he’d been chased by the terrible butterflies who kept putting him to sleep with magic. He is very agreeable to preparing food in exchange for his rescue, but seems to be a bit unsure as to what food actually is.

After a few minutes of burning a mushroom, dirt, and pine needle patty over a fire the party realizes that Gari is simply too much of a himbo for them to exploit, and sends him on his way.

They make camp and settle in for the night.

Brighter World’s Playtesting Note: By this point Granny had earned 2 XP and her player was looking to purchase a new Advanced Ability. Nothing on the sheet was speaking to them, and the player really enjoys looking through spell lists and making careful choices. I offered them the ability to take on an ability from the (currently unpublished) Crystal Wizard which would give them a choice of any spell or ritual each time XP is spent. An example of my attempts to make different Callings appeal to different player types being semi-successful.

As a point of comparison, in my other group a player with the Demonic Sorcerer Calling is absolutely loving the totally random mirror of this Ability.

After Thoughts

This group has a bit of a tendency to go from 0 to 60 when it comes to random violence, those poor fishermen. The fishermen incident is a good illustration of the level of detail I like in a module though, which Fangwitch’s hits quite well. Enough to provide a framework that I can run and (relatively) quickly spin up new ideas, but not so much where things I invent are going to cause contradictions later.

I recognize that a lot of people will want more detail or structure, but for me this is perfect. It’s a great middle ground where a single read through lets me understand the world enough to run without further prep and the flexibility to add more to the world.

Session 3 of the play report will go up whenever we manage to get out of scheduling hell and play session 3. Maybe this week? We’ll see!

It was this week, huzzah, read Part 3 here: https://academyofdoors.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-fangwitchs-falls-session-three-play.html

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The Fangwitch’s Falls - Session One Play Report

noreply@blogger.com (AwkwardTurtle) — Sat, 27 Aug 2022 03:33:00 +0000

Module Introduction

The Fangwitch’s Falls is a fantasy adventure by EmemyCo. It’s written for Cairn, but easily adapted to anything rules light, and is a fantastic example of the “talking to weird guys in the woods” style of module that I’m a big fan of.

It features a point crawl navigation of the strange Fangwoods, beset by calamity as the legendary Fangwitch thrashes about as it wakes. Six of the seven locations have a unique calamity that can occur as a result of the Fangwitch’s movements, although if enough actually suffer them the entire location will destabilize and be totally destroyed.

Much of the setup and content is randomized, from big details like what the Fangwitch is and what it wants down to small details like “why are those fishermen having a bad time and is it too much fish?”. I think the same group could probably run this twice without getting bored, but if nothing else running it multiple times as a GM means you get to see something new each time.

There’s a sizeable collection of the weirdo NPCs and creatures to be found, complete with fantastically adorable artwork, an encounter table (execution left to the GM), and a nice set of local events and rumors to help get the players invested.

I fell in love with this module while reading it, and have been looking forward to running it since then. The group I ran it with leans a little in the direction of “murder hobo” so it’s maybe not exactly the intended audience, but I think the ensuing friction was great fun.

You can pick up The Fangwitch’s Falls by itself here, or along with a new module by Em by the name of Try the Beetle Milk, currently being kickstarted and promising to be more of the same off-the-wall goodness.

System

I’m letting this mini-campaign also serve as playtesting for my system Brighter Worlds. In brief, Brighter Worlds is a game of modular crunch intended to let players muck about with the individual mechanics they enjoy without weighing down the game for everyone else at the table. It’s a more whimsical take on the OSR/NSR, as seen through the lens of Evlyn Moreau’s artwork, and I think is a good match in tone for the Fangwitch’s Falls. Mechanically it’s based on Cairn, Electric Bastionland, and Macchiato Monsters.

Grab it here (for free) if you’d like to read more, or check out the SRD here.

Player Characters

Granny Hexwhistle

Granny Hexwhistle is a Witch, and also an unforgivably awful human being. Her familiar, which assists her with spellcasting, is a tiny frog which secretes hallucinogenic poison. The frog is a prince she transmuted years ago, and can’t (or won’t) turn back. She has a broom to fly upon, as all proper witches should.

She’s here to try and weasel out any ancient witch secrets from the appropriately named Fangwitch.

Mercutio Smock

Mercutio is a Runewright, master of the subtle but flexible art of creating magical effects by chaining together rune elements. He specializes in adding logic elements to his runes, allowing them to be activated based on “if, then” statements.

He’s here to try and uncover the Rune of Mud, supposedly used as part of the original binding of the Fangwitch.

Pele

Pele is a Cleric of Small Gods, specifically of the God of Magmatic Renewal who takes the form of a small volcano headed golem. She can speak through her god to change the world within its domain.

She’s here because the waking of the Fangwitch is the end of a great cycle, something her and her god wish to witness.

Session One

The party arrives in Mahruko, a small town at the edge of the Fangwood, to a scene of widespread malaise. The road’s been washed out behind them, the square is filled with people fleeing a nearby town that was swallowed by sink holes, and a general sense of foreboding. They follow the sounds of activity to The Coiled Mare, a local bar where someone is blowing through their savings to buy drinks for anyone present.

Never one to turn down drinks, they tuck in while chatting up locals to find out what’s going on. A few interesting tidbits appear:

The groundskeeper for the local cemetery hasn’t been seen in a few days.
Someone swears they overheard some ghosts having an argument near the Old Well.
Everyone in town has been having the same dream: the whale sized Fangwitch thrashing about in a mass of coils and spines.

The party hits the road to investigate the ghost argument rumors, despite the other townsfolk suggesting that old Bill was just drunk.

GM’s Note: There are no explicit instructions for navigating the point crawl in module. I don’t mind this, as it’s so dependent on system and group that I’d likely have ended up ignoring it anyway. For this playthrough, since the module operates on the scale of days with the calamities, I’m having it take about 6 hours to get to a new location and a similar amount of time to thoroughly explore it. This way the party can visit around two locations per in game day. I’m also rolling on the Encounters table once every 6 hours.

On the way, the party runs into a couple remarkably fat chickens pecking at worms on the road. Upon seeing these chickens, Granny Hexwhistle immediately decides she wants to catch and eat them. She captures one with magic while Pele, always willing to go with the flow, speaks through her god to turn the ground to mud and catches the second chicken.

On closer examination the chickens exude a sulfurous smell, and have a malicious look in their eyes. Granny Hexwhistle considers this, then snaps their necks but decides not to eat them.

Dead chickens in hand the party arrives at the Old Well. Mercutio approaches to drain it with some runework but finds is already drained due to a crack at the bottom, likely a result of recent tremors.

Granny snaps a chicken bone to perform the Bone Sense ritual to scout the area before flying down on her broom into a small space through the crack. Inside is a skeleton huddling beneath a blanket, a skull sitting on some armor, and a strange spectral figure dancing around the room.

The skull introduces himself as the Seer. After shaking him like a magic 8 ball and asking questions it’s discovered that that spirit is the spectral form of the Fangwitch. The party is unsure what to do with this information as the spirit seems unable or unwilling to answer questions. The skull accepts a new skeleton (one of the suspicious chicken corpses) in trade for his armor which Mercutio enhances with a set of runes to make it unyielding as stone.

GM Note: The Seer “speaks in poorly rhyming verse when able.” Super fun to try and come up with rhymes on the fly, but also quite difficult. Was made more fun by making the struggle to come up with good verse “in character”, it’s the Seer struggling! Not me!

The party continues on towards the Lake, passing some strange stone structures on the way, and arrives at a small hut set on the shore. The hut belongs to the Yamuna sisters, who are unsettling elongated fish ladies (long and tall) who invite them in for a cup of tea.

Over the tea they engage in a nice, not at all strange and foreboding chat, in which the party learns some local lore. After parsing the strange singsongy parlance of the sisters, the party learns:

The Fangwitch is apparently behind the Falls that feed into the Lake
There is an ancient Mask (possibly the source of the Runes Mercutio is looking for) at the bottom of the Lake.
The Lake is home to a huge saurian creature by the name of Old Tago which may be an obstacle, although it apparently appreciates a good meal.

The Yamuna Sisters kindly offer the party a place to sleep, although Mercutio decides to set up a tent outside so as to not intrude on an otherwise all ladies night. After whipping up a quick dehydration rune the drizzle poses no problem.

Partway through the night Mercutio is awoken by a strange, skeletal creature approaching in the air. After rushing inside and waking the others, Granny Hexwhistle bursts outside to see who disturbed her slumber.

Turns out it’s the Seer! Now sporting a demonic skeleton! The chicken corpse they gave him was actually a demon cursed into the form, and the Seer was able to break the curse after gaining control of the body. The Seer stops in to thank the party for this wonderful gift, and heads off.

GM Note: The random encounter is demons cursed into chicken form, everything that followed was pure hilarious happenstance.

Session One Thoughts

So far, my players and I are having a blast. The module is fairly loose in structure, which some GMs may find insufficient without further prep. Personally, after just reading through it a couple times it provided me enough meat to go off of without having so much structure that I felt constrained. It gave me guidance but nothing I invented on the spot ever felt like it would contradict something else later.

The NPCs are lively, original, and very fun to play. The setting is fun and entwined enough that no matter which way my players decided to go I knew there’d be something to do, and it would connect to further locations to carry them along.

The only complaint I got was about the lack of combat, as mentioned this group leans a bit murder hobo-y, but don’t worry. In session 2 they found a way to solve that problem themselves. Read on now: https://academyofdoors.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-fangwitchs-falls-session-two-play.html

If this sounds fun, pick up the module here or alongside Try The Beetle Milk, Em’s currently kickstarting module which promises to be more fun of the same variety.

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The "Friction" Theory of TTRPG Mechanics

noreply@blogger.com (AwkwardTurtle) — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 21:42:00 +0000

The Idea

I often see a rules light game complimented by saying its rules, "get out of the way" or "don't slow things down" during play. Whereas I also see (usually different people) say that rules light games are too ephemeral, or there's not enough "meat" there.

I've had the thought that both of these statements are actually talking about the same thing.

Mechanics in a TTRPG provide friction. They slow things down, and they provide grip.

When you encounter a situation that requires interfacing with mechanics, that often means pausing the narration, consulting the rules (depending on complexity), and rolling dice before you can continue.

This can be bad, if it interrupts an otherwise good flow of conversation and narration. But it can also be good, if it provides a slight pause at the right time. That pause can build tension, provide a moment of bated breath before the dice hits the table and we know what happens next.

The friction from mechanics also lets the players grip the game, and the game world. Mechanics provide knowable, predictable ways in which the players can interact with the world. A bit of grit to help hold onto the otherwise nebulous shared space of ideas everyone at the table is contributing to.

Not enough friction, and your grip might slip causing the fictional world to become ethereal and unreal and difficult to properly interact with. Too much friction, though, and it might become hard to move easily and lead to spending more time thinking about mechanics than what's going on in the world.

First Example: Increasing Friction

This is something I was thinking about recently while working on my Cairn hack Meteor. My original rules for flying a space ship around a solar system were very light and nebulous; my initial instinct for RPG rules is to go as light as possible and see if it works. In this case, all I had was rough guidelines for how long it took to get to "nearby" and "distant" locations. In practice this wasn't enough. A solar system is too large, too abstract, and too disconnected from the norm to be easily imagined in a way that everyone at the table will agree with. Not enough friction.

So I added some basic exploration rules. Broke the system up into orbital zones, provided a basic map that can be used for any system, and some simple navigation mechanics. Still relatively light, I didn't want this to bog down the process of simply flying form point A to point B, but now it had enough friction that there were actual decisions to make during that process.

I had to add a little bit of grit to make sure players could properly grab onto the game.

Second Example: Reducing Friction

As an opposed example, in my game Brighter Worlds I was anticipating a campaign where much of the time was spend hex crawling through the wilderness. I wanted a mechanic to track supplies and interface with wilderness survival to provide pressure to return to settlements to restock and recover. I originally had a complex set of mechanics involving usage dice and opposed Saves that were dependent on the severity of the environment and the skills of the characters. At the table, this was simply too much. I found myself apprehensive when finishing a day of exploration since I'd have to now interface with a whole new system. Too much friction.

Instead I collapsed it down to a single Save each day (using the same mechanic as the rest of the game) plus an abstracted "Supplies" item. This created a small moment that paused conversation and had me ask "okay who's in charge of food tonight" and a single roll to see how that turned out and if they had to expend supplies. That's all that was needed to focus the conversation, remember that we're out in the wilderness, and let the players know they should usually have some emergency supplies on hand in case fishing or hunting isn't successful. Possibly most importantly, it was a nice ritual to create routines and encourage the players to develop out their character's habits and opinions. This is how we ended up with a canon where magically duplicated pickled eggs formed the basis of every meal, and one of the characters may or may not be a cannibal (he says it really depends on the definition!).

The original system had too much friction, but if I had taken it all the way down to zero there wouldn't be that slight sticking point to spark all these fun conversations.

Vague Outro

So that's the thesis here. Add friction to your game when you want to make things pause, either to breath or for dramatic effect, or when you want to provide a place for players to "grab onto" the game and interface with the world. Remove friction from the game when you want to speed things up, when you find you're spending time on something the table isn't interested in, or when you're finding the flow of the table is being interrupted by the rules.

I don't think this view of mechanics is revealing some hidden truth or particularly groundbreaking, but it's been a useful mental model for my own writing and it might be helpful to others as well.

Social Combat for Into the Odd

noreply@blogger.com (AwkwardTurtle) — Sun, 12 Dec 2021 00:38:00 +0000

For Into the Odd, Electric Bastionland, Cairn, and similar games. This is completely unplaytested, but it was bouncing around my head after some discussion in the NSR discord and I wanted to take a crack at writing it down.

I reference WIL specifically here, but swap out with CHA for Electric Bastionland (or whatever other ability might be appropriate in your system of choice).

Goals

Combat prowess in Into the Odd is mostly not dependent on a character's stats. Instead success in combat is determined by your choice of weapons, your tactics, getting the drop on your enemy, and the choice of whether to engage in the combat in the first place.

I wanted to know what a social combat system with similar ideas would look like. A way where your success is based on your arguments, rhetoric, strategy, knowledge and knowing when to fight it out and when to cut your losses. I want something that's freeform enough to not get in the way of good conversation and debate, but mechanical enough to allow the GM to "disclaim" having to simply choose when an argument is good enough, or when a character will capitulate.

Set Stakes & Resilience Points

Decide what each side stands to gain or lose.

Arguments are not mind control, you can argue people into giving ground, compromising, or retreating from a situation. However without significant leverage you cannot argue people into acting against their own self interest.

The more a side stands to lose, the greater the effort required to push them to that point. Resilience Points (RP) is a measure of how much they will resist Capitulation.

If it's something small their RP is a d6.

If it's something significant their RP is 2d6.

If it's something they would only barely consider their RP is 3d6.

Remember that both sides must have something they stand to lose.

The RP is shared across all members of the side of an combat. Roll the RP as combat begins.

Choose Leaders

A single character should take the lead for each side of an combat. Their WIL is used during the combat.

Social Armor represents any situation or environment in which one side might be shielded from full social consequences.

If one side's leader is in a significantly elevated social position compared to the other, that side should gain a point of Social Armor. This will change based on the setting of the combat. In court, a Noble would have Armor when arguing with a Commoner, the opposite might be true if the setting is instead in a bar or back streets.

Other factors that can mitigate Social Damage should also be represented with armor. For example having the audience of the combat supporting one side or the other.

Combat

Combat proceeded with each side taking turns. If it's not obvious which side should go first (social precedence, ambush, etc) the leaders of each side should make an opposed WIL Save.

On a side's turn, they may make an Argument and individual members of the side may make Gambits.

An Argument attacks the opposing RP directly. When you make an argument, roll a d6 as its damage.

Argument Modifiers

If an argument is based off of previously undisclosed information, attacks from an unexpected direction, uses the opponent's points against them, relies on some external leverage, or is otherwise advantaged it is enhanced. When your argument is enhanced roll a d12 in place of the normal die.

If an argument is similar to a previous point, has already been rebutted by the opponent, is a weak point lacking leverage, undercuts your own previous arguments, or is otherwise disadvantaged it is impaired. When your argument is impaired roll a d4 in place of the normal die.

Damage

Roll the argument's die, subtract any Social Armor, and deal the remaining to the opponent's RP.

Capitulation

If there is damage in excess of the opponent's RP, it is dealt to the leader's WIL. They must then make a WIL Save to avoid Capitulation.

If the leader fails the WIL Save, they Capitulate and receive one additional turn of combat. During that turn if they are able to force their opponent as well, the Combat ends in a Compromise. An agreement is reached that benefits both parties, or at least disadvantages both equally based on their initial stakes.

If they are unable to force the opposing party to Capitulate during the extra turn, they have been utterly routed and lose whatever they have staked on the combat.

Gambits

Members of each side may make Gambits to try and shift the argument in their favor. This could include shifting the audience to their side, thereby gaining Social Armor, uncovering or revealing information or evidence to advantage arguments, or any other actions that seem reasonable.

If there are risks inherent in a Gambit, they require a successful Save as usual.

Final Thoughts

I suspect simultaneous turns would work better mechanically, and avoid the awkward "extra turn/parting shot", but also going back and forth matches the flow of an argument or debate more closely.

I'm not convinced I've achieved the goals I set out, but I think more theory crafting should wait until I actually try the thing. I plan to test it in one of my games if the opportunity arises, and I'll revisit this when I do so.

Mothership Decisive Combat Hack

noreply@blogger.com (AwkwardTurtle) — Sun, 29 Aug 2021 18:21:00 +0000

Rules

Combat

When you commit violence, roll Combat:

If you under both your Combat stat and the weapon's Hit%, you deal a full Hit of damage.

If you roll under just one of the two, you deal damage equal to the sum of both dice (if you rolled a 45 you deal 9 damage).

If you roll under neither, you deal damage equal to the lower of the two dice (if you rolled a 93 you deal 3 damage).

Criticals that roll over both are a complete miss, deal no damage.

Criticals that roll under one or both activate the weapon's critical effect, or grant some other appropriate bonus.

Health and Hits

Players start with Health equal to the 10's place of their Strength + the 10's place of their Speed.

Players start with 2 Hits, except the Marine which starts with 3.

Conversions

Weapons and Attacks

Weapons no longer have a damage value, they instead have a Hit%. To convert existing damage values multiply the number of dice rolled for damage by 10 to obtain the Hit%.

Grenades and other explosives don't have a Hit%. Instead they deal 2 Hits on a successful check, and 1 Hit otherwise.

Weapons with unique damage values (like the laser cutter) should be converted individually as it makes sense.

NPC and Monsters

Convert NPCs and Monsters by dividing their health by 5 (round up) and keeping their number of Hits.

The wide range of Health and Hits on NPCs means this won't always work, so adjust as necessary.

Armor

Armor provides single use Hits. They are removed first, and doing so destroys or damages the item.

Notes

Why?

I consistently enjoy playing Mothership, I love the flavor, the characters, and the modules. However I do not like the combat.

Because of the normal starting values for stats in Mothership, most characters are more likely to miss than hit making many combat rounds result in nothing happening. Even worse, the relative values for Health and damage are such that most attacks functionally don't do anything.

In short combat feels boring and low risk, which is especially a problem when held against the usual tone of the game.

Nothing kills tension faster when the space crazed scalpel wielding doctor stabs you and deals... about 5% of your Health. It takes a dramatic and tense situation and makes it feel pointless.

I don't disagree with the advice I've seen Sean McCoy and others give, that you don't have to use the combat system to resolve situations. That rolls are only for during high stress, panicky situations. That you should progress the fiction on all rolls, that the situation should always change.

This is all good, but it's working around the combat system. It's mitigating it. I believe it would be much better to create a combat system that intrinsically supports the horror feel and high drama of the game.

Violence in a sci fi horror game should be dramatic, decisive, and scary. I want getting into combat to have real consequences, and I want those consequences to happen quickly.

Inspirations

This system is a combination of Into the Odd's "autohit" combat and Delta Green's "lethality" system, plus quadra's house rules.

Into the Odd has no to-hit rolls, instead damage is dealt directly to HP which is Hit Protection, the ability to avoid harm rather than a measure of physical endurance. It creates a fast, dynamic combat that is quickly decisive. There are no "nothing" rounds, and the situation gets resolved rapidly.

Delta Green's lethality system sidesteps the problem of "HP bloat" by simply letting dangerous weapons instantly kill their targets. This creates a tension, that makes a dangerous situation stay dangerous regardless of stats or equipment.

And from both, low Health totals.

The Numbers

The above chart shows the expected amount of damage dealt on a hit or miss with varying combat skill (ignoring Hit% of weapons). There's a bit of weirdness at the extreme ends of the skill, but those are unlikely to actually come up in play. Otherwise, Hits usually deal about 50% more damage than a miss.

The average character and roll will usually end up dealing around 5 damage per attack, which means that the average player will lose a Hit in two attacks. I like this amount as it means combat can't drag out too long, and it makes acting first very important which encourages use of clever tactics and fictional positioning.

Final Thoughts

This is currently untested, although I've played and enjoyed similar systems. I don't think this is perfect, or the end all of what I'm trying to achieve, but I do think that the weakest part of Mothership by far is the combat and something has to change. Dramatically reducing Health values, as I believe is the intent for Mothership 1.0, would go some way to fixing my problems but I still believe there's additional changes that can be made.

GLOG Wizard Class: Gatormancer

noreply@blogger.com (AwkwardTurtle) — Sat, 28 Aug 2021 02:44:00 +0000

School: Gatormancer

Drawn by the illustrious Brian Stauffer.

Gator Mutations

At first level, and whenever you gain a Gator Mutation roll an additional Perk and Drawback.

Perks

Your teeth are those of an alligator They grant you a 1d6 unarmed bite, and will grow back if lost.
You have a slow metabolism allowing you to hold your breath for an hour and go without eating for two years.
You have alligator jaws that can exert unbelievable force. You can bite through anything you can get your teeth around.
You have second eyelids that allow you to see clearly in water, and protect you from any sort of dust, sand, or liquid that might impair your sight.
You have sensitive, vibration sensing nodules on your skin. Nothing touching the same surface or body of water you're in contact with can get the jump on you.
You have scaley, tough skin with bone plates beneath which grant you +2 AC.

Drawbacks

You are ectothermic. Cold temperatures make you sluggish. If you don't bask in the sun for an hour each day you cannot regain HP from lunch, and a night's rest only restores 1d6+level HP.
Tiny gator limbs. Your arms and legs become stubby, and you have difficulty with tasks that require manual dexterity giving a -1 penalty to relevant skill checks.
You have a huge gator tail that drags on the ground behind you. You always have +1 point of encumbrance, and you'll have to get new pants tailored.
Your eyes are on the sides of your head, giving you poor depth perception. Ranged attacks have a -2 penalty applied.
You gain a menacing alligator visage. Reaction rolls with you present are rolled twice with the more hostile result kept.
You gain gator instincts. Advancing or gaining skills that are not related to being an alligator is twice as hard.

Doom

You are transmuted into an Alligator and summoned to answer another Gatormancer's spell (d6). If you survive the duration of the spell you're returned to your original location and shape, plus an additional Gator Mutation.
For the next week rather than summoning an alligator when you cast a spell, you transform into the alligator to complete the task.
Each morning Save or gain a new Gator Mutation. Each night, Save or the Mutation is permanent. When you gain all 6 Mutations, you are fully transmuted and care only for the obscure and esoteric desires of an alligator.

Avoid the doom by being eaten by an ancient 30+ foot alligator and surviving, or by petitioning the Great Celestial Gator to retain your mind when you are fully transmuted into an alligator.

Mishaps

MD only return to your pool on a 1-2 for 24 hours
You take 1d6 damage.
Random mutation for 1d6 rounds, then make a save. Permanent if you fail.
For the next 24 hours all alligators are hostile to you.
You lose your gator perks for 24 hours, but not your drawbacks.
Transmute into an alligator for 1d6 rounds.

Cantrips

You may stay perfectly still while floating in water. While doing so you appear as a log to casual inspection.
Burn a spell die after a successful unarmed attack to make the target Save vs Strength. If they fail, perform a Death Roll as per the alligator ability.
When you eat raw meat for lunch, the next time you cast a spell you may choose to set one of your spell dice to 1 rather than roll it.

Spell List

1. Instigator
R: [DICE]x10 feet T: Point D: [SUM] minutes

Summon a [DICE]x2 HD alligator at a point you designate. You do not control the alligator.

2. Navigator
R: [DICE] miles T: Location

Summon a [DICE]x2 HD alligator that will guide you unerringly to a target location within [DICE] miles. Once there the alligator will attempt to eat you. The alligator will allow [DICE] riders on its back during the journey.

3. Subjugator
R: 20' T: 1 Creature D: [SUM] rounds

Summon a [DICE]x2 HD alligator that exists for [SUM] rounds. The alligator will do everything in its power to immobilise a target of your choice. It disappears after doing so.

4. Interrogator
T: Falsehoods

Summon an [DICE]x2 HD alligator which will attack anyone that lies in its presence. It disappears if it hears no lies for a full minute.

5. Reptile Projectile
R: 100' T: Creature D: 0

A [DICE]x2 HD alligator is summoned next to the target and makes one attack before disappearing.

6. Conflagator
Summon a flaming [DICE]x2 HD alligator which will immediately rampage. It deals [SUM] damage to itself and anything adjacent to it. When it would die, it instead disappears. If there is a source of water nearby it will rush directly towards it.

7. Investigator
R: Sight T: Person, Place or Thing

Look with gator eyes at something that is Ancient, Forgotten, and Unrecorded to gain insight about its history and function. For each [DICE] spent, ignore one of the conditions.

8. Consegatory Prayer
R: Touch T: [DICE] Creatures D: [SUM] minutes

Grant up to [DICE] creatures you touch [DICE] Gator Perks for [SUM] minutes.

9. Impregatory Prayer
R: Sight T: Creature D: [SUM] days

Curse a creature with [DICE] Gator Drawbacks for [SUM] days.

10. Prognostigator
T: Event D: Varies

Pick a specific event that will occur within 10 [DICE 1: Minutes, 2: Hours, 3: Days]. An alligator is summoned that will communicate the outcome of that event perfectly, but the alligator cannot speak and can only communicate through charades.

11. Eradigator
T: Description D: [SUM]

State a description [DICE] words long and summon [SUM] HD worth of alligators (divided between as many alligators up to [SUM] as you choose). The alligators will attempt to destroy anything nearby that fits that description for [SUM] rounds before disappearing

12. Adjudigator
R: Nearby T: Creature D: Instant

Summon the Great Celestial Gator to judge a target of your choice. Make a flat opposed roll against them, and gain a +1 bonus for each [DICE] and each Gator Mutation you have. Both you and your target may attempt to sway the Celestial Gator with reason, sacrifice, or supplication for additional bonuses. If you win the roll, the Celestial Gator judges the target wanting, and consumes their heart. If you fail, immediately suffer the next stage of your Doom.

Alligator Stat Block

HD: Variable
Damage: HDd6 damage + Save vs Strength or Death Roll
Special: Death Roll, the alligator clamps down and rolls dealing HDd6 damage and leaving the target prone.
Size: 4+HDx3 feet long.

Alligator Reaction Table

2. Angry
3-5. Perturbed
6-8. Waiting
9-11. Basking
12. Sleeping

Notes

Inspired by the many excellent "-gator" spell names created by the NSR discord.

Thanks to Skerples for the excellent How To Design a GLOG Wizard post, which contains excellent advice I have failed to follow. No idea if the damage numbers or stats makes sense, I have very little experience directly with GLOG.

Probably a joke and not a real class... haha... unless...

Physical Media and Compositing Hybrid for Not a Place of Honor

noreply@blogger.com (AwkwardTurtle) — Mon, 05 Jul 2021 19:19:00 +0000

One of the main visual goals for Not A Place of Honor (NAPOH) was to achieve a found footage aesthetic that made the spreads seem "real". The usual, and easiest way, to make a collection of documents as a spread would be to create each element individually and composit them together into a pile of papers.

This can work quite well, see this example (forwarded to me by Emanoel, the incredible artist I'm working with for this project). However, especially at my own skill level, I felt that the spreads still seemed composited. They didn't feel "real", more of a pastiche of realness.

My original thought to get around this was to cheat. That is, since I'm not skilled enough to replicate reality why not just do it all for real? Print out each document, assemble, and scan back in.

This sounded good but I ran into the problems that one, my printer is not nearly high quality enough to make that work, and more importantly it's a huge pain. Any small change, edit, or typo correction means redoing the entire spread from scratch.

The approach I've settled on is a hybrid one. I assemble and scan physical media for the "structure" of the spread, then digitally add the "content" after the fact.

Here's a walk through of my process to accomplish this. One large caveat is that I really don't know what I'm doing, so I'm sure there are better ways to make this happen. I settled on this after a lot of trial and error, including the two preview spreads shown during the Kickstarter campaign (seen here on the main page, and here on twitter). The spread shown here is still not final, the Pictogram is unfinished (you can see where I roughly removed the background) and the handwriting font will be replaced with actual scanned handwriting once everything else is finalized (including the text going through final edits).

Hybrid Physical Media and Digital NAPOH Process

Step 1 - Rough Layout + Size

I scanned a size reference in using identical settings to what I planned to use for the actual spread. Then with that reference, roughed in the various bits of text, art, and layout. I calculated the scale between actual and scanned size using the reference, then used that ratio to measure the size of the paper I needed.

Step 2 - Cut Physical Media

Another important step is to move your gremlin of a cat who's trying to "help".

Using the sizes from step 1 I cut the paper into the sizes I need. One important thing to do here is to cut every paper into the wrong size at least once because you flipped your scale ratio. The paper itself is a bunch of differently textured papers in various shades of brown I got from a local craft store. I was mostly looking for things with enough textural and color variation to give good contrast.

Step 3 - Scan

I arranged all the paper and other elements on the scanner, aiming to roughly replicate my original rough layout. I used paper clips to ensure a slight physical gap between overlapping pieces to get depth in the image. As a background, I used a printout scroll from an extremely old spectrometer dating from a time before digital readouts on research equipment. You can find some wonderful things if you by digging through drawers nobody's opened for years in research labs.

This step took a lot of tries between adjusting the positions, scanning, realizing I'd shifted something off the edge, and repeating.

Step 4 - Composite

With the spread scanned in I position the art, symbols, and text where needed (using Affinity Publisher). For each piece of paper, I traced a shape around the edges and use it as a mask for anything that needs to only appear on that paper. This also accounts for places where different pieces of paper overlap with one another. In this example, I'm primarily using it for the artwork, but this would also work for applying digital textures to the paper (necessary before I purchased actual textured paper).

The mask is a little loose around the edge of the notebook, because I added an extra layer to make it blend nicely afterwards.

In this unique case, because the artwork is mostly dark there was an obvious, sharp edge to the art that didn't blend nicely with the lighter colored paper I had scanned. I fixed this in a roundabout way that I'm sure is more complicated than necessary:

Make a copy of the "artwork" mask.
Apply a Gaussian Blur to the copy.
Extend the edges of the unblurred mask only in the places where I want the edges to be softened.
Apply the unblurred mask as a mask to the blurred mask.
Apply the masked, blurred mask as a mask to the actual artwork.

Step 5 - Finish

How gorgeous is that artwork by Emanoel?

At this point I just fiddle around with anything that doesn't look quite right. Futz with the masks where they don't line up, apply extra filters, blurs, effects or textures where necessary to improve the look. This often involves using different "blending modes" (usually multiply) on the text and artwork to preserve the texture and "depth" of the scanned image with the composited artwork. This is also where I'll add in the BANE stamps and watermarks.

Once I'm fully happy with this, I'll nicely ask my fiancée to transcribe the journal and card text and scan those in to replace the handwriting font.

This is all probably overkill for what I end up with, but I'm pretty pleased with the results so I plan on sticking with it.

Now onto the rest of the artifacts!

Entries for Mothership Random Tables That Don't Exist

noreply@blogger.com (AwkwardTurtle) — Sun, 09 May 2021 01:25:00 +0000

A friend of mine is working on a Mothership project I'm not allowed to know the details of so as to be able to be in a playtest later. I have generously decided to help him fill in some random tables, despite his refusal to tell me what those tables actually are.

So, here are some orphaned random table entries, from tables that likely don't actually exist.

TurboBrew(TM) - Desktop home brewer that can ferment just about anything organic (in 24 hours or less!) to make something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike beer.

Sam & Sam's Deep Space Stopover - Roaming space station offering refuel, repair, food, comfy beds, and whatever miscellany the couple has picked up over the years. They prefer barter, but will accept creds.

Warp Cats - Domesticated cats genetically modified to sense warp space anomalies. Ostensibly provide forewarning for issues during jumps, most crews keep them around due to superstition or companionship. Extremely adept at zero-g maneuvering, although a zero-g litter box strongly recommended.

AnyPrint(TM) - Device around the size of a pack of gum that can print onto any surface. Designs are loaded using a data pad or HUD, and the AnyPrint is then swiped back and forth across a surface to print. Often modded to make semi-permanent tattoos, or very permanent graffiti.

Subtrace Worm - Malware covertly loaded into a ship's navigation AI to track its movement. Takes any opportunity (and unsecured network) to load itself onto other ships to attempt to make its way to a system where the info can be retrieved. The practical upshot is that most ships are infected with somewhere around half a dozen Subtrace Worms at a time. Original authorship unknown.

Shadowed Figures - Phenomenon reported by Androids monitoring ships while the human crew are in cryo during warp jumps. During debriefs Androids claim to have seen shadowy figures exploring their ships, taking particular interest in the sleeping crew but showing no awareness of the Androids themselves. No evidence of this appears on cameras or other permanent records, and only the consistency between reports has lent it any credence beyond Android malfunction.

Hit Dice Dungeons Initial Playtest - Version 0.1.1

noreply@blogger.com (AwkwardTurtle) — Sat, 31 Oct 2020 15:45:00 +0000

What's going on here?

I'm writing an RPG that spun out of the idea of using Usage Dice to track HP.

What changed from the original blog post?

Following on from my blog post where I outlined the basic idea, I developed it into an actual RPG system. Compared with that original idea, I fully abandoned any effects that modify the range of numbers that cause the Die to step down, and locked it at 1-3 for all situations.

Where weapons in that original version shifted the range that stepped down, weapons for my first playtest instead dealt a static amount of damage to their target. For each point of damage, you roll your Hit Die once, stepping down for each failure. This also solves the problem that the original idea had of Hit Dice capping the worst case scenario of a powerful attack to stepping down a single time. With damage causing individual rolls, a powerful attack can now step down your die multiple times and kill you outright.

Armor also had to be changed (it could no longer shrink the 'threat range') and now lets you reroll a number of failed "damage rolls".

I wrote up a small handful of backgrounds, in the style of Electric Bastionland's failed careers or Troika! backgrounds, to run a playtest with one of my usual groups. My original intention was to also have GLOG style classes, but I both didn't finish them in time and also wanted to test the core systems before I started layering things on top.

The Playtest

My players rolled (off of my expansive d8 table) an Exiled Neriad, a Rat Catcher, and a Traveling Salesman. Very early on in the night the Traveling Salesman player asked if he could be a Minotaur, which seemed like an excellent idea and was immediately added to the background itself.

For the module, I ran Tomb of the Last Tyrant from Dissident Whispers (technically now the 7th Dissident Whispers module I've run, although this won't get the whole micro review treatment I usually do) with the possibility of spinning it out into a sandbox hexcrawl to keep testing the system as it develops.

I won't give a whole play report here, than than to highlight a few fun moments:

Yeeting "serpent guards" off of rain slick cliffs.
Taking advantage of thunder to pick off guards from the back of the group.
Interrogating terrified cultists as to why they were called the Serpent Guard if none of them were actually snakes.

The main takeaways I got from running the game, and talking with the players afterwards, is that although none of us like "to hit" rolls having no roll when you make an attack and just waiting for the GM to roll the enemy's Hit Die to see how it went is pretty unsatisfying.

Changes Made

I've made two changes to the system I intend to test to try and address this. First, instead of weapons dealing a static number of damage, they have damage dice that get put through a filter. This is soft of halfway between Troika! damage tables, and the Scarlet Heroes damage system.

This adds a bit of fiddly-ness to the game I would have liked to avoid, but it adds some agency to attacks and hopefully doesn't cause much frustration. One other benefit of this damage dice system is that it let me add my Living Grimoires magic system almost unchanged to Hit Dice Dungeons, which is nice.

The second thing being changed isn't actually a rule change as such, simply that when you attack an enemy you are the one to roll their Hit Die to see if they get injured. This is really just a perception thing, but I'm hoping it makes players feel more connected to the results of their actions.

A couple also small changes were made:

Added a temporary advancement system (until I get those GLOG style classes off the ground) based on collecting accomplishments that would go into your Eulogy.
Allowed clever, fun, or daring attacks to be "enhanced" (similar to Into the Odd/Electric Bastionland) by stepping up the die that would be rolled for the attack. I may switch this from stepping up the die to giving a +2 to the damage die roll, but we'll see how it feels in play.
Added some guidance for how to track different equipment (the cowardly way of presenting three systems and letting the GM choose, hopefully I'll zero in on what works well to make a definitive statement).
Added the concept of "Clock Dice" which is a blend of Macchiato Monsters encounter usage dice, BitD clocks, and Dungeon World fronts.

The Game Itself

https://awkwardturtle.itch.io/hit-dice-dungeons

Check it out if you're interested, it's even got a character sheet! Expect things to change a ton as I get more playtesting and development in though.

Living Grimoires - Freeform (but closed ended) Whitehack Magic for Into the Odd

noreply@blogger.com (AwkwardTurtle) — Wed, 21 Oct 2020 21:49:00 +0000

Spell Lists or Freeform Magic?

Although I find spell list style magic fun, running Macchiato Monsters has showed me how much I enjoy the flexibility and open ended-ness that comes with more freeform magic systems. And because I appear to make a habit of taking whatever my most recent RPG obsession and hacking it for Into the Odd (I previously adapted GLOG magic into a cassette tape system for Electric Bastionland), here's my attempt at find a way to take a freeform system like Whitehack's miracles (or Macchiato Monsters spells) and fit it into the largely item based world of Into the Odd or Electric Bastionland.

Something I specifically wanted to avoid in crafting this sytem was making it so flexible as to nullify other methods of approach. A lot of the fun of rules light games is finding new and interesting ways to apply the resources you have, so I didn't want to create a system that replaced that gameplay with more rules.

Another factor in finding a way to limit the freeform casting is that although I enjoy working with players to create unique spells and effects, doing so every single time a spell is cast can be somewhat laborious (which is why I wrote this flowchart for Macchiato Monsters). Additionally, some of the fun of magic comes from finding new ways to apply niche existing spells in clever ways, so I wanted a system where players would have a set spells they could keep going back to.

The Whitehack does this to some degree by requiring spell effects thematically match the overall name of the "miracle", and narrow miracle wordings are encouraged with a discount on casting cost. I took it a step further, by setting a limit for how many different spells can fit within a single Grimoire. In some sense, this is a "write your own spell list" system, and if a player wants more spells they'd better find a way to get more Grimoires (probably by way of murdering some wizards).

With ITO rules, depending on HP levels and spell cost, many spells will be essentially “free” to cast outside of combat or other perilous situations. That’s as intended, and if an effect seems like it would cause problems if it were able to be cast over and over just apply some unique restriction or requirement to it.

One benefit of this "system" is that it doesn't have to be added to a game wholesale. It's entirely contained within an item, so letting players find a single Grimoire means you can add a dash of magic to the game without fully committing to a whole system.

All that being said, it’s entirely unplaytested so who knows.

Living Grimoires

Grimoires tomes of stored knowledge and magic. They're alive and want to be used, but only in a way pleasing to their nature.

MTG has a lot of good magic book artwork.

Each Grimoire has a title indicating its contents and personality, and can hold 6 spells; those containing 4 or more spells are Bulky (due to the weight of unearthly knowledge). Some Grimoires may come with prewritten spells, but most will just have blank space ready for new spells to be inked. Each Grimoire has a specific way in which spells may be added related to its title.

When stolen or recovered from a former owner, roll a Luck die to see which (if any) spells remain intact.

If you are playing a more traditional game, instead of having players write their own spells a Grimoire might come pre-written. Access to each spell would only be granted when the current owner has performed certain tasks or paid appropriate respect to the tome.

Casting Spells

To cast a spell, hold the Grimoire in both hands and speak the incantation aloud.

Casting the spell deals damage to you (ignoring armor) equal to its cost (from a d4 to a d12).

Excess damage is dealt to WIS/CHA, and a failed WIS/CHA save results in unconsciousness (or rolling on your favorite spell misfire table).

Spellcrafting

To write a spell, declare what you wish for the spell to do. The effects must be within the scope of the Grimoire's title.

To set the cost, start at a d4 to get one of:

A fleeting moderate effect
d6 damage
A lasting minor effect

Step up die for:

Improved effect (more powerful, more useful, more specific, etc)
More damage
Additional Targets
Longer duration

Step it up again for lots of one of those things. For example step up once for second target, and twice for Blast/Area.

Step down die for:

Narrow effects
Significant drawbacks
Negative side effects
Complicated or lengthy casting
Specific requirements

If you need a higher die size than d12 it's either not within the scope of the spellbook, or will require additional drawbacks, requirements, or steps.

Spells that seem like a poor fit for the Grimoire's title are either impossible, or require a significant drawback or limitation that makes them more suitable.

Make a note of the spell’s name, effects, and cost. Remember each Grimoire can only store a certain number of spells.

Make the spells interesting! Spells with very direct, useful effects will be expensive, and boring spells will piss off the Grimoire. If you have to jump through a few hoops to make it work, that’ll lower the cost to manageable levels.

Honestly you could do worse than just stealing Grimoire names from MTG.

Scrolls

Individual spells might be found (or created) as scrolls. Depending on the limitations of your world, scrolls might be single use. Or they might be reusable, but have the option to be destroyed during casting in order to negate the cost.

Examples

The Path of Flame - New spells must be burned into the Grimoire using a heated piece of metal.

Flame Friend - d4 - Summon a orb of flame that will follow the caster for a day and provide illumination.
Salamander's Lockpick - d6 - Superheat a small piece of metal to weaken or melt it.
Purifying Flame - d6 - With a touch purge a poison, disease, or enchantment from a target. Deals 1d4 damage directly to STR and leaves a hand print burn.
Oathkeeper's Light - d8 - Ignite a small white flame as an oath is sworn. The flame will internally ignite any who breaks the oath, dealing them d6 damage directly to STR every sunrise.
Circle of Protecting Flame - d10 - Trace a closed loop with a flammable material. As long as you stay within the enclosed space, anything attempting to cross will cause the loop to erupt into flame dealing 1d12 damage.
The Classic - d12 - Shoot a spark of flame that explodes to deal 1d10 Blast damage.

The Catalog of Lesser Spirits - New spells may be added by requesting them from the spirit of the Grimoire itself, along with a suitable gift (it likes fresh flowers to press within its pages).

Loyal Lock - d4 - Animate a lock and command it to open or close. It will do so and remain in that state until someone with a higher CHA countermands the order.
The Devil’s in the Dust-Trails - d6 - Blow dust at a mark on a surface (scratch, scuff, footprint, etc). The dust will briefly animate to show you what caused the mark.
If These Walls Could Talk - d6 - Draw a mouth on a wall with saliva. Using that mouth the wall will answer one question to the best of its ability (walls know about things that occurred near them, as well as things that support them or that they support).
Bleeding Edge - d4 - Awaken bloodthirst in a bladed weapon. Its next strike deals max damage, but if that hit does not cause Critical Damage it will deal 1d4 STR damage to its wielder.
Threshold Sentinel - d8 - Take 10 minutes to awaken the spirit of a doorway (or similar space) and choose a pass code. The spirit will prevent anyone from passing through the doorway unless they know the pass code (dealing 1d12 damage to anyone that forces their way through). Lasts a day, but if cast every day for a week becomes permanent.
Spectral Courier - d4 - Press a minor spirit into service to deliver a message to a named person. Most spirits travel only as fast as a walk, although they do so in a straight line.

Atlas of Flesh & Bone - New spells must be inked in blood, using a pen carved from bone.

Indefinite Loan - d6 - Restore 1d4 STR or DEX by transference between two creatures you touch.
Maximize Minimize - d4 - Touch a creature to set one of STR or DEX to 18 for 10 minutes. That stat is then set to 3 for another 10 minutes.
Bonus Limbs - d6 - Grant a creature d4 extra limbs (of your choice). After 10 minutes they dry out and fall off.
Bone Sense - d4 - You know the exact location of every bone within a 50 foot radius for 10 minutes.
No Mask? No Mask! - d8 - Reshape a person's face as though it were putty (a reference will likely be needed to aid the artist if the goal is disguise). Lasts until sunrise.
Monstrous Melding - d12 - Transplant a monster's organ or limb into a willing subject, they gain some aspect of the power or abilities of the donor. Will last for a week, but if this spell is cast again within that duration the effect becomes permanent (some side effects may occur).

Hit Dice Dungeons!

noreply@blogger.com (AwkwardTurtle) — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 00:56:00 +0000

While running Macchiato Monsters the other night, one of my players joked about how we should be tracking hit points with a Risk Die, since everything else in the game uses those.

But then we stopped, thought about it, and realized that it actually sounded like a good idea.

So here's a combat system using only a usage/risk die for tracking harm. It's designed to slot into something like ITO, but I included some potential ways to expand this into a full system at the bottom (or just go use Jason Tocci’s 2400 which is better than whatever I'll come up with).

Hit Dice Combat

Combat occurs simultaneously. Everyone involved declares their intent for the turn (usually moving a short distance + attacking, taking an action). The GM declares NPC actions first, but everything is resolved simultaneously.

Attackers do not roll dice to resolve attacks, instead every attacked creature rolls their Hit Die to avoid harm for each attack.

If the Hit Die rolls a 1-3 (the Threat Range) the Hit Die steps down in size. If the die cannot step down (i.e. it's a d4) the creature is incapacitated. They're bleeding out and will die in an hour if left unattended.

Armor and Weapons

Deadly attacks expand the Threat Range (e.g. if attacked with a +1 Sword take harm when rolling 1-4). This is written as +X, where X is the amount the Threat Range is expanded.

Armor shrinks the Threat Range, written as -X where X is the amount by which the Threat Range is reduced (e.g. wearing Scale Mail (Armor -1) means you take harm only when rolling a 1-2).

The Threat Range cannot be smaller than 1.

Example Items

Poison, apply to a weapon for +2 to the next attack.
Great Axe, two handed, +1.
Firebomb, blast, +1
Crossbow, slow, +2

Chain Mail (Armor -1)

Helmet (Armor -1)

Plate Armor, bulky, clumsy, (Armor -2)

Shield, sunder to prevent stepping down Hit Die when hit.

(This doesn't read wonderfully. Positive numbers always increase the Threat Range, while negative numbers always decrease it. However it's sorta messy that +1 on weapons is good, but +1 on armor would mean it's easier to hit you.)

Healing

If you took harm during a combat, a few minutes and a drink of water lets you roll the Hit Die. A result of 4+ will restore one Hit Die level (e.g. d6->d8). This only works once per combat, and only if you were damaged during that combat.

Resting overnight with food and drink automatically restores one Hit Die level, then you may roll to restore a second level (as above).

Your Hit Die cannot exceed its original size through healing.

Example Enemies

Goblin Guard, d4, Dull Stick -1
Lizard Bugcatcher, d6, Spear, Net Throw +1 (On hit tangles rather than reducing Hit Die size)
Fungal Warrior, d6, Spore Cloud +1
Giant Toad, d8, Thick Skin (Armor -1), Tongue +2 (On hit the target is grabbed and swallowed).
Crystal Mimic, d4, Fragile (Armor +1), Shard Stab (+2 if attacking from hiding)
Iron Golem, d10, Iron Construction (Armor +2), 2 x Pneumatic Fists +2
Werewolf, d8, Bite+2, 2 x Claws +1, silver weapons force Hit Rolls at disadvantage.

Ideas for Expansion

Death and Dying

Look at the final Hit Die roll to see what happens when someone goes down:

1: Dead
2: Bleeding out with minutes to live.
3: Bleeding out with an hour to live.
4: Knocked out.

Morale

Roll an NPC’s hit die for morale, on a 1-3 they flee or surrender. Enemies roll Morale whenever their Hit Die steps down (in addition to the usual times). This is basically just how Macchiato Monsters morale works.

Everything’s a Hit Die!

Treat any risky thing as an “attack”. Expand the Threat Range (as with weapons) if it’s particularly dangerous or difficult. Equipment acts like Armor does and reduces the threat range. Rolling inside the Threat Range means failure or harm, rolling above it means success or avoiding the harm.

This has the benefit of folding the entire game into a single mechanic, and means characters are just one die and some equipment.

A downside to this is that reducing the Hit Die doesn’t always make sense for every risk. This could be solved by making failure consequences more diverse when out of combat (or even when in combat!). Reduce the Hit Die when the thing at risk is bodily harm, but other risks could be lost or broken equipment, being separated, being put into a bad position, or really anything that makes fictional sense.

Another downside is that this will tend to make characters death spiral, because they’re entirely represented by one dwindling die. Every failure makes future failures more likely.

More Hit Dice?

Characters have the Hit Die as described above, which represents combat prowess and physical durability. They also have a Skill Die (representing training, talents and dexterity) and a Will Die (representing mental fortitude and magical aptitude).

Use these dice as described in the previous section, but now there’s more flexibility and characters are less likely to death spiral since harm can be spread out.

This also gives a little bit of room for mechanically distinguishing characters.

Advantage and Disadvantage?

It’d be very easy to add Advantage and Disadvantage to this. A clever attack from a good position means the enemy must roll their die at disadvantage.

However, that’s an extra mechanic and this is already something you could handle by giving situational bonuses and penalties to Threat Ranges.

Parting Thoughts

This is entirely unplaytested, just a neat idea I wanted to poke at for a bit. I’d welcome anyone’s thoughts on it, or if anyone has seen it show up in another system.

The Dissident Maze, Part 6: The Incident at Muto Station

noreply@blogger.com (AwkwardTurtle) — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 01:53:00 +0000

It's been a while since the last entry in this series, and will likely be quite a while before the next entry in this series. The group I've been running these with wants to return to our prior Scum and Villainy game, which I'm excited for but means I will have to convince some other group of people to play a year's worth of one shots.

If anyone is curious, the modules that were next up in the hopper were Grace Dynamics, The Dream of Nia Wen, and The Tomb of the Last Tyrant.

I'll get through all of Dissident Whispers, by hell or high water!

Rather than try to find a new way to phrase this each time, I'm going to copy and paste the intro from the prior entry:

Some background on this whole thing: I'm attempting to play through every module in Dissident Whispers with the same players, and the same characters (or at least alternate universe versions of them). I don't really expect to actually accomplish this, but I think it'll be fun to see how far I can get. Dissident Whispers is a community created collection of one page RPG adventures to raise money for Black Lives Matter, I personally wrote a Troika! adventure, and a Mausritter adventure location for the project.

See Week 1 for more background on Dissident Whispers, as well as the setup for how I'm running a single party of adventurers through wildly different modules and systems. I will admit, now that we're 5 sessions in, my original framework of an interplanar maze, with soul points and such, has almost entirely been tossed by the wayside. As I very often do, I underestimated how much players will self motivate to explore modules and find their own fun, so I really didn't need to set up an elaborate system to encourage them.

Last week the players were beating the odds and exacting an improbable revenge against Flails Akimbo in MÖRK BORK. This week they're investigating what went wrong on a black market research station, in The Incident at Muto Station.

Disclaimer: I contributed to Dissident Whispers. I realized I didn't explicitly say that in this post, although I have in all the prior ones.

The Module

The Incident at Muto Station is a module for Mothership written by Brian Stauffer (website). The layout was done by Sean McCoy (the creator of Mothership himself), the spooky monster artwork is by David Hoskins, and editing by Matthew Getch, Jarrett Crader and Sam Zeigler.

The System

The system used was for Muto Station was (as designed) used Mothership RPG, created by Sean McCoy. I have a decent amount of experience with Mothership, I've run a bunch of one shots and one lengthier campaign with my players attempting to escape the Dead Planet.

The Characters

Seven of Nine, the naive Android.

Red Washburn, the opportunistic Teamster.

Tenzin Smith-Glaxo-Kline-Monsanto, a corporate Scientist with some regrets.

Play Report

I used the terminal and map screens created by the module's author (linked from his own play report) to visual aids during this game.

I also tweaked the intro to the module to give the players a specific goal inside the station (beyond simply not dying).

Instead of the station being a mystery, the players were aware that it was a Xeno Poacher dropoff station, and (being xeno smugglers themselves) they'd done business with Muto Station in the past. In this case, they were hired to transport the head Xenobiologist Dr. Gallagher from Muto Station to Prospero's Dream, with maybe a little side smuggling gig from their contact.

Being very careful of their location, Muto Station sent encrypted jump coordinates, so the Crew wouldn't know where they were jumping to. Then, to leave, they had to get a second set encrypted jump coordinates since they didn't know where they were jumping from.

This meant that when they arrived, and picked up a distress beacon from a station that ostensibly runs dark, they knew they couldn't just turn around and leave. Random warp jumps tend to go badly.

After failing to raise anyone on the comms, they initially decided to try and enter through the Xeno Dropoff docking bay, rather than the standard one. They docked their ship (the Leaky Pete) at the Xeno Dropoff Bay, but found the airlock refused to cycle as long as their ship was docked.

A halfhearted attempt to hack through the door's terminal failed, and after a discussion they decided that they probably shouldn't start bashing/cutting down doors until they knew for certain what was going on. So they undocked, flew the 100 or so feet to the other bay, and redocked.

They get through the proper airlock without issue and find a hallway filled with blood, smashed lights, bullet holes and hear a noise akin to flesh dragging on metal although it almost immediately disappears. Tenzin runs a scan on the blood, and finds it to be human. Very on edge, they move forward into the station and into the first room they find: the Mess Hall. Inside the tables and chairs are smashed and thrown about, while streaks of blood lead to and from various doors.

While Red is poking behind a pile of tables and chairs with a flashlight, the players suddenly hear the sounds of muffled voices from somewhere outside the room. Spooked, Red startles and knocks over the chairs making an enormous clattering noise, and by the time the racket stops the strange muffled voices are nowhere to be heard.

They leave the Mess Hall trying to find the source of the noise. Seeing nothing they head into the Crew Quarters. Seven of Nine and Tenzin start digging through Gallagher's quarters, while Red rapidly looks through the other rooms looking for a map of the station which he eventually finds in the maintenance man's room.

Tenzin finds a locked datapad in Gallagher's quarters, and with Seven of Nine's help is able to bypass the password revealing a set of notes about a xeno life form recently brought to the station. It seemed to be a mass of different creatures mashed together, with some sort of biomass connecting the brains. With this new information Tenzin resamples the blood and, knowing what to look for, finds that although it's human blood it contains nine different DNA patterns.

The three meet back up in the common area of the crew quarters, but are interrupted by Dr. Gallagher herself appearing in the doorway, begging them to run before screaming and disappearing from sight!

Seven of Nine has a minor breakdown and sprints after her, but upon turning the corner finds no trace of the Xenobiologist. The android doesn't stop sprinting and runs all the way to the Science Lab, where upon opening the door she sees something wriggling on the ground and immediately closes the door again. At this point the other two have caught up and together they manage to break into the Control Room despite not having the access key card.

Inside the Control Room the scientist manages to extract the station's location data, meaning they can actually warp out of this place! Seven of Nine notices someone had entered half of the self destruct sequence before being interrupted by something that left blood and brains on the keyboard, but just wipes the keys clean in order to hack the computers to transfer all funds the station had on hand to their ship. Red finds a surveillance video of Dr. Nedry carelessly handling the xeno life form mentioned in the notes, and the three watch as the video captures the xeno's leap into the doctor's head. On video Nedry then turns to attack a nearby scientist, before screams and gunfire erupt as the action moves off screen.

Thoroughly stressed, but with a way out, they exit the Control Room to make their way back to their ship. Unfortunately Dr. Gallagher waiting for them at the end of a hallway. She alternates between begging them to save her and imploring them to run, but Seven of Nine is no longer having any of this and immediately shoots her with a rigging gun, pinning her to a wall.

Tenzin walks down the hallway to her to point blank tranq her, and put her out of her pain and misery, but while doing so notices too late the thin tendril leading from the back of her skull around the corner of the hallway. Looking in that direction, Tenzin has time to see the Amalgam only a fraction of a second before it grabs him.

The Amalgam is a horrible conglomeration of the entire crew of Muto Station, melted and molded together with faces still visible and trying to communicate. With a tendril it keeps Dr. Gallagher separate, but controlled, acting as a lure like some sort of eldritch angler fish.

All three characters immediately panic.

Tenzin completely loses his mind and welcomes the Amalgam as it begins to absorb him into the mass. Red panics and feels his heart being to beat erratically, and knows that if he takes any damage or fails any save before he gets medical attention his heart will stop (using a slightly altered panic table to avoid the common and instant "death by heart attack result). Seven of Nine's circuits begin to act erratically, and if any player fails a save nearby she will panic again.

It is at this point that I give Tenzin's player control of the Amalgam as his character is consumed.

Seven of Nine, realizing their only hope of escape lies in the set of coordinates sitting in Tenzin's pocket, dashes forward and manages to grab the datapad. She sprints past the Amalgam which tries to grab her and misses by inches.

GM's Note: If you've read other entries in this series, you'll know I often poke fun at how unreasonably lucky this group of players is. Well, what follows is the Amalgam's player (formally of Tenzin) losing a coin flip roll 6 times in a row. The one time a player's luck fails, it's when that player is working against the others. There is no hope against such monstrous fortune.

A chase ensues, as the Amalgam lurches after Seven of Nine who desperately sprints through the hallways to make it back to the ship.

Red, meanwhile, is running in the opposite direction with the plan to bust through the Science Lab and make his way to the Xeno Drop-Off Bay.

Willfully ignoring the wriggling tendril in the Science Lab, he uses his laser cutter to smash through the glass barrier and clambers through into the Clean room. Not stopping for anything, he runs through the Clean Room, then Specimen Storage, and into the Xeno Drop-Off Bay before realizing he doesn't have a space suit. Luckily (I do 50% luck rolls to see if something plausible falls in the player's favor) he finds a sealed hazmat suit, which he over-inflates with a tank of oxygen before yeeting himself into space.

Simultaneously Seven of Nine reaches the docking bay, and cycles through the airlock into the ship just ahead of the Amalgam (the Amalgam's player got one extra secret roll to try and sneak the parasite onto the ship, but sadly failed that as well).

Seven of Nine quickly undocks and heads out into space and, seeing Red floating towards the ship, through space tries to open the cargo doors to catch him. After a very close miss, Red vents the remainder of his oxygen tank to send himself tumbling into the Leaky Pete. Finally safe, and only missing one crew member, they enter the jump coordinates and leave Muto Station behind.

Unbeknownst to them, as they enter warp space the station's distress beacon turns back on, hoping to lure any future visitors.

Thoughts on the Module

First of all, this module was run by TheBardCommunityCollege/TheDnDMom and streamed on twitch, so if you want to see another run through of this check out the VOD on youtube. A very different crew and some different decisions made by the GM made for a pretty different experience, so it's interesting to see how flexible the module is.

My players and I all had a really good time in this module. A black site xeno smuggling outpost is an excellent location for things to go wrong in a sci fi universe, and lends itself really well to a sort of built in story. The premise of the location makes enough intrinsic sense that it's easy to fill in details, or invent new things as needed. An evocative setting is much preferred to one packed with specific details I need to remember while running.

The monster at the core of the module, the Amalgam, is a horrifying and unpleasant creature; the conglomeration of the crew who are still alive and conscious, but far beyond saving. The crew's good regard for their leader means Dr. Gallagher was "spared" absorption, but in return she has the probably more horrifying role of being the lure to bring more beings into the mass. It's technically possible for Dr. Gallagher to be freed from the Amalgam and rescued, but I honestly cannot imagine the band of Mothership characters who would be both inclined to make the attempt and capable of pulling it off.

An upshot of all this horror is that the Amalgam is specifically said to have all the knowledge and skills of anyone it has subsumed, so this isn't some mindless monster. It knows the station inside and out, and can likely predict what the players are going to do next. A smart monster that can actually operate station controls, doors, and computers isn't something the players are likely to expect right off the bat.

The Amalgam, up until open conflict breaks out, is controlled by a behavior table not totally dissimilar to the one used for the Alpha Gaunt in the Screaming of the Alexis (from Dead Planet), but with one significant difference. This encounter table is rolled with a 1d5 + the number of rooms visited. That means the behavior will continue to escalate as the players spend more time in the station, eventually leading to the Amalgam being all but guaranteed to lay an ambush for the players and force a confrontation. This is a really cool way to keep the behavior somewhat random, but slowly crank up the dial until all hell breaks loose.

Muto Station lays down a reasonable path for the players to take (learning about the xeno, finding the video, getting a keycard, figuring out the self destruct sequence) but as evidenced by my table it's flexible enough for players to forge their own path. There are also a handful of small details I think are really fun even if they're not likely to make a big impact on your game, like how the items left in each crew member's bunk tell a tiny story about who they were.

There are a few places I think the module could use a little bit of work. First, unless your players are naturally inquisitive, it is left to the GM to find a good reason to force the players onto the station in the first place. This is by no means unique to Muto Station, and is something I often find to be a problem in the first party modules as well, but it's worth pointing out.

Second, the layout of the ship combined with the amalgam behavior sometimes requires some creative interpretation by the GM to make things make sense. Particularly where this comes up is when the Amalgam needs to move around, there's often no immediately obvious way for it to move from place to place without being immediately found by the players. An easy fix for this is to add ventilation shafts, and to time encounters such that the Amalgam shows up behind players to ensure movement makes sense, but it's still something the GM needs to keep in mind while running the system.

The layout is as excellent as you'd expect from Sean McCoy himself, and I can't finish this section without mentioning the bone chilling, almost psychedelic rendering of the Amalgam by David Hoskins prominently featured in the spread.

Thoughts on the System

I'd be very surprised if this blog post were anyone's first exposure to it so I won't give an overview of Mothership RPG, and instead I'll just give my nitpicky issues with the system. I've run a 10 session Dead Planet campaign, and a handful of one shots prior to Muto Station so the system was a known quantity to me going in. I really like Mothership and I keep running more games with it for a reason, so take my complaints with a grain of salt.

The stress system is functional at providing a building tension and pressure for the players, without dictating behavior from them until things get very bad. However, I dislike that panic rolls are 2d10 roll under, and not percentile like everything else in the game. Mothership is extremely straightforward and easy to teach, so having one system that works entirely unlike everything else is a speed bump that requires re-explaining almost every time it comes up.

Mothership stats feel largely arbitrary to me. Creatures don't feel appreciably different from one another based on stats, and looking at the laconic stat block doesn't give me a good feel for what a given monster is really capable of. This isn't a huge problem, since much of the time players will try as hard as possible to not interact with a monster's stats, and monster description carries the majority of the weight, but it still rubs me the wrong way.

I also both like, and dislike the hit/hp system. By design it prevents massive damage from immediately wiping out enemies, but that also runs directly counter to my intuition for how something should react to massive damage. It didn't come up in Muto Station at all (the players made no attempt to fight the Amalgam) but when running Dead Planet I often found myself letting a single attack burn away several hits, particularly when explosives were used against relatively small and soft targets. My preference would be for multiple hits to be reserved only for the beefiest, most durable creatures. I understand rulings over rules so I can run the game how I like, but I don't believe the system as currently implemented carries enough weight on its own (although, technically it's not currently in the rulebook, so who knows).

Mothership is still a fantastic system, and I don't think there's anything better around for this particular brand of sci fi horror roleplaying.

Final Thoughts

Muto Station is an excellent Mothership adventure with a great layout, a really cool escalating monster behavior table, and a monster that's horrifying on both practical and existential levels. It takes a bit of extra work from the GM to really make it sing, but as shown by TheDnDMom's playthrough it can serve as an excellent introduction to Mothership RPG.

As mentioned at the top, I'm unfortunately going to be putting the series on hold for a bit. The playgroup I was doing this with wants to pick up our older Scum and Villainy campaign, so until we switch it up from that or I find another group to keep this going this is on hiatus.

In the mean time, please go pick up the book and try out some of these modules yourself! Dissident Whispers is full of fantastic modules like this; no matter if you're looking for one shots, places to populate a hex crawl with, or just great ideas to pillage for your campaign you'll find it within these pages.

Shit Wizards - Gastrointestinal Spell Casting

noreply@blogger.com (AwkwardTurtle) — Mon, 14 Sep 2020 18:20:00 +0000

"Malazarich the Great? He's a shit wizard, right?"

"What? No, he's a great wizard, it's in the name."

"No no, a shit wizard."

Written for Electric Bastionland/Into the Odd, but applicable to whatever game you'd like. Taken from conversation in the Electric Bastionland discord (special thanks to CosmicOrrery for their part in crafting this abomination).

Check out another take on this idea here.

What's a Shit Wizard?

A Shit Wizard (colloquial term, they prefer Excremancer) is a magic user who performs their magic by consuming spellstones, spells in physical form.

What are Spellstones?

Bezoar stones taken from the stomachs of magical beasts.

The residue of their magical abilities are accumulated in these stones, and once removed can be tapped into by a Shit Wizard's highly trained digestive system.

How's it work?

The Wizard consumes the spellstone and immediately gains the effect of the spell. Then, some number of hours later they pass the spellstone the usual way (hopefully behind a bush or around the corner) and after suitable cleaning the spellstone is ready to be used again.

Passing a spellstone will usually happen the next time the Shit Wizard makes camp, so long as at least 8 hours have passed. (Technically speaking it probably takes a 1-2 days to pass a solid object, so adjust to your desired level of "realism".)

Gross

Yup. Power at any cost.

Example

Malazarich chokes down an oversized spellstone recovered from the gut of a red dragon. His eyes begin to glow, and he belches a huge gout of fire before him dealing d12 Blast damage to everyone in the area.

Some time later, he is heard grunting behind a tree and cursing the gods for the size of a dragon's lower intestine.

Optional Rules

Slippery Spells - Spellstones don't like being inside a wizard's digestive tract, and will hasten their exit. Spellstones are passed in 1d6 hours.

Bonus, the number of hours is secretly rolled by the GM, although the wizard likely gets at least a few minutes warning.

Indigestion - Having more than a single spellstone in your body at once gives an awful stomach ache. You're deprived and cannot regain HP until all but one are passed.

Laxatives - Certain drugs and substances are known to wizards for speeding the passage of a spellstone through their systems. Consuming a laxative reduces the amount of time before passing by 1d4 hours. If the duration is reduced to less than zero, the spellstone is passed immediately with dramatic and explosive consequences.

Getting more Spells

Hunt down magical beasts, slay them, and extract the bezoars from their intestines. Any suitably magical beast will have a 1 in 6 chance of containing a bezoar stone, granting a spell related to the abilities of the creature. A given creature might have more than one potential spell.

Alternatively just find (or create) a dead Wizard and recover some spellstones from within their guts.

Failed Career

Excremancer's Apprentice

You thought you'd be studying under a distinguished and learned wizard, unlocking secrets to bend the universe to your will. Instead, you're spending all your time guzzling prune juice and uncomfortably squatting behind bushes.

You start with a bottle of prune juice and a Gutting Knife (d6).

How does the Bezoar stone did you managed to recover from your master's remains feel going down?

Uncomfortably large - Dragon: Deals d12 Blast damage.
Uncomfortably scaley - Basilisk: Shoot a petrifying ray, d6 STR damage and critical damage turns to stone.
Uncomfortably sticky - Giant Spider: Spray sticky webs over a large area.
Uncomfortably cold - Banshee: Unleash a horrific scream dealing d4 Blast CHA damage, critical damage stuns.
Uncomfortably fuzzy - Blink Dog: Teleport to any location you can see.
Uncomfortably moving - Mimic: Change your shape into any similarly sized object, lasts until the spellstone is passed.

What have the consequences on your gut been?

Iron Constitution - You have 1 Armor if you have a spellstone currently inside you.
Highly Absorptive - You can use a very minor version of the effect of any spellstone currently inside you.
Extremely Regular - Spellstones always pass in exactly 3 hours.
Magic Intolerance - The first time you consume a new spellstone you have 3 CHA until it passes.
Irritable Bowels - If you take critical damage, immediately void any spellstones within you. Their effects activate immediately and in random directions.
Chronic Constipation - Passing a spellstone takes 24 hours without assistance.

DUEL AT HIGH NOON - Simple Duel Procedure for Into the Odd or Electric Bastionland.

noreply@blogger.com (AwkwardTurtle) — Wed, 09 Sep 2020 20:14:00 +0000

Stare down the opposition in a dusty street under a burning sun, then...

DRAW!

Both duelists make a DEX save to draw their weapons.

AIM!

If one duelist succeeded and the other failed, the duelist who succeeded is the WINNER.

If both duelists succeeded, whoever rolled the higher number is the WINNER.

If neither duelist succeeded, there is no WINNER.

FIRE!

Anyone who succeeded has their attack ENHANCED (+1d12 Bonus).

If there is a WINNER they shoot FIRST.

The other duelist can then take their shot if they’re still standing.

If there is no WINNER, both duelists shoot simultaneously.

Normal damage and combat rules still apply.

Could also be used for samurai duels, the opening salvo of a sword fight, or a particularly brutal rap battle.

Learning to Jam with ELECTRIC WIZARDS! - Eclectic Bastion Jam Post Mortem

noreply@blogger.com (AwkwardTurtle) — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 17:24:00 +0000

I recently participated in the Eclectic Bastion Jam, an RPG game jam centered around Electric Bastionland. Hacks, modules, items, adventures, and more were accepted so long as they were at least tangentially related to Electric Bastionland or Into the Odd.

ELECTRIC WIZARDS! was my entry into the jam, and I'm honestly pretty pleased with how it came out.

I wanted to get down "on paper" my process for the design, writing, and layout of the module, collect the specific resources I used to put everything together, and talk through some things I learned along the way.

This ended up being much more meandering and unfocused than I'd originally envisioned, but hopefully someone else finds this info useful! If you'd rather skip me blathering on about my "process" and just want the resources I used, scroll to the bottom.

Game Jams?

Something I've learned about myself and writing is that without deadlines, I'll never get anything done. I mostly learned this in academia (research papers, proposals, conference submissions, even my friggin dissertation) but it has stayed very true in RPG writing. The first piece of RPG writing I actually finished (outside of stuff for personal use) was for Dissident Whispers, where I wrote and laid out one module, and wrote another (and then people much more talented than me created art and layout for it). During that project, the time from starting to when the writing was due was 72 hours. My first module (The Mechanical Menagerie of Michael Moreau, MD) was something I'd been working on prior to joining Dissident Whispers, but once I was in a position where things had to get done I was somehow able to actually do it. And then do it a second time, because I finished earlier than expected and wrote another module, The Crumbling Carmine Ruins, for Mausritter.

After Dissident Whispers was done, I went back to fiddling with a bunch of different projects and not really making any progress on things.

Which is all a long way to say, I need deadlines and specific goals to actually finish things. If you have similar problems I highly recommend joining game jams As far as I can tell they are designed specifically to give you a deadline to get you to finish things.

(Dissident Whispers is a community collection of one page RPG modules published and sold to raise money for the National Bail Fund. Get it here (it's incredible) or read play reports for my playthroughs of several of the modules here).

Module Goals

So deadline ahead of me, I decided to pull up an old blog post of mine about using the Goblin Laws of Gaming wizard magic (as filtered through Masuritter) in Electric Bastionland. Electric Bastionland is all about items and objects, rather than innate power, so cassette tapes containing magic spells was my plan to fit both the mechanics and the aesthetic of the game.

What I wanted to do was go a bit deeper with the mechanics than I did in the original blog post, and flesh it out into an actual module.

I went through a spectrum of different options for what I wanted in the module: starting with simply the rules adapting GLOG magic plus a handful of spells, all the way to a huge module with an entire borough including 8 wizard towers each of which would be a fleshed out adventure location ready for running heists to steal ætheric technology. There was going to be a faction war between the litigious Royal Thaumaturgical Society trying to keep magic locked down, and the FLOSS (Free Legerdemain and Open Sorcery Society) trying to spread it to the masses.

In the end I managed to fight back the feature creep and created the following goals:

Rules for Cassette Tape GLOG magic integrated into existing Electric Bastionland rules.
6 "GAUNTLETS", the devices used to cast Cassette Tape spells.
18 total spells, suitably "Bastionland-y".
6 GAUNTLET mods to customize the above GAUNTLETS.
2 Failed Careers, as a way to communicate the tiny slice of setting, and as a quick way for people to start with a GAUNTLET and SPELL.

Once I got into the writing and layout, it ended up shifting a bit. One failed career got cut and I added 6 oddities to go alongside the 6 GAUNTLET mods. But this is what I had in mind once I sat down to start working on the module in earnest.

Making Magic

I'm not going to restate the full set of rules here, but to briefly explain: it's GLOG magic. contained in physical items, combined with Electric Bastionland's HP system. If you want the full explanation, just go download my module, it's free!

To bring magic into Electric Bastionland I had a few goals to help it mesh together nicely:

Goal 1: It had to be very rules light.

Electric Bastionland has very few rules so adding any new ones has to be done carefully. GLOG magic is pretty straightforward and lightweight, so no trouble there, but the main trick was stopping myself from layering even more rules on top.

Starting with Mausritter's version of GLOG magic, I had originally been tracking charges per spell (or per cassette in my case) with unique recharge conditions. This is very fun, and I like it a lot (it works great in Mausritter) but for the scale and pace of how I run Electric Bastionland I found it unwieldy. Making the GAUNTLET holding the charges meant only one number was tracked, and it played more nicely with creating different GAUNTLET variants.

The next thing to handle was saving throws or hitting moving targets. Originally I just had nothing, spells simply did what they said. That restricted possible spell designs too much, as lots of potentially fun effects would also become instant kill spells if used on enemies.

The simple solution was to just let enemies make a DEX or CHA save to avoid a spell's effects, but I dislike that sort of binary resolution when handling things like spells. If you've sunk resources into something, it's frustrating when the outcome is just "nothing happens".

The solution I ended up sticking with was to tie the magic directly into the usual Hit Protection system for Electric Bastionland. HP in Electric Bastionland is already explicitly the ability to avoid harm, so if casting a spell is treated mechanically like an attack it works perfectly.

When you case a spell it is treated as an attack(using the highest die rolled as "damage" and only if it gets past their Hit Protection will it effect the enemy. Now even on a miss, you're still exhausting their ability to avoid further spells or attacks. It encourages teamwork in combat, since you might need your party to keep an enemy pinned down with normal attacks in order to get your spell through. Plus I get to take advantage of Bonus Damage (Enhanced in ITO) and Impaired attacks without any further complication on my part. Any time rules can do double duty it's a win.

At one point rewinding a cassette safely took time, a full 10 minutes, but you could rush the process by manually (maybe with a pencil) at risk of things going wrong. I eventually realized the main reason I had included this was just to make the pencil rewinding joke, and that wasn't worth the extra rules baggage. After a couple more iterations, I ended up dropping rewinding tapes altogether.

In the end I like where the systems landed, although I am probably just about doubling the total rules word count. Electric Bastionland is so pared down it's very hard to add extra systems without everything seeming unwieldy or heavy.

Goal 2: It had to be item based.

It should be something anyone could pick up and use. It had to be a physical item that could be traded, bought, or stolen. Magic being a tangible thing you could hold was important, and Mausritter provided a great starting place.

Cassette tapes are a fun, eminently tangible thing to use. The nice "cachunk" they make as you slot them into a player is permanently burned into my brain.

Using power glove type things as the requirement for casting is also great, because who doesn't want to run around shooting fireballs out of a power glove?

Goal 3: It had to have a high "shenanigan coefficient".

By which I mean straightforward spells with an obvious, useful purpose are boring. Weird, obscure spells that lend themselves to several convoluted purposes are better. I want players to be initially confused or amused by a spell's description and then start scheming. Spells shouldt lend themselves to odd uses, or encourage players to come at a problem sideways.

Just imagine the goofs players would get into using this.

There are already literally hundreds of GLOG spells out there, and I don't think anyone benefits by a few more reskins of standard DnD spells being thrown onto the pile. I don't think I was entirely successful in this, but I'm generally pretty happy with my final spell lists.

This same process is also what went into the design of the Oddities and GAUNTLET Mods. The Troika! spell list was also a great source of inspiration, showing that you can make traditional effects interesting again with strange enough trappings (see the Invisibility spell for my favorite example).

Layout

I'm very much a novice at layout, but wanted to try to do something that would be visually exciting to look at. This ended up turning into doing a different visually exciting thing on every single spread, which in retrospect was probably a bit over the top and also makes the entire module a bit incoherent to read through. I do like where it ended though, so I'm not too down on myself for this.

I used Affinity Publisher (technically the free trial of it) for doing the layout (with a bit of Affinity Photo for editing).

I approached the layout by trying to make each page resemble a specific thing. Layout was much easier when I had an end result in mind, so aiming for something real I could look at to reference helped a ton. I could usually figure out how to mimic the layout of something, but struggled much more with making the layout both easy to read and visually interesting on its own without there being any "gimmick" to the look. Evocative is easier than original, at least for me.

In order, after the intro and rules page, the visuals I was attempting to replicate are:

Patent Document
Cassette Tape Insert
Dot Matrix Printout
Government Form
Comic Book Advertisement Pages

For specific aspects of layout details I highly recommend finding things made by people who are actually good at layout, and shamelessly stealing their ideas. The first thing I tried to lay out myself was my Troika! module in Dissident Whispers, where I used a flowchart style "map" which I borrowed from Sean McCoy's layout in the Ypsilon-14 Mothership Module.

The rest of Dissident Whispers (i.e. the parts that I didn't do layout for) is an amazing exhibition of tons of different layout styles and techniques. It's a fantastic smorgasbord of excellent ideas to borrow from.

One layout "trick" I used that's is worth highlighting, if only because it's on nearly every page, is how to apply a texture to an entire spread to give it a "used" feel. I'd find an appropriate texture stock image, set it as the bottom layer of the spread, and then set the layers above it to "multiply" which translates that texture through all the elements on top of it. For black or very dark elements, like text, I used "pin light" or "hard light" blending, although I think simply lowering the opacity would accomplish something similar.

Paper texture blending. I didn't blend the "4. EPOXY" text particularly well, but you get the idea.

Beyond that, desaturated colors made things more visually easy to look at, and a more "authentic" feel in a lot of cases (specifically the Oddities spread).

Tipping text a slight angles can be visually striking (look at MÖRK BORG, or a bunch of the Dissident Whispers modules for examples) but I mostly used it in ELECTRIC WIZARDS! when I was trying to make something look hand written.

It's perhaps too subtle here, but looking at the whole page the slight misalignment between each desctipion sells the feel I was going for.

An Affinity specific goof I made was while using mixam's booklet templates, I did all of my layout using a single "page" within the software for each two page spread. What this meant was when I finished, I had no way to split each spread into individual pages for export (or at least, I couldn't figure out how to do so). What I should have done from the beginning is to use the single page templates then under Document Setup checking "Facing Pages". This lets you edit in two page spreads, but export as either spreads or singles.

The last piece of advice I'd give is that there are tons of really cool and interesting fonts out there, absolutely use them but don't forget that people should actually be able to read the thing at the end of the day.

Final Product

You can find the final ELECTRIC WIZARDS! at itch.io. It's totally free, and I'd love for anyone to give it a look and tell me what they think. While you're over there check out the rest of the incredible entries into the Eclectic Bastion Jam.

A friend of mine got the module printed and shipped to me for my birthday, for which I'm incredibly grateful. I recorded a video of a flip through so you can see what it would look like in print:

I'm very thankful for the Eclectic Bastion Jam giving me the framework and impetus to produce something I'm actually quite proud of. I highly recommend joining a jam just to get the experience of working on, and finishing a project.

For the curious, at time of writing the module has been downloaded 119 times, although some of those are people downloading both the singles and spreads pdfs. I don't have a following of any kind to try and market this to, plus it's a very niche crossover module connecting two relatively niche RPGs so the potential audience is pretty limited to begin with.

Resources Used

Fonts

Google Fonts

League of Movable Type

Misprinted Type

Moonbase Press - Specifically for the Dot Matrix style font.

Images

British Library Flickr - All the old timey images came from here. Searching for specific things can be a bit wonky, but digging around will provide a bounty of excellent stuff. A lot of my ideas came from things I accidentally found while looking for something else.

Unsplash - The large background images of cassettes all came from here.

photos-public-domain.com - Used for paper images to provide texture to backgrounds.

The US Patent Office - So it turns out most patent art is public domain. All of the images on the gauntlet page came from here.

Macchiato Monsters - References, House Rules, Hacks

noreply@blogger.com (AwkwardTurtle) — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 18:28:00 +0000

Collected resources for Macchiato Monsters

By no means is this intended to be comprehensive, just stuff I've come across and found useful (and a couple things of my own).

Play Aids and Advice

Spell Cost Reference Sheet (this one is mine!). I found that trying to create prices to spells on the fly was a bit taxing, so I wrote up a flowchart to get a rough cost as a starting point. Partly inspired by Blades in the Dark magnitude tables.

Combat Example by the author of Macchiato Monsters. Very helpful for getting an understanding how how it's supposed to play out.

Settings and Item Tables

UVG Equipment Tables and Rules by aincumis

Post Human Orbital Structures - really cool alternate setting, equipment tables thing by

House Rules and Hacks

Inverted Risk Dice (personal house rule)

Risk dice step down in size when the highest three values are rolled, not the lowest.

Rationale is that for consumables it makes more sense (I just ate a ton of these rabbits, that's why there are less of them), and it also spreads out the feel bads. Currently it's a double feel bad when you both roll low (and get very little benefit) and also now your thing is running out.

Downside, slightly more mental overhead since the numbers to watch for are different for each die size.

Monster Dice (personal house rule/hack)

Replace monster's Morale Die with an all purpose Monster Die. If they try to do something in their nature, roll the skill die.

1-3 are degrees of failure, and the die steps down until they get a chance to rest.

4+ are degrees of success.

If a monsters is particularly skilled at something, roll with advantage.

If they're bad at something or it's out of their nature, roll with disadvantage.

This can be used for everything from sneaking and ambushes, to resisting magical effects. It mostly felt weird to me that the advice for these things in the book was to just invent a stat for them on the fly, and roll under that. Risk Dice are used for everything else, why not also this?

The Dissident Maze, Part 5: Flails Akimbo

noreply@blogger.com (AwkwardTurtle) — Sat, 08 Aug 2020 22:17:00 +0000

I know I said it was going to be a few weeks before the next installment, but scheduling issues with our Vamp game lead to me learning on Sunday night that I'd be running a one shot Monday night.

Some background on this whole thing: I'm attempting to play through every module in Dissident Whispers with the same players, and the same characters (or at least alternate universe versions of them). I don't really expect to actually accomplish this, but I think it'll be fun to see how far I can get. Dissident Whispers is a community created collection of one page RPG adventures to raise money for Black Lives Matter, I personally wrote a Troika! adventure, and a Mausritter adventure location for the project.

See Week 1 for more background on Dissident Whispers, as well as the setup for how I'm running a single party of adventurers through wildly different modules and systems. I will admit, now that we're 5 sessions in, my original framework of an interplanar maze, with soul points and such, has almost entirely been tossed by the wayside. As I very often do, I underestimated how much players will self motivate to explore modules and find their own fun, so I really didn't need to set up an elaborate system to encourage them.

Last week the players were hunting for Snail Eggs in Ootheca, this week they're fighting for their lives in Flails Akimbo!

The Module

The full art and layout for this module is worth seeing, go buy the book!

Flails Akmibo is an adventure for MÖRK BORG written by Pablo Dapena (with art by Michael Harmon, layout by Matthew Johnson, Rolland and Pablo, and editing by Flora Van Den Berg). It's an over the top, hyperviolence send up of Guns Akimbo. I'd actually had the pleasure of playing through this module when a friend ran it, so I had a pretty good handle on it going in (part of what contributed to me picking it as a last minute thing).

The System

MÖRK BORG is the recently Ennie award winning Art Punk created by Pelle Nilsson and Johan Nohr.

Play Report

I started off by telling them they were almost certain to die during this, so to be prepared for that. When I played in this, I personally died 3 times, so I felt pretty confident in this warning.

Tenzin, Gunter and Dillinger awake with spinning heads and hurting hands in small stone cells (Garimir couldn't make it this week). They look down, and each realize that weapons have been crudely nailed to their hands! Tenzin has warhammers, Dillinger has knives, and Gunter has a zweihänder fixed to each hand (lots of damage, but combat rolls are penalized due to the difficulty).

They immediately come to the conclusion that this is some sort of battle royale thing, and Gunter loudly yells that he can't wait to kill Dillinger before the booming announcer voice even has a chance to introduce today's game of DEATH GALORE.

Finding their cages unlocked, they all run out and through the only door into the next room. Two cagefighters, and a handful of terrified looking prisoners were waiting in the room, and leap to attack the players as soon as the announcer's monologue was finished.

One cagefighter runs with spinning axes towards the zweihänder wielding Gunter, and this is where the first hints of how absurdly lucky my players would get in this module appeared. Gunter gets a critical success on defense, giving a free attack, which hits, and one shots the cagefighter.

Dillinger rushes the other cagefighter, managing to get behind him and slashing through the tendons in the back of his feet. Tenzin, meanwhile, avoids the fray and tries to figure out where the hell the announcer's voice is coming from. Seeing this as a sign of weakness the small band of prisoners try and swarm him, but Tenzin spins into a whirlwind of smashing hammers (using the special "Thou twirl me fair round, dearest, fair round. Like a breaking wheel, fair round round round" move included in this module) driving them off and narrowly avoiding falling into the huge open pit in the middle of the room.

Gunter finishes off the wounded cagefighter, Tenzin kills two of the prisoners attacking him with another spinning attack, and Dillinger shoves the remaining live prisoner down into the pit. Dillinger briefly considers going full Hunger Games by shoving Gunter into the pit, but is interrupted as Tenzin hears some "booing" sounds coming from the bottom of the pit where one of the prisoners had landed.

With some difficulty due to their weapon hands, they quickly splice together a rope out of the clothing of the dead, and lower Tenzin down into the pit to see what's going on. Dangling from the end of the rope, Tenzin finds a three fancily dressed, and very drunk, nobles halfheartedly punching and stabbing the body of the dead prisoner, complaining that they paid good money for this and it's bullshit that this guy is already dead. As Tenzin drops in among them though, they excitedly turn to him and declare joy at the prospect of a "meat pinata" and rush in. He releases the rope, and unleashes another cyclone of hammers upon the nobles. Hearing the commotion, Dillinger takes a high risk leap into the pit, managing to land on and messily crush one of the dilettantes, sending the other two fleeing in fear.

While Gunter more carefully and safely climbs down into the pit, Tenzin and Dillinger chase down and finish off the two remaining nobles. Through a door and up a set of stairs, the players find themselves in a narrow hallway populated by spear wielding nobles, after bringing destruction down upon them they find they can see into areas of "The Stage" through small slits in the walls. This, along with interrogating the lone noble they spared, allows them to realize these are the "spectator booths" through which the slaughter can be witnessed (and participated in by poking spears through slits). While looking through one of these slits, they see a group of three cagefighters dash through a door after hearing the announcer call for someone to go deal with the PCs.

Rounding a corner, and pushing their noble captive ahead of them, a huge armored man wearing a leather pig mask bursts through a door at the far end of the hallway, as the announcer introduces SNOUTFACE and promises a spectacular fight, even if it's a shame their paying audience can't see it.

The captive noble is shoved into Snoutface's path, bravely soaking a massive mace attack to protect the players. Then Tenzin rolls past Snoutface's feet, coming up behind the gladiator and smashing his warhammers directly into the back of his head (a critical hit, dealing almost all of Snoutface's HP, and damaging his armor). Gunter quickly follows up with his zweihänders and finishes off poor Snoutface before he managed to do anything more than kill a single noble.

As Tenzin retrieves the leather pig mask as a trophy, Dillinger passes through the door Snoutface has entered through. He finds a storage area with an armored, locked door, and a portcullis leading to a large amphitheater. In this room he can hear some very loud panicked breathing coming from behind a set of shelves storing hammers and nails. As the other two join him, the portcullis begins to open, and the three cagefighters they had seen before arrive in the amphitheater and rush towards the PCs.

Tenzin, however, simply steps forward and tosses the bloody pig mask of the arena champion onto the ground striking FEAR into the hearts of these three men. Two immediately break and run, while the last collapses the ground begging for his life.

GM Note: Tossing down the mask of the defeated arena champion, someone the cage fighters would fear, was a clever idea and I decided to simply roll morale checks for the three men. ALL THREE FAILED! After rooms of nothing but successful combat checks (by this point, the PCs had taken a grand total of 2 damage, and that was to the guy who started with NINE HEALTH) this was the final nail in the coffin for any hope I had of demonstrating how lethal this game was. At this point, I had no choice but to bow my head and accept that my players were simply too lucky to be killed.

The players then tore down the shelves, revealing the poorly hidden announcer (a man with a megaphone sewn to his mouth), then made their way through a door to find the "Bacchanalian Chamber" the secret room containing the hidden master of this blood arena the Grand Duchess Rottundha. Cowering with her are all the remaining nobles that had fled from the players approach, and Tenzin fell upon them in a tornado of whirling hammers.

His constant use of the spin attack finally almost came back to bite him as he managed to donk himself in the head. Fortunately, for him, his absurdly good HP roll meant he was pretty much fine. The rest of the players joined, and they made short work of the Dutchess and the remaining nobles. From the corpses, they retrieved the key to their freedom, and left the bloody arena injured but very much unkilled.

Thoughts on the Module

Well, first of all, my players had an absolutely fantastic time. After we finished they couldn't stop gushing about how fun it was, although they admitted it was likely in part to how absolutely unstoppable they were. Gunter's player did express some sadness that they hadn't died, after I'd hyped up how unforgivably deadly the module was. They loved being put in an awful, probably unwinnable situation and being able to let loose and damn the consequences in a bid for revenge.

This module is jam packed with horrible, hilarious, and fun things. The setup is perfect for putting players into the right frame of mind to play MÖRK BORG. You start off in a cell with weapons nailed to your hands, you're probably not getting out of here! Might as well go down swinging! The announcer provides a really fun excuse to give dumb, booming voice narration to everything the players do, and a vehicle to try to goad them into poor decision making.

I can't say that my players' experience will be the common one, my own experience playing in it had 5+ deaths among 3 players. However, from a player perspective, everything was so over the top, bloody, and gruesome that dying never felt bad. No matter if you defy the odds and escape alive, or die half a dozen times trying this module is a fantastic introduction to MÖRK BORG and I can't recommend it enough.

Thoughts on the System

I'm not going to have many original thoughts on MÖRK BORG, people much more eloquent than me have already waxed poetic about the incredible layout, the heavy metal influences, the fantastically disturbing artwork, and more.

The mechanics are light, but very functional. Character creation is extremely fast, a thing you need in a (usually) very lethal game. All the rolls are player facing (players roll both to attack and defend) and against generally fixed difficulties which is a thing I really enjoy. It always puts the ball in the players' courts, and means the game runs very fast and easily. Being able to quickly tweak the target numbers based on whatever goofball thing the players were describing let me mechanically show the impact of their ideas, which is not something I always want in a game (see Chris McDowall's blog post about handling variable difficulty in a game with fixed rolls) but it worked really well for this group.

The main thing running the game made me realize though, is how brilliant the "Calendar of Nechrubel" and the Miseries are. For those unfamiliar during a game of MÖRK BORG each dawn the GM rolls a die (size chosen based on the intended length of the campaign) and on a 1 a Misery is activated. When the 7th Misery occurs, well, I'll let the book express itself:

The table you roll the other miseries on is the coolest looking random table I've ever seen in an rpg.

When I first read this my reaction was, "Woah, extremely metal and cool. Sounds kind of annoying to use at the table though, since you'd get a weird anticlimax end to your campaign, right?" However, reflecting on Flails Akimbo I've realized this does something very important.

Since the world is going to end, DAMN THE CONSEQUENCES AND GO DOWN SWINGING. Players enter the game knowing that their characters will assuredly die and the entire world is going to end, and there's nothing they can do about it! They're already in an awful situation, so there's no need to be precious with their characters, instead they should play them like you'd drive a stolen car.

Flails Akimbo does this on a smaller scale, it puts the players in an awful, essentially unwinnable situation. They're going to die so they might as well try to strike back and take everyone else down with them. And hell, if they manage not to die? That makes a story worth telling.

Final Thoughts

Both the system and the module are great but I won't retread what I've said above. If you were looking for a way to get players introduced to the nihilistic, black metal violence of MÖRK BORG I can't imagine a better vehicle than Flails Akimbo.

My RPG schedule is still a bit up in the air, so I'm not sure when the next time we'll be playing a Dissident Whispers module is, but keep an eye out for our next adventure (where we'll return to my players voting on the next module). If this sounded great, and it was, go buy Dissident Whispers! It's got fifty seven more modules in there, including five (!!!) other MÖRK BORG modules. It even has a MB module written by Johan Nohr himself, and other amazing layout work by him can be found in a couple other places in the book.

The Dissident Maze, Part 4: Ootheca

noreply@blogger.com (AwkwardTurtle) — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 16:41:00 +0000

Week 4 of my attempt to play through every Dissident Whispers module (or at least as many as I can get through before my players get bored) brings us to hunting snail eggs in Ootheca written by @junkgolem.

Dissident Whispers is a community created collection of one page RPG adventures to raise money for Black Lives Matter. See Week 1 for more background on Dissident Whispers, as well as the setup for how I'm running a single party of adventurers through wildly different modules and systems. The short version is that they're jumping into the bodies of alternate dimension versions of themselves. Week 3 had the players attempting to traverse the Canal of Horrors.

The Module

Ootheca is a module written by @junkgolem for "the 5th Edition of That Fantasy Roleplaying Game" but is written in a way that makes it very suitable for any fantasy adventure game. In it, the players are tasked to retrieve the egg case (ootheca) of a particular sort of snail, for the holy Spiral Order so they may use it as a new vessel for their god.

The System

Since I am allergic to 5E DnD, and am also in part using this as an excuse to try more systems, I chose to use Macchiato Monsters for this week. It is often recommended as a blend between The Black Hack and The Whitehack, both of which are systems I'd also like to try out during this project at some point. I made stats for the monsters and items in the module for Macchiato Monsters, and I'll include those details at the end in case they're useful to anyone (it's also extremely easy to do on the fly).

One small caveat is that I'm not using Macchiato Monsters' encounter die, instead I'm using the encounter table as written in the actual module.

The Characters

Tenzin is a Member of the Order of Strangling Vines, with Specialist Training allowing him to perform incredible feats with his eagle Dozen. He also knows two spells "Nature Rebels!" and "You Cannot Stand Against Me!" He also has disgustingly good stats for it being 3d6 down the line: 13, 10, 17, 8, 15, 12.

Dillinger is a Repairman with an Awesome Handlebar Mustache (he chose this as a second trait) who has Specialist Training to induce an Adreneline Surge to perform feats of incredible strength of stamina. He also randomly rolled a a Jar of Snail Soup as part of his starting items, which was appropriate for the module.

Gunter is a Monk of the Burning Palm who worships a god of Urban Sprawl. He's able to channel divine power to cast the spells Fleshcrafting and Fortune, and is a bit more durable than the others (a whole second hit die).

Garimir is lost in the tumbling wastes of the interplanar maze (his player was unable to join us this week).

Play Report

We began with the players having already accepted the job to travel to the Cave of Perpetual Starlight in order to retrieve an ootheca of the Abmoor Snails. They received in prepayment vials of glowing blue Snail Mucus, which act as healing potions, and the promise of gold in exchange for the completion of the task.

An actual, real life snail egg sack. Time to add these to the list of things that actually exist but look like weird fantasy otherworldly nonsense.

Jumping to their arrival at the entrance of the cave, they peer down into the dark cavern and collectively realize none of them have any torches or lanterns. A faint glimmer of blue light deeper into the cave gives Gunter the courage to lead the way in. Barely avoiding tripping over stalagmites in the lack of light the others follow him in (leaving Dillinger's loyal Ox outside the cave, there are some fun results on the starting equipment tables).

Suddenly, they hear a shout "Get 'em boys!" and a single figure leaps out of the darkness to attack Gunter. Gunter manages to roll out of the way, while Dillinger and Tenzin realize the man is alone (at about the same time the bandit realizes his companions are missing) and rush forward to tackle him to the ground. They learn his name is Greg, two other men were also supposed to jump out during the ambush, he doesn't know where they went, he doesn't know much about the cave, that he's a vegetarian, and that he'll say whatever he thinks will get them to let him. They confiscate his short sword, a bag of mushroom jerky, and tie his hands behind his back with a belt.

GM Note: As they walked into the cave entrance, I rolled "1d6 Bandits" on the encounter table, and thought "this seems like a good place for Bandits to hide and ambush anyone heading into the cave". Then I rolled a 1 for the number of bandits, and decided to stick with that idea, but assume there had been more bandits that had been (unbeknownst to Greg) sneakily grabbed by the giant spider from deeper in the caves.

Prodding Greg before them, they follow the tunnel until it opens up into a small cave with two exists. It is covered with bio-luminescent moss and contains a large pool of water containing a huge stone hand. It also contains a huge crab that immediately takes issue with their presence and scuttles aggressively towards them claws extended.

He's comin' for you!

Gunter cases Fortune, manipulating probability to grant his companions good fortune, and with this benefit they quickly dispatch the crab. Examining the room carefully reveals a patch of the glowing moss had been scraped away close to the right branch away from this room. Taking this as two good pieces of advice, they travel down the right branch after collecting a few 'wads' of luminescent moss to light their way (and instigating a series of 'wad' jokes that lasted the rest of the session).

Traversing the next tunnel, they find themselves in a cavern large enough that the dim light from their moss wads is unable to fully illuminate the space. Disregarding a flash of blue-green movement at the edge of the cavern, they move carefully through and spot 6 pale bundles of something hanging from the ceiling close to the far wall. Tenzin travels forward to get a better look, and realizes they're person sized bundles of spider silk just soon enough to roll out of the way from the massive spider falling from the ceiling to attack him, slashing at one of the 8 legs on his way out.

Gunter uses his Fleshcrafting to worsen the wound, spraying spider ichor across the cavern, while the spider shoots webs at the group missing everyone but poor Greg. Dillinger runs forward with the carpet he'd been lugging around and tosses it over the spider to try and contain it. Pressing the advantage, the party manages to beat the carpet covered spider to death before it is able to free itself. Using the dead spider as a cushion, the party begins cutting the hanging bundles from the ceiling using well placed arrows.

Halfway through this process, Greg (still adhered to the ground by spider webs) lets out a scream and the party turns to see a large blue-green lizard taking a large bite out of his shoulder. A fierce battle ensues in which Dozen the hawk swoops in to blind the lizard with raking claws, and two deaths are staved off through shattering shields. The party emerges victorious, and even prevents Greg from getting dragged off to his death.

Now undisturbed, the party pulls down the spider bundles and finds two of Greg's companions (unconscious but still alive) and three dead adventurers (presumably the group sent by the church before our current party got the job). Greg and his companions are disarmed and sent on their way, while the party loots the dead bodies to restock (including an extra shield) and finds a mysterious tome filled with an unreadable language. The book is the Voynich Tome which allows the user to cast a random spell each day. Dillinger claims the book and learns that today's spell is Void Elemental.

Ce n'est pas une porte secrète.

With two exits to the large spider cavern and no guidance between them, the party heads north and finds a dead end containing a corpse and the words "No Secret Door Here!" scrawled across the wall. After lots of searching, attempts as puzzle solving, speaking secret words of opening, and several casts of Void Elemental (to look for voids in an element, clever) they eventually come to the conclusion that the message was telling the truth.

Heading back into the prior room and to the south, they find another cavern, this one mostly flooded with water and covered with glowing, crawling snails. Across the pool they see, attached to the wall, the mystical glowing snail ootheca that is the goal of their quest. Deciding to be careful, Tenzin looks before they leap and notices a small trail of bubbles rising from deeper into the water. Rather than do something clever with this information, Dillinger proceeds to just toss rocks at the source of the bubbles.

Perturbed by the rocks, a massive crab bursts from the water and angrily attacks Dillinger. It grabs Dillinger in a claw and nearly clamps him in two, dragging him along while chasing the other party members. Tenzin barely survives a deadly claw snap by sacrificing the shield he'd only recently pilfered from a corpse in the other room, while Dillinger pulls a crowbar out of his backpack and manages to crack the crab's claw sufficiently to escape. Gunter uses his Fleshcrafting to Worsen Injuries on the crab's claw and, with a lucky die roll, manages to explode the crab over the entire party.

Lookit this friendly, three eyed guy. I'd probably worship a god that looked like this.

With the pool now giant crab free, Tenzin makes a short swim to retrieve the glowing ootheca. Quest goal in hand, and us running out of time for the night, the party departs victorious (but sadly finds the released bandits have made off with Dillinger's ox which had been left outside the cave).

Thoughts on the Module

Ootheca ended up being a lot of fun. I'll admit that when I first read over it, I had the thought that it seemed to lack any over the top theme, or off the wall feature. Once in play though, it provided a wonderful foundation for some really satisfying, nearly deadly, old fashioned adventuring: crawling through some caves looking for "treasure" (snail eggs).

This module reminded me that not everything needs to be crazy all the time, so long as it provides the tools and prompts for players to make interesting choices and have a good time. Which are things that were provided by this module in spades. Every single encounter I rolled immediately suggested a fun tie in with the location I it was rolled in, which is both much harder than it looks and really good to get out of a module at the table.

My absolute favorite thing in the system is the actual, literal dead end helpfully labeled “No secret door here!”. There's no secret there, there's nothing to find, the message is (presumably) just a note from the last group of adventurers in here. It is also the greatest player trap I have ever seen in an RPG. If you took nothing from this module but this excellent idea, it'd still be well worth it. Watching players spend time, spells, items and effort to try and defeat what is just a stone wall is extremely funny.

One other note, I actually like that the big, faintly vibrating stone hand doesn't have a definitive "meaning" or purpose in the module as written. Having some interesting, mysterious things just exist is a good way to remind players this isn't a video game, and not everything is about them. Sometimes weird stuff just exists. But if you did want it to mean something, it'd be extremely easy to tie that into something else going on in your campaign. This module is practically begging to be dropping into a sandbox or hexcrawl game.

I had a great time running Ootheca, and did almost zero prep other than jotting down some quick monster stats. Being able to pick something up and immediately run it is something I look for in these short form modules., My players had a great time playing it and wanted to finish exploring the handful of rooms they missed, but sadly time limits meant we had to end the session as soon as they found their goal. It's for sure going onto my short list of modules that I can pick up and run in an emergency.

Thoughts on the System

This one is a bit complicated for me. I'll start with what parts of Macchiato Monsters didn't land super well at the table.

I actually found the system pretty difficult to run, at least on this first try. Combat is tricky; everything is determined by single, player facing d20 rolls which not only decide if a player's actions are successful but also resolve monster actions simultaneously. That means you have to establish at the beginning of the round what a monster intends to do, then reflect that in the fiction and narration based on how each subsequent die roll turns out. It's not quite a fully narrative system, because there are still strict rounds and monsters still have limited attacks in each of the rounds, but it requires a lot more narrative description and work on the GM's part to function properly. I found this thread where the author of the game gives some combat examples to be very helpful.

The freeform magic system is very cool, but I found adjudicating HP costs in play to be somewhat tricky. Trying to make spells impactful and interesting, while working within the mechanical framework, and making PCs actually able to cast spells with low HP totals was honestly fairly difficult. Edit: I have since created a sort of flowchart to help price magic in this game, you can find it in my collection of MM resources.

Despite those things working less than ideally at the table, I'm honestly really looking forward to getting another chance to run the system. I think with more practice running combat and working out spells, both would turn into highlights of the system, there's just a learning curve that makes picking it up for a one shot a little awkward.

Ubiquitous incorporation of Risk Dice is really nice, and is one of the reasons I want to play more of the system. Risk Dice are Macchiato Monsters' implementation of usage dice, which abstract tracking consumables into a single die size. For instance, if you have a Δ6 of arrows, after a fight you'd roll a six sided die, and on a 1-3 the die becomes a Δ4. If it were already a Δ4 you're out. The system uses this for everything from rations (roll the risk die of the ration while you camp to see how much HP you restore, to encounter dice (most of the dangerous outcomes are low on the table, so things get riskier over time).

As an extension of this the currency system seems wonderful, although it didn't come up during the one shot, and looks like it manages to pull off a really cool trick. It makes different types of coins matter and makes money take up inventory space, which are two things I love in theory but end up hating logistically and ignoring at the table. Macchiato Monsters uses Risk Dice to represent currency, where you have a different sized bag (Δ4-Δ12) of a particular currency such as copper, gold, or silver. Different things cost different coins so leather armor and trail rations are purchased with copper, but if you want some nice armor you'd need to cough up gold. Getting a temple to raise someone from the dead would require you to scrounge together platinum. Rather than setting specific prices for things, the player just rolls their money bag's risk die to see if the purchase depletes their funds. Sure you can splash gold around to buy some basic supplies, but do you really want to risk getting ripped off and losing your gold? There's more to it, but it seems really fun in practice.

I liked the idea of the randomly rolled starting items (players get one of each die size, and can choose which tables to roll on) but it ended up being awkward in practice. 1 or 2 on many of the tables are often feel bad results, especially if a player spent their d20 there, but also many of the higher results on weapons or armor tables are unusable by level 1 players. I don't hate it, but I might want to tweak it a bit before using it again.

My players enjoyed it overall, but felt a bit mixed on some aspects. One player in particular felt pretty constrained by the magic system costing so much of his HP, but I think that's more a matter of chafing at being a level 1 character than hating how magic worked. In a longer campaign I think they'd end up getting a lot of enjoyment out of the ability to get mechanically stronger in interesting ways. The classless, modular character creation and advancement means it's possible to build whatever sort of archetype you can think of while staying rules light.

Macchiato Monster Stats and Items for Ootheca

Vial of Snail Mucus: Δ6, heals Δ when drunk.

The Voynich Tome (the obscure tome in an unreadable language in room 3): Δ8
Can be used to cast a spell using INT. The spell is randomized each day (I used Maze Rats magic tables). The Risk Die acts as a reagent, but only for casting the book's spell. Restore risk die by sacrificing a point of CON to the book (or another suitable blood sacrifice).

Giant Spider: 4HD, d8 Bite (poison, Con save or paralyzed for 20 minutes), web spray (DEX save or stuck, STR save to get free), Δ10 morale.

Giant Crab: 2HD, d6/d6 Claws, Δ8 Armor, D8 morale. If killed the shell can be crafted into a lightweight Δ8 armor.

Giant Aquatic Lizard: blue green wyvern, nearly invisible under water, 4HD, d8 bite, d6 water cannon (check STR or get knocked back), Δ10 morale.

Bandits: 1HD, d4 Club, Δ4 Morale

Giant Centipede: 1HD, d4 Bite (poison, CON save or disadvantage for 10 minutes), Δ6 morale.

Giant Scorpion: 2HD, d4 Pincer, d6 Sting (poison, CON save or stung body part swells to twice the size for d6*10 minutes, disadvantage when using that body part), Δ8 morale.

Conclusions

Ootheca is a really nice cave crawl module with enough flavor to make it pop, but with a classic feel that would let you drop this into any existing fantasy campaign. It's self sufficient and complete enough that it can be run with zero prep (assuming your system has stats for these enemies, which it probably does) and even comes with a built in hook to tie it into your game.

Get your players to go snail egg hunting!

If you want more like this, go buy Dissident Whispers! There are 57(!!!) other modules in it, they've all got amazing artwork and maps. Plus it supports a great cause! My group is likely taking a couple weeks off from one shots to play a bit of Vampire the Masquerade, but this series will continue!

The Dissident Maze, Part 3: The Canal of Horrors

noreply@blogger.com (AwkwardTurtle) — Sun, 19 Jul 2020 01:56:00 +0000

Week 3 of my attempt to play through every Dissident Whispers module (or at least as many as I can get through before my players get bored) brings us to The Canal of Horrors written by Chris McDowall himself.

Dissident Whispers is a community created collection of one page RPG adventures to raise money for Black Lives Matter. See Week 1 for more background on Dissident Whispers, as well as the setup for how I'm running a single party of adventurers through wildly different modules and systems. The short version is that they're jumping into the bodies of alternate dimension versions of themselves. Week 2 saw the players exploring Graktil the Citadel the Crawls.

The Module

The Canal of Horrors is an adventure for Electric Bastionland written by Chris McDowall, in which the players have a chance to pay off their massive debt if they can manage to secure a luxury yacht (that no one owns, we swear!) and get it to a buyer in one piece.

The Characters

Tenzin is a failed Squidbagger who had gotten squid ink tattoos for every single squid he caught (which wasn't many, hence the career being failed). Through sheer happenstance this failed career also includes an animal companion and so Dozen joins us as a small frog.

Dillinger is a failed Vault Cracker, who mostly cracked into empty vaults which he used as living spaces. Looks strung out, with wild hair and an unpleasant wardrobe. He carries a single Breaching Rocket, left over from his vault cracking days.

Garimir is a failed Practicing Chemist wearing a burnt and torn apart lab coat, sporting shock white hair and zero eyebrows due to past (and frequent) chemistry induced incidents.

Gunter is a failed Curiosity Collector whose fashion runs somewhere between college professor and goth. He wears a black tweed jacket covered in pockets, and a large mammoth mask strapped to his head.

The System

We're using Electric Bastionland for this module which is what it was designed for. It's also my favorite system at the moment so it didn't take any arm twisting.

Play Report

The players began at the docks boarding the Silver Hammer to check out their new charge. Garimir and Tenzin went into the lower decks, while Gunter looked over the controls, finding a nameplate which listed The Great Xtenza as the ship's owner, and Dillinger ogled the extremely large gun mounted on the upper deck. In the lower decks, Tenzin found a very flattering portrait of an incredibly buff wizodd named The Great Xtenza and was disappointed there was no hidden safe behind it, while Garimir immediately broke into the locked hold to find a chest filled with black gems, each containing a screaming face. Tenzin primed the ship's engine, letting Gunter start the boat and begin steering out of the docks.

His initial impulse to set sail into the sea was curbed by the sight of an angry, jacked as hell, wizodd sailing towards them on a strange translucent version of the Silver Hammer. Yells about punishing them for stealing his boat reached them across the water; The Great Xtenza was after them! Gunter hit the boost and headed towards the canal entrance while Dillinger sprayed bullets behind to try and provide cover.

Locks! They're like water stairs!

Reaching the first lock and finding it unattended, Tenzin leapt out to operate the controls. He opened the first gates and Gunter quickly moved the Silver Hammer into the lock, then Tenzin closed the gates behind and started the pumping process. A tense moment passed until the water level raised enough that they could once again keep an eye on the approach of the angry wizodd. As soon as the level was clear Tenzin began opening the second gates while Dillinger opened fire first with the mounted gun and then with his breaching rocket at the pursuing ship.

Neither was effective, as the Great Xtenza appeared to age the rocket into rusty uselessness before it reached him. Rather than wait for the locks to cycle all the way through to pursue the thieves, the Great Xtenza instead seemed to rewind time briefly, as a translucent version of the lock opened for him and he sailed through the closed gates: hijacking the party's passage through the gate from a few minutes ago.

Hatching a plan Tenzin hid, waited for the Great Xtenza to pass through the second gates, and leapt onto the future (past?) version of the Silver Hammer to try and take out the wizodd. A highly skeptical rest of the party slowed their ship down to give this a chance to work.

Although Tenzin successfully got onto the ship, when attempting to bash the Great Xtenza in the back of the head with his squidhook he failed to do any lasting harm. Xtenza, furious at the insult, lifted Tenzin high over his head and slammed him down onto the controls of the boat, cracking bones and knocking him out. It seemed as though Tenzin were lost for sure, but due to the excretion Xtenza had to make a CHA save to not lose focus. He failed and warped back to the beginning of the day, once again proving that my players are total luck sacks.

The translucent boat blinked out of existence with its pilot, and the rest of the party was able to collect their wayward squidbagger, slap him awake, and continue on their way.

Reaching a fork, they took a left towards Mocktown and passed through another lock without incident, before deciding to pull to the side and try to ask for directions. They met a Mock Constrictor, who insisted they would only give directions to a friend. Who is a friend? Why, someone who has accepted the friendly gift of a Snake Heart!

Gunter immediately agreed, and found himself with snake eyes, a split tongue, a taste for live prey, a desire to encourage poor decision making (okay, maybe this one wasn't a change), and most importantly: directions for how to proceed.

Following the instructions, they got back to the main canal, and continued through the next lock peacefully. At the lock after that, however, just as they were leaving a large man with hooves and elk antlers ran towards their boat yelling about how strong he was and indicating he wanted to "hang out".

I was going to try and put a picture of an elk mutant here, but all the image results for "half elk half man" were things I didn't want to put in my blog.

Rather than speeding away the players decided to engage with him to try and talk him down. As this party is not known for their soothing words, this only enraged him and he reached out to grab the boat to try and lift it to prove how strong he was. The party objected to this, and a fight broke out. Dillinger was taken out of the fight after he was picked up and impaled on the man's antlers, and Tenzin was launched into the water after a failed attempt to push the Elk-Mutant off the boat. Gunter eventually landed the KO with his antique pistol which exploded in his hands on the final shot.

As the Elk Mutant collapsed and started bleeding out, his elk features and overgrown muscles dissolved away and instead appears onto the one to defeat him: Gunter. The party dumped the ex-elk-mutant off the boat, recovered their injured and dunked companions, and carried on down the water way (now with one member sporting both snake features, and oversized elk muscles and antlers).

It was smooth sailing until, just as they were passing through the final lock before their destination, they heard a familiar angry shouting coming from the extremely buff Great Xtenza. Once again on their tail, he followed them through the lock to try and punish the thieving party. This time, as he approached, he vomited out Rich Future Bastard Versions of the party (technically these are one of the other pursuer options besides the Great Xtenza, but I couldn't resist using them here).

Future Dillinger has saws in place of both hands and jaw, future Garimir was half man half chrome skeleton, future Gunter had been split into three pale triplicates of himself, and future Tenzin was nowhere to be seen. The party agreed that they had probably finally gotten sick of Tenzin, and offed him themselves at some point in the future.

An epic battle ensued as the Great Xtenza pulled his Silver Hammer alongside the party's. Dillinger on the mounted gun managed to take out the Gunter triplet that was manning the opposed ship's gun, with the help of a salvo of the screaming black gems they had found in the hold at the and forgotten about until now (Gunter the Curiosity Collector recognized them as containing a wrath, which emerges to attack everything around it when the crystal is broken: weird spirit grenades). A combination of machine fun, knives, squidhook, antlers and many more of the black gems made short work of the Rich Future Bastards, leaving the Great Xtenza standing alone.

Realizing he was at risk of a loss he shouted that he had already gotten revenge on them in the past, and warped away in a cloud of temporal dust. Out of this cloud tumbled a single lackey, who had just enough time to realize he was alone with zero backup before the party descended on him.

Now in the clear, the party disposed of their future selves (Dillinger kept his doppelganger's saws as keepsakes), tied the now blood spattered Silver Hammer up at a dock, and went to report to their debt holders. In exchange for the Silver Hammer they managed to clear their debt, and the Silver Key which had been taken as collateral was returned to them, allowing the party to depart back to the Interplanar Maze.

Thoughts on the Module

The Canal of Horrors was an absolute blast, both for myself and my players. There are three different pursuers that can be chasing the PCs, and all three sound hilarious and fun (enough so that I cheated and used two of them in my game). There are so many good ideas packed into this module it's a little silly. I honestly think that you could run the same group through this twice and it would be just as fun the second time (especially if you randomized the destination). I want to see every single encounter on every table happen at the table, which is an impressive feat.

If you've never played or run Electric Bastionland, I think that this module would be a great introduction. It's emblematic of the whole system and "setting" in how it's extremely strange, and downright bizarre in places, but never so much that you feel unmoored. The mundanity of bringing a boat through a canal, and dealing with the routine of having to work the locks, keeps the whole thing grounded even as you're running from time wizards or fighting strong man elk mutants.

One thing I really want to highlight is how the encounter die is tied to actual diegetic locations. Rather than an arbitrary "every 10 minutes" or "every X rooms" it's literally a roll to see what's going on at each of the canal's locks. It's a great idea, and something I'd love to see more modules pick up.

Thoughts on the System

I absolutely love Electric Bastionland, but I also knew that going in. I've been running a group through the Anomalous Subsurface Environment (transplanted into the Deep Country) using the system, and it's been great. Hard to list all the things I love about it, but I'll try to hit some high points.

Combat: The combat is super fast, very flexible, and extremely decisive without being instantly lethal. The most likely outcome for things going badly is getting knocked out, at which point you're down and bleeding out, but as long as the rest of your party wins the fight or drags you away, you're going to be okay (albeit with a lessened strength). Combat has real consequences and stakes, but also characters are unlikely to die quickly. It strikes a great balance for me.
Combat, addendum: Electric Bastionland (and Into the Odd before it) has completely ruined any system that includes to hit rolls for me. Removing them is brilliant, and makes combat so much more exciting and impactful.
Failed Careers: These provide an initial impulse for a character to know their place in the world and have something to build off of, without constraining them or forcing them down a specific path. Just by existing they paint an incredible picture of Bastion without having to read 'deep lore'. They're similar to the excellent backgrounds of Troika! in that they pull so much more weight than seems reasonable for the word count (the art is also consistently excellent).
Hit Protection: Sidesteps the never ending debate over what HP means by explicitly defining it as Hit Protection, your ability to not get hit. Refreshing more or less immediately while out of combat, while actual STR loss requiring resources or a lots of time to heal, also means the game isn't bogged down by the constant resource management of healing spells and potions.

There's more, but this isn't really supposed to be a full fledged review of Electric Bastionland, so I'll end here and just say the system is great and everyone should play it.

Conclusion

The Canal of Horrors was a huge success at my table, both me and my players had a great time with it. It's absurdly dense with great ideas while being light enough to run with zero prep. It plays very nicely in the framework of Electric Bastionland, and is honestly good enough that I can see myself running it a couple more times with other groups.

If this sounded like a good time (and it was!) go buy Dissident Whispers! There are 57(!!!) other modules in it, and you'll also get to see the excellent art and maps that accompany most of the modules. Plus it supports a great cause!