The Benign Brown Beast: Bloodring

Friday, February 22, 2019

A natural consequence of bad ideas. My entry in the Into the Odd PocketMod Jam (2019). CW: slavery, combat as sport.

Motivation

Amounts of money are rough. Pay should be enough to motivate free gladiators, but not so much that slaves are freed too quickly.
After first blood, combat is assumed to take turns.
Mutilations are meant to give combat consequences between "death" and "recovery". They also convey the passage of time on days when PCs do not fight.
Making more gladiators is easy: For captive gladiators I used 3d6. For free gladiators I used 4d6 drop lowest. For simpicity everyone starts with 1d6 HP and no mutilations.
As a starting point for adventure it still feels lacking to me because it doesn't provide many motivations of its own and takes away a lot of the PCs' toys.
Combat should be survivable enough that characters don't necessarily die, but unpleasant enough that PCs consider escape or revolt or other things preferable.
Consider gambits from Moonhop or extra HP from Electric Bastionland (under "Scars").

The booklet was written in LibreOffice with an A7 paper size. It's apparently quite difficult to do N-up printing without a margin, so I ended up using PDFResizer.com. Had I time, I would like to use PDFjam.
The PocketMod format really forces an economy of words. I found myself writing sentences that were barely intelligible in other contexts.
The cover image is Piranesi. The Wound Man is Ambroise Paré.
Printing on US letter paper, I found printing at 98% was the largest I could get before I lost things to the margins. This is why all my PocketMods are slightly off-kilter. The reasonable thing to do would be to print them all with outlines and then trim the paper to size, but that's work. Or find a printer that goes to the edges.

bloodring-A7.pdf - for viewing on a screen.

bloodring-A4.pdf - for printing on A4 paper.

bloodring-US.pdf - for printing on US letter paper.