Le Monastère de Saint Gastronomie (Review)

A whimsical mini-campaign set in rural medieval France. Players are monks who must gain the allegiance of local monstrous factions in order to save the world. Due to the nature of the system and adventure, it will be difficult to avoid spoilers in this review.

The adventure was part of Kickstarter’s third Zinequest event, and available as a reward. I have not yet found it for sale outside of that. The PDF is 36 pages, written and illustrated by Guy Potts. It includes “standee” paper miniatures for all of the monsters and monks.

UPDATE: You can now buy the game on itch for $7.50!

The System

It comes with a light set of rules that would be easy to swap out, but it would be a shame to do so entirely. The core of these is three stats, roll-over stat checks, a neat little initiative mechanic, and so on. But it also has three key elements that make the system feel tailored to the adventure: miracles, sins, and the timeline. I would consider grafting these subsystems into any game I ultimately used.

As all the characters are monks, there are no class options, spell lists or starting equipment. But there is magic! Before starting, the GM makes a secret list of specific miracles (“create a spring,” “bring a statue to life,” etc.). Characters can pray freely, and if they happen to ask for a miracle on the list, once per monk per campaign, that miracle is granted. (14 miracles are provided to start, with space for four more.)

Similarly, the GM is encouraged to create a list of “sins” (perhaps modeled on existing religious ideas). (Even without a list, certain actions in the module are defined as sins.) Whenever a monk sins, that player marks a circle on their character’s sin-o-meter. Then, the GM rolls 3d6, re-rolling one non-6 result for each sin marked. If the result is “666,” then each character takes a permanent damage. Characters who die this way are especially dead. I think this is a fun and thematic way of handling morality. It allows for a lot of luck-pushing and emphasizes the religious nature of the characters without punishing them outright for making hard choices.

Finally, the whole game takes place over 28 days, so time taken to heal or travel becomes important. This also informs the other two mechanics in their scope: players may choose not to “save” their miracles or may be more reckless with their sins, given this limit.

The Campaign

The adventure provides a compelling amount of direction for a sandbox. The characters are summoned by a dying monk to stop the current abbot (Pierre the Pious) from summoning an angel of death to purge the world of sinners, annihilating France. To do this, they need to recreate the three traditional products of the abbey under the old abbot (Reynard the Rotund): beer, wine, and cheese. Then they must barter them with local monstrous factions in exchange for their support in the coming battle.

The adventure is seven hexes with the monastery at the center, and each hex has an overland map and an underground dungeon. Three hexes house the monstrous factions and three hexes contain the supplies and equipment the monks will need to reproduce the recipes and arm themselves. The whole map is full of connections and secrets.

The Good

The adventure exudes charm from the art, the tone, the scope. The included system is elegant, as are the mechanics found throughout for dungeon elements, puzzles, social interactions, traps, and so on. (To be sure, the art in this review is not the style of the art in the book, which all matches the cover much more closely.)

It claims to be targeted at absolute beginners, and I believe it. It’s friendly in tone and well-considered in many small ways, from using only d6s to laying out the maps in a radial manner (so that they are easily covered by simple fog-of-war effects, or even sticky notes). In particular, I appreciate that it provides many opportunities to fill in some blank spaces, but it never feels incomplete without them.

The Bad

The adventure sits in a weird place as a drop-in. Not too much relies on the players being monks, so you could drop other characters in pretty easily. (If you’re the planning type, you could even have them meet Brother Bartholomew beforehand.) But the climactic battle seems like an end-of-campaign event that would be hard to continue after, and the tight timeline doesn’t leave much room for side-quests. It’s also slightly too long to run as a one-shot.

I’d like to know more about Pierre and his ritual. The book mentions that he will be out of town if the players think to kill him. But it’s unclear if the ritual could be prevented some other way. Does it have to happen in the palace? (Then could Pierre just be kept out?) Is timing important, or is Pierre just too busy to cause the apocalypse right away? (Then could he be delayed or misled?) If this is a Watchmen scenario, why bother keeping him away on business? Ultimately I’m not too worried about this because the draw of supernatural agriculture is probably pretty good and the clues leading to it are plentiful. But I do expect these questions to come up.

For all the interweaving and jacquaying, the PDF would benefit from hyperlinks, but it is short enough that it’s OK without.

Conclusion

I was expecting a short adventure, but instead I found a small world, full of character and innovation, with well-crafted support for its unique size. I wish I could tell you to buy this, but it doesn’t seem possible at the moment. I’ll update this if that changes. (UPDATE: This has changed! you can now buy it here! I recommend it!)

Ritual Entrances of the Palace Semi-Infinite

One of the main inspirations for the Palace Semi-Infinite is The Gardens of Ynn, and one of the things I love about Ynn is the ritual entrance. While I prefer to keep the exact relationship between the palace and reality nebulous, this is an option I'd consider for similar ritual entrances.

The Main Entrance

Anyone can get to the Palace with an invitation. A valid invitation must:

• be written in ink. Some frequent visitors even tattoo their invitations, although this is considered gauche.
• state the parties invited. The scope can be specific ("Jane Doe") or broad ("the bearer of this invitation") but must be somehow limited in number ("with a retinue of not more than seven") and time ("before the feast of St. Alouicious in the year 2003").
• be signed. An invitation will not work for the person who signs it, even as a plus one.
• be written (technically, only signed) inside the Palace.

Present your invitation to a guard or doorman at the entrance to any building and convince them to open the door for you. When you pass through, you will arrive in a random (but consistent) room of the Palace. (Some people claim that the guard must "announce" your arrival as part of the ritual, but this is in fact unnecessary and increasingly old-fashioned.)

The Servant's Entrance

1. Find a coin on the ground that is not yours and which you did not see drop. It must be worth at least 12 of a smaller denomination of coin. Pick it up and keep it.
2. Recite: "I, [insert name], gladly accept this payment for a week's honest work."
3. Enter thru any unwatched door.

You are marked as a servant of the Palace for the next week. This means:

• a small bonus to remain unobserved by palace inhabitants (other than servants).
• a penalty to the reaction rolls of palace inhabitants.
• you are unable to sign invitations to the palace.

At the end of the week, you will be ejected from the palace (if you haven't escaped already), unless you secure more stable employment first.

Other Crews

Rival adventuring parties are a classic device. But if I expect one to appear more than once, I'd like to make it an explicit foil to the party, differing most in only one aspect. This is not a complete taxonomy, only a brainstorm of common narrative roles.

Aspirational

Anything you can do, these guys do better. In the best case, they're friendly and distant, fighting far-off battles. Maybe they like you and occasionally check in. Maybe they really like you and they'd go so far as to sacrifice for you.

Counterpoint

These guys are Gary: they look down on you and just by chance know all your weaknesses. It's not that they're better, they're just accidentally your worst matchup. And they'll take your girl/guy/job/reputation.

Sucks

Anything these guys do, anyone else could do better. These guys are you, half a campaign ago. Maybe they're fans! Maybe they're impostors!

Done

After you have everything you want and settle down, you might become these guys. Of course, anything that risks the status quo might stir them from their comfortable retirement.

Gumptionless

If you were to give up or turn back, you might become these guys. They'll fight to stop anyone trying where they've failed before: after all, they know it's no use.

Immoderate

These guys will cross every line you've ever drawn. They'll betray allies, fight dirty, lie, cheat, steal, kill, all of it.

Rich

This crew didn't earn their strength like you. They bought themselves tools and influence. They took shortcuts and their power is consequently brittle. Tools fail, followers defect.

Alternative

These doppelgangers just did small things different. Maybe they're aligned with an opposing faction, maybe they're from a different homeland. But they want the same things as you and operate similarly.

RPG Linguistics

In many editions of D&D, everyone learns a handful of languages at character creation, and then either never thinks about them again or never has the one they need. I propose an alternative, with 5e as a base.

Characters learn fewer languages.

Everyone knows common. There are no racial languages. Only learn a second language if your background calls for it.

Each language satisfies a narrative function.

Common—common is great. Everyone knows common unless there's something strange happening. Don't think about it.

Ancient—dead civilizations speak and write this language. You might know it if you're a treasure hunter, a time traveler, or a classics major.

Ceremonial—this language is a secret for religious or magical reasons, like Druidic or Hebrew. From a world-building perspective, I'd limit myself to one of these per setting, even if that requires some contortion.

Underworld—this language is a secret for reasons of discretion, like Polari or rhyming slang. Dialects change, but learning on-the-fly is built-in to its rhythms. Written, this is the ability to read hobo signs, notice graffiti, etc.

Technical—this is how experts in a field talk about stuff. Even if you're a published author on the topic of applied divination, you can still muddle through someone's notes on optimal well-drilling or drop some convincing techno-babble.

Otherworldly—aliens and old Gods speak this. (Angels, devils, and other outsiders speak common: they want you to understand them.)

Foreign—someday you will find yourself somewhere where they only speak French. Until then, it's a social signifier of a misspent education, a party trick or a bit of flavor.

A Pair of Failed Careers

Into the Odd is my one-shot game of choice. It has just enough of everything. Just enough mechanics, just enough character, just enough world. I understand where Electric Bastionland is coming from, but it's always seemed like the "just a little too much" counterpart for my purposes. That said, the Failed Careers are elegant little thought-forms, similar to Troika! backgrounds, and I had some fun putting these two on paper. With some quick wombo.art (I'm a little meh on it, but it works), they're ready to go.

Courier

You took things places.

Sample Names
Major, Fries, Tate, Owney

You Get
Uniform, Letter Opener (d6, concealable)

Cash	What stopped you?
£1	Snow. Take a heavy down coat (Armor 1, Bulky).
£2	Rain. Take rubberized boots.
£3	Heat. Take a light metal water bottle.
£4	Gloom of night. Take a lantern.
£5	Forgery. Take a jeweler's loupe.
£6	Honor. Take one letter, unopened, undeliverable.

HP	What were you good at?
1	First-class mail. Test Wil to turn dogs.
2	Special deliveries. Take one bicycle. You can outrace anyone on a paved street, but cannot stop or notice anything along the way.
3	Packaging. Never break a fragile object.
4	Routing. For any address know the name of someone who has lived there or lives there now.
5	Labelling. Immediately and accurately know the weight of anything held in one hand.
6	Paper routes. Always know this morning's headlines.

If you are the youngest player,
the whole group is 10k in debt to the vagrant's HOA. You technically can't sleep on the streets.

Burnboss

If you don't set small fires, the big ones will rage uncontrollably.

Sample Names
Morgan, Smollex, Danver, Kangg

You Get
Shovel, Hatchet (d6)

Cash	How'd you get out of the game?
£1	Deregulation. Take a directory of your competitors (d6).
£2	Technical arson. Take an expired license.
£3	Backdraft. Take no hair.
£4	Antidrought. It is still raining when the game starts, wherever you were licensed.
£5	Aggressive noncompete. Other crews will not talk to you.
£6	Burncrew mutiny. Take one gilt-edged page from a holy book, a hole burned thru the center.

HP	How did you start fires?
1	Flamethrower. Take one (d6, Blast, Bulky).
2	Ritual duel. Take one flint sword (d8, sparks against steel).
3	Pyrokinesis. Test Wil to ignite any dry material, once/day.
4	Advanced optics. Take one magnifying glass.
5	Alchemy. Take three firebombs (d6 Damage each round until extinguished).
6	The old-fashioned way. Take one fancy lighter. You can do tricks with it.

If you are the youngest player,
the whole group is 10k in debt to Hurly & Sons Insurance Insurance Insurance. Collateral damage incurred is not added to your debt.

36 ABY: The End of History

(Spoilers below for various Star Wars properties.)

With the final death of Emperor Palpatine, history was ended. The Skywalker destiny doubly or triply fulfilled, the ultimate evil laid to rest, balance restored to the force. There are no more blockbuster movies to be made in the world of 36 ABY,¹ but that doesn't mean there aren't stories to be told. Smaller in scope and more nuanced in morals, I think these stories may be ideal for a role-playing game.

If the prequel trilogy took the fall of Rome as its model, 36 ABY takes the collapse of the Soviet Union. Repeated cataclysm and rapid retreat have left fractured militaries in the hands of new nationalist and nativist factions. A hundred empires and a hundred republics blossom in miniature.

What about the New Republic?

The destruction of Hosnian Prime by Starkiller base was a major blow to the New Republic, but not fatal. As the capitol was hosted by new planets from cycle to cycle, the infrastructure to continue existed already. With the New Republic military deprecated in favor of planetary defence forces, the New Republic's might was still strong. Emergency elections were held, business continued.

Well, in theory. The New Republic lives on, but more cautious and milquetoast than ever. Skittish, corrupt, gridlocked, they cannot command the might they have, nor direct it if they could. For now, it adequately prevents its members from open warfare, and freed from the existential threat of the First Order, could be open to a more involved role on the galactic stage.

What about the Empire?

The Empire is dead, but it remains everywhere. When news of the Sith defeat at Exegol spread, a common form of ultimatum was issued by occupied planets to their attendant star destroyers:

No resupply is coming. There is no base you can return to. Become citizens of our nations and serve in our militaries and you can build a new life here. Or else we will chase you off, and who else will take in imperial deserters?

It was a good offer, and many bands took it. Some refused, and ultimately lost these reverse sieges. Others fled and live as interstellar pirates and mercenaries.

Of course not all planets chafed under the empire, and these tended to organize splinter empires around charismatic moffs and generals. They now seek the legitimacy and acceptance that they once enjoyed.

What about the super weapons?

No remaining single faction has the resources to develop a superweapon. No current coalition of forces trusts each other enough to collaborate. More importantly, no superweapon could be developed unopposed: without a unified galactic body, reactions cannot be controlled. That said, there might still be some ancient super weapons around, waiting to shatter this precarious peace.

What about the Hutts?

Undisputed rulers of Hutt space since before the Old Republic, the stability of the Hutts has made them unwillingly legitimate. Hutt space is a rare known quantity, the most desirable place to be doing business. And the demands of this have led to an expansion of their role, and a creeping bureaucracy supporting them. All kinds of ne'er-do-wells find a second career as enforcers, clerks, and lobbyists in the burgeoning Hutt council.

What about the force?

Balance restored to the force, the Jedi order is no more. And yet, there is always a new generation of force-sensitive children and always a need for them to be trained. With no central schools, itinerant masters travel the galaxy, giving lessons and helping out where they can. Several distinct traditions of practice have emerged.

Skywalker

Heroes. Focus on luck, prophecy, visions, destiny. Hard to predict. Ask a Skywalker to protect a village or stop a villainous plot. Most common in the outer rim.

Huyang

Cops and judges. Focus on lightsabers, protocol, structure, restraint. Get along well with droids. Usually raised from a young age. Ask a huyang to mediate a dispute or catch a thief. Most common in the core worlds.

Bendu

Zen monks. Focus on inner peace, sensitivity, nature. Impossible to sneak up on. Ask a Bendu when to plant crops or how to communicate with a creature. Most common in the unknown regions.

Shelish

Witches. Focus on power, nuance, medicine, secrecy. Always women, always at the edge of society. Ask a Shelish for a potion or a curse. Rare, but evenly distributed.

What about the dark side of the force?

The Sith, freed from the rule of two, proliferate, climbing military and political ladders across the galaxy but stymied by their low ceilings. Current threats from the dark side include:

Darth Heret

Once a Skywalker-tradition Jedi, Darth Heret has been corrupted by a Sith Holocron, convinced that he is destined to be a great reformer and bringer of peace. Currently, he leads a widely-feared band of pirates, and fails to see how this is not an obvious stepping stone towards that. An alarming number of his devotees are also strong in the force, and he takes it upon himself to instruct them.

Lady Trace

A youth, perhaps 13 years of age. An orphan of Hosnian Prime with no family to return to. It is said that she can hear the voices of demons in the force, and she keeps no other company.

The Grand Inquisitor

The Empire's special projects division has always had some oddballs. Going rogue after the fall of the Sith, they believe they have grown themselves a new god from the (incomplete) records of the Inquisitorius. This new god will guide them, surely! But their god is a blank slate, an emotionless machine. They weep, for they have power and know not what to do with it. They seek meaningless conflict, hoping this will spark some desire or purpose in the Grand Inquisitor, the vessel of all their dreams.

Perhaps one day, this faction will create Am and Karre.

What else is going on?

• Improved nav computers are opening up the unknown regions. First to explorers, then to traders, and ultimately to colonists, as these advancements in tech filter down to more people.
• With so much turmoil, many long-standing grudges created by cycles of occupation and relocation are coming to a head, both at small scales and planetary. When a population is freed from servitude in the spice mines, where are they to go when other farmers have been working their ancestral fields for generations? What of the Alderaanians and the Hosnians? Who gets to prosecute the perpetrators of multiple war crimes? What if their research was really interesting and useful?
• Darth Heret's underlings all have lightsabers. Where are they getting them?

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1 At time of writing there is no canon media of any kind set in 36 ABY or a later year, and the only things that happen at all in the future are jokey framing devices or quasi-canon. Given the sheer quantity and scope of Star Wars material, this continues to astound me.^back

Cathedrals

Construction on York Minster Cathedral was finished in 1472, having begun c. 1220. For two-hundred and fifty years, the unfinished cathedral was a part of the city, an ongoing project longer than the life of any one person. In that time it brought in specialists and materials from far away and gave work and benefit to the locals.¹

Toolbox

This toolbox is intended to quickly sketch a settlement defined by its largest ongoing project. The locals are building something massive, and this is hopefully a shortcut to intrigue and conflict.

What is it? (1d20)

1. Amphitheater
2. Bridge
3. Canal
4. Casino
5. Cathedral
6. Fortress
7. Greenhouse
8. Lighthouse (warning, beacon)
9. Necropolis
10. Observatory (telescope, supercollider, lookout)
11. Palace
12. Power Plant (wind, solar, nuclear, hydro)
13. Pyramid
14. Reservoir
15. Roads
16. Ship
17. Stepwell
18. Tower
19. Tunnel
20. Wall

How far along is it?² (1d12)

1. Design
2. Surveying
3. Permitting
4. Site Clearance
5. Excavation
6. Foundations
7. Rough Structure
8. Exteriors
9. Interiors
10. Finishing
11. Cleanup
12. Warranty Period

What's the hold-up? (1d10)

1. Beasts
2. Beaurocrats
3. Errors
4. Funding
5. Holidays
6. Ill Omen
7. Labor (shortage, strike)
8. Materials (quality, supply)
9. Plague
10. Vandals

Why build this? (1d8)

1. Convenience
2. Defense
3. Memorial
4. Religion
5. Research
6. Spite
7. Tourism
8. Vanity

Who's building it? (1d6)

1. Condemned Criminals
2. Locals
3. Military
4. Refugees
5. Slaves
6. Sleepwalkers

Secret (1d4)

1. Corruption in sourcing or labor
2. Design is of occult significance
3. Roll a second, hidden purpose (1d8)
4. None

Thanks to David Macaulay.

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1 I assume some of this, but it seems reasonable.^back

2 Following the example of a cathedral, the barest functional parts may or may not be completed already.^back

Quest World™ and The Uncanny Hinterlands

Quest World™ is my entry into The Great Troika! Pocket Sphere Jam. For the unfamiliar, a pocketmod is a small booklet folded from a single sheet of paper, and a “sphere” is Troika’s rough equivalent of a plane or a planet. Quest World™ is one part of a stew I’ve had simmering for the better part of a year now, which I call the Uncanny Hinterlands.

The Uncanny Hinterlands

The first ingredient in the Uncanny Hinterlands was the Mothership adventure Hideo’s World, in which the characters enter a decaying virtual world in the mind of a genius game designer (a “slickworld”). It plays with the narrative frames in some interesting ways, for example you can order a coke in the virtual world, delivered to your physical location by drone. It’s also an “excuse” to explore a different set of tropes and aesthetics while keeping it grounded in a larger setting.

The second ingredient was Jared Sinclair’s Prismot zine, which expanded the idea from “I should run Hideo’s World” to “I should convert Hideo’s World to Troika!” I liked the idea of a world like Hideo’s, but that you could also travel to physically,¹ a digitally constructed artificial realm of adventure.

That was on 11 March 2020, and on 16 March 2020 I started working from home in relative isolation. Eventually, I picked up RuneScape (OSRS) again, and that influence created the Uncanny Hinterlands, a larger, stranger setting.² With my notes becoming too unwieldy to usefully think about, the game jam gave me the opportunity to ladle out a manageable portion to share with others.

Quest World™

Quest World™ is most heavily inspired by MMORPGs. I’m fascinated by the morality of RuneScape, where advancement may force you to compromise your morals. In general, there are many one-off or narrow solutions that could not reasonably exist in a normal TTRPG. Debates about violence in D&D and coverage of The Last of Us 2 put the term “ludonarrative dissonance” in my head, which seemed like a natural exploration inside these more complicated narrative frames.

I haven't got to play it yet, but I also wanted to shout out PAGAN: Autogeny as apparently having a similar concept (abandoned MMORPG), although I'm sure there are others.

Kill Arena

The next area of the uncanny hinterlands that I’d like to explore is the Kill Arena: a sphere inspired by classic FPS games. I especially always loved the way that physics glitches become core parts of gameplay or entirely different ways to play. I don’t know if this exploration will be coherent enough to share, but I offer it as an example of other spheres in the Uncanny Hinterlands.

Making the Pocketmod

I composed my first pocketmod at A7 page size, because an A4 pocketmod printed on US letter paper will still fold correctly (the reverse is not true). This time, I did not remember that and started writing at ⅛-size US letter paper. Fortunately, I gave myself 0.25” margins, so I was able to adjust the margins and paper size at the same time for the A4 version.

I used pdfjam for the final layout, which was pretty straightforward. My distribution (Mageia) provides it in the package “texlive-collection-basic” and the command to assemble the US letter-size pocketmod was:
$ pdfjam --angle 180 -o /dev/stdout qw.pdf '1,8,7,6' | pdfjam --nup 4x2 --landscape --paper letter -o qw-us.pdf qw.pdf '2-5' /dev/stdin
where “qw.pdf” is the 8-page ⅛-size US letter layout and “qw-us.pdf” is the pocketmod output. Similarly, the A4 pocketmod was assembled by:
$ pdfjam --angle 180 -o /dev/stdout qw-a7.pdf '1,8,7,6' | pdfjam --nup 4x2 --landscape --paper a4paper -o qw-a4.pdf qw-a7.pdf '2-5' /dev/stdin

I used LibreOffice for writing and layout, GIMP for image editing, Kolourpaint for rough image sizing and cropping, and Pixel Studio on an Android tablet for original art.

I made liberal use of the free resources on itch.io. I used the fonts Nicer Nightie, Silver, and Fool, and I used free 1-bit fantasy sprites and pixel portraits.

I also used several sets of glitch brushes and textures by dataerase. It’s a bit of a hack, but this is how I made them work in GIMP:

1. Copy the .abr files to ~/.config/GIMP/2.10/brushes (you can leave them in subdirectories).
2. Copy the folders of patterns from the CSP brushes to ~/.config/GIMP/2.10/patterns (you can leave them in subdirectories and also leave them as pngs).
3. Using the clone tool, select "Pattern" as the source and select one of the glitch patterns. You can use any brush, but the new brushes will be square.

These aren’t true brushes: the pattern doesn’t scale with brush size, nor does the current foreground color matter, but for painting on pixel-scales in black & white, it worked very well.

Into the Uncanny Hinterlands

There is a lot more in the uncanny hinterlands, so I’m collecting some of the other ideas that inform them here for reference.

• Early in quarantine, I finished digitizing all my old VHS tapes, where I rediscovered the Beyond the Mind’s Eye series of videos.
• This collection of early CGI.
• Glitch TV Bot and Crooked Cosmos
• The Art of PNG Glitch
• The Misremembered Men from I Don’t Remember That Move were one of the larger “game” references for the glitch aesthetic. I like the way it creates “digital” problems in an analog game.
• MissingNo. and other glitch pokemon strongly inform the glitch aesthetic, but I also appreciate the simple weirdness of Porygon, a pokemon created in “compressed” form.
• Mojibake
• Parsely, which I found through David Schirduan’s review. I haven’t played it yet, because I’m bad at pitching ideas to people and this is a tough one. But I’m genuinely excited by the ideas.
• I am interested in the way that MMORPGs handle glitches and hacks, both officially and communally, and in the long term effects of those glitches on the games. I remember the Corrupted Blood Incident and the Partyhat Duplication Glitch especially.

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1 While some inhabitants of the Uncanny Hinterlands are there via neural uplink, some are using PC terminals, astral projection, or spaceships. Some could be considered “native,” even. ^back

2 I still have not lost track of my other OSRS-inspired projects, as they are tending in a different direction. ^back

Crisis on Christmas: Coin Hunt

I’ve enjoyed hearing how people have made use of Crisis on Christmas Prime in the last few weeks. I hope that by providing a brief sample adventure it might be more approachable. I rolled “Rag-tag adventurers are buying up candy!” on the crisis table, so that was the starting point.

Hook

Ol’ Gran Yule has realized that Santa’s bag is a few thousand chocolate coins short. Can you find some before he leaves tomorrow?

Investigation

Loosely, here are some places around town that players might think to look for coins:

• Pharmacy: none stocked, busy.
• Rabbi: has a few hundred, will play dreidel for them if you have the time.
• Candy store: none stocked, bored.
• Chocolate factory: out of coins, suspicious of anyone who might be an inspector.

All the coins were bought up by three people. Clues given by people who are out of coins:

• They were all bundled up like they’d trekked in from out of town.
• They were dirty like they’d been digging or playing in dirt.
• They paid with palm-sized coins.

These clues should point to the giant-barrows outside town.

Other information available:

• There were three of them, one blind. They talked about a fourth person too.
• They were all squinting and smelled burnt.
• You shoulda seen the shooting star last week!

Getting to the Barrows

This is an opportunity to check for random encounters, and to make sure everyone has taken precautions against the cold. Checking for encounters here reinforces the sense of distance between the town and the mountain, but I didn’t come up with a good table. Aeval and Valmr are out finding supplies and leads, so they might be encountered on the road.

The Giant Barrows

  /--B-D
A<
  \--C-E

A - Entrance

Hewn into mountain base. Checking under snow on wall reveals a carving of a balance with a cross-legged figure on each side.

⚖

B - Cold Chamber

Drafty, tall, light filters in through natural chimney above. Snow and ice on the ground, large boulder in middle of room next to a chain extending from the floor to a massive wooden beam protruding from the wall on the right and leaning downwards. (Strength to move boulder.)

C - Warm Chamber

Mirror image of B, except with light filtering up from a large hole in the ground and no opening in the ceiling. (Chain and beam are too high up to be visible.)

D - The Last Giant

Jorg is still meditating very hard and will attempt to ignore all disturbances (damage will rouse him). Some large coins and religious texts free for taking.

E - Order of the Blue Lantern

A band of adventurers between expeditions recuperate in the cave with their new pet, Shiny. Shyren is here, lounging and playing with it, and Istwell is meditating. Remaining coins needed are here. They know they are the mirror of whatever group of misfits finds them, and do not trust them. They would like Shiny to go to a good home, but currently could not lose it if they wanted to. Will not give up the coins until a suitable replacement foodstuff is discovered. All have stats as Knight of the Road. (Names are from The Black Hack.)

Shyren (Thief)

Despite the fur trim, her winter clothes are wildly impractical. Likes Shiny most of all the order, and is trying to teach it tricks.

Istwell (Cleric)

Dressed in Saffron robes, meditating. Can be distracted by the religious texts in D or meeting Jorg. Believes that Shiny cannot see him because he is free from the cycle of birth and redeath, but in fact it is because he is blind (and sees only with his second sight). Knows Coal Resolve, Peace, and Zed.

Aeval (Wizard)

Jumpy, tattooed, elfin. Knows Open, Thunder, and Undo.

Valmr (Fighter)

Bored, aggressive, bearded. Speaks with a heavy, archaic accent.

Shiny

A blinding pinprick of light dropped by the comet last week (Jeffry’s Comet). Its nature is unclear this young, but it could grow up to be another comet, a star, a galaxy, a nebula, or a whole new sphere. Shiny wants food and company. It has only a loose understanding of the people around it, but does try not to hurt anyone.

Food

Shiny will consume any metal or alloy with a melting point below 700°C and be frustrated by metals it is not yet hot enough to consume.

Company

Shiny can only see people whose eyes its light can reach, and will try not to be left alone.

The Barrows’ Gimmick

The construction is a giant scale, currently weighted down by the boulder in B. If the boulder is moved, D is uncovered, and if a weight is added to the other side (in the warm room), E can be covered. It can be used as a trebuchet.

Ancilimander of Argon

A mad marble astrologer in an observatory atop the mountain (“So close to the North Pole, the stars barely wobble at all!”). Everyone in town knows he’s there, but the Blue Lantern and Jorg do not. He can provide the following information:

• Shiny can likely find its way home if you can get it up past the atmosphere.
• Melting points of any metal.
• Jeffry’s Comet passed last week, has been erratic since.

Treasure

Ideally, Gran Yule would have a unique gift for each of the characters. Recommend using Oddmas Oddities from The Hunt for the Great Goose.

Containment Spheres

Until tomorow (22 Dec 2020), the Mothership Discord server is hosting the 20x20 Jam. Make a piece of Mothership content (any sort) in Playscii in 20x20 format, and upload a png to the server. Winner gets a shirt?

I entered this thing, “Containment Sphere 5”.

20x20 is just too dense to be easily digestible, so I thought I’d expand some of it here (the submission itself is still only the image).

• The map is the net of a regular icosahedron (d20). The repeated letters at the top and bottom are the same room with connecting hallways doubled. The map wraps at the edges of the screen.
• There is an energy management game implied: it costs 2◆ to pressurize a room and 1◆ to open a door (hallways all have heavy blast doors and fail closed).
• Additionally some amount of energy is taken each “turn” by “anomaly containment”. The intent is that the +- value is a projection of the next turn’s consumption. (There is already some risk in the present configuration.)
• What happens when there isn’t enough power for anomaly containment will depend on the anomaly, but it might be related to VENT.
• WOOD is intentionally weird and vague. It’s a leftover from the derelict generation tables in Dead Planet.
• I opted not to use any of the available CRT effects. Instead, I drew on my real-life experiences designing operator interfaces for modern LCD monitors using tools from 10-20 years earlier that only go up to 640x480 anyway. The CRT effects all look “fake” to me, but the weird muted colors look very real.
• Possible missions on the containment sphere might include evacuation, recovery, restoration of power generation, or anything anomaly-related.

I kept thinking about usability, so after I entered I kept tweaking it. I re-keyed all the rooms so that rooms on opposite corners are in the same row as each other in the key. This might be useful if I made an interactive version, because it would aid memory if you rotated the map.

Finally, I wanted a way to communicate the “wrapping” nature of the map. Without making it interactive, animating it seemed to be the way to go. Ultimately I think it hurt the usability too much, but it was an interesting experiment.

Anyway, Playscii is fun and if you’ve got a bit of time today, you can still get your entry into the game jam. Good luck!

Two Flavors of Horror and Six Anomalous Media

Flavors of Horror

I’ve been thinking recently about why the early episodes of the Magnus Archives hooked me so immediately. In addition to solid storytelling, I think it’s down to the blending of two “flavors” of horror that I’m a bit of a sucker for, which I’m calling¹ skeptical horror and conspiratorial horror. Both of these also work well with the conceits that some information has been withheld or redacted and that ominous but vague warnings have been issued, but I don’t think those factors rise to the level of their own “flavors”.

Skeptical Horror

In skeptical horror, the supernatural elements may or may not be real at all, but people react to them as though they are, and that creates the horror. Often the audience will know if the elements are “real” or not but it hardly matters. It is not necessarily a one-to-one mapping onto “the real monster is man”, but the overlap definitely exists.

Examples include The Wicker Man (1973) and The Lovecraft Investigations.

Conspiratorial Horror

In conspiratorial horror, the supernatural elements are known to the characters and believed to be controllable. The illusion of control can only be maintained for so long, or the audience will lose interest. This lends itself well to tragedies.

Examples include Oculus and Cabin in the Woods. I would also consider SCP to be an example that’s too “static”: I like reading individual entries, but eventually I want more to happen (although it’s been quite a while since I actually engaged with it).

Anomalous Media

With this in mind, I read Dan’s Anomalous Media, and then Semiurge’s Additional Anomalous Media, and I thought to myself, “sure, why not?”

I. The Adiloim Broadcasts

First heard at sunset on September 30th, 1925 in Stuart Australia (now Alice Springs), and heard every two years thereafter, seven days after the Autumnal equinox, broadcasting on AM 950 kHz. For five minutes an androgynous voice repeats a string of seven syllables, then follows 2-3 minutes of glosslalia or gibberish, and finally the word “adiloim” is read by the first voice. The syllables are from no single known language and are different each time. The gibberish is always spoken by 5-7 different speakers, overlapping. Recordings exist of the broadcast from 1957 onwards, excepting 1973.

II. Mandarin is Easy!

A set of six language-learning casette tapes for the Mandarin language. On side A of each casette a woman’s voice reads aloud phrases in English and Mandarin, with pauses for the student to repeat. Side B of each casette consists of “quizzes”: a phrase from any of the previous casettes in either language, a pause for the student to translate, and then the answer. Casettes 1-4 cover everyday pleasantries, food and eating, navigation, and basic technical and scientific terms. Casette 5A covers religious and spiritual aphorisms. The quiz of 5B includes calmly-read pleas to spare the student’s life, interspersed throughout phrases from previous casettes. Casette 6 is lost, but the accompanying booklet indicates it would have covered common allusions to classical literature.

III. 1972 All-Star Series (Full Set)

A full set of heavily-damaged Topps-brand baseball cards from the 1972 All-Star Game. Regardless of the card, each one pictures Rookie of the Year Carlton Fisk in a different uniform and pose. All the eyes have been drawn over with blue ballpoint pen.

IV. Tim’s Root Floppy

A 3.5" floppy disk that appears blank and copy-protected when inserted in a running machine. When booted from, it exactly and correctly diagnoses any hardware problems in a curses-style display or printout, regardless of hardware. Any data on the machine will be lost. The label reads “Tim’s Floppy — DO NOT FEED”.

V. World of The Lost

An early MMORPG, discs can still be found at yard sales, online auctions, etc. The servers are long since offline, but a software patch on several onion sites will allow the game to apparently run without an internet connection (despite its small size). When running in this way there are no other players, and NPCs speak only in rhyming couplets. Most “quests” are inaccessible (due to dialog limitations), but a new quest called “Opening the Way” is available.

VI. Vision of Hades

Oil on canvas, Unknown Belgian, c.1620

A martian landscape, exactly as captured by the curiosity rover’s famous “selfie”, complete with lens distortions. Where the rover would be, a nude man kneels, weeping into his hands.

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1 I’m sure “horror theorists” exist and have better names and definitions, and I apologize.^back

Random Events

A random event or “random” is an idea I’m borrowing from the MMORPG RuneScape, although it may exist in other contexts or games also. I thought I’d see what I can learn from the design of RuneScape generally, and this is where I’m starting.

What is a Random Event?

RuneScape is an MMO with heavy repetitive elements. Where there’s repetition, there’s the opportunity to automate, so pretty quickly it was overrun with bot accounts farming resources, getting in the way of other players, and distorting the economy. Random events were an early anti-bot measure: whenever you’re doing stuff, there’s a chance that something strange happens. For example, if you’re chopping down a tree, maybe that tree is actually an ent right now, and if you keep chopping it will break your axe.

Maybe you were just running around, and a talking cat (“Evil Bob”) imprisoned you and asked you to play a minigame for your freedom. Sometimes a drunk dwarf appears and wants to share his kebab with you, but if you ignore him too long he’ll start attacking. You might find when you’re burying bones, that you disturb some existing grave site, and a shade attacks you.

These events were removed from the game as more effective anti-bot strategies were devised. However, a fork of RuneScape (Old School RuneScape, or OSRS) only includes updates that are voted on by the community, and after some revision, random events are still a significant part of that game.

My working definition of a random event will be: “a specific, rare, and unforeseen event that has some chance of resulting from a routine activity, and which demands immediate attention.”

“A specific…”
Random events are pre-defined. This could be considered a limitation of a computer game because it’s common enough to improvise exact rare circumstances in tabletop games. But the limited stable of random events means they have a different feel.

“rare and unforeseen event…”
A random event has to be rare enough that you can’t “farm” it or plan around it. Sometimes you can get a message in a bottle while fishing, but you don’t go fishing for one. Explosive gas might damage your pickaxe, but not often enough to bring two pickaxes.

“…that has some chance…”
My intuition is that they should not be more common than critical hits/failures (5%), and should probably be less common.

“…of resulting from a routine activity…”
In their current state in OSRS, most random events are truly random. They just happen whenever or wherever you are. This is something that computers can do great, but in a tabletop game, it would be tedious to check every combat round (say), for a range of infinitesimal chances that something utterly unexpected might happen. So we will use the older model of random event that happens when you are doing some specific, usually repetitive task.

“…and which demands immediate attention.”
A rainbow is not a random event. If we are going to go through all the work of checking for randoms, we’re going to make them impactful. In RuneScape, this is either because the event will cause you harm, grant you a reward, or literally remove you from your previous situation.

Random Events in D&D

In many ways, random events already exist in D&D. Consider random encounters while travelling: they may not strictly meet the definition above, but they come close. Critical successes might also come close, especially with some sets of house rules, but again fall a little short.

I think the closest thing to them in D&D “canon” as I know it is probably the divine interventions in Deities & Demigods. If you’ve never had the pleasure, Deities & Demigods is a mess of a book. Its purpose is unclear, it has questionable ties to its source material, and the information in it isn’t organized in any meaningful or useful way. Maybe it says something though, that I got rid of my AD&D core books, but never parted with this one.

These are the most promising random events I could find in it:

Action	Chance	Result	God (page)
A believer is reanimated.	2% per level of deceased	Arawn appears and fights against the reanimation (75%) or offers a substitute dead person (25%).	Arawn (p. 26)
An original composition is sung during battle.1	5%	The singer is granted a bonus level for the duration of combat.	Brigit (p. 27)
A believer flees from battle.	0.5%	The deserter is struck dead.	Morrigan (p. 29)
An original composition is performed/spread by others.	1%/5%	Great wealth is given to the creator by the lord of the hold, in the form of gold.	Oghma (p. 29)
An evil act affects more than 500 people.	0.05%	The evildoer is given a disease-causing gift.	Lu Yueh (p. 40)
Hastur’s name is spoken.	25%	Hastur sends 1-4 byakhee to slay the speaker.	Hastur (p. 45)
A tomb with Anubis’ image/consecration is robbed.	5%/10%	Anubis appears to kill the robbers.	Anubis (p. 50)
A cat is killed.	0.1%	Bast either kills the slayer or demands half of their remaining life in devotion.	Bast (p. 50)
A character takes a great risk.	5%	The gambler is gifted a luck stone.	Bes (p. 51)
A good person seeks righteous revenge.	5%	All of the avenger’s ability scores are increased to 19 until the deed is done.	Horus (p. 51-52)
Someone creates a new magic spell or item.	5%	Isis gives the creator a charm to resist the effects of one spell.	Isis (p. 52)
Someone/a worshipper/a cleric creates a device that is highly useful.	5%/10%/15%	Ptah gives the creator a Thet, an amulet that either allows you to become ethereal once/week, or acts as a one-way anti-magic shell.	Ptah (p. 53)
Dryads are in danger/Men are attacking the forest.	1%/5%	Mielikki appears to aid her dryads/attack the woodcutters.	Mielikki (p. 60)
A believer is reanimated.	1%	Tuoni comes to reclaim the resurrected soul.	Tuoni (p. 61)
Someone accomplishes a particularly difficult task.	5%	Epimetheus gives the person a ball of magic clay that can form itself into any 4th-level creature. The creature then fights the person (60%) or serves loyally until death (40%).	Epimetheus (p. 68)
Hermetic arbiters accept a bribe or graft.	15%	Hermes punishes the corrupt arbiter.	Hermes (p. 71)
A lawful-aligned person breaks an oath.	1% per level of oathbreaker	Varuna causes them to be punished.	Varuna (p. 79)
A being takes an unusual and great risk (in combat).	2%	The gambler makes all their saves and attack rolls for the combat.	Kishijoten (p. 82-83)
Beings that are neither lawful nor chaotic dig deeper than 100 ft.	5%	Darnizhaan attacks the diggers.	Darnizhaan (p. 88)

New Random Events

The interventions in Deities & Demigods are interesting, but mostly still fall short of our definition. For example, many of the activities are not “routine”, and many of the effects are still left up to the GM. So if we want to make our own randoms, let’s start with “routine” activities in D&D (assuming 5e). Skill checks come to mind first,² so for each skill, we’ll define one event that could happen whenever that skill is tested.

Acrobatics
Now you’ve done it. Whether through quick motion or tense concentration, you’ve slipped into the plane of shadow. You can exit anywhere you like, but the further you go the less accurate your exit will be.

Animal Handling
The king of the cockroaches is impressed by your empathic abilities. Would you be so gracious as to carry him and his retinue back to the outdoors or into the nearest structure? For this noble service, the king will grant you a knighthood! Knighthoods from the king of the cockroaches are not worth much, but are technically valid. Should you kill the king of the cockroaches, insectoid assassins will be sent for 1d6 nights following, but the new king does not bear a grudge.

Arcana
That thing you never quite figured out, you know the one? It just clicked. If you can find writing tools and drop everything you’re doing for the next 10 minutes, you can create a spell scroll of a random spell.

Athletics
Koroibos appears in a flash of lightning! Nude, oiled, muscular, he challenges you to a footrace. If you accept he insists on racing right now on the nearest suitable course (a hallway, for example). He wins and loses graciously, but gives one who defeats him an olive branch. When broken, the branch summons him to assist in one task (during which he automatically succeeds on any Athletics checks). In any case, he leaves in a similar flash of lightning.

Deception
I knew it, and this confirms it! Thou art that same villain! I demand satisfaction immediately! Whatever deception was just practiced, the duelist now believes that the character is responsible for the death of one of his twins, and fights to the death.

History
Whatever knowledge you called forth was an affront to the dead. They demand you retract any statement made, or fight to the death (again). If beaten, the answer to one historical question can be extracted. Nobody else can see the shade in question.

Insight
You understand the true nature of all things, and it is as though space and time stand still. Except for you, and if this was an opposed roll, the opposition. You both have enough time to speak a few sentences or take some decisive action (one “combat” round) before the rest of the world catches up, and after, nobody else will know.

Intimidation
You’ve caught the eye of Maxavogg, a lesser devil. He thinks you’ve got potential, kid. But you gotta learn the basics, review the fundamentals. Tell you what, he’s got a free seminar on the subject, take this card and burn it if you want to try. The seminar is 24 hours, but you’ll come back proficient in Intimidation if you weren’t already, and you’ll be known to a handful of [falling] stars in the infernal org chart. He won’t leave until he’s shaken everyone’s hand. (Thanks, Ancalgon_TB.)

Investigation
You find a tiny blue cog. These things just turn up sometimes and nobody knows why. Still, rich people collect them.

Medicine
Look, Ariel the djinn really meant to study for their mortal anatomy class, but they just didn’t get to it. If you could answer a few questions for them, they could definitely do quick favor for you, say a quick spell or sow some confusion somewhere. The questions are bizarre, but simple enough to answer. If Ariel is ignored, they might steal something shiny before disappearing.

Nature
Isn’t there a children’s rhyme about that lichen over there? “Purple fur and orange leaves / Death the drinker’s soul recieves” Maybe that wasn’t it, but you certainly recognize it. Given 10 minutes’ uninterrupted work, you could probably get a useful dose of poison from it.

Perception
One of the fair folk is hiding a cache. If you stand perfectly still and silent for the next 10 minutes, they won’t notice you’ve seen them and you can retrieve it after they leave.

Performance
A talent agent was in the audience (in the shadows if necessary), and would like to offer you a considerable advance. If you accept, 1d4 fiendish lawyers attack the next time you perform the same song again.

Persuasion
An impressionable dandy is not only persuaded by your arguments, but by your very lifestyle! They loyally follow you around, loudly agreeing and generally being obnoxious. If any sort of combat breaks out they throw one attack at random before fleeing. Left outside of your powerful presence, they quickly grow bored and disappear.

Religion
Clarence, a neophyte angel, needs to help some more good people before he’s allowed into the choir. Will the characters swear they’re really very pure of heart? (Clarence trusts them if they do.) That’s just great, is there anything he can do for them that doesn’t involve direct or indirect harm? Oh, uh, maybe not that big. Huh. Maybe like, he can carry a message or something? When this negotiation is finished, Clarence carries out the task unfailingly, but if no task can be settled on, he’s quite huffy and the character takes disadvantage on their next roll.

Sleight of Hand
No trickery escapes the watchful eye of Constable Dogberry, and that certainly looked like trickery. If you agree to cooperate he’ll issue you a very official looking, if incomprehensible … ticket? Court summons? It’s hard to say. But he’ll be detaining you for the next 10 minutes at least while he writes it up. Put up a fight and well, … Dogberry will probably flee after any amount of damage is dealt.

Stealth
You’re so sneaky! You’re practically invisible! Recall though, that Invisibility has duration of 1 hour. Good luck!

Survival
The hunter has become the hunted! For the next 24 hours, King Herla will hunt the character (sans the entire wild hunt, this is his day off). He can be defeated in single combat, or dissuaded by a boring hunt, but if a quarry evades him for the duration, he gifts them an antler. When broken, the antler summons him to assist in one task (during which he automatically succeeds on any Survival or Nature checks).

Implementation

Tying randoms to skill checks has a lot of potential. Whenever a player goes to roll, they roll a d% alongside, and on a 000, the random event happens. Only rolling when there’s a risk of failure prevents “farming” the events, and rolling multiple dice adds excitement.

Special consideration should be given to group checks. As they exist in D&D now, each member makes the check. To keep randoms rare, they should only be checked on individual tests, or alternative rules for group checks should be used. Similarly, they shouldn’t occur on passive checks.³

Because these events are so rare, they must be applied consistently. Even if the athletics check happens in an anti-magic field, the laws of the universe governing Koroibos’ appearance allow him in and out regardless. Religion checks don’t involve any action on the character’s part, but they can still attract Clarence.

These definitely aren’t ready to use as-is. Adversaries need stats, chases need rules, quizzes need questions, and wishes need limits. In the spirit of the original random events, the difficulty of any challenge should probably be scaled to the character that caused it, so that the event is always “relevant”.

Benefits

The events I sketched out here would fit a high-magic gonzo setting, but I do think some version of the mechanic could be worked into other settings. Even though they occur rarely, they define a setting by the types of unexpected things that occur. And because they have a chance of occurring to anyone, you can lean on them elsewhere in the setting. The cockroach court can be involved in unrelated intrigues, and the impressionable dandy might show up later following some NPC.

Challenges

Random events speak to a kind of story-telling that is rarer in 5e, but more common in OSR games, where the story is largely emergent. Even given some larger plot, a random encounter or roll on a table can recontextualize elements of it unexpectedly. These “story wrenches” still appear in 5e, but the reaction to them is largely negative from what I can tell (consider the wild magic sorcerer, for example).

At the same time, tying them to skill checks is a type of rules maximalism that the OSR does not usually go for. It would be easy to forget to check for these events, especially if there are any quantity of these always-in-play-but-seldom-relevant rules. One possible “clean” solution might be to hook them into a VTT, owning the video-game roots of the idea.

Personally, I think these challenges will stop me from using the idea in its current form, but it was a fun thought experiment, and I think the seed of the idea could be useful.

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1 As written, the player needs to sing an original composition for the whole of combat. Like I said, it’s a weird book.^back

2 Cantrips come to mind second, which could be a different, but promising avenue to explore.^back

3 I’d have to remember to use passive checks more often, to avoid perception having all the fun (or not).^back

The Palace Semi-Infinite

The implicit setting of PALACE RUN. The palace is richly-appointed, labyrinthine, and endless. Some would say “infinite”, but it is surely partly bounded as it has relatively easy access to the outside. The format is from Jack Shear, although I’m sure I haven’t done it justice.

Aesthetics

• Whole rooms of one color or material, tables set for hundreds, imperial staircases, gilt-framed family portraits, exotic tributes and gifts, the slow approach to the throne.
• Scaffolding for renovation and construction; kitchens so large they have their own weather systems; secret doors, passageways, and whole hidden complexes for servants.
• Vast unread libraries, dusty rooms of unknown purpose, sacred crypts and chapels, a lonely child exploring.

Themes

This is an RPG and not a fable. These are ideas to be interrogated, not morals to be enforced.

• “The rich are different from you and me.”
• Hierarchy scales poorly. Bureaucracy fills the gaps.
• Systems are people. Ritual, habit, and operational discipline hold them together.

Adventures

The core of PALACE RUN does provide some rough motivations (“Enrich”, “Entertain”, “Escape”, “Ingratiate”, “Investigate”, and “Overthrow”), but these hooks have a little more meat and should work in a more traditional set-up.

• The Duchess of the North Wing is to be wed this week, but the baker’s union is striking for better working conditions after a recent outbreak of “doughlung.” She will pay handsomely for a cake, but the provider risks being marked a scab.
• The palace is of such scale that at any given time, some portion is on fire. The palace bucket brigade does what it can, but after the fire passes through, there’s always work to be done. An imperial magistrate had to abandon their staff of office while escaping, and will pay handsomely for its return. What else might be found if you can beat the recovery crews?
• The youngest prince of the Southwest Expansion has gone missing! He’s only seven and he was last seen in the Bronze Armory, fiddling with a strange gauntlet.

Designer’s Notes

The first thoughts I had of the Palace Semi-Infinite were merely “what if the adventure site were so fabulously wealthy that it really stopped mattering?” But in the years that it’s stewed since, I think it’s gotten significantly weirder, and hopefully better.

Inspirations

• Blame! by Tsutomu Nihei
• The Gormenghast series by Mervyn Peake
• Buckingham Palace, Iolani Palace, Casa de Pilatos, and others

Notes on Three Systems

I’ve had the pleasure to run three new systems in the last year or so, and I’ve collected some notes here.

Mothership

Mothership is a Science Fiction horror game in the vein of Alien or Event Horizon. The Player's Survival Guide is available from Tuesday Knight Games in print or from DriveThruRPG as a free PDF.

• Character creation is as easy as the character sheet makes it look. It was great for new players and they picked up the percentile system quickly.
• It is much harder to GM than it looks and I don’t think I did it justice. Coming from dungeon crawling games, I made a few mistakes:
  • You can’t foreshadow every encounter. Combat can start before players have a chance to run, without them necessarily doing anything “wrong”.
  • Remember to ask for saves. In a “normal” game, the players find a body and roll for loot. In Mothership they find a body and roll a save.
  • Familiarize yourself with the players’ tools or be ready to improvise. When players scan behind for signs of life, do undead show up? Do androids? Insects? Big insects? In D&D, I’m familiar enough to know what detect magic can and can’t do (or I can look it up for a whole page of detail depending on edition), but Mothership suffers doubly from being a genre I’m less familiar with and from still having such a brief rulebook.
  • The game has no “fallback” mechanic. If an action isn’t covered by stats, saves, or skills, then you have to come up with a consistent resolution on your own, and it’s just light enough that this is likely. If a character hides, you can have a negotiation about it or roll under the enemy’s instinct stat, but it would be nice if the game gave you some guidance.¹
• Make snacks. Figs can be quartered with a honey sauce to make xenomorph eggs, and green jalapeño jelly on chèvre looks “biological”. We had some more mundane snacks also, and for dessert, a chocolate olive oil cake with green matcha frosting.
  
• Impromptu reviews of Oneohtrixpointnever included “I feel like the music is attacking me.” Ambient sounds were more constructive.

The players all said they had fun, so I’d try it again, but it definitely still feels like it’s in beta.

Troika!

Troika! is some weird shit. You can get it from a few places, and there is also a free "demo" PDF on itch.io (it does not include the sample adventure Blancmange & Thistle).

• Character creation is quick, but some players were a little miffed at their backgrounds. (We had to really emphasize that gremlins are purely malicious.)
• Free form skills are a lot of fun, because they encourage players to really try anything and not worry about what they’re “good” at. Skills learned in the first session included jar fighting and high-fiving.
• Free form skills also distract from existing skills that players might not know about. For example, none of the players had etiquette already, so it didn’t occur to them that they could rely on the skill instead of their role-playing when they were stuck. A list of skills can equally serve as a generator for ideas and a limitation.
  
• Blancmange & Thistle is a nice little adventure that showcases Troika! very well, but the direction is loose. My players ascended the hotel and heard some calls to adventure at the rooftop feast, but there’s not a lot of momentum towards any of them.
• Troikan initiative is a lot of fun in practice. For playing online, there is Dave Schiuridan’s tool and a Discord bot, or you can list the initiative tokens in a numbered list and roll an arbitrary die (shrinking it by one side after every roll).
  

D&D 5e

Dungeons & Dragons is a BFD. The fifth edition has a few starting points, but weirdly, it doesn’t look like you can buy the Player’s Handbook as a PDF.

Fifth edition is the easiest game to get a group together for. Because of this exposure, I’m sure I won’t say anything groundbreaking here.

• If you don’t limit character choices before players start making characters then they will use anything they can find, and they can find a lot. Our party has a warforged, a tabaxi, and an artificer, so I'm mostly just letting them tell me how their characters work. The artificer was difficult because it's not always clear to a new player when things you find online are homebrew.
  
• I had been warned about the power level and amount of magic, and while these things are higher than previous editions, I don’t think they’re game-breaking. It just gives everyone lots of different tools to interact with the environment and stronger assurances that they probably won’t die.
• Some things that make sense to me (coming from older editions), and look fine at first glance, do not make sense at all to new players:
  • The step-by-step “building a character” section only works for that character. For more complicated characters, you will need to do the steps out-of-order and jump back and forth and add steps. When you’re finished, only about half the character sheet has been filled-in.
  • A lot of terminology is not explained. An “ability modifier” does not modify your ability score, but a “racial modifier” does, and then can indirectly change your “ability modifier”. When I write sixth edition, I will call the modifier a “bonus”, and scrap the score altogether.
  • Similarly, levels and spell levels have always been confusing. It’s not helped by every class having its own casting rules. I will call them “spell circles” when I am benevolent dictator of the next edition, as in “magic missile is a first-circle spell”.
• The index is awful. In the space that it takes for “temporary hit points” to direct me to “hit points, temporary”, it could have given me the page number. The whole thing is like someone copied the style of an index without understanding it.
• I think the GM tools are probably lacking, but I borrow liberally from everywhere, so it’s hard for me to judge.

There’s a lot of fun to be had with 5e, but I’m never sure how much is just the inherent fun of RPGs. Still, I think it’s got an undeserved reputation in some places.

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1 There is a Warden’s (GM’s) guide planned, in the future. I hold out hope that book does for the GM what the survival guide does for players, but I’m less sure given the Twitter thread. There was definitely room to own that some parts of the rules were just less finished than others, but also everyone says dumb stuff on Twitter.^back