Bloodring

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

Motivation

• Make gladiatorial combat interesting in a game where combat is best avoided.
• Provide an opportunity for things to get worse.
• Create something useful within the given constraints (time, form factor).

Notes

• 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").

Learnings

• 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.

Files

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.

bloodring-A7.odt - for editing

About Zak

Apparently Zak S is an abusive PoS (CW: abuse, sexual violence, violence). Later today he is planning to make a statement, but what could he say?

I feel things, but obviously not nearly to the degree of his actual victims. From my place of relative privilege, what can I do? I'm not a large voice in this community, but I don't think that should excuse me.

What to do with his social media presence?

• Unfollow him on Twitter, Tumblr, G+, and Instagram, even where I am not active on these platforms.
• Unsubscribe from his podcast, and its associated media.
• Stop my Patreon contribution ($1/mo).
• Remove his blog from my sidebar and feed reader.
• Leave his Discord server. I won't be updating the Gygaxian Democracy doc anymore either.
• I don't have any of his porn, but like, I wouldn't watch it? I wouldn't watch James Deen either.

What to do with his stuff?

I've got some things of his:

• Vornheim (print/pdf)
• Maze of the Blue Medusa (print only)
• Death Frost Doom (print/pdf)
• A Red & Pleasant Land (print/pdf)
• Dial H (print)(he drew one page of it)

For now I'll keep them I guess, but I don't think I'll be using them. None of them can't be replaced by other books.

What to do with his associates?

Some of his collaborators and friends are waiting for his statement, although most of them have already distanced themselves. The ones I'm still watching are:

• LotFP. I have always thought of LotFP as an accepting place for minorities that got a bad rap from some corners because of their publicity-stunt GWARness. I believe that many of the other creators at LotFP have already cut ties with Zak, but if Jim continues to work with him, then I am not sure I can continue buying their products.
• China Miéville. China Miéville is one of my favorite authors, and has collaborated with Zak in the past. I'm not sure if they are in frequent enough contact that he would comment unprompted, but I'll certainly think much less of him if I see a future collaboration without some significant statement.

What to do with myself?

I have recommended Zak's blog to people in the past, and given his books as gifts.

• I'm attempting to reach every individual who I've recommended or gifted his stuff to to let them know, so that they can make their own informed decisions.
• On this blog, where I have linked to his blog, I am adding the rel="nofollow" property to those links.
• On posts where I have mentioned his things, I will comment with a link to this post.

I think I might know someone...

When I first moved to Buffalo and didn't know anyone in the area, I ended up staying with my girlfriend's roommate's mother's friends in the area (they were great people). When someone on the OSR discord was asking for a good contacts system I thought I would try my hand at one that reminds me of that connection. I figure this is probably half a solid contacts mechanic, so I hope someone gets use out of it.

Draft One

Roll	Relation (1d20, 1d10)	Ability (1d6)	Strength (1d8)	Weakness (1d12)
1	classmate	fence item	loaded	owe them money
2	roommate	carry stuff	trustful	addiction
3	friend	employ party	respected	snitch
4	fiance(e)	get information	loyal	hunted
5	drinking buddy	get item	manners	dumb
6	ex	teach skill	cautious	cowardly
7	landlord		learned	unwashed
8	tenant		strong	hidden
9	coworker			bad blood
10	boss			cursed
11	brother			mad
12	sister			busy
13	cousin
14	uncle
15	aunt
16	niece
17	nephew
18	mother
19	father
20	grandparent

This is what I made initially, and you can see it with a little more in the Google doc. When you have a chance to meet new contacts, you can roll up a contact at two removes (e.g. 1d20 and 1d10 under "Relation"). If that contact doesn't work out for you, add another d10 to relationship, then another d20, and so on each time you need a new contact before you can naturally make more.

Draft Two

Then I thought I'd try automating this process, because that's trendy these days. This generator owes a lot to Betty Bacontime and Spwack's work, but I had to rework it to make it do what I wanted it to.

DIE TRYING

I have had the pleasure to play in two of Spwack's DIE TRYING playtests. While I'm only talking about the DIE TRYING rules here, these can be difficult to separate from Spwack's play style. I can also only discuss the rules that I've encountered so far.

Click for the DIE TRYING rules. (Image credit: "Bogeyman")

The rules start with 7 pages of character generation. This is garbage unnecessary¹. You need two links to make a character:

• Spwack's Random Character Generator
• Optional: Character Intensifier [non sic]

This is the first great innovation in DIE TRYING: to automate character generation without loss of interest. It's 1% of the effort of rolling an OD&D character with all the nuance of a million pounds of Pathfinder splatbooks. I recommend making one now, just to see what I mean.

And yet, for all the tricks and abilities your new character will have, they will still be lacking. One of my characters started with a spell, but no magic dice. Both of my characters started with the eye of a malign entity upon them. Another party member started with a mystery egg, and no way to hatch it. Every character is very weak and readily dismemberable.

This is the core of it: DIE TRYING is a game of want. I'm sure you can starve to death in the game, but mere hunger and encumbrance and exhaustion are not its motivating factors. Instead, DIE TRYING presents a world full of interaction and interest. Then it gives you characters that have abilities, but not power, and an immediate need to fill that gap in order to survive. Where the rules shine is the lists of ways to get more power and learn new abilities. Because you will need those to live.

This leads to the other major innovation in DIE TRYING: the X system. Characters get ad-hoc Xs instead of experience. Xs are awarded for achieving things or failing terribly, for good plans and bad ideas. Xs are awarded out-of character for things like attendance, character portraits, or this review². And Xs aren't some nebulous investment in an eventual "level", they go directly towards meeting immediate needs. You can add an X to anything on your character sheet that needs more oomph behind it. I had a crowbar on its last legs, but with an X I shined it up good and now I have an acid-resistant crowbar. I appeased an ancient king, and now I have a little more leeway when dealing with it. After three Xs, my colleague's egg hatched, and now his "son" is a helpful slime that he carries with him.

In case I've been unclear (and even were I not being "compensated" for this review) I've had a genuinely great experience with the system. Especially if you're in Spwack's timezone, I believe he's still playtesting on Discord, and I recommend it.

---

1 The main reason I favor "OSR" type systems is that I find character generation to be a chore. The main thing I miss about more "bloated" systems is the bizarrely specific characters you could build, like a mutant half-elf blind seer/assassin. If this were my system, I would do it like Perl: the generator is the rules, and then relegate the whole 7 pages to an appendix.^back

2 Missed opportunity for a hot take: "DIE TRYING is a transmedia storytelling project that blurs the line between platform and experience and transcends traditional narrative frames." For real though, the same colleague with the egg got an X for opening a door with a big red "X" painted on it. We knew in advance that he would, but I'm not sure if it's because it was an obviously bad idea (it was), or if it's because it had an "X" on it.^back

The Frenchman's Curse

A parasitic spell for LotFP or similar.

The death of a Frenchman, if not "the Frenchman" of my notes.

When the Frenchman dies, all who witness his dying breath save or catch the curse.

Spellcasters

The curse lives in a spell slot. It prefers high-level spell slots, but can be persuaded to take a lower-level slot temporarily. You cannot cast the curse, it just lives there.

When another spellcaster witnesses you casting a spell, they must save or catch the curse also. This is how the curse "reproduces". If you are cunning, you may be able to coax the curse onto a scroll, or convince it to allow itself to be "cast" into another host (without leaving a copy behind). It knows that the target will get a save in both of these cases, so it needs to be a good deal.

When you die, the curse dies with you.

Others

The curse cannot "reproduce" properly if you can't cast spells, so instead it seeks out spellcasters. Intermediate hosts have disadvantage on saves vs. magic, and their skin is covered in crawling tattoos that are offensive, enraging, insulting, confusing, distracting, and profane. Fortunately, these tattoos are only visible to Read Magic, True Seeing, or those with second sight.

"The Op Tattoo", Robert Williams, 1993 (not public domain or anything like that)

On a 1-in-6, the intermediate host has some innate magical potential, and instead carries the curse asymptomatically.

When you die, the curse will pass into all who witness your death. If you manage to otherwise rid yourself of the curse, it will leave behind an empty spell slot.

References

Talking to your spells:

• Spell Consultation
• "It's still magic even if you know how it's done"

Parasites with intermediate hosts:

• Toxoplasmosis in Rodents

Memetic diseases:

• The Gardens of Ynn, probably

Being Useful

Always feels good to help people with things. Sometimes this is just recommending resources, but sometimes I get to flex my slowly-dying engineer muscles. These are two things I got to help people with recently on some Discord chats, but Discord is temporary so I'm writing them down here for posterity.

RPS Mechanics in Play-by-Post Games

Image source: wikimedia.

Rock-paper-scissors only works in person because you can throw more-or-less simultaneously. In a play-by-post environment, someone has to go first. Here's how:

1. Alice generates a random number and appends it to her choice.
   Example: "paper04"
2. Alice takes a hash* of the result and shares it.
   Example: "md5:fbe1a7f5e0330c5cf5a986d40065a21e"
3. Bob shares his choice.
   Example: "scissors"
4. Alice shares her original string.
   Example: "paper04"
5. Bob checks the hash of the original string.

This is not a protocol focused on security. For example, given that the salt is a number 00-99, Bob could generate a rainbow table of all the possible checksums and guess Alice's answer before she revealed it.
It could be automated in some ways if you ran the forum, for example, a bot could automate the final check.

Weighted Selection from a Compact Table

It's common for a table in a book to be formatted like:

1-10. Very common result
11-15. Less common result
16-19. Slightly less common result
20. Very rare result

This is useful if you want to mimic a specific type of distribution given a flat input curve. The theory is that if you use this table a lot, then it will make the results feel more natural.
This presents a problem if you would like to automatically roll on the table in a spreadsheet. A naive way to do this is the format it like:

(A1) Very common result
(A2) Very common result
(A3) Very common result
. . .
(A20) Very rare result

But this is time-consuming and annoying to change. Using VLOOKUP, you can format it like:

(A1) 10 (B1) Very common result
(A2) 15 (B2) Less common result
(A3) 19 (B3) Slightly less common result
(A4) 20 (B4) Very rare result

And then roll as normal. There is a (rough) proof of concept here. There's a couple mistakes in it, but if you play around with it you can see how it works.
Cols A & B are the actual table, while Cols C & D are for illustrative purposes and aren't necessary for the table to function. Cols E & F show how an automated roller might function.
* = I use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine. If you search "md5 [term]" it will auto-suggest the md5sum of "[term]", which is neat. Wolfram Alpha also does this.

Tables for a Nautical Campaign

Two junk tables for world building.

Illus. Harry Clarke

Flotsam (1d100+1d6)

Based heavily on Chris G's Secret Santicore 2013 contribution, "What did the ocean barf up this time?". I favor terser entries, so where there is a corresponding entry in that table I have put it in square brackets after. Entries that are bold with a "*" should not be replaced after they are rolled.

1. 20th Century Radio & Debris [31]
2. Addictive Air Bubble [81]
3. Alistair the Whale [78]
4. Ambergris [40]
5. Amnesiac Noble [12]
6. Anchored Ghouls [45]
7. Baby [62]
8. Baby Seal [89]
9. Bagpipes [73]
10. Barnacled Pier [58]
11. Barrel of:
1. Nothing
2. Ale [63]
3. Oil [16]
4. Vinegar[22]
5. Wine
6. Admiral Nelson
12. Blood [41]
13. Body* [95]
14. Boot, containing: [1]
1. Nothing
2. Foot with Toe-Ring [13]
3. Prosthetic
4. Crabs
5. Gemstones
6. Smaller Boot
15. Bottle, with Message: [100]
1. From a Castaway
2. Warning to PC from Future Self
3. Old Love-Letter
4. Plea for Help from Noble
5. Deed to Creepy Island
6. Treasure Map
16. Bottles, Broken [6]
17. Box of Chocolates [75]
18. Bridge
19. Capstan
20. Chalk [56]
21. Chest of MLT [23]
22. Chill Sea Serpent [84]
23. Cloak of the Manta Ray [91]
24. Coracle
25. Crate of Rations* [32]
26. Creepy Masthead [21]
27. Crystal Ball [87]
28. Cursed Sand-Counter [46]
29. Diary of a Time Traveler [10]
30. Dog [82]
31. Dragon Turtle Shell
32. Driftwood [34]
33. Drunk Assholes [70]
34. Escaped Rowing-slave [15]
35. Eavesdropping Seashell [60]
36. Evil Mermaid Wizard [3]
37. Famous Painting [9]
38. Fishing Net [67]
39. Fleet of Paper Boats
40. Floating City, Run Aground [99]
41. Floating Wizard's Tower
42. Floating Zombie
43. Formal Invitations to Poseidon's Party [37]
44. Garbage [55]
45. Genie in a Bottle [33]
46. Ghost Ship [20]
47. Giant Egg, Hatches in (1d6x2)² Hours [14]
48. Giant Oar
49. Giant Ornery Clam [35]
50. Grand Piano [19]
51. Hallucinogenic Kelp [11]
52. Haunted Treasure Chest [4]
53. Hecate [80]
54. Iceberg
55. Incandescent Sea-Slime [79]
56. Invading Military Force [59]
57. Jaunty Sea-Snail [39]
58. Lifeboat (False Bottom) [18]
59. Lobster Trap (1d6-1 Lobsters)
60. Lodestone [64]
61. Loose Buoy
62. Loose Oranges (1d6x100) [77]
63. Love Bomb [97]
64. Lovers [69]
65. Moldy Rope [57]
66. Murderous Mutineer [5]
67. Namor [66]
68. Nereid [38]
69. Oil Slick
70. Oracle Tortoise [61]
71. PC Sibling [17]
72. PC's Favorite Bag [86]
73. Pirate Philosophers [26]
74. Pirates Burying Rum [92]
75. Pleasure Barge [54]
76. Poltergeist with Anchor [27]
77. Pumice
78. Queen Seekers [28]
79. Rando Sailor*
80. Random Potion
81. Refugees [44]
82. Rower Golem
83. Sailcloth
84. Sea Chariot [76]
85. Sea Devil [68]
86. Seagull [51]
87. Ship's Manifest [74]
88. Ship's Mast
89. Skipping Stone [65]
90. Soul-Swapping Sea Cucumber [88]
91. Swimmer Racing Shark [43]
92. Tiny Deity [48]
93. Trail to the Far Lands [7]
94. Tricorne Hat [90]
95. Trident [72]
96. Upright Mirror
97. Vikings [96]
98. Waterskin*
99. Wooden Shoes [83]
100. World-Shattering Horror [98]

"I Search the Body…" (1d100+1d6)

There is an implied real-world setting to some of these. Entries that are bold with a "*" should not be replaced after they are rolled.

1-50. Number of sp equal to d100 roll just thrown.*

51. Abacus
52. Astrolabe
53. Auger
54. Barometer, Wrong
55. Block & Tackle
56. Chalk
57. Coded Message
58. Compass
59. Contagious Tattoo
60. Crowbar
61. Cup-and-Ball Toy
62. Deck of Cards
63. Dowsing Rods
64. Ear Trumpet
65. Fine Perfume
66. Flares (1d6)
67. Flask of Rum*
68. Flute
69. Giant Shark Tooth
70. Grappling Hook
71. Grenades (1d6)
72. Hand-Hooks (1d6)
73. Hatchet
74. Keys
75. Knitting Needles
76. Letter of Marque
77. Live Fish
78. Mattock Head
79. Mop Heads (1d6)
80. Packet of Seeds
81. Pearl Eyeball
82. Pocket Bible, Annotated
83. Political Pamphlet
84. Rations* (1d6)
85. Scrimshaw
86. Sea Salt
87. Seaglass
88. Sewing Kit
89. Sextant
90. Silk Rope
91. Snuffbox Full of Parmesan
92. Spare Flag:
1. Dutch
2. English
3. French
4. Portuguese
5. Spanish
6. Other
93. Spyglass
94. Treasure Map
95. Tuning Fork
96. Voodoo Doll
97. Wanted Poster for:
1. Corpse
2. Party Patron
3. PC
4. PC's Sister
5. Rando
6. Rival
98. Waterskin*
99. Weights & Scale
100. Whistle

Addendum

I have removed a mention of a product by Zak S. and also a link to some work I did related to his Discord server. For more information, see my post here.